Trayvon Martin--what can we do?

By now everyone (and I mean this in a global sense) or most everyone has heard the details about Trayvon Martin's death/murder/tragic killing (take your pick--I think all 3 fit the description for what happened to Martin).



He went to a convenience store for skittles and ice tea, and on the way back to his father's girlfriend's place (in a gated community in Florida) he was followed/stalked by neighborhood watch volunteer, George Zimmerman, who was explicitly told by a 911 dispatcher NOT to follow Martin, whom Zimmerman believed was "up to no good." Contrary to what all logic and common sense/decency would have us believe when a 28 year-old shoots, to death, an unarmed 17-year old, Zimmerman was not arrested but, instead, seemingly protected by a Florida law called "Stand your ground," which the Sanford Police seem to have misapplied to the wrong person (since it seems obvious enough that the one who should have stood his ground and been protected from his assailant was Martin and not Zimmerman).

There has been so much that I have been thinking about related to Trayvon Martin. I know that there's been a lag of about 3 weeks between my last post and this one, but I couldn't quite figure out what it was I wanted to say about Trayvon Martin--and I knew I wanted to say something--a lot of somethings.

For instance, I wanted to make a connection to the murder of Vincent Chin and the fact that Chin's assailants stalked and killed him because of his racial difference--because they were angry at the "Japanese" taking jobs away from them (this was Detroit of the 1980s). Chin's murderers, Ronald Ebens and Michael Nitz, paid $3,000 for their crime and spent one night in jail. Chin's case launched a pan-Asian American and pan-racial movement for redress and justice, very similar to the marches, the mailing of empty bags of skittles, and the wearing of hoodies in solidarity with Martin and his family and in protest for the racism (and I mean this in every institutional and systemic way) that allows Zimmerman to be free and at large.


[The Miami heat in hoodies]

I also wanted to think about the hoodie meme, particularly after reading this trenchant piece by fellow blogger Tenured Radical, "The Power of the Hoodie; or the Paradox of the Political Meme." Tenured Radical has gotten a lot of push back for questioning the role of the meme (the hoodie, in particular but also political memes, in general) in enacting political action. I was specifically drawn to this passage towards the end of TR's post:

The adoption of the “hoodie” is an invitation to a false collective fantasy that “we are all Trayvon Martin.” We are not all Trayvon Martin. The criminalization of black men in United States history needs to be accorded the specificity and critical analysis it deserves without the rest of “us” seeking to share or identify with it.

Indeed, this article in the New York Times reinforces the idea that it is specifically young black men who need to be most attentive to the ways that their bodies have been associated with criminality and thus must be most vigilant against being the victims of violence (an apparent irony that hasn't been fully explored in our society--that young black men are seen as perpetrators of violence and thus become the victims of said violence by others seeking to pre-empt the violence they believe will befall them).

Which brings me to the issue of race and racism. There have been those, such as Zimmerman's attorney, who has said that Martin's race was not a factor in Zimmerman's actions--that Zimmerman was attacked by Martin--his face was bashed to the sidewalk--and that he (Zimmerman) acted in self-defense, fearing for his life. The attorney also claims that Zimmerman cannot be racist because he is Latino (I think he uses the word Hispanic), has never used racial slurs against African Americans, and that he and his wife mentor two African American youth.

I know I'm preaching to the choir with most of the readers who come to Mixed Race America, so let me just say, unequivocably, that the fact that Zimmerman's mother is Peruvian, the fact that he may have black friends, may mentor African American youth, may be fluent in Spanish, and identify as Latino/Hispanic, doesn't mean that (a) race wasn't a factor in his identifying the teenager as a possible criminal (b) racist attitudes were subliminally or not so subconsciously part of Zimmerman's mentality.

In particular, I think "b" is important for all of us to remember, because we are ALL subject to racist thinking and we are all subject to systemic and institutional forms of racism, regardless of how we identify or who we associate with. We live in a white supremacist society--and by that I mean that the United States' foundation began on the premise that whiteness was the universal default mode against which everyone else would be measured (I could and should add that being a property owning heterosexual male was also part and parcel of whiteness). Some of us benefit more or less from this history depending on our current set of circumstances. But certainly Zimmerman lived in this society that has shown image upon image of black criminals. So seeing Trayvon Martin as a potential criminal couldn't have been that much of a stretch.

So where do we go from here? What do we DO? This is what I've titled this blog post--because I want to try to think about and talk about what kinds of actions we can be taking in light of Trayvon's murder. I want to go beyond just wearing a hoodie in solidarity and to think about and act on what seem to me most obvious and pressing: stricter gun control laws, fixing the criminal-justice system in its interpretation of laws like Florida's "Stand-your-ground" (or repealing said law), and decoupling, in our popular culture, the image of black men with crime/criminality.

I do have some hope. I think that this can go beyond just a meme and rhetoric. I think that the lessons learned from Vincent Chin's murder--the outrage and subsequent activism by Asian Americans (and their allies) can be instructive for those of us who want justice for Martin and his family--but most of all, for those of us (and I'm assuming this is everyone in the world except for the most callous among us) who want to make sure that a young teenage boy is never stalked and killed by a vigilante gunman.

The Authenticity Trap

Last week I did a workshop at the ECAASU (East Coast Asian American Student Union--an undergraduate collective of East Coast students who are interested in Asian American issues and/or who identify as Asian American) annual conference titled, "Authentically Asian American." The workshop was really about identity--about questioning what this phrase even means--to question, most of all, our notions of "authenticity."

It was really wonderful having this rich conversation with so many smart students. And I was struck by many things--first and foremost, the number of people who showed up for this workshop (I think it was around 80) demonstrated how eager students are to have a space to talk about issues of race and identity. And the kinds of comments, questions, observations, and testimonials from the students (who were largely but not solely Asian American) also demonstrated how they don't often get a chance to talk about these issues candidly, in safe spaces, and with their peers (I was the oldest person in the room by a good 15-20 years).

But what I wanted to write about today was this whole idea of "authenticity"--and the ways in which we get caught up in this notion that some people are more "authentic" than others. And that each of us has wondered, at some point, whether we are also "authentic" or whether we are fake and frauds.

[Aside: I'm going to stop putting quotation marks around the word "authentic" for the rest of this post since I think that everyone gets the point I'm making that the whole notion of "authenticity" is suspect--and that I'm in no way endorsing a singular and real or authentic vision of what it means to be a "fill-in-the-blank"]

Among the students chiming in with their opinions were several who identify as mixed-race. And these students, in particular, spoke very meaningfully of feeling that because of their multiracial makeup, charges of being inauthentic were often either leveled at them or they had internalized these feelings.

The interesting thing about what these students shared (and it echoes what multiracial students of varying backgrounds share in my classes at Southern U) is that aside from very personal/individual issues, what mixed-race Asian American students are concerned about, in terms of feeling inauthentic, are what many monoracial students feel.

For example, one issue that came up as denoting authenticity was language--that if you spoke an Asian language, the native Asian language that matched up with your ancestral background, that made you more authentic than the Asian American who spoke only English. And this is an issue I know all too well. In fact, recently during my office hours last month, I was thrown back in time when talking with one of my Asian American students.

This student, whose parents are immigrants from China, was raised in a bilingual household. She came by to talk about a question she had about our class and then she asked me whether I spoke Mandarin or Cantonese (she knew I was Chinese American). When I told her that I spoke neither, her jaw literally dropped and before she could help herself she said, "Why didn't your parents teach you how to speak Chinese??"

All of a sudden, I felt inadequate and defensive. While I'm positive my student was not questioning my credentials nor trying to make me feel bad in any way, the questions I've had to field, from Asian Americans and non-Asian Americans alike, about why I don't speak Mandarin or Cantonese, always makes me feel as if somehow I'm being marked as deficient in the eyes of my questioner--somehow my credibility, my AUTHENTICITY, is being questioned and seen as suspect. And when my parents get invoked--when the question becomes why my parents didn't make me learn Chinese or make me enroll in Mandarin classes--I definitely feel defensive because I am defending my parents from the implicit charge that somehow they did something wrong.

I shared this story at the ECAASU workshop because I wanted to show students that our ideas of authenticity are traps--they constrict others into fitting into singular definitions of who we think they should be--and it creates stereotypes about various groups. If to be authentically Asian American one should be fluent in an Asian language that matches with your ancestral heritage, this presumes that both parents are also fluent in the same Asian language, that someone grew up in an area where they could speak and practice the language among a whole group of people, and/or that their parents are of the same linguistic if not cultural and ethnic background. Which means that the Asian American multiracial person, the Asian American adoptee, the second or third generation Asian American, or the Asian American person who had only one parent fluent and another parent who was also monolingual--these people feel left out and somehow deficient.

I do want to make clear that the issues and concerns of multiracial students, Asian American or otherwise, are unique--and I'm not trying to take away from the experiences of mixed-race Asian American students in talking about language frustrations--mixed race Asian Americans may, indeed, be fluent in an Asian language that matches up with one of their ethnic heritages. But I share this story and raise this question of authenticity to demonstrate the ways that we so often, unconsciously, walk around with feelings of inadequacy--and that this feeling may be shared by more of us than we realize. After all, we are all authentically human (well, except for the sleeper cylons out there--that's for any BSG fans reading this) and if we're human, it means that we make mistakes and have flaws. And we have many, MANY differences (I don't want to suggest that we're all human and therefore race doesn't matter--I would NEVER make that claim)--but maybe what we should realize in getting out of the authenticity trap is that if someone identifies with a racial group, s/he has specific reasons for doing so and we should respect those reasons and try not to let the authenticity trap dictate whether we want to allow that person into our group.

More Afro-Asian connections in sports and US culture

Mark Anthony Neal has to be one of the smartest people I know who thinks about, writes about and talks about issues of race, especially on his blog, New Black Man. Neal also has a weekly webcast, Left of Black, and today he had on two scholars who look at race and sports, and they discuss Tiger Woods -- the original "Cablinasian" and apt symbol (and apt problematics--and by this I mean the problem of being read as mixed race in the U.S. not that I think Woods is a "problem" although his golf game is currently problematic, but that's a different post for a different audience) of a Mixed Race America. Watch now.

The Invisibility (or Linvisibility) of Asian Americans

My friend and colleague Tim Yu has a piece on CNN's Opinion Page, "Will Jeremy Lin's Success End Stereotypes?" It is a very smart and very thoughtful piece, and I hope you will all take a look at it. I had also been queried about the topic of racism and Asian Americans related to Jeremy Lin--although my piece didn't get placed with CNN (honestly I think Tim's piece is much better, so I'm glad it got picked over mine) I figured I'd share my own 800 word essay with everyone here. After all, the great thing about blogs is that you can have multiple voices chime in -- and Jeremy Lin's ascent in the NBA has touched on so many arenas of Asian American and critical race studies--it's really been a wonderful 2 weeks!



Three weeks ago, before the world knew the name Jeremy Lin—before all of the punning word play (Linsperational, Linsational, Linbelievable) that pays homage to Lin’s incredible 7 game winning streak (and most recent win over NBA champions Dallas Mavericks), before the world could chant the basic details of this Linderella story—led his high school team to a state championship but wasn’t recruited in college, ended up at Harvard but wasn’t drafted immediately, eventually picked up by the Golden State Warriors but then let go and picked up by the Houston Rockets but then let go and then ended up at the Knicks , where he slept on the couches of his brother and teammate, but were it not for a series of tragedies and accidents among his teammates, he could have found himself without a contract, his NBA hoop dreams dashed—before Linsanity had swept the globe, my college classroom in North Carolina said that they had no idea that the the acronym F.O.B. (fresh-off-the-boat) was an offensive term directed, primarily, at Asian Americans.

I begin here because, like my students, there are a lot of people who may not understand that words like “FOB” and “Chink” have a history, a very particular racist history. ESPN found itself under fire when one of their broadcasters, following the Knick’s loss to the Hornets, asked whether there was a “chink in the armor,” and then later that night on the ESPN mobile app this same expression appeared in a headline with a picture of Jeremy Lin underneath—the implication, and distasteful allusion, being that Lin is now the “chink,” both in terms of being a potential weakness in the strength of the Knick’s defense and because he’s the target of this racist slur as someone of Asian ancestry. I think that when people try to give the benefit of the doubt to ESPN by saying that it’s a harmless phrase, we miss the point that words are never harmless, and context is always everything. The word “chink” does mean a rift or crack, but its more insidious meaning has been with us for over a century. To call someone a “Chink” in the U.S. or to insinuate that someone is a “Chink” is always to invoke a history of systemic, institutional racism.

This is what has been missing from a lot of analysis about race and Lin. There’s a whole history of Asians in America that is simply missing from our general knowledge base. And this history is one in which Chinese men were lynched on the West Coast in the late 19th and early 20th C. because of fears that Chinese laborers were taking jobs away from white men or that Chinese men were a danger to the purity of white women. And as Lin himself has recounted, slurs like “Chink” were used to demean him while he played basketball for Harvard. And I’m sure that Asian Americans, regardless of ancestry, have had this term used against them. The fact that we don’t talk about this, that racism against Asian Americans goes almost unnoticed outside of select circles, is a result of the persistent invisibility of Asians in America – or a limited visibility in which Asian Americans are known only through dominant stereotypes: we’re good at math, we speak broken English, we know martial arts, we’ve overly sexualized (if we’re women) and we’re overly feminine (if we’re men), we built your railroads, washed your laundry, and now we do your nails, sell you coffee at the corner store, but we do not show up on prime time t.v. except as your sidekick best friend or your nerdy co-worker. And this invisibility of Asian Americans on the U.S. media landscape is a result of systemic, institutional racism. It is a result of not believing that Asian Americans have multi-dimensional lives—that we are more than Tiger Mothers pushing and punishing our children to be Carnegie Hall prodigies. That we are more than model minorities who took your son or daughter’s spot in college admissions. That we are more than what mainstream media has shown us to be.

Except now we have Jeremy Lin. Now we are fast; we are athletic; we are strong; we are mentally tough; and we’re smart (we’ve always been smart, remember Jeremy did go to that ivy league school in Boston, I mean Cambridge). Yes, we’re humble. Yes we are people of faith. Yes we are close to our families. But we can also strut and swagger with the best of them. And we have confidence in ourselves; we can dominate and lead. And by the way, did we mention, that we can dunk? We are Asian Americans. We are proud. We are loud. Get used to us.

Black History Month & the 70th Anniversary of Executive Order 9066 -- why both matter, together

It is Black History month, a time when we (as a nation) remember the significant contributions to American history, culture, and society of people of African heritage to the United States. At Southern University there has been additional programming highlighting various aspects of African American history, culture, and people/communities. While there are some who criticize the idea of "heritage months" because there is no "white history" month (to which I say, isn't everyday white history month?) and there are those who say why single out single month when we should be acknowledging African American contributions to U.S. society everyday (to which I say, well of course, but a month of programming and remembering is still a good and worthy thing), February is none-the-less the month in which those of us who care about issues of race, racism, white privilege, white surpremacy, and most important anti-racist practices, recognize the importance of honoring and celebrating African Americans.

And 70 years ago today, February 19, 1942, Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, which nullified the constitutional rights of every single person living on the West Coast of the United States. It allowed for the military to interpret and restrict who could remain on the West Coast--and the military, under the auspices of EO9066, targeted one and only one ethnic group: people of Japanese ancestry. There was no mention of race in EO9066--which is significant because it gave great power to the military to interpret who was a threat and who needed to be evacuated from the West Coast due to "military necessity."

By now, many people have debunked the idea of "military necessity" surrounding the Japanese American internment/incarceration, and I have written about this issue many times before, especially in this post. So I won't rehearse all of the standard reasons why it is important to remember the 70th anniversary of this infamous date (although I would encourage people to go to this link to an article in Colorlines Magazine).

But I do want to note a connection between EO9066 and Black History Month. Because I think there are more things that unite Asian Americans and African Americans than divide them, despite ridiculous recent comments by Floyd Mayweather and Jenny Hyun. The Afro-Asian connections and points of solidarity are ones that Dr. Sarah Jackson has tweeted about (click here). Asian American activism (of which the Japanese American Internment redress movement was part of) owes a debt to the modern civil rights movement for African American enfranchisement. Asian Americans and African Americans can and should join together to confront issues of white supremacy and white privilege -- and should join with all others who want to be anti-racist allies.

Social justice issues should give us all an opportunity to recognize the intersections of oppression and the possibilities for solidarity across racial lines. We should celebrate Black history month and recognize the injustice of Executive Order 9066 and the unconstitutional incarceration of Japanaese Americans during WWII--and we should continue to see why we are stronger thinking of both together rather than separately.

Why I love Michelle Obama

There's a lot of reasons to love Michelle Obama, but one of the best ones that I can think of is that she really understands why she is such an important symbol for so many people, especially African American women. She is a beautiful, intelligent, elegant, funny, and strong black woman who is the partner to the President of the United States.

On February 16 she surprised a tour of White House visitors (along with First Dog Bo)--it's a long video link, but it's worth going to time stamp 37:00 -- that's where she encounters a group of African American women, and it's so moving and powerful to watch their reactions--to see how much they love, admire, and respect her.

Click here for the link.

I've caught the fever and it's called LINSANITY

I've been wanting to write, for over a week, about the phenomenon we now refer to as "Linsanity" -- the rise of NY Knicks point guard Jeremy Lin.



If you live in the U.S. or China/Taiwan, you have not been able to not hear about, read about, and watch the highlight reels of Jeremy Lin tearing up the court at Madison Square Garden and at basketball arenas around the nation (and across the border in Toronto). The general rhetoric is that he came out of nowhere, an underdog who was underappreciated and undervalued, and now he has risen to stratospheric heights, saving the Knick's season, reinvigorating fans in NYC (and around the nation), and inspiring Asian Americans to claim Lin as Ours--he is one of us.

One of us.

That's a very powerful notion for Asian Americans--that we are seeing, EVERYWHERE, the face and body of a male Asian American athlete on a national stage--that we are watching Jeremy Lin hold his own night after night, quelling the nay sayers (and the haters) about being a fluke and showing that he had always had talent, but it was obscured by the stereotypes and misperceptions that people associated with college and professional basketball (and really mainline college and professional sports) have about Asian American athletes: we aren't really real.

And it's painful to not be really real. It's not just Asian American athletes who suffer from this perception--it's the way in our 21st Century society has made "real" what you see on a screen--whether it's the tv screen, the movie screen, or your computer screen. If it's not an image for mass consumption, it doesn't exist. If you aren't being represented on a sitcom, opening up a blockbuster movie, passing a ball or playing at the Grammy's, you're not real.

Asian Americans have not, historically, had a lot of positive screen time--and certainly haven't had screen time outside of pretty stereotypical roles--the martial artist, the geisha, the enemy soldier or war refugee, the nerd.

But now we've got Jeremy Lin!

And while I don't want to overstate his importance, there is no escaping that we are in a moment--and that particularly for Asian Americans, there is a sense that finally we have someone--someone who is getting a lot of screen time. Someone who defies stereotypes. Someone who has grabbed the nation's attention and is succeeding in an arena reserved for the most masculine of athletes (and this is additionally significant in terms of the way that Asian American men have traditionally been portrayed, especially in the media, as feminized and weak).

There's an especially astute post by my friend and colleague, Timothy Yu--it's long but it's definitely worth reading because Tim really gets at the heart of why Jeremy Lin is so important to Asian Americans at this particular moment, especially Tim's last line:

"This is why Asian Americans love Jeremy Lin: he's everything we are, and he's everything we've been told we can never be."

I don't know how long Linsanity will last--like all things, there will be a time when the Knick's winning streak will end and at the very least if the improbable happens and Lin keeps winning and winning, the basketball season will come to an end. And I know that there's also going to be the inevitable racist comment (there have been some minor ones already)--and certainly Lin has already faced racist taunts before. But what is important in the here and now are all the ways that Lin is inspiring to so many. And while I know I've concentrated on how he is an inspiration to Asian Americans, I feel really gratified to see that at least among some journalists, there has been an effort to do real racial analysis that is thoughtful and that recognizes all the ways that Lin has been overlooked and underappreciated because of society's stereotypes of who can play basketball. In other words, Lin's race matters.

Then again, I always think race matters!

Peter Hoekstra--PLEASE take an Asian American history class!

A student in my Asian American in the South class just sent me a link to a New York Times article that discusses an ad that ran in Michigan during the Superbowl--I've included it below and you can click here for the article itself:



Not sure where to begin with this one. The fact that the actress is Chinese American and NOT Chinese and certainly even in the ad, although she's speaking in this strange broken English she does so without a clear Chinese accent. The fact that this ad was filmed in California--probably in the Delta of California (which is northeast of SF) and NOT filmed in the rice paddies of China. And, oh, the fact that this ad is clearly playing off of fears of exporting jobs to China--which is a return to yellow peril rhetoric that American politicians have been using since the mid-19th C.

In fact, I just got through teaching the concept of "yellow peril" in both my Asian American classes a few weeks ago.

So here's the sad but true thing of it all: my students (who range from 18-22, generally speaking) are much more saavy and sensitive and smart about issues related to Asian Americans in this country than this Republican contender for the U.S. senate.

Shame on you Peter Hoekstra! Shame on you! If you really want to do something for the civic good of this nation, get yourself enrolled in an Asian American studies class at the University of Michigan. Go out and buy a history book about Asian Americans or Chinese Americans, like this excellent one by Peter Kwong and Dusanka Miscevic.

I cannot BELIEVE we still have to talk about yellow peril rhetoric and that Asians are still being linked to the loss of American jobs. AGHHHH!!!!!