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Synagogue of Augsburg, Germany.
Source: Neil Folberg. And I Shall Dwell Among Them. Historic Synagogues of the World.
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no desire to see the show again but
how I do love this supreme jackass
let me count the ways
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even a single book may overspill the skin.
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Carl Kronberger - A Portrait of a Girl Wearing a Golden Hood
indian and hindu women apparently aren’t inspiring enough to be featured on a bindi blog.
Push this blog into the fucking sea
Sometimes appropriation/borrowing/inspiration/etc. from traditional styles in contemporary fashion is a complex and nuanced issue.
And sometimes it’s not. Burn, baby, burn.
EDIT: Checked the blog. She tags her posts (all of apparently white models and starlets) with ‘indian’ and ‘desi’.
(via retronoisette)
February 19, 1942: Franklin D. Roosevelt issues Executive Order 9066.
The order provided for the designation of military areas (to be decided by the Secretary of War and commanders of the U.S. armed forces) from which “any or all persons” could be relocated. No specific ethnic groups or sections of the nation were singled out in the text of the order, but it stated that these new powers would serve as “protection against espionage and against sabotage”. In practice, it resulted in the internment of 120,000 Japanese-Americans, nearly two-thirds of whom were American-born citizens; smaller numbers of German- and Italian-Americans were interned as well, but no ethnic group was targeted by the government to the extent that the Japanese were.
Virtually every Japanese-American living on the West Coast was interned, while a small fraction of those living in Hawaii - just over a thousand - suffered the same fate. The justification for the executive order was practical; it was believed that many Japanese, Issei and Sansei alike, could not possibly remain loyal to the United States if it went to war with Japan. It was outwardly practical (the Ni’ihau Incident seemed to prove American suspicions), and it was deeply rooted in racial prejudice. Many white farmers were glad to see their Japanese competition uprooted and displaced; several newspapers printed opinion pieces that supported wholeheartedly the internment based on their own personal feelings toward the Japanese; the American public (including even Theodore Geisel/Dr. Seuss) generally supported the move; and the Supreme Court, the ultimate defender and interpreter of the U.S. Constitution, upheld the constitutionality of the executive order in Korematsu v. U.S. (also see: Hirabayashi v. U.S.). Camps were run by the Wartime Civil Control Administration and the War Relocation Authority; the largest of these by population were Tule Lake and Poston, but the most well-known today is Manzanar.
Some Japanese-Americans escaped internment by volunteering to serve in the U.S. Army, and many of them served in the famous 442nd Infantry Regiment, a unit that fought in Europe after 1944. Ironically, while many of its members’ families remained interned at home based on widespread racism and suspicions of disloyalty, this all-Japanese unit eventually became the most decorated infantry regiment in the history of the U.S. Army: twenty-one of its members were awarded the Medal of Honor.
Executive Order 9066 was eventually rescinded in 1976, and surviving Japanese internees received payments and apologies from the U.S. government in the 1990s. But money paid four decades later could not compensate for the time lost in the camps; the businesses, homes, farms, and other property sold last-minute at ridiculously low prices by their owners or vandalized and destroyed in their absence; and the humiliation and disillusionment at having been denounced by their own countrymen and rounded up by their own government.
(via amanda-gayfried)
It’s Time to Retire the Indian Motif in Sports
When Kevin Gover was a kid growing up in Norman, Oklahoma, college students at the nearby University of Oklahoma had begun protesting the school’s mascot. Known as “Little Red,” the mascot was a student costumed in a war bonnet and breech cloth who would dance to rally crowds. Gover, who today is the director of the American Indian Museum, says he remembers thinking, “I couldn’t quite understand why an Indian would get up and dance when the Sooners scored a touchdown.” Of Pawnee heritage, Gover says he understands now that the use of Indian names and imagery for mascots is more than just incongruous. “I’ve since realized that it’s a much more loaded proposition.”
On February 7, joined by a panel of ten scholars and authors, Gover will deliver opening remarks for a discussion on the history and ongoing use in sports today of Indian mascots.
Though many have been retired, including Oklahoma’s Little Red in 1972, notable examples—baseball’s Cleveland Indians and Atlanta Braves, and football’s Washington Redskins—continue, perhaps not as mascots, but in naming conventions and the use of Indian motifs in logos.
“We need to bring out the history, and that’s the point of the seminar, is that it’s not a benign sort of undertaking,” explains Gover. He’s quick to add that he doesn’t regard the teams’ fans as culpable, but he likewise doesn’t hesitate to call out the mascots and the names of the teams as inherently racist. - Continue reading at Smithsonian.com.
Ed note: The director of the American Indian Museum believes that in a decade or two, culturally insensitive mascots in sports will be gone. What do you think?
![theatlantic:
Why We Took Cocaine Out of Soda
Hale’s account of the role of racism and social injustice in Coca-Cola’s removal of coca is corroborated by the attitudes that the shaped subsequent U.S. cocaine regulation movement. Cocaine wasn’t even illegal until 1914 — 11 years after Coca-Cola’s change — but a massive surge in cocaine use was at its peak at the turn of the century. Recreational use increased five-fold in a period of less than two decades. During that time, racially oriented arguments about rape and other violence, and social effects more so than physical health concerns, came to shape the discussion. The same hypersexuality that was touted as a selling point during the short-lived glory days of Vin Mariani was now a crux of cocaine’s bigoted indictment.
Read more. [Image: 1894 ad for Vin Mariani, art by Jules Cheret]](http://24.media.tumblr.com/8793f59a6923d31cf34be320df2e69c8/tumblr_mhhxdvJEiX1qcokc4o1_500.png)
Why We Took Cocaine Out of Soda
Hale’s account of the role of racism and social injustice in Coca-Cola’s removal of coca is corroborated by the attitudes that the shaped subsequent U.S. cocaine regulation movement. Cocaine wasn’t even illegal until 1914 — 11 years after Coca-Cola’s change — but a massive surge in cocaine use was at its peak at the turn of the century. Recreational use increased five-fold in a period of less than two decades. During that time, racially oriented arguments about rape and other violence, and social effects more so than physical health concerns, came to shape the discussion. The same hypersexuality that was touted as a selling point during the short-lived glory days of Vin Mariani was now a crux of cocaine’s bigoted indictment.
Read more. [Image: 1894 ad for Vin Mariani, art by Jules Cheret]
A Black And White 1860s Fundraiser : The Picture Show
At a glance, they look like any other Civil War-era vignettes and portraits of children kneeling in prayer or cloaked in the U.S. flag. But, there’s more to these pictures than meets the eye.
Photo: Library of Congress
(via nprradiopictures)
Astounding..land a lot of people on both sides of segregation who experienced it are still alive. Mind-blowing, thank you for posting this.Recently The Gordon Parks Foundation discovered over 70 unpublished photographs by Parks at the bottom of an old storage box wrapped in paper and marked as “Segregation Series.” These never before series of images not only give us a glimpse into the everyday life of African Americans during the 50′s but are also in full color, something that is uncommon for photographs from that era.
(via fireofspring)
As much as I want to appreciate the sentiment here, I feel like there’s a lot wrong with it. And I feel like, in these issues, it’s important to be accurate rather than simply appealing to emotion.
The language “killed them all” is incredibly problematic because it fuels the mythology that Native Americans are just historical figures with no place or relevance in the modern world. That’s not the reality at all. We still exist, and there are literally millions of us.
The oversimplification of our history (read: “white people killed the natives during colonization”) doesn’t help anyone, least of all modern Native Americans. Playing on white guilt doesn’t benefit Natives, and it definitely doesn’t benefit relations between Natives and white people or the cultural discussions, like this, that are necessary for positive change. The plight of the modern Native American is not that we’re hung up on white people coming over 500+ years ago and killing a bunch of us. That’s a falsehood that makes it really convenient for ignorant people to pull the “I don’t feel guilty for what my ancestors did; get over it” card. And that’s bullshit because the problem is not that a large number of us were killed 500 years ago. It’s that 500 years ago a war was started to systematically wipe us off the continent both biologically and culturally, and that many—if not most—of the colonial laws, policies, treaties, and ideologies used as weapons of that war are still very much in place today—meaning Natives Americans in today’s society still have to struggle against them. The plight of the modern Native American is fighting to hold onto who we are while achieving a place in a society that, even after over five centuries and so much civil progress, is still built on the promise of freedom and equal opportunity for every American but us. That’s not on anyone’s ancestors; it’s a modern problem that modern people are actively participating in and supporting through activities like cultural appropriation.
And, while it certainly doesn’t help the matter, wearing a headdress as a fashion statement is not offensive because Natives died during colonization. It’s offensive because it’s not a hat; it’s a sacred, respected symbol that has to be earned in many of our cultures. It’s offensive because cultural appropriation has long been a very successful weapon of cultural genocide because nothing dissolves a culture faster than rendering every important aspect of it meaningless and then commercializing it. It’s offensive because it stereotypes us as historical or mythological rather than showing us as fellow humans who deserve equal respect and consideration. It’s offensive because it revives a long, incredibly racist tradition of white people mockingly playing Native dress up (exactly like wearing blackface). It’s offensive because it’s an act of white supremacy that sends the message that white people are entitled to everything we have or are simply because they want it, and that that’s somehow acceptable behavior.
(via huntsmonsters)
(via nprfreshair)
