By Guest Contributor David J. Leonard
Courtesy Bossip.com
Moments after Joel Ward’s overtime goal secured a playoff victory for the Washington Capitals over Boston last month, the twittersphere exploded with a barrage of racial epithets, threats of violence, and stereotypes.
Editor’s Note: Trigger Warning under the cut–pictures of racist slurs
By Latoya Peterson
Angela, who seems like she is the core friend holding the group together, is mixed Thai-German. She’s also got an amazing (and tragic) connection to some major players in pop culture. In 2001, Angela was paralyzed in the same car wreck that killed Thuy Trang (who was famous for playing Trini, the original Yellow Ranger on the popular Mighty Morphin’ Power Rangers series). At the time of the accident, she was married to 21 Jump Street star Dustin Nguyen. People Magazine did a write up on the couple in 2007, noting:
For Dustin and Angela, it was the beginning of a different kind of love story. All but abandoning his career, Dustin devoted himself to Angela’s care, bathing her, feeding her, tending to all her needs. The first time Angela cried was six months after the accident as Dustin inserted her catheter. “It hit me what our life was about,” she says. “I said, ‘You don’t have to live this life. You can just go.’”
Six years later, he’s still there. “The idea of leaving is ridiculous,” says Dustin, 45. “I’m not trying to be saintly or noble. But there is only one thing to do: take care of the wife I love. Things happen. You react and move on.”
Sitting in their cozy, wheelchair-friendly 1920s-era house in L.A., the couple laugh easily and trade affectionate gazes.
But as the story opens, it is revealed that Dustin and Angela separated in 2011, and there are many tense conversations about where each wants the relationship to go. Continue reading »
By Arturo R. García
Courtesy: Associated Press
It was only fitting, in this modern age, that news of the death of Mexican author, diplomat, and social critic Carlos Fuentes, spread via Twitter. And it was just as befitting of his stature that the person who broke the news was the President of México himself, Felipe Calderón.
That kind of acknowledgement from the highest political circles might’ve amused Fuentes; as recently as the 1980s, his name and works were practically verboten in the public-school curriculum mandated by the country’s ruling party of seven decades, the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI). Far from being a loyal party subject, Fuentes, the son of a diplomat, resigned from his post as Mexico’s ambassador to France in 1977 after the PRI named Gustavo Díaz Ordaz–the former president who sanctioned the 1968 massacre of student protestors at Tlatelolco Plaza in Mexico City–to be his colleague. The party also hovered over one of his more celebrated works, The Death of Artemio Cruz.
“There was no need to mention the PRI,” he once told The Associated Press. “It is present by its absence.”
In his absence, Fuentes’ presence will be remembered not just because of his sheer dedication–he published more than 50 works spanning literature, theater, and film, beginning with La Región Más Transparente (Where The Air Is Clear) in 1957–but because of his influence on the other writers who would fuel the Latin American “Boom” movement. As University of California-Riverside Professor Raymond L. Williams told the AP, Fuentes was responsible for galvanizing other preeminent authors, like Gabriel García Márquez, Julio Cortázar, and Mario Vargas Llosa into a collective.
“It took Fuentes’ vision to say if we unite forces and provide a common political and literary voice, we’ll have more impact,” Williams told the AP. “His home in Pedregal (an upscale Mexico City neighborhood) was the intellectual center what brought a lot of writers together.”
Fuentes was creative, almost literally, to the very end: not only is his latest book, Vlad, scheduled for release this July (“I loved the old Dracula movies,” he told Publishers Weekly)–but an essay he penned on the recent presidential elections in France was published in the Mexican newspaper Reforma the day he died, just 24 hours after his interview with the Spanish newspaper El Día was printed, in which he revealed that he had completed another book, and planned to start another.
So, it’s only fitting to let this consummate man of words speak for himself. Under the cut are selections and videos from several interviews Fuentes has given over the years. Today, we join readers, writers, and fans of the written word all over the world in celebrating Fuentes’ singular vision. Continue reading »
By Guest Contributor Erika Nicole Kendall, cross-posted from A Black Girl’s Guide To Weight Loss
… for crying out loud … good grief.
I had lots of thoughts about this op-ed, simply because I struggle with the reality that so much of women’s body issues are tied up in dating and mating, not their own health. I’m not downing those who have made that decision–that’s not my place–I just wonder if those women truly wind up getting what they originally wanted in the end.
I’ll explain that later. For now, on to the article.
I had to chop this up into bits and pieces. It’s so hard to read, that every time I go to paste a new paragraph, I feel like sticking my virtual finger out and saying “B-b-but …” because it misses so much of the point.
Maybe I’ve been writing about this stuff for too long.
At any rate…the article starts out with a photo of Josephine Baker, with the caption “Josephine Baker embodied a curvier form of the ideal Black woman.” This highlights a huge problem with a lot of Black women as it is today: we don’t understand sizes, our bodies or “curvy” because “curvy,” like “thick,” has been misappropriated so many times that it no longer has any meaningful definition.
Courtesy: A Black Girl's Guide To Weight Loss
“Curvy” simply means that you have curves. Josephine Baker–and, by correlation, Marilyn Monroe–does not have the same kind of curves that many Black women (hell, women period) refer to when the say “curves” today. Josephine’s waist isn’t any larger than a 28; her hips, no larger than 40 inches. Not by a long shot. She might be curvy, but she was small. Petite women and smaller women are also afforded the ability to be curvy. Maybe if we embraced and accepted that idea, we’d stop clinging to the notion that “curves” can only accompany a larger frame. It simply isn’t true, and I’m annoyed by the author’s attempt to use Baker’s photo to imply such.
by Guest Contributor GeekMami, originally published at Geekmundo
I sat on this post for a long time, because I really wanted to get my thoughts together on this and wait until a few episodes into the season. However, it’s painfully clear that I am not the only in the ‘Game of Thrones’ fandom to take issue with the sexism and the race issues being brought up in the show this season.
From ONTD to well-written essays on the topic, it seems like one or both of the aforementioned issues I am wrestling with regarding the show are being discussed, whether people like it or not. Does ‘Game of Thrones’ have a race and sexposition problem?
Sexposition is defined as the using sex to give the characters something to do, or grab the audience’s attention, as opposed to really contributing something major. Don’t get me wrong, sex scenes can be quite vital, but in this season of Game of Thrones, there tends to be a trend to add sexually graphic scenes to grab our attention, not develop the characters I mean, in season two, there were women wiping some man nectar from their mouths in a flagrant show of sexposition. What was the point in that?
Sex in The Seven Kingdoms: Where’s the Beef(cake)?
Sex in HBO’s version of the Seven Kingdoms seems to be a primarily male pastime, with the women on the fringes or on the receiving end of a piping down.
As a fan of the ASOIAF books, I know that sex is not taboo but isn’t as prevalent as in the series. Sexist and misogynist men are, but that’s natural because that’s keeping with the time and attitudes of the world. For example, Brienne of Tarth encounters grief for having the nerve to be a woman in armor and mail because she’s actually very good at fighting, seems vastly uninterested in sex—even though she was in love with Renly, she wanted to protect and defend him by force, not by providing him a womb and her bosom—and she’s rejected the idea that only men are powerful and in control of their destinies while other women in Westeros just have children and hope for the best.
Yet, it seems like the series adds lots of boobs and lady parts just to titillate the audience. My question to the producers, the writers, and the HBO honchos who approve this is who in the audience are you trying to tantalize? It doesn’t titillate me at all, but leaves me wanting to go smoke a cigarette or post on Twitter because it’s like watching a Divas match on the WWE (the TNA Knockouts are much more enjoyable, by the way)… It’s just there for the people who, for whatever reason, need to see tits and ass (and more) and get all hot and bothered for it. I have plenty of sex in my own life. I don’t need an already built in plot from the books usurped by sex scenes that don’t make sense or waste time. We wasted time on Roslyn and the man nectar scene when we could’ve learned more about Catelyn, Robb’s trials as a new king, Tyrion, Sansa, even Arya… Game of Thrones’ doesn’t need to be softcore period porn for me to enjoy the show.
Then again, I don’t think the producers or the writers are catering to me. I think they are courting a male demographic that they believe will enjoy that kind of thing. Sex is not taboo to George R.R. Martin when it comes to writing it into the books. We’ve got all manner of incestuous relationships going on, along with hetero and non-hetero relationships. I was and am able to enjoy the books easily. The problem is the series is clearly doing too much. It’s the TV equivalent of girls who kiss each other in a nightclub, not because they enjoy it, but because they think it looks “hot.” Continue reading »
Courtesy: Tampa Bay Times
Take a minute to walk to your limousine in my Gucci shoes, and you’ll realize that I’m just trying to make people smile. Mickey Rooney with buckteeth and a crazy accent in “Breakfast at Tiffany’s”? It’s so much funnier than finding a real Chinese actor just talking like himself. Then you’d have to get a screenwriter to actually write genuinely funny lines for that character. You get so much more comedy bang with buckteeth and a funny accent. I mean, it made me laugh.
Many people, including myself, were also convinced that Charlton Heston truly was a Mexican/Native American/Egyptian/Ape who talked to God. And I think I convinced a lot of Asians that Genghis Khan really did look like John Wayne back in the ’60s. Short Circuit was one of my biggest hit movies and I was completely convinced that Fisher Stevens was Indian. Who knew he was a Jewish guy from New York? That accent was spot on!
My point is, I’m not the bad guy. I’m just the rich guy. When you look at it through my studio executive lens, you understand how important it is that both white people and non-white people believe that Indians, Asians, Mexicans and Arabs are truly just white people in brown makeup. I don’t like thinking that way. I just don’t have the luxury not to. I’m a businessman.
- From “Whitewashing, A History,” in Salon
Update: via Racebending & Mediaite, check out Mandvi’s interview with CNN on the practice:
by Guest Contributor Paul Matsushima, originally published at Eesahmu
Courtesy: Christianity Daily
Recently, while attending one of the most ethnically diverse evangelical seminaries in the nation, I found myself in an environment where I had to defend the argument that race still matters. Don’t get me wrong; students and faculty alike openly discussed ethnic and societal culture; and, although all were unanimous that racial prejudice is wrong and diversity is good, when it came to America’s original (and continuing) sin of racism, there were choirs of crickets.
I, in partial reaction, left. After stepping back from my enmeshment in the evangelical world, I gained some clarity for why I felt so isolated. Personal reasons aside, my qualm with the (white) evangelical community was its hesitancy to analyze–much less struggle against–the historical and continuing racial bias in America. This “don’t go there” mentality is further compounded within evangelical churches that are predominantly Asian American. Here are my speculations why.
1. Unity in Christ, aka Colorblindness
Firstly, we who seek to discuss race in the Asian American church go head-to-head against the banner of colorblindness. Colorblindness, while it may value ethnic diversity, seeks to ignore one’s race in order to avoid giving differential treatment on account of it. In other words, it attempts to treat all people equally regardless of race.
This thinking is interwoven into the Christian doctrine of the primacy of one’s Christian identity. Common phrases such as “unity in Christ” or “children of God” shape American evangelicals to value their Christian identity over any other. Tim Tseng, in his article “The Young Adult Black Hole,” explores how Asian American young adults leave their immigrant-ethnic churches for white or multiethnic ones because the influence of colorblind thinking. The message of one’s Christian identity as most important, combined with assimilation into American culture as good and being too ethnic (i.e., too Asian) as bad, is thoroughly ground into these young people’s minds. The result: many Asian American evangelicals believe “the goal [of Christian identity formation] is to shed, not affirm their [racial] identities.”
In 2009, the Urbana Missions Conference hosted around 16,000 attendees, 30% of which were Asian American. I was shocked and disturbed when I, along with three other conferees were the only ones who attended the Asian American prayer workshop, a session devoted to exploring how racial identity shapes the way one prays. Asian Americans flocked to workshops on international and missionary issues in Asia, but when it came to the single workshop focused entirely on Asian American issues, their attendance was extremely minimal. Continue reading »
By Arturo R. García
Courtesy: Examiner.com
The comics world lost a pioneer last week with the passing of artist Tony DeZuniga, who died in the Philippines from complications from a stroke. DeZuniga is best known for being the co-creator of DC Comics characters Black Orchid and Jonah Hex.
DeZuniga’s association with Hex would span almost four decades: 38 years after introducing the character in All-Star Western in 1972, DeZuniga returned to draw Hex for a stand-alone graphic novel, Jonah Hex: No Way Back.
DeZuniga began working as an artist in his native Philippines as a teenager in the 1950s, during the country’s boom period for comics (or Komics, as they were called). In the early 1960s he moved to New York to study graphic design and advertising, a career he would pursue for a few years before returning to the U.S. toward the end of the decade and earning art assignments from DC editor Joe Orlando. DeZuniga became the first Filipino artist to break into the American comics market.
But more importantly, DeZuniga made sure he wasn’t the last to do so, as Comic Book Resources’ Kevin Melrose noted:
He used the opportunity to open the door for other Filipino creators, convincing Orlando and DC Editor-in-Chief Carmine Infantino to visit the Philippines in 1971 to recruit such artists as Alex Niño, Alfredo Alcala, Nestor Redondo, Fred Carrillo, Vicatan and Gerry Talaoc.
That same year DeZuniga collaborated with writer John Albano to create Jonah Hex, the disfigured Western antihero with whom the artist is so closely associated. “[John] asked me to draw the concept for the character, and one day I was at the doctor’s office and I saw this chart with a man, showing him half muscle and half skeleton,” DeZuniga recalled in a 2010 interview with Comic Book Resources. “I thought to myself, ‘This is neat,’ and I got the concept. When John Albano saw it, he was very happy.”
Under the cut you can find just a few examples of DeZuniga’s work with a variety of characters. Continue reading »
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(Click the book for the latest conversation) Feminism for Real – Jessica, Latoya, Andrea
The Same Woman – Thea
I Speak For Myself – Fatemeh
Yes Means Yes – Latoya
Sex Ed and Youth – Jessica
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