Michael Moore Clowning

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LfFfUxBDMDY&playnext_from=PL&feature=PlayList&p=052B3A0EA350BFA3&playnext=1&index=28

Someone sent me this video recently and i thought it was pretty amusing.

On a more... intellectual... level I thougt we could discuss the purpose of the vidoe. A lot of people in class seem to be searching for a sort of solution or a way to address this problems that occur. Here Michael Moore does some interesting things to shed light on the issue. So... here are some questions i was thinking about after i watched and i thought others might have an opinion.
Is Michael Moore's approach to this blatent racism at all effective?
At the end of the day does it mean anything to police, black people, Americans..?
It what ways does he, if he does, give up any priviledge that he has as a white man?

The Skit that Made Chappelle Quit

Chappelle's Show

Pixie Stereotypes - In-Flight Meal

Charlie Murphy Videos
Buy Chappelle's Show DVDs

Black Comedy
True Hollywood Story

Pertinent to the discussion.

1 more that I couldn't resist.

Chappelle's Show

Ying Yang Twins on MTV Cribs

Charlie Murphy Videos
Buy Chappelle's Show DVDs

Black Comedy
True Hollywood Story

The Sketch That Made Chappelle Say 'Enough'

News Type: Event — Fri Jul 14, 2006 1:28 PM EDT
entertainment, tv, humor, racism, black, white, comedy-central, hispanic, asian, dave-chappelle, race-relations, chappelles-show

By: Corey Spring

Dave fights the 'black pixie' that encourages him to feed into stereotypes.

Chappelle as the singing, dancing black pixie in black face with a cane and vaudville suit.

Chappelle in white face as the white pixie.

In May 2005, Time Magazine was the first to report that Dave Chappelle left his show in part due to one controversial sketch. In July 2006, friend and co-writer Neal Brennan also told Maxim magazine that Chappelle walked out after a crew member laughed condescendingly at this sketch. The sketch that made Chappelle say 'enough' will be aired Sunday night on the premiere of the second episode of Chappelle's Show: The Lost Episodes... but you can see it right now for what it is.

This video joins the sketch shortly after it has started (the end of this video has the beginning). Dave has just been asked by a stewardess on a flight if he would like to have the chicken or fish for dinner. Suddenly the 'black pixie' appears in front of Dave, tempting and chiding him to play into the stereotype of ordering the fried chicken. The pixie is a singing, dancing Chappelle painted in black face and wearing a vaudeville-esque suit.

The black pixie again shows up alongside the Ying yang Twins on MTV Cribs, saying "I never thought I'd say this, but even I'm embarrassed."

The show continues with a cocaine snorting 'Hispanic pixie' that tempts a Hispanic guy into buying leopard skin seat covers for his car, an 'Asian pixie' that plays on a man's inability to pronounce the name Lala, and a 'white pixie' that advises his counterpart on how to talk to his black friends.

The Time magazine article sheds light on Chappelle's own thoughts on the matter:

The third season hit a big speed bump in November 2004. He was taping a sketch about magic pixies that embody stereotypes about the races. The black pixie--played by Chappelle--wears blackface and tries to convince blacks to act in stereotypical ways. Chappelle thought the sketch was funny, the kind of thing his friends would laugh at. But at the taping, one spectator, a white man, laughed particularly loud and long. His laughter struck Chappelle as wrong, and he wondered if the new season of his show had gone from sending up stereotypes to merely reinforcing them. "When he laughed, it made me uncomfortable," says Chappelle. "As a matter of fact, that was the last thing I shot before I told myself I gotta take f_____— time out after this. Because my head almost exploded."

After a commercial break, the interim hosts of Chappelle's Show explain Dave's thoughts on the sketch, and as a result, their reluctance to air it, so they ask the audience for their thoughts. Responses were both positive and negative, with one young woman saying she felt the sketch was derogatory and played off the bad stereotypes of blacks and Hispanics, but played on the 'good' stereotypes of white people. More responses continue here.

So now, I pose the question to you, when are jokes like this acceptable and when are they not? When the person making them is the same race as the butt of the joke... when it's thought provoking and makes people talk? Or are some things just always unacceptable because of those that take it to heart?

Talk About Race? Relax, It's O.K.

For my post I read an article in The New York Times called “Talk About Race? Relax, It’s O.K.” This article was about how the election of Barak Obama has made it easier for people to bring up in conversation the idea of race. Also the article questioned whether it was naïve to think that “we can get beyond our racial divisions in a single election cycle, or with a single candidacy.” Mr. Rice, the executive director of the Association of Public-Safety Communications Officials, didn’t believe we could and that race is something in American history and life “that we’ve never really worked through.”
Barak Obama alone probably will not drastically change the perception and commonality of race; however, I do believe that what America does need to be exposed to more counter-stereotypical African Americans. I am so sick of turning on the television and seeing all these cartoons and reality shows exploiting racial stereotypes for human… and the saddest part is that people laugh at it. What makes Obama an extra-special counter-stereotypical African American is that he is President of the United States and perceived as a celebrity and star within the media. Can sheer the star-power of Obama do anything to improve race relations or even transcend race?
If anything Obama has given America an outlet to start to feel comfortable starting a dialogue revolving around race. Because of Obama’s perception as a star and how he is portrayed in the media, his role in American culture has already accomplished one great thing: Before Obama there was always this thing—“he’s a black president,” but now there is also, “he’s a president who happens to be black.”
The role of media and pop culture in America has the power to choose how to portray different people and situations. Television can manipulate the way Americans view things. The power of perception can be a powerful tool, and in the case of Barak Obama and starting conversation about race, the media has played a positive role. Getting beyond racial differences may not be possible through the single candidate alone, but with media and pop culture behind him, it just may be possible…

Official week 10

I did a little research, and from what I can tell Dave Chappelle did not quit just because he was tired of ignorant white audiences. A large part of his decision to leave was anger towards the network, and lack of control over his show. That’s good, because I really was disappointed to think that he would stop producing his quality social commentary because some of the audience doesn’t get it. We can’t just halt everything that can be misinterpreted in a derogatory way...because anything can be interpreted in a derogatory way. So what is the solution for situations like this?

Speaking of standup...in an earlier post people discussed the replication of racism through racist jokes. What is the harm of these jokes? are they always harmful because they reinforce stereotypes? Or do intent and context matter? How do stand up comedians fit into this? It seems like they can say whatever they want because they make fun of everyone. When does race matter here? How is this different from daily conversation among us little people?

And 2 of my cents on Monday’s class: American pop culture today is a culture of excess. Whites and blacks alike are showing their asses (literally and figuratively) throughout popular media. I think the best way to combat this is not through restrictions or moral preaching, but through making choices as individual consumers. Networks, publishers, etc., will do whatever makes money; and when Howard Stern and Flava Flav stop making money they will get cancelled. The second prong to the solution is creating alternative representations. I also think its necessary to look at the media culture as a whole, not just racially, in order to understand and fix its problems. Thoughts? 

Cornell University Report on Inter-Racial Marriage--About 3%

Here you go. As I noted in class the overall rate is up, but inter-racial marriages are less than 3 percent of total marriages. Thus, folks may date and have relationships across the color line, but these relationships are not translating into marriages.

This is a link to an interesting piece on Asian-White inter-racial dating and marriage from the San Francisco Gate.

@@@@

Interracial relationships are on the increase in U.S., but decline with age, Cornell study finds By Susan S. Lang

ITHACA, N.Y. -- Interracial relationships and marriages are becoming more common in the United States, according to a new Cornell University study.

The number of interracial marriages involving whites, blacks and Hispanics each year in the United States has jumped tenfold since the 1960s, but the older individuals are, the less likely they are to partner with someone of a different race, finds the new study.

Pat Cassano, assistant professor of nutritional sciences, and Ron Booker, associate professor of neurobiology and behavior, are an interracial couple who have been together since she was 19 and he was 20 years old, about 31 years ago.

"We think that's because relationships are more likely to be interracial the more recently they were formed, so younger people are more likely to have interracial relationships. This trend reflects the increasing acceptance of interracial relationships in today's society," said Kara Joyner, assistant professor of policy analysis and management at Cornell and co-author of a study on interracial relationships in a recent issue of the American Sociological Review (Vol. 70:4).

Although more young adults are dating and cohabiting with someone of a different race, the study found that interracial relationships are considerably less likely than same-race relationships to lead to marriage, though this trend has weakened in recent years.

To explore the changing patterns of interracial sexual relationships during the transition to adulthood, Joyner and her co-author, Grace Kao, associate professor of sociology at the University of Pennsylvania, analyzed data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health and the National Health and Social Life Survey, some of the first nationally representative surveys to collect information on sexual relationships.

"Studying trends in interracial sexual relationships is important because intimate relationships between different racial groups are viewed as an indicator of the social and geographic distance between racial groups, and a barometer of race relations," said Joyner. Unlike other studies, which typically look at marriage or cohabitation and sometimes at current dating relationships, this study looked at trends in these relationships over a 10-year period.

The researchers found that among 18- to 25-year-olds in 1990 and in 2000, interracial sexual involvement became increasingly common, with the greatest increase seen in cohabitating relationships, followed by dating relationships and then marriages.

Yet, interracial relationships declined with age within these two periods. In 1990, for example, about 14 percent of 18- to 19-year-olds, 12 percent of 20- to 21-year-olds and 7 percent of 34- to 35-year-olds were involved in interracial relationships. Roughly 10 years later, 20 percent of 18- to 19-year-olds and 16 percent of 24- to 25-year-olds were in an interracial relationship. (Information on 34- to 35-year-olds was not available for this period.)

While Hispanic is an ethnic group composed of both racial and ethnic groups, Joyner, like many demographers, uses the categories -- non-Hispanic white, non-Hispanic black (or African-American) and Hispanic (or Latino) -- to measure race.

In Joyner's study, Hispanics had the highest rate of interracial relationships: 45 percent of 18- to 19-year-olds and 33 percent of 24- to 25-year-olds were in interracial relationships in the early 2000s, compared with blacks (20 and 14 percent, respectively) and whites (16 and 12 percent, respectively). While Asians appear to be comparable to Hispanics in terms of rates of interracial involvement, age patterns for Asians were not presented in the study, Joyner said, because there were so few within some of the age groups in the surveys.

"In the analyses we did run, however, it looks like involvement in interracial relationships increases with age for Asians," said Joyner.

"Although interracial relationships were far more common in the early part of this decade than in the mid-1990s -- about five percentage points higher -- they still decline with age," said Joyner, noting that the fact that many young adults' transition to marriage is also a factor in the age decline. The rate of interracial marriage, however, is still relatively uncommon: in 2002, only 2.9 percent of all marriages were interracial, according to the U.S. Bureau of the Census.

In a 2003 study, Joyner had reported that adolescents in interracial romances were significantly less willing to reveal their relationship to family and close friends than those in same-race relationships, suggesting that such relationships still do not receive whole-hearted approval by society.

The study was supported, in part, by grants from McGill University, Cornell, the University of Pennsylvania and the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development.

OFFICAL week 7 (I think)

Read this article: http://www.pittsburghlive.com/x/pittsburghtrib/s_74358.html

I want to focus on Race in sports, while this article only really focus's on the athletes, why is there also such a discrepancy in management as well....Few minority coaches at all levels and even less in upper administration...

I know the article is really just a preview of the author's book but it raises many of the stereotypes that exist in the minds of the average american (meaning average white joe plumber). How do these perceptions come to be and more importantly why have they seem to become more prevalent.

I asked friends of mine what they thought of the argument (they can be considered avg. white joe plumbers) and they unanimously agreed with it and tried to defend the article with comments ranging from: "well thats obvious look at the N.B.A. and N.F.L. today or they gave me interesting anatomical differences between whites blacks and asians that are commonly believed but not necessarily true.....

Our class has forced me to re-examine all my conceptions on race and sports (seeing as its been the near the center of my life for as long as i can remember) and i'd like to hear some other peoples ideas in any or all apects of it....

***OFFICIAL*** A Class Divided

I think that you all should watch the whole thin but I think that the Daring Lesson and Day 2 are the best.   By having one experience that makes you the "other" can that change your mindset for a lifetime? What are the real long term effects of an experiment like this? 

 click on the site... 

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/divided/etc/view.html

Journalist Julie justifies Jewish injustice

I am writing this letter in response to...

http://www.mlive.com/kalamazoo/stories/index.ssf?/base/columns-0/1233984063217000.xml&coll=7

...where a recent political and social injustice representative of racist America was so nicely reduced to trivial child’s play by Julie Mack in her February 7th column, “Protestor protests the protest he caused.” And on a side note, I too would like to demonstrate my equal, perhaps superior, skill at crafting cute political alliterations.



Mack may be a self-proclaimed “free-speech kind of gal,” but she is clearly not an anti-racist kind of gal. She is a white kind of gal – the white kind of gal that is intimidated by her own white shame and white guilt. While this white kind of gal fails to acknowledge the race of the white male WMU DPS officers who physically assaulted me, and the race of the white male WMU students who defaced my property, she most definitely did not fail to mention my Muslim name. And she surely did not fail to mention “black crime” in her February 13th column. She seems to be working under the assumption that my Muslim name, of which I take great pride in, does not evoke a racist response in this political context. She seems to be working under the larger naive assumption that a group of bona fide, white, male, third-tier public university security guards did not internalize the beautiful milk-chocolate color of my skin, did not internalize my prominent and handsome ethnic features, did not internalize my intellectually-reasoned political dissent, did not internalize my Islamic faith, and lastly did not internalize me as just another brown, unshaven, big-nosed, American-hating, anti-Semitic Muslim terrorist.



Whether or not I was “looking to create a fuss” I have absolutely every bit of legitimacy in complaining about “the fuss that ensued.” Does breaking WMU’s “legal” ban on freedom of speech nullify racial victimization by a group of white male authorities? I was a fool to think the First Amendment was my permit to protest. And was the rabble-rousing Rosa Parks justly beaten for sitting at the front of that bus in Montgomery, Alabama? Rosa Parks was not a tired, old, black lady. She was trained by the NAACP to break the law and sit where she sat. She was trained to be arrested. Did that legitimize racist, white, male police brutality? After all, they were simply enforcing the law – making sure that justice was served. The Civil Rights Movement was professionally organized by black intellectuals and provocateurs – not by a group of underclass, jobless, uneducated free slaves. Does that legitimize the lynchings of black men by white America? Does that legitimize the legal rape of black women by white America? When did we forget Dr. King’s revolutionary theory on civil disobedience against unjust law? Probably when we were so preoccupied with painting him as just another hyper-sexual, black misogynist.



In an informal, e-mail interview with Mack prior to the publication of her column, she refers to my tactics as “doomed to failure” and “more intent on scoring points than having a substantial discussion on the merits”. I may have been “scoring points” in the paled opinion of this white kind of gal (and other white kind of guys and gals out there), but for us disruptive, tactless colored folk, scoring points is the daily lived struggle for freedom – freedom from the bondage and enslavement of white kind of guys and gals, like Julie Mack.



As an American-born Pakistani living in America, the mental and physical abuse I experience is justified in the name of patriotism and American nationalism. On the Web at mlive.com, what I assume to be another white kind of gal by the online handle “MarionGrace” responds to my January 17th viewpoint with “pity for Mr. Turk who is a citizen of a country, but who at the same time apparently has no respect or love for it.” Dear MarionGrace: 

save your pity for when another American building is destroyed by the innately hateful, war-mongering, Jew-despising, Quran-indoctrinated, Muhammad-worshiping, taxi-driving, Arabic-speaking Muslim terrorists. And when it happens, DO NOT ask why – that’s your duty as a good, silent (white) AmeriKKKan.

Race and the Human Genome Project

Here is a link to the conference proceedings on race, genetics, and the human genome project.

http://www.nature.com/cgi-taf/dynapage.taf?file=/ng/journal/v36/n11s/index.html

Unofficial- Human Origins and Migration

These two documentaries trace the origins of humanity, human migration, and with Diamond's documentary, the roots of human inequity. Neither is perfect, and I find the "Journey of Man" host especially annoying, but they provide some interesting theories.

I've post the first videos for both and if you're interest you should be able to navigate the entire documentary.


I would highly recommend the book Guns, Germs, and Steel, it does a better job than the movie outlining Diamond's theory and addressing counter-arguments.


Guns, Germs, and Steel
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bgnmT-Y_rGQ




You can use the first video to get up through five. Here is six.






Journey of Man

This host is really frustrating.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OV6A8oGtPc4