It seems from this article that, if you are in a situation where you can care for your child some, but not all, of the time, you don’t receive a whole lot of respite support. Your care may also reduce the likelihood that your child will be placed in a permanent supported residential position (which may not be what every person with a disability aspires to, or hir carer, but I’m sure many people do).

The solution? ‘Abandon’ your child by leaving them permanently in the care of DOCS and relinquishing all parental rights.

Yeah. Good one.

This article was about Miss Singapore, and I can't find the original article, but hree's another one about the same issue. While at the Miss World pageant in South Africa, she inadvertently slipped into speaking Singlish, the Singaporean creole that mixes English, Malay, Chinese and god knows what else. And this was a huge fucking deal because apparently, all beauty queens must be able to speak perfect English, the standard of which is probably set by the English-speaking world that is the UK and North America, I guess. And because Miss Singapore slipped up and showed her real linguistic roots, she is suddenly a shame of the nation!

Here's the deal, the next time someone says "It's not like I'm a Nazi wanting to exterminate the Jews / It's not like I'm a KKK member / It's not like I'm __ insert whatever extreme hate group they want to use to benchmark their own isms__"; the next time someone says something like that? I suggest your reply be this.

"Yeah, it's not like an abusive spouse is a serial murderer; it's not like a violent cop is Josef Mengele; it's not like a school yard bully is someone who abuses and kills dogs!"

Cause what they're doing is another form of Oppression Olympics. Only the competitors are the actual oppressors. And they believe they or whomever they're defending didn't even get the bronze; so why are you even saying anything? So it's a good idea, to at least state publicly what the fuck it is they're doing with their twisted logic.

I was also an early writer. And when I began to write, at about the age of seven, stories in pencil with crayon illustrations that my poor mother was obligated to read, I wrote exactly the kinds of stories I was reading. All my characters were white and blue-eyed. They played in the snow. They ate apples. And they talked a lot about the weather, how lovely it was that the sun had come out. Now, this despite the fact that I lived in Nigeria. I had never been outside Nigeria. We didn’t have snow. We ate mangoes. And we never talked about the weather, because there was no need to.

My characters also drank a lot of ginger beer because the characters in the British books I read drank ginger beer. Never mind that I had no idea what ginger beer was. And for many years afterwards, I would have a desperate desire to taste ginger beer. But that is another story.

What this demonstrates, I think, is how impressionable and vulnerable we are in the face of a story, particularly as children. Because all I had read were books in which characters were foreign, I had become convinced that books, by their very nature, had to have foreigners in them, and had to be about things with which I could not personally identify. Now, things changed when I discovered African books. There weren’t many of them available. And they weren’t quite as easy to find as the foreign books.

'Of course, of course, but my point is that the only authentic identity for the African is the tribe,' Master said. 'I am Nigerian because a white man created Nigeria and gave me that identity. I am black because the white man constructed black to be as different as possible from his white. But I was Igbo before the white man came.'

Is Malaysia a racist Country?
YES 455 (94%)
NO 29 (5%)

Additional reasons why I would be particularly concerned about inflicting this procedure on the group in question would be regarding follow up. Most people don’t go to the doctor unless they are feeling unwell. For a lot of Aboriginal people, they have to be feeling VERY unwell before they will seek medical advice (usually due to past experiences of racism or the cost of medical treatment). There are so many complications that can occur after banding that if not treated promptly can become life threatening situations. And who is going to sit down and explain the ins and outs of the procedure and the potential risks? Is there going to be true informed consent? How can there be when there are no long term studies into banding? Are the researchers going to consider the possible literacy issues some Aboriginals deal with on a daily basis?

This is called “tokenizing.” When you represent the point of view of a minority group through a “best friend” who is not present to use it to prop up your argument, you are invoking that person as a token. And this is not cool, for a number of reasons, among which is that fact that it alerts the person you are arguing with to the fact that you do not care about that minority group. As soon as the “my best friend is…” argument gets hauled out, I know it’s pointless to continue the discussion, because the person I am talking with is not willing to engage.

So whiteness is rarely discussed in white households. And the lack of discussion is used to further enforce the idea that race has no meaning, that we’re all alike under the skin, that we live in a meritocracy and that we don’t see color...But we can’t talk about racism, because when we do we’re silenced by the majority outcry. We don’t see race. We are colorblind. We treat everybody as equals here. And you are the one who is creating the racism by talking about it! But I am a person of color and this is my community. And I see race. And I am not colorblind. I would like to believe that everybody is equal, but when you silence my voice I know different.

I’m trying to remove the word “offense” from my vocabulary when talking about sexism, and I think it would be good if we all did...One of the tools I use to move from a reactive “offense” statement to an action statement is simply to replace the word “offended” in the sentence with something more specific: marginalised, belittled, stereotyped, frustrated, humiliated, threatened, patronised, silenced, intimidated, misrepresented.

A YOUNG builder out celebrating his 23rd birthday allegedly bashed an elderly man to death in a drunken race-hate crime.

James Anthony Dean-Willcocks, from Illawong, in New South Wales was yesterday charged with the murder of 67-year-old Magno Alvarado, The Daily Telegraph reports.

Residents of Elouera Rd, Cronulla, told police of being woken about 5.30am (AEDT) on Saturday to a male yelling: "F--k off back to Japan."