“During the civil rights struggle, Birmingham canceled high school prom for many black teenagers. This weekend, the dance went on for the Class of 1963”
http://www.cnn.com/2013/05/19/living/civil-rights-prom/index.html?hpt=hp_c2
The people who were teenagers during the Civil Rights Movement are still alive, y’all. Their lives were affected by blatant, government-sanctioned racism. It astounds me that people act like it was thousands of years ago.
(via notmissmarple)
Have just successfully defended a MA thesis about Schmandrew Schmird.
As someone who at least looks white and has had access, albeit with difficulty, to a lot of educational opportunities, I do have some kinds of privilege - in some ways, quite a lot of privilege - and I want to acknowledge that, straight up, because that shit matters. It creates the possibility for me to even be here, typing this to you, whoever is reading it.
(Edit: thanks to anghraine for suggesting a “read more.” I’ve had trouble making them work in the past, let’s hope this one does.)
Thank you for this.
There have been times I’ve regretted going to college and then grad school in my native Georgia, and then taking a job here in Alabama—a state where I spent much of my childhood because my mom’s family is from here. I felt like I should branch out more, settle elsewhere, learn to cope with cold weather and brusque attitudes. But then I read shit like this and remember that the rest of the country doesn’t want me. I remember my advisor telling me, when I first went on the job market, that Southerners don’t get hired outside the South. That schools elsewhere would assume that I was either stupid or racist. I remember watching myself in an instructional video for comp teachers and saying “Where the hell did my accent go?” and my husband saying “That’s how you talk when you want to sound smart.”
My mother grew up with no electricity, no plumbing, and often not enough to eat. Her father was an alcoholic truck farmer. They had nine kids. When the family mule died, my grandfather had to hook two of my uncles up the the plow. And that’s not the fucking punchline to a joke, that was her fucking life.
All of the eight kids who survived infancy went to college. Several, including my mother, got masters degrees. Two got PhDs. There are a fuckton of smart Southerners.
And you know what? There are a fuckton of ignorant Southerners. Because education costs money. Because travel to places where you meet people who are different from you costs money. A lot of my students make it to college barely able to read, and it’s frustrating as hell, but I’m not going to hate them for it. And no, I’m not defending racism and homophobia—your right to swing your fist ends at another person’s face—but dear God, we’re not morally and intellectually bankrupt, we’re just poor.
This.
It’s like patriarchy (and it has a lot to do with patriarchy): this shit hits everybody and we all suffer for it. There’s a fine long history in the U.S. South of upper-class whites setting poor, uneducated whites and blacks against each other, lest they band together and start some shit — from the Populist movement in the South to George Wallace. I’m two generations from the farm. One of my grandfathers didn’t finish high school. My father volunteered for Vietnam because he figured that was his best chance to get out of south Georgia and see the world, and if he didn’t get blown up, well, then maybe he could go to college. My grandparents and parents busted their asses. White privilege helped. So did, on the part of my grandparents, a fear-born commitment to the politics of respectability, which involved looking as not-poor as possible.
Y’all know that Lilla Watson quote, about coming here not to help, but because your liberation is bound up with mine? That is precisely why I do what I do. Kids all ought to have the same opportunities I had growing up. And those same kids all should be treated with respect, no matter what they look like or where they come from or what they sound like — which is going to take everybody, regardless of geography, recognizing that while some prejudice (hell, a LOT of prejudice) is worse than other prejudice, that doesn’t make the less-worse kind not prejudice.
My verbs don’t always agree with my subjects, especially when I’ve had a few. I say y’all. I have a Piedmont, rhotic accent that I can make go away when I think about it. And that’s just the way that is. If it results in an inability to achieve prestige in other parts of the country, it’s not because I’m not good enough or smart enough or nice enough or unable to play the game, and that is fucked up. It’s all fucked up. And it all intersects.
cutting down paper for conference: actual fucking worst
cutting down paper about how the sacred calf of this particular audience supports structural white supremacy: nightmares for weeks
because inevitably something I cut will be the thing that would have prevented five or six angry people in the Q&A from opening their mouths
There’s some map going around showing each US state by rates of passport ownership and much of the South has rates below 30% and people are reblogging it with stupid comments like ‘smh Mississippi’ and ‘this is what’s wrong with our country, people need to get out and see the world’ and I’m just like, you people are so fucking stupid.
There are many Americans who can’t afford to travel overseas. Mississippi has an average income of $26,000 and you’re shaming them because they can’t drop $135 on a passport and $800 on airfare to Europe? (and let’s not even get into how the states with less passports are disproportionately African-American and how it’s mainly middle class white kids saying this shit)
Being able to holiday in Paris is a marker of class privilege.
How coincidental that this post should appear on my dash the day after I, a Mississippi resident, get my first passport at the age of 27.
In the tax year 2012, my earned income was ~$2100 below the federal poverty line for a single person.
I have other sources of (non-taxable) income. I am privileged. I could choose how to use my tax refund this year; I chose a passport.
Other fellow residents do not have the luxury of making this choice because they want to/need to get things I already have access to. Things that are way the fuck more important than an overpriced booklet that requires a stupid number of hoops to jump through just to apply for.
The reason I applied for a passport this year — and I say this as someone with time and money — is that the New Orleans passport agency made a special field trip up to my university for a study abroad fair. There’s already vast and ugly town-and-gown division in this town; like hell is a federal agency going to make university-unaffiliated people who aren’t “supposed to” be there feel comfortable showing up on this campus. Other options for passport application: the post office (which is famously unfriendly), the county chancery building (which is vast, intimidating, and difficult to navigate).
Also, that application has to be signed in person, and they interrogate you about your travel plans. I got the side-eye for not having any. With all-inclusive costs, including the invisible ones, I spent about $175 for the privilege of being condescended to.
And I’m a middle class white woman.
(Source: docecomoacanela, via unsungtale)
any night when you get to go out with your favorite grad school friend and drink really strong beer and holler about critical race theory and Southern identity and why Stephin Merritt is the Stephen Foster of our generation is a good night
View high resolution
Popphoto: Getty Acquires, Restores Third Robert Johnson Image
HT Michelle Legro
I’m torn on this. On the one hand, this is an incredible historical artifact. On the other hand, Robert Johnson, while brilliant and talented, is only famous because of three things:
1) he was used by white ethnographers to embody the black origins of the blues
2) at which point he was turned into a ghost story by, again, white ethnographers, who claimed he’d sold his soul to the devil
3) at which point he became the primary blues mythological influence on white rockers.
It’s a pretty transparent, and fucked up, metaphor. But it’s still one with a lot of currency and it cannot be denied that he was foundational to modern music so…
And now his image will be used to make Getty some money.
I just flat out do not have time to get into why this news makes me want to Hulk out and throw shit but friends, this news makes me want to Hulk out and throw shit.
Further reading on what nextian’s talking about, for the curious: Marybeth Hamilton’s In Search of the Blues, Elijah Wald’s Escaping the Delta: Robert Johnson and the Invention of the Blues.
Note one thing, if you would, from this image: how well-dressed the young men are. Is that indicative of someone selling his soul to the devil so he didn’t have to put in the work because he was lazy? Or is that indicative of someone who busted his ass to get good, make money, and wear that suit?
The Robert Johnson myth perpetuates lots of myths about African Americans. Two of the most pernicious: that they’re lazy, that they’re evil. Neither are true. This is Elijah Wald’s argument, not mine — and this new picture just hammers it home even more.
unpopular opinion time!
while I realize this may be due to the fact that I just wrote 2000 words of close reading of the album in two hours and I’ve spent the last two days contextualizing the album as the place where he finally ditches pastiche and Southern essentialism in favor of actual critique and original thought, etc. etc.
I really do not think our man can ever top Armchair Apocrypha in terms of sheer jawdropping connections between form and function, image and reality, history and present conditions, chaos and order.
ever.
it’s been my favorite album of his for… ever. forever. and reading obnoxious globalization theory just makes it get deeper and deeper. amazing. it is amazing, he is amazing, I am amazed.
