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Thursday 8 January 2015

5 things: watching (and none of them is a poetry video! shocking!)

5 things I've been watching lately...

So it's been a mix 'n' match few weeks. This is also an overdue post, so I've replaced a couple of older videos with a couple of newer ones. 

1) 2014 Wipe

Ok, so this is a really long one - and a bit grim in places - but succinctly sums up the mood of the year 2014. Here's hoping this year will be more... hopeful.

(If you don't have time... at 25m38s it gets a little depressing. And at 28m33s onwards it's chilling - worth watching just those five minutes alone... and then it gets a little more playful again)




2) The Siddi people in India

This first video below comes from a Facebook profile of a great guy and author I know. Someone had posted this on his page... and then another person posted a link to the second one. If you have time to watch a couple of minutes of the second one, a very different video filmed by another group about the same people tells a very different story. The contrasts speak for themselves.


and



3) Reverse Racism

A term I've heard bandied about quite a lot recently: reverse racism. Events in Ferguson and the latest killings of black people in America (and unresolved cases back here in the UK) have all brought a lot of publicity* about institutional racism. I've personally got into uncomfortable conversations with people who just don't get it. Racism isn't about taking minor offence when some ignorant fool says something dodgy, but about the systematic demeaning and oppression of non-dominant races. This can come in bicycle form, through the assertion of 'white privilege'; it can also come in more nastier ways. So when people talk of 'reverse racism' - like it's a thing - I laugh.  




*on that note, I don't believe the police choked Eric Garner simply because he was black; Mike Brown isn't dead simply because he was black; nor Jimmy Mubenga. That's not how racism works; power structures create circumstances that mean, when you look at the bigger picture, an extremely disproportionate amount of black men and women on both sides of the Atlantic are incarcerated or killed by police compared to other ethnicities; underneath those extremes are inequalities in justice, education, housing, media... and beneath that, everyday slurs, lack of communication, subtler prejudices that go unchallenged. Sure, there are a host of other factors in these outcomes - class, chiefly, among them - but that doesn't take away from the fact that racism is very much a problem (and reverse racism isn't).


4) Cultural Collision - Woman in the Supermarket

I shared this video with a family member a couple of months ago... and said I'd post it. I also said my post might be a little controversial but, to be honest, I don't have time now to go right in deep with my thought processes. What strikes me isn't so much the woman being filmed but the reaction to this and, more bizarre still, the online reaction this has received.





5) Show Me the Money

Finally, something that cracked me up no end. This is for anyone who's ever had to fill out a funding application, uploaded by Paula Varjack a couple of days ago. Funding bodies, take note:



show me the money from paula varjack on Vimeo.

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