Red Light Politics

Real Actors Read™ Yelp #11 (by gottakidtofeed) “The...

Thu, 23 May 2013 12:26:01 +0200

Real Actors Read™ Yelp #11 (by gottakidtofeed)

“The Schnitzel Queen” surely elicits some passion in this reviewer. Quite possibly the most hilarious thing I’ve seen this week (or month even). The entire series is well worth checking out.

(Thanks to Mieke for leading me through this rabbit hole)

"My husband has expressedly forbidden me from going to that area at all times… that should tell..."

Tue, 21 May 2013 13:44:57 +0200

“My husband has expressedly forbidden me from going to that area at all times… that should tell you something.”

- DutchNews.nl - Police, locals deny claim part of The Hague is a ‘Sharia triangle’

This made me laugh out loud, cackling like a hyena. The quote is taken from a story about “the Muslim SCARE!” and how their “backwards” ways are “taking over good neighborhoods”, etc. You know, the usual racist, anti Muslim cries of Eurobigots. What makes the comment hilarious is that the woman in question is participating in a thread where they discuss (I use the word loosely, considering these are the grunts of racists) how “unenlightened” Islam is and how Muslim women are “oppressed”, yadda yadda… the commenter, of course, is NOT oppressed. Her husband just “forbids” her from doing stuff for her own good.

I wonder how these people live with the cognitive dissonance created by their bigotry.

I know I’m supposed to laugh at the “reality”...

Fri, 17 May 2013 18:44:32 +0200

I know I’m supposed to laugh at the “reality” but I so happen to find the fail more appealing than the expectation. There is some alluring character in those creepy ears.

Videla is dead

Fri, 17 May 2013 16:34:09 +0200

Jorge Rafael Videla Dies: Former Argentine Dictator Dead In Prison

OBITUARIO CON HURRAS de Mario Benedetti.

“Los canallas viven mucho, pero a veces se mueren”.

Vamos a festejarlo

Vengan todos

Los inocentes

los damnificados

los que gritan de noche

los que sueñan de día

los que sufren el cuerpo

los que alojan fantasmas

los que pisan descalzos

los que blasfeman y arden

los pobres congelados

los que quieren a alguien

los que nunca se olvidan

Vamos a festejarlo

Vengan todos

el canalla se ha muerto

se acabó el alma negra

El ladrón

El cochino

se acabó para siempre

hurra que vengan todos

Vamos a festejarlo

a no decir

La muerte

Siempre lo borra todo

Todo lo purifica

Cualquier día

La muerte no borra nada

Quedan Siempre las cicatrices

Hurra

Vamos a festejarlo

a no llorar de vicio

que lloren sus iguales

y se traguen sus lágrimas

se acabó el monstruo prócer

se acabó para siempre

Vamos a festejarlo

a no ponernos tibios

a no creer que éste es un muerto cualquiera

Vamos a festejarlo

a no volvernos flojos

a no olvidar que éste

es un muerto de mierda.

"Yahoo has a problem: it has no idea what it’s doing, or how it’s going to do it (outside..."

Fri, 17 May 2013 13:22:48 +0200

“Yahoo has a problem: it has no idea what it’s doing, or how it’s going to do it (outside of teenage dream hires). Some people who claim intimate knowledge say the company is going to do it by throwing a serious Hail Mary: buying Tumblr for $1,000,000,000. That’s one billion.”

- Rumor Alert: Yahoo Is Buying Tumblr for a Billion?

I don’t think I ever wished for a rumor to be untrue so badly. Imagine if suddenly all of Tumblr resembled Yahoo Answers. Or Yahoo’s rabid racist, bigoted comments. Or Yahoo’s awful forums full of spam. You get the idea…

Obligatory “Best of Yahoo”: HOW IS BABBY FORMED? (Only as an example of possible things to come…).

"According to a release from the universities of Bamberg and Bonn, a study by economists Armin Falk..."

Thu, 16 May 2013 18:20:14 +0200

“According to a release from the universities of Bamberg and Bonn, a study by economists Armin Falk and Nora Szech released in the journal Science found that markets erode people’s morality and help them make decisions that look outright awful without the thin veil of commerce. In short, capitalism makes us do some not-so-nice things.”

- Capitalism might be making us evil- MSN Money

From a study released today. Read the rest at the link, it’s really worth it.

"The G4S security guard in charge of restraining an Angolan man who died as he was being deported..."

Thu, 16 May 2013 13:42:03 +0200

“The G4S security guard in charge of restraining an Angolan man who died as he was being deported from Britain was told in court to read out a string of racist jokes he received and forwarded using his mobile phone.”

- G4S guard in dead deportee case shared racist jokes | UK news | The Guardian

Remember everything I’ve been documenting about the multimillionaire business of G4S in the administration of detention and deportation of undocumented people in Europe? The above quote comes from a court proceeding in the UK yesterday.

"I have a personal interest in this story because Jason Richwine was awarded a fellowship from my..."

Thu, 16 May 2013 11:26:19 +0200

“I have a personal interest in this story because Jason Richwine was awarded a fellowship from my employer, the American Enterprise Institute, in 2008–09, and I reviewed the draft of his dissertation. A rereading of the dissertation last weekend confirmed my recollection that Richwine had meticulously assembled and analyzed the test-score data, which showed exactly what he said they showed: mean IQ-score differences between Latinos and non-Latino whites, found consistently across many datasets and across time after taking factors such as language proficiency and cultural bias into account. I had disagreements then and now about his policy recommendations, but not about the empirical accuracy of his research or the scholarly integrity of the interpretations with which I disagreed.”

- In Defense of Jason Richwine | National Review Online

Remember when last week the guy behind the Heritage Foundation report against immigration reform in the US was found to be a proponent of eugenics? For those who might not be familiar, The Heritage Foundation released a report claiming that the currently discussed reform would cost the State trillions (I love hyperbolic figures pulled out of white rich dude’s asses, by the way… QUADRILLIONS! QUINTILLIONS! The tomato pickers that have been barely surviving with exploitative labor and yet pumping money into our economy will cost us QUINTILLIONS if we give them dignity in the form of a residence card! IMAGINE THE SOCIAL UPHEAVAL! etc). Anyway, I digress…

Turns out that the author of the inflammatory report was found to be a proponent of eugenics, claiming that non Whites have lower IQs than the White American population. His proposition was that Latin@s should have their IQs tested before being granted any residency status (of course, “discarding” those who are below a certain IQ). In 2009, in his Harvard dissertation he wrote:

The statistical construct known as IQ can reliably estimate general mental ability, or intelligence. The average IQ of immigrants in the United States is substantially lower than that of the white native population, and the difference is likely to persist over several generations. The consequences are a lack of socioeconomic assimilation among low-IQ immigrant groups, more underclass behavior, less social trust, and an increase in the proportion of unskilled workers in the American labor market. Selecting high-IQ immigrants would ameliorate these problems in the U.S., while at the same time benefiting smart potential immigrants who lack educational access in their home countries.

I won’t waste a second of my time trying to rebuke eugenics ideologies that personally implicate me (after all, I am one of those Latin@s with supposedly low IQs that is about to bring down the demise of the purity of Western White civilization… and you know what? I hope my “stupid” is contagious and I indeed ruin their purity with my presence but again, I digress). So, rather than trying to unpack his statements which do not deserve an ounce of consideration, I wanted to point out the beginning of the “polite right wing” circling of the wagons. This is not some Tea Party uncouth histrionics, this is the rich right wing claiming that eugenics deserve to be taken into account and that attacks on these ideas are based on misguided political correctness. The National Review, of course, enlists the apologists who begin the above mentioned circling of wagons:

I have a personal interest in this story because Jason Richwine was awarded a fellowship from my employer, the American Enterprise Institute, in 2008–09, and I reviewed the draft of his dissertation. A rereading of the dissertation last weekend confirmed my recollection that Richwine had meticulously assembled and analyzed the test-score data, which showed exactly what he said they showed: mean IQ-score differences between Latinos and non-Latino whites, found consistently across many datasets and across time after taking factors such as language proficiency and cultural bias into account. I had disagreements then and now about his policy recommendations, but not about the empirical accuracy of his research or the scholarly integrity of the interpretations with which I disagreed.

The data sets are correct! These people are indeed stupid! Incidentally, The National Review seems more equal opportunity White Supremacist and brings up the claim that Blacks have even lower IQs so, why miss the opportunity to single out one minority when you can also highlight everyone else’s supposed racial deficiencies in the process?

To my fellow Latin@s living in the US, I can only offer my sympathy. Here in The Netherlands, the notion that we are deficient and have lower IQs has gained mainstream momentum (Ha! we are ahead of the curve in White Supremacist eugenics! talk about being trendsetters). Pretty much like The National Review, in The Netherlands, the claims of lower IQ were also “backed with scientific data”. We don’t need to look too far away into history to know the kind of people who took a similar approach and made analogous “scientific” claims to create policy.

"I understood she is convinced that she [Ed: Anne Sinclair] and her husband [Ed: Dominique..."

Tue, 14 May 2013 18:25:43 +0200

“I understood she is convinced that she [Ed: Anne Sinclair] and her husband [Ed: Dominique Strauss-Kahn] belong to a class of masters of the world. She made the statement I reported in my book: “There is no harm in getting sucked off by a maid.” For her, the world is divided between master and servant.”

- Anne Sinclair : DSK était son “caniche” selon Marcela Iacub - L’Internaute Actualite

(Translation from French mine because I haven’t seen this covered in English even though I googled extensively trying to find an already translated quote)

This is not new but since I have already covered so many pages on Dominique Strauss-Kahn, I believe it is important to add further context, especially the kind that illustrates the type of culture he is part of. The quote above is from an interview with Marcela Iacub, a former lover of DSK who wrote a book about the affair (awful book, I might add, where there is so much vile I wouldn’t even know where to begin to unpack it).

Anne Sinclair, the woman who so nonchalantly mentioned “there is no harm in getting sucked off by a maid” is DSK’s ex wife, to whom he was married when he was accused of raping Nafissatou Diallo, an immigrant maid from Guinea at the Sofitel New York. Sinclair is no ordinary rape enabling wife, though. She is currently the head of the French edition of the Huffington Post.

So, when media shows a clearly racist and/ or classist bias, we shouldn’t wonder how it is possible for this bias to exist. We should go back to this quote and remind ourselves of the kind of people who run our media. I know better than to expect fairness when Sinclair claims “there is no harm” in a vulnerable working class Black woman “sucking off” her abusive ex husband.

Eurovision 2007 Final Ukraine Verka Serduchka Dancing (by...

Tue, 14 May 2013 12:33:55 +0200

Eurovision 2007 Final Ukraine Verka Serduchka Dancing (by vlades2002)

Today, 9 PM (Euro time), is the first Eurovision final. This is a little yearly ritual I have: WATCH ALL THE EUROVISION as it kind of marks the beginning of summer for me.

To get in the mood in anticipation, here’s one of my all time favorite performances (this is what Eurovision does best, over the top tackiness and Eurotrash pop music): Ukraine 2007.

The death toll in Bangladesh IS a feminist issue

Fri, 10 May 2013 13:19:37 +0200

A couple of weeks ago I extensively ranted about how neoliberal feminism has kind of become the default/ the neutral*. Some people were offended by my statements (I won’t bore you with an account of that as the offenses were mostly taken to Twitter). A week or so later and unrelated to my attempt at analysis of neoliberal feminism, I was told I had to “separate” issues of race, poverty, etc from feminism because they were not related.

This morning I woke up to news of an updated death toll: 1000 people so far, have died in the factory fire in Bangladesh.

In September 2012, when the European Union went through a short moment of outrage at the discovery that people from Bangladesh were attempting to cross borders into the EU, I wrote **:

Here is what neither the WSJ [ED: Wall Street Journal] nor European media or Frontex reports usually address: Bangladeshi migrants are escaping a desperate economic situation brought upon by decades of Western intervention and the perpetuation of an economic model based on sweatshop labor and lack of basic rights to feed the consumption patterns of the US and the EU.

According to a report published by the International Monetary Fund (not exactly a paradigm of humanitarian research), exports of textiles, clothing, and ready-made garments account for 77% of Bangladesh’s total merchandise exports. Bangladesh’s garment exports – mainly to the US and Europe – make up nearly 80% of the country’s export income. The country has more than 4,000 factories employing between two and three million workers and the industry currently employs 1.5 million workers, approximately 80 % of whom are women. More than 4% of the clothes sold in the EU are made in Bangladesh. The conditions in which these clothes are made, with salaries that do not even cover the bare basic necessities, conveniently forgotten when discussing migration patterns.[…]

Women, who make more than 80% of the labor force, are often subjected to sexual harassment and rape.

Here’s the problem I have with this neoliberal feminism: they have traded an in depth geopolitical and social analysis involving gender and the position of women in the West in relation to women everywhere else for the promotion of consumer empowerment dressed up as “choice” and career advancement. “Here, improve your chances at success by wearing the garments of your choice!” or “Here, see the latest fashion trends and pretty outfits! Wear this to succeed in your office job”, promoting this aspirational, mind numbingly decontextualized consumerism. The role models of this neoliberalism parading their manuals to better lean in and “having it all” chants as the only kind of gender analysis we are afforded. As women, we should aspire to rule the corporations that caused this death toll; as consumers, we should aspire to close the wage gap that prevents us from buying more “stuff”, with nary a word about how that “stuff” is produced, by whom and under which conditions. And when faced with over a thousand deaths, this neoliberal feminism will induce us to some form of rightful indignation (OMG all these people died! OMG this is terrible! ad infinitum) while obscuring the root causes of this death toll. Then, when the people that have to live day in, day out in these appalling conditions eventually leave and become undocumented migrants somewhere in a Western country, this very same neoliberal feminists will tell us that “migration is not a feminist problem” and we should “separate” these issues from gender.

To close in another self referential moment, I once said that this feminism thrives to make us better managers of exclusion. Nowhere is this more clear than in the atrocious death toll of Bangladeshi textile workers who supply Europe’s garments. Gender equality, it seems, is all about becoming the CEOs of the corporations that make these living and dying conditions possible.

* Yes, I am self referential today but I can sort of explain that: usually, I go through topics in a more or less long term way, with some of them recurring for years. There are a few themes always underlying whatever topics or news items I explore/ think about. I suppose I could call those the basis of my belief system and politics (notes on racism, xenophobia, immigration, feminism, varying degrees of leftist ideas, etc) and then I tend to spend days, if not weeks, just thinking of topics, even way past the time I posted something. So yeah, I tend to become self referential because those issues occupy a lot of my idle time simply thinking of them or reading further about them.

** See note above about being self referential.

"The mislabeled salads — a curried chicken salad and a vegan curried “chick’n”..."

Fri, 10 May 2013 10:43:29 +0200

“The mislabeled salads — a curried chicken salad and a vegan curried “chick’n” salad — were sold in 15 stores in Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, New Jersey and New York, Whole Foods said. In some locations, the company said the salads were sold in the cold food bars where customers can scoop food into containers, which are then weighed at the register. In other locations, it said the salads were displayed in the prepared food sections behind glass. The salads were sold on Tuesday and Wednesday.”

- AP: Whole Foods mixes up chicken, vegan salads

When I wrote about the food scandals in Europe involving food producers who substituted beef for horse or other animals, I got at least half a dozen comments from vegetarians/ vegans (which I promptly deleted because I really, really dislike food proselytizers of any kind) stating that it was actually the fault of those consumers that they had been fed stuff against their will because they were meat eaters and, if they had been vegetarian/ vegan, none of that would have happened to them. The sentiment was more or less “meat eaters had it coming” completely ignoring the fraud implications, the non consensual nature of being fed something against one’s preferences and the many problems and documented corruption in food production. To make matters worse, as I had originally written, the fraudulent foodstuffs affected mostly working class and poor people who were more likely to buy the more affordable items produced with these fraudulent ingredients. Of course, all of this escaped the righteous proselytizers who attempting to “school” folks into the right way of eating and implying that they were supposedly immune to having their agency taken away simply by “eating the right way”.

Now, I hate to be that person (no, I don’t really) but…

Yes, Disney Is Actually Attempting to Trademark “Dia de...

Wed, 08 May 2013 11:08:00 +0200

Yes, Disney Is Actually Attempting to Trademark “Dia de los Muertos”

From the article at Phoenix New Times:

In 10 applications filed May 1 through the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, Disney Enterprises Inc. is attempting to trademark the phrase “Dia de los Muertos.”
If successful, the corporation would be able to go after individual companies who attempt to use “Dia de los Muertos” for profit in the areas of education and entertainment, goods and services, apparel, toys, and food items.

Aside from the obvious outrage that an American corporation would attempt to do this, I have to wonder if we are going to be inflicted with a “Princesa Muerta” as well.

UPDATE: Well, that was a quick backpedal. Yalí Noriega tells me on Twitter that last night, amidst the rightful anger that this trademark application generated, Disney withdrew the request.

"In 2011, the Netherlands shifted away from its longstanding policy of allowing immigrants to lead..."

Tue, 07 May 2013 17:12:00 +0200

“In 2011, the Netherlands shifted away from its longstanding policy of allowing immigrants to lead parallel lives within society, and instead began vigorously urging immigrants to learn Dutch and abide by Dutch cultural mores.”

- Language Distance: The Reason Immigrants Have Trouble Assimilating - Olga Khazan - The Atlantic

Here’s how media normalizes racism: take a statement created and spread by racist politicians (first Pim Fortuijn, then Rita Verdonk, now Geert Wilders if you want the genealogy of this myth) and then repeat it as fact.

There is no actual evidence outside the racists’ minds that people ever lived these often touted “paralel lives”. There is actually, a very well documented history of Dutch white people refusing (to give one example) to send their children to schools populated by non whites. There is also a well documented history of temp agencies openly discriminating against non white candidates. There are also instances of public services reporting WoC to authorities just on the basis of their skin color and their obvious foreignness.

In short: there has never been a “paralel society” like The Atlantic would have us believe. This has always been the go to justification to further promote policies of alienation and stigmatization for minorities. Now The Atlantic presents it as “fact” and this is how a racist lie becomes an accepted truth.

"If you read Nathaniel Rich’s half-skeptical orbit around Y Combinator—one of tech’s..."

Tue, 07 May 2013 16:13:13 +0200

“If you read Nathaniel Rich’s half-skeptical orbit around Y Combinator—one of tech’s trendier cash camps—there’s one important takeaway: the guy in charge really doesn’t like foreign accents.”

- Want VC Cash From This Guy? Don’t Talk Like a Foreigner

For the past couple of weeks I’ve been reading the newly resurrected Valleywag blog and today, while reading this awful article, I realized this is the culture in which Lean In was created. I mean, Lean In does not exist isolated from the Silicon Valley sociocultural phenomenon and reading this article that details the racist abuse a Chinese engineer had to endure to get funded made it click. I just wonder why most of the critiques of the book (the feminist ones, at least) are not taking into account this specific culture as well…

@redlightvoices @sunili inequality of women viz each other is certainly a human rights issue but...

Tue, 07 May 2013 14:13:33 +0200

@redlightvoices @sunili inequality of women viz each other is certainly a human rights issue but not IMO a “feminist” issue.
— Sarah Joseph (@profsarahj) May 7, 2013

Today in “THIS IS WHY WE CANNOT HAVE NICE THINGS”.

The conversation (I hesitate to use this word to define an exchange that has made me feel despondent) continued when I was informed that inequality among women is simply either a “Human rights issue” or “an HR issue” and not something concerning feminism.

On being the unloved

Fri, 03 May 2013 15:04:15 +0200

I guess one shared human experience is the desire to be loved. Surely there must be exceptions and I am not implying every person ever has desired this (I am wary of universal axioms) but it does seem that humans, throughout history, have sought associations and forms of organization that hinted at this shared need: we form communities, familial ties (either by blood or affinity or sometimes both), friendships, partnerships, etc. Even the Nation-State is funded on some lose idea of shared love (the love of the land, the love we are supposed to feel for those who share the borders of the Nation-State by virtue of being in the same space and supposedly similar culture). I quite believe that most people do crave some form of experience involving love (not to mention the love one feels for one’s partner or children).

I live in a place where it has been made obviously clear that some of us are not deserving of love. The love that the Nation-State reserves for its subjects is spared to some of us. We are told we are Other. The law codifies our Otherness in no uncertain terms. We are to comply with these marks of Otherness by following specific declarations and pathways. Our children, even if they are born here, will bear this mark of Otherness (they call us “allochtoon”, which means exactly that, “one who is not of the land” and it is not reserved for immigrants, you can be coded “allochtoon” for generations and if you are Black or Muslim, it’ll be for ever). We are not actively hated. There aren’t calls for hunting or open aggression. It’s not that we have to actively fear for our safety on a permanent basis (though that happens sometimes but it’d be disingenuous to claim it’s a matter of policy encouraging it). We are simply unloved. The unloved share a space of “not hate” but “not love” either. It’s this active exclusion that implies we are not worthy of the shared love but it stops right before it actively turns to hatred. It’s the indifference sitting on the shoulders of our Otherness. Most of us also look the part. We can be singled out by visual queues (you are Black; you wear a veil; your hair is “ethnic”; you dress differently; you speak with an accent; your outward markers are culturally alien).

“Sos una desamorada”, my mother used to hurl it like a weapon against me when I acted in an uncaring fashion. “Desamor”, there is no word in the English language that can express this sentiment accurately. Unloving comes close, though. To be unloving is to be careless, to be indifferent, to not acknowledge the bond that should unite us. I didn’t accurately understand the meaning of it until I experienced it. Until, that is, I saw it become the basis of political systems. Unloving, I contend, is the basis of the institutionalized racism, the basis of the exclusion, the root cause of “not being allowed to belong”. “You are unworthy of love; you are unloved”.

You see, I don’t think people around me hate me. Sure, I know for a fact some people who know me most likely harbor some hatred. But I don’t think people hate a priori unless they have a reason to (real or perceived). Of course there are raging racists that are full of hate and will act upon such emotion (I’ve mentioned this before many times, I’ve been physically attacked by such specimens). But there is a spectrum of racism. There is the active hateful white supremacist and then there are those who simply unlove me and those like me. It’s an active indifference, it’s quite a different emotion that allows them to say “you are not one of us”. They can go on with their lives mostly ignoring people like me exist until they are somewhat presented with us in which case, they simply unlove. El desamor.

One of the experiences of knowing I am unloved is the fear. I already know I am not wanted so I constantly have to wonder how much I can say to prevent the unloving from turning into hate. I have established my reputation as a feminist killjoy already which renders me further far from the spectrum of those deserving of love. So I constantly have to ask myself “how much will I push?”. I crave the recognition and the love just like every other person. Yet, being Other means I know the recognition is absent unless I prove myself. I started writing online because I hoped I could talk about the things I couldn’t say in my immediate surroundings. If I write, I thought, others might find value in it, perhaps I won’t be alone anymore. And yet, what I found was that online was every bit as unloving as my immediate surrounding. Every instance of speaking out pushes me further away. Now, I don’t just fear alienating my fellow inhabitants of this country, now I know I have the entirety of feminism to estrange as well. Do I talk about this? Do I alienate more people? Do I speak out? Can I say this without closing more doors? This and a dozen more questions come out every time I am about to write something, every time I seethe with anger about something I have read. You are already unloved, Flavia, I tell myself, do you really want to be hated now? And that, which I don’t say becomes the burden of the unloved. We spend our lives fighting against an environment that doesn’t want us while pointing out every instance in which we are not wanted becomes further proof of our unloveability. Online, offline, wherever… you are Other no matter where you go.

"I’m an American citizen … I’m allowed to stand on American ground"

Fri, 03 May 2013 12:38:31 +0200

“I’m an American citizen … I’m allowed to stand on American ground”

- Reese Witherspoon

I never liked her and I find her “America’s sweetheart” schtick quite annoying, especially when paired with tales of her awful attitude towards production assistants whom apparently she regularly terrorizes on set (because you see, she is a DIVA!). But this statement above says quite a lot about her politics as well. Of course she has rights because she is A CITIZEN! You know, the implication being those who are not (or worse, *gasp* those illegals) are a completely different story. I guess now I can openly joke about Elle Woods becoming a Tea Partier once she was out of university.

Sephora I love you but today I hate you

Fri, 03 May 2013 10:16:40 +0200

Sephora I love you but today I hate you:

Consider this a public service announcement for everyone living in The Netherlands: Sephora is closing down operations. At the link, a list of closing dates for each store.

I must confess, I am a Sephora fiend. Over the years since I first started using their products (which I used to buy during trips to France until they opened in The Netherlands), they have consistently delivered high quality at drugstore prices (I’m talking about their home brand), plus, they are the only seller of Urban Decay (Urban Decay’s primer is my kryptonite, not to mention the palettes and other assorted stuff).

So, if like me, you love some of their products, check out the closing dates (the closest to me is already gone) because otherwise you’ll soon be out of luck.

"The Italian government has ordered an investigation into slurs on rightwing websites against the..."

Thu, 02 May 2013 20:18:24 +0200

“The Italian government has ordered an investigation into slurs on rightwing websites against the country’s first black minister, a case that has put Italy’s racial problems back under the spotlight.”

- Italy to investigate racist remarks against first black minister | World news | guardian.co.uk

You know, Europe, “the continent of human rights” and similar assorted empty rhetoric, once again showing its bare ass. More from the article:

Cecile Kyenge, an eye doctor and Congo-born Italian citizen, was named integration minister in the new government of Prime Minister Enrico Letta on Saturday. She is one of seven women in the government.

Since then, she has been the subject of taunts not only on neo-fascist websites but the butt of race-tinged remarks by a politician of the Northern League, which has been allied in the past with former prime minister Silvio Berlusconi.

Equal opportunities minister Josefa Idem ordered an investigation by the National Anti-Discrimination Office into websites that called Kyenge a “Congolese monkey”, “Zulu”, “the black anti-Italian”, and other slurs.

This isn’t just some internet thugs leaving the usual offensive racist remarks we’ve all seen pretty much everywhere. Northern League European parliamentarian Mario Borghezio made references to a “bonga bonga government” because of Kyenge’s heritage.