links for 2010-09-24

"There can be no denial that there are some people who will look at Gabourey and see mammy smiling back at them both consciously and unconsciously, yet that is not a function of her, but a function of Whiteness. When we use fat hatred to claim that her success is obscuring the talents of other Black women, we are only playing into the divisive strategy that Whiteness has long used to control people of colour. Even the Black women that some believe are deserving of greater accolades, are still perceived by Whiteness as fitting into either the jezebel or sapphire trope, and therefore; the way to divest ourselves of these horrible caricatures, is not to further demean another Black woman, but to defeat the idea that any of these labels are representative of Black womanhood. The entity that needs to disappear is mammy and not Gabourey."

“'There’s a level of hatred and animosity that is shocking,' said Mary Jo O’Neill, regional attorney of the E.E.O.C.’s Phoenix office. I’ve been doing this for 31 years, and I’ve never seen such antipathy toward Muslim workers.'

"Although Muslims make up less than 2 percent of the United States population, they accounted for about one-quarter of the 3,386 religious discrimination claims filed with the E.E.O.C. last year. Complaints filed by Jews rose slightly in fiscal 2009, while complaints filed by Catholics, Protestants, Sikhs and Seventh-day Adventists declined. Claims of race, sex and age discrimination also fell."

"Some conservative members of the Texas Board of Education assert that the history books used in this state have a pro-Islamic bias, and they are upset about it.

"Never shy about wading into the culture wars, they are planning to vote Friday for a resolution that would send a blunt message to textbook publishers: Do not present a pro-Islamic, anti-Christian version of history if you want to sell books in one of the nation’s largest markets."

"Instead I recommend a reimagining of the construct “science”: we need to own up to the cultural values that saturate all science. Indeed, the strength and power of native science is the acknowledgement of the welding of values to knowledge systems, where science is just another knowledge system. Rather than taking the reductionist approach noted at the start of our conversation, and rather than pretending that science is naked, we should welcome a vision of science as part of an interconnected system of dependent elements that emerge side by side–that are complementary and inseparable."

"In this long and rambling article on the need to protect Western civilization, which appeared in Occidental Quarterly — a magazine the Southern Poverty Law Center has called 'racist' — Russell opposed interracial marriage: 'parents need to be reminded that they have a natural obligation, as essential as providing food and shelter, to instill in their children an acceptance of appropriate ethnic boundaries for socialization and for marriage.' And he warned of popular movies that encourage black-white coupling by exploiting 'the critical period of sexual imprinting in their target audiences of white pre-adolescent girls and adolescent young women.' This was another variation of an old theme: they're coming for our white women."