"Giving White People The Illusion Of Darker Skin Makes Them Less Racist"

I'm sorry for vandalizing your schoolhouse.

This happened in 1985, when I was a freshman at Red Bank Regional High School. Red Bank Regional as you know, draws from the towns of Shrewsbury, Red Bank, Union Beach and Little Silver, where I lived. It was fall, not too long after school had started, and we kids from different towns were still getting to know each other. I was on the soccer team with a guy named Scott who lived right across the street from the Shrewsbury elementary school. Scott's mom went out a lot, and his red-walled kitchen became a place where groups of 14 year olds would gather to [...]

You know I love me some cultural studies wonkery. And yet sometimes it goes a bit off the rails! The incredibly esteemed Joseph Massad, of Columbia, may maintain a tricky position against the creation of "the homosexual" as a class in the "Arab world" (quite complicated backstory here, but, for a less nuanced take, "gayness as identity is Western and therefore colonialist, so we shouldn't support people there who choose to identify as gay even when they are, you know, getting murdered by state actors"), but his work overall is brilliant.

But also he is now revealed as the least fun TV critic OF ALL TIME, as [...]

"Many locals will flee," said the newspaper beforehand. "Some business owners blamed the police tactics for a precipitous drop in crowds and income this weekend," said the newspaper afterward. That's right: white people fled in droves in the face of the arrival of some 200,000 black people for Urban Beach Weekend in Miami Beach—and so the non-beach-side downtown was a ghost town. Like the far end of Lincoln Road Mall, with nobody on the street (and parking everywhere!).

"Last week, the Internet lit up upon the release of a University of Massachusetts—Amherst study that found white 9-month-old babies were worse than white 5-month-old babies at telling apart African-American babies." —I don't know how I missed this Internet conflagration last week, but I am thankful to whatever animating spirit helped it pass me by. In any event, if you're scoring at home, babies are not racist, according to the researcher who conducted the study. Dogs, on the other hand, are still guilty of anti-Semitism.

Fans awaiting the long-delayed remake of the Red Dawn reboot will have something to slake the thirst this weekend. The United States is finally getting a theatrical release of Tomorrow, When the War Began, the tale of Australian teenagers in armed rebellion against a national invasion.

Based on the wildly popular Tomorrow book series from the 1990s, Tomorrow, When the War Began updates one long-debated detail of the young adult novels. Now there is no doubt that the invaders are Asian.

It's a perfect film for the anxious American scene now, where a number of factors are colluding to expose just how far Asian stereotypes have hooks [...]

Research shows that sexism and racism are linked, and "could be a personality trait." Scientists believe that the characteristic, known as assholeness, could be controlled by early psychological education.

"Dear Nerds: If you’re getting upset that fucking Hollywood is too diverse for you, you need to have a long, hard look at the inherent racism of your racist-ass medium."

Did you have a good racism morning? There's only 13 shopping days left until Quentin Tarantino's Django Unchained hits theaters. But already whites are rising up against this film, which accurately depicts the intolerable cruelty of The Blacks to white people throughout American history. "Many of us are tired of blatant anti-white racism being couched in 'satire' or 'comedic routines' just so we can be called 'thin-skinned' when we take offense," is how people are responding. Think that's an outlier? Oh there is so much more, when Drudge commenters flood the Hollywood Reporter, which is so grateful for the sweet, sweet traffic flood that they're too stunned to TURN [...]

"Let’s face it. If you ask me, there’s no he said/she said here. The Republican Party is only a viable entity because of Southern racism."

You may remember how last Memorial Day, Miami Beach police officers gunned down black tourists and seized the cellphones of anyone recording the cops in action. (Spoiler: the shot bystanders, ignored for a full year now, are suing!) Well, Urban Beach Weekend is back again this weekend, and the city is ready! They've installed a "one-time" DUI checkpoint, some watch towers, scanners that record everyone's license plates, some "light towers," some road blocks—and a whites-only bridge. Oops sorry, "residents-only" bridge. (Ahem: "tourists will be given the impression that they can’t get in.") Let's look at some notable quotables from the Herald today, which are likely [...]

"Are you a cab driver?" "No" "Do you have a room here?" "Yes" Questions posed in the foyer of my new York hotel. #travellingwhileblack

— Gary Younge (@garyyounge) May 3, 2012

Guardian (and Nation) columnist Gary Younge has been in America for a few years now; he currently lives in Chicago, and is staying at the Soho Grand Hotel in New York City.

"[P]eople with compromised immune systems (due to a recent illness), and even people who describe themselves as afraid of germs or susceptible to disease, are more likely to avoid and feel prejudiced toward otherwise healthy people who merely look different than them, like foreigners or immigrants. It appears this prejudice can be reduced or erased by public health measures like vaccination or the simple act of washing your hands, according to a recent study in Psychological Science."

"Alabama’s reputation has also taken a huge hit just when it is trying to lure international businesses. No matter how officials may try to tempt foreign automakers, say, with low taxes and wages, the state is already infamous as a regional capital of xenophobia." —It's funny how times change. It was only 40 years ago that Alabama was infamous as a regional capital of racism.

I'm glad @theonion apologized for calling Quvenzhané Wallis curt. She's nine years old, who cares if her answers are short.

— Jesse Berney (@jesseberney) February 25, 2013

So The Onion apologized today for one of their many, many Oscars jokes last night. Which one? The one that was nooooottttt good or okay. Nooo, the other one.

Quentin Tarantino has been heavily criticized for his frequent use of the word "nigger" during tonight's red carpet interviews #Oscars2013

— The Onion (@TheOnion) February 25, 2013

Yeah, not that one. (That one is actually maybe good satire, about when and how some things are okay.) Buoyed [...]

One of the links passed around Twitter by China watchers yesterday was a photo gallery of "little warriors playing the game 'Defend the Diaoyu Islands.'" (The Islands being the disputed territory that sparked the nation's recent anti-Japan protests.) Armed with plastic assault rifles and (adorable!) berets, the children completed boot camp-like obstacle courses such as shimmying under razor wire (kidding; just string) while gripping tiny Chinese flags in their mouths (not kidding).

It's been two-and-a-half years since we first wrote about the Red Dawn reboot after coming across an early script. Then, the film's original 2010 release date was postponed; in the interim, the army invading America was [...]

"A few minutes before my reading, store employee Marshall popped in my CD. Not 30 seconds into my go-go playlist, a white woman went to the cashier to complain. The song in question wasn’t even a go-go song. It was Parliament’s 1970s funk classic 'Chocolate City'—a song that took on a moniker that was being used by Washingtonians celebrating the city’s first elected mayor, a black man named Walter Washington: 'What’s happening, C.C. They still call in the White House, but that’s a temporary condition….' The blonde woman marched straight to the cashier, who referred her to the owner of Politics & Prose. She said the music was 'racist' and [...]

Mayor says one utility of stop & frisk is that it discourages gun possession, since NYers think they could be stopped by police.

— Mike Grynbaum (@grynbaum) May 11, 2012

"The number of guns that we've been finding has continued to go down, which says the program at this scale is doing a great job," says mayor

— Mike Grynbaum (@grynbaum) May 11, 2012

Mike Bloomberg's weekly Friday radio chit-chat time went short this week, but—like every Friday—he still managed to let a real doozy rip. (Previously: "usually when we roll up they frisk themselves.") Something something "attachment mayoring."

"A common heart disease drug may have the unusual side-effect of combating racism, a new study suggests."

"Individually, each wasp flew from the bottom of the T to the fork, where they could view an image on either side before picking one to touch. One of the two images delivered a mild and unpleasant shock. For each pair of images, wasps had 40 chances to learn which was a safer bet. When wasps were shown two distinct wasp faces, it only took about 10 trials before they learned to consistently choose the right one, the researchers report today in the journal Science. For the next 30 trials, they picked right about 75 to 80 percent of the time. The insects were eventually able to perform as [...]