Sexism, Racism, And Swimming At The London 2012 Olympics | Racialicious
I’ve been a little taken aback this week at the level of racism against China in the British and US media, and on longer-than-usual comment threads on various friends’ Facebook walls. I mean, I know that racism in sport and in the media is nothing new, and I know that being mixed-race white-Chinese, I’m taking the various swipes being thrown at Chinese athletes particularly personally. But still, the obsessive furor that has surrounded the 16 year-old swimmer Ye Shiwen has brought out so many hackneyed Orientalist stereotypes, it would be boring if it wasn’t so hurtful and infuriating.
… None of this is to say that they aren’t massive problems with the Chinese state but, ultimately, it has to be asked why it is that when a young Chinese woman wins an event in a white-dominated sport, white men the world over feel both the need and entitlement to prove that she must have either been cheating or that she’s subject to a tortuous training regime unthinkable in the liberated west. So, true to every bad Hollywood movie you have ever watched featuring an Asian woman, she must either be a villain or a victim. In actual fact, Ye Shiwen is the hero in this story, and it’s about time we let her have the credit she deserves for playing that role in these Olympics.
but seriously fuck the fucking olympics
The toll the Olympic industry takes on host cities is made worse because it’s so predictable. Their destructive impact is documented in an extensive study of the seven most recent cities (Seoul, Barcelona, Atlanta, Sydney, Athens, Beijing and London) chosen to host the Summer Games. It was released in June by the Centre on Housing Rights and Evictions (COHRE), based in Geneva, Switzerland.
The worst abuses COHRE documents have taken place under the most repressive regimes. Beijing will displace 1.5 million people to host the 2008 Games, as it doubles the already frenzied pace of its urban redevelopment. Often without notice, officials cut off electricity and water to convince residents to leave. If that’s unsuccessful, garbage and sewage are allowed to pile up in entryways. Left without recourse, a few residents threatened suicide. Some succeed; others are arrested for creating public disturbances.
Beijing’s brutality is hardly unique. COHRE details how South Korea’s military dictatorship cleared out 720,000 people for the 1988 Seoul Games. Private security forces roamed the streets at night, using rape, beatings and arson to break community resistance.
But it doesn’t take a one-party state to bring out the jackboots when the Olympics come to town. Atlanta gained notoriety among Olympic watchers when it declared the central business district a “sanitized corridor” and had police pre-print arrest citations, with the words “African-American,” “Male,” and “Homeless” already filled in. In the lead-up to the games the city arrested about 9,000 people, a “crime” that has significant implications because people with criminal records are not eligible for public housing. Some of the homeless were given one-way bus tickets out of town.
What mass-produced arrest citations and bulldozers don’t accomplish the market’s invisible hand usually does. Real-estate speculation and ballooning rents push out vulnerable populations with inescapable regularity. Barcelona, touted as the most successful recent games, registered a 240 percent increase in new house prices in the run-up to the Olympics.
In Chicago, the recent fate of public housing gives Fleming reason to fear the Olympics. “We’ve always called Mayor Daley Slobodan Milosevic,” Fleming says. “The same thing is taking place — except it’s urban and economic cleansing. We’re watching this city be re-segregated by forces of greed.”
In 1999, Daley took back the Chicago Housing Authority from the federal government and subsequently destroyed entire blocks of the city’s infamous public-housing towers, packing people off to shoddy rental units without tracking where those evicted went. If the relocation plan was next to nonexistent, the blueprint for the destroyed sites was all too clear. Townhouses starting at $500,000 now sit on the land that was once the infamous Cabrini-Green housing project.
Fleming and other housing advocates see the city’s Olympic bid as a way to speed up gentrification on the city’s mid-south side, the six mile gap between the middle-class island of Hyde Park and downtown. Between 2,500 and 6,000 condos and apartments would be converted from Daley’s proposed 6,000-unit Olympic Village. No specifics have been released on what percentage will be affordable vs. market-rate, but Daley established a 10-percent rule in the affordable-housing law he pushed through the council in May. Using that as a guide suggests the games would net the city a whopping 600 affordable units at best, in a city where almost half of its 1.1 million households live in housing they cannot afford.
![Bhopal victims stage ‘Olympics’ to protest Dow sponsorshipJuly 27, 2012
Dozens of disabled kids affected by the 1984 Bhopal disaster, one of the world’s worst-ever industrial catastrophes, have held their own Games to protest against the London Olympics sponsorship by Dow Chemical.
The children, aged five to 16 and cheered by their nearest and dearest, have participated in 10 sports in Bhopal during the “Special Olympics”. The move was aimed to attract attention to the responsibilities of the company, which has a contract with the IOC until 2020 and, in particular, is a sponsor of London Olympics.
Dow Chemical has repeatedly denied any involvement in the tragedy and refuses to add to the $470-million compensation paid out in 1989.
The Bhopal “Olympics” kicked off with children suffering from cerebral palsy, partial paralysis and mental disabilities parading in wheelchairs and walking with the assistance of others around an outdoor stadium in the shadow of the old pesticide plant.
One of the competitions was called “the crab walk”: three children who were unable to stand propelled themselves down the 25-meter racecourse with their hands.
And one little boy was running back and forth on the field even when no race was on.
“The children are born like this because of the gas,” Kesar Bai, a 45-year-old mother from a slum near the old pesticide plant, told AFP. She firmly believes that the disaster and its long-standing influence caused her son Pratap’s severe cerebral palsy.
“I was thinking ‘If there hadn’t been this tragedy, then so many would not be born like this’,” she said, adding that in the area around her shack there were 10-12 ill kids.
Jamila Bi brought her wheelchair-bound 11-year-old grandson Amaan to take part.
“Today these children are participating, in spite of what Union Carbide did to them,” Bi told AP. “We are happy that they will walk. Those people will see that in spite of what they did these children are still participating.”
Some 25,000 residents of Bhopal died in the aftermath of a massive 1984 gas leak in a pesticide factory owned by the American company Union Carbide.
Immediately after tonnes of toxic gas leaked, survivors remember the slums surrounding the pesticide plant being packed with people, many unconscious, vomiting or frothing at the mouth.
“We woke up at 2am in the night. Everyone was running. If you fell down, they ran over you,” Bai remembers.
In 2001, Union Carbide liable for the disaster was purchased by Dow Chemical.
The latter, however, has done little to improve the situation in the disaster-stricken zone.
According to activists’ estimates, 500,000 people are still suffering from illnesses developed after the tragedy, including cancer, blindness and various birth defects.
“We have been protesting against Dow’s sponsorship [of the Olympic Games] for a year now; we want them to be dropped,” organizers’ spokeswoman Rachna Dhingra told Reuters. ”But we have realized this is not going to happen.”
Source](http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m7u31r2bin1r6m2leo1_500.jpg)
Bhopal victims stage ‘Olympics’ to protest Dow sponsorship
July 27, 2012Dozens of disabled kids affected by the 1984 Bhopal disaster, one of the world’s worst-ever industrial catastrophes, have held their own Games to protest against the London Olympics sponsorship by Dow Chemical.
The children, aged five to 16 and cheered by their nearest and dearest, have participated in 10 sports in Bhopal during the “Special Olympics”. The move was aimed to attract attention to the responsibilities of the company, which has a contract with the IOC until 2020 and, in particular, is a sponsor of London Olympics.
Dow Chemical has repeatedly denied any involvement in the tragedy and refuses to add to the $470-million compensation paid out in 1989.
The Bhopal “Olympics” kicked off with children suffering from cerebral palsy, partial paralysis and mental disabilities parading in wheelchairs and walking with the assistance of others around an outdoor stadium in the shadow of the old pesticide plant.
One of the competitions was called “the crab walk”: three children who were unable to stand propelled themselves down the 25-meter racecourse with their hands.
And one little boy was running back and forth on the field even when no race was on.
“The children are born like this because of the gas,” Kesar Bai, a 45-year-old mother from a slum near the old pesticide plant, told AFP. She firmly believes that the disaster and its long-standing influence caused her son Pratap’s severe cerebral palsy.
“I was thinking ‘If there hadn’t been this tragedy, then so many would not be born like this’,” she said, adding that in the area around her shack there were 10-12 ill kids.
Jamila Bi brought her wheelchair-bound 11-year-old grandson Amaan to take part.
“Today these children are participating, in spite of what Union Carbide did to them,” Bi told AP. “We are happy that they will walk. Those people will see that in spite of what they did these children are still participating.”
Some 25,000 residents of Bhopal died in the aftermath of a massive 1984 gas leak in a pesticide factory owned by the American company Union Carbide.
Immediately after tonnes of toxic gas leaked, survivors remember the slums surrounding the pesticide plant being packed with people, many unconscious, vomiting or frothing at the mouth.
“We woke up at 2am in the night. Everyone was running. If you fell down, they ran over you,” Bai remembers.
In 2001, Union Carbide liable for the disaster was purchased by Dow Chemical.
The latter, however, has done little to improve the situation in the disaster-stricken zone.
According to activists’ estimates, 500,000 people are still suffering from illnesses developed after the tragedy, including cancer, blindness and various birth defects.
“We have been protesting against Dow’s sponsorship [of the Olympic Games] for a year now; we want them to be dropped,” organizers’ spokeswoman Rachna Dhingra told Reuters. ”But we have realized this is not going to happen.”
(Source: thepeoplesrecord)
Cavalier (1968) examines the Mexican Revolution.
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