Even here, however, segregation persisted. Vaughan and her colleagues were placed in Langley’s ‘West Computing’ unit. White women computed on the east side. At the back of the Langley cafeteria, a white cardboard sign labeled COLORED COMPUTERS directed the West mathematicians to sit together at lunch rather than mingle. Eventually, “tiny firebrand” Miriam Mann stole the sign, and the table was left unlabelled.
Breaking barriers: the US space programme’s black women mathematicians : A view From the Bridge (via iamdanw)
sometimes, when i want to really treat myself, i turn my phone brightness up juust a little bit. i feel like i’m splurging. like i’m living a king’s life. sometimes i turn it up all the way and i’m like, “this is what god’s phone screen looks like.”
The bliss of open stacks is totally intoxicating. You’re let loose with no very large obligation to stick to the subject in a place where every book you’ve ever wanted to read is at hand. It’s a glorious thing, exciting. It takes care of the impulse to explore and to see radically and be radically different.
BOMB Magazine — Marie Ponsot by Benjamin Ivry
What the people I interviewed were drawn to was not necessarily the particulars of these theories. It was the deep story underlying them—an account of life as it feels to them. Some such account underlies all beliefs, right or left, I think. The deep story of the right goes like this:
You are patiently standing in the middle of a long line stretching toward the horizon, where the American Dream awaits. But as you wait, you see people cutting in line ahead of you. Many of these line-cutters are black—beneficiaries of affirmative action or welfare. Some are career-driven women pushing into jobs they never had before. Then you see immigrants, Mexicans, Somalis, the Syrian refugees yet to come. As you wait in this unmoving line, you’re being asked to feel sorry for them all. You have a good heart. But who is deciding who you should feel compassion for? Then you see President Barack Hussein Obama waving the line-cutters forward. He’s on their side. In fact, isn’t he a line-cutter too? How did this fatherless black guy pay for Harvard? As you wait your turn, Obama is using the money in your pocket to help the line-cutters. He and his liberal backers have removed the shame from taking. The government has become an instrument for redistributing your money to the undeserving. It’s not your government anymore; it’s theirs.
Arlie Russell Hochschild in Mother Jones. I Spent 5 Years With Some of Trump’s Biggest Fans. Here’s What They Won’t Tell You. (via protoslacker)
Privileged people are building lifestyles on espousing “Law of Attraction“ type spiritual beliefs, and sharing them with dogmatic insistence. There is an aggressive, holier-than-thou approach that prevails in this behavior.
“We create our own reality.” “Everything happens for a reason.” “What you put out is what you attract.” These are isolating, damaging, victim-blaming thoughts to distribute to people who have endured trauma or suffering as a result of societal madness and centuries-old oppression.
These types of beliefs are homogenizing: they assume a shared life experience background of privilege. Having privilege is emphasized as the norm. Espousing these beliefs reinforces hegemony: keeping those with privilege in a state of dominance over others. This thinking promotes attitudes of entitlement and assumes that having privilege is the “correct” way to be.
Virginia Rosenberg. Converting Hidden Spiritual Racism Into Sacred Activism: An Open Letter To Spiritual White Folks (via protoslacker)
There is a lens that is largely being ignored in attempts to imagine post-capitalist futures - this missing link is a result of the evasion of the reality that capitalism is born of white supremacist thinking and domination - and is therefore directly linked to anti-blackness, and consequently the erasure of black lives and futures. Unless capitalism’s origins in the project of Empire are acknowledged we will continue to hold the flawed assumption that humanness is universally agreed upon. The current circulating prescription of being human is one offered by white capitalism and is highly fueled by control, greed and need for constant accumulation. As different societies across the globe increasingly invest in these structures and relations, we risk narrowing the potential for nurturing of alternative (less cannibalistic) versions of being human.
Gathoni Blessol at Pambazuka News. White supremacy as cultural cannibalism
(via protoslacker)
But what is true is that this work — actually doing alternative economics in black and other communities — was always very dangerous work, which is why I titled this book “Collective Courage.” I’ve documented how there was physical violence and many times there was economic sabotage against these businesses. I often found instances of people getting killed, co-ops being burned down, commercial banks not lending or providing financial services to these businesses.
Jessica Gordon Nembhard in Equity Blog at Policy Link. Collective Courage: Jessica Gordon Nembhard on Black Economic Solidarity
Collective Courage: A History of African American Cooperative Economic Thought and Practice
(via protoslacker)
Luhrmann offered an explanation: Europeans and Americans tend to see themselves as individuals motivated by a sense of self identity, whereas outside the West, people imagine the mind and self interwoven with others and defined through relationships.
Clifton Parker writing in Stanford News. Hallucinatory ‘voices’ shaped by local culture, Stanford anthropologist says Stanford anthropologist Tanya Luhrmann found that voice-hearing experiences of people with serious psychotic disorders are shaped by local culture – in the United States, the voices are harsh and threatening; in Africa and India, they are more benign and playful. This may have clinical implications for how to treat people with schizophrenia, she suggests. (via protoslacker)
In 2013, Jackson, Mississippi elected a very progressive mayor, Chokwe Lumumba, who actually had planned to create a whole cooperative economy in the city. It was very exciting. His plan was to create co-ops out of many of the businesses that the city had already privatized and to help develop other co-ops. There were going to be urban-rural co-op linkages. There was a plan to have a year-long education program to train many people in Jackson, especially unemployed ones, in co-op development so they could start a variety of them. Sadly, Lumumba died [in February 2014, after only eight months in office], but despite this, the people in his administration whom he had hired to start doing this are now moving forward with a few of the co-ops, such as a waste-management cooperative. They hosted one of the largest co-op meetings in the US [Jackson Rising, in May 2014] which attracted about 500 people, predominately Black.
Beverly Bell and Natalie Miller at Truth Out, Other Worlds. The Legacy and Current Growth of Black Cooperatives
(via protoslacker)
Other research teams are taking different approaches to breeding fertilizer-frugal crops. Over the past six years, a group at the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Centre (CIMMYT), headquartered in Texcoco, Mexico, has had success using conventional breeding to create maize that grows well in the nitrogen-starved soils of Africa.
Natasha Gilbert at Nature. The race to create super-crops Old-fashioned breeding techniques are bearing more fruit than genetic engineering in developing hyper-efficient plants. (via protoslacker)
DONALD J. TRUMP, until now a Republican problem, this week became a challenge the nation must confront and overcome. The real estate tycoon is uniquely unqualified to serve as president, in experience and temperament. He is mounting a campaign of snarl and sneer, not substance. To the extent he has views, they are wrong in their diagnosis of America’s problems and dangerous in their proposed solutions. Mr. Trump’s politics of denigration and division could strain the bonds that have held a diverse nation together. His contempt for constitutional norms might reveal the nation’s two-century-old experiment in checks and balances to be more fragile than we knew.
The Washington Post Editorial Board in The Washington Post. The Post’s View
Donald Trump is a unique threat to American democracy
(via protoslacker)
I was thinking as long as I have my hands up … they’re not going to shoot me. This is what I’m thinking, they’re not going to shoot me. Wow, was I wrong.
Video shows moments before North Miami Police shot unarmed man
We’re used to so much nonsense and so many combustible tirades from Trump that we become partly inured to them. We also don’t slow down and look at precisely what he’s saying. What he’s saying here is that millions of African-Americans are on the streets inspired by and protesting on behalf of a mass murderer of white cops.
This is not simply false. It is the kind of wild racist incitement that puts whole societies in danger. And this man wants to be president.
Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo. A Propagator of Race Hatred and Violence (via protoslacker)
The distractions…
Shit is crazy out here
I swear I was just talking to my mom about how no one is talking about Flint anymore as if the water problem has ceased. Smdh
Hey guys here are some places still taking donations!
Please make this go viral. This is what’s happening in my state right now. The bill was passed almost unanimously. You may view it here : [www.ncleg.net/gascripts…
NEW LAW MAKES POLICE CAM FOOTAGE OFF LIMITS TO PUBLIC
Motivated by the controversial police officer-involved shootings in Louisiana and Minnesota, and the terror in Texas that unfolded after a Black Lives Matter march, Gov. Pat McCrory signed the Body Cam bill into law.
Related story: North Carolina Attorney General Roy Cooper says body camera law needs fixing
McCrory signed House Bill 972 on Monday afternoon.
The new law details who can view and obtain footage from body and dashboard camera. The footage is no longer public record.
If you are in the video, either your image or your audio, you can request the file. The request could be denied, however, and then you’ll have to take the fight to Superior Court.
McCrory says technology can mislead and misinform.
“My goal is to protect those who protect us,” he said.
The Governor believes the legislation is fair for everyone.
“It’s better to have rules and guidelines with all this technology than no rules and guidelines whatsoever,” said McCrory.
The ACLU of North Carolina calls the legislation “shameful.”
“Body cameras should be a tool to make law enforcement more transparent and accountable to the communities they serve, but this shameful law will make it nearly impossible to achieve those goals,” said Susanna Birdsong, Policy Counsel for the ACLU of North Carolina. “People who are filmed by police body cameras should not have to spend time and money to go to court in order to see that footage. These barriers are significant and we expect them to drastically reduce any potential this technology had to make law enforcement more accountable to community members.”
The Governor’s Office would not comment on the criticism.
The law goes into effect Oct. 1.
Wake County Sheriff Donnie Harrison is backing McCrory’s move. He says what law enforcement encounters in the field is not for everyone’s eyes.
“A lot of groups think we should show everything from start to finish and we just can’t do it,” said Harrison. “They think we’re trying to hide something and that’s not what it is. But if we go into a house for a domestic (assault) and if the wife has been assaulted has been unclothed, we don’t want that on YouTube. We don’t want that out there.”
McCrory took another step Monday to protect officers. He established the Blue Alert System, which is to help catch anyone who intends on attacking or harming a public safety officials.
http://abc11.com/politics/new-law-makes-police-cam-footage-off-limits-to-public/1422569/
** ELECTIONS ARE ON NOVEMBER 8th!!! YOUR VOTE COUNTS TO GET HIM OUT OF OFFICE***
The Slave Trail of Tears is the great missing migration—a thousand-mile-long river of people, all of them black, reaching from Virginia to Louisiana. During the 50 years before the Civil War, about a million enslaved people moved from the Upper South—Virginia, Maryland, Kentucky—to the Deep South—Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama. They were made to go, deported, you could say, having been sold.
Edward Ball in The Smithsonian, Nov. 2015 via Neo-Griot. Retracing Slavery’s Trail of Tears America’s forgotten migration – the journeys of a million African-Americans from the tobacco South to the cotton South
Kalamu ya Salaam’s information blog is good
(via protoslacker)
Both Bar-Yam’s and Cederman’s research suggests one answer to diversity within nation states: devolve power to local communities, as multicultural states such as Belgium and Canada have done.
“We need a conception of the state as a place where multiple affiliations and languages and religions may be safe and flourish,” says Slattery. “That is the ideal Tanzania has embraced and it seems to be working reasonably well.” Tanzania has more than 120 ethnic groups and about 100 languages.
Debora MacKenzie at The New Scientist. End of nations: Is there an alternative to countries? Nation states cause some of our biggest problems, from civil war to climate inaction. Science suggests there are better ways to run a planet (via protoslacker)
There are lots of things you can do if you witness racist behaviour. Bystander intervention may be able to stop a racist incident, prevent it from escalating and potentially prevent or minimise social or emotional harm to the targeted person or group. Taking a personal stand also contributes to the establishment of social norms which make racist behaviour unacceptable in our community and has the potential to affect individuals’ attitudes in the long term.
Monash University. Bystander anti-racism (via protoslacker)
So what caused Muslim societies to go from coolly reading homoerotic poetry to outlawing and stigmatising same-sex love? It’s tough to nail down an exact reason but here’s an interesting coincidence: there are five Muslims countries where being gay isn’t a crime. All that the five – Mali, Jordan, Indonesia, Turkey and Albania – share in common is that they were never colonised by the British.
Shoaib Daniyal in Scroll.in. Orlando shooting: It’s different now, but Muslims have a long history of accepting homosexuality Muslim societies have ignored their own history of accepting homosexuality, latching on to a twisted colonial legacy instead.
Via 3 Quarks Daily
(via protoslacker)
What all of this means is that we are steadily becoming a society of workers without work: a society of people who are materially, culturally and psychologically bound to paid employment, but for whom there are not enough stable and meaningful jobs to go around. Perversely, the most pressing problem for many people is no longer exploitation, but the absence of opportunities to be sufficiently and dependably exploited. The impact of this problem in today’s epidemic of anxiety and exhaustion should not be underestimated.
David Frayne at Roar. Against meaninglessness and precarity: the crisis of work (via protoslacker)
Then I knew the Africans were right. There is spirit stuff. There is spirit affliction; it is not a matter of metaphor and symbol, or even psychology. And I began to see how anthropologists have perpetuated an endless series of put-downs about the many spirit events in which they participated—“participated” in a kindly pretense. They might have obtained valuable material, but they have been operating with the wrong paradigm, that of the positivists’ denial.
Edith Turner in Shamanism, Spring/Summer 1997, Vol. 10, No. 1. The Reality of Spirits
Edith Turner passed away today, she was 95.
Celebrating the Works of Edith “Edie” Turner Youtube video
(via protoslacker)
For the black man to come out superior would be against America’s teachings. I have been so great in boxing they had to create an image like Rocky, a white image on the screen, to counteract my image in the ring. America has to have its white images, no matter where it gets them. Jesus, Wonder Woman, Tarzan and Rocky
Watching Rocky II with Muhammad Ali | Interviews | Roger Ebert