Race

Yo, is this racist?

Funny, Race
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Finally a site that tells you if you’re racist or not. Of course, if you have to ask, you probably are. The guy behind it got a wicked sense of humour and I especially like his answer to the white supremacists who just found the site:

Now, I just wanted to say that, by and large, I will be ignoring your shit and not giving you a platform and definitely not a dialog on your ideas. Mainly this is because, at the end of the day, you’ve already lost. However flawed the world is now, you’re never going to achieve whatever open, racist, white supremacist world you so desperately want, and it’s not going to be particularly fun or useful to swear at you racist fucks.

Think of it this way, at some point in the future, when your kids, or your grandkids, or your great-grandkids speak of you, the nicest way they’ll be able to do it is to ignore the central thing that defines you, your racism. That’s at best. Obviously most likely you’ll be the scary, embarrassing, racist piece of trash that the family wishes never existed.

For more on Andrew Ti, the guy who runs the site, read this interview at Colorlines.

One more reason not to visit America

Policing, Race
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Thin skinned, thick as shit police. From the description of the video:

Here’s the scene:
We were enjoying the nice spring weather from our balcony. A friend was visiting on his bike, and he rode up on the sidewalk from the street to our front door. In NYC this is illegal. You are supposed to stop in the street, get off the bike and walk it on the sidewalk. Although he was merely coming from the street up to our front door, those few second were illegal. NYPD rolls up, and I begin to film as they are issuing him a summons to appear in court.

Meanwhile our neighbor walks by while this scene is unfolding. My neighbor and my friend on the bike exchange some banter. No one is offended. We all laughed. He keeps walking.

From there everything escalates… Seems completely unnecessary to me…

At the end of the day, my neighbor was charged with harassment, disorderly conduct and resisting arrest.

Welcome to an afternoon with the NYPD

There’s the reason why there’s never a cop when you need one. Dude jokes to his friend, didn’t say anything to the police and officer McRacist decides to make a case out of it — in the end three police cars and about a dozen officers are involved. Meanwhile one of the local neighbourhood drug dealers (judging from the commentary from the guys with the video) walks by…

That’s one reason I don’t want to visit the US anytime soon, because I’m not sure I could’ve stayed as calm as this guy did had this happened to me. I’ve been angry and done stupid things before, but nothing that could’ve gotten me tasered and I’m not in a hurry to try that.

It helps sometimes to state the obvious

Race, Wingnuts
Published on

Tim Wise on white privilege:

Imagine that hundreds of black protesters were to descend upon Washington DC and Northern Virginia, just a few miles from the Capitol and White House, armed with AK-47s, assorted handguns, and ammunition. And imagine that some of these protesters–the black protesters–spoke of the need for political revolution, and possibly even armed conflict in the event that laws they didn’t like were enforced by the government. Would these protesters–these black protesters with guns–be seen as brave defenders of the Second Amendment, or would they be viewed by most whites as a danger to the republic? What if they were Arab-Americans? Because, after all, that’s what happened recently when white gun enthusiasts descended upon the nation’s capital, arms in hand, and verbally announced their readiness to make war on the country’s political leaders if the need arose.

One minor quibble: if we imagine the tea party protests happening not against Obama but against Bush and his policies, do we think they would have recieved the same amount of media and political support/approval as they do now? It’s not just white privilege that gets the teabaggers their free out of jail cards: it’s also that they are broadly in line with an important part of elite opinion as well. Setting aside their own motivations, rightwing leaders in politics and the media find the movement an useful tool to pressure Obama. This perhaps as much as white privelege explains the indulgent way the teabaggers have been treated.

Linky Goodness: Science, Scones and Squid

Africa, bigotry, Blinded by Science, Capitalism, Corruption, Food, Life under Capitalism, Linky Linky, Natural World, Race, Slebs, Squid
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Discover Magazine: Off the California Coast, Giant Volcanoes Made of Asphalt

Tin-Tin In The Congo is likely to be banned in Belgium unless sold with a racism warning sticker. Quite right too.

Also sounding rather Tin-Tinesque, an insight into the odd social life of the world’s only living secular saint in The Mystery of Naomi Campbell and the Blood Diamond

But back to the benthic theme: a lovely deep sea fauna gallery, including video of the elusive oarfish (often mistaken historically for an actual sea serpent) , from the Serpent Project. NB: Piglet squid!

There’s nothing as delicious as scones with jam and cream (or better still, treacle and cream, AKA ‘thunder & lightning’) but it’s not a treat I get often; even though I was born and bred in Devon my scones are like bricks, despite my incredibly light hand with pastry and talent for cakes. But my mother’s scones were light as a feather, while her pastry was like concrete. Small wonder her pasties (the savoury kind, not the sequined nipple covers) were known in our family as ‘trainwreckers’. The scone gene got twisted somewhere. So when I saw this post – How to make the perfect scone– I was inspired to have another go. But first I have to get out of this hellhole of a hospital.

3,000 years of pre-Sumerian history left undiscovered because of husbandly misogyny