The Mutiny was a result of various grievances. However the flashpoint was reached when the soldiers were asked to bite off the paper cartridges for their rifles which they believed were greased with animal fat, namely beef and pork. This was, and is, against the religious beliefs of Hindus and Muslims, respectively.
__________________ Old Pain In The Ass says: I am on a mission from God to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable; to bring faith to the doubtful and doubt to the faithful.
OK, I'm pretty mad and I want to say some stuff. I've just been walking around fulminating and getting madder and madder, especially with this weird convergence of racism lately with celebrity apologisms and Supreme Court rulings and the Zimmerman trial and shit.
So yesterday, I was reading this, about voter literacy tests. Go read that. Go take those tests. Contemplate the irony of white people in Alabama classifying people as illiterate because they 'mispronounced' a word.
Paula Deen was alive when this shit was happening. She was voting age by the time the VRA passed. She lived among this shit all her life. Hell, the last mass lynching in the US happened right in Georgia the year before she was born. And yet she and her supporters think it's A-OK to blithely reminisce about fucking SLAVERY so long as they remember to say that they're totally colorblind and don't waste their beautiful minds on such ugly things as racism. And it's apparently not uncommon in the south, from a whole lot of shit we've seen recently. In that one interview, Deen grimly tells the story of her great grandfather committing suicide because he was unable to support himself post-slavery. So you could argue she was ashamed when she realized that her great grandfather was a horrible person whose success depended on cruelty and exploitation of other human beings. But no. Nope. Someone who was upset about the injustice in that system wouldn't want to roleplay it for a family wedding. Her emotional reaction wasn't for those slaves, but for the poor, put upon slaveowner who was overwhelmed at the prospect of taking care of himself without kidnapping and enslaving other human beings. And hey, Brad Paisley is only wearing a shirt with a CONFEDERATE FLAG on it to show his support for a band, not, you know, what it actually stands for, so it should really be OK because he never once even considered that not everyone he would encounter that day would be an also racist white person.
Do people not actually learn about their own racist history in schools? Don't kids have to look at pictures of Emmett Till in his coffin anymore? That kind of seems familiar, too, doesn't it? Emmett Till's mother demanded an open coffin because she wanted people to have to look at what happened to her little boy. The thing that stood out about that case wasn't even the brutality--that happened all the time, still does--it was that his parents refused to let anyone sweep his murder under the rug. Not every parent of a murdered child has that kind of strength and resolve, or the influence to bring their case into the public eye.
Do people still learn this shit at all, or do they just pretend it never happened so they can repeat history over and over and over again? So now in 2013 we can stop and seriously consider whether maybe it's OK to kill young black boys because white people are afraid of them. And we can all throw up our hands, horribly flummoxed because a witness to the case for some reason is not an old white man, and is probably unreliable at best and deceptive at worst, and we can subject a teenaged girl who heard her friend being murdered in cold blood to endless criticism for not reading cursive because old people think that's still a thing, and for repeating the horrible racial slur cracker that her friend called his murderer because white people are really oppressed when children call them hurtful names before they murder those children, and for painting her fingernails and taking pictures of it because WTF men don't do that so it must be disrespectful. OLD. WHITE. MEN. being confused when they notice for the first time that some people are not also OLD WHITE MEN. This is who is driving the mainstream media narrative. Old white men interrupting people to explain shit from the oft-ignored Old White Man perspective.
Old White Men who don't remember lo these many months ago when black and Hispanic voters had to wait almost twice as long in line to vote as white ones. But hey, that's probably a coincidence, as long as you don't remember all the officials who admitted that they did it on purpose. But old white men weren't bothered by that, so they've decided that probably means that racism is dead and really, even talking about racism is racist, because they never noticed the color of the people whose votes were suppressed! SO THIS IS NO BIG.
And now, not only are there people who were denied their right to vote in 1964, then lived to see it denied again in a different way, but there are no doubt a few pollworkers out there who actively played a role in disenfranchising those voters in 1964, then lived to figure out new ways to do it again. Because that's how Jim Crow shit works. If at first you don't succeed, try, try again. And that's exactly what they've been doing all along. Just trying a bunch of new ways to do a bunch of old things. And now the Supreme Court is helping because racism is over, and federal oversight is just making black people think they're somehow entitled to vote, which really isn't fair to racists.
apropos of only one tiny part of what you said, re: colorblindness, I have a couple of small comments.
I can't say that I personally don't ever notice people's color, but (1) I was taught from childhood that people's color doesn't or shouldn't matter, (2) I also don't see that well, including having a terrible time recognizing people, such that I often don't notice or can't tell a person's ethnicity. I grew up in the 1960's, and I clearly remember the Dodgers' Maury Wills stole some incredible number of bases one season, like 102 or 104. Years and years later, long after Wills had retired, the Dodgers did a retrospective on famous Black players in their organization, such as Roy Campanella and, yes, Maury Wills. I remember the shock ... what? Maury Wills was Black? I never realized. I just thought he was vaguely exotic looking.
My brother has worked even harder on colorblindness than I have. He was involved in a car accident a few years ago, when he was T-boned by a teenage driver running a red light. He remembered that someone in a yellow car got out and came up to him and asked if he was OK. At the trial (the teenager sued my brother -- go figure) he was asked over and over the race of the person from the yellow car who had been a witness. He couldn't tell the person's race. The lawyers were just incredulous that someone wouldn't think that was the most salient and memorable thing about another person.
There really is a problem, though, with people who either lie about being 'colorblind' or who use it to treat everyone as though they're white.
In the case of voter suppression, ultimately, I'm sure that race isn't the direct reason that some people want to keep black voters from the polls. They want to stop black people from voting because black people overwhelmingly don't vote the way they want them to. And the reason for that is that their candidates and issues are often hostile to black people. So it really doesn't matter even if it's true (which it isn't) that the people intimidating black voters don't notice that most of the people in lines are black. But either way, you can't make racism go away by not noticing it.
And also, you don't want to go around stereotyping and profiling people on an individual basis, either, but all too often, when people say they don't notice race, it just means they treat whiteness as normative. People who are minorities in just about any aspect often identify very strongly with their minority status, and to ignore something that they consider important can be really offensive. I know you don't do this sort of thing, but some people's idea of treating everyone as equals just means treating everyone as though they were exactly like them, with all the same interests and preferences and backgrounds. And 'them' is usually an average middle class heterosexual white man. (The reason I know you don't do that is because I learned the platinum rule from you.)
Comments on a story about Paula Deen's racism vs. Alec Baldwin's anti-gay insults directed at a reporter:
Quote:
Originally Posted by comment 1
Also, the rampage against Deen isn't the utterance of a single word; it's her apparent cluelessness & insensitivity regarding matters of race, like when she made this preposterous claim: “I feel like the South is almost less prejudiced, because black folks played such an integral part in our lives. They were like
our family.” Yeah, family members who were SLAVES!
Quote:
Originally Posted by reply to comment 1
Have you not seen The Help. To many people they were like family.
This further cements in my mind the opinion that that's some shitty racist movie.
So annoying hearing people talk about how great it was.
This further cements in my mind the opinion that that's some shitty racist movie.
What how can you say that? The help was a striking look into racism of the 60s; or so the author, a white Mississippi women raised by a black nanny in the 70s would have you believe. A bunch of white people gave it awards, I'm sure at least one of them has a black friend (he blends into the background so well), so it's totally legit!
Before going further into the discussion, Lisarea, you captured everything that I felt and expounded upon it. I've never used 'cracker' as a pejorative before. I have only argued agains.t it. But, yeah, fuck you old droopy, snarkly-assed, white crackers!
There really is a problem, though, with people who either lie about being 'colorblind' or who use it to treat everyone as though they're white.
In the case of voter suppression, ultimately, I'm sure that race isn't the direct reason that some people want to keep black voters from the polls. They want to stop black people from voting because black people overwhelmingly don't vote the way they want them to. And the reason for that is that their candidates and issues are often hostile to black people. So it really doesn't matter even if it's true (which it isn't) that the people intimidating black voters don't notice that most of the people in lines are black. But either way, you can't make racism go away by not noticing it.
And also, you don't want to go around stereotyping and profiling people on an individual basis, either, but all too often, when people say they don't notice race, it just means they treat whiteness as normative. People who are minorities in just about any aspect often identify very strongly with their minority status, and to ignore something that they consider important can be really offensive. I know you don't do this sort of thing, but some people's idea of treating everyone as equals just means treating everyone as though they were exactly like them, with all the same interests and preferences and backgrounds. And 'them' is usually an average middle class heterosexual white man. (The reason I know you don't do that is because I learned the platinum rule from you.)
It's a serious caution, which I am glad to see you lay out so explicitly here. I am by no means immune from privilege-blindness and majority-culture assumptions, though I do try to pay attention. I have learned a lot about such things over a long period of time, from many kinds of people. There's plenty of room for me to learn more.
Andrew Pendergraft is the grandson of Thomas Robb, the modern-day Ku Klux Klan's national director. As a young boy with floppy blond hair and a slight speech impediment, Pendergraft hosted a number of short episodes of his very own amateur talk show, "The Andrew Show," which presents the Klan's ideology in a format aimed at kids -- more specifically, white kids.
It's a bit painful to watch not just because of the contents but because the kids can barely read their script.
Having grown up in the South, I can attest that deep, deep denial regarding racism and slavery is a very common thing. I've known plenty of intelligent, well-educated people who insist that the stories of slavery being a cruel, degrading, dehumanizing industry are just that -- stories.
Because, after all, it would be "irrational" for slave-owners to treat their property badly. The "reality" is that slaves were far better-off here than they would have been back in Africa, and they knew it. So really, by providing them with good work and a decent place to live, slave-owners were doing their slaves a favor.
As far as I can tell, this sort of thing is believed with a fervency that approaches religious fundamentalism by a significant percentage of White Southerners.
And they don't want to hear anything different. "I'm not listening to you. NANANANANANANA."
Oh, and that the Civil War was fought in order to preserve "States' Rights" against the tyranny of the Federal Government -- and that slavery had nothing to do with it; nothing whatsoever -- is also an article of faith for an astonishingly-large percentage of White Southerners.
And we were not shown pictures of Emmitt Till or told anything about him. Or told about lynchings. Or sunset laws. Or anything like that. Heck, I never heard the name Emmitt Till until I was an adult.
Denial is a powerful thing. An awful lot of Southerners would like to sweep all that history under the rug and pretend it never happened.
The ones who don't reminisce about the "Good Old Days" when Blacks "knew their place," that is ...
__________________
“The greatest way to live with honor in this world is to be what we pretend to be.”
It's part of the whole Colonial Mentality thing. The White Man's Burden and all. All of it was done for their own good, because they are like children who can't make their own decisions.
It's part of the whole Colonial Mentality thing. The White Man's Burden and all. All of it was done for their own good, because they are like children who can't make their own decisions.
NEW YORK -- Critics of affirmative action generally argue that the country would be better off with a meritocracy, typically defined as an admissions system where high school grades and standardized test scores are the key factors, applied in the same way to applicants of all races and ethnicities.
But what if they think they favor meritocracy but at some level actually have a flexible definition, depending on which groups would be helped by certain policies? Frank L. Samson, assistant professor of sociology at the University of Miami, thinks his new research findings suggest that the definition of meritocracy used by white people is far more fluid than many would admit, and that this fluidity results in white people favoring certain policies (and groups) over others.
Specifically, he found, in a survey of white California adults, they generally favor admissions policies that place a high priority on high school grade-point averages and standardized test scores. But when these white people are focused on the success of Asian-American students, their views change.
Affirmative Action for me, not for thee!
__________________
"Trans Am Jesus" is "what hanged me"
__________________
What a man believes upon grossly insufficient evidence is an index into his desires -- desires of which he himself is often unconscious. ... The origin of myths is explained in this way.
Notice the fraud in your link has no instruction or any sign of being presented by a government.
The real test has questions like:
1. The Constitution of the United States places the final authority in our Nation in the hands of--
a. the national courts.
b. the States.
c. the people.
__________________
What a man believes upon grossly insufficient evidence is an index into his desires -- desires of which he himself is often unconscious. ... The origin of myths is explained in this way.
Re: More blithe racism
Linear Mode
