GET YOURSELF BETTER KNOWLEDGED: Institutional Racism & War on Drugs

#endthewarondrugs

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(Source: blackademic.com)

Todd Clayton’s thoughtful essay addresses white privilege in the mainstream LGBT cultural narrative. Invoking gay author James Baldwin, Clayton writes:

Baldwin, more than anyone else, taught me that although I am gay, I am white, and that being white always involves persistent privilege that must be recognized and accounted for. Baldwin explains that white LGBTQ men and women feel slighted precisely because they know that had they been straight, they would have been heirs to incomparable privilege.

Read more here.

Essayist Tim Wise’s analysis on Trayvon Martin’s murder and the working of white denial is spectacular. Thanks Manny G. for the lead. Below are two great quotes; The first on empathy, which is underlines the progressive perspective of politics and society:

Empathy — real empathy, not the situational and utterly phony kind that most any of us can muster when social convention calls for it — requires that one be able to place oneself in the shoes of another, and to consider the world as they must consider it. It requires that we be able to suspend our own culturally-ingrained disbelief long enough to explore the possibility that perhaps the world doesn’t work as we would have it, but rather as others have long insisted it did.

And below, a reminder of how racial privilege contours political postures.

Yesterday, I received an e-mail from someone suggesting that perhaps we should begin to sport buttons like those that became so ubiquitous in the case of Troy Davis last year. You know the buttons, right? The ones that said: “I am Troy Davis.” The ones that aimed at solidarity with an unjustly executed man, but which, on the lapels and t-shirts of white people seemed, to me at least, more banal and offensive than anything else, since we were not, in fact (and would not likely ever be) in the position of Troy Davis.

WATCH: Wanda Sykes Tells Piers Morgan: It’s harder to be gay than Black in America

In Keli Goff’s rather diplomatic indictment of President Obama’s lack of leadership in addressing the AIDS crisis, she suggests the president may have a kind of racial anxiety about proving that he is “president of all Americans, not just Black Americans,” which has kept him from discussing publicly the disproportionate ways Blacks are affected and infected by HIV/AIDS.

True, AIDS “transcends barriers of race or station or sexual orientation or faith or nationality,” but we cannot ignore the ways those differences need to shape a robust—if not adequate—national AIDS strategy.

Ann Coulter, Ann Coulter At Homocon (via brooklynmutt)

We at daniel extra HQ are starting to think she gets paid a high rate every time she says something offensive. Our low-ball guess is $20,000 per episode of mouth diarrhea.

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Much of the tea party agenda is driven by white Christian America’s deep-seated fears of sex, race and interracial “pollution.”

David Rosen, author of Sex Scandals America: Politics & the Ritual of Public Shaming, takes on the sexuality anxieties of America’s neo-fascistic tea party movement from masturbation, miscegenation and homosexual marriage.

+ here

Inside the AC360 doll study

CNN’s Anderson Cooper looks at racial bias in a “doll study” in the first installment of a series on race and children. Once again, the discourse on race seems to be a black and white affair as only white and African American children participate in the study.