Posts Tagged With race
Monday, February 13, 2012 / 12:04 pm
Comfortably Ignoring Society’s Problems
Addressing inequality head on, since 1865.
by Tony Chavira
Tags: Mitt Romney | race | disparity | slavery | progress
The blog, Letters of Note, posted a fantastic old letter from Mr. Jourdan Anderson, a freed slave living and working in Dayton, Ohio in 1865, in response to his former master, Colonel P.H. Anderson of Big Spring, Tennessee, requesting that he return to Tennessee and get back to work on the farm.
Read these highlights from the letter and jump for joy:
Read more ...
permalink | comments
Thursday, January 26, 2012 / 6:00 am
This Job Is a Solid Killer
African Americans in wartime, as depicted on stage and screen and in the funny papers.
by Gary Phillips
Tags: race | Red Tails | movies | stage | comics
This past weekend I was watching the big budget Captain America: The First Avenger on our newish flat screen TV. Set in World War II, I’d seen it in its 3D glory at the cineplex last year, but enjoyed the movie so much I rented it on DVD. For years we’d had this Sony Trinatronic. That much used machine finally gave up the ghost a few months ago, and a trip to the Best Buy in Culver City yielded the bad boy we got now, a Samsung LCD 40-incher. Not only does it deliver a bigger, crisper picture, it’s less than half the weight of the Sony, reminding me just how far we’ve advanced technology-wise.
Read more ...
permalink | comments
Friday, January 20, 2012 / 5:00 am
Why Ron Paul is Wrong About Everything Ever, Social Issues Edition
He completely dismisses the realities of reconstruction, drug laws and the drug conviction rate.
by Tony Chavira
Tags: marijuana | race | why Ron Paul is wrong about everything ever
Racists—and those who exploit racism—are rarely about the business of openly declaring themselves as such, especially after their cause has been thumped. Before the Civil War, you could find all manner of Southerners exalting the “great moral truth of slavery.” Afterwards, they claimed it was just “States’ Rights.” Before Reconstruction, the defeated Confederates employed explicit black codes that reduced African-Americans to slavery. After Redemption they moved to “vagrancy laws,” “contracts” and “grandfather clauses.” In the 1960s George Wallace would loudly declare “segregation forever!” Now we say “the Civil Rights Act destroyed privacy.” In the era of militia madness, Ron Paul defended his racist newsletters. In the era of Barack Obama, he didn’t read them.
— Ta-Nehisi Coates
American history is full of strange asymmetries, which Americans of all color justify differently in retrospect. White settlers murdered 99% of the Native American population, but justified those murders by giving the remaining 1% land, tax exemptions and nation status. Africans were wrongfully enslaved for more than two hundred years, then given nothing when they were freed. Interned Japanese Americans were given a stipend after three years of wrongful imprisonment.
