Griminy Cricket

there’s a campout that starts tomorrow, june 4th, and an online study group that starts this weekend, june 6th, and some events and shows this summer that look really fun. there’s also a newsletter for any future events!

looks like i can’t put the link to the website, but it’s just the name of the project dot org

I have always loved a good banjo. It's crazy bc it's from Africa, but it always gets a bad rap as a Southern White Hick stereotype. Which, interestingly enough, is probably why they gave it to Remmick. A sort of sign that even in this, he's trying to use Our Music to get Inside to Us. But anyway, somebody shredding on a banjo is 🤌🏾🔥

I'd actually love to participate in something like that, because I gave up on this guitar 😭 I don't have the memory and focus anymore to teach myself music.

They formed at a Black Banjo Gathering in North Carolina in 2005 and have been a big influence in the revival of Black traditional/string band/old-time/folk music in general but also from the Piedmont region of the Carolinas.

So I was driving with my dad earlier and he was discussing a house he used to live in (we are both white) and said that it was in a "bad part of town" and referred to this part as "the hood". Now I know these are terms with a lot of racial history and often are meant to refer to the amount of Black people in an area, but he wasn't incorrect that it is an underprivileged and often more dangerous area. How should I handle a situation like this? What should he have said if he still wanted to convey that it was a dangerous area? Or is there no reason to emphasize the specific danger of these places as compared to others?

Thank you for your time

Ask him "what makes it the bad part of town? WHY?" "Why do you call it the hood?" This my friend, is what we call a dog whistle!

Make him SAY the quiet part out loud! Because the reason those neighborhoods are impoverished and full of Black people and Latinos is very purposeful and systemic! There's a REASON that we got pushed into ghettos and projects! There's a reason it's called "the hood"!

He could have just said "this area is underprivileged and has a higher rate of crime". You know, like you did. Because if he's calling it run down, poverty begets poverty. People who are cared for and have what they need socioeconomically tend to commit less crime. He specifically used racially charged (yet color-blind!) words to describe the area. It also doesn't help that Black and Brown neighborhoods are more policed- so there could be the same amount of crime happening (if not more so!) in the white trash section of town, but will be addressed less because of less policing.

So from then on whenever one of us called something problematic, he would make us talk it out until we could name the “bad” thing we were hinting at. In this particular class, 7/10 it was some type of oppression, and the remainder was like, “I’m uncomfortable because this is very new/confusing/pushing boundaries that made me feel safe.”

Once we stopped calling things “problematic” and stopping at that, class got way more interesting and... we all had to say, like, “that’s racist” or “that’s misogynistic” or “ew capitalism gross” out loud, which a lot of us had never done in a classroom before. Or we had to be like, “Uhhh... I’m not sure what’s so bad?” and confront our own beliefs and that was maybe even more useful.

Scientists invented a fake disease. AI told people it was real: Nature.com