blacksundae

Michael Bérubé:

[I]n 1974, I was a freshman at Regis High School in New York, where I heard one of my more conservative classmates say, in the course of a discussion about affirmative action, that he had been the victim of reverse discrimination for too long. Exasperated to the point of flummoxation, I noted in reply that (a) affirmative action showed up only yesterday, (b) you’re thirteen years old, d00d, and (c) you’re attending an elite, tuition-free Jesuit high school that does not admit women. And the reason I remember that moment 35 years later is that it has never gone away: guys like Stuart Taylor and Fred Barnes are still thirteen years old, still the victims of reverse discrimination, and still questioning the credentials of smart women while campaigning for the protection of conservative white men under the Endangered Species Act. Taylor graduated from Princeton in 1970; Barnes from the University of Virginia in 1965. Neither of them had to compete with women for admission; Princeton started opening its doors to that half of the population in 1969, Virginia a year later. That’s why guys like these worry so much about the decline of standards in college admissions since 1970, you understand. Because things were tougher and people were smarter when white guys only had to compete with 44 percent of the population for admission to elite colleges, positions of power and influence, and so forth.

Read on. Via Pharyngula

Here’s Cracked’s list of Hollywood’s 6 Favorite Offensive Stereotypes.

This article is a fairly standard, albeit well-written, list of the “top 10 zombie films of all time.” Any list that claims to be the top ten of anything is bound to attract critics, but I find little to quibble with here (other than Night of the Living Dead not being number one). The only reason it stands out to me is this line, regarding Jacques Torneur’s I Walked With a Zombie, which puts rather simply something I’ve struggled to articulate to people:

This may be a creaky, outdated and depraved representation of ‘The Islands,’ but only in the same way that Conrad uses the Congo or Philip K. Dick the future. Stories have to be set somewhere and it’s only right they use the fears of the day to express themselves.

I’ll think of this next time I hear about people getting their panties in a bunch over something like a Song of the South re-release.