loose threads

lolobee8288:

thepeoplesrecord:

The troubling viral trend of the “hilarious” Black poor person
May 7, 2013

Charles Ramsey, the man who helped rescue three Cleveland women presumed dead after going missing a decade ago, has become an instant Internet meme. It’s hardly surprising—the interviews he gave yesterday provide plenty of fodder for a viral video, including memorable soundbites (“I was eatin’ my McDonald’s”) and lots of enthusiastic gestures. But as Miles Klee and Connor Simpson have noted, Ramsey’s heroism is quickly being overshadowed by the public’s desire to laugh at and autotune his story, and that’s a shame. Ramsey has become the latest in a fairly recent trend of “hilarious” black neighbors, unwitting Internet celebrities whose appeal seems rooted in a “colorful” style that is always immediately recognizable as poor or working-class.

Before Ramsey, there was Antoine Dodson, who saved his younger sister from an intruder, only to wind up famous for his flamboyant recounting of the story to a reporter. Since Dodson’s rise to fame, there have been others: Sweet Brown, a woman who barely escaped her apartment complex during a fire last year, and Michelle Clarke, who couldn’t fathom the hailstorm that rained down in her hometown of Houston, and in turn became “the next Sweet Brown.”

Granted, the buzzworthy tactic of reporters interviewing the most loquacious witnesses to a crime or other event is nothing new, and YouTube has countless examples of people of all ethnicities saying ridiculous things. One woman, for instance, saw fit to casually mention her breasts while discussing a local accident, while another man described a car crash with theatrical flair. Earlier this year, a “hatchet-wielding hitchhiker” named Kai matched Dodson’s fame with his astonishing account of rescuing a woman from a racist attacker. But none of those people have been subjected to quite the same level of derisive memeification as Brown, Clark, and now, perhaps, Ramsey—the inescapable echoes of “Hide yo’ kids, hide yo’ wife!” and “Kabooyaw,” the tens of millions of YouTube hits and cameos in other viral videos, even commercials.

It’s difficult to watch these videos and not sense that their popularity has something to do with a persistent, if unconscious, desire to see black people perform. Even before the genuinely heroic Ramsey came along, some viewers had expressed concern that the laughter directed at people like Sweet Brown plays into the most basic stereotyping of blacks as simple-minded ramblers living in the “ghetto,” socially out of step with the rest of educated America. Black or white, seeing Clark and Dodson merely as funny instances of random poor people talking nonsense is disrespectful at best. And shushing away the question of race seems like wishful thinking.

Ramsey is particularly striking in this regard, since, for a moment at least, he put the issue of race front and center himself. Describing the rescue of Amanda Berry and her fellow captives, he says, “I knew something was wrong when a little pretty white girl ran into a black man’s arms. Something is wrong here. Dead giveaway!”

The candid statement seems to catch the reporter off guard; he ends the interview shortly afterward. And it’s notable that among the many memorable things Ramsey said on camera, this one has gotten less meme-attention than most. Those who are simply having fun with the footage of Ramsey might pause for a second to actually listen to the man. He clearly knows a thing or two about the way racism prevents us from seeing each other as people.

Source

Now that you know this is a thing, please stop sharing these memes. Poor Black people speaking candidly about various serious incidents isn’t a hilarious joke.

Yes. Exactly. 

(via jessehimself)

tedx:

Dr. Timothy Noakes has dedicated his life to uncovering the truth about health and exercise advice. At TEDxCapeTown, he explained how many of the popular recommendations and guidelines for how to be healthy — from diet advice to instructions for proper hydration — aren’t supported by even basic scientific research.

From his talk:

The [question] that I really got involved with in the 1980s was: Should we drinking more or less during exercise?

…In the 1960s, it was held that if you drank that actually if you drank during exercise, that wasn’t a very good idea. And Abebe Bikila, who was the first African runner to win two Olympic gold medals in the 1960 and the 1964 Olympic marathons, he ran both races without drinking anything.That was what runners did those days.

Then, all of a sudden, in the 1960s and 1970s, things changed and we were told that if you didn’t drink enough, you were going to die during exercise.

…In 1981, on the first of June, 1981, an athlete started the Comrades Marathon in Bourbon and she reached 70 km and her husband withdrew her from the race because she didn’t recognize him…within two hours, she was unconscious having epileptic seizures and she had to be taken to a hospital in Bourbon. And when she was admitted to hospital, she became the first case of this condition: [exercise-associated hyponatremic encephalopathy (EAHE)]… Her chest X-ray [showed] that [she had] fluid in her lungs and it took five days later before the fluid had gone out of her lungs. 

…Over the next four or five years, we picked up a couple more cases and worked out that they had probably overdrunk and that — in other words — they’d [drank] too much during exercise … So the more you overdrink, the lower your sodium, and the sicker you were. And we published that in 1991, and thought, “That’s the end of the problem. We cured the problem. We know what causes it: it’s overdrinking.”

And we thought the problem would go away. But, unfortunately, at the same time that we were doing that, industry had come along and said, “No, actually, the more you drink, the better.”

…And we predicted what would happen. We predicted this would happen: The accumulative incidence of this condition, which had never existed before 1981, never existed — there were a total of 1,600 cases in the medical literature…and, tragically, 12 deaths. All completely avoidable.

And so what happened was that the sports drink industry came along and then they influenced the official drinking guidelines drawn up by official bodies. And those promoted overdrinking.

Then a lady died in the Boston Marathon in 2002, and in 2003 I was invited by two organizations to produce alternate drinking guidelines, which promoted drinking to thirst, and that finally has now been accepted that that is the way we should be drinking.

…The “science of hydration” is utterly bogus. There is no science to it. It was dreamed up by marketers to sell a product.

For more of Dr. Noakes’s research into health and exercise claims, watch his entire talk “Challenging the myths of good health” below:

(via jessehimself)