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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