Vote Now!

OK, folks: three more days to vote for your Athens Favorites 2012—your favorite local coffee house, your favorite place to buy wine, your favorite hair salon, etc., etc. It only takes a minute, and it’s fun, in addition to giving the nod to all those places that have provided great food, services, entertainment and value to you throughout the year. Just tune your dial to flagpole.com/athensfavorites and zing your votes on in there. The deadline is Friday, Feb. 3, and the Athens Favorites 2012 will be announced in the Feb. 29 issue of Flagpole. (See the ad on page 16.)

And Vote Again!

Athens Business Rocks is back and better than ever. This is the all-out competition among the bands assembled from the staffs of local businesses to raise money for Nuci’s Space. You remember how it works: you vote with your dollars for your favorite band. All the money goes to Nuci’s Space; all the glory goes to the winning bands, and all the fun goes to those who back their bands and turn out for the shows. Bands win on talent, showmanship, etc., but a big component of the win is how much their fans shell out for Nuci’s Space. So, dig out your credit card and go to www.athensbusinessrocks.com and vote soon and often. But hurry! Time is running out. The competition is this week: Feb. 1-4 at the 40 Watt Club. (See the story on page 17 and think Walmartians.)

Yellow Box Blues

It all started with a big yellow box. On Jan. 23 People for a Better Athens released a crude illustration meant to detail the scale of the proposed Walmart. After getting a mixed response, with many Facebook fans confused by Selig's apparent proposal for a "yellow building with no windows," PBA leader Russell Edwards scrambled to present a more realistic model—with a brick facade and more detailed scale using the height of a pickup truck for reference. Both graphics proved ripe for parody. Within a few hours, Athenians starting posting their own projections for the new Walmart—using everyone from the Kool-Aid Man to Andre the Giant as a scale. Soon an Athens-centric meme was born. By Jan. 25 a Tumblr was formed to host these images all in one place. There are now over 100 submissions to the Athens, GA Memes site with more posted every day at www.athensgamemes.tumblr.com and have since expanded to include other Internet memes that only Redditors or Internet junkies might recognize. It's an inside, inside, hyper local joke that has provided some levity to this whole situation while simultaneously raising awareness through the most organic, viral means. For this week’s Flagpole cover, we selected some of our favorites among those that had come in by press time. [Michelle Gilzenrat]

Whites Only

School integration happens because it is perceived as being in the best interests of white students. Prof. Robert A. Garda, Jr., a law professor at Loyola University Of New Orleans School of Law has written several copiously documented articles arguing this thesis.

Garda argues, for instance, that the Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision in 1954 basically happened because the Court accepted the view of white elites that racial integration of our public schools was a vital part of our worldwide struggle against Communism, that we could not win the hearts and minds of nations of brown-skinned people while our own people of color were relegated to second-class educational status, so the Court ordered that the schools be integrated, not for the best interests of black students but for foreign policy reasons.

Prof. Garda says that unless something is perceived as being in the best interests of white students it will not happen in the public schools, because white parents will always act in what they see as the best interests of their children.

Garda furthermore will tell you white students in all-white schools are not being prepared to do business or anything else in our multi-cultural world.

As Garda puts it: “The free market demands interracially competent participants due to globalization and an increasingly diverse society.” Students in all-white schools are coming out largely interracially incompetent, and if that perception ever takes hold, white parents will demand racially integrated schools for the benefit of their own children.

Sound farfetched? Go listen to Prof. Garda tell you about it in his own words this Thursday evening Feb. 2 at 7 p.m. in the UGA Chapel on campus in a public lecture entitled, “The White Interest in School Diversity.”