Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
Following a meeting organized by the Arizona school district where six high school girls wore T-shirts spelling out the n-word (more or less), Don Harris, head of the Maricopa County chapter of the NAACP—who also happens to be white, and Jewish—commented on a reporter’s appearance: “Nice tits!” Tempe Union High School District invited about 50…
Last week I critiqued Bernie Sanders for dismissing reparations specifically, and for offering up a series of moderate anti-racist solutions, in general. Some felt it was unfair to single out Sanders given that, on reparations, Sanders’s chief opponent Hillary Clinton holds the same position. This argument proposes that we abandon the convention of judging our…
Katrina Pierson, the national spokesperson for Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, on Sunday defended her call for a “pure breed” president by arguing that she was a “half-breed” like President Barack Obama. In 2012, Pierson had complained that both then-GOP nominee Mitt Romney and Obama were not “pure breeds” because their fathers had not been born…
In December 1950, Woody Guthrie signed his name to the lease of a new apartment in Brooklyn. Even now, over half a century later, that uninspiring document prompts a double-take. Below all the legal jargon is the signature of the man who had composed “This Land Is Your Land,” the most resounding appeal to an…
The don’t-call-it-a-boycott Oscars might be more interesting for who won’t be in attendance than who will. Spike Lee, Jada Pinkett Smith, and now Will Smith have all said that they’re not planning on attending the Oscars, which, for the second year in a row, nominated 20 white people in the acting categories. Oscar nominee Mark…
article start Films featuring black actors were shut out of the main categories when the nominations for the 2016 Academy Awards were announced this morning, prompting some movie fans to voice their outrage on social media. No people of color were nominated for best actor, best actress, best supporting actor, or best supporting actress and…
A village in central New York voted on Monday night to maintain its controversial seal, which depicts a white man with his hands placed on the shoulders of a Native American man, apparently choking him. Whitesboro, New York residents voted in favor of the 19th-Century town seal by 157-55 this week, the Associated Press reports….
Illustration by Marissa Maciel /end .figure The night after Christmas finds me seated with relatives and friends at my in-laws’ crowded dinner table, enjoying a delicious meal and happily chatting about television — one of few topics that’s nearly always safe to discuss in mixed company. Of the fourteen people laughing and passing laden platters around, only one is new to me. Someone mentions…
little while ago, @dtwps published a piece on Model View Cultureentitled “Your Half-Assed Diversity Initiatives Aren’t Going to Cut It In 2016”, in which they asked “Has Twitter learned their lesson?” I thought the answer to that was yes. I thought it was getting better at Twitter. I’d just come off a private talk with some members of the Blackbirds group,…
Fromm Star Wars to Mad Max, a new, more diverse kind of storytelling went mainstream this year – and the backlash shows how much it matters. I saw Star Wars this week like everyone else, and yes, it was madly entertaining, and no, it wasn’t perfect, and if I want to see a film that’s…