Race and Racism
gregladen | October 7, 2009Have you arrived to read this post because you don't like the sound of the title? Does it piss you off? Good.
A repost from last election season.
Listen. When I was a child, in Catholic School, I was told (by the nuns, older kids in school, and some other adults) not to trust the Jews. It was literally true that the Catholic rhetoric in this small but significant city in an an Eastern US state was that "The Jews killed our God."
I was told to not go near the Jewish Temple, especially on Friday or Saturday, because it would be too easy to stumble on a ceremony. In second grade, I was…
gregladen | September 21, 2009This is yet another in a series of posts on falsehoods. To refresh your memory, a falsehood is a belief held by a number of people that is in some way incorrect. That incorrectness may be blatant, it may be subtle, it may be conditional, it may be simple, it may be complex. But, the unraveling of the falshoodosity of the belief is a learning experience, if it is accomplished in a thoughtful manner and without too much sophistry. In order for a falsehood to "work" as a learning opportunity it is important to define the statement in terms of the thoughts the falsehood invokes in the target…
gregladen | September 16, 2009A couple of weeks ago, I published a very controversial post titled "Maybe We Should Have Elected a White President After All" about the ongoing, possibly growing racism in connection with Obama's presidency. The idea that a lot of the anti-Obama, including anti-health care reform, rhetoric and action was racially motivated was understood by some and rejected by others who seem to not want to see any significant racism in the mix. This was parallel to the head in the sand reaction to my earlier post on the the arrest of Skip Gates in Cambridge Massachusetts last July.
There are those of…
gregladen | September 16, 2009A follow-up on "Racist Act at Health Care Forum ..."
Earlier, I posted this video:
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In this video you see a fairly typical (for these days) "Town Hall" meeting, this time with Senator Claire…
gregladen | September 16, 2009Senator Claire McCaskill's health care forum. You can't see much detail, but when a couple of black women in an all white room are dragged off by the police, I figure they were probably victims of the growing racism we are seeing in this discourse.
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gregladen | September 16, 2009This includes Jimmy Carter's comments.
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gregladen | September 15, 2009These are pretty mainstream voices.
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gregladen | September 15, 2009There is no racism in America. People are not excluded from jobs or not allowed admission to a school because of the color of the skin. The whole racism thing is over, solved, kaput, no longer an issue. You'all can go home now. Especially if you live in Texas and/or are concerned with Social Studies curriculum. ...
Peter Morrison is on a Texas State Board of Education panel set up to help revise state standards in Social Studies And he's trying to do a lot of work in this position. He's trying to edumicate us all on how racism is pretty much passe, and at the same time, he's trying to…
gregladen | September 14, 2009It has been said that civility is an excellent conversation stopper. And it can be, because demanding civility has been a way to control or limit the voice of alterity or the unprivileged. When it comes to Joe Wilson's now-infamous shouted remark at the joint session, the question arises as to whether the tone or style of this act was the important issue, or whether the meaning or content of what he said ... the truth of his "You lie!" ... is what should be focused on. In my view, the answer is: Both, neither, and you are missing the point.
I offer the following:
1) His incivility at this…
gregladen | September 2, 2009Central Asian ethnic groups are more defined by societal rules than ancestry. Researchers writing in the open access journal BMC Genetics found that overall there are more genetic differences within ethnic groups than between them, indicating that separate 'ethnic groups' exist in the mind more than the blood.
Evelyne Heyer, from the Musée de l'Homme in Paris, France, led an international team of researchers who studied mitochondrial DNA and Y chromosome data from several populations of two major language ethnic groups of Central Asia, the Turkic and Indo-Iranian groups.
She said: "Our…
gregladen | August 31, 2009The practice of growing food and keeping livestock was invented numerous times throughout the world. One 'center' of agriculture is said to be the Middle East. Despite the fact that calling the Middle East a "center" in this context is a gross oversimplification, it is true that agriculture was practiced in Anatolia and the Levant for quite some time before it was practiced in Europe, and it seems that the practice more or less spread from the middle east across Europe over a fairly long period of time.
Archaeologists have long asked the question: Was this a spread of agricultural people…
gregladen | August 22, 2009It was important that this man was thrown in jail. It is very bad that he is not spending more time there. Let me tell you why.
The South African man convicted of feeding one of his ex-workers to the lions is due to be freed on parole shortly, after three years in jail.
Mark Scott-Crossley was originally given a life sentence for murder but this was reduced after a judge said there was no proof the man was alive. [at the time the victim was thrown into the lion cage]
The remains of Nelson Chisale's body were found in the lion enclosure, causing a national outcry.
The case highlighted the…
gregladen | August 17, 2009Posey was one of several, probably several dozen, people directly involved in the murders of James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner. He died a free man and of natural causes last Thursday at the age of 77.
In those days, America was an unabashedly racist society, so it was quite possible for a horrendous crime such as occurred then to happen with little done about it. That crime amounted to terminal violence against three men in order to make them shut up. Today, of course, no one would threaten violence or even shout really loud at anyone to make them shut up. Would they…
gregladen | August 10, 2009A bit of reporting on what they look like. I'm sticking with my original story: They look like the Roe v. Wade protests of the 1980s, but with a racialized twist.
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gregladen | August 9, 2009
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gregladen | July 29, 2009At this point, I don't think I'd have a beer with this cop. Also, I have to agree that Obama stuck his foot in it on this one. He may have been right, wrong, whatever, but when this sort of thing happens it is best to stand back and not get directly involved in this sort of thing until the dust settles.
I already told you about this, but I thought you'd like to see the updated MSNBC piece on it, which starts out like this:
CAMBRIDGE, Mass. - The woman whose 911 call led to the arrest of Harvard scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr. spoke publicly for the first time about the case Wednesday,…
gregladen | July 29, 2009According to the following, the person who made the 911 call did not mention race until asked, and even then did not mention "two black males with backpacks." The two black guys with backpacks seem to have been added in to the police report authored by Police Seargant James Crowley. Specifically, he states that the 911 caller observed these two men. That is not even slightly surprising to me. There is nothing close to a guarantee that police reports will be accurate, and race is often used as a factor when discussing crime. It is most sensible, it would seem, to investigate black men…
gregladen | July 25, 2009Jud Süà is a 1940 Nazi anti-Semetic propaganda film that was widely loved in much of Europe, especially Germany (and also vilified and banned in various places). The production and showing of this film was a significant moment in the development of the widespread German hate of the Jewish People that facilitated a nearly successful attempt at their utter extermination.
In other words, Jud Süà played a measurable role in the development of mid 20th century racism to the ultimate conclusion which racism, unfettered, always leads: Holocaust.
John Ubele is a hate-mongering white…
gregladen | July 24, 2009UPDATED (based on feedback from commenters, new information, and some other data)
Is racial bias ever a factor in police work? Was racial bias a factor in GatesGate, the recent incident in Cambridge Massachusetts involving Harvard scholar Skip Gates and the Cambridge Police? Here, I want to relate an incident in which I was involved in which a very strong racial bias clearly occurred, in which the police tried to arrest a black man principally because he was black even though he was totally innocent, and at the same time, gave undue sway to a white man. First a little context, then the…
gregladen | June 29, 2009A racist arrested by chance at a railway station was "on the cusp" of waging a terror campaign using tennis balls and weedkiller, a jury has heard.
Neil Lewington, 43, had a bomb factory at his parents' home in Reading, Berks, and wanted to target those he thought "non-British", prosecutors alleged.
The Old Bailey heard he was carrying bomb parts when arrested at Lowestoft, Suffolk, for abusing a train conductor.
details here at the BBC