Mike from the Useless Duck Company simply wanted to make a dancing and talking banana robot. For his troubles, he got banned from Twitch due to racist and sexist content. Read the rest

Edward Suazo recorded and posted a video of a white man harassing his wife and the cashier at a NYC deli; the Caucasian fellow was triggered by hearing people speaking in Spanish, prompting him to loudly, grossly insult several strangers, accusing them of being undocumented immigrants and vowing to have them deported. Read the rest

Wherein a contractor invests in a house and the next-door neighbor objects to him entering the house, insults him, and calls the police: "This is what we go through, young black men trying to do what's right."

The cops turn up and check his paperwork. Some other neighbors emerge to see what all the fuss is about. Then everyone starts chatting amicably. This further angers the racist lady. Read the rest

Police in Rialto, California have released bodycam footage of an incident in which Bob Marley's granddaughter was detained when a white neighbor reported her for suspected burglary. Donisha Prendergast was merely staying at an Airbnb, on her vacation, with friends, while Black. Read the rest

A woman delivering lunch to an Atlanta residence was assaulted, say police, but fought off her attacker with her keys.

The woman, 29-year-old Sonya Kristina King, said that she entered the home of 55-year-old Rick Painter to drop off his lunch. She said as she tried to leave the home, Painter grabbed her by her headdress and attempted to grab her by the neck. She responded by hitting him on his face and body with her keys. When police entered the home, they say they discovered Painter had blocked the door with a couch. They found Painter naked with "scars, marks, and bruises on his head and torso."...

"Painter, who has a criminal record and was described by one of his neighbors as a "racist," declared himself to be "Jesus" during the attack," CAIR-Georgia said.

The "headdress" was described elsewhere as a niqab or "religious veil". Here's NBC News with more:

Police met the driver at the South Grand Avenue address. When they got there, they tried to get inside the apartment, but found the door was blocked by a couch.

Officers were able to move the couch aside, and found Painter laying in the bed with the covers up. When they drew the covers back, they found Painter unclothed, covered in scars, marks and bruises on his head and torso.

First responders treated Painter at the home, then transported him to Grady Memorial Detention for further treatment.

Officials charged him with misdemeanor battery. A judge set Painter's bond at $5,000, and his next court date is May 23 at 9 a.m.

The UK's Data Protection Bill is far-reaching and long overdue, extending vital privacy protection to Britons -- unless they're immigrants. Read the rest

Anti-Muslim hate personality John Guandolo was speaking just a couple of weeks ago about his desire to arrest Democratic and GOP leadership, then execute people. Mr. Guandolo's 'training workshops' on the dangers of jihad have some popularity among some police officers in the U.S., as evidenced by past speaking engagements with various police departments. Mr. Guandolo is now reviving that speaking tour. Read the rest

Calling cops on black people is something white people do to place them in lethal danger, which is why several members of the Grandview Golf Club in York, Pa., left the course Saturday to avoid trouble, even after local police declined to charge them with the imaginary crime of playing golf slowly.

The five are part of a larger group of local women known as Sisters in the Fairway. The group has been around for at least a decade, and all of its members are experienced players who have golfed all over the county and world, Thompson said. They’re very familiar with golf etiquette, she said.

Thompson said the man from the second hole, identified as former York County Commissioner Steve Chronister, his son, club co-owner Jordan Chronister and several other white, male employees approached the remaining two women and said they took too long of a break and they needed to leave the course.

The women argued they took an appropriate break, and that the men behind them were still on their beer break and not ready to tee off, as seen in a video Thompson gave the newspaper. The women were told that the police had been called, and so they waited.

Northern York County Regional Police arrived, conducted interviews and left without charging anyone.

Apologies are easy when money is on the line. For a taste of the resentment and rage involved in this incident, watch Jordan Chronister having to be pulled away from one of the black woman as his anger escalates: start at 0:37. Read the rest

If you want to erode the public's trust in the legal system, making a court house an unsafe place to be, even during what's supposed to be a joyful occasion, is a great place to start. Just ask Alexander Parker and Krisha Schmick: They went to a courthouse in Pennsylvania, intent on getting married. The pair had known one another since high school and it seemed like the right time. There was just one problem – Alexander's skin was brown and the judge he and his bride were to stand before was a raging bigot.

According to Newsweek, when Parker and Schmick stood before Judge Elizabeth Beckley in Camp Hill, Pennsylvania, instead of presiding over their wedding ceremony, she called Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agents to check out Parker.

Parker, originally from Guatemala, was adopted by American parents and brought to the United States when he was eight months old – he is legally allowed to be in the country. He has the paperwork to prove it, too. But for some reason, maybe because, I dunno, HE WAS GETTING MARRIED, he forgot the official documents that proved his right to be in the country at home. All he had on him was a Guatemalan identification card. Court staff, believing for some reason that the document was a fake, contacted ICE to check Parker out.

On his wedding day, when he should have been exchanging vows, Parker was answering questions. Instead of having a ring slipped on his finger, he was forced to provide fingerprints. Read the rest

A young man from Florida hoped to impress a potential prom date with a sign reading "IF I WAS BLACK I'D BE PICKING COTTON,BUT I'M WHITE SO I'M PICKING U 4 Prom?"

The Huffington Post:

Acting principal Kathy Wilks sent this message to parents:

“We want to make everyone aware of a student’s social media post that has caused a very concerning situation. It involves one of our seniors and his ‘promposal’ to another student.

“It was racial in nature and administration became aware of it last night. Many who saw the post are understandably upset with its contents as well as the subsequent commentary to the post. Riverview High School absolutely does not condone or support the message conveyed in this post.”

It isn't clear from the story if the target of his romantic proposal agreed to go to prom with him. Read the rest

This is a pretty amazing thing for a company as big as Starbucks to do. Read the rest

Whoever scripted this hated Belize almost as much as they hated Britain -- it's so sanctimonious, condescending, self-loathingly offensive you suspect it's dark comedy and start looking for Peter Serafinowicz to show up. But it's an old explainer for upper-crust military officers, apparently, a glove that certainly fits all the above. It's gone viral as an artifact of the 1980s, but by then Belize was independent, so it's probably older. The political backdrop: Belize was supposed to become independent in the 1960s, but Britain knew Guatemala would invade if they left, so things got very complicated. It's one of the funny little secrets of decolonization that Britain was responsible for Belize's defense well into the 1990s and never really left. Read the rest

U.S. President Donald Trump is expected to sign a proclamation today to authorize deployment of National Guard troops to the southwest border with Mexico. Read the rest

Thanks to a recent court filing, we may soon see who's responsible for funding the bigoted neo-nazi bullshit machine we all loathe and know as The Daily Stormer. Read the rest

A few years ago Vicki Momberg launched into a racist rant as a black police officer attemtped to help her. Shockingly, the video went viral. For verbal racist abuse a South African court has given Momberg a 3 year sentence, of which she will spend at least two in prison.

Via The Guardian:

In a ruling that lawyers believed to be the first prison term imposed in South Africa for verbal racial abuse, estate agent Vicki Momberg was sentenced to three years, with one year suspended, for directing offensive slurs at the officer. Previously people convicted of the same crime have been fined.

A video clip went viral following the incident in 2016 when the police officer tried to help Momberg after thieves broke into her car at night at a shopping centre.

It showed her saying she wanted to be helped by a white or ethnic Indian officer, and that black people were “plain and simple useless” and “they are clueless”.

In her rant, she several times called the policeman a “kaffir”, apartheid-era slang for a black person and one of the worst terms of hate speech in South Africa.

Momberg wiped away tears as judge Pravina Rugoonandan read the ruling in a Johannesburg court on Wednesday, finding her guilty on four counts. Momberg’s lawyer, Kevin Lawlor, said she would seek the right to appeal against her sentence.

The episode highlighted how 24 years after Nelson Mandela became South Africa’s first black president, espousing reconciliation, the country is still struggling with race relations.

As a child in 1942, Mireille Knoll escaped the capture of Jews by police in occupied France during The Vélodrome d'Hiver roundup. The majority of those arrested during the roundup were sent to Auschwitz, where they were killed. Her evasion of France's Nazi puppet police force during the second world war allowed her to survive the horrors of the Holocaust, unlike so many of her neighbors and relations. But she couldn't escape racism. Her time on earth came to an end this past week after she was stabbed 11 times and left to die in her burning apartment, in Paris, France. She was 85 years old.

According to the The Washington Post, Knoll's murder has French journalists and Jewish advocacy groups concerned that, given the area and brutality in which her life was ended, there could be reasonable grounds for the murder to be considered a hate crime. As in North America, Anti-Semitic hate crimes have been on the rise in France. In the past year, bigots and fascists who were once too afraid to show their hate in public have made their way into the mainstream, emboldened by the politics of our times.

From the Washington Post:

Jewish advocacy groups were quick to put the case within the context of rising anti-Semitism in France and to point out the similarities to another high-profile case being investigated as anti-Semitic: the April 2017 killing of Sarah Halimi, a 66-year-old Orthodox Jewish physician and kindergarten teacher who was beaten in her apartment and then thrown out a window.

As a species, we've got a long history of being shitty to one another for no other reason than skin color. White folks, myself included, have arguably earned the right to drop the mic on bigotry. Over the centuries, we honed systemic racism to such a razor edge that the cuts our ugly worldview made are still being suffered today. As our world's recent politics have illustrated, a lot of people still buy into this superiority-of-the-white-man bullshit. But it's getting better. Views are changing, albeit slowly, and we're crawling on our knees towards equality.

I think that one of the reasons that it's taking us so long to get there is that no one likes to admit that they're wrong. Doing so puts you in a perceived position of weakness, which is ironic given that owning one's faults can be so powerful. Believing this as I do, I was really surprised to read this morning that National Geographic decided to call itself to account for the racist reporting that its correspondents have written and they've published over the decades:

Instead of wasting their time on naval gazing, the magazine's editorial team asked an outsider, historian John Edward Mason, to hunt down all of the ugly, racist writing he could find from National Geographic's archives. As National Geographic's current Editor-in-Chief Susan Goldberg explains, examining the publication's past was both painful and necessary:

I’m the tenth editor of National Geographic since its founding in 1888. I’m the first woman and the first Jewish person—a member of two groups that also once faced discrimination here.