Monday, September 22, 2008
Since September 2nd, I've grappled with one major question: what does the outcome of the District 29 Democratic Party State Representative primary say about local politics? I fear that Mr. Cruz's sobering loss in the September 2nd Democratic Party primary speaks to our community's failures to forge and maintain an open and diverse Pima County Democratic Party, where local progressives, liberals and moderate Democrats band together to solve our community's problems, including laughable state spending on public education, disheartening unemployment and underemployment concerns, and serious misuse of our state's finite natural resources.
Yes, the Democratic Party's foremost interest involves electing Democrats to public office, but each and every one of us should scrutinize our electoral candidates to ensure that the Democrats we elect are the Democrats we need. I supported Ephraim Cruz because Ephraim Cruz is a Democrat who suffered for our shared ideals, who fought for those without power and privilege under our system. I never required the Democrat who simply parrots liberal talking points before liberal audiences like a patronizing Pinocchio jerkily animated by a low-budget James Carville wannabe in Geppetto drag.
Bottom line: a local campaign revolves around using political action to help one's neighbors. Most political candidates sound inauthentic, flat, and bored with their own dogma because candidates begin their odd sojourn in local politics filled with immense ambition and little else. Certainly Democratic candidates are decent folk who want clean air, low health insurance premiums for all and microwavable chicken dinners in every refrigerator, but most begin their campaigns with a benign abstractness about the entire deal, outside of their pet projects. Then they can't shut up.
You've seen the debate: Ephraim Cruz proves he's the world's foremost expert on immigration policy, Tom Prezelski hammered home his understanding of legislative minutia, Daniel Patterson emerged as some grey-haired mad scientist's experimental cross-pollinization between the AFL-CIO and Greenpeace, and Dr. Matt Heinz offered a wide range of sensible domestic policy proscriptions on all manner of serious local issues, all of which focused solely on his interest in health care. No money in the state budget? I'm a doctor. I heal people. Mining interests pollute the state's potable groundwater? I'm a doctor. I heal people. No money for public education? I'm a doctor. I heal people.
To attend that debate was like watching cable television with an eleven year old Halo aficionado raised on Pop Tarts and Pop Rocks. One second Jorge Ramos debates militarized borders with Lou Dobbs, the next Luca and Abby fight to save their newborn baby on a syndicated episode of ER. Somewhere in between flashes a touching tribute to Crocodile Hunter Steve Irwin, but that's interrupted to display gaunt and trendy Hollywood writers picketing and chanting to argue in favor of aborting your favorite television shows to beg for DVD royalties, and you close your eyes to forget the insanity, because no one's really talking about you!
Want to know what I learned? Our elected officials should reflect who we are and where we live. Anyone who purports to represent your interests should be able to logically and succinctly discuss those interests in public, and not himself ad nauseam. Local elections, in my opinion, are the largest contributor to voter apathy, because here the orthodox political commentary monopoly respects only pathetic micro-targeting and closed-circuit networking campaigns when candidates win friends and influence voters. Nothing more.
Average voters are not seriously asked to participate -- not by their local media, and not by their local political parties. It's not hard to get people interested: talk about what they care about, not what the Sierra Club or Planned Parenthood or the Arizona Education Association wants you to care about. In District 29, no one cares about the food you grow at home or the hybrid car you drive -- especially when a collegiate student body president is shot a few blocks from where you live. Don't tell me about the bed and breakfast statutes you've changed during your time in office when Tucsonans are laid off from their jobs all over.
Frankly, it became too simple to ignore the interests of the residents of District 29 in the mad dash to appeal to the small subset of plugged-in, Establishment Democratic voters in District 29. You can learn all manner of useful information about a place just by walking around the neighborhood, and I learned that much of South and Southeast Tucson present neglected neighborhoods, where people fend for themselves and nothing ever really changes.
I'll never forget: one Saturday my girlfriend and I canvassed Democrats in a South Tucson neighborhood filled with Richard Elias & Ramon Valadez signs, pit bulls, iron barred windows, liquor stores, and eight foot tall wire and iron fencing around every home. Every single home. You can't canvass folk you can't reach, and the dogs and fences obstructed more than we would have liked. Throughout that day, however, the Unisource Energy Tower, the tallest office building I've seen in Tucson, injected itself over these lower middle class homes, a mocking portrait of glass and steel opulence, Southern Arizona's answer to Mount Olympus.
That's the most galling part of this story. We Democrats know the local problems, and how to fix them. When schools suffer from anemic public funding and nonexistent public interest, we Democrats know who is hurt, and who is hurt most abundantly. We know who is most affected by rising gas prices and urban sprawl. We know who has health insurance, and who needs AHCCCS. We know that increased melanin content can decrease meaningful life choices in for many Tucsonans, statistically speaking. But we steadfastly refuse to discuss these issues during election season, to inform our fellow citizens of the reasons economic calamities befall them, and what they can do about it. We allow our elections to revolve around the simple and the mundane, the meaningless and the comical, the prurient and the personal. We cheapen the suffrage too many fight and bleed and die for when our politics devolves into the childish bickering and underdeveloped thinking that usually characterize local politics throughout our tortured and resilient county.
Seriously, all the election integrity advocates in Pima County have it wrong. I do not doubt their sincerity when they push for clean and fair and auditable elections, but the most glaring and serious threat to local democracy in Pima County is voter apathy. What Brad Nelson and Chuck Huckleberry do with the vote after its cast isn't really relevant when the vote itself approaches numerical insignificance. In District 29, 31,588 citizens are registered Democrats, yet only 8,797 voted in the September 2nd primary, with seven candidates. I toured polling places throughout District 29 on election day, only to find that with only a few hours left at some of the largest districts, barely fifty or sixty people total showed up to vote all day long. Really, if a voter didn't already personally know a candidate, or have some connection to the local Democratic Party or a local special interest group, chances are they didn't even know that September 2nd was Election Day.
Make no mistake -- Tucson Democrats rejected Ephraim Cruz. Out of seven candidates, Mr. Cruz won sixth place, only ahead of the nonexistent campaign of Gil Guerra. Our campaign visited over five thousand households in District 29, spent $21,875.00 in campaign funds, and mobilized volunteers throughout the blistering summer months to contact voters directly about Ephraim Cruz's message for change in Southern Arizona. Our mechanics proved effective; voters heard our radio advertisements, saw our television commercial, received our mailing, read our flyers, noticed our door hangers, and spoke with our campaign volunteers, often on multiple occasions. None of it worked.
Senator Barack Obama famously ripped author Alice Walker in a recent speech when he pronounced "We are the change we've been waiting for!" Maybe that's true. But we are also the problem we've been avoiding. Public outreach to increase both registered Democrats and voter turnout could provide the majorities we need in Phoenix to actually fix the public education and health care access issues that so plague this state. Get involved.
Yes, the Democratic Party's foremost interest involves electing Democrats to public office, but each and every one of us should scrutinize our electoral candidates to ensure that the Democrats we elect are the Democrats we need. I supported Ephraim Cruz because Ephraim Cruz is a Democrat who suffered for our shared ideals, who fought for those without power and privilege under our system. I never required the Democrat who simply parrots liberal talking points before liberal audiences like a patronizing Pinocchio jerkily animated by a low-budget James Carville wannabe in Geppetto drag.
Bottom line: a local campaign revolves around using political action to help one's neighbors. Most political candidates sound inauthentic, flat, and bored with their own dogma because candidates begin their odd sojourn in local politics filled with immense ambition and little else. Certainly Democratic candidates are decent folk who want clean air, low health insurance premiums for all and microwavable chicken dinners in every refrigerator, but most begin their campaigns with a benign abstractness about the entire deal, outside of their pet projects. Then they can't shut up.
You've seen the debate: Ephraim Cruz proves he's the world's foremost expert on immigration policy, Tom Prezelski hammered home his understanding of legislative minutia, Daniel Patterson emerged as some grey-haired mad scientist's experimental cross-pollinization between the AFL-CIO and Greenpeace, and Dr. Matt Heinz offered a wide range of sensible domestic policy proscriptions on all manner of serious local issues, all of which focused solely on his interest in health care. No money in the state budget? I'm a doctor. I heal people. Mining interests pollute the state's potable groundwater? I'm a doctor. I heal people. No money for public education? I'm a doctor. I heal people.
To attend that debate was like watching cable television with an eleven year old Halo aficionado raised on Pop Tarts and Pop Rocks. One second Jorge Ramos debates militarized borders with Lou Dobbs, the next Luca and Abby fight to save their newborn baby on a syndicated episode of ER. Somewhere in between flashes a touching tribute to Crocodile Hunter Steve Irwin, but that's interrupted to display gaunt and trendy Hollywood writers picketing and chanting to argue in favor of aborting your favorite television shows to beg for DVD royalties, and you close your eyes to forget the insanity, because no one's really talking about you!
Want to know what I learned? Our elected officials should reflect who we are and where we live. Anyone who purports to represent your interests should be able to logically and succinctly discuss those interests in public, and not himself ad nauseam. Local elections, in my opinion, are the largest contributor to voter apathy, because here the orthodox political commentary monopoly respects only pathetic micro-targeting and closed-circuit networking campaigns when candidates win friends and influence voters. Nothing more.
Average voters are not seriously asked to participate -- not by their local media, and not by their local political parties. It's not hard to get people interested: talk about what they care about, not what the Sierra Club or Planned Parenthood or the Arizona Education Association wants you to care about. In District 29, no one cares about the food you grow at home or the hybrid car you drive -- especially when a collegiate student body president is shot a few blocks from where you live. Don't tell me about the bed and breakfast statutes you've changed during your time in office when Tucsonans are laid off from their jobs all over.
Frankly, it became too simple to ignore the interests of the residents of District 29 in the mad dash to appeal to the small subset of plugged-in, Establishment Democratic voters in District 29. You can learn all manner of useful information about a place just by walking around the neighborhood, and I learned that much of South and Southeast Tucson present neglected neighborhoods, where people fend for themselves and nothing ever really changes.
I'll never forget: one Saturday my girlfriend and I canvassed Democrats in a South Tucson neighborhood filled with Richard Elias & Ramon Valadez signs, pit bulls, iron barred windows, liquor stores, and eight foot tall wire and iron fencing around every home. Every single home. You can't canvass folk you can't reach, and the dogs and fences obstructed more than we would have liked. Throughout that day, however, the Unisource Energy Tower, the tallest office building I've seen in Tucson, injected itself over these lower middle class homes, a mocking portrait of glass and steel opulence, Southern Arizona's answer to Mount Olympus.
That's the most galling part of this story. We Democrats know the local problems, and how to fix them. When schools suffer from anemic public funding and nonexistent public interest, we Democrats know who is hurt, and who is hurt most abundantly. We know who is most affected by rising gas prices and urban sprawl. We know who has health insurance, and who needs AHCCCS. We know that increased melanin content can decrease meaningful life choices in for many Tucsonans, statistically speaking. But we steadfastly refuse to discuss these issues during election season, to inform our fellow citizens of the reasons economic calamities befall them, and what they can do about it. We allow our elections to revolve around the simple and the mundane, the meaningless and the comical, the prurient and the personal. We cheapen the suffrage too many fight and bleed and die for when our politics devolves into the childish bickering and underdeveloped thinking that usually characterize local politics throughout our tortured and resilient county.
Seriously, all the election integrity advocates in Pima County have it wrong. I do not doubt their sincerity when they push for clean and fair and auditable elections, but the most glaring and serious threat to local democracy in Pima County is voter apathy. What Brad Nelson and Chuck Huckleberry do with the vote after its cast isn't really relevant when the vote itself approaches numerical insignificance. In District 29, 31,588 citizens are registered Democrats, yet only 8,797 voted in the September 2nd primary, with seven candidates. I toured polling places throughout District 29 on election day, only to find that with only a few hours left at some of the largest districts, barely fifty or sixty people total showed up to vote all day long. Really, if a voter didn't already personally know a candidate, or have some connection to the local Democratic Party or a local special interest group, chances are they didn't even know that September 2nd was Election Day.
Make no mistake -- Tucson Democrats rejected Ephraim Cruz. Out of seven candidates, Mr. Cruz won sixth place, only ahead of the nonexistent campaign of Gil Guerra. Our campaign visited over five thousand households in District 29, spent $21,875.00 in campaign funds, and mobilized volunteers throughout the blistering summer months to contact voters directly about Ephraim Cruz's message for change in Southern Arizona. Our mechanics proved effective; voters heard our radio advertisements, saw our television commercial, received our mailing, read our flyers, noticed our door hangers, and spoke with our campaign volunteers, often on multiple occasions. None of it worked.
Senator Barack Obama famously ripped author Alice Walker in a recent speech when he pronounced "We are the change we've been waiting for!" Maybe that's true. But we are also the problem we've been avoiding. Public outreach to increase both registered Democrats and voter turnout could provide the majorities we need in Phoenix to actually fix the public education and health care access issues that so plague this state. Get involved.
Wednesday, April 09, 2008
Many non-Asian American people of color indulge the common fantasy that Asian Americans as a group do not suffer from American racism. For these pitiful anonymous, Asian Americans as a group have so ingratiated themselves into White supremacist America that the phrase 'model minority myth' has become a hollow throwaway from the arrogantly underprivileged towards those they consider lucky at best, and unimportant usually.
Personally, I found this phenomena most prevalent during my Cornell days where, from my perspective, the most international and ethnically diverse Ivy League university in this nation never once encouraged intense dialogue within its student body on multiculturalism and diversity. Now, the campus operated daily with those buzzwords; even the Campus Life residence hall directors and building managers and cafeteria workers and janitors attended monotonous meetings without end designed to indoctrinate cross-cultural unity perspectives in every facet of student life, all to little effect.
'Multiculturalism' and 'diversity', like their precursor 'integration', serve one purpose: to convince young scions of the privileged and alienated majority that people of color matter enough to their personal and professional lives that basic social interaction between the races must emerge to preserve the Establishment. This interaction, social sometimes but financial usually, is literally the only way the iconic institutions of the United States of America - our imperiled dollar, our vaunted ingenuity, our inhuman military supremacy - can thrive amid the real and imagined geopolitical Katrinas of the Twenty-First Century - an international energy crisis, global warming, stateless terrorism, welfare state financial meltdown, etc. Leave it to academia to decipher Ben Franklin's handwriting on the dusty walls of our nationally forgotten past -- after a building takeover best described as a bastardized hybrid between passionate student activism and the death of liberalism itself shocks Cayuga's genius into paying attention.
The point? In balkanized liberal America, no one offers guidance on race to those the majority expects to teach. At Cornell, one on my favorite sayings was "I don't get paid to be your professional Negrologist, and I wouldn't cash that check if you offered." (I'm obviously paraphrasing; this is a family blog.) But I'm convinced - then and now - that a major reason so many non-Asian American people of color express ambivalence and/or outright contempt for the racialized plight of Asian Americans derives from the unchallenged concept that Asian Americans are all smart, wealthy, hardworking, and too polite to cause trouble. What's more, in the absence of consensus among Asian Americans on the political worth of the model minority myth, many non-Asians indulge a defensive antagonism toward Asian American politics, one that excludes Asian Americans from much of the anti-racism activism in this country.
Even in 2008, when national media covers a race story, it involves the senseless murder of an African American teenager in Los Angeles, or Newark, or Washington D.C. It involves the influx of undocumented workers from our porous southern border who wish for nothing more from this country than to work hard at backbreaking labor in exploitative plantation conditions just to provide the rest of us with cheap lettuce (and benefit from the American welfare state, of course). Race in America involves the vision of an untried and brilliant biracial Senator who offers national unity -- wearing racial absolution's summer Sean John -- to mainstream White America, and the automatically beneath contempt sermons of his respected and beloved pastor, immortalized after decades of spiritual and political service to the Chicago African American community as a frothing, rabid throwback of a forgotten era when Whites were a silent majority and Blacks like the good Reverend deserved the water hoses and German shepherds for 'stirrin' up the good Negroes'.
Mind you - nowhere in our current race dialogue can Asian Americans speak about themselves. Nowhere.
And frankly, we lose something important this way, when some people of color, usually African Americans, are always called on to discuss themselves. America defines race dialogue today as teaching White people the specific racial etiquette necessary to never under any circumstances allow a person of color to detect their individual racism or their individual benefits from the institutional racism constructed by Whites past, and to prevent any real racial dialogue at any time for any reason that any White person must engage and/or respect. When people of color employ this dynamic publicly, I consider it selling melanin, and we should never forget that the whole world lines up for this new-age auction block. Just ask Juan Williams. And Boyce Watkins, for that matter.
None of us gain encouragement to look beyond our own racial or ethnic or gendered or economic oppressions in this country. Between reality television's faux-documentary visual immediacy where Viacom cameras offer a behind-the-scenes gaze on twenty-two year old oiled, muscular Caucasoid cavemen who consume enough Budweiser in thirty minutes to piss alcohol throughout the insipid physical challenges that offer money and prestige to the moronic and pathetic, between popular music's endless parade of gaudy, half-naked thirty-plus songstresses still begging you the consumer to inject the mountains of China White necessary to believe the Duchess is only twenty-five (and could ever sing), between the ever-present U.S. Marines recruitment commercials featuring all the dirt and grime and explosions a Santa Monica sound stage can glean from wartime Tikrit footage and a Puddle of Mudd single, between the self-centered rappers who devolve Black masculinity amid urban blight into bulging muscles glistening with baby oil and meaningless beefs over money, 'hoes and clothes to replace lyrical content with insipid controversy, between the cable-news pundits who sell introverted xenophobia and unapologetic racism in a folksy Main Street cadence ripped from President Ronald Reagan himself, the master at hate-your-neighbor politics, between the Ferraro feminists who despise Sambo success in exactly that language and hate their own booty shorts-clad Obama Girl daughters in the New York Times Sunday opinion page and the Wright "revolutionaries" who bellow and scream and screech over a basic Fuck Whitey! speech so they can gather the strength to serve Missy Anne Ferraro in our modern corporate big house with the marble tile and wood-grain tables and plasma screen televisions in the slave quarters' break room -- between all the insanity living in America generates the Millennium Generation has progressed into the All About Me! Generation, and our anemic politics panic at the disco.
Progressed, not evolved. A new study lays waste the claim that all Asian Americans are wealthy enough to afford healthcare in this nation, and that Asian American healthcare concerns do not exist. Pockets of economic uncertainty derived from small business ownership have left the rates of healthcare insurance ownership abysmally low for Korean Americans, and this study provides much more incentive for Americans to elect a President concerned with slashing the exorbitant costs from our current system while we push for universal healthcare. Also, this study encourages our nation to stop treating people as if they emerge from monolithic, homogenized groups. Poverty and lack of access to healthcare exists among us all, even the so-called model minorities among us, and a concerted focus on the specific groups affected by these problems, whether inner-city African Americans, immigrant Mexican Americans, small-business owning Korean Americans or working poor Native Hawaiians, would in my opinion, go a long way towards crafting and executing needed solutions, while all of us learn to look at each other without typecasting.
And we'd better: I work for a political campaign right now, and I don't have insurance. I can't afford it.
*Originally published at Reappropriate.com
Personally, I found this phenomena most prevalent during my Cornell days where, from my perspective, the most international and ethnically diverse Ivy League university in this nation never once encouraged intense dialogue within its student body on multiculturalism and diversity. Now, the campus operated daily with those buzzwords; even the Campus Life residence hall directors and building managers and cafeteria workers and janitors attended monotonous meetings without end designed to indoctrinate cross-cultural unity perspectives in every facet of student life, all to little effect.
'Multiculturalism' and 'diversity', like their precursor 'integration', serve one purpose: to convince young scions of the privileged and alienated majority that people of color matter enough to their personal and professional lives that basic social interaction between the races must emerge to preserve the Establishment. This interaction, social sometimes but financial usually, is literally the only way the iconic institutions of the United States of America - our imperiled dollar, our vaunted ingenuity, our inhuman military supremacy - can thrive amid the real and imagined geopolitical Katrinas of the Twenty-First Century - an international energy crisis, global warming, stateless terrorism, welfare state financial meltdown, etc. Leave it to academia to decipher Ben Franklin's handwriting on the dusty walls of our nationally forgotten past -- after a building takeover best described as a bastardized hybrid between passionate student activism and the death of liberalism itself shocks Cayuga's genius into paying attention.
The point? In balkanized liberal America, no one offers guidance on race to those the majority expects to teach. At Cornell, one on my favorite sayings was "I don't get paid to be your professional Negrologist, and I wouldn't cash that check if you offered." (I'm obviously paraphrasing; this is a family blog.) But I'm convinced - then and now - that a major reason so many non-Asian American people of color express ambivalence and/or outright contempt for the racialized plight of Asian Americans derives from the unchallenged concept that Asian Americans are all smart, wealthy, hardworking, and too polite to cause trouble. What's more, in the absence of consensus among Asian Americans on the political worth of the model minority myth, many non-Asians indulge a defensive antagonism toward Asian American politics, one that excludes Asian Americans from much of the anti-racism activism in this country.
Even in 2008, when national media covers a race story, it involves the senseless murder of an African American teenager in Los Angeles, or Newark, or Washington D.C. It involves the influx of undocumented workers from our porous southern border who wish for nothing more from this country than to work hard at backbreaking labor in exploitative plantation conditions just to provide the rest of us with cheap lettuce (and benefit from the American welfare state, of course). Race in America involves the vision of an untried and brilliant biracial Senator who offers national unity -- wearing racial absolution's summer Sean John -- to mainstream White America, and the automatically beneath contempt sermons of his respected and beloved pastor, immortalized after decades of spiritual and political service to the Chicago African American community as a frothing, rabid throwback of a forgotten era when Whites were a silent majority and Blacks like the good Reverend deserved the water hoses and German shepherds for 'stirrin' up the good Negroes'.
Mind you - nowhere in our current race dialogue can Asian Americans speak about themselves. Nowhere.
And frankly, we lose something important this way, when some people of color, usually African Americans, are always called on to discuss themselves. America defines race dialogue today as teaching White people the specific racial etiquette necessary to never under any circumstances allow a person of color to detect their individual racism or their individual benefits from the institutional racism constructed by Whites past, and to prevent any real racial dialogue at any time for any reason that any White person must engage and/or respect. When people of color employ this dynamic publicly, I consider it selling melanin, and we should never forget that the whole world lines up for this new-age auction block. Just ask Juan Williams. And Boyce Watkins, for that matter.
None of us gain encouragement to look beyond our own racial or ethnic or gendered or economic oppressions in this country. Between reality television's faux-documentary visual immediacy where Viacom cameras offer a behind-the-scenes gaze on twenty-two year old oiled, muscular Caucasoid cavemen who consume enough Budweiser in thirty minutes to piss alcohol throughout the insipid physical challenges that offer money and prestige to the moronic and pathetic, between popular music's endless parade of gaudy, half-naked thirty-plus songstresses still begging you the consumer to inject the mountains of China White necessary to believe the Duchess is only twenty-five (and could ever sing), between the ever-present U.S. Marines recruitment commercials featuring all the dirt and grime and explosions a Santa Monica sound stage can glean from wartime Tikrit footage and a Puddle of Mudd single, between the self-centered rappers who devolve Black masculinity amid urban blight into bulging muscles glistening with baby oil and meaningless beefs over money, 'hoes and clothes to replace lyrical content with insipid controversy, between the cable-news pundits who sell introverted xenophobia and unapologetic racism in a folksy Main Street cadence ripped from President Ronald Reagan himself, the master at hate-your-neighbor politics, between the Ferraro feminists who despise Sambo success in exactly that language and hate their own booty shorts-clad Obama Girl daughters in the New York Times Sunday opinion page and the Wright "revolutionaries" who bellow and scream and screech over a basic Fuck Whitey! speech so they can gather the strength to serve Missy Anne Ferraro in our modern corporate big house with the marble tile and wood-grain tables and plasma screen televisions in the slave quarters' break room -- between all the insanity living in America generates the Millennium Generation has progressed into the All About Me! Generation, and our anemic politics panic at the disco.
Progressed, not evolved. A new study lays waste the claim that all Asian Americans are wealthy enough to afford healthcare in this nation, and that Asian American healthcare concerns do not exist. Pockets of economic uncertainty derived from small business ownership have left the rates of healthcare insurance ownership abysmally low for Korean Americans, and this study provides much more incentive for Americans to elect a President concerned with slashing the exorbitant costs from our current system while we push for universal healthcare. Also, this study encourages our nation to stop treating people as if they emerge from monolithic, homogenized groups. Poverty and lack of access to healthcare exists among us all, even the so-called model minorities among us, and a concerted focus on the specific groups affected by these problems, whether inner-city African Americans, immigrant Mexican Americans, small-business owning Korean Americans or working poor Native Hawaiians, would in my opinion, go a long way towards crafting and executing needed solutions, while all of us learn to look at each other without typecasting.
And we'd better: I work for a political campaign right now, and I don't have insurance. I can't afford it.
*Originally published at Reappropriate.com
Wednesday, March 26, 2008
I'd never heard of Asiance Magazine before Jenn wrote this post, and after reading Ms. Bandong's article I doubt I'll return to that site. But while I find the gross characterizations of Asian men in Ms. Bandong's piece unfortunate, I don't understand why every writer who pens anti-Asian male fluff pieces warrants a letter-writing campaign. Certainly people can pursue justice however they see fit, so long as they aren't breaking laws, but I'm a little shocked that people would increase Asiance Magazine public profile with this outcry.
Further, I'm bothered that an obvious 'chick-lit' piece warrants this controversy. I haven't read any more from Ms. Bandong outside of this offending piece, but I would hardly describe that piece as 'feminist' anymore than I'd describe HBO's Sex in the City as 'feminist'. Ms. Bandong wrote a simplistic op-ed detailing her desire for racially fueled excitement based around cultural offence toward (or cultural ignorance of) her family's traditions and culture. That's not female empowerment, or gender equality - it's just adolescent. Ms. Bandong reminded me of teenage girls who pay for tongue and belly button piercings to upset their middle class parents' hard-won suburban apple cart. Her juvenile assumptions that one could build a more exciting relationship with a person who either does not know your family's culture or could care less about abiding by their cultural parameters in their household stuck me as simply uninformed or uncaring about the family disturbances and ostracism those situations create.
And I'm a guy who did not grow up in a household where I removed my shoes upon entering. I dislike doing that now. That's not how I was raised. But when I enter someone else's home and that's what they do, I follow suit. It's their home, after all, and no one ever needed to cajole me into that small common courtesy.
The point? There are serious feminist issues in many American communities of color that minority men have yet to embrace or understand, but when people mistake whimsical dating ruminations for the Asian American answer to The Second Sex, the unneeded and dehumanizing hyperbole abounds all over. Ms. Bandong's piece has nothing to do with feminism - it involves a young woman's immature self-justifications for dating non-Asian men - justifications so below-the-radar unimportant that the minor outcry represented here makes absolutely zero sense.
Lastly - and this is what really bothers me - why can't some Asian American men admit that minority feminism can evolve? What is the problem? I don't expect Black feminists to parrot Sojourner Truth at a Tavis Smiley conference in 2008. Black feminism concerned labor issues then and now, but today's glass ceiling issues must contend with thirty years of higher education advancement where Black women outpace Black men in matriculation and graduation rates. The point isn't that Black sexism has died or that Black feminism is outmoded because by some measures Black women achieve educational and professional success at higher and faster rates than Black men - it's that Black feminism itself must and has evolved to combat other issues that harm Black people in general and Black women in particular: the HIV/AIDS epidemic that exploded among Black women in the past twenty years, for example.
So when Asian men try to assume that all Asian American feminism can be distilled into the political positions or literary licenses on Maxine Hong Kingston or Amy Tan, they pretend that Asian American feminism can't change to suit their own anti-feminist agenda. Yes, given differences in tone and debate topic, this sometimes crosses the rhetorical demilitarized zone into a sexist country where Asian females are likened to humanity's corporate pleasure providers, posable and disposable, and no one - especially Asian men - has to respect their bodies or minds.
I'm convinced that this phenomena lies at the heart of every online Asian male backlash against Asian American feminism I've ever read. To me, it's not that different from the anti-Black female backlash that Anita Hill endured when she testified against Associate Justice Clarence Thomas. On some level, it didn't matter to some professional and public Black men that Justice Thomas was at best a C-level legal mind who spent his entire career dismantling the gains of the Civil Rights Movement and New Deal Keynesian economic policies; no for some, all that mattered was that a Black man had a chance to sit on the Supreme Court of the United States of America, and that a Black woman threatened to destroy that chance. Enter knee-jerk sexism as 'defense of the race', where 'the race' devolves into an aggrieved boys' club without social constraints in it's hatred of uppity women who assert their stories and their pain. If Anita Hill were Chinese, she would have been called a SOW.
So that's the state of gendered discourse in the Asian American community today - men add porcine qualities to the sexist overkill of the phrase 'sellout whore', causing very few Asian American women to brave the sexist backlash online long enough to develop lasting institutions that nurture Asian American feminist thought. Not for nothing, but Reappropriate.com did have a sizable amount of female posters over the years; I fear the unreasonable craziness and personal attacks during repeated interracial relationship debates from Asian American men have taught many women not to comment.
And that's just sad.
Because it shows that minority sexism exists, has real consequences in the real world, and damages the range of acceptable commentary in minority communities. Denying feminism's utility matters. Antagonism toward interracial dating by Asian American women - and all the anti-Asian female misogyny and sexism that always emergent topic provides - has become the shibboleth that Asian men use to unify their community online, and this byte-sized good ol' boys networking dehumanizes and disrespects Asian women as much as any Chinese Laundry advertisement or mail-order bride webpage or Kobe Tai 'love you long time' pornography.
So no, I don't condemn Ms. Bandong. I ask her to perform the same task I ask of many of the Asian American men I've read in comments here, and on Fighting 44's and Model Minority.com.
Grow up.
Update: Jaehwan pens a response blog on the Fighting 44's site. Although I fear that Jaehwan's perspective clings desperately to the unnecessary and unfair notion that Asian American feminism is irrevocably defined by Maxine Hong Kingston and Amy Tan, his argument provides a useful and well-written counterargument to the views presented here (even if I don't agree with it), so check it out. (3/27/08, 7:33 AM PST)
Further, I'm bothered that an obvious 'chick-lit' piece warrants this controversy. I haven't read any more from Ms. Bandong outside of this offending piece, but I would hardly describe that piece as 'feminist' anymore than I'd describe HBO's Sex in the City as 'feminist'. Ms. Bandong wrote a simplistic op-ed detailing her desire for racially fueled excitement based around cultural offence toward (or cultural ignorance of) her family's traditions and culture. That's not female empowerment, or gender equality - it's just adolescent. Ms. Bandong reminded me of teenage girls who pay for tongue and belly button piercings to upset their middle class parents' hard-won suburban apple cart. Her juvenile assumptions that one could build a more exciting relationship with a person who either does not know your family's culture or could care less about abiding by their cultural parameters in their household stuck me as simply uninformed or uncaring about the family disturbances and ostracism those situations create.
And I'm a guy who did not grow up in a household where I removed my shoes upon entering. I dislike doing that now. That's not how I was raised. But when I enter someone else's home and that's what they do, I follow suit. It's their home, after all, and no one ever needed to cajole me into that small common courtesy.
The point? There are serious feminist issues in many American communities of color that minority men have yet to embrace or understand, but when people mistake whimsical dating ruminations for the Asian American answer to The Second Sex, the unneeded and dehumanizing hyperbole abounds all over. Ms. Bandong's piece has nothing to do with feminism - it involves a young woman's immature self-justifications for dating non-Asian men - justifications so below-the-radar unimportant that the minor outcry represented here makes absolutely zero sense.
Lastly - and this is what really bothers me - why can't some Asian American men admit that minority feminism can evolve? What is the problem? I don't expect Black feminists to parrot Sojourner Truth at a Tavis Smiley conference in 2008. Black feminism concerned labor issues then and now, but today's glass ceiling issues must contend with thirty years of higher education advancement where Black women outpace Black men in matriculation and graduation rates. The point isn't that Black sexism has died or that Black feminism is outmoded because by some measures Black women achieve educational and professional success at higher and faster rates than Black men - it's that Black feminism itself must and has evolved to combat other issues that harm Black people in general and Black women in particular: the HIV/AIDS epidemic that exploded among Black women in the past twenty years, for example.
So when Asian men try to assume that all Asian American feminism can be distilled into the political positions or literary licenses on Maxine Hong Kingston or Amy Tan, they pretend that Asian American feminism can't change to suit their own anti-feminist agenda. Yes, given differences in tone and debate topic, this sometimes crosses the rhetorical demilitarized zone into a sexist country where Asian females are likened to humanity's corporate pleasure providers, posable and disposable, and no one - especially Asian men - has to respect their bodies or minds.
I'm convinced that this phenomena lies at the heart of every online Asian male backlash against Asian American feminism I've ever read. To me, it's not that different from the anti-Black female backlash that Anita Hill endured when she testified against Associate Justice Clarence Thomas. On some level, it didn't matter to some professional and public Black men that Justice Thomas was at best a C-level legal mind who spent his entire career dismantling the gains of the Civil Rights Movement and New Deal Keynesian economic policies; no for some, all that mattered was that a Black man had a chance to sit on the Supreme Court of the United States of America, and that a Black woman threatened to destroy that chance. Enter knee-jerk sexism as 'defense of the race', where 'the race' devolves into an aggrieved boys' club without social constraints in it's hatred of uppity women who assert their stories and their pain. If Anita Hill were Chinese, she would have been called a SOW.
So that's the state of gendered discourse in the Asian American community today - men add porcine qualities to the sexist overkill of the phrase 'sellout whore', causing very few Asian American women to brave the sexist backlash online long enough to develop lasting institutions that nurture Asian American feminist thought. Not for nothing, but Reappropriate.com did have a sizable amount of female posters over the years; I fear the unreasonable craziness and personal attacks during repeated interracial relationship debates from Asian American men have taught many women not to comment.
And that's just sad.
Because it shows that minority sexism exists, has real consequences in the real world, and damages the range of acceptable commentary in minority communities. Denying feminism's utility matters. Antagonism toward interracial dating by Asian American women - and all the anti-Asian female misogyny and sexism that always emergent topic provides - has become the shibboleth that Asian men use to unify their community online, and this byte-sized good ol' boys networking dehumanizes and disrespects Asian women as much as any Chinese Laundry advertisement or mail-order bride webpage or Kobe Tai 'love you long time' pornography.
So no, I don't condemn Ms. Bandong. I ask her to perform the same task I ask of many of the Asian American men I've read in comments here, and on Fighting 44's and Model Minority.com.
Grow up.
Update: Jaehwan pens a response blog on the Fighting 44's site. Although I fear that Jaehwan's perspective clings desperately to the unnecessary and unfair notion that Asian American feminism is irrevocably defined by Maxine Hong Kingston and Amy Tan, his argument provides a useful and well-written counterargument to the views presented here (even if I don't agree with it), so check it out. (3/27/08, 7:33 AM PST)
Thursday, December 06, 2007
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/12/06/AR2007120600569.html?hpid=topnews
Gov. Romney's speech answered nothing, and hid in our Constitutional freedom of religion protections in order to justify his silence. He basically told evangelical Christian Republicans 'I share your values, let's not quibble on the details'. Perhaps that would work for many of them, since they'd rather have a Pastor in Chief than a President who's intellectually curious enough to interrogate the frailties of many evangelical public policy proscriptions.
Basically, any GOP candidate who shouts 'I share your values; let me beat Hillary Clinton and/or Barack Obama!' will find GOP primary voters willing to listen. Romney made that point to those people with his lines opposing a 'religion of secularism' but if one doesn't happen to be a GOP primary voter, Romney's speech presented more uncritical patriotic fluff with a sprinkling of salty Holy Water.
Bottom line: Nothing I saw today convinced me that Gov. Romney would lose the GOP nomination. As a African American atheist who votes Democratic, Gov. Romney does not share my values, and probably doesn't want to. But at least with atheism, one thinks critically about established beliefs. Gov. Romney offered no detailed explanations on Mormonism, and that makes him both a useful GOP Presidential candidate and a terrible option for the highest executive office in our country.
Gov. Romney's speech answered nothing, and hid in our Constitutional freedom of religion protections in order to justify his silence. He basically told evangelical Christian Republicans 'I share your values, let's not quibble on the details'. Perhaps that would work for many of them, since they'd rather have a Pastor in Chief than a President who's intellectually curious enough to interrogate the frailties of many evangelical public policy proscriptions.
Basically, any GOP candidate who shouts 'I share your values; let me beat Hillary Clinton and/or Barack Obama!' will find GOP primary voters willing to listen. Romney made that point to those people with his lines opposing a 'religion of secularism' but if one doesn't happen to be a GOP primary voter, Romney's speech presented more uncritical patriotic fluff with a sprinkling of salty Holy Water.
Bottom line: Nothing I saw today convinced me that Gov. Romney would lose the GOP nomination. As a African American atheist who votes Democratic, Gov. Romney does not share my values, and probably doesn't want to. But at least with atheism, one thinks critically about established beliefs. Gov. Romney offered no detailed explanations on Mormonism, and that makes him both a useful GOP Presidential candidate and a terrible option for the highest executive office in our country.
Monday, September 24, 2007
After reading a recent post on Racialicious.com by founder Carmen Van Kerckhove on September 21, 2007, I Can't Wait to 'Feel the Noise', I wrote the following response. The comment didn't appear on the Racialicious site (probably a technical error because of its length) so I have reproduced the comment here.
For context, watch the following preview:
Next, Carmen's commentary:
I know what's worse. The undeniable fact that Black male entertainers like Omarion routinely appear in moralistic minstrel shows greenlit by Hollywood to consume African American entertainment dollars by devolving Black masculinity to complicated precision dancing and/or baby-oil drenched Mandingo warrior swagger clearly presents a more disgusting problem than an uncritical throwaway reference that dehumanizes a Black man by calling him a 'tiny little magical dancing machine'.
I can't say that I care very much right now, though. I read Racialicious.com because it focuses on racist symbolism in popular culture, the very phenomenon with which so many supposedly liberal, supposedly anti-oppression people have trouble.
In their defense of the mainstream, these faux liberals offer the point that obvious fiction can't possibly tell us much about ourselves, so if John Q. American sometimes enjoys watching hip hop movies with hypersexualized thugs who sport shiny nickel-plated Glocks and scantily clad women of color bouncing their rounder portions, then maybe market forces dictate the only useful morality.
Racialicious.com opposes such cynical logic, and I've always respected that. So, after reading this post, I felt confused. Carmen, you rightly discuss the obvious formula in these Stomp the Last Dance or Die Tryin' flicks, but your attempt to characterize Omarion as a skilled dancer immediately conjured images of immense physical skill masked in blackface, and cast Omarion as a copasetic Bill 'Bojangles' Robinson, skilled and subservient, whose fantastic entertainment forces forgetfulness of his personal political plight.
Omarion is not a machine. When we see acrobatic dancing from Black men, its all too easy to dissect the skill from the humanity, and focus on the skill alone. I find that dangerous, and believe that it only increases the gulf of racial difference that posits African Americans as the Other.
Maybe the real problem here remains the fact that entertainers like Omarion, Chris Brown, and Usher appear so happy to dance for mainstream audiences that cooning becomes an inevitable result for the American viewer. Every time people catch Chris Brown's genial smile during a performance - no small feat considering the rambunctious bouncing and epileptic jerking - I wonder if they mentally shade burnt cork and firetruck red Max Factor on Brown's broad smile. Perhaps people view Black male physical skill as something otherworldly and superhuman, so that Black male physical skill in general becomes something designed to entertain only, like a plastic toy from Mattel.
I don't think it matters though. It doesn't take much to remember the humanity of the Negro entertainer, and frankly, we have to. To lose that focus devolves athletic Black entertainers from shining examples of human focus and training to mechanical animals bred for mainstream merriment, and that's just a little too Dixie for my tastes.
For context, watch the following preview:
Next, Carmen's commentary:
Tiny little magical dancing machine? ....Yesssssssssssssss!
I can't wait to Netflix this. Long-time Racialicious
readers will know how much I love movies with multiple dance-offs. But this movie looks extra-special because it stars that tiny little magical dancing machine, Omarion!
(My dream dance-off would be Omarion vs. Chris Brown. Omarion would crrrrrrush him.)
It must be so effortless to make these movies, since they all follow the exact same script.
A young man gets into trouble at home, so his parents send him away for a change of scenery. He sees a hot girl and is immediately infatuated. But even though she clearly wants him, she doesn't want to leave her evil boyfriend because he's powerful and handsome.
The troubled young man gets involved in the subculture (stepping, marching bands, breaking) of this new environment but fumbles, humiliating himself. He finds out about A Big Event (competition, tournament, talent show) that will allow him to redeem his honor.
After a montage of him training, interspersed with him flirting with the girl, the movie culminates with The Big Event. Just when you think he's about to lose, he delivers a crushing blow to the Evil Handsome Guy, winning his dignity and the girl! Woohoo!
I know what's worse. The undeniable fact that Black male entertainers like Omarion routinely appear in moralistic minstrel shows greenlit by Hollywood to consume African American entertainment dollars by devolving Black masculinity to complicated precision dancing and/or baby-oil drenched Mandingo warrior swagger clearly presents a more disgusting problem than an uncritical throwaway reference that dehumanizes a Black man by calling him a 'tiny little magical dancing machine'.
I can't say that I care very much right now, though. I read Racialicious.com because it focuses on racist symbolism in popular culture, the very phenomenon with which so many supposedly liberal, supposedly anti-oppression people have trouble.
In their defense of the mainstream, these faux liberals offer the point that obvious fiction can't possibly tell us much about ourselves, so if John Q. American sometimes enjoys watching hip hop movies with hypersexualized thugs who sport shiny nickel-plated Glocks and scantily clad women of color bouncing their rounder portions, then maybe market forces dictate the only useful morality.
Racialicious.com opposes such cynical logic, and I've always respected that. So, after reading this post, I felt confused. Carmen, you rightly discuss the obvious formula in these Stomp the Last Dance or Die Tryin' flicks, but your attempt to characterize Omarion as a skilled dancer immediately conjured images of immense physical skill masked in blackface, and cast Omarion as a copasetic Bill 'Bojangles' Robinson, skilled and subservient, whose fantastic entertainment forces forgetfulness of his personal political plight.
Omarion is not a machine. When we see acrobatic dancing from Black men, its all too easy to dissect the skill from the humanity, and focus on the skill alone. I find that dangerous, and believe that it only increases the gulf of racial difference that posits African Americans as the Other.
Maybe the real problem here remains the fact that entertainers like Omarion, Chris Brown, and Usher appear so happy to dance for mainstream audiences that cooning becomes an inevitable result for the American viewer. Every time people catch Chris Brown's genial smile during a performance - no small feat considering the rambunctious bouncing and epileptic jerking - I wonder if they mentally shade burnt cork and firetruck red Max Factor on Brown's broad smile. Perhaps people view Black male physical skill as something otherworldly and superhuman, so that Black male physical skill in general becomes something designed to entertain only, like a plastic toy from Mattel.
I don't think it matters though. It doesn't take much to remember the humanity of the Negro entertainer, and frankly, we have to. To lose that focus devolves athletic Black entertainers from shining examples of human focus and training to mechanical animals bred for mainstream merriment, and that's just a little too Dixie for my tastes.
Thursday, April 26, 2007
No excuses. I stopped writing here because of my ego. I never translated my writing style into hypertext. I'm cutting off comments. For all feedback, email me at jlamb1313@gmail.com.
Thank you.
Thank you.
