International Blog Against Racism Week, belated link roundup and related personal musings

The second annual International Blog Against Racism Week has just ended (on Sunday, but this took me a little while); all the links to formal participants are being collected at ibarw, but there is (awesomely) a truly daunting number of them. Personally I've dealt with the influx by mostly keeping my reading to the places I lurk anyway, so I thought that I would link to some of the posts I've seen that struck me idiosyncratically the most, for the benefit of other people who might otherwise have been overwhelmed.

oyceter has a basic definitions post that should probably go first and be read before anything else here by somebody new to these discussions, as well as this post on anger (cf. truepenny on metaphors for voice) and this one on the rhetorical fallacy of bringing up racism in Japan as a counter to discussions of white privilege (plus bonus interesting history of colonialism).

coffeeandink's "Four Cabs" (which, again for possibly idiosyncratic personal reasons (though it's also very well-written), I found especially affecting); she also has roundups of pertinent web recommendations and book recommendations, as well as this post on why she participates in the Week.

She also earlier posted this compact explanation of the shocking stuff going on right now in Jena, Louisiana, with links to more information and ways to help. I linked Rachel (masamage) to that post, and she wrote a column about it for her school newspaper where she's a columnist, even though the last time she wrote about racism a bunch of people yelled at her and made her frightened of doing it again (I am proud).

While I'm linking my friends, Hannah who is synchcola has a brief amusing analysis of tokenism in the US government as related to Star Trek.

elisem has this post about jokes, and a couple of followups in response to one of the comments.

And yhlee on the idea of 'virtual integration', as well as posts on race and teaching, race and writing, and being asked where one is "from".

Another pertinent yhlee post, somewhat predating the Week proper, is this one containing some excerpts from a book called By The Color Of Our Skin. ( Some stuff spinning off in reaction to that one. )

I'm pretty nervous about thinking and talking about this stuff in public; due to lack of practise, I'm probably not very good at it. But it seems worth trying to do anyway, even if I get here a little late.