Adjuncts are overworked and underpaid with little job security. The circumstances under which many work are appalling and I know that I’m fortunate to be on the tenure track. But I can pretty much guarantee that being an adjunct is markedly different from being “a nigger on a plantation.” For some reason, I’m certain of that.

— Things of which I Am Tired [via]

one of the things I marvel at daily when I’m teaching courses on/talking about race in my classes is that, when my students are being honest with me, many of them honestly believe we live in a culture that disadvantages white men in particular, that being white and male is the hardest thing to be in this country because of the complaints of women and PoC and unfair laws and every scholarship and job being earmarked for women and PoC and on and on.

— elle commenting on Things of which I Am Tired

try being a working class, black mother radical activist and find a midwife to mentor you because you really want to be a midwife to the marginalized. really. try it. its not just the money. its the way that (white) midwives look at you and talk to you. the way they talk about your neighborhood. your culture. the way that they dismiss racism as ‘really being about classism’. and classism about ‘really being about education’. and education ‘really being about trying hard enough’. when in reality, racism is about racism, classism is about classism. and while these issues intersect, we cannot reduce racism to classism. i have experienced racism in situations where i was class privileged and well educated from midwives.

— mai’a commenting on Stuff White People Like: Talking About Birth [via]

A3N: Many people call Angola Prison a “modern day slave plantation.” Do you think this is a fair label?

NAH: Absolutely. Angola was and is still is very much a plantation. At 18,000 acres, it is the largest prison in the US—the only prison with its own zip code. Mostly black men are still maintaining the same agricultural activity—planting, hoeing, picking cotton and other crops by hand—that slaves did originally. And they are doing so as captives who are compensated for their back-breaking labor with mere pennies per hour. While Warden Cain may not be Simon Legree, he is still a plantation master—albeit one who uses Christianity as a means of controlling the neo-slave labor under his watch. The very same practices and social control mechanism that existed under slavery persist—just under a new name.
My interest in Angola is as both a paradigm of the Southern transformation of plantations into prisons and as a prototype for what we now call the prison industrial complex. Many old plantations in the South became prisons after the Civil War. Angela Y. Davis traces the initial rise of the penitentiary system to the abolition of slavery, writing: “in the immediate aftermath of slavery, the southern states hastened to develop a criminal justice system that could legally restrict the possibilities of freedom for the newly released slaves.”
Slave Codes became Black Codes and criminalized a range of activities if the perpetrator was black. The newly acquired 15th Amendment right to vote was curtailed by tailoring of felony disenfranchisement laws to include crimes that were supposedly more frequently committed by blacks. And, the liberatory promise of the 13th Amendment – “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude shall exist in the United States”- contained a dangerous loophole- “except as a punishment for crime”. This allowed for the conversion of the old plantations to penitentiaries, and this, with the introduction of the convict lease system, permitted the South to continue to economically benefit from the unpaid labor of blacks.
The patterns established in the old south have proliferated and expanded throughout the US, as African Americans are disproportionately policed, prosecuted, convicted, disenfranchised and imprisoned in the prison industrial complex. There has been a corresponding shift from de jure racism codified explicitly into the law and to a de facto racism where people of color, especially African Americans, are subject to unequal protection of the laws, excessive surveillance, extreme segregation and neo-slave labor via incarceration—all in the name of “crime control”. It is the current manifestation of the legal legacy of the racialized transformations of plantations into prisons, of Slave Codes into Black Codes, of lynching into state-sponsored executions. The “imputation of crime to color” that Frederick Douglass warned of 125 years ago continues to the present.

— Visiting A Modern Day Slave Plantation: an interview with Nancy A. Heitzeg

What this suggests is that the key to understanding today’s anti-immigration movement—as well as anti-Obama organizing such as the “tea parties”—is to see it as a “virtuous middle” movement. In other words, these are movements whose members see themselves as a virtuous middle—religious, moral, hardworking, patriotic and truly American—who face the threat of losing their relatively privileged social status. They fear that they are under attack by a bewildering global economy and unscrupulous corporations that are moving their jobs overseas. Even more, they feel they are being attacked by cultural elites—Harvard and Hollywood, the universities and pop culture—who undermine the moral values of this virtuous middle with moral relativism and sexual permissiveness. They also fear that they are under attack by the rabble below them—lazy people who live off public benefits paid for by the virtuous middle’s tax dollars (these folks are often secretly coded as black) and illegal aliens who are flooding the country, stealing jobs and degrading American culture (these folks are often coded as brown). The virtuous middle fears that cultural elites from above and the black and brown rabble from below are conspiring —now with the help of a black president!—to undermine their social status and by extension the moral, political, and economic foundations of America. The fall into Sodom is right behind.

— Minutemen and Klansmen [via]

Whites often confuse comfort with safety and state that we don’t feel safe when what we really mean is that we don’t feel comfortable. This trivializes our history of savage brutality towards people of color and perverts the reality of that history. Because we don’t think complexly about racism, we don’t ask ourselves what safety means from a position of dominance, or the impact on people of color for Whites to complain about their safety when merely talking about racism.

— My Class Didn’t Trump My Race: Using Oppression to Face Privilege [via]

You know, this is very interesting to me. Lately it seems as though every third post on Metafilter has been about racial prejudices, and everybody is pleased to run their mouth and knight-in-shining-armour it up about how tolerant they are and how many [insert race here] friends they have and how they even had sex with one once and how racists and bigots are morons, but nobody ever fucking does anything. It’s easy lip service and doesn’t tell us anything about you other than you are not completely ignorant.
So what? I don’t give a shit how many [insert race here] friends or spouses you have an how amazing their culture is and how fast and how far you run from racists and bigots because you are as fucking useless as a brick if you’re not actually doing something about it.
Here you have a perfect opportunity to impart a little wisdom to an ignorant person. She isn’t this way because she actually sat down and thought hard about it and decided that, yes, based on my researches and the evidence I have carefully analysed, I Am A Huge Racist. She’s this way because it’s just always been what she has thought, because it’s how she was raised. Her racism is a by-product of her upbringing, not a conscious choice that she has made.
Why not stop with the lip-flapping and make half a fucking effort to educate her, reprogram her, encourage her to understand that being racist is not only stupid, it’s utterly fucking pointless? Ignorance is only going to continue to breed ignorance if you tolerate it, if you do nothing.
So, your girlfriend is a racist. Fine. Try and do something about it for once. Solve a problem rather than ignoring it.
Or don’t. But get the threesome out of her before you dump her stupid ass.

— turgid dahlia commenting on “No sweetie, not all black people drink grape kool-aide.”

1. All The Victims Were Black
2. Many Of The Victims Were Drug Users Or Had Run Into Trouble With The Law
3. Previous Reports Regarding Sowell’s Behavior Went Ignored
4. The Police Didn’t Take The Missing Persons Reports Seriously
5. His Neighbors Saw Sowell As Strange, But Non-Threatening

—

5 Reasons The Cleveland Serial Killer Case Flew Under The Radar

The news about this has been so bizarre, but I was still kind of surprised to hear that it was a national story.

Most women I have spoken to never consider adoption as a real option. When I counsel women they typically weigh two options, parenting or ending the pregnancy. Adoption is not an option for everyone. Most often putting a brown or black child up for adoption means foster care, which may or may not ensure a stable home. On the other hand white women who bear healthy white children are able to set up private adoptions, have medical expenses paid and sometimes other expenses, and choose an open adoption if they want. We live in a society where race defines one’s life options. White people more often have resources and the ability to adopt children, and the demand for white adoptees is much higher than the supply. As transracial adoption becomes more popular this trend could change; however, the mental and emotional health of transracial adoptees is also a very complex issue. In addition to race as a factor, adoption or foster care means that after spending nine months carrying a fetus in her body a woman will not know if that child is safe, cared for, and happy. Most women I talk to immediately shoot down any suggestion of adoption.

— The Abortioneers: In You We Trust [via]

It’s important to recognize that white movements attract white people. Or rather, white people attract white people. Similar dynamics exist with many other racial/ethnic groups in this country due to the highly segregated nature of the US. Examining this country’s racist history (and present), the social contexts of different cultures and subcultures, the demographics of poverty, and the purposes of particular social institutions will help glean some understanding of this, but that is beyond the scope of this piece.
However, individual EF! groups ought to continue to check themselves on incestuous organizing (what one might call preaching to the choir, reaching out only to the same white punks at every show or using specifically white subcultural imagery and language in promotional materials and discussions). If EF! groups don’t do this, they should not act surprised that it’s the same people or demographic of people showing up to everything. I’m not suggesting that certain people cover up their Crass tattoos or EF! groups attempt to acquire token individuals of every race and ethnicity in order to appear diverse. Instead, recognize that we have an important message that has the potential for broad appeal. Trying to keep young, white punk kids in familiar territory, physically and mentally, should not hinder sharing our strategies and values. That, or just accept that yours is a small group with a few of your friends who, if you are white, are probably white, too.

— Practical Ideas for an anti-racist radical ecological movement

I think the idea of seeing a situation and replacing the races with white people works for me. I’m not sure the actual scene, but if there were a group of white people dressed in hip-hop clothes with open drinks standing in my driveway after dark I would be both scared and pissed.
It’s quite ok to be classist. Honestly, I think you have to remember that the people in the all white neighborhoods don’t ever have to worry about this kind of guilt, and you do, so cut yourself some slack.

— sully75 commenting on How do I combat my knee-jerk racist responses?

If you are walking down the street, and a black guy is walking toward you, you don’t think he’s just going to rob you because he’s black, right?
On the other hand, if a group of young white men in the alley dressed in stereotypical urban fashions, conversing loudly (but not aggressively) with each other, you wouldn’t think “oh they are white, I’ll be fine.”, would you?
You’re not racist, so stop worrying about it. Just look out for yourself.

— santaliqueur commenting on How do I combat my knee-jerk racist responses?

I find it kind of bizarre that its ‘not racist’ to have your example of predator-white-people be white people that look ‘urban’. In this context, isn’t that just a synonym for black?