8 Racist Words You Use Every Day | Cracked.com
http://www.cracked.com/article_16967_8-racist-words-you-use-every-day.html

8 Racist Words You Use Every Day. Happy MLK day! You're a racist!

Have you ever worried that, no matter how hard you try, you'll just never be racist enough? Well, you're in luck. As it turns out, you've been unconsciously using racial slurs your entire life! Slurs like...

Facing an influx of refugees, the residents of Algiers Point could have pulled together food, water and medical supplies for the flood victims. Instead, a group of white residents, convinced that crime would arrive with the human exodus, sought to seal off the area, blocking the roads in and out of the neighborhood by dragging lumber and downed trees into the streets. They stockpiled handguns, assault rifles, shotguns and at least one Uzi and began patrolling the streets in pickup trucks and SUVs. The newly formed militia, a loose band of about fifteen to thirty residents, most of them men, all of them white, was looking for thieves, outlaws or, as one member put it, anyone who simply "didn't belong."

Hurricane Katrina Information

It was September 1, 2005, some three days after Hurricane Katrina crashed into New Orleans, and somebody had just blasted Herrington, who is African-American, with a shotgun.

The attack occurred in Algiers Point. The Point, as locals call it, is a neighborhood within a neighborhood, a small cluster of ornate, immaculately maintained 150-year-old houses within the larger Algiers district. A nationally recognized historic area, Algiers Point is largely white, while the rest of Algiers is predominantly black. It's a "white enclave" whose residents have "a kind of siege mentality," says Tulane University historian Lance Hill, noting that some white New Orleanians "think of themselves as an oppressed minority."

One of the most disturbing investigative reports to date. Mob mentality is indeed difficult to understanding during life threatening times. Where does one draw the line between self preservation and compassion. Makes me wonder far too often how any of us would react under the same circumstances.

OMG A BLACK GIRL! Zoe Saldana is a major character in a summer action sci-fi blockbuster. OMG A BLACK GIRL! She is ambitious and intelligent and clever without being a caricature. OMG A BLACK GIRL! She is not forced into asexuality by the inexplicable disinterest of every male character. OMG A BLACK GIRL! She is one half of the principle romance. OMG A BLACK GIRL! She is in love with and desired, romanced, and loved by one of the most iconic figures, not just in all of nerdom, but in all of popular culture. OMG. A black girl is fucking Spock. Nyota Uhura is not a white girl. Her just being there is still worthy of a fuckton of notice. This, right here, is one of the biggest coups in media representation that I've seen in my entire lifetime. Goggle adjustments may be in order. Just saying.

My essay on Nyota Uhura in STXI and holding women of color to white feminist standards.

Nyota Uhura is a black girl and there is no angle from which her actually being allowed to have consensual sexuality, being desired, and being loved (in addition to having her job and intellect, no less) is a fundamental downgrade from what she had before.

"Uhura being single in TOS was not empowering. She was single because the male leads were all white and as a black woman she was less of a person than them, she was less of a person than a white woman, and the fact that this serendipitously ended up meaning that she didn't have to spend all of her time mooning pathetically after dismissive men does not make that any more acceptable."

"Now, in general, I don't like the idea that because a female character has a love interest that is all she is and/or that she is automatically reduced by it. It's not that I don't want female characters to have as wide a range of roles in the story as male ones because I absolutely do. It's that, inkeeping with that, I don't feel the need to restrict or limit female characters any more than they already are. Saying that a female character can't be a strong character if she's in a romance is just as shitty as various alternatives."

A reminder of why Uhura and Spock's romance in XI is just so incredibly awesome...and why the way Uhura is portrayed is one of the best things to happen to mainstream media ever. As one parody/recap says, Uhura has an "MA in Advanced Linguistics, PhD in Badass", and she is all that and so much more.

Meta: Why Uhura being in a relationship in STR is noteworthy.

Simply put: Nyota Uhura is not a white girl.

...black colonial soldiers - who made up around two-thirds of Free French forces - were deliberately removed from the unit that led the Allied advance into the French capital.

Papers unearthed by the BBC reveal that British and American commanders ensured that the liberation of Paris on 25 August 1944 was seen as a "whites only" victory. Many who fought Nazi Germany during World War II did so to defeat the vicious racism that left millions of Jews dead. Yet the BBC's Document programme has seen evidence that black colonial soldiers - who made up around two-thirds of Free French forces - were deliberately removed from the unit that led the Allied advance into the French capital. By the time France fell in June 1940, 17,000 of its black, mainly West African colonial troops, known as the Tirailleurs Senegalais, lay dead.

Allied High Command agreed, but only on one condition: De Gaulle's division must not contain any black soldiers.

"We were colonised by the French. We were forced to go to war. Forced to follow the orders that said, do this, do that, and we did. France has not been grateful. Not at all."

WWII

"I was in Gaza and they kept emphasizing that the object of the operation was to wreak destruction on the infrastructure, so that the price the Palestinians and the leadership pay will make them realize that it isn't worth it for them to go on shooting. So that's the idea of 'we're coming to destroy' in the drawing."

Dead babies, mothers weeping on their children's graves, a gun aimed at a child and bombed-out mosques - these are a few examples of the images Israel Defense Forces soldiers design these days to print on shirts they order to mark the end of training, or of field duty. The slogans accompanying the drawings are not exactly anemic either: A T-shirt for infantry snipers bears the inscription "Better use Durex," next to a picture of a dead Palestinian baby, with his weeping mother and a teddy bear beside him. A sharpshooter's T-shirt from the Givati Brigade's Shaked battalion shows a pregnant Palestinian woman with a bull's-eye superimposed on her belly, with the slogan, in English, "1 shot, 2 kills."

Whether Avatar is racist is a matter for debate. Regardless of where you come down on that question, it's undeniable that the film - like alien apartheid flick District 9, released earlier this year - is emphatically a fantasy about race. Specifically, it's a fantasy about race told from the point of view of white people. Avatar and scifi films like it give us the opportunity to answer the question: What do white people fantasize about when they fantasize about racial identity?

about Avatar, District 9, & Dune

A story that revisits the same old tropes of colonization. Whites still get to be leaders of the natives - just in a kinder, gentler way

Critics have called alien epic Avatar a version of Dances With Wolves because it's about a white guy going native and becoming a great leader. But Avatar is just the latest scifi rehash of an old white guilt fantasy. Spoilers...

Sure, Avatar goes a little bit beyond the basic colonizing story. We are told in no uncertain terms that it's wrong to colonize the lands of native people. Our hero chooses to join the Na'vi rather than abide the racist culture of his own people. But it is nevertheless a story that revisits the same old tropes of colonization. Whites still get to be leaders of the natives - just in a kinder, gentler way than they would have in an old Flash Gordon flick or in Edgar Rice Burroughs' Mars novels.

"When whites fantasize about becoming other races, it's only fun if they can blithely ignore the fundamental experience of being an oppressed racial group."

Like Dances with Wolves, Last Samurai, and even Dune, tis a story about white guilt.

io9?

"Critics have called alien epic Avatar a version of Dances With Wolves because it's about a white guy going native and becoming a great leader. But Avatar is just the latest scifi rehash of an old white guilt fantasy. Spoilers... Whether Avatar is racist is a matter for debate. Regardless of where you come down on that question, it's undeniable that the film - like alien apartheid flick District 9, released earlier this year - is emphatically a fantasy about race. Specifically, it's a fantasy about race told from the point of view of white people. Avatar and scifi films like it give us the opportunity to answer the question: What do white people fantasize about when they fantasize about racial identity?"

"If Obama’s first legislative priority had been immigration or financial reform or climate change, we would have seen the same trajectory. The conjunction of a black president and a female speaker of the House — topped off by a wise Latina on the Supreme Court and a powerful gay Congressional committee chairman — would sow fears of disenfranchisement among a dwindling and threatened minority in the country no matter what policies were in play. It’s not happenstance that Frank, Lewis and Cleaver — none of them major Democratic players in the health care push — received a major share of last weekend’s abuse. When you hear demonstrators chant the slogan “Take our country back!,” these are the people they want to take the country back from."

Questions: of all the video and audio footage there, no footage? And also, really? They wanted to enjoy a spring day during a protest. Absolutely logical. Seems politicians never tire of the "Look there! A (racist, bigot, socialist, etc.)"

To find a prototype for the overheated reaction to the health care bill, you have to look a year before Medicare, to the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Both laws passed by similar majorities in Congress; the Civil Rights Act received even more votes in the Senate (73) than Medicare (70). But it was only the civil rights bill that made some Americans run off the rails. That’s because it was the one that signaled an inexorable and immutable change in the very identity of America, not just its governance

How do racists, anti-Semites and all-purpose hate-mongers view the possibility of America’s first black president? Not necessarily the way you think they would.

WTF o_O

"In an informal Esquire survey, three out of four white supremacists prefer Obama, while McCain is the clear favorite among black nationalists. (Sure, our methodology suffered from an extraordinarily low sample size--limited to four white supremacists and one black nationalist--but just because it wouldn’t fly with Gallup doesn’t mean there ain't a kernel of truth in there.)"

interesting article

"White people are faced with either a negro or a total nutter who happens to have a pale face. Personally I’d prefer the negro.

Then, we have a black man, who loves his own kind, belongs to a Black-Nationalist religion, is married to a black women--when usually negroes who have 'made it' immediately land a white spouse as a kind of prize--that’s the kind of negro that I can respect. Any time that a prominent person embraces their racial heritage in a positive manner, it’s good for all racially minded folks

Probably one of the most ironic things in the history of irony.

I'll up the ante. What if they were Muslim? @laughingwoman Tim Wise: What if Tea Partiers were black? http://bit.ly/cZzE8K

Protest is only seen as fundamentally American when those who have long had the luxury of seeing themselves as prototypically American engage in it. And this, my friends, is what white privilege is all about. The ability to threaten others, to engage in violent and incendiary rhetoric without consequence, to be viewed as patriotic and normal no matter what you do, and never to be feared and despised as people of color would be, if they tried to get away with half the shit we do, on a daily basis.

RT @CarriBugbee: Ephphatha Poetry: "Imagine if the Tea Party Was Black" - Tim Wise ""Imagine if the Tea Party Was Black" - Tim Wise" htt ...

"Protest is only seen as fundamentally American when those who have long had the luxury of seeing themselves as prototypically American engage in it. When the dangerous and dark “other” does so, however, it isn’t viewed as normal or natural, let alone patriotic. . . . // And this, my friends, is what white privilege is all about. The ability to threaten others, to engage in violent and incendiary rhetoric without consequence, to be viewed as patriotic and normal no matter what you do, and never to be feared and despised as people of color would be, if they tried to get away with half the shit we do, on a daily basis." (avoid the comments)

Excellent article on white privilege

"In other words, imagine that even one-third of the anger and vitriol currently being hurled at President Obama, by folks who are almost exclusively white, were being aimed, instead, at a white president, by people of color. How many whites viewing the anger, the hatred, the contempt for that white president would then wax eloquent about free speech, and the glories of democracy? And how many would be calling for further crackdowns on thuggish behavior, and investigations into the radical agendas of those same people of color?" Via Debbie.

And this, my friends, is what white privilege is all about. The ability to threaten others, to engage in violent and incendiary rhetoric without consequence, to be viewed as patriotic and normal no matter what you do, and never to be feared and despised as people of color would be, if they tried to get away with half the shit we do, on a daily basis.

When Tommie Smith and John Carlos gave a gloved Black Power salute on the Olympic podium in October 1968 it sent a shockwave through sport. But what happened to the other man on the platform?

In case you ever wondered who the white guy on the podium was.

Extremist material of any kind always looks gaudy and cheap, like a bad pizza menu. Not because they can't afford decent computers - these days you can knock up a professional CD cover on a pay-as-you-go mobile - but because anyone who's good at graphic design is likely to be a thoughtful, inquisitive sort by nature. And thoughtful, inquisitive sorts tend to think fascism is a bit shit, to be honest. If the BNP really were the greatest British party, they'd have the greatest British designer working for them - Jonathan Ive, perhaps, the man who designed the iPod. But they don't. They've got someone who tries to stab your eyes out with primary colours.

Charlie Brooker: For the BNP to claim to be more British than the other British parties is as nonsensical as your dad suddenly claiming to have invented the beard

"Don't vote for those nasty slick parties. Vote for a shoddy one! Never mind the extremism, feel the ineptitude"

The BNP represents Britain's workers? They don't even represent basic British craftsmanship

Charlie Brooker skewers the BNP

For the BNP to claim to be more British than the other British parties is as nonsensical as your dad suddenly claiming to have invented the beard.

Extremist material of any kind always looks gaudy and cheap, like a bad pizza menu. Not because they can't afford decent computers - these days you can knock up a professional CD cover on a pay-as-you-go mobile - but because anyone who's good at graphic design is likely to be a thoughtful, inquisitive sort by nature. And thoughtful, inquisitive sorts tend to think fascism is a bit shit, to be honest.

RT @eliza: Charlie Brooker on the BNP http://bit.ly/4fKf2O Bunch of wankers. [from http://twitter.com/standardman/statuses/1835238421]

Lovely piece

As the US presidential campaign enters its final weeks, both the Republican and Democratic candidates are hitting the swing states. But misconceptions and rumours abound and many voters have thei... As the US presidential campaign enters its final weeks, both the Republican and Democratic candidates are hitting the swing states. But misconceptions and rumours abound and many voters have their facts about the candidates all wrong. Some believe that Democrat Barack Obama is a Muslim, for instance. Casey Kauffman talked to some Republican supporters after a rally by Sarah Palin, the Republican vice-presidential candidate, in Ohio.

I know I shouldn't discount Republicans as being bad or dumb or crazy. I know that. But these are the ones that specifically concern me as being ridiculous. I am trying, but they make it hard!

Al Jazeera's 2 minute view of Ohio's battleground state.

Al Jazeera news video

"...the black will take over", "when you got a nigger running for president...", "...he's related to a known terrorist", "just the whole muslim thing...9/11", "...he thinks us white people are trash".....LISTEN TO THESE PEOPLE!! THESE ARE MCCAIN SUPPORTERS....But I honestly can say that McCain allowed Sarah Palin to feed these people, then he had to start cleaning up her mess. Their campaign is resorting to fear-mongering to win this election.