A teacher, mercifully left anonymous, was filmed rapping in blackface on Halloween.
Chris Norwood, the MUSD school board president, called the teacher's actions "inappropriate, unprofessional and insensitive," according to an online statement.
"As an African American man, the history of Blackface reminds me of the cruelty, hatred and fear my parents and people of African Ancestry have dealt with in the past and still experience today around the world," Norwood said.
Imagine: it's 2019, you're a history teacher, you ain't black, but your school board president is. The thought comes to you: I know, I'll black up and rap for the kids. 🤷 🤷 🤷
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On Halloween, a child at Creekside Elementary School in Kaysville, Utah wore a Nazi uniform as his costume for a parade at school. After some people complained online, the school principal and a teacher were suspended with pay for allowing such a thing. I wish they could suspend the boy's parents from being parents. According to the Salt Lake Tribune, "others (on social media) supported the boy." From the Salt Lake Tribune:
In a statement, the Davis County School District apologized for the costume.
“[The district] does not tolerate speech, images or conduct that portray or promote hate in any form,” the statement read. “The district is taking the matter very seriously and is investigating every aspect of the situation.”
School district spokesman Chris Williams declined to name the faculty members who were placed on paid leave, but the elementary school’s website lists Steve B. Hammer as the principal.
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Henderson, Kentucky is a town of about 30,000 people in the western part of the state. It's not far from Evansville, Indiana, and it's one of the top three corn and soybean producers in the state. Read the rest
The NRA used advertising agency Ackerman McQueen to transform itself from a pro-gun group into a right-wing media toilet, then fired the firm when it woke up to the consequences of spokespeople issuing shameless calls for violence against political enemies and the media in its name. Now a lawsuit is exposing all the dirty laundry: the NRA claims its executives found Dana Loesch's NRA TV antics "distasteful and racist", that they were lied to by Ackerman McQueen about traffic, and eventually realized they were being looted for "tens of millions of dollars."
... NRA officials believed the short-lived TV outlet—which featured shows from right-wing stars like Dana Loesch and Dan Bongino—“strayed from the Second Amendment to themes which some NRA leaders found distasteful and racist.” As an example of a “damaging” segment, the NRA filing alludes to an instance on Loesch’s show Relentless, in which an on-air graph featured a picture of kid’s cartoon character Thomas the Tank Engine wearing a Ku Klux Klan hood. “Attempts by the NRA to ‘rein in’ AMc and its messaging were met with responses from AMc that ranged from evasive to hostile,” the gun lobby further alleges.
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Three Muslim families were unlawfully forbidden to board an NYC ferry, according to a complaint filed by the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR). The women in the families were wearing traditional Muslim garbs -- "hijabs, religious headcover, and long dresses covering their legs and arms for religious purposes." The families were about to board but were stopped by an NYC Ferry employee who told them they would not be allowed on the ferry do to a security issue. They were escorted to a security officer, who said he didn't know why they had been prevented from boarding the ferry. When they returned to the boarding area, a ferry employee told them they had been denied boarding because their children had been observed standing on seats, a claim that another ferry employee contradicted.
From NBC News:
NYC Ferry offered to reimburse the families for their fares, calling the incident a "misunderstanding." CAIR said it is seeking payment of compensatory damages for "humiliation, embarrassment, and severe emotional distress" and punitive damages.
New York City's Economic Development Corporation, which runs NYC Ferry, told NBC News that it was aware of the complaint and is investigating the incident.
Image: Shinya Suzuki/Flickr. Attribution-NoDerivs 2.0 Generic (CC BY-ND 2.0) Read the rest
A black security guard at Madison West High School in Madison, Wisconsin, asked a student—also black—to stop calling him the n-word. The school fired the security guard, citing its zero-tolerance policy on racial slurs.
Marlon Anderson's Facebook post in which he describes his termination from the Madison School District after working there for 11 years generated hundreds of comments supporting the former school worker. Many derided the district's zero-tolerance policy toward use of the slur by staff in any context. ...
"Regardless of context or circumstance, racial slurs are not acceptable in our schools," West High School Principal Karen Boran said in an email to families Wednesday.
In a statement, Madison School Board President Gloria Reyes said the district has "taken a tough stance on racial slurs" in an attempt to improve the school climate for students and staff.
The school became notorious for all the racist slurs, the zero-tolerance policy was introduced to get rid of the racist slurs, but it has been used to get rid of a black member of staff complaining about the racist slurs. Read the rest
Garrett Hardin's 1968 Science essay "The Tragedy of the Commons" is one of the most widely assigned readings in the past ten years' worth of university syllabi; notionally, it describes how property that is held in common is prone to overuse and exhaustion, while privatization creates an owner who has an incentive to serve as a wise steward over the resource.
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**UPDATE** The young girl has admitted to lying about the attack. **UPDATE
At the private school where Karen Pence, wife of the US Vice President, three sixth grade boys reportedly subdued a young black girl and cut her hair.
WUSA9:
Three sixth-grade boys are accused of pinning down a fellow classmate -- a 12-year-old girl -- on the playground and cutting her locks because they are "nappy" and "ugly."
Amari Allen said she has never been more traumatized in her life until Monday when she said a group of white male classmates attacked her on the playground at Immanuel Christian School, a private K-12 school, in Fairfax, Virginia.
Amari tells WUSA9 that one boy covered her mouth and the second boy put her hands behind her back, while the third boy pulled out scissors and cut her medium-length locks while calling her names.
Allen's family pays nearly $12,000 a year for Amari to attend the private school where Vice President Mike Pence's wife, Karen Pence, teaches there twice a week.
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It was very briefly a feelgood story. Carson King held up a silly sign with his Venmo account asking for beer money, and when money started pouring in, immediately decided to dedicate the funds to the children's hospital in Iowa City. ESPN and other outlets publicized the story, Venmo and Busch agreed to match funds, and soon $1 million had been raised. But the internet's symbol is a duck devouring its own milkshake-covered tail, so the story soon turned to poison.
The Des Moines Register decided to profile King, and in the process of researching the story, a reporter dug through King's Twitter feed until finding racist jokes posted in 2012 when King was 16. After the reporter mentioned the tweets to King, King expressed disgust and shame at his own actions, and then publicly expressed those sentiments.
Despite King's comments, internet sleuths pursued the reporter, investigating their social feed until finding racist and homophobic tweets posted between 2010 and 2013. The Des Moines Register responded to that news by firing the reporter.
In related news, TweetDelete is a service that can delete your tweets in bulk or on a schedule.
(Image via Wikipedia.) Read the rest
A day after a photo emerged of Justin Trudeau in brownface, as an Aladdin-esque genie at a 2001 party, the other shoe dropped: video of him fully blacked-up in a minstrel wig. The video dates from the 1990s.
CBC News:
The video was shot in the early 1990s, however it’s not clear where it takes place.
The video, obtained exclusively by Global News, shows Trudeau covered in what appears to be dark makeup and raising his hands in the air while laughing, sticking his tongue out and making faces. He’s wearing a white T-shirt, and his jeans are ripped at the knees. It appears as though his arms and legs are covered in makeup as well.
You can't trickle-truth when you don't control the faucet. Read the rest
He was performing 'Day-O,' the Afro-Jamaican chant made famous by Black civil rights activist Harry Belafonte.
Days since last Facebook scandal: Zero.
The man President Donald Trump once used as a 'my African American' stage prop now says the GOP is pursuing a "pro-white" agenda, uses black people as "political pawns."
Gregory Cheadle does not have anything good to say about Trump, either. Read the rest
Having managed to be so vile as to be kicked off Twitter, a darling of the white supremacy market complains about how hard it is to be him.
Vice:
The provocateur made no mention of the harassment that landed him in social media jail. Nor did he touch on being forced out of Breitbart the following year, after he made comments that seemed to endorse pedophilia.
While Telegram allows Yiannopoulos to share such important commentary with more than 19,000 followers directly, it does not offer the mass reach of Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube. The same goes for Gab and other social networks set up in protest of Big Tech’s increasingly aggressive content-moderation efforts.
“I can’t find anyone who’s managing to grow a really big channel here,” wrote Yiannopoulos, whose Telegram posts typically reach around 2,000 pairs of eyeballs. “Everyone is hitting a wall. There’s no future to Telegram for social media refugees if this is the best it gets.”
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A Glendora, California woman is about to blow a gasket because she spots a man in the Walmart parking lot who "looks illegal." That's the reason she tells police that they have to come and arrest him. "There's a guy illegal here," she insists. "The other guy behind him might snap my neck." She babbles on, irate as hell, and even gets into a heated argument with another guy, in his car, who calls her a racist. The only thing askew is that it's a sunny day and she's not wearing her MAGA cap. Read the rest
Glad no one was hurt, but seriously? $250? Read the rest
You can explain it to them. They can sense the damage, and they can perceive that they have made a mistake. They can pretend to be contrite, and maybe for a brief moment they can even understand what it is they have done wrong. But as soon as the voices of complaint fade away and the crisis subsides, they'll go right back to doing it again, because the truth is they don't care and they are completely indifferent to everything about you that they cannot take and sell.
UPDATE: Here's the amazing full-length version; Johnny Depp is involved.
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