Many of you have likely seen, or even participated in, the comments sh*tstorm happening on Jessica Yee's post on Native appropriation from earlier this week. If you haven't, trust us that things have blown up over there, and not in a great way. We are working on a response to this blow up, as well as a change in our comments policy and perhaps an upping of our comment moderation (your input would be helpful here). As you may know, we aren't used to getting tons of comments here – most of our posts average about 15 comments or less – so we haven't felt the need to moderate with an iron fist in the past. Unfortunately, an iron fist would've likely helped in this case.
For now, we'd like to direct your attention to a great post by Thea Lim from our friends at Racialicious that responds to many of the comments Jessica's post has received. An excerpt:
Racialicious considers Bitch a friend – all year Racialicious bloggers will be guesting at the Bitch blog. But when Jessica sent out an email to the team with a link to said Bitch post and its comments, we shuddered a long, sad, collective sigh. This kind of blowback is so depressingly standard, and calls immediately to mind the dozens of times we’ve received these types of responses when we’ve asked for ourselves, our cultures and our experiences to be respected.
The resistance Jessica got is so standard that we can categorise it into three, typical responses that entitled folks make when called out for their privilege.
One thing you'll notice if you spend any time following youth issues in the media is that coverage comes in waves. The Pew releases a report, new employment stats for the quarter come out, etc. and all of the mainstream outlets take a turn at reinventing the wheel via their own spins on the story du jour. In the last few days, the illegal and, in some quarters, unethical nature of unpaid internships has been on the front burner.
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