Alliance of White Anti-Racists Everywhere – Los Angeles
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Readers Learn Their Lesson About The Tiger Mother
01 year ago
During our writer Julianne Hing’s recent guestblogging stint at the Atlantic, she discussed the “pseudo-controversy” around a Washington Post op-ed by Amy Chua, in which Chua seemed to crow about the advantages of ‘Asian-style’ parenting that bordered on the psychologically abusive. That op-ed, we now know, was a series of cherrypicked excerpts from her forthcoming book; the book itself, as Julianne reports this week, is far more nuanced and reflective than the linkbait WaPo first laid in front of us.
Julianne used both of her pieces to frame the political in the personal, discussing her own upbringing, as well as the immigrant families she knows whose best efforts and university degrees still don’t qualify them for the American dream. And, as Amy Chua appears on Dateline and the cover of Time, smart conversations around the issues continue. Here’s a sampling of recent highlights from our readers.
Have some thoughts about this, or perhaps about Batman villains? Join us in the comments, or on Twitter, Tumblr, Facebook, and Youtube.
Reader skatter says the problem is both systemic and interpersonal, and not always in the ways we’d think.
The first thing to remember is that not all Chinese-American kids are high academic achievers. And, no, I’m not talking about “thoroughly Americanized” third or fourth generation kids. I’m talking about the children of “fresh-off-the-boat” immigrants. The ones who supposedly do so well in our education system. I’ve known many Chinese, and other Asian, immigrant kids who have run into trouble because their teachers expected them to be some sort of super achiever when they were just normal kids with normal abilities.
Yes, there is a large percentage of Chinese-American children who do do well in our schools, but so did other immigrant children in past generations. The difference being that legal discrimination no longer exists and, most importantly in the last 30 to 40 years, the only way out now is through academic achievement since this country’s manufacturing base- with it’s decent paying, mostly unionized, jobs – has largely disappeared.
And Colorlines.com contributor Michelle Chen chimes in too, reposting her comment on Julianne’s original TNC post.
I just looked at the original WSJ excerpt and was kind of amused when I realized that I have the exact same photo of the piano recital hall in my bedroom, except it’s me on the bench, playing Mozart’s variations, and not Chua’s daughter. While I’m mildly embarrassed by the cookie-cutter parallels between my childhood musical ventures and Sophia’s, what really intrigues me is the fact that I grew up in a very different household. I was never subjected to the kind of maniacal, dictatorial discipline that Chua touts here. My parents were quite open-minded and laissez-faire, probably much more so than a lot of “Western” (i.e. American-born) families I’ve encountered. There were piano lessons, specialized high school tests, and a very brief, failed foray into daily math drills. I can’t say those were my fondest childhood memories but I don’t regret them. The bottom line is that much of children’s development and worldviews are shaped not necessarily by a single parenting doctrine but by environmental factors, peer pressure, mass media, expectations from one’s community, and yes, culture. But that’s “culture” in a more organic sense, not necessarily imposed through parenting regimens. Children, particularly children of immigrant backgrounds, are, from birth, involved in a process of forming an identity by mixing and matching cultural elements to which they’re inevitably exposed. What’s been misleadingly described as the “Chinese” way of parenting seems to turn on a longstanding debate about authoritative vs. more permissive parenting styles. Though it has the element of cultural difference that throws the normative analysis off its axis. Perhaps what Chua failed to realize (and to her credit, her book does suggest some measure of personal growth and soul-searching toward the end), is that not all of the social and cultural factors are under a parent’s control. Children are individuals and they readily internalize family lessons as well as stimuli from their surrounding social environment, and eventually–maybe at 12, maybe at 35–they will learn to do so on their own terms.
Beyond the vague, reductivist argument over “Western” vs. “Chinese” parenting, it’s important to recognize that kids are remarkably resilient creatures. And that, for better or worse, makes them perfect blank slates on which parents tend to project their own insecurities, aspirations and neuroses, until maybe the filial sons and daughters start to discover that they’re not who they’ve been taught to see themselves as.
Is it any wonder that all this hoopla surrounding Tiger moms is emerging in the midst of growing anxieties about America’s place in the world and “losing out” to China as it takes our jobs and outscores us on tests? What would be really sad is conformity to this or that parenting dogma simply on the basis of geopolitical tensions, which have enlisted mothers and children as pawns in a battle for economic and political power. Largely absent from this discussion is that it is taking place under the assumption that this well-resourced realm of the well-educated, middle-class family is the ideal, indeed only, arena in which these parenting dramas can play out. Are mothers and fathers who don’t know algebra, or who can’t afford violin lessons, also entitled to have their own parenting styles?
By the way, Jeff Yang wrote an interesting piece about Chua’s own take on the media spin surrounding her manipulated excerpt in WSJ.
America loves its mommy wars but it’s a sucker for paper tigers.
And on Tumblr, undercover in the bay presents a key paragraph of Julianne’s Atlantic post with her own thoughts, excerpted here:
One thing that sticks out in my mind is this: In junior year of college, I went home to visit. My long-term boyfriend and I had just broken up, and I was pretty upset and smoking a lot. My mom with her super ninja psychic mom skills figured out that I smoked. I went back to college and she wouldn’t talk to me for a month.
I couldn’t figure out why she was mad at me. Was she disappointed in me? Did she think that, somehow, because I smoked that I was a bad kid? Was she worried that people would think she hadn’t raised me right? Was she mad because I didn’t listen to her when she said that smoking was bad for me? Because I wasn’t a good daughter and obeyed all the house rules?
I finally got her on the phone, and she asked, “Why do you smoke?”
“It’s nothing, Mom,” I said. “I’m just stressed out.”
Then, near tears, she asked me, “What did your father and I do to ever to make you stressed?”
That was it. She thought it was her fault. The whole time it wasn’t “My daughter’s a bad daughter.” It was “I’m a bad mom.” My kid’s so stressed out that she’s smoking. What did I do to hurt her? What can I do to help her?
ColorLines Livetweets NBC’s Humorless "Outsourced"
01 year ago
Last night the ColorLines crew live-Tweeted the series premiere of NBC’s new show “Outsourced,” and we weren’t impressed. In short, the show picks up from where the 2006 film left off by following the fictional life of a white American man who’s sent to India to train workers at a call center that’s been outsourced from the states. But it seemed so poorly written that there it was hard to even make fun of over Twitter, but we tried. Take a peak at last night’s conversation.
Friday Twitter Break: DREAMers Storm The Senate
01 year ago
Hello, sweet Friday–and even sweeter ColorLines readers. Let’s get right to it: if DREAM Act activists have their way, this week will go down in history as the week that the bill pushed through a gridlocked Congress to pass the Senate. On Tuesday Sen. Harry Reid, who’s in the heated race back home in Nevada with Republican challenger Sharron Angle, announced that he would be introducing the bill that benefits almost a million undocumented youth as an amendment to the defense authorization bill. Since that day, DREAM Act activists have been flexing their considerable organizing muscle, clogging up the mailboxes of senators with tens of thousands of phone calls, hanging out in the offices of congressional leaders, and marching in the streets.
No matter which way it goes when the bill comes up for a cloture vote next Tuesday, the campaign to win the DREAM Act will always be remembered as a youth-driven movement. And Twitter played a not insignificant role in that. Here now, a collection of some of the DREAM Act chatter (and a smattering of unrelated tidbits) from the Twittersphere to send you off into the weekend.
Find us online at @colorlines. Or come meet us offline next week at Facing Race, the conference being hosted by our publisher the Applied Research, in Chicago from Sept 23-25.
Readers Demand Executive Realness, in Politics and Fashion
01 year ago
by Channing Kennedy
in readersforum
This week on ColorLines.com, the big news is the DREAM Act will finally get a vote–which could mean great things for thousands of undocumented college-bound students, if the Democrats can muster the will to pass it. Plus, mainstream fashion magazines are still afraid of plus-sized women of color, and the establishment isn’t nearly afraid enough of hiphop. Want to join us? Jump on in — here on ColorLines.com, or on Twitter, Tumblr, Facebook, and Youtube.
Gabby Sidibe’s one of our favorite people here in the ColorLines offices, and it seems like y’all love talking about her too, judging from the activity on Julianne Hing’s two pieces on her lightened, cropped, and be-weaved Elle cover. On Facebook, Janet R. points out that the issue is more complicated than it first seems. Not by much, though.
The only thing that makes this worse is she is Elle’s token fat girl cover model. Do a google image search for “Elle magazine covers” & you’ll quickly see that.
… In recent years Elle has had an African American celebrity cover model quite a bit (don’t forget~Beyonce sells a whole lotta magazines!). But an obese cover model? Rosie O’Donnell is it, until now. So one could argue that is progress? But it doesn’t much feel that way when they gave her such bad hair & a bleached out look.
And frequent commenter convo_girl couldn’t be contained by the constraints of our comment box, and wrote a whole blog post herself, which includes a comparison of the Elle cover with Gabby’s March 2010 appearance on the front of Ebony. More female politico-cultural bloggers, please!
We also got lots of comments on all of Julianne’s coverage of the breaking developments in the DREAM Act, mostly from supporters of the legislation, and some from opponents. We got this undeniably inspiring message in a brief email from Shilpa B.:
I’m from Alabama, so my senators are nearly hopeless on progressive issues, but the DREAM Act article spurred me on to call their offices. And to make my family members promise to do the same.
Meanwhile, commenter Vitablue says the DREAM Act does nothing to address the fact that the United States isn’t that great a place to be a citizen of in the first place:
We have to look past our reactionary, nationalist views of immigration to understand what is at stake for the United States. To start, there is a legacy of race, gender, and class exploitation in the United States. Exploitation is fundamental because unlike other countries, nations, civilizations, The United States begins with the conquest of indigenous lands. It isn’t like the United States developed thousands of years ago in the hills of the Ozark mountains. All of the land was taken from other groups of people. The South was taken from Mexico, France, and Native groups. The West, Mid-west, and Northwest was taken from Native, Spain, and Mexico.
How the process of taking land was facilitated was through the inclusion and exclusion of people given the status of “White, Male and American” this slowly progressed to include Non-native American White men, White Women, Blacks and Latinos, and now the United States is debating the inclusion/exclusion of foreign born people of color.(We have yet to hear the outrage of Eastern European folks). With each successful inclusion into the United States system formerly excluded groups of people are forced to hold the front line in defending the United States from terrorism, diseases, mythical creatures and other groups who are not included, yet.
The Dream Act does nothing to challenge the absurd notion that the United States heritage is based not on a unified struggle, or the overthrow of a monarchy, but in a silly notion that someone is an American by having access to all that this country has to offer. Which is 15% unemployment in major cities, the poorest medical care out of any first world nation, a country where a CEO of a company makes 450% than his entry level worker, and a place where high schools has a 30 to 70% drop out rate.
This is nothing to look forward too. I can’t see how this is a Dream.
Guest author Eric Arnold’s call for renewed lyrical revolution, “Why We Need (Real) Gangsta Rap Right Now,” broke out into a great conversation — and Eric (aka E-Scribblah) took all comers. His engagement with y’all that commented is well worth a second read. Aztlanlbre builds on Eric’s argument and asks for the community to help its representatives to help the community:
… many of the rappers identified, like Ice Cube, Ice-T, Jay-Z or Dr Dre, have never articulated any substantive political analysis and/or ideological sentiment that indicated that they had a systemic understanding of why the issues that took place in the hood while they were coming up were even happening. I have heard Ice Cube say he was angry when he was young and while he felt strong about his opinions regarding the police and other issues of inequality — he feels, as a career person and parent, he must portray positive images and tell feel-good stories of African Americans.
… For long term change to take place we must continue to create spaces for youth to speak about injustice through music, but more importantly work on building their analysis so that they can make a lifetime commitment to struggle for justice. Once these rappers are no longer musically relevant, we need them to use their earnings and talent to continue to inspire youth and engage in other forms of community and economic development. They need to be taught other mechanisms for them to challenge inequalities like the abuse of poor people, the high drop-out rate, the overconcentration of African American and Latinos in the prison system, etc. This way, their legacy will not be known for their one-time contribution to identifying and calling out issues of injustice through rap music, but will more importantly help them develop a long-time contribution to social and economic justice in communities.
And finally, Rattailsmakemewannaooooh makes sure we do our job when it comes to stories about skateboarders who rescue holy books from being bbq’d by radical clergymen in city parks.
Wait. How did this article fail to mention Isoms’ amazing rattail!
A truly egregious oversight on our part, Rattailsmakemewannaooooh. Thanks for keeping us honest.
See y’all at Facing Race 2010 next week!
Friday Twitter Break: Fireproof Your Quran
01 year ago
Welcome to this week’s Friday Twitter Break folks. It’s not just any Friday though. It’s also September 10, 2010, the eve of the ninth anniversary of Sept. 11, and Eid al-Fitr, the Muslim holiday that marks the end of the holy month of Ramadan. To honor both important events, Florida pastor Terry Jones was going to set fire to a Quran tomorrow. Jones thankfully seems to have rethought that particular course of action, but not before dragging the entire country into a screaming match over Islam and America and American Muslims’ basic constitutional rights. And just when the whole thing looked like it might explode, President Obama weighed in today with some much-needed reason.
With all that now behind us, let’s get on with this week’s FTB. Bonus points if you can spot which of this week’s contributors will be speaking at our publisher ARC’s Facing Race conference in Chicago, September 23-25. (Hint: it won’t be @muslimhulk).
And as always, you can find us on Twitter at @colorlines.
Readers Want Justice for All on 9/11 Anniversary
01 year ago
Welcome to the weekend, all.
This week, we saw tensions rise unabatedly around the idea that Muslims can also be Americans, at a level unseen since September 11, 2001. Is the media fueling it? (Yes.) Is it election season? (Yes.) Is there a kernel of real anxiety in it, the same anxiety that our nation experiences every time its identity undergoes an inevitable expansion? Oh yes.
Want to join us? Jump on in — comment right here on the site, or get involved with us on Twitter, Tumblr, Facebook, and Youtube.
We’ve gotten some great discussion on Rinku Sen’s “This 9/11, Let’s All Take Responsibility For Ending A Summer of Hate” — her reflection on her friend and coauthor Fekkak Mamdouh’s pre- and post-9/11 experiences, first as an employee at the World Trade Center, and later as an organizer and advocate. Commenter Hanuman speaks about his experiences as a Sikh who observes the five articles of faith:
I am Sikh and have been confused for Muslim a number of times and have been the recipient of hate rhetoric, once a half-hour-long tirade about how I was Bin Ladin, Arab terrorist bomber, etc., a rhetoric I was afraid to stop for fear of the violence the stopping might incite. First my reaction was self-pity, then pity for all the little Sikh boys who get beat up for wearing patkas to school, then pity for the actual Muslims who have to put up with this abuse every day. It is simply not right. People deserve the freedom to have a life and to go through it calmly, coolly, with expectation for a good day, not the expectation of abuse and violence. 9/11 was like ten years ago now. Time to get over it and let the vast number of Muslims who had nothing to do with it live their lives just like everybody else does.
And ColorLines contributor Victor Goode reminds us of our nation’s history with ‘others’ of any color:
In the later part of the 19th century it was Catholicism that was attacked as the foreign religion. As waves of southern and mostly Catholic European immigrants entered he US there was a backlash that bears striking resistance to todays Islamaphobia.
Numerous editorials ran claiming that Catholicism was a foreign religion incompatible with American values and that catholics could never integrate into American society. Sound familiar?
In a case called Pierce vs. Society of Sisters decided in 1925, a state law in Oregon sought to ban private catholic schools. The Supreme Court eventually overturned those efforts holding that parents had a fundamental right to educate their children as they saw fit, including sending them to private religious schools. But a little know fact from the case was that the anti-Catholic movement in Oregon was lead by the Ku Klux Klan. Xenophobia, anti-cathilc bias and anti-immigrant sentiments found a comfortable home in the racist politics of the Klan.
It took years before this bias against catholics, subsided. It is tragic that we see the same “them vs. us” bias rearing its head again, but this time the target Muslims. While much is being said about the importance of “religious tolerance” as an American value, we unfortunately ignore our history of virulent religious and anti-immigrant bias, and so once again we repeat it.
On Julianne Hing’s article, “Protests, Outrage after LAPD Gunman Kills Guatemalan Father of Three,” Adam22 calls for solidarity across communities:
The Rampart district has long been a haven of corruption and police-sanctioned violence. Remember the Rampart scandal of the late ’90s which charged over 70 members of the department with misconduct? This looks like more of the same. I am a Black American living in the area where this happened. Although well aware of the divisions between Blacks and Latinos, I also understand the source of this division and refuse to play into the hands of the dividers, as many did when the LAPD used covert violence and underhanded tactics to bring an end to the L.A. gang truce of the early-mid ’90s. If more non-minorities and non-immigrants would speak out against this kind of abuse of official power, we all could enjoy safer, more harmonious communities. If more Whites would look into the history of official abuse of power by the LAPD, perhaps they would gain a more thorough understanding of why minorities tend to view police in an adversarial way. We, the targets, cannot end this abuse on our own. It takes people of conscience from all backgrounds.
We’ll leave you with a reader-made video posted on another of Julianne’s articles on police shootings this week. On “Seattle Demands Answers After Cop Shoots Native American Man,” AngryBroomstick calls for the deaf community and its allies to formally denounce the actions of the Seattle police. She shares this short, powerful video made after the news of John T. Williams’ death, in American Sign Language with captions, that explains the shooting and its impact on her safety as a deaf woman of color.
Friday Twitter Break: War, Hip-Hop, and Lots of Bite
01 year ago
We’re back with our Friday Twitter Break. And it’s just in time. From the official “end” to our War in Iraq to the signing of the first Domestic Worker’s Bill of Rights, it’s been a long week. We’ve rounded up a few gems from the week’s most important news.
Don’t forget to follow us on Facebook, Tumblr and of course Twitter, @ColorLines!
And now, to start your weekend off right:
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Readers Wish Congress Labored For Them, Too
01 year ago
We’re all in a hurry to enjoy a long weekend at the beach, and it’s no wonder: it’s been a tough news week. Unless you allow yourself to geek out on reading Kanye West’s (genius!) Twitter account, chances are you were on the receiving end of stories about greedy politicians and their scandalous insider hustles. And Jan Brewer. Luckily, our readers were right there with us, pushing us to dig deeper. Here’s the best of the week’s commentary from you, the readers.
Lazarusbrands had a lot to say about Texas Congresswoman Eddie Bernice Johnson, who’s the latest Congressional Black Caucus member to get caught up in an ethics scandal:
I must take issue with your statement that Congresswoman Johnson “seems to feel the heat.” On the contrary, in a very unusual move for a major newspaper editorial board, the Dallas Morning News Editorial Board’s August 30th commentary implores the congresswoman and her staff to “stop talking.” The DMN editors rightly observed that the more the congresswoman speaks, the more arrogant and self-serving her statements get.
On Facebook, readers chimed in on Naima Ramos-Chapman’s digest of the furor surrounding New Orleans’s charter schools at The Root:
Ya’ll were rightfully upset at Julianne Hing’s news that it cost millions to kill Oscar Grant. Liza quipped:
BART actually paid an outside consultant $283,000 to “recommend” that Marysol Domenici and Tony Pirone be fired? You mean it wasn’t obvious that these two needed to be taken out of law enforcement before they got someone else killed? Some outside consultant gets hundreds of thousands of dollars to “recommend” what obviously had to be done?
And Hena Ashraf added to the Park51 debate a personal account of what it’s like to attend the mosque that everyone’s talking about. Cbrownlie added some clarity to the whole debate:
I want you to know that many people of faith are appalled by this anti-Islamic drumbeat. In my community the Unitarian Universalists are organizing a “read-in” of the Qur’an on 9/11 which will include readings in Arabic with an English translation courtesy of our local Islamic community. We will also remember the thousands of lives that have been lost in the wars and the violence that has followed the attacks of 9/11/01.
But hey, there was some good news. Seth Freed Wessler wrote about how immigration actually drives up wages. Michelle Chen brought up a good point by noting:
I agree with the overall findings, which are reflected in other studies I’ve read, but I am concerned that the real struggles faced by less-skilled native-born workers could get drowned out in the polarization over whether immigration is a “net positive or negative.” Highlighting the need for labor equity across all demographic groups is necessary to counter the right-wing backlash and foster solidarity among workers who might otherwise see each other as competition. And just as we shouldn’t accept blanket indicators of overall growth on face value, we should also be conscious that economic “positives” seldom affect all communities equally.
Readers Prefer Net Neutrality to Glenn Beck
01 year ago
Welcome to the weekend, readers! We did it!
One of our week’s hottest topics was net neutrality; check out Jamilah King’s “Air Has No Prejudice, But Verizon Does, in which she takes apart Verizon’s efforts to discredit its critics, and the net neutrality movement, via a racially inclusive… ad campaign. In the comments, Alton Drew disagrees with Jamilah’s thesis:
First, let us look at revenues. So what if Verizon, the villain in Ms. King’s article, makes billions. It’s simple math. If Verizon serves tens of millions of customers, Verizon is going to make billions of dollars. In addition, if the customers didn’t think Verizon’s service was worth having, Verizon wouldn’t earn billions of dollars in revenue.
Second, Ms. King conveniently leaves out the expenses necessary for Verizon to provide mobile broadband services. Some of these expenses are imposed by the FCC and other government bodies; the same entities that she and other net neutrality proponents would like to impose even more regulations and costs. Ms. King forgets that these additional costs will eventually be passed on to the very African American and Latino consumers she allegedly is concerned with.
Finally, Verizon does not own the airwaves. It has a license from the federal government to use the airways. Verizon also has franchise authority from state and local government for its towers and the lines that connect them.
If this were about prejudice, then far fewer than the 64% of African Americans currently using cell phones to access the Internet would be able to do so.
diana13 pushes back on Alton and puts a human face on the issue:
… Many Native communities out here don’t have broadband infrastructure, and definitely not the money to afford it. Sometimes they rely on their phones for internet access (although only a few have it) or have to travel up to 20 miles to the local library or coffeeshop to get online.
This makes it really difficult for high school students, especially, who are starting to write research papers and use the internet as their main resource. Some teachers have stopped requiring research-based home assignments because students can’t complete them outside of school. It’s really affecting a lot of people.
It’s not fair to ask young students to choose between getting their homework done at home (for an insane amount of money) or biking 20 miles to the nearest library before it closes. That’s not a choice.
The internet is quickly becoming an essential tool. Not only for social interaction (some people in the communities we work with depend on the internet to talk to their families out of the country and state) but for essential things like homework, applying for government services, getting accurate health information and forms and applying for government services like Social Security.
No one needs to convince our communities that affordable internet access (wireless or wired) is important.They know that these are public structures that Verizon and other telecom companies are trying to privatize. And as they increase the cost of their services, our communities know that this means they’ll be pushed out of access to a tool that is becoming more and more essential.
I encourage some of the readers to visit poor areas of their states (rural or urban) and see what “choices” people have when it comes to getting basic services.
And Alexismontex encourages a broader view:
The more this is framed as a “consumer” issue, the more dangerous this debate becomes. Google just announced this week that it’s launching a new telephone service to compete with Skype. Thinking in purely innovative terms, that’s where the future is. And you mean to tell me this isn’t a basic communication rights issue? The Internet is fast becoming THE way to be heard and get info in our country. Let’s not sell it off to private companies.
It’s no surprise that people love talking about Glenn Beck. Yesterday, Kai Wright’s “Glenn Beck’s MLK Dream is Perverse, But What’s Our Vision? asked a tough question of those condemning Beck’s efforts to co-opt of MLK’s legacy: how true is our own movement being to that same legacy? ColorLines contributor Victor Goode, who recently penned “The Roots of the GOP’s Birth Citizenship Mania,” adds to the list of King’s since-neglected causes.
Beck claims that his rally is to “honor our troops” … as if some event has transpired that has dishonored them. But there he may have a point. Every American soldier takes an oath to defend the nation and the constitution, and thrusting them into a war against Iraq without the constitutionally required declaration by Congress might very well qualify as dishonor.
But rallies wont cure that problem. Only bringing them home from these wars of empire can truly place the military back into its role of “defending the constitution.”
Beck also fails to note King’s evolving awareness of the costs to democracy of American militarism that led in 1965 to his famous denunciation of the Vietnam war.
Honoring our troops would be to once again have them stand down from these wars of American empire and return to their role as defenders of the nation against the aggression of other nations. It would also fulfill King’s dream that America’s economic might could once again be focused on the real enemies of poverty, joblessness and discrimination.
On the ColorLines Facebook page, Tabitha Hudson wants us to go further:
In the same vein, on Naima Ramos-Chapman’s post from earlier in the week, “Glenn Beck Turns MLK’s Dream to Nightmare on Anniversary,” John reminds us that perceptions of Beck aren’t universal. For many households, he’s the only person on TV talking about Black history.
Are you serious??!?? I know you haven’t watched Beck in the past year. I am white and raising a black child, we have been watching Beck because he has been discussing black history, real history, honoring their sacrifices and roles. So whites can’t share the beliefs MLK had? Isn’t that in complete opposition to judging a person by their character and not their skin color? Why can’t whites believe in MLK’s message and honor it? That sounds racist to me. Maybe you should watch him and learn something; I have learned GREAT forgotten/erased history that makes me proud to be an American. I am also very proud my “black” son is learning this history. I haven’t seen the black community leaders teaching this history, they try to keep blacks as victims because it helps raise money. Glen Beck is saying claim your “Rightful” place in history.
And finally, on Michelle Chen’s “ACLU Confronts Denver Prison’s Abusive Strip Searches,” commenter Guest says that:
Many of the women have complained to me about that particular method of being searched, experience flashbacks of a traumatic event in their past, and are afraid of losing what few privileges they have. If a prisoner refuses to comply with the search procedure, they are handcuffed, taken to ad seg, and will receive a disciplinary case for refusing to obey a lawful order.
Many of the non-uniform female staff refuse to do the search at all.
It wasn’t right from the beginning, and now maybe it will be stopped all together. One can only hope.
Don’t forget you can join the conversation yourself, right here at ColorLines.com and on Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, and Youtube.
Readers Prefer Net Neutrality to Glenn Beck
01 year ago
Welcome to the weekend, readers! We did it!
One of our week’s hottest topics was net neutrality; check out Jamilah King’s “Air Has No Prejudice, But Verizon Does, in which she takes apart Verizon’s efforts to discredit its critics, and the net neutrality movement, via a racially inclusive… ad campaign. In the comments, Alton Drew disagrees with Jamilah’s thesis:
First, let us look at revenues. So what if Verizon, the villain in Ms. King’s article, makes billions. It’s simple math. If Verizon serves tens of millions of customers, Verizon is going to make billions of dollars. In addition, if the customers didn’t think Verizon’s service was worth having, Verizon wouldn’t earn billions of dollars in revenue.
Second, Ms. King conveniently leaves out the expenses necessary for Verizon to provide mobile broadband services. Some of these expenses are imposed by the FCC and other government bodies; the same entities that she and other net neutrality proponents would like to impose even more regulations and costs. Ms. King forgets that these additional costs will eventually be passed on to the very African American and Latino consumers she allegedly is concerned with.
Finally, Verizon does not own the airwaves. It has a license from the federal government to use the airways. Verizon also has franchise authority from state and local government for its towers and the lines that connect them.
If this were about prejudice, then far fewer than the 64% of African Americans currently using cell phones to access the Internet would be able to do so.
diana13 pushes back on Alton and puts a human face on the issue:
… Many Native communities out here don’t have broadband infrastructure, and definitely not the money to afford it. Sometimes they rely on their phones for internet access (although only a few have it) or have to travel up to 20 miles to the local library or coffeeshop to get online.
This makes it really difficult for high school students, especially, who are starting to write research papers and use the internet as their main resource. Some teachers have stopped requiring research-based home assignments because students can’t complete them outside of school. It’s really affecting a lot of people.
It’s not fair to ask young students to choose between getting their homework done at home (for an insane amount of money) or biking 20 miles to the nearest library before it closes. That’s not a choice.
The internet is quickly becoming an essential tool. Not only for social interaction (some people in the communities we work with depend on the internet to talk to their families out of the country and state) but for essential things like homework, applying for government services, getting accurate health information and forms and applying for government services like Social Security.
No one needs to convince our communities that affordable internet access (wireless or wired) is important.They know that these are public structures that Verizon and other telecom companies are trying to privatize. And as they increase the cost of their services, our communities know that this means they’ll be pushed out of access to a tool that is becoming more and more essential.
I encourage some of the readers to visit poor areas of their states (rural or urban) and see what “choices” people have when it comes to getting basic services.
And Alexismontex encourages a broader view:
The more this is framed as a “consumer” issue, the more dangerous this debate becomes. Google just announced this week that it’s launching a new telephone service to compete with Skype. Thinking in purely innovative terms, that’s where the future is. And you mean to tell me this isn’t a basic communication rights issue? The Internet is fast becoming THE way to be heard and get info in our country. Let’s not sell it off to private companies.
It’s no surprise that people love talking about Glenn Beck. Yesterday, Kai Wright’s “Glenn Beck’s MLK Dream is Perverse, But What’s Our Vision? asked a tough question of those condemning Beck’s efforts to co-opt of MLK’s legacy: how true is our own movement being to that same legacy? ColorLines contributor Victor Goode, who recently penned “The Roots of the GOP’s Birth Citizenship Mania,” adds to the list of King’s since-neglected causes.
Beck claims that his rally is to “honor our troops” … as if some event has transpired that has dishonored them. But there he may have a point. Every American soldier takes an oath to defend the nation and the constitution, and thrusting them into a war against Iraq without the constitutionally required declaration by Congress might very well qualify as dishonor.
But rallies wont cure that problem. Only bringing them home from these wars of empire can truly place the military back into its role of “defending the constitution.”
Beck also fails to note King’s evolving awareness of the costs to democracy of American militarism that led in 1965 to his famous denunciation of the Vietnam war.
Honoring our troops would be to once again have them stand down from these wars of American empire and return to their role as defenders of the nation against the aggression of other nations. It would also fulfill King’s dream that America’s economic might could once again be focused on the real enemies of poverty, joblessness and discrimination.
On the ColorLines Facebook page, Tabitha Hudson wants us to go further:
In the same vein, on Naima Ramos-Chapman’s post from earlier in the week, “Glenn Beck Turns MLK’s Dream to Nightmare on Anniversary,” John reminds us that perceptions of Beck aren’t universal. For many households, he’s the only person on TV talking about Black history.
Are you serious??!?? I know you haven’t watched Beck in the past year. I am white and raising a black child, we have been watching Beck because he has been discussing black history, real history, honoring their sacrifices and roles. So whites can’t share the beliefs MLK had? Isn’t that in complete opposition to judging a person by their character and not their skin color? Why can’t whites believe in MLK’s message and honor it? That sounds racist to me. Maybe you should watch him and learn something; I have learned GREAT forgotten/erased history that makes me proud to be an American. I am also very proud my “black” son is learning this history. I haven’t seen the black community leaders teaching this history, they try to keep blacks as victims because it helps raise money. Glen Beck is saying claim your “Rightful” place in history.
And finally, on Michelle Chen’s “ACLU Confronts Denver Prison’s Abusive Strip Searches,” commenter Guest says that:
Many of the women have complained to me about that particular method of being searched, experience flashbacks of a traumatic event in their past, and are afraid of losing what few privileges they have. If a prisoner refuses to comply with the search procedure, they are handcuffed, taken to ad seg, and will receive a disciplinary case for refusing to obey a lawful order.
Many of the non-uniform female staff refuse to do the search at all.
It wasn’t right from the beginning, and now maybe it will be stopped all together. One can only hope.
Don’t forget you can join the conversation yourself, right here at ColorLines.com and on Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, and Youtube.