The sad fact is, so idiots will but into it.

Related Story: Nobel Winner Issues Apology for Comments About Blacks

Bygbaby

I created a character named Phaedyme for a book I contributed to (for the Vampire roleplaying game). She was a soldier (disguised as a man) in Alexander’s army, who had been turned into a vampire in India. She was a tribute to the women who have had to pose as men to accomplish what they wanted in society, or serve in the military, or anything else denied them as women.

http://messagenet.com/myths/ppt/Otanes_1.html

An Arab man told me once he thought it might be an ancestor of the name “Fatima,” but I’ve never really been able to track anything down. When I first came across the name (and used it online), I didn’t know about Otanes.

How do you pronounce your name and what does it mean or signify!?

[;o)

I’m not trying to make excuses here, but rather explaining what I perceive as a white person who does try to call out racism when I see it. We’re not supposed to acknowledge that when Imus or Richards or Watson says these things that they’re not just individual events with no relation to each other. We’re not supposed to say “When they say these things, they’re tapping into what many white people think and say every day, a vast reservoir of privilege and assumed superiority.” We’re supposed to pretend that racism is something that burns crosses, wears white hoods, segregates, or even enslaves. Not something that promotes one person over another, or quietly refuses to rent to one family instead of another, or looks the other way when someone says or does something that is obviously bigoted.

And, of course, most white people happily go along with that. It seems to me that Richards, Imus, and Watson get in trouble as much for inadverdantly revealing that racism is alive and well as they do for saying the objectionable things they choose to say.

I don’t tend to hear much overt racism, but I’ll admit to being really ignorant of the subtle ways of saying racist things outside of the ones endemic to my religion (metagenetics boo!!!). I’ll never forget the time a friend used “ghetto” in plce of “black” and it took me several minutes to figure out what she meant, and then only by looking around and realizing (I haven’t noticed – I’m used to it) that there were very few white people around.

I never confronted her about it directly. I still wonder if I should have, or if my violent disagreement did the trick.

It is by emphasizing the negative while claiming only to report and ignoring all else, ignoring positives in our community, ignoring real ills and highlighting trivia and never contextualizing what we do versus what they do. Slick, baby, slick.