Crazy Old ‘Uncle Pat’ has outdone himself again.

A brief rundown on the shenanigans: Pat Buchanan has been calling for Republicans to actually be more EXPLICIT in their bigotry against Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor. He wants them to call her an “affirmative action candidate” and shoot her down simply because she’s a Latina, because being the first Latina nominee, there’s no way she could actually be qualified for the post. /sarcasm

Rachel Maddow, whom I adore, btw, had a cringeworthy, high blood-pressure inducing discussion with him two days ago, in which he railed against the “reverse discrimination” against hard=working, middle class white men. Oh, the poor darlings! *sniffle*

When she asked Buchanan why 108 out of 110 of the last Supreme Court justices were white men, he responded thusly:

I think white men were 100% of the people who wrote the constitution, 100% of the people who signed the Declaration of Independence, 100% of the people who died at Gettysburg and Vicksburg, probably close 100% of the people who died at Normandy. This has been a country basically built by white folks.

I’m going to go out on a limb here and assume that those of you reading this post are intelligent enough to know that there are many reasons why white men have made many of the decisions that shaped this country, a laundry list of them also being TERRIBLE, INHUMANE, and UNBELIEVABLY STUPID ones, and a lot of those reasons lie in their racism, sexism, homophobia, ableism, and various other forms of bigotry and the persecution and silencing of the members of the oppressed groups thereof. I won’t go into detail here.

However, if you want to view Rachel giving Pat a nice smackdown after he shows his ugliness for a good ten minutes, then here is the link:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EAiN3DBchFU

I’m warning you, this is one of the most infuriating TV segments I’ve seen in a long time, and after watching two years of cable news coverage and YouTube clips on the 2008 U.S. Presidential Election, that is saying something.

Whitewashing of cover art for books about people of color has been a problem for a long, long time, going back to Uncle Remus and the minstrelface that the publishers thought would sell more copies.

Now Justine Larbalestier, YA author of How to Ditch Your Fairy, has showed bravery is saying what her readers allowed her to say by expressing themselves vociferously: that she actually hates the current cover of her upcoming book, Liar. The protagonist is biracial but looks black, and yet the cover shows a white girl with fair, straight hair.

Larbalestier doesn’t have a clause in her contract giving her final approval of the cover art, and she strongly objected to the cover, to no avail. The hard truth is that the more rights you ask for in your contracts, the less llikely you are to find a commercially advantageous book deal. Authors usually have little to NO say over the art design for their books. The -isms present in the publishing industry are as bad as the music industry’s ever were, only the people in power are unable to recognize their perpetuation of these oppressions because they consider themselves to be ‘liberal.’

Justine expresses the cold facts eloquently:

Every year at every publishing house, intentionally and unintentionally, there are white-washed covers. Since I’ve told publishing friends how upset I am with my Liar cover, I have been hearing anecdotes from every single house about how hard it is to push through covers with people of colour on them. Editors have told me that their sales departments say black covers don’t sell. Sales reps have told me that many of their accounts won’t take books with black covers. Booksellers have told me that they can’t give away YAs with black covers. Authors have told me that their books with black covers are frequently not shelved in the same part of the library as other YA—they’re exiled to the Urban Fiction section—and many bookshops simply don’t stock them at all. How welcome is a black teen going to feel in the YA section when all the covers are white? Why would she pick up Liar when it has a cover that so explicitly excludes her?

The notion that ‘black books’ don’t sell is pervasive at every level of publishing. Yet I have found few examples of books with a person of colour on the cover that have had the full weight of a publishing house behind them4 Until that happens more often we can’t know if it’s true that white people won’t buy books about people of colour. All we can say is that poorly publicised books with “black covers” don’t sell. The same is usually true of poorly publicised books with ‘white covers.’

When are clueless white people going to get it? Those of us under 35? We don’t want incremental change that only manifests itself on our deathbeds. We’re sick and tired of excuses for this kind of behavior. White are the minority on this planet. In a few years, they will be the minority among people under 25. By 2050, maybe much sooner, they will be the minority in the United States. It’s time to move past colonialist attitudes and shove the ignorant portions of the populace into the 21st century, whether it makes them uncomfortable or not.

Bloomsbury wants proof that their racist sales strategies are going to cost them money if they don’t change? Fine. I’m going to buy the Australian version of the book. I encourage you to help the author and protext simultaneously by doing the same, and make sure to tell Bloomsbury why you’re doing it.

Bloomsbury Publishing
Distributed by Macmillan
175 Fifth Avenue
New York, NY 10010

marketing: marketing@bloomsburyusa.com
publicity: publicity.adult@bloomsburyusa.com

F: (212) 780-0115 or (212) 982-2837

Pass on this information as you see fit. If you’re going to cut and paste the post, though, please link to me and give credit.

Eight years and a day after Bush revived the law that prohibited the U.S. from giving governmental assistance to health clinics abroad that discuss abortion options or provide abortions abroad, President Obama overturned it with a stroke of the pen.

According to the L. A. Times:

President Reagan instituted the rule, also known as the “Mexico City policy,” in 1984, stating that the U.S. government would not contribute to groups that “perform or actively promote abortion as a method of family planning in other nations.”

The result, critics said, was that nongovernmental organizations working in the developing world could not refer women to safe abortion providers or even conduct family planning education campaigns that discussed the procedure.

This is one of the first acts of Obama’s presidency, and it signals to me and other progressives that he has not forgotten the most grievous of the past ills of the Bush Administration. Whether or not his White House will attempt to or even be able to dismantle all of the harm Bush has done remains to be seen. I would hope for an overal reversal, but I suspect that not allof the damage the neoconservatives have done in the name of so-called “patriotism” and “family values” will be as easy to erase from the legal system or our memories. Still, the future is looking better than it has for a long time now.

I think he will see us through this depression. I hope he will.

I could weep for joy. I have been waiting a third of my life for this day.

Actually, I loved CBS’s montage of the Inauguration Day as well, but they cut off Aretha Franklin’s last note on that one for Katie Couric to say goodnight. WTH? Do it like Brian did, only do a longer version, people. Hello!

I tried to watch and tape all three of the major network’s evening news broadcasts yesterday. I think the best overall was NBC’s, which makes me angry because I only taped half of ABC’s and all of CBS’s. Once again. I picked the wrong network to record. D’oh. Anyway, here’s a clip from an amazing day.