"I couldn't let these Klansmen get away with murder..." Investigative reporter Jerry Mitchell has started a
blog focusing on
cold case murders of civil rights workers. In this
Moth Podcast, Mitchell discusses some of his investigations, the death threats he received, and the stunning redemption and forgiveness he witnessed. For his work
Mitchell was recently
awarded a MacArthur "
Genius" grant.
[more inside]
posted by bguest
on Feb 15, 2010 -
18 comments
Due to the threat of legal action the British National Party has amended its membership policy to be
open to all races. It's first non-white member, a Sikh, will soon be handed his membership card personally by BNP leader Nick Griffin. Explains Griffin:
Anyone can be a member of this party. We are happy to accept anyone as a member providing they agree with us that this country should remain fundamentally British
posted by PenDevil
on Feb 15, 2010 -
45 comments
Australian television show "Hey Hey It's Saturday" is currently back on the air after a few decades, running a series of reunion shows, and the other night a group that had been on the show in the 80s came back with the same act,
in blackface. [more inside]
posted by barnacles
on Oct 8, 2009 -
216 comments
"We’ve processed the messaging habits of almost a million people and are about to basically prove that, despite what you might’ve heard from the Obama campaign and organic cereal commercials, racism is alive and well." The people who run the dating site
OkCupid continue to analyze the aggregate data of their users, shedding light on preferences and behavior. The most recent
OkTrends post takes a look at their compiled racial data:
Your Race Affects Whether People Write You Back. (previously
1 2)
posted by naju
on Oct 7, 2009 -
459 comments
GLAAD recently published their
third annual GLAAD Network Responsibility Index, evaluating networks on the quantity, quality and diversity of images of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) people on television. The SyFy (Sci-Fi) channel was given an F rating for their failure of their depiction of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) characters. In response, the head of the SyFy network promised to
be more diverse.
[more inside]
posted by FunkyHelix
on Aug 13, 2009 -
250 comments
...The narrative of the blues got hijacked by rock ’n’ roll, which rode a wave of youth consumers to global domination. Back behind the split, there was something else: a deeper, riper source. Many people who have written about this body of music have noticed it. Robert Palmer called it Deep Blues. We’re talking about strains within strains, sure, but listen to something like Ishman Bracey’s ''Woman Woman Blues,'' his tattered yet somehow impeccable falsetto when he sings, ''She got coal-black curly hair.'' Songs like that were not made for dancing. Not even for singing along. They were made for listening. For grown-ups. They were chamber compositions. Listen to Blind Willie Johnson’s "Dark Was the Night, Cold Was the Ground.'' It has no words. It’s hummed by a blind preacher incapable of playing an impure note on the guitar. We have to go against our training here and suspend anthropological thinking; it doesn’t serve at these strata. The noble ambition not to be the kind of people who unwittingly fetishize and exoticize black or poor-white folk poverty has allowed us to remain the kind of people who don’t stop to wonder whether the serious treatment of certain folk forms as essentially high- or higher-art forms might have originated with the folk themselves.
From
Unknown Bards: The blues becomes apparent to itself by one John Jeremiah Sullivan. I came across it while browsing
Heavy Rotation: Twenty Writers On The Albums That Changed Their Lives. For Sullivan, that album was
American Primitive, Vol. II: Pre-War Revenants (1897 - 1939), which is my favorite CD of the year. Which came out in 2005 while I just got around to buying it this year. Foolish me. It is a piece of art in itself in every respect--all CDs should have such production values.
[more inside]
posted by y2karl
on Aug 6, 2009 -
50 comments
"I don't see where there's a story, I'm not the only one that does it." Such is the excuse of
patriotic Atwater City (CA)
Councilman (and Mayor Pre Tem)
Gary Frago for sending out "at least a half-dozen e-mails to city staff and other prominent community members containing racist jokes aimed at President Barack Obama, his wife and black people in general." Frago received some of the e-mail jokes from ex-city worker Bob Rieger and
forwarded them on "to various community leaders, 'including a county supervisor, a former police chief, a city manager, a former city council member, a former president of a veterans group, a former grand knight of the Knights of Columbus, among others.'"
Rieger said the jokes he sent had no racial meaning. "As far as I'm concerned the e-mails need no explanation," he said. "I sent them out, I'm not concerned with it," he said.
[more inside]
posted by ericb
on Jul 17, 2009 -
90 comments
55 years ago,
Brown v. Board of Education was decided, which lead to the controversial court-ordered school integrations in the South. Four years later,
the prolific Charles Beaumont wrote his
only solo novel,
The Intruder, based on a true story but set in a fictitious small southern town of Caxton that is riled up by a mysterious man from out-of-town who wants to halt the school integration. The novel was turned into
a movie by the same name in 1962, produced, directed and financed by
Roger Corman, starring
a charismatic William Shatner as the mysterious intruder, some 4 years before the start of his iconic role in Star Trek.
Shot on location, using
locals who were not fully aware of the plot of the movie, the whole film was made for $80-$90,000, and was Corman's only film to lose money at the box offices. The production was
banned in some Missouri cities because the local people objected to the film's portrayal racism and segregation. The film finally saw a profit after its re-release on DVD in recent years. (
Previously discussed as part of this 1970s Shatner post; video links inside)
[more inside]
posted by filthy light thief
on Jul 7, 2009 -
26 comments
Bank Accused of Pushing Mortgage Deals on Blacks: "They referred to subprime loans made in minority communities as ghetto loans and minority customers as 'those people have bad credit', 'those people don't pay their bills' and 'mud people,' " [a Wells Fargo subprime loan officer] said in his affidavit, filed in the NAACP's
lawsuit (pdf) against 13 mortgage lenders. "The company put 'bounties' on minority borrowers. By this I mean that loan officers received cash incentives to aggressively market subprime loans in minority communities."
posted by hayvac
on Jun 8, 2009 -
40 comments
"
How do black women fight crime? They have abortions." "
How do you stop a poofter from drowning? You take your foot off his head." These and other 'jokes' featured in an advertisement on
The Gruen Transfer, an Australian television program focusing on advertising. The ad, part of a segment called 'The Pitch' which usually produces humorous ads, was banned by the ABC, but the national broadcaster has still allowed it to be viewed online, and hundreds have now seen it. The ad was designed to sell "fat pride", with creator Adam Hunt explaining his motivation behind the ad being to say "if you discriminate against somebody on the basis of their shape then you are no different to someone who is racist, homophobic or anti-Semitic."
Debate has raged online if the ad is offensive and discriminatory, as the ABC has declared, and whether or not it was effective.
Watch the ad and judge for yourself.
posted by Effigy2000
on May 15, 2009 -
157 comments
My gut reaction was that the story--although a legitimate consumer complaint—seemed to reinforce a cultural stereotype about Black people and chicken. I know for a fact that no one on our staff meant for that to be the point of the story, but the fear that we would be accused of this sounded an alarm to me. It’s sad that I even had to worry about this.
Last week a couple of Popeye's restaurants in Rochester ran out of chicken. And local ABC affiliate WHAM
decided to run a story. Some people
complained, and WHAM
responded.
Warning: Second link contains some idiocy.
posted by hifiparasol
on Apr 26, 2009 -
135 comments
As the Jim Crow overt style of maintaining white supremacy was replaced with “now you see it, now you don’t” practices that were subtle, apparently non-racial, and institutionalized, an ideology fitting to this era emerged... -
The Linguistics of Color-Blind Racism.
posted by lunit
on Mar 9, 2009 -
191 comments
I don't know if this is more troubling than any of the other anti-immigrant movements that have been cropping up in Europe, or whether it's just that Italy has Silvio Berlusconi (
previously on MeFi), but with the
fingerprinting of Roma, including their children,
the destruction of Roma camps and the blase attitude towards two Roma girls
found dead on an Italian beach, one wonders whether comparisons to the 1930's may become justified. Now, in an act that, while not violent, is perhaps even more indicative of the country's views on race the city of
Lucca and the region of
Lombardy have banned the opening of new "foreign" restaurants, as, one newspaper put it "a new Lombard Crusade against the Saracens."
[more inside]
posted by Hactar
on Feb 3, 2009 -
48 comments
