Would anyone be kind enough to provide a simple transcript for the 1st video? I would love to understand what Jay Smooth said in the video... but I agree with the headline -- we should ignore John Mayer !!

Newsweek had an interesting article a few months ago on research around children and race. It talks specifically about how white parents try to be "color blind" and never discuss race with their children, thinking that if they don't mention it, the kids won't notice it. Instead, the kids notice it, notice that their parents don't talk about it, and come to the conclusion that it must be a big deal if it's so taboo. Non-white parents, on the other hand, talk to their kids about it all the time, because unlike white parents, they can't ignore it.

Also, John Mayer is a tool.

Black is a colour, not a race. White is a colour, not a race.
What is race, by the way? I take classifying humanity based on some standard which is founded on appearance or other qualities an act of racism on its own.

More important than rooting out that racism itself is to root out the absurd ideas of categorisation upon which this whole understanding of "race and ethnicity" are founded.
Colours do exist but colour blindness would not be such a bad thing since colour of ones skin does not really express anything aside of which continent ones ancestry is from, and not that even by certainty. Europeans, for an example, surely are not of unified ethnicity but they are all more or less white. Same goes for africans. And asians, et cetera.

I will reiterate what my first reaction to this was when I saw it a while ago. "His white privilege is a wonderland" has got to be one of the best lines ever!

"Let's see it and be sane about it."

I like this guy :)

what was John Mayer's racist comment?

gwen wrote,

I get this with [white?] students a lot: they desperately want to deny ever noticing anyone’s race/ethnicity, because the discourse of color blindness states that the way to treat people equally and eradicate racism is to stop acknowledging racial categories at all. But when you simply start ignoring the role of an important socially-constructed category without actually eliminating the negative effect is has on those in certain categories, you aren’t ending racism.

I notice white people doing that a lot too. They also do it a lot in a reverse way -- that is, they often feel and express shock when other people, white or non-white, address or assess them in any way in terms of their own whiteness. They do "desperately want to deny ever noticing anyone’s race/ethnicity," but they also seem to think that everyone else should notice and think about their own racial status as little as they themselves usually do. (I guess that's mostly "special snowflake syndrome" all over again.)

Another wonderful benefit of ignoring the John Mayers of the world: Maybe if we stop paying attention to them, they'll go away! Although speaking from the experience of interacting with racist, sexist homophobes for a large portion of my life, they don't usually go away when you ignore them. So maybe instead of going away, they'll just become less famous.

Jay Smooth is black?

I guess that shows some of my own White Privilege - I automatically assume anyone who does not fit into any of my preconceived "slots" for race defaults to "white" automatically.

Not loving the crazy = racist language going on in here, and even aside from that I'm not sure how to feel about this. Sure, structural issues are important and certainly they get less play in the mainstream media than the kinds of statements Smooth is talking about here. But isn't the main point of critically analyzing these kinds of statements (the kind of analysis that happens here and elsewhere) to show that they are symptomatic of broader inequalities? Excoriating a celebrity for a racist comment and focusing on their personality as the cause (not that there isn't room for tearing down someone like Mayer) is different from pointing to such an individual and saying, "See? This is what we're talking about when we say that racism is alive and well."

Sure, but, who cares? It's crummy that John Mayer said some awful things, but what about the fact that the recession has hit Black people twice as hard, or the fact that our schools are becoming more and more segregated? As Jay Smooth said, "Why, in 2010, does it so often seem like, on an institutional, systemic, structural level, black people are still disproportionately affected by – almost everything that’s bad?" Shorter life spans, less educational opportunities, less access to health care, more jail and prison, lower income and wages...

People are being distracted with a big ruckus about John Mayer, Chris Matthews, or whomever, instead of actually talking about how racism - institutional, structural, societal racism - really messes up a lot of people's lives. I think it is our job to do our best to shift the conversation from the spectacle, to something of more substance.