LA

Speaking of race in America, one of the most amazing and heartbreaking things I've seen recently is Jill Leovy's Homicide Report over at the LA Times. Essentially, Jill has taken it upon herself to blog every homicide in the city each day. Often details are slim when only police reports are present, but often she conducts interviews and tells stories that are incredible testaments to the violence and destitution that oppresses the lives of so many people of color in America today. Today's post is a pretty shocking example of what it means to to say that the problems of racism and poverty are ignored in this country. The truth is, we could fix all of this if we cared. It's often said that the first step is admitting you have a problem. In this case, they first step is admitting that we're at fault.

It's Institutional

I want to take a moment to expand on my post from yesterday. What I mean when I say the race issue is going to be interesting to dig up is this:

I'm a firm believer in the old adage that the biggest race problem in the United States today is the fact that white people don't believe there's a race problem in the United States today. The logic that leads to this conclusion is that today racism is not so much overt discrimination (although that still definitely happens) but institutional discrimination, whereby deeply ingrained systems and institutions behave to reproduce class and cultural stratification based on ethnicity. Thereby, it's not that folks are starting their day to say "I'm going to be a big racist and discriminate," it's more that not enough people are waking up and saying "I'm going to tear down the structures of institutionalized discrimination." Complacency caused by the idea that "we solved racism with civil rights in the 60's" is a great way to end up in this situation.

Yesterday, I read an article in the business section of CNN by a woman who was arguing against legislation to encourage employers to narrow the income gap between men and women. You can read the article if you like, but here's a synopsis: women these days aren't overtly discriminated against, but instead make less because they choose to major in English and take career breaks to have kids.

Now, this is a fine logical argument, except for the fact that it completely ignores the concept of institutional discrimination. The very idea that we would arrange society to reward less people who major in English and choose to spend time with their kids, which are two traits found disproportionately among women (her assumption, not mine) is in and of itself INSTITUTIONAL DISCRIMINATION. Just the same way that mortgage brokers lend at worse rates to people looking to buy a house in neighborhoods with higher crime rates, that just happen to be black community centers (for example) is also discriminator to black folks.

My point of all this is that upon reading that article yesterday, it struck me that we haven't just forgotten about race as a real issue in this country, we've forgotten about a whole concept of methods of discrimination. Or maybe we never learned.

It it just me...

...Or did they flatten the midtones on this picture (from cnn.com) to make Clinton and Obama have more similar skin tones than in reality? Note how Clinton looks distinctly grey, which is contrary to the super warm tone look networks usually go with for folks with light skin. Gah, I'm already looking forward to this race...

In all seriousness, though, I think the most interesting thing that's going to happen is that we might actually have a conversation about race in America for the first time since, well, the Johnson administration. That's probably a good thing, though I'm a little scared to see what's going to come out of it...

Ridiculous HDR

One of my favorite flickr contacts, tendril , has been doing some ridiculous HDR stuff lately. For those of you outside the know, high dynamic range (HDR) photography is essentially combining multiple exposures to extend the dynamic range of digital camera sensors. Thus, by over and under exposing a shot, you can combine them to get well exposed areas from both the light and dark regions of a scene. The problem is, it's easy to make this look really bad, and flickr is littered with bad attempts. tendril, on the other hand, makes it look like magic. Anyway, check this shot and his other's out, he's rad.

Link to his HDR tagged shots: |<->-<->-<->-<->-<->-<->|

Not the way you planned...

Here's a good one from the White House Press Briefing today:

"MR. SNOW: I'm sorry, but the President is not the kind of guy who says, tell me what I want to hear. As a matter of fact, you sit in a meeting and you try to do that, you're not going to get very far. What the President wants and demands of his people is -- are their best opinions and their best advice, and that's the way it operates. So --

Q He got a lot of lousy advice, didn't he?

MR. SNOW: Well, he got some advice that -- you know, it's interesting, Bill, you can say about any war that Commanders-in-Chief got lousy advice, because wars never work out quite the way you planned."

Yeah, four years later and no end in sight isn't really what you planned, was it? Oh well, I guess that's just the way it goes!

Welcome back, Tony.

Oh Jeez...

Here's a quote from the reddit comments that really cuts:

"I think you lost your right to "benefit of the doubt" when Bush got re-elected - it was a tacit democratic approval of his actions by (supposedly) the majority of the country.

I think your next president will have to do a lot more than "just change direction" to get people back on-side. One of the worst things about Bush's tenure has been not just his actions, but the fact that from outside the USA a sizeable portion of your population has been right alongside him, cheering him on and constructing apologist excuses for his excesses.

The take-home lesson hasn't been "Bush was an evil man" - it's been "Americans can and will elect brainless vicious egomaniacs, and then often side with them for no better reason than a false understanding of patriotism and a herd mentality".

FWIW I know plenty of very cool Americans, and I'm well aware that there was a determined (but ultimately pretty ineffectual) resistance to many of his policies.

That's a very nuanced position though, and in the cartoon-vision most people think in it just looks like the majority of you were either right alongside him, encouraging and egging him on as he invaded other countries, abducted innocent civilians and tortured people simply because he could... or you were too fat, lazy and apathetic to do anything other than whinge about it on web comments pages.

As I said, I disagree with this unfair perception, but it is the perception you've created for yourselves that you now have to disprove."

Here's a good interchange at today's WHPB (White H...

Here's a good interchange at today's WHPB (White House Press Briefing, natch):

"Q: Does the President risk using the troops when this morning he talked about if this does not go the way he wants, those troops and their families may have to wait longer for them to come home?

MS. PERINO: The President takes great pains not to politicize the troops. But what he was repeating was what the military -- Department of Defense has told him they are going to have to do, since they don't have this money."

Um, ok.