Will Shetterly's Blog, page 148

when black folks lynched a white man

From TWO VIRGINIA LYNCHINGS - Whites Hang Negro and Blacks Dispatch His White Comrade. Killing of the White Man May Lead to a Race War -- Negroes Said to be Armed. - NYTimes.com:

EMPORIA, VIRGINIA - Saturday - March 24, 1900. Two lynchings have taken place in this county today. Walter Cotton, a negro, the confessed murderer of two men, Justice of the Peace Saunders and a man named Welton, was hanged and riddled with bullets by the indignant white citizens of Emporia at 12 o'clock noon. A few m...

if lynching was racist, bullets were, too—plus the taxi test; or the ignorance of Oprah and Forrest Whitaker

I had wanted to see The Butler, but I want to see it less now, because the ignorance of its creators is impressive.

Oprah Winfrey said of the word "nigger", "I always think of the millions of people who heard that as their last word as they were hanging from a tree." According to the Tuskegee Institute count of lynchings between 1882 and 1968, 3,446 black people were lynched, and 1,297 white people were lynched. Which is 4,743 too many, but far from millions.

Lynching became disproportionately...

W.E.B. DuBois on class, race, and the obligations of privileged black folks

"so long as American labor is more conscious of color and race than it is of the fundamental economic needs of the whole laboring class, just so long the development of labor solidarity is impossible." —W.E.B. DuBois, "The Nucleus of Class Consciousness"

"Some years ago I used the phrase "The Talented Tenth," meaning leadership of the Negro race in America by a trained few. … Very gradually as the philosophy of Karl Marx and many of his successors seeped into my understanding, I tried to apply...

a simple question for N. K. Jemisin and Vox Day—and any anti-racist or scientific sub-speciesist who wishes to answer

ETA: I noticed this is being discussed at MetaFilter's "there is no neutrality when bigotry is the status quo". Since I can't answer there, I'm going to quote a relevant things from there and answer them in the comments on this post.

What do you want, besides book sales? You both have strongly-held beliefs, Critical Race Theory and Human Biodiversity, but you're both silent about the practical application of those beliefs.

Vox Day, you say:

I have repeatedly pointed out that the existence o...

How privilege lost its meaning, or The problem with Privilege Theory

For most of my life, a privilege was a special treatment for a tiny minority, usually contest winners or rich people. Which makes sense—"privilege" comes from the Latin for "private law", meaning the privileged get to play by different rules than you or me.

But "Checking Your Privilege 101" defines privilege as "an unearned advantage that a dominant group has over marginalized groups" and lists examples ranging from race and gender to "able-bodied privilege" (the "privilege" of not being disab...

cunt vs. nigger

I've long thought that people who object to genital-based insults for women should not use genital-based insults for men. I mentioned this to a female friend, who said "cunt" was the most insulting word in English and that, unlike penis-inspired insults, it's never complementary. To which I noted that all of the penis-inspired insults continue to be fighting words. The difference between "cunt" and words like "dickhead" is one of degree, not kind. Arguing that it's okay to use one and not the...

It doesn't look like Oprah was the victim of racism

From Switzerland Apologizes to Oprah for Treating Her Like a Pre-makeover Julia Roberts in Pretty Woman | Vanity Fair:

The owner of the luxury-goods shop, which has since been outed as Trois Pommes, is not in agreement, however. “This is an absolute classic misunderstanding,” Trudie Goetz told Reuters today. To CNN, she clarified, “Mrs. Oprah said she just wanted to look at the bag, she didn’t want it taken down, and because my sales assistant felt a little embarrassed about the price, s...

A bit about outrage junkies. Also, Hitler.

Just posted this on Facebook:

Outraged people really love to be outraged. A guy was writing on Facebook about an outrage du jour in scifi fandom, so I mentioned the time a few US Nazis wanted to march in Skokie: They were so politically insignificant that they needed the ACLU to defend their First Amendment rights, yet people reacted as if they were a viable threat to anything other than good taste. The Nazis were undoubtedly flattered.

The person writing about the fannish incident reacted with...

a cool fact about the US Civil War that snobbish historians won't tell you

From 1861: The Civil War Awakening by Adam Goodheart:

Although it is often said today that half the U.S. Army resigned in 1861 to join the Confederacy, this is untrue. Very few enlisted men in peacetime came from the South. Only twenty-six privates out of all sixteen thousand ended up defecting to the rebels—compared to more than three hundred out of the thousand or so men in the officer corps.

Dear Reader,

Emma has been away this week, teaching writing at Hamline University, so I've been catching up on things, most of which I'll kindly not record here. But this might be interesting:

The coolest thing I saw in Zumba this week was a muslim woman in a hijab, long skirt, sparkling vest, and loose jacket who danced like Tina Turner (or maybe like Angela Bassett) to Ike and Tina's version of "Proud Mary":



(Insert here my usual frustration that Bassett didn't get to play Storm in the X-Men movies.)

Monda...