Asian Boss, a YouTube channel that features person-in-the-street interviews around Asia on different topics, went to Shanghai to ask people about what they thought of white foreigners living in China, about skin lightening, and about "white monkey workers" -- white people hired by Chinese companies to appear at dinners and events to make the company seem more international. Read the rest
2,000 US schools use textbooks from Abeka, BJU Press and Accelerated Christian Education (ACE), including tax-funded charter schools across America; students who learn from these texts are taught that God wanted Protestantism to flourish in North America and that Catholocism is not a true faith; that it was better Africans to be enslaved and come to "know Christ" than to be free but not Christian; that evolution is untrue; that humans and dinosaurs lived together (and that Noah brought baby dinosaurs on the ark); that the Loch Ness monster is real; that "abortion, gay rights and the Endangered Species Act" are part of a "radical social agenda"; that nonwhites are inferior (60% of the tax-funded scholarship students at charter schools come from racialized minorities and are thus taught that they are racially inferior to their white schoolmates). Read the rest
Niall Ferguson is a conservative British historian who teaches at both Oxford and Stanford, where he chaired a right-wing lecture series called Cardinal Conversations. Read the rest
Last Monday, UC Berkeley woman's basketball coach Lindsay Gottlieb and her fiance Patrick Martin tried to board a Southwest flight with their one year old, biracial son; they presented the check-in clerk with their son's passport, but the clerk refused to let them fly until she showed the clerk Facebook posts or a birth certificate to prove that she was her son's mother. Read the rest
Back in April, afrofuturist icon Janelle Monáe (previously released Dirty Computer, an "emotion picture" that serves as accompaniment to her album of the same name. Read the rest
Myisha Haynes and Jaz Malone released the second in their fun and interesting series on how cartoonists can draw black people while avoiding imagery fraught with negative connotations. Read the rest
A working paper from a pair of political scientists analyzed World Values Survey data to trace the rise of support for authoritarianism in America to a growing sense among white people that democracy's commitment to giving everyone a vote would soon erode their privilege, as the growing population of racialized people started to vote for fairer policies. Read the rest
Nkechi Diallo, formerly known as Rachel Dolezal, was charged with welfare fraud this week over payments totaling about $9,000, received between 2015 and 2017. As Dolezal, she served as the Spokane Chapter NAACP President, but became infamous after it was found that her biological parents were white.
According to court documents, Diallo illegally received $8,747 in food assistance, and illegally received $100 in childcare assistance. Total restitution, according to the documents, is $8,847, allegedly stolen from August 2015 through November 2017.
The tl;dr: she kept signing on after getting a book deal and other income that put her beyond the threshold for assistance.
Previously: Kareem Abdul-Jabbar on Rachel Dolezal, Isaac Hayes, and Al Jolson Read the rest
Aaron Schlossberg is the triggered snowflake who became internet famous when he went on an unhinged racist rant against some customers and servers at a restaurant near his law office, who had been speaking Spanish. Read the rest
On April 29, a black family set up their charcoal barbecue in the designated barbecuing area in Oakland, Californias' Lake Merritt, only to have a hostile white woman come and demand that they move on or face arrest, because they were using charcoal in one of the areas designated for gas grilling. Read the rest
Since Donald "Childish Gambino" Glover debuted his single "This Is America" on last week's Saturday Night Live, the song and its accompanying video have raced around the internet, sparking analyses and arguments. Read the rest
In 2016, Google banned ads for payday lenders; now it has followed up with a ban on another predatory industry: for-profit bail bondsmen, who rip off black people and poor people with deceptive financing terms that are designed to create a usurious cycle of permanent debt. (Image: Sarah Nichols/CC-BY-SA) Read the rest
The BBC has published a long and welcome feature on Afrofuturism, the term coined by former Boing Boing guestblogger Mark Dery to describe (in the words of Steve Barnes) "science fiction, fantasy and horror created by or featuring the children of the African diaspora (people of African origin living outside of the continent)." Read the rest
The Washington Post created some interesting maps that show levels of diversification in various American cities. They categorize cities like Chicago as examples of legacy segregation, where cities like Houston indicate rapid diversification. Read the rest
Oakland, California -- a city across the bay from San Francisco whose large African-American population has struggled with gentrification and police violence for decades -- has a long reputation for police corruption and surveillance. Read the rest
From Labor Notes, a weekly report-card of teachers' strikes, which are spreading from state to state, with North Carolina -- the laboratory for gerrymander-fueled Republican takeover -- next in line for a wave of school closures. Read the rest
The Negro Motorist Green Book was a series of annual guides for African-American drivers and holiday-makers who wanted to know where they could find gas-stations, restaurants and hotels that would serve them and which "sunset towns" they should avoid on pain of violence from corrupt, racist law-enforcement. Read the rest
