How can we stop racism? By better education? By enforcing laws? By outing racists on the Internet and then campaigning to have them fired from their jobs? This is how one group of activists have gone about the problem with their Tumblr site Getting Racists Fired.

Getting Racists Fired is where oeople can out racists by submitting their toxic and dumbass Facebook posts, tweets, comments and images to the site, where they are shared in a bid to shame the individual. The site then urges its followers to write and phone the individual’s employer to have them fired for clowning themselves in public with their racist social media pollution…

To this end, they have posted details of what to say when phoning a company about a racist employee:

Here’s a script of what you can say while calling employers

“Hello can I speak to a manager on duty? I have a complaint to make about one of your employees”

“Yes hello, my name is ______ and I’ve been seeing some very disturbing and disgusting racist comments coming from one of your works. Their name is ____”

” I know that your business is not one that would condone such behaviour. Considering that this person has your company listed as their workplace, they represent it and the ideals your company was built on. I would like to think that your company isn’t one that supports these vile comments and actions, and that’s the purpose of my call today”

“I was also wondering if there is an email address I can send the proof of these comments too, just to solidify these claims, if you find it necessary”

IF THEY SAY THEIR “Hands are tied” say this: “Well if you are not willing to take care of this issue at your level I will be forced to take it to your supervisor and go from there” that usually gets them. And if not ask for their supervisor’s number and call them.

It is absolutely vital that you CALL BACK to check on the status of the issue. Make sure you hold them to their word and that something is being done. Stay calm and cordial. Channel your inner slightly annoyed PTA soccer mom and you’ll be fine.

As a response to the tragic events in Ferguson the site also posted a template for “messaging/emailing businesses about their racist employees.”

___(place of business)___,

In light of recent events in Ferguson, MO, and the resulting protests that have spread out across the country and beyond (of which I’m sure management is aware), just as many people have come to light with violent words as there have those been with support.

I am writing to respectfully request that you do firm checks into the racist behaviors and words of your employees, who post their hate publicly on social media accounts that are tied with your place of business. For both moral and business reputation reasons, other businesses have begun to terminate and/or warn employees who exhibit racist behavior online.

Your employee, ___________, is seen to have posted racial slurs and racially charged discriminatory claims on their facebook wall. I’ve attached a screenshot that contains the posts in question. Warnings for racial slurs and racist language
Yours,
____________

Now some may think this all sounds like bullying, but when queried about this, and why they were seemingly “not even going after racists,” but “going after people who make so called ‘racist’ jokes or comments,” the moderators replied:

Unfortunately, this blog or the actions of its users, which amount to sharing their opinions about whether or not a racist or bigot should continue to be employed, don’t account to ‘ruining lives’. The majority of these individuals will resume employment without much to impede them since they’re white.

The thing about white sociopathy is that only a racist would find such statements to be ‘funny’ or amount to jokes. So your excuse that these are just innocuous comments or jokes are simply not the case, especially since these same individuals are ones that hold jobs and positions with which they can wield institutional power.

You deeply misunderstand the purpose of this blog. By holding individuals accountable to their actions in public, we force change and remove dangerous individuals from positions of power from which they could do harm. The nature of this blog makes it so that as moderators we exist solely in anonymity, such that it is impossible for us to be motivated by personal satisfaction. This is about how People of Color, together, are indeed powerful.
Spoiler alert: the vast majority of the world is not white. It is the tens of thousands of users here, following this blog, that are reading your inane message with varying mixtures of disgust, humor, and pity. Anyway, I’m going to go back to hopefully getting your ass fired.

Bye

There have also been questions raised over privacy and possible “stalking” one moderator replied:

First off what a submitter does is not stalking. Stalking is a very serious issue and shouldn’t be equated to this or thrown around lightly. Checking a couple public sources to get information freely given to report racist public behavior to an employer is nowhere near the sort of criminal behavior of stalking. Demanding accountability for racist actions and words is not stalking.

In the US people may have freedom of speech, but so do we and employers have every right to terminate an employee based on what they choose to say publicly. This isn’t “gettingracistsarrested” it’s “racistsgettingfired”

Getting Racists Fired does have one caveat:

Do not message, contact, threaten, harangue, or harass the individual, their family, friends, or acquaintances; only contact their place of work or study.

And one moderator has further clarified the intention of the blog:

We do not condone sending messages to the accounts of racist people submitted to this blog and suggesting to send messages to a family member was completely uncalled for. Neither me nor Mod N would ever want anyone to harass a family member or to harass or threaten the people in these submissions.

If you are looking for people to message and threaten then this is the wrong place to look. Harassing and threatening a person to the point of them deleting their page is not the intent of this blog and can very well be illegal. It also breaks links to public posts that are sent to employers and schools which is completely counterproductive to the intent of this blog.

We are looking for public accountability not for people to delete and remake their social networking pages.

Three hours after setting up the blog, Getting Racists Fired had 4,000 followers. Now they have more than 40,000.

Racism is a learned behavior. It can be unlearned too.

Below: some examples from the site of the kind of racism they are outing
 

 

 

 

 
I am not up on what is supposedly cool or uncool these days in regards to acceptable Americana, but I have always held a deep and totally unironic love for Tom Petty. In addition to his later work, which I think does amazing stuff with folk, jangle, country and rock sounds, I’d argue he’s the only artist that really successfully integrated twang into proto-punk. As far as I’m concerned, “Anything That’s Rock ‘n’ Roll” has all the great elements of a good Dictators or New York Dolls song—but with this lovely Southern flair. Tom Petty is cool.

Like almost every artist though, I cannot defend his entire canon. “Peace in L.A.” was Petty’s 1992 comment on the events that unfolded after the Rodney King verdict, a weird miss for a relatively socially conscious guy known for lambasting record companies and playing Farm Aid. Part of it is that the song is just really bad (the dated production is even forgivable), but it’s also that this particular incident simply did not require Tom Petty’s musical commentary.

Cringe-along with the lyrics:

We need peace in L.A., what happened was wrong
We all feel betrayed, but we got to be strong
If the powers that be let evil go free
You must understand, don’t play into their hand

We need peace in L.A., peace in L.A.

Don’t need beating and shouting, don’t need burning and looting
Tonight we all pray, that our children are safe
There’s hurt and frustration, there’s a hard realization
But how can we help if we steal from ourselves?

We need peace in L.A., peace in L.A.
We need peace in L.A., peace in L.A.

Stay cool, don’t be a fool
Stay cool, don’t be a fool

The song was apparently written and recorded in one day, and then rush-released to radio stations the very next day. Its effect on the rioters has never been quantified (for some reason!). Oh Tom, I still love you, but I’m so glad you didn’t try and write a song about Ferguson! Take a listen below, if you dare—it gets really bad around the bridge… I mean spoken-word bad.
 

 
A series of posters questioning the London Metropolitan Police’s record on racism, violence and corruption have appeared on advertising hoardings across London. The billposters are the idea of STRIKE! Magazine, which produced them in response to the Metropolitan Police’s own promotional campaign—as the magazine explains:

The Metropolitan Police Force spend ridiculous sums of our money trying to convince us – and themselves – that they’re not violent, racist and corrupt. In 2012 it was £12.6m and in 2013 it was £9.3 – in two weeks alone last year they wasted nearly half a million pounds of public money on pointless poster campaigns. This is from the webpage promoting the local policing pilot scheme:

“Evidence tells us that giving people very local information about police action in their area may increase the confidence they have in police. These boroughs were chosen as places where confidence in policing is lower than average.”

It’s propaganda pure and simple: they want us to forget that they murdered Mark Duggan, an unarmed civilian, and caused the 2011 riots; they’d rather you didn’t talk about being 28 times more likely to be stopped and searched in London if you don’t have white skin; and if the heavily redacted Operation Tiberius report is anything to go by, they definitely don’t want you to know about the 42 corrupt senior Metropolitan Police officers caught literally letting criminals get away with murder. Their entire barrel is rotten, so they want to keep the lid tight shut.

STRIKE! Magazine is a bi-monthly anti-profit, advertisement free newspaper covering politics, philosophy, art, subversion and sedition. The magazine launched the campaign two months ago, but claim they do not know who is behind printing the posters and putting them in bus shelter advertising hoardings.

However, one designer from STRIKE! told Vice UK that he had seen about twenty posters since they first appeared on Saturday December 13th, and was “[e]normously pleased” with them. Photographs of the posters have been shared by many users on Twitter.
 

Outside New Scotland Yard. #ACAB pic.twitter.com/LvQJf6Hrf8

— Hannah Hannoo (@Han_So_Solo) December 15, 2014

 
More after the jump…

 
Positive Force is a Washington DC-based activist collective that’s been around since 1985. The documentary, Positive Force: More Than A Witness; 30 Years Of Punk Politics In Action, explores the history of this organization, which often stages benefits with like-minded bands to promote various causes. There’s a wealth of archival performances in the film—including footage of Fugazi playing in front of the White House on the eve of the Gulf War—and this updated edition of the DVD has another 30+ minutes of rare live clips. The documentary also features interviews with such notables as Ian MacKaye, Kathleen Hanna, Jello Biafra, and Dave Grohl, who talks about his first-ever live gig, drumming for the band Scream at a Positive Force benefit.

One of the highlights of Positive Force is the interview with Penny Rimbaud, drummer and co-founder of the UK group Crass. Rimbaud’s band, which existed from 1977-1984, very much influenced the principles of Positive Force. Crass not only put out their own records and were critical of the mainstream, but they were also activists, believing that it wasn’t enough to just sing about social justice, you had to practice what you preached. In the clip, Rimbaud accuses the members of the Clash and the Sex Pistols of not meaning it, man, as he feels their drive to make it as rock stars came before all else.

If you have any interest at all in the history of American punk and/or activism, Positive Force is definitely worth your time. Pick up the new edition of the DVD via PM Press or Amazon.

All right, here’s Mr. Rimbaud:
 

Photo via Anti-Surveillance Feminist Poet Hair and Makeup Party
 
As facial recognition technology makes the transition from dystopic science fiction boogie-man to modern Big Brother reality, folks are becoming understandably concerned about being tracked and recorded without their permission. In many cities, including New York, it is at least unwise if illegal to wear a mask in public, so completely obscuring your face is out of the question. As an alternative, artist and designer Adam Harvey has developed a make-up technique—CV Dazzle—that hides from facial recognition software but falls well within the parameters of legal fashion. Confusing the machines is surprisingly simple:

The name is derived from a type of World War I naval camouflage called Dazzle, which used cubist-inspired designs to break apart the visual continuity of a battleship and conceal its orientation and size. Likewise, CV Dazzle uses avant-garde hairstyling and makeup designs to break apart the continuity of a face. Since facial-recognition algorithms rely on the identification and spatial relationship of key facial features, like symmetry and tonal contours, one can block detection by creating an “anti-face”.

“Anti-Surveillance Makeup Parties” have made waves with a subset of young feminists, but I don’t see CV Dazzle actually catching on in our highly aesthetically-minded urban centers. The source pattern, “Dazzle” is most relevant in today’s culture as the inspiration for an ugly-ass, Jeff Koons-designed yacht. The look is bad enough on a boat, but it certainly runs counter to what most people consider attractive on a female face. Meanwhile most men stubbornly refuse to even try mascara (even though you’d look so pretty!)

Still, while the practical applications of CV Dazzle may be limited, especially as facial recognition becomes more and more accurate, as an art project this dystopic raver of an “anti-face” is a fascinating take on privacy. Check out the makeup tutorial from artist Jillian Mayer below to get the basics—your life may depend on it, enemy of the state!
 

 
If you haven’t already, do yourself a favor and check out the hashtag #pornprotest on Twitter, it’s the best thing on the Internet right now. It seems that Parliament has recently been messing with what you can and can’t do in adult videos, and right-thinking individuals on the scepter’d isle came out in numbers today to protest the legislation.
 

 

 

 

Photo by Ms Slide @sliderulesyou
 
More pics from today’s protest after the jump…...

 
A new entry of the annals of monumentally missing the point…

“I Can’t Breathe” may be the sentence of 2014. They are, of course, the last words, uttered many times, of Eric Garner, the 43-year-old NYC Department of Parks horticulturist and occasional loose cigarette salesman whose inexplicable death by police chokehold in the Tompkinsville neighborhood (where I lived until quite recently) last July has led to a great deal of outcry.

The sentence has achieved the ultimate that can happen in our society—it has become a free-floating signifier in social media, just like Paula Deen’s supposedly homophobic fried chicken recipes or something. This past week several prominent athletes in the predominantly African-American NBA, including the Bulls’ Derrick Rose, the Cavaliers’ LeBron James, the Lakers’ Kobe Bryant, and the Nets’ Deron Williams, have warmed up wearing T-shirts heartbreakingly emblazoned with that simple message of solidarity with a blameless victim of police brutality: “I CAN’T BREATHE.”

All across America, a small minority of observers reacted in the expected way: they tut-tutted the shirts’ choice of font. The shirts, while admittedly embodying a courageous stand against the combined forces of intolerance, had committed the unpardonable sin of violating a bit of design etiquette.

Among people who take design very seriously, the Comic Sans typeface has been a bête noire for at least a decade, because it is often used by “design-blind” “normals” outside of its optimal range of uses, frequently lending an unserious air to messages of stern import. Designed by Vincent Connare, Comic Sans was released by Microsoft in 1994, which surely contributed to its popularity.

For instance, Tony Seddon named a book after it (Thou Shall Not Use Comic Sans: 365 Graphic Design Sins and Virtues: A Designer’s Almanac of Dos and Don’ts) in which he calls it “arguably the most inappropriately used typeface in history” (although a page later he sort of takes it back).

Eventually, on the McSweeney’s website, Mike Lacher defended the honor of the typeface with “I’m Comic Sans, Asshole,” which contained the immortal line “I’m the best thing to happen to typography since Johannes fucking Gutenberg.” The piece simultaneously seemed to agree with the design critics’ peeve while putting them in their place.

On the T-shirts, for instance, Caroline Fredericks, of “California/Alabama,” tweeted, “how many people will be able to look past the choice of comic sans?” Ryan Hubbard, of Kansas City, tweeted, “Who’s giving all of these NBA players “I can’t breathe” shirts set in Comic Sans? I love that they’re wearing them, but come on, man.”

The New York Times report on the shirts emphasizes the outsize efforts of Jay-Z and others to replicate the gesture made by Derrick Rose of the Bulls and makes no mention of Comic Sans or any other aspect of the shirts’ design, except to note that “Rameen Aminzadeh, a member of Justice League NYC, drafted a simple design for the text of the T-shirt, which other members of the group approved sometime after 1 a.m. [referring to late Sunday night/early Monday morning].”

Here are a few of the tweets—there’s plenty more where these came from.
 

I'm all for the "I Can't Breathe" shirts, but some of those New York cops had to be behind them using Comic Sans as the font. #Fail

— Tyler DeHate (@tylerdehate) December 10, 2014

i love that all these athletes are wearing "i can't breathe" shirts but i wish the font was pretty much anything but comic sans.

— crissle (@crissles) December 10, 2014

F*cking comic sans “@BleacherReport: Kobe Bryant and the Lakers wear “I Can’t Breathe” tees before tonight’s game pic.twitter.com/i5ochupkL5”

— Luke Bertolet (@TheIslandRunner) December 10, 2014

Not to ignore the fact that a man died needlessly, but is the font on those I Can't Breathe shirts Comic Sans?

— CHILI (@heyitschili) December 10, 2014

Who's giving all of these NBA players "I can't breathe" shirts set in Comic Sans? I love that they're wearing them, but come on, man.

— Ryan Hubbard (@ryanjhubbard) December 10, 2014

It's great the Lakers are wearing "I can't breathe shirts." However, how many people will be able to look past the choice of comic sans?

— caroline fredericks (@carolinefred) December 10, 2014

 
via Vocativ

 
The cheeky introduction of sex into other subject matter has long been a staple of advertising that seeks to use word of mouth and/or media reverb to make its impact. Everyone enjoys a good chuckle at a banana positioned to resemble a willie, for instance, and why not? It’s all a lot of fun, the banana lobby is happy, and everybody wins. However, sex in advertising can also be a bit of a tightrope walk, as the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals recently learned.

Only one day after it was put up, PETA was ordered to take down an “indecent” billboard poster in Nottingham after a request from the Notts County Football Club. The poster, which was appealing to consumers to stop using dairy products, had been placed just outside the club’s playing arena.
 

 
The billboard read, “Some bodily fluids are bad for you” and a photo of a woman having experienced the, ahem, “aftermath of a sex act,” as one report delicately phrased it.

PETA has defended the billboard by calling it “cheeky,” but some pedestrians disagreed. As a local resident named Richard Brown said, “It’s clear what they are doing but I think it’s a bit naughty. I’ve got a seven-year-old daughter and young people aren’t stupid, they can read and it’s not great that they can see things like this that are indecent.”

The billboard was the only one of its type in England;  PETA commented that it used the location because it was “suitable.” Damian Irvine, commercial director at Notts County, said: “Once the content of this advert was identified we informed advertising company Space Outdoors who agreed the content was not in keeping with our community and family-focused values.”

via Arbroath

 
Joseph DeLappe is not your ordinary artist. He’s a professor of art at the University of Nevada, and some have called him the first “gamer artist.” In October 18, 2002, with the TV show Friends still on the air, he and five gamer friends staged a recreation of “The One Where No One Proposes,” the premiere episode of Season 9, in the medium of a Quake III Arena game server (that is, a massively multiplayer environment where hundreds of players compete in the same arena). The project was called “Quake/Friends.” Each character in the show was given an avatar in the violent shoot-‘em-up, and the players used the in-game messaging system to render the episode’s dialogue: “Our performers functioned as passive, neutral visitors to the game—we were constantly killed and reincarnated to continue the performance. The piece was presented a second time in 2003 using six projected points of view, multiple audio channels and microphones for each performer.” The episode they were reenacting was not quite a month old at the time of the first performance. It was kind of a big deal at the time—the New York Times gave the second performance of the piece a writeup with the title “Take That, Monica! Kapow, Chandler!”

More recently, DeLappe’s work has shown a more explicitly political flavor. From 2006 to 2011, DeLappe undertook the impressively subversive “Dead in Iraq” project, which involved logging on to the U.S. Army recruiting game “America’s Army” with the username dead-in-iraq and typing in the names of all 4,484 (at that time) service persons who had died to date in Iraq. In 2013 DeLappe commenced the “Cowardly Drone” project, which was essentially an elaborate effort to fuck with Google Image search results. He would take images of e.g. MQ9 Reaper Drones and Photoshop the word “COWARDLY” on the vehicle’s side in large bold letters, then re-upload the images with unprepossessing titles like “predator drone” in the hopes that some of his images would come up as hits in Google Search. The images are intended as “a subtle intervention into the media stream of US military power.”

DeLappe’s newest idea, “In Drones We Trust,” is combining a critique of the U.S. military’s use of drones with the defacement of U.S. currency. He noticed that all U.S. bills in wide circulation (except for the $1 bill) feature an etching of an august edifice connected with the U.S. government on its reverse side. (The $2 has a reproduction of Joseph Trumbull’s painting The Declaration of Independence.) In each case the building comes with an entirely featureless, placid sky, so DeLappe figured, why not add a menacing image of a drone to them? “It seems appropriate,” writes DeLappe, “considering our current use of drones in foreign skies, to symbolically bring them home to fly over our most notable patriotic structures.” He has created a couple hundred rubber stamps with the drone image and you can get one for yourself for a nominal price that simple covers the price of postage ($3 for domestic orders). I ordered one, and I can’t wait to ... er, use it on non-currency bits of paper! (Actually, if I’m reading this right, it’s not illegal to draw on or add markings to U.S. paper currency.)
 

 

 

 

 

 

 
No video of “In Drones We Trust” that I could find, but here’s a look at “Quake/Friends”:
 

 
via Internet Magic.

 
You may have been born too late for radical chic, but you’re just in time for, uh, radical chicory? Yes, Bobby Seale, founding chairman and national organizer of the Black Panther Party, has a cookbook, cooking show and “BobbyQue” website, all devoted to the lost art of barbecue (or “barbeque,” as he insists it should be spelled). Seale has even formulated his culinary principles in the “Barbeque Bill of Rights”:

WHEN IN THE COURSE OF HUMAN DEVELOPMENT it becomes necessary for us, the citizens of the earth, to creatively improve the culinary art of barbe-que’n in our opposition to the overly commercialized bondage of “cue-be-rab” (barbecuing backwards); and to assume, within the realm of palatable biological reactions to which the laws of nature and nature’s God entitle us, a decent respect for all the billions of human taste buds and savory barbeque desires; we the people declare a basic barbeque bill of rights which impels us to help halt, eradicate, and ultimately stamp out “cue-be-rab!”

As the commercialized backwards “bottle-back” recipe methods pursue and invariably evince a design to reduce our backyard-picnics into burnt, half done, bland, badly seasoned, improperly pit-qued entrees, then it is the right of we the barbeque lovers of the world, to alter the cue-be-rab phenomenon and creatively change our recipe process for a more righteous saucy, down-home, wood-smoking, delectable, baste-marinating, barbeque’n methodology.

 

Seale oversaw one of the Black Panthers’ most ambitious and popular projects, the People’s Free Food Program.
 
Filmed in front of a live studio audience in Philadelphia, Barbeque with Bobby Seale is co-hosted by Seale and his wife Leslie. Sun Ra Arkestra trombonist Tyrone Hill and his band, the Deep Space Posse, are live in the studio. You can watch the cooking show on Seale’s YouTube channel. (The video is low-resolution and the sound is out of sync—if you want a hi-fi experience, it looks like you’ll have to buy the DVD.) Meat-eating radicals can find six free recipes here and a couple more here. You’ll have to tell me what it tastes like; I’m vegetarian.

As you will have guessed, not everyone loves the idea of one of the world’s most famous black revolutionaries selling BBQ recipes, though accusing Seale of “selling out” by writing a cookbook strikes me as more than a little silly. When the first edition of Barbeque’n with Bobby was published in 1988, Seale told the Chicago Tribune that Jerry Rubin first suggested the idea while the two were in jail during the Chicago Conspiracy Trial. Seale talks about how he responds to cries of “sellout” in this interview clip: