- Newspaper Sorry for Suggesting That Undocumented Immigrants Are Going to Destroy White People’s Thanksgiving – Caroline Bankoff (New York/Daily Intelligencer)
- Roaming the Land: The Immigration Crisis and The Walking Dead – Josh Barfield (The Public Sphere)
- Kim Kardashian doesn’t realize she’s the butt of an old racial joke – Blue Telusma (The Griot)
- A Southern Reformation – Andrés Bello (The Economist)
- Casualties of the Cosby Vortex – Will Leitch (BloombergPolitics)
By Caroline Bankoff
November 22, 2014
New York/Daily Intelligencer
It's fitting that President Obama's decision to temporarily protect 5 million undocumented immigrants from deportation came just before Thanksgiving, which, among other things, celebrates the generosity this country's original inhabitants showed to the undocumented immigrants who landed on their shores in 1620. Unfortunately, the connection was lost on Gary Varvel, an Indianapolis Star cartoonist who doesn't seem to like the idea of sharing anything with people who do not look like him.
Varvel's latest cartoon, published on Friday, shows a mopey white dad holding a turkey and telling his scared-looking family, "Thanks to the President's immigration order, we'll be having extra guests this Thanksgiving," in reference to the decidedly darker-skinned people who can be seen climbing through the window.
Roaming the Land: The Immigration Crisis and The Walking Dead
By Josh Barfield
October 2014
The Public Sphere
The immigration crisis at the US-Mexico border is beginning to look like an episode of AMC’s widely popular drama, The Walking Dead (TWD). This year alone has seen a 500% spike in apprehension of families at the border, while it is estimated that over 57,000 unaccompanied children have been detained in fiscal year 2014. If these numbers, along with pieces such as Leni Velasco’s on the Filipino sugarcane crisis and NBC’s on Honduras’ gang-violence, are any indications of these travelers’ reality, which includes a search for place amidst hunger, danger, and dehumanization, this alarming correlation between TWD and the current immigrant exodus into the U.S. is not unwarranted.
In line with the experiences of many immigrants, TWD focuses primarily on its characters’ search for a new home and their fight to survive along the way. Although this zombie-filled show has its fair share of zombie-on-human crime, TWD is rarely about zombies, and is instead often at its best when showing the day-to-day struggle of a traveling group of survivors dealing with hunger and difficult social situations, travelers in search of a place to settle down after losing everything. At its roots, the show is a tale of desperate homelessness in a land where finding sanctuary is the hope, and the greatest impossibility.
Kim Kardashian Doesn’t Realize She’s The Butt of an Old Racial Joke
By Blue Telusma
November 12, 2014
The Griot
While everyone else was arguing over Kim’s K’s right to show her butt, my focus was on something else entirely. When I looked at the spread all I saw was a not so subtle reincarnation of Saartjie Baartman – imagery that is steeped in centuries of racism, oppression and misogyny.
Saartjie was a woman whose large buttocks brought her questionable fame and caused her to spend much of her life being poked and prodded as a sexual object in a freak show.
This idea that “black equals erotic” is fetishism in its purest form; it mocks “otherness” while pretending to celebrate it and defines human beings by their genitals instead of seeing them as whole people.
By Andrés Bello
November 15, 2014
The Economist
Latin America is undergoing significant religious change. Since around 1970 the world’s most Roman Catholic continent has become steadily less so. This trend, much remarked, shows no sign of slowing down, according to an exhaustive new study by the Pew Research Centre, a self-described “fact tank” based in Washington.* This found that only 69% of adult Latin Americans are now Catholics, down from 92% in 1970. Protestants now account for 19%, up from 4%.
Two things distinguish Latin American Protestantism. First, it is mainly a result of conversion (see chart). Second, two-thirds of Latin American Protestants define themselves as Pentecostal. Much more often than Catholics, they report having direct experience of the Holy Spirit, such as through exorcism or speaking in tongues. Indeed, the words “evangelical” and “Protestant” are used interchangeably in the region. Pew finds that Latin American Protestants are conservative on social and sexual issues, such as gay marriage and abortion. As Catholics become more liberal on such questions, that points to looming American-style “culture wars”.
Casualties of the Cosby Vortex
By Will Leitch
November 25, 2014
BloombergPolitics
The biggest political casualty of the current scandal stems from the fact that Bill Cosby stood for something. In politics, Cosby's primary driver was his belief–refuted memorably by Coates–that African-Americans were the central cause of their suffering, that they needed to take care of their own problems before expecting others to rise to their defense and fight injustice. This belief is actually where it started. Comedian Hannibal Buress, whose comedy routine in Philadelphia may have been what pushed the Cosby story to its tipping point, called Cosby the “smuggest old-black-man public persona that I hate. He gets on TV, 'pull your pants up, black people, I was on TV in the '80s. I can talk down to you because I had a successful sitcom.' Yeah, but you rape women, Bill Cosby, so turn the crazy down a couple notches.”)
The conflagration that Burress started shows no signs of abating, and it's not only Cosby's genial-dad reputation that's been destroyed. A whole strain of African-American political thought, having lost its leader, has been decimated by the scandal.
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