Posts tagged "words"

“That most black Americans have not been to Africa, do not speak an indigenous African language, and/or cannot trace their ancestral line to a particular tribe or region is beside the point. The “African” in African American is not that grounded; it is does not signify the particularities of Africa. Instead, the “African” in African America refers to a very distinct historical process of acculturation, trauma, and community building.”
Why ‘African American’ IS the Most Accurate Term

Cliché

Seth Godin on clichés:

In printing, a cliché was a printing plate cast from movable type. This is also called a stereotype. When letters were set one at a time, it made sense to cast a phrase used repeatedly as a single slug of metal. “Cliché” came to mean such a ready-made phrase. The French word “cliché” comes from the sound made when the matrix is dropped into molten metal to make a printing plate.

Hear the sound of stereotypes, a 1949 Number Four VanderCook Proof Printing Press in particular. via bobulate

Online shopping in the UK via swissmiss Reminds me of Ravinia’s title field options.

Online shopping in the UK via swissmiss

Reminds me of Ravinia’s title field options.

slaughterhouse90210: “Sometimes you get a flash of what you look like to other people.”  — Zadie Smith, On Beauty

slaughterhouse90210:

“Sometimes you get a flash of what you look like to other people.” 
— Zadie Smith, On Beauty

In The Ghetto

I was watching Look-A-Like a while ago, that TV Guide Channel show that gets left on because nothing else is on. This episode had a black person and the staff completely loses their shit, throwing around the term ‘ghetto’ more than once. The episode I’m talking about (which you can see in full here, it starts going around 2:30) is of a woman who thought she looked like Halle Berry but was decided she looked more like Mary J Blige. Then she was put through the ghetto-izing gauntlet. The makeup artist goes from creepy to annoyingly offensive:

‘As for her style, I don’t know how ghetto fabulous it actually is. But I’m sure today that after hair, makeup and wardrobe that we’ll be able to pull out that inner queen of hip hop’.

You really have to watch it to get the full proper creepiness of this guy. Then the hair stylist uses the term ‘ghetto’ for something that is incomplete looking, or shabby. I can’t imagine he’d call his unfinished hair on a white lady trailer trashy. Even the woman herself starts using the term ‘ghetto’ unnecessarily. Eventually the hair stylist and the creeper get in a short confrontation over the use of the word ‘ghetto’ because they’re clearly using it for different ignorant reasons and need to fight about it. The creeper then explains that ‘ghetto fabulous’ means something that you wouldn’t see in an office but on a street corner and with a designer label it turns into ‘fabulous’. The wardrobe stylist seems a bit confounded and even tries to correct his faux-pas. The outfit of course is fairly normal looking, conservative even, but through his fashion world gaze he sees something on a black person and part of his brain turns off. His neurons fire thoughts down a well worn path already laid out for him that leads to the very limited representations of black people in fashion/society. In addition to that there’s nothing negative street worker stereotype about Mary J Blige or hip hop or any of this is. My threshold for hearing this term must have just been met because whenever I hear it now it’s really aggravating.

“When Troy Erik was first imprisoned in California, his cellmate made the introductions for both of them. “He said to me, ‘Your name is gonna be Baby Romeo, and I’m Big Romeo.’ He was saying he would be my man.” Troy was 12 at the time. A skinny, terrified little kid, he accepted the prisoner’s bargain being imposed on him: protection for sex. He wasn’t protected, though. Soon he was attacked and raped at night by another cellmate, a 16-year-old. He told staff he was suicidal, hoping to be placed in solitary confinement, but they ignored him; the rapes continued.”

— The Crisis of Juvenile Prison Rape: A New Report | NY Review of Books Blog

via sexartandpolitics:pegobry

Illegal Art: What did you leave unsaid this year? Photo link

Illegal Art: What did you leave unsaid this year? Photo link

Haha: inherhips: working at the library encourages me to “get rid” of books that i think are harmful for others to read. sometimes i want to throw bill o’reilly books away, but adults should know better. this is the only book that i have been offended by enough to “get rid” of it. the first one i took home without checking out and recycled each page. the one i found today i dropped in between two shelves that will never see the light of day. i don’t feel bad. i just feel like these books are stupid and harmful. and if you want to get offended, read some of the comments on amazon (click the pic) that people have written.

Haha:

inherhips: working at the library encourages me to “get rid” of books that i think are harmful for others to read. sometimes i want to throw bill o’reilly books away, but adults should know better. this is the only book that i have been offended by enough to “get rid” of it. the first one i took home without checking out and recycled each page. the one i found today i dropped in between two shelves that will never see the light of day.

i don’t feel bad. i just feel like these books are stupid and harmful. and if you want to get offended, read some of the comments on amazon (click the pic) that people have written.

Well I didn’t have to wait for the State of the Union, Obama tells The Washington Post that the health care bill contains the droids we are looking for*:

“Nowhere has there been a bigger gap between the perceptions of compromise and the realities of compromise than in the health-care bill,” Obama said. “Every single criteria for reform I put forward is in this bill. […] I didn’t campaign on the public option.”

Well, this is technically true if your criteria for reform is lower than you previously implied and therefore doesn’t require massive compromise, also if the things you say on your past political trail are exempt. He doesn’t touch the abortion restrictions.

*sometimes a random reference pops in my head when writing that I can’t stop, I don’t even like Star Wars, but I’m keeping it in if only to have a record of how my brain works over time.

Author Chimamanda Adichie gives a TED talk on why letting only one person be the voice of a certain ‘other’ is dangerous. via Racialicious which points out that ‘often this kind of dynamic sets up vicious competition between members of marginalised groups vying for the single position allotted to their entire demographic – and people who should be allies become opponents’.