Rolling 2015 Thread on Race

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2015/05/grim-racist-methods-of-one-brooklyn-landlord.html

what a delightful person

http://gawker.com/no-indian-friends-1700471892

Good piece. It has been positive to see Twitter develop as a place for young Indian-Americans, partic Indian-American girls, to discover / embrace / talk about their heritage over the last few years in a way that might have been more difficult before.

https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2015/05/19/writing-group-kicks-poet-committee-because-her-tweets-gone-wind

well this seems… recondite

The Association of Writers and Writing Programs normally comes to the defense of controversial writers. On Monday, however, the group announced it has kicked Vanessa Place, a prominent and sometimes controversial poet, off the planning committee for the association's 2016 meeting.

The association, which represents more than 500 campus-based writing programs, as well as thousands of writers, acted after many members pushed for Place's removal. They object to her Twitter account (below right), on which she is posting, line by line, the text of the novel Gone With the Wind. The Twitter feed also features a photograph of Hattie McDaniel as the profile picture. McDaniel was the actress who won an Academy Award for her portrayal of Mammy in the film version of the novel.

Place is a poet, artist and criminal lawyer who has won critical praise for her work, much of which defies conventions. Some see her Twitter account as a form of art; many who wanted her off the committee of AWP (as the group is known) called her project racist, whatever its intentions.

I think people have become really, really stupid

like, this is kind of a dumb project, but it also seems to be really obvious what the intent is even before her explanation? mostly I just want to give everyone involved a dunce cap

What is happening with the main cover art on that Twitter profile?

Context is everything, but yeah, I'd have some questions too.

yeah, the project seems kind of silly, kind of an attempt to get the Margaret Mitchell estate to sue her. She published a book that was just the references to black people in GWTW, and then a second book that was the complete text of GWTW

so is she the poetry cocorosie or something

omg

A little more info about the Waco bike gang riot: https://twitter.com/kwtx/status/601059418122260481

Saw that GWTW thing and am wondering HOW SOMEONE COULD NOT GET IT!!!

http://openspace.sfmoma.org/2015/05/on-being-hated-conceptualism-the-mongrel-coalition-the-house-that-built-me/

appreciated reading this by Trisha Low. hinges on a very personal meditation on family but then touches on an equally personal meditation on the Vanessa Place / Kenneth Goldsmith art pieces.

there were things i liked about it, definitely things that i could relate to in terms of "chosen family" and artistic subcultures, but i had to start skimming because she kept repeating herself and i got bored.

it's pretty long! I like the parts on Place and Goldsmith. cultural appropriation issues are a thing.

this Place piece is a lot more interesting than the whole Goldsmith piece:

https://www.facebook.com/notes/vanessa-place/artists-statement-gone-with-the-wind-vanessaplace/10152841235969212?pnref=story
http://www.latimes.com/opinion/opinion-la/la-ol-a-twitter-art-racism-20150519-story.html

I like her statement. On Twitter, you can not target your audience. white progressives targeting the relatives/friends who need to hear certain disturbing messages are now all effectively in the same room as the people who most certainly do not need to hear those things even one more time. it reminds me of the pushback against #crimingwhilewhite; something that I do think started as a movement attempting to show support by pointing out white privilege to sheltered relatives started to come across as a massive humblebrag / hijacking of the national conversation on race away from black voices (I appreciated reading this article but my takeaway at the time was that I hope we figure out what the hell Twitter is doing to our nervous systems within the next ten years)

Can't believe she's been kicked off the panel but if she's serious about personally embodying the problem, then there is a way in which she should be encouraged by this response

it is interesting thinking about using twitter for art vs. the sfmoma's open space blog

Thinking about it more made me realize that I have a lot of baggage about my former workplace, and how "high art" (which includes the poetry community she is a part of, members of which regularly write for the sfmoma openspace blog) has all these class-based (undoubtedly race-based as well, but I can't speak to that) barriers to entry. So when I mentioned a few posts back about artistic subcultures, now I think about how there's a real difference between mine and hers, which is almost entirely comprised of the privileged. So here she is, whining about things in an affluent, over-educated 26 year old way to people like her. Contrast this with the writers doing their projects on twitter or #crimingwhilewhite. Would the response be different if their venue was an institution like the SFMoMA?

Oh, and I just remembered, last weekend I was in L.A. and was at dinner with a woman who was part of that poetry community. And when she mentioned that she had grown up near the Oakland/Berkeley border, I asked, "Oh did you go to Chabot Elementary?" I asked this because the weekend before I was hanging out with a friend who teaches autistic kids in the Oakland public schools, and she had told me about her first job in Oakland, at Chabot Elementary, where the parents were really snobby and actively resented the presence of the autistic kids, who were mostly non-white from poorer parts of the city. And indeed this woman had gone to said school.

And that isn't to say there was anything snobby or wrong or bad about this L.A. poet, just that it was another piece of evidence that so many members of these progressive artistic communities come from privileged class backgrounds.

It can be depressing, but I find the only way I can co-exist with it is to recognize that it isn't that one has race or class privilege, but what one does with the fact that they're a beneficiary of discriminatory history: do they try to address that inequality? Do they share their skills with young people who are not of their background? Are they trying to learn about people different from themselves? Far worse to not be able to admit you HAVE a bias.

Let's face the facts, the RW probably doesn't care about poetry, so it skews "progressive". The amount of race and class ignorance I've seen in music is a lot worse, there's an attitude of, "I am so wonderfully, enchantingly musical and sensitive that I don't have to consider perspectives that aren't white."

A defense of Vanessa from another poet in the "scene"

http://ronsilliman.blogspot.com/2015/05/normal-0-false-false-false-en-us-x-none_22.html

lol I couldn't make it past the first sentence

in what universe is the right to free speech THE fundamental right upon which all others depend

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wvZbq7AzQ3g

same universe, just the part of it that's never touched directly by violence

haha yes

http://labourlist.org/2015/05/labours-lead-among-bame-people-has-narrowed-poll-finds/

http://lordashcroftpolls.com/2012/04/ethnic-minority-voters-and-the-conservative-party-2/

Does anyone know if Border Force UK is required to record the ethnicity of individuals they choose to search upon entry into the country?

Xp, the targeting of Hindu voters via the National Council of Hindu Temples was probably the single most disreputable thing any major party did this election.

I believe they do record data on people searched.

On a related note, the holding pen at Gatwick for people who need to be interrogated by immigration officers isn't something i've seen before. There's a fenced-off seating area right in front of the border checkpoint that everyone queuing has to file past. When i was there earlier this month, they were effectively questioning people in public - loud enough for everyone to hear. Even if they weren't, having an open area for people to gawk at seems deliberately shaming.

I'd like to see Border Force UK's stats then if they are recording them. I work in the dept. lounge at gatwick and when leaving work have to exit via the customs arrivals hall, anecdotal I know, but the ratio of white people stopped to black is probably 1 to 50.

It might depend on what provision they are stopping them under but if it's done under Section 7 (related to terrorism) there were stats suggesting that minorities were up to 130 times more likely than white people to be searched. It's hugely abused though so pretty much any search can be listed as anti-terrorist.

They were also famously stopping non-white people at tube stations even if they were British.

more high-stakes artworld kerfuffling!

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/harriet/2015/06/kenneth-goldsmith-says-he-is-an-outlaw/

In March 2015, just a little over a week after the U. S. Department of Justice cleared Officer Wilson of all charges of Brown’s death (therefore approving before the world of putting six bullets into an unarmed young black man), poet Kenneth Goldsmith participated in the Interrupt Conference at Brown University where he read a document which he calls “The Body of Michael Brown.” Goldsmith says of his conceptual poetry practice of taking preexisting texts and remixing them, “I always massage dry texts to transform them into literature….” In the case of “The Body of Michael Brown” he slashed and cut into county autopsy reports, essentially the language representing the bone and flesh of the slain young black man. Goldsmith’s rearrangement of his chopped and hacked pieces of Michael Brown’s body ends with the young man’s genitals.

The outrage from poets could be heard everywhere in the United States. As a result Goldsmith asked Brown University to withhold the video of his performance because, as he wrote on Facebook, “There has been too much pain for many people around this and I do not wish to cause any more.” When I worked with Kenny at MoMA in 2013 he appeared apolitical at best, but now he was in a position to be humbled and seemed sincerely sorry for causing pain. Then he regained his strength on Twitter, hash-tagging Michael Brown’s name and saying that “the left is the new right.” Hash-tagging “pen,” hash-tagging “freespeech,” spinning himself into the victim like a Bush administration Neocon deflecting attention from his actions and branding all who opposed his racist “art” enemy combatant censors.

Kit Schluter, you are my hero

omg

It's worth comparing word counts, that article and the solicited responses vs. the unlinked single tweet (still up) and the single word "outlaw" in a very brief, undated interview.

keep it real, son of Tom Hanks!

http://blog.sfgate.com/dailydish/2015/06/03/tom-hanks-rapper-son-defends-his-use-of-racial-slur/

there's like 15 diff threads to post this on but holy shit (and lol) http://dopenmind.tumblr.com/post/107166111639/reblogging-this-once-more-because-my-mom-and-i

I went on a school field trip to a cotton farm when I was 10, they didn't make us pick it, though.

are you white, y or n?

my wife was supposed to go on a cotton-picking field trip when she was young; her dad cut that one off immediately

when i was in 1st grade, my 1st grade class all came over to my house and we picked potatoes. We got to keep the potatoes.

were any of them irish?

probably a few, but they were like 3rd or 4th generation

In retrospect, I am glad that it was just digging potatoes, as opposed to having the 40-50% of my Latino classmates pick berries and fruit :/

probably a few, but they were like 3rd or 4th generation

― Mistah FAAB (sarahell),

this makes a difference does it

jk let's not even start

I never went on a field trip where the children were forced into manual labor.

we were taken down into a mine but I didn't get to use a pickaxe

I take it the bog is not a thing anywhere but here huh