links for 2010-09-18

"'How are they going to out fire-breathe each other? I mean where this rhetoric has gone to at this point? It's only 2010. And we're having Newt Gingrich, as we were talking about before, calling [the president] an anti-colonial Luo tribesman. Luo tribesman,' Maher said.

"'That's the new Kenyan, Larry. And Kenyan, of course, was code for [the N-word]. But that's where they are. They can't say it out loud. But that's where this whole campaign is going to be.'"

"Wise and others call D'Souza's view 'Birtherism with big words.' That's true, but why stop there? It's racist stereotyping of indigenous people as evildoers with big words. It's the same thing the first Europeans said about Indians."

"What is interesting is, how a few people have managed to use this 'duskiness' attributed to their skin to their advantage, or that is what the media would have us believe. This is why we think Nandita Das is such a 'good actor' because a lot of producers and directors initially rejected her because of her skin colour so she could dedicate herself to 'indie' and 'experimental films', not because she initially might have had no say over what projects she took on. Because Bipasha Bau is 'dusky', she has become the new-age sex-bomb of Indian cinema. Not because she has spent years perfecting and crafting that persona or anything."

*TRIGGER WARNING*

"While it’s widely known that Native women experience violent crime at rates much higher than the rest of the population (with 86 percent of rapes committed by non-Native men), relatively little attention is paid to why that is.

"The answer is both simple and convoluted: Violence against women is rampant on reservations because it can be perpetrated with impunity.

"As a 2008 report by Amnesty International notes, violence against Native women is the result of the under-funding and under-training of tribal law enforcement agencies, as well as a tangle of jurisdictional issues which so often stall criminal investigations and prosecutions, leaving many victims without justice."

"School authorities also suspended Hispanic and American Indian middle school students at higher rates than white students, though not at such disproportionate rates as for black children, the study found. Asian students were less likely to be suspended than whites."