Yesterday Jo took both Evan and Vivian for trims. Vivian has been asking for bangs for a while and Evan has been resisting all discussions about going to the barber. "I'm going to grow out my hair" is his common refrain. I could barely recognize either kid when I saw them. Here they are with their cousins Grace, Ava, and Cade.
We have just finished watching a great performance of the Jungle Book. The Cousins were elephants (African, not Asian hathis, haha). Cade was the tiniest elephant, but he didn't play the role of the Baby Elephant "because I'm not a baby". Afterwards Nicolle treated everyone to gelato.
For inexplicable reasons, Disney took Kipling's imperialistic bombast and added King Louie to it. Louie is an orangutan (they don't live in the Indian jungles) and is often described as a thinly veiled reference to an African American. Disney introduced him as the king of the Kipling's leaderless bandar-log, a bland reference to colonial Indians who needed the rule of the white man - thereby adding a whole new layer of heated discussions in graduate literary criticism classes everywhere for decades.
Speaking of racism (nice segue), Jo and I had left the kids with Sarah and went to a friend's for dinner a couple of nights ago. There were guests Jo and I had never met before. After some wine, a guest was saying how the shootings of black men by police in 8 out of 10 cases were essentially justified (he might not have said those exact words but said something very close).
I know that this opinion exists in the wild but I had never faced it across a dinner table. Out of the corner of my eye I saw Jo tapping the napkin holder on the table. It was a heavy metal ring with "family" and "friends" inscribed in cursive. She was getting ready to throw it at this guy. Specially when he explained how in the 70's he worked in civil rights. "I taught these people skills that they didn't have. Once I hired one of them even if he wasn't qualified for the job".
A black man in the US today is justifiably very scared when interacting with the police. A broken tail light could be the end. If it wasn't for phone cameras the public wouldn't know any better. Evidence would be planted. Stories would be made up. Anyone who argues that needs to read up some more.
Some say that if they followed every instruction, the police wouldn't need to shoot black men. A black man laying on the ground with his hands in the fucking air trying to protect his autistic client who is playing with a toy truck gets shot. A white man who shoots 9 black people dead in a church in Charleston is successfully arrested in the next state in a traffic stop without a single shot being fired. This is where we are. They say that if you don't know what you don't know, it's isn't going to be easy. We are screwed, kids. Long road ahead.
We have just finished watching a great performance of the Jungle Book. The Cousins were elephants (African, not Asian hathis, haha). Cade was the tiniest elephant, but he didn't play the role of the Baby Elephant "because I'm not a baby". Afterwards Nicolle treated everyone to gelato.
For inexplicable reasons, Disney took Kipling's imperialistic bombast and added King Louie to it. Louie is an orangutan (they don't live in the Indian jungles) and is often described as a thinly veiled reference to an African American. Disney introduced him as the king of the Kipling's leaderless bandar-log, a bland reference to colonial Indians who needed the rule of the white man - thereby adding a whole new layer of heated discussions in graduate literary criticism classes everywhere for decades.
Speaking of racism (nice segue), Jo and I had left the kids with Sarah and went to a friend's for dinner a couple of nights ago. There were guests Jo and I had never met before. After some wine, a guest was saying how the shootings of black men by police in 8 out of 10 cases were essentially justified (he might not have said those exact words but said something very close).
I know that this opinion exists in the wild but I had never faced it across a dinner table. Out of the corner of my eye I saw Jo tapping the napkin holder on the table. It was a heavy metal ring with "family" and "friends" inscribed in cursive. She was getting ready to throw it at this guy. Specially when he explained how in the 70's he worked in civil rights. "I taught these people skills that they didn't have. Once I hired one of them even if he wasn't qualified for the job".
A black man in the US today is justifiably very scared when interacting with the police. A broken tail light could be the end. If it wasn't for phone cameras the public wouldn't know any better. Evidence would be planted. Stories would be made up. Anyone who argues that needs to read up some more.
Some say that if they followed every instruction, the police wouldn't need to shoot black men. A black man laying on the ground with his hands in the fucking air trying to protect his autistic client who is playing with a toy truck gets shot. A white man who shoots 9 black people dead in a church in Charleston is successfully arrested in the next state in a traffic stop without a single shot being fired. This is where we are. They say that if you don't know what you don't know, it's isn't going to be easy. We are screwed, kids. Long road ahead.
No comments:
Post a Comment