July 9th, 2008
A lot of people want to pretend that racial discrimination is ancient history. It’s not:
John Jordan, a 40-year-old, black Milwaukee man, was invited by a friend to head down to the east side to Decibel and its Deep Bar Vodka Lounge.
“What he said was (it’s a) great place to go to. ‘I want you guys to meet me down here,’” Jordan said.
Decibel’s Web page boasts it’s Milwaukee’s hottest new nightclub.
When Jordan got to Decibel, he said guards stopped them cold at the door.
“I was greeted by two security officers and they were like, ‘Hold on, wait a minute,’ and I was like, ‘Ah, guys are asking me for my identification.’ I was like, ‘Great’ with laughter,” Jordan said. “They told me no your pants are too baggy, and I said, ‘No, you’re joking.’”
Meanwhile, Jordan said he saw other guys in similar attire walking in and out of the doors of Decibel who were not black.
“I’ve heard rumors of things like this happening. I just didn’t know it would ever happen to me,” he said.
Jordan said he and his buddies left quietly that night but returned a week later to see if it would happen again.
When they returned, they took a video camera.
When Jordan returned, he talked to a black man named Alfonso who said he was turned away at the door for not being dressed properly.
Before attempting to enter the club a second time, Jordan took video footage of the group’s attire. He also showed the camera the tag showing size on his pants.
Upon his return to Decibel, Jordan said the same two security guards were working there.
But again, Jordan was denied entry for his pants being too long and his friend was told his shoes were not right.
“We don’t allow boots in the club and that’s that,” a Decibel security guard said.
After being denied, Jordan was able to capture footage of patrons wearing clothing that the guards said was prohibited.
“I’m looking at this guy’s pants. Your pants look nice and long,” Jordan said. “Thirty-twos, and you just came out of the club. And you’re wearing boots? I just wanted to make certain you’re wearing boots.”
After being denied a third time, Jordan decided it was time for a little experiment and called up his friend Joel, who is white.
He wanted to see if the clothes he was denied in would be acceptable if they were worn by a white man.
Jordan’s experiment worked.
“On three different occasions, I put all the clothes on that he had a problem getting in with. It was absolutely no problem (for me),” Joel Edgar said.
That night, Edgar was wearing the same brown cashmere jacket and dress pants Jordan wore previously. The next time, he had the same black jack and red vest on.
“I walked right in, and they flagged me right on in every time,” Edgar said.
Edgar said that in three visits he saw just one black woman in the club.
“When I walked out, there were three black men trying to get in and they denied them access,” Edgar said.
[Emphasis mine.]
Read the whole story. It’s appalling.
Categories: Culture, News & Current Events, Race |
29 Comments
July 9th, 2008
Things are bad down Texas way: an unusually boring Dallas County Commission meeting turned into a racial shouting match over one Commissioner’s bizarre eruption at the use of the word “black” in a non-racial context.
County commissioners were discussing problems with the central collections office that is used to process traffic ticket payments and handle other paperwork normally done by the JP Courts.
Commissioner Kenneth Mayfield, who is white, said it seemed that central collections “has become a black hole” because paperwork reportedly has become lost in the office.
Commissioner John Wiley Price, who is black, interrupted him with a loud “Excuse me!” He then corrected his colleague, saying the office has become a “white hole.”
That prompted Judge Thomas Jones, who is black, to demand an apology from Mayfield for his racially insensitive analogy.
The “black hole” reference, it should be painfully obvious, was an analogy invoking the scientific term for an object with such a strong gravitational field that nothing can escape it (i.e., when things go in they never come out - like the paperwork at the traffic ticket office, apparently). Black holes are “black” because they do not emit light.* The term has nothing to do with race, and is not derogatory (even in a race-neutral sense like “a black day for Dallas”). Mayfield tried to explain this. The story says “other county officials quickly interceded to break it up”, but doesn’t explain exactly how it all ended.
OK, so the obvious first reaction is to note how stupid the outraged Commissioners were. The phrase “black hole” is in fairly common currency these days, and it doesn’t seem too much to expect responsible public officials to be able to recognize it as a scientific term, whether or not they understand it in detail. In addition, their assumption that it must have been a racial insult (and Price’s immediate retaliation with what he apparently thought would be the corresponding racial insult “white hole” [also a scientific term that means exactly the opposite of what was being expressed about the traffic ticket office]), seems to underline the complaints we hear about “racial sensitivity” and the supposed incidence of knee-jerk claims of racism founded on ignorance or unthinking anger.
But there’s a lot more going on here, and it leaves me with a feeling that the situation is more complicated than that.
more… (more…)
Categories: Culture, General, Media, News & Current Events, Politics, Race |
19 Comments
July 9th, 2008
Lufthansa has an amusing (though logo-filled) Flash game on their Web site: You get a map of North America and Europe, and a graphic of a Lufthansa aircraft flying from JFK to somewhere across the Atlantic. The name of the destination city flashes on the screen and you have a few seconds to click on the appropriate location for the plane to land before it crashes. Then it tells you how far off from the correct location you were. The first round shows an unlabeled map with country borders and dots representing numerous cities - one of which will be your destination for each “flight”. The second round shows country borders but no cities. The final round just has you staring in panic at a blank landmass in all its shocking emptiness.
The game’s a bit finicky - it will dock you points for being as little as 3 miles off-target, which is a pretty small target to hit on a map of all of Europe and Russia that’s about 6 inches wide. It also seems to have a relatively small number of target cities - play it a few times and you quickly start to see the same ones over and over. On the other hand, you quickly learn some geography that way, too.
As I already knew, I am teh suck at geography. But this is embarrasing.
(My best out of three tries. Oy.)
Categories: Education, General, Humor |
4 Comments
