mouseworks

I've been watching someone else where propose an American photo project that will show the people who think America is the Great Satan why we're all just humans being and who believes that empathy cures all hostility. Her photography project will stop terrorists in their tracks and stop 15 year old Palestinians from throwing rocks at the Israeli army.

I'd be in breach of Photo.net's terms of service if I really told her what I thought (early stages mania, actually), but the real bottom line is it is probably about her bottom line. She can probably get a grant for it from the same folks who thought Human Terrain studies was a more humane way to do warfare.

The even more fun part is putting the terms "Islam" and "photography" in Google and seeing the debate over whether photography is halal or haram, though I suspect that this issue is like American Catholics and the Pope's position on birth control. Or most of those Gulf States falconers driving their SUVs on YouTube are claiming that vids are just an aid to memory.

I finally understand precisely what the black people are talking about regarding "white women's tears," though the "oh, I found out the hard way that they can be racist, too" doesn't necessarily come from women.


Why should those people empathize with us? We've broken their countries and we're shooting at them. And that someone wants to go in and tell them that they wrong for not empathizing with the people funding doing these things to them is....amazing.

White people shouldn't expect special attention from minorities because they finally are beginning to learn to treat minorities as fellow human beings. That's a base line for being a decent human being, not something that entitles the white woman to special attention from the grateful blacks, or the white man who did a black studies degree with a dissertation on how black media portrays whites the deanship of a black studies department. The self-contratulatons for not being a bigot, the massive attention soliciting, the defense of people who are perfect capable of defending themselves -- no, you aren't special because you aren't a bigot (and this fits in with the "nice" guy syndrome, too).


The white person who uses being liberal toward the blacks as ground for expecting special treatment and attention from blacks is deluded. Anyone who thinks what kids chant during a rally shows anything deep and significant that can be changed by looking at photographs of Americans having the same human issues they have, arrgh.