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Showing posts with the label Racism

The bleating gurgle of one drowning in his own shit

I love this comment from "anonymous" and I will leave it up here. If it was worth my time, I'd trawl through the server logs to find this little fucker's IP and respond in kind. But alas, I have much better things to do with my time. Still, I'd like to keep this comment for the rest of us still living in the civilized society that is Canada -- a reminder of how fragile our civility really is. A comment like this could be nothing more than graffiti of a delinquent. Or it could be more. We should think of it as more, rather than be dismissive of the dangers that lurk right here in Canada. When Ann Coulter can travel to Canada and be welcomed to have an audience to spout similar hate, we should all be worried. The dangers are real when we tolerate such rants -- give it a platform -- and don't challenge its veracity. To the "anonymous" who responded to my post: I'm assuming you're of European descent, since you refer to my skin colour as a...

Racism alive and well in Keswick

Racism in our own fucking backyard. Who'd think it? White bullies in Keswick love to show their ignorance, by calling Asians, "Chinese," pushing Asian anglers into the water in a sport locally known as "nipper tipping" and beating up on Asian kids who happen to be A+ students and black belt martial artists. Yes, a bully fucked with the wrong 15-year-old Korean when he pushed him and punched him in the face. He did count on a left handed (weaker hand) punch in return that broke his nose. Now the school has suspended both students and has threatened to expel the Korean student. WTF? Just before you think all Keswick residents are racists, take note of this little tidbit. In response to 15-year-old's suspension for fighting back, 400 hundred of his peers walked out of Keswick High School on Monday in protest. Hopefully the York Region school's administration will take a moment to reflect on the Ten Tenets of Character they have posted on the schoo...

Wearing braids in school now OK for Native American boy

America's south is still fucked up. School rules in the Needville Independent School District requires boys to keep their hair short -- which was a problem for a five-year-old kindergarten student of Native American heritage. His hair is short. His parents asked for an exception to the rules, siting cultural and religious reasons. School officials refused to budge. When the boy attended school with his long hair anyway, he was suspended. It took a lawsuit to force the Texas school district to do the right thing. Why did it have to go that far?

As the Arabs see the Jews

This fascinating essay, written by King Hussein’s grandfather King Abdullah, appeared in the United States six months before the 1948 Arab-Israeli War. In the article, King Abdullah disputes the mistaken view that Arab opposition to Zionism (and later the state of Israel) is because of longstanding religious or ethnic hatred. He notes that Jews and Muslims enjoyed a long history of peaceful coexistence in the Middle East, and that Jews have historically suffered far more at the hands of Christian Europe. Pointing to the tragedy of the holocaust that Jews suffered during World War II, the monarch asks why America and Europe are refusing to accept more than a token handful of Jewish immigrants and refugees. It is unfair, he argues, to make Palestine, which is innocent of anti-Semitism, pay for the crimes of Europe. King Abdullah also asks how Jews can claim a historic right to Palestine, when Arabs have been the overwhelming majority there for nearly 1300 uninterrupted years? The essay e...

Loving Once Upon a Time in Virginia

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"Almighty God created the races white, black, yellow, Malay and red, and He placed them on separate continents. And but for the interference with His arrangement there would be no cause for such marriages. The fact that He separated the races shows that He did not intend for the races to mix." -- Leon Bazile, Trial Judge, Jan. 6, 1959, Virginia, USA. Not so long ago, people went around telling others who they were allowed to love. The culmination of love between two people, marriage, was forbidden in certain circumstances, and enforced by law. Today, sadly, not much has changed. There are still people going around telling others who they are allowed to love, and who they're not. In some places, they are supported by the law. In some places, it can lead to death. We're an unjust society when we allow such laws to remain -- and when we allow some to dictate who others can live with and love. This is why I support same sex marriages. [Source: reddit ]

The Racist Gene

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Bruno Maddox's Blinded by Science column (as of this posting, not yet online) in Discover Magazine this month, raises the whole question of a genetic basis for intelligence that exploded last October, when James Watson remarked that blacks are just not as smart as whites. Watson let his tongue get ahead of his brain, and it was too late to take the words back. He got sacked, and his entire career would never be viewed the same again. That being said, in Maddox's column, a myth continues to be perpetuated. The myth of race and a genetic basis for it. The human species may be varied on the outside, but inside, at the genetic level, we're all the same. Race is a social affliction that the best of us seems to find a difficult hurdle to get over. There is more evidence that race is a byproduct of our environment, not our genes. Our environment determines how our genes express themselves -- and while this may have been obvious from early genetic studies, evidence is now...

Are You Prejudiced?

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Harvard has an Implicit Association Test (IAT) online, to measure the association with white and black Americans. The IAT is used social psychologists "to measure the strength of association between mental representations of objects in memory. The IAT requires the rapid categorization of various stimulus objects, such that easier pairings (and faster responses) are interpreted as being more strongly associated in memory than more difficult pairings (slower responses)." The aggregated responses from those who've taken the test online is captured in the image above. Take the test and see where you land. The result doesn't necessarily reflect racial prejudices towards whites or blacks -- but definitely a bias -- although there is controversy in the use of the test.

"You fucking Arab!"

Something stinks in Joliet, IL. An officer from the local police force, noticed a van parked on the driveway of Kuldip Singh Nag 's house with expired registration tags. The officer instructed Nag, a Sikh, to move the vehicle into his garage. The van was inoperable, and Nag had the audacity to point out that on his private property, he could actually park the van wherever he wanted to -- including his driveway. According to Nag and his wife, what followed was bizarre. The officer pulled out a can of pepper spray, sprayed Nag in the eyes, then proceeded to beat him with his baton, while yelling, "You fucking Arab! You fucking immigrant, go back to your fucking country before I kill you!" Nag stayed in the hospital a few days to recover, after suffering head injuries, bruises and temporary blindness. Now clearly, something is just not right here. Even I'm having a hard time believing this. But I can't see the motivation for the cop to do what he did. WTF? ...