Repeat after me: "Whether clueless or not, liberals can be racists too".

Look, just because a person doesn't wear white robes with white hoods, finds burning crosses appalling, would never scream the words "spik" or "nigger" it doesn't mean they don't have serious issues with people of other races.

And let's just drop the stupidity that voting for Barack Obama somehow has cured whole generations of white Americans from the transgressions of their ancestors, the upbringing of their parents and the culture of imperial white supremacy that would lead an idiot like Chris Matthews to say they forgot Barack Obama was black during an hour of great speechifying.

Chris Matthews may not be a hard-core bigot but he's a racist. Well intention in a bumbling idiot sort of way? Sure. Yet still a racist.

You know what that means? That a lot of you out there may well be one too. You look at Chris Matthews and you say, "but he reminds me of ..." If you don't get that Chris Matthews could be you, then you don't get how pervassive the culture of white supremacy and hence racism is.

Racism is a social and cultural cancer. It is because we refuse to work outside of he bounds of white supremacy that we allegedly can't find a cure. So we say racism, just like cancer, can't be cured. It just goes into remission.
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Sorry to do this, but this bears repeating, even though I posted this a few moments ago at A hungry man is an angry man; a hungry mob is an angry mob | culturekitchen:

we need more black and brown people in medicine, in nursing, in media, in relief and advocacy work. We need more French and Creole and Spanish speaking people in positions of power in the United States. We need to look at how bad immigration laws have cheated this country of the best and brightest of African Diaspora from it's universities, its businesses, it's technology, it's science.

We need to look at the fear-mongering in Haiti coupled with the average demograpics of the relief workers hitting it's ground as a prime example of the systemic racism that is so entrenched and yet so subtle in the United States culture that cannot but help seeing in starving black man or woman with hand out but machete in hand as a big black monster waiting to attack them. We could do better as a country. We could be better as people. We could be building a better multiracial, multiethnic and multilanguage future today if only, if just only, we'd be more weary and aware of the prejudices that holds us back.

Having more blacks and latinos in college cannot just be about upward mobility. Honestly, we have not had upward mobility in years what with wages being stagnant in the US for what some believe has been specific to the last 25 years. We need to see more black and brown faces who are multi-ethnic and polyglot because we need a cultural revolution. Not just in the United States, mind you, but in all of The Americas.

Education doesn't cure people of bigotry but it does minimize it; especially when your teachers, one of the most primary positions of authority in our culture, are black and brown and multilingual. We don't just need them in urban or inner city school, by the way. We need them in suburb and and rural schools. And we most certainly need them in more university departments; especially in more technology and science and research centers.

This doesn't mean though that I propose this as the only answer. Honestly, I believe it is ultimately the wrong one.


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The title of this post comes from a tweet by Richard Morse, or as we know him on twitter @RAMHaiti. He's been posting, as his generator and cell phone allow, continuously every 15-20 minutes about the situation in Haiti and what people are reporting back to him from what they see on the streets.

As I look through myh twitter stream I see people and organizations reporting directly from Haiti without any incidents. The tweets are usually S.O.S. alerts, pleas for water/food/supplies, road block or fallin debris alerts and other daily or asking request for survivor information. It's why it's so important that people like Ansel, the journalist of @mediahacker, call the mainstream media (BIgMediaCo or "Legacy Media") for trying to push tabloid writing as factural journalism. From Tell CNN to stop hyping fears of violence in Haiti. For shame.

They started pushing the violence meme the day after the earthquake. I was interviewed by Wolf Blitzer that evening via Skype. Part way through the interview, they cut to their correspondent for a live chat from the airport.

He spoke briefly with Mario Andreso, the chief of Haiti’s national police, who warned of out-of-control violence from all the prisoners who escaped the penitentiary the day of the quake. The CNN reporter repeated the claims uncritically.

When they came back to me, I began to explain that I had walked through the remains of the jail (here’s the video). That many of the prisoners were reportedly shot dead by police as they tried to escape. And that I had not seen or heard of violence so far.

The prison was a hellish place, with almost no medical facilities. Did it contain some genuine thugs? Yes. But it also contained many political prisoners and people who never received a fair trial from Haiti’s flawed courts. These are simple facts that CNN is too happy to overlook. I was quickly interrupted by Blitzer and they went to commercial break.

Haitians on the streets are not worried about the jail. Food, water, fuel, medicine, and shelter is all I hear.

These digital warriors in the trenches who have been reporting facts and not fictions of machete wielding mandingos or children of tonton macoutes are people or organizations such @MyriamFehmiu @karljeanjeune @GlobalVoices @InternetHaiti @carelpedre @fredodupoux @pierrecote @smithjoanna @unicefusa, the always trustworthy @MSF_USA and even the Israeli Defense Forces propaganda machine, @IDFinHaiti.


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Nielsen Media owns Editor and Publisher and instead of a spinning it off into a seprate company, they've decided to kill it. As the fine people of Gawker point out, "one of the premiere[sic] chroniclers of the long, slow, death of the newspaper business is now dead". From Poynter Online - Romenesko:

Today, we announced that Nielsen Business Media has reached an agreement with e5 Global Media Holdings, LLC, a new company formed jointly by Pluribus Capital Management and Guggenheim Partners, for the sale of eight brands in the Media and Entertainment Group, including Adweek, Brandweek, Mediaweek, The Clio Awards, Backstage, Billboard, Film Journal International and The Hollywood Reporter. e5 Global Media Holdings has also agreed to acquire our Film Expo business, which includes the ShoWest, ShowEast, Cinema Expo International and CineAsia trade shows.
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A couple of weeks ago I was invited to be part of a panel that would preview and comment Soledad Bravo's effort, "Latino In America" #LIA. What you see here in the product of my appearance.

As I was sitting in an empty camera room, watching the video, I actually was amused, outraged, annoyed and moved to tears by what I was watching. To me that means that Soledad and her team did an awfully good job at trying to stir people's emotions and minds about the subject in question.

No, I wouldn't give them an A or even A- for their work. Even though their effort is certainly extraordinary --like the very quiet shout out they give to afroLatinos with the Garcia family with the 2 teenage boys-- CNN needed to give the topic at least 8 if not 12 hours in order to just cover the basics. I find it a failure on their part to dedicate less than a couple of minutes to Puerto Rico's colonial/commonwealth status.

That said, I think it is a good start.
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Here's the background: The features editor of the brick&mortar Washington Post, Raju Narisetti,  tweets some awesome commentary such as :

“We can incur all sorts of federal deficits for wars and what not ... but we have to promise not to increase it by $1 for healthcare reform? Sad.”

and 

“Sen Byrd (91) in hospital after he falls from ‘standing up too quickly.” How about term limits. Or retirement age. Or commonsense to prevail.”

These comments were tweeted on a private account; meaning that unless Narisetti gave you permission to follow him, there was no way to see the tweet. That is, unless it was cut and pasted into a new tweet, email, blog post, et cetera; and attributed back to him. Is that a bad thing? No, not really. There doesn't seem to be a breach of privacy. The problem has to do with the Washington Post itself.

In Ombudsman Blog - Post Editor Ends Tweets as New Guidelines Are Issued, Andrew Alexaner writes about Narisetti's reckoning of his tweets: They were “personal” observations, he said. “But I also realize that... seeing that the managing editor of The Post is weighing in on this, it’s a clear perception problem.”

And that's in and of itself a problem: The assumption that there's no perception at all in news reporting. And that WaPo sees this as what brings value to their "brand of journalism". A brand of journalism that seems to say that nothing that has happened in last 100 years in the field of knowledge studies (philosophy, linguistics, history, sociology, politics) bears any threat to this "freedom from bias" lie.

Let me give you a recent example using the latest news about Roman Polanski as an example.

Look at the following headlines which basically report on the same bit-of-news about Polanski's arrest and impending extradition to the United States. There's from the website of a California TV station, Roman Polanski arrested on warrant for 1977 sex charge. Here's the headline for a report coming out of the usually right-wing and conservative Examiner: Director Roman Polanski arrested for 1977 rape. Yet also look at the rather fact based opinion piece wrritten for the Guardian by Melissa McEwan: Roman Polanski's life of crime. Compare that to Anne Applebaum's The Outrageous Arrest of Roman Polanski. This last one was written for The Washington Post and still is bereft of any explanation of Ms. Applebaum's conflict of interest in the Polanski matter.

That's just a rather pedestrian example but it presents rather nicely how bias is projected by newspapers. In the case of the Polanski debacle there are those who refuse to call him a rapist even though he plea bargained his way into the statutory kind. Then there's those who either see Polanski as too good for the adjectives "fugitive", "criminal", "statutory rape" and instead opt for describing his situation as being inconvenienced by a "sex charge".

Which is why it's really amazing to read these guidelines. At this day and age, it is rather distasteful if not ludicrous for any newspaper or media outlet in this country to publish guidelines that dictate, All Washington Post journalists relinquish some of the personal privileges of private citizens.

WaPo is not only denying they are free of bias when writing a headline about a fugitive child rapist who also is a popular Oscar wining director. What they are saying also is that, after the 100+ years of ontological work by the likes o Nieztsche, Hegel, Blanchot, Derrida, Deleuze and Guattari, Foucault, Eco, Barthes and others that "perspective" and "opinion" are matters of "personal privilege".

As if perspective were something outside of humanity, something that you can turn on and off. As if "giving up perspective" were not only possible but in the case of WaPo something their employees really want in order to sell their "brand of journalism"

To which I have to say to the ladies and gentlemen of the Washington Post editorial board: Every single article or report your company publishe is a representation of your collective biases as a publication. To try to hide your biases is exactly the same as admitting them and wishing them away. Denying the individuals who work for you as journalists their ability to express and discuss their opinions and biases in a public forum is to force them to lie about the work they provide to your company. Which is to say, your desire to sell impartiality as residing outside of the reality of human perspective is a lie and it taints your image by suggesting you are a fabricator of news instead of being a true witness to history.

The full text of the guidelines was posted by Staci D. Kramer and we're reblogging with my commentary below:

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