The Tory id revealed in rap music. By Cassetteboy.
The culture of poverty does not exist
The importance of the culture-of-poverty approach is that it allows for recognition of the accumulated history of racism and inequality, but posits the ongoing effects of these as mediated through black cultural pathologies. It therefore permits American liberals to identify with opposition to racism while pushing them towards policy solutions geared towards the transformation of black people, and not American society.
With every crisis in Black America the same pathologies the Black community supposedly suffers from — veneration of the criminal lifestyle, lack of proper family structures, abhorrence of education as acting white — are trotted out as an explanation, by conservative commentators as that’s just how those people are, by supposed liberals as the unfortunate end product of Black history in America. There’s just one problem: they’re lies. The culture of poverty does not exist.
Progress
In Kenya, illegal demolitions of housing to make way for a railway made thousands of people homeless:
I can’t remember when it started but it’s been going on for very long and I’m tired of it. It gets tiring having your homes destroyed in the name of development. It gets very tiring.
Non-consensual technology
Deb Chandra on non-consensual technology:
This week, of course, provided a glorious example of how technology companies have normalized being indifferent to consent: Apple ‘gifting’ each user with a U2 album downloaded into iTunes. At least one of my friends reported that he had wireless synching of his phone disabled; Apple overrode his express preferences in order to add the album to his music collection. The expected ‘surprise and delight’ was really more like ‘surprise and delete’. I suspect that the strong negative response (in some quarters, at least) had less to do with a dislike of U2 and everything to do with the album as a metonym for this widespread culture of nonconsensual behaviour in technology.
Driving while black is real
The Washington Post has confirmed that driving while black is real:
The Justice Department statistics, based on the Police-Public Contact Survey, show that “relatively more black drivers (12.8%) than white (9.8%) and Hispanic (10.4%) drivers were pulled over in a traffic stop during their most recent contact with police.” Or, to frame it another way: A black driver is about 31 percent more likely to be pulled over than a white driver, or about 23 percent more likely than a Hispanic driver. “Driving while black” is, indeed, a measurable phenomenon.
Cue collective “well, duh” from the black community.