Barack Obama as our first Asian American President?: Part II

So it's a bit longer than I anticipated, but here is Part II of my playful querying about whether Barack Obama can be considered our first Asian American president (click here for Part I).

As I noted in Part I, I am not the first to make this speculation--both Rep. Mike Honda and Jeff Yang (during the 2008 elections) made note of the many Asian connections in Obama's biography and background (which I already elaborated on in the previous post).

What I didn't mention in Part I was that their imagining of Obama as Asian American was riffing off of Toni Morrison's essay in The New Yorker in which she famously was quoted as saying:

white skin notwithstanding, this is our first black President. Blacker than any actual black person who could ever be elected in our children’s lifetime. After all, Clinton displays almost every trope of blackness: single-parent household, born poor, working-class, saxophone-playing, McDonald’s-and-junk-food-loving boy from Arkansas

 This quote from Morrison got a lot of play during Obama's 2008 election since it was noted, many times, that Bill Clinton was not an "actual" black person but that Obama was.

However, what is missing from this widely repeated quote is the context that Morrison was writing about Clinton--namely the Lewinsky scandal and the way that the impeachment hearings were using his infidelity as the impetus to get him out of office--the ways in which

"the President’s body, his privacy, his unpoliced sexuality became the focus of the persecution, when he was metaphorically seized and body-searched"

which Morrison saw was akin to the experience of African American men being policed and persecuted based on their sexuality.

I mention this because while one could argue that there are tropes of "Asian-ness" that we can see in Obama's life--his time spent in Indonesia, his upbringing in Hawaii, his Asian extended family--they are but symbolic gestures--figurations.  They aren't how he identifies and it's not how others would identify him either since we are still living in an age where we believe we know what someone who is "Asian" looks like, and we know what someone who is "black" looks like--and we apply these rubrics to people and call them racial identities.  

Furthermore, the truth is that Obama does not identify as Asian American.  Technically, as far as the 2010 US Census goes, he identifies as African American rather than both black and white and certainly he didn't check the "Asian" box.  And it is important for us to acknowledge that people get to identify the way they want--something folks often forget when they refer to Tiger Woods as monoracially black when he, himself, identifies as mixed-race or half-black, half-Thai.  

So why enter into this exercise at all?  I guess I wanted to think about the limits of racial ambiguity, which is the topic of my current book manuscript--the one that has been consuming me and taking me away from being able to think about blogging.  I do think that imagining race as fluid and as flexible is an anti-racist position.  But I also think that there is a historic reality to racialized bodies that we can't ignore.  And that's the tension between theory and praxis.  It's important to be able to theorize beyond our raced bodies--to imagine a place where we can acknowledge the constructed nature of race and the ways in which multiracial people especially complicate this simplistic notion that there are pure races.  But on the other hand, there are the ways that the state has regulated bodies based on believing in race.

(sigh)

So I will continue to think about the possibilities of what if--what if we could say that Barack Obama is our first black American, first mixed race American, and first Asian American president?  What if checked off more than one box became the norm for all of us?

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

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.

Mixed race reading (and viewing)

In a continuation of the reading recommendations I've been making this week for race/anti-racism & fun summer fiction, let me now make a plug for some key selections of mixed-race reading.

*Half and Half: Writers on Growing Up Biracial and Bicultural. Claudine Chiawei O'Hearn, editor. New York: Pantheon (1998)
--Good collection of first-person essays by a range of people who identify as mixed heritage and multiracial or written by parents in interracial relationships discussing their thoughts about their children's identities and how being in a mixed family impacts them (Gish Jen's essay, in particular, addresses this issue). One of my favorites in this collection is Danzy Senna's "The Multatto Millennium"--it's very tongue-in-cheek.

*Mixing It Up: Multiracial Subjects. SanSan Kwan and Kenneth Spiers, editors. Austin: University of Texas Press (2004).
--This is more "academic" in nature--largely because it is written by academics, but it offers a broad range of essays that ruminate on various mixed race issues, like Naomi Zack's essay on multiraciality and the 2000 census and issues of mixed race in popular culture.

*Interracial Intimacies: Sex, Marriage, Identity, and Adoption. Randall Kennedy. New York: Pantheon Books (2003).
--I know I've mentioned this book before, but it's really a very solid book, through and well researched, and really gets at the legal and social issues surrounding interracial relationships of various sorts, not just marriage or partnerships but also familial ones. Kennedy is a professor at Harvard Law and his legal training shows in the court cases he analyzes, but court cases are important when looking at issues of "miscegenation" or the better contemporary term, interracial relationships.

On the fiction side of things, let me introduce you to some mixed-race authors whose protagonists or plot-lines also pivot on issues of multiraciality--I won't give you a blow by blow because I could go on and on about these works, but you can google them to find plot synopses, and I GUARANTEE--these books are both very enjoyable/pleasure reading as well as reflecting some mixed-race experiences:

*Caucasia -- Danzy Senna

*My Year of Meats -- Ruth Ozeki

*The Painted Drum -- Louise Erdrich

*Edinburgh -- Alexander Chee

*Mixed: An Anthology of Short Fiction on the Multiracial Experience -- Chandra Prasad, editor

For some on-line reading, check out this post from Racialicious, "Not Quite White: When Racial Ambiguity Meets Whiteness," especially the comments (there are almost 100 at the time of this posting). The comments section on Racialicious are almost better than the posts themselves--in this case, you get to hear, directly, from people who live their lives with racial ambiguity.

Finally, check out this animated short by mixed-Japanese-Canadian Jeff Chiba Stearns (tip of the hat to Angry Asian Man). Stearns calls this genre "hapanimation" in honor of his mixed-race heritage. Check out his website Meditating Bunny--he's clearly a VERY talented guy!

Who are your peers?

This morning I went to the county courthouse to sign in for Jury Duty. And I was really *hoping* that I would get called to serve. Because I've always wanted to sit on a jury. Truly. I know that sounds crazy to a lot of folks. But I've just thought that the American legal system, flawed as it is, does have this really interesting process--to have people be tried by a jury of their peers. I could go on and on about what I do think is flawed about our system (and I'm sure you could too). And yet, the opportunity to be part of the process--to see and experience what it looks like from the inside. I think it's a rare opportunity--to actually make a difference in our judicial system--to play a small (and in some cases like the Rodney King trial or Vincent Chin) or perhaps large and historic role.


I never made it into the jury box. There were about 50 people. About half a dozen claimed some type of hardship or medical difficulty or personal relationship with one of the people in the case that prevented them from serving. And the random shuffle didn't yield my name, so they selected the jury pretty quickly and the rest of us went home.

Of the 50 people in the room, I was the only visibly Asian American person. There were about a dozen African American people; gender-wise it seemed about equally male and female; and age wise we ranged the gamut--on the jury box was a young teen who just graduated from high school and literally JUST turned 18 and someone else who declared themselves to be in their late 60s (it wasn't mandatory that people announce their ages, but for some reason, the majority of people did).

And as I looked around me, I kept thinking about the phrase

"Jury of your peers"

Because if I were ever in a courtroom in this county, would I have a jury of my peers before me? I mean, race is really only one barometer, right? Clearly, outside of places like California or Hawaii, I'm not ever going to be faced with a jury that is going to look like me--at least not a significant portion. And in the South, it's conceivable that my "peers" would largely be white men born and raised in The South.

Are these my peers?

How about education. Or career/job history. Or gender and sexuality.

If you found yourself in a trial situation, who would YOU want to be the jury of your peers?

All I know is that I would *hope* that the jury would be a reflection of "My America"--the one I aspire to see around me--which is a diverse America and a mixed-race America.

Guess I better hope not to be taken to trial in my county. And I guess I'll wait another 2 years to see whether I make it into the jury box.

Gee, you don't look "Asian"...

I was doing a "google" search under "mixed race" and found this entry at the blog Gene Expression "Mixed Race but Homogenous Appearance" (click here for the link).

The blog entry discusses the racial appearance of mixed-race people, and uses celebrities, like Tiger Woods and Jason Kidd, as examples of how racial features can predominate (or not) in certain people. There is even a segment that discusses the genetic breakdown of parents of different racial backgrounds and their subsequent mixed-race child who may tend to favor one parent's phenotype over the other.


One of the observations that the blog entry makes is that how we "see" a person's racial makeup is most often determined by our own preconceived notions of race. Two boldface comments by the author sum up the trickiness of mixed-race identification, either by oneself or by others:

"[P]erceptions of race are as much a matter of psychology and culture as they are of genetics."

and

"Cultural priors matter, and in the United States we give great weight to black ancestry as determinative of one's race."

The other interesting points about the Gene Expression blog entry is the discussion that follows. I could actually write a whole blog post about the comments because there is a particularly disturbing "joking" comment that one commenter makes towards a self-identified female hapa (half-Asian, half white) woman in which he claims that given her ethnic background she must be "Hot" and can he get a photograph of her? He follows up by saying he's "joking" but, really?! It just seems to undercut the seriousness of the race and genetic discussion that precedes and follows the comment. And I'm tired of people telling me I have no sense of humor when I don't find the combination of sexual orientalization "funny"--HA HA! ENOUGH ALREADY! MEN WHO FETISHIZE ASIAN AMERICAN WOMEN ARE NOT FUNNY--THEY ARE DANGEROUS, ESP. THE GUY AT PRINCETON 4 YEARS AGO WHO STALKED ASIAN AMERICAN WOMEN, SECRETLY CUT OFF SNIPPETS OF THEIR HAIR AND THEN FILLED MITTENS WITH THEIR HAIR FOR HIS PRIVATE PLEASURE. HE WAS CAUGHT CUTTING THE HAIR OFF OF A WOMAN ON A BUS AND THEY FOUND THE MITTENS AND IT'S SO GROSS AND DISTURBING I DON'T KNOW WHERE TO BEGIN EXCEPT TO PLEASE ASK EVERYONE TO CEASE AND DESIST WITH THE "Asian Women are so hot" COMMENTS!!!

OK, I digress once again. Sorry--Orientalizizing, esp. of Asian American women, especially mixed-race Asian American women drives me bonkers.

Given the last few posts I've written about getting rid of the category of race in favor of an anti-racist praxis, as well as the absence of certain athletes of color, I thought this entry about how one "looks"--esp. how "Asian" Tiger's features are, would be a good discussion point for a blog on mixed-race America.

And I really do think Tiger is an interesting example of mixed-race America because of his transnational, multicultural, and American affiliations with golf, with the war in Viet Nam, with an African American history of exclusion, with an Asian American history of political agitation, and with the weight of the world wanting him to be all things to all people.

Does it matter that Tiger is black, Asian, both, or neither--that he is "cablinasian"? Does it matter that he married a blonde Swedish woman instead of a woman of color? Does it matter that he didn't marry an American woman? Is Tiger, by virtue of where he stands in the world of golf and money, beyond race because he is rich and he is not exactly taking on social justice issues with respect to race (and gender and sexuality--he is, apparently, notorious for his off-color/homophobic jokes).

Because what is Tiger? And should we care? I suppose that's really the key point. Should we care how Tiger either self-identifies or how others identify him, according to race? Many people mocked him for the "Cablinasian" category he created on the Oprah Winfrey show, and yet, there is something to be lauded about his trying to create an alternative space where he is not simply lumped into categories according to conventional wisdom or the status quo.

Segregated Sunday

I had lunch at my favorite Chinese restaurant with my boyfriend (who is a white Southerner). We were the only interracial couple in the restaurant (not unusual for the South) but what WAS unusual was that my boyfriend was the only non-Asian person (and almost every table was full) for the first half-hour we were there (eventually a white family of four came in). When I realized the different racial dynamics at work, it dawned on me that not only is this a rare occurrence in the South for anyone Asian American, outside of restaurants (seeing a majority of Latinos in a Mexican restaurant or African Americans in a Caribbean restaurant would not seem unusual), is there any place where the patrons would be mostly non-white?

According to my boyfriend, Sunday is the most segregated day of the week--at least in the South--because apparently white Southerners go to white churches and black Southerners go to black churches and with the burgeoning immigrant population, there are also special Sunday services held in Spanish at Catholic churches for the largely Mexican-Spanish speaking population and Vietnamese for the Vietnamese immigrant population (there is a local Baptist church that holds services in English, Spanish & Vietnamese).

Apparently segregation also follows you into death because funeral homes also cater to specific communities--black people go to black funeral homes and white people go to white funeral homes.

I can't quite believe that this is true--and yet, this is the South and as I am constantly reminded by people, I live in an academic liberal bubble and life outside my college town is very different. Perhaps, but I can't help wondering, especially as rates of inter-marriage and mixed-race children increase, what does the half-white, half-black person do? Or the trilingual English-Spanish-Vietnamese person of mixed Mexican-Vietnamese ancestry? I suppose you have your pick of any of the three services, and yet, it seems like the ongoing difficulty of where you fit in is ever-present. And if the rates of inter-racial couples and mixed-race people increase in the South, will there eventually be an option--beyond black, white, Spanish, Vietnamese, English? A mixed-race America church--wonder what it would look like, sound like, feel like...

Talking about race in the Blogosphere

About a week ago The Boston Globe ran an article about bloggers of color called "Blog is Beautiful: Bloggers of Color Challenge Mainstream Views On-Line." (Thanks to CN Le & Angry Asian Man for the heads up on the article).

There has been some discussion on various blogs (like Racialicious) about how to have real conversations about race--debating about where these spaces are (because they don't seem to be happening in mainstream media). I guess one of the questions I wonder about is: will it make a difference? I want to believe that it will--that blogging about issues of race will lead to larger social justice in the world. But like all things that are proactive or preventative, it's just hard to know what the real effects will be.

Self Silencing

I've been thinking alot about silence and in particular self silencing and all the various ways that we self-silence: holding your tongue, being afraid to speak truth to power, feeling intimidated into silence, choosing silence in order to let other voices be heard, silence as a goal in itself, and other variants of this nature.

I've been thinking of self-silence because there are sometimes things I choose not to write about in this blog because I know it's public, and especially now that I don't require people to be invited to view this blog, I have no idea who is reading my words and the conclusions they are drawing about me and my work/research and how what I write in this space may or may not have ramifications for the people who comment on this blog, my academic reputation, or the professional and personal affiliations I have.

I have been thinking of self-silence because I have had thoughts about the Duke lacrosse case in Durham and the fall-out of that case and the reaction of the communities in the South and around the nation to this case, and the way it links up to other contemporary racial issues like Jena 6, Clarence Thomas's new book, and even Jimmy Carter's trip (along with other humanitarian representatives) to Sudan. And I know that I am not writing about the Duke Lacrosse case because of the negative experience I had 2 months ago, and it makes me feel like a coward--that I am not speaking truth to power, that I am censoring myself, that I am letting the mass group of (I believe largely) men who sent me hate mail or wrote scathing comments win.

And yet, I also feel like what would be accomplished by inviting another feeding frenzy into this blog space? It's not dialogue that many of what I'll call "the rabble" want--it's blood. Or at least it feels that way to me. And it also takes up so much energy to respond or to even choose not to respond. And it does raise the question of whether the blogosphere is the appropriate medium/venue/forum to have difficult, challenging, and respectful discussions about race from people who don't agree with one another.

Yet, how are we to reach any sort of understanding if we don't try? And why does civil discourse seem so hard to come by, especially surrounding issues of race?

Any thoughts?

Academic Privilege

Hello--if you are reading this blog, more than likely you are a friend of mine and have an invitation to view this blog. It's now Monday morning and I've had a very interesting weekend, which I'll attempt to rehash below (and I apologize for those of you, probably most of you, who talked to me and know these details already).

The blog entry below this one--Friday, July 27--is entitled "Duke Lacrosse: The Exonerated?" and as you'll see, if you go to the trouble of reading it and the 25 comments that follow (3 of which are mine) it created quite a storm. There are very strong opinions about the Duke lacrosse case. And let me now confess to some naivety on my part:

Naive belief 1: I didn't think anyone really read my blog. I certainly didn't think random people would bother to troll the depths of the blogosphere to read what I had to write.

Naive belief 2: I didn't think this was such a controversial subject. I mean, yes it is controversial and heated and I knew of disturbing stories about Duke faculty getting targeted and about the harassment they were facing from Duke students and some other folks, but I had no idea the extent of the hatred out there and the degree of harassment that Duke faculty and others were experiencing in light of this issue.

Naive belief 3: I don't think of myself as a public figure. I assumed that since I didn't specify that my affiliation was with Southern U, that I could be a professor at any other area college and just be living in "liberal college town," but furthermore, I assumed that I was writing as myself and not Dr. myself, Assistant Professor at Sousthern U's English Department. I certainly didn't stop to think about how easy it would be to find my faculty webpage and to download my cv, and of course, I forgot that my cell phone & home address are listed on my cv.

Naive beleif 4: (final point). I started this blog as a way of pre-writing (I'm writing a book on passing and mixed-race Asian Americans) and as a way to put down the things I think about related to race and American culture in a place that could be read and shared and discussed by other people. I've been complaining, lately, about always preaching to the choir and I thought that the blog could be a way to engage in dialogue about race with not just like minded people but people who were really interested in having REAL discussions about race--one's that are difficult to articulate and maintain in a respectful manner. I knew it could be challenging to do this, but I thought it was part of my larger mission as someone who teaches and researches about race.

Anyway, here are the series of events that followed:

1) Someone with the pseudonym "Wayne Fontes" cuts and pastes from my blog on the lacrosse rape case and posts it on the blog "Liespotters"--which is apparently dedicated to exposing the "lies" that liberal folk, esp. humanities professors, tell about the duke case. I was described as yet another "Angry Studies" professor and there was a link to my blog and then someone posted my UNC email address.

2) I got a flurry of blog activity, which for the first 11 posts, were civil, if a bit harsh. Some of the comments I think were fair and some made good points, at least to give me some food for thought. I may not have agreed with all of the opinions, but I did think that perhaps these people (who largely seemed to be men) wanted to really discuss this and dialogue about it, and my first 2 comments were to that effect (although I did lambast the anonymous people, because the anonymous posters were largely flaming me and I said I wasn't interested in that kind of comment, but that I appreciated people who actually raised provocative questions and points and that I would try to explain my own point of view. However, by 7pm that day, I realized that most people didn't want dialogue, they wanted to vent or to target me, and so I wrote a final comment that said that I appreciated people coming to view my blog, that they were welcome to continue reading future posts, but that I was no longer responding to this thread because I was tired, had other work to do, and I appreciated that people were polite and that they kept the conversation civil up to this point.

3) When I went to check my email before going to bed at midnight on Friday, I saw that 11 more people had posted and a quick glance revealed that they had gotten more mean spirited rather than less. Again, I naively thought that when I wrote that I was done commenting, that it would all taper off and that when I said let agree to disagree, people would accept that. I became very uneasy (perhaps a premonition of what was to come) but so far no one had crossed the line and emailed my college account. I wrote to a few friends and colleagues asking for advice on how to handle the blog situation, because I wanted to be able to get past the Duke thing and to talk about other issues, like the recent news that a mule had just given birth and vets are trying to figure out whether it's a chimera (a freak abnormality of genetics) or a legitimate mule birth.

4) I checked my email for the first time at 10am on Saturday to discover that someone named Jim Clyne had emailed me telling me that he had just impersonated me on someone else's blog. To back up, let me say that a CUNY Brooklyn History professor, KC Johnson, has a blog called "Durham-in-Wonderland" in which he blogs extensively and provocatively about the Duke case--essentially attacking anyone who doesn't agree with his position (he also has a book forthcoming in September about the mistrials of justice related to this case). He had posted my entire blog entry, but not only that, he had put a link to my faculty web page and had discussed some of my academic articles and research, mocking both the opinions I wrote in my blog as well as my academic credentials and my research. This person, Jim Clyne, then posted a response to KC Johnson by pretending to be me. KC Johnson then posted this fake response and responded to the fake me, in terms that I think were pretty nasty. I'm not exactly certain. A colleague-friend, who did read it, told me not to, after I had printed out a copy. Needless to say, I was very shaken up knowing someone had impersonated me, but I was also shaken up by the hate mail that had now found its way into my college email account.

5) What followed Saturday afternoon was a series of email message and phone calls. Again, a very supportive and enormously helpful friend-colleague immediately called and gave me great advice about how to handle everything. On his advice I wrote to KC Johnson, forwarding him the email message from Jim Clyne, which proved that I did not write a response to his blog, I then asked him to remove all mention of my name from my blog and to alert his readers that there had been a hoax going on and to stop emailing me. I also told him that he did not have permission to use the contents of my correspondence with him on his blog or any other publication, and I copied the general counsel of Southern U and the chair of my department. [Johnson did take down the fake response, his response to the fake response, and the comments to those blog entries. He included a note that said that I "denied" replying to him and that he would have to take me at my word since I wouldn't give permission to have him print my email message to him. He did leave his original blog entry replicating my posting about the lacrosse thing, with links to my faculty page and website, although he discontinued the commenting feature and he wrote a note saying that my blog was now set at "invitation only" as was my right.] I then made my blog into an "invitation only" site and, after I received a phone call to my cell phone from someone named Les Blaitz in Iowa, who wanted to "talk" about the Duke case and who said he got my cell from my cv, I had another friend-colleague take down all contact information from my faculty website and I talked to the chair of my department to let him know what was going on, in case the craziness spilled over into Monday (thank goodness it hasn't). I also did not read any of the hate mail. I did glance at it--Les, when I wouldn't talk to him, sent me a very nasty note. I don't know if it was threatening or not, because I decided for my mental health not to read any of the mail or the comments that were posted after my last comment at 7pm to my blog. I do know that regardless of whether anyone was really physically threatening in the email messages I got, that when someone starts a message by calling you a "fucking whore" what follows is not going to be nice. I did, on the advice of legal counsel and some colleagues, send a "reply" to these people, essentially informing them that their original email message had been recorded and that it was illegal to send harassing or threatening email messages and that sending such messages could result in legal action. I haven't gotten any more email messages or phone calls.

6) Let me end my numbered points by saying that I think it's over (knock on wood) but more importantly, as upsetting as all of this has been, there has been amazing support out there. I received triple the number of supportive email messages and phone calls--some from people I've never met but who have had similar run-in's with KC or over the Duke issue. I had colleagues on a weekend call me and be so helpful with giving advice and being supportive. I had people drop by my home to check up on me, and friends from far away call me to make sure I was doing OK. The positive moral support far outweighs the negative hate mail, and that was the turning point for me Sunday morning when I was still feeling uneasy and weird about everything. I realized that I had received, in total, 6 pieces of hate mail, 22 comments, and one phone call. This is minor in comparison to the overwhelmingly supportive email messages, phone calls, and in person confirmations that I received. Again, I can't judge how threatening any of the email messages were, but I have been told by friends who did read the comments that while some of them are mean spirited, none are truly threatening. And in comparison to the death threats and verbal harassment that Duke faculty get over this issue, this is nothing. It's totally minor. And while this blog is set at invitation only currently, I'm hopeful that in a month I'll put it out in the wider world of the blogosphere. I may, for protection purposes, take down the whole Duke postings. I am still not sure if that would be the right thing to do. I do know that I'm not allowing anymore anonymous postings and will put a caveat about not giving permission to cut and paste from my blog--if anyone knows about intellectual property law, give ma a ring.

So where does this leave me? I'm really fine. I've learned a lot and will write about it later, when I've had some time and distance away from this subject. I think it needs to be written about. Not even because of what I went through but just the idea, which is so angering, that someone, this KC Johnson, has incited so much hate and has been the conduit for people to attack faculty around the nation based on their progressive ideas. He has targeted Duke faculty, but he has been known to attack other progressive-liberal faculty members, at Wesleyan, for example. But perhaps the larger picture is this: there are a lot of angry white men out there. Truly, if you go to Durham-in-Wonderland (not that I think you should--I was going to put a link to KC Johnson's blog, but I don't think anyone should give him the time of day), you will find that people are angry. Some angry women, but lots and lots of angry men, the majority seem to be white. And they are nasty, not all, but a lot of them are angry and nasty and say the kind of racist and sexist things that confirm your worst fears. And it just feels discouraging, but at the same time, it also affirms, to me, that something needs to be done.

And so we finally (sorry for the length of this post) get to the title of my blog entry: Academic Privilege. Because I have A LOT of it. I have a PhD and a university affiliation--because of these things I had the support of my colleagues and chair in English and I had access to a lot of advice, most importantly, free legal advice. I do have a platform to speak about the things I want to speak about and believe in, both in this blog but also in the research I conduct and the classes I teach. On a regular basis I get to make my opinions known and heard, and for the most part it's done entirely within the realm of academic freedom of speech. I don't feel censored by what I write about or research or teach. I get a lot of support from the university, my department, colleagues and friends. I am lucky in many, many ways, but more importantly, as part of the less than .05% of the population holding a PhD, I am very, very privileged, to have a PhD, to have a tenure-track position, to have access to power and influence, to be a semi-public figure.

There is a responsibility that comes with academic privilege--and there are many things that I think I feel more strongly about--like academic freedom of speech, like doing the research I do on race, like speaking out about gender and class and sexuality issues. And I don't want to feel, as I briefly did this weekend, that I should second-guess myself with what I write on this blog or that I don't have the right to talk about issues of race or that I should bow to the hate mail or the not-so-nice-things that were written about me on KC Johnson's blog. There is a problem of dialogue and discourse--maybe I was naive to think the blog was a place to have civil dialogue and discourse about race. I don't regret trying--I am a little discouraged, but I'm also determined not to give up. I don't want to preach to the choir, but I also don't want to plead in front of the lynch mob. But somewhere in-between there has to be a space and a place where people can engage in civil dialogue about difficult subjects, like race. Where we can all be open minded, not say everything perfectly, but still manage to hear one another.

If anyone knows where that place is, let me know. I'll be there in a second.

Is Tiger black?

I was in the gym the other day reading a special issue of Sports Illustrated--one primed for the US Open (it was an old copy). And there was an editorial from an African American sports journalist about Tiger Woods--specifically, lamenting Tiger's lack of political activism around issues of race (and I would add gender). The gist of the editorial was that this black journalist was, like many African Americans, initially enthused and supportive of Tiger's golf career--seeing him as someone who had made it into the most hallowed and whitest of institutions--the PGA--and that he could lead a race revolution in the world of golf. And yet, it hasn't happened. Tiger remains the only black PGA golfer in the tour, there are no up and coming new African American golfers set to rival Tiger's record--there are not scores of African American golf athletes infiltrating lily white university golf programs, and Tiger has not taken a stand on key race issues in the public domain. In other words, he's no Jackie Robinson.

And I know I've had similar critiques about Tiger's lack of politicization--and also speculating about how fair that is--for me to want and to demand that Tiger become a political spokesperson for racial justice and gender equity. After all, we are not making these demands on Ernie Els or Jim Furyk or Phil Mickelson. Or even Vijay Singh. They get to be "just golfers" and they have their respective charities and corporate sponsors, and yes they are under scrutiny, but none of them have the pressures to be a symbol in the way that Tiger so clearly is under a media and world microscope.

Yet there was something else about the editorial that troubled me. The dismissiveness of Tiger's claim to be "Cablinasian." There was much "to-do" made when he first coined the word and when he tried to show that he was not simply an African American golfer but a person who had many different racial and ethnic strains in his ancestry. And there have been many people who have called him on his apparent lack of black pride for not claiming a mono-racial African American identity. But Tiger himself said it best when he explained that to claim a black identity would be to disavow his mother and her life, her influence, on him. His Thai mother. Which makes Tiger as much Asian American as African American.

So is Tiger black? I'm not saying he's not because the truth is, he's identified by others and perceived to be "black" because he *looks* black. In other words, if he had more Asian features, if he favored his mother's side of the family more than his father's, phenotypically, perhaps we would be calling him an Asian American or at least a mixed race, hapa, golfer and not simply a black golfer.

I actually do think that Tiger is a black golfer. It's just that he's not only black. He's also Asian American and mixed race and hapa and Cablinasian. He is a multitude and he's got a killer golf swing and so we want him to infiltrate the bastion, the fortress of white privilege--the country club--to lay waste to their belief systems and herald in a new age of racial tolerance and acceptance--to get them where they sleep, so to speak--on the fairway.

Maybe he'll do it one day. Maybe he'll stick it to "the man" and take a political stand and support a cause that is contrary to his Nike endorsement and the galleries that watch him. Maybe not. At any rate, maybe we can start by recognizing that Tiger is both black and not black and that there's nothing wrong in acknowledging the complexity of who he is, just as one day perhaps he will also recognize and embrace and act on that complexity.