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Religion and the Legacy of Slavery

This is an older post that never got posted for some reason. ————————- You won’t hear the word “nigger” on broadcast TV anymore. It means you won’t hear “sand nigger” or “kike” or “gook” either. The lack of degrading names is the great victory of “liberal” media. The reality is that race, and constructions of racial power, constitute one of the most important subtexts in American public discourse. Racist language persists in most parts of mainstream media, but it is now heavily coded. Dave Neiwert does an admirable job of trying to decode that language on his blog Orcinus (read…

NYPD’s Religious Profiling – Ta-Nehisi Coates – National – The Atlantic

NYPD’s Religious Profiling – Ta-Nehisi Coates – National – The Atlantic. This where you see the really long-term effects of terrorism. It’s not simply the number of people you murder, it’s how the smallest can alter the character of a country. Some incompetent asshole straps a bomb to his underwear, and now we have to get full body scans. The free exchange of ideas is one of democracy’s greatest benefits. Universities, ostensibly, are supposed to showcase that more than anywhere else. But for want of conjured evil, we’re willing to part with that asset.

Keith Ellison

I think it’s cool that he’s Muslim. I think the bigger a deal we make of it, the more he gets marginalized, and the more we get marginalized. He’s an American. He’s an elected representative. For some good background pieces on what I“m babbling about see these three pieces (1, 2, 3) Technorati Tags: Islam in America, Keith Ellison