Today begins the monthlong fast of the Holy Month of Ramadan, that is followed by a three-day feast. This is an extremely important time for Muslims, one that is respected by all - Muslims and non-Muslims alike.
The folks who are fasting (the majority of people), wake up before sunrise and eat a large meal. Then they fast all day, forsaking water and food, breaking the fast after sunset, again with a large meal. In places like here where the days are especially long and extremely hot, it is quite a challenge.
The work day is shortened for all. Our report time has changed from 7:00 in the morning to 9:00. We did get out at 1:30 or 2:45 on the two days we have meetings each week, but now our dismissal time is 2:00 everyday. We're still in school, although the kids have stopped coming. Our last day is July 9th.
All restaurants and places that serve food are closed during the day. That includes Starbucks and other fast food establishments. They reopen again after sunset, staying open into the wee hours of the morning.
The concession stand is closed in the theaters, as well as the ice cream kiosk in the malls. All food shops are closed in the airports, too.
Any sign of food, or smell of food cooking, is forbidden.
Grocery stores are open regular time, interestingly.
As extreme as it sounds, it's really not bad at all for non-Muslims. We can eat at any time, as long as it's behind closed doors where we're not seen eating and it does not emit food odors.
Eating in your car while driving is also prohibited, but I've never seen this enforced.
Getting things done during this month is tough, as most everyone takes a very laid back approach to life and business. There is a lot of lounging around, with no excess effort that might cause fatigue and hunger.
There are folks who are exempt from fasting - kids (usually younger than 10 years old), pregnant women, old folks, and folks whose jobs require exertion.
Attached below you'll find a link to "Ask Ali," a really helpful local who is featured in the paper answering/responding to some of the ex-pats questions about Islam, Muslim culture and traditions.
Ramadan Kareem! (Happy Ramadan)
http://askali.com/newsletter/uploads/issue23.pdf
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Thursday, June 18, 2015
Tuesday, June 16, 2015
Quote
“I identify as black,” Ms. Dolezal told Matt Lauer on the “Today” show this morning. That may be. But actual black people, like me, don’t have the option of choosing. -
Tamara Winfrey Harris
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/16/opinion/rachel-dolezals-harmful-masquerade.html?action=click&pgtype=Homepage&module=opinion-c-col-left-region®ion=opinion-c-col-left-region&WT.nav=opinion-c-col-left-region&_r=0
Tamara Winfrey Harris
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/16/opinion/rachel-dolezals-harmful-masquerade.html?action=click&pgtype=Homepage&module=opinion-c-col-left-region®ion=opinion-c-col-left-region&WT.nav=opinion-c-col-left-region&_r=0
Trailer: 'Dope'
This movie was something I was interested in watching, if for nothing else, then to see the characters navigate through their hood to reach their goals.
I was ready to put it on my list of movies to look out for, until I watched the review below.
I've decided this critic and I don't share the same taste. So when he says "Go," I say "No."
Watch the link to the movie first. It's a minute long. Then watch the review below it.
What do you think?
Go?
Or . . .
No?
Trailer: 'Dope'
I was ready to put it on my list of movies to look out for, until I watched the review below.
I've decided this critic and I don't share the same taste. So when he says "Go," I say "No."
Watch the link to the movie first. It's a minute long. Then watch the review below it.
What do you think?
Go?
Or . . .
No?
Trailer: 'Dope'
Monday, June 15, 2015
Another View
Of the white woman, Rachel Dolezal, passing for black.
An excerpt from the Vox - (Bold is mine)
An excerpt from the Vox - (Bold is mine)
White people have been passing for black for centuries. A historian explains.
Dara Lind:On the other hand, that gets into another criticism — that in order to make white people care about black issues, it takes a white person pretending to be black.
Baz Dreisinger:Of course! That's the criticism that's leveled at John Howard Griffin (the white man who passed for black and is the author of Black Like Me) all the time. Frankly the same thing is true of so many experiences. We think about the success of Orange Is The New Black — no criticism of that book per se, but how many prison memoirs are there by nonwhite people who are incarcerated that didn't get that level of attention? This happens all the time, that it takes a white person to translate for a white mainstream audience. That's partly why John Howard Griffin, I think, fell out of favor. because it was like, "We don't need that translator anymore." So it's certainly a big problem.
It would have been a far more radical thing for her to just say, "Hi, I'm white, and I identify with these causes, with this culture, in whatever way that I do; yes, I teach Africana studies and I'm not of that descent, because it doesn't take being of that descent to care about these issues on an intellectual, cultural, or moral basis." That would be a far more radical thing to do, because it's saying you don't have to be it to care about it. I don't have to be female to care about women's rights issues. I don't have to be black to care about black rights issues. I don't have to be incarcerated in order to care about issues around incarceration. I bring that up because that's the primary work I do now, and my next book is about global mass incarceration. I've never been incarcerated, I don't have family members who are incarcerated. I have friends who are, but I think most people do in this day and age. But that doesn't mean that I can't care about it in a profound way.
http://www.vox.com/2015/6/15/8784327/passing-white-black
Sunday, June 14, 2015
No thanks.
Part of this runway is built on stilts. Only 20 pilots are cleared to land here.
http://roadwarriorvoices.com/2015/06/13/this-runway-is-built-on-stilts-and-british-airways-only-has-20-pilots-cleared-to-land-there/
http://roadwarriorvoices.com/2015/06/13/this-runway-is-built-on-stilts-and-british-airways-only-has-20-pilots-cleared-to-land-there/
The Big Boys
This map may be hard to read, but it's worth checking out. Find the whole story at The Huffington Post link below.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/06/10/biggest-companies-revenue_n_7552802.html?cps=gravity_2246_-3774485293071823420
Another Banksy
http://smile.amazon.com/Destroy-Racism-Banksy-Reproduction-Poster/dp/B00AHTU6SA/ref=pd_sim_79_30?ie=UTF8&refRID=1DXP0RVTZN96AKKFNE59
Vincent & Jules
From "Pulp Fiction," with bananas instead of guns.
The artist is the mysterious and illusive Banksy.
It can be purchased on canvas from a "Touch of Modern."
https://www.touchofmodern.com/sales/banksy-b68f93e9-cbe3-44e2-be56-ccce2dd8c8fc/vincent-and-jules-with-bananas?share_invite_token=WLQ0XX2Y
Saturday, June 13, 2015
Priceless Reactions to NAACP Head Claiming to be Black
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/06/12/rachel-dolezal-faking-bla_n_7571422.html
Mosquito Trap
A must for summer time. This is especially useful for my Texas folks, where the mosquitoes are as big as birds.
History Repeating Itself
From Salon -
White panic, white denial: The racial prehistory of the McKinney pool party that white America can’t let go
Hey white people: If we can get over our twisted relationship with the past, the future might actually be better
ANDREW O'HEHIR
TOPICS: RACE, RACISM, MCKINNEY, MCKINNEY TEXAS, TEXAS POOL PARTY, TEXAS, EDITOR'S PICKS, POLITICS, WHITE PEOPLE, WHITE PRIVILEGE, BLACK, BLACK PEOPLE, AFRICAN AMERICANS, AFRICAN AMERICAN, NEWS, POLITICS NEWS
There is a central trope of racial discourse within America’s white majority – or let’s say within a particular subset of that majority – that African-Americans are overly obsessed with the past. If you are white and claim you have never heard anyone in your extended family or your circle of acquaintances express this view, you have deliberately chosen not to pay attention. This is a fundamental premise of the Fox News worldview, often addressed directly by Bill O’Reilly and Sean Hannity, which lies behind their insistence that Barack Obama is a stealth black nationalist and ‘60s radical who will one day reveal his true agenda. It undergirds coverage of every racially coded news event, from the “pool party” in McKinney, Texas, that transfixed the nation last week to the lengthening sequence of unarmed black men and boys killed by police or panicked white civilians.
Like so many aspects of American popular ideology, this contention contains and conceals a powerful element of truth — but not the truth its proponents perceive. When turned upside down and uncloaked, this anxious insistence that history has no long-term consequences and no connection to present-tense events reveals itself as a distorted mirror image of reality. It is whites far more than blacks who cannot break free of the poisonous attitudes of the past, and facing that truth can help us understand the peculiar state of American race relations in the 21st century, so painfully distilled in that video clip of a white police officer and a bikini-clad African-American teenager.
We shouldn’t lose sight of the fact that the confrontation between those people was a real event in a real place, which unmistakably evoked America’s history of racial violence and civil disobedience. I also saw it, almost literally, as a collision between the past and the future. Whether or not that young lady behaved with perfect decorum on the afternoon in question, she is unmistakably an American of the future – not a future in which cultural or racial identities don’t matter (we won’t see that in any living person’s lifetime), but a future of increased fluidity and intersection and overlap. Her crime, so to speak, lay in being a black girl who went to a pool party in a largely white suburban neighborhood and acted as if she belonged there, without assuming she was to be held to some special standard of good behavior. That police officer, on the other hand, seemed to have absorbed a contact high from the long and brutal history of police violence against people of color. Fortunately for all of us, his obvious zeal for the role was rendered ludicrous rather than tragic by its context.
Yet it is African-Americans who are constantly accused of fixating on ancient history, a charge presented in various ways, many of them subtler than the white-centric paranoia delivered by Fox. Stated most directly and without hyperbole, this boils down to the idea that black people need to get over all that stuff that happened in the history books or in black-and-white video clips, like slavery and lynching and segregated lunch counters and generations of systematic economic and residential discrimination. It isn’t helpful; it’s only holding them back. Anyway, white people living today aren’t responsible for any of it and America simply isn’t racist anymore: Check out Obama and Jay-Z and LeBron. If anybody’s a racist, it’s all the black people calling everybody else racist.
OK, I said I would avoid hyperbole and I lied. Not everyone who expresses this view follows the chain of association all the way through that last sentence, or the one before it. (Although the “I’m not a racist, but …” mode is distressingly common.) But the important ideological thread, even in the most polite and neutral formulation, is the desire to decouple distressing individual events from the even more distressing current of history. The deaths of Trayvon Martin and Mike Brown and Eric Garner and all the rest are disconnected cases of perceived threat and police authority and possible wrongdoing, each to be weighed on its own merits. They do not belong to any larger historical pattern, and those who insist on perceiving such a pattern are dwelling in the past or playing the race card or nursing old grudges or otherwise denying and undermining the greatness of America.
Except of course for the confusing fact that many white observers do perceive a larger pattern linking the thorniest issues in the African-American community, which is the point where this ideological construction begins to reveal itself. Since it is urgently important to resist the obvious pattern — the one that would be discerned immediately by any outside observer — an alternative must be found. So the pattern we get instead of history is a murky and shapeless monstrosity spawned from the bad conscience of the social sciences: The “culture of dependency” or the “collapse of the black family” or, if we’re really reaching for the dog whistle, the “thug subculture” of baggy pants and Purple Drank and incomprehensible rap lyrics and, most damning of all, a disrespectful attitude towards authority. (Thank God young white folks have never expressed anything like that.)
Simply put, all of this represents a classic case of projection. Who is paralyzed by the past and unable to break free of toxic associations, outmoded stereotypes and ingrained fears and prejudices? Here’s a hint: It isn’t black folks. What we see at work in so many of these cases, and especially in the McKinney pool-party fracas, is a tangled web of half-conscious assumptions inherited from previous white generations, assumptions that were poisoned at the roots by fear and shame and have now become psychotically dissociated from social reality. (Please notice, my hypersensitive fellow European-Americans, that for the moment I am steering away from the term “racist,” which has become an impediment to communication amid all the nutsack-clutching about how it’s the cruelest thing you could ever say to any white person.)
Those assumptions are so familiar to Americans of all races and colors that I hardly need to spell them out. To their core believers, of course, they are not flawed assumptions but profound truths that must be spoken out loud in the face of P.C. liberalism and its pieties. Black people, as a category, are understood to be a uniquely dangerous and disruptive force that must be contained, and whose individual members are virtually interchangeable. African-American men (and boys, all too often) are such threatening figures in themselves that they can be considered armed and dangerous simply because they are black and male. Black people in suburbia, as we saw in McKinney, are instinctively understood by many white residents and police as invaders, bringing the imagined chaos and lawlessness of the “inner city” to the ordered land of weed-free bluegrass rectangles and endless identical cul-de-sacs.
While the terminology and rhetoric have been massaged for contemporary usage, at their ideological core these seemingly deranged views go back a long way. All the pseudo-concern about African-American culture and the troubled state of the black family serves to conceal the deep historical roots of these ingrained attitudes – history is bunk, as we noted earlier, and there are no lessons in the past. Since early in the history of the slave trade, the people brought here in chains from Africa have been depicted as a special sub-caste of humanity, with certain gifts (playing music, and picking cotton in the sun) and certain deficits, such as a tendency to violence and an inability to handle personal liberty.
Whether those prejudices and many related modes of bigotry emerged organically among the white population as a way of justifying the existence of slavery in a nation that claimed to be based on principles of liberty and equality, or were the fruits of a concerted ruling-class strategy to divide exploited workers along the color line, is an exceedingly complicated historical question. I am tempted to suggest that the perception that blacks were dangerous was less destructive to the white psyche in the long run than the perception that blacks were pretty much all the same. (It was not inherently irrational for those who owned slaves or benefited from the slave economy to live in fear of slave rebellion.) But there’s really no separating the two, and those are the intertwined ideas that continue to bedevil and enslave white people, and that prevent so many of them from taking a full part in the vibrant cultural landscape of America.
I claim no special expertise in African-American culture, but I’ve lived in several different racially mixed contexts at different times of my life, and there’s one thing I can say with a high degree of confidence: The immense diversity and heterogeneity of black America, which always existed but was perhaps constrained by a perceived need for group solidarity, has become unmistakable to anyone paying even the slightest attention. Any possible stereotype about how black people behave or talk can be undermined with a million counter-examples. Here’s a news flash: Black people have been moving to suburbia for 50 years or so, and plenty of them can host their own damn pool parties. If we want to be invited, we’d better be polite.
African-American communities remain disproportionately affected by economic inequality, poverty and crime, but this is also a golden age of black self-definition, of black computer nerds, black stoners, black preppies, black hipsters, black intellectuals, black “Lord of the Rings” buffs and a vibrant African-American LGBT community. Chris Rock’s gag about how he hadn’t realized that black people could be snotty specifically referred to my neighborhood in Brooklyn. The African-American teenagers who live next door to me aren’t snotty; they’re skateboarders who listen to both rap and metal and play role-playing games. I don’t think it would occur to anyone they know to suggest that they are “acting white,” or to care.
But there are a great many white people who would vigorously resist the R-word I mentioned earlier but who can’t see or appreciate any of that, and don’t want to. Their self-image is apparently defined in opposition to the classic stereotype of African-Americans as a hostile and undifferentiated Other, an amoral criminal class driven by anger and resentment. There’s a strong element of projection going on there too, I’m afraid. I felt an infinitesimal twinge of compassion for Karen Fitzgibbons, the infamous elementary-school teacher in McKinney who used her Facebook page to express her belief that “the blacks are the ones causing the problems and this ‘racial tension,’” and then to suggest that segregation wasn’t such a bad idea: If you ship all the black people to the other side of town, she wrote, “they can hurt each other and leave the innocent people alone. Maybe the 50s and 60s were really on to something.” There’s no question Fitzgibbons had to be fired, if only because no one ignorant enough to conflate “the 50s and 60s” like that should be teaching children anything, including needlepoint or tetherball. (And because she actually used the hashtag #imnotracist.)
But Fitzgibbons’ real offense was to say, in an indelicate and overly public fashion, what millions of other white Americans say in code or in private. I’d rather we were honest about it than sweep it under the carpet. If she’s the comic-relief version of non-racist racism, then Michael Dunn, the man who shot and killed 17-year-old Jordan Davis at a Florida gas station after a dispute over loud music, is the tragic and hair-raising version. In the riveting new documentary about that case, “3 ½ Minutes, Ten Bullets,” we hear Dunn tell his fiancée “I’m not racist; they’re racist,” during a jailhouse telephone call. There’s no need to ask who “they” are; he launches into a rant about the dysfunctional “subculture” of baggy pants and gangsta rap and fatherless families, against which he has struck such a courageous blow.
As it happens, Jordan Davis grew up in a middle-class Christian household in the Jacksonville suburbs. He had a close and loving relationship with both his parents, although they were separated. He went to that gas station that night with a couple of friends to buy chewing gum. He could hardly have been a more clean-cut young American, except for the semiotics of his skin color and the music he liked, which were the only things about him that Dunn could perceive. Dunn had been drinking heavily, and was on his way home from the wedding of an adult son he hadn’t seen in many years. He had a loaded gun in the glove compartment and was itching to use it. Yet in Dunn’s understanding of the world, an understanding handed down from the deep past when racism required no apology, no denial and no disguise, he could not possibly be the one who belonged to a diseased and dysfunctional subculture.
A certain presidential candidate once promised us a “national conversation” on race, what seems like a lifetime ago, and the phrase sounded noble for five minutes before becoming a national joke. But it might be time for white people to talk to each other openly and without censorship about the dead weight of the past that we pretend does not exist or does not matter. Black people have their own problems to deal with, but they do not suffer from the crippling delusion that America’s past was so sacred and glorious we can never let it go. They aren’t the ones dragging around an inherited burden of hatred and fear and unhappiness that keeps on killing black and brown people and poisoning white minds and doing absolutely no good for anyone. It’s time, brothers and sisters, to set that burden down.
Her True Colors
Sometimes "No Comment" is the best response.
From The Root -
From The Root -
Texas Teacher Fired After Racist Facebook Post About McKinney Pool Attack
Karen Fitzgibbons, a teacher at the Frenship Independent School District, was fired Thursday.
BY: LYNETTE HOLLOWAY
Posted: June 13 2015 10:29 AM
Karen Fitzgibbon
FACEBOOK
A Texas elementary school teacher has been fired after her racist Facebook post about the McKinney pool attack went viral, according to the New York Daily News.
The teacher, Karen Fitzgibbon, worked as a fourth grade teacher at Bennett Elementary School in the Frenship Independent School District in Wolfforth, Texas, and was fired Thurday, the report says. Her dismissal came after she wrote a post on Wednesday ranting about the firing of ex-McKinney officer Eric Casebolt, a white officer who attacked black teens at a pool party last week.
“This makes me ANGRY!” Fitzgibbons wrote, according to KCBD. “This officer should not have to resign. I’m going to just go ahead and say it...the blacks are the ones causing the problems and this ‘racial tension.’ I guess that’s what happens when you flunk out of school and have no education.
“I’m almost to the point of wanting them all segregated on one side of town so they can hurt each other and leave the innocent people alone,” she continued. “Maybe the 50s and 60s were really on to something.”
After an uproar, Fitzgibbon deleted the post and apologized. The district issued a statement about the incident, according to Yahoo News.
“Frenship ISD is deeply disappointed in the thoughtlessness conveyed by this employee’s post,” the statement says. “We find these statements extremely offensive, insensitive, and disrespectful to our Frenship community and citizens everywhere. … The employee whose account is responsible for the post will be relieved of her teaching duties at Frenship ISD.”
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