In particular, we're not going to improve the district until we build more single-family homes. I kept mis-hearing him as saying single-parent, because it seemed sort of like a weird thing to obsess over.
The only people who live in apartments and duplexes are those people.
re: antisemitism in the 30s, I learned recently that the antisemitic radio priest Father Coughlin was one of the early popularizers of the term "social justice". I imagine that all the right wingers who complain about "social justice warriors" would be thrilled if they found out.
I have a black granddaughter. How cool is that?
I was called a "kike" in elementary school.
It's an asset in the world of bubblegum pop and culture aimed at the mainstream kids to be black. Being black carries the most coolth. Other minorities have more complex relationships to pop culture, but black people (men, especially) are seen as pop trend-setters.
This seems way off to me somehow. Black people as super cool has been around for a long time -- Norman Mailer wrote The White Negro in 1957 (which isn't exactly on that point, but is connected) -- and believing that to be the case has been compatible with recognizing that racism was a powerful force.
I think it's more about highly evolved defensiveness: racism is generally recognized as evil, I've looked into my own heart and I'm sure I'm not evil, in fact none of the normal people I associate with are evil, therefore they're not racist, and by induction no one is, and there is no racism.
(I just mentioned a couple of threads ago that my somewhat imperfectly enlightened father found reactions to the Obama administration to be a revelation that yes, people other than toothless rednecks are still genuinely racist.)
5: But not high school? If so, progress.
My thought process really was trying to figure out when being Jewish went from being the object of scorn and ridicule to being something semi-desirable, because you code as different and not-white.
But then I figured everyone was sick of talking about my stupid family, so I tried to make a bigger point.
because you code as different and not-white
That was a joke on "Third Rock from the Sun" and now I blame you for making me recall that fact, thus ensuring that I can't reuse those brain cells for something useful.
This was dealt with in Why I Hate Saturn. I think it said: "Black" is cool to white people in the abstract, but black people are not.
7, 8: No conversion, but I did move. There was a peculiar class/religious divide in Royal Oak, Michigan where I went to elementary school. Royal Oak was working-class and had virtually no Jews. Neighboring Huntington Woods was nearly half-Jewish and was more middle to upper-middle class. There was a certain tension about this, but it wasn't anything I took very seriously. They made fun of my name a lot more, and that also bothered me more.
That sounds like my current neighborhood.
9.1:
Is that true? Yes to different, but not-white? I thought that was a delusion Jewish people had.
I misspoke - I didn't mean not-white so much as not-whitebread.
heebie, I know you're out of that first-year seminar and don't have to read stuff about this, but I remember appreciating Everything but the Burden when I read it, essays offering black takes on the semi-fetishizing appropriations of black youth culture.
Would you rather be a skinny German parody singer in a turtleneck and a fanny pack or a sexy, ambiguously black/Latina/Asian women rocking a bikini and sweet tattoos and riding into space on the back of a gigantic pigeon? I know which one I'd choose.
One tangential thought I've had is that since maybe...the 60s? the 80s? being not-white gained a bit of pop-culture status.
"The White Negro" was published in 1957.
I am sometimes surprised at how many memories I have of how mainstream antisemitic vibe in my youth (schools and neighborhood). For instance my high school was xxxxstone, and it was often referred to as xxxxstein because ti was more Jewish (but trust me, not very much so) than the rest of the community.
And in retrospect my own behavior at the time was certainly not very proud-making--I found it distasteful but in actuality I was quietly complicit*.
*Description applies to a any number of other isms.
They made fun of my name a lot more, and that also bothered me more.
Well, I mean, c'mon. "peep"? Your parents were just asking for trouble.
I found it distasteful but in actuality I was quietly complicit*.
*Description applies to a any number of other isms.
Stormcrow is Wächter.
AIMHMHB I never knowingly experienced a single instance of antisemitism in my small town (then medium sized town) in Kentucky. In elementary school/middle school everyone was a little curious about the whole Jewish thing (not to say problem!) in a nice way.
At my high school, the cool kids all had blue sweatshirts with "Herzl" written on the back.
My exposure to anti-Semitism mostly comes from people who assume it's "safe" to make anti-Semitic comments around me. IME it seems like there's more low level anti-Semitism in the Midwest than on either of the coasts (don't know about the South), but hate-crime-level stuff is more likely to occur in the South or the West.* I really vacillate on thinking that it's increasingly nbd and thinking that it's an intractable problem.
*This comes from looking at FBI hate crime stats in the late 90s.
6: Yeah, I think it's an "asset" in that in a very limited setting it gets you access to a better set of stereotypes. I think that if non-black kids see this as proving that racism doesn't exist, that has far more to do with their lack of experience with how anti-black prejudice works. (I mean, I could see myself thinking something like that when I was in my teens, just because Black Writers Were Very Important in my neck of the woods.)
I have been in many youth-heavy social settings where black men - especially black men born in the US - are not treated as trend-setting but as outsiders who don't know the correct way to do things, unless they signal very clearly that they are....I don't know....going to adhere to white norms? Ie, some kid who is just some kid in absolutely bog standard high school fashions is going to get read as low class and likely to behave badly; a young guy who is obviously hipster-looking is going to be assumed to be "one of us", which has its own problems. It's godawful, actually, because at least around here, majority-white social settings - even youth ones - are often really really awkward about blackness. And if I can see it as a white person, it can't feel very good to be a black person who knows the situation from the inside.
I imagine that there are certain unusual social settings where being a person of color gives you a certain amount of cachet - just as in certain activist circles being visibly queer gives you some extra social points. But that probably has a lot to do with performing race "correctly" and probably has its drawbacks - I mean, as a person who is visibly queer in a rather unusual way (ie, obviously gender non-conforming, plus my many dapper stylings, of course) I can certainly say that I get some social points, but it's also isolating.
Also, honestly, the more attention that I, a white person, pay to race and how I was brought up, the more racism I realize that I have learned - not anything dramatic or obvious and much more of the "unconsciously assume that my opinion is Very Important and I Should Always Be Centered" stuff, but also pretty hard to get at to unpack. Also, I assume, totally visible to people of color when interacting with me, and then I feel bad because it must be so tiring to always be dealing with various white people of my general type, of whom there are a lot.
I have encountered a lot of people being Sort of Weird about Judaism lately here in the upper midwest. Not what you'd call anti-semitic, but just kind of othering. I think it's because we don't do difference well here at all.
I like to think that people of all colors find me tiring.
All these colors run. From me.
At lilac evening I walked with every muscle aching among the lights of 27th and Welton in the Denver colored section, wishing I were a Negro, feeling that the best the white world had offered was not enough ecstasy for me, not enough life, joy, kicks, darkness, music, not enough night... I wished I were a Denver Mexican, or even a poor overworked Jap, anything but what I was so drearily, a "white man" disillusioned. All my life I'd had white ambitions; that was why I'd abandoned a good woman like Terry in the San Joaquin Valley I passed the dark porches of Mexican and Negro homes.
I suppose that itt speaks volumes about me that I have met an apparently unusual number of uncool black people.
32 speaks to my youth
Spoke to it when I had it, too
Two cops driving along:
JOE: Hey, Larry. Dig that chick.
LARRY: She's groovy.
JOE: Hey, man! Are you ready for that spade?
LARRY: Wow! He's groovy! All spades are groovy.
JOE: Dig that chick. She's groovy.
LARRY: Right! Hey . . . ! Dig that!
JOE: She's not groovy!
LARRY: Mmm-hmmm . . .
25 makes me wonder if my parents know any Jewish people at all. I don't remember being aware of any until high school.
The exotic kids when I was in elementary and middle school were the Catholics.
I didn't meet anybody Jewish until I went away to a summer learning thing in Omaha. That must have been the summer before 9th grade. AIMHMHB, my school brought in a rabbi to talk to our religion class. If he drove like a gentile, it would still have taken him three and a quarter hours to get there.
My parents have opinions about what constitutes a Jewish person that are arrived at by pure logical deduction. At some point it came up that someone I knew was Jewish but not religious and they explained to me that Judaism is a religion so no one could be Jewish but not religious. At another point they explained to me that some aspect of Judaism as she is practiced (I've forgotten which) couldn't actually be part of the religion because they never read about it in the Old Testament.
I was so very disappointed when I found out Yom Kippur doesn't involve a goat any more.
They're farther along then some people because they are at least bible-literate. I've shown members of my family the original passage a Jewish practice is based on, and they "get it" You can't do that with everyone. You also have to accept, as your parents don't seem to, the possibility of development and interpretation.
By your parent's definition I'm Jewish and Heebie isn't. For lots of people it would be the other way around.
My kids are by any definition.
I also recall a passage where they were supposed to make images of their hemorrhoids and, for variety, some mice. I think this is why, to this very day, there aren't many Jewish sculptors.
I thought that was why we use the word "Philistine" for people who don't get art.
46 is right. It was the Philistines who can do make butthole statues. 1 Samuel 6:4.
"can do" s/b "had to"
Anyway, you don't see may Philistine sculptors these days. The theory is sound.
God afflicting people who disobey with mice and hemorrhoids would explain so much.
they explained to me that Judaism is a religion so no one could be Jewish but not religious.
My own mother has made this argument.
If your mother has made that argument, you're Jewish. If your father has made that argument, you're not as far as the Orthodox are concerned.
On some googling, I see that sometimes whatever Hebrew word was translated as "hemorrhoid" in my old religion text book is translated as "tumor". That sounds both more likely and less fun.
52: especially if mice (or guinea pigs?) are involved.
Rodents don't sit down. They can't get have an hemorrhoid.
It took ten plagues to bring Egypt around and only two for the Philistines. I think that's pretty clear at establishing where ass tumors rank in the hierarchy of bad things.
So, who wants to make a wager about the eventual disposition of People v. Michael T. Slager?
C'mon, you guys won't take my money? Look at that video! They fired him and arrested him same day! Surely, he'll be tried and convicted of murder, and receive a long sentence! Whose gonna give you better odds?
I know as well as most people how fucked up juries can be but man, even OJ wasn't caught on camera.
What's the outcome you're betting on? Plea deal? Acquittal? Because I just might take you up on an acquittal.
Hmm, I guess I'd have to think about what I'd pay out for various outcomes. I mean, obviously acquittal and death penalty are the least likely results. I'm guessing this one'll be another Mehserle situation -- 2nd degree manslaughter, with a medium sentence, only a couple years of which will be served.
Yeah, I'll take 3-1 odds on an acquittal or a plea deal of less than ... 4 years. Shall we say I put up $25 and we pay to a non-libertarian charity of choice?
another Mehserle situation
I really doubt that. I and many other people in the profession thought Mehserle looked like a genuine accident. So far the consensus I've seen from other law enforcement guys is that Slager is on video straight up shooting a guy for no justifiable reason and then immediately and casually planting evidence. I think 4 years on a bet is way too conservative. I'm thinking more like 10 at the low end. And that might be generous.
Yeah I would consider any really serious sentence to decide it in your favor. I mean, what if it's like, 20 years with all but 1 suspended? Can they do that in SC?
Either way, it'll be a long, hot spring.
There've been cool black entertainers and trend-setters since the days of William Henry Lane and especially since the existence of blues and jazz as popular music forms. There's been incremental improvement in their status and standing through various periods -- nobody ever dreamed in the days of Satchmo that there'd be photos one day of a guy like Jay-Z shooting the shit in the White House with a black President -- but they've all faced various versions of the same basic insanities and the same basic gap between being exploitable as entertainment and having actual social standing. Cf. Mos Def's classic track on the subject, Mr. Nigga.
|| The Princeton urban congo thing popped up in my fb feed. I sure don't remember thinking you could say shit like that in public when I was a college student, but maybe I'm just Pauline Kael. |>
68: I think the difference that heebie is picking up on is a shift in the relative importance. For example, in the big band era white big band leaders were more popular than black big band leaders. In the 50s you could make a career translating black music to white audiences, like Pat Boone. Now you have much less of that, and black performers can be mega-stars in their own right.
For example, in the big band era white big band leaders were more popular than black big band leaders.
Goodman was more popular than Ellington or Basie, yeah. But I don't know if the other big white leaders -- Artie Shaw, the Dorseys -- were bigger, though?
Lawrence Welk worked longer than any of those guys.
re: 70
I'm not totally disputing the general point, though. Just nerding out on big band music.
Although it is possible to overstate the extent to which things have changed. There have been truly super popular black musicians for years. Louis Jordan was a _huge_ seller. And I think a lot of white artists still translate music of black origin for white audiences, albeit the traffic now more often goes both ways, and the relationships may sometimes be more collaborative than exploitative.
I mean, what if it's like, 20 years with all but 1 suspended? Can they do that in SC?
I finally got around to looking it up.
http://www.scstatehouse.gov/code/t16c003.php
If they get murder it looks like 30 is the shortest sentence.
"Murder" is the killing of any person with malice aforethought, either express or implied...Where a statutory aggravating circumstance is not found, the trial judge shall sentence the defendant to either life imprisonment or a mandatory minimum term of imprisonment for thirty years. No person sentenced to life imprisonment or a mandatory minimum term of imprisonment for thirty years under this section is eligible for parole or to receive any work credits, good conduct credits, education credits, or any other credits that would reduce the sentence required by this section.
The real wiggle room will be if they don't or can't demonstrate the malice and get manslaughter instead.
A person convicted of manslaughter, or the unlawful killing of another without malice, express or implied, must be imprisoned not more than thirty years or less than two years.
AIMHMB, the only guy I know who I think murdered somebody was only convicted for gross abuse of a corpse, probably because nobody was sad that the murdered guy was dead. Now he's back in prison, but for something nobody died over.
He didn't try to have sex with the corpse or anything. Just stuffed it somewhere and walked away.
I've arrested a woman on our equivalent charge. She and a couple friends woke up to a mutual acquaintance obviously dead from an OD. They decided the wise course of action was to dump the body behind the neighbor's garage next to a chain link fence that bordered an Arctic Circle parking lot. Jail wouldn't take her until I took her to the hospital to get the fist sized abscess on her ass lanced.
Hey, gswift, please don't ever get caught doing this: http://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/california-officers-pummel-man-repeatedly-after-chase-stolen-horse-n338881
That beating...kind of lasted a long time. Maybe pause for a second to notice the news chopper overhead.
79: Dude, forget taking too long--the beating was comprehensively unnecessary--dude spread eagled on the ground, then putting arms behind back UNDOUBTEDLY in response to instruction! And the jerk winding up to KICK HIM IN THE HEAD, AND THEN EVERYBODY ELSE DECIDING TO GO TO TOWN.
That was some bullcrap.