I’ve already written a couple posts about Lt. Dan Choi and his organization Knights Out that’s fighting the controversial “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy that prohibits openly gay servicemen from serving their country. Lt. Choi, a graduate of West Point that speaks fluent Arabic, was a translator (among other things) serving overseas. He was discharged in May for violating the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy and is heading into trial on Tuesday. He is now asking for the public’s help in the form of a letter. Please, please spend some time to hand-write a letter and e-mail it to Lt. Choi to show your support of his effort to repeal “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell”. I know I am a bit behind and there are only a couple of days left before the trial, but every letter counts!
For more information: http://ltdanchoi.com/id4.html
“It will not be welcome on the territory of the French republic.”
Following a meeting with U.S. President Barack Obama in which the two disagreed on the issue, French President Nicolas Sarkozy made a major policy speech condemning the covering. “The burka is not a sign of religion, it is a sign of subservience,” this male, non-Muslim expert stated on Monday, adding that it deprives women of identity and acts as a prison.
In 2004, France made a controversial decision to ban headscarves in public schools. Sarkozy has evidently watched a few too many Hollywood terrorist propaganda movies, he himself denying the identity of the Muslim women who choose to wear it. As a burqa-wearing thread contributor on Salon.com points out “I’m also happy to have non-Muslim friends who don’t try to take my agency away by assuming I must be brainwashed.” And she is only one of many Muslim women speaking out against anti-head covering sentiments.
Since when is spinning spiritually significant clothing as evil considered to be progressive? Oh right, like when Sikh turbans were banned from Canadian Mounted Forces until 1990. Canada being one of the most progressive countries, naturally.
Many try to play off the call to ‘ban religious symbols’ in the name of secularism. Yet, it is usually muslim women who wear head or body coverings that are the first targeted. On behalf of Islamaphobia and sexism — ahem — secularism, naturally.
A recent tweet by a New York Times reporter posted a link to Modeling Interracial Love, a report about a recent Center for Economic and Policy Research discussion paper excitingly titled Anthropometry of Love: Height and Gender Asymmetries in Interethnic Marriages (.pdf):
“We argue that a simple preference for a taller husband (or shorter wife) can explain part of the gender-specific… asymmetries across ethnic groups in the propensity to outmarry. Blacks are taller than Asians, and their height distribution is closer to whites. Because they are taller, black men have better prospects on the white marriage market than Asian men. For women, the reverse is true. Because Asians are relatively short on average, women fare substantially better on the white marriage market than black women.”
Their findings are primarily based on British data, but also consider American marriage data and patterns; economists and sociologists try to model interracial dating based on such factors as education and socioeconomic status in order to explain interracial marriage imbalances between men and women of the same ethnicity, without much luck.
Most would agree that men prefer women who are shorter than themselves and women prefer men who are taller than themselves, but to say that height alone is the sole determining primary factor for interracial marriage imbalances between men and women is simplistic — I’d like to think that humans are more evolved than our predecessors. That said, studies exist in regards to height and their relationship to management material.
Elaine Touch is a beautiful 24 year-old college grad from Long Beach. She aspires for a career in public relations and she’s in the news. Why? Because the custom wheelchair that she relies on to live her life was stolen last month when she went to see Star Trek on a date.
That’s right. Some bonehead kids evidently stole the wheelchair from a woman with cerebral palsy while she was watching John Cho kick some alien butt. If I had seen this happen, I’d have kicked those kids’ asses to Romulus.
Elaine graduated from CSULB last year with a degree in Sociology. She’s had a number of cool internships, including the Mitsubishi Electric & Electronics USA’s summer internship program for young people with disabilities. Normally she watches movies in her wheelchair, but she wanted a better seat for this particular movie. She asked her date to carry her up to a better seat a few rows up and left her wheelchair a little ways away. By the time the house lights went up, her wheels were gone. Security tapes show footage of two minors rolling the wheelchair out of the theater. To get back to the car, her date had to push her out of the theater on a rolling computer chair.
If you think that this is some isolated case, well in the nearby town of Lakewood, 14 year-old Summer Kearney, also had her wheelchair stolen from a backyard patio at her home. What the HELL people?!?!?
Anyway, because of these two random acts of unkindness, there now is a “Wheelchair Donation Fund” to get these ladies in new wheels. The Wheelchair Donation Fund is being taken care of by the Disabled Student Services department at Cal State Long Beach and you can send your donations to:
Address: Disabled Student Services
Attn: Disabled Student Wheelchair Fund
Address: 1250 N. Bellflower Blvd., Rm 250, Long Beach, California 90840
Phone No. 562-985-5401
Email: dss@csulb.edu — Subject line: Disabled Students’ Wheelchair Fund
Let’s get these ladies rollin’ again.
*Please don’t fire me from writing headlines.
Paul Fong, “Godfather” of Silicon Valley’s Asian American’s political community and current California State Assembly member, last week introduced resolution ACR 42 calling on the state of California to offer the first formal apology to Chinese Americans for unjust laws and discrimination dating from the Gold Rush Era to the 1940’s:
“Unjust laws include foreign miner’s tax on all gold found, prohibition to marry the person of your choice, Chinese Exclusion Act, prohibition to buy a home and work for a state, county or city entity. ACR 42 also recognizes the work Chinese in California performed on the Transcontinental Railroad and their contributions to the success of California’s fishing and agricultural industries. In addition, Chinese in California helped build the Delta levees.”
I previously mentioned the famous 1869 photo capturing the joining of the Central Pacific Railroad and the Union Pacific Railroad at Promontory Point where not one Chinese laborer was included in the photo, even though up to 12,000 Chinese worked for Central Pacific, making up to 90% of the workforce. But photos can lie, with history is often written by the victors. And sometimes, history needs to be corrected.
Not many Americans were taught the very racist and exclusionary practices of America’s past when regarding Chinese Americans in the 18th and 19th century, let alone the internment of over 120,000 Japanese Americans during World War II (which the United States formally apologized for paid reparations, albeit in 1988.)
I’m sure many Californians will complain about any such efforts regarding addressing past injustices of discrimination, especially with the state of California falling apart and dealing with a massive budget deficit. But these resolutions don’t actually take up all the of the legislature’s time — it’s not like everyone in the state senate and assembly can’t be working on other matters when there is time in between negotiating budget compromises and votes. I’m glad that at least someone is trying to redress such past discriminatory acts; the longer these acts are left behind and forgotten, the harder they are to go back to to redress. In an interview, Fong expresses part of his family’s experience and his personal motivation for introducing the resolution:
“Growing up in his family’s flower business, Fong heard many stories about the hard life of Chinese immigrants, building railroads, mines and irrigation systems. They weren’t allowed in public schools, couldn’t vote and couldn’t marry a white person. Fong’s grandfather was detained for two months on Angel Island in 1939 and had to wait for several years to be reunited with his wife and daughter, Fong’s mother.”
Ultimately, a formal apology for past injustices would serve more to educate, inform and redress past official policies of the state of California — and hopefully in the future, the United States federal government.
As the old saying goes, “Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it.” Let’s not repeat history when history has proven past actions wrong. For this reason, I personally want to wish Assembly Member Fong all the best in trying to get ACR 42 passed, and hopefully get a federal apology of past unjust laws and discrimination.
By Linda
The Fiancé and I have talked about how many kids we want, and what names we’ll call them. We have more girl names than boy names, mainly because in my opinion, girl names are a lot more fun to think up than boy names. But according to a recent NY Times article, Asian couples living in America — particularly Chinese, Indian and Korean — may face a different scenario. In those communities, there are a disproportionately high number of male children in families with two or more children.
Census survey data from the year 2000 points out that Chinese, Korean and Indian families who already have one daughter are more likely to have a second child who’s a boy; if the first two children are both girls, then the third child is even more likely to be a boy. If at first you don’t succeed in having a son, try, try again. And again. These same families also consider other options to ensure a male birth, like in vitro fertilization or sperm sorting. Or abortion.
Yes, we all know about China’s one-child policy — or, as the Chinese government calls it, the family planning policy — and how that has led to the increase in abortions and infanticides of female babies. And we all know that many Asian cultures prefer male children to female. But I had no idea the bias toward male children had extended to the United States.
Generally, there are slightly more male births in the U.S., by a ratio of 1.05 to 1. But in American families of Chinese, Korean and Indian descent, the likelihood of having a boy after the first child is a girl goes up to 1.17 to 1. If the first two kids are girls, the ratio of the third child being a boy goes up to 1.51 to 1. This doesn’t sound so bad, until you think about the mentality that goes into these numbers. That some families will abort if they find out they’re having a second or third girl.
Suddenly, having an unequal number of boy names and girl names thought up doesn’t seem so important after all.
ABOUT LINDA: Linda Chan is an aspiring novelist and currently works in TV research in New York City. She is interested in all issues Asian, particularly Asians in media and entertainment.
(Flickr Photo credit: ernop)
Friday, June 12, 2009 marks the “conclusion” of the fourth trial for the murder of South Asian youth, Reena Virk. Reena was fourteen years old when she was killed in 1997 by a gang of white youth in Victoria, British Columbia. Kelly Ellard and Warren Glowatski are the only members of the entire group of teens tried over the past twelve years in relation to Virk’s murder that were successfully convicted of second-degree murder. Found in combination with the final drowning of the girl’s body were several other potentially fatal injuries inflicted by the group, including attempts to set the girl’s hair on fire.
What makes this a hate-crime?
It is the targeting of Reena’s South Asianness in how her murder’s tortured her that makes it so. Yet, the media repeatedly casted the reason Virk was targeted as the fact she was an outcast, “dark-skinned”, a little overweight, just wanting to fit in. “The implicit message was that had she been white and had she been thin, she would have fit in, and there would have been no reason for her to be killed,” as anti-racist scholar Yasmin Jiwani highlights.
Not surprisingly, that Virk was South Asian is rarely mentioned in related media. While Ellard and Glowatski had allegedly made fun of Reena’s “hairy back” and burned a cigarette into her forehead where a South Asian woman may wear a bindi, racism was not even examined as a motivating factor for the violence. As a side note, at one point in one of the various attempts to bring justice over the four trials, it surfaced that Glowatski joked and prided himself when explaining the blood on his shirt to a witness as evidence he had killed a Native man.
After several appeals, it has taken four trials to date to convict Ellard of second-degree murder. In 2003, she served 18 months of a life sentence before she was let out on bail. She ended up on trial again when she was charged with assault causing bodily harm of a 58-year-old woman. The woman’s race is never mentioned in media reports of the crime.
August 3, 2006 marks the third time Ellard was convicted in relation to Reena. The fourth and latest decision by Canada’s Supreme Court comes after Ellard’s third conviction was overturned in 2008 by the B.C. Court of Appeal. Friday’s conviction again misses to cite the murder as a hate-crime and instead recognizes Ellard as guilty only of second-degree murder.
Man, what’s a sweet, thin, white girl gotta do to be put away for good these days?
I could have just as easily titled this piece, “Is it racism if nobody complains?”. Douglas Maughan, British Airways (BA) pilot claims there’s been a culture of casual racism at BA for some time now against Asians. He published his thoughts in the staff newsletter, and was later abused for making his observations on the matter known. Maughan refers to the company culture as “institutional racism“, but I personally call it the “old boys club“. And it doesn’t just affect Asians, it affects almost any race, culture, ethnicity or sexual orientation. Maughan took a stand and I applaud him for it, but not enough of us do so in our daily lives.
A former partner of mine, used to work with a very racist individual. While my partner was Caucasian, I was of course gay and Asian. His workplace was a typical one, with office politics and water cooler humor. The individual in question liked to tell jokes that were offensive to about every minority imaginable. No one else in the office dared to confront him, as he was fairly highly placed in the organization, but my other half would make up something appropriate as a response to the man’s joke. For example if the joke were about an African-American, his response would be something like, “Oh that’s a good one, I’ll have to tell it to my wife Lakeisha”. Personally, I thought his responses were almost as bad as the jokes that were being told, but at the very least, he was trying to alert every one else in the room that those types of jokes weren’t acceptable.
I realize many of us make jokes as a response to offensive comments, like my partner because we aren’t comfortable with confronting the racism directly. But I’m sure if you didn’t know my partner, you might have mistaken his response as an insulting one. And there might have been someone present who might have taken just as much offense to his response as to the joke.
Maughan took a stand, and as a result was sent anonymous condemning messages and phone calls, which made his job extremely difficult. He’s fighting back by suing for discrimination, but his ordeal probably makes many of us who would have said something just as uneasy about speaking up the next time we hear an offensive remark or joke. That’s the unfortunate part of this story, and a reminder to the rest of us to speak up the next time we hear something offensive, as there’s many more who won’t.
(Photo by Bruno Vincent/Getty Images)
