Ultime Fauchelevent

mohandasgandhi:

brofiling:

white privilege radically changes the appearance of Tsarnaev bros

This is how brofiling actually works in real life. The Week Magazine ran with this image as their cover sketch.

Just so it is said, clearly and unambiguously: the Tsarnaev brothers are white guys. They are white. The FBI’s own wanted poster for Dzhokhar Tsarnaev lists his race as “white”, but you would never know it from the cover image on The Week.

Hold up the cover to someone else, and ask them how many white people they can see on the cover. Chances are they will identify Gabby Giffords on the top left and the image of the Boston policemen (all white men) on the top right, but how about those two guys in the center? Nope, not a chance that anyone would say these caricatures look white.

Why? Because in addition to being white they are also “Muslim”, which is the current dehumanizing “Other” that whiteness has constructed as a sanctioned target for violence in US popular culture.

This is how white privilege works in media representations and everyday life: when the criminal suspects are demonstrably white men, seize upon any aspect of difference and magnify it such that they become Othered, non-white, and menacing. If it is too hard to do so, simply dismiss them as aberrations and isolated cases of insanity. This is also how white culture, specifically the process of whiteness in conjunction with white privilege, portrays several non-white identities, including those that are now considered white but at one time were decidedly not so. For example, see here for how the Irish were depicted as violent apes or lazy drunks in the late 1800s to early 1900s.

If this story is true, Tamerlan Tsarnaev clearly self-identified as a white Muslim. The Week Magazne is active on Tumblr. Maybe they can help explain how this cover happened.

This is interesting. I think it was the younger brother who said he was often asked by people at his mosque if he was Syrian, and “white” tends to be more about borders than anything. Italians/Spaniards are considered white, but some look very similar to Middle Eastern people. Maybe they’d be described as “Mediterranean” by the FBI, but I doubt it. The government knew they were of a Russian Republic background, and Russia is “white”. These guys don’t quite look like their caricatured versions, but they also don’t look like what most people would imagine a “white” guy to look like.

My main point, we’ve got to stop ordering people by white/black/middle eastern/asian. It’s not descriptive of the people, it’s just descriptive of what we think of the country they come from. Of course we have to have some way of simply describing someones color when it comes to searching for someone(let it be criminals or missing children). These guys, I’d probably describe them as “white/middle eastern” as they have qualities of both. If I was looking for two white guys with ball caps I’d walk right past these guys, and try and find two bros down by a frat house.

The brothers literally come from the Caucasus Mountain regions. It is where we get the word caucasian, and it’s also one of the geographic borders that separate Europe from Southwest Asia. That’s why these guys have a look that can meet both ideas of what their “race” may be. 

About the caricature. Well, it’s a caricature, but I do think they were obviously drawn a bit darker than they actually are. Everything else is spot on for that style of portraiture. That kind of drawing is used in all kinds of political art, but it is fair to say that these two “white/middle eastern” guys were drawn more “middle eastern” than anything else. Hopefully The Week will acknowledge that as a big mistake.

The Week shouldn’t have had them be that dark, and the FBI shouldn’t have tricked you all into thinking that these guys were your everyday white guys. 

(via peacepunx)

beeishappy:

TDS | TCR 2013.04.22 [x]

(via m-ellen-choly)

newsweek:

This story out of Little Falls, MN is tragic:

According to the complaint, Smith, 64, told police that he heard someone breaking into his house at noon on Thanksgiving. He showed police the window he says Brady, 17, and his cousin, Kifer, 18, used to enter his house, which he said had been broken into several times before. Lange, his friend, said he kept his valuables downstairs.

Smith told police he armed himself with a rifle and a handgun and waited downstairs until he saw the first person’s feet, then legs, then hips.

He said he fired and the first victim, Brady, tumbled down the stairs. While Brady looked up at him, he shot him in the face, according to the complaint.

“I want him dead,” he told investigators.

He put Brady’s body on a tarp and dragged him into his basement workshop and sat back down i his chair.

Several minutes later, he heard more footsteps and saw Kifer coming down the stairs. He waited until he saw her hips, then fired. She also fell down the stairs, but then his rifle jammed and Kifer laughed.

That angered Smith. “If you’re trying to shoot someone and they laugh at you, you go again,” he told police.

He then pulled out the .22-caliber, nine-shot revolver that he was wearing, and fired “more shots than I needed to.” He dragged Kifer into the workshop, placed her next to Brady and noticed she was still gasping for air.

“Smith stated at this point he placed the handgun under the woman’s chin and shot her … up into the cranium … a good clean finishing shot.”

There’s self-defense and then there’s cold-blooded execution.

This guy does sound very disturbed, but this is one of the few reasons(I say few because I don’t think you need a lot of reasons to not break into peoples homes.) I don’t break into peoples homes. I would have stopped at the point in which the trespassers were subdued. Hopefully that would be once they see I have a gun(which I don’t currently own), but who knows what would happen. Especially after shooting someone and all they can do is laugh. Did anyone else think that was odd? Not that it makes it okay to end things off with a “good clean finishing shot.”. I know I don’t ever want to be in a situation where there are multiple people breaking into my home. What would you do. Just let the first guy sit there, and hope the others don’t have weapons? It’s an odd thing. 

The fact that this story seems to be a complete white washing of the situation, and turned into a story about how the futures of two teens were taken from them is complete bull. Yeah, the dude is crazy, but he killed two future convicts. Is the old man a sicko, yeah, but are these kids angels, no. I don’t know if I charge him with murder though. Given the whole situation I’d lean towards manslaughter… send this dude to a mental hospital. 

I feel sorry for the families of the teenagers, but I also feel sorry for the family of this crazy old man. Wild stuff I hope I never have to go through. 

Thanks Wiki! Sunglasses, and all. 

Kim Jong-il has died.