There’s been a lot of discussion about creepy-ass crackers,” and apparently friend of the show, Jasiri X, decided to weigh in on the subject:
We may not use the term itself, but the sentiment expressed in Jasiri’s verse is real.
On today’s #TWiBRadio, #TeamBlackness discussed some history of the C.I.A.’s involvement with Nelson Mandela’s arrest (00:26:00), how “cracker” is not the same as “nigger,” (00:46:38) and why the #GOPisANTIme.(01:15:30)
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And this morning on #amTWiB, L.Joy, Imani, and the rest of the #TheMorningCrew discussed the potential Olympic village in Tulsa (33:00), prison guard insurance issues (51:00), and exfoliant destroying the environment (54:00).
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handy
Not another Snowden post!
MikeJ
As @kevin_church said on twitter, “Nobody ever hung a white guy from a lamppost with a note that said “THIS CRACKER VOTED.””
Dacia
@Handy: zing!
Chris
@MikeJ:
No “are black people the REAL racists?” bullshit argument should ever occur without someone throwing that quote in their faces. Good find.
Violet
Re: the exfoliant segment: the microbeads in exfoliant and lotions really are dangerous to the environment. They’re made of plastic, are not biodegradable and small things like fish end up ingesting them and it kills them. People don’t have any idea and the cosmetics industry has no incentive to tell you and the government doesn’t seem to care or regulate it at all. So vote with your wallet and don’t buy lotions and other stuff with microbeads.
ranchandsyrup
Here’s an article about a Cracker that code-switches. http://www.salon.com/2013/06/28/rand_pauls_code_switching/
Sorry for Salon link but the piece stuck in my craw because Seitz-Wald says that everyone code-switches and brings up Obama as a counter-example to Rand Paul. The way that Paul does it is different from how O does. Obama changes how he talks to people, not the entire message. Paul switches his message (sometimes a 180) to fit the ideology of the audience.
PeakVT
Here’s a big article on exfoliate beads and the Great Lakes.
Comrade Mary
@ranchandsyrup: Seriously? I don’t read Salon these days, and this just emphasizes why.
@Violet: Yeah, get a gentle willow-bark extract instead (salicylic acid). It’s much more effective for smoothing skin and clearing pores than rubbing with something mechanical.
Violet
Speaking of Crackers, Rick Perry is going to announce his future plans on Monday.
Sucks that he probably won’t run for Governor again. He’s beatable. Greg Abbott comes across a likeable guy, but a wingnut of course. He’s a paraplegic. Wonder how he feels about the Senate rejecting the UN treaty for the disabled?
ranchandsyrup
@Comrade Mary: I should really follow your lead re: Salon.
Comrade Mary
@Violet: He might have been beatable: TPM showed that he had a double digit lead over Davis in recent polling. In contrast, if Abbot runs against her, he has only an 8 point lead right now.
Violet
@ranchandsyrup: I haven’t read Salon in years. Occasionally someone links to it and I’ll visit it from there and kind of click around to see what they’ve got. And…no. It’s not what it once was, or even what it was after that. When it first came on the scene in the early years of the internet it was fantastic. I used to read it almost every day. And little by little it lost it’s purpose or voice or something. And I quit going every day. And then quit going every week and month. And now for years I have hardly ever been there.
muddy
@Comrade Mary: My pores have been super happy since I’ve been using the oil method. Seems counterintuitive, but it’s great.
Comrade Mary
@muddy: I’m glad that it works for you! Alas, I have rosacea, and the prolonged massage with oil (or anything, really) makes my skin pretty red. Oh, well …
Violet
@Comrade Mary: Yes, good point. It’s all very early to know. I think any polls now are just name recognition. But Perry has embarrassed the state on the national stage and he’s not popular at home. I think he could be beatable with the right candidate.
Abbott will have the advantage of being a “fresh face”, despite having been politics for awhile. He’ll have the Republican machine behind him. I don’t think the Dems have any candidate who have been elected to any statewide office that they could run.
Citizen_X
@Violet: Did he send that email from Crackerhead?
ranchandsyrup
@Violet: I’ve been following the code-switching series on NPR and I saw a link on twitter about code-switching and ended up at Salon. I felt dirty. Then angry. Angry enough to inflict it on the Juice-atariat.
muddy
@Comrade Mary: I don’t know about rosacea aside from knowing what it is. I don’t massage much, I put it on there like lotion, wait a few minutes and use a warm damp washcloth to wipe it off. Sometimes I put it on and then shower, rinsing it off last. I use 3/4 olive oil and 1/4 caster oil.
Cacti
Political appeals to the prejudices of crackers was always based on making them afraid that the n***ers were going to move up the social ladder and take their spot at second from the bottom.
Violet
@Comrade Mary: Speaking of rosacea, are you familiar with the relationship between rosacea and SIBO (small intestine bacterial overgrowth). Here’s a PubMed link. And the PDF of the article.
Chris
@Cacti:
Although, it’s interesting that in quite a few cases, the 1% still didn’t trust the crackers enough to let them vote either (poll taxes were known to disenfranchise poor whites as well as blacks).
Comrade Mary
@Violet: Thanks! Yes, I have looked into that. From what I can see, treatment for SIBO can improve the type of rosacea that manifests as blemishes, but it doesn’t seem to do much for erythema (redness). I don’t break out: I just flush and have some permanent pinkness (red if I get irritated).
Related: Some posters at a rosacea board thought that treating H. pylori could reduce erythema, but results are mixed. In addition, it’s really easy to get re-infected after treatment.
Violet
@Comrade Mary: Interesting. I’ve got rosacea and it seems to run in my family. I don’t have terrible blemishes like some people do, but I do have the erythema. I have tried various diets and have noticed that low carb diets improve my skin if I stick with them for three months. When I go off the diet (as I always do because I find it so restrictive) the redness comes back.
I’ve relatively recently given up grains and most sugary stuff, so by default it’s lower carb, although I’m eating “safe starches”. Interestingly my skin started improving. I’m certain there’s a relationship between what I eat and my skin, although my dermatologist doesn’t really agree.
I’m on a mission to get tested for SIBO and see what results I get. If I test positive with the breath test I’ll see if I can convince a doctor to give me the antibiotic for it. I’ll let you know what happens, if you are interested. I have an appointment with a doctor who I hope will ok the testing in a couple of weeks.
Comrade Mary
@Violet: Sure, report back! I don’t think I’m the only one who’d want to hear about your results.
Mnemosyne
@Comrade Mary:
@Violet:
I also have rosacea, but I pretty much only get blemishes when my skin is unhappy with the way I’m treating it (wrong cleanser, too little sunscreen, etc.) I do want to get back on Noritate since that seems to help quite a bit with the redness and occasional roughness.
Patricia Kayden
@Cacti: Or marry their daughters.
Violet
@Comrade Mary: I’m happy to report back. The rosacea thing has bugged me since it first showed up for me–and when it showed up it was overnight. One day I had it, the next I didn’t. I didn’t know what it was at all. I can’t tie it to anything, except I think something went haywire in my body at that time because a couple of things went wrong around that time. I still wonder if I had some kind of undiagnosed infection or something.
I’m completely unsatisfied with the medical establishment’s response, which is “it’s common in women your age” and “take this medication” and “there’s nothing else you can do” and “we don’t know why you get it”. I’m sure there’s a reason, but the medical establishment doesn’t have a lot of incentive to investigate things like diet because they can’t make a drug and make money off it. I think there is a reason why the rosacea showed up so suddenly for me. I don’t know what that is, but I’m determined to keep investigating. I want to be healthier and I think the rosacea is a sign I’m not as health as I can be.
Violet
@Mnemosyne: Have you ever done low carb and had a positive effect on your skin? For me, I have to do it for a couple of months to see the effects. I know we’ve talked about the no grain/gluten-free thing before, but it has definitely had a positive effect on my skin. It’s not perfect, but it’s better. I know that sugar is an issue for me and also my skin, and I’m not quite as dedicated to staying off the sugar as I could be. If I can do that, I think my skin will improve more.
Comrade Mary
@Violet: Hmm. In my case, it just runs in my family. (For years, I just thought my dad had a permanent sunburn from fishing.) It probably started slowly in my twenties, although I wasn’t diagnosed until my mid-30s.
@Mnemosyne: Did Noritate really help with the redness? I tried it and Metrocreme for years and didn’t see any improvement, but maybe I should try again.
Violet
@Comrade Mary: It runs in my family too. But that doesn’t mean that there isn’t some issue that can’t be treated. It could be genetic, but it could also be some kind of infection that is handed down or a problem processing a certain nutrient, which, if that’s supplemented, will help the rosacea. If you haven’t tried a low carb type diet, it might be interesting to give it a try and see if it helps you. If it does or doesn’t, then that’s information you can use as you go forward with other treatment decisions.
As for the creams, Finacea worked best for me. Metrogel worked okay, but seemed to be less effective over time. I got to where I’d kind of alternate months. I only use the Finacea if it gets really bad, and even then I usually don’t bother.
muddy
@Violet: I think things like that are both inherited and suddenly (sometimes) turned on. I know it can happen in type 1 diabetes, I know a couple of people who had it in their family but didn’t have it until after they had serious viruses in their adulthood. I’ve heard of a number of things along those lines. The “weakness” is there, but is not turned on until the immune system has an issue.
I also know someone who ended up with congestive heart failure from a virus. I remember when they first started treating h.pylori for ulcers. Before that all they said was low acid, low stress.
Mnemosyne
@Violet:
@Comrade Mary:
The low-carb diet (basically, a South Beach kind of thing) did extremely awful things to both my mood and my digestion, so I’m unwilling to try it again.
Honestly, the thing that helped most with my rosacea was finding a really good facialist who was able to help me find skincare products that didn’t irritate my skin. Once I wasn’t annoying my skin every time I washed it, things got much better. Right now, I’m using an organic brand called Ilike — it’s on the pricey side and I have to order it online, but I love it. Just about the only mass-market cleanser I’ve found that works for me is Origins Mega-Mushroom.
The Noritate helped a lot with the redness (which is making a bit of a comeback because I let my prescription lapse). My skin is weirdly sensitive (as in, sensitive to products it’s not supposed to be sensitive to, like Cetaphil), so all of the “Metro” formulations just made things worse.
Violet
@muddy: Yep. I know a couple of people who had their celiac disease “turned on” after either illness or a lengthy stressful period in their lives. I think we can have the genetic tendency, but the gene’s switch isn’t turned on. Something happens to flip the switch. Don’t know what that is in my case, if that is the case.
Pogonip
Is there a trial lawyer in the house? I have been wondering why the Zimmerman prosecutors seem to be doing their best to throw the fight. It occurred to me that many prosecutors have political ambitions. If local sympathy happens to be with Zimmerman (I don’t know if it is or not), an ambitious prosecutor might not want to be remembered as the person who sent him to jail. What say you, legal beagles?
mouse tolliver
Speaking of racism, it’s so prevalent on this season’s edition of the CBS reality show Big Brother that it’s getting covered by NPR.
http://www.npr.org/blogs/monkeysee/2013/07/02/197995283/big-brother-isnt-just-a-terrible-show-its-a-wasted-opportunity
Normally this stuff only gets covered by frivolous entertainment sites. But this time — in the wake of the VRA ruling, Paula Deen, and George Zimmerman — it feels different to me.
For those who don’t know what BB is, it’s a Survivor-like elimination game set in a house where contestants live under constant surveillance. Fans get to watch raw footage of the show online via live feeds and for two hours every night on the TV Guide channel. CBS edits it into a storyline for the TV broadcast. However, whenever there’s a racist, sexist or homophobic incident, CBS usually leaves it out, giving most viewers a sanitized and totally unrealistic view of what’s actually going on.
I agree with NPR’s take. If CBS ignores it this year, it will be a huge missed opportunity to show how pernicious racism really is. Because the racists aren’t screaming “nigger nigger nigger” at black people. They’re casually making ugly remarks about “black Candice” behind her back. Or they’re making cracks about Helen (who’s Asian) and how she should “shut up and go make some fucking rice.”
Anyway, even the totebagging NPR …