Kevin, a long-time blog buddy, thinks that I am a kick ass blogger. I am honored to be given this award. A lot of the bloggers that have received this award have been mainstays in my RSS reader since I started wading into the blogosphere pool.

There are some rules/regulations for the awarding of a Kick Ass Blogger award. According to Kevin, if you neglect to follow the rules, then your ass kickingness card will be subsequently revoked.

• Choose 5 bloggers that you feel are “Kick Ass Bloggers”
• Let ‘em know in your post or via email, twitter or blog comments that they’ve received an award
• Share the love and link back to both the person who awarded you and back to MammaDawg
• Hop on back to the Kick Ass Blogger Club HQ to sign Mr. Linky then pass it on!

So without further ado, here are 5 bloggers that kick ass:

Professor, What If…? A relatively new addition to my feedreader, Professor, What If…?’s posts are insightful and kick serious ass. Asking tough questions and providing critical analysis are the hallmarks of this site. Critical educational ass kickery. Add this feed to your reader. Go. Now. Do it.

Michael Faris at A Collage of Citations An ass kicking blend of rhetoric, composition, and pedagogy. Michael does not need nor want awards which is exactly why he should win them. Pretentious? Yes, in a he’s-smart-so-listen-to-him-as-he-puts-down-some-kick-ass-thoughts kind of way. Brilliant? Mostly Don’t let him know about it. His head can’t take the swelling

Crip Chick Kicking ableism’s ass and putting up some amazing posts. One of my favorite bloggers. Go check out her stuff. Pronto.

Feminist Philosophers A multi-author site, Feminist Philosophers is a great read for anyone who wants to sit back, think, and learn. Learn a lot. Oh and they have cat posts on Sundays Ass kicking cat posts.

Nezua at The Unapologetic Mexican He’s blogging the DNC. Redesigning his site. Shooting video for MTV. Feeding zillions of posts into our feedreaders. Tweeting from morning til night on the twittersphere. Nezua kicks ass on so many levels. Every post is like a poetic essay that forces us to think while enriching our spirits.

This is my 500th blog post. I’ve been blogging for almost 4 years now. Time flies when you’re blogging. I never thought I would last this long. I’ve had a few breaks here and there. It takes a lot of juice to keep blogging on a regular basis. The blogosphere and the brickosphere require a lot of energy. Thankfully, I am blessed with a wonderful partner, Wendy, who supports her techie-social-justice-oriented-Iowan/Oregonian partner’s blogging endeavors! Te amo muchisimo!

The most rewarding aspect of blogging is the community that I have grown to know and love. Brownfemipower, Kevin, Vegankid, Kortney, Kai, Jenn, and Rachel are all bloggers that I connected with during my initial dips into the blogging pool — people who I have never met in person (hopefully someday!) that I admire and respect. It is the blogging community that makes blogging so special to me.*

I appreciate all of my friends, colleagues and family members who continue to read my posts and provide spectacular comments. I have learned a lot from your shared wisdom. Thanks for visiting!

*I want to also acknowledge the following bloggers as they too have helped me grow as a fellow member of the blogosphere:

• Michael Faris
• Nezua
• Devious Diva
• Joseph Orosco
• Racialicious
• The Angry Black Woman
• Belledame
• Vox

The flood stage for my hometown of Columbus Junction, Iowa is 19 ft. The floodwaters reached 28.3 ft. in 1993. The current prediction is that the flood waters will crest at 33.2 ft. I remember how bad it was in 1993. This is much worse. My parents live out in the country and are at a high enough elevation that they are safe from flooding. My mother told me yesterday that they cannot travel north or east as the roads are closed due to flooding.

Columbus Junction’s Mayor Dan Wilson says they’re trying to save the town’s business district. All the stores in the district were closed Friday afternoon, including the town’s only grocery store, bowling alley, doctor’s office and senior center and child daycare center. All were surrounded by stacks of sandbags. “We’re in uncharted territory,” says Wilson. “We”ve done everything we can.”

via the USA Today

The Economart, Columbus Junction’s grocery store, has the potential to be inundated with up to 4 ft. of water if the levees fail. I used to work there as a teenager. I’ve bowled at the bowling alley. The doctor’s office that is at risk is the clinic that I used to go to when I was growing up in Columbus Junction.

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I really miss our old neighbors. They used to throw parties in their back yard and were extremely friendly. The new neighbors have a loud gas-powered leaf blower and drive a huge Mercedes SUV.. I guess their goal must be to find as many ways as possible to waste gasoline. Anyway, Wendy and I came home the other day and I noticed that the neighbors have a new dog…and it’s in a small doggy prison / cage. It looks so sad. It was 98°F last Friday and the dog looked like it was in a coma. I’m not a fan of having pets in town. I’ve never had a house pet. My childhood was spent on 6 acres in Iowa at my parent’s property and our pets roamed around the entire space. This dog in a cage makes me sad. The cage sits atop a concrete patio. It seems so inhumane…

It has been a little over a week since Barack Obama’s speech on race in America. I watched the speech while I was at an Academic Advising conference in Vancouver, BC. It feels like a moment that I will remember for a very long time. It’s similar to the Challenger accident or the events that transpired on September 11, 2001. This was a monumental day in American history.

• I was in Cotter, Iowa at Cotter Elementary when the Challenger exploded.
• I sat in front of a tv at my apartment in Oak Park, Illinois on 9/11.
• I watched Barack Obama’s historic and moving speech in a hotel in downtown Vancouver.

These are three events that will always remain in my memory. I’ve watched this speech several times and it’s not perfect, but it’s the most honest speech on race in the United States that I have ever watched.

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I was in Waldo Hall about a month ago when I came upon a larger version of this poster. I’m a fan of inverted black and white posters as they remind me of my graphic design days in Chicago.

The poster was advertising a community forum to discuss “isms in media.” I moved a little closer and read the list of “-isms.” Sexism, racism, ableism and classism. Okay, those are all forms of oppression. What? Why was alcoholism on this list? It just did not make sense to me as it did not fit with the rest of the items on the poster. And where oh where was heterosexism? A list of institutionalized oppressions and a disease. I do not understand why alcoholism was included…?

The Daily Barometer, Oregon State University’s student newspaper, has had yet another year where the paper prints something racist, sexist, homophobic, etc. and then attempts to do a better job (usually folks of color start appearing in the photographs on the front page during Winter term). It’s a cycle and the pattern has occurred since I moved to Corvallis in 2004 and became a member of the OSU community. Year after year a student editorial board and their lackluster faculty advisor bring about copious amounts of harm to the community, apologize and then attempt to rectify what happened in the fall. I can understand that student editorial board members come and go, but the faculty advisor remains…

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Dear Ikea,

Many years ago, in 2001, I purchased two beech-colored items of furniture. The items, a bookcase and a CD tower, were bathed in a lovely golden brown veneer. Recently, Wendy and I decided to embark on a trip to the new Ikea in Portland, Oregon. We decided that we would like to procure another beech CD tower. Upon our arrival at the Portland store, we grabbed a golf pencil and used a gps to locate the CD tower on the demo floor. I was gleeful when I discovered a fleet of benno CD towers in all sorts of different colors. I wrote down the stock number and we proceeded downstairs to the loading area. The box containing a beech benno was loaded onto the neatest handtruck ever and we rolled to the checkout counter.

Three days passed before I decided to build the benno. I opened the packaging and that’s when I realized that something was wrong. The beech on the new benno was much lighter than my seven year old beech colored furniture! Gasp! I showed Wendy the color disparity and we knew that we did not have a match.

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One of the themes that I keep seeing as I peruse the rather lengthy list of racist incidents at college and university campuses is the idea of “real racism.” Comment after comment are posted on how nooses and blackface are not “real racism” and that dialogues about these events should not take place as they might dilute conversations about “real racism.” It should be noted that the majority of “real racism” commenters are usually anonymous white folks who have decided to say when “real racism” has occurred and when it is just “crying wolf.”

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dis·cov·er·y
–noun, plural -er·ies.

1. the act or an instance of discovering.
2. something discovered.
3. Law. compulsory disclosure, as of facts or documents.
4. (initial capital letter, italics) U.S. Aerospace. the third space shuttle to orbit and return to earth.
5. a cable TV channel for white men.

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The 2007 batch of first-year medical students at the University of Missouri-Columbia is the least racially diverse in recent history.

We are constantly concerned and aware if we don’t mirror the population of the state, and we just keep working at it,” William Crist, dean of the medical school, said. “Fortunately, in big systems we try to view how well we’re doing not by a single class. You look at four-year periods because by chance you can get an unlucky year.”

Dear Dr. Crist, “chance” and “luck” have nothing to do with the intentional recruitment and support of students of color. Citing that the reason that Black enrollment is low because of the number of medical school applications by Black students does not answer the question of “why” the number of applicants is low. Maybe you could ask why the number of white student applications is so high? Is it luck? Perhaps it is because the system is biased towards white students…?

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