Is Reid a racist?

In case you haven't heard, the senate majority leader Harry Reid, said of Obama during the 2008 primaries that Obama was a viable candidate because he was "light skinned" and didn't speak with a "Negro dialect."

For regular readers of this blog, it goes without saying that his remarks are problematic, particularly the fact that in the 21st century, Reid is using a phrase that is clearly antiquated and offensive.

Republicans, especially in the form of Michael Steele, the RNC chairman (and yes, if anyone before Obama's presidential election-win was scratching their heads thinking "Michael who?" one only has to think back on Obama's Illinois senate run-off against KC Watts to understand the (il)logic of the Republican party in how they handle race), are crying "DOUBLE STANDARD" when it comes to the Democratic reaction to Reid's remarks. They want Reid OUT and they are citing the ouster of Trent Lott after Lott famously praised Strom Thurmond and waxed nostalgic for the good-old-days of segregation that Thurmond represented when he unsuccessfully ran for President.

So people have been asking: is Reid a racist? Were his remarks racist? Should he be forced to resign?

I hesitated to blog on this issue because it almost seems like a non-starter. I don't mean that Reid's remarks are egregiously in bad taste and racially insensitive (they are) or that the race-baiting that the Republicans are now engaging in doesn't smack of the worst of opportunism (it does), but do we need to really debate whether or not Harry Reid is a racist or more specifically whether his remarks are racist? Does it matter the context in which Reid was speaking--in support of an African American man who was running for the presidency vs. Lott's remarks--in support of a known segregationist who espoused the worst racist rhetoric of his time once-upon-a-time?

Why I am blogging about it now is that I think it's easy to flatten out all instances of racial insensitivity and, again, easy to trot out the dreaded "R" word when accusing folks of different levels of offensiveness. Is Trent Lott a racist? I'm not really quite certain. Does it matter whether I call him a racist or his remarks racists? Again, what I would say is that we have to look at the context of Lott's remarks and to think about what he was trying to convey--support for a colleague and friend who espoused a platform of racial separation within a white supremacist framework--and that Lott affirmed, in his remarks, that the U.S. would be a better place to live had Thurmond won the presidency and was allowed to have his value and politics triumph. Reid's remarks, by contrast, while racially insensitive and ignorant in phraseology (again, really Mr. Reid? Negro? Who uses that phrase?) were meant to convey a hard truth: that for many voters, Obama seemed palatable because he wasn't threatening or living up to a stereotype of an African American man that would make white mainstream voters uncomfortable.

The question to ask isn't whether Reid is racist or his remarks are racist--the question to ask is, why is Reid using such antiquated language and why are the Republicans so quick to jump on the bandwagon all of a sudden when so many of their supporters and politicians have been making racist and racially insensitive comments about President Obama far worse than Reid's remarks? In my opinion, it's because the Republicans see all racially insensitive remarks or all awkward racial remarks to be on par with all racist remarks.

And flattening out these differences is similar to deflections of real racism and racial discrimination by claiming that there is reverse racism or that blacks are prejudiced against whites just as much as whites may be against blacks or that individuals of color are bigoted against white people. What this flattening does is ignore a complicated history of power dynamics and institutional racism and white supremacy. It makes it seem as if all is the same when it's not.

Anyway, my final word on this will actually be to draw your attention to NPR's "Talk of the Nation" and the piece they did on this subject today as well as Kelli Goff's piece in The Huffington Post. I do think Goff, on the radio, said it best--we have to really ask ourselves about whether these are teachable moments rather than to react defensively. If only the Republican party could learn that lesson...

I only want real friends on Facebook

Let me first say that I defy many stereotypes. Case in point: this past holiday season I spent part of my winter break in Toronto with family members. Now, if you have ever spent any time with the large and extended Chinese Jamaican family that is the "Y" family (those of you related to me reading this know what I mean) then you will at some point or another been introduced to dominoes. There was one day that I literally didn't change out of my PJs and just played round after round of dominoes with aunts and cousins. Of course part of domino scoring is about adding up the tiles in your hand (depending on what game you play). And for the life of me, when confronted with adding up multiple figures that don't end in a 5 of 0, I become stymied. My cousins continually laughed and teased me about this defect--I kept begging for a calculator--and my aunt would simply add up my tiles for me, from time to time, when my own computational skills were just too slow to start a new game.

Now I suppose one could say that while I defy the "good-at-math" stereotype of the Asian nerd, I am perhaps perpetuating the "Math's-hard" mentality of that infamous talking Barbie doll (and the stereotype that girls aren't good at math). Guess you win some and you lose some.

But one area that I really DO defy all expectations of the Asian as computer nerd/tech geek whiz, is text messaging and social networking.

Text messaging, I know, is what everyone is doing nowadays--and it has its conveniences and potentially can save my life. Say I was kidnapped and put in the trunk of a car with my hands tied in front of me. With the use of my opposable thumbs, I could flip open my cell phone and text a message to friends to come rescue me. But aside from this implausible scenario, I can't imagine the need to send text messages--and those few friends and family members who have texted me know that I never reply--I simply pick up the phone to call them or send an email in return.

As for social networking, I've been asked to join Linked In and I have--and I have politely accepted all invitations because to say no seems rude, although I don't really understand Linked In and/or make no real use of it myself except to accept invitations from friends and colleagues. I don't twitter, or have a My Space Page and never got into Friendster when it was hot way back when, and prefer not to chat with people on gmail or any other chat forum. And I resisted Facebook for as long as I could until it became the place to have certain professional conversations--like different professional groups have Facebook Pages, so you really can't get away with not being on Facebook anymore, at least if you work in the fields that I work in.

But here's the thing I can't figure out (and yes, I know I am going to sound like a curmudgeonly 82 year old man shouting "You kids get off my lawn!): if I'm not really your friend (or professional colleague/acquaintance) in real life, why would I want to be friends with you now? And if we were never friends in high school, why are you looking me up to be friends over twenty years later? Seriously, I've received friend requests from the most random people--in some cases total strangers who happen to know one person in common with me--and that person is usually a professional colleague I once shook hands with at a conference 2 years ago. In some other cases it's folks from high school or middle school even who have found me and want to be friends with me--but if we are to be brutally honest with one another, we'd have to admit that we were never really friends. Yes, I may have signed your yearbook and you may have signed mine, because back then it's what you DID--you accumulated signatures in your yearbook (or at least I did) out of a sense of reciprocity or popularity or herd mentality. But if we never exchanged a meaningful conversation in high school and my only vague memory of you is that we may have shared Mr. Hokom's pre-calculus class, then why on earth are you trying to be friends with me now?!

Yes, I am ranting. Yes, I recognize the value of social networking. I even suspect that I could come up with something profound about race and social networking--about the ways in which it's a double-edged sword--easier for the white supremacists and bigots of all stripes and sub-groups (I haven't tried searching for this but I bet there's a Facebook group dedicated to hating mixed race black-Asian children living in Texas whose parents are veterans of a foreign war) it's also a space in which allies working for various social justice causes can find common cause and work together on issues (can anyone say Barak Obama's presidential campaign? Or the Courage Campaign's fight against Proposition 8 in California?). And certainly I have appreciated the many wonderful readers of this blog who have added to and at times challenged the different conversations I've been delighted to engage in, here.

But really, can you kids just get off my lawn?!!! And stop trying to be friends with me. I don't have the time right now. You see, I'm too busy looking for my old Smith Corona, and I'll be playing my 78s on the Victrola and cranking up the old Model T to go take in a talkie tonight.

MRA Movie Review: Up in the Air about Invictus

So I thought I'd combine two movie reviews in this single post: Invictus and Up in the Air.

Today, Southern Man and I went to see Up in the Air



First, let me say that I thought the most powerful part of the film were the scenes of people describing their reactions to being fired. Apparently, these were not actors but rather real people who had recently experienced being laid off due to the downturn in the economy. I'm going to include an extensive quote from an interview that Jason Reitman (the director) gave to Indiewire.com (by the way, if you follow the link to the interview, just be aware that there are spoilers in it--they do warn you, but I wanted to warn you too):

"[S]ince we were shooting in St. Louis and Detroit, two cities that got hit hardest in this country, we reached out to find people who had been fired to act in this movie. We put an ad out in the local papers and said we wanted to make a documentary about job loss, we thought by saying this we would weed out actors trying to sneak into the film, and find people who had no on-camera experience who were ready to just open up about what it’s like to be searching for purpose on a daily basis in a very, very tough time.

We ended up putting 60 people on film, 22 of which are in this movie. So everyone besides the actors you recognize, everyone who gets fired in this movie, is someone who’s lost their job. They would come in, sit at a table, we would interview them for about 10 minutes, we would ask them questions about how they lost their job, who they told first, how this has affected their life, and as soon as they were comfortable on camera, we would say, ‘we’d like to actually fire you on camera now. And we’d like you to respond the way you did the day you lost your job, or if you prefer, how you wish you had responded.’ And this would begin an improv scene; unlike any improv scene I’ve ever seen in my life.

My job as a director is to get people to get people to be honest on camera, that’s kind of it in a nutshell. It’s to get actors to be authentic. And I know how hard it is to sometimes get people to be authentic on camera. And yet here in this moment, 22 people who had never acted before, we would read them this boilerplate legal firing document that I found through an HR person, that is basically used coast to coast for firing. And the second they would hear this legal verbiage, and they would hear the kind of language they heard the day they lost their job, they would start to use sense-memory without knowing it. Their body language would change, their shoulders would fold, their eyes would turn, one girl broke into hives. I’m not sure if you noticed her, the hives broke out across her neck, right at that moment. And they’d begin asking questions of our interviewer, who knows nothing of their situation, they’d ask them about severance, and their medical benefits, and why they were chosen and why not somebody else. And if there was another job that they could get in the company, and these would go on for ten, sometimes 20 minutes. They were really emotional, and they would get angry and they would cry, and they would say the kind of things I could never think of as a writer, and it was said in a way that I would never think to direct them."

I think, given the times we are living in, the themes of this film--of alienation and the fragility of human connection and the difficulty of true and honest communication, is very apropos.

As for the rest of the film, I also enjoyed it--as much as you can say you enjoyed a film focused on a man who fires people for a living. To that end, I can't imagine anyone else but George Clooney in the role. There is a moment, and I promise not to provide any spoilers, but let me just say that there is a moment in the film that shows that Clooney isn't just a pretty face, he's an actor with true talent.

I do have to offer a criticism, however, since this blog is called Mixed Race America--namely that while the people getting fired were a somewhat mixed and diverse group, racially, all of the actual actors were not. The people at Clooney's company, the people at his sister's wedding, and most of the folks in the airport were a rather monochromatic lot. Which may be true if you are flying into certain airports, but having recently flown in and out of Toronto, Canada and Washington DC, I'd say that the folks I saw in the airport were vastly diverse, racially, ethnically, nationally. Can't guess socio-economics, but of course if you're flying you more than likely come from a middle-class (or higher) background, since taking Greyhound is still cheaper than many roundtrip tickets (and let me say that part of me contemplated taking a bus out of Toronto because of the huge hassle that followed). Ok, tangent aside, I'd say that Up in the Air, while entertaining, didn't really do anything to dispell my disappointment that most of Hollywood still maintains a very white-washed notion of America, even when the face of America, as represented by real people who have recently been fired in the Midwest, display a different side.

Now, on to Invictus



I was recently talking to a friend about this film--she asked what I thought, and I prefaced my remarks by saying that any film about Nelson Mandela was going to be a film I'd go see, because I LOVE Nelson Mandela, as is evidence by this previous post on his 90th birthday (he'll be 92 this July--REMARKABLE!).

Apparently Nelson Mandela handpicked Morgan Freeman to represent him on film (click here for Freeman interview), so you know that this film, as far as the casting goes, has Mandela's seal of approval. And my favorite part of the film were the first ten minutes that shows Mandela's release from prison, the reaction of black South Africans, Mandela's campaign and election into the presidency, and the changing face of South Africa. The footage was largely re-created since it was Morgan as Mandela that you saw, but that feeling of triumph and joy at Mandela's release--it made me remember what it was like in the early 90s to witness the end of Apartheid and the ascendancy of Mandela. I was literally in tears in the beginning.

As for the rest of the film, it is your standard "rise from the ashes to glory" kind of sports film--fairly predictable (particularly if you google this event since it is a historic event) with fairly predictable conflicts and resolutions. But you know, it's not a bad reason to make a film--certainly with dreadful movies out in the world, to have a film made about one man's attempt to heal the racial wounds of his country and to have the forethought to recognize the cultural significance of a sport to help make this happen, is reason enough to give this film a viewing. That this man is Nelson Mandela was all I needed to plunk down my money.

I was struck, in particular, by one part of the film--a section in which Mandela talks about forgiveness--how important it is to forgive the white Afrikaaners who subjugated black South Africans for decades. That the time for anger was past and the time for healing was now. It is a theme I have heard again and again in terms of racial reconciliation, especially between blacks and whites in various contexts--especially between minorities previously disenfranchised about those formerly in power. I'm always amazed at this sentiment--because forgiveness does not seem obvious or natural and yet, what are the alternatives? Escalation of conflict and tensions that pull people and countries apart into civil war?

Finally, let me just say that while I was trying to be clever in my blog title, I actually am a bit ambivalent about Invictus. Because I wish it gave me a bit more about Nelson Mandela. Guess we'll have to wait for that biopic to be made in the future.

It only took 2 days (sigh)

On Saturday, January 2, 2010, only 2 days into the new year and new decade, a black doll with a noose around its neck was hung over a billboard with a sign reading "Obama." This was in Plains, GA and the billboard reads "Plains, GA--Home of Jimmy Carter--Our 39th President."

(big sigh)

This is the WALB clip where you can see the doll very clearly.



And this is Jimmy Carter speaking to Brian Williams back in September about how much of the language and criticism directed against Obama is a subtle--or in the case of the effigy a not-so-subtle--form of racism:



There are so many disturbing things about this--the obvious I don't need to state, but in the WALB clip, they interview an African American man who says that everyone can see it [the effigy] but no one is talking about it. And that's what seems particularly disturbing. We are witnessing outright racism but everyone is afraid to name it clearly and directly. We have become so afraid of talking about racism--as if it's a disease. Or that calling someone racist may be seen as worse than actually saying or doing racist things--the label becomes worse than the actual, underlying problem. And so all those people who were mad at Carter for calling it as he sees it--as it actually IS...what do they think now?

I know it's a bit discouraging to have this be the second post of the new year (I was intending to write about Invictus, the new film about Nelson Mandela starring Morgan Freeman--guess I'll save that for tomorrow) but I also think that this is a good reminder to us that there is work to be done and that we must step up and take on that work. Are you ready?

Happy 2010 -- a year and a decade in review

I've been very remiss in blogging--my apologies. The end of the semester and the holidays were a bit more chaotic for me this year. Or last year I should say. Because it's now January 1, 2010--a new year and a new decade!

If you think about all the changes that have happened in this past decade, it's really quite remarkable. Perhaps this is what we did when we looked back on the last decade, which was also the last millenia. But I do think that the changes we've seen over the last ten years have been true game changers.

Of course, what immediately leaps to mind are 2 in particular: 9/11 and the election of Barack Obama.

But on a personal note, the last decade had some game changers for me as well. I finished my dissertation and got my PhD, I landed a tenure-track job in the South, I ended one longterm relationship and began a second--and I suppose this is also the time to announce that a few months ago Southern Man proposed and I said yes!

So what does this upcoming year have in store for me? I am up for tenure, which means that I'm reading and writing as fast as my little eyes and fingers can stand it. I am planning a small wedding (I've never disclosed this before, but I was married before and did the 250+ traditional wedding--both Southern Man and I would like something much more low-key. And I'm turning 40 sometime this year--which means I'll have to change my profile to reflect that I'm actually a 40-something professor of English.

Anyway, this was a more personal post than I had planned. But never fear! 2010 will see more posts thinking about all things race related since this blog is called "Mixed Race America." But for now, I'm keeping it simple by just letting you all know what I'm currently reflecting on and what I'll be planning in the year ahead. And I do wonder what 2020 will have in store for us as we begin the first day of the second decade of the second millenia.

R.I.P.: Jennifer Jones, actress

Have any of you ever seen the 1955 film Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing? It stars the late William Holden as a war correspondent covering the Korean War. He also happens to be married but estranged from his wife, who is in the U.S. It also stars the now late Jennifer Jones, who plays a "Eurasian" doctor, Han Suyin. I put "Eurasian" in quotation marks because no one uses that term anymore, although it was quite popular (and more politic) back in the days. Now, we'd just say she is mixed-race--the daughter of a Chinese/Cantonese man and a British-white woman. The film is actually based on the memoir of Dr. Han Suyin--I'm sure that the romance between her and William Holden's character is really played up for dramatic purposes, but I've never read the memoir.


[A still from the film showing Jennifer Jones]

I begin with the film because Ms. Jones is my namesake. My mother LOVED (or maybe it should be the present tense LOVES) this film. And while "Jennifer" was the most popular name the year I was born (most folks either blame it on the film version of Camelot--Jennifer is a derivation from Guenivere or on the film Love Story--the tragic protagonist is named "Jenny"). And last week, on December 17, 2009 Jennifer Jones died of natural causes in her Malibu home at the age of 90.

I've always thought it was funny that I am named after a white actress who famously played the role of a mixed-race Asian woman. That a woman acting in yellowface essentially propelled my name into the world and that I ended up being someone who critiques yellowface and writes about issues of mixed race.

Anyway, rest in peace Jennifer Jones. I feel an odd sense of kinship and connection to you. And I must admit, I also have a certain fondness for this film...even though I wish they could have found someone who was actually Chinese or mixed-race Asian to play the lead.

Racism + Environment = Environmental racism?

This story just out of the AP: as the globe warms and waters rise, there are going to be thousands if not millions of people displaced from the coast. And as this story demonstrates, a history of racism and discrimination makes trying to sort out the environmental impacts and to provide aid more difficult since aid continues to look like discrimination.

This is a lengthy piece, but I think it's worth reading to demonstrate the complexities of racism, historic and unremitting racism against a group of people whose links to the land extend back millenia--and whose mixed-race lineage also reminds us that purity really is a myth.

===================================================

"La. Indian village holds out against plea to move"
From Associated Press
December 14, 2009 3:02 AM EST

ISLE DE JEAN CHARLES, La. (AP) — A day in the life of Edison Dardar starts with a caterwaul of a shout. A yawlp. His chest puffs up: "Yay-hoooo!" Morning cries down the road greet him. "Wa-hoooo!" .... "Yaaaah!" .... "Aaaahh-eee." The Indian fisherman smiles. His cousins and nephews are doing well.

Soon enough, roosters and dogs join the morning chorus, and the island is awake.

"It keeps your chest clear," the 60-year-old barrel-chested fisherman rationalizes. "Over in Bourg, if I did that, they'd probably put me in jail."

Bourg is a tidy Cajun bayou town a few miles north of Dardar's hurricane-smashed Indian village in the marsh where holdout families are being urged to move to by a tribal chief, scientists and public officials.

Why? Because life on this spit of soggy land 6 miles from the Gulf of the Mexico may soon be impossible for the interrelated families with French, Choctaw, Houma, Biloxi and Chitimacha bloodlines that go back 170 years when a Frenchman came here with his Choctaw wife and named the island after his father, Jean Charles.

The road to the island is caving in. Hurricanes are flooding homes more often. The Gulf gets closer every year. Isle de Jean Charles is at risk of disappearing under the Gulf of Mexico.

But to Edison Dardar and his kin, the name Bourg sounds like a prison.

"What am I going to do there? Wake up and look at the road?" Edison Dardar shrugs. "No, not me. I'm not moving. This island is more beautiful than ever. This island is a gold mine for me."

He casts for shrimp at sunset behind his house. Sips coffee at Oxcelia's, his sister's place up the road, in the mornings. Checks in on Leodilla, his blind, 90-year-old mother who's old enough to remember the huts made of mud and grass, or bousillage. His wife, Elizabeth, is content watching old Westerns like "Bonanza" and feeding her chicks. A son still lives at a home they raised on 12-foot stilts after Hurricane Andrew in 1992 flooded the island. It wobbles like Jell-o when someone walks from one room to the next.

With a bad limp from 40 years of backbreaking work dredging for oysters, Edison Dardar hobbles over to a handmade plywood sign on the road through the village. He stands next to it proudly.

It reads: "Island is not for sale. If you don't like the island stay off. Don't give up fight for you rights. It's worth saving. Edison Dardar Jr."

"My son wrote it," Dardar, who cannot read and write himself, says with a grin.

___

From New Orleans, it's a long road to this alligator- and mosquito-infested marsh island. The road goes past the city's outskirts, postwar suburbs and po' boy sandwich shops; it sails across Cajun farmlands of sugar cane fields, moss-draped oaks and roadside watermelon vendors. You must drive beyond the inland fishing towns connected by clunky drawbridges and bayous bobbing with shrimp trawlers and hyacinth.

Push on, and the canopy thins out, the road crosses a levee and enters the wide open expanse of marsh tidelands that run for miles out to the Gulf of Mexico.

An end-of-the-world nausea sets in on the narrow road that rolls across open water toward Isle de Jean Charles. A crooked yellow sign warns: "Water On Road." When high tides and a stiff southern wind combine, the road is slick with water. Half the road caved in after last year's hurricane season.

A gut check hits as the road wends through the island. Half the houses are empty shells, blown apart by hurricanes. Most of the others are raised high on pilings — not for the view, but to keep sofas, beds and Grandma's photos out of the Gulf's regular inundations. The church is gone, the store is gone, most of the children too.

The islanders are living the doomsday scenario that many researchers say awaits Miami, Houston, Savannah, New York: A rising sea at the doorstep.

The village sits outside the main levee systems of south Louisiana, and in the middle of some of the fastest eroding wetlands in the world. For the past 80 years, oil drilling, logging and the Army Corps of Engineers' levee building on the Mississippi River have doomed the island. The knockout is the combination of sea level rise and intense hurricanes.

"In the 1980s, I asked someone to take me to look at Fala, an important Indian settlement, and he took me out there in a boat and said, 'Look down,'" recalled Jack Campisi, an anthropologist who's worked to get south Louisiana's American Indians recognized by the federal government. So far, the Bureau of Indian Affairs has shot down their petitions. "What's at stake is a viable ethnic identity. It's easier to do if you have a federal relationship."

Many tribes moved into the swamps to escape enslavement or forced banishment after Congress passed the 1830 Indian Removal Act. Today, there are about 20,000 American Indians on the coast. Until the 1950s, most Indians lived in isolation with limited interaction with whites. Old timers recall barefoot children scampering into the woods to hide when the first cars rattled onto the island in the 1950s.

Before the coast was overrun by the oil boom and shipyards, the Indians lived off the land, growing small gardens and raising livestock. Fish, oysters, crawfish and crabs were staples. For medicine, they relied on plants. There was "bon blanc" tea made from a leafy plant. Medicinal teas were gotten from boiling "citronelle," ''venera," a Houma word for sage, and the bark of the "bois connu" tree.

"We had no running water. We washed our clothes in the bayou," recalled Hilda Naquin, a 95-year-old Houma woman who grew up between mud walls covered in newspapers and under a thatched palmetto roof. "We didn't have much to eat. My grandpa used to plant a garden. Thank God for that. Our oven was made outside with the dirt and mud."

This isolation was imposed, as stories of discrimination attest. Indian children were barred from schools until the 1960s and called "sabines," a derogatory term.

"My daddy couldn't go get a haircut up the bayou. He couldn't get a hamburger in the town of Golden Meadow," said Laura Billiot, Hilda Naquin's daughter. "The prejudices are still there today; not as bad, but they're still there."

___

Albert Naquin, one of two tribal chiefs recognized by the islanders, stands on the sinking road surveying his old village. The sound of water laps at the road and fills the silences between his words.

"They had a small lake over yonder, just north of here. Wonder Lake. Now it's all open water," Naquin says.

He resembles a defeated general surveying a battlefield. The contours of the past — smoke rising from thatched-roof homes, barefoot children splashing in crawfish ponds, fishermen poking through the marshes in pirogues — shimmer on the flat marsh horizon in front of him. But these are only memories now. For him, it's time to move inland and reconstitute the tribe behind the safety of levees.

"We didn't have any money. We lived off the land. We had our own cows, we had our pigs, we had chickens, and they were fishermen, and they also raised the garden. So, during the Depression, we didn't even feel that at all," Naquin says.

The idea of moving to Bourg was Albert Naquin's idea. He's talking with state and federal officials about a $12 million plan to buy a tract of land for 60 homes, in return for not fixing the road.

But his intentions are regarded with skepticism and open hostility by the families that remain on the island. Naquin's family moved off the island after a hurricane destroyed their home in the 1970s.

"Sometimes I feel like Moses," he says. "But Moses had something to go by. I don't have anything. I mean, I'm just an old Indian guy from down here."

He shakes his head. "I'm taking a beating."

Isle de Jean Charles is not the first Indian village to face relocation because of erosion and sea level rise. These factors are combining to force the relocation of seaside villages like Newtok, Shishmaref, Unalakleet and Kivalina in Alaska.

"This is not something that is happening just in Louisiana and it is not something that is theoretical," said Robert Young, the director of the Program for the Study of Developed Shorelines at Western Carolina University in Cullowhee, N.C. "If we don't at least talk about relocation, nature will make those decisions for us, and they won't necessarily be the ones we want to make."

Since Hurricane Katrina, Louisiana officials and the Army Corps of Engineers have set about drawing lines across south Louisiana to determine what can and cannot be saved from sea level rise and delta erosion.

"They drew this broad red line, and said the entire area below the red line would be at risk," said Michael Dardar, a diesel mechanic, tribal historian and a leader with the United Houma Nation. "Every major Houma community is below that red line. Lower Dulac, Pointe Aux Chenes, Isle de Jean Charles. Our whole way of life is in danger."

This bleak future has been the topic of a recent series of community meetings, called "How Safe, How Soon?"

And at each meeting, Brenda Dardar, the principal chief of the Houmas, has gone in with the same message:

"We need to make sure that we can adapt, whether it's elevating our homes, building smart or moving to a different location. Our history's important, our culture's important and preserving our communities is important."

___

Isle de Jean Charles may be on the wrong side of the line being drawn across the map of south Louisiana. But defiance here seems immovable. The Dardars, Naquins, Billiots and Verdins aren't going easily.

"I wouldn't move. No way. I don't care if this place floods time and again. Nobody but me is living on this land," says T.J. Dardar, a fisherman and one of Edison's cousins, squatting outside his dilapidated wooden house. It's missing siding, needs a coat of paint; piles of beer cans, burnt trash and assorted junk lie around it. A heap of asphalt shingles, with a couple of television boxes thrown in, slumps into the canal across the road.

Notwithstanding the flooding, dangerous road and declining sense of community, it's not hard to see why people want to stay.

"You can do anything you want on this island — catch your crabs, your shrimp, dry your shrimp," Edison Dardar says. "I see nothing changed, me," he says on a walk through his village. So what, he says, if there is now water where he once saw grass? "We were killing duck (when there was land). Now we're killing shrimp. If you're hungry, you make a living."

Back home, his tangy shrimp are drying on a tarp behind his house. Chickens squawk. He mashes a piece of shrimp between his teeth. "They still need to dry some more."

Time slows down here. The plop of a fish brings a great silence of the marsh. Dardar rests for a moment and the symphony of frogs, bugs and birds comes back.

"Make some good gumbo, jambalaya. Talk about good, partner."

"Leave? For what?" he says.

Phildelphia cream cheese wants to spread a little inter-racial love

Last night while channel surfing through cable tv (Oh, how I miss my Sunday Mad Men nights) I saw a commercial from Philadelphia cream cheese in which an African American woman--in her mid-20s, hip, young and fashionable, and attractive is making spaghetti with marinara sauce, stirring in a tub of Philadelphia cream cheese.

[Health note: I really can't believe they are advocating that we do this--stir in a whole tub of cream cheese into red sauce? I've never been a fan of stirring in cream cheese to make things thicker--like in mashed potatoes. I know there are some who swear by it, but I don't like it when I can feel my arteries clogging up with all that fat/cholesterol]

We also see a white man (also mid-20s, young, hip, attractive) enter the frame, who is helping her with the meal--setting the table and adding things to the pot. The music playing is one that you typically hear with these kinds of ads, soft-rock-jazzy-peppy. The couple are affectionate with each other and are framed close together, sharing in the fun of cooking this meal, sitting down to eat it, and then afterwards, dancing in each others' arms and sharing a close-up kiss before the commercial ends. The commercial is not long--I mean, it's the typical length of a commercial (15-20 seconds), but it's probably the first time I've seen an inter-racial black-white couple acting ... like a couple. Sometimes you see groups of "friends" who could also be "couples" and they are a mixed-race group, but it's not quite clear if they are romantically linked or even sometimes who is with whom (after all, even though there are 2 women and 2 men, the men could be with one another and the women could be paired as well--although who am I kidding--this is mainstream advertising--they do not want us to assume queer coupling, but I think it's interesting to consider this possibility!).

Anyway, I was struck by this commercial--because I can't recall seeing another young, attractive, affectionate, hip 20-something black-female, white-male inter-racial couple in a commercial for something as mundane as cream cheese. In fact, it made me think about the dearth of inter-racial couples who really SEEM like couples--who act like couples. All those ads for KY jelly or for Visa or for the hundreds of other mundane products and stores seem to show Asian couples/families and Latino couples/families (rare but we're starting to see them), black couples/families (a bit more visible), and white couples/families (yep, they are all over the place and hence "the norm"). If we're heading into the second decade of the 21st century, shouldn't being a mixed-race couple and especially a mixed-race family be a bit more visible and commonplace than in just this one Philadelphia cream cheese ad?

And shouldn't this couple be eating healthier??!!