IBARW posts collected on 2009-8-1

[kate_nepveu]

Behind the cut are IBARW posts collected on Delicious in the last 24 hours ( more details).

• we all want to explain ourselves | tumblelog :: There's no point to any of this. It's just a... a random lottery of meaningless tragedy and a series of near escapes. So I take pleasure in the details. [photo]
  
  (tags: ibarw ibarw4 by.multiracial.people by.poc)
• afro_dyte: Dear dvlwears_prada mods and fandom :: Thank you, dvlwears_prada, for reminding me of the fact that fandom is not a safe space for my voice as a woman of color. Thank you for sweeping me under the rug and doing your part to the voices of fans of color (instead of, oh, posting a modly reply and freezing further comments). Thank you for taking a fun twist on a serious idea and making it into an issue that needs to be dealt with. And thank you very much for making my Blackness into a problem.
  
  (tags: ibarw ibarw4 by.poc english.language black white.privilege whiteness fandom)
• gryphonsegg: Racism--I blog against it :: There's a certain line that makes my head hit the desk every time it comes up in a racism imbroglio: "I'm not racist-- I'm [your blood quantum here] Native American!" There's also its more recently arrived on the continent cousin, "I'm not racist. I'm Irish/Italian/Polish-- my grandparents were discriminated against as harshly as Hispanic/Asian people are today." Both are bullshit, and I don't accept either of those arguments for one second.
  
  (tags: ibarw ibarw4 english.language by.white.people by.multiracial.people american.indian racism.by.poc whiteness)
• International Blog Against Racism Week « Enter the Octopus :: As many of you know, I’m from the Deep South. I’ve seen racism up close and personal. We’ve got it here. Of course, it’s everywhere else, too, but let’s just leave it as the South has a longstanding racial wound that still hasn’t healed, and the days of institutionalized racism aren’t as far in the past here as they are in other places. I was born after the Civil Rights era, so I grew up in a fully integrated school system, worked alongside people of all different races and creeds and have lived in mixed neighborhoods all of my life. When you’re living in that kind of environment it’s easy to think that it’s always been that way. But it hasn’t, and things can be difficult here for all of us.
  
  (tags: ibarw ibarw4 english.language by.white.people racism united.states black white african.american)
• International Blog Against Racism Week: July 27 - August 2nd | BlogHer :: So there is a bit of happiness mixed with a bit of sadness - but no surprise. Happiness that there are blogger's still writing about combating systemic, institutional, overt and covert racism and its place in popular culture; and sadness because in this, ahem, 'Post-Obama' age, there seems to be more problems than in years past. On the other hand, maybe those issues have always been there but with the advent of the Internet, we now have a place to discuss issues, share insights, and maybe change a few minds.
  
  (tags: ibarw4 ibarw english.language by.white.people meta roundup)
• starlady38: IBARW: Albinos in Africa, albinism on our screens, race as a cultural construct :: I mention these experiences not because I'm fishing for pity (I'm not) or out of a mistaken belief that my incidental, mostly trivial experiences somehow equate to the lifelong experience of being discriminated against because of one's race in one's own native country (although I do think that I understand racism better for having experienced it personally), but because I think that my experiences demonstrate again that race and racism are entirely cultural constructs.
  
  (tags: ibarw ibarw4 english.language by.white.people racism africa)
• lirazel: Virginia Hamilton :: Provides links to information on the life and work of a great African-American writer for young people whose immense bibliography and range of genres seem to me to be too little known.
  
  (tags: ibarw ibarw4 english.language writing sf/f books.science-fiction/fantasy books book.recs black african.american)
• 
  stultiloquentia: IBARW: I Have No Dance :: Got a course catalog in the mail for the Cambridge Center for Adult Education. Lots of amusing things on offer, from "Shower Singing in Public" to "The Microsoft Word You Wish You Knew" to an entire $140 course on single malt scotch. This abstract from the Dance section caught my eye for a different reason: Exotic Dance Instructor: Veronica Control your body with confidence! Learn how to move your hips, caress your body and send a look that will seduce your audience. We will help you create a full repertoire of floor routine and chair moves that you can use in an enticing exotic dance performance. This class is for women only - women who are looking for a fun way to build all-around confidence in a sensual way that doesn't even feel like exercise! Wear comfortable clothing that makes you feel sexy and high-heel shoes. Limited to 14.
  
  (tags: ibarw ibarw4 english.language by.white.people cultural.appropriation art white.privilege)
• Lobster Salad and Champagne: "Maybe they didn't have black people back then." :: I've written three manuscripts and I'm starting a fourth, and guess what? I haven't written a single black character, or Indian character, or Egyptian character, or even a Jewish character (and I'm Jewish myself). I haven't written a single character who isn't white and Christian. Not even a minor character or an extra in a crowd scene, unless you count having my heroine bank with Rothschild that one time.
  
  (tags: ibarw4 ibarw english.language by.white.people history colonialism writing roundup recommended.reading)
• jonquil: She's not there, part N :: In this book (not naming it because I don't want to give it or its author advertising), "Seminole patchwork" is an abstract free-floating concept, divorced from the living Seminoles who created and continue to create it; a woman in California can create the technique ab initio by examining her mother's 1940s skirt and a few other photographs of textiles. No consultation with actual Seminoles is required or, apparently, considered. (Incidentally, none of the patterns I linked to under "beautiful stuff" above is included in the book; to the author, "Seminole piecing" means "zigzaggy stuff like my mother's skirt."She created all her designs with pencil and graph paper and, later, on a computer.) This is what cultural appropriation is all about: taking somebody else's hard work, filing their names and history and identities off it, and reselling it as your own.
  
  (tags: ibarw ibarw4 english.language by.white.people cultural.appropriation seminole american.indian)
• misadventurelad: White investment in colorism :: Recently, I've seen and heard tell of people derailing discussions of progressive and educational discussions of racism by asserting that a) colorism is rampant within communities of color (specifically communities connected to South Asia and the African Diaspora) and that it is, in fact, evidence that we're all racist (and the logic is, then, that we ought to just continue on our merry and racist way, damaging some, but not others) b) that non-white persons have no place to speak on external racism until they've dealt with internal racism and c) colorism is an issue specific to communities of color, hence the reluctance to speak on it in public spaces and therefore, it is not an issue for white people.
  
  (tags: ibarw ibarw4 english.language by.poc by.multiracial.people colorism rape whiteness)
• stormfeather: Musings on Race and Communication :: Alright, since not all of you will be familiar with what kicked this particular post off, a quick recap: there was a post in another friend's blog, that got fairly quickly sidetracked onto posting about another particular poster and their "race crusade," (in another person's words) which then quickly devolved into a... discussion for lack of better term... about the race issue, blogs about it, and what does or doesn't work. (Note that I'm being vague here as to identity, since I don't feel comfortable saying "such and such a person said such and such" without their permission, or what have you.)
  
  (tags: ibarw ibarw4 english.language discourse by.white.people tone)
• Not for your entertainment: International Blog Against Racism Week :: Anywho, this does give me a great opportunity to write down some of the thoughts that I've been having lately relating to race. Specifically, being multiracial. I've always known that I wasn't White. But I've also always known that I wasn't Latin@, either. I was something other, something that could not fit neatly into either category. I was always assumed to be one or the other. I would be with White people, and they would assume I was Latin@, because I "looked Spanish" and when I'm around Latin@ people, it was assumed I was white because I was pale (read: I didn't look like a stereotypical Latin@ person).
  
  (tags: ibarw ibarw4 by.multiracial.people multiracial latina/latino white whiteness by.poc)
• Rules For Beneficial Discourse | The Angry Black Woman :: These links are going up in the Required Reading (or, at the very least, a link to this) because I feel like both posts illuminate the core of how I feel about discourse around contentious issues such as racism and sexism and the pitfalls of said discourse.
  
  (tags: ibarw ibarw4 by.poc english.language discourse racism sexism)
• Racism and genre fiction | Blog | Futurismic :: The important outcome of RaceFail for me - as for many others - was the uncomfortable but important realisation that, despite my best efforts to the contrary, I’m still racist sometimes. We tend to think of racism as an active verb, something that is by definition pursued deliberately, but that’s not necessarily the case. At very deep levels of our culture, we’re conditioned into a worldview that subconsciously reinforces the values of the past, even when we consciously embrace the ethics of the present. I guess you could say that - in what I hope and believe to be the majority of cases, at least within the genre fiction community - we’re racist by accident rather than design.
  
  (tags: ibarw ibarw4 english.language sf/f fandom books books.science-fiction/fantasy racefail09 by.white.people)
• I Saw it in Palestine :: Feeling the Hate 2: A Look at Hate Speech in Tel Aviv (International Blog Against Racism Week) [video]
  
  (tags: ibarw ibarw4 english.language video.recs palestinian israel middle.eastern zionism)
• OF Blog of the Fallen: International Blog Against Racism Week: July 27-August 2 :: Sadly, the first issue that comes to mind is the recent blow-up involving K. Tempest Bradford and Harlan Ellison. The details of this may be found in this link, where the issue expanded from perceived sexism to ageism to racism at the argument's nadir.
  
  (tags: ibarw ibarw4 english.language sf/f racism books.science-fiction/fantasy books)
• Fusion Despatches » Blog Archive » On the other hand…. :: I’ve just found out that 27 July - 2 August is “International Blog Against Racism Week”. Man, I had to laugh. Yes, let’s save all our deep discussions on the complex issue of race for one week. That’ll get profound. TRIGGER WARNING - graphic description of rape
  
  (tags: ibarw ibarw4 english.language meta about.ibarw)
• Colorblind Doesn’t Help | Onward :: Being “colorblind” doesn’t help. You, pretending that black woman with her own culture and her own place and proud heritage is just like any white girl walking down the street? That’s not cool.
  
  (tags: ibarw ibarw4 english.language color.blindness by.white.people)
• just_katarin: CNN's Black in America 2 :: I was channel flipping and came across a special report on CNN. It was called Black in America 2. I hadn't seen nor been aware of the original Black in America and apparently it was a two-day broadcast so it's entirely possible I missed something really, really important in an earlier installment. What follows is my opinion on what I did see and if anyone saw the rest and would like to school me, please come and do so. (and they did! [info]ninasis on DW informs me that CNN talked about racial privilege in previous installments of this program, which at least gives these anecdotes a bit of context, though IMO, it doesn't fix everything that's wrong with this series by half.
  
  (tags: ibarw ibarw4 english.language media.(mis)representation fat.acceptance social.justice health by.poc)
• just_katarin: Black in America, for real :: In case you haven't been following, yesterday Justin Barrett, a Boston police officer responded to an editorial in the Boston Globe and CC'd it to his buddies in the National Guard. In his response, he completely lost his shit and called Gates and men like him "jungle monkeys". After he got in trouble for it (he is currently suspended pending a termination hearing), he had the audacity to say he isn't a racist.
  
  (tags: ibarw ibarw4 english.language united.states black white racism whiteness african.american by.poc)
• Queen of the Nile by *sailorptah on deviantART :: Cleopatra, as portrayed in this TV movie by Leonor Varela. For slytherinpuddle, in honor of International Blog Against Racism Week.
  
  (tags: ibarw ibarw4 english.language art media.(mis)representation)
• Shakesville: International Blog Against Racism Week :: We write about racism every week; this week was like any other, in that there were a bunch of posts, in part or whole, about racism, and in that there weren't enough, in the way that there can never be enough-no minimum, no maximum, no perfectly adequate average-because you cannot put a number on such a thing. You can't just pay your dues as an activist or ally; you can't quantify your work in measures of sufficiency. You must always, always, expect more, especially of yourself.
  
  (tags: ibarw ibarw4 by.white.people english.language meta allywork privilege white)
• Bruceclay.com - Friday Recap - Power Nap Edition - SEO Blog :: Battlestar Galactica fans already know that Edward James Olmos, who plays Admiral Adama on the hit Sci Fi show, gave a rousing speech at the United Nations a few months ago and ranted passionately about the use of the word "race" when what they're mean is different cultures. Turns out, if you're the savior of the whole human race, you can rant like that and actually get the UN to resolve to only use race when referring to the entire human race. Well done, EJO. (I like him because he sounds like my grandpa.)
  
  (tags: ibarw ibarw4 english.language media by.poc)
• not undecided: It’s International Blog Against Racism Week :: Better late than never. I touched on it a bit earlier this week. Please join us.
  
  (tags: ibarw ibarw4 english.language announcement.only)
• A Funny Thing Happened to Me at the Grocery Store the Other Day | Spontaneous ∂erivation :: A nice white lady came up to me, maybe in her 20s to 40s, I’m not one to judge, and said, “Oh! I have to ask you a question. Do you know the name of this kind of skin cream that all the pretty young Asian women are using?”
  
  (tags: ibarw ibarw4 english.language by.poc asian vietnamese internalized.racism racefail09 beauty)
• dichroic: IBARW: listening :: So I think my place this week is to shut up and listen, or rather read.
  
  (tags: ibarw ibarw4 english.language by.white.people whiteness racism.101)
• glvalentine: IBARW: A Night at the Movies :: I thought about writing a heartfelt essay about people of color in movies. Then I thought about writing a well-organized essay about people of color in movies. Then I thought about creating a list of well-realized people of color in movies. Then I realized there's no way to organize any aspect of this little Hollywood clusterfuck, so let's play it fast and loose, okay? There's just so many ways to be offensive, why stick to just one?
  
  (tags: ibarw ibarw4 english.language movies media.(mis)representation humor)
• catherineldf: IBARW :: Since I'm not sure I have much to say that isn't being said better and more topically elsewhere, I thought I'd put forth a list of books by writers of color of sf/f/h currently on my recently read or soon to be read list.
  
  (tags: ibarw ibarw4 english.language books book.recs books.science-fiction/fantasy)
• Mary Robinette Kowal: International Blog Against Racism Week :: I spent yesterday reading about racism, but not writing anything because I felt like I didn’t have anything to add to the conversation. After all, as a white person, race doesn’t affect me. Except that’s completely false. Race affects me every day.
  
  (tags: ibarw ibarw4 by.white.people privilege english.language white.privilege whiteness)
• 
  inkstone: Where's My Filipino Horror At? :: Asian horror is a pretty big thing right now -- especially when you take into account the number of recent American horror movies which are remakes of Asian ones. Thing is, when you look at Asian horror cinema that's made it "big," a lot of it is Japanese. Sure, you have films from other countries like A Tale of Two Sisters (Korea) or Shutter (Thailand), but the number of Japanese horror films far outnumber the others.
  
  (tags: ibarw ibarw4 by.poc filipino/filipina movies books books.fiction book.recs english.language)
• ethrosdemon: A few First Nations/AmericanCanadian Indian/Native People you should know. :: Hm, I was going to do a whole post about Chief Joe Medicine Crow since he's getting the Medal of Freedom this year and so is sort of in the news (but not really), but I figured, what the hell, how about highlight a bunch of different people that you can fall down a googlehole or wikihole over and maybe accidentally learn things even I don't know?
  
  (tags: ibarw ibarw4 english.language first.nations united.states canada history by.poc)
• not undecided: Stewing is not good for the soul. :: The references to this are what reduce me to an eight year old, or worse. Technically, is this not some kind of bizarre racism? Ooooh, the multi-colored girl. She's scary because that is just not right in my Big Book of Grievances, and I'm pissed that I must be affronted with her opinions or her presence and thus will even unthinkingly apply every method of retrofuckery possible in one fell swoop. Okay, a dozen or so swoops. I guess calling it a diatribe was overselling it. But you don't come here to read my stating the obvious. My racism reference: I certainly am not trying to equate a white-privileged upbringing and heritage with the experience of any minority in this country, let alone anywhere else across the globe, but it this particular exchange (or lack thereof) somehow seems to to highlight the whole left vs. right mentality of this country's general if not popular culture.
  
  (tags: ibarw ibarw4 english.language racism class)
• 
  avendya: IBARW: The Rapture of My Dreams :: This week, for [info - livejournal.com] ibarw, I am featuring poetry by people of color. On Wednesday, I showcased Li-Young Lee and on Thursday, Langston Hughes. Today's poem is by Jose Luis Diaz Granados, a Columbian poet.
  
  (tags: ibarw ibarw4 english.language poetry south.american colombian)
• Non-Privileged White Men: Marketing Fandom: HUGO AWARDS! | The Crotchety Old Fan :: I’m personally very sensitive to race/gender/religious/&etc other forms of bias and discrimination, having been subjected to it from a very young age: my personal tale of woe runs the gamut from ‘too smart’ discrimination, to ‘ageism’ (I’ve always looked far younger than I really am), to ‘heightism’ (I was almost always the shortest boy in class and yes, suffered through insensitivities like always being at the end of the line...
  
  (tags: ibarw ibarw4 english.language by.white.people racism.doesnt.exist united.states)
• Cheryl’s Mewsings » Blog Archive » International Blog Against Racism Week :: Apparently this week is International Blog Against Racism Week. Given that we have Worldcon coming up in just a few days, I’m not going to produce anything spectacular, but I would like to point you at a couple of interesting posts.
  
  (tags: ibarw ibarw4 english.language books roundup)
• Overview of People of Color in Heroscape | Spontaneous ∂erivation :: Heroscape is one of my favorite games ever. Not so much for the just-enough strategy, the quick game play, the cool figures, and the brilliant terrain building, but because… of its combination.
  
  (tags: ibarw ibarw4 english.language gaming by.poc heroscape united.states)
• mllesays: ibarw: art and media recs iv :: Today's theme is South Asia, and I'm excited because I got my coworker S. - who is Pakistani and who studied film at Emory, which makes her like 20 times more knowledgeable about the topic than me - to recommend 8 Bollywood films that everyone should see.
  
  (tags: ibarw ibarw4 english.language movies india bollywood)
• kirizal: In which Privilege Girl tries not to fail too hard :: If I'm going to fail--and let's keep in mind, the game is rigged and we are all going to fail--then I need to at least try to fail in ways that leave the door open for voices that aren't my own. Voices that get silenced or drowned out or replaced by the dominant voices of privilege.
  
  (tags: ibarw ibarw4 by.white.people united.states privilege white.privilege)
• rosefox: "How are you Jewish?" (IBARW, day 5) :: ...for ibarw day 5, have some links to intriguing blogs by Jews of color
  
  (tags: ibarw ibarw4 english.language jewish by.white.people)
• karenhealey: 1602: Manifest Destiny in Action :: Marvel 1602, by Neil Gaiman, Andy Kubert et al, at first appears to be an Alternate Universe story, where the early Marvel heroes have appeared all over the world in the Elizabethan Era; the story itself takes place over a period just before the death of Elizabeth I and just after the ascension of James I and VI. However, it is eventually revealed that this is not an alternate world at all - the Captain America/Steve Rogers from main continuity, many years in the future, has been transported via technological spatiotemporal interference to the America of this alternate history. Rescued by the people native to the area, he later encounters the (in our own history) doomed English settlement of Roanoke and saves it from destruction. His appearance results in an "anomaly" that threatens space-time.
  
  (tags: ibarw ibarw4 english.language by.white.people comics colonialism)
• Fatshionista! - 101: Thoughts on Intersectionality, Or, Why There’s No Dark-Skinned Fat Black Women on More to Love :: Race, fat, and class are inextricably tangled up together, and whether you personally realize and experience that entanglement or not, it exists.
  
  (tags: ibarw ibarw4 by.white.people united.states english.language intersectionality fat.acceptance class black african.american)
• Velveteen Rabbi: IBARW: Celebrating the diversity of Jewish community :: I don't mean to knock Ashkenazic Jews, or our food and culture -- these are the building-blocks of my own family and childhood! But there are whole other Jewish worlds out there: Sefardic Jews (Sfarad is the Hebrew word for Spain) of Spain and North Africa; Mizrahi Jews (mizrah means "east") of the Middle East, North Africa, and Central Asia; Jews in, and from, India and Latin America and Asia. Klal Yisrael -- the broader Jewish community -- has always been multifaceted and multicultural.
  
  (tags: ibarw ibarw4 by.white.people english.language united.states jewish middle.eastern african asian black)
• troubleinchina: IBARW: Jordan's Principle :: One of the things that we talk about here, on occasion, is how lucky we are that Don is a white man with a disability living in Canada. Things become more complicated in my post-racial utopia of a country when someone of a different race is born with a disability.
  
  (tags: ibarw ibarw4 canada intersectionality ablism first.nations health english.language by.white.people)
• Pah » One post for IBARW :: Iranians are not, for the most part, Arabs. The majority did not originate from the Arabian Peninsula, do not speak Arabic, and the country is not a member of the Arab League. In fact, Iran means Land of the Aryans.
  
  (tags: ibarw ibarw4 english.language by.white.people iran)
• redbird: IBARW: overlapping meanings of "privilege" :: As far as I can tell, there are at least two things going on here and called privilege. One is the things that in a better world, everyone would have: it should not be a privilege to decide whether, or who, to marry, or to say no to sexual advances, or to be able to choose your religious practices or lack thereof. And one person having those rights doesn't take them away from someone else.
  
  (tags: ibarw ibarw4 united.states english.language privilege)
• davidlevine: Context (a RaceFail post) :: My post, which was intended to improve the tone of the debate, was itself offensive and hurtful to many readers, and for this I am very sorry.
  
  (tags: ibarw ibarw4 english.language by.white.people tone racefail09)
• Memorabilia Antonina: Blogging against Racism :: What I want to write about, at the risk of starting up an emotive debate that has gone quiet, is what I learnt from RaceFail, how I have changed my way of thinking as a result.
  
  (tags: by.white.people racefail09 english.language united.kingdom ibarw ibarw4)
• sweet_adelheid: [IBARW] Australian Indigenous Feature Films (poll)
  
  (tags: ibarw ibarw4 indigenous.australians movies australia english.language)
• capesforladies: Friday Female Comics Creator, IBARW Edition: Jackie Ormes
  
  (tags: ibarw ibarw4 african.american comics black united.states english.language)

Comment here with new IBARW links (which will be collected today by sophinisba), or tag them for:ibarw on Delicious. If your post is tagged wrong, please comment at this post.

(Sorry for delay; Internet outage at Chateau SteelyPips. Formatting updates 11am EST.)