Check Out The Erase Racism Blog Carnival!

Last week I blogged here about the Erase Racism Blog Carnival. Blog Carnivals are an impressive development in blogospheric self-organization, wherein once a month a host blog (generally a role rotated among a number of blogs) collects submissions from other blogs of recent diaries on a given topic and curates and posts a whole set, which can be categorized, excerpted, commented on and, of course, linked.

The one I got turned on to was the Erase Racism Carnival which examines white supremacy and white privilege in our society. A couple of days ago the April edition came out, hosted by the two bloggers who run the aptly named Double Consciousness blog.

I want to recommend that anybody interested in issues of white supremacy and white privilege give this month's Carnival a run-by. (Full disclosure: they were kind enough to link to a post on "sundown towns" I had at FotM and DailyKos.) The categories Jack and Carlo used will give you the flava: Fighting Oppression Within the Movement; Racism, The Subtle Everyday Occurrence; and Whiteness and Other Issues.

One of the most fascinating things for me, as one who has been dealing with these issues since the days of the Civil Right Movement, is how many young folks, people of color and the melanin-deficient alike, are thinking and writing about this stuff, some on blogs dedicated entirely to the issue. What's more, some are activists and some don't seem to be deeply involved in social movements at all. I'm not going to single any out, but encourage folks reading this to really give the whole thing a once-over.

Among the intellectual stimulation and first hand accounts there was some trenchant social criticism, too, and some first rate snark. Without the Erase Racism Carnival, I doubt I ever would have found MADtv's take on the recent boom in feel-good movies starring the likes of Hilary Swank and Michelle Pfeiffer, which propound the thesis that the cure to the problems of kids in inner-city schools is to be found in the form of a Nice White Lady.



And before signing off, the obligatory plug for the great new book, The Cost of Privilege: Taking On the System of White Supremacy and Racism. Get it and read it!

[crossposted at DailyKos.]