The nominees for the 2009 People’s Choice Awards were announced their earlier this week — in categories like Favorite TV Drama Actress, Favorite Action Star, and Favorite Breakout Music Artist — and it looks like the biggest gathering of white people since Glenn Beck’s last Tea Party.
Only a handful of the 80 individuals nominated are people of color, and about half of them are nominated are in the R&B category. Maybe the People’s Choice folks are hoping hiring Queen Latifah as the host will distract us from noticing?
To celebrate America’s time-honored tradition of overlooking talented people of color in entertainment, I’ve created this 2009 White People’s Choice Awards game from the nominations on the PCA website. (Duplicates are the result of Taylor Swift some people being nominated in more than one category).
Play the game and see how well you score!
This handy guide can also double as a bingo card when the awards air on Jan. 6 on CBS!
Who said ethnocentrity can’t be fun?
What does Scandinavia, Applebees, and the Space Needle have to do with the fight for civil unions in my home state? Everyone’s favorite fake conservative Stephen Colbert explains it all in this edition of The Word earlier this week:
“Swedish Fish Stories.”
I love that guy.
ReadWriteWeb’s Sarah Perez has a good summary of the case of two former female Yale University law students who have settled their suit brought against some 30-plus anonymous commenters who posted derogatory remarks about them on an internet forum called AutoAdmit. Although the details of the settlement are private, it appears they received some sort of compensation from 8 or 9 of the commenters.
Before you start worrying that anonymity will go away on the web (not that this is even possible), the basis of the suit by these women was that the reportedly unsubstantiated and highly inflammatory personal attacks (including sexually explicit ones) were:
- made on a website frequented by potential employers (law firms)
- tied to the women’s real names (so anyone doing a Google search on their names could easily find these comments).
I’m all for free speech, and I believe the anonymity provided by the internet is really good in a lot of ways (allowing closeted or questioning gay or bisexual people to be out online, for example). But as someone who has run a very large community, I’ve seen how detrimental anonymous commenting can be, both to the community and to the individuals being attacked. Although most commenters are fairly respectful (or at least not outright malicious), I’ve been appalled over the years to see what some people will say when they can hide behind anonymity — things I doubt they would ever say if they had to attach their real names to it — if they had to be personally accountable for their own speech.
I also believe community owners or moderators have a responsibility to prevent abuse of anonymity. Unfortunately, a law called “Section 230″ currently immunizes internet publishers from legal harm, so the women could not sue AutoAdmit for refusing to remove the comments, they could only go after the anonymous commenters themselves. Perez points out the problems with this law:
At the time of its establishment in the 90’s, however, those “publishers” were the ISPs themselves - the AOLs and CompuServes that delivered Internet access to consumers. The idea of bloggers, social media publishers, and anonymous blog and forum commenters didn’t really exist yet and therefore wasn’t taken into consideration.
It’s the policy of AfterEllen.com’s community to remove personal attacks, or racist, sexist or homophobic comments, and while I’m the first to admit the line can be fuzzy sometimes, I believe I should absolutely be held responsible if I allow comments that clearly cross the line to stand (as long as I’ve first been made aware of them).
I’m not suggesting people shouldn’t be able to have freedom of speech on the internet, or that there shouldn’t be anonymity, but I do believe there should be legal recourse available for those who are subject to personal attacks online made by people hiding behind anonymity, just as there is in the offline world. As more and more employers and schools use the internet to research potential employees or students, malicious and unsubstantiated attacks have real-world effects beyond just hurting someone’s feelings.
Jessica Valenti of Feministing.com makes a similar point in a great piece she wrote in 2007 for The Guardian entitled “How the web became a sexists’ paradise” about the particularly detrimental effect anonymity is having on women online:
While online harassment doesn’t necessarily create the same immediate safety concerns as street harassment, the consequences are arguably more severe. If someone calls you a “slut” on the street, it stings - but you can move on. If someone calls you a “slut” online, there’s a public record as long as the site exists … And for young women applying for jobs, the reality is terrifying. Imagine a potential employer searching for information and coming across a thread about what a “whore” you are.
Sometimes the attacks are even more personal, as Valenti recounts the story of a woman who received harassing comments on her site that escalated to death threats and the publication of her social security number and home address — all from anonymous commenters, of course.
If the threat of being sued for libel makes someone think twice before posting those kinds of comments, then I say bring it on.
By now most of us have heard about the amendment introduced by Senator Al Franken to the Defense Appropriations Act of 2010 that would allow the employees of military subcontractors who are victims of sexual assault to sue their employers (currently binding arbitration is their only option). It’s been all over the news lately because of Jamie Lee Jones, who is suing Haliburton/KBR after she was subject to a vicious sexual assault by other KBR employees, than put in a shipping container for 24 hours without food, water, or a bed, and warned her that if she left Iraq for medical treatment, she’d be fired.
Nathan Havey makes several good points about it in a well-reasoned piece on The Huffington Post.
At one extreme, one in six women in the United States will be the victim of sexual violence in her lifetime (RAINN). At the other, controlling for differing industries and employment levels, women earn $0.77 to the dollar that men earn. And this is the best it has ever been … it is critically important, particularly for the men reading this, that you take a moment and really consider the idea that we are living in a system that started with women as property and is still a long way from ‘equal.’
Do these Senators consciously support rape? Of course not. But their actions absolutely support a status quo in which rape and sexual violence flourish.
An anonymous blogger started the satirical website RepublicansForRape.org as their form of protest, and Jon Stuart took the Republicans to task about this in his usual pointed but humorous style:
It’s fairly obvious why so many Republicans are against this amendment, given how much money military contractors have donated to the Republican party, and of course it’s reprehensible. (Disclaimer: I vehemently disagree with most of the Republican Party’s positions, but I don’t think most Republicans are evil. Although I’ll admit I wonder about Dick Cheney.)
But it turns out the amendment’s biggest obstacle may be a Democrat: Daniel Inouye of Hawaii, the third longest-serving senator in history, who heads up the Senate Appropriations Committee, is reportedly considering removing the provision after pressure by the military subcontractors.
The Department of Defense, with the support of the Obama Administration, is also apparently against the amendment.
Health care reform, meanwhile, is being held up by Democrats, not Republicans — a point on which Inside Washington host Ana Marie Cox and her guests (one Democrat and one Republican) all agreed this week.
“Never let it be said that the Democratic Party is monolithic, or unified for that matter,” blogger Tracie Powell summed up on CQ Politics in her analysis of the military contracts amendment. But The Onion made a similar point in the fake headline they tweeted out last month: “BREAKING: Democrats Hoping To Take Control Of Congress From Republican Minority In 2010.”
With friends like these, who needs Republicans?
FDR famously said “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” Rebecca Solnit demonstrates how true this is in her new nonfiction book A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities that Arise in Disaster.
Through an in-depth examination of five major North American disasters — the San Francisco earthquake of 1906; the 1917 explosion in Halifax, Nova Scotia; the 1985 Mexico City earthquake; the 9/11 attack in 2001; and Hurricane Katrina in 2005 — Solnit reveals how people really behave when normal rules of society are suspended in the wake of tragedy — with spontaneous altruism, self-organization and mutual aid — vs. the how people are widely (and falsely) believed to behave in these circumstances (with violence, sexual assault and the hoarding of resources).
She also demonstrates why promoting the idea that people will behave badly in the aftermath of a disaster actually creates that behavior; and why government intervention (or lack thereof) has historically made the situation worse, not better.
I originally picked up this book because I’ve long had an interest in how people behave in unusual or life-or-death situations, and because I’ve had a few brushes with disasters myself (although none as devastating as the ones described in the book), including the Mt. St. Helens eruption in 1980 (fortunately, I lived far enough away that we just had to deal with the ash); the 1994 Northridge earthquake (I was staying in a hotel in L.A. and had to run down 22 flights of stairs in pajamas without my contacts in); a tornado in Fargo, ND in 1996 (I was just driving through); and the 2001 Nisqually earthquake — one of the worst quakes we’ve had in the Seattle area in a long time (I was at the top of a tall building in downtown Seattle when it happened).
I also live in the shadow of North America’s largest dormant volcano, Mt. Rainier. There are Volcano Evacuation Route signs posted throughout my neighborhood, with warnings from local newscasters at least once a year that we are overdue for a catastrophic eruption. (I don’t spend much time worrying about this, but I also won’t be surprised to wake up one morning and find a fast-moving lahar with my name on it, since I seem to be a magnet for disasters.)
But you don’t have to live in a disaster-prone area to find this book inspiring, and useful.
In fact, given the ongoing threats posed by global warming, terrorist attacks, and the Swine flu, this should be required reading for all Americans, if for no other reason than to dispel the myths that lead people to behave in terrible ways after a disaster, like the handful of white New Orleans residents who shot any black man who moved during the Katrina aftermath because of false reports about rape and looting.
