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If You Don't Think This Is Racist, I Would Honestly Love To Hear What You WOULD Consider Racist.

lazybookreviews:

Reached by telephone and asked if she thought the email was appropriate, Davenport said, “Oh, come on! Everybody who knows me knows that I am not a racist. It was a joke. I have friends who are black. Besides, I only sent it to a few people—mostly people I didn’t think would be upset by it.”

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Yes, American history makes an image depicting Obama as the ape child of ape parents inordinately more toxic than this image of ape-baby Bush snuggling with ape-daddy Ariel Sharon.* Still, the Obama-as-ape story out of Orange County and the “I Would Honestly Love To Hear What You WOULD Consider Racist” headline I’m reblogging above reminded me of Larry Wilmore’s 8/22/06 appearance on The Daily Show when he denounced “lazy racism” that’s unworthy of  a nation “born out of the eradication of one race and the enslavement of another.” He played a clip from Strom Thurmond’s 1948 presidential campaign and put Thurmond’s words up on the screen. These words: 

There’s not enough troops in the Army to force the Southern people to break down segregation and admit the nigger race into our theaters, into our swimming pools, into our homes, and into our churches.

As Wilmore said right after the clip, “Now that’s a racist motherfucker.”

(Well, they bleeped it. But it’s clear what he said, and it’s clear that it’s true.)

- David Quigg, 4/17/2011

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* In an American context, at least. Globally, the inclusion of Ariel Sharon makes the Bush photo more complicated. In a slapdash effort at thoroughness, I Googled “jews as apes,” braced myself, and got hits such as NPR’s “Saudi Textbooks Still Teach Hate, Group Says.”

(this post was reblogged from lazybookreviews)
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My brother does not understand my husband’s inability to perceive the advantage in the rather common real-estate transaction known as “sale-leaseback,” and my husband in turn does not understand why so many of the people he hears about in my father’s house have recently been committed to mental hospitals or booked on drunk-driving charges. Nor does he understand that when we talk about sale-leasebacks and right-of-way condemnations we are talking in code about the things we like best, the yellow fields and the cottonwoods and the rivers rising and falling and the mountain roads closing when the heavy snow comes in. We miss each other’s points, have another drink and regard the fire.
- Joan Didion in 1967’s “On Going Home.”

motherjones:

“Hate Comes to Orange County”

The next time someone complains to you about “union thugs,” show them this. It kind of puts the lie to the idea that there’s any moral equivalency between progressive demonstrators and angry, hateful right-wingers.

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This sickens me. Knowing the context of it does not make me feel any less sick. But the context is worth knowing. Here, from the Orange County Register, is why these fine patriots think they’re defending freedom by shrieking their bigotry at little kids:

Many in the crowd outside the event said they were concerned about past anti-American statements by the event’s two keynote speakers, Imam Siraj Wahhaj and Amir Abdel Malik Ali. Wahhaj is an imam at a mosque in Brooklyn. A U.S. attorney named him and 169 others as co-conspirators in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. Wahhaj was never charged and has denied involvement.

Malik Ali is a Bay Area Islamic activist who spoke at “Israeli Apartheid Week” at UC Irvine in 2010. There he said he supports Hezbollah, which the CIA labels a terrorist group.

Therefore, “one nation under God! Not Allah!”

Um, yeah, go back to Europe — twelfth-century Europe.

 - David Quigg, 3/3/11

UPDATE (3/3/11, 7:04 pm): The end of this post never felt right to me. I know I was joking. Joking bitterly, granted. But joking. Still, this is a blog. Strangers will read it. They may take me literally. So while I’m not going to cover up that I wrote what I wrote, I’ll sleep better if I make it clear that any kind of “Go back to (insert non-U.S. locale here)!” is toxic to what I treasure about America. So stick around, you screaming bullies. This land is made for you and me.

(this post was reblogged from motherjones)
If the Nikon Fairy showed up and offered to grant me three photographic wishes, I’d ask for an exact replica of the three pieces of gear I own: my D200 camera, my 1980s-era 28 mm lens, my 1980s-era 135 mm lens. Having said that, I know there are newer cameras with newer lenses that do things my camera cannot. Exhibit A: my father-in-law’s new Canon. Exhibit B: the wonderfully detailed bird photos he’s been sending me lately. Burrowing Owl photo copyright protected by Larry Shushan Photography Click for high-res photo

If the Nikon Fairy showed up and offered to grant me three photographic wishes, I’d ask for an exact replica of the three pieces of gear I own: my D200 camera, my 1980s-era 28 mm lens, my 1980s-era 135 mm lens.

Having said that, I know there are newer cameras with newer lenses that do things my camera cannot. Exhibit A: my father-in-law’s new Canon. Exhibit B: the wonderfully detailed bird photos he’s been sending me lately.

Burrowing Owl photo copyright protected by Larry Shushan Photography

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I’m writing this to you because you are the victims of this enormous cheat … Every year, fewer and fewer of you read newspapers, speak a foreign language, understand the basics of how government and business actually work, or have the energy to push back intellectually against me or against each other. Or know enough about history, literature, and science to do it effectively! You spent your school years with teachers paid less and less, trained worse and worse, loaded up with more and more mindless administrative duties, and given less and less real support from administrators and staff.

- from “A letter to my students” (8/24/10) by Michael O’Hare, a public policy professor at Berkeley.

A friend and fellow Berkeley grad used Facebook to link to O’Hare’s letter. That’s how I saw it. The overall message makes me wish I could still vote in California. Things are bleak.

What moved me most, though, is O’Hare’s mourning over students being less and less equipped to “push back intellectually against me or against each other.”

Since it was just a couple of days ago that I used this blog to push back intellectually against another Berkeley professor, I want to give O’Hare props for craving students who can push back intellectually. (I write “props” even less than I say it, but it’s the only word I can think of right now. Not much sleep last night. Besides, “give O’Hare props” beats “I’d like to salute O’Hare” and the other feeble alternatives my brain is offering.)