white weekend links

• "This Respectable Negro's Feelings Have Been Hurt--Mr. McCain and the Republicans Once More Exclude Us Poor Negroes from the American Narrative" (Lady Zora, Chauncey DeVega, and Gordon Gartrelle @ We Are Respectable Negroes)

  [C]an't McCain throw Black Americans at least a little love as being a people who are central to the national narrative? I, like you, know the answer. McCain cannot include Black Americans as "Americans" in his halcyon infused imagining of America because our very inclusion would detract from the Republican's grand narrative this election cycle (and of many previous), that Black people are really alien, hostile, foreign, and outside of the American mainstream: especially if they are named Obama and Michelle.

• "Old White Guys Making Music Are Figuring Out This Internet Thing" (David Hauslaib @ Jossip)

  White people love the Internet and social networking sites. And everyone loves to download music for free off of LimeWire. But how do old, white people bands make money off their product when no one is paying cash for their compact discs anymore?

  Case in point: Recall R.E.M., that band that was really popular with your older siblings and had that really fast song about the end of the world as you know it. And you felt fine?

  Michael Stipe hopes you remember, and in between listening to Muxtape.com and writing for Pitchfork, he would like you to check out his new awesome Internet campaign to become relevant again. And he's not alone.
  
  
  

• "Ladies and gentlemen--but mainly just white people . . ." (Ta-Nehisi Coates)

  I present your spokesperson [John Rich]. . . . He comes equipped with requisite "black friend," and a buddy who plays an "American guitatar"--as opposed to a, you know, French one. I know, I'm mocking "small-town American." I clearly have no regard for the "white working class"--the only working class that exists, ever, in history. What do you expect? I'm the only guy who started drinking Honest Tea because McCain mocked Obama for drinking it.

• "What is it with white people?" (David Paul @ Liberty: in great measure the cause of all people)

  So, my wife and I are sitting here, and I look to her and just shake my head. What is it about these White kids that they just keep having babies? Wouldn't you know that that man makes the effort to put a White on the ticket, and a woman at that, and the next thing you know, her daughter is pregnant!
  
  I mean really, what with all the advantages they give White people, the least you would think that they would teach their kids some values and not go around being like that. And now they say that she was the same thing, pregnant in high school and had to get married and all?
  
  The shame of it is that this is going to set White people back another 20 years.

• "Welcome to the USA, Where All the Classes Are Middle" (Glen Ford @ Black Agenda Report)

  In the American political conversation, "middle class" is sometimes so vague as to be meaningless, while at other times the term "middle class" stands in for a whole range of implicit "values" and attributes--especially race--that have nothing to do with one's type of work or salary. "Middle class" becomes a code word by which politicians and propagandists identify people who are the good, solid, "salt of the earth" people versus the Others. Rather than a useful term of economic and social science, "middle class" is in practice a cultural construct and political weapon.
  
  "Middle class," in the mouth of a racist, is code for white people, or a certain kind of white people. These kinds of culturally "middle class" white people tend to live in the "Heartland"--another American term whose only use is to promote a virulent strain of white nationalism. Of course, the "Heartland" is a racial and political construction that has nothing to do with geography. Missouri is located in the Heartland, but inner city St. Louis, Missouri is not. That's where the "Others" live. Few people want to be counted among society's "Others"--so, naturally, most people will claim to be "middle class" regardless of their true condition.
  

• "Review of Undoing Whiteness in the Classroom: Critical Educultural Teaching Approaches for Social Justice Activism" (Helen Anderson @ Teachers College Record)
  

  [In] her essay “Figuring the Cultural Shape We’re In,” Cathy Bao Bean writes with reference to her own experience as a “Chinese American” about the complexities of multiculturalism and the need for conceptualizing culture outside an American pyramidal framework. As she explains, in this cultural pyramid that shapes many American social institutions: “[T]here is room for fewer or only one at the top...Progress is linear and upward....The most desirable is primarily a matter of exclusion and choosing only one...’Perfection’ and ‘ideal’ are meaningful terms.” In contrast to her American self, Bean describes her Confucian self “as being the central space of a spider web. In this web, there is no ‘I’ except that which is formed by the strands or ‘relationships’ to family, neighbourhood, company, government and so on.” She contends that undoing the hegemony of whiteness requires reconfiguring the cultural shapes that one is/”we” are in, paying attention to one’s multiple selves and the ways that diverse cultural situations have shaped her or his life/our lives.

• "White People Like taking credit from Asians: Who is Myles Valentin?" (Restructure!)

  Christian Lander received a $350,000 advance and receives royalties for his book, Stuff White People Like: the Definitive Guide to the Unique Taste of Millions, but Myles Valentin is living paycheck to paycheck in East Vancouver. Myles Valentin has written #11 Asian girls, #15 Yoga, #30 Wrigley Field, #31 Snowboarding, #44 Public Radio, #45 Asian Fusion Food, #56 Lawyers, #57 Juno, #66 Divorce, and #74 Oscar Parties. However, Valentin is rarely mentioned in articles about the blog Stuff White People Like, except being credited as Christian Lander’s Filipino friend.

• "White People, Can We Talk?" (TexasMango @ Daily Kos)

  I've found throughout my short life that few white people fully understand the extent to which all black people even, brilliant, successful and beautiful black people like the Obama's, are still subject to racism. This used to frustrate me, but then I thought about how separate black and white people often live. Some whites are well aware because they have black friends, black spouses or lovers. Or black people who are in their lives in some real intimate way that has allowed them to see the difference in treatment first hand. But for those of you who are not racist, but don't have black people you are close to, you are finding that many people you know don't want to vote for a black man for president and are using any excuse not to do so even though they know it's in their own best interests to vote for the Democratic Nominee. Many of you, especially people under 30 are getting aquainted with how race plays out in modern America, more covert then overt. You are shocked and hurt. I understand, but you better get over it and fast.
  

And finally a clip from "The Daily Show" that disrespectfully mocks rural, working-class white people. Or maybe, disrespectfully mocks people who disrespectfully mock rural, working-class white people?