Yup. I couldn't have said it better with five hundred pages of social science jargon. :)

Photo links misdirect, with slightly hilarious results.

...it's mocking how many white people view themselves as individuals while they view non-white people as an easily stereotyped conglomerate. The message is that from the outside, it's easy to stereotype. If you've ever seen a white friend meet a black person and immediately start talking about what kind of music they assume that person likes, the site is really pretty funny.

Is it the case that Liberal Jew thinks "hip-hop or African" music is the same thing? and encompasses Reggae, which is neither? 

PAPIST.

 

edit: I only say this because I worry about you.

A LOT.

...fixed, no. And naftali, are you saying, as juju would interpret, that getting beaten up on the way to school is worse than the Holocaust? (That's reductive, you'll say; yes, just as reductive as juju's remark.)  You hold up assimilation for black people as success; what do you say about assimilation and Jews? How can black people become more literate (by which I presume you mean educated generally) when predominantly black schools are chronically underfunded, teachers with bad records or insufficient credentials are sent to teach in these poor schools to get them out of predominantly white schools, economic disempowerment keeps most black people from being able to afford college, affirmative action in state schools has been overturned (at least in my state, I don't know about yours) and blind tests show that college entrance evaluators are, generally speaking, likely to judge the same essay by a Tenisha Davis worse than by a John Smith or a Mary Wright or even an Elisheva Goldman?

Please don't confuse the Human Rights Campaign, which shares more than initials with Senator Clinton, with the rest of the gay community. I'm strongly pro-Obama, and so are most of the rest of my gay and straight friends; those of my gay friends who are pro-Clinton disagree with me about her war stance and health care policies, but we all acknowledge that we can probably point to about as many pro-gay statements and anti-gay flubs on either side. I don't have any close friends who support McCain. Oh, but a member of my synagogue is a Ron Paul supporter and has pontificated vociferously about Von Mises-style economics (if you can call it that); that doesn't make me one of his disciples. It's also worth pointing out that many people of color are also gay, many straight people of color are among gay people's staunchest allies, and many gay white people are horrifyingly racist—something I'll go to great lengths to point out to them whenever I can. HRC (the org, not Senator Clinton) has often been accused within the gay community, with reason, of leaving behind gay people of color.

I feel there's plenty of room for nuance in the discussion of gay marriage, and also if I didn't strongly feel my position (unequivocally pro) is right, I wouldn't be an advocate for it. I've heard people argue strongly for civil unions, for incrementalism, even for the idea that there should be no civil marriage at all and only religious institutions should have control over marriage: I respect them and we disagree, and I'll go to great lengths to make sure they understand why. I respect nuance. What I don't respect is when someone is ignorant about why they hold a particular position, or what kind of ideas they are basing their stance on. The idea that marriage should be reserved for straight people because gay people getting married would somehow harm children, for example, is rooted in homophobia. The idea that America does not still systematically disempower black people is rooted in racial ignorance. Those who hold those ideas and cannot acknowledge where they come from, but who develop elaborate and transparent fallacies to justify them, lose at least a bit of my respect. I don't see that as nuance, but as ignorance.

Bigotry against a group of people in power is simply not universally the same as bigotry against a group of people who are systematically disempowered, even if only because the consequences are different. If I'm bigoted against straight people, I'm hardly in a position to do anything about it; I might be able to affect a handful of individual straight people but I will hardly be in a position to make collective decisions that have an impact on straight people's access to medical care or adoption practices (for instance). This is something that those of us who are white (and yet feel qualified to make sweeping judgments about the validity of non-white people's opinions on race) must accept, and those of us who are protected by citizenship in the country we live in (and yet feel rage and terror at undocumented immigrants) must accept, and those of us who have access to the tangible and intangible benefits of legal marriage (and yet feel it is a moral imperative to deny those benefits to gay people) must accept. For some black people to hold extreme views about the legitimate injustice that continues to exist today may be a logical failing and a source of annoyance and even of further tension among people of different races. For some (many) white people to go to great lengths to justify and deny that black people continue to be discriminated against and to write off discussion of racism as "black anger" is more than just a logical fallacy, it's a continuation of those same injustices, which self-perpetuate through the use of such illogic.

I think Daniel's done a good job in this article pointing out how this is influencing the media firestorm over Rev. Wright.

And now back to your regularly scheduled electioneering.

If I see a bus coming your way while you stand in the street, but can't prove whether it will hit you in a second or a second and a half, I promise not to stop and take more measurements before yelling a warning.

I love anti-consumerism that costs me $5k a pop.

...that would be eutopia: good place. Utopia simply means "nowhere place," and is a perfect label for these temporary kingdoms of the mind that are not fixed in location and are bounded more by time and attitude than by space. You don't have to think they're good to recognize that these collective temporary autonomous zones are something quite different from the town of Millbrae, the state of Vermont, or the United Kingdom.