Why isn't New Orleans Mother's Day parade shooting a 'national tragedy'? | David Dennis
m.guardiannews.com“So I shouldn’t be surprised that the Mother’s Day Parade shooting has largely been forgotten. On Sunday, shots were fired into a crowd during a parade in the New Orleans 7th ward. Police said they saw three suspects running from the scene.
This is the largest mass shooting in the United States where the shooters were still at large after the crime was committed. Think about that for a minute. From Columbine to Virginia Tech to Fort Hill to Aurora, all the shooters were either killed or apprehended on site. But the person or people responsible for shooting 19 Americans are still free.”
“Through a career that has included crotch-grabbing, nudity, BDSM, Marilyn Monroe fetishizing, and a 1992 book devoted to sex, Madonna has been viewed as a feminist provocateur, pushing the boundaries of acceptable femininity. But Beyoncé’s use of her body is criticized as thoughtless and without value beyond male titillation, providing a modern example of the age-old racist juxtaposition of animalistic black sexuality vs. controlled, intentional, and civilized white sexuality.”
—All Hail the Queen? (http://bitchmagazine.org/article/all-hail-the-queen-beyonce-feminism#.UZvUyP56MrU.facebook)“The interviewees in my study who were most angry about affirmative action were those who had relatively fewer marketable skills — and were therefore most dependent on getting an inside edge for the best jobs. Whites who felt entitled to these positions believed that affirmative action was unfair because it blocked their own privileged access.”
—How Social Networks Drive Black Unemployment - NYTimes.com
“…despite complaints about “reverse discrimination,” my research demonstrated that the real complaint is that affirmative action undermines long-established patterns of favoritism.”
I’ve been harping on this subject a lot lately, but I feel like somebody has to. The fact that Khan has been changed to a white man is quietly being accepted, and the performance lauded. I’ve seen people trying to say JJ did a good thing by taking color out of the equation, and that they are tired of POC being cast as the villains.
Do people not realize the history that was made when Khan appeared on network television? Let’s look at what was going on around the time Khan made his debut on network TV.
- August 28, 1963: 20,000 blacks and whites gather at the Lincoln Memorial to hear speeches against racism; among them is Martin Luther King Jr’s “I Have a Dream.”
- June 12, 1963: Civil Rights activist Medgar Evers is gunned down outside of his home. His killer is not convicted until the year 1994.
- Summer 1964: The Mississippi Summer Freedom Project begins; civil rights workers help blacks register to vote. 3 are killed and many black churches and homes are burned in retaliation.
- August 4, 1964: Civil rights workers James E. Chaney, Michael Schwerner, and Andrew Goodman were murdered by the Ku Klux Klan.
- March 7, 1965: Martin Luther King Jr. leads a 54-mile march to support black voter registration. They marched from Selma to Montgomery.
- June 12, 1967:Banning interracial marriage is ruled unconstitutional by Supreme Court.
- July 1967: More race riots occur in Detroit and New York; they are the worst riots in US history and result in 43 Detroit deaths.
- April 4, 1968: While outside his home, Martin Luther King Jr. is murdered by James Earl Ray; riots broke out in 125 cities in response.
“Space Seed” premiered on television in February of 1967, right smack dab in the middle of all this. Before Khan, Star Trek included a black woman, and Asian man, and a Russian character as main parts of the crew on the Enterprise. All three had vitals roles on the ship, and Captain Kirk looked to them for answers, and trusted them to help him complete his mission.
Do you not realize how huge this was? This was something people had never seen before, and to date, still don’t see it all that often. This broke the ground for so many of the actors and actresses we all know and love. This was history being made.
Then came Khan. While Ricardo Montalban was not a man of Indian descent, he was still a man of color. He was a man of color, playing a character that rivaled Captain Kirk. He was a character that commanded respect and admiration from those around him, because he was smart, cunning, charismatic, and powerful.
Khan Noonien Singh was a man that could out think and out muscle any person on the Enterprise. To state it more simply, a man of color was more powerful and more intelligent than all the other men and women aboard the Enterprise. Without Marla McGivers help, Kirk would not have been able to stop him.
A man of color would have defeated the crew of the Enterprise were it not for a guilty conscience and the use of a club. Khan’s strength could have easily overpowered Kirk’s, and it would have, had he not hit him over the head with a heavy tool.
This is what makes Khan more than the stereotypical POC villain. Khan is super human. He is created to be stronger, faster, smarter and better than a normal human being. He rises above the stereotype because he is BETTER than all aboard the Enterprise.
On top of that, a white woman falls in love with a man of color. In 1967. She gives up everything she’s known to be with him. The fact that Khan was a POC, and he was far more powerful and far more capable than all the others makes him stand apart from your stereotypical role POC are given when they play the part of the villain.Khan is an icon of television for being a groundbreaking character in the middle of our Civil Rights movement, just like Uhura and Sulu are.
Would you be okay if someone changed the race of Uhura or Sulu? I can’t see how you could be. There would be outrage from here to the moon if anyone tried to cast either of them as anything other than an Asian man, and an African American woman.
Yet with Khan, because he’s the villain, people think it’s okay to erase what he was because of what we’ve gone through over the past decade or so. Don’t you see? It’s because of that that Khan should have been cast as a man of Indian descent, as his biography clearly states he is. I know Ricardo was not Indian, as I’ve stated before, but back then getting POC on TV in roles that were main parts of the story wasn’t as easy as it is now. That’s why this is even more inexcusable. There is nothing to stop Paramount or JJ Abrams from casting any person from any ethnicity on the planet, and they chose to take one of the most iconic roles that belonged to POC, and give it to a white man.
It’s like taking the history of Star Trek, taking all the things it did to pave the way for so many people by refusing to stick to what was accepted, and throwing it in the mud. Everything about Star Trek was promoting acceptance of those different than ourselves, whether those people were green skinned aliens, or African American, or Asian.
Look at all the POC on TV or in movies today. Who do you think started the path to stardom for them? Who do you think started chipping away at those barriers that would have prevented them from becoming big name stars in the media?
Lucille Ball, Desi Arnaz, Gene Roddenberry, Nichelle Nichols, George Takei, and Ricardo Montalban.
Now, after reading all of this, if you can look me in the eye and still tell me you see nothing wrong with the fact that a white man is playing the role of Khan, well then, I guess that’s the opinion you’re going to stay with.But my hope is that maybe, just maybe, you can see why there are people out there who are so upset, and why the silent acceptance of this casting choice needs to be stopped.
“The problem with Seth MacFarlane’s humor, as always, is that he’s almost always punching down instead of punching up. He’s picking on people who have always been picked upon, and he thinks he’s hilarious for doing so. What’s more, he’s making a lot of money from other people who enjoy that sort of thing. But that doesn’t make him funny. It makes him one of those fratboy douchebags who seem to be everywhere in life, even into middle age, making uncomfortably insulting wisecracks that always seem to end with the protest that “I’m just joking.” The result? The two white guys are the straight men in this bit. Everybody else—foreign, old, female—is ripe for the ribbing.”
—Joel Mathis, “Seth MacFarlane’s Racist, Sexist New Show, Dads”
do people not realize that comparing skin bleaching to tanning products is ridiculous as fuck?
like one of the reasons ‘tanning’ became a thing was because it was a sign of wealth, it meant you could afford to go on vacations and such, so how is that the same thing as women with dark skin being told that they’re not worth as much as their light skinned counter parts?
pale women aren’t being kept from opportunities based on their paleness… I’m pretty sure you can open any magazine and see them, they’re all over the runway, they’re all over tv and movies, like damn just look at hollywood.
Meanwhile women with dark skin not only have to deal with racism but colorism within their own communities, they’re overseen for job offers, there’s a multi million dollar industry that directly markets to them by telling them how undesirable they are, how the only way to find a husband is to lighten your skin, and how much more beautiful light skin is etc. etc. etc.
so just, no.
stop it.
The USA Twitter Bigotry Map
users.humboldt.eduA team of researchers at California’s Humboldt State University have produced a visual representation to show where the most hateful, bigoted speech on twitter originates. The Geography of Hate shows which regions in the United States produce the most homophobic, racist, and anti-disability twitter traffic. You can search the country by specific slurs, none of which we want to print here. According to the MIT Technology Review, the researchers used an algorithm to develop the map but had actual people review 150,000 tweets to ensure that the slurs were truly being used in a derogatory context.
