I Do

Have you ever noticed that people hate being told that they can't do something? Little kids know this all too well; they hear "no" from adults (particularly their parents). And I think that as we grow up, we often retain the knee jerk reaction of hearing "no" because it feels as if someone is infantalizing us or controlling us.

And if you add on irrational prejudices as the rationale for why we are told no, well I think very few of us would be able to keep our tempers. And yet, the truth is, so many people for such a long time in our nation's history have been told "No."

*Women were once told they couldn't vote.

*African Americans were once told where they had to sit using public transportation.

*American Indians were once told where they could live.

*People of different races were once told they could not marry.

If you have never known what it's like to be told "no" as an adult--just stop and think for a minute what it would be like to have something that seems so fundamental to everyone else--like the right to vote, the right to public transportation, the right to live where you choose, the right to marry--and imagine if someone said, "Sorry--everyone else can do these things, but based on this one part of who you are, we're barring you."

Which is why I'm calling attention, again, to how great and yet how ordinary California's recent decision to overturn the gay marriage ban is--how great and ordinary the recent weddings that are taking place all over California truly are.

Because the right to marry--the right to decide you want to join in matrimony, whether secular or sacred, with a person you want to spend the rest of your life with--this should be something that any consenting adult gets to do. It should not be remarkable--it should be ordinary. And the fact that it has taken the California Supreme Court to make this into an ordinary act for all people, gay or straight, is remarkable, because we have a social and cultural climate that does not seem queer friendly.


[This is Doreen Wong and Jennifer Pizer celebrating the California Supreme Court's May 2008 decision to overturn the gay marriage ban]

Yet let me quote from a New York Times article back in May that made comparisons between the Perez decision in 1948 (the decision to allow inter-racial marriage and overturn California's anti-miscegenation laws) and the recent decision in May 2008 to overturn the gay marriage ban:

“Perez was a really courageous decision,” said Andrew Koppelman, a law professor at Northwestern and the author of “Same Sex, Different States: When Same-Sex Marriages Cross State Lines” (Yale, 2006). “It was handed down at a time when it was just taken for granted that legally entrenched racism was not anything you could do anything about.”

Let me repeat the last line by Koppelman, in bold CAPS: IT WAS HANDED DOWN AT A TIME WHEN IT WAS JUST TAKEN FOR GRANTED THAT LEGALLY ENTRENCHED RACISM WAS NOT ANYTHING YOU COULD DO ANYTHING ABOUT.

Although I think almost everyone would agree (or almost everyone who reads this blog would agree) that entrenched racism is still a problem in the U.S. (and in many other places around the globe), I think we can also agree that "legally" there are recourses and resources to combat racism that just didn't exist in 1948, as well as a cultural atmosphere that would not support rampant, public racism and discrimination of the type that Perez vs. Sharp had to face.

There is an entrenched homophobia in this country. It cuts across race, religion, and region. And yet, the parallels to Civil Rights struggles around race in the 1950s and 60s seem very apt. And so I HOPE that one day, in the not too distant future, when I talk about social justice and civil rights, my students will think that it's utterly BIZARRE that there were ever laws preventing people of the same sex to marry. Because that's how they react when they hear about anti-miscegenation statutes today or when they get the full background behind the Supreme Court decision in Loving vs. Virginia.

In the meantime, we can at least celebrate the small victories--like Phyllis Lyon and Del Martin--the couple who were one of the first to get married back in February 2004. They were the first, and only, couple to be married by Mayor Gavin Newsom on Monday, June 16, 2008. Congratulations Phyllis & Del--you waited a long time for this ordinary right. I hope others don't have to wait nearly as long.

Book Plug: Covering by Kenji Yoshino

I have just finished reading Covering: the Hidden Assault on Our Civil Rights by Kenji Yoshino.



Yoshino is a law professor at Yale University and his book (published by Random House) is both a work of legal scholarship as well as a memoir about growing up gay and Japanese American, and his research on issues of civil rights as a Yale law school professor.

His basic argument is that all people cover, in the sense that we hide or mute parts of our identities, our personalities, from the general public--and that this covering demand, made most explicitly on certain groups of people like gay men, racial minorities, and pregnant women, is an assault on civil rights.

Using his own life as a text for interpretation, he traces the stages of his gay identity through three stages: conversion, passing, and covering. He sees covering as a form of assimilation--and tracing the legal precedents of Title VII, he also sees the ways in which the American legal system has sought to create legal jurisprudence that emphasizes a common American culture of conformity.

There are many more things to say about Yoshino's argument and the main message of his book--which is that it is imperative, in our day and age, to think about the covering demands we are placing on people and to understand them as limiting civil rights. As Yoshino writes:

"We must find a way to protect difference that does not balkanize the country into separate fiefdoms of competing identity groups. We need a new paradigm of civil rights."

What I appreciate about his book is the elegance of his prose--the way that he weaves his gender/sexual/racial identity into the larger legal narrative he is telling. And that he makes this all very accessible to a broad audience interested in issues of identity, of assimilation, and of course, of civil and human rights.

And if you want to actually see and hear Yoshino discuss these issues (and you have a good 30 minutes to spare), you can hear his lecture at UCLA law school on this clip.

Missing Leadership

Last night I saw the film Bobby (2006), produced and directed by Emilio Estevez. It received mixed reviews by critics when it first came out, but I really liked it. I think one of the things I appreciated about it was the sense of anticipation--excitement--that RFK's candidacy held for people. People had a sense of hope--they needed that hope and that excitement: they needed leadership. One of the main themes throughout the film was how divided the U.S. had become, over the war in Viet Nam, over racism--Ceasar Chavez's strikes for the United Farm Workers, MLK Jr's assassination and the struggle for equal rights for African Americans (and all Americans), and just the sense of conflict and despair that seemed omnipresent--but which Bobby seemed to dispel, at least this is what the film and archival footage would have us believe.

A sense of hope and optimism--a belief that the country can do better and will do better under the leadership of a new president. The film reminds me that we are missing leadership in so many ways.

Book Plug: AMERICAN INQUISITION

I know I said the next post would be about the difference between individual bigotry and institutional racism, but I just finished Eric Muller's book American Inquisition: The Hunt for Japanese American Disloyalty in World War II (UNC Press) and I just wanted to put in a plug for it. First of all, it weighs in at a slim 216 pages, which includes notes and bibliography, so it's just under 150 page pages of text. Second, it's extremely well written. Muller writes elegantly and with precision--I suppose it's his training in legal writing. What impresses me about this type of concise writing is that it's not dry. Particularly when Muller tells the stories of Japanese American people whose lives were irrevocably impacted through their internment/incarceration, it's a very moving account. And finally (but this should probably have been the first thing I wrote) it's an important book--because it systematically goes through the process that the various military and non-military agencies used to evaluate who was "loyal" versus who was "disloyal" and therefore, who was deemed a threat to national security and a danger to the war effort. Muller's work is important because he clearly lays out how arbitrary, in many ways, the various cases for "loyalty" were made by the different agencies and in the last chapter in particular, he makes clear that the idea of loyalty as a barometer for who is not dangerous, or to put it a different way, to equate disloyalty with someone who is dangerous or someone who will betray the country is based on faulty logic in many ways.

I also think the book is important for the links it makes, at the end, with what happened in the past regarding civil liberties and civil rights for a specific ethnic group and our current situation, post 9/11 for Muslim and Arab Americans. In particular, there is one quote from American Inquisition that makes this link clear, and it's in a chapter that describes a case brought against the U.S. military by an internee and Nisei, George Ochikubo, who believed that his exclusion from the West Coast and detainment in an internment camp was illegal. Here is a small excerpt from Muller's book:

"For the WDC [Western Defense Command], it seems the Ochikubo case was not really about George Ochikubo, or his loyalty to the United States, or the danger that he--or, for that matter, Japan--actually posed to the West Coast. The Ochikubo case was instead mostly about making law. It was about creating legal precedent favorable to the unfettered deployment of military power against American civilians on American territory, at a moment that the military deemed an emergency" (Muller 133).

If you are interested in reading more about the book or ordering it from UNC Press, you can go to their website here.

Take a look at it--or take a look at other books that talk about the Japanese American internment. I really do feel this is an important piece of U.S. history that we should ALL know about, wherever we are in the country or wherever we are in the world. Because the Japanese American internment, from the moment it was conceived and implemented to the reparations movement and formal apology, to the current day, is one of the most American stories I know--it's one we should all know and remember.