Feminist or white feminist

In her acceptance speech at the Oscars Patricia Arquette made a impassioned plea for civil rights and equality for woman.

"It’s time for all the women in America and all the men that love women, and all the gay people, and all the people of color that we’ve all fought for to fight for us now"

She got in a little trouble for her speech with the internet being the way it is and people listening even closer. They claimed she was only advocating for white woman, later she clarified that's not what she meant. Looking back on the history of feminism in this country her words are exactly what she meant and in line with American feminism. A quote attributed to Susan B Anthony is:

"I will cut off this right arm of mine before I will ask for the ballot for the Negro and not for the woman"

Not to say Anthony wasn't a friend of the negro she was a anti slave voice even at the age of 17 and was a agent for the American Anti-Slavery Society. The American feminist movement has by and large been a movement for white women by white women. The black feminist has battled on two fronts, the specter of racism and sexism while white feminist have only battled sexism.

Look at any picture of feminist parades and you will mostly see black woman if present in the back.
Understandably people of color have had to worry about racism first and were and still seen as a monolithic group but each "minority group" is made up of men and women. The next time a feminist talks of women ponder whether they mean all women or just white woman

Trickiest Dick Of All

Just when you thought it was safe to be black again..Recently news surfaces that racism in the presidency is a real thing and not just imagined. A interview of top Nixon aide  John Ehrlichman
done with a reporter 22 years ago was just published by Harper's magazine which stated that essentially the 1969 "war on drugs" was created as a political tool to fight blacks and hippies.

Its well documented in the Nixon presidential tapes released after his death about his opinion of blacks and minorities...lets just say Nixon wasn't too fond of them. This new info shows just how much and to what level he hated them. J Edgar Hoover level of government abuse

 "We knew we couldn't make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin. And then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities," Ehrlichman said. "We could arrest their leaders. raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did." - John Ehrlichman

It seems the plot of the Blaxploitation parody Black Dynamite wasn't too far off base.

Sign Of The Times

If you are a ptc site regular then you know what crowdflower is, a tab that you do little tasks for points. the tasks are easy somewhat and most involve searches on Google or Bing but today it was different.


Today the task was identifying voice commands for help to improve a cars onboard system. I  was into the task and they were quite interesting until I came upon this section

I'm no prude, i listen to the hip hop but seeing this was offensive to me, any spelling of the N-Word is offensive to me.  The fact that this was used offended me, the fact that someone thought it was okay to put it offended me so i sent a support ticket hoping to have it fixed...and the next day it was resolved but not in the way i thought.

here is the response to my complaint from the owners of crowdflower

Pretty nonchalant if you ask me. consider appending a explicit content warning to the task? how about taking the offensive part down, how about removing it. how about giving a Damn!!!

Byrne victim

I am a marvel zombie from way back, I used to collect comics but I stopped some time ago. One of my favorite artists was John Byrne, the dude could draw although his depiction of black people was a little limited it was okay because not many black people showed up in the comics. My only prob with Byrne was his way of putting little sneaky racial stuff in his works.
A while ago in his website he used the word "nigger" in a rather offensive way. I know how can you use it in a non-offensive way. The problem I had was that he compared the use of the N-word as being interchangeable with black, like the two words for the word bubbles in comics that hold the dialogue of the characters. I don’t know about you but "word balloon" and "word bubble" has never been as repugnant as "nigger" to me. Not only was his analogy wrong but also it was gross and a little racist. I just think it was a way for the dude to say his own feelings. As for some of his works I have a problem with, they are numerous.

1. Fantastic four- (241) Byrne finally uses the Black Panther in a story but it is destroyed by his antagonist being a racist, a Greek or Roman racist too at a time when the kind of racism that exists today the villain would not even be aware of


2. 
   Captain America- (I am not sure of the issue number) Captain America is having a flashback about being in school and the pictures are an obvious play on the little rascals and there is buckwheat pictured as an inkspot. I don’t know if it was the colorist’s doing or the way it was drawn but I am sure Byrne was happy with the results.


3. Marvel Fanfare- (29) Hammer and Anvil star in this issue. They are marvel comic’s play on The Defiant Ones (one is black the other is white)and they battle the hulk. In the end of the story a mysterious stranger blast one of the two in the face with a gun (guess which one?)


4. 
   Omac limited series- here we have Byrne doing a reworking of the classic Kirby character (Kirby being the one artist he is compared to most and he has chased his whole career) there is one scene that has been changed from the original comics. A scene depicting how to relieve stress. There are these dolls that you can kick and beat up. Well Byrne decided that one of the dolls should be black complete with wide mouth and white lips. A change from the original drawing by Kirby.

I could go on but I think I made my point