Internet gleanings.
- The New Republic on the impulse to cast out our violent demons and label them away from us accordingly: “Why Are White Racists Always Called White Trash?”
Only the most desperate white racists openly identify as racists. Invariably, these white people come from a social stratum deprived of all that whiteness tries to connote: wealth, beauty, power, cleanliness, grace. But because it is uncomfortable for white people to define such things too clearly, the phrase “white trash” had to be invented to cover them. The phrase, developed to describe all Southern whites outside the aristocracy, has shifted in tandem with economic and social changes so that it now applies to a demographic sliver. Yet this reduction in range has not corresponded to a reduction in the disgust it evokes in whites of putatively higher status.
- Tech that encourages exploration girls to learn how to code and revels in its own girliness: programmable friendship bracelets! They make a better gift for your niece than yet another Barbie.
- MTV piques my interest with their new documentary, ‘White People’
- The Obama administration takes step to address one of the ‘hidden frontiers’ in combating racism: discriminatory housing practices.
“Housing discrimination is the unfinished business of civil rights,” says Sherrilyn Ifill, the president of the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund. “It goes right to the heart of our divide from one another. It goes right to the heart of whether you believe that African American people’s lives matter, that you respect them, that you believe they can be your neighbors, that you want them to play with your children.”
- On color in comics: “Lighten Up”
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