links for 2009-02-27
February 27, 2009-
Sylvia Rivera is one of the many Latino faces of queer liberation, one whose sacrifices and bravery made men like Harvey Milk possible. Queer Latinos have been part of queer liberation since day one. Since the day I came out, and even before, I have seen gay film after gay film–Lie Down with Dogs, Billy's Hollywood Screen Kiss, Love! Valour! Compassion!–in which the Latino is the plot twist, the slut who comes in between two white lovers who are meant to be together. It pained me to see the images in those films, and in a movie about queer history; one that never once mentioned Stonewall and presented gay liberation as almost exclusively white.
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This applies to journalism. It applies to everything in our society, but it especially applies to journalism where white reporters and white writers (particularly white male writers) are seen as objective and everyone else just brings their minority bias to the table. And I don’t see how Jacoby can argue that there is no need for racial parity in journalism when his racially tone-deaf article proves that reporters will bring their own bias into whatever they will report.
It’s just strange how some biases are perceived as objective.
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Octavia Estelle Butler was a leading light of the science fiction world, black, a woman, a lesbian, where white men dominated.
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A few weeks after South African minister Fatima Hajaig set off a firestorm by saying much of the world is under the heel of “Jewish money”, it is becoming more and more apparent that this is not a one-off. COSATU, a major South African union deeply tied to the ruling ANC, recently lead a march to protest Israeli government policies. Not necessarily bad in of itself. Where did they march? On the Israeli embassy? Nope. They decided the best place for their march was a Jewish community center.
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The very idea that waste needs to be “managed” is relatively new. Throughout much of human history waste took care of itself, and in many parts of the world it still does. In poor agricultural societies there is not much of it to begin with. Broken tools and worn clothes are repaired, food scraps are fed to livestock and so on. In such places waste is seen as having an inherent value. The reason why plastic bags blow about by the roadsides in so many poor countries, says Philippe Chalmin of the Université Paris Dauphine, is not that the local people are litterbugs but that they are frugal enough not to need a waste-collection system of any sort. Plastic bags are among the few items they cannot recycle.
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IN SOUTH KOREA people who want to look something up on the internet don’t “Google it”. Instead they “ask Naver”. Among the 35m South Koreans who use the internet every day, the nine-year-old search engine is wildly popular, accounting for 76% of internet searches, compared with less than 3% each for Yahoo! and Google.
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THE drought of foreign capital is beginning to wreck many economies in central and eastern Europe. Currencies, shares and bonds are tumbling, and some economists fear that one or more of these countries could default on its foreign debts. Emerging-market crises have a nasty habit of spreading as investors flee one country after another. Some Middle Eastern markets, notably Dubai, are already in trouble. But which of the larger emerging economies are most vulnerable?
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incl translation
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wow
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But if it isn't racist, and isn't trying to be racist, then it's saying an awful lot of things that racists will agree with – and not because they're unpleasant or awkward truths that an objective journalist must state for the record so the readers can know the truth. Quite often they're not saying the truth at all. Sometimes, even, they've tried so hard to make their version of the truth look like the truth, whereas in fact the truth is more complex or simply not that at all, but something entirely different, that you have to wonder what they're trying to achieve, if not to please racists. You have to wonder, if they're not racist, why they're coming out with this stuff all the time.
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While it was pretty clear before that the paper meant 'white people' when it mentioned British people in these stories, that can't be in much doubt any more.
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I’m guessing you thought I was way off on your political philosophy but right on the button about the other two. Just think about that for a while.
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THE monument to Soviet central planning was supposed to have been a heap of surplus left boots without any right ones to match them. The great bull market of the past quarter century is commemorated by millions of empty houses without anyone to buy them.
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So yes, of course I am excited that Slumdog did so well at the Oscars. It makes me happy that all these South Asian actors are in the spotlight along with the genius of AR Rahman and MIA. However, it is only one step and we must resist the desire to homogenize the Indian experience that we know so little of in actuality, based on a fictitious film directed by a white man.
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So I guess I'm left with sort of an empty movie. It's clearly not supposed to be a movie with a message about social justice, but it kind of sucks as a love story, too, since one side of the love line is basically an acted-upon object.
And after all this, I still really, really want to like it. I still really did like it. Ugh. Movies can be really annoying when you're a feminist.
