Sunday, June 3, 2012

The Good, the Bad, and the Curious (Links)

This is what I've been reading this week that made me smile, rip my hair out, and think. What about you?

The Good


I mentioned the NPR Heart of the City contest last week. Check out some of the submissions

It's not a link, but we spent yesterday at the park and the splash pad. This picture of my daughter trying to look cool after a burst to the face caught her totally off guard makes me smile. 


The Bad

I used to occasionally tune into the Rickey Smiley morning show on my way to work, but I refuse to listen to it ever again after my entire commute was once spent listening to him and his cronies mock a man without arms for going to the gym. If I hadn't already written them off as being a horrible media outlet, this clip that Blacktating writes about where Monica and Brandy take turns "debating" how to best judge breastfeeding mothers would probably have done the trick. 

Racialicious has a post on white privilege and TV shows. Young white boys feel good about themselves after watching TV. Young white girls and boys and girls of color all feel worse about themselves. I wonder why?

The Curious

Civil Eats has a post about Americans trending toward healthier eating and ask if it's the start of a larger movement, or just a natural up and down that's about to end. 

Racialicious has a great post on the evolution of Snow White:
This is a problem that continually dogs fairy tales as a genre as a whole. While many are hailing the break from tradition that would require Snow White to be helpless and in need of rescue, those same voices scoff at the idea of tradition being “violated” to include marginalised bodies. There are few genres that are more erased than fairy tales. In fact, I’m tired of exclusion being assumed with fairy tales–if someone shows me a new fairy tale series or film or book I know it’s going to be totally straight and 99% white before I even look at it–often being excused through either a medieval setting and the fact that they’re aimed at children who are somehow unable to understand diversity. 
But this latter, in particular, is why fairy tales need to be the most inclusive of genres. These are books consumed by children trying to discover the world, trying to absorb messages about the world and trying to see where they fit into the world. It seems silly to say, but marginalised people are children, too–and just as women in general are hurt and demeaned by endless representations of the pervasive passive princess, so, too, are marginalised bodies by being told that they don’t belong at all–whether an active force to participate in the story or even someone worthy of rescue and questing for.
This Crunk Feminist Collective post takes a look at the hip hop trope of the Down Ass Chick and asks if the DAC has the potential to mature (and, if so, why isn't she represented in songs?):
I am down to be a woman who calls out all of your beauty but also calls you out on your shit. A woman who loves, supports, defends, holds, co-creates and motivates. Yeah, I can be that chick. I am that chick. But she is somehow missing from the (mainstream) music… (or is she some desirous version of the independent woman that, though perpetually single, was heralded and serenated through song five years ago?).
Colorlines reports that most immigrants from Spanish-speaking countries do not prefer the label "Hispanic." They'd rather identify with their individual family's countries of origin.

This post from Mixed Race America shows us why it's damaging to make broad generalizations about the beliefs and politics of people from certain regions of the U.S. and why that left this author defending the South.

This post at Raising My Boychick does a beautiful job of laying out the differences between childrearing and parenting:
what children most need, more than organized playrooms or clean tables or even getting to schools, is to have adults who love them so deeply and broadly and fiercely that we’ll do the reflexive work of parenting.
So, that's what I've been reading this week. What about you?

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