Race and Racism
gregladen | August 15, 2008This is an exclusive repost of this exclusive post from Gawker regarding yet another "slanty-eyed Chinese" photograph from a Spanish sports team.
Read the story at Gawker. Hattip: Phil.
gregladen | August 14, 2008Especially after seeing this unbelievable display of racism and disrespect:
Spain's Olympic basketball teams have risked upsetting their Chinese hosts by posing for a pre-Games advert making slit-eyed gestures. The advert for a courier company, which is an official sponsor of the Spanish Basketball Federation, occupied a full page in the sports daily Marca, the country's best-selling newspaper.
source
This means that no one can call the Olympics a venue for enhancing relations amongst the people of the world. For, oh let's say two years. None of that talk for two years.
gregladen | August 11, 2008I find it interesting that people are suggesting that the Georgian move on South Ossetia a few days ago occurred when it did because the Olympics are on and no one would notice because they would all be watching the sports. Meanwhile, at this particular moment, the highest ranking story regarding the Olympics on the BBC news feed is 15th in line. It seems to me that this year's Olympics are not exactly the hottest thing going. There are probably a few reasons for that.
In any event, "Why boycott the Olympics?" you say?
Well, if I was a country, I would be unlikely to boycott the Olympics…
gregladen | August 4, 2008The bodies of civil rights activists Michael Schwerner, James Chaney, and Andrew Goodman were found after they had been missing for six weeks in the vicinity of Philadelphia, Mississippi, on this day in 1964.
From the bbc report of the time:
The three young men had left the CORE office in Meridian six weeks ago to investigate the destruction of a black congregation church in Longdale, Neshoba County because it was used as the site for a "freedom school".
The school was set up by Mr Schwerner as part of a wider civil rights campaign in Mississippi teaching black children, among other things,…
gregladen | August 1, 2008 Photograph of anthrax
Do you remember the Anthrax Scare? Envelopes with strange notes and mysterious white powder were showing up in various mailboxes. In many cases the white powder was "weaponized anthrax" ... anthrax (bacterial) spores processed in such a way to enhance the spread of the spores by air and infection via lung tissues.
A total of five people died in that incident, which occurred shortly after the September 11th attacks.
US Government Scientist Bruce Ivins had been under suspicion for a number of reasons, and on learning that prosecutes were about to charge him with…
gregladen | July 2, 2008On this day in 1964....
The Civil Rights Bill - one of the most important piece of legislation in American history - has become law.
US President Lyndon B Johnson signed the bill creating equal rights in voting, education, public accommodations, union membership and in federally assisted programmes - regardless of race, colour, religion or national origin.
The bill has caused much controversy since it was introduced last year by President John F Kennedy.
gregladen | June 23, 2008 Triatoma infestans, Chagas vector This is the conclusion of a report to be published in the June 2008 PLoS Neglected Tropical Diseases journal. The report, by Peter Hotez of George Washington University and the Sabin Vaccine Institute, is a clear indictment of economic disparity in the United States. The bottom line: Many poor Americans are, effectively, living in a poorly managed third world country.
Poor people in the United States are subject to a mostly ignored burden of diseases "caused by a group of chronic and debilitating parasitic, bacterial, and congenital infections known as…
gregladen | June 18, 2008In the early days of South Africa ... well, not the really early days, but some time in the 19th century or early 20th century, a fairly large number of Chines people were imported as workers/slaves. One of the reasons to do this was to break the indigenous workers' efforts for reform. It failed, and the Chinese became of no special use to the Apartheid government or the mining corporations, so they were sent back. All of them.
Nonetheless, there are some 200,000 or so "ethnic Chinese" living today in South Africa. Now, I do not really know for sure who these people are or how they got…
gregladen | June 12, 2008I need to relate a somewhat complicated story about James Watson, Seed, Scienceblogs, Me and You.
James Watson was on the board of directors of Seed Magazine at the time he made remarks mentioned in this post (reposted earlier today). I was just coming on board Science Blogs at that time, so I'm a little fuzzy on this, but my understanding is that many/most/all Sblings issued some sort of complaint, in blogs or via the Sb staff or whatever (as I say, I was barely aware of my surroundings at the time, having just been born), about Watson's affiliation.
After a period of time, there has…
gregladen | June 11, 2008Just for fun. A repost of something that floated to the top several months ago. October 17th 2007 to be exact. There is a reason I'm reposting this. For now, I'll let you guess.
It is now time to kick James Watson's ass.
The man is a terrible embarrassment to us all. ("Us" being scientists and rational types.) It is said by the press that Watson "makes his colleagues cringe when he goes off script" or "is known for making controversial remarks" and so on. Fine. But these are not apt descriptors for James Watson's most recent remarks or, for that matter, many of his earlier remarks…
gregladen | May 26, 2008"I don't mind that they work over at the factory, but I don't want one of those lactose intolerant people moving in next door..." or "Some of my best friends are lactose intolerant. But I sure don't want my sister marrying one...."
Say what?
Amused in Vivo, who is VERY COOL, has recently posted some comments on race as an expansion of her comments on race upstream on my blog.
In her post, she made this assertion:
Saying that people of African descent are more prone to lactose intolerance than those of Northern European descent is not racist, because, well, it's true. Right?
Which…
gregladen | May 22, 2008I'm starting to become a little unnerved by the situation with the Democratic party. I'd like to lay out a couple of questions and arguments for discussion. I'm hoping very much that certain people will chime in on this. You know who you are (like, when you get my email asking you to chime in).
From the beginning, this primary involved gender and race. Obviously. A democrat could actually win this year. So, the giddiness over having a viable female candidate and giddiness over having a viable African American candidate is palpable. But we can see that this giddiness has given way to a…
gregladen | May 14, 2008You must watch this to the end.
"Just because you were born here, doesn't make you an American...."
(The good news is that the racist haters are even more hateful than the hateful racists. As needed.)
Hey, don't forget to Hit This Poll!
[Hat Tip: Boris Milicevic]
gregladen | May 13, 2008Marietta tavern owner Mike Norman says the T-shirts he's peddling, featuring cartoon chimp Curious George peeling a banana, with "Obama in '08" scrolled underneath, are "cute." But to a coalition of critics, the shirts are an insulting exploitation of racial stereotypes from generations past.
"It's time to put an end to this," said Rich Pellegrino, a Mableton resident and director of the Cobb-Cherokee Immigrant Alliance. He was among about 15 people who protested outside Mulligan's Bar and Grill Tuesday afternoon against the sale of the "racist and highly offensive" shirts.
Express your…
gregladen | May 8, 2008
Moooo
... turn your volume up for this one, it is quiet and you want to hear every word of this astounding performance:
gregladen | April 20, 2008Steve Mirsky does a little Darwin Quote Mining reversal exercise in a recent post called "Never You Mine: Ben Stein's Selective Quoting of Darwin:"
One of the many egregious moments in the new Ben Stein anti-evolution film "Expelled" is the truncation of a quote from Charles Darwin so that it makes him appear to give philosophical ammunition to the Nazis. Steve Mirsky reports.
Steve rightly corrects stein, but does not put the quote mining in sufficiently broad context. So I do:
The original text from Darwin that Stein refers to in Expelled! expresses Darwin's ambivalence about the social…
gregladen | March 21, 2008And the winner for best music video: "Chocolate Rain." Tay Zonday morphed from an unknown musician to an Internet superstar who got booked on national TV shows after his song "Chocolate Rain" - an amateur clip of his baritone crooning - went viral last year. Now he's among the 12 winners of the second annual YouTube Video Awards, recognizing the top user-created videos of 2007.[source]
gregladen | March 11, 2008I had a plan, to get on board with Sciencwoman, who is putting out a series of posts on Racial Diversity, Race and Racism, with a post on this topic. However, Friday was a tough day, Saturday was a no-blogger (because of something else I was doing that I'll tell you about later), I don't remember a thing about Sunday, I had a late meeting Monday, and I'm teaching tonight. So I have not had time to spend the effort this post needed. (Aren't you glad I don't usually write blog posts telling you what I had for breakfast and why I blogged more or less on a given day?)
But I still want to get…
gregladen | March 5, 2008I'm kind of shocked. Well, whatever.
Some moron just blew 70 bucks, or whatever it takes to register a domain name, to anonymously post photographs of most of the scienceblogs.com bloggers (without linkbacks, and therefore in violation of Blogging Ethics and possibly copyright laws), dividing the bloggers into "Aryan" and some other category. I don't think I want to know what Mr. Moron would call this other category.
There are people such as Jews, other immediate descendants of the victims of Nazi occupation, G,L,B,T's and their A's who might take exception to this. This is probably why…
gregladen | March 1, 2008Americans revel in violence. We have an excuse for almost any kind of violent or oppressive act. When a young boy poking around, on a dare, in what he thought was an abandoned house was shot dead by my neighbor last year, the boy was vilified as a threat and the trigger happy crazy guy lauded as a hero, by my other neighbors. Why would that be? Earlier this week, an event happened in a nearby town that helps us to understand the sorry state our culture has attained.
During a high school basketball game between local teams Shakopee and Prior Lake, a "fan" ran onto the basketball court…