links for 2010-02-17

"Names of slaves owned by Leak — Caruthers, Moses, Isaac, Sam, Toney, Mollie, Edmund and Worsham — all appear in some form in “Go Down, Moses.” Other recorded names, like Candis (Candace in the book) and Ben, show up in “The Sound and The Fury” (1929) while Old Rose, Henry, Ellen and Milly are characters in “Absalom, Absalom!” (1936). Charles Bonner, a well-known Civil War physician mentioned in the diary, would also seem to be the namesake of Charles Bon in “Absalom.”

Scholars found Faulkner’s decision to give his white characters the names of slaves particularly arresting. Professor Wolff-King said she believes he was “trying to recreate the slaves lives and give them a voice.”

"To the extent that communities of color have developed movements around health care equity—advocating for more clinics in underserved areas, for example, or demanding better language access for immigrants—LGBT people of color face the dual political hurdles of alienation from their own racial and ethnic communities, and from a mainstream LGBT rights movement that orients its public image toward middle-class whites. When illness strikes, or a loved one is hospitalized, or you're struggling with the stigma of a sexually transmitted disease, those tensions create some pretty wide gaps to fall through."

"It looks like Marvel Comics' Captain America is throwing his mighty shield at the Tea Party Movement. Warner Todd Huston wrote on his Publius forum blog that the super-powered soldier who fought the Nazis in WWII observes with disdain Americans who are seemingly compared to Tea Party Movement protesters of today."

"The largest Silicon Valley companies lost more than one in ten black and Hispanic employees from 2000 to 2005, leaving their workforces just 7 percent black and Hispanic, even as their overall employment grew 16 percent, accoring to federal employment data obtained by the San Jose Mercury News. And that's among the 10 companies who allowed the newspaper's Freedom of Information Act Request to clear the Labor Department. One would presume the situation is even worse at stonewalling Apple, Google, Oracle, Yahoo and Applied Materials, though the firms insist they are merely protecting trade secrets."

"And in a usual move to usurp feminist talking points, the Radiance Foundation one of the billboard sponsors claims that the impetus for the campaign is to uncover the "segregationist" agenda from liberals to essentially wipe out the black community. Right, that is exactly what the pro-choice community has been putting all their energy into, getting reproductive health and information into the hands of women that can't get access to it is a clear shroud for segregation *eye roll*. "