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In: Academented, Race and Racism, Rhetoric and Communication
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Sixty years ago the Supreme Court handed down the Brown vs. Board of Education decision. Until around 2005 or so, give or take a year, the East Baton Rouge Parish school system operated under a federal desegregation order, one of the longest running orders in the country. Today, Baton Rouge Community College continues to receive entering freshmen educated under that order. Due to the cult of self esteem, the best of these students have been told throughout their education that they can succeed, that they are smart, that they have a future. In college classrooms over time, these students demonstrate facility with logic, organization, and critical thinking. Even though theyRead More →

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At Walgreens pharmacy today a gentleman, late 60s, was called to pick up his prescription. The pharmacy tech was Asian, presumably Vietnamese, presumably named Nguyen, but I didn’t look at his name tag to be certain. When I experience moments like the one, I am consumed with the urge to apologize for my race, which makes me equally stupid. The guy behind the counter was probably just bewildered more than anything. Eventually, though, I couldn’t help but laugh – loud and hard – because the conversation became ludicrous. First, the man asked why “you people” are all named “Nguyen.” The tech didn’t answer. Then, theRead More →

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Scandal is a guilty pleasure with its bodice-ripping, twisty-turny Shonda Rhimes storyline. Lauded in many circles as a positive image, Olivia Pope is a familiar tragic trope clad in a power suit. All the blogs say that audiences, particularly women of color, have a love/hate relationship with Olivia Pope, the main character of Scandal, because she’s a two-steps-forward, two-steps-back kinda girl. Olivia Pope is a “fixer” with a heart of gold. She worked on the President’s campaign, helping him earn office. The two fall in epic-level love, and have an ongoing interracial, extramarital affair, enacted physically and sustained emotionally, even when the physical component ceases.Read More →

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In: Politics, Race and Racism
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The biggest threat from ObamaCare, according to the Humanix Books’ ObamaCare Survival Guide, is the influx of the mass uninsured populace into the healthcare system.  The logic behind this argument boggles the mind. The short version: there aren’t enough doctors to handle the sudden mass increase in patients and the existing pool of doctors will all quit in frustration. Consequently, everyone’s health care will suffer. The odds of anyone going to medical school to replace this pool are low and no one will be trained in time to treat all these new patients or fill in the gap. How is it that this influx ofRead More →

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In: Pop Culture, Race and Racism
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An aliens and monsters meme floated around Facebook this morning with this annoying cast of images. The meme depicts aliens and monsters in pop culture transforming from ugly and monstrous to attractive and desirous. It asks WTF happened? Here’s my first FB post: “People would rather embrace aliens from outer space than illegal aliens.” My later post: “It’s actually an old pattern from way back when. People who study pop culture say that we had an invasion of alien bug movies when we were afraid the aliens (in this case, Japanese during WW II and Koreans afterward). We’ve been invaded by illegal aliens time andRead More →

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In: Academented, Politics, Race and Racism
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In a picture, when a child touches a black president’s hair, representational politics changes the world. In the 90s when academics and television pundits were busily engaged in the culture wars, I believed mastering the politics of representation was revolutionary. Surely, transformative images would en/gender transformative politics, and that social change could come from studying and politicizing media, popular culture, language, and discourse. There had to be some momentous connection between representation in images and representative democracy. In those days, young Turks in English departments fought old white guys about the canon, which entailed fierce battles over ethnic/area studies, women’s studies, and the relative meritsRead More →

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In Django Unchained, the “N-Word” occurs 109 times. Occurs? Is used? (Look at how awkward that statement is; it’s an active sentence about a word spoken, but without a speaker doing the action.) I twitch to imagine Tarantino saying the word himself. It just sounds wrong. It sounds like some clumsy white dude trying to sound cool while he hangs with his homies. When Samuel L. Jackson says it, it’s quite cool and melodious. As a director, Tarantino can say the “N-word” one hundred and nine times with whatever accent, register, or inflection he desires. With gusto, in fact. Fortunately, at least for my auditoryRead More →

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In: Politics, Race and Racism
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ColorOfChange.org is sponsoring a successful boycott of Fox New’s Glenn Beck. I read AOL’s “Politics Daily” blog on occasion. The audience is heavily conservative, so the comments are vitriolic, vituperative, and vigorous (I needed another v-word for balance). They make me point-laugh. Yesterday, Carl Cannon wrote some stupid BS about the boycott, claiming that it’s censorship and not good citizenship. Well, after reading pages of comments, I got totally frustrated and I actually posted a comment. I suppose it’s just a means of blowing off steam. It’s buried 5,000 comments in, so I doubt a soul will read it. But it was fun and itRead More →

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The Southern Christian Leadership Conference is internally conflicted over gay rights and Proposition 8 according to the Empowering Spirits Foundation. Apparently the national SCLC leadership threatened to remove the Los Angeles chapter’s president (Rev. Eric P. Lee) because of his outspoken support of gay marriage. My first response was of course, SCLC…Southern…Christian. What should we expect? But it’s disheartening nonetheless. The tension between “blacks and gays” (a linguistic construction that perpetuates the invisibility of gay blacks, not to mention the complete absence of the L, B, and T part of GLBT or of any other non-white queer in this struggle) has been part of theRead More →