Discarded all your beauty in despair,
declared yourself a concubine,
filled the bathtub full of wine,
bathed and drank the night away,
and said there’d never come a day
when politics would ever mean a thing.
Last Night, by Over the Rhine, from Besides. There's an mp3 available, which is good, since my only copy is on tape. . .
I only said I'd stop the Ani lyrics. Be more specific next time.
From Racial Vilification Policy - empowerment, not punishment, by Dr Katharine Gelber:
Hate speech doesn't just impart incorrect information and stereotypes about people. It stereotypes its targets, it restricts their ability to participate as fully equal human beings in society. Racist stereotypes can contribute to a climate of justifying violence and discrimination against marginalised groups. But at the same time racist hate speech in fact does the marginalising. Vilification is not just unpleasant. It does things, which have been documented at this conference and elsewhere. These include limiting victims' personal liberty; leading hearers to internalise discriminatory messages, so that they begin to believe them; and silencing. Of these, the silencing impact is the most immediate, and I would argue, susceptible to remedy by hate speech policy.If vilification silences and disempowers its targets - and this is both its aim and its outcome - then hate speech policy should be designed to redress the harm occasioned. Perpetrator-focussed remedies tend not to render targeted communities less silenced or less disempowered. This is why I advocate a policy of "speaking back"; a policy of providing educational, material and institutional assistance to targeted communities to respond to incidences of hate speech.
Providing assistance to targeted communities to respond allows them to challenge the silencing effects of hate speech - by actually speaking. It also allows them to contradict the claims made by hate speakers - by sending out their own messages.
In this way the hate speech has been responded to in an appropriate way, a way that empowers targeted communities to speak back. This policy is not perpetrator-focussed, rather it is focussed on empowering targeted communities.
Don't worry, it's from a conference in Australia. No one is talking about such heresy here. Or I'm just not looking in the right places.
Dr. Gelber's name appeared as a reference fairly early in Digital Representation: Racism on the World Wide Web, by Indhu Rajagopal with Nis Bojin. Bits of that might be appearing here in the near future, too. I think Neo sent the link to keep me distracted, so I would shut the hell up.
And it's working.
"Anyone with a message can easily access a functional demo of Coffee Cup, Homesite, Dreamweaver, or other software, and create a Web page"
This is suspect to me, when viewed in light of the fact that only about half of US households have access to (and use) the internet. And certainly not everyone who "has a message" has a significant amount of time to sit around spouting off about it. hahahahaha.
Resident Bush feels that the digital divide has been bridged. What he's not understanding is that it's no longer an issue of access to technology alone. It's an issue of literacy.
There are significant voices that are missing.
But it's an interesting article, nonetheless. Thanks for the link.
One of the maxims that drifts around in my head, usually when something I read or someone with whom I interact is fixin' to make I-and-I lose my religion (at least, the Bene Gesserit training) is that "the answer to speech with which one disagrees is more speech." Not louder speech, not speech hurled back at the speaker in anger, but dialogue that addresses and challenges any unrighteous speech and invites clarification and reconciliation (instead of the kind that, as one can feel narrowing one's throat as you try to repress it before it's spoken in haste -- and that kind of response comes to me most often when people tell me to "get over" subjective responses to things, but I digress ...).
When someone is trying to call me out of my name, I have to remind myself (after I and the other have been sorted) that it's not my name. "Speaking back." I like that. *nods*
Dude, this good-twin gig's kinda heavy. When is it we get to trade duties, again? Don't tell me I have to move to Minneapolis to do it, now.
thanks for the quote, aaron. i've been following your bad example and trawling the libertarian/neocon bottom-feeder tanks (not so much "think-" as perhaps "septic-"), and your post was just the antidote to cheer me up.
i think i'll go out and do some talking back now...
Hey. Interesting and truthful. Got a question for you, though. I am white. Over and over I've heard the expression "call me out of my name," (usually, "call me outta my name"). Though I am a genarally perceptive person, I've no idea what this means. This is not a cultural barrier, but simply the fact that I've never heard an example of what it is to be "called out of your name" nor an explanation. If you would possibly take a minute or so and enlighten me on this--anything I don't know, I wanna know--I would be grateful. I've only started noticing its use in the past few years, so am also curious has to how long the expression has been around.
Thanks, Mahone Dunbar