"Yankees Drop Kate Smith's Version of 'God Bless America' Because People Were Racist in the 1930s"

From the Washington Post:

The voice of singer Kate Smith is rapidly disappearing from the world of professional sports. The New York Yankees reportedly confirmed Thursday that they were no longer playing Smith’s version of “God Bless America” during the seventh inning of home games, after the team learned of a Depression-era song she’d recorded that raised questions of possible racism. The Philadelphia Flyers followed suit on Friday, distancing themselves from Smith by taking her famed rendition of “God Bless America” out of their playlist and covering a bronze statue of the singer near their arena as they investigate the matter.

Smith and her rendition of “God Bless America” have been most closely associated in the sports world with the Flyers, who had a decades-long stretch of remarkable success in games preceded by her version. She performed it at the team’s former arena, the Spectrum, before the Flyers won the first of their two Stanley Cup titles in 1974.

Two of Smith’s other songs cited by the New York Daily News, which broke the story on Thursday, included “That’s Why Darkies Were Born,” a 1931 hit for Smith, and “Pickaninny Heaven.”

Via instapundit 

Joyner Lucas - I'm Not Racist

Via Reddit

I watched this over a week ago. I first thought Google would take it down, but it is up.

A BET writer defends the inevitable criticisms saying Joyner Lucas ‘I’m Not Racist’ Doesn’t Need Your Approval .

"'Baseball is a white man's sport'"

"Adam Jones on MLB's (baseball) lack of Kaepernick protest"

Perhaps someone is quietly sitting on the dugout bench, or even lingering in the clubhouse until the national anthem is over, but no one has publicly made their intentions known.

Why?

“We already have two strikes against us already,’’ Baltimore Orioles All-Star center fielder Adam Jones told USA TODAY Sports, “so you might as well not kick yourself out of the game. In football, you can’t kick them out. You need those players. In baseball, they don’t need us.

“Baseball is a white man’s sport.’’ (more)

UMass: Harambe jokes are an 'attack' on African Americans

"An email sent to some students at UMass Amherst is drawing criticism after students were told not to make drawings about Harambe, the gorilla killed at the Cincinnati Zoo earlier this year."

NYT: Is the National Anthem Racist?

NYT:  The continuing refusal by the San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick to stand during the playing of “The Star-Spangled Banner” before games has set off a debate about patriotism, protest and professional sports. But it has also raised another fraught question: Is our national anthem itself racist?

The journalist Jon Schwarz, writing in The Intercept, argued yes, denouncing the lyrics, written by Francis Scott Key during the War of 1812, as “a celebration of slavery.” How could black players, Mr. Schwarz asked, be expected to stand for a song whose rarely sung third stanza — which includes the lines “No refuge could save the hireling and slave/From the terror of flight or the gloom of the grave” — “literally celebrates the murder of African-Americans”?

That argument drew outrage from some conservative news outlets, as well as a more scholarly rebuttal from Mark Clague, a musicologist at the University of Michigan and the founding board chairman of the Star Spangled Music Foundation. We spoke with Mr. Clague, who is writing a book about the song, about the anthem’s history and shifting meanings. The interview has been edited for clarity and length.

Why do you think those who call the song racist are wrong?

The social context of the song comes from the age of slavery, but the song itself isn’t about slavery, and it doesn’t treat whites differently from blacks. The reference to slaves is about the use, and in some sense the manipulation, of black Americans to fight for the British, with the promise of freedom. The American forces included African-Americans as well as whites. The term “freemen,” whose heroism is celebrated in the fourth stanza, would have encompassed both.  (Link to rest of the interview)

"CBS put on defensive for new shows starring white males..."

Entertainment Weekly:  When CBS ordered six new shows last week, fans on Twitter pointed out the one thing they all had in common: The top-billed actor in each was white and male.

Soon observers began to accuse the broadcaster of not doing enough to cast women and actors of color at a time when the rest of the industry was making strides in that direction.

On Wednesday, CBS unveiled its fall schedule to reporters and network executives were asked about the network’s “male-centered” lineup.

It's come to this: Is Thomas The Tank Engine racist?

Sky News is debating whether Thomas The Tank Engine is racist and if it has enough “multi-ethnic trains" pic.twitter.com/HUsNuZwVxW

— James Cook (@JamesLiamCook) April 6, 2016

College Chronicles

"[W]hite student was... accused of 'cultural appropriation' for having dreadlocks"

The 47-second clip shows a woman physically stopping a white boy with dreadlocked hair and confronting him for 'appropriating her culture'.

SF Weekly has identified the man with the dreadlocks as Cory Goldstein.

Both the woman and Goldstein are San Francisco State University students and the confrontation is believed to have happened on the school's campus.

In the video another male student, who is also black, defends the woman.

Elsewhere... "University Cancels ‘Vagina Monologues’ Because a White Lady Wrote It"

“I felt that limiting women to only Eve Ensler’s work was doing a disservice to both the women performing and to the audience at large,” Rachel Arco, the sophomore who organized the performance, told the Megaphone. “This performance will largely be done with works by women of color,” she continued. “In doing so, it will be more representative of the experience of women, rather than only offering the white woman’s experience.”

But wait, that's not all... "Atheist group targets Muslim prayer rooms at University of Iowa"

“The presence of such religious venues on a public campus raises a number of issues,” the group argued. “By instituting areas that are exclusively used by specific religious groups such as Christians and Muslims, the University of Iowa is violating the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment. … The organization is also concerned that the university is facilitating the discriminatory practice of gender segregation practiced in the Muslim prayer rooms.”

"Migration fears not racist - Archbishop of Canterbury"

BBC: He recognised that some people had concerns about the pressure that new arrivals put on communities and services. The archbishop said: "There is a tendency to say 'those people are racist', which is just outrageous, absolutely outrageous.

"Fear is a valid emotion at a time of such colossal crisis.  "This is one of the greatest movements of people in human history. Just enormous. And to be anxious about that is very reasonable."

He said it was "really important" that fears were listened to, and resources put in place to address them. Archbishop Welby also described fear about what would happen if the UK left the EU or remained as a "valid emotion".

He adds: "I don't think there is one correct Christian view, one way or the other. You can't say 'God says you must vote this way or that way'."

Elsewhere... American devotion to religion is waning, according to new study 

Professor David Voas (UCL Institute of Education) said: “These declines aren’t happening fast, but the signs are now unmistakable. It has become clear that American religiosity has been declining for decades, and the decline is driven by the same dynamic of generational change that has driven religious decline across the developed world.” 

"Kanye West Asks "White Publications" to Stop Commenting on "Black Music""

To Pitchfork, Rolling Stone, New York Times, and any other white publication. Please do not comment on black music anymore.

— KANYE WEST (@kanyewest) February 15, 2016

I love love love white people but you don't understand what it means to be the great grandson of ex slaves and make it this far.

— KANYE WEST (@kanyewest) February 15, 2016

I'm surprised these tweets are still up... as of 10 PM the next day.

"It’s Now Racist to Wear Toe Rings"

National Review Online: Yep. According to the article’s author, Aarti Olivia, wearing these kinds of jewelry amounts to an appropriation of South Asian culture.

Olivia explains that in her culture, “it has been traditionally expected that married women wear bangles,” and that although that tradition is no longer “imposed upon women,” they do “wear them for religious or festive occasions.”

“In pop culture, you have probably seen the likes of Iggy Azalea and Selena Gomez wear them for music videos and performances,” Olivia writes. And that, she continues, is not okay.

In fact, according to Olivia, there is only one very specific situation in which a non-South Asian person such as a yucky whitey can wear this type of bracelet: “If you are in attendance of a Hindu friend’s matrimonial functions and the dress code is Indian ethnic — but [yes, there’s more!] be sure to check with your host first.”

Fox News Stacey Dash goes rogue

“We have to make up our minds, either we want to have segregation or integration,” Dash said. “If we don’t want segregation then we need to get rid of channels like BET and the BET Awards and the [NAACP] Image Awards, where you are only awarded if you are black. If it were the other way around, we would be up in arms, its a double standard.”

"#OscarsSoWhite, in Part Because #EverythingsAProblem"

A classic case of damn if you do, damn if you don't

WFB: For the second year in a row, no actors of color have been nominated for an Academy Award. As a result of this travesty, the Academy Awards—an organization that has awarded the following men

(From l. to r.) Alfonso Cuaron, Alejandro G. Inarritu, and Ang Lee

the last three Oscars for best directing, by the way—has again been slammed with the #OscarsSoWhite hashtag. People are very upset! There are so many strong movies with heavily black* casts, films like Chi-Raq and Beasts of No Nation. Why weren’t they rewarded?

Of course, we haven’t considered the fact that many of these films were also deemed extremely problematic, both before and after their release. Can you solve one problem (lack of Oscar diversity) by appealing to problematic art?

Let’s go through some of the snubbed pictures and see how socially conscious types addressed them during their release:

Chi-Raq

Chi-Raq is the latest Spike Lee joint; I reviewed it here. It’s a modern retelling of Lysistrata set on the streets of Chicago, where the gal pals of gang leaders refuse to give it up for their men whilst bodies are still dropping. Many people are rallying to Spike Lee’s side after he called out the Academy for its problematic lack of “flava” (his word, not mine). Of course, Chi-Raq itself was deeply problematic, as was a song tied to the film’s release:

Titled “WGDB”—We Gotta Do Better—it’s an ode to black pathology, anchored by two opinions. The first is that black-on-black gun violence is something that occurs because blacks widely approve of or ignore it, which means it still needs repudiating. The second is that maybe if black people just had more self-respect, the cops whose salaries black people pay would treat them nicer, shoot and/or jail them less, and so on. These are both bad and dumb opinions.

So let’s say Spike Lee’s film gets a bunch of nominations in the acting categories. What do the think pieces look like then? “Oh, sure, the Academy loves rewarding films that blame black people for all their own problems! #smdh #outrage” (read the whole thing)

Missouri student arrested for making racist threats on YikYak

Aged nineteen, from St. Louis, Hunter Park is a computer science student at Missouri University of Science and Technology in Rolla. He is charged with posting a threat about shooting every black person he sees on campus, except some are good guys.

Details of story at St Louis Today

Why would a computer science person do this? What in St. Louis would provoke a student to do such a thing? Is this the institutionalized racism the BLM student protestors are talking about (right at finals) or is this fresh racism reacting to fresh forces?  Hunter does not look anything like what we imagine racists look like and that is the point of the protesting students. Thanks Hunter, for demonstrating their point that everybody is racist inside. Truly racist or merely provoked Hunter still proved their point. He reinforced their worldview. He fed the unholy monster.

You're supposed to starve the monster, not feed it. Starve it by not giving it energy. The same type of energy that I feed the same monster by mentioning and discussing. So I'm guilty as well, here, let's draw a picture. Let's do something different instead. I like Hunter Park's look. He should be doing fun things like riding dirt bikes or rock climbing, not getting into trouble at university.

Hunter's got a great profile. Let's draw him.

"Missouri football players strike amid campus racial tensions"

"More than 30 black football players at the University of Missouri have said they will boycott team activities until the school's president is removed over his handling of racial tensions on campus. The players said on Twitter Saturday night they would not participate in practices or games unless president Tim Wolfe resigns or is sacked."

"The athletes of color on the University of Missouri football team truly believe 'Injustice Anywhere is a threat to Justice Everywhere'," the statement read, quoting slain black civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr. "We will no longer participate in any football related activities until President Tim Wolfe resigns or is removed due to his negligence toward marginalized students' experience. WE ARE UNITED!!!!!"

Racial tensions have been brewing for some time now at the University of Missouri. Here is a photo below of the University president Tim Wolfe, nearly a month ago, choosing not to confront the protesters, possibly believing meeting with them would only aggravate an already tense situation.

On Oct. 10, with the LBC abuse still fresh in their minds, Butler and 10 other African American students interrupted Mizzou’s homecoming parade by surrounding Wolfe’s gleaming red convertible. “We will be here until we are heard,” Butler shouted into a megaphone as Wolfe and his wife sat awkwardly on top of the back seat, “and our people are protected and they feel safe on this campus.” 

When Wolfe didn’t hear them out, Butler (the student now on a hunger strike) became even more frustrated. 

“I thought, ‘What else do I have to do to prove my humanity’?” Butler told The Washington Post. “What else do I have to do, just because I’m a black person, to prove to you that I deserve to have a good experience on campus? That’s when I started to think about the action of the hunger strike.” 

Then, two weeks later, Mizzou’s racial tensions flared again when someone used their own feces to smear a swastika on a communal bathroom wall in a brand new residence hall... For Butler, the disgusting incident, and the university’s response, was the last straw. On Nov. 2, he tweeted out a letter announcing that he was going on hunger strike.

"Ivy League Prof Calls Ben Carson a ‘Coon’"

University of Pennsylvania’s Anthea Butler has also called God a “white racist.”

A professor at the University of Pennsylvania called presidential candidate Ben Carson a “coon” because he said he’s cool with NASCAR flying Confederate flags during races if that’s what its fans want. 

“If only there was a ‘coon of the year’ award . . .” Religious Studies professor Anthea Butler tweeted last Tuesday in response to a tweet sharing a Sports Illustrated article about Carson’s comments.

Her post has since been deleted, but not before a screenshot of it was captured, according to an article in Campus Reform.

Something must have led this professor believe she could get away with that kind of barb against a distinguished African American.

midtone

For the race-obsessed party and their press tone is everything. SuperMexican put up a statement Obama is black because Democrats and media need him to be and this person is white because Democrats and media need him to be. We hear about and read about shades of color being important to so many for so long, about the words for specific degrees of skin pigmentation "high yellows" and the like, and percentages of racial heritage, "quadroons" and the like, I must say by observing it is Democrats and it is media that are tonality obsessed. And not just regular tonality. Mid-tonality. That's how specific the tonality obsession. In the US It MUST be reported this British person be white. It must. The British press has no such qualms. No such narration to insist upon. No such inherent racism pervading their reporting naturally with the ease of moving a slider. 

Levels window, "control L." 

“White Friends, Pay For My Therapy”

"An Oregon woman has raised nearly $1,500 to pay for illnesses she claims were brought on by being an Asian-American living in a predominantly white city."

“I grew up in and live in the [Portland] area. The stress of living as a Thai-Cambodian woman in such a white city replete with constant interpersonal and institutional racism has a big toll on my health and wellbeing,” according to the YouCaring posting by Rinna Rem.

Rem claims to be 29 and suffering from depression and the connective-tissue disorder Marfan syndrome.

“I’m 29 and really tired,” she wrote. “I want to live a healthy, happy life. I want to have a healthy, happy family in the future too. Help me pay for therapy to deal with the stress of racism. Please don’t let racism shorten my life or kill me.”

Why not move? If living there is so detrimental?

"The Hard Untruths of Ta-Nehisi Coates"

"A bestselling polemic riven with hatred thrills the liberal elite"

Coates’s great stylistic innovation is to render his inner turmoil thrillingly visceral by repeatedly, even obsessively, referring to America’s alleged determination to attack and cage “my body” or “the black body” in general, even when the topic is such abstract calculations as how mortgage lenders figure credit ratings. “How do I live free in this black body?” Coates asks. A better question would be, why does he imprison himself with fear? In a country the size of ours, a one-in-a-million event can be expected to happen 320 times. Coates behaves as if such headline-making events are the norm. A routine traffic stop that ends without incident (a cop pulled over Coates, checked his license, and sent him on his way) becomes memoir-worthy solely because of what’s going on in his head. “I sat there in terror. . . . I had read reports of these officers choking mechanics, shooting construction workers, slamming suspects through the glass doors of shopping malls.” Coates is, of course, like the rest of us, far more likely to die in a motor-vehicle accident than at the hands of police, but an all-consuming fear of cars is not going to get you anointed America’s deepest thinker...

Ordinary journalistic standards don’t apply to Coates. His aggrandizement is the predictable outcome when a self-flagellating elite class, having spent 30 years propagating notions of group rights and group guilt while dismissing individual agency, concludes that victim classes should be encouraged to bear witness to “my truth,” the better to advance an extreme vision. New York magazine detected no irony in titling its recent cover story “The Hard Truths of Ta-Nehisi Coates.” Coates is both an effect and a cause of the cultural leadership’s resistance to the precise and the rigorous, the rational and the logical. The book won’t be questioned by the cultural mandarins—can’t be questioned, can’t be treated as anything less authoritative than holy writ—because they share Coates’s feelings, and that is the only reality that matters. (read the whole thing)

"Dark complexioned couple shamefully beats up victim... for being in the "wrong hood"

This report is delivered by Fox6:

A confrontation outside a Milwaukee gas station turns violent and the disturbing video has surfaced online. The incident happened last week outside of a north side gas station. One community activist says it is important to see the reality in some parts of Milwaukee and make sure there is change. 

Near Locust and Teutonia, a woman is punched and kicked by two people while others stand around filming the whole thing. The incident happened last Tuesday, August 18th [2015]. The victim has not come forward and the attackers have not been identified. 

Milwaukee police say they are aware of the video but no official reports have been made. It is unclear the condition of the woman but the video shows she was able to get up after the beating.

Warning - disturbing video after the jump