Content with terrible themes is often defended as a ‘product of its time,’ but this argument holds no water with me.
No more ‘product of its time,’ please
Tag: racism
The real story behind racism and Donald Trump
Some have attributed a rise in racist activity to Donald Trump, but the real blame lies the other way ’round, with that activity driving the rise of Trump.
Laying Some History On You: The Chinese laundry
The story behind the plethora of Chinese laundries in the United States is a dark one, and a reminder that social phenomena often have sinister origins.
Laïcité and the burkini ban
The infamous burkini ban is allegedly about sexism, but it’s really about anything but — this is a calculated attack on Muslim women and girls hiding behind the shield of protecting freedoms.
Fighting dual racisms: People of colour in the environmental movement
Racism plays out in many complicated ways for people of colour in the environmental movement — in addition to the structural inequalities that degrade the environment in their communities, the movement itself continues to struggle with racialised problems.
Child actors of colour deserve better
I didn’t watch the 2016 Oscars, for a number of reasons, not least of which is that I feel increasingly disconnected from what the mainstream Hollywood establishment wants to celebrate and what I enjoy viewing. The event has been criticised heavily from a number of angles, but I’m especially fed up with seeing limited diversity […]
Must minorities dance for you before they can be human?
As Quantico started its slow rise into the US consciousness — an interesting take on the traditional procedural, presented in an intriguing way — I started reading a great deal of commentary about the show, and I particularly enjoyed Anu Bhagwati writing at the New Republic about Priyanka Chopra’s role on the show. Bhagwati noted that Chopra is a […]
Yes PTSD is a disability and yes it is racialised
Defining ‘disability’ can be a slippery thing. There are definitions government agencies use for the purpose of demographic studies and addressing requests for reasonable accommodations. Workplaces, educational institutions, hospitals, and long-term care facilities use their own definitions, and within the disability rights movement, there are many ways to conceptualise disability. This is not, in other […]
How one lion reveals our race problems
The death of Cecil the lion in what may have been a poaching in Zimbabwe was still filling headlines worldwide Thursday — and spurring Internet vigilantes everywhere, who are descending upon the life of Dr. Walter Palmer, his killer, in droves. On July 1, Palmer shot the lion in circumstances that suggest he and his guides […]
The intersectionality of chronic pain
100 million adults in the United States have chronic pain conditions. Women are overrepresented in their number. Women of colour, even more so. There’s a tangled thread of circumstances that creates these imbalances, and it loops around to another problem: Intersectional oppression in the treatment of chronic pain, both medically and socially. Deep-seated social attitudes about […]