Slap On the Wrist

Apparently if you are white and drunk you can kill a Latino man and get no serious repercussions.

Are we to believe that he stabbed someone to death only after they beat him to his knees? I’m not saying it couldn’t happen, but I would defend myself way before that point. Also he told paramedics that he was just a bystander to the stabbing, ok whatever.

Anyways I think it is far to easy for a white, Masters canidate at Harvard to blame the death on a Latino, 18 year-old who happens to be both a teen father, and a high school drop out.

The issues of race and class within this are so intense. And of course… This white dude has the privilege of a 2 year sentence, which could mean as little as 11 months served.

Who is James David Dickson?

Not me… despite what someone seems to think. So… I tried to learn who this guy is, and I found out that he is a conservative journalist/pundit type, fresh from University of Michigan, and a conservative. Eww… I don’t want my piece to be accredited to him. Maybe I should add more info about myself so it doesn’t happen again. (Also… I feel like there was a case of me being black Dickson being black. I can’t find proof that he is black other than suspicions, topics I’ve found that he wrote about, and this).  I know that this is a scam site, but it is so annoying to have my writing attributed to someone else.

No Woman is Illegal

http://www.lvrj.com/news/13702902.htmlThose were Hillary Clinton’s words at a recent stop near Las Vegas. Its good to see that the idea of no person being illegal has made it to some more mainstream rhetoric. Hopefully I will hear fewer people using the phrase “illegals” this year– I hope so.

However, Clinton’s phrasing of another point didn’t sit well with me :

“Clinton said unscrupulous lending leads to bad mortgages, which lead to foreclosures, which lead to people with nowhere to go and vacant neighborhoods that can go rapidly downhill.‘We treat these problems as if one is guacamole and one is chips, when … they both go together,’ she said.”

Is it just me or is there something odd about using that sort of simile when talking to a mostly Latino group (is it ok, because she was in a Mexican restaurant? but then the setting brings up questions in my mind as well… why the Mexican restaurant?).

Vegetarianism and the Hypermasculine

So I began thinking the other day about the bizarre relationship between food and gender (and of course sexuality). It is pretty well known that meat is associated with masculinity (perhaps lending to the higher rate of certain health issues in men?). If you want examples: here here here here here. Men eat more meat than women traditionally, etc etc. However, I came to thinking– how is my masculinity affected. After all black men are hypermasculinized in the public discourse… so do I come out not as demasculinized? How masculine, in the public eye, is a Black male vegan compared to a White male vegan, or an Asian male vegan, or a Latino vegan, or so on and so on.