A quick Google gives me The St. Louis Post-Dispatch, where Brown is remembered, and pictured, as a "gentle giant."
Here's the Washington Post with the graduation picture.
(The Post also had a discussion of the Twitter hashtag.)
AfricanGlobe is the first place I saw the top picture in the linked article. I'm not sure I get the point the author is making regarding that picture. Is it offensive? If it's not this picture, which one is she objecting to? The peace sign one?
Good Morning America has several pictures contained within the video, none of which seem offensive.
Time Magazine has at least one in the attached video, which I haven't watched.
I wish Callahan had called out the offenders by name. She purports to be talking about the "mainstream media," but the closest she comes to identifying anyone is to describe Brown's mistreatment by "conservative media." The offending picture that she mentions - which doesn't seem particularly offensive to me - is sourced to "Twitter."
"The media" is not one thing, but, at least after a quick search - and after reading the linked article - I can't see where the "mainstream media" has gone wrong on this one.
The offending picture that she mentions - which doesn't seem particularly offensive to me - is sourced to "Twitter."
Well the tweet in question was by NBC News.
And the argument isn't whether a given photo is "offensive". It's that given a choice of photos of black victims of violence, the media will tend to choose the least flattering or, worse, the one that best plays into negative stereotypes/narratives. In sharp contrast to white victims of violence.
I had an interesting talk with my trainer this morning at the gym. He's black, from Cameroon and had no idea how careful he had to be when he first came to the US. He was here all of a month before getting pulled over for doing 27 in a 25 mph zone. He was wearing a hoodie because it was cold. Ended up getting the car searched top to bottom. Apparently it's almost a monthly occurrence now, since he drives a relatively nice car and is a youngish black guy traveling through whitish areas to get to work. In contrast, I got pulled over for running a stop sign having left my license at home, along with proof of insurance and got away with a simple fine for the moving violation. The cop could have clobbered me with fines for not having proof of insurance or a drivers license, but I guess I read as "one of us" to that particular cop at least.
I liked this piece on "respectable victims" and the narrative about going to college. All of this is just making me unbearably sad.
Last night was the night we signed adoption papers and got several reams of printouts on Nia's and Selah's lives before us (as well as while they were with us; it's thorough!) and I had to read all of that and see the biases that came into play at various times and what was missed or ignored or never made it into their histories until now and I'm just so sad for them and for their parents and families.
That's another important use of Twitter, to go back to that thread: getting a window into Black Twitter is very improving if you aren't that connected to black communities otherwise.
Seconding 7. It's a great way for stupid pale folk like myself to listen. It's very eye-opening.
It's also interesting how very much Black Twitter is a definable thing, almost to its topological structure. (The researcher was an undergrad classmate of mine.)
Re: that last article, what exactly are "these types of conversations" as distinct from the topological structure of Black Twitter? As far as I can tell it's basically the twitter version of blog/forum/Youtube memes. Indeed, that article seems to imply as much with "Many read like Jeff Foxworthy's "You might be a redneck ..." routine applied to black people". Is the idea that white people don't put these memes on Twitter and black people do? Or am I missing some common feature of these hashtags? Or indeed something basic about Twitter? From that article again: These patterns suggest that the black people who start these tags "are using Twitter as a social tool," Meeder says. "They're using Twitter like a public instant messenger". I thought that's what everyone did.
I understood 10.last as meaning that a higher proportion of conversations (than twitter in general) begin with an @ to someone. More conversations begin as privateish bidirectional ones instead of a one-to-many broadcast. If you have a close knit community represented as a complete graph, you can still do that and have a fairly open conversation that people can later join in on.
This piece from Jonathan Capeheart is good:
Somewhat in that vein, a couple of links about celebrities getting stopped by the police:
LeVar Burton: "So when I get stopped by the police, I take my hat off and my sunglasses off, I put them on the passenger's side, I roll down my window, I take my hands, I stick them outside the window and on the door of the driver's side because I want that officer to be relaxed as possible when he approaches my vehicle. And I do that because I live in America. "
Doug Glanville: "When my mother heard the story of the West Hartford policeman, she responded with wry humor: "You got your come-uppance again." I knew exactly what she meant. If you are the president, or a retired professional athlete, it can be all too easy to feel protected from everyday indignities. But America doesn't let any of us deny our connection to the black "everyman." And unfortunately that connection, which should be a welcome one, can be forced upon us in a way that undermines our self-esteem, our collective responsibility, and our sense of family and history."
Forest Whitaker: " Oscar-winner Forest Whitaker's visit to a Morningside Heights gourmet deli came with a side order of stop and frisk. The "Bird" star was accused of shoplifting and patted down Friday around lunchtime by an overzealous employee at the Milano Market, according to Whitaker's publicist. The encounter was confirmed by a store employee."
It's crazy that this is the country we live in.
It's crazy that so many white people don't believe this about the country we live in.
If it doesn't happen to you, you don't see it. Sally's rugby team (with the affiliated boys team, mostly minority for both sexes) had a talk on safely interacting with the police which included story-swapping, and she was really surprised by the difference in amount of being hassled by cops between white and non-white kids. Not explainable purely by neighborhood, either. But anyway, she was shocked not only by the difference, but that she hadn't known it already -- she thinks of herself as an insider in the relevant communities, but not enough to be directly aware on this issue.
My colleague that does the crazy-longterm-unsolicited mentoring was shocked at how much her mentee gets pulled over and harassed by cops. Quite a lot of her story - we were driving to a conference, and chatted about her mentoring for the bulk of the drive - was trying to impress upon us how often it happens. (I felt it reflected her naivete pre-mentoring this kid.)
I mean, I do only know about the harassment on an academic level, but I still think I have a realistic idea that the kid gets stopped on almost all trips home from college.
I understand 10.last as being akin to someone's observation years ago that "in Iraqi culture, throwing shoes aty someone is a sign of contempt", in contradistinction to American culture, where it's a sign of friendship.
That's admittedly how I understood the rest of 10, but I thought the last bit was meaningful. These are quite large clusters of people who know each other, as opposed to the other use case on twitter where there's much more fan out. (I may be trying too hard to defend an article I read a while ago and from which the only thing I remembered was the topological bit.)
16: I said at the time, and still think, that the shoes thing makes sense. Throwing a shoe at someone is a hostile act here, sure, but not one with a cultural meaning beyond throwing an object of that size that maybe isn't clean. It's not coded differently than throwing a doorstop, or a baseball glove. What I understood about throwing shoes in Arab culture is that it is not just generally hostile, but specifically meaningful.
10: The article's old and was pretty soundly mocked by Black Twitter when it came out in 2010. I haven't been on twitter in a few years and don't really know how to describe Black Twitter versus White Twitter because I didn't spend much social time in the latter.
Fair enough; mea culpa. I still fine the idea of graph topologies differing a lot by community, but I'll try not to read too much into it.
dalriata, I think the graph topology part could very well be accurate. It was the yo-mama parts that didn't seem like sufficient explanation.
White people Twitter like this, and Black people Twitter like this.
I would have thought Italian people Twitter like this
Italian people twitter with their hand emoji.