Headlines of the Week (Or Whatever)

Death Penalty and Race: Race of Homicide Victims in Cases Resulting in an Execution since 1976

Economic harassment and the Ferguson crisis

Why I Don’t Call the Police: Michael Brown. Eric Garner. Debra Harrell. And that’s just the latest.

White Privilege: An Insidious Virus that’s Eating America from Within

What I've Learned from Two Years Collecting Data on Police Killings

What Militarization Has Done to Our Police Departments: A few facts you might have missed about the flow of military equipment and tactics to local law enforcement.

Whitewashing and the Problem With the Ice Bucket Challenge

Headlines of the Week (Or Whatever)

Things I'm reading and contemplating this week. Also, Christian Bale IS Patrick Bateman. That is all.

THE TROUBLED BIRTH OF AMERICAN PSYCHO

America Is Not For Black People

Line By Line: "The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald"

Robin Williams and the Myth of “Battling” Depression

Despicable Memes: How “miracle” jokes and inspiration porn demean disabled people.

Headlines of the Week (Or Whatever)

I think about racism alot because it happens alot.

Preview: No Selves to Defend – Marissa Alexander & A Legacy of Criminalizing Women of Color for Self-Defense

The Science of Your Racist Brain: Neuroscientist David Amodio on subconscious racial prejudice and why we're still responsible for our actions.

How LBJ Saved the Civil Rights Act: Fifty years later, new accounts of its fraught passage reveal the era's real hero—and it isn’t the Supreme Court.

Headlines of the Week (Or Whatever)

Online Shoppers Are Less Likely To Buy Items Modeled By Someone with Tattoos or Dark Skin

Utilities Feeling Rooftop Solar Heat Start Fighting Back

Jesse Willms, the Dark Lord of the Internet: How one of the most notorious alleged hustlers in the history of e-commerce made a fortune on the Web

Ancient stone bridge revealed after Chinese lake dries up

Tweet Police: Kansas’ ability to fire professors for posting on social media is bad news for academic freedom—and may not even be legal.

Headlines of the Week (Or Whatever)

When Men on the Left Refuse to See Their Sexism

White Hot Rage

On Thin Privilege

How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America: A Remembrance

The Thing Is, I’m Undocumented

The Aesthetics of Internalized Racism, As Seen In "The Bluest Eye"

            One of the most striking elements of The Bluest Eye is the sheer number of perspectives; all rounded and fleshed without judgment on the part of the author. As a reader, I am used to a more directed point of view, wherein every character whose point of view we see is either sympathetic or unsympathetic, as guided by the author. Even nuanced characters are ultimately good or bad, and the worse they are, the less we are given to understand them. However, in the case of The Bluest Eye, while the focus is largely on the ‘good’ characters, Claudia MacTeer and Pecola Breedlove, we are also led to understand the ‘worst’ characters, in Cholly Breedlove, Soaphead Church, and the townspeople altogether.

Headlines of the Week (Or Whatever)

News is bad for you – and giving up reading it will make you happier

Psychedelic Portuguese Man-of-War Photos Prove God Is a Stoner.
(They prove no such thing, but the images are gorgeous.)

The Saudi Marathon Man

Black Gold: Thar’s Oil In Them Thar Walls (On the Discovery of a Hidden Mural)

States Can Legalize Marijuana (Though Federal Laws Stand), Says Congressional Research Service

Headlines of the Week (Or Whatever)

This week, I'm thinking about privilege. Okay well really, I'm always thinking about privilege but this week I'm linking about privilege. Haha.
 
On Privilege

The Distress of the Privileged

THE ETHICS OF LIVING JIM CROW: An Autobiographical Sketch

Whites Believe They Are Victims of Racism More Often Than Blacks: In Zero Sum Game, "Reverse Racism" Seen as Bigger Problem than Anti-Black Racism

Straight White Male: The Lowest Difficulty Setting There Is

Facts are Cool: In Support of Straight White Male

What We Aren’t Talking About When We Talk About ‘White Privilege’

On Privilege

From my Honors Colloquium II term paper:

“What the advocates of our dangerous and deepening social amnesia don’t understand is how deeply the past holds the future in its grip—even, and perhaps especially, when it remains unacknowledged.” ~Timothy B. Tyson, Blood Done Sign My Name

In our society, we are taught that racism, sexism, and classism, inasmuch as they still exist in our modern society, are things that put others at a disadvantage. The interesting corollary to this is for every person put at a disadvantage, someone has an advantage. In an essay on the topic, entitled “The Breeze at My Back”, Dr. Michael Kimmel, esteemed sociologist and author, compared privilege to running in the wind, stating:

“To walk or run with that same wind at your back is to float, to sail effortlessly, expending virtually no energy. You do not feel the wind; it feels you. You do not feel how it pushes you along; you feel only the effortlessness of your movements. You feel like you could go on forever. It is only when you turn around and face that wind that you realize its strength. Being white, or male, or heterosexual in this culture is like running with the wind at your back. It feels like just plain running, and we rarely if ever get a chance to see how we are sustained, supported, and even propelled by that wind.”