racism
mikethemadbiologist | August 4, 2008David Gergen this weekend described the Republican strategy towards Obama perfectly:
The best dog whistles are the ones most people don't hear. The reason McCain's ad works is because, at the root of it, there are a significant number of whites who see a successful, confident, intelligent black man. And they hate him for that, and that alone. He is everything they are not. But because he's black, they can latch onto that. As the old Southernism goes, "If you ain't better than a n----er, who is you better than."
I guess the Coalition of the Sane should be fortunate that the McCain camp…
sb admin | July 22, 2008Radovan Karadzic, one of the worst mass-murders of the post-WWII era, has been captured, or, perhaps more properly, has been allowed to be captured. Karadzic was responsible for orchestrating the murders of tens of thousands of Bosnian Muslims during the Balkan Wars.
A close friend of my family grew up in a small Bosnian city during the war. She lived in basements, and came up dodging sniper fire and grenades only when they couldn't wait any longer to find food and water. Her mother suffers osteoporosis from years of malnutrition. He brother-in-law died of complications of war wounds.…
mikethemadbiologist | July 13, 2008...the Crazy Twenty-Sevens. From driftglass:
If you replay the video, and listen under Stephanopoulos' interruption, this is point Koppel was trying to get across:
"And I think there is just a small but significant fraction of Americans for whom...the truth in this instance is never going to matter."
Which sounds like a small thing, but for me it was almost a cultural event, because it is almost the only time in my memory when a Big Time Newscritter sat in front of a camera and called bullshit on some specific, identifiable group other than "bureaucratsinwashington" or "liberalelites".…
mikethemadbiologist | June 11, 2008Or is it pendula? Regardless, one has to work for progress; it is not an indefatigable natural phenomenon. A while ago, I had this to say about racial progress in the U.S.:
Racial progress wasn't inevitable; it required a lot of sacrifice. It wasn't that long ago, that publicly saying that you weren't opposed to inter-racial marriage, in many parts of this country, meant that you would be called a Communist, un-American, and far, far worse. A few even paid for it with their lives. For all those left-of-center who think the political pendulum will swing back on its own, I think you're…
mikethemadbiologist | June 8, 2008I've been very leary of all of the discussions of Obama as a transformative figure: I remember in Virginia when Doug Wilder was elected as the first black governor since Reconstruction and then...a few years later, a wave of conservatism washed over, well, everything. But, nonetheless, Obama's nomination does lend itself to some optimism:
Here is the fundamental tragedy of the backlash [against civil rights]: Voters like this empowered a party that decided they didn't need protection against predatory subprime mortgage fraud. Didn't need affordable, universal health insurance; made it…
scientificactivist | May 28, 2008When I was a student at Texas A&M University and active in politics there, I spent a lot of time on voter registration. Much of this effort was devoted to the community outside of the university, but my primary focus was on students at the university. And, although some people would contend that college students should register to vote from their hometowns, I strongly disagree. At the very least, students should be allowed to choose which location they prefer, but beyond that I believe there's a strong case for students to register at their university location, unless they have a…
mikethemadbiologist | May 27, 2008Recently, I ripped into Kathleen "Ein Volk, Ein Reich, Ein Führer" Parker for mainstreaming white power garbage. But Gregory Rodriguez makes a good point about the "formal re-articulation of whiteness as a social category and a racial interest group" (italics mine):
To be white in America meant that you were a member of the default category that just isn't discussed. In 2000, journalists didn't incessantly mention that George W. Bush was seeking to become the 43rd white male president of the United States. No one even thinks in those terms. It's implied. It's one of the perks of dominance.…
sb admin | May 26, 2008Given Ford's early track record, this story out of California is rather disturbing. (Via PZ). A SoCal Ford dealership is using prejudice against non-Christians as a prominent selling point for their business.
Henry Ford I was a well-known antisemite, and published the Protocols of the Elders of Zion in his personal rag, the Dearborn Independent. During the pre-war/depression era, Detroit hosted a number of prominent isolationists and antisemites, including Ford and Father Coughlin.
But, if you know your market, intolerance sells, and hard times sometimes bring out the worst in people.…
mikethemadbiologist | May 22, 2008Washington Post syndicated columnist* Kathleen "Ein Volk, Ein Reich, Ein Führer" Parker writes about the "patriot divide" (italics mine):
It's about blood equity, heritage and commitment to hard-won American values. And roots.
Some run deeper than others and therein lies the truth of Josh Fry's political sense. In a country that is rapidly changing demographically -- and where new neighbors may have arrived last year, not last century -- there is a very real sense that once-upon-a-time America is getting lost in the dash to diversity.
We love to boast that we are a nation of immigrants--and…
mikethemadbiologist | May 21, 2008...in Oregon. Despite all of the talk about how Obama has a problem with white voters, he won Oregon, even though the electorate is essentially entirely white. So what do commentators mean when they say Obama has a problem with white voters?
What they mean is that Obama has a problem with whites whose ancestors or communities participated slavery, 'convict labor'*, lynching, Jim Crow, and segregation (as well as 'massive resistance'). One just doesn't walk away from that kind of brutality, even decades later. These attitudes linger. So why won't the media discuss this openly and honestly…
mikethemadbiologist | May 7, 2008By way of Kathy G, I see that Caitlin Flannagan won an award for being "thoughtful and bracingly honest, filled with humor and empathy, and free of cliches and political correctness." This gives me an excuse to rescue from the Google cache an old post, "Hell, I'll Pile on Flanagan Too", illustrating some of Flannagan's thoughtfulness:
I'll leave to these fine people to criticize Caitlin Flanagan's efforts to bemoan her sorry lot as a faux stay-at-home mom. What honked me off in the Time article was this:
The Democrats made a huge tactical error a few decades ago. In the middle of doing the…
scientificactivist | May 7, 2008You can file this one under "should have been done about twenty years ago." From the Mail & Guardian:
Lawmakers on Tuesday debated legislation to remove former South African president Nelson Mandela and the African National Congress (ANC) from an apartheid-era United States terrorist blacklist.
Several members of the House of Representatives immediately expressed support for a Bill aimed at removing from any US databases "any notation that would characterise the ANC and its leaders as terrorists".
The House Bill is sponsored by Howard Berman, the California Democrat who chairs the…
mikethemadbiologist | April 6, 2008...maybe it's time for Martin Luther King's promised land. Maha explains what I mean:
Much of white America was still simmering with resentment over court-ordered school desegregation. Also, Lyndon Johnson had initiated New Deal-style programs aimed primarily at relieving poverty among African Americans. Suddenly, whites who had had no problem with "entitlements" before - when benefits went mostly to whites -- discovered the virtues of "self-reliance."
...The Right-Wing Narrative says that Democrats lost power because George McGovern opposed the Vietnam War, and the Dem Party was overrun by…
mikethemadbiologist | April 4, 2008Today, in 1968, Martin Luther King was assassinated in Memphis. This is why he was in Memphis.
mikethemadbiologist | March 2, 2008Stephen Budiansky's The Bloody Shirt: Terror After Appomattox is a powerful and detailed examination of the widely-supported terrorism in the post-Civil War South. Because Budiansky cites a lot of primary literature, such as newspaper editorials, legal testimony, and published memoirs, the horror and the nauseating race hatred of that era are not hidden with euphemisms. Were it up to me, this book would be required reading in every high school history class. And it is relevant to today's politics.
Why?
Because the Southern Strategy is beginning to fail: that is, the bogus notions of…
grrlscientist | February 12, 2008tags: James Watson, racism, sexism, genetic engineering, seed media group, scienceblogs, Adam Bly
James Watson, 1962 Nobel Prize winner
for co-discovering the structure of DNA along with
Francis Crick and Maurice Wilkins.
Yesterday, Adam Bly, founder, CEO and Editor-in-Chief of Seed Media Group, was interviewed by Carol Goar for an editorial about the Canadian government's dismissal of its national science adviser, Arthur Carty.
"Science is driving our global culture unlike ever before," Bly is cited as saying. "Now is not the time to send a signal -- domestically and internationally --…
greengabbro | February 12, 2008You know, when you join a new organization, you don't typically scan the board of directors looking for people who have previously been publicly identified as over-the-line bigots no reasonable person should associate with ever. Or at least I don't. I certainly didn't when I signed on as a minion for ScienceBlogs.
So I was surprised to learn that the over-the-line racist sexist bigot biologist Jim Watson is still on the Seed Media board.
Of course, if I refused to work for anyone who associated with what I consider to be unacceptable racism or sexism, I would never have a job ever again. I…
mikethemadbiologist | February 1, 2008From commenter mcc over at Pandagon:
"Post-racial" just means "after we all agreed not to talk about race anymore".
"Post-feminist" means something similar.
Indeed.
mikethemadbiologist | January 31, 2008...the morons at Bucky's Family Restaurant do. From some actual NY Times reporting:
"I wish there was somebody worth voting for," said Buford Moss, a retired Union Carbide worker sitting at the back table of Bucky's Family Restaurant here, with a group of regulars, in a county seat that -- as the home of the 11th president, James K. Polk -- is one of the ancestral homelands of Jacksonian Democracy.
"The Democrats have left the working people," Mr. Moss said.
"We have nobody representing us," he continued, adding that he was "sad to say" he had voted previously for Mr. Bush. He was…
mikethemadbiologist | January 29, 2008Because why offend one group of people, when you can offend two at the same time? From Chet Scoville:
It appears that "Canadian" is a new racial epithet in America; it's now a code word for black.
Don't believe me? Take a look:
Last August, a blogger in Cincinnati going by the name CincyBlurg reported that a black friend from the southeastern U.S. had recently discovered that she was being called a Canadian. "She told me a story of when she was working in a shop in the South and she overheard some of her customers complaining that they were always waited on by a Canadian at that place. She…