Rolling 2016 Thread on Race

I mean, I'd had a good meal at this place before this incident from last year (which IIRC was on the 2015 thread about race):

http://verification.blogspot.com/2015/02/strange-fruit-in-friendly-toast.html

I learned about this time that the decor in this place included a golliwog that the owners chose to paint white when they received complaints about it rather than remove it.

interesting course of action

sorry, apparently they painted it green

MUCH BETTER

I don't care if you're black, white, green...

sad lol

I've never got the "whitewashing" of racial artifacts.

"See? See everybody? I just wanted a jockey boy of any color at the end of my driveway. Just so happened the first one was black, why did you all flip out?"

Ugh, someone I know on FB a few weeks ago posted some nonsense about how we have black lawn jockeys all wrong, that they were originally used to designate houses that were on the Underground Railroad, so really they're ANTI-racist. Am I correct in assuming that this is complete bullshit?

yes

http://www.snopes.com/jocko-lawn-jockey-racist/

haha that is the stupidest thing I've ever heard.

that was on facebook trends earlier except they said "the photo appears to depict an execution"

which to me felt like an unwillingness to engage with the substance of the event

― 龜, Friday, March 11, 2016 12:37 PM (5 hours ago) Bookmark

http://i.imgur.com/JNbeS0f.png

call it for what it was

"Nooo, a burning cross in your yard is a just a friendly way of saying 'Welcome to the Neighborhood!' Like Christian fireworks!"

Joe's Crab Shack: Restaurant sorry to hear that you think photo depicts execution scene, but restaurant thinks maybe you need to ask yourself why you would think photo depicts execution scene, maybe you have some things you need to deal with before eating at Joe's Crab Shack

"execution" instead of "lynching" would be like calling a cross burning a "residency dispute"

The bigger point, regardless of whether this is an "execution" or a "lynching", is why you would think a picture of someone being killed would be appropriate decor for your chain restaurant; that alone shows massive disregard for life and is fucking racist

https://www.aclunc.org/blog/two-lawyers-walk-bar-and-get-kicked-out-being-black

I posted this on my Facebook wall and one of my friends from college, who currently lives in DC, works for NOAA, and has morphed into a conservative libertarian, responded with "Unreal. Especially as it's in California."

I feel like posting a bunch of stuff about Orange County on his wall now.

DO IT

or the new residents in San Francisco who keep calling the police on people who have lived on their block for 30 years but they view as suspicious

He clarified with "I figured this sort of thing was limited to the deep South."

He further clarified with "Rephrase: I would have hoped this was limited to the deep South."

I responded with "As long as we're hoping for things, I would have hoped that things like this didn't happen anymore."

OH btw re: the Joe's Crab Shack talk up thread, I realized very belatedly that I was thinking of Jasper White's Summer Shack. I've never been to Joe's Crab Shack.

With a name like that, I think you'd be forgiven for the mix-up.

so this thing.
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/making-sense/do-you-live-in-a-bubble-a-quiz-2/

I clicked through that thing the other day and again today and I realized that at no point does it ask anything that could be a definite indicator of race, only economic/social class

A lot of assumptions in those questions - like, I don't drink, therefore there is neither domestic nor imported beer in my refrigerator.

i kind of think that's more of a qualification question than a disqualification

i would ignore that it's by the same guy who wrote the racist book The Bell Curve https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bell_Curve

hmm, not sure i would ignore that

lol at them qualifying him as "libertarian"

Is there a decent aggregator that aims at race domestically AND globally

It told me I was definitely not living in a bubble, which is kind of hilarious as I've spent the entirety of my post-high school life constructing the strongest, most impervious bubble I could reasonably make

Yeah despite the copy saying "if you grew up working class, it will still be reflected in your score even if you become upper-middle later in life" all my knowledge of Nascar and domestic beer didn't save me from being scored in a deep bubble, which I don't think I am THAT much. Weird questions, weird scoring.

Quiz was written by a bubble dweller who likes to think otherwise.

Quiz is aimed at white people and designed under the assumption that education makes you stupid.

I grew up upper middle-class in a middle-class/working-class environment and the test results seemed to inordinately reflect that.

I also laughed at the domestic beer question because I have a refrigerator filled with domestic expensive microbrews.

I am inordinately proud of my time in the service possibly mostly because it makes me a statistical outlier
that is all

http://www.cnn.com/2016/03/30/us/black-privilege/index.html

welcome to 2016

Terrible article. Why don't white people have special institutions explicitly dedicated to their group interests [that aren't also on a SPLC list]? Because they haven't needed them historically or today. However, I do understand why this stuff is coming up - because white people in the US are becoming a minority (slowly) and there is going to be a moment when they have to understand who they are distinct from their historical representation as the hegemonic majority. Are European Americans going to be an identity group like other groups? There's a lot of stuff in there that they haven't had to work out because they've just been the default culture for so long. From the context of identity / belonging I can understand why white ppl might feel like they're lacking something. (i don't think this is separable from the reality that going from hegemony to non-total hegemony will look like a terrible loss / theft to white ppl + like more equitability to everyone else.) imho sorry if anything I said was offensive.

xp sorry, read the title and closed the tab

The concept of black privilege is still so new, though, that some of the nation's most acclaimed scholars on race didn't even know it existed.

Can't help hearing this in a Daily Show correspondent voice

is there an app that sends grenades to the author's house for this shit

Uh, maybe some of you should go back and read the article. I think the author is a bit incredulous about this mountain of "black privilege" everyone thinks they see.

And would they hear a white leader step forward at a crowded news conference to announce: "It's time to talk about reparations"?

I mean, there's the author's answer to "Why isn't there a NAAWP?"

^^^it's a click-bait headline

Are European Americans going to be an identity group like other groups?

Throughout most of the 20th Century Americans of various European backgrounds existed in ethnic enclaves. The next town over from where I live still has stuff like a Polish credit union (not to mention a whole street where all the stores have signs in Polish); there's a huge Portuguese community in Newark still, I think; there's Little Italy in NYC, though it's shrinking; the kitsch Irishness of Boston and St. Patrick's Day; before World War II there was an organization called the German-American Bund...this kind of stuff is currently seen as mostly a relic, for old people, but it could quite easily make a comeback if it's seen as necessary. Hell, I think it probably should. The contemporary pop-cultural understanding of "white culture" is ridiculous, basically synonymous with lameness when it's not just accused of stealing everything good about itself from black people; white ethnic groups should counter that message. Not in a hostile/oppositional way, but as a reminder of what they've brought to the table. "White" isn't a monolith any more than "black" or "Latin" is.

yeah I may have overstated my closing speed, I skimmed and saw the names of usual suspects and was disgusted

http://www.goal.com/en-gb/news/3275/bundesliga/2016/03/31/21877722/german-team-black-up-to-protest-racist-attack

at least, unlike the 2008 Spanish basketball team picture when they were making slanty-eyes in honor of Beijing*, this has a followable chain of logic to it that allows you to see why someone would think this was a good idea

* I still can't believe this happened btw

Germans.

http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/criticism-of-new-racism-film-journalist-goes-undercover-to-discover-life-as-a-black-man-in-germany-a-656569.html

http://i.imgur.com/u5OknzC.jpg

The use of blackface to fight racism is quite common in Northern Europe. There was a Danish artist who had a happening called 'With Other Eyes', where people could get make up on so that they would look like some other race, and could therefore experience what that is like. The artist got the idea when he forgot to remove his makeup after a play, where he apparently performed in blackface himself (I have no idea what play that would be in 2014, but it's a weird detail) It happened in Denmark a couple of times without anybody giving a fuck, but then it got moved to Malmø, and all hell broke lose.

To the artist's sorta credit, he kinda seemed to get it, when he went to a community discussion about it, and told that he wanted white people to learn what racism felt like, and a black guy stood up and said 'then why don't you have them ask me?'