High Low Middle - My Brightest Diamond
“When the wind is at your back, you don’t even notice it, but when it’s blowing in your face, you become very aware of it’s presence. That’s how it is with privilege. When you have it, you don’t even notice it. When you don’t have it, you know.”
The intro to this song is fantastic, and also I want whatever ze is wearing to be in my closet right now.
Clayton Plake reports on the angry response to a video, released online, of San Francisco police assaulting an African American college student.
SAN FRANCISCO police have sparked anger and outrage after officers were caught on videotape carrying out a vicious, unprovoked assault on Kevin Clark, a young African American man, in the city’s Mission district.
Footage of the attack on Clark was captured by what appears to be an anonymous bystander, using their cell phone camera. The video was posted to the Internet by activists from the Idriss Stelley Foundation—a leading organization in the struggle against police brutality in the Bay Area.
Over four minutes in duration, the video opens with an unidentified motorcycle cop riding his bike up onto the sidewalk near the 24th Street BART station and approaching a pedestrian now identified as 18-year-old Kevin Clark, a student at City College of San Francisco. The first cop was followed closely by another officer, also on a motorcycle. Neither cop appears to deliver a command for Clark—who was peacefully walking on the sidewalk—to stop walking or otherwise obey directions.
In the video, one cop uses his motorcycle—the front wheel pointed squarely at Clark’s body—and alternately accelerated and decelerates, seemingly to terrorize Clark. The terrified Clark yells, “Are you going to run me over?” Then the other officer, having stepped off his bike, grabs Clark from behind and throws him to the asphalt with staggering force, pushing him face first into a gutter.
Both cops then throw themselves on top of Clark. Each grabs one of Clark’s arms and pulls them up and back, and one cop digs his knee into Clark’s back. Clark’s screams of pain become interspersed with frantic pleas to be left alone. One cop, still keeping Clark’s arm in a locked position, starts to push the man’s face into a sewer grate.
In short order, a squad car arrives, as do a host of other police officers—no less than 10 officers were deployed to the scene, despite the fact that the victim appeared unarmed and was not resisting arrest. Comments from off-camera eyewitnesses reveal that this is the second African American man the police had stopped in the area in less than 10 minutes.
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What you can doA rally and march against police brutality has been planned for February 7 at 5 p.m. at 24th and Mission Streets. Visit the Facebook event page for information.
Siobhan Brooks, ”Black Feminism in Everyday Life”
Repeat after me, folks: INTERSECTIONALITY!!!
But wow, crying and running out of a room because your prof reminded you black women exist? Come on now…
(via fuckyeahfeminists)
too true. it’s almost a given that the person will derail the convo over being CALLED -ist rather than caring that what they did/said is =ist.
sigh.
As a Privileged Person®, it is natural that you would feel excluded and frustrated by the recent spate of Marginalised People “reclaiming” historically negative words to refer to themselves.
Not only do these Marginalised People™ kick up a great big ole stink by making it “politically incorrect” for Privileged People® to use these words - even going so far as to have some of them defined under ‘hate crime’ legislation! - they take the insult one step further and use them freely amongst themselves!
This is very perplexing and annoying for Privileged People®, who can only stand on the outside, gazing wistfully in, wishing it were a simpler time when it was totally okay for everyone to call women whores, Mexicans spics, Trans* folk trannies, gay men faggots and people of African descent the n-word.
After all, who do those Marginalised People™ think they are, taking ownership of language traditionally used to oppress them! That just isn’t playing fair!
But take heart, because there is a way you can worm around this one - where there’s Privilege®, there’s always a way!
First of all, you must feign utter cluelessness about the ins & outs of reclaimation and behave as though you were under the impression that in these ‘post race/sex/sexuality/gender/etc times’ that we had all evolved into a new era where ‘words don’t mean anything’ and it’s totally okay for everyone to use offensive slurs and then… well: use them.
When a Marginalised Person™ calls you out on it, become indignant. Express confusion. Demand an explanation. Say that you just don’t understand - if you people use those words to refer to each other, why can’t I?!
You see, you’re implying that they’re being hypocritical. That if they are going to use abusive & oppressionist language amongst each other, they simply have to accept that they’re employing a ‘double standard’ by preventing the Privileged® from using them.
What this enables you to ignore is the reality of the power dynamic involved. Language reclaimation is a means by which Marginalised People™ gain back some power they are traditionally denied by taking control of words used to demean and discriminate against them. When these words come from Privileged People®, there is a long and very serious negative history behind them that cannot be divorced from the words themselves. Thus, when Privileged People® employ these words, they are perpetuating that history and the psychology behind the word. They are exercising oppressive power that have become inherent to those words - a power Marginalised People™ seek to subvert and dismantle when they use them.
Pretend not to understand this. Just continue to imply hypocrisy and pout that it isn’t fair.
It also ignores the fact that, from within Marginalised Groups™, discourses around abusive language are actually not simple and there are many divided and varied opinions on the subject. Treating Marginalised People™ like a hive mind is always a great way to further subtly insult them and since the point of this entire debacle is to come out with as many notches on your belt as possible, you want to make sure you slip in as many knocks below their belt as you can manage.
" - ‘But If It’s Okay For Marginalised People To Use Those Words, Why Can’t I?’ - http://www.derailingfordummies.com (via mooglets)
A 21-year-old woman who grew up on the Cheyenne River Indian Reservation has created a new fashion magazine. It’s geared toward Native men and women, and non-Native Americans who want to learn about the culture.
Kelly Holmes says she founded “Native Max” magazine after getting tired of thumbing through issues of “Seventeen” or “Vogue” and not seeing models that looked like her.
The premiere issue cover of “Native Max” features Mariah Watchman, a member of the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation in Oregon, who rose to fame following her appearance on “America’s Next Top Model” as the first Native woman to compete.
Today is the anniversary…of one chapter in American History…that we should NEVER FORGET…!!!
On July 25, 1972, the notorious Tuskegee syphilis experiment came to light as The Associated Press reported that for the previous four decades, the U.S. Public Health Service, in conjunction with the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, had been allowing poor, rural black male patients with syphilis to go without treatment, even allowing them to die, as a way of studying the disease.
Yeah, this is a big fucking deal. The ramifications of this experiment (and others like it) won’t ever go away. They’re still being felt and will continue to forever.
Sister Simone Campbell [x]
I like how she articulates the simple financial impossibility of religious organizations being able to replace government aid. I’d like to add that, of course, there are so many people who have trouble receiving aid from religious institutions because they’re LGBT and/or non-religious or have a fraught relationship to religion… aid is a human right—and, as she points out, a business subsidy as well as a subsidy to food companies—which people should be able to receive in a secular setting.
(via mswyrr)
I know I’ve reblogged this before, but it bears repeating.
The study found that participants who had in mind a black offender more strongly endorsed a policy of sentencing juveniles convicted of violent crimes to life in prison without parole compared to respondents who had in mind a white offender.
“The fact that imagining a particular target could influence your perceptions of a policy that would affect an entire class of people, we think, is pretty important to know,” Eberhardt said.
The black-offender group also rated juvenile offenders as more similar to adults in their culpability than did respondents in the white-offender group.
“Race is shifting how they are thinking about juveniles,” Eberhardt said. “So the protected status the offenders have as juveniles is threatened.”
The study took into account racial bias and political ideology, yet neither accounted for these effects.
“The findings showed that people without racial animus or bias are affected by race as much as those with bias,” said Carol Dweck, another of the study’s authors.
“That suggests they believe black offenders will likely be the same when they’re adults but white offenders are in a developmental period and could be very different adults. This starts breaking down the protections against the most severe sentences,” said Dweck, the Lewis and Virginia Eaton Professor in the Department of Psychology.
in other news, young black women are the fastest growing population in prison despite the fact that crime rates for the demographic haven’t risen at all.
Education is shown to give college aged black students the necessary social mobility to try and erase institutionalized achievement barriers & concentrated poverty - but NAW lets just keep funding the creation of more private prisons and over policing of poor neighborhoods. that totally works too.
Charlie Sheen has been given another TV show. And a Fiat commercial. Both of which he flaunts his blatant disrespect of women by asking in the fiat commercial, what do i get for good behavior? (inferring to his house arrest) to the model he is pressed on. And then in…
I still don’t and never will like Chris Brown ever. But I definitely noticed this too! Like, his image is only made BETTER by the fact that he is a criminal?! His past actually makes him marketable and he gets MORE deals and money? For being a criminal? That only happens to White Privileged Men in the business. Chris Brown was banned from the UK. Banned from various radio stations. People were saying he should be banned from the grammys. People are STILL talking about Chris Brown.
Yay rallying behind injustice but why do we only show that type of ‘sisterhood’ and support when its a face that falls in line with the historical image of “dangerous man”? Because Charlie Sheen got a roast from historical Friars Club on comedy central, love from the whole nation. He doesn’t look like a scary black man so suddenly his violence is acceptable and cool?! It doesn’t help women in the least when violence against women is ignored because the loudest feminists only identify the loudest feminists as a threat.
It doesn’t stop at just being a feminist, you have to be a feminist that’s willing to critically deconstruct the biases you hold and check what the movement as a whole is FAILING TO DO. You have to be CONSISTENT against violence and misogyny. But I guess it seems consistent when we only see violence as a threat when its racialized.
But seriously - Charlie Fucking Sheen?! You see nothing in the news about how vile and reprehensible he is. White Heterosexual Male Privilege must be ONE HELL OF A DRUG. White men in power have been painting black men as monsters since the dawn of this nation, while excusing and celebrating their own privilege and violence.
CHARLIE SHEEN SHOT HIS FUCKING WIFE
Ben Barry’s research at Cambridge University:
”I found that Canadian and American women increased purchase intentions for fashion products advertised by models who reflected their own demographics: age, size and—for non-Caucasians—race. While one side of the debate over model diversity argues that curvy models should replace thin ones— assuming that one model is universally more effective than another—I find that every model type can be effective. Their effectiveness depends on whether the model shares the consumers’ traits.
My study found that women increased their purchase intentions by more than 200 percent when the models in the mock ads were their size. In the subgroup over size 6, women increased their purchase intentions by a dramatic 300 percent when they saw curvier models. Conversely, when women saw models who didn’t reflect their size, they decreased their purchase intentions by 60 percent, and women over size 6 dropped their purchase intentions by 76 percent.” - ELLE Canada
See:
http://www.ellecanada.com/living/culture/can-using-different-types-of-models-benefit-brands/a/58327
see even capitalism says be more diver
Representing a broader spectrum of humanity in advertisements makes people more likely to buy from a company whose models show them a representation of themselves? Imagine that!
Seriously, they paid someone to do this study? How about someone pay me to tell them obvious shit like that? Please, I will do it more cheaply and give you your results thirty times faster.
In the run-up to the election, we’ve mostly avoided talking about the Republican horse-race. But with Mitt Romney finally the clear front-runner, it’s time to consider what a Romney presidency could mean for the programs so crucial to people of color. From criminal justice to unemployment to health care, the effects of a bad economy tend to disproportionately impact blacks and Latinos—often making regulation and government safety net programs the only things keeping the hardest hit afloat.
We’ll break down some top issues affecting people of color and how Romney’s policies could play out.
Click through to see Romney’s record in regards to immigration, unemployment, entitlements, and health care. Here’s a preview
Health Care: Romney is unequivocally opposed to the Affordable Care Act. He vows to repeal it (if the Supreme Court doesn’t get there first). Instead, he wants to turn health care over to the states, letting them figure out how to insure their residents.
What it could mean: In 2000, 57.5 percent of black Americans had employer-sponsored health insurance. By 2010, that number fell below 50 percent, to 45.3. For black children, the drop was even steeper: employer sponsored health insurance fell 14.1 percentage points.
