Selfless Signal-Boosting Wednesday

11 thoughts on Selfless Signal-Boosting Wednesday

1. There’s some very strong writing around this week on the valorisation of white ignorance about the lived experiences and competencies of people of colour:

   Sikivu Hutchinson: Stuff White People Like: Secular Tourists

   By lionizing high profile white “defectors” organized atheism has become a sideshow that is just as demographically and politically clueless as the Tea Party in a multicultural nation with the greatest wealth gap between whites and people of color.

   Ta-Nehisi Coates: What It Means to Be a Public Intellectual

   I came up in a time when white intellectuals were forever making breathless pronouncements about their world, about my world, and about the world itself. My life was delineated lists like “Geniuses of Western Music” written by people who evidently believed Louis Armstrong and Aretha Franklin did not exist. That tradition continues. Dylan Byers knows nothing of your work, and therefore your work must not exist.

   Here is the machinery of racism—the privilege of being oblivious to questions, of never having to grapple with the everywhere; the right of false naming; the right to claim that the lakes, trees, and mountains of our world do not exist; the right to insult our intelligence with your ignorance.

   1. Thanks for the T-NC link.

   2. The Hutchinson article was really thought provoking!

      That said, this line:

      In their zeal to brand predominantly religious communities as backward, unenlightened and unsophisticated in the exceptionalist ways of Western rationality

      rubbed me the wrong way- most atheists and atheist orgs I know are pretty clear that their beef is with religious ideas, not religious people.

      And I challenge anyone to provide a succinct explanation of what the last eight words are trying to communicate. There’s nothing ‘western’ about atheism or about rationality; the groups that the author is writing about are all Western; lastly, objectively, belief in false truth-claims is the definition of unenlightened.

2. guardian UK world feminism

   1. Is there a particular article you’re trying to signal-boost? The link just goes to a page on The Guardian’s website with links to all their “feminism” articles in the last month or so.

      1. [was consolidating.
         mostly the poc writers.
         for instance]:

         America is still a deeply racist country
         Gone is the overt, violent, and legal racism of my childhood in the 1960s. It’s been replaced by a subtler, still ugly version

         1. [for instance, the concept, in the link above.
            sorry]

         2. [i hope we aren’t micromanaging other’s links now]

            1. Seriously? You went there? You’ve been dropping links with barely any context and not engaging on the blog in any other way that people can get an idea of anything you stand for, and when you do respond/engage it’s to passive-aggressively snark at someone who merely asked for a bit more information as to why you were recommending a particular extremely general link?

               I’m putting you in the pre-mod filter from now on, and no further links will be published from you unless you mention two things for each link:
               1. the name of the signal-boosted article’s author, and;
               2. WHY you are recommending it to the readership here.

         3. an oldie but a goodie

            http://dearwhitefeminists.wordpress.com/

3. I loved this article: http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2012/10/the-real-reason-america-used-nuclear-weapons-against-japan-to-contain-russian-ambitions.html

Comments are currently closed.