What’s annoying about the new, softer War On Drugs (for white people):
It is a grave insult for Michael Botticelli, director of the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy, to condescendingly suggest in the NYT piece that the sole difference between the treatment of heroin users and crack cocaine users lies in the political acumen and savvy organizational skills of white people who understand how to petition government for change. As if black activists and families have not been passionately fighting back against racist drug policies for decades.
This suggestion that if only we had enough intelligence, if only we had made enough noise, then African-American communities would have been treated more gently by police officers when they came through the hood stopping and frisking for drugs, is disingenuous and dangerous.
What that says is that if only black Americans understood the complexity of bureaucracy, perhapsTarika Wilson would not have been killed when a Lima, Ohio, SWAT team raided her home to arrest her boyfriend on drug charges, and perhaps her 14-month-old son would not have been shot as she held him in her arms.
If only we had organized enough, perhaps 18-year-old Ramarley Graham would not have been gunned down by Police Officer Richard Haste inside his grandmother’s home as he attempted to flush a bag of marijuana down the toilet.
Jolie on cleaning various parts of your shower:
Go take a good look at your tub or the floor of your shower. What do you see there? A brown ring around the tub? Black marks where your dirty feet have stood? Hairs galore? The tub itself will get really grimy over time, which is annoying since it’s the place you go to get clean!
Does water back up because of a slow-moving drain? Fix that. Backed-up water will leave behind product buildup that will make a mess of your tub.
Clean it up: Fill the tub with very hot water, add a large scoop of oxygenated bleach like Oxo Brite, and let it sit for 30 minutes. Drain the tub and use a sponge to quickly scrub away any residual buildup.
Roxane Gay is part of the Out 100! Also, the pic they used is very sexy and brooding, go look:
Roxane Gay’s 2014 was marked by the release of a novel, An Untamed State, and a collection of essays, Bad Feminist. A year later, public and critical interest in her work hasn’t abated — if anything, demand for her is on the rise. From Sydney to New York, she has empowered women through her insistence that there is no shame in being a “bad feminist,” a middle-of-the-line feminist, or any kind of feminist. For Gay, feminism belongs to all women, and it should embrace all types. “It’s OK to believe in your voice,” she says. “And to use it.”
A little comments request! Now that Mallory is Dear Prudie (omg), commenters over at Slate will occasionally say dickish things about her over there, because they are not sternly ruled over. If they come here to say dickish things, I will delete them and carefully hand-select a few for us to mock, but I would rather you not re-post dickish/stupid Slate comments about Mallory or her advice over here, even to make fun of them. That way, if Mallory wants to read the Slate comments (which she often will, I suspect!) she can, but she’s not going to UNEXPECTEDLY see them on her own turf. Deal?
(She has not asked for this, but I feel very protective of my Toast family, like Vin Diesel and his Furious family.)
Please enjoy my adorbs new avatar/author pic! Our amazing illustrator, Libby VanderPloeg, is making ones for everyone on staff so we can roll out our new masthead page, at which point Tech Goth Marco can have his handsome mug but one click away from the mainpage. She insisted on not being paid for these particular illos, since we have an ongoing relationship, so this is merely the first time I will plug her beauty and talent and generosity in these pages. Anyway, here’s meeeee:
My college buddy’s girfriend has made a card game involving the expression of taxidermied animals, obviously.
Tim Wolfe resigns from Mizzou, and it is for the best (I genuinely hope his replacement will do more to engage with the concerns of students of color):
A campus group, Concerned Student 1950, which refers to the year the first black student was admitted to the university, has held multiple demonstrations this fall protesting what Missouri graduate student Jonathan L. Butler described as a “slew of racist, sexist, homophobic” incidents on the university’s Columbia, Mo., campus, and Wolfe’s response to them.
A group of black students were rehearsing a skit in early October when a white student climbed onto stage and shouted racial slurs. Protesters blocked the president’s car during the homecoming parade a few days later; he looked detached and did not engage with them as they shouted. Later that month they issued a list of eight demands, including Wolfe’s removal as president.
Speaking of, here’s Juana Summers on her experience as a black student there:
In the days since the story of racial tensions at the University of Missouri began making headlines, I’ve wanted to defend my alma mater. I’ve wanted to make the case that the portrayal of the university, and the people who go there, doesn’t reflect the experiences I had at Mizzou.
But that would not be true.
I’m the kind of alumna who carries a Mizzou koozie in my purse, the kind who can still sing every word of the school’s fight song. But during the three and a half years I spent on the overwhelmingly white campus in Columbia, Missouri, I was also incredibly alone.
So, my Jesus church meets in a former auto body shop (picture the church that Rachel on House of Cards started to go to with the girl she then fell in love with before Stamper ruined everything, that’s basically it) and is in a neighborhood with a LOT of food insecurity and poverty. And the leadership and the congregation as a body likes to think very carefully about how we can serve the community that welcomed us, which can take a handful of different forms. Now, as it happens, a BUNCH of the ballet dancers from the city company (a very good one, FWIW) attend Missio with me, and something they’ve organized is free weekly ballet lessons for little kids from the neighborhood, because ballet lessons cost a FORTUNE, after which they feed the kids a massive sack lunch. That sack lunch is most definitely the only meal that some of these kids will eat that day, as weekends can be especially difficult for families who really rely on school lunch programs.
And the kids FREAKING LOVE IT, and love ballet, and the dancers take them on trips to real ballet shows and then buy them froyo after while they talk about the show, and it’s something I think is so great and so loving and so fun, and it’s also been really meaningful in the lives of the adult ballet dancer volunteers who’ve struggled with body image and eating disorders, that they are feeding bellies in addition to teaching dance.
And I am mentioning this because I would love your prayers and/or good vibes for this program, and I would also love to hear about any of your own causes at this time.
One of my VERY favourite comedians, John Mulaney, is releasing his new standup special “The Comeback Kid” on Netflix this Friday, and I have literally put it into my calendar, because I have watched “New In Town” about eighty times. What’s your favourite John Mulaney bit? I think mine is when he lists how the New York Post ranks types of people (angels, heroes, tots, bozos, pervs.)
Deleted comment of the day (reasons for deletion of previous two comments were: 4. “Humorlessness re: humor pieces from a person without a commenting account” and 5. “Didn’t feel like it at the time”):
