In our neo-enlightened America, it seems that everything is -ist now, or select groups–sometimes all groups–are guilty of some form of -isming or -phobiaing. This week especially, and it’s only Wednesday.
Here are a few examples of the -ismzzz we’ve seen over the last few days:
1. The Mississippi flag is racist.
Well done, Ole Miss. Symbols of hate have no business flying over a place of learning. -H https://t.co/t3WL4pJcjV
— Hillary Clinton (@HillaryClinton) October 26, 2015
Pride in one’s roots is hate. Scary symbols are scary. Jazz hands.
2. Volume control is sexist.
Hillary Rodham Clinton has seized on remarks Senator Bernie Sanders made in the first Democratic debate that “all the shouting in the world” would not keep guns out of the wrong hands, suggesting that Mr. Sanders used those words because of Mrs. Clinton’s gender.
“I haven’t been shouting, but sometimes when a woman speaks out, some people think it’s shouting,” she said at the Jefferson-Jackson dinner in Des Moines, Iowa, on Saturday.
You offend my eyes and ears, Shrillary. That’s not nice.
3. The word “too” is sexist, too.
I have a very love-hate relationship with my hair. I love its uniqueness — it seems signature to me. But I’m never really satisfied. Frustrated, I decided to text my friend. After a quick exchange of opinions about my hair, our conversation ended with, “Well you don’t want it to be too short or too long.” What she said was harmless, but it still caused an epiphany.
There is no proper way for a woman to cut her hair, let alone do anything right in this world. There seems to be an unobtainable one-millimeter-wide mark of perfection, and none of us can reach it. Everything is too this or too that. We see it every day in the tabloids. For example, one day a female celebrity is too revealing and the next day she is too matronly.
In my experience, I rarely hear too thrown around about men. You hear someone say, “He’s short,” but you seldom hear “too short.” I hear women and men alike each day describing women as too something. But what does it really mean when you call a woman too? I asked myself, “too what?” I have determined that too means you’re calling a woman too far away from your idyllic vision of what a woman should be. Something as small as calling a woman’s dress too long or her muscles too built has a much larger social construct. With all the varying tastes and cultures in this world, it is impossible for a woman — or anyone, for that matter — to fulfill everyone’s criteria. And why is it our responsibility to satisfy them, anyway?
This woman writes TOO much more on the topic. It really is TOO funny. You TOO can read more at the Huffington Post link, or you can read Kat Timpf’s take at the National ReTOO.
4. Firing people for not doing their job is anti-Muslimist.
Well, at least they were not told to bake a cake for a gay wedding. In President Obama’s fundamentally transformed America, Christian bakers are forced by the blunt instrument of government mandate to cater a gay wedding regardless of their religious beliefs, but Muslim truckers can now refuse to transport alcohol because their Muslim beliefs and Sharia law prohibits it.
As an Equal Employment Opportunity Commission press release cheerfully chirps about its victory over Star Transport, a trucking company based in Morton, Illinois:
A federal jury in Peoria, Ill., has awarded $240,000 to two Somalian-American Muslims who were fired from their jobs as truck drivers at Star Transport, an over-the-road trucking company, when they refused to transport alcohol because it violated their religious beliefs, according to the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), which brought the case. The trial started on Oct. 19, and the jury returned its verdict the next day after 45 minutes of deliberation.
Judge James E. Shadid, the chief judge of the U.S. District Court for the Central District of Illinois, found in favor of EEOC after Star Transport admitted liability in March 2015. …
“EEOC is proud to support the rights of workers to equal treatment in the workplace without having to sacrifice their religious beliefs or practices,” said EEOC General Counsel David Lopez. “This is fundamental to the American principles of religious freedom and tolerance.”
But bakers, nuns, photographers, florists, county clerks, and hypothetical wedding pizza-makers who believe in a different religion apparently have to sacrifice nothing when forced to comply with other people’s demands.
5. Crosswalks? Racist.
Sadly, it seems, “walking while black” can have dangerous consequences.
That’s because a recent study suggests motorists are less likely to stop for an African American pedestrian in a crosswalk. A black pedestrian’s wait time at the curb was about 32 percent longer than a white person’s. Black pedestrians were about twice as likely as white pedestrians to be passed by multiple vehicles.
The small but provocative study — conducted by researchers at Portland State University in Oregon and the University of Arizona — suggests that biases just outside people’s conscious awareness can make them less likely to yield to minority pedestrians. And that could put those pedestrians at risk, said Kimberly B. Kahn, an assistant professor of social psychology at Portland State University.
Put another way: Not only do black men have to worry about being hassled — and possibly shot — by police for simply being black, they have to worry about being run over by motorists.
Kahn said a follow-up study is underway to see whether drivers also discriminate based on gender and whether crosswalk design and signage might change driver behavior. …
The study — whose findings were published in August by Transportation Research Part F — took place in downtown Portland, a city of about 600,000 that’s 76 percent white and about 6 percent black.
A mid-block crossing without signals was selected so that there would be no doubt the drivers were yielding to a pedestrian, and not slowing for an intersection or to make a turn. The crosswalk was marked with zebra striping. The trials were conducted in daylight, so visibility wasn’t an issue.
The researchers used six young men who were black or white to be pedestrians. All of them were in their 20s. Each had a similar height and build, and they wore identical, nondescript clothing: khakis and a long-sleeve gray shirt. They were coached on how and when to approach the crosswalk, with the same pace and posture. They were told to make eye contact with drivers but otherwise be as neutral as possible in their facial expression.
In 88 trials, a total of 173 drivers passed through the crosswalk, including those who stopped. There was not a huge racial discrepancy in regard to whether the first car to reach the crosswalk would stop for a pedestrians: 55.6 percent stopped for white pedestrians, compared with 48.8 percent for blacks.
What was more striking, however, was that if the first driver failed to stop for a black pedestrian, several others blew by him, too. In fact, black pedestrians were more than twice as likely to be passed by two or more cars, compared with white pedestrians.
Though the races of the racist drivers were not evaluated, the academics performed this study in a very white and very liberal city. Shame on you, “progressive” drivers. SHAME. You aren’t yielding in equal proportions. What an injustice, not stopping for people who were trying to cross the street in the middle of the block where there are no traffic lights. SHAME. #BlackWalkersMatter.
Notice that they didn’t do this study in the inner city. No doubt the results would have been the same.
6. Juries of random peers not of the same skin color…that’s racist.
A black Kentucky judge is under fire after he halted a drug trial and dismissed the entire jury upon noticing a lack of black jurors.
It is the second time that Jefferson Circuit Court Judge Olu Stevens has brought in a new jury over diversity concerns, and now the state Supreme Court is going to determine whether he is abusing his authority, a local Fox News affiliate reported.
“The concern is that the panel is not representative of the community,” Judge Stevens said last week.
The judge also dismissed an entire jury on Nov. 18 after noticing there were no black jurors.
“There is not a single African-American on this jury and (the defendant) is an African-American man,” he said at the time, Fox reported. “I cannot in good conscience go forward with this jury.
Judge prejudges that white jurors would be prejudiced. Post-racial America, y’all.
7. Sleep is also racist.
…But it wasn’t just slow-wave sleep in general that interested the researchers; they specifically hoped to compare how blacks and whites experienced slow-wave sleep. And what they found was disturbing. Generally, people are thought to spend 20 percent of their night in slow-wave sleep, and the study’s white participants hit this mark. Black participants, however, spent only about 15 percent of the night in slow-wave sleep. …
“The insufficient amount of sleep, the short sleep duration of the African-Americans really stood out,” says Susan Redline, a Harvard professor of sleep medicine and one of the study’s co-authors. “It really emphasized that African-Americans, as a group, are getting the least amount of sleep compared, at least, to the three other groups.” Whites in the study slept an average of 6.85 hours; blacks slept an average of 6.05 hours.
Compared with white participants in the study, black participants—most epidemiologists prefer “black” to African-American; it encompasses more people—were five times more likely to get short sleep, defined as less than six hours a night. (Hispanic participants were 1.8 times more likely to get short sleep; Chinese participants were 2.3 times more likely.) Blacks were also more likely to report feeling sleepy in the daytime, and they woke up more often in the middle of the night. …
Danielle L. Beatty Moody, a psychologist at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, conducted a similar test while working as a post-doctoral scholar in the psychiatry department of the University of Pittsburgh in the late 2000s. People who are discriminated against, she believes, carry worry throughout the day. And that worry literally keeps them up at night. “It’s uncomfortable for them to sleep because they are thinking back over mistreatment, thinking back over maltreatment, thinking back over bias they experienced,” she says. “In thinking about those experiences, they are getting more aroused, more cognitive arousal, which does the opposite of what you need it to do to go to sleep.”
I’m lucky to get six hours of sleep a night these days. I’m down with the struggle.
8. Using force because a bratty, disruptive kid won’t listen to adults in authority and who is probably just as disrespectful to her pushover parents? Utterly übersuperstooperdooper-racist.
South Carolina authorities have apparently made up their mind, and Richland County Senior Deputy Ben Fields is going to be out of a job.
Fields – who has been under pressure since a video was released of him tackling a high school student from her desk after she refused his orders – will officially be relieved of duty because of his actions, according to NBC News.
CBS News reported that the trouble started because the student wouldn’t listen when the teacher and assistant pricipal told her to put her cell phone away. Did they reprimand the three students who used their own cell phones to record the takedown? Probably not, if the students had the Skin Hue of Privilege™.
As this week’s examples of victimhood show, the -ists and -izmz are abundant. I’m sure I missed a few hundred more examples.
There will be more. There are always more.
