This is the global Feminist Blogs aggregator. It collects articles from many smaller community
hubs within the Feminist Blogs network. For stories from particular places, groups,
or other communities within our movement, check out some of these sites.
I have a dream that one day, a racistex-Morning Zoo bobblehead will hold a rally on the mall in Washington, on the very anniversary of Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream” speech.
I have a dream that the racist bobblehead will claim he is the true heir of Martin Luther King. And that his wingnut fans are the true heirs of the Civil Rights Movement.
I have a dream that the bobblehead will call his rally “Restoring Honor.”
I have a dream that the ghost of George Orwell will rise from its grave, and spin like a top across the Atlantic and land on the mall in Washington D.C. And the spinning-top ghost will smite the damn bobblehead, and he will fall, and his wingnut fans will raise a groan!
4. “Tea Partiers Aren’t The Bigoted White Guys You Fear” claims the New York Press. It’s an interesting piece by Spencer Wilking, who apparently spent some time with the Tea Party in New York. It turns out that the Tea Partiers aren’t just deluded Fox-News-brainwashed white males; they’re also deluded Fox-News-brainwashed women, black men, immigrants—everybody! Actually this doesn’t surprise me at all. It’s clear that there is a lot of racism in the Tea Party, but that’s just because there is a lot of racism in rightwing propaganda. Fundamentally, the Tea Party is a creation of the rightwing noise machine: talk radio, Fox News, the whole Rush Limbaugh-Glenn Beck axis of evil. I don’t mean that the Tea Party doesn’t really exist; I mean that Tea Partiers are Tea Partiers because they’ve been listening to this wingnut garbage for years and they think it’s true. They think Democrats are socialists, that Obama is a communist, that we must cut taxes on the rich, and so forth. The Tea Party is what you get when you have an unbridled giant propaganda machine running 24/7 for 30 years.
I clicked over to the ScienceBlogs link to the story, since I thought a scientist might have some interesting points to offer. Alas, the “scientist” turned out to be Jason Goldman, whose post is noteworthy for its repeated references to the zedonk as male. Even as he’s quoting news stories that clearly refer to the animal as female (emphasis added):
I’m not going to create a new category for this creature, because I never expect to blog about these critters again. At least it’s clear that he’s a mammal.
A zedonk, an unusual cross between a donkey and a zebra, is attracting attention at Chestatee Wildlife Preserve in north Georgia after being born there about a week ago.
The animal, which has a zebra father and a donkey mother, has black stripes prominently displayed on her legs and face.
C.W. Wathen, the Dahlonega preserve’s founder and general manager, says the foal has a zebra’s instincts. Wathen says she sits up instead of lying on her side, as if she’s staying alert for predators…
…Donkeys and zebras don’t usually mate, but zedonks turn up occasionally. In 2005, a zebra gave birth to a zedonk in Barbados, according to the news website Science Daily. And in the 1970s, three zedonks were born at a European zoo to a donkey mother, according to the website of Britain’s Colchester Zoo. (via boston.com)
According to Alexis Madrigal of The Atlantic:
Now, the zedonk can finally take its place in the menagerie of weird hybrid animals like ligers, wholphins, and camas (camel-llama mixes), all testaments to the power of “love” to transcend all obstacles, even speciation.
I just wonder what they’re gonna name the little guy.
Actually, they named her Pippi Longstocking. Seeing as she’s a girl and all.
So I’m reading this thing, wondering about this clown who is so saturated in the maleness-as-norm viewpoint that four feminine pronouns fail to impinge on his consciousness, and I thinks to myself, “Hang on! Could this possibly be the same guy who did that dude-centric Porn Is Good post Twisty wrote about?”
And whaddya know: same guy.
What’s hilarious is that Goldman describes himself as a “graduate student in Developmental Psychology at the University of Southern California,” with an interest in “the way that the environment interacts with biology in producing innate or skilled behavior, and the evolution of the mind.”
First of all, I should start by saying that I’m very tired. I was up all night trying to find a good solution to stationery needs for the Secret Feminist Cabal (which, while terribly powerful and awe-inspiring, can’t afford to pay much). But my mood is good! Cheerful, even. Or maybe just punchy.
Let’s NOT have a conversation about race. The calls for Obama to now make the Shirley Sherrod debacle a teachable moment fills me with panic that the president will retreat to the Oval Office and craft a soaring piece of oratory, instead of getting on with the humdrum business of firing the stumbling, bumbling members of his own team who, as the saying goes, can’t find their ass with either hand.
Good idea, sez me—but is that really the way they say it over there? “Can’t find their ass with either hand?”
The American expression (or at least the version I grew up with) is “can’t find their ass with both hands tied behind their back.” Which, as I’m sure you’ll agree, is vastly superior.
Dude is not exactly my favorite person, but he’s done a Good Thing. And now I don’t have to do it, which makes me happy because I’m in a bad mood anyway.
Here’s the deal: one of the things that’s been annoying the living fuck out of me about the Sherrod business is the wingnut claim that the NAACP people in the video laugh and cheer at racial discriminination. No, they don’t. It’s a weird upside-down kind of world where you can watch a video in which people clearly do not laugh and cheer, and still come away saying ooh look, they laughed and cheered! What the fuck?
So Lord Saletan has done exactly what I was getting ready to do, which is parse the goddamn video (since apparently people can’t be relied on to simply watch the thing; no, we have to provide a blow-by-blow narrative of the action):
Breitbart’s followers have parroted this indictment in messages to numerous media outlets, including National Review and Slate. But is it true? Let’s look at the video. The key section starts around 16 minutes in. I’ll quote the speech and describe the reactions from the audience, to the extent I can discern them. You can check my version by listening to the audio as you follow along. Here’s Sherrod:
When I made that commitment, I was making that commitment to black people, and to black people only. [Pause. Silence.] But, you know, God will show you things, and He’ll put things in your path so that—that you realize that the struggle [Audience: Alright] is really about poor people. [Audience: Alright, alright.]
Racial appeal met with silence; non-racial appeal met with approval. Sherrod’s next words:
You know, the first time I was faced with having to help a white farmer save his farm, he—he took a long time talking, but he was trying to show me he was superior to me. [Audience: Alright. Murmurs.] I know what he was doing. [Audience: Alright.] But he had come to me for help. [Audience: Amen.] What he didn’t know, while he was taking all that time trying to show me he was superior to me, was I was trying to decide just how much help I was going to give him. [Laughter.]
The audience seems sympathetic to Sherrod’s resentment of the farmer’s arrogance, as she perceived it. How should we interpret the laughter? Is it laughter at her power to withhold help from a white man? Or is it laughter at her power to withhold help from a guy with an attitude? The evidence so far suggests the latter: The audience has embraced an appeal for “poor people,” shunned an appeal for “black people only,” and given Sherrod her only Amen when she noted that despite the farmer’s attitude, “he had come to me for help.” But let’s keep listening.
I was struggling with the fact that so many black people have lost their farmland, and here I was faced with having to help a white person save their land. [Audience: Mm-hm.] So, I didn’t give him the full force of what I could do. [Sherrod smiles and pauses. There's a single staccato noise somewhere in the room. No words, no laughter.] I did enough so that when he—I assumed the Department of Agriculture had sent him to me, either that or the Georgia Department of Agriculture. And he needed to go back and report that I did try to help him. [Pause. Silence.]
This time, Sherrod has mentioned only the farmer’s race, not his attitude. She delivers the crucial line—”So, I didn’t give him the full force of what I could do”—with a smile and a wry tone that invites any racist to laugh or blurt out approval. But she gets nothing. I had to listen to this clip more than a dozen times before I realized that the “applause” Breitbart describes could only be the staccato noise. To interpret this as applause, you would have to believe that a single person, representing an otherwise silent audience, suddenly decided to change the congregation’s language of affirmation from call-and-response to clapping—and just as suddenly, after a single stroke, decided to stop.
As Sherrod renounces her old attitude, the audience comes alive:
Well, working with him made me see [Audience: Mm-hm] that it’s really about those who have versus those who don’t [Audience: That's right, that's right], you know. And they could be black, and they could be white; they could be Hispanic. And it made me realize then that I needed to work to help poor people—those who don’t have access [Audience: Mm-hm] the way others have [Audience: Mm-hm].
So, let’s review the Breitbart gang’s allegations:
When … she expresses a discriminatory attitude towards white people, the audience responds with applause.False. The NAACP … is cheering on a person describing a white person as the other. False. The NAACP audience seemed to have approved of her actions when she talked about not helping the white farmer.False. They weren’t cheering redemption; they were cheering discrimination.False. As Ms. Sherrod recounted the first part of her parable, how she declined to do everything she could for the farmer because of his race, the audience responded in approval.False.
First Breitbart and his acolytes falsely accused Sherrod of discriminating against whites as a federal employee, despite having no evidence for this charge in the original video excerpt. Strike one.
Then they misrepresented Sherrod’s story as an embrace of racism, when in fact she was repudiating racism. They later pleaded ignorance of this fact because they didn’t have the full video. Strike two.
Now, with the full video in hand and posted on their Web site, they’re lying about the reaction of the NAACP audience.
I’ll add one other thing, which I daresay is outside Lord Saletan’s experience. The part where the NAACP audience laughs? What they’re laughing at is the kind of anecdote all black people and all feminists know very well: the sexist/racist white guy who needs your help but can’t resist trying to show how much better he is than you. I personally think the NAACP audience is laughing in recognition of the situation and Sherrod’s very human response (”how much do I want to help this schmuck?”).
Not that I suppose any of this really matters. Andrew Breitbart is a white supremacist hoaxer, and he’s going to keep right on with his lying bullshit.
*************
Update: You know what else Andrew Breitbart is? Not anonymous. Yeah. He’s totally, completely, not anonymous. Everybody knows his name. His whole media empire is named after himself. So why in the fuck did CNN use the Sherrod hoax as an excuse to complain about “anonymous bloggers” who do terrible things like this?
The most obvious aspect of the Shirley Sherrod affair is its shabbiness. How many minutes do you spare before deciding to destroy someone’s life? It would be nice if the answer to that question were a number greater than two. In March, Sherrod, the director of rural development for the Department of Agriculture in Georgia, gave a speech at a local N.A.A.C.P. Dinner. It was about forty-three minutes long. A few days ago, Andrew Breitbart posted and publicized a clip from the speech. (Who is Andrew Breitbart? See Rebecca Mead’s New Yorker Profile for more on that.) The clip was two minutes—long enough for N.A.A.C.P. officials to condemn her, and for frightened Department of Agriculture officials to call Sherrod on her cell phone and demand that she resign. She says that the final call came when she was driving, and that she was told to pull over and end her career before she even got where she was going.
It’s the pull-over-and-resign-now incident that really gets me. If you’ve ever been wrongfully accused of something, you know that what’s worse than the initial accusation is when people who ought to know better—or who should at least be willing to give you the benefit of the doubt—believe it.
As for the false accusations against Sherrod and the breathtaking dishonesty of Andrew Breitbart, Davidson’s summary is elegant:
It’s not just a matter of quotes being taken out of context (although there is that). The two-minute clip Breitbart ran is introduced with this text: “Ms Sherrod admits that in her federally appointed position, overseeing a billion dollars… She discriminates against people due to their race.” And here’s Breitbart’s description of the action:
This federally appointed executive bureaucrat lays out in stark detail, that her federal duties are managed through the prism of race and class distinctions.
No, she doesn’t. She tells the story of how, twenty-three years ago, she initially assumed that a white farmer, with the law on his side, unlike a black farmer, didn’t need much help beyond being put in the hands of a white lawyer; when she realized that he did, she sprang into action, and saved his farm. She says that God put the farmer in her path to show her what her full mission was: helping poor rural people of all races. (This was during the farm-foreclosure crisis of the eighties.) She was not an “executive bureaucrat” then, and the whole thing had nothing to do with “federal duties” or “a billion dollars.” And anyone who saw even a couple of minutes more of the video would know it. Surely, whoever put the clip together did.
Breitbart, of course, is a toad; whether he’s a mentally deranged toad, as Andrew Sullivan suggests, is unclear (though I daresay Sully would know about that sort of thing).
Now, one obvious fact to emerge from this is that the conservative blogosphere, and its allies in the media, are not especially careful about who they hurt in pursuit of a political scalp that will hurt the Obama administration. But that’s so obvious as to be barely worth noting. No one will be especially surprised to learn that Bill O’Reilly issued a swift call for Sherrod’s resignation, or that Breitbart’s most salient comment after the full facts emerged was that he “could care less about Shirley Sherrod.” Indeed, as this Washington Post story makes clear, Fox News was far from the biggest villain of the piece.
What’s much more striking and worrying is the way the Democratic administration and its allies acted. Sherrod was called three times in the same day by Agriculture Department officials urging her to resign; she was told that she had to quit immediately because the row was “going to be on Glenn Beck tonight”. Nor did the NAACP try to contact Sherrod before issuing a ruthless condemnation designed to put as much distance between the organisation and the story as possible. The reason for all this, of course, is that establishment liberals in America are utterly terrified of the brutality of the right-wing media, and will do whatever necessary to cut off those attacks before they happen – including throwing one of their own under the bus.
What a distressing lesson in the realities of public discourse in America. There’s been plenty of evidence before that the Obama administration is ruthless to the point of being callous when stories of this sort arise, that they’re petrified at the slightest whiff of a story about black-on-white racism, but this is just a different league of awful. I have never liked the president less.
Sorry. Last week my email connection kept getting hosed, so everything got backed up. On top of the stuff that was already backed up because I’m so goddamn busy.
It’s the Fourth of July weekend, and those of you in climes where it isn’t 470 degrees outside may be planning to attend a parade. (Those of you where it is 470 degrees and you’re still planning to attend a parade — god help you. Really.) At any rate, while you’re at the parade, take stock of the balloons. Who are the characters? How many of them are female? Any?
Parades are one of those things that, like currency and stamps and statues, we don’t really think about. We’re awash in male imagery and role models, but we’re so used to it we don’t notice. Fish can’t taste the water, and all that. That’s why EVE is tackling this stuff: to change the silent messages our kids absorb.
But back to balloons. EVE is kicking off a new project to introduce a line of parade balloons featuring “great American women,” with Amelia Earhart as the first entry. From the blog post:
The Amelia Earhart balloon is going to be the first in a series of parade balloons featuring American heroines, which we’re developing with StarBound Entertainment, one of the top balloon suppliers for parades all over the country. Here at EVE we’ve talked about the way character balloons are overwhelmingly male; the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, for example, has only had 10 female balloons in its entire 85-year history. Our “great American women” series will bring heroines to parades all over the country. Can you imagine how cool that will be for families and kids? Can you imagine how inspired little girls will be?
“Mom, who’s that?”
“Amelia Earhart! She was the first woman to fly across the Atlantic! She was the first person ever to fly solo over the Pacific!”
We need to raise the money to finance the balloon, so we’re asking people to chip in $99 — that’s in honor of Amelia Earhart’s Ninety-Nines, the organization she founded in 1929 for women pilots. Our goal is to raise $9,801 (that’s 99 people x $99 each). Donors will be inducted into EVE’s 99 Club and have their names listed on the Wall of Fame (unless they want to be Howard Hughes or something, in which case we promise not to tell).
EVE has a little fundraising widget you can put in your sidebar, which I’ve already done. Now let’s spread the word!
