quote out of context
If you get killed by a rock and you were carrying a gun, but didn’t shoot, you don’t get into heaven.
Which of these things does not belong?
GOOD has a nice little photo essay on the The Central Valley Tea Party.
photo out of context
Just Longing for the “Good Ole’ Days”
An Atlanta-area sports promoter has announced plans for—brace yourself—a whites-only pro basketball league. Dubbed the “All-American Basketball Alliance,” the league would only be open to “natural born United States citizens with both parents of Caucasian race.” The commissioner, former pro-wrestling promoter Don “Moose” Lewis, says the league will tip off in June, with teams in 12 Southern cities. Lewis insists he’s not racist; he just doesn’t like the “street-ball” that “people of color” play.
Ah, yes. Just a nostalgic return to the fundamental basketball of the good ole’ days — it could be painted by Rockwell himself.
I wonder, at what point will “I’m not racist, I just long for the good ole’ days” cease to be a valid defense?
African immigrants in southern Italy
The riots in Rosarno, which reportedly began after three Italian teenagers fired air rifles at two African immigrants, unsettled a nation that prides itself on its bella figura – the beautiful image. About 2,500 migrants live in the Rosarno valley in the southern Calabria region, moving with the seasonal agricultural jobs. Many have political asylum or are otherwise legally in Italy, but legal or not, the migrants are managed by a Mafia-run employment system, the caporalato, that operates like a 21st century chain gang. Saviano says that those who object to low wages or poor working conditions are simply eliminated – and not just by a pink slip. “It’s a military system,” Saviano tells TIME in Rome as one of the plainclothes cops guarding him stands nearby. “The farm and factory owners employ the Mafia caporali to bring the workers. The immigrants wait on the roads, the caporali pick them up and take them to the work. If they complain, they get killed.”
you can take the boy out of Texas
After he arrived, Whitten met with the employees. He says he immediately noticed that they were hostile to his management style and worried they might start talking about him in Spanish.
“Because of that, I asked the people in my presence to speak only English because I do not understand Spanish,” Whitten says.
Some employees were fired, Whitten says, because they were hostile and insubordinate. He says they called him “a white (N-word).”
Then Whitten told some employees he was changing their Spanish first names.
What’s wrong with being racy?
The White City
The brunt of the article is that white people moving to progressive cities is the new suburban white flight. It’s an interesting idea, but a hard sell (in other words, one should be cautious about agreeing with such claims).
Louisiana judge denies interracial couple marriage license
“I’m not a racist. I just don’t believe in mixing the races that way,” Bardwell told the Associated Press on Thursday. “I have piles and piles of black friends. They come to my home, I marry them, they use my bathroom. I treat them just like everyone else.”
Ra Addresses the Youth
Oakland, California. 1972.
From Space Is the Place (1974). Directed by John Coney. Featuring Sun Ra, Ray Johnson, Christopher Brooks, The Intergalactic Myth-Science Solar Arkestra with June Tyson, John Gilmore, Marshall Allen. (Reissued in a revised edition on DVD in 2003. The edition on VHS presents the film as released in 1974. This clip appears to be from the revised DVD edition.)
Sun Ra Meets Napoleon
Over the winter of 2004-2005, the Philadelphia-based Slought Foundation sponsored an exhibition titled “Sun Ra Meets Napoleon: Fragments of the Alter-Future”. In conjunction with the exhibition, a 1990 recording of Sun Ra in conversation with jazz critic Francis Davis was released.
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L’homme sans tête
(Via @pipsan)
Shaving Points #2
There are oils, creams, cremes, foams, soaps, and gels all containing inexplicable and engineered molecules and/or the finest available botanicals. They serve either to facilitate the enactment of the sought after good, close shave or to soothe the hurt that accompanies it. And with a scent that evokes the essence of your particular brand of masculinity.
Thoughts on beergate
If there was a teachable moment in this incident, it could be found in how some powerful white people well beyond Cambridge responded to it. That reaction is merely the latest example of how the inexorable transformation of America into a white-minority country in some 30 years — by 2042 in the latest Census Bureau estimate — is causing serious jitters, if not panic, in some white establishments.
With a little local flavor:
What provokes their angry and nonsensical cries of racism is sheer desperation: an entire country is changing faster than these white guys bargained for. We’ve been reminded repeatedly during Gatesgate that Cambridge’s mayor is a black lesbian. But a more representative window into the country’s transition might be that Dallas County, Tex., elected a Latina lesbian sheriff in 2004 (and re-elected her last year) and that the three serious candidates for mayor of Houston this fall include a black man and a white lesbian.
Does McDonald’s market to Caucasians?
Alternately, when did McDonald’s stop marketing to white people?
State of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations
Legislators in Rhode Island are attempting to shorten its official name to disassociate it from a history of slavery.
Banished from the Massachusetts Bay Colony for his unorthodox religious views, minister Roger Williams set out in 1636 and settled at the northern tip of Narragansett Bay, which he called Providence Plantations. Williams founded the first Baptist church in America and became famous for embracing the separation of church and state, a legal principle enshrined in the Bill of Rights a century later.
Other settlers made their homes in modern-day Portsmouth and Newport on Aquidneck Island, then known as the Isle of Rhodes.
In 1663, English King Charles II granted a royal charter joining all the settlements into a single colony called “The Colony of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations.” The name stuck. Rhode Island used that royal charter as its governing document until 1843.
Opponents of the name charge argue that “plantations” was used at the time to describe any farming settlements, regardless of slavery.
Rhode Island merchants did, however, make their fortunes off the slave trade. Slaves helped construct Brown University in Providence, and a prominent slave trader paid half the cost of its first library.
Richard Was a Dick
Speaking to Charles Colson after the January 1973 Roe v. Wade decision legalizing abortion, the president said: “I admit, there are times when abortions are necessary, I know that.” He gave “a black and a white” as an example.
“Or rape,” Colson offered. “Or rape,” Nixon agreed.
Putting The Free In Freedom
For the second year in a row (that I have noticed), Austin’s Chapman Motors gave away free watermelons on Juneteenth.
Dear Cindy
Can I learn to be a Mexican, too?
young conservatives rap (n(i)s)*
Enjoy feeling uncomfortable?
“Three things taught me Conservative Love / Jesus, Ronald Reagan, plus Atlas Shrugged.”
*not (intentional) satire.
Hurray for the Bud Billiken Parade and for the Woodson Regional Branch of the Chicago Public Library! Hurrah!
Abbott-Sengstacke Family Papers/Chicago Public Library. President Harry S. Truman, left, John H. Sengstacke and Mayor Richard J. Daley of Chicago in the 1956 Bud Billiken Parade.
This is cool. My archival-collegial friend Michael Flug is cool. You’ll find him quoted in the Times if you read on down.
First negro to receive U.S. patent for his invention, “dry-scouring”
Thomas Jennings, a tailor of New York city, has become the world’s first Negro to be granted a U.S. patent on his revolutionary dress cleaning method, which he calls “dry-scouring”. Jennings is a free man, born in the United States, and an American citizen.
1820
Old Black Joe
Cindy loves the fact that I, as a first-grader in a private school, performed (in a choral performance with other students) in black face. I was quite blond as a small child and had to have hair-darkening as well. [Cooper Renner. 22 April 2007.]
The Red House
If you watch only one racially inclusive furniture store commercial today, make it this one.
I thought dogs didn’t see color
On the way to the train, I passed a man with a pitbull puppy, spinning loops under its leash, tail wagging, ecstatic to be outside on a beautiful spring day. An older lady walked up to the pair and smiled down at the dog. The puppy looked up, wagged even more frantically, and let out a small yet throaty bark.
The woman drew herself up, and said in a thick Caribbean accent, “I didn’t hear you bark at that white woman, bitch, so you best cut that out!”
A Different Way To Win in Dallas, 1971
When I was seventeen I lived in an apartment in a complex that probably brought in more of its revenue from security deposits than from rent. The Dallas area was in the middle of a housing boom, and jobs building tract houses were plentiful. I shared the apartment with two other young men also doing such work, and our lives revolved around dealing with sunburn and drinking beer. Read more