Author Archive for Waldo Jaquith

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Rodney Thomas on Race

Published by Waldo Jaquith on September 24, 2009 in Politics. 67 Comments

One month ago BoS candidate Rodney Thomas was interviewed by Lisa Provence for The Hook. In the context of highlighting his local roots (versus those of his opponent, incumbent Democrat David Slutzky), Provence wrote:

Rodney Thomas has lived in Charlottesville all his life. He went to Lane High School and as a freshman, was president of the Young Republican Club in 1958, the year Governor Lindsay Almond closed the school rather than integrate it.

“We got along fine,” he says of African-American students. “I think it was a pure government thing to force down people throats. Blacks had the best school. We loved to go over there [to Burley].”

Thomas is referring, of course, to massive resistance, which closed both Lane High, the white school, and Burley High, the black school. Lane’s facilities were considerably better than those of Burley, as was standard for black schools; hence the debate over “separate but (un)equal” and Brown v. Board of Education. Since Thomas wasn’t a student at Burley, though, he may not have known that.

Well, those remarks didn’t escape Slutzky’s attention, and he brought them up at Albemarle Democrats’ annual barbeque last weekend, as Brandon Shulleeta writes in today’s Progress. When asked to explain the remarks by Shulleeta, Thomas said that he didn’t really want to talk about integration, for fear of being “misconstrued,” but said that he “always thought that integration was necessary.” But then, unfortunately for Thomas, he kept talking:

However, Thomas said he doesn’t always use words that society considers “politically correct.”

“There’s certain things that I say, that I’ve said all of my life. And I really don’t want to have to change my vocabulary just to adapt to someone else’s politically correct answer to something. I mean, I’m still having a hard time calling Asians, ‘Asians.’ I still call them ‘Orientals,’” Thomas said. “And I have a hard time calling the black people African-Americans. I’m forcing myself to do it.”

Thomas added: “The word ‘N-word’ was never used in my house. And I’ll be honest with you, I don’t think I’ve ever used the word either, unless it was ‘Negro.’ I don’t know; do they mind me calling them a Negro anymore? Is that improper also?”

Ouch.

Superintendent Recommends Against School Consolidation

Published by Waldo Jaquith on September 24, 2009 in Education. Closed

Albemarle County school superintendent Pam Moran has recommended against consolidating three southern elementary schools, Henry Graff reports. The school board is debating whether to consolidate or renovate three schools—Red Hill, Scottsville, and Yancey. The school board has been waiting on a recommendation from staff, which they may or may not adhere to. They’ll make a decision next month.

C-Ville Weekly Looks Back on 20 Years

Published by Waldo Jaquith on September 22, 2009 in Meta News. 2 Comments

In the latest C-Ville Weekly they’ve rounded up some really enjoyable memories of the twenty years that they’ve been publishing. Owner Bill Chapman recalls the highlights, with staff rounding up the highs and the lows (“Gail Force,” anyone?) in the years gone by. Look closely in the “lows” section and you’ll see the logo of Distribution the ‘zine that became this very website, from back in 1994. Perhaps intentionally–in a nod to nudity in The Hook last week–Chapman’s piece includes their 1998 photo of a streaker and a description of the fallout, which included Kroger pulling C-Ville’s rack from their store and the requisite Daily Progress story about the ban.

Hook Publishes Playboy Photos

Published by Waldo Jaquith on September 17, 2009 in Meta News. 57 Comments

The Hook has a montage of tiny nude photos in its current issue, Liza Palka points out for CBS-19. The article is about UVA students who wound up in Playboy (such as in their “Girls of the ACC” feature) and how their future careers panned out. (Which turns out to be as successful attorneys, generally.) Palka does seem to be attempting to gin up controversy—she says that the image “has Charlottesville buzzing” and and is “causing controversy,” but the only reader who appears to care is a UVA student, who describes the appearance of the nude female body as “horrendous”—though it is fair to point out that featuring full frontal nudity in a Charlottesville newspaper is a bit unusual.

The image in question includes twenty images containing nudity, fourteen including breasts, three bottoms bared to an extent that probably wouldn’t be permitted on network TV, and six instances of more-or-less exposed genitalia. The images are pretty small—the biggest bits of nudity I see are 4mm of pubic hair and a pair of 1cm wide breasts—so this doesn’t exactly constitute an anatomy lesson. Another image features tastefully-placed flowers (though the flower doesn’t quite cover the girl on the left), presumably because those images are significantly larger—and thus detailed—than the montage. Palka asked Hook editor Hawes Spencer what the thinking was behind including the images, who said that they help to illustrate the article, and that the paper’s staff didn’t regard them as inappropriate for their own children to view in the paper.

This isn’t quite a parallel, but a personal media pet peeve is stories about an offensive word—such as the lengthy federal court case over U2’s Bono declaring at the Golden Globes that winning an award was “fucking brilliant”—in which the media outlets refuse to utter the word in question, which often leaves the audience wondering what, precisely, we’re all supposed to be so upset about. There’s certainly logic in showing images from Playboy in an article about UVA girls posing nude in Playboy—otherwise it’s tough to assess what, exactly, they’d gotten themselves into—though whether that logic trumps standards of decency for a publication will surely vary from reader to reader.

County Facing Revenue Shortfall

Published by Waldo Jaquith on September 17, 2009 in Government and Taxes. 2 Comments

The county budget is in rough shape, Rachan Dixit writes in today’s Progress. Sales tax and personal property tax revenues are down 6.6% and 4.8% respectively, leaving Albemarle with a $4.7M shortfall. That’s worsened by the governor’s recent budget cuts, leaving the county $600k short on expected state funding. Short of a spectacular improvement in the economy in the coming months, the debate over taxation and spending should be particular contentious come spring. If this seems familiar, it’s because the same thing happened last year.

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