Atlanta Business Chronicle -- Student wants White Student Union

Link: Atlanta Business Chronicle -- Student wants White Student Union

Read the story in the link above. Try not to facepalm.

What people like this Patrick Sharp character don’t recognize is the notion of privilege and power. The ignorance is probably better understood through the analogy of the Affirmative Action Bake Sale, an anti-historical stunt certain conservative student groups across the country have held and think is HI-LAAAAARIOUS.

Here’s how the AA Bake Sales work:

Someone sets up what looks like a regular bake sale with goodies on a table, but instead of charging static prices, they’re labeled “$0.50 for Whites, $0.25 for Latinos and African-Americans”, or whatever, in order to illustrate that Affirmative Action makes things “easier” on people of color.

In what’s known as the real world, this is not a proper analogy for Affirmative Action. Here’s a better, though still super-simplified, analogy:

Someone sets up what looks like a regular bake sale with goodies on a table, but there are a few key differences. Behind the table is a giant digital clock counting down from three hours and 57 minutes. Each minute will represent one year in United States history.

— To start, only white males will be allowed to buy goodies.

— At the 83 minute mark, the vendors will start a fistfight, after which white males will be allowed to buy goodies, and there will be a separate, tiny, crappy table for men of color to buy goods.

— At the 144 minute mark, white women will be allowed to buy from the nice table and women of color will be allowed to buy from the separate-but-“equal” table.

— At the 188 minute mark (THREE-PLUS HOURS), the tables will be combined and people will be allowed to buy whatever they want. At the 193 minute mark, prices will be changed so that white people will be charged more than people of color on some of the goods. But the vendors will, without telling anyone, occasionally choose to sell only the “better” goods to white people and occasionally refuse to sell to people of color for no reason.

By the way, all of this assumes that we ignore how institutionalized racism in the past still has clear echoes in ownership today, since in a bake sale we can’t really replicate how redlining and such has a cascade effect when property is passed on to the next generations.

(Image cc-licensed: "Bake Sale Cupcakes and M&M Cookies" by joelorama)

Django Unchained: We have to demand more

(Guest post by Ben Valentine)


I did not go into Django Unchained expecting to dislike it. Quite the opposite; I really, really wanted to like to like the movie.

Full disclosure: I’m mixed-race with African and European Jewish heritage. While my ancestors were not slaves in the American South, they were in the Caribbean. And the only Quentin Tarantino movies I’d seen before this week were Kill Bill: Volume 1 and Kill Bill: Volume 2, and I didn’t like them all that much.

Despite my hopes, I didn’t find Django satisfying. It wasn’t cathartic, even when it was telling me that’s how I should be feeling, and I left the theater struggling to articulate why. [Warning: spoiler alerts upcoming…]

Slate: You know how all the states of the Confederacy vote Republican? That's not an accident

Link: Slate: You know how all the states of the Confederacy vote Republican? That's not an accident

The great irony here is that militant Republicans probably believe Ron Rosenbaum is racist for arguing their party has a racism problem.

No, I’m not saying all Republicans are racist. I’m saying that as a party, ever since Goldwater and Nixon concocted the benighted, openly racist “Southern Strategy” in the ’60s, the Republican Party has profited from overt and covert racism.

The “weird” part, though, is that Rosenbaum tackles this subject in a piece that boils down to discussing whether or not journalists should continuously report widely accepted and fully absorbed truths, lest they become lost in a sort of banality.