Quickies
Quickies: Chola Fashion Trends and Feminism, Dinosaur Feathers, and Native American Actors Protest Stereotyped Characters
- Why Rich People Think They’re Middle Class – “Chris Christie’s net worth (at least $4 million) is 50 times that of the average American. His household income of $700,000 (his wife works in the financial sector) is 13 times the national median. But he doesn’t think he’s rich.”
- Native Actors Walk off Set of Adam Sandler Movie After Insults to Women, Elders – “The examples of disrespect included Native women’s names such as Beaver’s Breath and No Bra, an actress portraying an Apache woman squatting and urinating while smoking a peace pipe, and feathers inappropriately positioned on a teepee.” :-O!!
- So You’ve Been Publicly Scapegoated: Why We Must Speak Out on Call-out Culture – “What these works all have in common is that they attempted to address something that has exorcised radical activists for years: the mob mentality that grabs ahold of us when we use social media, where we lose ourselves in the censorious crowd eager to punish someone (almost always a single individual) who gave great offense. In other words, the screaming, directionless crowds on the internet who descend onto someone unlucky enough to get their attention.”
- The Folk Feminist Struggle Behind the Chola Fashion Trend – “I get it. Celebs reference the style to conjure a subversive and feminine fierceness. Aesthetically, cholas are really fucking cool. However, there is a dysfunctional idea at the heart of these instances of chola appropriation—that an elaborate outfit is all you need to enter into a culture. ” From Kerry.
- That Fat Person You’re Looking At. – “Shame is an unsustainable motivator. Your disdain is ultimately an albatross around their neck… and around yours.” From Donna.
- Dinosaur Feathers Discovered in Canadian Amber – “Today a group of paleontologists announced the results of an extensive study of several well-preserved dinosaur feathers encased in amber. Their work, which included samples from many stages in the evolution of feathers, bolstered the findings of other scientists who’ve suggested that dinosaurs (winged and otherwise) had multicolored and transparent feathers of the sort you might see on birds today. The researchers also presented evidence, based on the feathers’ pigmentation and structures, that today’s bird feathers could have evolved from dinosaur feathers.”
- Seattle Author Sherman Alexie Once Again Makes Banned Books List – “Marcie Sillman talks with author Sherman Alexie about his novel, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, and its place on the American Libraries Association list of most frequently banned and challenged books.”
- Amandla Stenberg: What if We Loved Black People as Much as Black Culture – “Stenberg, alongside classmate Quinn Masterson, created the video Don’t Cash Crop on My Cornrows for her high school history class and later released it on her Tumblr. In it, she presents a truncated history of cultural appropriation with the majority of her focus on black hair and the rap-to-pop crossover of the past 20 years. Stenberg discusses pop acts like Macklemore, Miley Cyrus, Katy Perry and Iggy Azalea—all white artists who’ve profited from black culture as the actual treatment of black people worsens (or at least becomes more public).”
It’s Friday, time for cute things! Here’s a dog trying to get a baby to chase it. This 7-year-old wrote an amazing comic called Moxie Girl, which features magical afropuffs. (From Courtney.) And this girl gets gifts from the birds that she feeds. (From Amy.) Here’s a guy who took the bugs in his garden and set up little photoshoots for them.
Sherman Alexie seems to get banned everywhere. You’d think his books were some kind of porn for the degree of banning. (I mean, okay, The Toughest Indian in the World includes explicit gay sex, but that’s not the one we’re talking about here.)
On Sandler, there is a history of…sexually explicit Lakota men’s names like Iron Penis (ce mãza) or Wanker (slukela). (Both are actual historical people, BTW.) But that’s men’s names, and then you have the rest of it; could you imagine someone urinating while giving the Eucharist? Probably not. And you just know these jokes are just added in for their own sake, MacFarlane style, because Hollywood can’t do a comedy without forcing jokes into places where they make no sense these days.