I came across this Kevin Durant shoe that seems to scream cultural appropriation to me.
Thanks to the sportingnews.com for the image of Nike Kevin Durant shoe.
The shoe raises money for Nike, Kevin Durant and some Native American athletic programs (I assume in that order). But the description is a toxic collection of generalizations and stereotypes mashed together.
The bold Nike N7 KD VI features the repeating pattern of arrows that first launched on the Pendleton Woolen Mills Nike N7 blanket last month. The arrow print symbolizes energy and forward motion and has reflective built in for a surprise effect when worn in the elements. The bold colors used on the KD VI have significant meaning in Native communities. Turquoise is used often as a color symbolic of friendship, and red is one of four colors—yellow, red, black and white—featured on the traditional Native America medicine wheel, representing movement and the four directions. The KD logo appears on the heel and the N7 logo is on the tongue.
That is amazing! Red is a color significant for Native Americans! Whoa! It is good to know where that stuff comes from (sarcasm). How about vague ambiguity when it comes to so-called native symbols and precise articulation of the Kevin Durant logo?
Nike has also developed a wide shoe, the Air Native N7, for Native North American’s supposedly wider feet (they measured 224 indians feet to justify this claim!) While criticizing the marketing of this shoe, we can lay some of the News from Indian Country analysis against this Kevin Durant shoe press release.
Some vocal opponents of the Air Native N7 believe the shoe line indeed fosters stereotypes because, along with the companys trademark swoosh, the footwear features feathers, arrowheads, sunset designs and circle of life motifs. Nike officials have said the product is designed to deliver sustainable innovation, and the N7 portion of its name is meant to encourage a seventh generation ethos.
In my opinion, the whole idea is racist, says Eugene Johnson, a member of the Confederated Tribes of Siletz Indians, whos paid close attention to the development of the shoe line. This is a branding scheme of advertising that Nike is known for I have no doubt that the sales folks are hoping that Indian sympathizers and the general public will be thinking of how Nike is so charitable in thinking of the Indians, thus, increasing sales through the usual brand of Nike branding advertising.
I happen to agree that the dual marketing benefit of being seen as charitable to anonymous poor indians helps to sell the shoe as does the appropriation of cultural symbols. I think the same might be said about this Kevin Durant shoe.
Time Magazine gave Chelsea Manning some space and she makes some good arguments. A political prisoner who uses her access to media to talk about complicated ideas. Complicated ideas like direct action, accountability, violence to native nations, class, risks associated with solidarity, killing activists, and the movement. Here is the whole thing. Stay real america.
I’m usually hesitant to celebrate Thanksgiving Day. After all, the Puritans of the Massachusetts Bay Colony systematically terrorized and slaughtered the very same Pequot tribe that assisted the first English refugees to arrive at Plymouth Rock. So, perhaps ironically, I’m thankful that I know that, and I’m also thankful that there are people who seek out, and usually find, such truths. I’m thankful for people who, even surrounded by millions of Americans eating turkey during regularly scheduled commercial breaks in the Green Bay and Detroit football game; who, despite having been taught, often as early as five and six years old, that the “helpful natives” selflessly assisted the “poor helpless Pilgrims” and lived happily ever after, dare to ask probing, even dangerous, questions.
Such people are often nameless and humble, yet no less courageous. Whether carpenters of welders; retail clerks or bank managers; artists or lawyers, they dare to ask tough questions, and seek out the truth, even when the answers they find might not be easy to live with.
I’m also grateful for having social and human justice pioneers who lead through action, and by example, as opposed to directing or commanding other people to take action. Often, the achievements of such people transcend political, cultural, and generational boundaries. Unfortunately, such remarkable people often risk their reputations, their livelihood, and, all too often, even their lives.
For instance, the man commonly known as Malcolm X began to openly embrace the idea, after an awakening during his travels to the Middle East and Africa, of an international and unifying effort to achieve equality, and was murdered after a tough, yearlong defection from the Nation of Islam. Martin Luther King Jr., after choosing to embrace the struggles of striking sanitation workers in Memphis over lobbying in Washington, D.C., was murdered by an escaped convict seeking fame and respect from white Southerners. Harvey Milk, the first openly gay politician in the U.S., was murdered by a jealous former colleague. These are only examples; I wouldn’t dare to make a claim that they represent an exhaustive list of remarkable pioneers of social justice and equality—certainly many if not the vast majority are unsung and, sadly, forgotten.
So, this year, and every year, I’m thankful for such people, and I’m thankful that one day—perhaps not tomorrow—because of the accomplishments of such truth-seekers and human rights pioneers, we can live together on this tiny “pale blue dot” of a planet and stop looking inward, at each other, but rather outward, into the space beyond this planet and the future of all of humanity.
Chelsea Manning, formerly named Bradley, is serving a 35-year prison sentence at Fort Leavenworth for leaking hundreds of thousands of classified documents to the anti-secrecy group WikiLeaks.
Cops gone wild – where they arrest anyone who has ever criticized them. Like a convenience store clerk who regularly gets arrested for trespassing WHILE HE IS AT WORK!
Earl Sampson has been stopped and questioned by Miami Gardens police 258 times in four years.
He’s been searched more than 100 times. And arrested and jailed 56 times.
Despite his long rap sheet, Sampson, 28, has never been convicted of anything more serious than possession of marijuana.
Miami Gardens police have arrested Sampson 62 times for one offense: trespassing.
Almost every citation was issued at the same place: the 207 Quickstop, a convenience store on 207th Street in Miami Gardens.
But Sampson isn’t loitering. He works as a clerk at the Quickstop.
The convenience store owner had to install video cameras to track the cops. What did he find?
Saleh was so troubled by what he saw that he decided to install video cameras in his store. Not to protect himself from criminals, because he says he has never been robbed. He installed the cameras — 15 of them — he said, to protect him and his customers from police.
Since he installed the cameras in June 2012 he has collected more than two dozen videos, some of which have been obtained by the Miami Herald. Those tapes, and Sampson’s 38-page criminal history — including charges never even pursued by prosecutors — raise some troubling questions about the conduct of the city’s police officers.
The videos show, among other things, cops stopping citizens, questioning them, aggressively searching them and arresting them for trespassing when they have permission to be on the premises; officers conducting searches of Saleh’s business without search warrants or permission; using what appears to be excessive force on subjects who are clearly not resisting arrest and filing inaccurate police reports in connection with the arrests.
Soleil Ho has a nice critique in Bitch Magazine of some trends of cultural simplification and racism in food culture. I like her salty tone. She kicks off the discussion with the one directional consumption/service relationship of immigrant cultures reduced to food. Wondering what to reply when someone mentions to the author ‘Oh you’re Vietnamese, I love pho’:
What can one say in response? “Oh, you’re white? I love tuna salad!” It sounds ridiculous, mostly because no one cares if a second-generation immigrant likes American food. Rather, the burden of fluency with American culture puts a unique pressure on the immigrant kid. I paid attention during playdates with my childhood friends, when parents would serve pulled-pork sandwiches and coleslaw for lunch. (It took me a long time to understand the appeal of mayonnaise, which, as a non-cream, non-cheese, non-sauce, perplexed the hell out of me.) From watching my friends, I learned to put the coleslaw in the sandwich and sop the bread in the stray puddles of sauce in between bites. There’s a similar kind of self-checking that occurs when I take people out to Vietnamese restaurants: Through unsubtle side glances, they watch me for behavioral cues, noting how and if I use various condiments and garnishes so they can report back to their friends and family that they learned how to eat this food the “real way” from their real, live Vietnamese friend. Their desire to be true global citizens, eaters without borders, lies behind their studious gazes.
Ho seems insulted by the notion that you might be able to get at something essential or authentic in the culture by eating take-out food. She makes a strong argument here.
Like a plague of culture locusts, foodies, Chowhounders, and food writers flit from bibimbap to roti canai, fetishizing each dish as some adventure-in-a-bowl and using it as a springboard to make gross generalizations about a given culture’s “sense of family and community,” “lack of pretense,” “passion,” and “spirituality.” Eventually, a hole-in-the-wall reaches critical white-Instagrammer mass, and the swarm moves on to its next discovery, decrying the former fixation’s loss of authenticity. The foodies’ cultural cachet depends on being the only white American person in the room, braving inhumane spice levels and possible food poisoning in order to share with you the proper way to handle Ethiopian injera bread. But they can’t cash in on it unless they share their discoveries with someone else, thereby jeopardizing that sense of exclusivity. Thus, happiness tends to elude the cultural foodie.
She is particularly good at pointing out the harms of reducing a culture to food.
Over time, you grow to associate nationalities with the quaint little restaurants that you used to frequent, before they were demolished and replaced with soulless, Americanized joints. You look at a map of the world and point a finger to Mongolia. “Really good barbecue.” El Salvador. “Mmm, pupusas.” Vietnam. “I love pho!\” When you divorce a food from its place and time, you can ignore global civil unrest and natural disasters (see: Zagat declaring Pinoy cuisine the “next great Asian food trend” this past fall as deadly floods swept through the Philippines), knowing as you do that the world’s cultural products will always find safe harbor in your precious, precious mouth.
Visibility and awareness above all. What are the stakes? Many German medical professionals gained subjects for experiments from the Nazi murder machine. Take this one example:
The most startling breakthrough comes from German journalist and Tübingen culture professor Hans-Joachim Lang. He has identified all of the Jews selected for gassing by August Hirt, director of the anatomical institute in Strasbourg who had a singularly ghoulish plan for their remains.
Hirt was interested in adding to a collection of skulls at the University of Strasbourg. “Although extensive skulls collections existed from nearly all races and peoples,” the Jews were missing, he wrote to the director of an SS research group established to prove Aryan superiority. “From the Jewish-Bolshevik commissars, who embody a disgusting, but characteristic type of subhuman, we have the opportunity to acquire a tangible scientific document by securing their skulls.”
Hirt was essentially competing with the Natural History Museum in Vienna, which procured Jewish skulls from another anatomist, Hermann Voss. In consultation with the staff of Heinrich Himmler, Hirt received permission to go ahead. Two staff members were sent to Auschwitz to separate out a group of Jews, 30 women and 79 men. They were examined according to the standards for racial typing of the time: Their skin, hair, and eye color were noted and coded using special tables, and the shapes of their heads, foreheads, noses, mouths, and ears measured. Fifty-seven of the men and 29 of the women were chosen. They were gassed in a special chamber and their bodies delivered to Hirt at his anatomical institute.
Hirt stored the bodies in the basement. In the end, he didn’t work on them—he lacked the equipment during the course of the war. At the war’s end, Himmler ordered the bodies destroyed. But in January 1945, after the liberation of Strasbourg, the London Daily Mail reported their discovery in the anatomical institute.
Oh yeah, the bogus idea that rape doesn’t lead to conception traces back to some grotesque nazi scientists.
Whether they know it or not, Stieve’s work is the source for their discredited claim. The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists warned that saying rape victims rarely get pregnant was “medically inaccurate, offensive, and dangerous.” But the anti-abortion doctor Jack Willke, former head of the National Right to Life Committee, insisted otherwise. \”This goes back 30 and 40 years,” he told the Los Angeles Times in the midst of the Akin furor. “When a woman is assaulted and raped, there\’s a tremendous amount of emotional upset within her body.\” Willke has written that \”one of the most important reasons why a rape victim rarely gets pregnant” is “physical trauma.\”
Where did he get this idea? In 1972, another anti-abortion doctor, Fred Mecklenburg, wrote an essay in a book financed by the group Americans United for Life in which he asserted that women rarely get pregnant from rape. Mecklenburg said that:
The Nazis tested the hypothesis that stress inhibits ovulation by selecting women who were about to ovulate and sending them to the gas chambers, only to bring them back after their realistic mock killing, to see what effects this had on their ovulatory pattern. An extremely high percentage of these women did not ovulate.
The Smoking Section has a nice interview with Tech N9ne, who get’s legitimate props for his hard work and business savvy. Here he describes getting emcees for Strange records. An independent record label poaching musicians from major labels.
TSS: What are your thoughts on major label record deals in 2014?
Tech N9ne: I don’t know about ‘em. It’s not my world, anymore. I just know that some of the artists I’m interested in have been just sitting on these labels, for years. I don’t like that shit.
That’s why we took Jay Rock off Warner Brothers. That’s why we took Stevie Stone off Ruthless. That’s why if Atlantic don’t quit fucking up, I’m gonna’ snatch Snow Tha Product. She’s supposed to be out, doing her thing. Yeah, she just put out a mixtape. But, fuck that, let her do her album.
TSS: I’m pretty sure I didn’t even get proper press for her mixtape.
Tech N9ne: Yeaaaah. I just retweeted her mixtape. I saw she had 2,000 views in three days. I’m like, ‘Baby girl, you killed it.’ I don’t get anything for that. She’s not my artist. But, I got love for her, because she’s an MC. And, I love MCs.
I think Tech should get more respect for his wordplay and genuine style. But if he has to gain access to greater fame via his business swagger then so-be-it. And I think another powerful independent hip hop label with Tech, Jay Rock, Rittz, and Krizz Kaliko could make some really gooooood music.
Thanks to Laurie Penny (author of Cybersexism: Sex, Gender, Power and the Internet) for a few insightful quotes about fighting sexism on the internets. I happen to agree about the rising moments of accountability.
Look. The internet makes dicks out of us all, but it means that for a few people, the perceived costs of extreme douchebaggery are far lower than they would be otherwise. But that sense of inviolability is beginning to erode. Men — and I do believe that it’s mainly men, even though I’ve had troll encounters with women and others — are beginning to realize that there are actual consequences to behaving like this. It’s happening in “the real world,” too. Comedians now think twice before making rape jokes. Tech conferences think twice before lining up scads of all-male panels. And it’s happening because of the internet. I think.
Capitalist patriarchy hurts everyone, not just women. What I really hope is that this explosion of debate and discussion about gender and sexuality, facilitated by the internet, will give men permission to speak honestly about what capitalist patriarchy does to them.
Right now, though, it seems men only feel empowered to speak of how gender affects them when they’re directly attacking women and girls or bawling artlessly at feminists. I meet a lot of MRA’s who genuinely seem to believe that an attempt to make the world fairer for women and freer for everyone is a direct attack on men, and that calling someone sexist is worse than actually being sexist. Those are lies, and we need to stop treating them as adult arguments.
If women are shamed and harassed out of full digital participation online, everyone loses.
And perhaps one of the greatest approaches to internet trolling:
But none of that is terribly helpful when all you want to do is slam the laptop shut and never look at Twitter again.
At which point I’d advise a long walk, a strong cup of tea, and a healthy dose of spite.
Spite is underrated. Sometimes, on dark days when I believe every awful thing mouth-breathing misogynists say about me online, when all I want to do is give up, I remember how important it is not to let the fuckers win.
John Spong has a narrative essay in Texas Monthly describing the rebellious country music scene around Austin Texas in the early seventies. A few of my favorite quotes:
JERRY JEFF WALKER I had a whole lot of money available, and I knew what people like the Band were doing. You buy the equipment, make your record, and when you’re done, you own the shit! I thought that might be a good thing to do.
BOB LIVINGSTON Someone had gutted the old Rapp Cleaners on Sixth Street, put burlap on the walls, and made it one of Austin’s first recording studios. We’d been with Murphey in a Nashville studio, and now we’re with Jerry Jeff in this funky little place, plugged into a sixteen-track tape recorder in the middle of the room, with no board, no nothing. We’d get there about seven each night, and Jerry Jeff would be standing in the doorway, mixing sangria in this big metal tub.
JERRY JEFF WALKER The sound engineers wanted to bring in this souped-up equipment. I said no. This needed to be like one of those nature shows: [He whispers in an affected English accent]“This is the first time we’ve ever seen the birthing of a Tibetan tiger baby.” I figured if somebody could sneak up on a tiger, we could be recorded where we’re comfortable.
I like this next quote by James White about letting these new country rebels play at his club. Maybe it’s because he judges everyone so much on their shoes. And of course — musical integration comes because five hundred hippies will buy a lot of beer.
JAMES WHITE opened the Broken Spoke in 1964. They drew over five hundred people. And I guess about 70 to 80 percent were hippies. Some of them were barefoot or wearing moccasins or tennis shoes, like a PF Flyer. None of them could two-step. They all did a dance I called the Hippie Hop, jumping around like old hoedown dancing. But there were five hundred of them, and I figured anybody who can draw five hundred people is okay.
I know that Willie Nelson is fundamentally bad-ass, but this article gives me a whole new perception. Here he is calming down redneck violence during the transition:
STEVE EARLE I saw Willie play this joint in Pasadena called the Half Dollar. Pasadena was where the Ku Klux Klan clubhouse was in the Houston area. It was as redneck as Texas got, full of refinery workers who went dancing every weekend. But that night, a bunch of us hippies wanted to sit on the floor and watch Willie play. So as the regulars go around the dance floor, they’re kicking us in the back. Willie stopped in the middle of a song and said, “You know what, there’s room enough for some to dance and some to sit.” That chilled it out.
Austin gave Tom T. Hall a lesson in gender politics. Visible here is the understanding that the power/disempowerment of gender dynamics is the pleasurable thing for male-dominant sex:
TOM T. HALL My show at the Armadillo was the first time I was ever propositioned by a woman. I came out of Kentucky and had this naive notion that men were supposed to chase women. That was the sport of it. So this beautiful, blond-haired girl came out of the audience looking like one of the Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders. She said, “Hey, you want to go screw?” I said, “Oh, I don’t think so.” The charm had gone out of the thing.
I’ve got to search for the first season of Austin City Limits.
BILL ARHOS That first year of Austin City Limits was crazy. Doug Sahm was on, and the air in the studio turned purple from marijuana smoke. I had to throw a guy out for spraying silver paint up his nose. Seriously. And God, Jerry Jeff was supposed to tape one night, but he’d gone to Miami to see the Cowboys play in the Super Bowl. If they’d won, he would’ve never shown up. But they lost, and he came, walking onstage while the Gonzos were singing “London Homesick Blues,” just grinning like an idiot. I said, “What the hell?” And someone said, “There’s a guy in the audience wearing a gorilla suit.” There was.
Perhaps the best musical defense against a drug charge by Waylon Jennings:
RICHIE ALBRIGHT The next day Waylon was booked for possession, and that was big news in Nashville. And it was funny because Willie played in Nashville that night and had Waylon come out onstage. The place went nuts. The day after that, we were at the lawyer’s office, and Waylon said, “You got a guitar around here?” They did. He said, “You’ve got to hear this new song.” He started playing “Don’t You Think This Outlaw Bit’s Done Got Out of Hand.” He got to the part where he says, “They got me for possession of something that was gone, long gone,” and the lawyers faces all drained. They said, “You can’t say that.” Waylon goes, “Hell, it is gone.”
Interesting how common gun play was at this point:
RAY BENSON We were filming a show at the Alliance Wagon Yard, and I’m in the video truck with a guy from CBS Records named Herschel. I put my hand on the board and suddenly go, “Ow! Was I just shocked?” and then Herschel goes, “Ow! My leg!” and I turn and see his jeans going dark with blood. One of Willie’s guys had shot at Joe Gracey’s brother with a .22, and the bullet went through the side of the van, grazed my left hand, and then went into Herschel’s leg. But when CBS found out who shot him, they decided not to press charges. They didn’t want to alienate Willie.
LEON RUSSELL That was my video truck. But I figured that if you send your million-dollar truck down to Austin, you’ve got to expect to get a bullet hole or two in it.
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Life of refinement 