Tag Archives: racism

Flossing and the dental hygiene paradigm of race discourse | Nonprofit With Balls

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As always, Vu Le, at Nonprofit with Balls, says it best:

Flossing and the Dental Hygiene Paradigm of Race Discourse

[Quoting Jay Smooth:] “We don’t assume, I’m a clean person therefore I do not need to clean my teeth. Being a clean person is something you maintain and work on every day […] And when someone suggests to us that we’ve got something stuck in our teeth, we don’t say, ‘I have something stuck in my teeth?! But I’m a clean person!’”

Undoing racism and other forms of injustice is a practice we must do every day, like brushing our teeth, according to Jay Smooth. We must look in the mirror constantly. And like brushing, on some days, we’re better at it than on others. On occasion, we don’t spend enough time, and we still have bits of gross stuff stuck in our chompers even though we feel minty fresh. Sometimes we’re lazy and just gargle with some bourbon and call it a night.

…

With all the injustice out there that we are trying to fight, let’s give each other some grace. Let’s admit we don’t know everything and we can’t be perfect. Let’s all lower our defenses and see each other as imperfect human beings trying hard to do some good in a complex world. And when someone says, “Hey, you got a little bit of racism (or sexism, or ableism, or ageism, etc.) stuck in your teeth,” we thank them, do some looking in the mirror to remove it, and continue forward to make our world better.

Source: Flossing and the dental hygiene paradigm of race discourse | Nonprofit With Balls

I’llRideWithYou?

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After North Carolina made the brilliant decision to police its citizens’ bathroom habits, a movement arose urging cis folks to be available to accompany trans or genderqueer folks to the restroom or other gendered spaces.  It’s called “I’ll Go With You.”   It has a website … and buttons!

This week, two more Black men were assassinated by the police under circumstances that defy rational understanding, but that share with so many other similar murders this feature:  they would not have happened to a white person.

What can a random middle age white lady do about all this killing?  I can march, shout, post . . . all things that announce my horror, anger, and sadness.  But I can’t force grand juries to indict murderous cops or juries to convict them.  And worst of all, I can’t stop the shooting from happening in the first place.

Or can I?   What if I were there?  Could enough of us be there for our Black friends, allies, and fellow citizens to stop some of the random killing?  If we’re willing to go to the bathroom as a show of solidarity with our trans and genderqueer friends, is there a way we ride along with our Black friends to show solidarity or, y’know, be a human shield?  Call it the White-People Ride-Along program*, placing random white people in the cars of random African-Americans while they drive to work, run errands, go out to dinner, stay up late, joy ride, and other things white people can do in cars without risking death at the hands of law enforcement.  It would work like a sort of reverse Uber. When the Black driver is ready to go somewhere, he or she enters the information in the WPRA app and connects with an available white passenger.  Voila!  Instant, if unfounded, respectability and potential survival.

Wild-ass idea, right?  Or maybe not.  Anyone with the balls & tech skills to get this rolling:  I’m in.

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*Yes, I’m intending to copy the police “Ride-Along” label.

“The white community needs to ask itself, ‘how are we going to deal with this problem?'”

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Chris Hayes‘

Note the warning at the beginning.  Nevertheless, countdown to FoxNews meltdown in 3, 2, 1….

Denver Post or The Onion: it’s hard to tell

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One of my favorite Onion headlines is

Stereotypes Are a Real Time-Saver

I’m a busy guy. And, while I’d love to, I don’t have the time to get to know every person I encounter in the course of my daily life. So thank goodness I have a handy little device at my disposal that helps me know how to deal with just about anyone I come across: stereotypes. Yes, stereotypes are a real time-saver!

The Denver Post appears to have borrowed this crucial piece of wisdom to guide its journalistic standards.  In reporting the tragic death of Tom Clements, the Executive Director of the Colorado Department of Corrections, the Post added the following pieces of gratuitous, unsupported, speculation to its initial reports:

Clements’ death occurred a week after he denied a request by a Saudi national, Homaidan al-Turki, to serve out the remainder of a Colorado prison sentence in Saudi Arabia.

The article goes on for three paragraphs to describe the al-Turki case — citing no evidence outside the chronology to connect it to Clements’s murder — but does not offer any further gratuitous, unsupported, speculation concerning other individuals of, say, other races or affiliations.
Colorado corrections officials are investigating whether a paroled white-supremacist prison-gang member at the center of the investigation into the execution-style slaying of state prison chief Tom Clements was ordered by the gang to do a “hit,” a source told The Denver Post on Thursday.
No time, funding, or balls for real reporting?  Stereotypes are a real time-saver!
[Updated to note dates of DP articles.]

Modesty glasses: finally, recognition that it’s their problem, not ours.

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In Israel, new modesty glasses for Orthodox Jewish men blur women out of their line of sight – NY Daily News.

It’s the latest prescription for extreme ultra-Orthodox Jewish men who shun contact with the opposite sex: Glasses that blur their vision, so they don’t have to see women they consider to be immodestly dressed.

This is sheer genius!  With modern technology, if we can’t convince bigots to bring their thinking into the modern world, at least we don’t have to change our behavior to cater to their stone age views.  Bigot Glasses:  think of the uses!

  • Racist?  Here are glasses that make everyone’s skin tone look white.
  • Homophobic?  These glasses will portray, to the wearer, that any couple observed through the lenses consists of one man and one woman.
  • Islamophobic?  The glasses can be programmed to photographically superimpose members of the 4H Club overtop of any images of men with dark skin, beards, or turbans or women in headscarves.
  • Disabiliphobic?  There will be glasses to blur out wheelchairs, white canes, and sign language, showing instead those same people walking, seeing, hearing, and flipping you off.  (Still a few bugs in that technology.)

The ultimate genius, of course, is that Bigot Glasses only affect the bigot, so the rest of us can go about living our black, female, Islamic, gay, and/or disabled lives in peace.

There is, of course, one set of these glasses I’d invest in:  grumpy old lady glasses.   Technology that erases tattoos, pulls up pants, covers up exposed underwear, brushes hair, feigns respect, and edits out the word “like.”