(Untitled)

[ijustwantkungfu]

I haven't posted in a really long time, so I suppose it's time. Hello! How are you? I'm kind of having a blast around here. My classes are pretty awesome, and my print classes are going well (except fot the computer. I hate working on the computer. Digital print would do really well to go eat a dick. I'm serious about this.)

Comments

[theljparadox]

the picture is pretty, and the project sounds interesting. keep me posted on where it goes.

[flavia_sneech]

Having just watched footage of practice sit-ins from Nashville in the 1960s, in which both black and white participants shouted "nigger" at each other (when acting as the one who was sitting in), I'm intrigued. There's a book, by the same title, that gives a history of the word. I'd recommend it as part of your project.

I also think that liberal people tend to have this assumption that, because they don't "mean it," the word nigger is fine for them to use in certain situations (the historically white-dominated realm of the academy, for example). As such, I think you guys need to examine your own reasons for doing the project in the first place. That might (and you may have already started doing this) yield some interesting feedback in and of itself.

I have to admit that I'm wary of the project producing a constructive outcome. But I would like to hear more about it as you go along.

[ijustwantkungfu]

figuring out why we wanted to to it is actually totally step one. Sondra (who is black, so it's not just a bunch of white kids making this up) spent a lot of time just thinking about the idea of the word. How loaded it is, but trying to figure out why, and how a person might go about disarming it. She got us together, we did the experiment, and what happened with us is that we started out being really tense and aprehensive, and there were two kids who REALLY didn't want to, but just repeating the word for 10 minutes made us more comfortable with it, enough that we could actually face it, and we had a subsequent 5 hour discussion that was the most candid I've ever had about race, and how it exists in the world today. One thing we learned from it is that everybody was getting something really different and personal out of the experiment, but we were all thinking about things that our liberal sensibilities usually tell us to ignore. Really the goal right now is to bring that same level of candid examination to more people than just us,

[flavia_sneech]

My question then is: Does one have to be comfortable with violent terminology to have a candid/honest discussion about a weighty topic?

Because I feel like often people use that as an excuse for not discussing race -- "we can't do it because we don't really get it." Obviously, that's not what you're doing, per se, but the notion that it's requisite for true conversation gives a lot of power to a word that already has been given too much.

I guess I just don't see the first part of the exercise as required to achieve the second. I.E. you don't have to sit and have someone call you nigger in order to feel like you really trust them. That trust (the requirement for having open, honest dialogue) can occur through other avenues.

[what_can_i_say_]

Dude! I ain't seein' no picture!

[ijustwantkungfu]

I think I fixed it!

[shattered_stash]

wow, that pic is amazing.

best of luck with life.