Burnt Ochre was always my favorite crayon name

File under "le sigh"

At least 10 states look like they'll be dealing with at least attempts to emulate Arizona's immigration law. Granted, it seems like lots of these ideas won't go far (Ohio, really?), but it's still...unfortunate, I guess.

I've never quite understood why states seem to go through fads with hot-button issues. One state moves on something and all of a sudden an equivalent is being proposed at the state house or offered as a ballot initiative all over the country--even though most of these issues don't affect all states in the same way or to the same degree.

I do understand the kick-in-the-ass effect of having one of your peers go where none has gone before or what have you, but it always feels stupid to me even when it's working in a direction I agree with. You'd think if it's that important, you'd want to take the time to do it right--or perhaps you'd already have done it--rather than waiting for one audacious (or in this case, totally effing crazy) state to lead a straggling charge.

For the record, my favorite of the initiatives discussed at the link is Missouri's:

The state legislature is considering a law that would make it unlawful for any person to conceal or shelter "illegal aliens," and would also make it a crime for illegal immigrants to transport themselves. Similar local laws have in the past been declared unconstitutional.

It just brings me back to when I was learning about the Underground Railroad in second grade, you know?

Storytelling

Coates:

I don't racialize those moments to take away anything, but to say this--I am fucking sick of hearing about black people in the 60s. At least I am sick of hearing about in the way we discuss, like only Abraham Lincoln happened before Martin Luther King, like everyone marched on Washington, or grew an Afro. I am just tired.

I want to hear about white people, now. Not their mythologizing and blind glamor, and not their cynical, infantile backlashing against that blind glamor (No more whining about how much the suburbs suck, please.) I want to hear something humble about a world I can't even envision, because here is the thing: If you tell me about that world, if you tell me something I don't know, and tell me about it in all its lush beauty, and rank hypocrisy, I will see myself in you. You don't have to show me my pedigree. Just show me yours. Don't try to be "inclusive." Just try to be human. Just tell me a story.

Also links

Connectivity ftw:

Some people are crazy:

Though the Obama media have been ballyhooing her brilliance -- No. 1 in high school, No. 1 at Princeton, editor of Yale Law Review -- her academic career appears to have been a fraud from beginning to end, a testament to Ivy League corruption.

One of them is Pat Buchanan.

Really cool interactive word cloud of Iranian opposition on Twitter.

Sullivan on why Iran matters

Gotta go!

Uh oh, is your privilege shrinking?

Good lord, people are truly insane.

Tom Tancredo went on CNN and got pissy about Sonia Sotomayor's being a member of La Raza--you know, the major Hispanic rights and advocacy org--and called it a "Latino KKK".

Meanwhile, some douche factory at my school has decided that what the world really needs is a Men's Rights and Advocacy Group. Not kidding. Apparently the framework of our entire society wasn't enough for them. Think I'm exaggerating? It's called Men In Power.

I know it must be scary to have your 100% privilege encroached upon when you either are not confident of your ability to compete on a truly open field or are simply unaware of your privilege. It feels like oppression because it feels unfair, because it's never occurred to you that the way things have always been might not be fair. It worked well for you. But for the love of god, do these people hear themselves? It just makes me want to take a nap and wait for it all to be over.

Sotomayor

I must say, watching the reactions to the Sotomayor pick has been an almost beautifully predictable exercise in Kabuki politics. Observe:

SCOTUSblog:

Opponents’ first claim – likely stated obliquely and only on background – will be that Judge Sotomayor is not smart enough for the job. ... By contrast, John Roberts was described as brilliant and Sam Alito as exceptionally smart. The objective evidence is that Sotomayor is in fact extremely intelligent. Graduating at the top of the class at Princeton is a signal accomplishment. Her opinions are thorough, well-reasoned, and clearly written. Nothing suggests she isn’t the match of the other Justices.

Rod Dreher:

Given that we were certain to get a liberal justice out of Obama, I suppose one has to take comfort in knowing that Obama made a quota pick too, and did not choose a liberal justice who can match intellects with Roberts and Scalia.

Done and done.

What is incredible is that Dreher's sole basis for insulting Justice Sotomayor's intellect is the infamous Rosen hit piece that went up at The New Republic. I find it impossible to believe that Dreher missed the entirely warranted firestorm that followed the story, which was largely composed of anonymous gossip and amorphous "doubts" and concerns as well as flat-out falsehoods. That Dreher relied on a piece that even Powerline called gossipy suggests that he has given little if any thought to his opinion. He seems quite ready to buy into what Greenwald described as "the Jeffrey-Rosen/Ben-Wittes/Stuart-Taylor grievance on behalf of white males that, as Dahlia Lithwick put it, 'a diverse bench must inevitably be a second-rate bench.'"

Truly, deconstruct Dreher's statement for a minute. He said that Obama was bound to choose a liberal, and of his options he chose a "quota pick" who, for reasons passing understanding, therefore is necessarily intellectually subpar for the Supreme Court. I'm sure Dreher did not actually intend to say that any non-white non-male nominee would be likely to be below the level of Samuel Alito or John Roberts; what he intended to say, no doubt, was that this particular brown woman is seems to be below their level, and therefore must be seen as a quota pick.

But he's stuck in a circle here: he has no decent evidence to rely on when it comes to assessing her as indeed a less brilliant mind. The only evidence he bothered to cite is flimsy at best. So what I want to know is, how does he know she is a quota pick?

I won't attempt to answer the question. I don't know Dreher's mind. But I will say I do think he has what my roommate would call his judgment pants on.

So good

*headdesk*

Normally I love lolcats. However:



Yeah, that's racist as all get out. Lovely.

A more perfect human

The man is just so articulate.

Some links

One of Obama's first acts on his first day was to call President Mubarak of Egypt, Olmert of Israel, Abbas of the PA, and King Abdullah of Jordan. It's nice to see the President caring about the Middle East.

From DipNote (already, I know), an update on the international response to piracy off Somalia.

Advocates for the Geneva Conventions and the rule of law, as well as anybody who doesn't like crazy detention and torture policy, should be happy to see Neal Katyal Principal Deputy Solicitor General.

A linguistic analysis of racial dialect in Obama's inaugural. I can't decide if this piece is a total trainwreck of unnecessarily racialized horror, a well-meaning attempt that ends up trying for too many reaches, or legitimately interesting. I think there are some aspects of all three. The last paragraph definitely makes me unhappy, though:

So: The son of an African immigrant picks up a sonority of speaking from the descendants of slaves brought here from Africa centuries before--and then uses it to help seduce a nation full of descendants of slaveholders into making him their master. Linguistically as in so many ways, Obama embodies the extent to which we are all more "fellow citizens"--as he opened his oration--than we might think.

I mean, "master"? Really? That's not only a heavily laden term in this context, it's the kind of thing you'd read over at The Corner written by people who were expecting the inauguration to feature him lighting Abe Lincoln's Bible on fire, producing a turban from under his jacket, and screaming "FARRAKHAN 4EVAHZ YO!" before demonstrating the proper application of jihad by beheading Justice Stevens to the accompaniment of an illegally immigrated mariachi band and Bill Ayers on the banjo.

Plus, it's not like nobody noticed the topsy-turviness of a black man being elected President, you know? Stick to linguistics.

The conversation on race since the '80s

There has been an interesting conversation going on about how race relations in the U.S. have changed since the 1980s, which has gone (as I understand it) more or less like this: 1. We elected a black man/biracial man who reads as black President of the United States--crazy! 2. Black-white relations have improved distinctly since the 1980s, when political conversations were very much charged with racialized conversations about welfare, affirmative action, and busing. 3. Yes, but is this only because we're now more afraid of Arabs/Muslims than we are of African-Americans?

Hilzoy's post on this references these ideas as well as putting forward some ideas about a natural and necessary evolution of race relations. It's well worth reading and I encourage everybody to do so.

What frustrates me about this conversation is this. On the one hand, yes, race relations have come a long way, and that is not nothing by any means. On the other hand, we are still not really talking about race relations in terms of anything but black vs. white, and there are still unspoken problems in terms of Asian-Americans, Latin@ Americans, immigrants of many stripes, and any other ethnic group you can think of. It makes perfect sense that the issue of black vs. white Americans is the centerpiece of our race debate: it is also a central problem of our history, a "birth defect" as Condoleezza Rice put it in response to Obama's race speech. But we have yet to even really begin to deal with other racial issues, let alone with our general sense that race is a category to be dealt with in terms of either/or, boxes to check on a census. What about biracial or multiracial Americans? How do we understand them?

I think a lot of the often-clumsy discussion of Barack Obama's race over the course of the last Presidential campaign illuminates how clumsy we still are in understanding and discussing these issues: why does he have to be "more white than black," or solely black because he chose to marry a black woman, or some sort of post-racial chameleon and panacea? Why is it so hard to get our heads around the fact that he's simply a biracial man of African and white American ancestry? I took a class on late antique North Africa last quarter, and more than once students brought up questions of race relations. The professor had to emphasize over and over that the Romans/Greeks/Byzantines/Berbers/Arabs simply didn't think of things that way. They weren't living in a racialized discourse and society, and in ancient North Africa there wasn't a question of whites vs. blacks nearly so much as there were questions of class, of imperial allegiances (at various times) and military power, of religious identification, and of linguistic heritage. We can't seem to get away from this oppositional framework, even when the data do not fit into it and never suggested it.

On a more positive note: Josh Marshall's point that perhaps the receding of black vs. white questions has been in favor of Judeo-Christian vs. Muslim or "Western" vs. Arab issues is, I think, well taken. However, it is not as simple as just swapping one opposition for another; in the "us" and "them" of these more current polarities, in this particular "self" and "other," African-Americans are more in, are more "us" and "self" than they have been in a long time, if ever (I am not qualified to make an absolute statement on that). As disheartening as it is that some Americans regard Arabs and Muslims as "other", it is still significant that, at least for some white, xenophobic Americans, American blacks stand with them against the national threat. This is not meant to justify anti-Muslim attitudes, but to say that this is not a zero-sum game. Improvement in one area coupled with antagonism in another does not cancel out. It is simply that: improvement in one area, disimprovement in another. That improvement should not be discounted. It can be built upon.

Choice

I've been meaning to post this from Ta-Nehisi for a while. I think it speaks for itself.

...The case for/against gay marriage is hung-up on this idea of choice--i.e. we should frown on gay marriage because it's a deviant lifestyle. Or we shouldn't frown on it because it isn't a lifestyle, it's a biological fact. This is where the comparisons with race come in. But I always hated this argument. Whenever people say, "You should not discriminate against people because they didn't chose to be black," I hear the mild tones of wild liberal condescension.

Implicit in that logic is a kind of judgment, the notion that if I could choose, I obviously would choose to be white. But what if I just like being black? What if I could choose and would still choose black? Ditto for homosexuality. So what if you do choose to be gay? I understand that a lot of the science says you don't, but why do we accept this implicit idea that heterosexuality is, necessarily, what everyone would chose?

I'm not trying to minimize the bias and trauma that must come from being out, but a basic extension of humanity, a belief that those who aren't like me actually are like me, says that to be gay has to be more than coping with living beneath the boot of the ignorant. It's always about more than getting your ass kicked, no? What if you actually love the "more than?" What if it is who you are and what you choose?

Not going to the back of the bus

I have no words

So. Um.

John LaBruzzo, a State Representative of Louisiana, apparently thinks the way to get people off welfare is to pay poor women $1,000 to get sterilized, thus eliminating the chances that their offspring will also be on welfare! See, poor women of color have more kids than white people do, and the poor WOC are on welfare and the white people are taxpayers, so...


...

...I...I just...what fucking year is it?! This is racist eugenics in place of meaningful policy. (He also wants to create tax incentives for white educated people to breed more.) FOR THE LOVE OF--OF--fuck it, I'm not feeling any love right now.


And if anybody comes back at me with some bullshit about how it's totally the free choice of any woman who does this, I will reach through the screen and feed you your own reproductive organs.

Mommies and Mamis

I am quoting this post by Maegan “La Mala” Ortiz from
Racialicious in its entirety because I think it's so spot on in terms of why Sarah Palin's being hailed as a progressive moment bugs me. [Note: I have placed all Spanish words in italics. I would rather not have done so as it violates the integrity of Ortiz's bilingualism and alienates the Spanish words, but I have seen people mistake them for misspellings or bad grammar before and I wanted to avoid that.]

Last night, Alaska Governor Sarah Palin accepted the nomination to the vice-presidency at the Republican National Convention.

Originally the buzz about Palin, focused on her having a vagina. Her presence was analyzed as a calculated McCain strategy to lure disgruntled, hard core Hillary Clinton supporters.

Then the shift went internal, to her uterus, her identity as a mother to five, the youngest with some form of developmental delay, and a 17 year old daughter, unmarried and pregnant.

So what does this Palin parranda of information and analysis mean to mamis of color, Latina mamis like me? Not surprisingly, nada.

Sarah Palin wants to put herself out there as “every woman”. She wants to be seen as “just your average hockey mom”, and other mommies see themselves and their reality reflected through Palin, except, mamis of color, that is.

The talk returns to mommy wars, not mami wars, because the entire conversation excludes Latinas and other moms of color. We are not even soldiers. Even for so called progressive white feminist, the war is fought by them and maybe, if mamis like me are lucky, we’ll reap some benefit. When I was a pregnant teenager, in a Latin American country where abortion was and still is illegal (Chile), there was no opting out of pregnancy or working. Which is why the debate of how Palin could go back to work after having a baby with special needs or how a pregnant unmarried teenage daughter is being used, feels like a sideshow with little significance in reality. The politics of choice is being raised, with the emergence of a woman who is anti-choice, even in cases of rape or incest and with no talk of how for women of color, choice goes beyond an abortion and means the very right to have children (forget 5!) Imaginate if Michelle Obama had five children? Imagínate if one of the Obama children were older and pregnant? Imagine the hate and stereotypes that would be unleashed? Oh wait, I don’t have to imagine, as a single mami of color, I live it. Palin’s large brood isn’t seen as a strain on the system. They are a beautiful portrait of an “American” family making every other family, families like mine, ugly.

And let’s talk about the perceived double standard, that if a man had five children no one would be making a big deal of it, that men are held to a different standard, as stated in the video above. Claro if you take race out of the picture, it’s easy to follow along, pero if Obama was the father to five instead of two children, you don’t think the media and politicos would be making all sorts of references to black men and their hyper-sexuality? Or black men and responsibility? I hear no one telling Palin’s husband to put on a damn condom.

Just as many of women of color couldn’t get behind Clinton and her campaign because of racist attacks on Barack Obama, attacks that asked women of color to choose a candidate based not on a complex and painful history and reality, but rather because of perceived shared genitalia. Palin positions herself as continuing Clinton’s struggle, as continuing the struggle set forth by Geraldine Ferraro, the first woman to run as a vice-presidential candidate. Let’s not forget that Ferraro called Obama “lucky” for being black. Is Palin then lucky for having five children, like my abuela did before being forcibly sterilized? You wanna talk about Palin’s uterus or the uterus of her daughter? I want to talk about my abuela’s uterus, how it’s power was deemed dangerous because of it’s power to bear brown Spanish speaking babies, my uterus and it’s abortions, miscarriages, and pregnancies, violations upon it, the uterus of an immigrant woman being viewed as a weapon in a culture war and the need to put those immigrant women in chains as they push babies from them and the need the U.S. government has to separate mamis and babies and deport and dispose.

My uterus and my head is tired.

this is a fascinating unpacking of the Olympics and the concept of "representing" a nation, on many levels.

Also, sometimes I really despair. How such idiotic, white-and-gender-privileged drivel can get PUBLISHED in the FUCKING LA TIMES is beyond me.

The Gates foundation, see, has a wide-ranging program of college scholarships for disadvantaged ethnic groups--African-Americans, Latinos, Asians, American Indians/Alaska Natives, and Pacific Islander Americans. Apparently, one Ernest W. Lefever just couldn't handle the injustice:

"America's most celebrated college dropout had a great opportunity to boost higher education, help needy students and strike a blow against racism, but he blew it. If Bill Gates had been able to chat with Teddy Roosevelt before launching his breathtaking $1-billion program of college scholarships, America would be a better place. Unless significantly amended, Gates' 'minority' scholarships will further inflame racial tensions, delay the achievement of a colorblind society and subvert the cherished virtue of reward by merit. The Gates Millennium Scholarships for thousands of high school seniors over the next 20 years are intended to produce more scientists, engineers, doctors and educators from among American minorities, who, he claims, are woefully underrepresented in college. His commitment to arbitrarily preferred groups is bound to increase racial resentment. Gates' vague concept of 'diversity' confuses the laudable diversity of cultural talents that strengthens the nation with the self-conscious racial diversity that divides it by breeding arrogance and envy."


Now, look, race-based affirmative action has its problems and its controversies in many different spheres and communities. I am not here to give testimony to its glories, because it is certainly flawed. But honestly, this guy is grade-B nuts (grade-A is reserved for House Representatives who say we don't need environmentalists to save the world because Jesus already did it). Honestly, column summary:

"I am mediocre and not particularly good at anything. In a world where white guys are on top, I do just fine. Start letting in those uppity...everybody else, and I'll be fucked. STOP FANNING RACIAL RESENTMENT, BILL GATES, BECAUSE I KNOW I'M GETTING PISSY."

(By the way, this is not current events--the op ed was written in 1999. I came across it doing research on Gates Foundation and just couldn't even get over it. Oops, I forgot--"get over it" is what everybody but the poor poor white male victims of the occasional act of protest are supposed to do in order to solve all problems!)

"Kids in Congo were being sent down mines to die so that kids in Europe and America could kill imaginary aliens in their living rooms," said Ex-British Parliament Member Oona King. Upsetting but not surprising, sadly. The need for a particular ore in making, among other things, PlayStations, has been fueling violence and conflict in Congo. (Note that the article emphasizes Sony's video game products--a frivolity--but glosses over the use of the same material in cellphones and other items that we aren't giving up, not from our cold dead fingers. Convenient, no?) You'd think in the Information Age these things would come up sooner. Oh, right, we don't care.


In other news, John McCain, supposedly the Second Coming of foreign policy, is seriously addled. Why, exactly, would we even bother talking about throwing Russia out of the G8? It's dumb, unproductive, and--oh, yeah--impossible.(The G8, for your edification, is the Group of Eight, a forum for the leaders of eight powerful nations in the world. They hold a yearly summit--the most recent was in Japan, where Bush made us all so very proud by signing off saying, "Goodbye from the world's biggest polluter!" Aww, what an authentic, beer-drinking cutie!)





IllDoctrine is pretty much always the shit. Now, what he's saying here I know well, and many of you do too, but it's worth spelling out always. Especially keep it in mind next time a public figure/politician is called on any form of discrimination--racism, sexism, sizeism, ableism, heterosexism, homophobia, classism, any and all of them, this kind of thing applies.

Because that's the thing about oppressions--while they're all different in whom they affect, how they affect them, and how they feel, many of the patterns are the same. That's why intersectionality is so everpresent, and why the Oppression Olympics a) won't go away and b) are useless.

Those last two paragraphs are total duh obviousness for those who are into the study of any of the above isms and I'm almost embarrassed to write them, but I guess that's why this is a livejournal and not a real blog--I get to be as dumb as I want! Eat it! Sucka FOOL![*]

[Obviously, that was written when I was still writing on Livejournal.]

Watch it. Seriously. Then go to hub.witness.org.



I fucking love that it's my job to find these things.

ETA: Marc Jacobs, what the fuck?! I mean, what in the fucking name of fucking fuck is that supposed to mean?