The McPalin camp has been doing a pretty good job of driving a big race/class wedge in America over the past several weeks. Palin, in particular, has been doing all she can to fan the flames of intolerance as she draws a clear line between “real” Americans and inauthentic Americans, pro-Americans and anti-America Americans.

If a person were to seriously believe the hateful rhetoric of McPalin, you’d believe that “real” Americans only exist in small towns somewhere far from either of the coasts. You know, us non-white folks living on the coasts who have never ridden on a tracker trailer or wrestled a moose with our own bare hands or worn a trucker hat without a bit of irony – McPalin would have us believe that we’re not real Americans. In the republican world, there is no way that us university educated, media and technology obsessed, secular, children of immigrants can possibly be just as patriotic or pro-American as our more rural counterparts.

This is what I have to say to all those arbiters of “Real” America propaganda: TAKE YOUR HATEFUL BS AND SHOVE IT WHERE THE SUN DON’T SHINE.

You want to know what “Real” Americans look like?

• They leave their middle class lives in their home country to immigrate to a strange foreign place where they barely speak the language, have little to no connections, and where their college degrees are worth about as much as the paper they are printed on — all on the minuscule hope that their children will have a better life.
• They work in sweatshops or labor in the back kitchens of filthy restaurants and stores, working for less than minimum wage just so they can scrimp and save to some day open up their own little shop in a neighborhood long neglected by more traditional retail shop.
• They suffer abuse and indignation at the hands of their customers who resent their presence as outsiders.
• They study for citizenship tests that most native-born Americans would never be able to pass.
• They beam with pride as their kids graduate from college with the realization that they’re children are now freed from the harrowing physical labor that they endured for decades.
• They pay their taxes, vote, create jobs, go to church, buy homes, help their kids buy homes, start non-English language newspapers and TV channels, and eventually get a parade celebrating their culture down New York’s 5th Ave.
• And most importantly, they have more kids. They have so many in fact that we will be a majority minority country by 2050.

I’m a real American. I may not look like the folks attending McPalin events in Ohio or Colorado…but I look a heck of a lot like the future of America – whether they like it or not.

(Flickr photo credit: Ctd 2005)

Okay, so what’s the real count during these 08 Olympics? I’m not talking about the medal race between China & the US, or how many golds Michael Phelps has rack up. I’m talking about the count of human rights violations. As many people had suspected, the whole “officially sanctioned protest area” thing was a total sham. To date, not a single protest has taken place. The Chinese government has put up so many bureaucratic barriers, most Chinese citizens are deterred from even filing an application. Those who went ahead and persisted with their applications? Well, they were either sentenced to 1 year hard labor (like these two septuagenarian, nearly blind women) or pretty much just up and disappeared like Gao Chuancai. And for these lucky foreign protesters? They only get detained for 10 days with no trial or court hearing.

The 2008 Olympics official slogan should be redubbed from “One World, One Dream” to “One World, Countless Nightmares.” The world should have known it was in for a doozy of a human rights violation fest when the government began rounding up and imprisoning well known human rights advocates and dissidents prior the start of the games.

Shame on the IOC for complicitly sitting by while China makes a mockery of human rights, free speech, and free expression. So unwilling to admit they made a mistake when they selected China as the official host country 6 years ago, they are now turning a blind eye to the repeated offenses made by the Chinese government. Dude, you’re the f*cking International Olympics Committee – do or say something! I love how the IOC admitted just weeks prior to the start of the game that they knew China would not allow full internet access to the journalists and media traveling to Beijing. Who is going to hold the IOC accountable for sanctioning the Chinese governments human rights violations through their inaction?

The thing that is most incensing is that except for a few media outlets, everyone seems to be pandering to the PR machine created by the Chinese government. NBC’s coverage of the Olympics presents a shiny happy image of China that makes it look like the next eden. China is being portrayed as some sort of responsible global citizen. Does no one remember that just weeks prior to the start of the Olympics, China voted against UN sanctions against Zimbabwe president Robert Mugabe. And they continue to invest and sell small arms to the Sudanese government.

I realize I am now probably barred from ever entering China.

I’m sure every Asian-American has been asked that question at least once in their lifetime.  A question asked innocently by a (presumably) well-intentioned colleague, acquaintance, or even stranger.  In the mind of the asker, the question seems like nothing more than an easy way to start a conversation…something akin to talking about the weather, sports, or weekend activities.  However, if you’re like me, the question feels like some loaded accusation of “foreign-ness” and difference.  It usually takes every once of my self control not to smack the asker and instead semi-facetiously respond “I’m a New Yorker”. 

Humans like to catalogue and categorize.  It’s a trait route out of survival.  Given the millions of bits of information hurled at us throughout our waking day, we try to simply the world we live in – apply heuristics and catalogue information into neat boxes that help make the world seem a lot more manageable than it truly is.  Case in point, we generally catalogue expensive things into the “good quality” bucket even if this may or may not be true. 

So, when someone tries to learn what I am, its there way of starting the cataloguing/simplification process – which they probably already started when they looked at my decidedly asian face or read my decidedly asian name on my resume. 

But racial grouping has always carried with it a whole slew of baggage, bile, and resentment.  What purpose does racial grouping serve…and more importantly how should society even begin to define the boundaries of race?  That’s the question the WSJ attempts to address in their recent article Racial Identity’s Gray Area

When Barack Obama, whose mother was white, identifies himself as black, and when Bill Richardson, whose father was white, identifies himself as Hispanic, who is white?… The U.S. has never found it easy to assign race, although it certainly has tried. A century ago, the people who did the counting — demographers, sociologists, policy thinkers — divided whites into three strata. They considered Nordic whites, from England, Scandinavia and Germany, the most ethnically desirable and elite, followed by the Alpine whites, from eastern and central Europe, and finally the Mediterraneans. Everyone else was identified as black, red, yellow or brown, which included South Asians… Some minorities or multiracial Americans who were once counted as white are opting out of the category. The population calling itself Native American quadrupled when the Census Bureau began asking people to identify themselves by race rather than relying on its own enumerators to do the job.The number of Hawaiian dropped by half when the “two or more races” category was introduced.

Besides the articles interesting approach to this topic – from a white identity angle rather than a “colored person’s” perspective, but that’s a topic for another day - I appreciated the articles presentation of race as a social paradigm with nebulous boundaries that is frequently redefined based on shifts in culture and immigration patterns.  IMHO, race is discussed far to often as some sort of preordained condition that neither changes or evolves.  Too often, the language used to discuss who is white, black, Hispanic/Latino (although they aren’t technically a “racial” group) or asian falls into the category of absolutes.  To often we take for granted that the definition of white has shifted significantly since the turn of the last century.  As the WSJ article points out, in the early 1900s there was some serious debate about whether Southern Italians were technically white.  I doubt anyone driving through Staten Island or walking through the Bronx’s Arthur Ave. today would even think of confronting the areas’ Italian communities and proclaiming them black.  You might get beat up for that.   

So if we begin to accept the fact that race isn’t a rigid category and instead is amorphous and ever recalibrating, then what purpose does it serve?  In the days of Jim Crow, race meant a lot.  It meant the difference between owning land, voting, and being fully protected by the Constitution.  But in this day and age, what purpose does race serve?  Can it tell you about someone’s socio-economic status, educational background, religion, political leanings, personal habits, values?  Maybe, but less and less so every day.  Race has become such a distorting and misleading classification that you actually see groups who try to differentiate and distance themselves from being summarily lumped together.  You see it in the black community where blacks of Carribean and West Indian heritage hesitate to be grouped with African-Americans, and you see it in the Asian community where there is an on going battle to differentiate between groups that may have immigrated under vastly different circumstances (refugees vs. voluntary emigration, 1^st generational vs. 2^nd, 3^rd, 4^th generation).

So then, if racial grouping is nebulous and, dare I say, misleading and devisive, how does it continue to hold such sway in our perceptions of the world?  Maybe race is like religion in that it helps makes sense of the world – it creates an artificial boundary for community and defines rules for how things should be.   

Remember back a few years ago when Washington DC judge Roy Pearson sued a Korean dry cleaner for $65 Million over a pair of lost pants.  For months, no pictures were run of the judge – all we knew was his name.  Then, after months of legal battling, a picture of Roy Pearson emerged…and *OMG*  He’s black!  With this revelation, the whole landscape of the case change.  It was no longer the simple case of a crazy judge and some bad customer service.  The case became yet another manifestation of the on-going tensions between the black community and Korean merchants.  People recalled the Rodney King riots and gun toting Korean store owners, they recalled the Korean deli boycotts of the early 90s in Brooklyn, NY.  Was this a fair assessment of the case or was it simply a case of a crazy, lonely, angry man and the loss of a favorite pair of pants?  I guess we can never be fully sure.     

Well, maybe it’s not breaking news for regular readers of this and other Asian-American centric sites, but the AA community is finally getting some real research to back up our assertion that we’re an extrodinarily diverse and complicated community.  The just released report, “Facts, Not Fiction: Setting the Record Straight“  by New York University and the College Board, attempts to dismantle the stereotype that Asian-Americans are all a bunch of math & science geeks focused on nothing but academic acheivement and without legitimate needs.  Basically…we ain’t the model minoritiy.

From the New York Times article:

“It pokes holes in stereotypes about Asian-Americans and Pacific Islanders, including the perception that they cluster in science, technology, engineering and math. And it points out that the term “Asian-American” is extraordinarily broad, embracing members of many ethnic groups.

“Certainly there’s a lot of Asians doing well, at the top of the curve, and that’s a point of pride, but there are just as many struggling at the bottom of the curve, and we wanted to draw attention to that,” said Robert T. Teranishi, the N.Y.U. education professor who wrote the report, “Facts, Not Fiction: Setting the Record Straight.”

“Our goal,” Professor Teranishi added, “is to have people understand that the population is very diverse.”

The report goes on to highlight how the mass lumping of Asian-Americans into a singular monolith of achievement severly underscores the struggles of some subgroups within the community such as the Hmong. 

And even more impressive…the report actually calls out universities and suggests that Asian-Americans may be held to higher admissions standards at more selective colleges AND also suggests that the “model minority” stereotype unfairly pit Asian-American students against African-American and Latino students.  Damn!  Honesty.  At last!

You can download the full report for yourself.

Wow, I’m really impressed by the level of depth in this report.  Reading the report summary really feels like validation.  Nearly ever Asian-American I’ve known has had to deal with the unfair implications of being perceived as “the model-minority” at some point in their life.  Maybe this report will lead to actual change in academic policies and perceptions.  One can hope.  

Mildred Loving, an unintentional heroine of the civil rights movement, passed away earlier this month at the age of 68.

Mildred, a Black/Native American native of Virginia, along with her white husband Richard, were arrested in July 1958, 5 weeks after getting married in Washington DC. Their crime? Violating Virgina’s miscegenation law barring marriage between people of different racial groups. They plead guilty and promised to leave the state and not return together for 25 years. They eventually settled in DC and visited family in VA separately over subsequent years.

After struggling to raise their three children away from their families and the life they knew in VA, Mildred contacted then US Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy in 1963 for help. He directed Mildred and Richard to the ACLU. Loving vs. Virginia finally made its way to the Supreme Court in 1967 and the court struck down the last remaining segregation laws on the books. In a twist of fate, the same justice who wrote the court’s opinion in Brown vs. Board of Ed. also wrote the opinion in Loving vs. Virginia.

Mildred and Richard Loving were always adamant that they pursued their case not for other people but for themselves. They wanted to be able to love each other freely without government interference.

I’m always struck by the fact that in my parents lifetime (and only 8 years before I was born) it was illegal in some states to be an interracial couple. This hits particularly close to home for me b/c my partner is not Asian and we could have been illegal back in the day. Without the Lovings the world could have been deprived of Tiger Woods, Derek Jeter, and the beautiful couple that is Heidi Klum & Seal. We’ve come a long way if you consider the fact that the current Secretary of Labor Elaine Chao would have been a felon b/c of her marriage to US Sentor Mitch McConnell (R-Kentucky).

Of course, many things change but many things also stay the same. During last year’s 40th Anniversary of Loving vs. Virginia, Mildred made a statement in support of gay marriage.

The “classic” videos include such gag/anger inducing titles such as ‘Tokio Jokio’ and ‘Coal Black and de Sebben Dwarfs’ and several were created (not surprisingly) as war propaganda during WWII. Many, including the NAACP, are calling for the videos to be returned to the vault while YouTube/Google are less inclined to pull the videos unless Warner Bros comes forward to claim copyright infringement.

A representative for Warner wrote in an e-mail message that “Warner Brothers has rights to the titles” in question and that “we vigorously protect all our copyrights. We do not make distinctions based on content.”

The cartoons, known as the “Censored 11,” have been unavailable to the public for 40 years. Postings no longer appear if YouTube is searched for “Coal Black and de Sebben Dwarfs,” a parody of “Snow White” and the most famous of the cartoons. But a search for “Coal Black” does find the cartoon.

Considering the viral nature of media these days, even if YouTube were to pull ever version of the offending cartoons it’s unlikely that they’ll truly disappear…so the argument is pretty much moot. But here’s the real interesting question that I pose to all you readers…and the real issue that I believe is at the heart of this controversy. How should we (as a collective society) deal with our racial history and all the artifacts that come along with it? Do we bury the offending materials and pretend they never existed or do we inject the materials into the ongoing public dialogue about race and racism in America? Personally, I’m for an honest examination of race in this country – even if that means making these videos publicly available.

Obviously Warner Bros. wants nothing more than these videos to disappear. But beyond that, what good is yielded from ignoring the existance of these cartoons? They were apart of our country’s history and a telling clue to how horrifyingly racist this country once was and, some might argue, still is. Critics will argue that these cartoons, when taken out of context and viewed without proper guidance, may serve as fooder for and exploited by racial supremisists and other seperatist groups.

What do you think?

An Open Letter to Asian Cultures & Asian/Asian-American parents:

Re:  Misogyny & Son-Bias

Why do you hate females?  Why do you feel the need to selectively abort us when you discover you’re carrying a member of the XX?  Why do you retain antiquated ideas of female worth (re: virginity)?  Why do you make us feel less worthy and valuable then our male counterparts?  And why do you then try to guilt-trip us and call us brainwashed when we become fully acculturate in American society and partake of all the opportunities western society affords us – including dating and eventually marrying the person we truly love regardless of race and ethnic background? 

I can almost (but not completely) understand why, back in a more agrarian & rural time, boys were preferred.  They didn’t move away when they got married.  They retained the family name.  They didn’t require large dowries.  They took care of you in your twilight years.  I get it.  At one time boys were the next best thing to a nationalized social security system.  But we’ve now entered the 21^st century.  We have things like telephones and cars – a married daughter is no longer out of reach.  A person’s long-term success is less dependent on their ability to till the soil and more to do with how well they do in school, their communication skills, capacity for creative and unique ideas, and overall technical skill set.  Recent college and graduate school graduation data shows that women are graduating at a higher rate then men and perform better overall.  Women don’t even have to change their last name when they get married.  Once a Lee, Chang or Singh…always a Lee, Chang, or Singh.  And on top of all this, girls are less likely to commit crimes, get involved in gangs, and kill themselves while trying to mimic the newest X game move.  Modern birth control even eliminates the risk of unplanned teen pregnancies.     

So again, I want to know why you still don’t love us as much as you love the boys?  Are we not cute enough?  Do you just hate the color pink?  Are you uncomfortable with the idea of trying to raise a daughter and instilling a sense of worth, power, and value in her?  Do you just dislike the idea that women are actually creatures worthy of life and respect? 

Please help me out here?  My partner and I are contemplating bringing a baby into this world.  We don’t have a gender preference – all we want is a healthy, happy baby, god willing.  But if you articulate a real, reasonable reason for why we should strive for a boy, please let me know so that I can make an informed decision?  

But until you can rationally tell me why boys are better than girls, can you please cut out the whole pre-natal sex selection thing.  It’s really bumming me out and kinda makes me want to turn my back on my own culture. 

Yours truly,

A proud, strong Asian-American female.

(If you want to know what inspired this, check out this NPR story about a Census data study examining male birth rates among Asian-Americans.  Not surprisingly, there is evidence that Asian-American (meaning people in this country) are using prenatal screening technology to ensure the birth of boys.)

I’m curious to know how other Asian-Americans interpreted and related to the speech. Reflecting a very blunt black-white perspective of race in America, the speech felt largely irrelevant to my experience of race and racism in this country. Sure Obama threw in the occasional ‘Asian’ and ‘Hispanic’ into the mix but by in large the simplified dynamics of poor vs. rich, black vs. white, privileged vs. disenfranchised felt clumsy and naive…and completely unrelated to the more complex issues and impact of institutionalized racism, unconscious bias, and micro-inequities that most people of color deal with on a daily basis. I guess that’s my beef with Obama’s speech. It felt like the speech was written to appease the fears of white America…the portion of white America that doesn’t have to deal with race on a daily basis. It felt pandering, as though Barack Obama was trying to say “We colored folks still confront racism on a daily basis but don’t worry, we ain’t mad at y’all. We just want to sing a song of unity, hold hands, and rise above it all.”

My conversations with friends and colleagues have confirmed some of suspicions. My white friends and colleagues uniformly found the speech “inspiring,” “brought me to tears,” “made me proud to support him,” and “healing”. Conversely, my non-white friends, for the most part, felt the speech “was okay,” “mixed,” “made some good points,” “could have gone further,” and “felt contrived”.

What do you guys think? Were you inspired or unmoved?