Disshadow'd livery

An even lighter shade of Shilpa

Indian American author Sujit Saraf published Big Brother: a tale of two white women back in January, when Jade Goody's poppadom debacle was at its height:

Indian racism is quite uncomplicated. Jade’s abhorrence of foreign races includes - in addition to skin colour - spicy chicken, smelly onions, odd accents and unpronounceable names. By contrast, Indian racism is elemental: as nature abhors a vacuum, so India abhors dark skin."

I don't believe that the article has lost any of its relevance, or indeed its dark humour, in the intervening period.

Scars of racism

In 1939, psychologists Kenneth and Mamie Clark began publishing papers based on experiments that had found young African American children to often perceive being white as preferable to being black. Their evidence was later used in the case of Brown versus Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, in which the US Supreme Court ruled against racial segregation in American public schools.

Kiri Davis' first documentary A Girl Like Me has won an award at the Media That Matters Film Festival, and in part of it she has attempted to replicate Clark and Clark's famous 'doll experiment' to try to gauge how much things may have changed regarding African American children's views of themselves.

I have no idea how faithful she was to the psychologists' original methodology, or how comparable the two sets of experiments really are. Despite this, the sight of young African Americans repeatedly identifying the white doll in front of them as 'good' and the black as 'bad' cannot be anything but disheartening.

Found via a Gay Persons of Colour post.

Offence: give and take

Nigger by Drek Davis

Two BBC News stories that were originally posted within 25 minutes of each other today:

Race complaint over Dandy reprint

Publishing giant DC Thomson has been criticised after it reprinted a 1939 annual which contained racist references to black people. A reader condemned the inclusion of a comic strip from the original 1939 Dandy annual which included a term deemed unacceptable in modern society."

'Offensive' poster banned on Tube

London Underground (LU) has been accused of censorship after refusing to put up posters for a comedy show. LU said adverts for the show Pride and Prejudice and Niggas by African-American comedian Reginald D Hunter were 'likely to offend'."

The glamorous world of content facilitation

Kim Fletcher in today's Guardian on the continued need for those of us who cut, correct and rearrange in order to make writing worth reading...

Smash lits

Disgrace, watercolour and ink on paper by Patter Hellstrom (patterhellstrom.com)

Today's Observer includes a slightly silly Best Novels of the Past 25 Years list, having gathered nominations and votes from 120 'literary luminaries'.

In response to a New York Times exercise in May that determined Toni Morrison's Beloved to be the best work of American fiction from the last quarter century, the Observer poll allowed for the inclusion of British, Irish and Commonwealth books.

I was a bit perturbed by the realisation that I hadn't read any of those voted to the top ten - perhaps an indication that I need to move on from my ongoing fixation with formulaic murder mysteries?

For the record, Disgrace by JM Coetzee came first and Money by Martin Amis second, while Anthony Burgess' Earthly Powers and Ian McEwan's Atonement took joint third.

Intriguingly, one of the authors polled actually voted for himself, though the anonymity they were all assured of prevents the newspaper divulging who... Salman Rushdie, anyone?

Send back your 'guardian'

Compare and contrast:

1) Mahmood Ahmadinejad's new 'blog'

2) Stop censoring us

Comment by 'the blogfather of the Iranian blogs' Hossein Derakhshan.

As seen in today's Guardian.

Yet another reason not to bother watching CNN

Eric Boehlert describes watching CNN's Situation Room last week in a contribution to the Huffington Post:

Thanks to CNN, I'd learned that Israeli forces had bombed Beirut International Airport and a blockade was in place to cut off Lebanon's ports, that president Bush announced Israel had the right to defend herself, that Hezbollah had fired missiles into the seaside city of Haifa, and that an Israeli woman in Nahariya had been killed amidst the cross-border violence. But I hadn't learned many details about the more than four dozen civilians in Lebanon being killed, a fact that struck me as central to the unfolding story."

With this kind of negligently unbalanced reporting in the US mainstream 'news' media, perhaps it's less surprising that there is often such a slick of pro-Israel nonsense from US contributors in response to perfectly sensible posts on The Guardian's Comment is Free site.

David Clark's article today questions any notion that the ends of the government of Israel are in line with those of the West.

Notice your nuts

Everyman has launched an interesting new campaign called Notice Your Nuts promoting awareness of testicular cancer and encouraging men to check their balls.

The organisation's communications manager Alison Morgan says:

We realise that showing men with giant testicles is quite controversial, but the advert has been filmed in such a humorous way that we feel it will appeal to young men, which helps us to spread important messages to them."

As seen on Gay.com.

Two Apples, two Guys

The man awaiting a job interview who was mistaken for a computer expert and questioned live on BBC News 24 a week ago was identified by BBC News today in an article that also links to footage of the ensuing, rather unenlightening conversation.

Guy Goma was asked his opinion on the Apple Corps v Apple Computer verdict, a role Guy Kewney would perhaps have been better placed to fill. Unfortunately, Mr Kewney was left in reception while the 'wrong Guy' (subeditors have been creaming themselves over potential cheesy headlines) was ushered into the studio.

Apart from its humour value and possibly reflecting the desperate-for-anyone-to-say-anything-no-matter-how-meaningless mentality of rolling news, I was also quite impressed by how gamely he fielded Karen Bowerman's questions.

I reckon someone should employ him, don't you?

Hockey stick jollies

The Swiss Federal Office of Public Health and the Swiss Aids Federation have launched a fresh campaign promoting safer sex that features people playing potentially dangerous sports while naked with the line No action without protection.

You can view the TV-spot via the media section of the Love Life website.

My favourite image from the campaign website:

As reported by the BBC yesterday.

Sugar baby love

Last week, French HIV/AIDS organisation AIDeS launched a new safer sex campaign targeting gay men with a great animation featuring The Rubettes' Sugar Baby Love:

From YouTube.com, as seen on Pax Romano's Ramblings.

Opium to the people

See this article in today's Guardian for a Communists sell opium to the Chinese shock.

Something the British haven't done for a while ...

Graphic offence

After reading Ben Goldacre's Sweary Mary I was fascinated to see this diagram in the 2000 report it links to, Delete expletives? (pdf) by the ASA, BBC, BSC & ITC (both now Ofcom):

Personally, I think they're just fucking with our heads.

Animation is sweet

Too funny! From BBC News' South Park gets revenge on Chef:

South Park has exacted revenge on its former star Isaac Hayes by turning his character Chef into a paedophile and seemingly killing him off."

Perfect.

Trouble getting wood

The press release of a report published yesterday on illegal and unsustainable logging is headed US, EU Consumption Driving Chinese Imports of Illegal Wood from Around the World with the subtitle "Chinese Government Faces Opportunities to Boost Timber Production And Reduce Poverty and Conflict in Rural Areas."

BBC News' China furniture destroys forests seems to shift focus from demand in developed economies toward China's imports from dubious sources. Though it does refer to Western consumers playing a "major role," is this basically yet another story written on the 'hungry waking dragon spoiling it for everyone else' template?

Of course, it's hardly the job of journalists to unquestioningly accept the pitch of a press release and the full report itself, China and the Global Market for Forest Products (pdf), does appear to give more emphasis to the country's role in driving overexploitation of forests in nations such as Indonesia and Papua New Guinea.

English news of the report was released by Forest Trends and the Center for International Forestry Research but it was produced jointly with the Center for Chinese Agricultural Policy, run under the aegis of the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

Given a tendency in China to intentionally politicise everything, it is tempting to speculate that such an agency may have pressured a spin of the press release away from the country's regulatory and enforcement deficiencies.

But the overall tone of the report (facing "opportunities" rather than problems) also chimes with Forest Trends' description of themselves as "market promoters," and it could be argued that a report produced with the involvement of a Western government agency might be just as likely to have news of its release skewed from anything too awkward.

And awkward the issue of wood supplies certainly is in China; even official news agencies have reported sporadically on likely local government corruption connected to logging by the notorious APP in the provinces of Yunnan and Hainan.

Embarrassments like these have helped prompt crackdowns on logging within China, resulting in increased supplies from elsewhere.

Perhaps, regardless of who produced the report, a genuine desire to positively influence Chinese policy rather than berating it lies behind its diplomatic phrasing.

Governments that cannot take criticism might respond laboriously slowly to carefully-worded recommendations, but not at all to bare exposure of their flaws. And boy, if there was ever a government with flaws...