Idea totally ripped off from Gary Dauphin’s Should I use blackface in my blog? flowchart. I find Visio a lot easier to work with, though it doesn’t allow any sort of easy image mapping in HTML that I can tell. More tinkering is clearly needed.

Meanwhile, I present for your enjoyment an examination of how fraught it is to compare one group’s sufferings or civil rights to another as a rhetorical ploy. Any well-intended feedback is appreciated.

[Read more →]

I’ll answer sparkymonster’s questions today. Note that you’re going to get mixed answers, because white people know some obscure everyday shit too, and I am, don’t you know it, half.

[Read more →]

Feel free to give feedback.

This one’s about whether you should write an angry response to being called a racist.

Idea totally ripped off from Gary Dauphin’s Should I use blackface in my blog? flowchart. I hope it meets with his approval.

[Read more →]

Sorry to miss yesterday’s IBARW post. I was thinking, definitely, about it, but didn’t have anything that seemed worthy. I do think I will plan, soon, to come up with a flowchart (or possibly more than one) in the style of the “using blackface on your blog” flowchart, that has to do with how to have privilege and avoid being racist, though I fear that scope is too wide for practicality.

Though I sometimes disagree with where Kate Harding and her posse go, I have to give her respect for this self-revealing post about her own privilege and her own processing about privilege.

[Read more →]

Apropos of a friend’s IBARW post, I went looking for good links that talk about Cultural Appropriation. For those with no time to read about it on Wikipedia, Cultural Appropriation is the selective adoption of elements of a culture one does not belong to, and is characterized by in some way idealizing what we like about cultures and only hearing/seeing what we want to about them. Often commentators will talk about how appropriators have romanticized parts of the culture and done what they liked or simply ignored the rest. Most folks indigenous to the appropriated culture will see the picking and choosing and observe that the appropriator’s knowledge about the complexities of cultural, political, economic and other factors go unnoticed.

[Read more →]

I had cause recently to go (re-)read Directive 15 (because I had been speaking authoritatively about it and hadn’t reviewed it in quite some time - a couple of decades, probably). The last time (before this time) I thought I had reviewed it (or potentially related regulations with the IRS or some other governmental organization - I’ve had a lot of trouble trying to find such a citation, by the way), I learned that I couldn’t self-identify as White, because at that time only folks who were 7/8 White or more were allowed to self-identify as White. So I could only identify as Asian/Pacific Islander.

On further research this morning it sounds like I might have been reading an older regulation (if I had to guess, it was issued by a governmental or private agency in Virginia, but I can’t narrow it down further than that - I just don’t know) based on the older “One-drop rule“. It also sounds like in practice, this kind of rule was really only applied to folks who could be categorized as African Americans, but when I read it I’m pretty sure I thought it applied to me as well.

For reference of anyone who might find this via IBARW, I am half Chinese American and half Caucasian American by blood, ancestry, parentage. I can tell you where my families are from, but it also works if I say I’m 1/2 Taishanese, 1/4 Welsh, 1/8 English and 1/8 Scot. Cool, huh? I’m proud of my inherited ancestries.

Anyhow…

[Read more →]

This summary/links post is toward providing more contributions to IBARW 3, but may be interesting for my readers as well. Also, it’s helping me declutter my tags, so that’s also good.

Links and summaries after the cut.

[Read more →]

An almost 17-year old New York Times article.

An aware (we presume) surgeon.

[Read more →]

Feel free to join in, if you like.

[Read more →]