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I knew it would be bad, but who’d thought it would feel this terrible?
One thing I know is this:
After the jokes, and even as we trigger back into all our various kinds of respect, you can’t help but feel that something else really terrible has happened, more than just his death.
The question is: what?
More later. For now it’s just the sad (and the smiles and the dancing and the listening!)
In the meantime, a nice clippy thing below:
So here is the question: do we take the Sasha and Malia Obama dolls as shameless profiteering, or do we take the dolls as part and parcel of wanting to celebrate everyone’s favorite new family?
To be honest, I’m hard-pressed not to see this as pretty shameless. But, at the same time, my perusal of the comments at sites like Huffington Post gets me feeling a little bit suspicious in the other direction. Most of the comments there and elsewhere, are pretty, well, poopy. A little more mean in spirit than snark; a vague hostility whose target is unclear. I can’t quite put my finger on it.
While poking about, sussing out my thoughts, I come across this website, called Dolls Like Me.
I must say, in the context of this site, Sasha and Malia dolls resume being awesome. Now they remind me of all the dolls so many Americans have wanted to exist for so long: black dolls, relevant dolls, gasp– dolls like me!
(Or maybe you.)
No, Miss Obama doesn’t refer Michelle Obama (and who would have the nerve to call her such a thing anyway?!). No, “Miss Obama” is what France has dubbed Chloe Mortaud, the first woman of African descent to be named Miss France. So I guess she’s Barack Obama’s sister!?
But, no, the “new” also isn’t about Mortaud being mixed race and bi-cultural, with a white French father and an African American mother. If she’s Obama’s sister, it’s in the good ole fashioned political sense. And that, I think, is a big step for France, which officially adheres to policies that do not acknowledge racial difference. (Race riots? What riots?)
But back to Miss France.
Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: 30 Rock, Chloe Mortaud, Miss France, Obama, race, Sarah Palin, The Root, Tracy Morgan
Earlier this week, the sci-fi writer Steven Barnes
The article offers his take on the currently-raging debate over King Tut’s complexion, which is taken as a signifier of his (and therefore Egypt’s) links to Sub-Saharan Africa and is also taken as bearing on the matter of whether Egypt should be understood as “African” or “Middle Eastern.”
(Whatever. Everyone who has ever seen a Hollywood film knows that the ancient Egyptians were white, just like Jesus! You can click the head for a pictorial history of Tut, and if you haven’t heard this story, background reports are at the end of this post.)
This week’s hoopla actually started in 2005, when a major museum exhibit was accused of whitewashing Tut’s image. The exhibit featured “new” images of Tut popularized by Zahi Hawass, secretary general of Egypt’s Supreme Council of Antiquities, who in 2005 led a team of anthropologists and forensics experts France, Egypt, and the United States. Just this week, Hawass declared:
I’m watching Fox’s Don’t Forget the Lyrics. There is a black minister from Topeka, Kansas singing karaoke-ing The Rolling Stones’ “Brown Sugar.”
Something is very wrong with this. It’s difficult to be sure. But I am reminded of sitting in my tiny study in my old Flatbush apartment. Looking out the window, I see a squirrel perched on a fence post, chowing down on a chicken wing.
A chill goes through me. Oh Wayne.
In The New York Times today:
“Skulls Confirm We’re All Out Of Africa”
Well, apparently UNICEF Germany, like The Guardian, might have already gotten the memo:
But maybe they also took it a little too seriously? (curtsy to Black Women in Europe, via African American Political Pundit)
John over at Theory My Culture has a nice post on the recent brouhaha over a British group asking Borders to remove Tintin in the Congo from shelves.
(And don’t worry, I’m not jumping on the tintin hate bandwagon lorry… I’ve hated this tintin shit my whole life!)
At the center of his post, John asks an interesting question: Read the rest of this entry »
According to this story by Christi Parsons in the Chicago Tribune, Barack Obama came with it during a Democratic candidate’s forum yesterday to the NAACP (story below). The article compares his statements to the NAACP with a speech he gave at Howard University, where he spoke in “mostly lofty terms.” At the NAACP event in Detroit, however, Parsons’ describes Obama’s statements as combining “his intellectual assessment of social problems with a stronger does of personal feeling.”
So, following my previous post on Jamaica, which got me thinking about race and class, of course I came across this news gem at Jack and Jill Politics, about “Hot Ghetto Mess,” a new show on BET. The news originally came via Racewire.
Here’s a quote from BET, but there is more to read at Jack and Jill:
“Hot Ghetto Mess” is an entertaining, tongue-in-cheek examination of the good, the bad and the ugly of Black popular culture. Read the rest of this entry »
I posted a little bit on this on Cypher&Syllable last week, but it’s time to listen more closely. The original 911 recording and some transcription are after the jump.
Via Racialicious, I found this article at the L.A. Times, regarding Edith Isabel Rodriguez’s death at the Martin Luther King Jr.-Harbor Hospital: Read the rest of this entry »