“When whites fantasize about becoming other races, it’s only fun if they can blithely ignore the fundamental experience of being an oppressed racial group. Which is that you are oppressed, and nobody will let you be a leader of anything.

It feels good to know that Analee Newitz, who I loved to read as a teenager, really is effing awesome.

# When Will White People Stop Making Movies Like “Avatar”?

(via an article in today’s Times about the many critical responses to the movie.)

Fascinating: ‘Negro’ will make an appearance on the 2010 census form because there were large numbers of write-ins for the term in 2000, predominately among older Blacks.

Fascinating: ‘Negro’ will make an appearance on the 2010 census form because there were large numbers of write-ins for the term in 2000, predominately among older Blacks.

[via Rosie]

I asked last month, “can the times really be changing, even if only a bit?” Cornel West, it should come as no surprise, has a mellifluous word on the subject, and he offered it to Stephen Colbert last week:

Thank God we’ve got white brothers and sisters who are a little bit less racist than they were in the past – that’s a beautiful thing. But it doesn’t mean that just because you’ve got a black face in a high place, racism has been eliminated. It just means we’ve made some progress – thats a beautiful thing.

Like Whac-a-Mole, I think I never feel satisfied with the dismantling of white supremacy because there’s always some other manifestation of it I hadn’t happened to notice before. I’ve been grappling with the complementary questions “What just happened?” and “Now what?” for a year come Wednesday morning. Graduate school hasn’t afforded much time to puzzle out an answer, and I’m no further along than I was on that glorious and hopeful morning after.

Say what you will about Brother Cornel, but he is a sort of cultural seer and must have a point here. All I meant to say was: this interview is hi-larious, much better than his first appearance last year. Check it out.

“To me this film would be as awful and haunting as cell phone videos of real death, and seeing violence of this kind, even if it’s passed off as art, is a kind of voyeurism I just don’t want to participate in. Violence in communities of color must be discussed, but it will never be entertainment.

Julianne Hing, on the new film ‘Precious,’ over at ColorLines.

Pastor Molly preached on this last year, acknowledging that although she consumes it and although media violence may not beget real violence, there is a “soul-shaking disconnect” between the “real violence we condemn and the fake violence we consume.” Violence in our lives is muffled, “by distance and by euphemisms,” and I wonder if ‘Precious,’ and its mass marketing isn’t more of the same.

How do we walk in the way? Molly didn’t have any answers, but she thinks about this topic a lot and I recommend her sermon to you.

Halloween is always an occasion to perpetrate some racist shit, and this year American Apparel seems to be quick out of the gates with some fabulous costume ideas. For a company known for its misogyny, I still have to say I’m a bit aghast. Really the brown girl as the “warrioress” for a made-up tribe? Black devils? Does this not raise any red flags anywhere between dressing, shooting, editing, and posting? No one? Anyone? Didn’t think so. I won’t even get into the interracial “hip-hop couple,” whose costumes so accurately send up a community that shops at American Apparel.

Halloween is always an occasion to perpetrate some racist shit, and this year American Apparel seems to be quick out of the gates with some fabulous costume ideas. For a company known for its misogyny, I still have to say I’m a bit aghast. Really the brown girl as the “warrioress” for a made-up tribe? Black devils? Does this not raise any red flags anywhere between dressing, shooting, editing, and posting? No one? Anyone?

Didn’t think so. I won’t even get into the interracial “hip-hop couple,” whose costumes so accurately send up a community that shops at American Apparel.

“In the annals of American slavery, this painful story would be utterly unremarkable, save for one reason: This union, consummated some two years before the Civil War, represents the origins of a family line that would extend from rural Georgia, to Birmingham, Ala., to Chicago and, finally, to the White House.

Sends shivers up my spine to read that line. Coincidentally, I re-listened to Zadie Smith’s extraordinary lecture at the NYPL from the last winter – both pieces call me to reassess, somehow, my understanding of how race is constructed in America. Can the times really be changing, even if only a bit?

# In First Lady’s Roots, a Complex Path From Slavery - NYTimes.com
# Speaking in Tongues – Zadie Smith live from the NYPL

Just so we're clear

Asked of me on facebook:

I apologize if I am misunderstanding. But you are calling me a racist because I was born white? And you are implying that I perpetuate racism because I am living my life as a white woman?

Yes, and yes.

(I’m back.)

“Let me tell you just a little something about the American Indian in our land. We have provided millions of acres of land for what are called preservations—or reservations, I should say. They, from the beginning, announced that they wanted to maintain their way of life, as they had always lived there in the desert and the plains and so forth… And we’ve done everything we can to meet their demands as to how they want to live. Maybe we made a mistake. Maybe we should not have humored them in that wanting to stay in that kind of primitive lifestyle. Maybe we should have said, no, come join us; be citizens along with the rest of us. As I say, many have; many have been very successful.
Ronald Reagan on “humoring” Native peoples, at Moscow State University in 1988.
“[Kimberly Smith] argues that racial oppression, slavery, sharecropping and segregation altered the meaning of the American landscape for black people. She argues that these injustices alienate black Americans from the land in critical and enduring ways. Therefore, when black Americans reclaim their interest in land, nature, and the environment, they do so in ways that are uniquely concerned with equity and distributive justice.

Being Black on Earth Day, from RaceWire

By the by, Melissa Harris Lacewell is my ultimate academic/theoretical crush (I’ve linked her before).