When the sides are divided, when they start making accusations, it’s always enlightening to look at what each side considers an insult. On my side, we see the other as agents of oppression, misogynists and racists, people who want to discriminate and maintain an unjust status quo. On their side…
Demonstrators intrude on St Louis Symphony Orchestra concert with a little musical interruption.
I know that Reddit is immensely popular and has some good qualities, but I’ve never been able to get into it, because it invariably happens that anything I read there will be tainted by some hideous commentary. I don’t just mean comments I disagree with; I read creationist sites for entertainment, you know. I mean comments that cause me to despair for humanity.
A few years ago, Nnedi Okorafor won the World Fantasy Award. Okorafor is a Nigerian-American writer. The World Fantasy Award is a bust of HP Lovecraft. You can guess where this is going, because Lovecraft was a flamingly awful racist. How awful? Read the poem at that link and suppress your gag reflex.
Which obviously causes some conflict. Okorafor wrote to China Mieville for advice, since he’d also won the award, and he wrote back with a suggestion.
Good question.
I have been down the rabbit hole. I got sucked down into a prolonged web search on the matter of pre-WWII eugenics, which is more than a little squicky, but was fascinated to discover a thriving community of correspondents which reminded me precisely of the various flavors of blog commenters today — that is, opinionated, sometimes pretentious, and often liberally sprinkled with asses. I started picking out names and searching for their contributions.
They’re not racist, they’re just oblivious! The Daily Show confronted the fanatical advocates of a racist slur with Indian activists…and didn’t change anyone’s minds. I still think they’re freakin’ racists.
You’d think they’d have totally exhausted the lode of all possible scorn and contempt already, but no — they’re still mocking the idiocy well. I thought this was something I’d said before, only they managed to wring out much more disdain out of it than I could.
Apple announces a new line of iPhones, and the annoying pretentious yuppies all descend on the Apple Store in New York.
This is my university, as it was about 130 years ago. UMM was only established as a university in the 1960s, and before that it was an agricultural school, and before that, it was a Catholic school for Indians — one of those places dedicated to ‘helping’ the poor backwards people of the continent to assimilate into superior white culture by taking their children away and raising them the White Man’s Way. For the past week, students have been busily chalking the outlines of the old buildings around campus, as part of a project to remind us all of our history as an Indian boarding school. I am glad to see that we don’t whitewash this shameful part of our past, and that my university tries to make amends by offering free tuition to Indian students — but nowadays we don’t force them to attend, it’s entirely voluntary, and the curriculum isn’t about telling them how bad their culture is.
Jennifer Raff writes about another side of America’s history with indigenous people.
