Ummm…because I can?
You know, I might be the first person who ever digitally altered someone’s race.
I drove an early photo manipulation workstation in the mid Eighties, several years before Photoshop existed. We were doing this primitive computer simulation/game that involved lots of static head shots of various characters. It was a training thing. We had just finished, when it dawned on some clever sod that there weren’t any persons of color in it.
So, I took one of the characters — the one my boss had modeled for, as it happened — and made him a brother. It was a perfectly harmless bit of illustration. He looked handsomer in color, if I do say so myself.
Management was -=HORRIFIED=- when they saw it. They could quite put their finger on what was wrong about it, but they made me erase it on the spot and gave me to understand I’d done a Very Bad Thing and Must Never Tell Anyone.
Anyhow, a funny thing happened on the way to the national conversation on race we were supposed to be having…
So, I confess, I’m far too lazy to go listen to Part Two of the Shirley Sharrod/NAACP speech that was supposed to exonerate her and leave egg all over Breitbart’s face.
Because, frankly, I’m having a hell of a time imagining anything she could have said in Part Two that would get her off the hook for Part One. Except, maybe, “Oh my god, I was such an asshole, those things I was saying a few minutes ago…”
Did anybody listen to the whole thing?
July 21, 2010 — 10:41 pm
Comments: 24
Can I just say something…?
A white cop will arrest a white man for being mouthy.
A black cop will arrest a white man for being mouthy.
A black cop will arrest a black man for being mouthy.
So it’s sure as shit not news when a white cop arrests a
black man for being mouthy.
Word.
July 24, 2009 — 10:05 am
Comments: 33
Golly!
Behold, the Golliwog.
There’s this mixed Brits-and-Americans forum on which I out-hang (I don’t know why; it’s a terrible place full of leftards and hippies). On inauguration day, there was an outbreak of no-YOU-guys-are-big-fat-racists, and somebody brought up the Golliwog. An indignant Brit sputtered that it’s called a “Golly” now, and anyway you can’t buy them in Britain any more.
So I had to stop and take a picture when I passed this shop window today.
I’m not entirely sure why the Golly is considered offensive. He’s got the jaunty little suit and tie and everything. I mean, nobody gets the vapors over Raggedy Ann, and she’s a ginger. And raggedy.
January 21, 2009 — 8:41 pm
Comments: 21
Loot! Plunder! Swag!
This? A British Airways place setting…from the Concorde. This is just the sort of brilliant, clever gift-giving Uncle B excels at and I…do not. I made him circle shit he wanted in a gardening catalogue. I’m pretty darned sure this is the first time in my life I’ve ever bought anyone vermiculite for Christmas.
We’ve just polished off the champagne…the turkey is in the oven…it has been an good Christmas. Hope yours was, too!
See you on Boxing Day! (Don’t ask).
December 25, 2008 — 9:02 pm
Comments: 36
Shameless
Ifill questions why people assume that her book will be favorable toward Obama.
“Do you think they made the same assumptions about Lou Cannon (who is white) when he wrote his book about Reagan?” said Ifill, who is black. Asked if there were racial motives at play, she said, “I don’t know what it is. I find it curious.”
Okay, let’s walk down the list, shall we?
▓ Ifill wrote a vomitously saccharine puff piece about Obama in Essence magazine. (Warning: Barack holds Michelle in his arms and sings. Can you take that, sunshine?).
▓ She covered Palin’s convention speech like she was sucking a lemon.
▓ She’s writing a book titled “The Breakthrough: Politics and Race in the Age of Obama.”
▓ It’s set to be released on Inauguration Day — hence, she stands to make substantially more money if Obama is elected than if he is not.
▓ She’s moderating tonight’s Vice Presidential debates.
▓ If you think there’s anything wrong with that, the AP thinks you’re racist.
This election makes me feel like I took the crazy bus to Crazytown.
October 2, 2008 — 7:32 am
Comments: 57
Nice hat, Senator
Y’all know I’ve been pretty depressed about this presidential election. John McCain seriously harshes my shadenfreude. Every time I start to go after a Democrat, I hear McCain’s evil-grampa laugh in my ear, and my (entirely metaphorical) balls shrivel.
But I’ve listened to the entirety of Jeremiah Wright’s National Press Club and NAACP speeches and I can’t remember a time I have so passionately wished to poke someone in the snoot. Entirely metaphorically, of course.
I think it was where he imitates the way white people talk. Being mimicked reaches right back into my nursery school braincells and makes them throb with screaming monkey rage.
Or maybe that bit about how Europeans and Africans are different right down to the brainal level. I don’t know from neuropathology, I only know if a white man had said anything close to that, it would buy him a one-way ticket to Lepertown.
Listening to Wright made me feel grubby; that he is slick only makes it grubbier. It was like being dipped in a cesspit of toxic racial sludge. Like attending a Klan rally on Bizarroworld.
How bad was it? Bad enough that Obama disowned the man he could no more disown than the black community or his white grandmother (watch your back, Granny).
Wright didn’t develop his peculiarly smelly brand of afroNazism over the weekend. It’s totally implausible that Obama rubbed elbows with Wright for twenty years and never heard a word of his ridiculous, balls-out craziness before yesterday. Clearly, Obama chose this church for these qualities, because he desired that particular flavor of cred.
I doubt Obama believes a word of that crap; he doesn’t strike me as a retard. That makes this ass-bite especially satisfying. It’s dangerous to handle poison, Senator.
Heh. Heh heh. Heh heh heh.
Oh, shut up, John.
UPDATE: I told mesa I’d make a color version, but it was pretty much FAIL. I’ve never tinted a photo using this technique, and it looked awful. Like a tinted photo. So I made some slight adjustments to the grayscale version and replaced the image in the post. I’ve also uploaded a large version and one that is 160 pixels wide. It’s a bit too tall for a sidebar graphic, but I’m not the boss of you.
This is as good a time as any to review my graphics policy: take it. Take anything you like. Change it, if you want. Post it. Have it tattoo’d on your butt. No need to link back or give credit. This is ephemera we’re making here and I need the karma.
Just…say something nice about me when I’m gone.
UPDATE THE TWOTH: Yay! Ace-o-lanche! It’s raining morons! Thanks, Deb!
April 29, 2008 — 3:18 pm
Comments: 141
African plus American does not equal African-American
For somebody who doesn’t like to talk about race, I’ve certainly done a lot of it this week. Eh. Here goes. This article in the American Spectator touched on something that I’ve thought a lot about in the days since Obama’s Pastor Wright problem surfaced: the profound hostility that often exists between African Americans of different shades of brown.
Check out this widely circulated picture of Wright and Obama together. The two men don’t have a hell of a lot of melanin between them. Wright is the paler of the two; he could easily pass for some variety of Southern European. Obama isn’t much darker, and he has an added problem: he’s no more descended from slaves than I am.
I’m guessing both men have been deeply pained by identity problems in their lives. Wright tried to solve his and cement his group identity by wearing dashikis and peddling the most vitriolic hate-whitey creed he could get away with. Obama tried to solve his and cement his group identity by cleaving to Wright — and, clearly, Obama would rather throw his typical white grandmother under a bus than renounce the relationship.
Is he going to skate on this? I don’t know. I watched the Race Speech live and thought it sounded polished and thoughtful. But he’s gotten this far by promising white folks he’s something new. This week, he felt compelled to reassure black folks he’s something old and familiar.
March 21, 2008 — 12:44 pm
Comments: 4
Toxic retardedness
Have you read Horatio Alger? He’s a lightweight, pleasant read, in the way of so much Victorian popular fiction. Good people thrive, bad people get smoted and not too too much drama along the way (not like that hot-headed Mister Dickens and his plot devices).
Horatio Alger stories are often described as “rags to riches” stories. It would be more accurate to describe them as “rags to middleclassness” stories. Here’s the plot to every one of them: be honest, cheerful, helpful, thrifty, don’t drink, work hard, look after your mom and you will prosper in America.
It’s satisfying because it’s true.
Add “don’t have any babies you can’t afford” — new for 2008! — and it still works today.
That’s the only part of Pastor Jeremiah Wright‘s sermonizing that really shocked me. All that frankly retarded stuff about the CIA engineering the AIDS virus to bring down the Twin Towers in Pearl Harbor…eh. Heard it before. But I had no idea anybody other than Goth teenagers and hardcore Marxists were arguing against middleclassness.
PEOPLE! One in a million of us, through some combination of good luck and natural gifts, will become rich. The rest of us get to choose between poverty and middleclassness. I’ve sampled both; I recommend the latter.
Apparently, another document at the Trinity United Church of Christ website clarifies: it’s okay to pursue middle-incomeness. Middle-classness is
Seducing them into a socioeconomic class system which while training them to earn more dollars, hypnotizes them into believing they are better than others and teaches them to think in terms of “we” and “they” instead of “us”.
I’m not sure what this means. Even if you prosper, don’t you dare be happy? If you work hard and succeed, don’t start thinking you’re better than people who don’t? No matter how far you go and how well you do, you have more in common with ghetto blacks than white people in your tax bracket?
Hey, you stay bitter, now! Is that it? How far is that going to get you?
Happily — judging from my neighborhood, which is mostly composed of upwardly mobile immigrants in many shades of mocha latte — most people come to America to chase middle-classness with everything they’ve got. They take real good care of their lawns and are unfailingly polite to the nice white lady on the corner.
Yeah, that would be me.
Did you know Horatio Alger, Jr lost his first post as a Unitarian minister for diddling teenage boys? He wriggled out of it and was never accused again…whatever that actually means. That explains why there are no women (except mothers) in his little stories. Puts a different light on the Ragged Dick Series, don’t it?
You can read Alger for free, thanks to Project Gutenberg, and it’s lots more fun than doing your job. Take it from a weasel.
March 20, 2008 — 2:16 pm
Comments: 47
If you keep picking at that thing, it’s going to leave a scar
So I started off this morning with a post about nondestructive testing — you know, where you slather a special dye on cast metal and shine a blacklight on it and any flaws or cracks fluoresce. I had this whole political metaphor going about how McCain was the dye and the Republican coalition was the machine and…oh, trust me, it was working. Then IE hiccuped and I lost the whole thing.
When I went to retrace my steps, I got totally distracted. First I ran across this article about the nondestructive testing that was done on the Liberty Bell after this nutcase walked up behind it and began whaling on it with a sledgehammer (remember that? I didn’t). That brought me to this cool site about the Liberty Bell, which is where I ran into these people. The ATAC people, from the graphic.
Oh, it’s okay. The “Avenging” doesn’t appear to involve smiting of any kind. The group wants to ensure any monuments commemorating the President’s House in Philadelphia are constructed employing sufficient persons of African heritage and that it is officially noted that Washington kept slaves there. The usual shakedown, in other words.
Which is why “avenging” is such a jarring choice of words, with its hint of violence — or punishment, anyway. And their position paper:
ATAC requires the commemorative project because justice demands it. Justice demands it because our ancestors as forced laborers transformed America into the economic world power that it remains today, because our ancestors died for America in all of its wars, and because our ancestors had their freedom, culture, family, language, land, religion, name, and often their sanity, limbs, and even lives ruthlessly stripped from them for three centuries by America (and other European-initiated slave trading countries) in a manner unlike anything ever experienced in the history of humankind. ATAC also requires the commemorative project because it an essential step toward telling the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth about American history.
Jesus! Can we turn up the AC a couple of notches? Slavery is a shameful blot on America’s founding — and we took to it embarassingly close to modern times — but it was hardly “unlike anything ever experienced in the history of humankind.” As historical atrocities go, US slavery was middlin’ atrocious.
Has this ahistorical sense of unique grievance been simmering out there all along? Am I just becoming aware of it on account of Obama’s racial two-step? Being a white girl from Tennessee, I reeeeally don’t like to talk about race, but maybe white cringe is partly how we got here.
This is not headed anyplace good.
March 17, 2008 — 2:02 pm
Comments: 83
Give us your nerds, your geeks, your poindexters
The head of our Research division gave a talk the other day. He’s having a hard time getting our labs fully staffed because of a shortage of H-1B visas. That’s the one they call the “highly qualified” visa, though that isn’t exactly accurate; it’s technically a “specialty occupations” visa. Congress has recently throttled back on them, from a cap of 190K down to 65K.
To which I can only say — you have GOT to be fucking KIDDING me! They’re trying to jam twenty million sullen agripeasants down our throats but can’t be arsed to poach a hundred thousand of the world’s smartest people?
Our laboratories are like the U-freaking-N up in there; I assume it’s that way in research labs across the country. Lots of Indians and Chinese, but we’ve nicked a fair number of Europeans and other exotics, too. I’ve worked with dozens of them over the years. I don’t care where they come from, these people make fantastic Americans! They’re smart, enthused and grateful.
I know, I know…IT types scream bloody murder about H-1B visas. Screw ’em. Apologies if any of you are corporate IT types, but in my two-decades-and-a-bit driving a desk, I never met one that wasn’t grossly overpaid and underperforming. And arrogant about it. Bill Gates is not proof God wants half-assed incompetent computer geeks to rule the world, okay?
Brain drain on the rest of the world? Fucking A! That’s the beauty of it! Continued American hegemony by absorption. We build a country smart people want to live in and then invite them to come live in it.
So what say we propose no cap on H-1B visas. None. Send them all — we’ll take them! And make it a path to citizenship (the current visa is six years and you’re out). I think it’s a winning antidote to the racism charge that got hung ’round our necks after that stupid immigration bill fiasco. Shoot, send in the Mexican PhDs, too!
Slogans? How about, “we judge no man by the color of his skin, but of the quality of his resume”? Hm.
We’re elitists, not bigots. Hm.
Not racists — snobs!
September 27, 2007 — 9:44 am
Comments: 20