We’re back with another episode of our podcast series that we’re calling “SERIOUSLY?!”. This week we talked about a post-election “riot” that happened on Ole Miss campus in Oxford, Mississippi. Roughly 400 students gathered in outrage over the election results, and some were overheard shouting racist epithets at both President Obama and black people in general. No physical violence was reported at this event, but it brought a lot of unwelcome attention to a school and a region that has a particularly fraught history when it comes to racism.
We were joined this week by Jasmine and Robert. Video and links below the fold:
- Racist ‘protest’ at Ole Miss
- Candlelight vigil at Ole Miss
- Ole Miss student victim of repeated racist attacks
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Hey guys, for what it’s worth I saw an interesting post on Something Awful from an Ole Miss student. He says the riot was really 5 drunk racists who pulled a fire alarm to force hundreds of students out of the dorms, then burned the Obama campaign sign in front of everyone.
http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?action=showpost&noseen=1&postid=409412002
I’m relieved that it seems there weren’t hundreds of rioters after all, but the incident is still troubling. I hope the junior klansmen are dismissed from school for this.
Are there any plans to setup an RSS feed and release these as audio? I’d like to add it to my podcast aggregator and have them autodownloaded so they’re just ready to listen to when I have the time for a podcast.
At present, unless I’m ready to watch and listen when you post these, I need to make a note and come back later, and even then I tend to just forget all about it.
Releasing the audio from these is something I’m looking into, but not with any great enthusiasm. I will step it up, as people are starting to ask this question more frequently.
I have to admit that it’s a little weird (different / unusual? not sure the right word) for me to see black people talking. Most of the on-line debates and various convention speeches I’ve consumed are decidedly not black. I don’t watch much TV but do like to listen to a range of content. Aside from knowing a commentator or presenter (say a Gwen Eiffel) is black, listening doesn’t have the same sense (visual) impression.
Am I in a bubble or is this reality?
I don’t specifically seek out youtube channels or media on a race specific basis. I’m usually looking based on topic and for general consumption (npr, abc (austrailian), bbc, tpm, young turks, maddow, etc).
You should check out some of the MSNBC weekend shows (Specifically Chris Hayes’ and Melissa Harris-Perry’s). They usually have panels that are at least 50% PoC.
And yes, usually if you have PoC on a show it’s to talk specifically about issues relevant to PoC. I think this was the first episode where we’ve explicitly done that.
I wasn’t commenting on content so much as visual impact. I do listen to those shows from time to time but will flip the screen on while I’m ironing or some such.
I should be more clear.
I (very white, I’m so white that tanning is not something I can do (literally)) somewhat cringe when white people do stupid racist acts. I want to know if it’s a one-off some drunk idiots (or not), how the college admin responds (or not) and how that response is taken by the relevant communities (or at least some members of those communities). This episode covered all that in very easy to follow and conversational way. I don’t mean this comment as an exercise in anthropology rather that I do look to avoid being insensitive (at least unintentionally) and I can’t always intuit what counts or not.
I would expect PoC (or any other group) to cover issues relevant to them, were I bored or annoyed, I can shut off the playback.
I meant that when they (we) are invited onto national news programs like the ones you mentioned, it is usually the case that we are there to talk about things from “the black perspective” or “the Latin@ perspective” or whatever. It is somewhat more rare to see a PoC invited to talk about it from “the perspective of a Harvard professor of law” or “the perspective of a union leader”, which are also animals that exist.
I’ve read your comment like 5 or 6 times and I don’t know if you actually made your intention more clear 😛
I’d also appreciate an audio-only option. There are youtube-mp3 downloaders but they tend to suck, and watching video whilst driving isn’t exactly safe.
The problem is that the video comes from Google+, which goes directly online. I’m not sure if I can download the video directly to rip the audio from it. I’ll keep poking around and see what’s possible.
“I think it’s because it requires too many candles.”
Awesome dude, just awesome.
There’s a browser user script that you can use with browsers that support user-scripts (greasemonkey extension if you use firefox), which gets rid of a lot of the bullshit and clutter on youtube and also adds a download link. Once you’ve downloaded it you can demultiplex it and grab just the audio. There’s a python script called youtube-dl that will do it too, if you don’t mind working from a command line.
This isn’t how I’d recommend you do it, though. I’d suggest that you and other participants record their own audio and then you edit it all together once it’s done. The sound quality will be much better this way.
Once you’ve got an audio only version going and an RSS feed, get it into iTunes and any other podcast hubs so it’s as easy as possible for new people to find and subscribe to it. If you don’t do this, you’re limiting yourself to just your blog readers and a small audience becomes less fulfilling as time goes by.
In addition to grabbing the audio via YouTube to Mp3 software and other browser based solutions, many audio recording applications can attach to any audio stream on your computer. You have all this piped into, say, your headphones, you can configure the software to record all the audio on your headphone output.
Audacity is what I’d suggest as a first go, it’s free and has extensive and extendable facilities to process the resulting audio file.
Oops, I somehow neglected to include the name of the user-script I was talking about in my post above.
It’s YousableTubeFix
http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/13333