Spelling Racist "W-H-I-T-E"

On my side bar of this blog you will now see the "Diversity of Whiteness" essay, which I originally wrote in 2008, and is based on theories I started developing in 2005 about how the "white privilege" concept may be doing more harm than good in overcoming racism.

This essay has been through several revisions, the main obstacle being my own whiteness making it very difficult for me to use real life examples without coming across as very racist myself. If this sounds wrong to you, I assure you that it IS wrong, and that is one of the main points of this essay.

On the street I am accused of being racist simply because I am white. My response these days is "hey, you are one of those people that spells 'racist' with a silent 'w.' W-H-I-T-E, am I right?"

Shoulder Rolls

A relative of mine is interested in parkour, and asked me to help him get started in learning dive rolls. I immediately noticed a stylistic difference between the way I learned to do this in Aikido, and the way the parkour guys on youtube were doing it. Here's how I learned to do it:

Notice the roller's head stays straight forward, chin tucked in. If his head is closer to one arm than the other, it is closer to his lead arm.

In BJJ we have done some shoulder rolls that conflicted with that, where the head is actually intentionally turned way from the lead shoulder/arm (chin still tucked into the chest):


So I didn't quite know how to proceed. The parkour guys call their shoulder roll a "break fall", as in it IS their fall, and they like it BJJ style:

So I got out in the yard and started doing some high impact should rolls parkour style, and they feel a LOT softer than how I first learned to do it in Aikido.

Parkour rolling is now my preferred shoulder roll method.