Tag Archives: racism
Devon Avenue’s masks
Chicago’s East-West Rogers Park is home to Devon Avenue, a unique stretch of street dominated by Desi (generally anyone from the Indian subcontinent) shops, stores, places of worship, and restaurants. Indo-Pak culture, in all its vibrant and vivid brightness, shines here in a blend of Americana that gives the atmosphere a distinctiveness hard to match anywhere else in the city.
Addressing latent racism and blatant discrimination in America
By Liz Dennis
There is a widespread misconception that “racism lives in the heart of particularly evil individuals, as opposed to the heart of a democratic society;” this mentality is “reinforcing to anyone who might, from time to time, find their tongue sprinting ahead of their discretion”. There are instances every day where people are profiled, and treated in a particular way because of their race.
Israel’s Ethiopian Jews: A community not “Jewish” enough
By Dima Ansari
In January, the state of Israel admitted that it had been administering birth control injections to Ethiopian Jewish immigrant women without their consent or their knowledge. “The government had previously denied the practice but the Israeli Health Ministry’s director-general has now ordered gynecologists to stop administering the drugs,” reported The Independent.
The women were injected with the contraceptive, Depo Provera, every three months and were misleadingly told that the injections were “inoculations.” Some women who rejected these injections were forced or coerced into taking the drug anyway. The drug was administered while these women were still in transit camps in Ethiopia.
The 21st Century Jim Crow
By Aymen Abdel Halim, Chief Editor
On January 31st, 1865, the U.S. House of Representatives passed the 13th Amendment to the Constitution, abolishing slavery in the United States. African Americans, in the legal sense, became “free.” But the segregationist policies of Jim Crow and the upholding of these policies with Plessy v. Ferguson, kept African Americans separate and certainly not equal.
Robert Spencer: Master of misinformation
Robert Spencer has made it his job to defile and “expose” the Muslim faith for what he thinks it’s really about, but he does more of the former rather than the latter. He holds the belief that Muslims are trying to convert and dominate the world at any and all costs. Spencer comes off as intolerant, somewhat paranoid, and misguided individual who simply cannot make distinctions between a handful of extremists and the Muslim majority. There is simply nothing to “expose” about the ordinary Muslim.
AFDI ad campaign: Another toxic initiative
“IN ANY WAR BETWEEN THE CIVILIZED MAN AND THE SAVAGE, SUPPORT THE CIVILIZED MAN. ✡ SUPPORT ISRAEL ✡ DEFEAT JIHAD”
This message was displayed on buses throughout the San Francisco metropolitan area in the form of pro-Israel advertisements, which caused some disturbance among the neighborhood spreading nation wide. The infamous anti-Islam group American Freedom Defense Initiative (AFDI) and main supporter/sponsor Pam Geller, was granted the permission to exercise her first amendment right to display controversial advertisements on the side of MTA and MUNI public transportation. If the first amendment is synonymous with belittlement then Geller’s was well applied.
The most segregated hour in America
By Sarah Goomar
Eleven o’clock on Sunday Morning is said to be the most segregated hour in America.
Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. startled listeners with this proclamation at first, shedding light on the fact that despite being followers of the same faith, blacks still constituted the “other” and virtually worshipped solely among themselves. As a reverend and champion of civil rights, King waited and hoped for a time when Americans could live and worship together, across color lines. The usage of these words is widely viewed as cliché today.
RedEye’s “Turban Primer” enables racist attitudes to persist
By Muhammad Shareef (courtesy of Sixteen Minutes to Palestine)
I love the RedEye. It usually features a glimpse into what’s going on around Chicago, sometimes expanding on larger national events, but more importantly balancing its informational articles with just enough entertainment pieces to have turned me into a loyal reader each morning for the past three summers.
