In case you missed it, there's a movie being made in which white liberals go to South America to "protest," only to end up getting kidnapped and eaten by a tribe of Brown savage cannibals. →
In 2013. Directed by Eli Roth, who said:
“So I wrote about these student activists who want to save these un-contacted tribes in the Amazon… They chain themselves to trees and protest and stream it and hash-tag, and it works… Then on their way home, their plane crashes. And the very people they save are like ‘Ah, food – that’s great!’ It’s like a free lunch, and they are brought back into the fold of absolutely barbaric, primitive man. People that have had no contact with the outside world.
So when we shot it, I wanted to film somewhere that was really, really, really in the Amazon. Really, authentically off the grid. We scouted in the summer-time and went up the river for hours and hours and found this village where there was no electricity, no running water, grass huts. Ten people in a shack. And it looked incredible; it looked like a village from another time, so we asked if we could film there. But I was told that we have to tell them what a movie is because they have no idea. They’ve never seen one. They’ve never even seen a television. So they went back with a television and a generator and showed the village Cannibal Holocaust, which I couldn’t believe. And the villagers – thank god – thought it was a comedy. The funniest thing that they’d ever seen. And they wanted to play cannibals in the movie. So we had the entire village acting in the film. And they speak Quechua – which is like another language from another time.”
I don’t have much commentary, but I want you to pay close attention to the coded language he uses. You might think “this is inappropriate” or “this is rude” or “this is racially insensitive,” but let’s not beat around the bush. This is what white supremacy looks like in 2013 — the idea that a group of people not living by Western standards are automatically “primitive savages.”
The mere fact that he was taken in by an indigenous village, unharmed, and decided to turn around and portray the people who opened their home to him as cannibalistic savages is a disturbing effort to create colonial propaganda. The fact that he listened to a current language spoken by an existing people and called it “another language from another time” proves that he doesn’t view them as real, equal human beings, but as a concept to be exploited for a cheap film.
I’m done.
This is a receipt for the payment of a Louisiana poll tax in 1917. The fee was $1 (which is equivalent to $18.14 in today’s money). This tax was meant to keep recently-enfranchised people of color, as well as poorer working-class folks, from voting.
Poll taxes, or any voting fees for that matter, were outlawed by the 24th amendment. But the new Voter ID laws being passed by republicans are designed to do the same thing as a poll tax. They require all voters to have photo ID on them when they go to the polls. But how much does photo ID cost? Well, It depends on the state…
- Alabama – $23
- Florida – $3
- Georgia -$20 for 5 years, $35 for $10 years
- Indiana – $13 under 65, $10 for over 65, last for 6 years
- Kansas – $18 under 65, $14 over 65
- Louisiana – Average $21, free for over 60
- Michigan – $10, free for seniors.
- Mississippi – $13
- Pennsylvania – $10
- South Carolina – $5
- South Dakota – $8
- Tennessee – $12.50. For those 65 and up, they never expire
- Texas – $15. 60 and up, $5 and never has to be renewed
*NOTE: The states in bold are where photo IDs are more expensive than the original (unconstitutional) poll taxes.
And yes, I know part of the Voter ID laws are that the states are required to give out free photo ID but…
- Republicans are trying to keep that part of the law hush-hush.
- Some people (including a 95 year old woman) went to get their free ID (which they were guaranteed by law) and were still turned down.
- And forcing eligible-voters to go wait in the DMV for several hours is just going to further discourage people from voting, free ID or otherwise. Which is bad for America, considering we have awful voter turnout as it is.
Golden Dawn’s Violent War Against Immigrants in Greece
Golden Dawn’s Violent War Against Immigrants in Greece
The neo-Nazi party had a strong showing in Greek elections, winning a staggering 7 percent of the vote. Barbie Latza Nadeau on Golden Dawn’s violent campaign to force out immigrants. by Barbie Latza Nadeau | June 19, 2012 9:19 AM EDT
The smell of urine and sweat, simmering in 90-degree heat, wafts through an open window like poisonous perfume. A half-full plastic water bottle balances on the ledge below a dirty mesh curtain tied in a knot. More than 20 illegal immigrants live behind the window, in the four-bedroom apartment on Filis street in central Athens, sleeping in shifts to share the beds. They pay what they can, and are forced to give up their bed when someone can pay more. “It’s better than the street,” says a man when asked what it’s like inside. A few blocks up, the doors are half-open with bare lightbulbs above them. When the light is on, it means the brothels inside are open. Women of all ethnicities and ages peer from the windows. This is not the Athens that tourists flock to. But it is home to roughly 1 million estimated illegal immigrants who live and work in the city.
Being an immigrant—illegal or not—has become a risky way of life in Athens. Since May 6, when Greeks gave voice to extremist neo-Nazi anti-immigration party Golden Dawn, attacks on immigrants have doubled. On May 31, an Albanian man standing on the street in Athens’s Neos Kosmos neighborhood was stabbed with a sword by a masked motorcycle driver. Paramedics had to remove several ribs to dislodge the sword, which pierced his chest and was left sticking out of his back.
The same night, 20 minutes later, two Polish men were stabbed with knives in the same part of town. The next day men from Bangladesh and Pakistan were stabbed in the city’s subway stations. “Things have gotten worse since the elections,” Reza Gholami, who heads an association for immigrants from Afghanistan, told Greek Kathimerini newspaper after the May 6 election. “There are daily beatings.”
Read more at the source: http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/06/19/golden-dawn-s-violent-war-against-immigrants-in-greece.html
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This is horrific…
White Americans who live in proximity to large numbers of Latinos tend to have more conservative views. All else equal, whites living in zip codes with larger Latino populations are less likely to want the federal government to reduce income inequality, less likely to seek increased spending on health care for the poor, less likely to want to do more to cover the uninsured, and almost significantly less likely…to view poverty as a serious problem. This implication of this set of findings is an important once. Latino context is now shaping core policy concerns of the American public. And it is doing so in a way that mirrors the negative reactions that have often faced the African American community in the past. In contexts where Latinos are prominent (and perhaps threatening), whites tend to be eager to reduce services and expenditures that benefit the bottom rungs of society.
Five Things You Should Know About Fred Shuttlesworth
When legendary civil rights activist Reverend Fred L. Shuttlesworth died today, many Americans had no idea who he was or what he’d accomplished in his 89 years on earth. It’s an unfortunate reality that people often think Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X were the beginning and end of black activism in the Civil Rights era. In fact, nothing could be more wrong. From the 1950s onward, Shuttlesworth was a major factor in ending Jim Crow laws in the South, and many other oppressive forces throughout the United States. Here are the top five things you should know about him.
1. From the start of his career, Shuttlesworth, who was raised poor in Alabama, was fiery and obstinate. After Alabama officially banned the NAACP from operating within the state in 1956, Shuttlesworth, then a pastor, founded the Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights. The ACMHR’s first major order of business was a Birmingham bus sit-in, during which Shuttlesworth and others boarded city buses and sat in the “whites only” sections. The ACMHR would eventually become charter member organization in the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.
2. He lived nearly nine decades, but many people tried to kill Shuttlesworth much earlier for his outspokenness. He was the target of two bomb attacks, one on his home and one on his church. And when Shuttlesworth tried to enroll his daughters in an all-white Birmingham school in 1957, an armed mob attacked him, beating him unconscious and stabbing his wife. The couple survived, and when a doctor remarked that Shuttlesworth was lucky to have avoided a concussion,Shuttlesworth said, “Doctor, the Lord knew I lived in a hard town, so he gave me a hard head.”
3. Though he worked closely with King, Shuttlesworth’s style was decidedly different. “Among the youthful ‘elders’ of the movement,” historian Diane McWhorter told The New York Times, “he was Martin Luther King’s most effective and insistent foil: blunt where King was soothing, driven where King was leisurely, and most important, confrontational where King was conciliatory—meaning, critically, that he was more upsetting than King in the eyes of the white public.” Despite their differences, King once called Shuttlesworth ”the most courageous civil rights fighter in the South.”
4. Shuttlesworth’s fiercest enemy in Birmingham was infamous public safety commissioner Bull Connor. Connor’s violent responses—attack dogs, fire hoses, billy clubs—to Shuttlesworth’s peaceful demonstrations were integral in changing America’s attitude about Jim Crow. “The televised images of Connor directing handlers of police dogs to attack unarmed demonstrators and firefighters’ using hoses to knock down children had a profound effect on American citizens’ view of the civil rights struggle,” says the Shuttlesworth Foundation’s website.
5. After his actions helped spawn the passage of the federal Civil Rights Act in 1964, Shuttlesworth continued fighting for justice in realms both racial and economic. In 1988 he founded the Shuttlesworth Housing Foundation to help low-income families own their own homes, and in 2004 he became president of the SCLC. A firebrand to the end, he resigned from the SCLC within months, saying “deceit, mistrust and a lack of spiritual discipline and truth have eaten at the core of this once-hallowed organization.” Three years ago, the city of Birmingham named its airport after Shuttlesworth. There are still no monuments named after Bull Connor.
A person of good intelligence and of sensitivity cannot exist in this society very long without having some anger about the inequality ― and it’s not just a bleeding-heart, knee-jerk, liberal kind of a thing ― it is just a normal human reaction to a nonsensical set of values where we have cinnamon flavored dental floss and there are people sleeping in the street.
Love and hate like the tattooed fist: [As I Read...] →
…these posts about Troy Davis, I’m becoming increasingly annoyed. Non-people of color are absolutely shocked at the atrocities that played out last night. They’re posting pictures of themselves crying, they’re posting texts about faulty legal systems and are trying to comfort one another by offering solutions to make the current system better.
I’m not shocked by what happened to Troy Davis. People of color know all too well that being black and male in America is one of the worst identities to have. It is equivalent to painting a bright red target on your back. The system doesn’t care about us. We know racism is institutionalized and have been raised to be cautious of it. We know that being black makes everything harder. This is our daily experience. Our people are ALWAYS being wrongly persecuted, used as this country’s scapegoat.
Not one post made by a POC contained a tone of surprise. It is generally understood that if we get caught up in the “justice” system we most likely won’t get a great outcome. Many of us were disillusioned, angered, and disappointed, but not shocked.
This is where the disconnect comes in. Non-POCs don’t talk about race. They blame the process in itself, but they don’t attribute race to the problem. They don’t have to watch their brothers and friends get harassed on a daily basis by cops. They don’t feel the awkward stares if they walk into a store where the owner has already stereotyped them and has deemed them dangerous. They don’t have to live through any of this and so they’re shocked when they find out about people like Troy Davis. They’re sympathetic and recognize that the system is faulty, but they don’t even know the half of it because they don’t have to live this every single day. The true meaning behind all of this escapes them.
I don’t want to see another picture of a non-POC crying. What the hell do they have to shed tears for? In a few week’s time, most of them are going to forget all about Troy Davis and will go back to their lives, devoid of all prejudice. They’ll be free to do and say whatever the fuck they want without being challenged because they don’t have dark skin, whereas the rest of us will continue living through this. We will undoubtedly meet and hear about more Troy Davis’s whose stories most likely won’t make it to the major news stations. The ache will never leave our hearts. We will continue on in our lives in the quest for peace and success and whatever else one strives for, but the truth, the feeling of otherness that this society ingrains in us, will always be there. We will NEVER forget. They might, but we won’t. This is not an anomaly or some kind of accident. This is reality, our reality.
This is why hearing “I am Troy Davis” coming from white folks is not working. We’re not. If we were, we wouldn’t have been executed.
I agree with the above but I think it’s overly simplistic to say that the only factor that could lead to someone “being Troy Davis” is race. When non-normative individuals interact with the prison-industrial complex, the results are always worse for those who differ in some way— the norm being, white, gender-conforming, straight and male. The sad irony of this, as we all know, is that that is far from the norm of prison populations— and yet difference still creates indications of guilt.
I’m not saying that I am Troy Davis— because I’m not. What happened to him would never happen to me, because we live in a justice system that values conformity to a standard storyline and if you are not the perfect defendant, you may be put to death despite your innocence. This isn’t just the case with capital cases or those accused of a crime. Witnesses, who give some of the most questionable evidence and are just people trying to do the right thing, frequently change their stories because memory is fickle. And plaintiffs, especially women, are considered by judges and juries to be hysterical or mistaken.
A probably innocent man was put to death by the state last night, because pardoning him, staying the execution longer or canceling it altogether, would have indicated that there may be bias in our justice system, which is tantamount to treason in some circles. We have a black president, what could possibly go wrong?
Think the death penalty isn't about race? Have some statistics →
Racial discrimination remains a dominant feature of criminal justice in the United States and Alabama. More than half of the over 3,300 people on death row nationwide are people of color; nearly 42% are African American. Prominent researchers have demonstrated that a defendant is more likely to get the death penalty if the victim is white than if the victim is black. The key decision makers in death penalty cases across the country are almost exclusively white. Despite decades of evidence showing that the administration of the death penalty is permeated with racial bias, courts and legislatures’ refusal to address race in any comprehensive way reveals a fundamental flaw in America’s justice system.
Each year in Alabama, nearly 65% of all murders involve black victims, yet 80% of the people currently awaiting execution in Alabama were convicted of crimes in which the victims were white. Only 6% of all murders in Alabama involve black defendants and white victims, but over 60% of black death row prisoners have been sentenced for killing someone white.
^^ Exactly.
Courts in GA sought the death penalty for 70% of black defendants with white victims but for only 15% of white defendants with black victim.
New York City: Emergency Demonstration to Stop the Execution of Troy Davis, Sept. 20, 2011. Protesters gathered at Liberty Plaza, site of the Occupy Wall Street encampment, and marched to City Hall.
Photos by redguard
Atlanta: Protesters gathered outside the building where the Georgia Board of Pardons and Paroles held a hearing for death row inmate Troy Davis, Sept. 19, 2011. This morning the board announced its refusal to grant clemency.
ON THIS DAY
On Sept. 15, 1963, four black girls were killed when a bomb went off during Sunday services at a Baptist church in Birmingham, Alabama, in the deadliest act of the civil rights era.
(via NYTimes)
Can you hear us now? Verizon strikers fight for all workers →
The heroic 45,000-strong strike against Verizon continues throughout the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic regions, as workers, including many women, African Americans and Latinos/as, rail against the corporate monolith’s fierce anti-union assault.
Picketers walk outside Verizon and Verizon Wireless offices, call centers, phone stores, garages and hundreds of workplaces from coast to coast. The lines are strong and growing. “Workers are being joined on the line by Communication Workers of America members from other companies and members of other unions as the battle continues to get the company to start bargaining seriously,” reports the CWA website.
Verizon insisted on 100 concessions from the workers during contract negotiations, stripping away 50 years of hard-won benefits. The CWA and International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, which represent the landline workers, called a strike on Aug. 7 after the contract expired. Strike votes were nearly unanimous.
When negotiations restarted on Aug. 10, Verizon hadn’t budged from the demands they made when talks began on June 22. Although proclaiming it must cut wages and benefits and outsource jobs to be “competitive” in a mostly nonunion industry, Verizon, unscathed by the recession, is one of the top 10 wealthiest U.S. corporations. The company earns $108 billion a year and $7 billion in profits. Verizon didn’t pay federal taxes last year — and even maneuvered a $1.3 billion tax rebate!
The corporation seeks even more profits by demanding $1 billion in concessions — $20,000 per worker per year — by gutting vital benefits.
Its aim to eliminate a paid holiday on Martin Luther King Jr. Day is also a right-wing jab at the Civil Rights Movement.
Ron Paul Suggests We'd Be "Better Off" Without The Civil Rights Act →
In one of his first interviews after announcing his 2012 bid yesterday morning, he called for eliminating FEMA, even as much of the country suffers from devastating natural disasters, suggesting that people who happen to be in the path of a tornado or wildfire are “dumb.”
But in an an interview just minutes later yesterday evening, Paul outdid himself by telling MSNBC host Chris Matthews that he wouldn’t have voted for the 1964 Civil Rights Act because it was unfair to property owners.
IS RON PAUL COMPLETELY SERIOUS? He just guaranteed that a big majority of Americans will not like him!!
He has lost my vote!!
-Drew, Concerned American
There’s absolutely nothing you can say in defense of this man. By extension, he wouldn’t have voted to abolish slavery either - after all, a lot of people lost what they considered ‘property’ that way, too. The fact that said property consisted of living, breathing human beings, well…
I’ve said this many times before, and I’ll say it again: Hollywood can make a movie set anywhere in the world, in any era of history… and still somehow find a way for the movie to star a white guy.
From a post at Angry Asian Man on a movie about a white guy becoming a yakuza. (via pseudo-tsuga)
it’s something that has always bothered me. i get that it’s a “less traumatic way” to get to experience another culture’s otherness but seriously? (also it’s not just Hollywood, it’s mostly western cinema in general, with a few notable exceptions, but still) (via rachelthehouseelf)
Such infuriatingly sad truth.
(via caterfree10)
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