“How My Amazing Grandfather Met Martin Luther King” by Jeremy Williamson (3rd Grade)
Penned a decade or so ago by the younger son of my friends Lydia and Al and rediscovered just this month.
My grandpa John Snow was the director of a place for people who had nervous breakdowns or other bad troubles in their lives. The place was called Gould Farm. Although it may seem strange, it was through his work at this place that John met an amazing man of peace. This is the story of that important meeting and how it happened.
Murdered Kansas Abolitionist David Hoyt’s Bloodstained Map and Condolence Letter
What he was doing in the area is not entirely clear. Some reports indicate that he was attempting to negotiate a truce with proslavery elements; others suggest that he was “testing” the intentions of Southerners in Lawrence by entering a proslavery gathering unarmed.
The Cowan’s Auctions copywriter continues,
Included with the lot is a 3pp letter, 5 x 8″, Leominster, 11 Sept. 1856. The letter is from James F. Legate to the parents of David Hoyt expressing his condolences and trying offer some solace in the idea that their son gave his life …that Freedom might live….Take comfort for he died that Liberty might come to the oppressed people of Kansas…. Incredibly, he also asks Hoyt’s parents if they know anyone else who will come carry on the fight: I have been laboring ever since in the State to get a party to go back with me. Has he no friends to go & do battle for which he fell a [martyr]? If so I’ll take them to the spot where he yielded his young, useful life….
Both map and letter sold last month for a mere $705.
Possible moral of the story: Do not “test” the intentions of Southerners while unarmed.
(Via SC.)
quote out of context
If nothing else I think it’s a sign of how far we’ve come as a nation that a middle-aged Jewish woman and an African-American man can participate in paramilitary-leaning right-wing ravanchist politics on a equal footing with white people.
wow
Just go read this post and watch the video.
The Cooler Bandits
My friend Bruno is producing this:
Maybe you can help?
Oh. My. God.
Yo Gabba Gabba! – The Homo Secret Within Your Children’s Minds.
the decaffeinated Other
Good ole’ Zizek, always shit stirring:
Progressive liberals are, of course, horrified by such populist racism. However, a closer look reveals how their multicultural tolerance and respect of differences share with those who oppose immigration the need to keep others at a proper distance. “The others are OK, I respect them,” the liberals say, “but they must not intrude too much on my own space. The moment they do, they harass me – I fully support affirmative action, but I am in no way ready to listen to loud rap music.” What is increasingly emerging as the central human right in late-capitalist societies is the right not to be harassed, which is the right to be kept at a safe distance from others. A terrorist whose deadly plans should be prevented belongs in Guantánamo, the empty zone exempted from the rule of law; a fundamentalist ideologist should be silenced because he spreads hatred. Such people are toxic subjects who disturb my peace.
On today’s market, we find a whole series of products deprived of their malignant property: coffee without caffeine, cream without fat, beer without alcohol. And the list goes on: what about virtual sex as sex without sex? The Colin Powell doctrine of warfare with no casualties (on our side, of course) as warfare without warfare? The contemporary redefinition of politics as the art of expert administration as politics without politics? This leads us to today’s tolerant liberal multiculturalism as an experience of the Other deprived of its Otherness – the decaffeinated Other.
Slavoj Zizek, if you are not familiar, is a rather atypical thinker.
sharecropping
This story about a school field trip is as hilarious as it is terrifying.
UPDATE: Sadly, this video has been removed by the user.
Update: A replacement video was uploaded. [Deron]
Texas diversity
Hospital cafeteria. Table with 2 women–one Thai, one African American. Talking all kinds of bad about a co-worker.
Thai: She Mexican, right?
African American: Yeah, she’s from Brazil. She always speaking Spanish.
fuck Chip
The moral dilemma of the Trolley Problem gets confounded by race.
In The Motivated Use of Moral Principles the authors show that self-identified liberals are more reluctant to sacrifice Tyrone than Chip despite prior agreement that race is irrelevant to moral questions of this kind. Even more interesting when first presented with the Tyrone story liberals subsequently become less consequentialist even regarding Chip. But when first presented with the Chip story they maintain consequentialism for Tyrone.
Slip of the Tongue
from the spam
Why are all plus size clothing stores targeted at African Americans? There are plenty of white overweight people too….
The explosions will not happen for 10, 15, 20 years.
I can’t get enough of this Gohmert dude. It’s like he’s impersonating himself. To a hilarious and fearsome result.
The Flight Home
Mia and I took the last flight out of El Paso to Dallas last night. The two male flight attendants were assholes. I surmised that each had worked for car dealerships and/or golf stores prior to the career move. One of them kept stopping to talk to the man in the seat across from me, explaining his wish for the passenger (presumably a real estate agent) to find him a foreclosure in Celina, TX (a former small town morphed into a lily-white, ultra-conservative Dallas/Fort Worth suburb). He explained to the guy how much better a place to raise kids Celina is than San Diego county, which he said is dangerous like ”this El Paso situation.”
When the attendant asked for drink orders, I heard him ask the woman behind me if she would ask the other two people in the row if they wanted something to drink. I had seen them board–a woman and a 20-something man, probably her son–and I immediately gathered that they were from Mexico and had likely never flown. The woman behind me asked the two in English if they wanted something to drink. The flight attendant said, oh, I thought you spoke Spanish. The woman said no, she did not. The attendant then asked the two in very bad Spanish if they would like something to drink. Each said “Coke, please.”
I had heard all three speaking in Spanish earlier.
I unbuckled my seat belt, turned around and popped my head over the seat. The three looked at me. I smiled and said, “Viva la Raza!” We laughed and laughed.
photo out of context
from the comments
My old friend Sylvester (fry cook at Dan’s Coffee Shop where I worked as a dishwasher at 13) once told me that he had to wrap his dick in a cold washrag between bouts to keep it strong. He’s the one with the gold teeth with the doors that opened to a filigreed silhouette of Aretha Franklin. He also had albums set up around his big stereo in his apartment that had lines of bright yarn running from them to a thumbtack perspective point on the ceiling–like rays radiating from James Brown, Aretha Franklin, Bessie Smith…. He took me to bars in places that would have killed my mother to know about, where he introduced me as his “little white friend.”
Dear Clusterflock
I always wanted a gold tooth.
So, when I got a temporary crown put in today by my new dentist, (to replace the awful “permanent” one my old dentist put in, you see) I ask about getting a gold crown. With the old one, I didn’t know how things worked so when they put the awful one in, I didn’t know when to ask about whether I could get a gold one until it was too late.
So, this time I ask. And I’d have to pay $800 extra because my insurance considers it cosmetic. She tells me that it would last longer and that ordinarily they don’t ask if people want gold for their teeth near the front. So, I fume while she matches the shade of porcelain I’m going to end up getting. Am I detecting an ethnic bias in the policies of my dental insurance provider or is this just standard serving up lemon jello and telling me it’s dessert Ticketmaster doublespeak?
SuperSonic Car
The Bloodhound has a grand total of 135,000 horsepower, which is equal to 180 times the power of a formula one car.
Shake | Otis Redding
Otis Redding performing Shake on Ready Steady Go! (1966).
“I want to shake.” (Deron)
White men can’t jump and black men can’t swim…
…but it’s not quite because of race:
Our approach is to study phenotypic (somatotypic) differences … which we consider to have been historically misclassified as racial characteristics. These differences represent consequences of still not well-understood variable environmental stimuli for survival fitness in different parts of the globe during thousands of years of habitation. Our study does not advance the notion of race, now recognized as a social construct, as opposed to a biological construct. We acknowledge the wide phenotypic and genotypic diversity among the so-called racial types.
The “social construct vs. biological construct” approach, though deceptively simple, could be profoundly important in advancing how we think about race and gender.
Political movement out of context
“I am disinclined to take lectures on racial sensitivity from a group that insists on calling black people, ‘Colored,’” Mark Williams, national spokesman of the Tea Party Express, told CNN.
Not the tack I would have taken, but I suppose compromise has fallen out of favor.
stumbled upon: Annie at shoesonwrong
Me: It’s supposed to be really hot this weekend. Really hot and really sunny.
Ryan: Oh good. They’re setting up for a whole festival type thing on the riverfront right now, so lots of white people will be around this weekend. I love it when they come downtown and complain about how hot it is while they gradually get more and more sunburned.
Me: And there’s already like four beer stands set up, but they’re all advertising cheap nasty beer.
Ryan: Fantastic. So they’ll be drunk, too. Drunk, bright red white people.
Me: Well, against the backdrop of the blue sky, it could be kind of pretty. Red, white, and blue — like patriotic little lobsters that don’t acknowledge traffic signs and keep referring to everything in the city as “ghetto” like they are on some sort of inner city safari.
Ryan: Stupid white people.
The Eugenics Experiment That is Jessica Simpson
I saw the VH1 ad in People magazine, and I was all like WTF?? And then I was like wait, I have seen this before:
from the comments
This reminds me in an oblique way of an incident from the childhood of a young woman I’ve known for years. When she was a baby, one or both of her parents dumped her on the doorstep of a Pakistan hospital; she was adopted by a ‘mixed’ US couple who pulled strings with the Pakistani authorities.
When the girl was eight or nine, she entered a (US) school poster competition: Martin Luther King’s Birthday. Her entry came in second or third, and in a fit of pique, she ripped one off at the first-prize winner. Told him she thought her poster was better.
Then the winner of the Martin Luther King’s Birthday poster contest called her a nigger.
Williams syndrome, social anxiety, racism, and gender stereotypes
Children with Williams syndrome, a rare genetic disorder that makes them lack normal social anxiety, have no racial biases. They do, however, traffic in gender stereotypes, said study researcher Andreas Meyer-Lindenberg of the University of Heidelberg in Germany.
Williams syndrome is caused by a gene deletion known to affect the brain as well as other organs. As a result, people with Williams syndrome are “hypersocial,” Meyer-Lindenberg told . They do not experience the jitters and inhibitions the rest of us feel.
Despite their lack of racial bias, children with Williams syndrome hold gender stereotypes just as strongly as normal children, the study found. That is, 99 percent of the 40 children studied pointed to pictures of girls when asked who played with dolls and chose boys when asked, say, who likes toy cars.
The fact that Williams syndrome kids think of men and women differently, but not blacks and whites, shows that sex stereotypes are not caused by social anxiety, Meyer-Lindenberg said.
You learn something new every day.
