COMING OUT COLORED™

Daily Kos: "Colored invisibility" and Media Exclusion

Thanks to my sistuh Liza Sabater at Culture Kitchen for hipping me to Daily Kos's "oversight" of finding any Black or Latino bloggers 'worthy' of their Top 100 list.

Sabater says she's "disappointed". I'm saying it's more of the same old same. Don't get me started. Writes LIza: "This is insane!" How true, my sistuh. Here we are - decades after "We shall overcome", still working to overcome the same old madness of exclusion. I don't know Peter Daou at Daily Kos, but it seems Liza rightfully has taken a chunk out of his... group blog. 

Kenyan Jeff Koinange's New Orleans dissonance

Kenya native and CNN AFRICA correspondent Jeff Koinange is accustomed to reporting on human suffering in places like Liberia or Congo. Those humans "just happen to be" Black yet in Africa Blackness is such a 'built-in' feature, few (often erroneously) ever mention - or question - it. Today Koinange is reporting from another disaster which has befallen people who also "just happen to be" Black - but this time they're in New Orleans, Louisiana USA. I don't think Koinange can quite describe the simultaneous familiarity and strangeness of where he finds himself. Where he is versus where it feels like he is. But I do hope he will take some time and process his feelings and perceptions, as they would yield him and all of us very valuable insights.

Internet images of people of color

How would Harvard's Project Implicit test on race describe and interpret a seemingly ordinary (to me) image? This is from Technorati. Helping 're-discover' the world's people of colour.

Technorati: "there are no posts tagged antiracism"

Well, before this one anyway... At 11 August 2005, on Technorati, prior to this post - in Technorati's own words - there are no previous posts tagged 'antiracism'. Part of me wishes I were making that up. Although I'm sure some relevant material already has been tagged under 'racism' (how about 'antiracist'?), the two words obviously are not exactly the same, and in the strictest sense they're antithetical. Tag: http://www.technorati.com/tag/antiracism

The 'Implicit Association Test' - Perceptions, and Coming Out Colored

Folks are talking about something called the "Implicit Association Test," or IAT. The discussion I saw on television focused only on how Blacks, whites and Asians - in the U.S. I think? - perceived Blacks and whites. There seems to have been no test or discussion of how the same groups perceive Asians, compared to their perceptions of, say, ("non-Hispanic") whites compared to American Indians, or Latinos/Hispanics who are people of color (which seems the vast majority of Latinas/os. I'd like to address this when I have more information and time. The IAT also raises issues of the transmission and 'contagiousness' of perceptions including some perceptions of "race" as well as how perceptions - positive and negative - spread and are spread deliberately, and what we can do about this when we take responsibility and choose to change images we're promoting.

 

Veteran photographer Chester Higgins' book of images, Elder Grace: The Nobility of Aging