links for 2011-08-30

"Jim Crow segregation survived long into the 20th century because it was kept alive by white Southerners with value systems and personalities we would applaud. It’s the fallacy of 'To Kill a Mockingbird,' a movie that never fails to move me but that advances a troubling falsehood: the notion that well-educated Christian whites were somehow victimized by white trash and forced to live within a social system that exploited and denigrated its black citizens, and that the privileged white upper class was somehow held hostage to these struggling individuals.
But that wasn’t the case. The White Citizens Councils, the thinking man’s Ku Klux Klan, were made up of white middle-class people, people whose company you would enjoy. 

"Following the events in Norway and PxC's growing protagonism in Spain, the blog Unite Against Fascism and Racism (Unitat contra el feixisme i el racisme [cat]) exposes the ideological similarities between Norway's murderer Anders Behring Breivik and Josep Anglada, which is based on the belief that European principles are threatened by Muslims and the effects of immigration.
"The conflation of immigration and Islam is evident, clearly, in point 5 of the PxC Programmatic Declaration [es].  According to this document, globalization is associated with 'massive waves of illegal immigration,' which in turn, endanger the social well being and identity formation of the welcoming States." 

"Such parents are certainly more disadvantaged than suburban parents, but that's not the point: To be demonstrably superior, selective charter school students should outperform comparable students in regular schools. Perhaps they do, but that has yet to be shown. And there is now considerable evidence that both KIPP and the Success Academies have high attrition rates. Students who don't succeed are encouraged or required to return to regular schools. For selective charter schools, this may not be bad policy, but it vitiates comparisons with regular neighborhood schools that must take all comers, including students who rebel against learning, those with expensive and difficult-to-treat disabilities, and those who flunk out of charters."

Just. No. Words.–AJP

"A photograph uploaded on Facebook of a white South African man posing like a hunter near an apparently lifeless body of a black child has created a furore as South African police try track him down.

"The man has a Facebook user profile with the name "Eugene Terrorblanche," an apparent play on the name of Eugene Terreblanche, an extremist Afrikaner leader murdered last year, and has 590 'friends' as of Saturday. Authorities are yet to confirm the authenticity of the undated picture and have not ruled out the possibility of photograph manipulation."

This story has the full fauxpology. As with fauxpologies, color me unimpressed.–AJP 

"The photo, briefly run on the Qantas Twitter site, was the result of a competition asking Australian fans to tell how they would show their support for the team and depicted two fans impersonating Fiji-born Australian team player Radike Samo at a Saturday night international game.
"'We apologize that the photo of two Radike fans offended some of our followers,' Qantas said in a statement.
"'We've spoken with Radike and whilst he is not offended we decided to remove the image.'"