I have no idea how frequently to post these. It was feeling hard to keep up with “weekly,” but then if “monthly” I find myself just putting shit on facebook in the shorter term, which ends up challenging my mental health, so: I’ll see what happens when I post whenever I get to 10 resources that have affected my Assiness in some helpful way, that I think could affect others’ Assiness in some helpful way.** They are in order of encounter, not awesomeness. They are all awesome!
1. Summary and analysis of a paper detailing the history of lynchings of Latinos in the 1800s.
2. Cinemacked: A site on race and gender in movies from Trudy of Gradient Lair. I want this for books–does anyone know it for books?
3. Your Media Has Problems: tumblr about dynamics-of-oppression-reproducing media. Some on books even!
4. US Today (of all things!) Interactive Arrest Rate Map: I wanted to know if there were disparities in Carrollton, and this was actually the only thing I could find. Sort of hard to use but worth it–scroll within the pop-up window to find the search bar at the top.
5. Suite of pieces (Slate, NPR, study itself, infographic if nothing else) on the racial disparity in our Southern schools’ suspension and expulsion data. The racial disparity in suspensions and expulsion is every where, and it’s worse in the South. We are Asses down here if we don’t decide to be responsible in whatever our small spheres of influence are.
6. Pariah. It’s a movie and it’s on Netflix. Watch Pariah!
7. Onion Talks, esp the first one: “I’ll be your visionary…and you do the things I come up with.”
No one makes fun of the cult of ***visionary!*** young white men quite like The Onion. As a collection, which I recommend you devote 40 minutes of your life to, these send up the cult of innovation-for-it’s-own-sake (represented by TED talks) more than just visionary young white men per se…but that first talk is, I think, pretty pointed.
8. Comic on the difference between Latino and Hispanic. It’s not so much “you’re using it WRONG!” as “No one knows what these mean and we who Mean Well use them uncomfortably and without information. Here is information!”
9. How Black Reporters Report On Black Death: A story on NPR that floored me.
10. The World’s Most Trafficked Mammal Is One You May Never Have Heard Of: This is also an NPR story, about the pangolin. You may recall my first acrylic painting; I did not know about the trafficking. It’s so sad.
11. Possibly way too much radical critical analysis… the most critical I can find, because that’s what I need to keep blowing up my own brain. Podcast “Behind the News” with Doug Henwood (you can subscribe the usual way, but that link takes you to every episode ever, which you will want); Orchestrated Pulse piece critiquing “leadership class” of Black Lives Matter; Jacobin’s “Poverty of Culture” (dead-on call of bullshit on “culture of poverty” …”Like so many other “zombie ideas” in our current moment, the culture of poverty narrative persists not because of its success in explaining reality, but in spite of it. What it does succeed in doing is providing an explanation of reality that salves the consciences of the powerful and their supporters.”
12. Rape Culture and Down Syndrome
13. Who Fears Death, Nnedi Okorafor. Read some post-apocalyptic fiction set in future Saharan Africa. Amazing.
14. Piece on charter schools in post-Katrina New Orleans.
Speaking of which: the major brain-blowing up of recent days was going to the Southern Movement Assembly V in New Orleans. I’ll try to post something about it eventually. You can learn more about it via #gulfsouthrising, #southernpeoplespower, and #TheSeasAreRisingAndSoAreWe, and here’s a whole article.
That’s it for now…if you have suggestions for not being such an Ass, I’ll always take them.
Love,
Sarah
***Oh, I got to so many more than 10 before I could manage to post this! Oh well.
interlexionality 