Pete Hoekstra is super racist, doesn’t understand the word “satire”
If you’ve gotten someone’s attention by giving them policies to challenge and facts to debate, you’re doing something right. You’re putting yourself out there as a contender. You’re making yourself part of the conversation. Good for you! If you’ve gotten someone’s attention by putting a young Asian woman on a bicycle to pedal through rice fields in a sedge hat to the tune of a gong and a pentatonic scale, so she can smilingly criticize your opponent in broken English, it’s not because you’re a contender–it’s because you’re a racist asshole.
...read moreSome Transformative Justice Links
In the wake of recent conversations, I’ve been looking around for further resources on transformative justice. I haven’t been able to do a lot of intense follow-up on the topic lately, because in mid-January I had major spinal surgery (after breaking my neck in an accident back in 2011); this obviously has involved many painkillers and a lot of sleep and not-working as much as possible. However, I have been able to do some reading, and I want to share some of what I’ve found most compelling.
...read moreLocked Up
This article on mass incarceration is a must-read:
...read moreFor most privileged, professional people, the experience of confinement is a mere brush, encountered after a kid’s arrest, say. For a great many poor people in America, particularly poor black men, prison is a destination that braids through an ordinary life, much as high school and college do for rich white ones. More than half of all black men without a high-school diploma go to prison at some time in their lives. Mass incarceration on a scale almost unexampled in human history is a fundamental fact of our country today—perhaps the fundamental fact, as slavery was the fundamental fact of 1850. In truth, there are more black men in the grip of the criminal-justice system—in prison, on probation, or on parole—than were in slavery then. Over all, there are now more people under “correctional supervision” in America—more than six million—than were in the Gulag Archipelago under Stalin at its height. That city of the confined and the controlled, Lockuptown, is now the second largest in the United States.
The New Long Duck Dong
I have admittedly never watched 2 Broke Girls, mostly because it looked really fucking stupid (I have, however, watched multiple episodes of The Bachelor and Kourtney & Kim Take New York, so that says something). But apparently in addition to being really fucking stupid, it is also really fucking racist:
...read moreLessons Learned And Unlearned
I realized something recently. I realized something about rights, about oppression, and about voices—specifically, Native American voices.
I can already hear some of you exhaling in thought, shuffling through your memories, trying to recall a recent incident, a story in the news, a connection between this post about Native Americans and current events. There isn’t one. There isn’t one because stories of Native American hardship don’t get told very much. While headlines do occasionally appear, most people have never heard of the abject poverty suffered by the Attawapiskat, or the imprisonment of five Makah men for their participation in a traditional hunt, or of the state of South Dakota essentially kidnapping Crow Creek children from their community. Many of us carry out our lives completely unaware of what is going on just miles away from the communities that we know.
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Filming Against Odds: Undocumented Youth “Come Out” With Their Dreams
By Anne Galisky, cross-posted at On The Issues Magazine.
“Papers”is the story of undocumented youth and the challenges they face as they turn 18 without legal status. More than two million undocumented children live in the U.S. today, most with no path to obtain citizenship. These are youth who were born outside the U.S. and yet know only the U.S. as home. The film highlights five undocumented youth who are “American” in every sense but their legal paperwork.
...read more“If I Were A Poor Black Kid …” “If I Were A Slave Owner …”
Forbes ran this totally appalling thing titled “If I Were A Poor Black Kid” that is only interesting because of the amount of fail involved. On the bright side (?), at the end of it, they link to some of the outraged responses around the Internet. One of those responses is from Ta-Nehisi Coates.
...read moreDr. Erik Fleischman and Involuntary Sterilization
Via Femonomics, we find a really disturbing post from Dr. Erik Fleischman, an American doctor practicing in Tanzania who brags about participating in an involuntary sterilization, calling the doctor who performed the procedure a “hero.” After a pregnant patient’s heart stops beating on the operating table during a C-section (because they screwed up the epidural [...]
...read moreMapping Bias: LGBT Resources on the South Side of Chicago
This is a guest post by Kayla Higgins
The interesting thing about maps is that they are almost never objectively accurate. Rather, they depict a space through the perspective of the Chicagoan mapmaker. And such is the case of the various maps of gay life in Chicago. They are “Gay Chicago” as seen through the eyes of a particular mapmaker or, sometimes, an entire demographic. But they cannot be said to depict “Gay Chicago” as it objectively exists.
“Racism and Science Fiction” by Samuel R. Delany
Samuel R. Delany is a brilliant and fascinating gay black science fiction author who has won many awards and been the subject of at least one documentary. Here’s an article he wrote about racism and science fiction, which I found both eloquent and insightful. I tried to find something to snip for y’all, but it’s [...]
...read moreGoodbye, Rev. Shuttlesworth
October 5th was a rough day for civil rights leaders: Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth, who not only helped establish and lead non-violent anti-segregation actions and the civil rights movement as we know it but also took the right to protest right up to the Supreme Court, passed away yesterday. He stared the devil in the face [...]
...read moreIs anything just “racist” anymore?
“At Rick Perry’s Texas hunting spot, camp’s old racially charged name lingered.” Paint Creek, Tex. — In the early years of his political career, Rick Perry began hosting fellow lawmakers, friends and supporters at his family’s secluded West Texas hunting camp, a place known by the name painted in block letters across a large, flat [...]
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