A fantastic story: A fashion designer who dislikes Obama because he think’s Obama is a Muslim sells a t-shirt that reads “Obama is my slave” to a grad student who thinks it’s a good idea to wear this t-shirt out and about in New York City.  The grad student is, unsurprisingly, assaulted by a group of angry New York denizens, then sues the fashion designer.

I can’t figure out who I like least in this story, the xenophobic fashion designer, the foolishly short-sighted and litigious grad student, or the violent street people?

CrazyMonk points to a great article about “how black Baltimore drug dealers are using white supremacist legal theories to confound the Feds.”

In the previous year, nearly twenty defendants in other Baltimore cases had begun adopting what lawyers in the federal courthouse came to call “the flesh-and-blood defense.” The defense, such as it is, boils down to this: As officers of the court, all defense lawyers are really on the government’s side, having sworn an oath to uphold a vast, century-old conspiracy to conceal the fact that most aspects of the federal government are illegitimate, including the courts, which have no constitutional authority to bring people to trial. The defendants also believed that a legal distinction could be drawn between their name as written on their indictment and their true identity as a “flesh and blood man.”

It’s long, but good.

“[Brigitte] Bardot has been convicted four times for inciting racial hatred.” She’s got me beat.

I just remembered an incident I overheard a few months ago.

I was meandering through a GameStop and a black man, about 40, was looking at Rock Band for the Wii. The store was crowded at the time, but he managed to get the attention of a clerk, also black. The shopper asked if the game merely allowed the playing of pre-selected songs, or if it also allowed freestyling. The shopper was clearly hoping that Rock Band was more of an actual music generation system than a video game. The clerk explained that the game only played pre-selected songs and that he could not use it to freestyle.

The clerk then looked around, did a sort of fake cough, and stated “and, uh, you can only play… well… rock music.”

I wonder if this unrequested piece of information was volunteered because the customer had asked about freestyling, or if it was because the customer was black?

I’ve always been amused by the lyrics to the Creed song “One”. It’s really transparently about affirmative action… and it’s really negative. You don’t often hear songs based on decrying affirmative action, Creed pretty much has the market cornered on this genre:

Affirmative may be justified
Take from one give to another
The goal is to be unified
Take my hand be my brother
The payment silenced the masses
Sanctified by oppression
Unity took a backseat
Sliding further into regression

…

Society blind by color
Why hold down one to raise another
Discrimination now on both sides
Seeds of hate blossom further
The world is heading for mutiny
When all we want is unity
We may rise and fall, but in the end
We meet our fate together

If you don’t recall the song, here they are doing it on Saturday Night Live.

Something just popped into my head: How did anybody think this was an acceptable idea for a movie?

That is all.

Tonight I watched The Confederate States of America, a documentary about the Americas set in an alternate universe where the South won the Civil War. It’s a deeply flawed movie in both concept and execution and includes some of the worst acting I’ve seen in a quasi-major motion picture. Where’s Spike Lee when we need him?  This sort of thing is his bread and butter?

However, intermixed among the bad acting, bizarre/pointless story and corny effects was the occasional gem, including this DW Griffith version of Abraham Lincoln’s attempted escape to Canada, in blackface, next to Harriet Tubman on the underground railroad. Beware, it’s pretty racist and hence probably NSFW:

YouTube also has a collection of racist alternative universe commercials used in the movie.

This is my first crack uploading anything to DailyMotion since my spat with YouTube, let me know if anything’s amiss.

Over the summer I made a short video of a strange dry cleaner in Los Angeles.   Today I received the following question about it through YouTube:

Hi, i watched your dry cleaners video. Interesting, I loved it.

I was just wondering if you knew, is the cleaners owned by honkys, wetbacks, chinks or niggers ?

It doesn’t realy make a difference however,im just curious.

do you know ?

Thanks for your question, fidelvis.  Sadly, I don’t know what ethnic group owns the dry cleaner.  It’s obviously unfortunate that I don’t; without accurately knowing the owner’s race, it’s difficult to properly display racism towards them.  It would be a shame to call them one ethnic slur when in fact a second ethnic slur would have be more appropriate.  Then who would look the fool?

Perhaps with some further investigation we could uncover this important fact.

Racist is a hard word to spell.

Be Kind Rewind, directed by Michel Gondry, is about people who create homemade, low budget reproductions of famous movies. In that spirit, Michel Gondry has released his own homemade, low budget reproduction of the Be Kind Rewind trailer. Weird.

I’m a little unsettled by Gondry’s decision to portray Mos Def by putting on an afro wig and big black gloves, but whatever…

PS - this was totally CrazyMonk territory.  Sorry.

Via Adfreak.

Everywhere you look today there’s a story about how Obama’s huge victory in South Carolina “transcended race” or how voters were “not swayed by racial politics.” Maybe those people are looking at different exit poll numbers than I am, because when Obama takes in 80% of the black vote and comes in last in the white vote he didn’t transcend race — he was lofted to victory almost exclusively ON race.

Now that race has become an issue (which it wasn’t in Iowa), I’m curious how he’s going to play in white America.  Could this sweeping victory actually be Barack Obama’s campaign’s death knell?

I just started watching the first season of Mad Men, a show on AMC about advertising executives in the 1950s. It depicts a startlingly racist, sexist and smoke filled vision of the era (seriously, their minutes-to-cigarettes ratio is off the chart, I’m surprised I didn’t come down with lung cancer just from watching the thing). The first episode has me intrigued enough to keep watching. To help you get a quick feel of the tone of the show, here’s one very short clip:

Ten points to anyone who can identify what big-name show the secretary in yellow was on prior to landing this gig (without looking it up). I’m looking at you, jbg.

I see a typo and I want it grammatically correct,
No commas anymore I want them to turn black…

Troeltsch & Lorelei point out that the official title to Paint It Black by the Rolling Stones contains a comma in the original release, as in “Paint It, Black.” Keith Richards apparently feels the comma was mistakenly added by a secretary at Decca Records, while alternate theories consider the title to be racist. The comma has appeared intermittently on track listings ever since (according to a cursory search of Amazon).

Who, knew?

Thus far this year 412 people have been murdered in New York City.  Approximately 29 of them were white and 272 were black.  Only 8.5% of the murders were committed by strangers — if that stat stays constant across races, only two or three white people were murdered by strangers in New York City so far this year (the number for black people would be around 23).  These numbers are staggeringly low.

Go Broken Windows.

One enterprising writer for Vanity Fair decided that the time was right for him to grow a Hitler mustache:

This is the part where I am supposed to explain just why I decided to write this story now. I might talk about the re-emergence of facial hair on the world stage, or the rise of the “new anti-Semitism,” or Holocaust denial in Iran, but, the fact is, my interest in the Hitler mustache never started and never ends. It is always. If you’re a Jew, the Hitler mustache exists in the eternal present. I grew it for the same reason Richard Pryor said the word “nigger.” I wanted to defuse it. I wanted to own it. I wanted to reclaim it for America and for the Jews. My name is Rich Cohen, and I wear a Hitler mustache.

I think he made it too broad.

jbg contends that I was wrong in my assessment that Homeboys in Outer Space was the most racist show on television and posits that The Secret Diary of Desmond Pfeiffer was, in fact, the most racist show on television. I admit, it’s a close call, but I still think I’m right. You can come to your own decision:

Homeboys in Outer Space’s intro:

The Secret Diary of Desmond Pfeiffer’s intro:

Tough decision.

If you need more help deciding, you can see the entire first aired episode of Desmond Pfeiffer on YouTube: part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4.

This used to be the best show on television:

For those of you who didn’t browse through all my Ireland pictures, here’s one of the more interesting selections:

I, at the time, assumed (hoped?) that Jap Cars Dublin was a used car company run by a guy named Jap, but I was wrong. It is indeed a company that appears to sell primarily Japanese cars.

Cultural differences are often surprising.

The afore-mentioned Tufts/Primary Source decision is being cheered by the ACLU who took an active role in lobbying for the outcome.

Tufts University had a few issues with questionable articles published by the Primary Source, the campus’s conservative/libertarian magazine, over the past year. Through an internal disciplinary process, the magazine was required to provide bylines for all subsequent publications. That decision was, today, overturned and the president of the University, Lawrence Bacow, provided his thoughts on the matter.

They seem pretty coherent:

——– Forwarded Message ——–
From: OfficeOfThePresident <OfficeOfThePresident@tufts.edu>
To: TuftsCommunity <TuftsCommunity@tufts.edu>
Subject: Freedom of Expression at Tufts
Date: Mon, 27 Aug 2007 13:02:27 -0400

Today, Dean of Undergraduate Education James Glaser ruled on an appeal
by The Primary Source of a decision by the Committee on Student Life
(http://ase.tufts.edu/undergradeducation). Specifically, Dean Glaser set
aside that part of the decision requiring The Primary Source to include
bylines on all future articles. Since Dean Glaser’s decision leaves open
other issues raised by the CSL decision, I thought I would take this
opportunity to express to the community my own views on freedom of
expression at Tufts.

First, some background: Twice last year, The Primary Source published
articles that many in this community, myself included, found incredibly
offensive. The first article, allegedly a satire of affirmative action,
suggested that African-American students admitted to Tufts were
academically unqualified. The second article, published in response to
Islamic Awareness Week, strongly implied that all Muslims were violent
and intolerant.

After the publication of the first piece, the community responded
collectively. In rallies, meetings, and pieces published in the student
press, people strongly voiced their own opinions. The editors of The
Primary Source withdrew the article and apologized.

After the publication of the second piece, I wrote a Viewpoint for The
Tufts Daily in which I strongly took issue with the substance of the
Primary Source article about Islam. Although The Primary Source had once
again offended a discrete minority within our community, I opposed any
attempt to censure or limit the publication. I repeated a statement I
have made often since coming to Tufts: The appropriate response to
offensive speech is more speech, not less.

Following publication of the second article, a student organization and
an individual student petitioned the Committee on Student Life,
asserting they were harassed by the publication of the two articles. The
CSL held a hearing and ruled that The Primary Source had harassed these
students given the definition contained in our student handbook, the
Pachyderm. In response, the CSL imposed the byline policy which Dean
Glaser vacated today.

In retrospect, I think that the CSL was ill-advised to hear this case.

Universities are places where people should have the right to freely
express opinions, no matter how offensive, stupid, wrong headed,
ill-considered, or unpopular. To say that people have the right to
express such views does not mean that we condone them or that they
should go unchallenged. Rather, it means that the responsibility to
respond is shared collectively by all members of the community and not
vested in the action of any administrative body.

We modeled an appropriate response to offensive speech after The Primary
Source published its parody of a Christmas carol questioning the
academic qualifications of our minority students. This approach – people
speaking strongly and clearly in response to offensive speech – was far
more powerful than any decision of a student-faculty committee. It was
through our collective voice that we affirmed our community values.

While Tufts is a private institution and not technically bound by First
Amendment guarantees, it is my intention to govern as President as if we
were. To put it another way, I believe that students, faculty, and staff
should enjoy the same rights to freedom of expression at Tufts as they
would if they attended or worked at a public university. With the
exception of the recent CSL decision, we have operated in the past as if
such rights applied. I will work with the Board of Trustees to formalize
this policy.

During the McCarthy era, a number of university presidents in the United
States failed to defend the principle of freedom of expression.
Students, faculty, and staff paid for this equivocation as the
government sought to purge college campuses of those expressing
particularly unpopular opinions. We must be vigilant in defending
individual liberties even if it means that from time to time we must
tolerate speech that violates our standards of civility and respect.

Lawrence S. Bacow
President

It’s hard to imagine that kids in blackface would play well in an ad campaign in America.

In Germany, however…

Via Cynical-C.