Moonwolf's Lair

I was catching up on my Twitter friends’ feed this evening while waiting for a render to complete, and noticed a mini-rant from Yasmine Galenorn, the author of the Sisters of The Moon novels.  With her kind permission, I’m reposting it here to give some context on my own thoughts:

It’s not easy being a Supreme Court Justice, I imagine.  As we’ve seen with the confirmation hearings in recent years, just getting the job demands you be laid bare before a public and will be judged not for your deeds, but for your ideology.

But once they’re confirmed and take up their place on that bench, they’re supposed to take on the tough questions they were grilled so hard to determine their views for.

That includes the ugly dark questions of racism and bias that have formed such a core part of the identity of the United States since before its inception.

“You might fancy running say, the Jewish Relocation Office, or the German railroads system – agencies which, come to think of it, may have some crossover… “

Anyone think a European journalist would ever dare to write the above paragraph in an article? How about one writing for the BBC?

I didn’t think so.

Except it seems perfectly acceptable for a BBC journalist to do just that, when the topic refers to Native Americans.

Witness the article about the incoming US Administration’s quest for replacements for a myriad of government jobs and appointments, which includes this paragraph.

Yes, I used the N word. I did it on purpose.

The United States football team for the Capital city itself is called the Washington Redskins.

That’s the same level of racial epithet as calling the team the “Washington Niggers”.

It’s got nothing to do with the racial makeup of the team, it’s about the team’s name itself.

“Redskins” is a word loaded with racist hatred, bigotry, and was commonly associated with the attempted genocide perpetrated on the Native American Indians by the white settlers.