"Prison Journal of a Child Bride"

"Raeesi first met Zarbibi in jail, after she had been sentenced to death, and encouraged her to write the diary printed here as “both as a kind of therapy as well as a way to explain her story to the public.” This unedited document captures the distress of a young woman who wanted the right to choose when and whom to marry, as well as the uncertainty of a young mother contemplating her daughter’s future. Though the arc of her narrative can be confusing at times, her writing demonstrates a talent for self-expression, one made all the more remarkable considering her limited learning and marginal cultural place. “While her crime is exceptional,” says Raeesi, “the intense feelings that seemed to have motivated it articulate the struggle of so many women in similar positions.”...

Later that night, when I told the family that I would refuse to go through with it, my mother lashed me so hard that my skin started crying for me. A pool of blood formed on my back, soon hardening into a dried cake...

I had only been in my husband’s home for a week when I had an excuse to return to my neighborhood for a party. When I went back to my family home, the first thing I did was to go to my old school to see my friends. They all asked me why I hadn’t been going to school. I was too embarrassed to tell them the truth. When I told my family I really wanted to go back to school, they all laughed at me. They said, “Young lady, you won’t be staying with us long enough to go back to school.” I can’t believe that my greatest dream went down the drain. They thought that I was a grown-up, just because I was tall. They didn’t know how much I felt like a child. I just liked playing with kids, going to the park, and attending school. I never felt ready to have a husband and become a housewife...

Every mean word he said and every little way he acted out in anger now made me more determined to take action. I felt in that moment like a strange energy had come over my body. Even though I kept telling myself that he is young and has hopes for the future as well as parents and a sister who love him, I would suddenly forget about all that. I couldn’t talk myself out of it, and finally that evil night came to pass. I had suddenly become a murderer, a person who had taken somebody else’s life for her own selfish happiness."

https://www.guernicamag.com/prison-journal-of-a-child-bride/

Related: Father fights against child marriage

"Why Some Protests Succeed While Others Fail"

"So it seems clear that if the inauguration protests are going to have a lasting impact, it will be vital for them to activate people — to get them to continue chipping in their time and energy once they return home from wherever they came. Because Trump has aroused outrage that cuts across so many different areas — everything from reproductive rights to the environment to foreign policy to police reform — a gathering of that size will reflect a real opportunity to mobilize people.

But only if certain conditions are met. The general advice I heard from researchers, over and over again, all fit in the same general category: Make the barrier to entry as low as possible; make the protests as inclusive as possible. Sometimes, this will involve moves that feel counterintuitive. For example, Rojas said that while the reason everyone will be gathering in D.C. is obviously Trump’s election, protest organizers should downplay the focus on Trump himself and make things more issue-oriented. “What I would recommend is instead of having an anti-Trump inaugural protest, try to break the protests up into issue-oriented marches,” he said. “And I think they’re already doing that,” he added, in the case of the Women’s March."

http://nymag.com/scienceofus/2016/11/how-should-trump-protesters-organize-themselves.html

"Hit the Reset Button in Your Brain"

"If you’re feeling overwhelmed, there’s a reason: The processing capacity of the conscious mind is limited. This is a result of how the brain’s attentional system evolved. Our brains have two dominant modes of attention: the task-positive network and the task-negative network (they’re called networks because they comprise distributed networks of neurons, like electrical circuits within the brain). The task-positive network is active when you’re actively engaged in a task, focused on it, and undistracted; neuroscientists have taken to calling it the central executive. The task-negative network is active when your mind is wandering; this is the daydreaming mode. These two attentional networks operate like a seesaw in the brain: when one is active the other is not... 

A third component of the attentional system, the attentional filter, helps to orient our attention, to tell us what to pay attention to and what we can safely ignore... The efficacy of this switch varies from person to person, in some functioning smoothly, in others rather rusty. But switch it does, and if it is called upon to switch too often, we feel tired and a bit dizzy, as though we were seesawing too rapidly... 

Taking breaks is biologically restorative. Naps are even better. In several studies, a nap of even 10 minutes improved cognitive function and vigor, and decreased sleepiness and fatigue. If we can train ourselves to take regular vacations — true vacations without work — and to set aside time for naps and contemplation, we will be in a more powerful position to start solving some of the world’s big problems."

https://mobile.nytimes.com/2014/08/10/opinion/sunday/hit-the-reset-button-in-your-brain.html?_r=0&referer=android-app://com.google.android.gm

"Oral History: In 1985 Mr. Snuffleupagus Shocked 'Sesame Street'"

"The actors’ desire to play off a new dynamic was soon joined by a more pressing, potentially catastrophic issue. In the early 1980s, news programs like 60 Minutes were reporting on troubling statistics involving child abuse both at home and in daycare centers. If Big Bird—ostensibly the show’s stand-in for the 6-year-old viewing audience—was being brushed aside when trying to convince people Snuffleupagus was real, there was the chance children might not be convinced adults would believe them if they came forward with more troubling claims...

Parente: It’s rare a children’s show is grounded in the real world. Much of our competition is in the animated world, where fantastical things happen. This is a real neighborhood. We think of it as kids coming to a play date with real friends, and it requires a real investment in how you tell a story.

Lawrence Rubin, Ph.D. (Child Psychologist): The writers took a real-world concern and asked themselves, "Are we helping or hurting kids by keeping Snuffy in the imaginary closet, and do we have a moral imperative to respond to a real issue by changing something about the show?"

Stiles: We wanted kids to know that grownups will believe them, but we wanted to preserve the fun that we were having, so I proposed that we have some of the grownups believe Big Bird, and that was the first step...

Robinson: They devised this two-year scheme, where in the first year they would have some of the cast members learn from Bird that Bird could indeed tell the difference between what was real and what was imaginary, that he knew the difference and was very clear about it. And once they got that from Bird, they said, "Okay, you know the difference. If you say Snuffy is real, then he’s real and we’d love to meet him, whenever the timing is right." And the other half of the adults said, "What, are you crazy? He’s imaginary! There’s no such thing as a Snuffleupagus."

Stiles: That changed the dynamic between the grownups ... Now, Big Bird wasn’t alone. He had grownups believing him, and we had a new dynamic where the grownups who believed him would now actually try to see Snuffy."

http://mentalfloss.com/article/71281/oral-history-1985-mr-snuffleupagus-shocked-sesame-street

"LIVE, FROM NEW YORK, IT’S FUTILE SATIRE!"

"How did SNL become the most important force in America, apparently more likely to unseat Trump than the media tasked with covering him or the government charged with challenging him? To understand this, we must revisit the blog industrial complex. SNL is the perfect show for bloggers, providing a cornucopia of pre-made content that needs little writing to supplant it... 

there exists an unctuous relationship between the media (traditional, print/digital hybrid, start-up) and late-night media (satire, fake news). Media organizations report the news. SNL makes fun of the news. Media organizations report on SNLmaking fun of the news they just reported. This adds to the glut of meaningless internet content while affording us little distance from what we are consuming... 

The people whose jobs it is to convey this type of low-stakes humor are not concerned with effecting change, and even less with cultivating an audience outside of their cosseted, exclusive sphere. Although they may address politics, they’re free from the responsibility that comes with being involved in politics."

https://theoutline.com/post/1081/saturday-night-live-satire-will-not-save-us?utm_source=FB

"If “Boys Will Be Boys” Why Don’t We Just Kill Boys?"

"Go with me here, women have to live defensively. Even more so if you’re not a White Woman. And a lot of men assure me that the reason anything bad ever happens to women is their fault for attire/presence/state of sobriety/not leaving/not leaving fast enough/not getting help/expecting people to help/not fighting back/not taking elaborate martial arts classes/assorted other reasons that involve backbreaking, acrobatic logic. So if it’s the fault of women that Pissbaby and assorted other “boys” feel entitled to harass us, shouldn’t we just do a control kill? If you want women to take responsibility of the situation, isn’t this the most effective way to do so?

We do it with deer, raccoon, rats and other vermin. And the phrasing “boys will be boys” is clearly some sort of internalized self hatred where you have reduced yourselves to bestial, criminal impulse, why wouldn’t we profile you and exterminate those of you that are a harm to yourself and others?"

https://medium.com/@Dissident/if-boys-will-be-boys-why-dont-we-kill-boys-bf87fbf676d8#.jdsqdwq6w

FB: Pointing out that the excuse for rape culture is often literally "Well, it's white men doing it. So it's fine"

"Onna-bugeisha- Rare photos show the Japanese female warriors"

"Women learned to use naginata, kaiken, and the art of tanto Jutsu in battle. Such training ensured protection in communities that lacked male fighters. One such woman, later known as Empress Jingu (c. 169-269 AD), used her skills to inspire economic and social change. She was legendarily recognized as the onna bugeisha who led an invasion of Korea in 200 AD after her husband Emperor Chūai, the fourteenth emperor of Japan, was slain in battle.

https://www.thevintagenews.com/2016/01/27/female-samur/

"Too poor to vote: how Alabama’s ‘new poll tax’ bars thousands of people from voting"

"In Maine and Vermont, she would have never lost that right in the first place. But in Alabama and eight other states from Nevada to Tennessee, anyone who has lost the franchise cannot regain it until they pay off any outstanding court fines, legal fees and victim restitution.

In Alabama, that requirement has fostered an underclass of thousands of people who are unable to vote because they do not have enough money.

For folks like Williams, who said she regularly voted before her conviction in 2008, poverty is the only remaining obstacle to participation in the electoral process... 

In 1964, the 24th amendment abolished the poll tax, but to this day in Alabama, money keeps thousands of people away from the ballot box. According to the Sentencing Project, a Washington DC-based criminal justice reform non-profit, there are 286,266 disenfranchised felons in Alabama, or 7.62% of the state’s voting-age population.

More than half of those disenfranchised felons are black, despite the fact that African Americans made up only 26.8% of the state’s population as of July 2016, according to a US census estimate."

"How a former sharecropper in an SUV helped drive Doug Jones to victory in Alabama's Black Belt"

"59-year-old Hardy recalls picking cotton after school growing up. She eventually finished her education, bought her own home, and had a successful career as a home health nurse.

But for the past two-and-a-half decades, Hardy has dedicated much of her free time to another pursuit: trying to ensure that every single person in Lowndes County shows up to the polls for every election in Alabama. A native of the unincorporated community of Collirene, she has done about as much as one person possibly could to boost turnout in the impoverished, majority-black county with a population of just 10,458 people...

She helps sign up local students enrolled at out-of-state colleges to vote absentee, using a portable scanner plugged into her Tahoe's cigarette lighter socket to scan their driver's licenses and Social Security cards and submitting the forms on their behalf."

http://www.al.com/news/index.ssf/2017/12/how_a_former_sharecropper_in_a.html

"MISSING LINK BETWEEN GUT AND BRAIN DISCOVERED WITH BIG IMPLICATIONS FOR DISEASE"

"The immune cells play several important roles within the body, including guarding against pathogens and triggering allergic reactions. In exploring their role in protecting the brain, the Kipnis team has determined they are vital in the body’s response to spinal cord injuries. But it’s their role in the gut that makes Kipnis suspect they may be serving as a vital communicator between the brain’s immune response and our microbiomes. That could be of great importance, because our intestinal flora is critical for maintaining our health and wellbeing.

“These cells are potentially the mediator between the gut and the brain. They are the main responder to microbiota changes in the gut. They may go from the gut to the brain, or they may just produce something that will impact those cells. But you see them in the gut and now you see them also in the brain,” Kipnis said. “We know the brain responds to things happening in the gut. Is it logical that these will be the cells that connect the two? Potentially. We don’t know that, but it very well could be."

http://neurosciencenews.com/immune-cell-gut-brain-5770/?hootPostID=a5567af989c96e1e222baccf0f8efa4d

Related: Parkinson's...

"Hidden Figures and The Hope for More Real Science Stories"

"Cultural memory is a very powerful thing, and films — specifically Hollywood films — play a considerable role in shaping it. They say that looking at the past is the best way to anticipate what will happen in the future, but the “history” that actually shapes current attitudes and opinions is history as remembered, which can vary significantly from history as it actually was (thus, “Make America Great Again”). It could be argued that films and popular culture are responsible for a lot of the misremembrance of the past that fuels popular nostalgia, but by the same token films are similarly capable of counteracting the image of the rose-tinted world of yesteryear — a time of blatant racism, sexism, and a lot of diseases...

One of the great things about Hidden Figures is that it’s the sort of film, with it’s PG rating and upbeat tone, that a little girl could go see and come out thinking “now that’s cool” or “hey, maybe I could do something like that.” We need more of these kinds of films. It’s not about indoctrinating kids into becoming scientists and mathematicians and engineers — just letting them know that those options are out there. In a peculiar sense it’s almost a Chicken-and-Egg question: do so many little girls want to be princesses and the like because they want to be, or because most of the female characters they are exposed to are princesses? I attribute a lot of my interest in microbiology and immunology to the PBS American Experience documentaries “The Polio Crusade” and “Influenza 1918,” and I know people pursuing STEM careers who reminisce fondly over childhood memories of watching movies like Apollo 13."

https://filmschoolrejects.com/hidden-figures-and-the-hope-for-more-real-science-stories-e0e7c5ce612#.bj4kz73fd

I also want more media that points out that scientist aren't, like, meta-humans disconnected from the real world in ivory towers (or unkempt socially ignorant geek-caricatures), we are regulars and you can def interact with us.

"Bad sugar or bad journalism? An expert review of “The Case Against Sugar”."

"Scientifically, The Case Against Sugar suffers from a condition Steven Pinker has called the “Igon Value Problem”. This term describes the tendency of certain science journalists to arrive at obtuse conclusions due to a superficial understanding of their subject matter (3). There are many examples of this in The Case Against Sugar, but the underlying theme is that Taubes misunderstands (or chooses not to apply) the scientific method itself...

Besides its misapplication of Occam’s Razor, the passage above manifests the Igon Value Problem in a second way: the diseases in question are actually not all correlated with one another, or even with sugar intake. Statistics demonstrating this are readily available. For example, sugar intake is higher today in the US than it was in the 1970s, and while obesity has increased three-fold, coronary heart disease mortality has declined by over 60 percent (4, 5, 6). Taubes neglects to inform the reader that sugar intake has been declining since 1999 in the US, a period over which obesity and diabetes rates have increased substantially (7, 8, 9)...

A person who actually wants to get to the bottom of this question should conduct their investigation in a very different manner. The first order of business is to look up the relevant metabolic ward studies, which are the most tightly controlled diet studies available. These studies consistently show that calorie content is the only known food property that has a meaningful impact on body fatness. This is true across a wide range of carbohydrate-to-fat ratios and sugar intakes, and a correspondingly wide range of insulin levels (17).

What makes Taubes’s oversight so extraordinary is that he was involved in funding one of these metabolic ward studies, which compared two diets that differed more than tenfold in sugar content. The results showed that a 25 percent sugar, high-carbohydrate diet caused slightly more body fat loss than a 2 percent sugar, very-low-carbohydrate (ketogenic) diet of equal calories (18). Despite these clear and consistent findings, Taubes continues to insist that calorie intake is not an important determinant of body fatness, and he offers the reader questionable evidence in support of this while omitting high-quality evidence to the contrary. All while exuding righteous indignation about the scientific community’s misguided beliefs."

http://www.stephanguyenet.com/bad-sugar-or-bad-journalism-an-expert-review-of-the-case-against-sugar/

Sugar shaming is exhausting; searching for the one thing to cut out is a great way to cause health crises

FB: "Science is imperfect, and scientists are as well. Pioneers such as John Ioannidis, Brian Nosek, Vinayak Prasad, Adam Cifu, Chris Chambers, and David Allison are making a good faith effort to identify flaws in the scientific process and address them. Journalists have an important role to play here as well, by helping to identify problems and raising awareness about how to fix them. Taubes also views science as flawed, but primarily where it disagrees with his personal beliefs. Rather than contribute to the solution, Taubes adds to the problem by promoting an unscientific thought process that systematically excludes opposing evidence."

"The starships of the future won’t look anything like Star Trek’s Enterprise"

"It’s one thing to build a hypothetical starship—it’s another to actually try living in it. “From the second version of Seeker onward, we started organizing actual isolation missions, like pre-hearsals of the future,” says Vermeulen. “Doing this totally changes the dynamic of the design process — it gives the work a performative quality. For Seeker in Ljubljana, Slovenia, we tested our speculative construction by locking ourselves up for four days with six team members,” he says. “We stayed inside the art work in the museum, even at night after the guards had left.”

Isolation missions are part of Vermeulen’s interest in possible social structures and governance for interstellar communities—particularly distributed and self-organized decision making as opposed to traditional military-style command. “During the isolation mission in Ljubljana, we had a crew member who’d served in the Yugoslav army during the war. As we discussed how military command works, the ex-soldier shared his experiences with us, and it was chilling,” says Vermeulen. “He was very much against military structure because it psychologically discourages people from connecting. The main goal, he said, is to make sure a commander can give orders to individuals because communities are threatening: they are strong, can voice an opinion and rise up.”

https://fellowsblog.ted.com/the-starships-of-the-future-wont-look-anything-like-star-trek-s-enterprise-4b2a45a255dd#.xnymnw2s7

Kind of giving everyone ownership of the future, not just for NASA engineers.

"The Gloriously Immortal Life of “My Immortal”"

"The story, and the character of Ebony, is an example of “Mary Sue” fan fiction, i.e. a story where the author inserts a thinly veiled version of herself into the text and makes herself the hero. Most authors of fan fiction are women, and Mary Sue fanfic in particular is often written by teenage girls (and in keeping with the grand tradition of pouring scorn on things teenage girls like, it’s the target of a lot of bile). My Immortal may not be a good piece of work, but it is an important one: A young girl creating a piece of work where she is the hero is a radical act.

Like a lot of great literary epics, we don’t have a definitive version of the text. It’s like the writing of some ancient culture. In fact, the typos make it seem like it’s written in another language sometimes (“c dats basically nut swering and dis time he wuz relly upset n u wil c y”). But I think if My Immortal had genuinely been written as a joke and had reached this level of success and notoriety, the author would have come forward. Maybe I just want to believe. Because My Immortal is important to me...

Stories are most meaningful when we see ourselves in them. The majority of our most famous stories are about straight white men and a lot of fan fiction exists to try to subvert this in some small way. In My Immortal, Tara Gilesbie created a version of herself – Ebony Dark’ness Dementia Raven Way – and put her right in the centre of Hogwarts along with all the silly, brilliant, trivial things she cared about. And the fact that this story has come to be acknowledged as the worst, but also one of the most important pieces of fan fiction ever written is utterly heartwarming."

http://www.buzzfeed.com/mathildia/he-put-his-boys-thingy-in-mine#.mqE64lqV8

Oh, the mid-2000s. In some ways, I think I was perfectly positioned to enjoy that era of the internet: in middle school/early high school when I had the time and the extremely self-referencial social groups to get really into things like fan fiction and those weird repetitive animated viral videos (like that one about potatoes and lord of the rings? or the llama one?) and the online quiz websites! There was a huge piece of the internet that was really teen girls talking to and creating for other teen girls, validating each other and feeling safe to build our own stuff and put ourselves out there. 

It's only reading this now that I realize how important these stories were, how much they really did give us the ability to write our own stories outside of the ways people used to frame teenage girlhood (which was at an especially weird point in the mid-2000s, full of anorexia and long straight hair and media giving us adventures in social success or traumatized emo-girls). And I recognize that typo language from that time; a major pastime was finding terrible fanfiction and reading it out loud in groups, and there was so much communication about our expectations for our own stories in the ways that we laughed and critiqued and celebrated the behaviors of those characters.

I don't know, just thinking about this right now, but my brothers had all sorts of action movies and classic adventure novels staring men that they could discuss with friends; imagining being those people, talking about different decisions they would have made, but having group conversations about their desire to be these impactful figures in the world. And I think that fanfiction and YA novels gave me that opportunity with my friends, to build our images of ourselves together.

Related: Love for Homestar Runner

"We never feel authentic enough, and that’s not fair"

"Notions of authenticity exist in a historical vacuum, as if places and people remain in time capsules, untouched by global movements and interactions. In this way, purist myths of culture and ethnicity infect ethnic communities and their diasporas, meaning we often hold ourselves and are held by others to an unrealistic standard of Authentic Enough.

It can be difficult to convince others of our ethnic community that we are, indeed, Authentic Enough. I’m often asked by older desi folk why I don’t speak Hindi when I’m half-Indian, and I’m expected to know about holidays I never celebrated and a religion I was barely taught. I’ve also been chided for speaking insufficient Spanish by a woman who believed I was Latina (I’m not, but Latinas shouldn’t be judged for this anyway)...

As diaspora kids, we adapt to changes in our environments, becoming a mixture of cultures and a kaleidoscope of identities. Dusty history books or older relatives can’t tell us what’s “authentic” about us when our histories are being written by all the spaces we inhabit in our rich, varied and divided lives."
http://www.comingoffaith.com/2016/01/25/culture/aryannaprasad/are-we-authentic-enough/?hvid=X59F9

"Why Succeeding Against the Odds Can Make You Sick"

"Over the past two years, Dr. Brody and colleagues have amassed more evidence supporting this theory. In 2015, they found that white blood cells among strivers were prematurely aged relative to those of their peers. Ominous correlations have also been found in cardiovascular and metabolic health. In December, Dr. Brody and colleagues published a study in the journal Pediatrics that said that among black adolescents from disadvantaged backgrounds, “unrelenting determination to succeed” predicted an elevated risk of developing diabetes.

The focus on black adolescents is significant. In much of this research, white Americans appeared somehow to be immune to the negative health effects that accompany relentless striving. As Dr. Brody put it when telling me about the Pittsburgh study, “We found this for black persons from disadvantaged backgrounds, but not white persons.”... 

Globally, there is no association between skin color and the length of one’s life. This is an American phenomenon. In medical school we are taught that black men are much more likely than other patients to have hypertension, as if this were simple biology... 

The Trump administration could do much more to damage Americans’ health than just repeal the Affordable Care Act and leave people without access to hospitals and medications. “The consequences around the divisiveness, and increased instability and uncertainty for families and children, combined with increased racial tension and overt acts of discrimination,” Dr. Mujahid noted, all stand to heighten the John Henryism effect."

https://mobile.nytimes.com/2017/01/27/opinion/sunday/why-succeeding-against-the-odds-can-make-you-sick.html?smprod=nytcore-iphone&smid=nytcore-iphone-share&_r=0&referer=https://m.facebook.com/

FB: "decades of research show that when resilient people work hard within a system that has not afforded them the same opportunities as others, their physical health deteriorates." 

"HEADPHONES EVERYWHERE"

"Read enough archived editorials, and you begin to believe that as long as human beings have wandered the Earth’s surface, reluctantly grunting at each other about the weather, we have also been entrenched in “an inwardly focused era.” Portable audio, then, is likely more a reflection than an engine of our egotism. The sociologist Edward Hall, in his book “The Hidden Dimension,” from 1966, introduced the discipline of proxemics, which he defined as “the interrelated observations and theories of man’s use of space as a specialized elaboration of culture.” Hall is responsible for the notion of so-called personal space, or the invisible force field most Americans ensconce themselves in while moving through public places; a breach of implied boundaries (per Hall, the human ego extends about a foot and a half outside the body) is neither welcome nor tolerated. No indiscriminate or uninvited contact, the social contract goes. Certainly never any uncomfortably close talking! As W. H. Auden wrote in his poem “Prologue: The Birth of Architecture,” “Some thirty inches from my nose / The frontier of my person goes.” Headphones help demarcate personal space. They allow us to feel cloistered, safe, and comfortably alone."

http://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/headphones-everywhere?utm_source=nextdraft&utm_medium=email

FB: "These days, people seem to be perpetually gearing themselves up for the epic battle of merely existing. At the end of the day, jogging up to our front doors, we are all Rocky, reaching the summit, conquering that last step: “Just a man / and his will / to survive!”"

"Is It Racist To Call Someone 'Racist'?"

"If you needed another illustration of how the word racist has been defined so preposterously that nothing might ever meet the criteria, here it was. One of America's most prominent white separatists — a dude who dreams of a whites-only America and has called for the full repeal of the Civil Rights Act because it bars discrimination in private enterprise; a dude who was attending an event that ended in a chorus of Nazi cheers — was arguing against being labeled a racist because it makes his ideas sound distasteful.

But many more, less cynical Americans seem to look at racism in an equally odd way: Good people should endeavor to be colorblind and never talk about race or its unequal effects on how we live. And real racism is the province of a small cohort of uncomplicated knuckle-draggers whose presence is overstated by the ax-grinding, "identity politics" crowd.

Our mainstream news media haven't done much to add clarity."

http://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2016/11/23/503180254/is-it-racist-to-call-someone-racist

FB: this article is a perfect. summary. of these definition problems "avoiding the word racist misrepresents the truth. The result is that racial issues have no meaningful distinctions, and racist in our mainstream discourse is defined only as something as extreme as the lynching of Emmett Till, or as an idea up for debate (Is THIS racist?), or as a phenomenon with no contemporary human vectors."