This Week in Racism:

Above: basically me.

As you can imagine, being one-quarter Canadian in a non-Canadian world makes my life a daily struggle between two cultures. In this way I am much like the half-human/half-Vulcan Mr. Spock: a child of two worlds yet at home in neither. Also I can totally perform the Vulcan neck pinch, I just choose not to. But since most people are unaware of my mixed heritage, I rarely encounter the kind of discrimination and racism experienced by millions of full-on Americans every day.


Par example, Minhee Cho walked into a Papa John's in New York on Friday and actually found something more offensive than the pizza. The jackass at the counter, apparently unaware that we live in the future with things like Twitter and the internets, thought it would be hi-larious to fill in the name field with a racial slur. On the upside there is now a job opening at Papa John's #3070 in New York.

Employee 3989 would have gotten away with it if wasn't for the fact he put it in writing and handed it to the customer who had a cell phone with a camera, and a Twitter account. Oh, and also he's an idiot.

Ow! The subtly just smacked me
in the faces! Racism: solved.

In another example of racism that makes you wonder if the last one-hundred years of progress and this totally subtle episode of Star Trek even happened, did you see this thing about the third grade class getting racist homework? In Georgia? Yeah, students at Beaver Ridge (sorry, real name) Elementary got math homework with questions like: 'Each tree had 56 oranges. If eight slaves pick them equally, then how much would each slave pick?' and 'If Frederick got two beatings per day, how many beatings did he get in one week?' Wow.

Here's a helpful homework hint! The answer to both questions is:
Holy shit, what is wrong with you?

Um, how fired is everybody?

I know, right? The school said it was trying to tie together math and social studies (synergy!), and there's nothing wrong with that. But was it really necessary to reduce centuries of slavery and brutal treatment to 5 points on a homework assignment? I mean, Georgia's basically famous for two things: peaches and plantations where people were forced to work for no money. Did no one at this school stop to think this assignment was a terrible idea?

Hey, I hope this one's on the next exam:


'There were 34 States in 1861 and 11 of them decided to launch a bloody rebellion in order to cling to their medieval, slave-based economy. How badly did they get their asses handed to them?'

Was it:
A) Badly B) Very badly C) Completely or
D) just badly enough to force a surrender, but not so bad as to keep them from spending the next 150 years
building statues to Confederate heroes and pretending they won.