Boy, there's an awful lot of good thoughtful people out there in the blogosphere critiquing the system of white supremacy and white privilege. A recent click-by run at the esteemed Yolanda Carrington's The Primary Contradiction steered me to a site called Double Consciousness. These folks who run it are, some time in the next couple of days, hosting something I (clueless newby that I am) learn is called a blog carnival.
The idea is that every month a new blog owner volunteers to take on the task of assembling (and curating) a set of recent posts around a particular theme or topic volunteered by the original bloggers. In the case of the Erase Racism Carnival, the posts deal exactly with white supremacy and white privilege. So once a month, around the 20th in this case, the great all-enveloping swamp of the blogosphere opens out onto a clearing, a patch of higher ground where bloggers of various nationalities, political views, class backgrounds, ages and so on have laid out their recent thinking on these crucial matters.
I like the idea, a "socialist new thing" in terms of the self-organization of the blogosphere and the archived month or two of the Erase Racism Carnival I've had a chance to peruse include some fascinating material. I kicked in a couple of recent pieces from FotM and am waiting to see if I make the cut. Will this supplant forms like the Day of Blogging Against White Supremacy kicked off earlier this year by Nelson Hawkins at Pottawatomie Creek? I don't see that it necessarily should, but time will tell in this rapidly evolving intellectual/social space...
When I went back to Double Consciousness today, they had a new post which tended, as the time-honored folk saying hath it, to harsh my mellow. It is a video, not a music video, just a little slice of everyday life in which a young Mexican sister gives us, close up and live, an unsolicited testimonial to the power of white supremacist and heteronormative hegemony in this society. I could write pages about this clip, but instead, I will just kick it to you, dear reader (with a hat tip to Carlo Montemayor at Double Consciousness).
Whew, hunh?
In a forthcoming post I hope to look at another good news/bad news scenario around white privilege, this one related to the invaluable new book, The Cost of Privilege.
April 16, 2007
The Rose And The Thorns
posted by Jimmy Higgins
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2 comments:
Thanks for the post on our blog. I'm looking forward to your upcoming post on white privilege. I've also learned a new phrase that I've never heard before "harsh my mellow."
Holy Crap. I'm totally gonna have to blog about this.
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