Tagged as: culture
distrusting the police…
When white Americans are in trouble, they rarely hesitate to call the police. That’s because most of them trust the police. They rarely realize the significance during encounters with the police of their own protective “white” skin.
Many white folks also have trouble understanding the deep distrust of the police in other racialized communities. That’s because they fail to realize how quick many police officers are to harass non-white people, and how much less they tend to value non-white lives.
White Americans should listen, with sincerity and respect, to the reported experiences of others with the entrenched racist attitudes among the police, and the rampant abuse such attitudes inspire. They should also listen to the corrosive effects on non-white communities of the relative impunity with which police repeatedly harass, and murder, non-white people.
In the following short film, Stacey Muhammad’s “I AM SEAN BELL, black boys speak,” black Americans effectively explain their reasoned fear, distrust, and dismay regarding the police. I think that for starters, this film is perfect discussion material for all American classrooms. And any other gatherings that include white eyes and ears.
I AM SEAN BELL, black boys speak from Stacey Muhammad on Vimeo.
read further: Failing to understand when non-white people distrust the police
seen at sociological images
support for gays is largely a superficial thing
as i’ve been saying for months.
take this, for example:
Ever since Barack Obama was obliged to distance himself from Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr. (and all the right-wing hyperventilating that entailed), our President has been lacking a home church. To fill that vacuum Obama has embraced five pastors, presumably to dispense spiritual wisdom and not, one would hope, stick their evangelical noses into politics. Four of those pastors blindly follow fundie “values,” while the fifth might be described as only mildly progressive since he loudly disassociates himself from “left-leaning” churches.
who are these five?
interesting shows…
from abc’s “what would you do”...
you see a group of white teens vandalizing a car, what would you do? what if the teens were black?
either andrew sullivan is an idiot, or a serious provocateur…
i have as yet to make up my mind. while there have been times that i was in agreement with him, the saying “even a broken clock is right twice a day” always comes to mind.
and now there’s this:
Journalist Charles Platt follows Barbara Ehrenreich’s lead and tries working at Wal-Mart:
Several of my co-workers had relocated from other areas, where they had worked at other Wal-Marts. They wanted more of the same. Everyone agreed that Wal-Mart was preferable to the local Target, where the hourly pay was lower and workers were said to be treated with less respect (an opinion which I was unable to verify). Most of all, my coworkers wanted to avoid those “mom-and-pop” stores beloved by social commentators where, I was told, employees had to deal with quixotic management policies, while lacking the opportunities for promotion that exist in a large corporation.
Platt says that such stories are not easy to place in magazines:
I considered writing about my brief experience, but a book defending a company that has been demonized does not have a large potential audience, and the writer tends to be dismissed as either hopelessly naive or bribed by corporate America.
Similar factors result in someone such as Adam Shepard remaining relatively obscure.If you haven’t heard of Adam Shepard, this illustrates my point. His remarkable book Scratch Beginnings, now being promoted through http://www.scratchbeginnings.com, describes how he went through an experience far more gruelling than my brief flirtation with low-paying work. He placed himself in a homeless shelter with $25 in his pocket, found a job as a day laborer, then worked for a moving company, and after 10 months had a pickup truck, an apartment, and $2,500 in savings. His conclusion: People can still make it in the United States if they are willing to live carefully on a budget and work hard.
Somehow that kind of news is never as popular as denunciations of the free market written by professional handwringers such as Barbara Ehrenreich.
what exactly is the point here? that anecdotal evidence by “just a guy” (charles platt happens to be a senior writer with wired magazine) somehow outweighs the ample evidence provided by walmart workers in labor dispute after labor dispute?
does platt seriously think that a book “defending a company that has been demonized” wouldn’t be prominently displayed at every walmart in the country and thus have a HUGE potential audience?
the example of adam shepard is even worse. do these people seriously think it’s JUST THE SAME to go and pretend you’re homeless as it is to actually BE homeless, with nothing to fall back on? the meme is getting really old and really tired: “if poor people would just work harder, they wouldn’t be poor”. statistics have shown time and again that there is very little class mobility. by and large, people are stuck in the circumstances in which they were birthed. while they may improve conditions to some extent, they will not leave that class.
to even come close to mimicking reality, they’d need to travel back in time, assure that generations of their family have all lived with lower class incomes, in circumstances in which they had no hope of better education or better income opportunities, THEN be birthed, live through it themselves and THEN try to see what it’s like to work at walmart or to be homeless. then…
come back and talk to me when you’re working for a supervisor who throws a full trashcan into the middle of the floor, because the night staff forgot to leave it on the aisle to be emptied and he tells you to go pick it up.
come back and talk to me when your supervisor asks you daily to stay past your scheduled time, but when it comes time to turn in timesheets, tells you he can’t pay you over your 36 scheduled hours.
come back and talk to me when your company locks you into the building at 7am for inventory and refuses to allow you to leave until inventory is completed. god forbid you’ve forgotten to bring your lunch.
come back and talk to me when you ask for time off for a funeral, because your grandmother has just passed away, and your supervisor tells you that you can’t be gone more than 2 hours for it.
come back and talk to me when your employer fires all of your stock people and tells a department of older women that they must lift the boxes themselves and stock their shelves.
come back and talk to me when YOU PUT UP WITH THIS SHIT, because you need the fucking job and you don’t have the skills or education to find something better.
nevermind that the conditions at other similar employers aren’t any better - they’re just new and different. the employers KNOW they can treat you like shit, because YOU HAVE NOWHERE TO GO. they laugh and tell you, “if you don’t like it, leave”.
i’ve seen entirely too many people treated like dirt, myself included, who were working HARD for their pay and received nothing but derision, humiliation, and abuse from their employers. nevermind the fuckhead customers who come in and expect you to treat them like they’re queen sheba, acting as if their world will just END if they don’t get the perfect powder blue satin sheets RIGHT NOW. while in your head, you’re running through the list of bills that are due: rent. electricity. phone. doctor bill. it’s a litany that you repeat every single day of every single month, wondering which you can pay and which ones you can let slide, so that you have enough money for groceries.
color this anecdotal if you will; however… statistics back me up as do labor complaint after labor complaint against companies like walmart.
rick perry, dan patrick, and frank corte: pls stay outta my vagina, kthx.
from texas politics:
Gov. Rick Perry told lawmakers that he supports legislation by Sen. Dan Patrick, R-Houston, and Rep. Frank Corte, R-San Antonio, requiring “those wanting to terminate a pregancy to review their ultrasound before proceeding.”
“As we consider the growing threats to our nation’s unborn, I believe it’s time to add another layer of protection for the most vulnerable Texans,” he said.
as usual, they worry more about the unborn than they do the birthed. if they actually cared about *people*, they’d implement a plan that made sense:
1) raise awareness through more education (planned pregnancies are best),
2) support birth control (in ALL of it’s forms, abstinence AND other means - birth control should be affordable, accessible, and available to all),
3) social networks to assist when there has been an unnplanned pregnancy, whether the woman chooses abortion, adoption, or to keep the baby, and
4) above all, compassion and understanding (cuz really… calling someone the child of satan because they don’t agree that abortion is murder is NOT getting your message heard nor is telling someone to go get raped so they understand why abortion is acceptable). (see: now for something less controversial: abortion)
THAT is the number one way to cut the number of abortions.
instead, texas has led the nation in abstinence education while our teens were more apt to have sex, not use condoms, and led the nation in teen pregnancies. (see: texas leads the nation in losing)
never forget, this is a calculated maneuver by those on the right to chip away at roe v wade. we’ve seen it time and time again. from rewriting the definition of conception to the pill kills campaign. (see: menstruation… or god’s dirty little abortion secret )
it’s easy, folks. unless you’re invited, stay out of another woman’s vagina, kthx.
to split yourself in two is just the most radical thing you can do, so girl if that shit ain’t up to you, then you simply are not free, cause from the sunlight on my hair to which eggs i grow to term to the expression that i wear, all i really own is me
i mean to split yourself in two is just the most radical thing you can do. goddess forbid that little adam should grow so jealous of eve and, in the face of the great farce of the nuclear age, Feminism ain’t about equality, it’s about reprieve
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