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Why is race so difficult to talk about?
We’ve heard it said: “You can’t even have a conversation about race in this country without being called racist.” Damned if that will stop us from trying. We’re obviously not afraid to tackle the tough subjects of issues relevant to men. We had an in-depth, sometimes ‘vehement’ discussion of pornography going on for weeks. We like to come at topics of importance from multiple angles—not to moralize, not to tell you what’s good – but to help figure it out together, as our community shares insights through comments, reactions posts, across social media and throughout the web universe. So we’ve asked several people to give us their views on men and race. We don’t think you’ll find them racist. We think you’ll find them fascinating.
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In “White Boy in a Black Land” Tom Matlack travels to Kenya and confronts his own views on race both here and abroad. “Am I a racist? I hope not. But if I’m not a racist and you’re not and neither is anyone else this country, how can we collectively end up with a million black men in prison and such stark and persistent racial differences in terms of education, wealth, and life expectancy?” Jackie Summers writes a reaction piece, “Black Boy in a White Land” that starts out, “I had no idea I was black, until my first day of first grade.” Once Jackie realized that the color of his skin had meaning, he found there was an elephant in the room everywhere he went. We asked Steve Locke to write on race and he refused. He had the courtesy of telling us, “Why I Don’t Want to Talk About Race.” So we printed his email. And Damon Young, in “Eating While Black”, talks about a peculiar type of “race neurosis” that makes it difficult to see actions as separate from the color of his skin. An example—“It makes you hesitate to help an elderly woman struggling with her bags at the supermarket because you’re aware that she might think you’re trying to rob her.”
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We would like nothing better than to have all of you join in the conversation and give this topic the importance it deserves.
How to get ready for a date… #LOL
RIP Versace. * July 15, 1997*
My favorite picture of Georgie, so happy when he could lay on the sidewalk in the summer.
A decade in war zones took a physical and emotional toll. In 2007, Tim snapped his leg trying to evade a Taliban ambush in the Afghan mountains late one night. He walked on the broken limb for several excruciating hours to reach safety, sometimes crawling on his hands and knees.
“Tim was wiped out after Afghanistan,” his friend Shoshana Guy told me. “It drained him emotionally, physically, spiritually. He knew he was losing something he would never get back.”
Jeremiah Zagar, a filmmaker and close friend, points to Tim’s conceptual video Diary as evidence of his exhaustion.
“Someone said, ‘Diary is so beautiful.’ No, it’s not, it’s the opposite of beautiful. Diary is about Tim trying to express that he is completely sucked dry by war—a shell of a human being. The end is a dude on the phone with the press, he can’t explain anything of what he’s seen. He’s like, You have no fucking idea.”
From: Tim Hetherington: Photojournalist, Giant. by his friend and collegue, Michael Kamber. Read more here.
things I heart
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YO-LANDI VISSER
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Candyman is the next topic!
Great ideas are hard to come by. Getting credit for them can be even harder. David Klein, the inventor of... -
“I’ll hope my boy becomes someone different from his father, braver in the right ways, less frightened.”
