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“Hamline University has suspended six players from its football team for donning blackface and body paint to dress up as African tribesmen for an off-campus Halloween party”
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A must-read: “Ephraim Cruz became a whistleblower against the mistreatment of detainees…Reported abuse of detainees included overcrowding of cells, denial of food for 20-30 hours to children and pregnant women”
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“So for many adoptive parents, distance between themselves and the birth parents is a positive…The best of all is when the birth parents aren’t known–because then they can be recreated in any image the adoptive parent desires.”
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This is crazy. “reports began to surface in Canada of a sport known as “n*ppertipping.” It apparently involves shoving people of Asian descent into the water.”
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“The less fortunate, isolated and apprehensive, suffer a dismaying array of abuses — from exploitively low wages to sexual harassment. Some are forced to sleep in closets; others are threatened with deportation if they complain about overwork.”
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Awesome post: “if Spears, who has 5 gazillion times the amount of economic and social privilege than I will ever have, is seen by our society as being absolutely powerless and corner-stricken, then what am I?”
Carmen Van Kerckhove is co-founder and president of 
hoo_boy wrote:
I snuck onto Hamline’s Facebook group to catch the pulse of the discussion on this one. The student quoted as a friend of the team in the article has her profile turned off.
http://www.facebook.com/networks/?nk=16777894
Yes, standard chatter for those who’ve heard it all before. The news article failed to mention the “flyer” episode with images on campus as well.
A few points of interest always worth noting especially after diving among the idle rants of our young mid-sized midwestern Methodist population :
(1) “Free speech” as a defense turning on intent, versus “free speech” presented in the expression itself followed by…
(2) Inability to articulate purpose for the expression in question supported by…
(3) Anger at authority and/or society for condemning that expression (the “no one better teach me tolerance, dammit, I’ll learn it myself” appproach) while
(4) administration swiftly moves to condemn, contain, and control the situation in that order. a/k/a “What they did was wrong/we’re not sure who’s responsible/but everyone involved should’ve known better/maybe they didn’t/but how could they not have/let’s play it safe and comment publicly in advance of proceedings leading to suspension or expulsion to bias the outcome/then educate them on what’s right by forcing them to take a class”.
That’s how you get a group of willing, receptive, sincere college knuckleheads to truly acknowledge, accept, and understand the consequences of their culturally, racially, or ethnically insenstive/thoughtless acts such that they’ll *never* do it again– and to examine, explore, and reflect upon their attitudes towards people unlike them so they can form healthy diverse relationships throughout and beyond their school careers.
To be clear: whoever organizes these parties, posts these pictures, etc. can and should be held responsible by the schools in loco parentis. But that raises a larger question no one else amid the hollering: what have the parents been telling the kids before they hit campus?
Posted 06 Nov 2007 at 9:10 am ¶
summer wrote:
I am so sick this “blackface” thing. And especially the whack apologies that follow. This morning on msnbc (http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/21645714/from/RS.5) there was yet another account of this at Homeland Security’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement department. This time the guy was awarded first place for his costume “dressed in prison stripes, dreadlocks and dark makeup.”
Posted 06 Nov 2007 at 1:03 pm ¶
Thea wrote:
Aw, thanks for the shout-out!
Posted 08 Nov 2007 at 1:59 pm ¶