What is wrong with this picture?

1.)   He is the President. She is being disrespectful. As hell.  Period. Point Blank. End of Discussion.

2.)   White privilege conditions white people not to see white rage. However, it makes them hyper-aware of Black threat.   Newt Gingrich is white rage personified. And for it, he gets loads of applause.  So is Jan Brewer, but usually we think of white rage in masculine terms. Gender stereotypes condition us not to see white women as being capable of this kind of dangerous emotional output. We reserve our notions of female anger for Black women. Such hidden race-gender logics allow Brewer to assert that she “felt threatened,” even though she was trying to handle the situation “with grace.”

Now look back at the picture: who is threatening whom? Couple white rage with white women’s access to the protections that have been afforded to their gender, and you have something that looks ironically like white female privilege. Yes (yes, yes), the discourse of protection is based upon problematic and sexist stereotypes of white women as dainty and unable to care for themselves, and yes, these stereotypes have caused white women to be oppressed by white men. But remember, gender does not exist in a racial vacuum. It is performed in highly racialized contexts, and history proves that what constitutes oppression for white women in relation to white men, dually constitutes privilege for white women in relation to Black men. (I’m not spoiling for a fight today, so anybody who feels uncomfortable with such assertions should probably go read some Patricia Hill Collins, Black Sexual Politics and then try again.)

What I know is this: 100 years ago (less than, actually) a Black man even standing that close to a white woman would’ve gotten him lynched.  (Seriously, I just discovered that even accommodationist Booker T. Washington was beaten in New York in 1911 for talking to a white woman.) And I know that if a Black woman had wagged her finger at Bush II or even Bill Clinton, we would have seen her faced down, handcuffed, with Secret Service swarming. When your race and gender grant you opportunities to be treated with dignities that others don’t have or conversely, to heap indignities on those people, that is what we call privilege. Deal with it.

3.)   Unchecked white rage has always been dangerous for Brown and Black folk in America. Jan Brewer’s Arizona is not safe for Brown people and by implication, not safe for Black people (Presidents included). Not only has she terrorized and racially profiled immigrant communities, but she has gutted one of the model Ethnic Studies programs for high school students in this country.  If there were ever a time for Black and Brown solidarity, it is now. And hell, lest we forget, Arizona is not even safe for white women. It is the vitriolic racial climate that Brewer’s anti-immigrant, anti-Latino policies have helped to foment that led to the violence against Gabby Giffords.

(It’s amazing what different stories these two pictures tell.)

4.)   This picture demonstrates something important. The logic of racial supremacy dictates that white people are most comfortable when people of color do the affective labor involved in maintaining white supremacy. (No disrespect to Gabby Giffords: of course, I don’t think this hug shared between colleagues supports white supremacy. But this kind of bodily connection is important for humanizing Black public figures, and it is the logic of that which I’m getting at.)

Historically, it was not enough to be placed in positions of servitude; affecting an attitude of subservience was also critically important.  Failure to be deferential could get you killed, even if you were doing the tasks at hand. The term “uppity Negro” hasn’t always been a slogan to rock proudly on a t-shirt.  Something happens when Black and Brown folks decide that we do not exist in the world to make white people comfortable. And white folks feel it.

This is why a movie like The Help so powerfully resonates with White America, and with countless facets of Black America as well.  The affective labor of white supremacy prefers Black people in certain postures, like for instance dishing out hugs and words of affirmation to  little white girls who will become white women that they, indeed, “is smart, is kind, is important.”

As if the world would ever teach anything different. The effect of such labor is powerful: white America feels more comfortable with the disturbing realities of racism, and Black people can convince ourselves that our humanity, and indeed, our struggle is being acknowledged.  Even her well-deserved Oscar nomination has not convinced Viola Davis of such ridiculousness. (And um, would someone help Charlize Theron get a clue?)

5.)   Finally, I just have to say it: If Jan Brewer and any other bad-ass wants to leave here with the fingers and toes they came here with, I would suggest they keep their hands to themselves. Because frankly, I wish a*&%$# would wag a finger in my face… Kudos to the President for keeping his cool.

By Arturo R. García

Just when you thought Satoshi Kanazawa had wrapped up Tone-Deaf Article Of The Year honors for 2011, Forbes’ Gene Marks sauntered his way into consideration Monday with “If I Were A Poor Black Kid,” which spun a speech by President Obama on economic inequality into a privilege-fest with bon mots like these, emphasis mine:

If I was a poor black kid I would first and most importantly work to make sure I got the best grades possible. I would make it my #1 priority to be able to read sufficiently. I wouldn’t care if I was a student at the worst public middle school in the worst inner city. Even the worst have their best. And the very best students, even at the worst schools, have more opportunities. Getting good grades is the key to having more options. With good grades you can choose different, better paths. If you do poorly in school, particularly in a lousy school, you’re severely limiting the limited opportunities you have.

Somehow Forbes chose not to tag the bit about good grades as BREAKING NEWS. But maybe Marks’ editors didn’t want to overshadow the moment when he breaks it down even further than the President. That whole Occupy business? Totally barking up the wrong tree:

President Obama was right in his speech last week. The division between rich and poor is a national problem. But the biggest challenge we face isn’t inequality. It’s ignorance. So many kids from West Philadelphia don’t even know these opportunities exist for them. Many come from single-parent families whose mom or dad (or in many cases their grand mom) is working two jobs to survive and are just (understandably) too plain tired to do anything else in the few short hours they’re home. Many have teachers who are overburdened and too stressed to find the time to help every kid that needs it. Many of these kids don’t have the brains to figure this out themselves – like my kids. Except that my kids are just lucky enough to have parents and a well-funded school system around to push them in the right direction.

And about Prof. Melissa Harris-Perry thinking Marks’ column sounded like something out of The Onion? Well, she’s not wrong:

You know, it occurs to me that you don’t even live in America. And I’ve got to know, what the heck are you doing living in Sri Lanka? What do they have there? Camels? Rugs? Well, I can tell you one thing they don’t have: 100 percent grade-A American opportunity.

America is the land of milk and honey. You can probably catch a flight here from Sri Lanka for as little as $2,500 if you shop around. So what’s keeping you? Okay, I can imagine how it is: you live in a back alley and you eat garbage. And maybe you don’t have the liquid capital to outlay $2,500 on a luxury-like first-class airfare to the U.S. Well, you can always fly coach for about a third of first-class fare, and if worst comes to worst, put it on the plastic. As long as you pay it off as quickly as you can, the interest won’t cramp your style. (See Tip #1.)

It should also be noted that, as, Talking Point Memo’s Callie Schweitzer pointed out, Marks has also applied his “wisdom” to gender-equality issues in the workplace:

Women also have more personal and social pressures than men. And this affects their ability to further their careers and get the experience they need to become good managers. It’s common today for families to have two working parents. But let’s admit it, when little Johnny gets sick at school who’s the first person that’s usually called? When a child is up at night coughing, which parent is staying up with her? When the plumber has to make an emergency morning visit, who’s generally staying at home to deal with it?

It’s usually mom. And even if she has a full time job too.

When my wife and I were younger and our baby would cry in the middle of the night I would put a pillow…over my head. That stopped the crying for sure. My wife (who was working full time by the way) was the one who got out of bed to care for the child. Yes, I was an ass. I’m not saying that many dads don’t pitch in or try to do their fair share. But as much as women have achieved in earning their equality, there are still some age old cultural habits that won’t die. Children need their mommies. And most moms I know, whether they have a full time job or not, want to be there for their child. I know plenty of women who admit they struggle with this instinctual tug on their gut. Men don’t have this kind of instinctual tug. Let’s face it: unless there’s beer involved, men don’t have many instincts at all. We figure our wives will ultimately handle these things. And in many cases, they just do.

I could go on and on, and but, you know – beer. More reaction from around the ‘Net under the cut.

In other words, there’s more to getting a foot-hold in middle class than simply knowing how to use Google Scholar. There are a number of complex and tangle-ly mazes to maneuver when one is climbing up the socioeconomic ladder. Working hard is important; but let’s not be naïve. Gene Marks gives no real mention of the hard road ahead it will be for this kids like – access to a full range of technology, transportation to these those fancy-pants magnet schools. And what about supplies, equipment, oh and perquisite education just not offered at those lousy public schools. You see, no matter how hard a kid tries, when the smartest student from a poor-functioning school district walks into my freshman biology class, I can tell. And from day one, she or he is playing catch-up with the kids who attended those private or suburban school districts.
- DN Lee, Scientific American

Everything about Marks’ stupid, stupid essay assumes as unchanging truth that a poor person will have to work ridiculously hard in order to have a future where they are not poor, and this is the root of the problem that Marks not only doesn’t address but asserts is just not that big a deal in his preamble when, after applauding Barack Obama for talking about income inequality, claims that the superrich aren’t getting vastly more than their fair share. Because there’s nothing wrong with expecting someone to work hard to rise above their current status. But there’s plenty wrong with expecting kids to load themselves to the bone with work in order to have a chance to rise above their current status.5 He’s willing to pay lip service to the idea that inequality is wrong, but he’s not willing to suggest that something be done to address the problem of inequality. It’s just another hurdle for poor black kids to jump, and he’s ever so gracious to admit that he, Gene Marks, did not have to jump these hurdles – and that’s just how it is. Tough luck, poor black kids! Those of you who cannot do these incredible and amazing things to struggle upwards, well, there’s always McDonald’s.
- Christopher Bird, MightyGodKing.com

We Negroes are familiar with this particular brand of help. The #WhiteLove™ style of caring. Movies love to show how, when a white person with an open mind shows up and deals with poor blacks, their lives are magically changed. As I read this piece, I sighed to myself and mumbled, “White liberals.”

Please stop your furious typing. I’m not claiming that all white liberals are as completely clueless as Mr. Marks. I’m not even sure that Mr. Marks is, in fact, liberal — but this brand of “help” normally comes wrapped in an “I’m here with you, man! I understand your pain” bow that is purchased at your nearest “Awesome Liberals Totally Get It” gift shop. It’s the “Let me help you help you” brand of awesome.
- Elon James White, The Root

Excuse me Mr. Marks, while I understand and somewhat agree with your position, when was the last time you heard of Black kindergartners in inner-city Chicago receiving iPads? I’ve got all day.

He goes on to say that poor black children need to try their hardest to research nationally recognized magnet schools in hopes to attend. The accelerated learning material will put them on the track to college and higher learning.

Um, once more. I don’t know a child– white, Black, or otherwise– researching schools to attend in hopes of a better tomorrow. They would much rather be out playing with friends or watching cartoons, ignorant to the fact that the educational gap is indeed widening.
- Camille Travis, Uptown Magazine

If I was a rich white dude I would first and most importantly work to make sure I actually saw what it’s like to live as a poor black kid myself before I wrote a condescending column about how we should solve “our” problems. I would make it my #1 priority to spend some actual time with a working-class black family. Obviously, I wouldn’t know any personally, but I’d outreach to a social services program or an inner city school for help finding one willing to let me talk to them. Even the most privileged and obtuse person can look up the name of a charitable nonprofit in the phone book. And if you’re a technology columnist and business consultant, you’ll have even more resources: You can use Google!

Getting firsthand insights is the key to writing an informed column. By seeing and talking to actual people facing the actual situation you’re covering, you can choose to pen a different, better piece. If you choose to give advice about poverty from the comfort of your heated office, behind your expensive computer, in your ergonomic Aeron chair, you’re severely increasing the chances that you’ll look like an arrogant, condescending jerk.

And I would use the contacts available to me as a columnist for a magazine for rich white dudes. My school teacher says that columnists usually have or can find all kinds of stuff online these days. That’s because (and sadly) it’s oftentimes the only way that lazy columnists who don’t want to do their own reporting can get data to inform their opinions.
- Jeff Yang, WNYC

Dear Person that decided to dress up as an Indian for Halloween,

I was going to write you an eloquent and well-reasoned post today about all the reasons why it’s not ok to dress up as a Native person for Halloween–talk about the history of“playing Indian” in our country, point to the dangers of stereotyping and placing of Native peoples as mythical, historical creatures, give you some articles to read, hope that I could change your mind by dazzling you with my wit and reason–but I can’t. I can’t, because I know you won’t listen, and I’m getting so tired of trying to get through to you.

I just read the comments on this post at Bitch Magazine, a conversation replicated all over the internet when people of color are trying to make a plea to not dress up as racist characters on Halloween. I felt my chest tighten and tears well up in my eyes, because even with Kjerstin’s well researched and well cited post, people like you are so caught up in their own privilege, they can’t see how much this affects and hurts their classmates, neighbors and friends.

I already know how our conversation would go. I’ll ask you to please not dress up as a bastardized version of my culture for Halloween, and you’ll reply that it’s “just for fun” and I should “get over it.” You’ll tell me that you “weren’t doing it to be offensive” and that “everyone knows real Native Americans don’t dress like this.” You’ll say that you have a “right” to dress up as “whatever you damn well please.” You’ll remind me about how you’re “Irish” and the “Irish we’re oppressed too.” Or you’ll say you’re “German”, and you “don’t get offended by people in Lederhosen.”

But you don’t understand what it feels like to be me. I am a Native person. You are (most likely) a white person. You walk through life everyday never having the fear of someone mis-representing your people and your culture. You don’t have to worry about the vast majority of your people living in poverty, struggling with alcoholism, domestic violence, hunger, and unemployment caused by 500+ years of colonialism and federal policies aimed at erasing your existence. You don’t walk through life everyday feeling invisible, because the only images the public sees of you are fictionalized stereotypes that don’t represent who you are at all. You don’t know what it’s like to care about something so deeply and know at your core that it’s so wrong, and have others in positions of power dismiss you like you’re some sort of over-sensitive freak.

You are in a position of power. You might not know it, but you are. Simply because of the color of your skin, you have been afforded opportunities and privilege, because our country was built on a foundation of white supremacy. That’s probably a concept that’s too much for you to handle right now, when all you wanted to do was dress up as a PocaHottie for Halloween, but it’s true.

I am not in a position of power. Native people are not in positions of power. By dressing up as a fake Indian, you are asserting your power over us, and continuing to oppress us. That should worry you.

But don’t tell me that you’re oppressed too, or don’t you dare come back and tell me your “great grandmother was a Cherokee Princess” and that somehow makes it ok. Do you live in a system that is actively taking your children away without just cause? Do you have to look at the TV on weekends and see sports teams with mascots named after racial slurs of your people? I doubt it.

Last night I sat with a group of Native undergraduates to discuss their thoughts and ideas about the costume issue, and hearing the comments they face on a daily basis broke my heart. They take the time each year to send out an email called “We are not a costume” to the undergraduate student body–an email that has become known as the “whiny newsletter” to their entitled classmates. They take the time to educate and put themselves out there, only to be shot down by those that refuse to think critically about their choices.Your choices are adversely affecting their college experiences, and that’s hard for me to take without a fight.

The most frustrating part to me is, there are so many other things you can dress up as for Halloween. You can be a freaking sexy scrabble board for goodness sake. But why does your fun have to come at the expense of my well-being? Is your night of drunken revelry really worth subjugating an entire group of people? I just can’t understand, how after hearing, first-hand, that your choice is hurtful to another human being, you’re able to continue to celebrate with your braids and plastic tomahawk.

So I know you probably didn’t even read this letter, I know you’ve probably already bought and paid for your Indian costume, and that this weekend you’ll be sucking down jungle juice from a red solo cup as your feathers wilt and warpaint runs. I know you’re going to scoff at my over-sensitivity. But I’m telling you, from the bottom of my heart, that you’re hurting me. And I would hope that would be enough.

Wado,

Adrienne K.

PS- I wonder if you saw these posters? Because I think they illustrate my point really well.

UPDATE 10/27: Have a look at some of the costumes I’m talking about. I think it makes my arguments a lot clearer.

Earlier:
But Why Can’t I Wear a Hipster Headdress?
Nudie Neon Indians and the Sexualiztion of Indian Women
A Cowboys and Indians Party is just as bad as a Blackface Party 
Paris Hilton as a Sexy Indian: The Halloween Fallout Begins (includes lots of links about the costume issue)
Mid-Week Motivation: I am not your costume

From the creator:

“We instantly went to Tumblr and made hotchicksofoccupywallstreet.tumblr.com. Our original ideas were admittedly sophomoric: Pics of hot chicks being all protesty, videos of hot chicks beating drums in slow-mo, etc. But when we arrived at Zuccotti Park in New York City, it evolved into something more.

There was a vibrant energy in the air, a warmth of community and family, and the voices we heard were so hopeful and passionate. Pretty faces were making signs, giving speeches, organizing crowds, handing out food, singing, dancing, debating, hugging and marching.”

The Occupation of Wall Street was, plain and simple meant to be a rejection of corporate America. But the video and author’s description above are instead a sendup to the very culture the occupiers claim to be corrupting. The music sounds like a Rick Perry campaign commercial and acts as a silencer to further their agenda of objectification. Oh, right, there are those three soundbites that capture the maternal essence of ALL of those hotchicksatoccupywallstreet. Are the hotchicksatoccupywallstreet concerned with the IMF, or say, pushing for collective bargaining in the Teachers Union? No, hotchicksatoccupywallstreet only talk about children, beauty, children, Gandhi and children.

From the outset, the imagery circulating the internet of “Occupy Wall Street” is reflective of a white and young adherence. Paradoxically, this video “piece” has three people of color in it, which, sadly seems like a lot when it comes to OWS coverage. Even stranger, two of the three women of color featured in the film are given voice, whereas the white women remain objects of beauty. Peculiar, ey? Taken straight from the pages of the corporate America’s advertising handbook, the reproduction of images seen in this video play into the reinforcement of the white woman’s stand alone beauty and the black and brown woman’s strength.

I feel like I don’t even need to speak to how the creators of this piece cop to the standards of beauty so i’ll just make a list of the ways in which they did it to save time:

skinny + white + slowwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww music + +slowwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww images + no voice = carefree white girl

It is monstrosities such as this that add to my skepticism of having a movement without intentionality. If, from the beginning there was a “General Assembly” that looked more like the General Assembly at the UN, and if from the beginning there was thought put into the whole IDEA of what occupation has meant in this country (see: COLONIALISM) and how skeptical people of color are to that notion I think that we’d be seeing a much more nuanced and thoughtful process. The call for the redistribution of wealth alone does not get at the root of the problem. We have to think about this more critically and we have to be more vigilant of those (like homeboys that made this video) that are trying to keep existing power structures steadily in place.

As a woman and as a woman of color who has been down there various times since its inception, I’m not comfortable yet. Help me get there and not by doing DUMB SHIT LIKE THIS.

By TV Roundtable Member Kendra James

Did anyone else know that Emmy and Oscar nominee Taraji P Henson is the third lead this season on Abrams’ and CBS’ new thriller Person of Interest?

No? Don’t be ashamed, because you certainly wouldn’t know given the advertising. The New York billboards feature the white male leads, Jim Caviezel and Michael Emerson, and that same poster is the one you’ll see featured in magazines and papers all over, including this morning’s free Metro in NYC. As far as I was concerned these two men were the show’s only leads. I had no idea that an Oscar and Emmy nominated actress was the female star.

When TV Guide gave more of the same on the cover of their latest issue, Taraji took to her Facebook fanpage to speak to her fans:

WOW!!!! TV Guide is NOT including me on the cover with my cast members……..I am the female lead of a 3 member cast and I’m not included on the cover!!!!!! Do you see the shit I have to deal with in this business…..I cram to understand!!!!

The post was removed later and replaced with:

I swear you guys keep my spirit lifted cause it ain’t easy AT ALL for a sister in Hollywood. Your love is God sent!!!! Thank you ALL from the bottom of my heart. Wanted to tell you all this on live TV at the Emmys (if I’d won) but……oh well. Muah!!!!!

Normally, I’m the first to applaud CBS for their diverse casting on their procedural series. CSI, Criminal Minds, Cold Case, Hawaii Five-0, and NCIS: LA each feature(d) staring men and women of color. Criminal Minds: Suspect Behavior was also led by Forest Whitaker before being cancelled. However, the omission of an Academy Award nominated lead actress from an entire advertising campaign is more than an accidental oversight.

Both Taraji and Forest are the latest actors of color to follow in a trend I have mixed feelings about. While award winning and popular white film actors often make guest spots on network television  you don’t often find them leading shows outside of HBO (and that’s not television, it’s HBO). Award winning Actors of color, on the other hand, seem to be making the transition from their Oscar nominated and critically acclaimed movies and parts to network and cable television. Forest Whitaker, Sandra Oh (Greys Anatomy), Terrence Howard (Law and Order: LA), Lawrence Fishburne (CSI), Viola Davis (United States of Tara, one season), Djimon Hounson (Alias, recurring role) and Don Cheadle (House of Lies), come immediately to mind. Out of the group Sandra is the only one not nominated for Oscar, though she does have a SAG to her name.

While each of these talents certainly deserve to work, why is it they’re taking jobs on network and cable television their white counterparts never would, especially if they’re not going to get the exposure? (Another question to muse on: why are so any of them men?) If we look at the year Taraji was nominated for The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, we’ll see that she was nominated against Amy Adams, Viola Davis, Marisa Tomei, and Penelope Cruz. Of the five who are the two who’ve had recurring television work since? Viola and Taraji. The same thing happens if we look at Forrest Whitaker, who was nominated against Will Smith, Leonardo DiCaprio, Ryan Gossling, and Peter O’Toole.

For all intents and purposes their fellow nominees are their peers (after all, they’re nominated by their fellow actors and actresses … or at least their assistants) and we can clearly see that they’re not getting the same type of work. (Can you imagine DiCaprio deciding to do a Showtime series, much less a Criminal Minds spin-off? Can you imagine him needing to do so?) Then, when actors and actresses of color are chosen to headline or co-headline a show, are they ever the face of the show? Are they out doing publicity and taking photos for magazine covers? Both Terrance Howard and Forrest Whitaker were given a huge promotional push and CM: SB and L&O: LA were cancelled in the middle of their first seasons. A search for Sandra Oh magazine covers reveals one result for a Marie Claire (Sara Ramírez has two covers to Latina to her name). I counted nine for Ellen Pompeo before I stopped, and didn’t even bother with Katherine Heigl or Patrick Dempsy. Taraji’s beef with CBS’ and TV Guide’s exclusion is hardly a unique one.

It’s bad enough that actors of color aren’t always given the same credit (or role choice) as their peers within the film industry (the publicity department for The Adjustment Bureau would have preferred that you didn’t know Anthony Mackie had a starring role– he was in a good two thirds of the movie. Certainly more than John Slattery). As television leads and co-leads, the opportunities to represent themselves and be represented by the shows they work for should be provided, and yet they don’t seem to be. Women of color especially are pushed to the side of the advertising table; CBS and NBC at least tried with Forest Whitaker and Terrence Howard.

I used to joke that after the failures of Undercovers, L&O:LA, and CM:SB in a one, two, three punch no network show would ever use a black face and the main face in their campaigns again. Given how quickly CM:SB came and went, there might be merit in wondering if CBS chose not to make Taraji part of the ad campaign focus because of the show’s failure and the direction of that particular campaign.

Whatever the reason, for Taraji and others the reality is mostly this: I’m sitting here watching The Big Bang Theory premiere and I’ve seen three ads for Person of Interest so far (two short, one full length). Two ads didn’t feature Taraji at all, and the thirty second ad featured her for a total of three seconds — I timed it. Worse, I know that had it not been for Taraji publicly calling out TV Guide I wouldn’t have known she was on this show. And that’s a shame because there’s no reason that should be the case. They took a shot of the three cast leads. They made the poster. Why aren’t they using it? Because Jim Caviezel and Michael Emerson are obviously meant to be the stars of this show.

No one can blame Taraji for taking to Facebook to express her displeasure, and it’s important that even though the post was eventually deleted she had the chance to make her opinion public. It’s especially important for actresses of color like Joi Bryant (Parenthood), Annie Ilonzeh (Charlie’s Angels — who isn’t even listed as a “star” of the show on its IMDB page), Naturi Naughton (The Playboy Club), Maggie Q (Nikita), and Jasika Nicole (Fringe) who don’t have the prestige of an Academy Award nomination behind them, and continue to be underrepresented in advertisment and promotion by the networks that depend on them to show up on set each day and deliver quality work.

Taraji’s experience with Persons of Interest is no more than the latest example of Hollywood’s continuing issue with race and, as the actress her self said, “the shit” a person of color has to deal with in the entertainment industry even when they’d accomplished as much or more as their white counterparts.

It never ends.

Reader AnoninPhilly sent us a link to the latest in the woe-are-unwed-black-women articles from the Wall Street Journal, this one titled “An Interracial Fix for Black Marriage.” Sing along if you know the words:

Audrey belongs to the most unmarried group of people in the U.S.: black women. Nearly 70% of black women are unmarried, and the racial gap in marriage spans the socioeconomic spectrum, from the urban poor to well-off suburban professionals. Three in 10 college-educated black women haven’t married by age 40; their white peers are less than half as likely to have remained unwed.

But since it’s the WSJ, the idea of the market is the main angle of the story.

I came away convinced of two facts: Black women confront the worst relationship market of any group because of economic and cultural forces that are not of their own making; and they have needlessly worsened their situation by limiting themselves to black men. I also arrived at a startling conclusion: Black women can best promote black marriage by opening themselves to relationships with men of other races.

Audrey and other black women confront a social scene in which desirable black men are scarce.

Part of the problem is incarceration. More than two million men are now imprisoned in the U.S., and roughly 40% of them are African-American. At any given time, more than 10% of black men in their 20s or 30s—prime marrying ages—are in jail or prison.

Educationally, black men also lag. There are roughly 1.4 million black women now in college, compared to just 900,000 black men. By graduation, black women outnumber men 2-to-1. Among graduate-school students, in 2008 there were 125,000 African-American women but only 58,000 African-American men. That same year, black women received more than three out of every five law or medical degrees awarded to African-Americans.

These problems translate into dimmer economic prospects for black men, and the less a man earns, the less likely he is to marry. That’s how the relationship market operates. Marriage is a matter of love and commitment, but it is also an exchange. A black man without a job or the likelihood of landing one cannot offer a woman enough to make that exchange worthwhile.

At this point, we need a Black Women and Marriage Bingo Card.

Comments are predictably vile. A little more than I expected (quite a few “I’m not like those other Negroes!”), but that may just be the crowd over there.

Sigh.

As a writer, I wonder how these articles keep getting published. News has a definite cycle – try writing about a study two weeks after it first releases. If you don’t have a new and timely angle, your editor will tell you that it’s been done and to move on. Yet, it appears that no matter how many of these articles are written, editors are never tired of single black women stories. (Especially considering how discussions of incarceration, the wealth gap, and other issues that are often cited in these articles as causes disappear after twenty four hours in the news cycle.)

If you listen to the media, it would seem that no matter who she is, a black woman, by dint of birth, can’t beg, borrow, or steal a man. And yes, it’s always a man. Because black women are only queer because they can’t find a man. And because no partnered black women exist, they are not interviewed for these articles. And if there is a partnered black woman, and she’s with a man that is working class, she will be told she is settling – despite having no kind of information on why this person actually chose their partner. (And, again, the flip side of these articles is always “black men are slacking so women can’t find partners” – a pernicious reinforcement of stereotypes about black men which is often missed in the glee to bash black women for the crime of singleness.)

In addition to shitting on working class men of all colors, the WSJ article finally concludes that interracial relationships should be entered into…because it increases your negotiating power:

By opening themselves to relationships with men of other races, black women would also lessen the power disparity that depresses the African-American marriage rate.

Okay, stop, stop, stop, stop. Stop the damn band. Let’s get a few things clear here:

• Interracial relationships should not be pawns in larger games of intra-racial gotcha.
• Interracial relationships should not be entered into because you feel you have no other options.  Seriously, what the fuck?  We are talking about people in relationships. This isn’t like not being able to afford an iPad and settling for a Kindle. There is another person involved.
• Attraction and relationships are complicated, and our preferences are influenced by societal messages. Interracial relationships are also complicated, because of what both people are bringing to the table and what is involved.  All these “what you need to do is” articles fail to compelling grapple with the whys behind people’s dating behavior.  Much is made of black women not wanting to explain their hair; less is made of the problems that arise when someone who is anti-racist starts dating someone who sees themselves as “beyond race.” 

Mainstream conversations on IR dating leave much to be desired – but this particular drumbeat of “single black women get a white man!” needs to be retired.

White men deserve better than to be someone else’s last resort.

Black women deserve better than to be dictated to about how to handle their romantic lives from people who are basing their ideas on one part research to three parts stereotype.

And everyone deserves a better conversation on relationships, ethnicity, and race.

—-

Earlier:

Sex In The Diamond District: Race, Love, And Relationships In Washington
Social Capital and Denying the Pain of Black Women
Interracial Dating: Interracial Dating with a Vengeance
Interracial Dating: “Beyond Race” versus “Anti-Racist Dating”
Black Women Can’t Find A Man? Blame The Church! [Rant]
Quoted: Jeff Yang on Interracial Dating
Rise of the Hot Jewish Girl? Details Continues the Objectification
The Flip Side of A Fetish
Geishas and Whores

The good women from Disgrasian have pointed out that American Apparel is selling a rice paddy hat for $15. I’m a little surprised it has taken American Apparel so long to get on with this “trend.” I remember first seeing it on whipster (white hipster) fashion student Nora from the first season of Project Runway, and that was like 8 seasons ago. Anyway, AA is really scraping the bottom of the PBR barrel with this one.

The Disgrasian bloggers let the hat speak for itself and instead eviscerate the would-be wearers as fashion victims. Fair enough. Wearing it would make you look like an asshat. But is it racist?

The hat brings me back to the sweet times of my youth when Abercrombie & Fitch was the hip brand (hey, I’m from Florida). A&F stirred controversy for their excessively racist t-shirts, that depicted caricatures of Asian men wearing – yup, you guessed it – rice paddy hats with slogans like “Two Wongs Can Make It White.”

Rice paddy hats have a long history in the American imagination stemming, most directly, from the Vietnam War. Movies like Oliver Stone’s Platoon, and other Vietnam War movies, often depict desperate, fleeing Vietnamese in rice paddy hats. The hats are also a common trope in editorial cartoons.

The hat itself isn’t racist, but it has a deep, Orientalist history that subsumes multiple nations, histories, and billions of people, under one big coolie hat. What is truly offensive is the ability of the West to take something like a rice paddy hat, something that has actual meaning and substance and shape and turn it into a cheap symbol of the Orient. If I drew a head with that conical hat on it, a viewer would immediately know to reference: Asian person.

I’m trying to think of a time and place where I would welcome the coolie hat, that is not mid-summer on Bedford on a whipster or traveling in rural Asia. It would be Halloween. The wearer would be an Asian American female, dressed like a Vietcong guerrilla fighter with a sniper rifle slung around her in a reference to Full Metal Jacket. The hat would look pretty badass.

And here’s Stephen Cobert’s response, for all the Ds in the house (also NSFW):

We’ve received a few requests to explore the planking phenomenon, based on Xzibit’s assertion that planking is racist since it had roots in the way slaves were stacked on slave ships.

Adrien Chen at Gawker writes:

Actually, “planking” is a rebranding of the years-old British meme “the lying down game”. It comes from Australia, and is something radio stations ginned up as a promotional gimmick earlier this year.

Turns out, Xzibit is not the first person to claim that planking is somehow inspired by the horrific conditions in slave ships crossing the Atlantic. A popular June 28th post on the entertainment blog Courtneyluv.com seems to have kicked off the planking-comes-from-slavery panic.

But there isn’t any evidence to back that up, as far as we can see. Slaveships are one thing, but a plank is essentially a board, and an exercise move. Saying slaves were stacked like planks (or, more commonly, boards) or saying slaves were chained to planks of wood is an accurate depiction of what occurred on slave ships. It is probably not what people were thinking about when they named the move.

Some people love planking, some people hate it, but we’re not seeing anything racist on this count.

That last one hit a variety of demographics, but this one even made the folks at Bossip cringe:

Oh, and our Latina readers? They made one for you too…

We…just can’t.

But in the wake of Mr. Hill’s death, the BART police department is once again facing disapproval, similar to what it endured after Johannes Mehserle shot Oscar Grant III in the back at the Fruitvale station in Oakland in 2009. That case touched off riots and looting last year after Mr. Mehserle was convicted of involuntary manslaughter. Mr. Mehserle was released from jail last month after serving 11 months of a two-year sentence.

BART has not released the names of the two officers who confronted Mr. Hill. But one of the officers was not carrying a Taser, officials said. Neither officer (one is a six-year veteran, the other has been on the force for 18 months) had received crisis-intervention training.

Asked if the officers were adequately prepared for the confrontation, Chief Rainey said, “Absolutely.” But critics said Mr. Hill’s death was a direct result of the agency’s slowness in making changes after the 2009 shooting.

“There’s been a two-year struggle to reform BART,” said Anne Weills, an Oakland lawyer who represents victims of police brutality. “They’ve made no effort to open themselves up to the public, to hire and screen people or to train people to adequately deal with these situations.”

BART officers have shot and killed six people since the agency was founded in 1972; three of the shootings occurred during the past three years. The police force for Atlanta’s transit system, which employs 321 officers, has had two in the last three years; the New York Police Department’s transit bureau, with 2,400 officers, has not had a fatal officer-involved shooting in at least 10 years.

- From “In San Francisco, Latest BART Shooting Prompts New Discussion of Reforms,” by Zusha Elinson and Shoshana Walter

Reached for comment, a spokesperson for DC Comics gave the official reason for the switch as follows:

“This fill in issue contains a lost classic, Lost Boy: A Tale of Krypto the Superdog, set shortly after Superboy died in Infinite Crisis and Superman went missing.

DC Comics determined that the previously solicited story did not work within the ‘Grounded’ storyline. However, Chris Roberson, will be back for the final two issues of Superman’s year long walk across America. As we near the conclusion, catch up with Superman next month as he makes stops in Portland and Newberg, OR.”

The statement that it “doesn’t work within ‘Grounded’” is vague enough to raise questions all by itself, because — fittingly enough for a series about Superman walking across America — that story has been all over the map in terms of tone. That’s to be expected with a story that has two writers as different as J. Michael Straczynski and Chris Roberson (and a third if you count the fill-ins G. Willow Wilson did before Straczynski’s official departure), but there’s no getting around it. In the past year’s worth of Superman comics, we’ve seen stories about Superman smugly lecturing passers-by about Thoreau, burning down drug dealers’ houses with his heat vision, helping space aliens build a factory to revitalize the economy, visiting the extradimensional headquarters of a team of Superman-inspired heroes from the future and fighting an army in Tibet with Batman.

- From “Why Did DC Cancel Superman’s Team-Up with a Muslim Hero?” by Chris Sims, June 22

When the news broke that the Gay Girl in Damascus blog was a hoax, I wanted to read a bit more about exactly what happened. The Washington Post notes:

And Sunday, the truth spilled out: The gay girl in Damascus confessed to being a 40-year-old American man from Georgia.

The persona Tom MacMaster built and cultivated for years — a lesbian who was half Syrian and half American — was a tantalizing Internet-era fiction, one that he used to bring attention to the human rights record of a country where media restrictions make traditional reporting almost impossible.

On Sunday, MacMaster apologized on the blog. “While the narrative voice may have been fictional, the facts on thıs blog are true and not mısleading as to the situation on the ground,” he wrote. “I do not believe that I have harmed anyone — I feel that I have created an important voice for issues that I feel strongly about.”

MacMaster, a Middle East peace activist who is working on his master’s degree at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland, wrote that he fictionalized the account of a gay woman in Syria to illuminate the situation for a Western audience.

Essentially, this MacMaster fellow is Peggy Seltzer for the Arab Spring. (And, insert plot twist – LezGetReal, the blog that encouraged “Amina” to tell “her” story was ALSO run by a white man claiming to be a deaf, lesbian, mother of two.)

But the why of this intrigues me. While news organizations are in a tizzy about what this means for using blogs as sources, what I want to know is how the media environment got so skewed that fictionalized accounts by white writers get more media attention than actual accounts by people of color?

Reader Kat sent through this item from KABOBfest called “The Politics Behind the Role Play”:

More than just speaking for Syrian activists, or Syrian women, or Syrian lesbians, as so many righteous liberal Westerners “interested” in the Middle East so often do, Tom MacMaster, in his own words, “created a voice,” and in doing so redefined what representation means for Arabs in western media – we call it ventriloquism. In creating the “dummy,” Anima, through the blog Gay Girl in Damascus, MacMaster became the mouthpiece for an entire class of Syrian people while denying Syrians (activists/women/lesbians/all of the above) the right to a voice in an already one-sided global media.

In this violent act of representation in which language and meaning was appropriated, MacMaster detracted from the stories of REAL Syrians who risk their lives daily in opposition to the dictatorship of the Assad regime. Not only did the attention received by MacMasters fake blog rob Syrians of their own voice, it put them in danger in a very real way.

The entire Kabobfest piece is worth a read, but this part, in particular, cuts to the heart of the issue:

One shouldn’t need the sensationalized fictional narrative of a lesbian Syrian woman to affirm the rights of Syrian demonstrators who are being brutally repressed by their governments. But if the goal is to arouse emotion and entertain, then MacMaster has succeeded in proving that the truth about Arabs comes secondary to Western perceptions and feelings towards them.

I wonder how did Gay Girl in Damascus amass such a following, while other activists and bloggers did not? Probably for the same reason Peggy Seltzer’s memoir was a literary darling until they discovered it was fictional, and why a young white able-bodied male college grad could make headlines by explaining that poverty isn’t so bad after all. Writing from a white western perspective confirms a white western perspective. Or to put it more simply, like recognizes like. Clearly, people were able to find Syrian activists, writers, and bloggers to go on the record about this in the aftermath – where were their voices before?

This whole drama hearkens back to the enduring issue of diversity in media. Most people can see, visually, the lack of racial/ethnic diversity and a failure to incorporate women into the higher echelons of news and culture institutions. But the problem runs far deeper than that. Who do we consider an expert? Frustration is the only word that came to mind when the news coverage of the MENA region started and television networks could deliver me nothing that wasn’t filtered through a white man over the age of fifty (and in some cases, someone who may have directly contributed to the cause of the unrest). How can we adequately frame issues from around the globe without featuring voices from around the globe? Traditional news has always been about selection – what a roomful of men thought the world needed to know about. When I interviewed Derrick Ashong from Al-Jazeera’s The Stream, he mentioned:

Ashong pointed out that media has traditionally been a top down kind of business, where a handful of people were expected to curate what was newsworthy for the masses.

“If I turn on CNN, I won’t hear anything about [what's] going on in Africa unless there’s a conflict to be covered or a tragedy. As a person born in Africa, that’s unacceptable to me. It isn’t that there’s no news being created, it’s just that we won’t hear about that news.”

We have come to a sad state of media affairs when fictional creations receive far more attention than those actually putting their lives on the line, and that the stories of “others” are only worth telling once they have been co-opted.

—

Further Reading:

“The story of a gay girl in Damascus or, a straight guy in Edinburgh” [Daily Maverick]
Doree Shafir on White Intellectual Norms Post-Seltzer [The Doree Chronicles]
Daniel Nassar on “The real world of gay girls in Damascus” [The Guardian]
Liz Henry on Amina and Fictional Blogging [Composite]

Satoshi Kanazawa’s Monday blog post about black women and beauty standards, since taken down, was only the latest in a string of questionable contributions to both Psychology Today and his field.

In 2006, Kanazawa was accused of reviving eugenics-era theories after publishing a paper in England blaming low IQ levels for low life expectancy and high infant mortality rates in the continent of Africa – seemingly ignoring decades worth of political and social unrest. This led to him being called “the great idiot of social science” by renowned biologist PZ Myers in an article last year on Alternet.

Daniela Perdomo’s piece for Alternet focused on another study by Kanazawa, this one alleging that atheists are “more likely to acquire and espouse evolutionarily novel values and preferences (such as liberalism and atheism…) than less intelligent individuals.” Perdomo writes:

… Not only does Kanazawa wax over structural inequalities that may lead to varying IQ levels in American society, even the disparities he finds in this imperfect measure of intelligence are relatively miniscule. For the most part, he is not speaking of a difference of more than six IQ points between liberals and conservatives, atheists and believers — a negligible difference one would never notice in real person-to-person interactions.

Kanazawa isn’t the first to study the intelligence-religiosity nexus. Other studies have also found a three- to six-point IQ difference between atheists and religious believers, in the atheists’ favor. But those studies didn’t claim that atheists were more evolved, as Kanazawa presumes, and merely conclude that they are more skeptical due to a certain kind of schooling and cultural exposure (which might also account for why some people perform well on IQ tests), leaving room to account for why so many people — say, like William F. Buckley, Jr., the late conservative public intellectual — can be so religious and conservative and yet quite intelligent.

In February 2008, Kanazawa defined his position as “extremely purist” in a post in Psychology Today, saying findings can only be either true or false:

No other criteria besides the truth should matter or be applied in evaluating scientific theories or conclusions. They cannot be “racist” or “sexist” or “reactionary” or “offensive” or any other adjective. Even if they are labeled as such, it doesn’t matter. Calling scientific theories “offensive” is like calling them “obese”; it just doesn’t make sense. Many of my own scientific theories and conclusions are deeply offensive to me, but I suspect they are at least partially true.

Once scientists begin to worry about anything other than the truth and ask themselves “Might this conclusion or finding be potentially offensive to someone?”, then self-censorship sets in, and they become tempted to shade the truth. What if a scientific conclusion is both offensive and true? What is a scientist to do then? I believe that many scientific truths are highly offensive to most of us, but I also believe that scientists must pursue them at any cost.

It is not my job as a scientist to “use” scientific knowledge in any way to improve the human condition; that’s the job of politicians, policy makers, physicians, and other social engineers. Their goal of helping people and improving their lives is a noble and important (albeit nonscientific) one. Any successful intervention, however, must be based on the true understanding of nature. If these social engineers don’t know the true causes of what they are trying to create or eliminate, how can they possibly hope to succeed? By opposing and entirely disregarding certain scientific theories and conclusions a priori on ideological and political grounds, because they believe they could not and should not be true, they risk the chance they might not achieve their goal of helping people.

Less than a month later, however, he engaged in a rather unscientific – and genocidal – bit of speculation as to how the United States could have ended the “war on terror” more quickly, emphasis his:

Here’s a little thought experiment. Imagine that, on September 11, 2001, when the Twin Towers came down, the President of the United States was not George W. Bush, but Ann Coulter. What would have happened then? On September 12, President Coulter would have ordered the US military forces to drop 35 nuclear bombs throughout the Middle East, killing all of our actual and potential enemy combatants, and their wives and children. On September 13, the war would have been over and won, without a single American life lost.

That post is still active on PT’s website, while Monday’s has been pulled – justifiably, according to fellow PT blogger Mikhail Lyubansky. But it wasn’t because Kanazawa’s work arrived at an unpopular confusion, emphasis his:

The point is that there are also group differences, not in attractiveness (as Kanazawa claims), but in cultural messages about what is and is not attractive. Standards of beauty, like most other beliefs, are socialized and change not only from place to place but also over time. In both the United States and England, (where Kanazawa lives and works), standards of beauty are essentially “White” standards, because whites comprise the majority of the population and have disproportional control over both media and fashion. And while it is not just White respondents who are socialized this way (internalized racism has been well documented), it is certainly the case that White Americans and Europeans (who are less likely to have received more positive messages about Black beauty) would show the strongest anti-Black bias.

As long as this is understood and framed accordingly, there is no problem with the data Kanazawa reports. What they show is that because Black faces and bodies don’t fit mainstream White standards of physical attractiveness, both respondents and interviewers show an anti-Black bias. Unfortunately, Kanazawa fails to consider either sample bias or socializing effects. Even if he believes, as he apparently does, that human behavior is entirely “evolutionary”, good science requires a careful analysis of sample bias and an explicit discussion regarding the study’s generalizability. Without this kind of methodological analysis, Kanazawa’s entire premise — that there is such a thing as a single objective standard of attractiveness — is fatally (and tragically) flawed.

It is worth noting that Kanazawa repeats this same flaw of omission when he explains that the attractiveness results are not due to race group differences in intelligence, as though there are no scholarly critiques of IQ measures in general and their racial bias in particular.

These are not trivial omisisions. They are the necessary context that gives readers the information they need to draw their own conclusions.

Compiled By Arturo R. García

Since bar graphs make everything truer, we present a pictorial representation definitively showing that although Kanazawa was pretty much the worst before his post on black women, he is now even worster.*

*As measured by the Jezebel Worstness Index, developed by leading Worstologist Anna North of Jezebel University, Internet Campus. Margin of error = +/- a million.
- Anna North, Jezebel

Few articles in recent memory have stirred a response from our readers like this piece, originally posted at Psychology Today, in which “evolutionary psychologist” Satoshi Kanazawa states, “As the following graph shows, black women are statistically no different from the “average” Add Health respondent, and far less attractive than white, Asian, and Native American women.”

Kanazawa, a regular contributor to Psychology Today, says he arrived at this theory, based on data in which black women were constantly rated as “less attractive” compared to women from other races. However, he says, “even though black women are objectively less physically attractive than other women, black women (and men) subjectively consider themselves to be far more physically attractive than others.”

After dismissing black women’s “much heavier body mass” or disparities in intelligence, he comes to one conclusion for his findings:

The only thing I can think of that might potentially explain the lower average level of physical attractiveness among black women is testosterone. Africans on average have higher levels of testosterone than other races, and testosterone, being an androgen (male hormone), affects the physical attractiveness of men and women differently. Men with higher levels of testosterone have more masculine features and are therefore more physically attractive. In contrast, women with higher levels of testosterone also have more masculine features and are therefore less physically attractive. The race differences in the level of testosterone can therefore potentially explain why black women are less physically attractive than women of other races, while (net of intelligence) black men are more physically attractive than men of other races.

The article was pulled from Psychology Today’s website without explanation Monday afternoon. Latoya is putting together a roundtable discussion on the article, which we’ll post here soon, but in the meantime, thanks to our readers who mailed us a tip on it. Here’s a collection of views from around the blogosphere:

“The only thing I can think of”? Really? The blog’s presentation of the allegedly scientific findings had a decidedly informal tone, especially given the highly contentious conclusions. It struck us as so outrageous that we almost thought it was a hoax of some sort, and we double-checked the URL to make sure it didn’t include “The Onion.”
- Jenée Desmond-Harris, The Root

As I hold back my temper thinking as a woman, I already have cultural pressures to be something other than what I am in terms of a beauty standard, but I cannot believe this complete failure of an attempt to scientfically prove I’m less attractive than a white woman (assuming the same general characteristics).

What is absurd about the premise is what is he basing it on? “Black” women run the gamut of able to pass for white, to dark-skinned afro-centric features. We have dead straight blonde hair to ultra-nappy fros. Who participated and what did they look like? Who knows, that information isn’t there.

Any “scientific analysis” is fool’s gold without any context to historical sociological or ethnographic impact on majority and minority populations in regards to notions of physical attractiveness. Yet Kanazawa is trying so hard to make it work that you get the feeling that he gave himself a migraine.
- Pam Spaulding, Pam’s House Blend

Shame on Psychology Today for being a willing instrument to perpetuate racism. But I can’t be surprised, can I? It seems like every other week we hear NFL players saying “they don’t like black girls,” (c)rap songs calling us hoes and b*tches, and news of how some regions of Africa rape 48 black women per hour. Per. Hour. And with no one coming to our defense, it’s just implied that we’re denfense-less. This kind of soul-killing propaganda has got to stop, but I have a feeling it’s going to have to be black women making a concerted effort to work together and say “Enough is enough.”
- Christelyn Kazarin, Madame Noire

Perhaps at another point in my life, I would laugh this off as the musings of someone too stupid to realize how racist he is. But we live in an environment where the President of the United States is repeatedly forced to produce his birth certificate to prove that he was born in this country and where one of the leading candidates on the Republican side repeatedly characterizes the President’s attitude as “Kenyan anti-colonialist” and produces dog whistles like “food stamp president looking to make the entire country like Detroit”. This is not an isolated event by an insulated individual. This is a nasty undercurrent that simmers below the surface all the time and that has been bubbling up more and more frequently. And after being tangentially part of some rather heated online discussions about race and privilege recently, I don’t know that we can ever truly work towards a more progressive future without acknowledging and dealing with this.
- Nicole Belle, Crooks And Liars

Idiot.

This is a long-standing problem with evolutionary psychology proponents, despite the field’s potential use in principle: there’s a desire to reduce any and all perceptions and societal norms as being the result of evolutionary selective pressures. Why? Because if it’s the result of biology—not sociological trends—then we have an excuse to cling to ignorant perceptions, stereotypes, and norms. Kanazawa has a long track record of pushing studies and narratives such as this (this isn’t his first time on the issue of race) and he is unfortunately not unique. All of these studies have one thing in common: they have no methodological basis to link some aspect or behavior being measured with a history of evolutionary selective pressures.

Black women are beautiful.

Black. Women. Are. Beautiful.

F-ck this asshole. Contact Psychology Today to express your disapproval. I think this needs to go beyond taking his article down.
- The Erratic Synapse, The Daily Kos

The May 2011 cover girl for ESSENCE magazine this month is none other than one Wendy J. Williams, the woman the Black gossip blogs love to hate and misgender.

Like I’ve said in previous posts on this subject, some of you Black folks need to buy a vowel, pick up a science book and get a clue that transpeople exist in all colors and sizes and aren’t going anywhere.

Note for the ignorantly clueless:  Some of my transsisters are petite size 8 pump wearing fashion divas, so don’t get it twisted..

We are all blends of genetic material and characteristics from mommy and daddy.   A little less testosterone in the womb and some of you so called ‘men‘ attacking Wendy would be rocking her dresses and pumps.

You also need to get a clue that it’s not cool to do what whiteness has done to the images of Black women for centuries and participate in the denigrating of the mothers of humanity. It’s even more repugnant to me as a proud African descended transwomen to see Black people (or alleged online Black people) deliberately misgendering Black women they don’t like.

But some of you are too stupid or insecure about your own gender identity and sexual orientation issues to get that point.

Cue transphobic BS from Bossip in 5…4…3…2…1…

Y’all can hate on Wendy and hurl transphobic slurs at her all you want, she’s got more money in her bank account than you pathetic losers hiding behind your computer terminals misgendering her.

Photo Credit: TransGriot

By Arturo R. García

The phrase I used above is Spanish for “(An)Epic Fail(ure).” And that’s exactly what Casa De Mi Padre promises to be. Because if there’s anything the world did not need, it’s a film in the tradition of Nacho Libre.

As with Jack Black’s forgettable, nigh-execrable film, one of the film’s “hooks” is that it features Will Ferrell speaking Spanish. Here he’s playing a ranch hand named Armando, who falls for his brother’s fiancee while landing into trouble with a local drug kingpin.

HE’S SPEAKING SPANISH, YOU GUYS, AND HE’S WHITE! ISN’T THAT F%#!$^ING AMAZEBALLS?

But wait, there’s a twist! Since the film is set in Mexico, just about everybody speaks Spanish. So – wait, this is totally high-concept ish -  instead of adopting a ridiculous accent, Ferrell’s Spanish actually isn’t bad! IT’S LIKE HE TOOK CLASSES OR SOMETHING!

A subtitled trailer, for those of you with strong stomachs, is under the cut.

The other gimmick behind Casa is that it’s allegedly done in the style of Mexican soap operas. From the looks of this trailer, this is bullshit.

Oh, sure, the dialogue is a little too formal, and there’s overblown close-ups and whatnot. But one could say the same about American soaps. If this movie were really going to be done telenovela-style, we’d be getting the story from the point of view of the fiancee, Sonia (Genesis Rodríguez). It’s possible that both Ferrell and a Mexican showrunner would define Sonia as a small-town girl living in a lonely world torn between loving Ferrell’s character and his more successful brother Raúl (Diego Luna).

But on a proper Mexican soap, the story would hinge on her choices, not the mens’. So, not only is Ferrell using whiteface as a selling point for his movie, he’s also seemingly ignoring one of the key aspects of the genre he’s reportedly parodying. If anything, this is Ferrell taking a stab at making a “so bad it’s good” Robert Rodríguez flick – without half of Rodríguez’s usual wit, from the looks of it.

But perhaps the saddest aspect of the film to deal with is the involvement of not only Luna, but Gael García Bernal. I can’t blame them or Rodríguez for wanting to make a go at films made for the multiplex crowd. And each of them should be able to lift some of the material. But … really, this had to be their attempt at a crossover vehicle? For their sake, I hope it works, and that they can find better parts because of it. But for the first time in a long while, they won’t get a dime from me in support.

Hat tip to reproductive-rights activist Shelby Knox for this:  today the anti-choice group Life Always, the group behind the billboard that was taken down in New York City due to the melding of online and offline activism, reveals its latest billboard in a press conference in Chicago.

According to Life Always’ press release, about 30 of these outdoor ads will be place around Chicago’s South Side, where President Obama served as a community organizer and where First Lady Obama grew up.  So, since using the image of a darling little Black girl stirred up a fiasco instead collective guilt over not wanting to carry a fetus to term,  the group decides to go for double-barrel sentimentality with the placement of this message: the soft spot that some Chicagoans have for their  hometown heroes and connecting the termination of a pregnancy to the nationalist trigger-word of “genocide.”

To further push the racial-guilt sappiness, Life Always Board Member Reverend Derek McCoy, one of the attendees at today’s press conference said, “Our future leaders are being aborted at an alarming rate. These are babies who could grow to be the future Presidents of the United States, or the next Oprah Winfrey, Denzel Washington or Maya Angelou.”

::Direct laser side-eye::

What would be great is if any or all of these celebrities–especially the POTUS and the FLOTUS–publicly told the anti-choice group to get their names out of the group’s mouth because they’re not feeling the anti-choice  message.

According to Huffington Post Chicago, other leaders joining Rev. McCoy include “former 2nd Congressional district GOP candidate Rev. Isaac Hayes, Rev. Ceasar LeFlore, [sic] and Pastor Stephen Broden, an anti-choice activist who ran for office as a Republican in Texas last year.” The press conference for the first billboard, to be hung in an empty lot at 5812 S. State Street, Chicago, will be held at 11AM.

As Andrea noted in Monday’s links, there’s a whole lot of ridiculousness going around as the world watches the events in Japan unfold. But there’s also been a couple of positive notes among the weirdness.

The Good

The #prayforjapan hashtag, which spread over Twitter, has spawned its’ own collection of tweets from the scene, well-wishes, and first-person accounts, including this:

“I received an email from my Korean friend: “The only country to have experienced nuclear attacks. The country that lost the WWII. The country that suffers from typhoons every year and the earthquakes. However, isn’t Japan the country that always stood up and overcame such difficulties? Gambare. Gambare.” FYI, I am crying right now.”

Also, CouchSurfing.org has created a group specifically for members who can either use temporary housing during the crisis, or make their own homes available for those displaced. This note has been added to Monday’s Open Thread on fundraising efforts, which we encourage you to visit for donation options, or if you know of any charity efforts going on in your area.

The Bad
Call it a collision of tension and media “accessibility”: Even as she tried to report on the opening earthquake and tsunami early Friday morning, CNN anchor Rosemary Church found herself becoming the story after criticism surfaced online accusing her of making light of the situation. Here’s some Mediaite video of Church’s live report:

Based on that, said Chris Taylor at Mashable, at least one infamous statement made during the telecast was attributed to Church by mistake:

The anchor in question, Rosemary Church of CNN’s International Center in Atlanta, did not make any “Godzilla jokes.” One of her guests, an American eyewitness named Matt Alt, describing the video footage, said “these waves of debris, it is almost like a monster movie.”

Tweets at around this time slammed Alt, misidentified as a CNN reporter or anchor, for making a “Godzilla-esque” reference. Later retweets removed the “-esque.”

Church’s words could not be accurately described as “joking”. Her tone, clearly irksome to many viewers, is another question. An anchor with some serious news chops — she covered 9/11 and the fall of Slobodan Milosevic, among other major events — Church also has a bubbly, Australian-accented voice. Some of her statements around 2:15am ET, according to the Twitter stream, may have sounded inappropriately jovial. That’s when the earliest cluster of results for “CNN laughing” appear:

Far less ambiguous was CNBC’s Larry Kudlow’s error. In (apparently) trying to explain to viewers that the stock market had not been affected too negatively by what had happened, Kudlow said, “The human toll here looks to be much worse than the economic toll and we can be grateful for that.” Kudlow subsequently apologized – via Twitter, of course, and not on the air.

The Bizarre

When disaster hits, it doesn’t take too long before people start victim-blaming “in the name of God.” And sure enough, you had your Glenn Becks of the world grasping at thorned straws. But as Phillip at YOMYOMF noted, in this case it’s also hitting closer to home:

Senior pastor David Yonggi Cho of South Korea’s Yoido Full Gospel Church (the largest church in the whole world for those keeping score) told an online newspaper that the quake may have been punishment for the Japanese people’s refusal to accept Christ: “Japan sees a lot of earthquakes, and I think it is regrettable that there has been such an enormous loss of property and life due to the earthquake. Because the Japanese people shun God in terms of their faith and follow idol worship, atheism, and materialism, it makes me wonder if this was not God’s warning to them…I hope that this catastrophe can be turned into a blessing and they take this opportunity to return to the Lord. We in Korea look at Japan and think that at this juncture, more than a physical earthquake, it is in need of a holy spiritual earthquake.”

Even Shintaro Ishihara, the governor of Tokyo, got into the act yesterday when he told reporters that the earthquake and tsunami were divine punishment (tenbatsu) for the Japanese people’s sinful lifestyle.

Even the faux-religious tried to get in on the act, like “tamtampamela,” the YouTube user who sought – and got – plenty of attention with a rant of her own, which included this breathless declaration:

On Wednesday at the start of Lent, believers all over the world came together and we have been praying specifically for God to open the eyes of Atheists all over the world, literally in every corner in every direction; any place that there is an Atheist we’ve been praying for God to open their eyes and to see that there really is a God that he does exist and that he loves them and that he is the God of the Bible – that the Bible is true.

And just a few days, not even a few days later, God shook the country of Japan. He literally grabbed the country by the shoulders and said “Hey look, I’m here.”

Oh it’s just so amazing to see how God can just answer prayers like this and I am just so overjoyed and so encouraged for the rest of this Lentle season, I am going to be praying even harder than I have ever before.

On Monday night, though, she … well, she didn’t exactly show remorse. She released a brief, rambling video saying she had been “trolling for a year,” which apparently meant the whole thing was supposed to be a joke, before closing her account.

And speaking of bad jokes:

Keep it classy, gentlemen.

Another week, another politically damaging phone con. This time, National Public Radio was the mark, and it got hit hard.

NPR CEO and President Vivian Schiller was forced to resign Wednesday after a fellow executive, Ron Schiller (no relation) was caught on tape describing the Tea Party as not just “Islamaphobic, but really xenophobic. I mean basically they are, they believe in sort of white, middle-America gun-toting. I mean, it’s scary. They’re seriously racist, racist people.”

Now, what could ever have given Mr. Schiller that impression?

Photos and video are under the cut. Warning: photos contain racist language/imagery.

At the time, Ron Schiller, NPR’s senior vice-president for fundraising, was speaking to two members of a group called the Muslim Action Education Center. According to an NPR statement released later in the day, the two men insisted on giving him a check for $5 million, which he did not accept. In fact, he was speaking with two members of the ironically-named Project Veritas, led by James O’Keefe – the same man behind the 2009 ACORN hit-job.

And just like in the ACORN case, the video that went online yesterday was edited to show Schiller putting his foot in his mouth – at least from a strategic standpoint.

At various points in the video, Schiller is captured making statements like:

• “Well frankly, it is clear that we would be better off in the long-run without federal funding. The challenge right now is that if we lost it all together we would have a lot of stations go dark.”
• “I think what we all believe is that if we don’t have Muslim voices in our schools, 0n the air, it’s the same thing we faced as a nation when we didn’t have female voices.”
• “It feels to me as though there is a real anti-intellectual move on the part of a significant part of the Republican Party.”

To be sure, Ron Schiller should have been disciplined for allowing himself to get pranked so thoroughly – and for not checking his sources; a spokesperson for Public Broadcasting told MSNBC one of its’ own executives had also been contacted by Veritas/MAEC, but broke off talks when PBS couldn’t verify the group’s story. So at the very least, he should have known better than to “take his NPR hat off” here, even before his two new buddies started in with the “Our founders were part of the Muslim Brotherhood in America” and “Zionist” talk.

But sacking Valerie Schiller smacks of overcompensation, both for this incident and for the firing of Juan Williams last year. And as least one expert told the Christian Science Monitor, it might not stave off attacks and calls to pull its’ funding anyway.

“I don’t think any of this helps the survival, let alone the quality existence, of public broadcasting in the United States,” said Stephen Ward, the director of the Center for Journalism Ethics at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. “You can argue that these comments … don’t reflect the grander importance of public broadcasting, but in a world of agenda-setting journalism, these are perfect examples for people who dislike or oppose public broadcasting to use for political purposes.”

“Obamanomics” image courtesy of Progress Now Colorado