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What We’re Fighting About When We Fight About Racism

A few days ago the Q-Center, Portland, Oregon’s aspiring LGBTQ community hub, hosted a discussion about racism. The event was organized in response to a mostly-online fight that erupted over a local gay bar’s Facebook ad for a performance by white drag performer, Chuck Knipp.

Knipp’s bread and butter is the character, Shirley Q. Liquor, whom he describes as “an inarticulate black welfare mother with 19 children.” I’ll spare you video. The act is performed in black face and plays to damaging and hurtful stereotypes for laughs.

Hundreds weighed in on whether Shirley Q. Liquor is an example of racism, … Read more “What We’re Fighting About When We Fight About Racism”

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More on Racially Profiling Whites

A friend (who I’m lucky to know because he’s so much smarter than me) commented my my post “Why Don’t We Racially Profile Whites?” pointing out that there is a white racial profile.

The white racial profile is the other side of the story of the way people of color are profiled. So, for instance, where welfare is concerned, Blacks are undeserving entitlement junkies, but whites are deserving needy people facing temporary setbacks, and that’s just among those who are able to put “white” and “welfare” together at all. Some would say whites are profiled as over-burdened taxpayers subsidizing freeloaders.… Read more “More on Racially Profiling Whites”

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My First Seder

What you make of liberation, that is the trick. Can you, unshackled, set someone else free?

– from “exodus and after” by Cynthia Greenberg.

I just attended my first Passover Seder.  For those, like me, who are new to this tradition, Seder is a gathering of remembrance of the Jewish story of liberation from slavery.  I’m 50.  One is not supposed to be a racial justice advocate attending his first Seder at 50!

I did once “observe” a Seder in Portland, Oregon circa 1991. It took place on the anniversary of the murder of an Ethiopian man named Mulugeta Seraw Read more “My First Seder”