These same friends are also all good people who have told me how they are outraged by racism, hurt by it, bewildered. And sometimes that’s what makes it so frustrating: how difficult it is to talk about race even with them, people I know are on my side, because the conversation inevitably becomes one about how they’re not racist, how they’re not even, when it comes down to it, white. The bulk of these conversations end with me reassuring them that I know they mean well, and then insisting as gently as I know how that if I have to be yellow, if blacks have to be blacks, and so on, then they have to be white. The truth is that they don’t realize that it is the particular privilege of the white to say they don’t “feel” white, that they’re not bound to “white” culture. And that casual dismissal, that simple, blind, unwitting privilege, always makes me angry. I understand my anger might be misplaced, unfair, ungenerous. At its deepest level, it’s probably born of envy. It’s so easy for them to casually disavow their race, as if it were a matter of personal choice. If only it were so easy for the rest of us.

Yellow Peril And The American Dream by Catherine Chung, and powerful and incisive essay about racism, white privilege, and how even the best of intentions can’t erase centuries of institutionalized prejudice. (via therumpus)

Saving this to read later — Chung’s Forgotten Country is one of the best books I read last year.

(via therumpus)

thesmithian: The cover stands out for its cast of black and Hispanic caricatures with exaggerated features reminiscent of early 20th century race cartoons. Also, because there are only people of color in it, grabbing greedily for cash. It’s hard to imagine how this one made it through the editorial process. Compounding the…problem with the image is the fact that race has been a key backdrop to the subprime crisis. The narrative of the crash on the right has been the blame-minority-borrowers line, sometimes via dog whistle, often via bullhorn…the record is clear: minorities were disproportionately targeted by predatory lending, which has always gone hand in hand with subprime. Even when they qualified for prime loans that similar-circumstance whites got, they were pushed into higher-interest subprimes…minority borrowers were disproportionately victimized in the bubble. But BusinessWeek here has them on the cover bathing in housing-ATM cash, implying that they’re going to create another bubble. more, at the Columbia Journalism Review. It’s 2013 and crap like this gets ok’d by editors?!! UGH.
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thesmithian:

The cover stands out for its cast of black and Hispanic caricatures with exaggerated features reminiscent of early 20th century race cartoons. Also, because there are only people of color in it, grabbing greedily for cash. It’s hard to imagine how this one made it through the editorial process. Compounding the…problem with the image is the fact that race has been a key backdrop to the subprime crisis. The narrative of the crash on the right has been the blame-minority-borrowers line, sometimes via dog whistle, often via bullhorn…the record is clear: minorities were disproportionately targeted by predatory lending, which has always gone hand in hand with subprime. Even when they qualified for prime loans that similar-circumstance whites got, they were pushed into higher-interest subprimes…minority borrowers were disproportionately victimized in the bubble. But BusinessWeek here has them on the cover bathing in housing-ATM cash, implying that they’re going to create another bubble.

more, at the Columbia Journalism Review.

It’s 2013 and crap like this gets ok’d by editors?!! UGH.

(via racialicious)

Source: thesmithian

What bothers me more than anything else about these jokes is how boring they are. I’ve heard variations of them countless times from people who think they’re hilarious, and act as if no one has ever unearthed such comedic gems before, and they’re always wrong. They are the scraps of humor actual comics left on the table a decade earlier in their careers after they learned that playing to people’s dumbest, most stereotypical assumptions is not actually the same thing as joke-making. But the laziness of MacFarlane’s brand played particularly poorly at the Oscars given the movie industry’s very real problems with both women and derivativeness, in a celebration of what’s supposed to be Hollywood’s best, the things that the profits of things like The Avengers make it possible to keep in production.
Why Seth MacFarlane Bombed The Oscars—And What It Says About Hollywood | ThinkProgress

Source: thinkprogress.org

theatlantic: The Banality of Seth MacFarlane’s Sexism and Racism at the Oscars The best moment of Seth MacFarlane’s Oscars hosting gig may have come late in the night when, in announcing Meryl Streep, he said “our next presenter needs no introduction” … and then just walked away. If only he’d kept his mouth shut more frequently. Read more. [Image: AP] UGH. AMY & TINA OSCARS HOSTS 2014
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theatlantic:

The Banality of Seth MacFarlane’s Sexism and Racism at the Oscars

The best moment of Seth MacFarlane’s Oscars hosting gig may have come late in the night when, in announcing Meryl Streep, he said “our next presenter needs no introduction” … and then just walked away.

If only he’d kept his mouth shut more frequently.

Read more. [Image: AP]

UGH. AMY & TINA OSCARS HOSTS 2014

This is Florida and I’m from the Deep South. You come to places like this, you can count the black people on your hand. They see us doing things they don’t think I should do.
Patricia Carroll, the CNN camerawoman who two Republican National Convention attendees threw nuts at earlier this week, told the Maynard Institute. An Alabama native, Carroll is now based in CNN’s Washington, D.C. bureau. (via tpmmedia)

(via tpmmedia)

Two RNC Attendees Removed After Throwing Nuts At Black CNN Camerawoman

tpmmedia:

Nearly 24 hours after an ugly incident in which two attendees at the Republican National Convention in Tampa were ejected after throwing nuts at a black CNN camerawoman and saying, “This is how we feed animals,” remarkably few details about the particulars of the incident have emerged.

CNN, convention organizers, the RNC, and the managers of the venue itself have all either declined to provide more information about what exactly happened or have referred questions to one of the other entities involved.

It remains unknown whether the two attendees were delegates to the convention, which state delegation they were members of, whether they were forcibly removed from the arena, whether their convention credentials have been revoked, or whether they will be back in attendance today.

Here’s what is known.

That moment when you’re reading a book based in 1930’s London and enjoying the sly wit of the language until you come to a racist simile. (p. 48, Elizabeth Bowen’s The Death of the Heart, (c) 1938)

Why that word as a descriptor instead of something else? And in such a throwaway manner? It came at me from left field and disrupted the flow of my reading.  I seriously re-read the sentence a couple times to make sure that I hadn’t read wrong.

Now I’m wary of what I’ll find in the rest of the book… 

About the colonial-Africa themed wedding:

nerdshares:

If you haven’t seen the original blog entry it links to, you haven’t seen the picture that sums it all up:

We love being white!

Talk about your bad ideas.  Nerdshares is right with this pick — as far as I can tell from the photos, the only people of color in the wedding are the servers.  No one even had the tiniest suspicion that this theme might be in bad taste? Ok.