the world:
overnight Africa “experts” or Middle East “experts” or South America “experts” are paraded on Western television to downplay Western exploitation and violence against these parts of the world
a fun idea:
we air people who are actually FROM AFRICA, FROM ASIA, THE MIDDLE EAST, OR SOUTH AMERICA who don’t lurve exploitation and violence (but then they might be like “dear west, gtfo and pay us reparations” and that would be awkward, wouldn’t it)
A photo of Sarsour’s son’s essay on his experiences with Islamophobia and racism. From Sarsour: ‘His teacher commented on the paper and wrote “I am sorry this happened to you. Tamir, you have tackled very significant issues in your writing – I can feel your passion and writing from the heart is the best way to go.”‘
Linda Sarsour, Palestinian-American Activist recently involved in the passing of the CSA in New York, posted this piece on her blog. It’s a piece about the impact of racism and Islamophobia on youth in America. In it, she includes excerpts from an essay her young son wrote for school – an essay in which he reveals some of the ways he’s been affected by racism. I encourage you wholeheartedly to read the full thing. The most heartbreaking part (to me) is included below:
“Sometimes my culture is portrayed as the evil culture. But we are probably the most down to earth people anybody would know. One way people have put me down is only knowing my people as “The Terrorist”. A Second way is that they won’t let us speak on our behalf. My last reason is because my experiences show people are ignorant.
My first reason is many people portray Muslims as terrorists. None of us are like that. One time in the fourth grade I got an extremely challenging question right. Nobody else got it. So when the teacher said I was right a kid shouted “He is going to use an equation to build a bomb.” At that age, I didn’t know how to react so I just smiled. But now I knew I should have been angry.
Steve Almond writing for The Baffler: The Joke’s On You
Our lazy embrace of Stewart and Colbert is a testament to our own impoverished comic standards. We have come to accept coy mockery as genuine subversion and snarky mimesis as originality. It would be more accurate to describe our golden age of political comedy as the peak output of a lucrative corporate plantation whose chief export is a cheap and powerful opiate for progressive angst and rage.
Fans will find this assessment offensive.
‘Ugly girl’: The negative messages we send to our daughters
Last week, the Everyday Sexism Project received a deeply moving entry from a fifteen-year-old girl.
It might seem shocking to some, but it was just the latest of many hundreds of similar posts we have received from girls in their teens and younger.
She wrote “I’m fifteen and feel like girls my age are under a lot of pressure…I know I am smart, I know I am kind and funny…everybody around me keeps telling me I can be whatever I want to be. I know all this but I just don’t feel that way.”
She continued: “I always feel like if I don’t look a certain way, if boys don’t think I’m ‘sexy’ or ‘hot’ then I’ve failed and it doesn’t even matter if I am a doctor or writer, I’ll still feel like nothing…successful women are only considered a success if they are successful AND hot, and I worry constantly that I won’t be. What if my boobs don’t grow? What if I don’t have the perfect body? What if my hips don’t widen and give me a little waist? If none of that happens I feel like [sic] there’s no point in doing anything because I’ll just be the ‘fat ugly girl’ regardless of whether I do become a doctor or not.”
Her words reveal a keen perception of double standards in a society that tells young women they can have all the same dreams men can, study at any academic institution they wish and aim for any career path they choose, whilst simultaneously inundating them with an onslaught of daily messages that as women they will be judged almost exclusively on the basis of their looks, regardless of success.
She is even aware of this influence, writing: “I wish the people who had real power and control the images and messages we get fed all day actually thought about what they did for once… I know the girls in adverts are airbrushed. I know beauty is on the inside. But I still feel like I’m not good enough.”
Click link above to read the entire thing.
Another white privilege Tim Wise and other white anti-racists carry is the ability to emotionally express their views about racism without having that expression dismissed as “angry” or “too emotional”. When Wise speaks passionately and fervently about racism, his expression is understood as a sign of a person standing up for what he believes. As such, it is championed even when he is derisive or sardonic in his remarks. When we, people of color activists, speak passionately about racism, we are maligned and ridiculed as being angry, militant, even hateful and dangerous. If we wish to be heard (let alone understood), we are expected to speak calmly and politely about our experience and analysis regarding racism. Otherwise we are demonized. White moral indignation is justified. Black moral indignation is vilified. This has long been the case.
– Ewuare Xola Osayande
When rule of law is subservient to rule of man (Canada and America’s treatment of Omar Khadr)
‘Rule of law is better than rule of man’, Plato had reportedly once said. Islamic jurisprudence recognised the supremacy of law as a prerequisite for good governance. Western democracies consider rule of law as the foundation of democratic governance. Last month, Canadian-born Omar Khadr — the youngest Guantanamo prisoner and the youngest ever to be accused of war crimes — was transferred to the Edmonton Institution in Alberta, Canada, a maximum security prison. This classification significantly decreases his chances for parole. And it is yet another illustration of the cruel and inhuman nature of the treatment meted out to Khadr by his US captors and by the government of his own country.
A courtroom drawing of Omar Khadr at the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, in 2008 (Janet Hamlin/AP).
smashedlantern 