shadowspar

Max Ignorable Racism: the threshold that doesn't exist

Fri, 06 Jun 2014 21:52:01 GMT

You would think that some things are just so racist that, on encountering them, everyone—even white folks, almost to a one—would say "holy FUCK that is some racist-ass shit, what the FUCK are you even thinking?" A sort of Maximum Ignorable Racism Threshold, if you will.

Apparently you'd be wrong, because you can be the most vilified racist shitbag in recent memory and still have people going to bat for you in the mainstream media: arguing that happened to you was wrong, telling people they should "calm down" over your racist remarks.

If this supposed threshold did exist, these racist-ass shirts would never have seen the light of day. Like, seriously, just think how many people have to have been party to that production, with none of them raising sufficient hue and cry to put a stop to it.

I sorely doubt that this is much of a revelation to anyone who's not carrying around a gigantor sack of white privilege. Chalk that up to yet another example of how privilege works to hide the realities of the rest of the world from people possessed of it.

comments

Perspective

Mon, 30 Dec 2013 13:45:19 GMT

I am just now starting to come up to speed on the Ani DiFranco / plantation retreat thing, but...

If somebody says that a given person's slaves were "probably well treated for the time", and the insidious depravity of that statement doesn't immediately thump you on the head, perhaps this quote will help put it in perspective:

The cells of the Inquisition were, as a rule, large, airy, clean and with good windows admitting the sun. They were, in those respects, far superior to the civil prisons of that day.

That from the 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica's article on Thomas Torquemada^{[trigger warning]}.

On the very real fiction that is Intellectual Property

Wed, 19 Jan 2011 21:41:58 GMT

This, this, this. A thousand times this.

A huge chunk of the reason why I am so opposed to the fiction of "intellectual property", as it's currently formulated, is because it's a formal methodology of taking knowledge -- knowledge which is collectively developed, built on the shoulders of giants, and can spread freely from one person to another -- and stuffing it by pieces into compartmentalized, commodified boxes, then assigning some entity an outrageous and obscene ability to monopolize it, a privilege backed backed by the weight of the legal system and the full force of the state. This privilege extends not only to being the only one able to make money off of an idea or work, but effectively to the ability to dictate if anybody else can use that piece of knowledge at all.

He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me. :Thomas Jefferson

comments

I wonder...

Mon, 08 Nov 2010 00:07:31 GMT

( Trigger warning: allegory describing the fallout from reporting a sexual assault )

comments

Fellow people of privilege: about that thing you said...

Tue, 29 Sep 2009 03:02:54 GMT

I've been meaning to write this up for a while, but certain events impelled me to try to get it out while it still has a slight pretense of timeliness.