I'm trying to write a thing about stereotypes, but it's hard because I haven't been writing for a while. While procrastiresearching, I started asking my (non-Latina) girlfriend whether she thought "Mexicans love Morrissey" was a stereotype. She had never heard anything like that. She wanted to know, in response, whether "Mexicans love Mariachi ( Read more... )

STEPHEN GREENBLATT: When I was writing the glosses for the Norton Shakespeare, I remember doing the glosses for Much Ado About Nothing and I came to the line in which Claudio says, I would marry her "were she an Ethiope." So I had to explain what "were she an Ethiope" meant, and I said in the marginal gloss, "Ethiope, i.e., black and therefore, ( Read more... )

I'm back in LA, and recent evidence confirms that Portland may be quirky, but Southern California is weird, the kind of Capital-W Weird that encompasses Lovecraftian-level Weirdness.

• There was an earthquake in Los Angeles last night. It wasn't big (magnatitude 3.7, below the 4.0 threshold for most Angelenos to care about), but it was centered in a ( Read more... )

I mentioned Quora in my last post. It's a weird site, and I'm going to post about my experiences with it ( Read more... )

I was talking with
( Read more... )

I used to do reviews of the Escape Artists podcasts. Maybe I should do that again. Recently, I've been meaning to post more, but the days slip by without me even noticing I haven't posted again. (On the other hand, my exercise is staying fairly regular, despite wisdom-tooth disruptions, so that's good.) But I really wanted to talk about one ( Read more... )

Lotería Chicana sums up my antipathy toward the U.S.'s Cinco de Mayo in a positive way:If Cinco de Mayo was a real holiday-instead of just an excuse to drink lots of tequila-there'd be some kind of gift giving or at least all Mexicans would get hugs. Even, better there'd be Cinco de Mayo miracles and claymation movies reenacting the Battle of ( Read more... )

The Nigerian historian J.F. Afe Ajayi steers a sensible middle course between dramatization and trivialization of the effects of colonial rule: "Although the Europeans were generally masters of the colonial situation and had political sovereignty, they did not possess a monopoly of initiatve during the colonial period." We must therefore ask who ( Read more... )

In a 1998 survey, three different groups of white people were asked whether they had black friends ( Read more... )

I've been meaning to post this for a while, and I'm going to do so now, if for no other reason than I won't have to keep looking for it. I think Bonilla-Silva may have rephrased this more precisely in later revisions, but this is the version I have.This argument [racialized social structures] clashes with social scientists' most popular policy ( Read more... )