Open Thread: WTF Edition

Posted on 9/3/2010 by Ampersand

Post what you like, as you like it. Self-linking makes me giggle like a small baby.

This video might not be SFW:

  1. A buncha links on “triggering” and “calling out”
  2. Sex, Gender, and Toilet Signs. A discussion of gender in bathroom signs. This is awesome, partly for the discussion, and partly for the enormous variety of signs that the blogger has collected and categorized.
  3. Who are the girls who need to bypass parental notification laws by going to a judge? It’s explained here, in painful and lengthy detail. This blogger really knows what she’s talking about; well worth reading.
  4. “Charles Darwin … imagined a world in which organisms battled for supremacy and only the fittest survived. But new research identifies the availability of “living space”, rather than competition, as being of key importance for evolution.” Interesting idea.
  5. Great point: But thinking of “choice” as the opposite of “discrimination,” as Brad Peck of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce did in his blog post about the pay gap, is wrong. Discrimination and opportunity shape choice, and as long as women see an unfairly matched, uphill battle in every election, they’re unlikely to jump in willingly unless they have an unusual amount of resources or support.
  6. Gov. Barbour Implicitly Criticizes GOP’s Tough Talk On Immigration
  7. “The talented Ukrainian artist Vladislav Erko has created an absolutely amazing deck of playing cards based on authentic traditional Ukrainian costumes.”
  8. Riz Khan on Afghan Women: “One thing that Riz Khan’s program brought to light is that the damage done to women’s rights is not just a result of Taliban rule nor is it just a result of occupation. The problems have preceded both the Taliban’s rule and U.S. occupation and thus cannot be expected to be solved in just nine years of occupation.”
  9. The Argument For Getting Rid Of The Home Mortgage Deduction. Interestingly, what everyone says — that this deduction was created in order to encourage home ownership — isn’t true.
  10. Female Impersonator reviews The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. I really liked it, and would argue that it is a feminist novel (although not a perfect feminist work, but what is?).
  11. “South Sudan is planning to literally re-build its city centers from scratch…into the shape of… safari animals.” No, really. It’s worth clicking through to see the proposed city plans.
  12. Note to White House: It’s ugly out there. The base actually matters. Do something. Fast. Although really, I think it’s too late. I’d be delighted to be wrong, but I think the Democrats are going to get creamed in two months.
  13. The Quest for a Solid Ice Beer Tray
  14. Republican Candidate Michael Stopa’s Anti-Atheist Bigotry Ignored.
  15. I need a (non-copyrighted) drink
  16. Quote: “Really? No ‘more horrible person [can] be imagined’ than Alice Walker? Maybe if your imagination really, really sucks.”
  17. The economy is going to keep on sucking for a long, long time.
  18. Prostitution on CraigsList: the US and Singapore
  19. Ted Rall, of all people, argues that our mission in Afghanistan is doing some good.
  20. MLK’s Movement Was More Interested in Justice Than Harmony. There are also some really nice photos in this post.
  21. The Death Dealer — Rebecca Dart’s kitteny take on the famous Frazetta painting.
  22. I really like this 1916 photo of a mother and her son, a marine. Not sure why.
  23. You think your hospital experience was bad? This man’s was worse.
  24. Eunomia (one of the best foreign policy blogs out there — and I’m saying this about a conservative blog!) discusses and defends Feisal Abdul Rauf’s most controversial statements.
  25. (Yet Another Reason) Why immigration could help America
  26. Paul Krugman: This Is Not a Recovery
  27. The Ethos of an Advocate in an Adversarial Model of Democratic Discourse: “Indeed, I worry that the whole premise of a “contest of advocates” model is that there is someone sitting in the jury box, someone being convinced. But the more we sort into ideological tribes, the smaller the pool from which one might draw such a jury.”
  28. Should Retirement Be Nasty, Brutish, and Shorter?
  29. This cartoon cracked me up.
  30. A record backlog in immigration courts
  31. Propaganda Posters of World War Two. Includes some anti-American posters the Axis countries created!
  32. On fatphobia, thin privilege, and “eat a sandwich!”
  33. Below: An image from The LowBrow Tarot Card Project

Posted in Link farms, crossposted on TADA | 1 Comment  

This is what progress looks like

Posted on 9/2/2010 by Maia

A minor shit-storm has blown up over on Feministe where a guest blogger called Monica posted an fat-hating rant.* I’m not going to quote any of it – it was an inane, illogical post – and the point of this post is not to refute her nonsense (she actually talks about how people need to put down the donuts – that’s how unoriginal she is).

Instead I want to talk about another post on feministe that was written almost four and a half years ago. It was a better written, and more coherent. But it was also arguing that fat acceptance activists went too far, and that we needed to talk about the unhealthyness of fat.

There were 122 comments on Monica’s recent post – a good 95% of which are people telling Monica exactly how ridiculous and offensive her post is.

Four and a half years ago, there were just a few of us who spoke up for even moderate fat acceptance (and if you read the comments – which I don’t actually recommend – I was being embarrassingly moderate and conciliatory).

In four and a half years the number of people talking fat and politics at feministe and feministe adjacent spaces has increased exponentially. Every person who says “I’m fat and there’s no shame in that”, makes it a little easier for the next person.

That a few moderates has become 100 angry radicals gives me such hope, and it really shows the value of continuing to talk and fight for what I’d still prefer to call fat liberation.

*Prompted by of all things a Jezebel post – if Jezebel is too fat accepting for you I recommend you don’t read my archives.

Posted in Fat, fat and more fat | 33 Comments  

Sketchbook: Zero Mostel

Posted on 9/1/2010 by Barry

Posted in Sketchblogging, Syndicated feeds | Leave a comment  

Fix The Economy: Open The Borders

Posted on 9/1/2010 by Ampersand

[Crossposted on "TADA" and on "Alas"]

Chicago Immigration Reform Protest - HR4437

Felix Salmon writes:

Never mind the stimulus vs austerity debate: here’s something that both sides should be able to get behind. It’s a simple legislative fix which increases tax revenues without raising taxes; which increases the demand for housing; which increases the economy’s productive capacity; and which boosts wages for American workers. It’s about as Pareto-optimal as legislation gets. So let’s open the borders, and encourage much more immigration into the US!

Salmon links to this report from the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco. Giovanni Peri, the author of the report, compared states with high levels of immigration to states with low levels of immigration, a sort of “natural experiment.”

For example, in California, one worker in three was foreign born in 2008, while in West Virginia the comparable proportion was only one in 100. By exploiting variations in the inflows of immigrants across states at 10-year intervals from 1960 to 2000, and annually from 1994 to 2008, we are able to estimate the short-run (one to two years), medium-run (four years), and long-run (seven to ten years) impact of immigrants on output, income, and employment.

Peri found that immigration is strongly beneficial:

First, there is no evidence that immigrants crowd out U.S.-born workers in either the short or long run. Data on U.S.-born worker employment imply small effects, with estimates never statistically different from zero. The impact on hours per worker is similar. We observe insignificant effects in the short run and a small but significant positive effect in the long run. At the same time, immigration reduces somewhat the skill intensity of workers in the short and long run because immigrants have a slightly lower average education level than U.S.-born workers.

Second, the positive long-run effect on income per U.S.-born worker accrues over some time. In the short run, small insignificant effects are observed. Over the long run, however, a net inflow of immigrants equal to 1% of employment increases income per worker by 0.6% to 0.9%. This implies that total immigration to the United States from 1990 to 2007 was associated with a 6.6% to 9.9% increase in real income per worker. That equals an increase of about $5,100 in the yearly income of the average U.S. worker in constant 2005 dollars. Such a gain equals 20% to 25% of the total real increase in average yearly income per worker registered in the United States between 1990 and 2007.

Basically, the US employment market is not a zero sum game. When immigrants come to the US to work, that benefits them (which is a strong reason, in and of itself, to favor opening the borders), but it also benefits us.

It’s also worth remembering that “life without competition with low-skilled non-Americans” is not an option on the menu. American workers will experience the downside of competition even if every single undocumented immigrant was somehow magically deported. But if those undocumented immigrants aren’t in the US, then Americans receive far less of the benefits. As the Economist blog wrote a couple of years ago:

Another possibility is that immigration also increases labour demand. This becomes especially important when we remember two other things. First, the one point upon which everyone can agree in this debate is that immigration substantially increases the productivity and earnings of the immigrants themselves. Secondly, we need to ask how the importation of low-skilled workers is different from the importation of goods produced by low-skilled workers abroad. Absent immigration, Mr Borjas would argue, wages would be higher in America and lower in trading nations. As such, price competition for tradeable goods would press down native worker wages.

Why is that important? Well, for one thing, it suggests that it’s difficult to separate cross-border flows of workers from goods. For another, when comparing outcomes, we need to remember that immigrants are still around whether they immigrate or not. In other words, immigrants might lower the wages of domestic workers, but immigrant consumption demand is much higher when they work on the American side of the border. If they do not immigrate, they’ll still be competing with native workers via imports of cheap products, but they’ll also be buying far fewer American goods, because they’ll be a lot poorer. It’s still difficult to know how things play out in the end, but one shouldn’t pretend that the proper comparison is a domestic labour market with immigrants versus one without.

Notably, even George Borjas — the best-known (and almost the only) economist arguing against immigration — calculates that in the long run, immigration has no effect on US worker’s wages overall (he predicts that immigration lowers the wages of high-school dropouts by nearly 5%, but raises the wages of other Americans, including those with only a high school degree). And Borjas reached his results not through empirical examination of what’s actually happened in the real world, but through an abstract calculation in which he considered only the downside of immigration, but didn’t account for the economic benefits at all.

So the worst-case scenario from Borjas is 1) Not all that bad (some workers gain, others lose, but overall there’s no difference), and 2) based on the dubious assumption that immigration provides no economic benefits to native workers. On the best-case scenario, we have strong benefits for everyone, immigrants and natives alike. And let’s not forget, fighting “illegal immigration” is expensive.

For that reason, it just makes sense to favor open borders (for all immigrants, I’d argue, except violent criminals) and immediate amnesty for all undocumented immigrants.

Further reading: The immigration category at the Ambrosini Critique. And the immigration category at Cardiff de Alejo Garcia. And the study from the Federal Reserve of SF, which is really pretty readable.

Posted in Economics and the like, Immigration, Migrant Rights, etc, crossposted on TADA | 18 Comments  

Pretty, Ugly, Plain

Posted on 8/31/2010 by Mandolin

i.

Once when my friend was seventeen, a woman stopped her in the shopping mall and said, “Do you want to be Miss Teen Santa Clara?” And she said yes, because why not, and she came in runner up that year for Miss Teen California. She took the modeling contract they offered her, too, and stood thin and blonde and flushed in front of the fan, wheat-blonde hair blowing out behind her.

She auditioned for a role in a musical adaptation of The Ugly Duckling, and they cast her as the beautiful swan, and she drove every day across the hill into Santa Cruz for the long hours of rehearsals. Sometimes they didn’t need her while they ran the other numbers, sometimes for hours, so she went out on drives, wandered the beaches.

“Hey there, pretty,” shouted one man, who was with a group of men. “You a mermaid?”

She was walking the shore, alone. Dusk drew dark to the horizon. Some of the men sat on the pier. Some stood.

“You look like a mermaid,” he said. “Why don’t you give me your number?”

The men clustered around her, and my friends heart pounded, and she didn’t know if she’d be able to get away to the silver honda her daddy bought her for high school graduation. She smiled and acted calm as she wrote out her number, like she wasn’t a fish they’d caught on their line, like they might not decide to reel her in and gut her.

ii.

“Just shut up and enjoy it,” my friend’s mother said to her, when she went in for her first temp job. She’s twenty-two and just out of college, very pretty, with long dark hair, and dark eyes, and pin-up curves accented by her pencil skirt. Men have been talking; have been leering; have been gearing up to touch.

“Just enjoy it,” her mother repeats, “You’ll miss it when you’re not pretty anymore.”

iii.

“Why are you even trying?” The girl is blonde, tan. The letters “UCSC” are printed in yellow across the butt of her trim blue sweat pants. She stands next to the treadmill on which my friend is working out, her hands on her hips, a white towel tossed over her shoulder.

She sneers at my friend’s ass, the shape of which she can’t even discern underneath the baggy sweats that hide the fact that my friend is much smaller than she looks. She’s slender, though not as painfully thin as when she was at her most anorexic. After years of sexual abuse, she hides the contours of her body underneath clothing made for much larger women, each bulge and billow and fold suggesting flesh that isn’t really there. She feels like it’s there, though, still has the anorexic’s view of herself in the mirror, the conviction that her body is spilling everywhere, uncontrollable, insatiable, massive.

The blonde’s eyes flick derisively from shrouded ass to bared face. “It obviously isn’t working,” she says. “Leave the machines for someone else.”

iv.

“You act well enough,” the art director of the musical theater institute I’m attending tells me, “but your singing is really incredible. You could play any kind of roles, as long as you lose weight.”

Every day, there’s the toilet, the calorie count below starvation, the hours of exercise. Emotional control has slipped away–I cry when the wind blows, and then rage a second later. I’m not eating enough to run my brain. The pounds won’t shed, won’t shed. I can’t be the person I’ve always wanted to be. My body refuses, hoards its energy, would rather pitch into a faint than burn any more of its stores.

“Why are you eating that?” mom says, when I’m back on food again. “You really need that?” She’s furious about something else, and she wants to make me hurt, and this is such a good way. I throw away the food and she complains about the wasted money.

v.

My friend is very skinny and very tall. She’s the kind of tall that attracts your eye across a store. She’s the kind of skinny that draws bad remarks. “You play basketball?” “Are you anorexic?” No one asks if she’s a model; she’s not that kind of tall and thin. Turns out you can be stretched too much, drawn too narrow. People watch her bones and her back.

She wants to stretch free and become the thing she feels she’s growing into, but her mother wants her home in the nest. Her heart is fragile. There are health reasons to keep her home. It’s not health that makes her mom insist she wear makeup on her way out of the house, that makes her police her clothes for any hint of something too butch, too goth, too hard.

My friend argues for leaving home. Going to a college far away. Getting to meet new people. Getting to choose her own clothes. “I don’t want to be here forever,” she says.

It’s the end of a long argument that, in her mother’s opinion, should have been over a long time ago. Her mother can’t believe she continues to press. Decisions have been made. The shoe has been dropped.

She fixes her daughter with hard eyes. She grabs away the half-eaten bowl of cereal. Milk spills over the edge onto the table. “You’re as ugly on the inside as you are on the out.”

Posted in Gender and the Body | 9 Comments  

Review of (and plug for) Mary Hobson’s NATIVE STAR

Posted on 8/31/2010 by Mandolin

Let me tell you about my friend Mary Hobson.

You might know her as M. K. Hobson, and maybe you’ve read her blog, or maybe you’ve read or heard her many fine stories, such as “Hotel Astarte” (and if you haven’t, go listen).

But the special thing about today is, today you can read her debut novel, NATIVE STAR.



NATIVE STAR tells the tale of a backwoods witch named Emily who gets into trouble when she goes off to fight some zombies and accidentally gets a chunk of the living spirit of Mother Earth stuck in her hand. She and an obnoxious warlock transplanted from New York City, a lean gentleman who labors under the very substantial name of Dreadnought Stanton, must travel to find Professor Mirabilis, leader of the credomancers, so that he can rescue Emily and her hand. Along the way, they encounter troubles aplenty, including conniving warlocks, wild magic, and a giant raccoon.

Let’s talk about the good points. The novel is infused by Mary Hobson’s humor and vivacity, which is a particular delight. Mary can light up any bar or party at a hotel convention and her voice is just as charismatic here. It shows up in some extremely charming dialogue between Emily and Stanton, as well as in the humorous and fanciful choices of imagery–including the aforementioned giant raccoon, and the lace-clad bounty hunter who pursues our hero and heroine. There’s a sense of whimsy and playfulness in the increasingly tangled events that prevent Emily and Stanton from reaching New York.

Hobson is excellent with historical details. She’s also masterful with side characters, from the pleasantly daft Ebeneezer Hembry, to the large-boned grand dame of the alternate history’s women’s movement. Although Emily was quite charming, the side characters almost take over this story: poor Rose with her dreadful novels, the gambling witch in San Francisco, whatever outcast from the world of fashion was the original owner of Emily’s plaid suit.

As the Greenman review by Camille Alexa notes, the book is fast-paced, with an unusual combination of steampunk, romance, historical, and fantasy elements. It reminded me of Gail Carriger’s SOULLESS, and particularly of Cherie Priest’s BONESHAKER—especially when it invoked the same combination of mines and zombies.

Like Cherie Priest’s novel, I found this one entertaining, but ultimately not quite fulfilling. I can point to specific critiques: What was gained by starting the novel with a prologue that could have been sloughed to no detriment that I can see? Can even gloves explain why no one ever inconveniently spots that Emily’s hand has a rock in it? Was it necessary for the magic-as-oil metaphor to be quite so heavy-handed?* And I’m rather tired of romance plotlines that pit the initial nice guy against the initial jerk, especially when it means I know who the heroine is going to end up by the end of her first fuming inner monologue.

But ultimately, I think my problem was one of scope. M. K. Hobson’s short story “Hotel Astarte” (linked above) covers some of the same territory as this piece: it poses a world in which America’s destiny is manifested by magic: warlocks who rule Wall Street with incantations, the march of industrialism, an archetypal King and Queen of the Midwest. Ironically, when I first saw a draft of “Hotel Astarte,” I suggested that Mary should trim back the prose—but here, in a leaner, trimmer version of that world, the magic and mystery and epic scope have disappeared. There was a breathtaking strangeness to the world of Hotel Astarte, carefully layered into the tiny material details, the familiarity of bunting made strange by the import it was given by the epic events and formal language.

NATIVE STAR doesn’t have that. It’s our world, slightly shifted. There are reasons for that, I think. I don’t think the heavy, ritualistic aura of “Hotel Astarte” would have survived the transition to a fast-paced novel. NATIVE STAR is an adventure with particularized characters, whereas “Hotel Astarte” is an epic with archetypes.

But for me, “Hotel Astarte” also captured something I hadn’t seen before, which is why I eventually bought it for PodCastle. It was a fictional flavor I had to adjust to, but it also made me think about history in a new way.

NATIVE STAR is something I’ve seen before. It’s has shades of BONESHAKER, SOULLESS, even JULIAN COMSTOCK**. It’s a grand, cross-country adventure. The stone in Emily’s hand often seems like a MacGuffin—once circumstances got dire enough, I wanted her to just cut the damn thing out. Better mutilation than death. Her excuse—that she doesn’t want to lose her writing ability—was immediately undercut; even her Pap admits she’d get used to off-hand writing. Sometimes Emily and Stanton encountered side-plots that had no effect on the plot as a whole, except to keep them from reaching New York. It was clear that I had to take the book as a journey, that I had to stop thinking about new ways of looking at fiction, or other ways of solving the plot problems, or whatever other distractions I’d invented—this book wanted me to forget all that and just travel with Emily and Stanton.

And it was fun traveling with Emily and Stanton. It was fun to experience their adventures. It was fun to see what new, fanciful pitfalls Hobson had laid in their path. It was fun to see the colorful side characters. It was fun to see the splash and sparkle of magic. It was fun to run away from a giant frickin’ raccoon.

NATIVE STAR is a fun book. It’s not the book I hoped for when I heard that M. K. Hobson was working on a text in the vein of “Hotel Astarte;” it’s not a book that kicks my ass and takes my name, the way Mary’s work sometimes can. But taken on its own terms—as a grand, sometimes comic, adventure—it’s a fun ride. And one you can take today, by visiting Amazon or another fine bookseller.

–

*Though I liked that the magic was alive, which reminded me of Sarah Prineas’ Magic Thief series

**I gave relatively high rankings to COMSTOCK, BONESHAKER and Carriger on the Hugo and the Campbell, so it’s not like this is bad company to keep.

Posted in Whatever | 2 Comments  

Cartoon: Street Harassment

Posted on 8/30/2010 by Ampersand

[Crossposted on TADA, where anyone can comment. Comments on this post here on "Alas" are restricted to feminists and pro-feminists only.]

Click on the cartoon to see it larger.

Script for this cartoon

When I was researching this cartoon, I came across several different women reporting they get harassed more often when they’re on a bicycle. So I decided that in one panel the woman should be riding a bike. But it turned out I was lousy at drawing a bike, so I actually had to use photo reference, and redraw it several times. So I probably worked harder on that one panel than any other in the cartoon.

Then, when I finalized the cartoon’s layout, I ended up cropping 90% of the bike out of that panel. Oh well.

Posted in Cartooning & comics, Feminism, sexism, etc | 56 Comments  

Fit to eat

Posted on 8/28/2010 by Maia

The New Zealand based Child Poverty Action group has discovered the wonders of facebook, and so a lot of my friendshave been liking them recently. I was all prepared to join in, until I saw they were promoting this post with a cheerful “What are our kids eating? And what is our government doing (or not doing) to encourage them to choose an orange over an oreo?”

First it reminded me of the endless ridiculous games of substitutions that you see in women’s magazines and “healthy food” (Next time you feel like eating chocolate try a tin of tuna instead). Which made me think of Sarah Haskins, swapping a six pack of beer for a fifth of whiskey:

So I was happy for a while. But when I recovered from my distraction I was still grumpy. Why should children be choosing Oreos over oranges – why can’t they have both, and lots of other food as well? Why is an anti-poverty group calling on the government to promote a diet mentality among kids?

The post they linked to was called “Not Fit To Eat”* was talking about a $2.50 pack sold in a South Auckland dairy, that contained Oreos, two packets of chip like things, and an orange drink. I agree that that is not an adequate lunch, but each of the individual components, and the pack of the whole, is totally fit to eat.

What I found most ridiculous about the response to this pack, was the emphasis on how cheap it was – as if that was a bad thing (someone made their horror at this food being cheap explicit in the facebook thread). I do not understand how anyone concerned with poverty could ever have a problem with any food being cheap. I have so often heard people tutt-tutting about the fact that a litre of coke is cheaper than a litre of milk – as if it is the cheapness of the coke that is the problem.

The person who had found this pack asked the dairy owner “aren’t you ashamed to be selling this?” Why is it more shameful to be selling this for $2.50 than anything else? Dairies make their money through high margins – if their is shame in their trade – surely it is selling food for more, rather than selling food for less.

You know there was a time when calories weren’t as relatively cheap as they are now. Cheap calories can give people the ability to stay alive, and they’re fabulous. I understand being angry at the expense of other nutrients, such as milk, vegetables, fruit, meat and whittakers dark almond chocoalte, but why is this so often discussed as if the cheapness of other fooods is the problem?

This seems to be my week to be grumpy about how people on the left talk about food and bodies.((Who am I kidding, every week for at least the last five years has been my week to be grumpy about the way some people on the left talks about food and bodies.)) But I think it’s really important. It is totally possible to talk about food and poverty, without buying into a worldview that fetishises food and buys into an ideology that sees food in terms of morality. I really should write a grand theory post about why this is bad one of these days – but the really short reason is that one of the purposes of this ideology is to blame individuals for the effects of poverty. This is not something we can co-opt – it is something which will co-opt us.

And because no post like this would be complete without it, here is a link to the fat nutritionist’s If only poor people understood nutrition.

Posted in Fat, fat and more fat | 17 Comments  

Still Not Satisfied

Posted on 8/28/2010 by Ampersand

It was 47 years ago today…

There are those who are asking the devotees of civil rights, “When will you be satisfied?” We can never be satisfied as long as the Negro is the victim of the unspeakable horrors of police brutality. We can never be satisfied, as long as our bodies, heavy with the fatigue of travel, cannot gain lodging in the motels of the highways and the hotels of the cities. We cannot be satisfied as long as the Negro’s basic mobility is from a smaller ghetto to a larger one. We can never be satisfied as long as our children are stripped of their selfhood and robbed of their dignity by signs stating “For Whites Only”. We cannot be satisfied as long as a Negro in Mississippi cannot vote and a Negro in New York believes he has nothing for which to vote. No, no, we are not satisfied, and we will not be satisfied until justice rolls down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream.

(Thanks.)

Posted in Race, racism and related issues | 5 Comments  

Trash, Bootstraps, and the Undeserving Poor

Posted on 8/27/2010 by Mandolin

Over on Scalzi’s blog, people are discussing the phrase white trash. Says commenter Lysana at 61:

It’s often easy to spot white trash. One Confederate battle standard or American flag item on the wardrobe and my antennae go up. Sorry you seem to think it matters that some of us know the signs while you don’t.

“Well, sure,” says Other Bill, at 63, “I know the signs. Just like we all know the signs for poor black trash and poor puerto rican trash, right?”

Over here on our own blog, we’ve got a tiff going on in comments about how poor people shouldn’t buy nice things, since they’ve got to save up their money so they can break out of poverty. RonF says at 12:

The desire for better material goods/healthcare/housing/food/etc. is what motivates people to get better education/training and work harder and longer in order to move up to the economic point where they can afford those things.

People who presumably aren’t poor, and certainly aren’t the poor people in question, feel free to comment on the responsibility of poor people’s economic decisions, as Sebastian H says at 14: “Isn’t it kind of a question of which nice things? A TV may or may not be a good example of acting irresponsibly, but a Cadillac almost certainly is.”

But these comments come from the same assumption: that we know what poor people want, and it’s to escape poverty. They come from another assumption, too: that it’s possible for the poor people to escape poverty if they make the right decisions.

But people in generational, grinding poverty, may not share these middle class assumptions and experiences.

I’ll let Dorothy Allison speak to both arguments, with excerpts from her short story collection Trash.

From the introduction:

My family’s lives were not on television, not in books, not even comic books. There was a myth of the poor in this country, but it did not include us, no matter how I tried to squeeze us in. There was this concept of the “good” poor, and that fantasy had little to do with the everyday lives my family had survived. The good poor were hardworking, ragged but clean, and intrinsically honorable. We were the bad poor. We were men who drank and couldn’t keep a job; women, invariably pregnant before marriage, who quickly became worn, fat, and old from working too many hours and bearing too many children; and children with runny noses, watery eyes, and the wrong attitudes. My cousins quit school, stole cars, used drugs, and took dead-end jobs pumping gas or waiting tables…. We were not noble,not grateful, not even hopeful. What was there to work for, to save money for, to fight for or struggle against? We had generations before us to teach us that nothing ever changed, and that those who did try to escape failed…

I had sweet-tempered cousins and I saw them get ground down. I had gentle aunts and it seemed they almost disappeared out of their own lives. Is it any wonder that when I set out to write stories, I made up women like my grandmother, like my great-grandmother? Troublesome, angry, complicated women with secretive, unpredictable natures… I wrote to release indignation and refuse humiliation, to admit fault and to glorify the people I loved who were never celebrated…

I originally claimed the label “trash” in self-defense. The phrase had been applied to me and to my family in crude and hateful ways. I took it on deliberately, as I had taken on “dyke”–though i have to acknowledge that what I heard as a child was more often the phrase “white trash.” As an adult, I saw all too clearly the look that would cross the face of any black woman in the room when that particular term was spoken. It was like a splash of cold water, and I saw the other side of the hatefulness in the words. It took me right back to being a girl and hearing the uncles I so admired spew racist bile and callous homophobic insults. Some phrases cannot be reclaimed.

Posted in Whatever | 16 Comments  

“Now excuse me, I have to go.” Satoshi Kon’s Last Words.

Posted on 8/27/2010 by Ampersand

Anime director Satoshi Kon (Perfect Blue, Tokyo Godfathers, Millenium Actress, Paprika) died of cancer earlier this week, age 46. He wrote a long statement about his death, which his family posted on his blog, and which blogger Makiko Itoh has translated into English.

While my wife was running around getting things in place for my escape, I was pleading with doctors “If I can go home for even half a day, there are things I can still do!”, then waiting alone in the depressing hospital room for death. I was lonely, but this was what I was thinking.

“Maybe dying won’t be so bad.”

I didn’t have any reasons for it, and perhaps I needed to think like that, but I was surprisingly calm and relaxed.

However, there was just one thought that was gnawing away at me.

“I don’t want to die here…”

As I thought that, something moved out from the calendar on the wall and started to spread around the room.

“Oh dear, a line marching out from the calendar. My　hallucinations aren’t at all original.”

I had to smile at the fact at my professional instincts were working even at times like this, but in any case I was probably the nearest to the land of the dead that I’d ever been at that point. I really felt death very close to me. [But] with the help of many people, I miraculously escaped Musashino Red Cross and came back home, wrapped up in the land of the dead and bedsheets.

Read the whole.

Posted in In the news | 3 Comments  

I’m Really Beginning to Think We Need an Islamophobia 101 Post and I Wish I Were the One to Write It

Posted on 8/25/2010 by Richard Jeffrey Newman

I have been increasingly frustrated by the direction in which Phil, Sebastian and maybe one or two others are taking the comments in my post on the Dove World Outreach Center’s burn-a-Quran day. Instead of focusing on the obvious Islamophobia motivating the event, they want to interrogate Islam, Islamic values, the values Muslims hold, etc., and it seems to me that they want to do this in part in order to determine whether or not the Islamophobia my post was pointing out is at all justified. (I might be wrong about this; it is just the feeling I get.) For example, as I pointed out in a response to Phil, there is a big difference between asking, as he does:

Does that mean, then, that it is always wrong to wonder how many millions of Muslims hold extremist views?

and asking:

Does that mean, then, that it is always wrong to wonder what percentage of Muslims hold extremist views?

The former version of the question seems to me clearly Islamophobic, not because there might not be millions of Muslims who hold such views, but because the question proposes its own answer in a way that frames Muslims as “the enemy.” If we were talking about any other religious group, I don’t think this kind of rhetoric would be allowed to stand unchallenged, and I think people from those groups would, rightly, refuse to engage the conversation precisely because the rhetoric of the question is so biased and inflammatory.

To give a specific example, an awful lot of people have a problem with the idea within Judaism that the Jews are God’s “chosen people.” I can understand why someone who is not Jewish might not care that this phrase does not have a monolithic meaning within the Jewish community, that they might, in other words, find offensive any way in which the phrase can be understood. It is, however, one thing to say, simply, that this belief and therefore Judaism is offensive; while it is quite something else to demonize the Jewish people as, for example, Zionist conspirators who want to rule the world and feel it is their right to do so because they are God’s chosen people. (And I would like, please, to leave out of any discussion of this what Christians mean when they talk about the Jews as God’s chosen people.) Similarly, as I pointed out in another comment: It is one thing to point that there have been despotic Black political leaders in the world, demonstrating–as if it needed to be demonstrated–that Black people are just as capable of being evil and oppressive as everyone else, but it is quite something else to start talking about those leaders when the discussion at hand is about anti-Black racism in the United States.

There is nothing wrong with asking questions about Islamic values, beliefs and traditions, even for the purpose of critiquing them; there is nothing wrong with asking how many of which Muslims hold which kinds of beliefs, religious, political or otherwise; there is nothing wrong with pointing out that Sharia law has within it, as do Jewish and Christian law, elements that we today consider barbaric, and there is nothing wrong with pointing out that those regimes which put those elements into practice are, in fact, behaving barbarically.

I hope that statement is unambiguous enough. Because there is something wrong with using those questions to demonize Muslims and their religious tradition. And that is why I have given this post the title I have given it. I just wish I knew enough about Islam to write Islamophobia 101.

Posted in Islamaphobia | 58 Comments  

Shared Workspace in SE Portland For Writers, Artists, Cartoonists, Etc

Posted on 8/25/2010 by Ampersand

I draw my comics at a shared space in Portland (Oregon), on SE Foster.

We’re currently looking for mild-mannered, friendly writers, cartoonists, visual artists, and anyone else who wants a affordable workplace share a usually quiet, air conditioned work space.

- Large desks (5 x 2.5 feet).
- High speed internet and utilities included.
- Open 24/7.
- Microwave, refrigerator and half bath.
- Close to food, comics shops and other awesomeness.
- On the 14 and 17 bus lines.
- $90/month — which is, frankly, incredibly affordable.

I can say from experience, being able to get out of the house to work is really, really nice, and boosts productivity. If you’d be interested, drop me an email.

Posted in Whatever | 1 Comment  

Where Shadows Meet Light

Posted on 8/25/2010 by Ampersand

Fantasy Magazine has posted a new story by Mandolin, “Where Shadows Meet Light.”

Mandolin commented to me in IM that this story “relates a bit” to my nelly screamer post (although the story was written well before that post). “Since the main gay character is feminine, and I decided to go with that because feminine gay men need depicting and celebrating; it’s a valid gender presentation; and avoiding them can smack of anti-femininity.”

Here’s how the story begins:

Princess Diana’s ghost emerges at night. There are other ghosts, presumably, but she doesn’t see them. She only sees the living.

At first she haunted Charles and Harry and William, but eventually it grew too painful to think about her life. She even grew tired of the longtime pleasure she’d taken from blowing into Elizabeth’s ear while she slept, making the old woman’s dreams as disturbed and uncomfortable as she had made Diana’s life.

She went overseas to America where she’d once visited the White House and danced with John Travolta in a midnight blue velvet gown that sold at auction for a hundred thousand pounds. This time, she traveled between ordinary houses, some white and others beige and mint and yellow. It was easy to find people she could haunt there, people who owned memorabilia with her face on it, but whose distance from the British Isles meant they didn’t know every detail of her reported life, giving her enough room to dwell and still keep her secrets.

That’s the first three paragraphs — for the rest, you’ll have to click through.

Posted in Mandolin's fiction & poems | 2 Comments  

The High Cost of Copyright On Jazz History. And A Rant About Barnaby.

Posted on 8/24/2010 by Ampersand

copyrighted

(Crossposted on “Alas” and on “TADA”)

David Post writes:

The National Jazz Museum (who knew there was such a thing?) has apparently acquired a true treasure trove of early jazz recordings. The collection — nearly 1,000 discs! — was recorded in the 30s and 40s by William Savory from on-the-air radio broadcasts, and includes performances by Lester Young, Benny Goodman, Coleman Hawkins, Lionel Hampton, Billie Holiday, Teddy Wilson, and many others of the great names of jazz (from the greatest era of jazz). Savory, apparently, is something of a legend in recording engineer circles, and many of the recordings are of stunningly high quality (and many of the performances masterpieces).

If you’re like me, and consider American jazz of the 30s and 40s to be one of the great artistic outpourings of all time, the story induces something like a swoon of ecstatic delight. [...]

So needless to say I can’t wait to hear the reissues. But alas, that may never happen. As the original article noted (with additional commentary here), the potential copyright liability that could attach to redistribution of these recordings is so large — and, more importantly, so uncertain — that there may never be a public distribution of the recordings. Tracking down all the parties who may have a copyright interest in these performances, and therefore an entitlement to royalty payments (or to enjoining their distribution), is a monumental, and quite possibly an impossible, task, and it may well be that nobody steps forward with the resources to (a) undertake the efforts required and (b) take on the risk of liability.

In a passage that’s worth reading twice, Post goes on to write:

…copyright, inherently, operates to the detriment of the public when applied in retrospect, to works that have already been created. Lester Young, alas, can no longer be incentivized to produce these performances — they’ve already been created. We won’t get any more brilliant performances by Teddy Wilson if we protect these works. All we — the public — get from applying copyright here is a restriction on our ability to encounter magnificent works of art. Now of course, copyright is only ever applied in retrospect, and if we always ignored it when applied to already-existing works it would cease to exist, and would therefore no longer serve its incentivizing function prospectively.

And there’s your copyright balance; what we seek is a way to give creators enough of an incentive to create, but not too much, because too much gives us, the public, too much of an impediment to actually enjoying the works that have already been created.

Here’s the thing: Most creators need very little incentive to create. Yet our laws pretend that if we don’t have a monopoly extending to decades after our deaths, most creative sorts will hang up our pens and brushes and saxophones and go “oh, heck with this! I’d rather pump gas.”

Music only has value when it is heard. If it can’t find an audience, it’s dead. A copyright regime that kills music is one that needs reform.

There’s a brilliant comic strip, Barnaby, which is – rumor has it — not being reprinted because the creators’ family is unrealistically waiting for someone to offer Peanuts-size royalties. Or maybe they just loathe their father and want to see his legacy of art forgotten. Maybe they’re just used to seeing enormous sums of money from Harold and the Purple Crayon, and so don’t think it’s worthwhile to let their father’s comic strip see daylight, because they have no souls and think art is crap. Or maybe they have other reasons.

But I don’t really care, because they didn’t create Barnaby. They didn’t write it, they didn’t draw it, they have basically no moral right to that work. In particular, they have no right to lock up another person’s creative legacy in a vault, and deprive the reading public of that work.

Keeping a comic strip out of print, when there are plenty of publishers who’d love to print it, is no different from grabbing the Mona Lisa and chucking it into a fire. It’s censorship, and it’s a kind of censorship they’re only able to accomplish because copyright laws irrationally give them that right. I do think there are many situations where the creator of a work has a right to keep it from the public. But why should people who didn’t create the work have that right?

Yes, legally, they’re the heirs. But why should copyright be passed down to heirs at all? Is the thought that if Crockett Johnson hadn’t been able to imagine his heirs keeping his work out of print forever, he never could have motivated himself to draw a daily comic strip at a time when drawing comic strips was admired and extremely rewarding?

How does this situation benefit anyone? How am I, as a cartoonist, encouraged to create new works because I can see that Barnaby is being kept out of print, and because I can imagine my hypothetical future heirs deciding to keep my own work out of print? I don’t think I am.

I think I’m just being robbed as a member of the reading public. And I think Crockett Johnson is being robbed of one of the things that matters most to almost any popular artist — an audience.

Posted in Cartooning & comics, Free speech, censorship, copyright law, etc., crossposted on TADA | 12 Comments  

Two More Hereville Title Page Sketches

Posted on 8/24/2010 by Barry

Back when I was selling the self-published comic book of Hereville, folks sometimes paid extra for their comic in order to have me do a drawing on their title page. (A similar offer is now available for folks who preorder the hardcover book). Sometimes these sketches would be requests, other times I’d just choose a theme myself.

You can see a whole bunch of Hereville title page sketches here on Flickr. And I’ve just now added two more to the set:

The second sketch is below the fold.

Continue reading →
Posted in Hereville, Sketchblogging, Syndicated feeds | Leave a comment  

The Dark Side of Being Pretty

Posted on 8/24/2010 by karnythia
the-dark-side-of-being-pretty

I’ve been ruminating over my own experiences as a pretty woman for some time now. On the one hand it has definitely benefited me in some ways. I understand that it can benefit me in larger ways that I don’t necessarily notice or know about because of the reaction our society has to attractive people. Here’s the thing, some days the positives probably do outweigh the negatives, but at 2 in the afternoon when I’m having to threaten to cut some guy on a bus to get him away from me and random bystanders are ready to victim blame because I had the nerve to wear shorts on a hot summer day it doesn’t feel like it.

I know street harassment (hell misogyny in general) knows no bounds and that women of all races and sizes deal with some version of it. I’m not trying to downplay anyone else’s experiences. I’m just focused on what I’ve noticed since I gained enough weight to move from a B cup to a D cup. I’m pretty in that way people are when they have symmetrical features, the genes for straight white teeth, and a socially accepted body type. Please note, I am not saying this is the only way to be attractive, it is simply the way in which I am attractive.

My decision to go natural, and put my hair into comb coils means that I now have longish hair with a minimum amount of effort. In the past when I was the aforementioned B cup and had a habit of wearing my hair short I’d run into harassment probably once or twice a week. Now? It’s pretty much daily. Some of it is definitely because I present as very feminine now (I have a grown up job that requires business casual attire and in the summer that means a lot of skirts because I hate long pants when the sun is trying to broil me alive) and that seems to make some men feel as though I’m dressing to attract their attention. Some of my harassers have gone so far as to claim that everything I do is to attract their attention. The other day I actually had a guy insist that I wouldn’t have sat in the same row as he did on the bus if I wasn’t interested. Apparently the concept of public transport eluded him. Then again so did the idea that he wasn’t entitled to my being receptive to his overtures so we went the standard misogynistic insult route when I didn’t play my part of his internal script.

And it’s not just street harassment (though I’m at a point where it feels like a one way forcefield would be a good look so I can traverse the city in relative comfort) I also find myself being taken for an airhead on sight. I’m having to prove my intelligence over and over again to people who should have a clue. Someone at my current job was so amazed that I knew anything about computers that he broke into a conversation another coworker and I were having to tell me of his shock and awe. Twice. I don’t have the fanciest job title in all the land, but I do employ a fair amount of critical thinking skills on a day to day basis. Granted the case could be made that his shock was down solely to race and gender, but I’ve got my doubts since his hands couldn’t stop making certain gestures while he was expressing that shock and awe.

Is this a “It’s not easy being pretty so you should feel tons of sympathy for my plight” post? No. Well, at least that’s not what I’m trying to convey. I’m just feeling like some of the people in this article who are both reaping the rewards and suffering from the side effects. It’s easy to talk about pretty privilege, but the reality is that (like a lot of other facets of life) being attractive is a double edged sword. Just as white privilege doesn’t remove the oppression of sexism, or male privilege doesn’t remove the oppression of racism, being pretty doesn’t do away with any of those oppressions. In fact it can heighten the incidence rate (at least that’s been my experience) and then any comments about why it is happening are met with derision. Because we as a society seem to think being pretty is a cure all, so there’s a huge focus on becoming attractive without any discussion of what happens when you are attractive. Misogyny is a hell of a drug in general, and it seems to get particularly potent when it can be justified by pointing at a woman’s appearance as being such that it attracts the male gaze so she deserves whatever happens to her. Fetishization of attractive POC lends a certain nasty edge to the racial component, and that’s before we start getting into the intersectionality of class with this topic. I know it’s a tricky area to discuss, but I want to start having the discussion any way. You in?

The Dark Side of Being Pretty -- Originally posted at The Angry Black Woman
Posted in Syndicated feeds | 25 Comments  

Open Thread Thread Thread Thread Thread Edition

Posted on 8/24/2010 by Ampersand

This is an open thread, open for whatever sort of posting your blessed little hearts desire. Is self-linking allowed, you inquire? My darling, not just allowed, adored, I reply.

I’ve watched this video by Everynone, “Words,” several times over:

More links (a lot of light links this week, for some reason):

  1. A cartoony flow chart explaining the process of legally immigrating to the USA. Note the path if you’re an unskilled immigrant without relatives here.
  2. Predatory Lending and Health Services. More exploitation by the folks bringing us weight loss surgery.
  3. Being bigoted doesn’t require being overtly hateful or expressly wishing people harm.
  4. Jane Austen’s Fight Club
  5. It’s not a mosque near the WTC that the right (and, to be fair, some cowardly asshole Democrats) object to. It’s mosques being built in the USA, period.
  6. There are some amazingly great comics at What Things Do.
  7. “One of those dreaded ‘swallow shit or ruin the evening’ moments.”
  8. Justin Bieber’s ‘U Smile’ Slowed Down 800 Percent Becomes Haunting New Song/a>
  9. Are We Looking At A Genderless Future?, Newsweek asks. My answer: No, we’re not. But if we’re lucky, maybe we’ll look at a future with a lot more variety and freedom of genders. (Via.)
  10. Why helium balloons should cost $100 each.
  11. “But to me the most disappointing aspect of the way Wonder Woman is currently being presented is not the diminishment of her powers but of her iconic stature.” I agree. (Fortunately, they’ll probably revert to the iconic WW within five years.)
  12. Rachelmanija has some thoughts on Heinlein. She argues that feminists get so pissed at Heinlein in part because of the bait-and-switch his books perform.
  13. All the Sad Young Literary Women. The comments contain a lot of recommendations for female-authored fantasy and science fiction.
  14. Gavin Berliner, the man behind floating head movie posters
  15. It’s kids downloading manga that’s causing the economic problems of manga publishing. Not, you know, the economic collapse. Those darn kids! (Meanwhile, I owned an overflowing boxful of cassette tapes with illegally copies music when I was a teen, and I bet most of the people complaining about the downloaders did something similar when they were kids.)
  16. 45 Beautifully Designed Book Covers. My favorite is the cover for The Annotated Nose.
  17. “Think of the U.S. embassy in Iraq as a kind of well-armed anchor baby.”
  18. How to be civil, in cake form.
  19. Private prisons cost more than public prisons. They just appear to cost less because prison companies bid low in order to get contracts.
  20. Neptune recently finished the end of its first orbit since its discovery in 1846!
  21. How Republicans Really Balance State Budgets
  22. Video from Shuttle booster falling back to Earth. So. Very. Cool.
  23. Kevin Moore responds to that “Oh, what has become of 20-somethings?” article in the Times.
  24. How to make an easy paper model of a tricorner hat, for drawing reference.
  25. It’s amazing how many clients who hire illustrators are really like this.
  26. “So the problem, you see, is not that Cordoba House is too close to Ground Zero. It is too far away.”
  27. If Captain America had a baby… that baby would live in terror.
  28. A Worldwide Revolt Against Poverty Wages
  29. Nerd movies are consistently worth about $10 million in ticket sales on the first weekend. Nerd appeal is not wide appeal, it seems.
  30. What Does Obama Really Think About Gay Marriage? A Telling Timeline.
  31. Lastly, I enjoyed looking through 1979 Semi-Finalist’s list of her 100 favorite comic book covers (and 15 alternates). They weren’t the 115 I’d have chosen, but she gave her reasons for choosing each one, which made it interesting. Of her 115 selections, these three are my favorites:

Posted in Link farms | 41 Comments  

The Controversy Over Park51 (Cordoba House) Was Manufactured by Fox

Posted on 8/23/2010 by Richard Jeffrey Newman

Or at least that’s what Frank Rich, citing Salon’s Justin Elliott, wrote in his August 22 op-ed column, “How Fox Betrayed Petraeus.” (You can find links if you click through to the whole column.)

We owe thanks to Justin Elliott of Salon for the single most revealing account of this controversy’s evolution. He reports that there was zero reaction to the “ground zero mosque” from the front-line right or anyone else except marginal bloggers when The Times first reported on the Park51 plans in a lengthy front-page article on Dec. 9, 2009. The sole exception came some two weeks later at Fox News, where Laura Ingraham, filling in on “The O’Reilly Factor,” interviewed Daisy Khan, the wife of the project’s organizer, Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf. Ingraham gave the plans her blessing. “I can’t find many people who really have a problem with it,” she said. “I like what you’re trying to do.”

As well Ingraham might. Rauf is no terrorist. He has been repeatedly sent on speaking tours by the Bush and Obama State Departments alike to promote tolerance in Arab and Muslim nations. As Jeffrey Goldberg of The Atlantic reported last week, Rauf gave a moving eulogy at a memorial service for Daniel Pearl, the Wall Street Journal reporter murdered by Islamist terrorists in Pakistan, at the Manhattan synagogue B’nai Jeshurun. Pearl’s father was in attendance. The Park51 board is chock-full of Christians and Jews. Perhaps the most threatening thing about this fledgling multi-use community center, an unabashed imitator of the venerable (and Jewish) 92nd Street Y uptown, is its potential to spawn yet another coveted, impossible-to-get-into Manhattan private preschool.

In the five months after The Times’s initial account there were no newspaper articles on the project at all. It was only in May of this year that the Rupert Murdoch axis of demagoguery revved up, jettisoning Ingraham’s benign take for a New York Post jihad. The paper’s inspiration was a rabidly anti-Islam blogger best known for claiming that Obama was Malcolm X’s illegitimate son. Soon the rest of the Murdoch empire and its political allies piled on, promoting the incendiary libel that the “radical Islamists” behind the “ground zero mosque” were tantamount either to neo-Nazis in Skokie (according to a Wall Street Journal columnist) or actual Nazis (per Newt Gingrich).

I haven’t yet had a chance to read Elliot’s piece, but I will.

Cross posted on It’s All Connected.

Posted in Fox News, Islamaphobia, Media criticism | 2 Comments  

Some links on race and class

Posted on 8/22/2010 by unusualmusic
some-links-on-race-and-class 08/24/10 EDIT: Eminem/Rihanna link Fixed Hey you all. Been a while eh? Work and school have pulled me under, so I am a bit busy. However, have a few links: via: jhameia poor people aren’t supposed to want nice things
I don’t know if you guys received the memo; but poor people aren’t supposed to want nice things. All rags-to-riches (or rags-to-bitches, if you want to get all Boondocks about it) stories start with people who are poor but industrious. Tales of kids eating cigarette ash sandwiches to survive. Tales of people saving mustard packets so they have food that stretches through the whole year. Bonus points if your parent proudly refuses government help, or if you suffer through and survive a vitamin deficiency. You’re a rock star if you live many years out on the streets and still pull down a 4.0+ GPA. You have done poverty correctly.MORE
nonstressed thoughts about eminem and rihanna
make what you will of the following. * if you are going to say that the video “glamorizes” abuse/violence, you better have a better reason for saying that than the two lead actors are hot. news flash: workingclass/poor people can be and are hot. * people in violent relationships have sex. and it is often really really fucking amazingly hot.MORE
What ghetto really means
A look at Urban Dictionary reveals the most popular definitions of “ghetto” invoke not only predominately black, poor, urban areas, but also ideas of “inferior quality.” (Or, specifically, the inferior quality of the culture of poor, black, urban folk.) One definition suggests the word means “jury-rigged” or “half-assed.” Another reads like a hackneyed bit from BET’s Comic View, describing “ghetto” as “Yelling at your boo in the middle of the street…Dressing for work like you are going to the club…Wearing house slippers outside the house…Flashing money you don’t have instead of making your money last…Running from the cops for no reseaon just to see if they can catch you” Some synonyms offered for “ghetto,” based on reader-submitted definitions: hood, black, gangsta, nigger, poor, nigga, rap, slang, cool, urban, thug, drugs, cheap, stupid, bitch, pimp, dirty, slut, ugly… You get the picture, yes? When Paris Hilton proclaimed a rusty, old truck “so ghetto” on an episode of The Simple Life, she was using language loaded with race and class-related meaning. So, too, was Mary Mitchell, an African American columnist at the Chicago Sun-Times, who sparked controversy last month when she debuted a new term for bad parenting: “ghetto parenting.”MORE
New York and California back Jim Crow Era Farm Worker Laws
Two bills that would have given farmworkers the most basic of labor protections — overtime pay and one day of rest a week — were recently defeated in New York and California. It was a disappointing series of events, and unfortunately, only the latest episode in over a century of our country’s shameful treatment of farmworkers. Farmworker regulations have stayed stubbornly mired in the racism of the Jim Crow era for generations — decades in which black and brown farmworkers have toiled in the most backbreaking, low-paying jobs in America imaginable. Meanwhile, white farmers and politicians have consistently fought to keep those workers sweating in the fields seven days a week — for pay that would be illegally low for any other workers in this country. This is history that’s rarely taught, so here’s a quick primer: In the 1930s, Southern politicians pushed President Roosevelt to modify New Deal legislation to exclude black farmworkers from basic wage and hour laws. Southern congressmen hoped to preserve the race-based plantation system while netting profits for their farm-owning friends. Accordingly, since 1938, farmworkers have been exempt from the overtime pay and days off that are enjoyed by literally every other worker in America.MORE
Sympathy Grifting, the intersection of race, gender and fraud
Kirilow is young, thin, sweet-faced and white: over the year that she convinced people to donate money to her cancer cause, she was given trips to Disneyworld and took a paradise trip to Australia; she is alternately described as an angel and a princess. When I first saw this news case, I thought to myself (yes, rather cynically): there is no way that anyone other than a young, attractive, normative person could have pulled this off. If Kirilow had been—for example—fat, in her 30s, plain-looking and homeless, few would’ve given her the time of day. Much of Kirilow’s success seems attributed to the fact that she easily roused pity with her little lost girl story and her brave smile. Kirilow embodied a version of white womanhood that we want to believe in (or at least we’ve been socially conditioned to embrace it): pretty, plucky, determined, and in need of rescue. Kirilow is a prime example of a sympathy grifter: a grifter who uses racist/sexist/classist/etc beliefs in their favor, to get money, affection and attention, or to (literally) get away with murder.MORE
The Right’s long racist history of calling Moms criminals (I am having trouble accessing this site, so can’t give a preview.) BP dumping oil waste in communities of color, study finds I am having trouble accessing this site, so can’t give a preview) HUD housing policy conference includes no affordable housing advocates
The Obama administration will prove that they have a plan to do something about the housing crisis by holding a housing conference next week, in DC. The event, called the “Conference on the Future of Housing Finance,” has been organized by the Department of Housing and Urban Development and the Treasury Department. Panelists include… well, a bunch of economists, finance industry representatives, bank officials, think tankers, and an academic or two. Not included: Any actual consumer advocates or community group representatives. We’ve got PIMCO, Wells Fargo, the goddamn American Enterprise Institute, the MacArthur Foundation, Moody’s, and Bank of America. But:
“Apparently being a community organizer qualifies you to be president, but it’s not good enough to be part of HUD and Treasury’s think tank on housing,” said [National Community Reinvestment Coalition] chief executive John Taylor, whose group works with hundreds of community organizations to promote access to financial services for low- and middle-income people.
MORE
Birthright citizenship is a thinly veiled attack on Immigrant mothers
This is also an ugly strategy fueled by sexism and racism. It taps into a long history of population control—government efforts to curb growth among disfavored populations. During slavery, the children slaveowners sired with their slaves were deemed slaves themselves who could be sold as chattel, thereby increasing the wealth of the owner rather than the size of his family. Chinese women in the 1800s were labeled prostitutes and denied visas to join their husbands who labored on our railroads. And black women, Native American women, and Latinas were routinely sterilized either without their knowledge or without their consent as recently as the 1970s.MORE
Women of color and welfare Books. Storming Ceasars Palace: How black mothers fought their own war on poverty Thinking Class: Sketches from a cultural worker Policing Race, Policing Gender, Policing Sex Detroit: I do mind dying Highway Robbery: Transportation racism and routes to equity
Some links on race and class -- Originally posted at The Angry Black Woman
Posted in Syndicated feeds | 35 Comments