Note to Young Skinheads

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When will bigots come up with slurs our children can relate to? From the Raleigh-Durham News and Observer:

Gov. Beverly Perdue asked for—and received—the resignation of NC Alcoholic Beverage Commission Chairman Doug Fox on Tuesday, just hours after newspapers provided Perdue’s office with a copy of a racist photo illustration sent from Fox’s e-mail address after last November’s election.

The e-mail included an altered photo of the White House that turned the South Lawn into an enormous watermelon patch. The phrase, “There goes the neighborhood …” was printed above the photo.

The e-mail was sent from Fox’s law firm address Nov. 14—10 days after Barack Obama was elected president. The message, which had been forwarded multiple times by others before reaching Fox, contained no text other than the subject line, “how true.”

This is an outrage! How are young non-black racists supposed to figure out such dated racial slurs? We all know that kids today don’t know much history, like the name of that cold country to our north and the hot one to our south. Now you expect them to be familiar with minstrel shows?

Young skinheads: Demand that your elders have the common decency, and KKK Kommunity spirit, to update your racist imagery to reflect the times. What’s next? An email replete with references to ‘coons,’ ‘pickaninnies,’ and ‘jungle bunnies’?

C’mon neanderthals. You can do better than this.

[H/T: My man, John Schwade.)

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WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We canā€™t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

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