Check Out The Erase Racism Blog Carnival!

Last week I blogged here about the Erase Racism Blog Carnival. Blog Carnivals are an impressive development in blogospheric self-organization, wherein once a month a host blog (generally a role rotated among a number of blogs) collects submissions from other blogs of recent diaries on a given topic and curates and posts a whole set, which can be categorized, excerpted, commented on and, of course, linked.

The one I got turned on to was the Erase Racism Carnival which examines white supremacy and white privilege in our society. A couple of days ago the April edition came out, hosted by the two bloggers who run the aptly named Double Consciousness blog.

I want to recommend that anybody interested in issues of white supremacy and white privilege give this month's Carnival a run-by. (Full disclosure: they were kind enough to link to a post on "sundown towns" I had at FotM and DailyKos.) The categories Jack and Carlo used will give you the flava: Fighting Oppression Within the Movement; Racism, The Subtle Everyday Occurrence; and Whiteness and Other Issues.

One of the most fascinating things for me, as one who has been dealing with these issues since the days of the Civil Right Movement, is how many young folks, people of color and the melanin-deficient alike, are thinking and writing about this stuff, some on blogs dedicated entirely to the issue. What's more, some are activists and some don't seem to be deeply involved in social movements at all. I'm not going to single any out, but encourage folks reading this to really give the whole thing a once-over.

Among the intellectual stimulation and first hand accounts there was some trenchant social criticism, too, and some first rate snark. Without the Erase Racism Carnival, I doubt I ever would have found MADtv's take on the recent boom in feel-good movies starring the likes of Hilary Swank and Michelle Pfeiffer, which propound the thesis that the cure to the problems of kids in inner-city schools is to be found in the form of a Nice White Lady.



And before signing off, the obligatory plug for the great new book, The Cost of Privilege: Taking On the System of White Supremacy and Racism. Get it and read it!

[crossposted at DailyKos.]

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The Rose And The Thorns

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.

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