“Documenting images of American Indian, Alaska Native, and Native Hawaiian people, language, and culture in everyday life: countering stereotypes one cigar store Indian at a time.”
Monthly Archives: October 2010
“because not everyone in Detroit eats raccoons…”
A series of photos and stories.
How many spirit guides do I have?
Erin Pavlina answers questions about who you have on the other side helping you through life. You have guides who are with you your whole life, part-timers who help you with certain aspects of life, temporaries who help you with specific tasks or crises, and possibly a conduit guide if you’re an experienced intuitive.
I blog this mainly because it sounds like it would make for a really interesting book. Maybe fiction, maybe creative non-fiction, maybe fictionalized, depending on who’s writing it. Some kind of story from the point of view of all these different guides: how you end up being one type or another, what it’s like to be one type or another, how the various types interact with one another, etc.
Lady Scouts is, obviously, Girl Scouts for grown-ass women. Basically, it’s an institutionalized “Girls’ Night,” but for ladies who don’t say “Girls’ Night” and also who are awesome. And there are badass sashes (to come).
- Lady Scouts is for all manner of grown-ass women, youngish and oldish, married and single, gay and straight and something else, and other boxes we fit into (you get it).
- Instead of boxes of cookies, we sell boxes of wine. (When this becomes real, and not just something I say because it’s hilarious, I will let you know)
- Our song goes like this: Make new friends, but keep the old, but maybe don’t friend everyone you went to high school with on Facebook, let’s have some dignity.
- Like regular scouts, camping is important. “Camping” in this case is a metaphor for bar crawls.
Love it. I pretty much love anything that employs the use of the term “grown-ass woman.” You can submit badges.
Improving the “mulatto” definition on wikipedia: what we can do
This thread is for us to brainstorm how to improve the “mulatto” definition on wikipedia, and to make sure the improvements stay in the definition Here’s some of my thoughts:
1. Make it clear “mulatto” equally means people who are first generation AND multigeneration white/black mixed.
2. Emphasize the “mullawad” etymology of mulatto meaning “mixed’ in arabic as at least equal to the “mulo” etymology of meaning mule. I think one anonymous person keeps trying to emphasize the “mulo” etymology and put down the “mullawad” etymology for the sole purpose of trying to harm positive mulatto identity.
3. Make it clear many people in Brazil and other places DO identify as “mulatto”. Make it clear many people in America DO consider “mulatto” to be a positive identification label.
4. A bunch of us need to commit to visit the “mulatto” page on wikipedia regularly, make sure it’s edited to reflect positive mulatto identity fairly, and to remove unfair, negative edits.
The good people at mulatto.org discuss. It’s a couple years old, but the discussion is still relevant. A nice little piece of community organizing.
[W]e realized that we’d never seen a Coming Out Day feature dedicated to the experiences of lesbians, gay men, bisexuals and transgendered persons in the sciences and engineering. Science journalist powers: Activate! We hope today’s two-part celebration will add to the diversity of stories and help science-minded young queer folks everywhere know that it does, indeed, get better—both through the course of history, and the course of an individual’s life.
BoingBoing celebrates National Coming Out Day.
National Organization of Gay and Lesbian Scientists and Technical Professionals
The National Organization of Gay and Lesbian Scientists and Technical Professionals, NOGLSTP, is a membership-based professional society of gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender people — and their allies — employed or interested in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics fields. NOGLSTP educates people on LGBT issues in science and the technical workplace, and fosters mentoring and networking among its members.
Due to the media attention being given to suicides by bullied gay and lesbian youth, we have decided to create a list of straight kids who have been bullied by gays and lesbians until they were driven to take their own lives.
Make sure you turn your sound on.
Private Moment Made Public, Then a Fatal Jump
It started with a Twitter message on Sept. 19: “Roommate asked for the room till midnight. I went into molly’s room and turned on my webcam. I saw him making out with a dude. Yay.”
That night, the authorities say, the Rutgers University student who sent the message used a camera in his dormitory room to stream the roommate’s intimate encounter live on the Internet.
And three days later, the roommate who had been surreptitiously broadcast — Tyler Clementi, an 18-year-old freshman and an accomplished violinist — jumped from the George Washington Bridge into the Hudson River in an apparent suicide.
This is so unbelievably heartbreaking. Homophobia, bullying, privacy.
I cannot wait to see what becomes of the two students charged with invasion of privacy. I’m sure that they don’t think that homophobia plays into this, but it does. Would this have even happen if Tyler were making out with a girl? Which makes me think that, though invasion of privacy is the legal charge, and bullying is the primary issue, I wonder if it’s at all possible they’d be charged with a hate crime if a prosecutor can prove that homophobia motivated the incident(s). Even if it wasn’t motivation, it certainly exacerbated the situation.
While they may find acceptance by loving parents and be encouraged by a culture increasingly embracing their identity, these young people find that “being themselves” is not always well-received by an important slice of their world — school administrators, children who bully, and even teachers who subscribe to the “toughen up” philosophy. This world has not caught up, even as anti-bullying policies are being passed across the country.
An editorial by Pam Spaulding.