A great mind-opening piece about the possibilities, limitations, and exploitative dangers of creating indigenous curricula within historically colonial scholarship.
Source: “Indigenizing the Academy” without Indigenous people: who can teach our stories?
Mistress America is about many things. It is a screwball comedy refracted through the Woody Allen hall of mirrors. It is a study in the dynamics of desire and exploitation in female friendship. It is a biography of a muse according to the object of her inspiration. It is an account of the early days of college life just as the imperative to “discover yourself” feels simultaneously, paradoxically, crucial and passé. It is a portrait of the artist as a young co-ed. Continue reading “Artists and their Muses: “Mistress America” review”
UK writer Debbie Cameron *just* has a couple thoughts on pathologizing women’s speech, and the ways in which articles on how to talk in the workplace can reproduce patriarchy in subtle ways. Check out her article!
This week everyone’s been talking about an article in the Economist explaining how men’s use of language undermines their authority. According to the author, a senior manager at Microsoft, men have a bad habit of punctuating everything they say with sentence adverbs like ‘actually’, ‘obviously’, ‘seriously’ and ‘frankly’. This verbal tic makes them sound like pompous bullshitters, so that people switch off and stop listening to what they’re saying. If they want to be successful, this is something men need to address.
OK, people haven’t been talking about that article—mainly because I made it up. No one writes articles telling men how they’re damaging their career prospects by using the wrong words. With women, on the other hand, it’s a regular occurrence. This post was inspired by a case in point: a piece published last month in Business Insider, in which a former Google executive named Ellen Petry Leanse…
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There is A LOT of information out there circulating around the protests happening in
Baltimore, the death of Freddie Gray, and the state of police power as a systematic tool of oppression. We won’t try to provide any kind of summary—a quick perusal of #baltimoreriots will give you that.
We will, however, draw your attention to both the riots and their “bigger picture.” Violent looting and rioting is difficult to outright condone, but it is understandable once you begin to think of the context in which such actions occur. Baltimore is not an isolated incident (neither was Ferguson), but a culmination of a long, violent system of exploitation and abuse rooted in racial oppression.
This article from The New Inquiry puts it better than I could, and I urge you to read it and consider the rhetoric that drives media accounts of “looting,” as well as the perverted logic that presents violence done to property as far more worthy of our outrage than violence done to human beings.
As the Vox article below states, the situation in Baltimore also highlights the way race and class intersect to create systems of oppression—because the police force in Baltimore is racially mixed, this is not just something that can be “boiled down” to black citizens versus a white police force, though that is certainly still operative. It is rather a reminder that violence against black communities is perpetuated not only through physical violence, but economic isolation as well.
Further reading:
The Guardian on (racialized) economic violence: “We cannot breathe if we can’t eat”
The Baltimore Sun documents the striking history of police brutality and undue violence in the city.
Mic.com highlights the media’s double standard in presenting “black looters”
Vox looks into a history of police distrust and brutality
Ta-Nehisi Coates addresses the issue of nonviolence
First published April 28, 2015.
Updated: April 30, 2015. May 2, 2015.
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