Updates and Stupidity-ates....
Apr. 11th, 2013 08:33 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
captainsblogCameron's taxes got accepted, and they should have his refunds in a couple of weeks.
Our incredible illegible mortgage payoff got duplicated and delivered, and we're still hoping to know a closing date tomorrow. It won't be tomorrow, but since I tentatively have four of next week's five workdays scheduled at least partially out of town, it'll be damn nice to know when they're expecting to show up someplace for placements of John and Jane Hancocks on actual documents.
Other than those, the most noteworthy news of the day, for me at least, was reading about the odd collaboration between country singer Brad Paisley and rapper LL Cool J to try to bridge the ocean-sized chasm of racism in this country:
“Accidental Racist.” The title of the new Brad Paisley-LL Cool J collaboration alone is enough to signal “proceed with caution” for discerning first-time listeners. Those words, in that order, read immediately like a cop out, an attempt to side-step responsibility for prejudiced thoughts or actual racist behavior. And the song, with its qualified defense of the Confederate flag and its improbable Lost Cause logic offered up by a hip-hop legend, bear out those fears in rather stunning—if ridiculous—fashion. The video circulating yesterday and this morning has since been removed. You can listen to the song here, with lyrics here.
...
In the song, Paisley says we’re “fightin’ over yesterday … siftin’ through the rubble after a hundred-fifty years.” Thus he jumps from Reconstruction to the present, as though Jim Crow never happened, as though overt racist don’t happen anymore, as though, in 2013, there aren’t still high school students trying to integrate their prom. Racism—in schools, in the court room, in the hiring process, and elsewhere—still exists, and shouldn’t be dismissed as black people failing to get over something that happened “a hundred-fifty years” ago.
So, no, Brad. Battle flags and do-rags are NOT equivalences. Even if I'm sometimes slightly off-put when I see a dude passing me on the street in the former, I don't feel a justification to slap the latter onto my bumper, or flagpole, or t-shirt out of some sense of tit-for-tat. Your song may help begin a useful conversation, but if this equivalence is where you're going with it, that chat's going to be a painfully short one with my participation.
Our incredible illegible mortgage payoff got duplicated and delivered, and we're still hoping to know a closing date tomorrow. It won't be tomorrow, but since I tentatively have four of next week's five workdays scheduled at least partially out of town, it'll be damn nice to know when they're expecting to show up someplace for placements of John and Jane Hancocks on actual documents.
Other than those, the most noteworthy news of the day, for me at least, was reading about the odd collaboration between country singer Brad Paisley and rapper LL Cool J to try to bridge the ocean-sized chasm of racism in this country:
“Accidental Racist.” The title of the new Brad Paisley-LL Cool J collaboration alone is enough to signal “proceed with caution” for discerning first-time listeners. Those words, in that order, read immediately like a cop out, an attempt to side-step responsibility for prejudiced thoughts or actual racist behavior. And the song, with its qualified defense of the Confederate flag and its improbable Lost Cause logic offered up by a hip-hop legend, bear out those fears in rather stunning—if ridiculous—fashion. The video circulating yesterday and this morning has since been removed. You can listen to the song here, with lyrics here.
...
In the song, Paisley says we’re “fightin’ over yesterday … siftin’ through the rubble after a hundred-fifty years.” Thus he jumps from Reconstruction to the present, as though Jim Crow never happened, as though overt racist don’t happen anymore, as though, in 2013, there aren’t still high school students trying to integrate their prom. Racism—in schools, in the court room, in the hiring process, and elsewhere—still exists, and shouldn’t be dismissed as black people failing to get over something that happened “a hundred-fifty years” ago.
So, no, Brad. Battle flags and do-rags are NOT equivalences. Even if I'm sometimes slightly off-put when I see a dude passing me on the street in the former, I don't feel a justification to slap the latter onto my bumper, or flagpole, or t-shirt out of some sense of tit-for-tat. Your song may help begin a useful conversation, but if this equivalence is where you're going with it, that chat's going to be a painfully short one with my participation.