4-5-12 Links Roundup
- Korean Americans Look Inward After Oakland Shooting (New America Media)
Kyung Chan Kim, a pastor at the Richmond Korean Baptist Church and head of the Northern California Korean Christian Association, expressed condolences to the families of the victims, but was quick to distance the community from the violence.
“I’m very sorry to the victims of the shooting, and I’m very sorry that it happened in a Korean Christian school,” said Kim. “However, this kind of incident can happen regardless of place. I don’t think it’s just a problem within the Korean community.”
Such statements are exactly what Jonathan H. Lee, chair of the Department of Primary Care and Community Medicine at the San Mateo Medical Center, warns against. Lee, who is Korean American, says members must take stock of to what extent this tragedy reflects something within their own community.
“There is a racial overlay to this,” said Lee, noting that both the shooter and the university were part of the Korean American community. “Koreans are implicated… [but] the reaction of the Korean community is probably going to be to find an explanation that doesn’t require them to go inward.”
Outraged by the violence and stereotyping that sanctioned this terror, journalist Ida B. Wells-Barnett (1862-1931) and educator Anna Julia Cooper (1858-1964) cultivated what feminist scholar Patricia Hill Collins has called “a recursive relationship between … intellectual and political work.” In their respective 1892 publications Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases and A Voice from the South. By a Woman of the South, Wells-Barnett and Cooper educated white American men about how the suppression of blacks’ economic success and political activism was the true reason for most lynchings of black fathers and sons–rather than the spurious claim that they raped white women. The authors urged white American women to recognize how ending racial and sexual violence and gaining suffrage and other political rights were complementary rather than exclusive goals. They participated in and helped organize interracial campaigns and boycotts in order to publicize lynching atrocities and press for a national anti-lynching law.Similarly, as Koritha Mitchell writes in Living with Lynching: Afrincan American Lynching Plays, Performances, and Citizenship, 1890-1930, black women writers of the Progressive Era, such as Angelina Weld Grimké (1880-1958) and Georgia Douglas Johnson (1880-1966), created lynching plays to help black audiences survive the destructive effects of the mob on their homes and families.
By confronting a somnolent nation with the consequences of bigotry and fear, then stirring citizens into action, African American feminists have stood our ground, turning acts of violence and victimhood into opportunities for empowerment and advocacy. We’ve worked within black communities to develop anti-racist and anti-sexist strategies. We’ve claimed what Collins calls in Black Feminist Thought an “outsider-within” position “whose marginality provides a distinct angle of vision” on the politics of power and authority. This has enabled us to save our lives and communities by calling out the people, perceptions and policies that mask or deny the realities of African Americans’ experiences.
- Tea Party Leader At Supreme Court Rally: ‘Obamacare Is A Cancer!’ (Crooks & Liars)
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