Friday, February 28, 2014
Exclusive: Latinos Are Punch Line at Joe Arpaio Roast | Hatewatch
Arizona State Rep. John Kavanagh, a Republican from the Scottsdale area, had conservatives chortling with one joke after another about racial profiling, “rounding up Hispanics” and much more. For good measure, he mocked the controversy around SB 1062, the so-called religious freedom bill, taking a shot at Muslims in the process. And he mocked the federal monitor appointed to oversee Sheriff Arpaio’s operations after a judge determined that his department engaged in racial profiling and illegal detentions of Latinos.
It’s not uncommon for roasters to push boundaries. People joke about things that might otherwise be off-limits – sex, old age and a person’s personality and appearance. This was different.
Kavanagh, who made headlines last year for trying to criminalize bathroom use by transgender people, used Latinos as a punch line in one racist joke after another, and the crowd lapped it up. The jokes and laughter, caught in an unguarded moment, reveal why conservatives have such a difficult time connecting with Latinos – there is a fundamental lack of respec
Exclusive: Latinos Are Punch Line at Joe Arpaio Roast | Hatewatch
Thursday, February 27, 2014
Wednesday, February 26, 2014
Monday, February 24, 2014
Sunday, February 23, 2014
Audiobooks and the Return of Storytelling - NYTimes.com
"We tend to regard reading with our eyes as more serious, more highbrow, than hearing a book read out loud. Listening to a written text harkens back to childhood, when we couldn’t read it ourselves, or a time when our parents left off reading the chapter out loud in the middle, a nudge that we’d use our school-taught skills to finish it off by ourselves.
The great linguist Ferdinand de Saussure thought we treated writing as more important than speaking because writing is visual. Speech is ephemeral — you hear a word, and then it is gone. The word written down remains, and so we attach more significance to it. Saussure wrote that when we imagined text as more important than speech, it was as if we thought we would learn more about someone from his photograph than from his face.
But so it is. The ability to read has always been invested with more importance than mere speech. When only a small priestly elite could read, books were sacred mysteries. When more people could read, literacy became a means to move forward in the world. These days, the ability to read is a prerequisite for full participation in the social order.
But for most of human history literature has been spoken out loud. The Iliad and the Odyssey were sung. We think that the Homeric singers of those tales mastered the prodigious mnemonic task presented by those thousands upon thousands of lines of text through an intricate combination of common phrases — rosy-fingered dawn, the wine-dark sea — and nested plots that could be expanded or shortened as the occasion demanded..."
Did White Male Insecurity Kill Jordan Davis? - The Root
For angry white men like Dunn, Jordan Davis’ “gangsta rap” music and Trayvon Martin’s “hoodie” symbolize a larger culture war in which putatively wholesome American culture is under siege by blackness. “Stand your ground” laws, Dunn believes, give Americans the right to defend themselves against “the denigration of women” and “the violence and lifestyle that the ‘gangsta rap’ music and the ‘thug life’ ” adopted by “an entire generation” of “young black men.”
Awaiting trial, Dunn wrote several letters to his family and friends complaining about how “jail is full of blacks and they all act like thugs.” In a letter to his daughter, he offered the following solution to the problem of black thuggery: “This may sound a bit radical but if more people would arm themselves and kill these f--king idiots when they’re threatening you, eventually they may take the hint and change their behavior.”
Threatened by growing black economic and political power in the early 20th century, white men calling themselves the Ku Klux Klan used this same portrayal of black men as violent, sexual predators to justify racial terrorism. It’s estimated that from 1880 to 1930, more than2,400 African Americans were lynched, often for insulting white men or forgetting “their place.” For contemporary angry white men, standing up to “gangsta rap” and “thugs” is akin to night-riding on black men, as portrayed in D.W. Griffith’s classic 1915 film The Birth of a Nation.
Although economic downturns disproportionately affect black unemployment and home ownership, working-class and college-educated whites are now feeling the sting of restricted opportunity. In his book Angry White Men, sociologist Michael Kimmel describes how these men often blame the trifecta of feminism, affirmative action and immigration for their woes.
The relative devaluing of white privilege has been interpreted as racial oppression of whites and “reverse discrimination.” Opinion polls (pdf) suggest that half of all white Americans now see themselves as the targets of racism, and that number pushes past 60 percent among self-identified Republicans and among those who watch Fox News.
Did White Male Insecurity Kill Jordan Davis? - The Root
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