Don’t by Stemlit branch cherries.  They treat their farmers like crap.

I had an idea recently for a wikipedia-like database of information about how good different foods and food companies are, health-wise, environment-wise, worker-wise, animal-wise, etc.  And then someone told me it already exists, but I forgot what it was.  Does anyone know?

Created by OnePlusYou

Latoya Peterson over at Racialicious has a great analysis of this comment.  It’s true that Clinton has some (marginal?) advantage amongst white working class voters.  That means she may be better qualified to compete for the white, working class vote in the general election.  If that’s all she was trying to say, I think it’d be a pretty uncontroversial comment.

But that’s not the conclusion she is trying to reach.   She is trying to make a point about the breadth of her coalition and therefore her electability as compared to Obama’s.  As Peterson points out:

It doesn’t matter that Barack has more delegates and Clinton and Obama are neck and neck in the popular vote. No, fuck that. He still isn’t electable. The white vote is important, but it is not a monolith. But that doesn’t seem to matter. Obama will lose white votes (despite showing more than respectable numbers) and that alone should show us that he’s not electable. (Latoya Peterson)

Peterson also points to this quote from dnA over at Too Sense, which I think sums up Clinton’s intentions (conscious or not) quite well:

This kind of comment is less a description than an agitator, it’s meant to give white voters the impression that they would be “disenfranchised” by an Obama win. It’s a not so subtle effort to evoke racial resentment over Obama’s success. (dnA)

Viva la revolucion!  I am not alone!

But I wanted to share with the other white people who read this blog a basic truth that I’ve come to believe, something which was hard to realize, but which I am pretty confident in today:

All white people do and say racist things. By extension, all white people are racist.

The classic white response to this is “That’s crazy. Some white people are racist, but not all of us.” Probably some of you are thinking that right now. It’s what I believed most of my life, and I thought… well, I hoped that I was in the “non-racist” category.

As white people, we presume that the status quo with respect to race is that things are pretty ok. We think all white people can’t be racist because that would mean that the status quo is all screwed up, and like I said we presume the status quo is pretty ok. We have the privilege of believing that racism is not normal, not typical, not endemic.

But in fact the normal state of affairs it not ok, and people of color know it. They live it every day. Many will admit it openly to white people. Most will admit it with other people of color. Racism is bad, yet it’s normal, typical, endemic.

Contrary to the beliefs of racism deniers, the status quo is, in fact, all screwed up. The only thing allowing us to think that racism is rare is our whiteness.

As white people, we often respond with one of the following, when we’re accused of racism, whether directly (you’re racist!) or indirectly as a proxy for our race (those white people are racist!):

- yes, but I/they didn’t know there were racial connotations to that.
- yes, but I/they weren’t intending to be racist.
- yes, but I/they don’t actually believe that about people of color.
- yes, but not all white people do/say that.
- yes, but I/they are clearly a good person because of x,y, and z so don’t be mad!

These statements can all be roughly translated as:

- yes, they did do that, but let’s not talk about that, instead affirm that white people, aka me, are still ok!

Whether being racist makes us bad people is a reasonable topic of conversation. There’s nothing wrong with talking about it, and there’s nothing wrong with arguing that people who say and do racist things can still be good people.

What is not okay, and in fact amounts to further racism, is the belief that in the midst of a complaint about racism it is ok to derail the conversation to talk about whether white people are good people.

It’s not ok. For the most part, someone who is raising the issue of racism, especially if they are a person of color, does not care whether white people are actually good people, ethically speaking. To demand that the conversation focuses on that issue is to derail the concerns of people of color and privilege the concerns of white people. That’s racist too.

The sad truth is that this tactic is just one of a huge bag of tricks we white people have for pushing the concerns of people of color into the background without acknowledging our racism. Identifying and disabling these hidden tricks in ourselves is a difficult, lifelong pursuit. But it’s the only way to heal our racism, and it’s peanuts compared to the crap people of color have to deal with every day.

Racism is real, and the way to respond when someone brings it up is to respond with genuine concern and humility, and acknowledgment that yes, in fact, we white people do and say racist things.  Conversations about racism are an opportunity to learn to be a little less so.

.. which pray on our fears to try and squeeze money out of us, she started posting ads like this:

Teresa points out that you can pay as little as $5/day and reach thousands of people. If you want to buy some ad space, go here.  Teresa pointed her ads at the web site for Love Your Body Day.  If you post one yourself, I’d love it if you leave a message in the comments or link to this entry from your blog so we can all hear about it!

Thank you to Teresa for being awesome, and thank you to Katt for passing along the love!

If The Boss is endorsing Obama, my mind is made up.

There’s a rich tradition developing of studying the role our bodies play in cognition (Nunez, Goodwin, others).  I have presented evidence that we can take these analysis methods and theories into the digital realm to study the digital extensions to our bodies.  Put another way, I have tried to show that our “digital body” is subject to the same sorts of analysis as our body body.  This is in line with Andy Clark’s notion of “radical embodiment”, where the body does not end at the skin, but extends opportunistically to include any structures that we can command.

This evidence points at a rich space for further inquiry.  The programmers I’ve been studying use a pretty impoverished “digital body”, composed of a pointer, a carat, a selection and a few windows.  Given that embodied activities in the digital realm are an important part of our problem solving, how can we create richer digital body parts that will enable more advanced cognition?

One approach to answering this question is to use the bridge I’ve created in my work between the digital realm, where we know very little about embodiment, and the physical realm, where we know much more.  We can analyze the work of Chuck Goodwin and others to look for common embodied activities that could be pushed across that bridge to help do digital work.

Another approach is to look closely at digital tasks and use embodiment theory as a foundation for the design process for better digital tools.

Anyway, not super punchy, but that’s the bush I’m beating around.

Which means that women who seek an abortion after being raped will be required by law to be penetrated by a doctor with a medical device.

Whether you believe abortion is right or wrong, abortion legislation terrorizes victims of sexual violence. Parental notification laws can effectively force children to have to notify their rapist that they are seeking an abortion. Laws criminalizing certain abortion procedures put womens’ health at risk. Laws requiring additional procedures like this one force women to undergo traumatic and unnecessary medical procedures. Laws mandating waiting periods or extra mandatory procedures serve to prevent poor women from seeking and getting abortions.

A woman who is raped should be allowed to walk into an abortion clinic and get an abortion anonymously, safely, quietly, affordably, and without further violence to her person. I believe that is the minimum of respect we as a community should pay.

If you want to fight what you believe are “frivolous” abortions, that’s fine. I won’t be fighting with you, but I applaud your conviction, and your desire to act on your beliefs.

But criminalization is not the answer. The side effects are too awful.

Update: I want to say that I’m only aware of this news because of the hard work being done by the folks at feministing and the dozens of other feminist bloggers I’ve read and women I’ve talked to who’ve been generous enough to put their words out there in a place where I can hear them. I’m just trying to pass the message along.

Update 2: To be honest, what sparked me to add that update was reading about a recent incident where Amanda Marcotte, a relatively high profile white blogger, wrote an article that, while not lifting text, lifted en masse the intellectual work of Brownfemipower, a black chicana? blogger. There’s some dishonesty I think in spouting off these ideas as if they came out of my head “knocked-kneed, fully formed, and upright” (to use a phrase I stole from my friend Tracy). Just last week my friend Lauren called me out for rattling off Audre Lorde quotes like I was a black lesbian.

So, I’ll add this to the list of sexist, racist things that I do that I’m trying to work on.