feminist blogs

Remember when that sorry excuse for a political commentator, Glenn Beck, publicly stated that Obama is a racist who hates white people? If you don't remember, here's the video. Tie your hands behind your back to restrain yourself from punching your computer screen.



But, there is GOOD NEWS! Wal-Mart, CVS, Best Buy, and five other companies have just pulled their advertising from Beck's show after ColorOfChange.org asked people to take action, making a total of twenty advertisers who have ended their support for the Fox host. Sign the petition, and perhaps we can get even more advertisers to ditch the ignoramus. Oh, the power of online activism.

Thanks to Womanist Musings I came across these photos from the upcoming issue of Harper's Bazaar that feature supermodel Naomi Campbell.








Let's use a points system to evaluate these:

+100 points for using a woman of color in a photoshoot to counter the societal belief that being white equals being beautiful.

-50,000 points for portraying said woman of color in a racist, idiotic, and fucking offensive manner. It is possible to show a black woman doing something other than wearing animal skins and running wild with cheetahs in Africa. Are you kidding me?

Check out "5 Reasons We Still Need Feminism" on the Sirens Magazine website. I could easily write "50 Reasons We Still Need Feminism," but the five reasons they listed were certainly enough, which included the rape crisis and reproductive rights being in jeopardy. But just for some extra material to shove in the faces of folks who claim that feminism is dead and useless, here are my five reasons (in actuality, reproductive justice and the rape crisis would be on this list, but since Sirens already covered it, I'm trying to do something different).

1. Equal Pay Remains a Myth. Although we have laws to protect our right to fair and equal pay, a wage gap still exists. In 2008, women who were full-time wage and salary workers earned about 80 percent of their male counterparts' salaries. And the numbers are even worse for women of color. A core feminist belief (especially within Marxist Feminism) is that women cannot achieve liberation without economic independence. As long as women still continue to struggle with poverty, many have no choice but to depend on men for survival.

2. LGBT People Are Still Being Treated Like a Lesser Species. As long as people still exist who believe that same-sex marriage will lead to the apocalypse and will corrupt our children, gay people will continue to be stepped on by bigoted heterosexuals. Keith Olbermann once asked while addressing same-sex marriage opponents, "What's it to you?" Opponents of equality are selfish and ignorant people who envision a world with legalized gay marriage as a doomed world. To me, the scarier world is one in which over half the population in a state votes in favor of hatred instead of love, churches are performing fake exorcisms on frightened young people, scientific evidence is ignored for the sake of continuing harmful and medieval tactics, and entire groups of people who have done nothing but step into a gay bar are targeted by a terrorist group that wishes to poison them. In comparison to all that, love and acceptance doesn't sound so bad.

3. As High as the Rape and Violence Rates Are Here, Women Are Being Abused Even More Abroad. If you are a woman in the Middle East or in Africa, you have a shitload to worry about. Perhaps you were forced to live underground after surviving a rape because your family was so ashamed of you that they kicked you out, or maybe you have no choice but to undergo genital cutting, in which your clitoris is cut or removed or your entire vagina is sewn shut to ensure that you do not experience any type of sexual pleasure until you are forced into marriage. Or maybe you live in the Democratic Republic of Congo, where you constantly have to worry about you or your daughters or your sisters or your friends being raped endlessly and left with unwanted pregnancies, STDs, or a torn vagina. For these women, I'd say feminism is pretty damn important.

4. Racism is Alive and Well. Let's play a game called Don't Jump the Gun, in which we try with all our might to avoid declaring racism "dead" because our country finally allowed a black man into the White House. Because when said black man is still the target of racist attacks, like comparing him to a witch doctor or a "magic negro," or is targeted for an assassination by white supremacists, I think it's safe to say racism is still pretty active. And let's not forget when for the 45340598390534th time a black man was targeted by cops, and our black president defended him, he was ripped a new asshole by right-wingers.

5. Society is Laying Out the Narrowest of Paths for Our Children. Little girls play with dolls, and little boys play with trucks. If the opposite occurs, the little girl is taunted and called a "tomboy," and the little boy is called a "sissy" or a "fag." Shouldn't our children have the right to express who they are and choose what they want to do, as long as they are safe? In a perfect (see: feminist) world perhaps, but in our society, don't even think about it. Most major toy websites still have "boys" and "girls" sections with "gender-appropriate" toys that condition young boys to grow up to love violence and sports, and girls to grow up cooking meals and playing dress-up. A feminist's task is to break down these stereotypes, until finally a young boy can play with a Barbie doll without being teased by classmates and reprimanded by nervous parents who fear the boy will grow up to be (GASP!) a homosexual. Such restrictions harm children in the long run by forcing them to stifle their interests and talents if they do not fit the norm.

What are your reasons?

I tweeted that question yesterday because I seriously wanted a good discussion about it. Teresa Puente had posted at Chicago Now about being tired of hearing about Rick Bayless being this expert on Mexican food. The comments immediately went into calling her a racist. I wanted a higher level of discussion. Thankfully Amy gave me one. I wasn't calling Teresa a racist and I apologize if my tweet came off as that.

Teresa asked:

Something just bugged me that a white guy was gaining so much fame for his Mexican cuisine. I'm sure his love of Mexico is genuine and he does good charity work. I'm not saying he's a bad guy, and he is a great chef. But why does the media make him the spokesman for Mexican food in the United States?

And hear are my thoughts. I haven't watched many of Rick's shows and I've caught a few of Anthony Bourdain's show (especially the Chicago episode where you can catch Cinnamon in one scene).

*deep breath*

I can't shake the feeling when watching them wander through Mexico and far off countries that these sophisticated white dudes are trying to tell us what is authentic and what isn't. As if they are Marco Polo's of food searching for the most authentic food to bring back to the States.

I've heard or read comments classifying Bourdain as a food anthropologist. I kinda get that.

Honestly I'm torn.

As I tweeted to Amy, I'm not a foodie. I like my food fairly simple, thus the idea of gourmet Mexican food makes me itch. And maybe I just don't understand what Bayless and Bourdain are trying to do with their shows. There are few areas where I feel totally lacking in knowledge to comment on and food is one of them.

So I'm still torn about how I feel about all of this. It's all a mental exercise for me at this point. Stretching my brain to figure it all out.

Laurie Toby Edison and Debbie Notkin say:

We are delighted to be invited to guest blog here at Feministe.

We can usually be found (along with a couple of regular guest bloggers) at Body Impolitic, where we blog about body image (interpreted as widely as possible), photography, art, and occasional other topics.

We got into working together more than 20 years ago, when we started work on Women En Large: Images of Fat Nudes, which was published in 1994.

Ten years later, we published Familiar Men: A Book of Nudes.

Our most recent project, not yet in book form, is Women of Japan, a series of clothed portraits of women who live in Japan, which was done in collaboration with Japanese feminists.

Laurie is the photographer, and Debbie writes, edits, and manages the text portions of the projects.

Twenty-plus years of body image work is long enough to give us a lot of perspective on what changes, and what remains the same. Both of us were active feminists before we started doing specific work around body image; so we knew we were in for lifelong (generations long) battles. It’s been fascinating to watch what has gotten better. For example:

a much larger community of people are talking about and working on body image issues,

good information and health statistics are more available to everyone, 

attractive clothing is sold for women of different sizes, and

social awareness and acceptance of transgender issues has grown remarkably.

We’ve also watched what has gotten worse, including:

the media definition of “beauty” is a lot narrower now than it was in 1989,

the sexualization of young girls is rampant,

medical procedures like Botox and labiaplasty have become normalized, and

men’s looks have become almost as commercialized and commoditized as women’s.

As we do in the photographic work, at Body Impolitic, we try to look at the immense number of factors that affect how individuals feel about our bodies, about living in our bodies, and about the vast pressures on all of us to hate ourselves and our bodies. While “body image” is a term that people frequently associate with weight (and we do blog about size acceptance and health-at-every-size issues), we also cover racial issues, cultural expectations of masculinity, parenting practices, ability/disability, and much, much more.

We believe that knowing and appreciating the power and beauty of everyone’s bodies, exactly as they are, is a cornerstone not only of feminism, but of living well in the world.

And we’re looking forward to being a more active part of the conversation here.

The question is, how in the world are they going to get it?

Via HuffPo:

"On the issue of the Hispanic voter, we have to do a lot more. We Republicans have to recruit and elect Hispanics to office," McCain told CNN's State of Union. "And I don't mean just because they're Hispanics, but they represent a big part of the growing population in America. And we have a lot of work to do there. And I am of the belief that unless we reverse the trend of Hispanic voter registration, we have a very, very deep hole that we've got to come out of."

While he was one of only a handful of Republicans willing to tackle immigration reform in 2007, McCain faced a massive deficit with Hispanic voters in the 2008 election. His aides have said that, were he not the home state senator, he would have lost Arizona to Barack Obama, in large part because Hispanics had left the Republican Party in droves.

It's hard to imagine how a party which is staunchly anti-immigrant, anti-social programs, anti-bilingual education, who is opposing the first Latina Supreme Court Justice nominee, is going to find a way to lure more Latino voters.

Thanks for stating the obvious McCain, that the Latino population is a growing minority in the United States and you're in trouble if you don't get some of them into the ballot box for you. Some estimates are that by 2050 one in every four person in the US will be Latino.

There is no way your party is going to get the support of Latinos until you change your politics. Favoring immigration enforcement (aka border fences, raids and inhumane treatment of immigrant detainees) over immigration reform isn't going to win you much favor with a primarily immigrant community. Even Cuban-Americans (of which I am one) who have traditionally voted Republican because of the Republican anti-Castro hard line, are starting to swing toward the Democrats.

Maybe the changing demography of this country will finally force the party to realize it can't only support the interests of a small sector of upper-middle class white folks and be successful. Here's to hoping.

UPDATE: McCain declared today that he will oppose Judge Sotomayor's confirmation. Thanks for proving my point McCain.

I wanted to highlight that a new documentary is now out and available on DVD, Still Black. Below is a clip from the documentary, which I would love to see.

About the film:

STILL BLACK: a portrait of black transmen, is an alternative feature-length documentary that explores the lives of six black transgender men living in the United States. Through the intimate stories of their lives as artists, students, husbands, fathers, lawyers, and teachers, the film offers viewers a complex and multi-faceted image of race, sexuality and trans identity.

Check out the website to purchase the documentary, or see here for festival viewing.

• Officer Justin Barrett. Boston, Massachusetts. The Boston Police Commissioner recently suspended and moved to fire Boston patrol cop Officer Justin Barrett, after being forwarded a racist-ass e-mail that Barret wrote in response to Yvonne Abraham’s Boston Globe column criticizing Sergeant James Crowley for his stupid arrest of Henry Louis Gates. All the news stories have mentioned how Barrett stated I am not a racist, but I am [prejudiced] towards people who are stupid and repeatedly described Gates as a banana-eating jungle monkey. Some also mentioned active patrol cop Barret’s statement that, had he been in Crowley’s place, he not only would have arrested Gates but would have pepper-sprayed him in the face. None of the mainstream media articles I’ve read so far have mentioned that active patrol cop Officer Justin Barrett also complains that Your defense [4th paragraph] of Gates while he is on the phone while being confronted [INDEED] with a police officer is assuming he has rights when considered a suspect. He is a suspect and will always be a suspect. (Brackets in original; emphasis mine.) Or that, alongside the violent racism and explicit totalitarianism, he adds some crude misogyny, writing to the immediate target of his letter, Yvonne Abraham, that You are a hot little bird with minimal experiences in a harsh field. … You have no business writing for a US newspaper nevermind detailing and analyzing half truths. You should serve me coffee and donuts on Sunday morning. He later repeats the joke about coffee and says that you just need to get slapped. Officer Justin Barrett, when not a racist, sexist, police-statist patrol cop, is also a veteran of the United States government’s Army; he felt comfortable forwarding his racist, sexist, police-statist e-mail to a few of his buddies in the Boston police force and several of his buddies in the Army National Guard. Since the story hit, Barrett has complained to the media that in the uproar over his repeated use of the phrase banana-eating jungle monkey, People are making it about race. It is not about race, and that, although he made a poor choice of words, I didn’t mean it in a racist way. I treat everyone with dignity and respect. His lawyer says that he plans to fight to hold onto his cop job at the upcoming hearing.

• Disorderly conduct. Patrolman Robert Lang, Patrolman Jared Bock, and Patrolman Shawn Panchick. Brackenridge, Pennsylvania. Three white patrol cops in Pennsylvania are being investigated by another local government’s cops in response to allegations that they beat and robbed a three black teenagers who they arbitrarily commanded (why?) to clear off of a friend’s front porch where they were hanging out late at night. I don’t know whether or not the allegations of robbery are true — one of the victims, Kyle Dudley, claims that he was beat down and robbed of his watch and money by a group of cops possibly different from the three who originally responded to the call, which makes it hard to compare stories — but I do know that, whether or not those allegations are true, the story that the cops all agreed on for their report is more than enough reason to call their conduct belligerent, violent and stupid. Cops have exactly no business singling out black teenagers to be hassled, or for forcing them down and arresting them on a disorderly conduct beef simply for refusing to obey arbitrary bellowed commands that they leave a private residence where they have been invited to hang out with their friends, or a neighborhood where they are hanging out on public property. And once again, it is clear that disorderly conduct charges are the sheepdogs’ favorite threat for making that the sheep stay just where they’ve been herded, regardless of whether or not anyone is actually doing anything that would threaten anyone’s rights even in the slightest.

• Cops are here to keep us safe. (Cont’d.) By sideswiping our cars while they tear down the road at 20 mph over the posted speed limit with no lights and no sirens on. Then by concealing information or flat-out lying in the accident report and to the media about how fast they were going, until they finally reveal, a couple days later, that the accident was, after all, clearly the fault of the cop’s speeding. Where have I seen that before…? I guess his victim is lucky that he wasn’t doing 100; if he had gotten himself hurt or killed in the crash he caused, she probably would have been arrested for reckless driving and smeared as a cop-killer all over the local papers.

• Fun for ages 7 to 70. Unnamed patrol officer, Knoxville, Tennessee, and Deputy Chris Beize. Austin, Texas. In Knoxville, a government cop, who had important business to do Investigating reports of some neighbor kids getting into a fight, has been accused of trying to coerce a 7 year old boy into talking more candidly by handcuffing the child and cussing him out, while the boy was crying and asking for his mother. The 7-year-old was not involved in the fighting and was never suspected of, or charged with, any crime. Officials refuse to so much as disclose this dedicated public servant’s name, but they promise that the matter is being Internally Investigated.

  Meanwhile, in Texas, Deputy Chris Beize tasered Kathryn Winkfein, a 72-year-old great-grandmother, twice during a routine traffic stop, after she refused to sign a ticket and he decided to escalate the situation by ordering her out of her car, instead of just mailing the damn thing to her home address. Beize claims that she swore at him (which is not a crime) and that she pushed him into oncoming traffic (no she didn’t; the dashcam video clearly shows that he lunged over and grabbed her and shoved her back several feet, when she tried to de-escalate the situation by sidestepping him to get back to her truck). Then he blasted her with a 50,000-volt electric shock from the taser, and then tasered her again while she was lying on the ground. Then he arrested her for resisting arrest. His superior officers in the paramilitary chain of command have defended Beize’s hollering belligerence, physical assault, and torture by repeated electrical shocks, against an unarmed, 4′11″, 72-year-old great-grandmother who never threatened any physical harm and was guilty of nothing more than a moving violation and contempt of cop, as an appropriate reaction to a dangerous situation. By the by, when Beize is not busy shocking the hell out of elderly women, he is a taser instructor for the local police.

• Officer Morris Taylor. Springfield, Missouri. Officer Morris Taylor, a cop formerly on the Springfield, Missouri city government’s police force, is facing misdemeanor assault charges for beating John Sedersten, a prisoner under his authority, after Sedersten had been restrained and booked in the Greene County Jail. The story’s in the news because Sedersten, the victim of the beating, recently decided not to testify against Taylor in the criminal case, on advice from his attorneys, because of the danger that his testimony will open him up to lines of questioning that the government can use against him in his pending criminal cases. Sedersten is pursuing a separate civil lawsuit against Officer Morris Taylor for the beating; apparently he’s just not particularly interested in working closely with the same government office that is trying to lock him up in other cases, particularly not for so minor a vindication as a misdemeanor assault conviction. Even without his testimony, apparently portions of the assault are recorded on video.

  Besides having spent 11 years in local government police forces, Officer Morris Taylor also has experience in dealing with prisoners from working as a government soldier in the U.S. government’s war and occupation in Iraq.

• Deputy Marcus Smith. San Joaquin County, California. San Joaquin County Sheriff’s deputies stopped a car on a routine traffic stop near Manteca; Charles Inderbitzen was riding in the car. Inderbitzen was ex-con out on parole, and believed that he had a warrant out on him, so he got nervous around the cops. He tried to leave the scene without the cops’ permission; even though the police had no reason whatever, at this point, to suspect that he had committed any crime, or even (since he was not the one driving the car) of even the most minor civil infraction. But government cops in America aren’t actually interested in dealing with crimes; they are interested in targeting suspects, and are more than willing to summarily declare you a suspect sort of guy based solely on your failure to follow their arbitrary bellowed commands, or your decision to try to leave the scene when they are present. So a gang of police chased Inderbitzen down, cornered him in a back yard, drew their guns on him, and ordered him to get on his knees and put his hands on his head. After Inderbitzen complied with their orders, with several cops pointing guns at him and while physically at their mercy, Deputy Marcus Smith hopped the fence, kicked Charles Inderbitzen in the gut, punched him in the back of the head, kicked him two more times in the stomach, and then punched him about 5 or 10 more times until Inderbitzen was beaten unconscious. I guess he’s lucky they didn’t taser him to death instead.

• Oops. Our bad. Deputy Matthew Paul. Seattle, Washington. Christopher Harris was trying to get away from a group of King’s County police (or rather, a gang of beefy, heavily armed strangers, dressed all in black, who didn’t bother to identify themselves before they started hollering and chasing after him late at night). Turns out he didn’t actually do anything wrong (they were chasing him because a witness fingered him as having been involved in a bar fight; the witness was wrong). But rather than risking the possibility that someone possibly might get away from the cops (even when he had no way of knowing they were cops, who had every right to leave the scene, who posed no physical threat to anybody, and who, at the very worst, was suspected of some minor-league drunken fighting), Deputy Matthew Paul, who outweighed his victim by about 100 pounds, decided to put an end to things by waiting until Christopher Harris slowed down to a walk, and then body-tackling him so hard that he knocked him eight feet into a wall, slamming Harris’s head into the concrete so hard it put him into a coma. The story’s in the news because Deputy Matthew Paul’s coworkers in the King County government’s prosecutor’s office have announced that, as far as they’re concerned, Deputy Matthew Paul did not violate Christopher Harris’s rights and the only personal consequence that Deputy Matthew Paul will face, for putting his falsely accused, completely unarmed and physically harmless victim on life-support, is having been given a paid vacation from his job for a while during the investigation. According to the county government, It’s a tragic incident. Well, oops. I guess he’s lucky they didn’t just shoot him in the back instead.

• Non-Lethal Force (Cont’d.) Unnamed officer, Officer Debra Lynn Indovina-Akerly and Officer Charles Watson. Swissvale, Pennsylvania. Last summer, a 37 year old unarmed black man named Andre DeMon Thomas was extrajudicially electrocuted by a gang of three Swissvale cops, who tortured him with three 50,000-volt electric shocks, handcuffed him, and, after he was handcuffed, kicked him, punched him, and crushed him until he vomited, passed out, and died. They were electrocuting him, incidentally, For His Own Good, after he begged neighbors to call the cops to help him out. He was unarmed; he wasn’t acting aggressively; none of the neighbors felt threatened by him; he was never at any point charged with any crime at all by anyone; he seemed disoriented and terrified, and he wanted the cops there to keep him safe. But in cop-think, being terrified and disoriented means acting erratic, and acting erratic in the judgment of a cop, even if you pose no threat to anyone and even if you have not been so much as accused of committing a crime and even if you are yourself seeking help, is reason enough for you to get Served and Protected good and hard until you are physically subdued. Or dead, whichever comes first. And yet again, it became necessary to kill Dre Thomas in order to save him. The case is in the news again because the family has filed a lawsuit and the coroner’s autopsy report, which revealed deep and widespread bruising all over Thomas’s body, contradicts the Medical Examiner’s initial report absolving the cops and claiming that Thomas died from a mythical made-up condition called agitated delirium.

• Gang cops (Cont’d.). Gang Strike Force, Minneapolis and St. Paul, Minnesota. Seven victims of racist shakedowns by a multi-agency paramilitary Gang Strike Force in the Twin Cities have filed suit against the members of the Strike Force, the city governments that put it together, and the boss cops who commanded it. The Strike Force was permanently shut down earlier this month after repeated complaints about the cops on it making improper seizures, which is to say armed robberies under color of law, of money and property from innocent people with no connection to gang activity, but who happened to be immigrants (hence easy targets). If only we had some warning, had some way of knowing, that an elite gang police unit with an unlimited mandate, overwhelming force, and extremely broad legal powers to roust people and take their property with minimal legal accountability, might end up just acting like the baddest gangsters on the block. But who could possibly have foreseen that? It’s not like anything like this has ever happened before.

• Detective Keith Alfaro. San Antonio, Texas. A couple years ago Detective Keith Alfaro of the San Antonio police department got himself involved in what the media at the time dignified as a poolside scuffle with a teenager. By which they meant that he punched an 18 year old girl in the face, then, after he knocked her down, got on top of her, put her in a chokehold, and, according to an unrelated witness, pummeled her black and blue while she was on the ground. After Alfaro ran away from the Sheriff’s Deputies who responded to a call, Vaughn had to be taken to the hospital; she still couldn’t open her jaw for weeks after the attack. The reason he did this was that she told him to put out a cigar he was smoking; the community pool had a no-smoking rule. Tamara Vaughn claims she asked him politely; Alfaro claims she copped an attitude, got up in his face, dared to say some vulgar words in his hearing, and tried to swipe the cigar out of his mouth. Apparently, even if we grant his story to be true, Detective Keith Alfaro believes that that’s good enough reason for a grown-ass man to throw the first punch, then beat the living hell out of an 18 year old girl while she’s lying on the ground, and that doing so was totally defensive … It was her own actions that forced me to take those measures. Perhaps that’s also what forced him to answer her request that he not smoke a cigar at a non-smoking pool by telling her to take that East Side attitude back over there; maybe that’s also what forced him to call her a nigger and a half-breed while he was beating the hell out of her, or to tell Vaughn, who is a lesbian, that You wanna look like a man, I’m gonna treat you like a man.. Detective Keith Alfaro testified that his problem was not with her race but with her attitude (you know, the East Side kind), and that She though she was talking to a child, … She thought she was talking to someone she could bully — not an adult family man. Apparently Detective Keith Alfaro believes that an adult family man deals with tense social situations by punching 18 year old girls in the face and dislocating their jaws. In any case, this adult family man bragged in an online profile for an Ultimate Fighting website about his countless street KO’s.

  The story is in the news again because Keith Alfaro finally ended up going to trial this year on a misdemeanor assault rap, along with some resisting and evading arrest for having run away from the Bexar County Sheriff’s deputies. And just today, after the judge refused to allow Bexar County prosecutors to tell the jury about the online bragging about street fights, or about the numerous existing complaints against Alfaro in his internal affairs file (complaints which, of course, never endangered his position with the San Antonio Police Department, until he got into a fight on another police agency’s turf), the jury voted to acquit Alfaro on the assault beef. They convicted him on the misdemeanor evading and resisting arrest charges, because apparently busting up an 18 year old girl’s jaw is OK, but they’ll be damned if they’ll let anyone get away from the po-po.

• Rapists on patrol. Officer Feliciano Sanchez, Los Angeles, California. (Possible trigger warning.)

  Officer Feliciano Sanchez, formerly hired muscle for Los Angeles County’s Bell Police Department, recently plead guilty to using his police powers to abduct a woman he had detained on a traffic stop, drive her to an isolated location, and then flashed his gun and coerced sex from her before he would let her free. Bell Police Department Captain Anthony Miranda says he is shocked to hear that a male cop might use his government-granted legal powers and his arsenal of deadly weapons to intimidate and violently coerce sex from women who come under his power. He says that he’s in disbelief because he’s never heard of such a thing before. Well, I’m not. I have.

• 18 shots for running a stop-sign. Officer James Arnold. Fort Wayne, Indiana. The city government in Fort Wayne, Indiana just spent $335,000 of other people’s money in order to cover Office James Arnold’s ass after he shot an unarmed immigrant named José Baudilio Lemus-Rodriguez 18 times, after Lemus-Rodriguez refused to pull over for a routine traffic stop for running a stop sign.

  Fort Wayne Police Officer James Arnold, by the way, was just four months on the force when he lit up Lemus-Rodriguez’s car; before that, he had years of combat experience as a United States government Marine fighting for the U.S. government’s occupation and counter-insurgency operations in both Iraq and Afghanistan.

  Allen County Prosecutor Karen Richards refused to file any criminal charges; the city hired on a PR flack to declare Arnold’s actions objectively reasonable. The city’s main concern in settling the family’s lawsuit, besides using taxpayer money to cover Officer James Arnold from any personal legal liability for his lethal actions, is apparently as a bribe to ensure that the objective video record of the objectively reasonable shooting remains permanently concealed from the public.

Liar is a new young adult book by Justine Larbalestier that tells the story of a young compulsive liar, described in the book as a black woman with short, nappy hair. But you wouldn't know that from the U.S. cover.


Clearly, the cover depicts a pretty white girl with long silky hair. But Larbalestier is known for never having white protagonists in her books. As the author herself explains, authors of books often get little to no say on their book covers:

The US Liar cover went through many different versions. An early one, which I loved, had the word Liar written in human hair. Sales & Marketing did not think it would sell. Bloomsbury has had a lot of success with photos of girls on their covers and that's what they wanted. Although not all of the early girl face covers were white, none showed girls who looked remotely like Micah.

I strongly objected to all of them. I lost.

This is why those who were upset over the cover of Full Frontal Feminism by Jessica Valenti, which depicts a white, naked, flat-stomached woman, were wrong to attack Valenti herself.

Why did publishing companies of both Larbalestier and Valenti's books choose the covers that they did? Simple. Because they sell. White women sell. Naked women sell. Pretty girls on covers sell.

Upsetting, to say the least. Unfortunately, such habits are not subject to change until we can change what society views as "beautiful." The most direct thing to do is contact Justine's publisher and Jessica's publisher and state your disapproval for their cover choices. But ultimately, what creates the most change is celebrating all different types of beauty. Women are beautiful, whether they are black or white, or with short natural hair or long silky hair. Hopefully one day the rest of society will realize that.

(Thanks to Tiffany for the story tip)

So, if you haven’t heard, Obama’s drinking Bud Light at tonight’s “Beer Summit,” which brings together Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Cambridge Sergeant James Crowley in an attempt to seize a “teachable moment” on race relations. Unfortunately, if this moment is teaching us anything about race in America, it’s that we don’t know how to talk [...]

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