In defense of the sanctimonious women's studies set || First feminist blog on the internet

Category: Race & Ethnicity

“I’m Not a Racist”

“I’m not racist or anything,” he said. “It’s just, some people I hate, some people I don’t get along with. And black people just happen to be the ones because they think they’re better than everyone else.”

…and the conferate flag is just a symbol of Southern pride.

Censorship! First Amendment Violations!

Well, not really, but that’s what the hysterical right will tell you. Here’s the situation: Conservative columnist at UNC writes a piece on racial profiling. In her piece, she uses quotes from three students who she interviewed under the premise of writing a paper on Arab-American relations. They didn’t know that their quotes were going to be used in the newspaper, and they certainly didn’t realize that they were going to be used as evidence in support of her opinion. The editors at the paper liked the column, they told her it was good, and they ran it. After its publication, they learned how she got the quotes. They learned that she put the quotes in her column out of context. They learned that she strung together quotes to say something that the speaker hadn’t intended. And so the opinion editor fired her for breach of journalistic ethics (read his whole column. It’s good).

Now somehow, this all adds up to a violation of the columnist’s First Amendment rights. How, I’m still not entirely sure. She can use her First Amendment right of free speech as long as she wants; the right of freedom of the press is pretty in tact here too, isn’t it? They didn’t spike her column for its offensive content (and its content is pretty friggin offensive). They stood behind its publication. If this was about her ideas, those ideas wouldn’t have been printed in the first place. This is about misleading sources, taking their words out of context and quoting them innacurately. It’s ethically questionable, and breeds distrust between the student body and the paper that is supposed to represent and cater to them. If I had been her editor, I would have probably fired her, too — or at least given her a pretty strong talking-to and put her on probation (Shankar, opinion editor extraordinaire, what would you have done?). This isn’t about the First Amendment, and Mary Katherine Ham should study her Constitution before she goes around slinging those accusations.

I’m Not Your Sister

I wouldn’t say I’m better than you, Andrea, but since you did…

While we’re on the subject, one of her commenters says:

I’ve been following the argument with amusement. Any fool can see that you weren’t targeting her son. She hadn’t even made an appearance in the thread at that point. It was pure ego on her part to think that you even knew she was another blogger at the site

That’s funny. When Andrea and I get into a shit-slinging match on another blog, in which I dropped out of the argument to let Andrea play by her lonesome (as usual), and the subject of my biracial son comes into play as a core reason why I pay very close attention to race issues, Andrea decides to bring it up again by calling Ethan “quadriracial” and making fun of my concern for race-based discrimination that I have witnessed and detailed at length.

In detail she says:

Oh dear—you have attacked the delicate, sensitive female feminists at Feministe. Expect a puff-alanche of snippy comments from Proud Singlemom Womyn™ demanding Culturally Diverse communities in which they can safely raise their quadriracial children in a non-violent, non-misogynistic, secular atmosphere where they won’t have to hear about icky male phallic things like War!, Jesus, and rednecks in pickup trucks.

Womyn? Really? Don’t get all dumb on me, Andrea, when I think your bitchiness is halfway rooted in intelligence. I don’t know how anyone can bag on culturally diverse communities that see the critical value in her vile statements as much as they value all the vileness of mine. No, she didn’t know nothin’ ’bout me and mine. No.

Smarmy is as smarmy does. But yeah, you attack kids, you’re fucked up — that’s authentic right-wing hate right there, baby.

She’s only giving me traffic with her half-hearted defense of whatever it is she’s defending, so thanks for the link, hon.

Call to Conservatives: Stop Brown People From Loitering!

“Unfortunately, the right to loiter is the law of the land.” — La Shawn Barber.

Damn that Constitution! Without it, we’d be able to round up those irritating brown people, for having the audacity to just stand there in public.

You know this whole “I don’t really hate brown people, just all illegal immigrants (the brown ones, anyway)” point of view is really getting out of hand when conservatives are trying to figure out ways to prosecute brown people for simply standing outside of a 7-11. One plan is to build a center for these day-workers, so that they leave 7-11 alone. Of course, the kids on the right oppose even that action, because it would be doing something for the browns. So they’re pulling out every card: Zoning laws, declaring a state of emergency (“Brown man standing outside 7-11! Somebody call the National Guard, this situation is out of control!”), even the Minute Men. Don’t these people have something more productive to be doing?

Muslims are Nazis, kind of. Let’s declare war on them.

Total lack of historical knowledge, anyone?

Radical Islam, sometimes accurately called Islamo-fascism, has all the “advantages” the Nazis had in Germany in the 1930s. The Islamo-fascists find a Muslim population adrift, confused and humiliated by the dominance of foreign nations and cultures. They find a large, youthful population increasingly disdainful of their parents’ passive habits.

Just as the Nazis reached back to German mythology and the supposed Aryan origins of the German people, the radical Islamists reach back to the founding ideas and myths of their religious culture. And just like the Nazis, they claim to speak for authentic traditions while actually advancing expedient and radical innovations.

Now, wait a minute — weren’t the Nazis appealing to a sense of supposed tradition and rightful ownership of Germany, that Jewish and other non-Aryans couldn’t possibly have had? As far as I know, Nazis weren’t an immigrant group, they were quite the opposite. So… wouldn’t it follow that an immigrant group couldn’t really pull that card outside of their own country?

Well, we’ll just ignore that little problem and move right along, because, Nazis or not, these Muslims are really becoming an issue. Luckily, Tony Blankley has a solution : That’s right, it’s another WWII!

World War II was good, despite the millions of deaths, the limitations on daily lives, the encroachment on peacetime liberties and the arduousness of wartime life. The war was good because the sacrifice was for a noble cause, for the perpetuation of America and the American way of life.

The struggle against Islamist terrorism is an equally good war — and for the same reasons. We have just as great a responsibility to win our struggle against insurgent Islamist aggression as our parents and grandparents had to win World War II.

Read More…Read More…

Looting(?)

Thoughts on “looting” by Dr. B. who grew up in Detroit with the history of the race riots:

The best story of the the Detroit uprising was the story of a friend’s mother. On the day the rioting started (before things got going) a young African American mother went to a fabric store to buy thread. She was made to wait while the sales clerk waited on white folks and told not to touch things (yes this was Detroit in 1967!). She left without buying anything. Almost 20 years later when this mother passed away the son that she gave birth to 2 years later found a box of untouched thread in the attic. It turns out that once the uprising started later that day the woman went back to the store and got thread. Thread that she never used, but thread that probably made her feel better. Thread that made her feel empowered in a world of racism and oppression. So, can I understand why folks are stealing t.v.’s and other electronics even though they can’t use them now and may never be able to? Absofrigginlutely! You take what has been denied to you for so very long.