links for 2010-11-04

t goes back to verisimilitude, I think. Both of these scenes are hinting at some sort of truth. Misty Knight is using racial history to get her way. [Luke] Cage is using a reclaimed racial slur to show how cool he is under fire. Both of these scenes depict theoretically black things. A kind of ownership of a very specific facet of American culture, or a freedom to express yourself about race in a certain way.

Via OutSports and many others I learn of Kye Allums, a basketball player who also happens to be a transgender man. While I’m delighted that Mr Allums has been able to begin his transition, the fact that he remains on the women’s team at George Washington University in Washington, DC, is – or should be – a cause for concern. The story as reported provides an almost complete microcosm of one of the primary issues facing TS/TG people: the erasure of our identities by a phallocentric cissupremacy. Under this system, the only thing that really matters to our oppressors is, as usual, what’s going on inside our underwear. It’s essentialism at its most fundamentalist – and it’s unacceptable. It’s unacceptable that cis society continues with these outrageous breaches of human rights simply because of its own discomfort at the idea that some people are trans.

While riding the “anti-immigration wave” worked out for Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer, it didn’t do the same for campaigns across the board.

In Nevada, Harry Reid beat out Sharron Angle (R). In Colorado, Tom Tancredo lost to John Hickenlooper, and Jerry Brown took California over Meg Whitman.

Morrison, who is to unveil a memorial bench marking the abolition of slavery in Paris on Thursday along with members of the Toni Morrision Society, told the gathering she had "always felt welcomed in France.

"And it is important to me to receive this medal, la Legion d'honneur, because now I know in addition to being welcome, I am prized."

Members of Winnipeg's aboriginal community are speaking out against a pornographic website featuring only native women. They believe the women featured on it are vulnerable and were targeted.

Lisa Michell of the Women's Memorial March says the site furthers stereotypes of aboriginal women. The site advertises "casino girls," "reservation hotties" and "welfare chicks."

CTV News is not naming the website.

The website's creator, Florida resident Shim Mekbeb, says it's a niche website and the girls are willing.

The council used the anniversary, which coincided with the first decade of the 21st Century, to draw attention to the escalation of afrophobia, attributed to the global recession.    A statement issued to the Ghana News Agency in Accra, by Dr Koku Adomdza, President of the council, said: "Afrophobia has escalated based on discrimination against name, ascent, physical appearance, ethnicity and African ancestry in all spheres of life in the Global North." 

Once again, we are mutants. – LDP

 "Among the slew of data generated by surveying bloggers from 24 nations, come a bunch of headline figures about bloggers as a species: Two thirds of bloggers are male, and 65% are age 18-44 years old. 81% have been blogging for more than two years, and professionals blog an average of over 10 hours a week. Interestingly, the blogger demographic is "more affluent and educated than the general population," with 79% having college degrees and 43% possessing graduate degrees, too."

“There is one overarching reason why the polls were wrong in Nevada,” Mr. Barreto wrote in an e-mail to FiveThirtyEight. “The Latino vote.”

His firm, which conducts interviews in both English and Spanish, had found that Latino voters — somewhat against the conventional wisdom — were relatively engaged by this election and for the most part were going to vote Democratic. Mr. Barreto also found that Latino voters who prefer to speak Spanish — about 40 percent of Latino voters in California meet this description, he told me — are particularly likely to vote Democratic. Pollsters who don’t conduct bilingual interviewing at all, or who make it cumbersome for the respondent to take the poll in Spanish, may be missing these voters."

""In the introduction to "Alien/Asian: Imagining the Racialized Future" — a special issue of the academic journal "MELUS" that explores the depiction of Asians in science fiction and fantasy — Stanford University Asian American Studies professor Stephen Sohn notes that visions of an Asian-dominated future stretch back to the roots of the modern speculative fiction genre, the era of pulp novels and penny dreadfuls.

He cites by way of example Jack London's 1906 short story "The Unparalleled Invasion," set in what was then the far-distant year of 1976; it chronicles a rising China, empowered by the incredible fertility of its people to become a ravening horde that threatens to overrun the "civilized" nations of the West. The "Chinese problem" is neatly solved by genocide, in which the allied Western Nations bombard China with volleys of infectious disease, whose catastrophic impact on the population is described by London in ornate detail."