racism

Wait! Yes, you! Were you about to go buy some stamps? Be careful! According to the American Thinker, American stamps are "childish, silly, and racist"! Now, does that sound like something you'd want to support? Would you want to put "blacks no one has heard of" all over your nice envelope? The Thinker, an ironic title if ever there was one, certainly would NOT. We here at Bitch are henceforth renaming the conservative think tank the American Douchebag.

One of the most interesting panels I went to at SXSW was E-Race: Avatars, Anonymity, and Visualization of Identity on the Internet. It included Lisa Nakamura, Director of Asian-American Studies at the University of Illinois Urbana Champaign and author of Digitizing Race; James Au, who literally wrote the book on the avatar universe of Second Life; and Jeff Yang, who writes the column Asian Pop for the San Francisco Chronicle. I heard about generational divides in avatar usage and anecdotes about role-playing games that I don't know much about to begin with, but when Lisa Nakamura took the mic, the conversation really began.

Two students at Texas State University have founded the Former Majority Association for Equality to financially assist white men. Yes, only white men, because according to co-founder William Lake, they are "one group that just doesn’t have any support."

The past week has been awful for designer John Galliano. He was arrested, trashed by Natalie Portman, and fired from Dior. By now, you likely know the reason why. It all started on Feb. 24, when the 50-year-old reportedly pulled a woman by the hair and called her "a dirty Jew face" in a Parisian café. According to reports, he also spewed racial slurs at the woman’s Asian friend. Following these outbursts, French authorities arrested the superstar designer. After news of his arrest spread, another woman surfaced who accused Galliano of behaving similarly towards her last October. If that weren’t bad enough, then a video emerged of Galliano declaring his love for Hitler and that if Hitler had succeeded, Jews "would be dead. Your mothers, your forefathers, would all be f—ing gassed."

Need some awesome links to start your weekend? Thought so!

• First, the great news, in case you didn't hear: Obama declared DOMA unconstitutional!
• Feministe links to the full list of events for the Walk for Choice. Mark your calendars for Saturday! At Feministing, Ann Friedman talks about her experience on MSNBC talking about Planned Parenthood and points to ways to speak out and donate.
• Also at Feministing, Rose describes a feminist's fraught feelings about Malcolm X.
• Like Nadra Kareem Nittle recently did, The Detroit News talks about the relationships between race, names and discrimination, focusing on one loaded name in particular: Washington. (via Racialicious)
• Did you miss blogger extraordinaire s.e. smith on the Glee panel at Western Washington University? Keep up with ou's reviews, collected on Tumblr!
• Vampires on the mind? Dr. Sayantani DasGupta discusses the bizarre supernatural-BFF-as-Other trope on both Racialicious and Stories are Good Medicine.
• The New York Times reports that Ablene Cooper, who used to work as a maid for author Kathryn Stockett, is suing for appropriation of her name and image in The Help.
• Huffington Post covers the history of Petfinder.
• Jezebel pokes some bitter fun at the politicians clamoring to legislate our bodies.
• On Tiger Beatdown, Grizzly Fetus continues to rant from the womb by naming some anti-abortion a-holes... including Kanye.

Now that word’s spread about the assault she endured, Logan is being re-victimized by those who say that an attractive white woman with blonde hair should’ve known better than to make her way through a mob of brown, Muslim men. Why didn’t Logan realize that all Arab men are misogynistic beasts who haven’t the slightest respect for their own women, let alone Western women—all of whom they regard as whores? Yeah, that about sums up the message on sites from the Los Angeles Times to the New York Times to Salon.

If you’re a dark-skinned black woman in Egypt, you’re likely to be sexually propositioned by men and slighted by women there. At least, that’s what African-American journalist Sunni Khalid observed during his three years in the North African country with his Kenyan Somali wife.

How did you celebrate the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday—sleeping in, cruising sales at the mall or maybe even working because you didn’t have the day off? Of course, you may have actually spent the day attending a Martin Luther King Day parade or engaging in civil rights activism—for which you deserve to be commended because so few people observe the holiday by recognizing King and his work. I, for one, spent MLK Day watching the Oprah Winfrey Show to check out her roundup of programs she’s done on race over the past 25 years. So, what were Oprah’s most memorable shows on the subject?

I'd be remiss to begin a blog on the intersection of race, gender and pop culture without mentioning that, in reading various other blogs on all three topics, I’ve kept happening upon the same complaint: that pop culture and many feminist publications often exclude or oversee the unique perspectives offered by women who aren't white. So this blog, then, is a group effort, with your comments and experiences forming an integral part in fostering a thoughtful and inclusive discussion on feminism.

Dear Olivia Munn,

There has been a lot of noise about you over the past two months. And it has mostly been about how you are a woman, and how that identity influences your career. Namely people have said that you are not funny, and that therefore the only reason why you got your incredibly coveted position at the Daily Show is because you are beautiful.

But I am writing to you today not to talk about lady business. Instead I want to talk about how we are both mixed race Southeast Asian high femme ladies, and you are the first mixed race Southeast Asian lady I have ever seen on American television (I am not counting Cassie because she had hardly a line in Step Up 2: The Streets). Your work at the Daily Show has made me feel sad, alone, and quite a bit like crying, despite the fact that I have a shriveled angry little anti-racist feminist heart, and it's rare that things on TV hurt my feelings anymore.

I'm not going to argue about whether or not you got where you got because the male-dominated worlds of gaming and comedy value women who are beautiful, over women who are competently funny, because that horse has been beat to death. And also, comedy is pretty subjective and obviously you have a lot of fans, so clearly there is an audience for your style.

What angers me about your comedy, Olivia Munn, is how it is built on gleeful collusion with misogyny and racism. If we're talking about the race stuff, unlike other comedians of colour (Katt Williams! Dave Chappelle! Russell Peters!) whose jokes—while hit or miss with the kyriarchy—rely on poking fun at white racism, your jokes generally rely on racist stereotypes about your own damn people, to get a laugh out of a racist white audience.