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

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

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

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

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

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



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

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

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

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

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



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

Why is a mixed race character in this white novel?

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

But I digress.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So why does Bender do this?

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

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

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

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

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

All things Asian American

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

So.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Politics of Inter-racial Romance

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So why am I married to Southern Man?

(sigh)

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

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

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

A community of one's own

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

APA shout out!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

MAY IS HUG-AN-ASIAN-AMERICAN MONTH!

OK, not really.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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