I’ve been playing around with building maps with Google Maps. You can change the icons for placemarkers on your maps, and you can also create your own icons. They have a lot of icons, but they didn’t have one for museums, so I made one:
Category: Uncategorized
georgia multicultural school, many students refugees
Georgia School Melds a World of Differences – New York Times:
“The fact that we don’t have anything in common is what we all have in common,†said Shell Ramirez, an American parent with two children at the school….
“The mission,†Ms. Thompson [one of the founders of the school] said, “was never to create an enclave for refugees only because that would just separate them more.â€
…
”
Harvey Clark, whose son Zade is in the fifth grade, is a veteran of the first Gulf War and a hard-core Nascar fan.
“They’re getting exposed to cultures that they normally would not be exposed to except in National Geographic,†Mr. Clark said of the American children. “Instead of my boy having to go off to war to meet foreign people, he can do it here in town.â€
This reminds me of Ryan being stoked by What is the What, which I believe is partially set in Atlanta, hearing Kara Walker on Art 21 talking about moving from California to the Atlanta area and realizing what it meant to be a black woman in America, and thinking about multicultural education with regards to Florence and Oona.
[tags]refugee, education, multiculturalism[/tags]
they don’t make em’ like they used to
I watched the film Girls Town last night. I thought it was really good. It dealt with topics like domestic violence, rape, motherhood, and suicide in a way that was both empowering but not naively triumphant. I liked that the fact that the group of friends that the movie’s story followed were coming from different ethnic backgrounds and differences in class, even in the worn, urban setting of the film, were definitely eluded to, but weren’t exploded into the cliches that one finds in a lot of films about urban youth. The film’s soundtrack also reminded me of the song U.N.I.T.Y. by Queen Latifah which is awesome and it made me sad that the standards seem to have been lowered so that it is seen as important when there are women MCs, period, even if people in mainstream music aren’t talking about challenging things in a direct, personal way like Latifah and other artists did in the 90s.
On a side note, I found this review of the film on IMDB really endearing:
I’m a 62-year-old white male in Northern Michigan, and I liked this film. Rightly or wrongly, I felt that I was getting a good inside look at a culture that I have never brushed shoulders with. Lili Taylor, for a 30-year-old gal from Illinois, seems to have captured the spirit of Patti in a very convincing way, and her body language showed that she really had rapport with her friends. Under ordinary circumstances, I would not choose to watch a film about the subject of school kids in Brooklyn or Hackensack or wherever, but I liked these kids. It’s a nice piece for older people to watch, and be entertained by people telling you things you probably didn’t know. Rightly or wrongly. I’m not in a position to judge the authenticity of the cultural overview that the film presents. Warning to old fuddie-duddies: The F-word uccurs 31 times in a 51-second scene (Is this a new record?) so don’t watch if the grand-kids are around!
captivity narratives
Chiara is just finishing taking a class about captivity narratives and I’ve been reading a few things at the periphery of that. It’s created this reality tunnel about stories about captivity and stories that expose the basic human dynamics that cause people to value different groups of people differently.
I made this post to aggregate a few things:
- Last week’s This American Life, The Competition, had a story about a Tulsa factory owner who imported workers from India and had them living and working in terrible conditions.
- Yesterday’s NYT had an article on slavery on Long Island and the abuse of foreign domestic workers throughout the US.
- The book Women’s Indian Captivity Narratives has a narrative by Sarah Wakefield entitled Six Weeks in the Sioux Tepees that has an uncharacteristically critical perspective (and uncharacteristically outspoken for a woman writer at the time) on white’s perceptions of Native Americans.
linuxing the imac
There’s an old imac under the table at bz’s house that’s gathering dust and I was going to try to put Linux on it. I’ve had a good experience with xubuntu running well on older hardware and having good, easy-to-use features (and it’s debian based), so I’m going to try that and document my experience here.
I had a little trouble finding the iso for PPC xubuntu, but eventually found it at http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/xubuntu/ports/releases/7.04/release/
This article gave some information on installing xubuntu on various platforms, and said that the firmware needed to be upgraded on the iMac before xubuntu could be installed. I found the firmware for this particular iMac (slot-loading, 350 MHz, 128MB SDRAM) at http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=88010 (or maybe at http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=75130) and instructions for installing the firmware at http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=60385.
The machine ended up being bricked, but I thought I’d post this for future reference.
naomi wolf on parallels between US and despots of history
I thought about this a lot when I was in Germany this summer, seeing all the monuments to the atrocities of the Nazis, and even reading the last Harry Potter book – there is an identifiable pattern to despotism. Naomi wolf says this of her recent book that talks about the rise of despotism in the current US body politic:
But I guess the book really began with a very personal story, because I was forced to write it, even though I didn’t really want to, by a dear friend who is a Holocaust survivor’s daughter. And when we spoke about news events, she kept saying, “They did this in Germany. They did this in Germany.†And I really didn’t think that made sense. I thought that was very extreme language. But finally she forced me to sit down and start reading the histories, of course, not of the later years, because she wasn’t talking about German outcomes, ’38, ’39; she was talking about the early years, 1930, ’31, ’32, when Germany was a parliamentary democracy, and there was this systematic assault using the rule of law to subvert the rule of law.
And once I saw how many parallels there were, not just in strategy and tactics that we’re seeing again today, but actually in images and sound bites and language, then I read other histories of Italy in the ’20s, Russia in the ’30s, East Germany in the ’50s, Czechoslovakia in the ’60s, Pinochet’s coup in Chile in ’73, the crushing of the democracy movement in China at the end of the ’80s. And I saw that there is a blueprint that would-be dictators always do the same ten things, whether they’re on the left or the right, and that we are seeing these ten steps taking place systematically right now in the United States.
Update:
Today, there was a story on Morning Edition about GOP presidential candidate rhetoric which calls the war on Iraq things like “the front line on the war on terrorism”. Romney’s website refers to the war on Iraq as ‘defeating the jihadists’. Mike Huckabee says that we’re engaged in a ‘world war’ and that “radical islamic fascists have declared war on our country and on our way of life.” But, as the NPR reporter indicates, these words don’t mesh with the reality of the war in Iraq:
Al Queda in Iraq has few foreign fighters. It’s a home-grown group. American officers say many of them are fighting more for money than for religious fanaticism. Meanwhile the powerful Shiite Muslim militias in Iraq are not exporting terror, they’re vying for power in Iraq, sometimes battling each other …
The report goes on to quote a defense analyst saying that politicians prefer catch phrases to a serious discussion of the war.
This report makes me think of the language described in Wolfe’s interview and it’s even more frightening when there is so apparently little basis for this kind of fear.
[tags]politcs, us, naomiwolf, history, nazi, despot[/tags]
Media check for the week of November 25, 2007
Last night, I watched a movie called Saving Face. It was your traditional rom-com in the sense that it had both an interrupted wedding and an airport scene. However, the characters were Chinese-American and the primary love stories were between two young women and an older woman and a younger man.
I heard a story on NPR this morning that talked about Dunkin’ Donuts’ rebranding campaign, but I thought there was a nice statement about the cache of products being working class and upper class people aspiring to “lower class” identities.
Dunkin’ Donuts’ advertising campaign “America Runs on Dunkin” is created out of a sentiment among customers that they wanted to buy a good, simple product. Brand guru Leslie Bielby says the campaign expands the retailer’s appeal.
foundation to help youth attend college regardless of immigration status
I’m always interested in people doing big, helpful, transcendent things with whatever resources that they have. I’m also interested in people’s activism or humanitarian work following from the things that are relevant in their life. I heard a story this morning about one man’s work:
Bay Area Gardeners Foundation founder Catalino Tapia trims a tree at a client’s home in an affluent suburb of San Francisco. Tapia’s long-time clients donated money to the foundation, which gives college scholarships to students, regardless of their immigrant status.
Racism in central indiana
This is a comment to news article about efforts to confront the racist history and reputation of a town that is halfway between Bloomington and Indianapolis. I liked that this commenter noted that a homogeneous community is fundamental to racist beliefs and that racism exists outside of the lower-class white communities (another commentor replied to the story with “It could be all the rednecks in Martinsville…..”) that are the stereotypical face of racism:
Keep in mind that there are racists everywhere, including our beloved and enlightened B-town. As far as a small Indiana town goes, M-ville is no more or less racist than the typical. Unfortunately, the “typical” is a homogenous, conservative community that can tend toward attitudes of prejudice. This, however, is true in most homogenous, conservative communities. I went to school with a bunch of folks from the North Shore suburbs of Chicago, and most of their attitudes would be considered racist. Bottomline, if we don’t experience heterogenous community, we will ALL tend toward prejudicial thought and attitude. M-ville folks are no different, and I encourage them (myself a grad from M-ville HS) to “see the world.”
who i am …
Who I am is a transcultural, multicultural, interracial, hybrid, bridging worlds, being. I am Hollee McGinnis also-known-as Lee Hwa Yeong. I have an Asian face, an Irish last name, a blond-haired mother.
But who I am is not just about who I know myself to be, but who I want to also be known as in this world. At its best, intercountry adoption demonstrates to me the greatness of our human spirits to love across race, nationality and culture. But I also know that it takes a lot more than just love to make a success; – it requires courage, honesty, and commitment.
This means we must be willing to talk about the hard stuff – the discrimination, inequalities, and prejudices that exist in the world. We must also be willing to change and challenge our societies so that the gift we give our children – adopted or not – besides the love and security of a permanent family is a world that values them for who they are and who they will be – regardless of race, nationality, culture or circumstance.
This is from a great NYT op-ed piece about intercountry, transracial adoption, race, and complicated identities.