> On stage and screen, self-referential dramas such as A Strange Loop and American Fiction are on the rise, with playful postmodernism a potent weapon in the fight against inequality
SAVE THE DATE!
To Be Black & Indigenous Louisiana Creoles, Peoplehood, & Justice Studies
Tuesday, March 5, 2024 at 6:00PM
Dillard University, Stern Hall 112
Featuring: Dr. Andrew Jolivette
Hosted by: Monique Verdin
Presented by: UNO PhD in Justice Studies
in conversation with
The Center for Racial Justice at Dillard University
Cosponsored By: Atakapa-Ishak Nation, The Midlo Center, Neighborhood Story Project, Land Memory Bank and Seed Exchange, Bvlbancha Liberation Radio, Louisiana Creole Research Association
▶️ good morning once again and welcome to this week's edition of my #SoulfulSunday music thread! please give me a bit to compile the first few songs i'm gonna post—get comfy and get iiiiiinnnnnnnnn~ 🧵👇🏾
I'm a 54-year-old White guy in the USA and I have to infer that there must have been -- at one time not too long ago -- racist codes for "let the White person go first". I was never taught them, but I have to infer this from a few decades now of observing the following:
When I am standing in a small family-run store checkout line, and elderly Black people are in front of me, if I have a cough or need to clear my throat, something very strange happens. All eyes swivel backwards to look at me, and the elderly Black people in front of me all but fall over themselves to waive me to the FRONT OF THE LINE. Sometimes if I lock eyes with the shop keeper at the register, HE waives me forwards. At this point, there is NO POLITE GETTING OUT OF IT. I can try saying "I'm so sorry, I have a cold", or "you are clearly in front of me, please proceed", and none of it will work. Instead, I am given excuses to help ME feel better about myself. "Oh, no, I'm in no hurry", or "I have not quite decided if I have everything yet", or "the shopkeeper and I were just talking, we will be awhile, so please checkout first".
To be clear, I'm not the one being hurt (they are), but I AM mortified and embarrassed.
I've had to develop special procedures to combat this. I always stand a little further back in line, NEVER make eye contact with anyone, look intently at merchandise while waiting to checkout, and UNDER NO CIRCUMSTANCES ever clear my throat no matter how much I may need to.
I was reminded of this today when I (with plenty of room) passed an older Black woman in an aisle and merely nodded hello. She said "excuse me" and stepped backwards to give me more space. Huh.
Younger Black people don't do this (happily). Older Black people sometimes seem startled, like they have not encountered a White person coughing behind them in a long time -- but then their automatic training kicks in...
When I think about racism, I usually think about the more egregious examples (lynchings, denial of voting rights) but I have to wonder -- what was it like to just go on a mundane daily shopping trip in 1960?
QUESTION: Older folks reading this. Did/does this cough/throat-clear signal actually exist??
> In a new HBO documentary, writer #CharlesBlow explores how moving to the south could lead to important political and societal change for #Black Americans
> Charlene Prempeh’s new book, Now You See Me!, is a long overdue look at the #Black creatives previously written out of the canon, and the ones influencing the conversation now
#TurboTax Parent Company's Latest Argument Against Free Tax Filing: It Will Harm #Black Taxpayers
Articles published around the country repeat Intuit’s assertion — sometimes almost word for word — that the upcoming #IRS pilot program would hurt Black Americans.
A researcher whose work is cited by #Intuit says the company is misstating her findings.
Amazon.com’s Whole Foods Market doesn’t want to be forced to let workers wear “Black Lives Matter” masks and is pointing to the recent US Supreme Court ruling permitting a business owner to refuse services to same-sex couples to get federal regulators to back off....
If Amazon has a dress code, either it allows for a degree of self expression or it does not. The move to ban political messaging in the workplace doesn’t apply to the mere statement “black lives matter”. Black Lives Matter was a social movement and its name was informal and de-facto. There is an activist organization Black Lives Matter that claims (to my knowledge) a limited ownership of white-on-black “#Black Lives Matter” but the phrase itself doesn’t have a PO box, it doesn’t make political contributions. It is a value statement that one believes black human beings have inherent value. So to cede that the English phrase “black lives matter” is political assumes that the default LEGAL and POLITICAL viewpoint is that they do not, which is the terrifying, unspoken, yet not codified by law, truth underlying half of the America justice system. When you make the argument that Amazon has the right to ban such a phrase from clothing on political grounds you and Amazon are both admitting that you believe black lives in a general sense have no value and you’re willing to take it to court, because that is where this is probably going.
Are we really thinking that anyone at Amazon who matters actually believes that? Believes that this fundamental values conflict of American access to protected speech would actually resolve in a way that decidedly points to black lives having no worth as a legally upheld opinion in America? Really that is neither here nor there, we’re watching a version of this fascist semantics argument about free speech play out with minor or medium consequences all over the internet. This sort of move will curry some favor with racist culture warrior consumers and businesses, but it is about clamping down on employee rights to communicate symbolically at all. If the color chartreuse was a meme amongst unionists and union proponents, Amazon would do the same thing. On one side of the coin they are making a concession toward a racist status quo and on the other they are saying that the SCOTUS ruling they cite allows them to ban symbols in the workplace.
It isn’t good to shop at Whole Foods with this knowledge in the back of your brain. We will now, if you want, employ the thought terminating cliche that there is no ethical consumption under capitalism, and this is almost always true. However Amazon should not be allowed to target symbolic expression like this without a dress code saying “our employees wear an apron with the Amazon smile on it and a grey, breathable jumpsuit underneath”. There are workplaces like this with dress codes where this isn’t an issue. You are seeing Amazon casually admit it controls the symbolic language of the workplace entirely if it suits their agendas. Legality is not universal truth, especially when the Supreme Court has been arranged to flagrantly serve the interests of the business class. So there’s one argument for why people should get to wear chartreuse colored shirts that say whatever the fuck they want but hate speech.
I lost this typing it the first time and my second try wasn’t as good. I don’t care if you have a bunch of holes and flaws in my arguments to point out, I will quietly read them and appreciate them, but I will maintain you’re arguing for something racist and unethical either way unless it’s a really good argument. IE you’re not going to get me to say “gee you are right” by drawing similarities to Twitter cancellations over bad words and deplatforming of conservatives for speech that would get them punched in the nose in a public venue. In life, it is impossible to avoid political ideas, and even more impossible to avoid the techniques for propagating memetic formatted ideas like ads for conflict diamonds or unwell street preachers screaming the good word. You should buy your seitan somewhere that isn’t trafficking with fascist pseudolegal interpretations of free speech so they can control their employees by betting that a spineless lower court will uphold a directly evil SCOTUS ruling.
> Her first novel was turned down by several publishers, then embraced by a feminist press. As an author, poet, playwright and activist, she has continued to claim space for queer storytellers
Whole Foods argues it can ban BLM masks because the Supreme Court let a Christian business owner refuse same-sex couples (fortune.com)
Amazon.com’s Whole Foods Market doesn’t want to be forced to let workers wear “Black Lives Matter” masks and is pointing to the recent US Supreme Court ruling permitting a business owner to refuse services to same-sex couples to get federal regulators to back off....