Mixed Race America

Bullying Part II -- Chicago edition

2012-01-26T09:04:00.005-05:00

I've been having an interesting discussion on the comment thread of a post I wrote about bullying with a commenter known as Artificer. Artificer's original post to me was about his feeling that Asians in America are targeted by racism more than other minorities (a point to which I disagreed) and he included a very disturbing video that shows an Asian teenager (who is Chinese) in Chicago being brutally beaten by 7 different people (almost all of whom wear ski masks). I'm including it below--but if the embedding doesn't work, you can see the video here. Also, please be aware that this is VERY DISTURBING to watch.

If you've made it through this video, one thing you should look at is the "more information" portion -- because it describes the possible offenders (besides Raymond Palomino, one of the only attackers not to be wearing a ski mask and therefore the one who is most easily identified). The suspects, at least according to this random YouTube uploader, appear to be Asian American--specifically they appear to have Chinese surnames and American first names.

So I decided to find out more about who these attackers were, beyond Raymond Palomino, who was turned in by his father, a county sheriff, when relatives alerted the father to the youtube video. You can read more about that story here.

One of the things I came across was this very odd vlog by a young Asian American teen who seems to know the attackers and claims to have the "real story" behind the attacks--it's a rather rambling and inarticulate explanation and justification (of sorts) for the attack--she seems both sorry for what happened and yet trying to defend her friends for their actions, stating that their attack on the Chinese teen was retaliation for a beating by (her language) "20 FOBs" of 2 of the guys (which include Palomino).

It's not exactly clear what the race of the attackers are (other than Palomino, who appears white, but then again, he could be mixed race), but the lack of any discussion related to the civil rights violation of the Chinese American teen who was attacked or that this is a racially motivated attack leads me to believe that several of the teen abusers (all of whom are between 15-16--Palomino is the only 17 year old) are also Chinese American/Asian American, a fact that also seems to be confirmed by this post on Angry Asian Man, in which he writes that

Authorities have deduced that the attack wasn't racially motivated. I could tell you it breaks my heart to learn that some of the attackers were actually Asian kids too. Because it does. But it's certainly no surprise. It's a violent reminder of the inter-generational conflicts that have long existed within our own communities, between Asian American kids and more recent immigrants -- the so-called FOBs.

Angry Asian Man goes on to say that

It sounds crazy, but can I be so bold to suggest that even though both the perpetrators and the victim are Asian, you could still make the case that the attack was still indeed racially motivated?

And I agree with him. As I told Southern Man this morning when I was trying to explain to him why I was watching all these YouTube videos, while on the surface this might not seem to be a racially motivated attack, there is definitely racism involved--but it's a complicated kind of racism.

First of all, in the mainstream footage of the video, the audio is muted, so you can't hear one of the most disturbing things that is happening during the beating: that the Chinese American kid who is being kicked in the head and stomach and face is simultaneously having racial slurs being lobbed at him. But what he's being called, consistently and constantly in this video is: Nigger.

[Note: I apologize for the use of this offensive slur, but I think it's important to use it and contextualize it because it is being used as a weapon of racial hatred--but not in the way we would normally assume].

All throughout the video his attackers call him a "nigger." When I originally watched this video, I assumed (based on seeing Palomino) that this Chinese American teen was racially targeted for his Asian ethnic difference from the white teenagers who were then using a word of ultimate racial othering--nigger--to reinforce the racial difference and racial superiority that they felt over him. In fact it seemed to make perfect sense. As a linguistic weapon of hatred, the slur "nigger" only has one other corollary, and that's "fag" (truthfully I was surprised that they didn't go there). I'm not trying to say these two terms of hate are equal, but they have a similar weight in the way that people wield these words: as weapons.

In thinking about what it means for a Chinese American teenager to refer to another Chinese American teenager as a "nigger," I have to wonder at how this kid ingested this term. He uses his fists and his words to bludgeon the Chinese American kid--who appears to also be a first-generation immigrant who speaks with a Chinese accented English. And as the comments by the young woman above attests, he is regarded by his Asian American peers not as one of them--a fellow Asian American--but as a FOB (fresh-off-the-boat, a derogatory term for Asian immigrants)--and the way she says this sounds like she's using FOB to be a term of racial othering, racial hatred. After all, they're just FOBs. They aren't fully human.

And that's the thing about racism. Racism perpetuates the false belief that some people get to be real humans and others are sub-human. So within the ill-logic of racism, it makes perfect sense that young Chinese American teens, who appear to speak without a Chinese or Asian accented English, target a Chinese immigrant American teen who does speak a Chinese accented English and attack him for his racial difference--his otherness--his FOB-ness, his nigger-ness. Because they don't want to be associated with all that they deem to be foreign, bad, and other.

Perhaps, as the young female teen says, this is a simple matter of revenge and retaliation. Some of the Chinese immigrant teens (perhaps he, himself) beat up some of the Chinese American youth (and Palomino too). But regardless of whether it was a matter of revenge or retaliation, it's definitely wrong and it's definitely embedded within a system of racism in our country that continues to think that it's OK to dehumanize others based on some racialized differences.

The year of the black water dragon -- the 4709th Lunar New Year is here!

2012-01-23T08:26:00.003-05:00

Today is the first day of the 4709th lunar new year, the year of the dragon. Or more precisely, the year of the male water dragon. Every astrological sign is assigned a metal, which has a corresponding color associated with it. For more on what this year may bring to you, click here to read up on Chinese astrology.

Chinese new year is a 15 day celebration, beginning with family and a dinner that is supposed to be meatless (although how different folks interpret meatless varies widely--sometimes it's all vegan and sometimes it just means no red meat). Southern man and I will be dining at a local Chinese restaurant and sticking to veggies and seafood (fish is good luck--although perhaps not for the fish).

Dragons are a very powerful symbol--they are the only animals in Chinese astrology that are mythical/non realist--and inherently they signify all things celestial. So here's hoping that this year brings strength and good fortune to all of us.

Fear of a black president? Solution: the whitest man in America, Mitt Romney

2012-01-15T16:50:00.003-05:00

Today in The New York Times, Lee Siegel wrote an opinion piece about why Mitt Romney is the Republican front runner. In a nutshell, it's because he's white.

[This was the photo they used in the New York Times]

But Romney isn't just any kind of white. He's a white American in a way that makes folks who yearn for the good-old-days of a better, simpler, gentler, whiter way of life think that it's possible, just possible, to roll back the clock to an era when women stayed at home, families prayed at the dinner table, and the era of "rights" (civil and human) were not part of our lingua franca. To quote Siegel:

"The simple, impolitely stated fact is that Mitt Romney is the whitest white man to run for president in recent memory.

Of course, I’m not talking about a strict count of melanin density. I’m referring to the countless subtle and not-so-subtle ways he telegraphs to a certain type of voter that he is the cultural alternative to America’s first black president. It is a whiteness grounded in a retro vision of the country, one of white picket fences and stay-at-home moms and fathers unashamed of working hard for corporate America.

In this way, Mr. Romney’s Mormonism may end up being a critical advantage. Evangelicals might wring their hands over the prospect of a Mormon president, but there is no stronger bastion of pre-civil-rights-America whiteness than the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints."

I know I haven't really chimed in on the racial politics of the 2012 campaign--mostly because I haven't been blogging at all, but really the kind of ridiculously racist comments that get made, and the appalling homophobic, anti-family, anti-choice, anti-human rights, anti-women comments that are made by various candidates leaves me yelling at my computer screen, television screen, car radio. I think for many of these candidates, especially Newt Gingrich, being black and being poor are the same thing. And being black and being poor means being stupid and lazy. Which is just about what people believe about President Obama.

And in the state of Kansas the House Speaker Mike O'Neal (R) sent around two email messages that demonstrates not just what an ass he is, but that should have him on a short list with the secret service. In the first email he referred to First Lady Michelle Obama as "Mrs. YoMama" and in the second email, he essentially called for the death of President Obama--wishing for his assassination, as the "Think Progress" blog notes:

"[T]he Lawrence Journal-World was sent another email that O’Neal had forwarded to House Republicans that referred to President Obama and a Bible verse that says “Let his days be few” and calls for his children to be without a father and his wife to be widowed.

Nick Sementelli at Faith in Public Life notes that Psalm 109, which is a prayer for the death of a leader, became a popular conservative meme after Obama’s election. The “tongue-in-cheek” prayer for the president was seen on bumper stickers. The relevant part of the psalm reads:

Let his days be few; and let another take his office

May his children be fatherless and his wife a widow.

May his children be wandering beggars; may they be driven from their ruined homes.

May a creditor seize all he has; may strangers plunder the fruits of his labor.

May no one extend kindness to him or take pity on his fatherless children.

O’Neal forwarded the prayer with his own message: “At last — I can honestly voice a Biblical prayer for our president! Look it up — it is word for word! Let us all bow our heads and pray. Brothers and Sisters, can I get an AMEN? AMEN!!!!!!”"

As I said to a friend of mine, there should be a special place in hell (if you believe in hell) for this guy. And hopefully the Secret Service are keeping tabs on him because there's NO WAY you could say something like this--to make a veiled or not-so-veiled death wish on the President and not find yourself escorted off the plane and into an interrogation room with Homeland Security.

The 2012 Presidential election. I guess I should get geared up for some crazy racist comments (sigh).

I'm Back! (really, I am...or I intend to be)

2012-01-10T07:53:00.003-05:00

Readers of Mixed Race America, I apologize, once again, for falling off the radar. Of course, I'm hoping you are still out there. And if not, then it will be up to me to keep writing and to gain back readers. I sometimes think that blogging is like exercising--you know you should do it, but finding the time to sit down and blog or making excuses that you need a big chunk of time or something interesting to say...that's what usually prevents me from exercising (although interestingly enough, I have been exercising--perhaps I can only do one and not the other? Blog but not exercise, exercise but not blog?)

Anyway, it's a new year (albeit 10 days in) and a new set of goals and hopes--such as blogging at least once a week (if not more). I feel like I missed out on a lot of opportunities for commentary--I may go back and try to re-trace them over the next few weeks.

What I will say is that I do still have things to say about race in America and about issues of mixed race/multiraciality.

This is going to be a short post--it's the first week of classes at Southern U. and I've got to make sure I've got everything ready for my first day this afternoon. I'm teaching two back-to-back classes, one on Asian American Women's Writing and a brand new class called The Place of Asian American Literature in the U.S. South. That's right--I'm teaching a class about Asian Americans in the South! I figured since I'm living it I should be teaching it. When I tell people what I'm teaching this semester, they always get a quizzical look in their eyes when I mention the Asian American South class and the number one question they have is: is there enough material? To which I say "just barely"--but increasingly there are writers of Asian descent writing about the South. And of course if we include non-Asian descent writers, like Robert Olen Butler, who write about Asian American characters in U.S. Southern locations, then there are a few more to consider.

But in case anyone is wondering, here are the list of primary narratives that I'm including:

*Wooden Fish Songs -- Ruthann Lum McCunn
*The Foreign Student -- Susan Choi
*My Own Country -- Abraham Verghese
*Bitter in the Mouth -- Monique Truong

McCunn is a mixed-race Asian-white author and I'm also including an essay by Paisley Rekdal, a poet and essayist who is Chinese-Scandinavian. And no class on the South can stop from talking about inter-raciality (otherwise known as miscegenation back in the bad old days) since so much of Southern fears of racial mixing fueled the upholding of de jure and de facto segregation in the years leading up to the modern civil rights movement (and lets face it, policing of inter-racial coupling still goes on since it was only a few years ago that a principal in Alabama prevented an inter-racial high school couple from attending prom together).

The last thing I'm going to leave you with is a plug for a colleague of mine, Orin Starn, whose book, The Passion of Tiger Woods, is just out. I haven't read it yet, but I did hear an excellent interview with Starn on a local NPR station. And check out this article, in which Starn talks about race and Tiger Woods, which is what his book is about.

Bullying is NOT OK, esp. when you target an individual based on race/ethnicity/sexualitiy/gender

2011-11-08T13:40:00.002-05:00

Recently a study came out that found that 54% of Asian American teens experienced bullying--this is compared to 31.3% of white teens and 38.4% of black teens and 34.3% of Latino teens. Cyberbullying is even more ramapant among Asian Americans, with a remarkable 62% of Asian American teens being targeted on-line compared with 18.1% of white teens.

Many of those bullied seemed to be targeted as "terrorists"--assumably because they are either identified as Muslim or Arab American or in the case of South Asians, potentially mis-identified, at least in terms of ethnic nationalism and religion (in the case of non-Muslim South Asian Americans).

This disturbing study comes out at the same time as a news piece about a soldier in Afghanistan, Chinese American Private Danny Chen, who was found in a guard tower with a bullet to his head. It's not clear whether it was self-induced (ie: suicide) or whether he was murdered (and it's unclear who might have murdered him). What is reported in the New York Times story is that Chen described being harassed in the Army, by fellow privates and his superiors, based on his racial and ethnic difference from them--bullied because he was Asian American.

I know I've written before about my admiration for the "It Gets Better" project and the stands that people are taking against bullying based on sexual orientation or perceived sexual orientation.

Do we need a similar grass-roots movement for Asian American teens? To reassure them that it will "get better"--that the harassment and bullying that they are experiencing will cease or at least become more tolerable? Or should we, as a society, be trying to educate our youth (and our adults) that bullying someone based on their race or ethnicity--targeting Asian Americans because they are Asian Americans, is plain and simple racism. Making fun of Asian Americans because they may look different from white Americans, because they may speak with a non-American accent (we all speak with an accent--it just depends on how you choose to normalize it), about the differences in their values and what they eat--and my all time favorite, when people pull back their eyes to suggest a "slanted" look. These things are NOT OK -- THEY ARE EXAMPLES OF RACISM. And they are also never harmless. I think when we imagine a small child doing these things, we think, "Oh, these are just kids." But when mocking someone of another race goes unchecked, I think our entire society needs to be held responsible.

[Addendum--Dec. 13, 2011: I just found this article crossposted from Hyphen Magazine on the New American Media website--it's really a heart breaking article to read about a group of first-generation/immigrant teens who were repeatedly and violently targeted/bullied in the Philadelphia area. The Justice Department had to intervene and things are looking better, but it's really tragic that it had to come to THAT in order for Asian American youth to feel safe in their own schools.]

Help out a fellow blogger -- calling all African American women!

2011-11-04T13:28:00.002-04:00

I'm posting this message from my dear blogging sister, Tami of What Tami Said -- although she specifically mentions African American women, I suspect that she'd be interested in hearing from black women around the world. Read on--and if you have any questions, please contact Tami at Tamara@BackTalkBook.com--you can also find the original post here.
============

The way our society talks about black women and marriage--from the daily paper to the pulpit to movies and self-help books--is flawed, sexist and damaging. When black women tell their own stories, a more thoughtful truth emerges.

I am working on a project juxtaposing the authentic experiences of African American women with the tragic common narrative about black women and marriage--a narrative that narrows lives, turns black female successes into failures and unfairly burdens us alone with responsibility for the success of black male/female relationships, black families and the black community. My goal is that my efforts will result in a published book.

I am currently working to identify black women to have frank discussions about how they navigate relationships, sexuality, singleness, marriage and divorce. If you, or someone you know, is willing to be a part of this effort, please contact me at Tamara@BackTalkBook.com.

Some things to know:

I am interested in interviewing black women of all ages, backgrounds, geographic locations and experiences. One goal of my effort is to illuminate the lives of women often erased in discussions of the black marriage rate, including married women, divorced women, women who don’t wish to marry, lesbian women, women in interracial relationships and others.

Subjects should be willing to participate in multiple one-on-one interviews both in person and through technology. Initial interviews will be conducted by phone in November. While I will not require an inordinate amount of time from interviewees, I will need to interact with them enough to understand their stories, experiences and perspectives.

Elements of participants' stories, including quotes, will be included in a published work, written by me. Women have the option of being referred to by their full, real names; first names only or a pseudonym.

Beyond the ABC specials, “think like a man” romantic advice tomes and panic-inducing women’s magazine articles, exist the real stories of black women—too often told from another perspective and voice. Everyone is talking about black women and marriage. I want to talk back.

Please help by responding to and sharing this call for participants through your networks. Please direct questions about this project to Tamara@BackTalkBook.com.

Today is spirit day--support LGBT youth

2011-10-20T10:59:00.003-04:00

Yesterday I got an email letter from Brian Pines of the "It Gets Better" Project. I know there has been some controversy around the project--some saying that it has devolved away from its original mission to support queer youth and the bullying that they endure in school. Some saying that it's message is too feel-good and doesn't do enough in terms of activism. But I suppose I'm a moderate in the sense that I think any message that attempts to reassure and tell a teenager that they aren't alone--that there are others who have been through similar experiences--who were bullied--who thought about suicide--who didn't know who to turn to--that things get better--that they aren't alone--that there are people and organizations who can help...I think that's not a bad message to send out.

So today, October 20, is Spirit Day--a day that the "It Gets Better" Project has marked for support of LGBT youth.

I, unfortunately, do not own anything purple, but I DO support queer youth and queer people and their right for society to recognize their humanity. And I support our society growing and progressing so that we are inclusive of all people -- so that we will stand up to bullying and support queer youth especially who may feel alienated in their homes, schools, communities.

And I found this image--and if we replace "purple" with "LGBT/Queer" youth, then I think it's quite appropriate:

Mixed race in America -- New York Times edition

2011-10-13T09:39:00.006-04:00

Over the year, the New York Times seems to be doing more pieces on multiracial Americans. I'm not sure why this focus--or perhaps it's not a focus and it's just that as someone who is interested in multiracial issues, I'm more attuned to it.

[Aside: Actually, the ARE doing a series called "Race Remixed" -- I've posted links to some of the pieces in the past, but if you click here you can see other essays in this series]

Anyway, this morning I woke up and saw this video on their home page:

with this accompanying article (click link).

One of the things I was struck by in the above video are comments from the white parents who adopted bi-racial (black-white) children. The mother says that she does not think of their family as mixed--that they are "just a family." The father acknowledges the stares and comments that they received in the 1970s and says that they experienced racism on behalf of their children.

While there is a part of me that has a problem with the color blind rhetoric of "we're just a family"--there's another part of me--the part that looks ahead to my own future family that will be formed out of adoption, and wonders if I, too, will want to claim that we are "just a family"--one that challenges the nuclear norm of biological, same race, families but still a family none-the-less. As for experiencing racism on behalf of your child, I'm not sure that parents experience racism for their children so much as they may (esp. if they are white parents who perhaps had not been conscious of their white privilege or racism before) be experiencing racism with their children. Because I guarantee that the targets of the racist comments are not just the parents but the children as well.

[Aside: If you read the article, you will realize that the Dragans (the parents) are not clueless to racism and are not people who acted in the past or the present in a color-blind manner--which makes me wonder if their comments were edited out of a larger context (which often happens when you are filming/interviewing someone). The article is much more nuanced and complex in how they handled racist incidents in their family, although I still think the question of how or if one should "normalize" one's multiracial family experience is interesting to think about]

However, as someone who is not yet a parent and not multiracial herself, I'm curious what other folks think about this piece and the idea of whether a multiracial adoptee family can ever be (or should ever be) "just a family" and whether one can experience racism on behalf of one's children. Thoughts?

R.I.P. to the world's most famous mixed-race adoptee -- Steve Jobs

2011-10-07T23:05:00.003-04:00

As most everyone around the world knows by now, Steve Jobs passed away at the age of 56, succumbing to his long-time battle with pancreatic cancer. Quite frankly it’s amazing that he lasted as long as he did. I know his form of pancreatic cancer was an extraordinarily rare form that actually responds to cancer treatment, which is why after his diagnosis in 2004 he has done as well as he had. But I also know that typically a pancreatic cancer diagnosis means that most people die within a year (this was true of a maternal aunt of mine, my cousin’s mother-in-law, and a friend’s mother).

There have been tributes galore to Jobs, heralding him as a technology and taste pioneer—a revolutionary of design—someone who literally changed the way the world interacts with one another. Like many people, I learned about Jobs’ death by reading about it on a Mac device (one of 5 that we own—yes, my household has drunk the Apple kool-aid). And in reading about the many details of Jobs’ life, one that has emerged (or two I suppose) is that he was adopted by two working-class white parents and raised in the Bay Area of California and that his birth parents were graduate students who met in Michigan—his birth mother was a white American woman and his birth father was a Syrian international student.

Which makes Jobs one of the most famous mixed-race American adoptees.

Although I suppose it also begs the question about whether we would consider the child of a Syrian father and white-American mother “mixed-race” – because people from the Middle East, depending on their particular ethnic and national background, identify as “Caucasian” or “Asian” or “African.” None-the-less, the fact that Syrians are claiming Jobs as their own (declaring him the most famous Syrian to have passed in recent memory) means that he is at least seen as Syrian by his ancestral homeland.

But is he Syrian? He was raised in a white household by white parents and by and large seemed to have navigated in a predominantly white world (the nascent diversity of California in the 1970s not-withstanding). By all accounts he did not have a close relationship with his birth parents—he wasn’t really in touch with either one. And I can’t really find anything that suggests that Jobs was curious about his Syrian heritage, at least not curious enough that it would come up on a google search or appear in one of the many obits about his life that have been appearing in every magazine, newspaper, and blog.

I guess what I’m asking is, if race is a social construction—is ethnicity constructed as well? Can you really be Syrian if you were not raised Syrian? And particularly since Jobs, for all intents and purposes, appeared to navigate the world as a white man, is this, indeed what he was?

Of course, like everyone else, Jobs was so much more than just the sum of his race, ethnicity and gender. This is the man who wasn’t afraid to drop out of school and to take courses that appealed to him and to be a perfectionist. Most of all, it’s the words of his commencement address to Stanford University that I think is a great summation of what his life represented: Stay hungry, stay foolish. Great words for all of us to live by.

An open letter to the UC Berkley College Republicans and their misuse of the concept of racism

2011-09-25T20:52:00.003-04:00

An Open Letter to the UC Berkley College Republicans,

I just read an article in the on-line version of the San Francisco Chronicle that you will be holding an affirmative action bake sale on Tuesday, Oct. 27 as a way of mocking your fellow students' support of SB185--a bill that would allow the UC system to consider issues of race and ethnicity when considering admissions criteria.

On your Facebook page (listed as "Increase Diversity Bake Sale" you say that

"Our bake sale will be at the same time and location of a phone bank which will be making calls to urge Gov. Brown to sign the bill. The purpose of the event is to offer another view to this policy of considering race in university admissions. The pricing structure of the baked goods is meant to be satirical, while urging students to think more critically about the implications of this policy."

and then you go on to offer the following price list:

White/Caucasian: $2.00
Asian/Asian American: $1.50
Latino/Hispanic: $1.00
Black/African American: .75 cents
Native American: .25 cents

.25 cents off for all Women.

Additionally, on your Facebook Page, you claim that

"The Berkeley College Republicans firmly believe measuring any admit's merit based on race is intrinsically racist."

Racist. . . really???

Do you even KNOW what the concept of "racism" is actually rooted in? Do you actually KNOW the history of the United States--the full and real history of the United States--about what made America so great--what made us a super power? Free labor and cheap labor--which means exploited labor. And for the most part, it was a stratified labor system that targeted people based on (wait for it!) THEIR RACIAL DIFFERENCE FROM THE PEOPLE IN POWER (ie: white folks).

Chattel slaves from Africa were taken and exploited based on the belief of their racial difference (read inferiority). Understanding the history of this exploitation--the systematic belief in one group's inferiority to another. Understanding the workings of hegemony (read some Antonio Gramsci--you're college students and should know how to parse political theory) means that when you use a word like "racist" to describe people who are invested in a system of "racism" you should use this term ACCURATELY. You are, after all college students at one of the finest institutions in the nation. But your mis-use of the word "racist"--as if the word "racist" was synonymous with paying attention to racial difference--as if you actually believe (which you probably do, which is so sad since you are supposed to be among our nation's best and brightest) that there's this level playing field. That all races are equal. That there's no need to have a system in place that recognizes the historic oppression and systematic subordination of groups of people based on skin color/racial difference. That there's no need to try to rectify for this imbalance--to try to correct for centuries of WHITE PRIVILEGE and WHITE SUPREMACY that have kept non-white students from institutions of higher education.

If you want to use the word "racist" correctly, let me re-direct you to your own price listing.

Which is, in my opinion....racist.

Sincerely,
The Blogger of Mixed Race America and all people who understand what words actually mean and who understand the basic concept of racism.

[UPDATE: 9/27/11: Since this blog is called "Mixed Race America" I should have originally mentioned that of the many problems and offenses that the price list of the bake sale raises, the exclusion or lack of recognition of multiracial people seems glaring. Also, this is a quote from the president of the UC Berkeley College Republican from CNN's website: "We agree that the event is inherently racist, but that is the point," Lewis wrote in response to upheaval over the bake sale. "It is no more racist than giving an individual an advantage in college admissions based solely on their race (or) gender." (BIG SIGH) Well I'll say this, the kid is getting his 15+ minutes of fame]

Putting my money where my mouth (or ethics) is

2011-09-19T20:23:00.003-04:00

So there's this weird American idiom, "Putting my money where my mouth is"--and I'm not even sure how apropos it is for the post I'm going to write, but somehow that's what came to mind as a title when I thought about recounting a recent decision that Southern Man and I just made.

We have decided that it's time for the house to be painted--a daunting prospect because while it's not a large house that we have, it is an original mill house from 1949 with real wood siding--and since it's the South, it means that paint peels and you have to re-paint or at least touch-up your house every 5-7 years if you have real wood siding. Which is also an expensive prospect. I think we'd even think about doing the job ourselves, except we both have a healthy fear of heights and it is a two-story house we're talking about (and it would just look a little odd to only have the first floor painted).

Anyway, we have been interviewing painters this week and the first and lowest bid that we got is from a Painter I'll call "Joe" (not his real name). Now what you need to know is that I live in a very liberal town--it's not even the college town that Southern U. is in--it's the uber-liberal, crunchy-granola, recently gentrified formerly working class enclave that is located right next to the college town. It has the highest property taxes in the entire state because it's a small town with many residences but a tiny downtown business district and a population that likes slow to no growth. It's the kind of place that had Obama placards all over the place, where you can actually see the occassional same-sex couple holding hands (just saw two women strolling down my neighborhood the other day), and where the locavore movement reigns supreme.

So Joe comes and he's a chatty guy--mostly Southern Man is showing him around the house since I've holed up in my office to try to finish some fellowship applications. But I get called out so that I can get introduced to Joe and to see if I have any additional questions. I mention to Joe that the last time I had the house painted, I hadn't been that happy with the company I used because they were these contractors who farmed the work out to other people who weren't part of their company. And before I could explain further, Joe says:

"Oh, I use my own crew, and I never hire Hispanics"

Cue awkward pause.

Joe seemed oblivious at our discomfort and just kept talking away about what he and his crew would do to the house. And then, for some inexplicable reason, he showed us pictures of his cessna right before he left. He also, oddly enough, didn't try to shake hands with us. And he seemed, as Southern Man put it, odd and awkward, especially when I came out of the house.

The thing is, it's clear that Joe knows what he's talking about in terms of painting--and that he'd do a good job (we were referred to him by a very reputable source). But the minute he made that remark about "Hispanics" there was no way we could hire him. And truthfully, I wonder if we threw him off when I walked out of the house--that he may not have been expecting and inter-racial couple (although again, he's sort've an idiot if he didn't think that making a remark about "Hispanics" to an inter-racial couple in a liberal town wasn't going to go over well).

Anyway, the next guy is about $2000 above his price, but I think we have to do it--because at the end of the day, if I just talk the talk but don't walk the walk, what does that say about me as someone committed to issues of racial awareness/diversity/anti-racism?

Are Jewish people a race?

2011-09-06T07:52:00.003-04:00

The question in this blog's title was one posed to me by one of my student's after class recently. Actually, the question was more sophisticated. I had been lecturing, in class, about terms like "race," "racism," "anti-racism," and "white privilege." And I had talked about the racial pentagram--the way that we (meaning most people in the U.S.) talk about race as if there were 5 predominant categories: black, white, Asian American, Latino/Hispanic, and American Indian/Native American. I said that of course I wasn't saying that this was a good thing or trying to reinforce that we should only acknowledge 5 and only 5 races--that in fact our understanding of racial groups and racial formation is an ongoing and flexible thing--and that we may be talking about a racial hexagram soon since increasingly Arab and Muslim Americans are being racialized into their own category in the U.S.

So my student, after class, asked what I thought about Jewish people being considered a separate race in the U.S. And I said that certainly not that long ago, Jewish people were, indeed, considered a separate race in the U.S. and certainly around the world. And that anti-semitism is still with us--there are people who continue to discriminate against Jewish people based simply, sadly, and solely on their Jewishness. But I also said that with respect to how we think about race currently in the U.S. it was complicated because similar to either mixed race individuals whose multiraciality may include whiteness or with Latino/Hispanics, Jewish people whose phenotype trends white have white skin privilege because their Jewishness, at least at first sight, is not going to be apparent. And I said that like with all types of identities, there are elements of intersectionally that informs times when we exercise more or less privilege and find ourselves in oppressed or minoritized positions versus in majority positions. As an Asian American woman, I am seemingly in a minoritized position by my race and gender, yet as a straight identified, able bodied person who holds a PhD and a position at a research university, I exercise privilege in very tangible ways.

So I thought about all of this when I watched the film Sarah's Key yesterday. It is a film that I hope everyone watches, because it tells an incredibly moving story. And more importantly, it reminds us of an underdiscussed moment in history--the round-up and deportation of over 13,000 Jewish immigrants and refugees (and their French-born children and grandchildren) on July 16 and 17, 1942 in Vichy France--what is commonly referred to as the Vel d'Hiv (a shortening of Velodrome d'Hiver--which was the winter stadium in which these 13,000 people languished for days before being transported to transit camps in the countryside before being finally shipped off to Auschwitz). Click here for an article about the filmmaker's motivations for making the film.

The film was incredibly moving and powerful -- and an important scene in the film (and don't worry, this isn't going to spoil anything in terms of a plot point in the story) is when one character expresses disgust at the way that the average French citizens did nothing to stop this atrocity. And another character asks her what she would have done had she been there--how would she have protested or tried to stop this from happening? Would she have the courage, during the German occupation of France, to risk her life or the lives of her family to help a group of people being persecuted by the state?

This is the question I ask myself when I insert myself back in WWII in California when posters announcing the roundup of Japanese Americans were plastered all over the state. Or in the mid-1950s on segregated busses in the South. Or in the era of apartheid in South Africa. I think we all want to believe that we'd be brave--we'd stand up and speak truth to power--that we would risk our lives for our beliefs. But I don't know.

And honestly, if we look at history, over and over again, people often don't. They look after themselves rather than others. There are, of course, extraordinary exceptions--and these exceptions are important. At any rate, I think that films like Sarah's Key and my student's question are important reminders about the fact that it was not that long ago that Jewish people were racialized into an oppressed category in the U.S. -- the Holocaust may feel like the past, but it was not that long ago that Hitler's final solution was enacted all over Europe and 6 million people were murdered because enough people didn't believe in their humanity. And that is the ultimate form of racism--believing that another race isn't even human.

Yes, I'm still here!

2011-08-30T20:22:00.003-04:00

Hello readers of Mixed Race America--if there are any of you left. I realized, today, that it had been about a month and a half since I last wrote a post. And for that, I apologize. I ended up taking a vacation--truly my first in well over a year, maybe two years. And when I mean vacation, I mean that I did not do any work. I was not checking email. I was not reading the news or paying attention to the news or reading any of the usual blogs that I typically read.

You see, Southern Man and I finally went on our honeymoon--the one we had originally planned a year ago but had to delay since I was in the middle of chemo. So we had 2 and a half weeks in Northern California and for 8 glorious days we were in a house in wine country with no t.v., no internet--we were unplugged. And it was great.

And then when I got back home, I immediately got on a plane for Toronto, where my cousin A was getting married. And, again, I did no work--it was all a big blur of wedding rehearsal (I was a reader at the wedding--as I joked with folks, they picked me because they figured that as an English professor they knew I was literate), rehearsal dinner, family gatherings pre- and post- wedding, and the big day itself.

Anyway, all of this means that this blog went on hiatus. Which I probably should have taken the time to explain...but I was too busy being on vacation to remember to do this.

So now I'm back. Reality hit hard when I got off the plane and realized that classes were starting THE NEXT DAY (Southern University has a 16 week semester--I think it may be the longest in the nation because the state legislature wanted to make sure that the taxpayers were getting their moneys' worth from us lazy academics). And I'm sure that a few of my students are going to find their way to this blog this semester because one of the classes that I'm teaching is a class called . . .

MIXED RACE AMERICA

Ethically I would, of course, never blog about a specific student or things that go on in the class. But I may end up sharing some stories about the pleasures and challenges of teaching a class that is focused on issues of race/anti-racism/white privilege and multiraciality/mixed-race issues. Because I think it is challenging--to have honest dialogue or attempt to have honest dialogue about different perspectives and opinions about race and anti-racism. The students are great--I think we're both feeling each other out, but I think they are willing to be really open (some of them already have been open) and it's exciting to think about the kinds of conversations that will be happening throughout the semester.

I'll wrap things up now, but I just want to say to any loyal readers of MRA still out there, don't worry--I'm back now and promise to be more diligent about my blogging. In the weeks to come I'll share stories about being back in CA, about Toronto's multiracial complexion (and the multiracial complexion of my extended Chinese Jamaican family), and of course things that are in the news--like the murder in Mississippi of the black autoworker (who also happened to be gay--although authorities don't believe that was a factor in his murder, but who knows) by the white teen who ran over him in a pickup truck and reportedly yelled racial epithets at him as he did. And I'm going to blog about The Help. Because I've decided after reading an interview with Viola Davis (one of the leads in the film) that I should see the film first and then criticize it. Fair enough--I like Viola Davis so I'm willing to pay matinee price. And of course I'd love to hear your comments on any and all of these things.

T.G.I.F.: Maurice Lim Miller & Family Independence Initiative

2011-07-15T10:52:00.005-04:00

This morning I read an article in the New York Times about a unique program, the Family Independence Initiative, which is, in their own words:

"a national center for anti-poverty innovation that over this last decade has demonstrated that investing in people’s strengths and initiative delivers stronger, more sustainable and cost effective outcomes for working poor families."

As I read the article, a name recurred throughout--Maurice Lim Miller, the person credited for creating Family Independence Initiative, which began as a research project (inspired by then Oakland mayor, Jerry Brown) to make families be the drivers and leaders of figuring out the resources that they needed to get themselves out of poverty. The NY Times article and the website for FII describes their goals and process in detail -- but it was this description of Lim Miller that left me intrigued:

"Lim Miller, whose mother was an immigrant from Mexico who worked multiple jobs to support her children, had previously spent 22 years building Asian Neighborhood Design, a youth development and job training program, for which he was honored by President Clinton during the 1999 State of the Union address."

Intrigued by someone with a Mexican immigrant mother, the surname "Lim" embedded in his name, as well as his work with Asian Neighborhood Design, I decided to google Maurice Lim Miller, and this is what I found.

Maurice Lim Miller's parents (father, Chinese, mother, Mexican) crossed the Mexican border in the mid-1950s so that Miller could be born a U.S. citizen, and then they crossed back into Mexico. But at the age of 2, Lim Miller's parents had split, and his mother moved him and his older half-sister to Northern California. Insisting that Lim Miller got to college to get their family out of poverty, he received an Engineering degree from U.C. Berkeley, worked at Union Carbide, and then was drafted and was shipped off to Viet Nam. It was there that Lim Miller (who identified strongly as Mexican but who, because of his Asian features, was never fully accepted by the Chicano community) began to understand what it meant to be an Asian American:

“Being in Vietnam politicized me about being Asian,” he said.“I was pissed off all the time having to defend myself as an Asian.”

When he returned from Viet Nam he began working in political activist organizations in Chinatown and then got involved with Asian Neighborhood Design and eventually helped to develop Family Independence Initiative.

[If you want to read a full description of Lim Miller's life, google his name and find the pdf file for Asian Neighborhood Design's report]

For more on Lim Miller and FII, click on this link to hear an interview with Crosscurrents on KALW News and click here for the transcript of the interview with Holly Kernan.

Maurice Lim Miller literally personifies what it means to be a Mixed Race American. And Family Independence Initiative empowers families and individuals to make the best decisions for themselves--to be the drivers and leaders of their own success. And for that both are deserving of the T.G.I.F. award--because it is a truly Great and Impossible Feat to empower people to solve their own problems and to recognize that people who are living in impoverished circumstances aren't perennially marked by their poverty but, instead, can help one another find ways to strengthen themselves and each other.

Why is a mixed race character in this white novel?

2011-07-03T08:35:00.003-04:00

So I'm back after a 2-week stint at the Project Narrative Summer Institute at Ohio State University. For any humanities or even social science scholars out there who are looking to deepen their understanding and appreciation of narrative theory/narratology, I highly recommend PNSI. It was an intense 2 weeks--I feel like my brain expanded in a myriad of ways--and I am hopeful that the things I learned and the relationships I developed with my fellow PNSI seminar members will be long-lasting.

But I digress.

The above explains my lack of blogging over the last 3 weeks (I came back a week ago but needed a week to decompress after such an intense experience) and why I have been thinking about certain narrative elements in the fiction I'm reading. In this case, why the race of certain characters is either pronounced/announced or muted/invisible/assumed.

The book in question, The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake by Aimee Bender, is a story that I quite liked. In fact, I got to a certain point in the narrative where I couldn't put it down but simply had to keep reading it until I found out what "happened" (so to speak) to the main protagonist, Rose Edelstein, the first person narrator of Bender's novel, whom we are introduced to on the eve of her 9th birthday and whom we follow through her young adulthood over the course of more than a decade. The central conceit of this work of magical-realist fiction is that Rose can taste the emotional life of all the people who handled the ingredients that comprise a dish. In the case of the title food--the lemon cake that her mother prepares for Rose tastes hollow and full of emptiness, and every subsequent meal that her mother makes reveals the same flavor of unfulfilled promise and quiet desperation that her mother's perky exterior masks but that Rose's newfound taste buds discern.

However, my quibble isn't with the premise (which I accept--along with the other fantastical elements woven into this realist novel) but with the introduction of the character George--the best friend to Rose's older brother Joseph:

"He was Joseph's best and only friend. George Malcolm: half white, half black, with messy tousled hair, rumpled and tugged between kind of curly and extremely curly. Once, a year or so before, he'd been at our house and he'd pulled out a lock of his hair and used it to teach me about eddies and helixes. It's a circular current into a central station, he'd explained, giving me one to hold. I pulled on the spring." (31)

Then there's this description, much later in the book:

"The nurse, a black woman with a perfectly shaped nose and red-tinted hair, said he was getting tested at the moment by a specialist but that I was welcome to wait." (286)

In both these accounts, the "blackness" of these characters does not seem to have anything to do with their function in the novel. With the exception of George using his hair to demonstrate a helix (and one can imagine that nearly anyone with curly hair could have produced this type of demonstration), his mixed-race status is never dealt with again. In other words, in terms of what he is doing in the novel (and George actually does a lot--he is a major-minor character, if you will) George's race or racial difference from Rose and her family is never a question, a point of contention, or important from the perspective of plot or character development. It's simply a non-issue. Similarly, the race of the nurse in this brief sentence seems a non-starter--she appears on two pages of the novel, and her race apparently has no impact on her function as a nurse or her interactions with Rose or any other character.

Which brings me to the issue of racial difference. How do I know that Rose is white or even is Rose white? Her race, like that of most characters in the novel, is never announced. Indeed, the only two characters who are racially marked are George and the unnamed nurse--all other characters, major or minor, are never noted for their race--although Rose does reveal that her father's family is Jewish. So to the degree that we read and understand Jewishness as a type of racial category--as a type of whiteness--then Rose does, in fact, announce her family to be white.

Yet even her father's Jewishness is not pronounced or seemingly has anything to do with family dynamics, background, characterization, or plot. It simply seems to be a piece of information that, at some point, Rose shares with readers in her first person narration--in the same way that she informs us that George is mixed-race and that the nurse is black.

So why does Bender do this?

In a novel set in Los Angeles in our contemporary period, it seems very odd that her book isn't populated with more people of color--particularly Asian American and Chicanos/Latinos.

[Aside: although Bender doesn't specify an exact date, there are computers and the internet towards the middle-end of the novel, so my best guess is that it opens sometime in the mid to late 90s and closes in the first decade of the 21st century--the great thing about setting the novel in LA instead of NYC is that you don't have to put in a reference to 9/11 or the twin towers if you don't want to--your periodization can remain ambiguous.]

But even if Rose and her family live in a very white neighborhood (which seems to be the case), the fact that whiteness is the default setting--the universally taken-for-granted identity--the identity that need not be named--remains a point of annoyance for me. Rose's best friend--her neighbors--her class mates and teachers--are not racially marked and thus I think most readers assume that they must be white--a point emphasized through the way that Bender has clearly marked George as mixed-race within the first 6 chapters of the book. The fact that she goes to the trouble to mark the nurse as black, even though her blackness seems to do nothing for the narrative, again highlights the seeming racelessness of all other characters--a racelessness we are to see as synonymous with being white.

Which is a problem. To believe that whiteness is a universal--that it is a form of racelessness--is a HUGE problem in our day and age when trying to understand the ways in which people of color are racialized and the ways in which racism operates--because this IS one of the very subtle ways that racism operates--as a form of normalizing certain races (white) and emphasizing difference for all others (the non-white).

I did like The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake--and I would recommend it to anyone looking for a good summer read, particularly if you like quirky magical-realist novels (although it has an air of melancholy to it--so don't pick it up expecting a light-hearted read). But I am disappointed in Bender's bow to convention (which I'm sure she didn't even realize she was doing) by marking some characters race but not all. Which makes me, particularly sad.

All things Asian American

2011-06-11T10:43:00.005-04:00

So I know that this blog skews Asian American -- which I suppose is a function of the fact that I study/research/teach Asian American studies, and I identify as Asian American myself. What this means is that folks send me lots o'links to all thing Asian American. Sometimes I sit on them for months, thinking that I'll write a whole blog post about them. And then months past and what we have is a situation where I realize that the relevancy of the moment has passed and now I have all these links.

So.

Here's a few of the links I've been sent over the last few months. I'll include a little blurb by me, but for the most part I think you should check them out if you too are interested in things Asian American. And if you would like to see more diverse content on my blog, feel free to write to me (you can find my email address by looking at the sidebar and the "About me" link) and send me more links.

*Asian Americans & You Tube
This is not going to be a surprise for most folks--that Asian Americans have adopted YouTube as their own network--African Americans have BET and Asian Americans have YouTube (OK, that is an imperfect analogy for several reasons, but you get my gist). Anyway, this is an NPR piece about Wong Fu Production and Ryan Higa--Asian American young men who have created YouTube mini-movies that have reached millions--yes, MILLIONS. Check out Agents of Secret Stuff--it's a bit masculinist and sophomoric at times (I mean, these guys are straight out of college or in college) but it's also interesting for the way it handles issues of race and being Asian American, which is that it doesn't--it normalizes it--which is fascinating in itself. And Higa is pretty funny!

*What it means to be an Asian American man?
So Wesley Yang has written a piece in New York magazine about what it means, to him, to be Asian American and the stereotypes that cohere around Asian Americans and the fact that being a model minority is not all its cracked up to be, especially with that damn bamboo ceiling that no one can crack [insert Panda joke here]. The thing is, for all the hand-wringing that Yang does, there really isn't anything new that he's talking about (for 11 pages--it's a looooonnnnnggg essay) for folks who work in Asian American studies. In fact, I was formulating a response when a much smarter and cooler colleague, erin Khue Ninh wrote her own trenchant and insightful piece in The Huffington Post directly answering many of the points that Yang raised in his article. In particular, I was SO GLAD that erin dealt with the sexism inherent in this essay--because one of the things that bothered me A LOT was the idea that somehow Asian American men have made it in America only when they are able to have sex, at will, with white women--this is erin:

Learning to become an "alpha male" who can confidently paw strange women is a sexist way of dealing with the sexism directed against Asian men. Needing to bed white people as proof that you've made it is a racist way of dealing with the racism directed against Asians. Yang claims in interviews here and here that his article doesn't sanction either of those aims per se, but in that case he really should not have wrapped with this particular call to arms: "we will need more [Asians] ... willing ... to beat people up, to seduce women."

*More Asian-white inter-racial romance
The inspiration for my last post on inter-racial romance was actually this piece in The New York Times by Diane Farr (who apparently used to be on Num3ers, which I've never seen), a white woman who falls in love (gasp!) with a Korean American man (they're married with 3 children). The spin, if you will, is that it's not just her parents who object to her cross-racial dalliances, it's HIS Korean parents who are racist and who object to their son dating across the color line. She's apparently written a book about the whole experience of her inter-racial love. I'm sure Wesley Yang will feel very encouraged to know that at least one Asian American man has succeeded in America by bedding and wedding a white woman.

*2011 APIA Spoken Word and Poetry Summit--Twin Cities
If you are in the Twin Cities area August 4-7, please check out the APIA spoken word and poetry summit. They've got a great line up of folks--some very familiar and revered, like Lawson Inada and David Mura and newer/up-and-coming artists. If I weren't going to be on my honeymoon (yep, Southern Man and I are finally taking our delayed honeymoon in August!) I'd consider buying a ticket to the Twin Cities/Minneapolis and enjoying the festival.

That's it folks--by the way, tomorrow I'm heading to Columbus, Ohio for a 2-week narrative theory seminar. So I may be taking a bit of a blogging vacation--if you have any recommendations of eats in the Columbus area, please let me know in the comment section!

The Politics of Inter-racial Romance

2011-06-05T10:26:00.003-04:00

Yesterday I shared a story with a student, "H," about why I wasn't attending a wedding that my husband and his family were at that very same afternoon. My husband and his brother had been asked, a month ago, by their father (my father-in-law if you will) to help work at the wedding of a close family friend--to act as bartenders essentially. I was invited to attend as a guest. Now, I've been with Southern Man going on 4 1/2 years and I have come to know and love his family. So I felt that it might be time to start voicing some of my more honest opinions and concerns with my in-laws.

[Aside: For non-regular readers of this blog, you should know that Southern Man and his family are white--Scotch-Irish on his father's side and southern Italian on his mother's side, which for the South means that my in-laws, when they were married in the 1960s, were actually seen to be in an inter-racial relationship! My mother-in-law was seen as being "ethnic,"--because her parents were immigrants, because she was darker complexioned, because she cooked with garlic, and because she was not from the South (she grew up outside of Pittsburgh).]

So when my father-in-law invited me to attend this wedding, which would be an hour away from our liberal college town in a more suburban and conservative area of the state, I said:

"'C,' I feel comfortable with you and hope you won't judge me too harshly for what I'm about to ask and confess. Here's the thing: I get racially paranoid around groups of all-white people I don't know. Will there be mostly white people at this wedding?"

My father in law was pretty taken aback, I think, although to his credit, he tried to not to act too surprised.

[Aside: my sister in law "L," who is engaged to an African American man, completely cracked up at my question, which made me feel better because she understood where I was coming from]

"C" (my father-in-law) assured me that there would be "diverse" people at the wedding--which was his way of saying that I wouldn't be the only spot of color among the 300 guests.

However, later that night, Southern Man said that he thought his father was being overly optimistic, so I should just stay home, especially since I wouldn't know anyone outside of my in-laws and because I wouldn't even be able to hang out with Southern Man since he would be tending bar.

When I told this story to my student, "H," she and I began talking about the politics of inter-racial romance--especially what it means to be a politically progressive Asian American woman interested in issues of social justice and aware of how Asian American men have been viewed in larger society, romantically speaking, who dates/marries white men.

In other words, how do I keep from being a walking cliche?

The truth is, I'm not sure I do. I mean, I am aware that when people see me and Southern Man, we do not upset the status quo--after all, an Asian American woman with a white man is a fairly standard pairing in real life and even in infrequent reflections in popular culture: Klinger dated a Korean woman on M*A*S*H, Sandra Oh's character on Grey's Anatomy first dated a black surgeon then a white surgeon, that Asian American best friend on The Gilmore Girls dated a white guy, and if I could think of more depictions of Asian American women in mainstream media I guarantee that if they're depicted as being romantically involved with someone it's not with a fellow Asian and usually with a white guy.

[Aside: Or at least I'd say this is true in cosmopolitan areas and college towns--the truth is, we've had our fair share of hard looks in West Virginia and more rural areas of the South--this is where the idea of Asian as honorary white really breaks down--you may be OK eating at their restaurants but you don't want your son and esp. your daughter marrying one of THOSE people]

I am a professor of Asian American literature who studies mixed-race issues--I KNOW the politics of inter-racial romance and especially the way that desire and race have been coded in the U.S.--the ways in which Asian men, in particular, have been feminized in and demonized, so that they are not seen as desirable sexual partners.

[Aside: If you don't believe me, check out the work of scholar Gina Marchetti and Darrell Hamamoto, among others--and the excellent documentaries: Slaying the Dragon (1988) and Slaying the Dragon: Reloaded (2011).]

So why am I married to Southern Man?

(sigh)

I love him. As I write this, I know that it's not that simple. I've written in the past about this very fact--the ways in which I, and others, are impacted by internalized notions of race and beauty. The way I, and others, are influenced by society and popular culture into thinking that there are certain partners who are more desirable and attractive than others. I know that part of my attraction to Southern Man is bound up in the many reasons I'm supposed to find white men attractive, above and beyond other men. And I know that on the surface we look like we are perpetuating certain stereotypes of inter-racial dating models, particularly those that have a history of neo-colonialism and imperialism in Asian nations where the U.S. military has invaded throughout the 20th C.

But I do love him. And there are things I love about him that aren't reducible to either his race or ethnicity or mine (our shared love of dogs, of cooking, of politics). And I think deciding that I couldn't or shouldn't date him because I want to be politically correct--because I want to live the political progressive politics that I espouse--wouldn't ring true.

I think what's difficult is that no one questions the same-raced couples. There is an assumption that if you are of the same racial group and you are dating or partnered, this makes sense. Because this is still seen as "the norm." So it's only when people fall outside of this pattern that questions of politics arise. But as with thinking of the term "ethnic" as referring not only to people of color but to encompass white Americans as well, I think we should begin asking what the politics of NON-inter-racial couples says about our society and culture--why, in a time of increased globalization and an attention to social justice issues--why wouldn't more people date across ethnic, cultural, and racial lines?

A community of one's own

2011-06-01T14:26:00.003-04:00

So I just got back this past weekend from the American Literature Association Conference in my old stomping grounds of Boston. As the plane was landing at Logan Airport, I experienced a rush of nostalgia and affection as I scanned the surrounding Boston area, trying to find familiar places, like Mugar library at Boston University, Fenway Park, the Prudential tower, and of course the Charles River. And in the 3 days I spent walking around downtown Boston (and for anyone who lives in the area who knows me, I apologize in advance for not contacting you--I was in conference mode and barely left the Westin at Copley Center, except to eat good sushi and Vietnamese food), I reminisced about my grad student days and enjoyed my time with my fellow American literature colleagues--my academic community.

And 2 weeks ago, I found myself in New Orleans experiencing a different community at yet another conference, the Association for Asian American Studies (AAAS). This is my go-to conference--the one that I rarely miss (in fact, I've only missed 2 conferences in the last 11 years). This is the conference I feel most at home--the kind of friendly conference where you can usually just strike up a conversation with someone and grab a bite together or strike up a conversation with others at the hotel bar that you barely know and make friends. I feel like I get my batteries re-charged at AAAS because not only am I in a space (roughly 600+ attendees this year) where folks are interested in Asian American issues/scholarship, it's also a place where most folks ARE Asian American.

[Note: But not all--and I certainly don't want to make it sound like the only people who do Asian American studies or who are interested in Asian American issues are Asian American--or that the conference and association isn't welcoming to non-Asian Americans, because that couldn't be further from the truth!]

Anyway, now that I'm back from these back-to-back conferences, I've been thinking about community and what we mean when we talk about community. I think sometimes in academic settings, especially when one is dealing with ethnic studies and/or racial issues, "community" signals non-academic folk who are "real" people with "real" issues and who are often dealing with issues of power/oppression. For example, in many urban places, like Boston, there are Chinatowns that are no longer just havens for Chinese in America but places where other recent Asian immigrants (Vietnamese, Hmong, Cambodian) also live/work and who are oftentimes disenfranchised in terms of language (for those who are not fluent in English), legal resources (for those who may be extralegal or just aren't familiar with their legal rights), and culture/education (for those who may not have graduated with higher degrees or whose lack of English makes their degrees not as useful--there are many cases of recent immigrants who were doctors and lawyers in their home countries who come to the U.S. and work as janitors and cab drivers because of the lack of English language skills and/or because their degrees don't translate, so to speak, in the U.S.).

But is this the only way to talk about "community"? I often wonder if it's a bit condescending--especially in academic settings--to speak of "the community" as if people aren't speaking for themselves. Now, it might be that people aren't listening to them because of issues of access to power/a microphone/soapbox in which people can vent the issues that they are most concerned about. But I have been thinking, lately, about what people mean when they talk about "community" especially with respect to ethnic and racial communities since they are often so diverse in terms of class and religion, and if we're talking about a racial group like Asian Americans, then "community" almost seems non-existent, except in the context of political activists or academics since the issues that face most ethnic enclaves are specific to that group (Koreans in Koreatown, Los Angeles, Vietnamese in East New Orleans, Burmese in Chapel Hill).

At AAAS I attended the Mixed Race Section meeting, and I was acutely aware that I was the only person (at least I believe I was the only person) who was not multiracial. I teach on this subject and research this subject and my blog is called "Mixed Race America"--but I am not mixed race myself and I do not consider myself a part of the mixed race community because I do not identify as multiracial (although I might consider myself multiethnic, but that's another discussion). And I think that's an important distinction because while I am very interested and invested in multiracial issues and my research and teaching encompasses many aspects of mixed race studies, it is not a personal identification and I don't wish to inappropriately appropriate a community identification.

And yet...it does make me wonder about people who have cross-cultural and ethnic and racial interests. The African American woman who loves manga and K-Pop. The Asian American guy who loves salsa dancing and playing in a Cuban band. The White American woman who cooks Indian food and watches Bollywood movies. In that last instance, I wonder if folks would see the white woman as appropriating or being involved in exoticizing a culture not her own--whereas in the previous two examples, would we cry inauthenticity or appropriation or exoticization at the African American woman who learns Korean to enjoy her favorite K-Pop tunes? Or the Asian American guy whose passion is Latin music?

I don't really have answers for any of these, but I think that thinking of what we mean when we talk about "community," especially for the communities we belong to is important, both to un-fetishize "the community" as real (or the place where people "keep it real") as well as to figure out what communities we exist in or want to exist in but may not have access to (and if it's a community we don't have access to, then it can't really be our community, right?)

APA shout out!

2011-05-25T10:46:00.002-04:00

Just got sent this video link to a music video made by Magnetic North & Taiyo Na, featuring among many artists, Jin.

The video was made, in the words of the artists:

"In celebration of APIA Heritage Month we wanted to make this video a dedication to all the amazing people in our community. We reached out to entertainers, activists, teachers, students, actors, designers, dancers, writers, poets, bloggers, community organizers... anyone and everyone who gives our community strength, depth, beauty."

It's a veritible "Who's Who" of Asian American artists, activists, and academics. But probably my favorite shout out was from Yuri Kochiyama because she is a pioneering Asian American BAD ASS ACTIVIST!

It's May which means it's Asian Pacific American Heritage Month!

2011-05-16T21:32:00.002-04:00

So out of the 3 resolutions I made for myself back on January 1, 2011, only one remains achievable (the draft of my manuscript)--I failed to blog every week and to train for the 4 mile run I signed up for. Or more specifically, I realized that it was overly optimistic for me to think that my fatigue issues post-chemo and post-surgery would be resolved to the point where I could run a race.

[Note: here is where I have to invoke the advice of my uncle "N" who warned me NOT to try to do something foolish like train for a race until a full year after my bi-lateral mastectomy surgery since my body is in repair mode for a full year post-chemo/post-surgery. I, of course, ignored him and he, of course, was right]

I start off this way to say that I KNOW over two weeks since my last post (sigh).

OK, apologies and beating myself up over--this post is really about:

MAY IS HUG-AN-ASIAN-AMERICAN MONTH!

OK, not really.

But it is Asian Pacific American Heritage month. I have blogged about this month before (click here), so in honor of this year's APA heritage month, I wanted to highlight some things that you may find of interest.

First, big props to my friend and colleague Stephen Sohn of Stanford University, who guest curates a post on the Lantern Review blog--a journal devoted to Asian American poetry. Stephen talks about "food pornography" and shares his own creative writing on the blog (which I think is AWESOME)--here's the link. I hope anyone who reads his post will be inspired to write their own food-pornography inspired poem!

Second, this week in New Orleans, May 18-22 the Association for Asian American Studies holds its annual meeting--and this year the theme is: FOOD! Actually, more broadly, the theme is "Consumption" as in "Consuming Asian America." For anyone in the New Orleans area, please check out the conference--you can find the conference program in pdf format on the AAAS website. There's a great line-up of presentations and roundtables and literary readings--I'm VERY EXCITED to be going to the Big Easy where I'll hang out with friends, get invigorated and intellectually stimulated in all things Asian American, and eat REALLY GREAT FOOD, like at The Palace Cafe, which is right across the street from the conference hotel. What's more appropriate than eating good food at an Asian American conference where the theme is consumption??!!

Finally, for anyone who is interested in issues related to illness/disability studies, let me direct you to the Call For Papers of Amerasia Journal--a special issue, co-guest edited by yours truly and my friend-colleague, James Lee (UC Irvine) -- the topic is "The State of Illness and Disability in Asian America" and we are very excited to be working in the intersection of two important and emergent fields of study. You can find the details of the CFP here--the deadline for abstracts is June 1 (I know, only 2 weeks away). But it's only a 1-page abstract and we are hoping to get not just scholarly essays but works of creative writing (fiction and non-fiction, poetry) that engages in the themes of illness/disability and Asian America.

Happy Asian American Heritage Month everyone! And while I don't recommend walking up to Asian American strangers, if there is an Asian American loved one in your life, hugs are always appreciated this month and every other month!

post-Brown, post-Lawrence, post-hate?

2011-05-01T17:30:00.007-04:00

I was going to blog about the ridiculousness that is known as Donald Trump and the inherent racism of the Birther phenomenon. But if you are reading this blog, chances are you understand this all, very well, and do not need me or Bob Schieffer to draw your attention to the subtle (or not so subtle) racism of the Birther movement and of Trump's latest attempts to question President Obama's credentials by wondering how he got into Harvard Law because he heard that he wasn't a "good student."

[By the way, if you want to see Seth Meyers at the recent White House Correspondent's Dinner, click here for the link--Meyers did a great job and had some great zingers, particularly about "The Donald."]

However, rather than giving more airspace to the obvious (Trump is a narcissistic opportunist) I thought I'd instead link to this article in The New York Times, "A Tipping Point for Gay Marriage?" that discusses what may be considered a watershed moment in gay rights activism--namely that we are living in a time when for a segment of the population--the "elites" as the NY Times piece calls them/us (I guess I am one of these elites--I am a liberal university professor who blogs)--espousing any attitude that is not at least tolerant of a queer lifestyle is unacceptable--which is why the prestigious Atlanta firm of King & Spaulding refused to defend the Federal Defense of Marriage Act (or DOMA)--essentially, they are refusing to defend a law that would uphold marriage as defined as being between a man and a woman. They are refusing to uphold a law that discriminates against gay and lesbian couples.

The article talks about how there is a discrepancy between the "elites" and the masses--that people in legal professions or academia are more likely to see attitudes against gay marriage as discriminatory and prejudiced. And as Yale Law School professor William N. Eskridge says:

"We’re in the post-Brown era,” he said, “which for me is post-Lawrence. After Lawrence, there has been a social revolution in America."

I think that this analogy is telling. This blog is called Mixed Race America--but the idea of ending racial oppression is never only about ending racial oppression--because one is never simply reducible to a race--and because in the intersections of our many identities, sexuality and specifically the rights of queer people as being on a similar trajectory to those who fought for racial equality is instructive for us to remember. That equality against one oppression means equality against all oppressions.

150 years and one day ago...

2011-04-13T09:35:00.004-04:00

...the U.S. Civil War began. The first skirmish at Fort Sumter (just outside the harbor of Charleston, South Carolina) resulted in the U.S. Army's surrendering to Confederate forces--and according to Ken Burns (renown documentarian of all things Civil War related) the only casualty was a Union horse who died during the barrage.

I live in the U.S. South, yet I also live in a liberal college town. And at Southern U. (a very liberal research I state university) there was nary a mention of the beginning of the Civil War. I didn't see it noted in the student newspaper, and I didn't see any evidence among my students that anyone was commemorating this event (in other words, no one was whistling Dixie or wearing confederate flag paraphanalia). But then again, my corner of the U.S. South is not mired in nostalgia for a plantation economy, say in the way that Charleston is.

When Southern Man and I spent a few days on the South Carolina coast in December (part of my post-mastectomy recovery and recuperation), one of the things I was really struck by was how SOUTHERN South Carolina felt--and how the greater Charleston area was living through a Gone with the Wind rosy-romanticized-lens of itself. There were subdivisions named after different characters from that film--and everything was named with either "Magnolia" or "Plantation" (as in a condominium called "Plantation Acres"--now why on EARTH would you want to live in a place called "Plantation Acres"??? How is that at all appealing to be associated with a system of servitude???). I imagine that if we were in Charleston now, just as we had been during the 150th anniversary of Secession (click here for an older post on this event), that we would inundated with various commemorations and celebrations and re-enactments and reminders of a Confederate past that is not really past but very present.

And one of the things that drives me slightly batty when hearing about all these commemorations is the revisionist history that people seem to want to engage in--to re-imagine that the Civil War was fought over reasons other than slavery. Indeed, if you google "cause of Civil War" the first entry you will find is this article in About.com "Top Five Causes of the Civil War" that insinuates that people have falsely believed that slavery was a main cause when in fact there were many other factors that led to the South's secession from the Union.

[Aside: If you have the stomach to go through the comment thread, you will find a very interesting cross-section of America that shows just how divisive this issue continues to be, and how much people are unwilling to look closely at race and specifically the form of institutional racism that slavery was as a leading factor in the divisiveness that was (and continues to be) the Civil War]

On the PBS News Hour last night (click here for the video) they did a segment on the Civil War that included notable historians whose expertise is in the Civil War, such as Harvard University president Drew Gilpin Faust. Apparently while U.S. historians are united in their agreement that slavery was the leading cause of the Civil War, a majority of Americans believe that the war was fought over "states rights."

Which is true...the right to own slaves.

Finally, let me leave you once again with the words of Larry Wilmore, who reminds us that it's not politically correct to say that the Civil War was fought over slavery, it's CORRECT, correct!

The Daily Show
Tags: Daily Show Full Episodes,Political Humor & Satire Blog,The Daily Show on Facebook

Saturday link round-up

2011-04-09T09:32:00.004-04:00

Well, my plans for blogging at least once a week have failed (sigh). But, I suppose it was good to at least have a goal. I could tell you about all the busy things that happened and my current adenovirus (just got diagnosed by my doctors yesterday).

Because my head feels like it's stuffed with cotton (making any original thought of my own nearly impossible--or at least I'm not confident I could articulate anything worthwhile in my state), I've decided that today would be a good day to put out some links to articles and blog posts that should give you ample food for thought:

*The New York Times has an article about how the number of young white Americans are decreasing faster than originally predicted (click here). Apparently the number of white children born in the past decade slipped 10% and it's now projected that by the year 2041 (not 2050 as originally believed) white Americans will be a minority in the U.S. overall.

*The news that white Americans are decreasing as a population may be one reason why Republicans in Mississippi desire a throwback to the days of anti-miscegenation laws. According to a recent poll by Public Policy Polling trying to gauge which candidate Mississippi GOP want to be their next president, a question about inter-racial marriage was thrown into the mix, with these results:

"We asked voters on this poll whether they think interracial marriage should be legal or illegal- 46% of Mississippi Republicans said it should be illegal to just 40% who think it should be legal. For the most part there aren't any huge divides in how voters view the candidates or who they support for the nomination based on their attitudes about interracial marriage but there are a few exceptions."

Click here for the original post on the Public Policy Polling blog and here on the original blog (sent to me courtesy of my brother "C") that led me to the PPP post.

*Of course, perhaps the Mississippi GOP are upset not just because of the decrease in white American births but because evidence of a mixed race America are abundant and apparent in their own backyards, as this New York Times article, titled "Black and White and Married in the Deep South: A Shifting Image" demonstrates--when you click on the article link, be sure to watch the video of the 2 families that the article talks about. They are visual proof that times indeed are changing, despite the 46% of GOP Mississippi-ians who want a return to the good old days of the government interfering in people's lives by telling them who they can and cannot marry. That's really what the Republican are all about, right?

*And now for something a bit lighter (but no less relevant or important), here's a piece by Jeff Yang on the anniversary of Ken's 50th birthday (as in Mattel's boy-doll Ken--Barbie's boyfriend or manfriend or maybe depending on whether your Ken was gay or not, her fabulous next door neighbor). Lamenting the lack of Asian male dolls, Yang imagines what it would be like to take some real life Asian American "Kens" to diversify Barbie's universe (click here). Personally I'd love to see "Poet Ken" -- because Ken Chen, poet and director of the Asian American Writer's Workshop, is an exceptional person--check out both his collection of poems, Juvenilia (which won the Yale Younger poet's award--one of the nation's most prestigious poetry prizes) and the Asian American Writer's Workshop website--if you are in NYC definitely check out some of the cool events they have going on.

Why Asian American studies matters

2011-03-15T20:03:00.006-04:00

I've been in NYC for the last few days (it was spring break last week at Southern U) so I didn't get to see this video until today--but perhaps by now some of you are familiar with the racist rant from UCLA undergraduate, Alexandra Wallace in which she complains about "Asians" and all those awful things Asians do, like bring their families to the dorms, let their kids run wild, and talk on their cell phones in their "ching chong a ling long" voice (actual quote -- or perhaps actual paraphrase of her quote).

If you want to see the awfulness in its entriety, all you need to do is google the words "UCLA racist rant Asian" and up will pop the youtube video.

However, what I want to post is this vlog response from David So:

It's pretty funny and a MUCH better thing to watch than the actual video itself (which is just PAINFUL) but I do think that Ms. Wallace makes one thing clear, and that is the continued need for Asian American studies -- why people need to be educated about Asian American issues and about Asian American people. And Ms. Wallace is in the perfect place for such an education since the UCLA Asian American Studies department is one of the first such departments in the nation -- and the Amerasia Journal is one of the most pre-eminent journals on Asian American topics.

Also, a word to Alexandra Wallace and anyone else who think that (1) there is a single "Asian" language (2) that it sounds like people saying "ching chong ling long" -- I direct you to spoken word artist Beau Sia's "an open letter to all the rosie o'donnells" because he breaks it down and says it best.

Finally, I want to say one last thing about Alexandra Wallace. I think that A LOT of people have expressed a lot of anger towards her--but in some of that anger (including in David So's response above) people feel the need to make assumptions about her based on the fact that she is a blonde female student showing some cleavage--and so she's been called a whore and other disparaging names. While I confess that she sounds extraordinarily ignorant based on the content of her rant (and grammar is not a strong suit in her speaking skills), I think we need to be careful not to perpetuate another form of violence--misogyny and sexism--in order to decry Ms. Wallace's bigotry and racism. I think we can call her an ignorant idiot without calling her a slut.

[Update: The New York Times has now covered this debacle -- click here for the link to the article. Apparently UCLA officials are considering disciplinary actions against Ms. Wallace. So I decided to write an email message to the UCLA Chancellor--which I've reprinted below:]

March 16, 2011

Dear Chancellor Gene Block,

Forgive the intrusion—I recognize that you are a very busy man and that the last thing you need is more email to sift through regarding UCLA undergraduate Alexandra Wallace's viral youtube video. However, I just read an article in The New York Times that says you are considering disciplinary actions against Ms. Wallace.

As a professor who teaches Asian American literature and researches issues of race and anti-racism, may I make a suggestion? If you do decide to pursue some type of disciplinary action, I recommend requiring Ms. Wallace to enroll in an Asian American studies course. Any course will do. Given the level of ignorance about Asian Americans that Ms. Wallace demonstrated and given the illustrious history of Asian American studies at UCLA, I think it fitting to require Ms. Wallace to learn a little something about the people she is maligning.

Sincerely,
Jennifer

[Second Update: So I have been seeing a lot of video responses by folks, and I find it interesting that people (college-aged folks mainly) seem to be using YouTube as a platform to respond to Ms. Wallace. Now, a lot of stuff has been pretty misogynist--as a friend of mine put it (quoting from Audre Lorde) people have to learn that you can't dismantle the master's house using the master's tools--in other words, like I said above, resorting to sexist comments is another kind of violence that isn't helpful.

But humor is--and a friend send me a link to this YouTube video that showcases the humorous and most importantly musical talents of a guy named "Jimmy":

The post about adoption

2011-03-09T20:39:00.003-05:00

As regular readers of this blog know, recently I've been writing about more personal (maybe intimate or private is the more accurate word to use) issues on this blog--my breast cancer diagnosis, for example. And I've been thinking of writing a post about adoption for a while, but for a variety of reasons I've held back. Mostly because I recognize that writing about adoption is a very emotional, fraught, and provocative topic.

But it's also a topic that needs to be talked about, from a variety of perspectives. Especially when it comes to transnational and transracial adoption. I'd be doing a disservice to this blog by not talking about these issues. And while I could write about this from a dispassionate or seemingly objective perspective, it doesn't seem like that'd be the honest way to approach this topic.

I guess I should re-name the title to be "A post about adoption" because I don't think that this will be the only post I write on this topic. But I do think that I want to start with the personal, because like that feminist mantra says, "The personal is political."

And the personal, in my case, is that Southern Man and I will not be having a child biologically. We will be adopting.

As many of you can guess, my cancer diagnosis played a large role in this decision. But it wasn't the main issue--my age was/is. I am post-35, that magic number that doctor's like to throw around to let you know that the biological clock is tick, tick TICKING away. Added to this was the knowledge that I gained, a year and a half ago, that the age of my ovaries and my chronological age were not in synch--that the age of my eggs are older than I am. So when I got the cancer diagnosis in April and realized that the chemotherapy would knock out my ovarian function, perhaps permanently, and that even if it did come back that the tamoxifen hormone treatment that I'm on precludes pregnancy (you definitely do NOT want to get pregnant on tamoxifen--there are serious birth defects and miscarriages associated with it).

So this summer, while undergoing chemotherapy, I made my peace with this piece of my life. Southern Man and I went through a period of grief and mourning over this, but the further truth of the matter is we had always planned to adopt one way or another. That even if I had been able to get pregnant, only one would come from the womb--a second child would come through adoption.

The complication that cancer has brought about in our adoption is that one of the options we had been considering--adopting from China--is no longer on the table because China is one of several countries that does not allow parents to adopt if one has received a cancer diagnosis.

[Aside: Actually, China also doesn't like their adoptive parents to be overweight or suffer from depression or have chronic health issues--the list of physical and mental ailments that would preclude one from adopting from China is quite daunting. Other countries, like Korea, do not let you adopt if more than 10 years separates you from your partner]

Now, we had not settled decisively on adoption from China, but this option seemed attractive to us for several reasons--most especially because I am Chinese American and my father (and a few other relatives) speak Cantonese AND Mandarin (yep, my family is multi-linguistic). So the violence and loss associated with transnational adoption seems like it would have, potentially, been mitigated through that cultural connection--and certainly in terms of the racial identity--of being Asian American, that this IS something I understand and know on a very deep level.

Discovering that China was no longer an option in terms of adoption has been fraught in many ways for me. In some ways I have felt deep ambivalence about international and transnational adoption. But on the other hand, this means that we may be adopting a child whose ethnic and racial identity does not match either of our own since we have decided to pursue domestic open adoption.

I recognize that this is a very VERY private thing to share in a very VERY public space. And I recognize that people have very VERY strong opinions about adoption--about international versus domestic. About transracial and/or transnational. About the loss attendant in any adoption process.

I know all of that--and I don't want to go in blindly or to be naive about any of this. But in the midst of a year that has brought about many MANY losses and changes in my life, there is a part of me that would like to think of this option as simply this: happy. That the uncertainty of whether I can get pregnant has been taken off the table and what we know is that we will begin the process of open adoption at some point in the future (I'd like to be at least a year post-surgery before even beginning paperwork since even with open adoption it's challenging to have a birth parent select us given my health profile). That we know that we will have a family--that adoption allows us that option still. And that at the end of the day, this is what will make us very happy, and in that way, adoption is a blessing for us.

There's so much more to say--but I think I'll just end here, on a happy note. Because future posts will be discussing thornier subjects that are too complicated and complex to be discussed in a single post--and that shade and shadow the kind of happiness that my previous paragraph declares. But even still, I stand by this declaration: I am happy to know that we will be adopting in the future and that we will have a family.

Meet the Happiest Man in the U.S.: Alvin Wong

2011-03-05T20:08:00.002-05:00

Gallup (yep, the pollster/survey people) decided that they wanted to figure out what makes Americans happy and, the New York Times asked Gallup for a composite picture of who the happiest person in the U.S. -- and what they came up with was

"he’s a tall, Asian-American, observant Jew who is at least 65 and married, has children, lives in Hawaii, runs his own business and has a household income of more than $120,000 a year."

[apparently men are happier than women--which is NOT surprising]

Now, if you are scratching your heads and wondering, could such a person, actually exist? The answer is: Yes and his name is Alvin Wong.

For a picture of Mr. Wong and a description of the Times piece, click here.

I'm not sure that at 5' 10" Alvin Wong can really be considered "tall," although I suppose for someone Chinese American, it's all relative.

What I want to know is, are Asian Americans supposed to be the happiest race of people in the U.S.? And also, are observant Jews the happiest religious practitioners? If I convert to Judaism, will this make me a happier person? Of course I still need the kids, owning my own business, and making over $120,000...and then there's the little problem of my gender and living in Hawaii. Oh well--I guess not all of us can be Alvin Wong.

It still matters if you're black (or white)

2011-02-28T10:35:00.002-05:00

Despite what Michael Jackson may have sung about once-upon-a-time, I believe it DOES matter if you're black or white.

Meaning, it matters, still, whether you identify as African American or as Caucasian. Meaning, it matters if you benefit from white privilege. Meaning it matters how others perceive you, especially depending on where you are, regionally and contextually (ie: are you in the U.S. South or the West Coast? In a cosmopolitan city or a rural township? Are you in a classroom where you are the only one, and is this a course on 20th Century American writers or African American poets?)

I guess I've been thinking about this question a lot, lately, because of a novel I'm teaching in one of my classes and because I've recently read two articles, one in The New York Times that discusses racial passing, tracing how three families changed their racial identification from black to white over a few generations through a combination of inter-racial marriage and consolidating wealth and status. And the other is in the Chronicle of Higher Education with the provocative title, "Does African American Literature Exist?" Both essays, in their own way, talk about the disappearance of African Americans from the public landscape and discourse-- or at least in the latter, that what we think of as African American literature during the Jim Crow era no longer matters since Jim Crow no longer exists in its legalized, institutionalized form (so sayeth the author, not me).

It's tempting to downplay the legacy of race. To talk about race and racism is wearying. It's like beating an old drum that many people have tuned out.

By now we should imagine that a month dedicated to black history, African American heritage, and reminding us of the contributions of black Americans to U.S. life and society would not be necessary in the sense that we have moved beyond a stage of needing to highlight the contributions of African Americans because they should be woven within the larger history of the United States.

Yet it's not. Moreover, I believe that we're still a pretty racially segregated culture. Perhaps I feel this more because I live in the U.S. South. But I must say that I was impressed with the honesty with which my students came to a writing assignment recently. I asked them to describe the racial climate at Southern University. This was in preparation for talking about the novel Caucasia by Danzy Senna (a wonderful coming-of-age novel and a trenchant novel to talk about issues of race and especially mixed-race identity). My students were pretty honest in their assessment of race relations, meaning that while they noted the diversity here at Southern U, particularly as compared with some of the more homogenous town that they have grown up in, they noted two things. First, that compared to other locations, Southern U is probably not all that diverse. And second, that despite this diversity, people still hang out within self-segregated friendship groups by race--something my students readily admitted that they participated in (albeit it sheepishly). In fact, only one of my students disclosed that s/he had a close friend who was of a different racial background to him/herself (this in-class writing assignment was anonymous, so I don't have a sense of who this was, at least by gender--since there are only 3 self-identified Asian American students and 3 self-identified African American students, it's a good guess that this student was white, and also because s/he identified as such).

Nearly all the students lamented the fact that they only had friends of the same race, but none of them really knew what to do about this fact--and a few mentioned that they noticed other races (Asian Americans in the business school, African Americans in the dining hall, Latino students in the dorms) congregating together as well.

Interestingly enough, no one brought up where the mixed-race person fit in--the person who is both black and white. Or black and Asian. I suppose we are still working on hypodescent rules, where the assumption is that you identify with the group you look like the most or that is the furthest away from whiteness.

I was glad that my students felt so free to be honest in their writing about the state of race relations at Southern U. Of course they were also quick to say that they did not notice any racial animosity--that there did not seem to be racial hostility between or among groups, as there may have been once-upon-a-time. But I did wonder about the lack of social mixing, racially speaking. I also wondered if this was a difference in location--because I had grown up, in my high school environment, having close friends who were black and white and Chicano--and when I mean close friends I mean the kind of friends that you have sleepovers with or that you go to prom with or hang out with at parties on the weekend. Not just friends you see in the classroom or chat with because your lockers are next to one another.

A friend recently told me that many white students will say that they have an African American friend but most African American college students don't claim to have any white friends (or friends of any other racial group). The disparity, a researcher noted, was that the white college students were counting, as friends, black students who sat next to them in the classroom or who lived in the dorm--people they chatted with and were friendly with. But the African American students counted as friendly only people they had significant ties to--whom they socialized with outside of a classroom or dorm environment.

And perhaps the last thing I'll end with in closing out this post is whether or not it matters. If, as my students said, there is no racial animosity between groups that they can discern, does it matter that students are self-segregating along racial lines? My gut says that it does--but at the same time I am also well aware of the power of having safe spaces and friends that you have absolute comfort with--and in an environment where you are a minority, being able to be with people who understand your experiences is psychically important.

Honoring the Legacy of Malcolm X

2011-02-22T08:54:00.002-05:00

64 years ago yesterday on February 21, 1965, Malcolm X was assassinated. Many people know of Malcolm X after reading about his life's story in The Autobiography of Malcolm X. Others have perhaps seen the Spike Lee Bio-pic, Malcolm X. And for a few others, they may have actually had the honor of hearing Malcolm X speak--or perhaps they even knew Malcolm X.

Although Malcolm X is often figured as a radical, particularly in opposition to the way we have sainted Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., the truth is, Malcolm X's message of black pride and black strength and black nationalism does not seem out of the ordinary at all--certainly not radical. The idea that an oppressed and disenfranchised minority would finally grow weary of mistreatment by larger institutional forces and would want to fight for basic rights and to assert their essential humanity. This is not a radical idea.

[Aside: One need only look to the recent uprisings in the Middle East to see that people the world over will always try to fight against tyranny when they have been pushed to a breaking point]

Yesterday on The Story with Dick Gordon (and NPR staple in my area) his special guest was Malcolm Shabazz, Malcolm X's grandson. I was, unfortunately, unable to hear the entire interview, but thankfully the entire show is available online (click here) and the part I did catch was apropos, for me, because Malcolm Shabazz recounted how, during his time in prison, friends of his grandfather reached out to him, reminding him of his grandfather's legacy and putting him in touch with other political prisoners--people fighting for justice. The first of his grandfather's friends to send him a letter was Yuri Kochiyama, a close friend of his grandparents and the first person besides Betty Shabazz to rush to Malcolm X's side after he was gunned down. In fact, she started CPR in an effort to keep him alive (this was recounted on The Story).

I had just been talking to my Asian American literature class that the field of Asian American literature and Asian American Studies owe a huge debt to African Americans, particularly those who took part in the Civil Rights movement. Asian Americans and African Americans have a history of shared struggle, which often gets ignored in more sensational and violent conflicts like the Red Apple Boycott or Latasha Harlins.

The legacy of Malcolm X--what his work and words meant--is larger than just his influence on African Americans. His words were for all of us--especially for any group of people who had been oppressed by a majority government and culture. And while it is fitting that I'm writing this post in his honor during African American Heritage and History month, we should be remembering and honoring Malcolm X's legacy every month of the year.

R.I.P. Hisaye Yamamoto

2011-02-19T08:40:00.004-05:00

69 years ago today, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, which nullified the constitutional rights of every resident (alien and citizen alike) living on the West Coast of the United States. The military, under FDR's direction, interpreted the order such that only Japanese and Japanese American communities were evacuated, en masse, forced to relocate to concentration camps (the term used by FDR's administration) for the duration of WWII.

[Aside: It is true that Italian and German nationals, along with Japanese nationals, were arrested and forced to stay in special detention centers on the suspicion that these men (and almost all of the detained were men) were a threat to national security. However, the only community targeted through their racialized difference were Japanese Americans--no other ethnic community were targeted through exclusion in the way that the Japanese American community was during WWII.]

69 years ago, a young Nisei, Hisaye Yamamoto, and her family, prepared for their internment, eventually being forced into Poston internment camp. Ms. Yamamoto had her first short story published at the age of 14 and continued to write for the camp newspaper while interned at Poston. And upon her release from camp, she wrote for an African American L.A. area newspaper and also published her short fiction in such venues as The Partisan Review.

But it is the publication in 1988 of fifteen of her short stories, collected in Seventeen Syllables and Other Stories, that brought her to the attention of generations of college students who encountered Ms. Yamamoto's writing in their Asian American studies classes. The stories in this collection centered on the Japanese American community, before, during, and after the war, especially noting the racist tensions they faced in their post-war lives.

I was one of a lucky few who had the privilege of hearing Ms. Yamamoto read from her short story collection while I was an undergraduate at UCSB. She was down-to-earth and direct--and I was awed by the fact that a living writer was in our classroom talking about her work with us. I still have my autographed copy of Seventeen Syllables and still remember the good humor and patience with which Ms. Yamamoto handled our questions.

On January 30, 2011 Hisaye Yamamoto passed away in her sleep. She was 89 years old (click here for her LA Times obituary). She was a pioneer in Asian American literature. She was a woman who understood the necessity of being an ally in the Civil Rights movement. She was a witness to history, using her considerable literary talents to tell the stories of the Japanese American community. She will be missed.

Parody as a form of Flattery (or maybe just historical remembrance)

2011-02-17T22:52:00.004-05:00

This is compliments of my friend Crystal (who teaches African American & ethnic American lit), who posted this in honor of black history month on her Facebook page. Without further ado:

The Real Housewives of Civil Rights

[I'll be posting more about African American history/heritage month--so stay tuned!]

Calling all Asian Americans in all 50 States (we're talking to YOU Wyoming!)

2011-02-10T21:26:00.003-05:00

The Kartika Review has initiated The 500 Project--they are looking for 10 APIA (Asian Pacific Islander Americans) to write in about how they feel about APIA literature.

Specifically, here are the questions they're asking:

1. Does APIA literature matter to you?
2. Why does APIA literature matter to you?
3. Cite the last 3 works of APIA literature you read.
4. Who are your favorite APIA writers or poets and why?
5. In your own words, you are:
6. In your own words, APIA literature is:

I'm assuming that they're not going to have any problems finding folks from California, New York, Hawaii, and Washington (for example) but perhaps places that don't have as large of an APIA population (Wyoming, North Dakota, Nebraska) may need more representation, so if you are from one of these states, identify as Asian Pacific American, and like literature, then consider responding to their call.

I did! And to prove it, here are my answers:

1. Does APIA literature matter to you?

YES! Absolutely! Positively! Can I be more affirmative in the way I answer this question???!!!

2. Why does APIA literature matter to you?

Because it speaks of and to me. Because when I first encountered Woman Warrior as a freshman I felt like FINALLY someone was writing about ME and FINALLY someone was telling my story. Because regardless of whether you identify as APIA or not, the stories that the literature tells are ones that touch on the particular humanity of our community—that reminds us and others of our humanity.

3. Cite the last 3 works of APIA literature you read.

The Surrendered – Chang-rae Lee, World and Town – Gish Jen, Bitter in the Mouth – Monique Truong

4. Who are your favorite APIA writers or poets and why?

Mitsuye Yamada (because she is a witness to history and because only the lyrical can capture certain traumas), Chang-rae Lee (because he writes of horror with a sense of beautiful urgency that forces me to act as a witness to history), Lois-Ann Yamanaka (because although I know she’s controversial in certain APIA literary circles, her prose is raw and gut wrenching and visceral—she makes you feel the pain of adolescence in a way that few writers can so vividly capture the angst of that period—she knows the loneliness of being an outsider).

5. In your own words, you are:

…large. I contain multitudes.

6. In your own words, APIA literature is:

Sustenance.

I'm coming out! (well, sort've...)

2011-02-08T12:33:00.003-05:00

I don't want to mislead too many people by the title of this post--since I think the phrase "coming out" gives the general connotation of having someone announce their sexual orientation/declaration of a queer identity.

However, if we think of the phrase "coming out" as a way to make known a hidden or private identity, then I think this is apropos. Because I was actually, once-upon-a-time, very public about my identity on this blog and very public about my affiliations/geographic location.

But after a scare I had in July 2007 when writing a post on the Duke Lacrosse case, I went into hiding (ie: made the blog private--only people with an invitation had access) and edited previous posts to rid any geographic location or surname specificity associated with myself.

[Note: The above post is probably the most widely read post I've ever written and the one that garnered the most passionate reaction--and that STILL garners excitable and hostile comments from folks in the blogosphere. In fact, I'd be curious to see if after three years, anyone finds their way to this comment thread and sends me inappropriate comments blasting me. For all you trolls out there, read the comment guidelines on the sidebar--I'm NOT going to publish your comment telling me where to stick it--as the old schoolyard rhyme goes, "I'm rubber and you're glue, whatever you say bounces off me and sticks on you!" And if anyone is curious about the clusterfuck that made me go private was all about, check out this lengthy blog post, "Academic Privilege."]

Anyway, in different ways I've been "out" to quite a few people and in different forums. And so, I thought that it was time to come out on this blog...sort of. What I mean by this is that while I'm still going to adhere to the convention of referring myself only by my first name and to refer to Southern U. and Southern Man through these euphemisms, I'm not going to police myself so stringently in terms of specific geographic references or linking to things that will clearly give my full identity.

For example, I had the distinct honor and pleasure of having an essay I wrote, "Being Held Accountable: On the Necessity of Intersectionality" published in the Journal of Women's History (Winter 2010). Tenured Radical provides a link to the journal in this post and really, I'm quite proud of the piece, especially since I get to write about a fellow blogger (and friend!) Tami or What Tami Said .

[Aside: If you want access to the above journal, you pretty much have to have access to a university library in order to download it for free--although if you want to email me through my "View Complete Profile" link, then I'll be happy to send you a pdf copy]

I was also recently contacted by Leslie Bernstein Rojas, a reporter and editor/writer of the blog MULTI-AMERICAN: Immigration and cultural fusion in the new Southern California (it's affiliated with the local NPR station 89.3 KPCC) because she wanted to confirm that I was, indeed, the author of the post "We ARE a Mixed Race America" and because she wanted to quote from this post (which you can see here).

I definitely recommend checking out Leslie's blog--and Leslie was really lovely to talk to on the phone, once I got past my surprise that she was contacting me in my campus office about this blog--but of course I always knew it was very easy to figure out who I was through the magic of Google's mighty search engine. Which is the reason I've decided to link to these pieces that clearly show who I am. While I don't want anything I write in this blog to be affiliated with the university I currently teach at (hence why I'll continue to use the moniker "Southern U" and while I don't want to "out" people near and dear to me (like my partner, Southern Man), I have decided that I should be proud to be associated with this blog and should feel free to cross-post to other links and articles that will give away my "identity" so to speak.

So the last things I'll leave you with are plugs for the blogs of two colleague-friends. The first is a friend, "Ivy Dilettante" (not zher real name) who has an eponymous blog, The Ivy Dilettante, which is a very helpful blog about applying to ivy league schools from the perspective of someone who has both attended and currently teaches at an ivy league school. Please check it out--it's well written and definitely, for any parents who aspire to have their children attend an ivy league institution, it's a MUST READ.

Speaking of parents who want to get their kids into an ivy league school--the final word, I think, in the Amy Chua runaway train wreck, is this post by Timothy Yu, "Paper Tiger Mother: On Amy Chua." This is by far and away the BEST response to Amy Chua--and he HAS read the book. Way to go Tim!

Rabbit, Rabbit! Happy New Year!!!

2011-02-04T11:50:00.003-05:00

So yesterday marked the first day of the lunar new year, the year of the golden rabbit (as celebrated in Chinese culture) or the year of the cat (if you are Vietnamese).

Many Asian cultures celebrate the new year according to the lunar calendar, but the Chinese may be unique in having 15 days devoted to this holiday, which is a combination of Christmas, New Year's, Mother's Day, Father's Day, and the Fourth of July all wrapped up in one. Actually, that's not *quite* accurate either, but it's hard to emphasize the importance of this holiday in American terms. Suffice it to say, while I am Chinese American and grew up in California, this was still a much bigger holiday in my household than Christmas, at least in terms of its family significance.

[By the way, a great essay about the meaning of Chinese New Year and living in the Chinese diaspora was published in The Toronto Star (click here) -- thanks to my cousin "I" for the link!]

If you're wondering what the Year of the Rabbit holds for all of us, here's what we have to look forward to, courtesy of The Holiday Spot:

A placid year, very much welcomed and needed after the ferocious year of the Tiger. We should go off to some quiet spot to lick our wounds and get some rest after all the battles of the previous year.

Good taste and refinement will shine on everything and people will acknowledge that persuasion is better than force. A congenial time in which diplomacy, international relations and politics will be given a front seat again. We will act with discretion and make reasonable concessions without too much difficulty.

A time to watch out that we do not become too indulgent. The influence of the Rabbit tends to spoil those who like too much comfort and thus impair their effectiveness and sense of duty.

Law and order will be lax; rules and regulations will not be rigidly enforced. No one seems very inclined to bother with these unpleasant realities. They are busy enjoying themselves, entertaining others or simply taking it easy. The scene is quiet and calm, even deteriorating to the point of somnolence. We will all have a tendency to put off disagreeable tasks as long as possible

Money can be made without too much labor. Our life style will be languid and leisurely as we allow ourselves the luxuries we have always craved for. A temperate year with unhurried pace. For once, it may seem possible for us to be carefree and happy without too many annoyances.

So Happy New Year everyone! I, for one, certainly am glad to be done with the year of the Tiger--it WAS a fierce year for me and others--a little more placidity is something I'll treasure this year.

Also, for all you dog lovers out there, the second day of the Chinese New Year is noted for daughters to return "home" to visit their birthparents AND to celebrate dogs because today is celebrated as the birthdate of the first dog. So Happy Birthday to all dogs everywhere, especially my beloved "B"!

We ARE a Mixed Race America

2011-01-30T13:05:00.002-05:00

There is an article in the New York Times Sunday edition entitled, "Race Remixed: Black? White? Asian? More Young Americans Chose All of the Above." The journalist interviewed several members of University of Maryland's Multiracial and Biracial Student Association on their choice to identify as mixed race and on the prevalence of others, especially younger Americans, having the freedom to identify as multi- rather than mono-racial.

And if you are a regular reader of this blog, the article is not going to come as a surprise; rather, it will be affirmation of something that you and I have known for quite some time. That the U.S. is (and has always been) a multiracial space. I suppose what seems new is the freedom with which people are choosing to identify as mixed race. That the idea that one must only choose a singular race out of loyalty or social stigma or ethnic nationalism no longer rules the day.

However, the academic in me can't help but think about these choices occurring in the backdrop of a university setting. In other words, do mixed-race people feel as much choice as to how they identify if they are living in mono-racial areas where there may be a stigma to identifying as mixed-race or perhaps more accurately, to not identify within a particular racial or ethnic sphere would mean having charges of being a "sell out" or "acting white" leaving one in a socially vulnerable position--and would this also be exacerbated by one's other, potentially minoritizing, identities, like being gay/lesbian/bisexual/non-Christian/atheist/other-abled/working-class/poor?

I'm not trying to take away from the Times piece nor from the community and identities that the mixed race college students of University of Maryland are forging as a shared collectivity of "others" who reject one-drop rule prescriptions of who they should be and how they should identify. And I think the piece was good to remind us that the idea of a mixed race American or multiracial people does not spell an end to racism or racial divisions--being multi-racial does not mean that one transcends race or has racism licked. Being multiracial becomes another identity that people are free to choose in the 21st century. I guess I just want to remind us that our ability to choose is never as simple as making the choice--that it is often constrained by other factors.

Anyway, let me just end with two other pieces from the article. First, this interactive family tree--you can see (and hear) Lou Diamond Phillips (that's right, of La Bamba fame!) describe his mixed race family tree and you can develop one of your own (click here) and finally there's this video essay about this new generation of mixed race Americans:

I'm glad I have a Chinese Mom

2011-01-19T14:29:00.005-05:00

There's been a lot of hubbub in the mainstream media and in the blogosphere about the Wall Street Journal article that came out about a week ago. If the title of my post isn't a tip off, then let me give you the link here and tell you the title: "Why Chinese Mothers are Superior" by Yale Law School professor, Amy Chua. This essay is, apparently, an amalgamation from various parts of Chua's latest book, Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, with the very log subtitle -- which you can read on the book jacket below:

Various friends and family members have sent me the link to the original WSJ essay and have asked my opinion about the whole fracas. I've seen New York Times pieces decrying Chua and her style of parenting (including this thoughtful piece by David Brooks--a commentator I don't normally agree with), comments in various forums that call Chua's mothering child abuse. I've seen Chua interviewed on CNN and other news outlets telling us that she's received death threats and that the piece in the WSJ didn't accurately represent the book and her perspective--that it was never meant to be a handbook or an ethnic nationalist treatise; rather, it was a memoir about the trials and tribulations of her parenting, particularly the conflicts she faced with her younger daughter. I've read blog posts by Asian American women recounting the trauma of their own childhood experiences with a Chinese (or Asian) parent and two very thoughtful pieces by erin Khue Ninh (lit professor at my alma mater) and Jeff Yang (SF Chronicle) about the fallout in the Asian American community on Amy Chua.

So what do I think about Chua, specifically about her book Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother and whether the WSJ piece accurately reflected her parenting ideology?

The first disclaimer is that I haven't read the book, and I'm not sure that I'll get around to reading it anytime soon. I do think that she was mis-represented in the WSJ piece--that they crafted an essay that was designed to provoke and push buttons (and boy did it!). However, I also think that in a million years I wouldn't parent the way Chua parents. Mostly because I don't think that training your kids to be #1 is necessarily a path to happiness. Greatness, sure--but I value happiness over greatness. Yet I also agree with parts of the WSJ article that there does seem to be a sense of entitlement and indulgence in certain kids and you have to wonder if this is a result of a laxity in parenting.

[Aside: As one currently child-less, I recognize that any remarks I make about parenting will be potentially discounted right off the bat, but I've been teaching for a while now and this is my opinion about some of the freshman I see coming into the classroom--especially the ones whose parents contact me on behalf of their student to talk about academic issues--which in my line of work is a big NO NO]

So I'm not really going to comment on the book so much as the firestorm that has happened in the wake of the WSJ article. And one thing that strikes me about all of the comments is the disturbing return to Asian invasion rhetoric, one that renders China and all things Chinese as mechanical, robotic, unimaginative, repetitive, in terms suggestive of a horde (or for you Sci-fi fans, the borg) versus American exceptionalism which emphasizes creativity, individuality, and most of all, the pursuit of happiness, as granted to us in our Declaration of Independence. In other words, stereotypes of model minority, Asian Americans as perpetual foreigners, yellow peril, geeky Asian violin players are reinforced in the WSJ piece.

And while my colleague in academia has spoken about the dangers of the WSJ piece and Chua's emphasis on overachievement (even if she has learned a lesson from it) on the Asian immigrant parents who may see her book as an endorsement for strict parenting and excellence and achievement at all costs, what I think is truly sad and insidious about the fallout from Chua are all the Chinese and Chinese American moms, immigrant and American born, who are not the stereotype of the strict Asian parent.

Case in point: my own mother.

My mom (and my Dad) never pushed me to get straight A's. I was allowed and encouraged to go to sleepovers and to have sleepovers at my home. I was allowed and encouraged to pursue extracurricular activities like tennis and badminton and track (and I even dabbled in being a bluebird--but it didn't take). On my own initiative I played the violin for 7 years and piano for 3 years, and my parents didn't complain when I stopped playing both instruments in high school once I became more involved in student body politics. I watched plenty of t.v. (and also read plenty of books, largely fiction), and my parents didn't pressure me to attend an ivy league or tier 1 school or to major in something "practical" or to become an M.D.

In short, what Chua's article and book do is to obscure women like my mother who aren't the stereotype of the Asian mother who insists on excellence at all costs and who creates pressure-cooker tension in the home for her children. My mother never berated or insulted me--never threw homemade birthday cards back at me--she allowed me to make my own decisions and choices while still giving me structure and guidance.

Did we fight? Of course! Was it a perfect mother-daughter relationship? No way! But my mother is certainly a strong-willed woman who helped me become a strong-willed woman -- and she did this through a combination of structure and trust. So I just want everyone to remember that not all of us had overly strict Chinese mothers who made our lives miserable and forced us into doing things we didn't want to do for the same of excellence. I, for one, am very glad and very proud of the Chinese American Mom who raised me and who instilled in me a desire to succeed not by pushing me but by loving me unconditionally.

T.G.I.F. -- a Mixed Race America

2011-01-14T11:37:00.004-05:00

By now we have all heard about what unfolded in Tucson, AZ--the horror of the mass shooting, the grief and mourning, private and public. And we've also heard a lot of finger pointing--charges of amped up rhetoric, and irony of ironies, people who use amped up rhetoric as a defensive maneuver to say that they aren't using amped up rhetoric (we all know I'm talking about Sarah Palin here, right?).

I've thought a lot about what I wanted to write, with respect to the shootings in Tucson, the rhetoric that has emerged, the politics that are being played out. And then I watched the memorial service this past Wednesday, and I was really struck by the words of Daniel Hernandez, the 20-year old intern who is credited with helping to save Rep. Gabrielle Gifford's life. In his remarks at the memorial, which were amazingly poised and articulate given his relative youth, the size/scope of the venue, and the emotion of the service.

[I mean, can you imagine yourself at twenty standing in front of a podium facing 14,000 people, countless cameras, and with the President of the United States sitting front and center?]

Hernandez rejected, humbly and respectfully, the title of hero, instead calling the public/civil servants and first responders and medical staff of the hospital the real heroes in this event.

And what I was struck by, as they panned the crowd to show Rep. Gifford's surgeon, Dr. Peter Rhee, was how important a mixed-race America is to the cit of Tucson. Gifford's is Jewish. Hernandez is Latino. Rhee is Asian American. The six victims who died were Caucasian.

[Note: I'm assuming this based on their photos, but truthfully I don't know how any of them identified or whether some of them may have been Jewish or mixed race in ways that aren't apparent using only ocular evidence]

Arizona, as Sheriff Clarence Dupnik noted, has been a flashpoint for debates about immigration and ethnic studies--a state in which bigotry and prejudice have become so clearly institutionalized through anti-immigration measures (and rhetoric) and anti-Ethnic Studies measures. The not only tacit but clear white supremacist values that these measures promote make Arizona seem like it's this bastion of intolerance.

But then you have Daniel Hernandez. And you have Gabrielle Giffords. And the members of her synagogue. And you have Peter Rhee. All visions of a mixed race Arizona. A mixed race America. And thank goodness that we do.

I was going to give Daniel Hernandez the T.G.I.F. (The Great Impossible Feat Award) solo--because he certainly deserves it, despite what he says about not being a hero.

[Aside: He was one of the first responders on the scene--he was THE first responder, in fact, and while it's impossible to say for certain, I believe that had he not rushed to her aid immediately and had the presence of mind (and the skills of his nursing assistance class) to staunch her wound and keep her calm, then I don't think she'd be making the progress that she is currently making. He really is a remarkable young man--Time magazine did a piece on him (click here) and among the other things about Daniel that have not been reported on since it's not the most important things to note about him in light of his actions of the past week, is that he is a politically active, gay, Latino man. Yet these markers of identity--being politically active (he volunteered on the Clinton 2008 campaign and then for Gifford's re-election campaign after Clinton dropped out), being gay and being Latino are important for the world to recognize not only because it's part of who he is, but it's a reminder, in the midst of all the polemical debates about gay marriage, about queer rights, about Ethnic Studies and the importance of Chicano/Latino history in Arizona, that Daniel Hernandez's very existence is a refutation to the arguments of sealing borders and teaching white-washed and sanitized versions of history and not recognizing the rights of queer people everywhere.]

But I think since Daniel doesn't want to be singled out as a hero, that what we should be grateful for, what shouldn't seem impossible but sometimes is, is the fact that we live in a mixed race America.

Thank goodness we live in a mixed race America. Thank goodness for people like Daniel Hernandez. And thank goodness for organizations like Ben's Bells--a non-profit in Tucson whose message and purpose is to spread kindness to strangers. Click here on the link to find out more about what they do and watch this piece from the New York Times:

Changing words . . . charged words

2011-01-05T12:33:00.003-05:00

I'm an English professor who blogs, so it's not going to come as a surprise to read that I believe words matter A LOT. Words allow us to voice and describe our experiences--words allow us to shape and name experiences. Words, quite literally, have helped us to survive. And as someone who respects the written word, especially the published written word in book form, I take seriously anyone who wants to change or amend or (GASP) should dare plagiarize anyone else's words.

So this morning when I opened my email, I found an article sent to me by a family member, "G" about a scholar who is releasing versions of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer in which the word "nigger" is replaced by the word "slave" and in which "Injun Joe" is not "Indian Joe" and "half-breed" is now referred to as "half-blood."

In other words, potentially racially offensive epithets/slurs have been taken out and replaced with more benign versions.

Can everyone hear Mark Twain rolling over in his grave?

The scholar in question, Alan Gribben, believes that by taking out charged words, especially THE charged word, "nigger," readers (and school districts/teachers/professors) will be more likely to teach these particular Twain works to their students. After all, Huck Finn is one of the most widely banned books in the country, because of its invocation (219 times) of the word "nigger."

Gribbens move, while seemingly well intentioned, seems absolutely wrong-headed. First, I don't think you should ever edit someone else's writing without their permission, and since Twain is dead, we should let well enough alone. Second, I think it's possible to teach Huck Finn and have a discussion of the overuse of the word "nigger" and what Twain may have been doing by having his title character evoke this epithet again and again--in other words, Huck using this word has everything to do with his class status, his regional location, and not necessarily with his attitude about black slaves or African Americans. Third, if we don't read Huck Finn anymore, the world will continue turning on its access--I am not someone who believes in preserving the "canon" of American literature--so making a more "user-friendly" version of Huck Finn just to get people to read it seems ... stupid. Do I think it's great literature? Maybe. Am I glad I read it? I needed to read it as someone who studies American literature. Can students read other works of American literature, ones that deal with slavery and the South without having the word "nigger" appear? Sure...but understanding this charged word in context--understanding the nature of racial slurs, and the extremely provocative and violent nature of this particular racist epithet, would be very educational.

Finally, I've deliberately NOT referred to the "N" word in this blog post--which I know is a controversial thing to do and something that I'm trying to sort out with how I feel about offensive language/phrases and my own usage. In general, my stance as a teacher has been to talk about the slur in context--and to explain to students that when it appears in the text, it is not meant to offend them but that we need to understand the racial climate in which the word appears. When John Steinbeck writes about "Chinks" and "Chinamen" or other authors invoke phrases like "wet back" or "half breed" or "fag"-- they may or may not reflect the attitude of the author but they definitely convey information about the character who is voicing those slurs. And within the context of the story, that is important. It also tells us something about the social attitudes and cultural milieu of the setting of the work.

But the word "nigger"--IS the "N" word--and what I mean by that is, it's not like the other slurs I just listed above. There is no other equivalent. Not even a word I absolutely hate, "cunt," comes close to the level of linguistic violence that I think the word "nigger" does. No other slur has also had such a varied and controversial current usage--popping up frequently in the lyrics of African American hip hop and rap artists, used by black comedians, and invoked, colloquially, among African Americans in terms of affection and familiarity. If you do a google search, you will come across a very disturbing array of links (I didn't click on any of them--they were too scary) to jokes--which I think is very telling because jokes are one of the insidious ways in which we, as a culture, can keep people under surveillance. No one wants to be the butt of a joke--to be made fun of--to be laughed at. And this word in particular has been invoked, very specifically, by white Americans to target black Americans. Randall Kennedy, a Harvard law professor, has written a book detailing the history of this word, and you can click here on an insightful review of it and the slur.

So should we retire the word? Should we only refer to "nigger" as the "N" word? Does even reading the word in the context of this blog post seem too jarring, too upsetting, too violent? I certainly think that it should never be used as a racial slur. I also believe that as someone who has never had to endure the pain of being called this particular racial epithet, I can't speak to the psychic damage of hearing it or seeing it in print, and the potentially recuperative power of using it as an in-group expression of solidarity. But I also wonder about masking the word by saying "N" word in its place. As someone who believes in being honest in language, saying "N" word seems to give it a power that I don't want the word to have anymore.

But let me end with this bit of stand up by Danny Glover, who does have some opinions about who should and should not ever use this word:

Jokes.com

Donald Glover - Can't Say It

comedians.comedycentral.com

Jokes

Joke of the Day

Funny Jokes

New Year's Resolutions

2011-01-01T12:44:00.003-05:00

I know I've been an intermittent blogger since April 2010 when I received my cancer diagnosis. In that time I've gone through chemotherapy, surgery, and physical rehabilitation--and lots of time in doctor's offices (and lots more time in waiting rooms).

In two weeks I will be back in the classroom teaching, and I'm excited about being back on campus and getting back into a routine. I'm also determined to get back on a work schedule--which includes more regular blogging in this space. Because I have things to say, observations to make, conversations I hope to have in the comments section on this blog.

So here's what I resolve for 2011:

*To blog at least once a week--even if that post is simply to be a series of links to other blogs or articles. After all, linking to things others are saying/thinking about is just as important as trying to voice my own thoughts in this space.

*To finish a draft of my current book project -- I've got a *very* rough draft of one chapter and need to work on the last chapter.

*To keep exercising. Even if it just means walking for half an hour--but really, I want to train for the 4 mile race I signed up for in April.

Ok, that's it. Pretty simple goals--just 3--so should be achievable.

Happy 2011 everyone--I'm hoping that it's a healthy and happy one for us all!

150 years of PTSD OR South Carolina's selective historical memory

2010-12-21T08:45:00.004-05:00

For regular readers, you know that I've *slowly* been doing a series where I answer questions from students at Private U. about being Asian American (it was from a workshop I did back in November--click here for the original post). But I'm interrupting that series for something very topical in time and to my location, namely, the sesquicentennial (150) celebrations that are being planned (and in one instance, that took place) in commemoration of the Civil War.

Very specifically, 150 years ago yesterday, on Dec. 20, 1860, South Carolina became the first state in the confederacy to secede from the Union, issuing an "Ordinance of Secession" and eventually signing a "Declaration of Secession" and finally issuing a call to other states entitled, "The Address of the people of South Carolina, assembled in Convention, to the people of the Slaveholding States of the United States."

As the last call makes clear, South Carolina saw itself as a slaveholding state, saw its neighbors as slaveholding states, and understood the common cause that it had with other states in the Confederacy as slaveholding entities. In other words, the southern Confederacy broke with the union over states' rights...and that right was the right to OWN SLAVES. South Carolina in particular was upset that the North was not going to return fugitive slaves. Throughout the Ordinance and the Declaration and the Address, there are continuous references to rights of slave owners and slave holding states. This was about the economics, society, and culture of the South...all of which was predicated on African American enslavement. Because we're not just talking about abstract slavery--where anyone could be enslaved so that it became an issue of class--we're talking about a system of racial oppression and hierachy, or literal white supremacy.

Yet for many descendants of ex-Confederate soldiers, it's like there's been generational PTSD passed down over the last 150 years that has caused white Southerners to romanticize the past, to justify the loss of life, and to conveniently forget or overlook the historic reality of exactly WHY the Civil War was fought. And in the case of certain white native South Carolinians--it's a selective amnesia about why and how the ordinance of secession came about. Because in Charleston last night, the Sons of Confederate Veterans held a ball last night, a Secession Gala where 300 guests paid $100/ticket to enjoy a 45 minute theatrical re-enactment of secession, and where table sponsors had the honor of having their picture taken with the original declaration. For the organizers and guests who attended the gala, South Carolina's secession should be celebrated as a way to honor the issue of states' rights and the valor of the confederate soldiers who gave their lives for their state, refusing to see any connection to slavery or asserting that the celebration was not a "racial" issue.

Well, this seems patently absurd. Of COURSE it's racial! Who we decided should be enslaved made it racial. And if the demographics of those at the ball and those who protested the ball are any indication, then YES, it IS a racial issue. I mean, I (obviously) didn't attend the gala, so I can't say, for certain, that everyone who attended was white (but The Guardian can) but I have to say that in the hour that I was outside Gaillard Auditorium (and yes, I'm in Charleston as we speak) I didn't see any people of color enter the auditorium--and the organizers, dressed in period costume, all appeared to be white. Whereas those of us joining in the unity rally and protest of the ball were a mixed group of black, white, and in the case of myself and another woman, Asian American protesters.

[Note: There may have been American Indian and Latino and of course mixed race and multiracial folks in attendance at the protest--but at first glance, the crowd appeared to be largely white and black, especially if you didn't notice that I or the other Asian American woman was there, as this Boston Globe reporter clearly didn't since he only noted the "black and white" protesters in attendance]

I wasn't able to march with the protesters since my energy level is still very low post-chemo and surgery (I've heard it can take a year after chemo to feel "normal" again--sigh), but Southern Man and I were there, clapping and yelling and affirming the various speakers--we were a small part of the hundred folk who had gathered--and we got to see for ourselves the audacity of the sons of Confederate veterans and the guests who showed up in period costume--like the woman in The Guardian photo. When we saw her enter the auditorium I whispered to Southern Man,

"Where do you think she got that hoop skirt? Antebellum R Us?"

I wish I had brought my computer cable with me to upload photos from the protest to my laptop to show you some of the signs and some of the ridiculousness--like a band that played there who call themselves "Unreconstructed," the tag line on their trailer reads: "Keeping memories alive"

Ummm....which ones? I'd say that for the African American descendants of enslaved people, the memories of bondage and servitude and oppression are NOT ones they want to keep alive. And for women, particularly poor women? And for queer folks who were in the closet (as any queer people, black or white had to have been in the closet in the antebellum period--hell, throughout the 19th and most of the 20th century)? Or anyone who wasn't wealthy and white who had political power and wanted to keep their economic interests? What kind of memories do you want to keep alive for anyone who wasn't a wealthy white man or woman?

But let me leave the last word with Larry Wilmore, who notes that it's not just politically correct to say that the Civil War was fought over the issue of slavery, it's CORRECT correct!

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart

Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c

The South's Secession Commemoration

www.thedailyshow.com

Daily Show Full Episodes

Political Humor & Satire Blog

The Daily Show on Facebook

Another stab at answering questions about race & Asian Americans

2010-11-23T11:34:00.007-05:00

So I'm continuing to answer some questions from some great students I met while doing a workshop on race at Private U. last week. In my previous blog post, I answered 2 questions and now I'm going to tackle another two.

[Note: I hadn't intended on so much of a lag between posts but I came down with a virus and have literally been in bed the last 5 days--ACK! I'm still in bed but I have a bit more energy right now, although my doc told me that my symptoms would probably last for another week--SIGH]

1) How is having "Asian" become another overachieving racial group, like white, different from "Latino/Hispanic" or "Black? being so?

Hmmmm... I think that there are maybe 2 questions being asked (or implied). One is the assumption that Asian Americans are an "overachieving racial group" who are like "whites" (or Caucasian Americans). The second is that Asian Americans and Caucasian Americans, because of their "overachieving" status are different from "Latino/Hispanic" and "black/African American."

So first a word about terminology for newer readers of this blog. I never capitalized or use quotation marks around racial groups (yeah, I know, I just did above, but it was more in quoting from the question) like white and black Americans. And I pretty much use African American and black interchangeably, like I use white and Caucasian interchangeably. I do capitalize references to geographic spaces, hence Asian American. And I also use interchangeably Native American and Indian American (which is capitalized, I know--in general we capitalize those phrases like we capitalize Latino). I should also note that the question didn't ask about American Indians, a notable omission this time of year; unfortunately Native Americans are often left out of the conversation on race because folks think they aren't statistically relevant or they appear to be invisible. And finally I don't use the term "Hispanic"--which is a government word used to describe people whose ancestry is from South America and the Caribbean of Spanish origin. I use the term "Latino," instead, because I think it recognizes the hybridity of influences (beyond Spain) of people who are of Latin American and South American and Caribbean heritage.

OK now on to the question. I guess I'd want to rephrase it--why are Asian Americans and white Americans PERCEIVED as overachieving, and by distinction, why AREN'T African Americans/Latinos (and I'd add American Indians) PERCEIVED as overachieving (and by implication are often believed to be the opposite--lazy/not hard working, not successful).

Because I think it's about perception. The model minority myth that haunts Asian Americans declares that Asians in America are an overachieving "model" minority. But there are several problems with this myth. First, all stereotypes are damaging, in my opinion, because they are 2-dimensional portraits of people. Second, it's not true--not all Asian Americans are uber-smart/throwing off the Econ curve/science nerds. I, myself, squeaked by with a B- in pre-Calculus (and that was my last math class in high school--I took stats in college). I we WERE this incredible minority, then I pose this simple question: why aren't there more Asian American university and college presidents? If we are so good at school, wouldn't you think that we'd make it to the highest rank in the field of higher education? If we're so good at math and with money, why aren't Asian Americans dominating in the ranks of CEO's of U.S. Fortune 500 conpanies? And if we are so high achieving, why aren't we more visible/public? How many famous Asian Americans can you actually name (and I mean Asian AMERICANS.

Finally, believing that Asian Americans are high achieving, like white Americans, implies that black and Latino Americans are not--that they are NOT the model minority (and I suppose I should note that while we see many white Americans who are high achieving, I suspect that there are also many white Americans who aren't).

I guess what I'm saying is that in our current society when white American heterosexual hegemony predominates, this means that white Americans get to be rendered a fully human and individual whereas other racial minorities somehow have to "represent" or speak on behalf or act on behalf of the entire race.

2) Given that each "Asian American" group is so distinct is it accurate to classify them all into one group? Is that group too heterogeneous?

Short answer: yes. The term "Asian American" isn't a very efficient or even in many cases effective phrase to encompass a group as large as the disparate and diverse ethnicities that comprise the racial label Asian American. However, I use it and I think we need to use it and think about it because of the ways that people of Asian ancestry have been racialized and subject to institutional forces of racism (and oppressed by white supremacy/white privilege) throughout U.S. history.

In other words, racial categories exist because the system or racism needs racial categories to exist. It'd be great if we could get rid of racial categories, but that time won't happen until we can get rid of racism (see my post on this topic on the right sidebar "Getting Rid of Race"). I know folks want to see it as the other way around, but the truth is, the system of racism needs racial categories. So until we can get rid of racial inequities I don't think we get rid of racial categories.

Will the category of Asian American mutate? I think it already is. And I think depending on who you talk to, they either feel affinity with this category or they soundly reject it-and I think that's as it should be--I mean, I may believe and understand racism and racialization as a historic and institutional process that has power at its root, but my parents, who identify strongly with being Chinese (or Chinese American) may not believe that they have anything in common with their Vietnamese or Filipino neighbors. And so they may not feel like they need that label and may reject it.

And honestly, whether someone identifies as Asian American or with any racial category or not, doesn't matter to me. What matters to me is that we work towards ending systems of inequity, racism being a big one to tackle--so we need as many folks on board with this project of any and all racial/ethnic categories to work on ending this form of oppression.

Questions about Asian American movements & quotas

2010-11-16T18:12:00.003-05:00

So as I noted in yesterday's post, I am going to be taking the time to answer some questions that students at Private U. had written down on index cards--I'm tackling 2 today and will try to get to the rest in three or more blog posts. I am abashed that time did not allow us to have a longer conversation about these questions and other important issues related to race/racism/white privilege, but I'm hoping that some of the students at the workshop as well as anyone else in the blogosphere, will feel emboldened to chime in with their comments/observations/questions. Just one word of caution to any new commenters--please respect the rules on the right hand side of this blog, and please respect my pseudononymous identity on this blog--thanks!

1) Why do colleges have a ceiling/quota on us? Why was the SAT's emphasis on math decreased and English increased?

I'm not sure if this was a question specifically about Private U. or colleges/universities in general. Public vs. private colleges have different criteria and restrictions/guidelines that they must follow in terms of how many students they are allowed to admit in-state vs. out of state, international vs. U.S., legacy admits, need based admits, athletic admits, etc...

Inherent in the question it the assumption that there are more Asian American college applicants than there are spaces--in other words, unlike with "other" minority groups (African American/Latino/American Indian) Asian Americans are being treated like they are "white" and certain restrictions are being put on the number of Asian American students being admitted. The other assumption in the SAT question is that an emphasis on English vs. Math is automatically going to hurt Asian students.

So let me tackle the SAT question first. I don't know if that's true--in other words, I have not read nor heard anyone in Southern U.'s office of admission that there is a change of emphasis in terms of the SAT Verbal vs. Math sections. If there has, in fact, been a national trend to de-emphasize math scores, I'd be suspicious and find it odd since math and science are being so heavily touted as something that every college student should focus on (and that U.S. students, K-college are woefully behind in terms of their student peers around the globe).

I also think the SAT question assumes Asian Americans are going to spank all other racial groups in math but that they will be at a disadvantage in terms of their verbal skills. All I can say to that is I'm a walking refutation of this since in both my SATs and GRE scores, I *squeaked* by a decent # in math but excelled in the verbal section (no surprise there I guess).

In terms of quotas, I will say that trying to keep colleges balanced in terms of diversity is very important--racial and ethnic diversity of course, but also gender/sexuality, class/region/religion. I also think that this is a red herring in terms of the model minority myth--and the U.C. system is a perfect case study for this. Over 10 years ago, the U.C. system abolished affirmative action--and the assumption was that every U.C. campus would be overrun with Asian students. But the reality of what happened was that Asian American admits did not increase in huge #s--in fact, if you broke it down by ethnicity, certain Asian American ethnic groups decreased in terms of admissions--among Filipinos, Vietnamese, Cambodians, Hmong, and Laotians. So getting rid of racial quotas means that there is a decrease in black and Latino students (which definitely happened in the U.C. case) but no appreciable increase in Asian American freshmen--the reality is, getting rid of affirmative action seems only to benefit white college students.

2) Did pan-Asian political/social movement launch the first articulation of "Asian American" as a race, or did other earlier factors/influence cause it?

Yes. Very specifically, two graduate students, Emma Gee and Yuji Ichioka, coined the phrase as a way to reject and replace the term "Oriental": as Ichioka notes, an Asian American “gives a damn about his life, his work, his beliefs, and is willing to do almost anything to help Orientals become Asian Americans” (qtd in Chinese America: The Untold Story of America's Oldest New Community Kwong and Miscevic 267-268).

But it's important to understand that political consciousness did not just suddenly appear in the 1960s--it was galvanized by the political foment of the 1960s, particularly the civil rights struggles of the African American community, but the group soon to be known as "Asian American" were agitating in legal and extralegal ways from the time of the first waves of Asian-ethnic immigration--Chinese men fought racist laws taxing them for their queues, Japanese men fought for the right of naturalization, Filipino men fought for the right to be recognized as American citizens (I could go on and on, but I'd recommend reading a work of Asian American history -- any by Ronald Takaki, Sucheng Chan, or Gary Okihiro are quite exceptional).

Anyway, my main point is that while Asian American as a term, a racial group, became solidified in the 1960s (and as part of the anti-war agitations/civil right fomentations), many other factors were in place to allow for that political agitation to come to fruition (the injustices of the Japanese American internment foremost among them as well).

OK, that's it for today's post--I'll try to blog again with more questions (and answers) tomorrow--but please feel free to leave a comment and start the conversation!

The necessity of common spaces to talk about race

2010-11-15T20:16:00.003-05:00

So I just got back tonight from leading a workshop on Asian Americans and the politics of racialization at a college that I'll call Private U. I was invited by one of Private U's Asian American groups, and I was really awed by how many students showed up. What followed in the hour and a half of the workshop was a really wonderful conversation about race and Asian Americans. At least I tried to make it or intended it to be a conversation. Yet I confess that the professor in me tended to be a bit long-winded in my answers and because it was only meant to be an hour-long workshop, I also talked at folks more than I wanted to--because there were key points I really wanted to get to, like the fact that race is a social construct but that just because it's not linked to genes or blood doesn't mean it's not "real"--it's as real as money, and we ALL know how real money is (and what I mean by that is that the dollar bill in your wallet is a piece of paper but we have all agreed to believe that the piece of paper has a value linked to a worldwide monetary system--but at the end of the day, it's a piece of paper--just ask folks who have lived through a revolution and total upheaval of their way of life).

Anyway, what I wanted to do in this blogspace is to share some of the questions that students wrote down on notecards--my idea was that I wanted the students to drive the conversation and that they should write down topics that they wanted to talk about and we would discuss these. But because of time constraints, we only got to address a single question: Is the model minority stereotype ultimately beneficial to Asian Americans?

So regular readers of Mixed Race America, I beg your patience and invite your participation. I'm going to be posting the questions that I got below and in the following few days, I'll be attempting to answer some of these question or more specifically, to create a dialogue and invite conversation around these questions. Hopefully some of Private U's students will chime in--the ones who went to the workshop. But of course I welcome everyone in the blogosphere to weigh in--so long as they follow the guidelines on the right hand side bar.

And for any Private U. students, please note that while you know my full identity, on this blog I'm pseudononymous, so if you can edit your remarks to refer to your college as "Private U" and to not mention my full name and my university affiliation, I'd appreciate that!

OK, here are the questions [and please note, I am not editing them--I am quoting them in full and staying true to the punctuation/phrasing]:

*How are mixed race Asians classified--socially, internally, personally: white/Asian American, black/Asian American, Hispanic/Asian American?

*Did pan-Asian political/social movement launch the first articulation of "Asian American" as a race, or did other earlier factors/influence cause it?

*Why do colleges have a ceiling/quota on us? Why was the SAT's emphasis on math decreased and English increased?

*Given that each "Asian American" group is so distinct is it accurate to classify them all into one group? Is that group too heterogeneous?

*How is having "Asian" become another overachieving racial group, like white, different from "Latino/Hispanic" or "Black? being so?

*We're in this racial middle as Asian Americans, what do you see as the future for Asian/Americans in the U.S. (politically & socially)?

*How do Asian Americans solve the "perpetual foreigner" problem?

*What is the relationship between the established Asian-American community and the wave of post-racialism? How are the young people participating in and rejecting the notion of racial identity?

T.G.I.F. Joel Burns and the "It Gets Better" project

2010-11-11T11:50:00.001-05:00

Well the midterm elections are over, and I suppose I could write about that--but I think I'd rather focus on the positives (or at least not get into a rambling post about the state of politics in this nation and what it may or may not reflect about the state of race/racism in this nation) and so let me turn to a different topic. Because it's Friday, and this blog is overdue for another

T.G.I.F.: The Great Impossible Feat award

So let me introduce you to Joel Burns. Many of you probably know about Mr. Burns and the video that went viral on YouTube of his thirteen minute address to the Ft. Worth City Council (where he serves as a member). Burns had been haunted by the rash of suicides by adolescents and young adults that were the result of bullying and/or a lack of support because of their sexual orientation (or in one case, perceived sexual orientation). Inspired by the "It Gets Better Project"--an on-line movement of celebrities and everyday people speaking directly into the camera and telling young people, specifically young queer teens, that life will get better--that suicide is not the answer to their current pain, Joel Burns used his time at the city council meeting to address the rash of suicides and share his own story about bullying and suicide with the people of Ft. Worth and as it turned out, the world:

[Joel Burns speaking to the Ft. Worth City Council]

The aftermath of Burns' speech is told by Burns to different news programs and talk shows, like CNN and The Ellen DeGeneres show:

[Joel Burns being interviewed on CNN]

[Joel Burns on The Ellen DeGeneres Show]

One of the things I was particularly struck by is the anecdote that Burns shared about one of the most poignant and remarkable stories that emerged after his video went viral. And that is the correspondence he has had with a friend of a gay Australian teen who had been contemplating suicide that very week--and after being shown Burns's video by his friend, he realized that there was hope and he didn't go through with his plan.

One person really can make a difference. And for that, Joel Burns, the "It Gets Better Project" and the many queer adolescents and teens who struggle with finding a place for themselves--who daily endure with taunts and threats--they all deserve a T.G.I.F. award.

Because sometimes just surviving is an incredible feat in itself.

[UPDATE: 12:21pm: I just saw this very moving 2-minute spot by Tim Gunn (of Project Runway Fame) where he shares his own story of failed suicide and gives a plug for The Trevor Project--which is this AMAZING website/resource/suicide hotline for GLBTQ people, especially for youth. So here's Tim Gunn's "It Gets Better" video below:]

The scariest thing about Halloween is the Tea Party

2010-10-31T22:03:00.003-04:00

In honor of Halloween I thought I'd share something that scares the hell out of me--the idea that members of the Tea Party will actually win their elections and be serving in Congress! For anyone who wants to know how to combat the rhetoric of the Tea Party, see this very clever (and funny) video below:

I wish they had been more trenchant in their skewering of the racist comments made by the Tea Party animated animal--how can anyone let comments like "lazy black and lazy Mexicans" go without pointing out the inherent racism and bigotry? Perhaps comments like that are too obviously racist. At any rate, my favorite line is when the figure questioning the Tea Partier says:

"Words have meanings attached to them"

Because you hear phrases like "fascist" and "socialist" and "tax and spend" thrown around by some folks and wonder if they really understand what these terms mean.

All of which is a way of saying, please GO OUT AND VOTE ON NOVEMBER 2! THE MIDTERM ELECTIONS REALLY DO MATTER!!!

[Health Update: My bi-lateral mastectomy surgery was textbook, and I'm recuperating/healing/resting at home with the loving care of my Mom and Southern Man. Although I have to say that if I were more mobile, I'd probably go dressed up as a human pink ribbon...wouldn't that be something! Wonder if anyone would get the irony...]

Random observations related and unrelated to this blog

2010-10-18T00:35:00.007-04:00

It's past midnight and I'm up blogging because I'm a bit too amped up and anxious to sleep just yet. I'll be having bi-lateral (double) mastectomy surgery in about 12 hours, which means I won't be blogging for a good two weeks as my body will be healing and it just won't be physically comfortable for me to be sitting down with my laptop.

I feel like I've really neglected this blog. Granted, back in May when I first disclosed that I had been diagnosed with stage 2 breast cancer, I did explain that my blogging on this site would take a backseat to my health issues. And as any regular reader of this blog (are there any of you out there anymore???) knows, my blogging has been very irregular. Which is a shame, because there are certainly many bloggable events that have happened--I mean, there's the midterm elections and all the crazy stuff out there (can anyone say "Paladino"???).

And then there's the musings I've been having about issues of intersectionality, which I have blogged about early last month.

So I guess what I thought I'd leave you all with during my two week hiatus from blogging are a series of random observations and thoughts that I'm having right at this moment (warning: not sure how coherent they will be -- remember, the emphasis is on "random"):

*I saw The Social Network this afternoon and found it to be entertaining, although it failed the Bechdel test and made me cringe at the representation of women, particularly Asian American women. Apparently we are smart and hot and love to give blow jobs to geeky Harvard guys in bathroom stalls (preferably geeky Jewish Harvard guys--they are apparently creating an algorithm for why Asian women hook up with Jewish white guys). Also, apparently mixed-race Asian American women are especially "hot" in the film but also especially silent or nearly silent.

*I think Carl Paladino is an asshole. I think Rachel Maddow does too, even though she doesn't use the phrase "asshole."

*The Surrendered by Chang-rae Lee is one of the most beautiful, disturbing, haunting, lyrical, and captivating novels that I've read in recent memory. I could not put it down, even though at moments I was horrified by what I was reading. But I was horrified because these things happened--Lee writes about events that occurred during the Japanese occupation of Manchuria and the Korean war, and lets face it, while he is writing fiction, we KNOW that horrific things have happened during times of war (and during these particular events of the 20th C.). None-the-less, this is a novel that I highly recommend. It is not for the faint of heart. But I'd almost say it's required reading for anyone who cares about great literature and about the state of humanity in the 20th C.

*I wish people would really "think" before they buy all the pink ribbon stuff that is taking over seemingly every piece of merchandising and every major advertisement space in every major women's magazine during the month of October. First of all, just because something has a pink ribbon on it doesn't mean that a substantial percentage (or any percentage at all) will go to a reputable breast cancer charity. Second, National Breast Cancer Awareness Month (NBCAM) was started in 1985 by Astra Zeneca, a pharmeceutical company that makes tomoxifen, a hormone therapy that many women are put on for breast cancer (I'll be starting my own regimen post-surgery for 5 years). Astra Zeneca is owned by Imperial Chemical -- a company that makes herbicides--ones that have been documented as containing carcinogens that (wait for it...) contribute to cancer (including breast cancer). Third, we are well beyond issues of "awareness"--I mean, I think we all know someone who has breast cancer; after all, 1 in 8 women are diagnosed with breast cancer. And the Komen foundation, and others, have done a great job of turning the pink ribbon into a symbol of education. But what we REALLY need is activism--we need to fight for MORE government regulation of clean air and water. We need to hold corporations accountable for their polluting practices. 41% of Americans will develop cancer in their lifetimes and most of it is linked to the environment. While a cure for breast cancer, hell for ALL cancer would be great, what we need is for people not to get cancer in the first place. Fourth, while in terms of sheer #s, breast cancer is the 2nd leading cause of cancer related deaths for women (only lung cancer kills more women), ovarian cancer is often detected at a much later stage and thus the number of survivors is smaller--and while it's great that breast cancer has gotten so much attention (and resources) we shouldn't let the pink ribbon overshadow other cancers and other diseases impacting women's health (like heart disease).

*Finally, I'm a big Glee fan and loved this bit on last week's show:

204 sing @ Yahoo! Video

That's all she wrote!

It's National Coming Out Day (but not for Christopher Columbus)

2010-10-11T13:23:00.002-04:00

Sorry for the radio silence from my end. Both due to fatigue from the end of chemo as well as preparation for upcoming surgery (I'll be having a bi-lateral (double) mastectomy surgery in exactly a week from now--which means blog silence for about 2 weeks as I recover) I haven't felt like blogging a lot. I can also blame part of it on chemo brain--what folks who go through chemo describe as a kind of fogginess and inability to concentrate and remember details. I am hopeful that by November I can be back to my regular blogging schedule--or at least contributing to weekly posts if not twice or thrice weekly posts.

There's certainly a lot to blog about--midterm elections, new novels I've been reading like The Surrendered by Chang-rae Lee, The Lady Matador's Hotel by Cristina Garcia, and Bitter in the Mouth by Monique Truong. And then there's the tragedies of the last month--the suicides of queer teens across the nation.

Which brings me to today.

The Human Rights Campaign is sponsoring a National Coming Out Day for today, Monday, October 11.

[Aside: It also happens to be Columbus Day, but as a friend of mine, "A" wrote on her Facebook page, in celebration of Columbus Day you should go into a stranger's house and claim it as your own.]

Whether you are gay or lesbian or straight, please take a moment to acknowledge today as national coming out day. The Human Rights Campaign has a list of activities and resources on their website (click here) to celebrate this day and to help folks who haven't come out to their family, their friends, or co-workers/acquaintances with a guide or other resources to enable them to come out (safely and hopefully with the full acceptance of those who love them).

Round #8 completed -- I'm Done with Chemo!

2010-09-17T08:52:00.005-04:00

Yesterday marked my 8th and last round of chemotherapy--an ordeal I dealt with over 16 weeks, beginning June 10. I still have the side effects of the Taxol chemo drug to deal with, and there's still a bi-lateral (double) mastectomy surgery for me to cope with/recover from in a month, but for now I am celebrating the end of my chemo--what I hope to be my first and last chemotherapy treatment ever.

And so I'll just leave you with two things--a plug for my friends Greg Massa and Raquel Krach of Massa Orgnics. I first met Greg and Raquel at UCSB. In fact, I first met Greg when we were both freshmen living in the same dorm. I had the pleasure of visiting his family's rice farm one summer and was taken to a yummy Basque restaurant in the Chico area.

When Greg found out I had breast cancer, he put a carepackage in the mail to me filled with yummy, nourishing, and healing/organic food: brown rice, brown flour, almond butter, and my all-time favorite, ROASTED ALMONDS. The day I received his package was during my first round of chemo when I had just lost my taste buds and everything tasted like cardboard. For someone, like me, who not just loves to eat but who lives to eat, this was one sad state of affairs. So when I opened up Greg's gift, I didn't have much hope that I'd be able to taste anything. But LO AND BEHOLD! When I popped an almond in my mouth I experienced the sweet and nutty and roasted taste of one this almond which makes it HAND'S DOWN THE BEST ALMOND I'VE EVER TASTED IN MY LIFE.

And during the next few weeks, whenever I felt nauseous, I would pop almonds in my mouth--Massa almonds I mean--and they had both a calming effect on my stomach and also tasted good. A magic combination for anyone going through chemotherapy. I ordered 2 more pounds to make it through to the end of my chemo and am on my last handful as we speak.

But the other reason for me to plug Greg and Raquel on this blog is that theirs is truly a family that knows what the phrase "Mixed Race America" means:

This photo of the entire Massa-Krach family is taken from their farm's website, and as you can see, they are a beautiful family. What may or may not be evident is that all five children are adopted (and I'll be writing more on adoption and my own thoughts/feelings/experiences with this in posts to come). For me, Greg and Raquel's family is an inspiration--so between their responsible farming techniques, the yummy organic products that they sell, and the emphasis on sustainable living that they embody in all aspects of their lives, I just want to say that while I normally don't plug businesses on this blog, in this case I think you should at least take a look at their website--and if you end up ordering their rice or flour or especially some yummy almonds, you won't regret it!

Finally, let me leave you with a PSA from the National Breast Cancer Coalition, an advocacy group that is highly rated on Charity Navigator, who works not just to educate people about breast cancer but to ensure that research funds are being spent on actual scientific research AND they help lobby congress, especially to address the environmental toxins that contribute to about 80-90% of the cancer diagnoses in the U.S.--most people think it's genetic, but for women with breast cancer, only 10% carry the BRCA1 or BRCA2 gene--and even if you think another 10% is genetic based, that still means that 80% of us developed cancer because we live in a very technological, industrialized nation where the air we breathe and the water we drink and the plastics our food sits in could be contributing to cancerous cells growing in our bodies. I know that sounds scary, but I if you are interested, please read this article about breast cancer's link to the environment.

Responding to hate with charity and friendship

2010-09-10T18:44:00.003-04:00

Tomorrow will mark the 9th anniversary of the attacks on the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and the attempted attack on the White House.

[Aside: Although focus is almost always on Ground Zero in New York City, I think it is important to remember the people killed in the Petagon but especially in the various planes that were used in the attacks and the one plane that was successfully deterred from its White House destination, leading to the deaths of all on board.]

By now just about everyone knows the name Pastor Terry Jones and his plan to burn hundreds of copies of the Koran tomorrow (if you don't know what I'm talking about, click here for a New York Times article), as well as the waffling and last minute bartering he has been doing, linking the burning as a chip to be used to move Cordoba House--the interfaith and Islamic center that is a few blocks from the former site of the twin towers.

[Second Aside: It is REALLY important to note that it is not a mosque that is being built in lower Manhattan--it is a center that will have meeting spaces for youth groups and interfaith groups and yes a prayer room for Muslims to pray--not so unusual for lower Manhattan, especially since there was a Muslim prayer room on the 17th floor of the south tower--click here for the New York Times article.]

But rather than focus on Jones and the other voices of bigotry and Islamaphobia and hatred, I thought that a more appropriate way to observe the magnitude of our worldwide losses of tomorrow's anniversary is to actually focus on a story of charity and friendship between Christians and Muslims represented by the Heartsong Church and the neighboring Islamic Center in Memphis, TN. Essentially a year ago the pastor of the Heartsong Church, Steve Stone, learned that an Islamic Center would be built right next to the Heartsong Church, so he put up a sign that reads: "Heartsong Church welcomes Memphis Islamic Center to the neighborhood." And because the center wasn't ready in time for Ramadan observances, the leader of the center, Dr. Bashar Shala asked Pastor Stone if they could use Heartsong Church for Muslim prayer services during the month-long Ramadan observance. A true interfaith friendship--and a model for what more groups (and people) should be striving for.

For more from the Huffington Post, click here, and you can also see an interview on Keith Olberman's show with both Dr. Shala and Pastor Stone:

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Being aware of race

2010-09-05T09:54:00.004-04:00

Back on May 1, when I first announced that I had been diagnosed with breast cancer, I had thought that I would share stories about my observations about the intersections of my two new worlds: cancer and race. And I did share one story -- the horrible interaction I had with the lab tech and the comical interaction I had with the radiology fellow (where my poor left breast was flopping in and out of my gown due to my wild gesticulating of my hands, since whenever I get passionate and especially ANGRY I not only raise my voice, I throw up my arms--for the full comic account of this interaction, click here).

And now that I have chemo brain, the few anecdotes I had stored away seem to have melted away with a lot of my short term memory and focus. I can recall being in the 2nd floor waiting room of my oncologist and overhearing a conversation between two workmen who were repairing the lights on the floor. One was a twenty-something Latino man and the other was a forty-something white Southerner. The men spoke to one another in English, and seemed to have an easy going or at least collegial working relationship. An African American nurse, who seemed to know the Latino man, said something to him in Spanish, which I didn't quite catch, but it made the young man smile. His colleague smiled and the young man asked him if he spoke Spanish and the forty-something man said, "Why'd I want to learn something like that for? You won't catch me speaking Hispanic--you should speak English!"

Now, the forty-something man said all of this in a relatively good-natured way, despite the offensive nature of what he was saying. I mention this because tone and facial expression makes a big difference. The forty-something white Southerner seemed to think that he was joshing and joking around with the twenty-something Latino man. And clearly, this young man DID speak English--he also happened to speak Spanish, which seems like a BONUS in this day and age. So the forty-something's vehement declaration that "you won't catch me speaking Hispanic" speaks to his limited and worldview (as well as the inaccuracy of naming "Hispanic" as a language).

As this exchange played out, I stared at the forty-something white Southerner, who noticed me noticing him, and perhaps realizing that making these kinds of jokes on the 2nd floor of the oncology ward of the cancer hospital in front of patients of various ethnic and racial backgrounds was probably not the smartest or most sensitive thing to do, because he quickly turned back to his work and told the young man to finish up with this project and then he left, ostensibly to another work project elsewhere.

I suppose what would or could have made this more uncomfortable would be the presence of a Spanish-speaking family also in the waiting room. And I have seen Latino families, and female and male patients, both on the oncology floor as well as in the chemo waiting room. There is also a Latino receptionist who is one of a dozen people who checks in patients on the ground floor before dispersing us to the various floors--radiology, mammography, chemotherapy, oncology, hematology.

[Note: I should say that the Latino receptionist, who is very nice, is also the only person I've encountered thus far at the cancer center who has run through the "what are you?" scenario with me, guessing at first that I was Japanese and then Korean and then Filipino, before settling on Chinese--to which I finally nodded. She then told me I didn't look Chinese, which I found odd, but I didn't really feel like arguing with her--the days I have to be in the cancer center are days I'm getting chemo so I try to stay as polite as I can to everyone because inside I'm just pissed off and tired and trying NOT to take out my bad mood on the folks that work there]

I mention the Latino patients and staff that I've seen because, quite frankly, they are few and far between. Most of the people I see on the various floors are either white or black. If I had to give it a ratio, I'd say 70% white, 26% black, 2% Latino and 2% Asian (although maybe I'd tweak the white-black ratio--maybe it's 30% black and 66% white...)

But one of the most remarkable things I've found is that in the 9 chemo treatments I've had over 14 weeks, in the 4 months I have been in and out of various doctor's offices, mammography clinics, and cancer floors, I have yet to see another Asian American patient. I've had fellows come into my room who are shadowing/working with my oncologist who are South Asian American. And there is a lovely volunteer, a recent grad from Southern U. who is Asian American and who will be applying to med school this year (he lives close to the hospital). And I have seen Asian faces wearing hospital scrubs or gowns--folks who are clearly associated with the cancer hospital in some way.

[Note: I have to say that because my Mom is a retired RN and because I grew up in the SF Bay Area, my own experience with hospitals, esp. the nursing staff, is that Filipino nurses are prolific (and my mother also worked with Korean and Chinese American colleagues as well). But here in the South I have yet to see a single Asian nurse of any ethnicity, which just feels so odd....]

But I haven't seen any Asian Americans sitting in a chemo chair, waiting in any of the waiting rooms, or even wearing street clothes, like I do. In other words, in the 4 months since my cancer diagnosis, I appear to be the only Asian American cancer patient at Southern U. Cancer hospital.

Logically I know this cannot be the case. There has got to be at least ONE other Asian American patient receiving chemotherpay, right? But if there is, I haven't seen him/her. And there aren't any Asian Americans in the yoga class I go to that is dedicated for cancer patients. And I've never seen any in the Cancer resource center. I haven't even seen any Asian Americans accompanying cancer patients--in fact, there aren't many inter-racial pairings in the chemo ward. Mostly it's couples and families, which means that husbands accompany wives or vice versa, and it's pretty much been black couples and white couples and Latino couples. But I haven't seen any inter-racial couples, or even inter-racial friendships--when it has been two women, it has been two African American women or two white women.

Which makes my own presence in the chemo ward an exercise in mixed race dynamics since I have had a variety of family and friends sit with me through my infusions: my Chinese Jamaican mother, my Chinese immigrant father, my white best friend from CA, my Vietnamese American close friend from Southern U, my Chicano close friend from Seattle, and of course Southern Man. We are a striking couple, I suppose, not just because Southern Man is 6 feet tall and solidly built (he's pretty strong--he can throw me over his shoulder like a sack of potatoes--and I'm not petite) but because I don't think most people encounter another inter-racial pairing in the chemo ward, or even in the oncology floor.

Which also may explain why everyone seemed to remember my name immediately. I mean, the cancer center sees so many people daily--there are over 100 chemo bays and my best guess is that they see at least 100 people (or more) everyday. And yet after my first visit, all of the receptionists and nurses and even the person at the parking lot seemed to remember my name. And I always thought it was odd--I mean, I know it's the South and people are friendly, but this is a large Cancer hospital--a major medical center. And the only thing I can think of that makes me different and stand out is that I may, in fact, be the only Asian American cancer patient that they have, AND I'm probably the only one who has such a mixed race entourage of friends and family accompany me to my appointments.

All of which makes me wonder, is having a mixed group of friends or being in an inter-racial relationship really so unique in the 21st century in a Southern college town? Because shouldn't I be the norm rather than the outlier? Or is it just my fate to continue to be the minority--and really, why should my minority status be any different now that I have cancer?

Five years later...what have we learned?

2010-08-31T10:48:00.005-04:00

Unless you are living off the grid, by now everyone is aware that various news and media outlets have been reflecting on the state of the Gulf region, in general, and New Orleans, in particular, five years after Hurricane Katrina and the failure of the levees.

And if there was ever a topic for a blog called "Mixed Race America," it's thinking about how race impacted the rescue and reconstruction and rebuilding efforts in this region. While there was much discussion five years ago at the images of white hurricane "victims salvaging" items versus images of "black looters" with similar items (and we're talking about groceries and diapers and other necessities being taken), we should not forget to keep scrutinizing the way that racial difference and institutional racism continue to play out in subtle and not-so-subtle ways, five years later. For an example of the not-so-subtle, read this New York Times article about African Americans who were terrorized and subject to violence by whites in the aftermath of Katrina.

For an example of subtle racism, this photo journalism piece in the New York Times (see below) made me think about the role of race in this white family when I saw the Confederate flag on the truck and in the living room of the first family.

Spike Lee's latest documentary on life in post-Katrina New Orleans, If God Is Willing and Da Creek Don't Rise (a follow-up from his first series, When The Levees Broke, has received a lot of positive reviews (see this one from George Alexander on The Huffington Post). For more, see this interview of Lee below:

Finally, a group that has not received wide media coverage during and in the aftermath of Katrina are the SouthEast Asian Americans living in the gulf region. Specifically, prior to Katrina, the voices of the Vietnamese Americans living in East New Orleans, a neighborhood that was literally off the map of New Orleans, found a political voice and learned to exercise their civil rights to contest a toxic waste dump that would have been built five miles from their neighborhood. The struggle of this community to fight for the rights of their community has been documented in the wonderful film A Village Called Versailles by director Leo Chiang, and you can see a brief clip below:

A Village Called Versailles is available through Amazon, either to rent or to purchase, and you can also read more about the making of the film here.

Clearly, the aftermath of Katrina and the breaking of the levees is one that will continue to impact not only those who live in the gulf region, but hopefully all of us, especially as we work to prevent the debacle of the BP Oil disaster from happening again. I suppose I should say that we should be learning the lessons from these disasters, natural and man-made--the jury is still out on whether we really WILL learn these lessons...

Martin Luther King Jr. is rolling in his grave

2010-08-28T13:33:00.004-04:00

Back in May, Southern Man and I were playing a game with another couple, very close friends of ours. We were playing a game that is hard to describe, but there is a "mad libs" element to it and we had to fill in the blank with this sentence:

________ is the most obnoxious person in the world.

All 4 of us wrote in the same name: Glenn Beck

And as proof positive, the rally that Beck organized today, at the Lincoln Memorial, the site where Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. held a rally for black civil rights 47 years ago, should solidify that he IS the most obnoxious person in the world.

If you have been trying to ignore the doings of Glenn Beck, the Tea Party, and the aggressively conservative religious Republican right, I don't blame you--it's horrifying and frustrating and the feeling I have is of wanting to throw things at my t.v. or radio or computer because I can't BELIEVE the stupidity of what I am watching/hearing/reading. But it is always better to be informed of the doings of those you oppose on ideological/political/ethical/moral grounds.

So here's the New York Times article about the rally that Beck organized. Please note that this rally, ostensibly for all Americans and ostensibly in the spirit of Dr. King is a virtual sea of white people--not a hotbed of diversity. But of course, the Tea Party is NOT a hotbed of diversity. Which begs the question, how can a group of people be so deluded as to think that their attitudes towards race aren't part of their moral/ideological/political imperative? What kind of machinations do these folks have to do NOT to recognize the travesty of having a rally on the 47th anniversary at the site of Dr. King's famous "I Have a Dream" speech--that they have ANYTHING in common with the struggle for black enfranchisement and larger civil rights of the 1960s???!!!

AGHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!!

For more reactions to the Glenn Beck travesty, see these two New York Times opinions pieces by Charles Blow, "I Had a Nightmare" and Bob Herbert, "America is Better Than This."

Also, a friend's brother has started a website tracking the Tea Party--so if you have the stomach and the will to be informed about what those who I would categorize are NOT the readers or supporters of a blog called "Mixed Race America," I encourage you to check out the link to TeaPartyTracker.org, which is important as Timothy Egan notes, we are quickly becoming a nation of "Know Nothings."

But to return to Beck, I want to address the purported "purpose" of his rally--to bring us closer to God. Now, in the New York Times article, it does not specify which God Beck wants all Americans to get closer to, but we can all probably assume it is a very particular Christian God--and not the one embraced by Unitarians or the United Church of Christ or the Quakers (Christian organizations with very explicit social justice and/or liberal-progressive politics). I'm thinking of this because I've been disturbed at the anti-Muslim rhetoric/sentiment and especially anti-Muslim violence. Earlier this week a NYC cabdriver brutally stabbed by a passenger after learning that the man is Muslim (click here for the Huffington Post article). And the backlash against the mosque that has received a green light near the site of the former twin towers is just downright disturbing.

And I think there is a link--that this overly aggressive demand for Americans to be Christianized and that somehow citizenship and religion (and implicitly race) are all conflated so that to be a "real" American, a "good" American, one must be a Christian and to mirror the values (and the complexion) of the crowd at the Lincoln Memorial of Beck's rally--somehow all of this rhetoric is linked to the demonization of Muslims Americans, specifically, Muslims, more broadly, and anyone non-Christian (and non-white) more generally. And the rhetoric is dangerous. And although Egan, in his New York Times editorial, is right to point out the danger of people believing that Barack Obama is Muslim when he has said, time and again, that he is Christian, the other issue is, if Barack Obama WAS Muslim (as his father and his father's family was and is), what is wrong with that? Why can't we have an American president who is Muslim? What is the incomensurability or incompatability of someone's religion (or even LACK of religion) and someone's citizenship or their patriotism and loyalty to the United States?

[Update: August 31, 2010: Just read this Op-Ed piece in the New York Times by Stanley Fish and I have to say that I think it is SPOT ON, which is a rarity for me because I'm usually vehemently disagreeing with Fish on other issues. But this one really speaks to the hypocrisy of conservative right-wing rhetoric, especially related to its attacks on Islam and its particular form of hatred spewed at the proposed Islamic center in lower Manhattan]

Happy Birthday 19th Amendment!

2010-08-26T14:20:00.003-04:00

90 years ago today the 19th Amendment--the one that allowed women the right to vote--was formally ratified as part of the constitution. And so today, August 26, is officially EQUALITY DAY.

Now, I must confess that were it not from an email I received from "Women's Voices, Women Vote" I would not have realized the significance of this date--here's the text of their email:

"Ninety years ago, one mother's plea to her son helped pass the 19th Amendment by one vote and gave American women the vote. After thirty-five of the necessary thirty-six states had ratified the amendment, the battle came to Nashville, Tennessee. One young legislator, 24 year-old Harry Burns, had previously voted with the anti-suffrage forces. But a telegram from his mother urging him to vote for the amendment and for suffrage made the difference. Burns broke a 48 to 48 tie making Tennessee the 36th and deciding state to ratify. One vote does matter. Your vote matters. Today, even though women turnout at equal or great numbers than men on election day, more than one in four American women is still not registered to vote. If you're one of them, celebrate Equality Day today by visiting Women's Voices. Women's Vote website and registering to vote. If you are already registered, use your voice to talk to five women you know about the importance of voting."

Page Gardner, president of "Women's Voices, Women's Vote" also has a piece on their website that talks about the significance of Equality Day, and the debt we owe to Alice Paul, one of the leading suffragist who literally put her body on the line to fight for the right of women to vote.

There is a lot I take for granted--voting is one of them. So I appreciate WVWV reminding me that this right was won by the struggles and labor and, in some cases, blood of other women.

As for the phrase "Equality Day," well, my own thought is: shouldn't every day be Equality Day? Not just in terms of gender, but really shouldn't we recognize the rights of all need to be central and thus we should really work to make everyday EQUALITY DAY for everyone.

"If Liza Minelli can marry 2 gay men, can't I marry 1?"

2010-08-20T10:13:00.005-04:00

Saw this and thought it is a good reminder that we can use humor to protest what is surely the absurd--and one of the most absurd things I can think of is in the 21st century not allowing consenting adults to marry the consenting adult of their choice--in other words, WE NEED TO HAVE GAY AND LESBIAN COUPLES BE ABLE TO MARRY NOW!

Who, exactly, is a "minority"?

2010-08-11T09:08:00.003-04:00

First, for my long time readers/followers, I know I don't need to apologize for nearly a month's blogging silence--as I noted in a June post, because of my cancer diagnosis and chemo treatments, I knew that I wouldn't be blogging on a regular basis. However, I had hoped to be blogging more, because it would be a sign that I was feeling OK. But the truth is, the first round of chemo I was on (a particularly hard drug combo known as "AC") really had me laid out, mostly due to nausea and fatigue, but it also left my brain feeling mushy and my concentration levels hit an all time low--I wasn't able to read fiction most days and resorted to watching movies and t.v. series streamed on Netflix (thank GOODNESS for Netflix!).

This second round of chemo, Taxol, is mercifully easier on my system--no nausea and less brain fog (I finally got to finish a novel I started a month ago, Edgar Sawtelle--and just to let you know, normally it would take me a week to read a 400 page novel while teaching full time--it would take 2 days to read a 400 page novel if I was on vacation). The Taxol hasn't been wonderful--there is some pretty severe joint and muscle pain I've had to weather, and the cumulative effects of the chemo means I'm pretty tired all the time and my brain, while better, is still somewhat foggy. Plus, I'm bald.

I'm sharing these personal details with you because I've been thinking a lot about what it means for me to have cancer and for me to be going through chemo (and I know I've written about some of that already). And I've been thinking a lot about how I've been marked by my cancer diagnosis--how others have reacted to me--and how I think about myself, now.

Because I'm different now. I'm part of a new minority of people (largely women) who have received a breast cancer diagnosis. And in a few months I will be part of a subset minority of women who will no longer have breasts (I'll be having a bi-lateral/double mastectomy sometime in October). And like other parts of my identity, this new category of breast cancer "survivor" (I put this in quotes because lets be honest, it remains to be seen whether I'll be in the 86% of people with stage 2 cancer who "survive" or part of the 14% who don't), is one that I will carry around with me, but unlike my race and gender, it won't always be so visibly marked on my body, unless someone sees me without my hair or, in the future, without my breasts.

When I've written about being a "minority" before (and for the record, I hate that term as it is often used as a synonym for people of color/non-white people) it has largely been in the context of race, since that's often how it is deployed in popular discourse--those who are "minorities" in the U.S. are non-white people. It suggests a statistical status (whites comprise a majority over non-whites) as well as a power status (whites are in positions of power, institutionally, over non-whites). It also suggests that there is a norm--to be a white American is to be "normal" (and we can add the rest of the hegemonic imperative here: straight, male, middle-class, Protestant/Christian). And I've periodically written about the ways in which it is problematic to establish whiteness and maleness as the "norm" in our society.

But now that I'm inhabiting a body that has cancer, I've been thinking about something more basic to my identity, to all of our identities: health. And I admit, I took my health for granted. I also admit that it isn't until I am no longer occupying a healthy body that I've started to think about the new minority group I belong to--those of us who occupy bodies that aren't healthy, that are somehow marred or scarred or impaired or non-normative.

And it strikes me that at some point, we will all become "minorities" in terms of our health--that occupying a body that is or will become non-normative is actually a majority situation not a minority situation. And yet, what we largely see in our culture is an emphasis on the healthy body--a narrative that ignores or overshadows or downplays those of us who occupy bodies that are not healthy.

And when we do get narratives of the non-healthy body, it usually emphasizes a kind of romanticism or stoicism or sentimentality that I really cannot identify with. I guess I'm thinking of movies like Love Story or Dying Young or My Sister's Keeper, where you have these characters who have a fatal illness (and cancer is a very popular potentially fatal and lingering illness to portray in sensational form) help other characters (and hence the audience) learn valuable life lessons through the wisdom that they've gleaned from their illness.

[Aside: Now, this wouldn't be a blog called Mixed Race America if I didn't point out that the above 3 films all feature white protagonists who are stoically dying--and that I honestly cannot recall a character in film or television who is a person of color who has cancer--so if anyone can help me out here, please chime in--and I mean a SIGNIFICANT character of color, not just "patient #2" or a patient of the week on House.]

So maybe this is a sign that I still have chemo brain because I'm not sure, exactly, where I'm going with this post, other than to suggest that I've been recently re-thinking what it means to be a "minority," for me personally but also for our culture more generally. I think it's less about statistics than about power--after all, we need only look to South Africa to realize this. But I also wonder if this can also be a chance for those of us who occupy more "minoritized" identities to reappropriate the word or at least the discussion around being a minority--being non-normative. Because really, how many of us are part of the "norm" nowadays?

Why the phrase "half-blood" needs serious interrogation

2010-07-17T09:12:00.003-04:00

This morning I woke up and did my daily routine: I went for a walk (1-2 miles -- good for keeping me healthy esp. with the chemo treatments, and just as an f.y.i. aside, the treatments are taking their toll on me, in terms of my level of fatigue--which is high (sigh) and which is one reason I haven't been blogging as regularly as I like), I drank some water, and I open up my laptop to read The New York Times. And the first thing that caught my eye this morning was this blurb from the article, "At Camp, Make-Believe Worlds Spring Off the Page":

"Organized role-playing literary camps, like the weeklong Camp Half-Blood in Brooklyn, are sprouting up around the nation."
[the emphasis in bold is my doing]

The article describes a trend for summer camps based on literary themes, most notably those centered around fantasy children/young adult works of fiction, like the Harry Potter novels or the Percy Jackson and the Olympian series.

Apparently the premise of the Percy Jackson series (and this I've gleaned from the article and from the trailers to the movie of the same name that came out last summer) is that Percy is a young kid who finds out that his Mom slept with a god and so Percy is a demi-god in the making--a "half-blood" if you will. So this Brooklyn summer camp divides up these kids into different "half-blood" groups--like some are the half-human/half-divine offspring of Apollo or of Ares.

[Note: they probably didn't choose some of the more "problematic" gods, like what would the group look like and what would they DO if they were the offspring of Bacchus or Hades? And apparently all the kids in this particular camp are boys, but it still doesn't make sense why they don't seem to have an Artemis group or a Hera group, although Aphrodite may also be problematic in a different way...]

So I get it. The "half-blood" designation is supposed to refer to the fact that these kids are pretending (like their literary counterpart) to be half human and half god.

But is it just me or does anyone else see A LOT OF PROBLEMS with the use of the phrase "half-blood"?

First of all, these kids are pretending that their Mom shacked up with a god--and that it's perfectly normative for these male gods to have fathered multiple children with various women who have apparently all cuckolded their partners or the "human" fathers of these children. Now, I know: I'm being nit-picky here. And I don't think that any of these kids are really confused or that it's sending a bad message about their particular mothers. But I do think that the idea that you can be a male god and have sex with any number of women, human or divine, is part of what gives license to male privilege and the idea that it's OK for men to have multiple sex partners and to father multiple children without also PARENTING them. Because I mean look at poor Percy--he grows up not knowing who his real Dad is until he's 12. So where was his old man? Off doing the divine thing? And he gets cut slack because he's a god? Who was changing Percy's diaper and teaching him to walk and taking him to school and providing for his basic material and emotional needs? THE SINGLE MOM.

Seems like there's a ripe human contemporary counterpart in the making if we think about male celebrities. I mean, don't we hear stories all the time, esp. in the world of music, about rock stars or even someone like Ravi Shankar, who leave behind bits of their seed in the form of actual children who grow up and, in the case of Norah Jones, becomes a major recording artist following in the footsteps of the father who fathered but didn't parent her.

Anyway, the real reason I find the phrase "half-blood" problematic is that it's an offensive term that has typically been used as a racial slur against mixed-race people and very specifically against mixed American Indian people.

For example, if you google "half blood definition" you will find the following from both Answer.com and The Free Dictionary [which gets their source from the American Heritage Dictionary]:

half blood also half-blood (hfbld, häf-)
n.

1.
a. The relationship existing between persons having only one parent in common.
b. A person existing in such a relationship.

2. Offensive A person of mixed racial descent, especially a person of Native American and white parentage.
[emphasis in bold is mine]

3. A half-blooded domestic animal.

And according to the Oxford English Dictionary, "half-blood" has at its core the idea that there is both a quantifiable ("half") notion of blood AND a qualifiable (as in hierarchical) idea embedded in the phrase "half-blood":

"half-blooded a., born of different races; spec. of superior blood or race by one parent only."
[again, emphasis in bold is mine]

It just makes me cringe to think that these kids are going to these "half-blood" camps and will be referring to themselves as "half-bloods" without understanding the long and painful racial/racist history behind that term AND without understanding how problematic it is to split one's "blood" and the not-so-implicit connotations of blood (and really, wherever you see the word "blood" you should insert the word "race") as purity--of being able to determine which bloodline is better than the other.

Better to be a divine than to be human--sure, that's easy to see. Who wouldn't want to be able to fly or have supernatural powers. But we don't live in a fantasy world--and I just think it's too easy to to take that thinking to the next level--how much better to be white (the normative, the majority, the race that is associated with beauty and power and prowess) than to be "other"--one of those hyphenated, brown-skinned, minority Americans.

And finally, (and forgive me because what follows next is my attempt to be ironic through a self-conscious use of racial slurs--which I KNOW are offensive and hurtful, but I am trying to slam home a point with a blunt tool) but I just can't see any camp or book publisher being OK with titles like: Harry Potter and the Chink Princess or Percy Jackson and His Nigger Friends or Encyclopedia Brown and the Case of the Lost Kikes.

But on second thought, maybe "half-blood" isn't as offensive a term as these other racial slurs...maybe it'd be more like the equivalent of Harry Potter and the Oriental Princess or Percy Jackson and His Negro Friends, in which case I wouldn't put it past any mainstream publishing house to go with these titles...esp. "Oriental."

Anyway, if your child comes home proclaiming to be a "half-blood," it may just be time to sit him/her down and have a talk about language. I mean, I know language changes, and there's a movement to reclaim phrases. But last time I checked, large groups of Indian American activists were NOT agitating to use the phrase "half-blood" as a term of empowerment in the way that gay and lesbian activists have tried to take back the term "queer."

DOMA I hope you go DOWN!

2010-07-12T08:03:00.004-04:00

Recently a landmark ruling in Massachusetts made by Judge Joseph L. Tauro (a federal judge in that state) stated that there was never a rational basis for DOMA (Defense of Marriage Act) which claims that a marriage should be between a man and a woman. Judge Tauro, in one of the two rulings he presided over, claimed that the definition of marriage under DOMA violates the equal-protection provisions in the constitution for gay and lesbian couples wishing to marry. There are two articles from the weekend New York Times that discuss the ramifications for this ruling, an editorial "Defining Marriage," and a piece that discusses the ramifications for states' rights groups (like those tea party folks and a group called 10th Amendment), "Basis on Ruling for Gay Marriage Stirs Debate."

I know not all queer people care about this issue. In fact, I have friends and acquaintances who firmly believe that their identities as gay and lesbian and queer folk preclude them from entering into an institution that is seen as so rabidly heteronormative (and perhaps with certain class and cultural markers that they are uncomfortable with as well--the whole wedding thing for example).

However, I also have friends who have had commitment ceremonies, who have gotten married in Connecticut and Hawaii and Vermont and California (pre Prop-8). And I know that what they want is to simply have the same rights as every other person in the nation--to marry the person that they love. To join in the institution of marriage, for better or for worse, with all the baggage that comes with marriage that is both heartwarming and challenging. To receive the institutional and legal benefits that comes with marriage (and believe me, now that I have cancer and have been in and out of hospitals signing various waiver forms about whether I should be resuscitated and who will make these decisions and who is allowed to see me in the immediate post-op room, being married comes in handy--before, when we were living together, I had notarized forms designating Southern Man as the person to make these kinds of decisions, but we all know about situations like Terry Schaivo...)

Anyway, thanks to my friend "J" I watched this clip about the legal challenge to Prop 8 and thought I should share it here, because I really dropped the ball in recognizing June as Gay and Lesbian (and Queer) awareness month. I also dropped the ball with Asian Pacific Awareness Month (that was May). Mea Culpa. Although given my own resistance to just naming a single month to concentrate on these issues, I'd like to think that from time to time you'll just see a post discussing these issues (and others, and the intersections of these topics) rather than just containing all my queer themed posts to the month of June.

Rehabilitation or Gentrification or just simply surviving?

2010-07-09T09:19:00.003-04:00

A few days ago I noticed that one of the pop-up ads on The New York Times from Levi Strauss talked about a town called Braddock, PA who were "answering the call mend what needs mending and build what's there to build." I'm not sure why I decided to follow the link--I usually avoid these ads. But I think it was the invocation of "pioneer" (Braddock is described as a town of pioneers) that had me intrigued. So I found this short piece on the Levi site:

We Are Workers: Episode 1.. The Seeds of Change

Which then got me to googling about Braddock, and I found this CBS piece about the town and its mayor, John Fetterman:

Watch CBS News Videos Online

Now, one of the things that struck me from reading the article on the CBS site and watching the above video is the quote from the town council president, Jessee Brown, who admits that he doesn't see eye to eye with Fetterman and believes he is "overstepping his boundaries," caring more for his own self-image than the welfare of the town, with Brown adding the following:

"For some reason he's come to Braddock, which is a predominantly Afro-American community, that he seem to want to be the white savior for this community, and I just feel different."

A heavy charge, to be sure, yet one that seems completely valid. I mean, it was something that struck me and that I wondered about in the Levi ad. That the central figures in the town of Braddock, the talking heads in the documentary piece, are white townspeople, and in a few cases, folks who are not from Braddock but who have come to the town because they see something inspirational in it--in rehabilitating the buildings. They see something worth saving--and the emphasis seems to be on the physical structures--the decaying buildings and abandoned homes. Two figures in particular in the Levi short are young, 20-something, white hipsters, who are clearly there with good intentions--with wanting to help and make a difference. Yet, I was struck by the ways in which black and white townspeople shared equal billing in the ad--actually, the black voices did not seem to share equal billing--the white voices seemed to predominate the Levi spot, so that it wasn't until watching the CBS piece that there was confirmation that Braddock has a sizable black population.

According to the 2000 census (and I got this info from the wikipedia site on Braddock) white townspeople account for 30% and black townspeople account for 66%.

Yet you don't get this demographic feel from the Levi shot. It appears to be either 50/50 or 60/40, with white voices and perspectives and faces predominating over black voices, perspectives, and faces. The CBS shot is a bit more balanced--and it's good that they included Jesse Brown, who may have an axe to grind that is personal rather than political--and who is clearly in the minority in terms of his opinion of Fetterman, because Fetterman won the last mayoral race in a landslide and the people of Braddock, African American and white, seem to like the attention that the town is getting (Levi Strauss is donating $1 million to its revitalization efforts and other investors in the Pittsburgh area are pitching in to get Braddock back on its feet).

So here's what I'm wondering. Given just how depressed Braddock is--this town that has 3x the poverty rate as the national average. And given how much help it needs, is Levi coming in and other investors a sign of gentrification, which in social justice circles often becomes a code word for pushing out brown and poor people and moving in hipster white folks with disposable incomes OR is it really a matter of rehabilitation--of trying to improve the buildings and to get a youth center and a garden and an arts center up and running because you need to feed people body and mind and to give them a sense of purpose OR is it more complicated -- that there is the danger of Fetterman becoming the white savior in this poor black town but there is also the reality that the town is in need of saving and that people are trying to survive as best they can and they need help and thus will take it in whatever form it appears. I'm not quite sure I know the answer to this--certainly John Fetterman and others who have moved to and stayed in Braddock appear to have the towns best interest at heart. And certainly the town is depressed and needs help. And certainly its residents, black and white alike, would like to see the town revitalized. I suppose the question is, what will be the cost and who will pay? Only time will tell.

Smacks of privilege . . . white privilege

2010-07-07T08:40:00.008-04:00

This morning I read an article in The New York Times titled "American Dream is Elusive for New Generation." This four page article charts the "struggles" (notice I put this word in quotation marks) of Scott Nicholson, a young 24-year old white college graduate of Colgate (small liberal arts school), who is living with his parents in a suburb outside of Boston while he looks for the right job. He has been disheartened with his job prospects during these recession years and feels that he worked hard in college, got good grades, went to a good school, and deserves a good job, one that will inspire him to work (in the article, Scott admits that he turned down a $40,000/year job with an insurance company because he saw it as "dead-end work" and that "he would hold out for a corporate position that would draw on his college training and put him, as he sees it, on the bottom rungs of a career ladder" [note: Scott majored in Poli Sci and minored in History].

Meanwhile, his grandfather and father, lamenting the lack of job opportunities available for Scott, believe that the key to Scott's success is to follow the trajectory of their respective careers: to call on the favor of friends as a way to get their foot in the door. Scott's grandfather, who fought in WWII and does not have a college degree, landed a position as a stock broker because a friend from the army had a father who owned a brokerage firm and thus offered the grandfather an entry level job as a stock broker, which he parlayed into a lucrative career. Scott's father, graduating from Babson college (a business school), also obtained his entry level position when a friend opened a factory and hired him into a mangerial position, and from this early start he is currently the general manager of a manufacturing company. Connections are how both men got ahead--and is how they hope Scott will also find career success:

“Scott has got to find somebody who knows someone,” the grandfather said, “someone who can get him to the head of the line.” [emphasis mine]

If you are reading this, you may feel a twinge of disgust for Scott, as well as his family members, and in particular his grandfather--certainly the comments on The New York Times site following this article all registered contempt for Scott turning down a $40K job and at the attitude of entitlement he and his family espouses.

What I was really struck by was the quote by the grandfather--that the solution to Scott's "dilemma" is not for him to take the $40K job or for him to take ANY job that will provide him with a salary and enable him to stop living off of his parents, but that the answer is to get a job not on his merit but because of who he knows--and that because of these connections, he will leapfrog over everyone else to get to the "head of the line."

And OF COURSE the Nicholson's feel this way...because of their class entitlement but also because of their racial entitlement (and there's probably a fair amount of gender entitlement in there as well--which the comments post-article allude to). Is it really fair for Scott Nicholson to land a job that is more than an entry level position just because of who he knows? Or because of who his father or grandfather knows? To rely on others rather than his own talents and skills? And if he is, indeed, a hard working person, then why is he content to live off of his parents rather than getting a job at Starbucks or any retail position to cover some of his expenses -- he could still search for a corporate job while holding down a retail job--it would require more energy expended on his part, but MANY MANY people do just this every day.

All I could think of when I read this article were the unseen people who were overlooked because Scott's grandfather and father had connections--because their friends hired them, and that this is supposedly the bedrock of the American Dream.

And if this is the case--if we are only supposed to get ahead and achieve the American Dream not based on our own merits but on who we know, then is it any wonder that we NEED programs like affirmative action or pipeline programs that can get students into college and into graduate programs. Because the history and legacy of institutional discrimination, of racism, of bigotry and prejudice, is not going to be wiped out overnight. The people overlooked from jobs were often people who were not "friends" with those who owned brokerage firms and factories. The brown skinned people. The working class people. Women. People with accents. People with last names that are hard to pronounce.

It seems to me that what is happening to Scott Nicholson is happening because we passed legislation that attempted to make civil rights a reality for all people (although we still need to work on this area in terms of protecting queer Americans). Scott is supposed to be playing on a level playing field, which means that he can't just rely on the fact that he is a white male college educated young man who desires a job that makes more than $40K and that isn't what he believes is "dead-end work" (the condescension of that phrase is enough to make me want to smack him). What Scott is facing is a reality that THIS is what it's like to be trying to make it ON YOUR OWN and imagine how much harder it is for folks who have college loans (Scott's parents and grandparents paid for the college tuition at Colgate, a private university with a pretty big price tag for tuition) or whose parents are working class and can't afford to have them move back home and sit around the house not working or who have to wonder when they come to an interview and are not given a job, whether it's because of the color of their skin or their gender or sexual identity--their perceived "difference" from the mainstream culture of corporate America (which, lets face it, is dominated by white, middle-class/upper-middle class men).

The American Dream may elude Scott Nicholson, but how many people got sucker punched and overlooked throughout the past few centuries? How many people of color really had access to the American Dream?

Women writers kick ass!

2010-06-30T07:28:00.003-04:00

If only we lived in a world where this was a REAL commercial...

[tip of the hat to K & B!]

Observations on race and gender from Chemoland

2010-06-26T08:06:00.004-04:00

[Be aware: what follows is somewhat of a rant, but it's also part of my observations on going through the hospital system as fully aware that I occupy a raced and gendered body]

If you are a new time reader to this blog, I have a semi-apology to make. Usually I try to write 2-3 times a week (or at least once a week), sometimes with fillers like YouTube videos or links to other sites, but oftentimes I try to write about my observations on race--all things racial--all things dealing with the intersections of racial identity (like sexuality, gender, class, region, religion, you name it)--or just my own esoteric observations of the day based on what's going on in the news or in politics and popular culture.

However, in mid-April of this year, the week after I came back from this fantastic conference, the annual meeting of the Association of Asian American Studies (of which I am a proud member in good standing since 2000--I think I only let my membership lapse once and when Bush sent around those refund checks in the mail his last year in office I used mine for a lifetime membership with AAAS--so now I never have to pay the membership fee when I go to the conference--WOO HOO! And I used the money where I thought it would be best used--to help an organization whose mission is to educate ourselves and others about issues surrounding Asian American populations and to be a mouthpiece for anti-racism wherever we see it (most recently the organization put out a statement condemning the racism of the Arizona state legislature for their many egregious laws and resolutions).

Anyway, back to my main story. So I come back all invigorated from this conference and I have to suffer one of the most maddening and anxiety producing doctor's appointments ever. And this really minor thing happened with the mamography technician. I mean, it was a very small comment that she made--and I know, I KNOW she didn't mean anything by it. But I'm setting up this context so that you understand that I JUST got off the plane Sunday night from this amazing 4 day conference where I was immersed with scholar-activists around the nation and the globe, going to panels and hearing some amazing papers and taking part in wonderful conversations and just hanging out with the friends I only get to see once a year at this conference. And reveling in being with people who shared the same shorthand and understanding of what it means to be Asian American.

So when I had my 8am mammogram appointment (the second one in 2 weeks -- long story) I was grumpy and grouchy for several reasons (among said reasons: fearing a breast cancer diagnosis). And my nurse was one of those folks who if you turned to the word "chipper" in the dictionary, there would surely be a picture of her. She was a middle-aged, petite, white Southern lady and as perky as you could be for 8am. She was also one of these white Southern women who has decided that as short or as surly as you are, she will just get chipper and perkier by the second. Which perhaps works on 99% of the people she sees.

But not me.

Of course things got off to a bad start the minute she asked me my name--as in, "Excuse me, how do you pronounce your last name?" Now, I want to be pseudonymous on this blog, but I'm going to have you imagine all of the last names that someone who is Chinese American could possibly have--and mine was not spelled in any unusual way--it was spelled and sounds phonetically as you would imagine. It's homonym, in fact, is a very common word in the English language. So I said to her in the most deadpan way possible, "How do you think it should be pronounced?" And this woman drew out my last name (which only has one syllable) in the most tentative way possible, nearly whispering it to me (what did she think I would do if she mispronounced it--if in some oddly peverse way she had managed to completely mangle it--that I would scream at her "NO! THAT'S NOT HOW MY NAME IS PRONOUNCED???!!!" But I realized quickly that I was making her nervous. Because I am not your typical Southern woman. Anyway, I nodded my head and she breathed a sigh of relief and said, "Oh good, I just wanted to make sure because it's different."

Different from what???!!!

Because I'm Asian???!!!

WTF???!!!

So now I'm seeing red. I mean, there's a whole backstory about how the hospital didn't get all the mammogram films from the other clinic I went to 2 weeks ago (and where I spent 2 hours between the mammogram technician and the ultrasound technician having my breasts poked and prodded and squeezed every which way), and there was the maddening bureaucracy of the hospital machine (which I had wanted to avoid when I first found the lump and went to my primary care physician--I had hoped it was just some kind of benign cyst but NOPE, didn't get lucky on that score). Anyway, there was an issue about whether or not I'd be able to get the biopsy that the doctor at the clinic assured me I needed--as soon as possible.

But back to the tech. So now I'm only answering her questions in monosyllables. Because I'm feeling a bit racially targeted here. And let me clarify. I'm not saying that she behaved in a racist manner. In fact, I think she did what she thought she was supposed to do. Encounter a woman whose last name seemed "foreign" and ask for the correct pronunciation. It's just that--I just got off a plane the night before where I was at a conference where I didn't feel foreign--where I was surrounded by hundreds of other Asian Americans and where our names, funny as they may seem or sound to others, were completely within the norm in our little world.

So being asked the correct pronunciation of my two letter one syllable name just made me feel that in a state of vulnerability, with my lab coat being tied in the front not the back and the stress of having to re-do mammogram films and potentially not getting a biopsy for the lump in my left breast, well to have Nurse Chipper ask me the correct pronuncation for my name because it was "different" just made me feel she was holding up a mirror to me and saying, "See, you don't look like the women I'm used to dealing with and I'm just trying to be extra sensitive to you."

In short, it backfired.

And my clear seething (I was trying not to yell at her) clearly made her even more nervous, to the point where she went into high gear perky-rambling mode. And here's where she made tactical error #2. So, there is some low level radiation when you do a mammogram, so they always ask you if you are pregnant. Now, unbeknowst to this poor tech (and unbeknownst to all you dear readers) what Southern Man and I had been keeping semi-private is that we had been trying to get pregnant. Not for too long, just a few months, but still, it was something we were hoping for. So the tech says, "Are you pregnant?" and I know the answer to this because I just got my period so I say, "No, I'm not" And she repeats, "Are you sure?" And I say, "Yes, I'm sure."

And you would think that would be the end of discussion.

But NOOOOOOO!!!! This the Perky Tech decides this is where she can make nice with me and make me feel at ease because she says, "Oh, at least that's one piece of good news that you won't have to worry about today!"

Here is where I would have slapped her if she had been any closer to me. It took all my power and strength not to scream at her "LOOK LADY! MY PARTNER AND I HAVE BEEN ACTIVELY TRYING TO GET PREGNANT FOR A FEW MONTHS SO IT IS NOT GOOD NEWS THAT I'M NOT PREGNANT RIGHT NOW AND IT DOESN'T NOT MAKE ME LESS WORRIED IN THE EVENT I HAVE A CANCER DIAGNOSIS--CAN YOU PLEASE SHUT THE FUCK UP!"

I think she sensed that her last comment was not making me feel like she was my best buddy, so the poor woman went into this hyperdrive of constant chatter. And I mean CONSTANT chatter--about whatever it was that could come into her mind. It was like she lacked any kind of filter--whatever thought floated into her head, she said aloud to me, whether she thought it was appropriate or not.

So she starts up with a stream of noise that at first is just about the weather and the traffic and the pollen but then as she is positioning me in the mammogram machine and taking the images she starts to comment on what she sees--meaning my breast tissue--which is dense. I have dense, lumpy breasts. I've known this about my poor breasts since I was in grad school and for that reason have always been extra diligent about self-exams. So this woman tells me what I already know, that I have dense lumpy breasts. But then she goes on to say that there's nothing WRONG with having dense, lumpy breasts. Lots of women have dense, lumpy breasts and they're fine--there's not a good or a bad breast, one is not better than the other, and she's sure that mine are fine just the way they are.

Again, WTF???!!! REALLY??? You are going to prattle on about the state of my breasts and that I shouldn't feel bad that they are dense and lumpy and that they're fine just the way they are???!!!

When it was done I marched out of the mammogram office and back into the changing room, where I was supposed to wait for the doctor to tell me my results. But I was fuming, and I realized that I realized that I had left my bag of personal belongings back in the mammogram room, so I let out a loud and angry "FUCK!" as I stormed out of the waiting room to go retrieve my bag. Of course, behind me were a group of women, all in various states of undress either waiting to get their boobs smooshed or waiting to have a doctor tell them the results of the mammogram films. And I did feel a bit guilty--I was breaking all rules of Southern womanhood and decorum. The loud swearing, the stomping, the angry seething I was doing in the corner of the room.

I finally get called after about 5 minutes (probably much to these ladies relief) and was brought into a small conference room where I met with the radiologist, who happened to be a fellow working with the main radiologist (after all, I'm at a teaching hospital, so I knew that this was part of the deal). I mention this guy being a fellow not because he's not competent, per se, but because I think his bedside manner leaved a lot to be desired, perhaps because he's still in training. So the first thing he says to me, as I'm sitting across from him, angry as all get out, still in my gown that is tied in the front, so that I'm having to make sure that my right breast isn't popping out since the gown is an extra-large (all the gowns are extra large) and I'm NOT. Anyway, he's not gowned, he's fully dressed, not even in a labcoat, and he starts to go over my results, beginning with the fact that they think I may have cancer in my right breast.

Now, you have to understand, what brought me to this point was finding a lump in my left breast, one I felt myself and then was confirmed needed more imaging by my primary care physician. But nothing was said about my right breast. Yet apparently there were some abnormal calcifications that they saw on the mammogram films that they were concerned could be early stage cancer, oh and by the way, he thought I needed a biopsy so they'd have to schedule one for later.

This is when I lost it. Because it is SO DISEMPOWERING to be sitting across a conference table when I am clutching at my gown and this guy is fully dressed and he's telling me that not only should I be worried by my left breast but there's potentially cancer in my right, oh and by the way, the biopsy I'd hoped to get done that morning would need to be rescheduled for later.

So unfortunately for this poor guy, he was not dealing with a nice Southern woman who understood all the norms and manners of the region. He was dealing with a very ANGRY ASIAN WOMAN who started to rant and rave and gesticulate with my hands (because I am one of those people who talk with her hands) and I began by talking about the really humiliating and upsetting interactions with the mammogram technician and that I had WANTED to have a biopsy scheduled for today and how could they lose the mammogram films from my other clinic and what does he mean to tell me I could have breast cancer in my right breast when we had only been focused on my left breast before. And in the middle of my rant I look down and notice that my right breast is flapping in and out of the gown as I keep waving my arms up and down in front of this poor guy--who is around 6 foot tall, white, with glasses, and clearly FREAKED OUT that this woman is yelling at him in this manner.

So I grab my gown, calmly look at him, apologize for taking out all my anger and anxiety on him, but then I ask him this question: Do you ever do a breast exam in this room. He says no. I then ask him if he ever finds a reason to ask a woman to disrobe in this room for any reason. He says no. And then ever so quietly I lean in and ask him, why on EARTH, if there is no need for me to be gowned in such a manner, is he sitting across from me fully dressed telling me the news about my potential cancer and treatment options while I have to sit across from him clutching my open gown--wouldn't this suggest an automatic power differential that leaves female patients completely DISEMPOWERED???

To which he says, "I dunno" -- clearly miserable and unhappy that he had the misfortune to meet me and have to talk to me about my potential cancer.

Anyway, that's the story I'm leaving you with today. Because I haven't been blogging much about issues of race, but I have been thinking A LOT about race and gender and sexuality as I've been going through the hospital administration, from the time of my initial biopsy and then subsequent cancer diagnosis to my current chemo treatments (which I have to say, the first 5 days kick my ass and I am feeling HORRIBLE right now--nauseous, dizzy, fatigued, and generally feeling like crap, and yes they have me on a ton of meds to try to relieve my symptoms AND I'm taking acupuncture AND I'm wearing sea bands on my wrists AND I'm drinking and eating all things ginger AND I'm trying other things that, lets just say, are supposed to simultaneously help control nausea, increase appetite, and let me relax (yes, I'm literally trying EVERYTHING).

Listen, I really will try to blog about things other than my cancer and chemo. But I confess, I am pretty self-absorbed with my health, esp. the 5 days following my chemo treatment when I just feel like absolute CRAP. Plus, every time I go to the hospital, I am struck by things anew related to intersections with this blog. So I'll be trying to include those vignettes from time to time, as well as to ponder the ways in which cancer, like everything else in our world, has intersections with issues of race, gender, sexuality, class, region, but especially CLASS--in terms of education, culture, and especially socio-economic position.

Hope everyone is well--and healthy--and if you're not either of things right now, then I hope you will be well and healthy soon! That's my own hope for myself.

Please watch & circulate

2010-06-16T09:30:00.002-04:00

I've written about the importance of registering for the National Bone Marrow Registry before--especially the importance for people of color to register -- because minority registration is VERY LOW, especially in the Asian American community (only 7% of Asian Americans are registered).

I'd like to put a more personal face on this appeal--very specifically, the face of my aunt, Teri Li. Our family has created a video meant to be a direct appeal to the Asian American community. Please watch this and please circulate it among any Asian American groups/list servs/blogs that you know. It really could help save my aunt's life.

Because I've been a bad blogger and I love Star Wars

2010-06-11T08:07:00.004-04:00

Here's something I found from a friend's page--so tip of the hat to "M"--in light of World Cup Soccer/Football beginning today, I figured this was very apropos--and it is in keeping with the theme of a mixed-race America--or galaxy:

[By the way, I do plan to blog again--never fear! I had my first round of chemo yesterday and had some interesting/problematic interactions with very kind receptionists and nurses--definitely became an internal "is this a teachable" moment kind of thing--and honestly, while I can do righteous, you don't feel very righteous when someone is sticking a needle in your veins--but more on that later]

I'm not going to the chapel but I am...

2010-05-27T08:20:00.003-04:00

...going to get married tomorrow at 4pm at an undisclosed outdoor location with just immediate family (my parents and Southern Man's parents and siblings) in attendance.

[this is the graphical representation of how I feel]

While I know this is rather personal to be sharing (although as regular readers will note, I've been sharing more personal news on this blog since major life events seem to keep popping up and hitting me in the face), this particular bit of personal information is actually quite apropos of this blog because I am an Asian American woman marrying a white American man.

Even more specifically, I am a divorced, born in NYC but raised in the Bay Area of CA, Chinese ancestry, Jamaican culturally identified, transplanted to the southern U.S. feminist scholar-activist marrying a born and raised in the U.S. South Italian American/Scotch-Irish American no-longer-practicing/former-alterboy-Catholic, fluent-in-Spanish white ally.

Our household and now our combined extended families are truly a mixture of various races, ethnicities, cultural and religious influences, and sexual and gender identities.

So I'll be busy picking up folks from the airport, finalizing details on all the festivities this weekend, and just plain enjoying myself because I'm with those nearest and dearest to me celebrating the union of myself and Southern Man, who is an exceptionally amazing person.

When the dust settles I'll try to come back with something interesting and insightful. Unfortunately it will coincide with the beginning of a new chapter of my life: chemotherapy (yep, that begins the week following the wedding--sigh).

But that's to worry about next week--for now, I'm just enjoying myself!

Why we need a passport to enter Arizona

2010-05-19T20:11:00.003-04:00

So you know I've been self absorbed with health issues because I haven't blogged about Arizona yet. To be honest, because my diagnosis of breast cancer came right before the madness of Arizona's double-doozy laws: the anti-immigrant, "lets-make-everyone-carry-papers" law and the anti-ethnic studies "lets-make-everyone-say-nice-things-about-white-people" law.

But I just read this article in The New York Times and then followed the link to the Talking Points Memo (both are specifically about the anti-ethnic studies law and especially about the bill's sponsor, Tom Horne, and I just have to say

HOLY FUCK!

Let me repeat this:

HOLY FUCK!

[Aside: Yes, I swear now (actually, I always swear, I just tried not to do it in this space). I'm sorry--it's one of the things about me post-breast-cancer-diagnosis that I seem not to be able to help or rather choose not to self-censor. I do apologize to anyone who may be offended by my strong language, but I'm at a place where I feel certain events call for strong language, and my cancer and what's going on in Arizona seem to warrant these kind of expletives right now]

I don't even know WHERE TO BEGIN.

I guess with what is so messed up with the bill, which:

"Prohibits a school district or charter school from including in its program of instruction any courses or classes that:

•Promote the overthrow of the United States government.

•Promote resentment toward a race or class of people.

•Are designed primarily for pupils of a particular ethnic group.

•Advocate ethnic solidarity instead of the treatment of pupils as individuals."

WHAT THE FUCK???!!!

OK. So I guess they aren't going to teach the history of the Civil War since the confederates were exactly looking for the overthrow of the U.S. government. And I suppose this also means that we can't teach history that comes from Texas textbooks since all of it is geared for white Americans of a conservative nature (point #3). As for promoting resentment toward a race or class of people, well, I guess they are going to be teaching a lot of social justice classes to help against promoting resentment toward a race or class of people because the current way of teaching history or social issues seems to only promote a sense of resentment against people of color and poor people--and shall we now say that the curriculum is going to be queer friendly since most public school curriculums have not been so queer friendly--and yet clearly Arizona wants people not to promote resentment of different classes of people, right?

As for treating people as individuals rather than as ethnic blocs, again, I suppose they are going to be heavily emphasizing white privilege and white supremacy as a way to understand how people of color have not been seen, traditionally, as INDIVIDUALS and only been counted as a MASS of people in which white Americans were not and continue not to be seen as a raced and classed and ethnicized group of people.

Of course, all of the above is the OPPOSITE of what Mr. Horne had in mind. He apparently has a big axe to grind, specifically, with Mexican Americans. And I gotta say, Mr. Horne clearly needs to have a sense of REAL history to understand that to discount Mexican American history or to divorce it from Arizona history or U.S. history is like saying we should discount the revolutionary war or the Louisiana Purchase or Civil War history (the war of northern aggression as some would say south of the Mason-Dixon line). Because parts of Arizona used to BE Mexico--so what the hell is Horne afraid of? That people will learn THE TRUTH???!!!

Sometimes there are grey areas--times when we aren't sure if we should use the dreaded "R" word. And sometimes it's clear:

Tom Horne is a racist. This bill is racist. All of this is evidence of institutionalized state racism.

Any questions?

P.S. The title of the post is meant to convey that I think that what is going on in Arizona is so fucked up right now that it seems to be it's own country and that maybe EVERYONE who lives in Arizona should be the ones who should carry papers because they are the ones who need a passport to enter the rest of the 49 states of the union. And yes, I know how simplistic that is to say--and I suppose I'm not counting the people in Arizona who are unhappy with both bills, but it just seems SO FUCKED UP that I wanted to convey that Arizona seems to be its own freakish little white-supremacist state right now.

MRA Book Review: Ann Patchett's Run

2010-05-11T16:52:00.003-04:00

One of the pleasures of taking a time off from life (and I definitely feel like I am taking a time-out. I know for some people, a vacation means sight seeing and becoming edified and going places and doing things. My ideal vacation has always been about being still--about the ability to do nothing and to have no obligations other than to myself and the call of the ocean and sand, since my ideal vacations always take place near the sea), is that I get to do a lot of pleasure reading. Or even if it's reading that may intersect with my research interests, it's still a pleasure to read contemporary American fiction.

Which brings me to today's book review: Run by Ann Patchett.

I must confess that this is the first Patchett novel I have read. She's most acclaimed for her fourth novel (the one that immediately precedes this one, Bel Canto). And certainly it is on my "to read" list--it has been for a while, but especially now that I've finished Run (which I read in a 24 hour time span--I could not put it down and Patchett's lyricism make the book a delight to read), I will be sure to check out Bel Canto.

But besides being an enjoyable piece of contemporary fiction, this novel is appropriate for Mixed Race America because at its heart is a family, the Doyle's who are comprised of the senior Doyle, former mayor of Boston, his biological son Sullivan, who shares the same read hair as his deceased mother, Bernadette, and then there are the two brothers that Doyle and Bernadette adopt, Tip and Teddy, named after those iconic Boston politicians, Tip O'Neill and Ted Kennedy. And, indeed, the novel (which is set in the South End neighborhood of Boston) is about politics. It is also about transracial adoption--about adoption in general--and about how we find kinship and connection with those we do not share blood with.

Although one of the New York Times book reviews quite rightly faults Patchett for not delving more deeply into the reasons behind the boys being put up for adoption, Patchett does not shy away from race in the way that another reviewer accuses her of doing. Instead, I think Patchett drops in self-conscious observations throughout that make clear that she knows what kinds of assumptions and tensions others may bring or believe in seeing an older white man who is the father of two university-aged sons (one goes to Harvard, the other to Northeastern). Yet it doesn't belabor that tension and actually shows the tension to be something outside the relationship among Doyle and his sons. This isn't to say that the boys, raised in a privileged white background, are oblivious to race and the intersections with class. In fact, at one point the elder adopted son, Tip, acknowledges very directly that part of his difference from other black Bostonians comes precisely from his privileged class and educational status. It is one thing to be a poor Black citizen in Boston; it is another to be a wealthy Black citizen connected to a former mayor of Boston.

Perhaps it is the mood I am in--that my analytical lens has been tuned down. But I really did find Patchett's novel luminous and just simply a good read. I'd love to hear someone else's take on it--perhaps my rose colored lens aren't allowing me to be more critical of this work. Or perhaps Patchett's novel really is a page turner that let me briefly transport myself back to Boston (and perhaps nostalgically I liked reading about my old stomping ground). Or perhaps it is this. That sometimes it's nice to read a novel in which race is both the central point of the novel and absolutely marginal at the same time. And that is perhaps what I find most refreshing about Run--not that Patchett isn't aware of race and racism but that it doesn't necessarily inform the entiriety of her work--that these two young men get to be both young African American men but also (and perhaps more importantly) a devout Catholic (Teddy), a budding scientist (Tip), and brothers who loved their adopted mother devoutly and who treat their father and older brother were respect and affection--whose lives are defined, but not solely, but the color of their skin and whose personalities make them into individual character rather than caricatures.