Round up of interesting ideas

I feel like I am always a little behind on this blog.  I have read some great stuff this week, so rather that saving it and trying to pull together a piece of stunning integrated analysis I will share it now and analyze it all later if the muse comes to me.

WHITE MALE WAYS OF KNOWING by CLIFFORD L. STAPLES

I came accross this following my reading of bell hooks.  This is an older article but I appreciated his attempts at "reader respons-a bility" as described by Maria Anderson in "Recognition of Being" by claiming his white maleness as he reads hooks.  I like how he plays with his comfort/discomfort dichotomy as he reads as he moves from hope to loss and back again. 

 

I was taken with this quote " Sometimes I'm also afraid; there's always the chance that she's going to name one more prejudice I'm carrying around with me.  Confronting and sorting out these conflicting feelings about race is hard work. Not having to do this work until now, in my late-thirties, says a lot about what it means to be a white male."   So much hard work.  So much ignorance to be brought to light in my life.  But how far have we come.  Keep the hope.

 

I like that he does not go through this essay with the goal finding a solution to the issues of race, class and sex, but that he grapples with the problems that are introduced by even starting these conversation.  In talking you might say something wrong and look stupid and that is scary.  I feel this a lot as we talked about race alot working in anti-racism.  But one piece of research I read struck me.  The researchers argued that race is like sex and if children don't learn about this at home then they learn at school on the play ground, so that nice liberal parents who act "colour blind" may be actually doing more harm than having the hard conversations as they signal that race is something so bad you cannot speak about it.

" Wrestling with the issues that hooks raises for white readers will propel us toward ways of responding to black authors that are not racist; ways of responding that move between criticism and self-criticism in an effort to expose, not bury, the problematic nature of reading and writing in black and white."

My Body, The Unwelcome Relative by Arabelle Sicardi

This article made me kind of uncomfortable.  The lack of resolution in her story.  I had a viseral reaction.  I recognized parts of her story.  I wanted to know more.

Transgender Latina Woman Killed In San Francisco

The ongoing violence towards aboriginal women and trans women is numbing.  Cis or Trans we are sisters.  Taja Gabrielle DeJesus was our sister.

TIME MANAGEMENT OR TIME WARS? and 13 WAYS TO BOOST BRAINPOWER BY HONOURING CONNECTION by Zainab Amadahy

I liked these articles as they play on the popular list format of a lot of sites like Buzzfeed "providing X easy solutions to boost your Y".  Ms Amadahy adds an indigenous persepective that is a very good antidote to the quick and easy solutions to get rich/thin/smart fast.