By Guest Contributor Manissa McCleave Maharawal, cross-posted from in front and center

(In some ways this is a response to Esther Choi’s piece, and in some ways it isn’t…)

I spent yesterday evening as I spend many of my evenings: in the Financial District, at Occupy Wall Street, attending a Direct Action meeting, eating dinner, going to the General Assembly, and going to a POC-DA affinity meeting. As I was standing in the food line, waiting for my portion of beets, greens, cole slaw and bread, the conversation turned to Esther Choi’s article, “Private Danny Chen, and why I will never again reach out to OWS about something that matters to me.” Yesterday when I read this article it nearly made me cry: both because of how right she is, but also because I, somehow, felt personally responsible for the injustices and unjust and oppressive behavior that she had experienced at OWS. As someone who both identifies with the movement and as someone who has worked from the very beginning of my involvement at OWS to confront issues of racism and oppression within OWS, while still standing in solidarity with it, reading Choi’s article I suddenly felt very, very tired, sad, and angry.

To be honest, I was angry at both OWS and at her. I think OWS is strong enough and mainstream enough now to withstand serious critiques, and I think whether weak or strong, every movement should be self-critical. I’m tired of hearing that we can’t take on issues of racism and oppression because it would be “divisive.” I’m tired of hearing people call People of Color (POC) Caucus at OWS divisive because we bring up uncomfortable truths.

A friend of mine who is visibly Muslim (she wears hijab) said the other day, after recounting an incident where she was told that she had made people in a meeting “more uncomfortable than they had ever been” by telling them that she had been triggered by a racist sign: “If this is the most uncomfortable you have ever been, then please realize how lucky you are.” I laughed and agreed with her, but her comment stuck with me. In fact, this is exactly what some people everywhere, including at OWS, don’t want to have to realize–that they have a certain set of privileges in not feeling uncomfortable and that these privileges impact them and everyone around them.

So in these ways I completely understood what Choi meant and why her article feels and is so very viscerally and justly angry.

But in other ways I think her article includes troubling oversights. In making sweeping generalizations about the way an entire movement acts in regards to community events based on the actions of three people, in making them typical of an “OWS protester,” Choi does the movement and herself a disservice. Yes, some people act in these ways, I have seen and experienced similar actions. But not everyone does. If we are going to be strong as a movement, then we need to hold those who do act in oppressive and violent ways accountable while not collapsing the whole movement into their actions. To ignore the work of the POC Caucus, the Anti-Racist Allies Group and countless other people within the movement that do crucial work around racial justice issues is to do us all a disservice. It, in effect, actually silences the work of these people and groups in problematic and irresponsible ways.

All that said, I think we need to take the space that Choi’s article has opened up to talk about issues of accountability, oppression, racial justice and the way that these issues affect politics of our movement, frankly. That is not to say that people haven’t already been working hard to open up these spaces. They have, and I truly believe that more and more openings for these conversations are being created. The openings for these conversations are being created, for example, through the racial justice training that took the place of Spokes Council a few weeks ago, through a shift in language where we think about how to organize from the margins to the center, through the creation of new affinity groups and accountability structures, through holding each other as a community accountable and having conversations about what this means.

And so in the spirit of having these conversations I made a list of some of the ways that I think OWS needs to push itself to make sure that this is a movement that has has racial justice and anti-oppression at its center:

1) The “99%” does not mean that differences do not exist: I love the rhetoric of the 99%, I really, really do. I chant it at marches, I write it in my pieces about OWS. But we need to be aware of the ways that it erases difference by saying that because we are all in the same percentage bracket, we all experience this bracket the same way. This isn’t true. Let’s be careful and understand the 99% as a “complex unity” as Angela Davis so smartly said when she addressed the People’s University. Let’s draw strength from the differences within the 99% while also being explicit that, let’s say, white supremacists might technically be a part of the “99%,” but that they aren’t who we want in our movement nor who we would organize with.

2) We need to have a critique of the language of “Occupy” built into our movement: This has been said, very well, many times so I won’t rehash it. I don’t actually think we need to change the language of “Occupy.” At this point it seems like we have re-claimed the term, and if this is a movement about re-claiming then I think we might count this as one of our successes. But I want to be very careful here: we need to be critical of its use, we need to say both things at once: “De-colonize Wall Street” and also “Occupy Wall Street” and to understand how these things can be understood together. We need to say: “Occupy Wall Street, Unoccupy Iraq”. We can do this, it is possible, but the only way that this can happen is if a critique of the “Occupy” language becomes front and center in our movement (a good piece on this is here and here).

3) Privilege still exists even as people feel their conditions worsening: The Occupy movement has taken hold and sparked the nation’s imagination because so many Americans are currently experiencing the effects of the country’s economic downturn–the effects of years of corporate greed and power in this country. Many of those affected were economically privileged, and have seen this privilege start to disappear. However, they don’t like to hear that they still have a lot of access to other types of privilege, namely white privilege. So, what to do about this disturbing disconnect? People need to understand their privilege as having damaging consequences not just to those who don’t have access to it but also to themselves, simply because oppression anywhere creates oppression everywhere. Until there is first, a recognition that privilege exists and then the recognition that privilege oppresses us all, we won’t be able to move forward (for more on this go here).

4) Capitalism has always relied on racism to exist: If this is a movement about confronting capitalism and creating alternatives to it, which is my understanding of Occupy, then we also need to understand that capitalism relies on racism to perpetrate and reproduce itself; that it has always relied on a racialized division of labor and that we cannot tackle either without taking on both. The capitalist class has historically used racism to divide the working class, so if we are going to survive, we have to work hard, right now, to make sure that this doesn’t happen to us. When racism is thought about in this way, it is everyone’s problem. Everyone is affected by it, not just people of color. I am talking about both interpersonal racism as well as structural racism. In order to be strong, grow and survive, we need to be able to address both these levels of experience and analysis. We need to be both anti-oppressive as well as organize with a racial justice framework, and both must be done simultaneously in order to move forward.

The movement I am a part of still inspires me all the time. It inspires me for a range of reasons: because hundreds of people show up and stand in the freezing cold for the General Assembly like they did this past week; because I still have some of the most inspiring and exciting conversations with my friends from OWS; because on New Year’s Eve we re-assembled in Liberty Plaza and danced and hugged and chanted: “Whose year? Our year!”; because we are re-occupying homes in East New York; and because I think we do have the potential to create real change in this country. I am excited for the future of this movement and our communities and I agree with Choi that oppression should always be intolerable, but I also believe that in order to create the spaces that we want to see, we have to work for them. This is constant work, this is work that I do in my personal life and my political life, and I have found true allies within OWS who take on this work with me.

Received word through social media that civil rights hero Gordon Hirabayashi, best known for being one of the few people to openly defy the government’s unconstitutional internment of Japanese Americans during World War II, has died. He was 93.

Hirabayashi was arrested, convicted and imprisoned, and eventually appealed his case to the Supreme Court (Hirabayashi vs. United States) — the first challenge to Executive Order 9066. The Court ruled against him, 9-0. However, his wartime convictions were successfully overturned forty years later.

Rest in peace. Here’s the Facebook post from Mr. Hirabayashi’s son, Jay Hirabayashi, announcing his passing:

My Dad, Gordon K. Hirabayashi, who was ninety-three, passed away early this morning. He was an American hero besides being a great father who taught me about the values of honesty, integrity, and justice. My Mother, Esther Hirabayashi, who was eighty-seven, also passed away this morning about ten hours later. She was a beautiful, intelligent, generous soul. Although my parents were divorced, they somehow chose to leave us on the same day. I am missing them a lot right now.

Here’s a good summary of Hirabayashi’s landmark case:

During World War II, Gordon Hirabayashi was a 24-year-old senior at the University of Washington – an American citizen by birth – when, as acts of civil disobedience, he defied a curfew imposed on persons of Japanese ancestry and refused to comply with military orders forcing Japanese Americans to leave the West Coast into concentration camps. He appealed his convictions to the U.S. Supreme Court, which, in one of the most infamous cases in American history, held that the curfew order was justified by military necessity and was, therefore, constitutional. A year and a half later, in Korematsu v. United States, the Court relied wholly on its decision in Hirabayashi to uphold the constitutionality of the mass removal of Japanese Americans.

Forty years later, in 1983, represented by a remarkable and dedicated team of lawyers, Mr. Hirabayashi reopened his case, filing a petition for writ of error coram nobis in Seattle, Washington, seeking vacation of his wartime convictions on the ground that the government, during World War II, had suppressed, altered, and destroyed material evidence relevant to the issue of military necessity. In 1986, the Ninth Circuit, in an opinion authored by Judge Mary Schroeder, vacated both Mr. Hirabayashi’s curfew and exclusion convictions on proof of the allegations of governmental misconduct.
Hirabayashi v. United States, 828 F.2d 591 (9th Cir. 1987).

Next month, the Fred T. Korematsu Center for Law and Equality will host a major conference to commemorate the 25th anniversary of the Ninth Circuit opinion in the Hirabayashi v. United States coram nobis case. It’s happening February 11 at Seattle University. The event is free and open to the public. For more information, and to register, go here.

UPDATE: Here’s a statement on Gordon Hirabayashi’s passing from the Korematsu Institute and the Asian American Center for Advancing Justice: Fred T. Korematsu Institute for Civil Rights and Education and the Asian American Center for Advancing Justice Remember Civil Rights Leader Gordon Hirabayashi.

There will be a memorial service for Gordon Hirabayashi this Friday, January 6 in Edmonton, Alberta:

Quaker Memorial Meeting for Worship
1:00pm Friday, January 6, 2012
Edmonton Japanese Community Association
6750 88 Street Northwest Edmonton, AB T6E 5H6
(780) 466-8166

In lieu of flowers for Gordon Hirabayashi, donations can be made to:

1. The CapitalCare Lynwood, where Gordon Hirabayashi was cared for in the last three years of his life.
2. The Gordon K. Hirabayashi Scholarship Fund within the Dept. of Sociology at the University of Alberta.
3. The Gordon K. Hirabayashi Endowment Fund at the University of Washington.

In lieu of flowers for Esther Hirabayashi, donations may be made to the Canadian Association of Medical Teams Abroad, c/o 103 Laurier Drive, Edmonton, AB, Canada T5R 5P6.

I can’t stress enough that the following article only represents my opinions as an individual, and are not to be affiliated with any other person, organization or community.

December 15, 2011

Tonight was the march and vigil for Private Danny Chen, who was killed in the army on October 3, 2011. We don’t know how he died. The army is withholding all evidence, which it owes to the family, that could answer this question. What we do know is that he did not die in combat. We know he was constantly harassed and discriminated against by his fellow soldiers for being Chinese. We know some really twisted, violent hazing was committed against him by his superiors, right before he was found dead. We decided to hold a march and vigil because the army is currently carrying out an investigation, and we have to show them that the public is watching and that they cannot get away with another cover-up.

Just yesterday, board members of OCA-NY along with Congresswoman Nydia Velazquez and Council Member Margaret Chin went to the Pentagon to meet with high-ranking army officials, where they made demands that may fundamentally transform the way that hazing and bias crimes are dealt with in the military. We need them to know that the public and the media are watching, and that if they do not meet our demands, we will redirect our campaign to focus on our young men and women who are thinking of enlisting. These young people need to know before they enlist, the Army will not protect them from harm by fellow soldiers.

Before the vigil, we reached out to many organizations to support, and 36 signed onto our cause. We also reached out to Occupy Wall Street because justice and government transparency are in its mission, and we thought we could use the numbers and networks in OWS to bring out more support for our vigil, and we also wanted to show our solidarity with OWS.

So imagine my surprise when protesters from OWS showed up with OWS signs, not to stand with others lining up for the march to Columbus Park in support, but to stand in front of everyone, trying to direct them. These people, who had not, until that very moment, put in one bit of effort into organizing this action, who had no idea what the plan was, who had no idea who we were or who the family was, decided that they were going to make this an OWS event.

Conflict erupted when one of the OWS-affiliated protesters came with a giant Communist Party of China flag. This white man decided that he was entitled to represent us, at this protest for an American soldier, with a flag that has been used by this country to vilify the Chinese American community. When people began asking him not to demonstrate that flag because it was not the purpose of the event and we were in no way representing China or political parties, he began screaming at us about how we were ANTI-COMMUNIST and trying to take away his first amendment rights. We told him that Danny Chen was an American soldier and we wanted to respect the family and their wishes, but he continued screaming violent accusations at us at the top of his lungs and disrupting the event, until one of Danny Chen’s family members, on the verge of tears, finally convinced him to leave.

Then I overheard another OWS protester, who had earlier been trying to direct the protesters, give a video interview, and heard him saying, ever so solemnly, “They don’t want me here.” My question is: who are we and who are you? How do you expect to be welcomed as one of “us” when you have, from the beginning, made every effort to set yourself apart? Why do you think that you as an individual should be primary in this march for Private Danny Chen and his family? Why are you here giving video interviews?

Another white OWS protester began trying to use the human mic to direct the protest, and told me that I shouldn’t be using the blowhorn because the cops were going to take it away. I told her that, no, we had a parade permit and sound permit, which was why the police were there clearing the streets for our march. She looked confused and stopped yelling.

OWS protesters often make it seem like they are the birth of social justice activism, that they are here to teach us how to protest because none of us know what the fuck we are doing and need their wealth of experience to help us out. I was not at all surprised when that woman so naturally assumed that she, as a white woman, knew better than me – she thought that I had found a blowhorn somewhere and decided to play around with it. It didn’t occur to her that we had been planning this for weeks and thinking critically about every step, that it was led by a civil rights organization that has been at work for decades, that we had applied for 4 different kinds of permits so that our event could safely and effectively achieve its purpose.

The actions of these OWS protesters showed that they were at the march and vigil, not to show their support for Danny Chen’s family or the ongoing work on their case, but to provoke and garner attention for themselves and their brand, and then try to turn our strategic work and planning into a nonsensical, self-righteous tantrum. They acted like tourists on vacation in the social justice world, and our efforts and long-term goals were expendable in light of their self-interested pursuit of an interesting experience.

This is the problem I’ve always had with OWS—that it was a movement that came to earth as Christ himself, here to save us, to make the history of struggle, and the ongoing social justice work in this country by marginalized communities, irrelevant, and then to take the moral high ground and act as if we were the face of THEIR oppression when we took issue with their tactics.

I understand many people who came to the vigil from OWS were there with the right intentions, and it was great to have their support and solidarity. But these incidents of ignorance from OWS have been way too frequent and predictable to be isolated events. These incidents show that the OWS movement, while creating new opportunities to change the unjust world we live in, is, in many ways, the beloved child of our racist, sexist, intolerant capitalist society.

As marginalized people in this country rise, new forms of oppression are at work – those who have not experienced systemic oppression are claiming it anyway, turning social justice on its head and diluting the messages and movements that have been our hearts and souls. I think this quote from the New Jim Crow sheds a lot of light on why OWS emerged the way that it did: “Following the collapse of each system of control, there has been a period of confusion—transition—in which those who are most committed to racial hierarchy search for new means to achieve their goals within the rules of the game as currently defined. It is during this period of uncertainty that the backlash intensifies and a new form of racialized social control begins to take hold.”

I tried to love the movement. Since I wrote about OWS last, I’ve been attending OWS meetings and marches. I reached out to OWS about this action. I tried so hard to understand the movement, to check my own biases and question any negative feelings I had towards it, to engage with it as much as time would allow. I had so many conversations with people in OWS spaces, which usually just left me feeling perplexed, as the basic factors involved in social and economic inequity always seemed to be news to the people I was speaking to or a curious piece of trivia to be quickly passed over, and people would instead start talking to me about things like herbal medicine as if I had any fucking clue, or would say really ignorant things that would leave me feeling attacked.

I deal with ignorant bigots every day and am willing to do so as part of my own commitment to my work, but when bigots come posing as allies and then very dramatically play the martyr when we call out their bullshit, it really derails our ability to do our work.

I now realize that my time cannot be wasted trying to work in spaces that are paralyzed by ignorance. I will continue to engage in my activism using my experiences and empathy to guide the way I choose to live and work. But I’ll choose to do it in spaces where bigotry, drama, and ignorance do not masquerade as the thing I love. And I’ll choose to work with people who join community actions to respect and support those communities, not to objectify and use them as ornaments for their movement bereft of genuine compassion and understanding.

Besides the oppression brought by some OWS protesters, the march and vigil were beautiful. Over 400 people came out, and the interactions were passionate and heartfelt. I am proud to be an Asian American and glad to be involved in the struggle for a military and a world that does not ruthlessly exclude and exterminate those who are different in any way. I feel blessed to have a fierce mentor who, during the meeting with the Pentagon, told the Assistant Secretary of the Army to sit back down when he tried to leave their meeting early, and he actually listened. I think that our capacity for resistance is growing and we are finally feeling empowered and entitled in this country. We have taken far too much shit, and we are unapologetically asking to be seen as fully human. I am excited for the future of our communities and look forward to growing with each other and our true allies, and despite the importance of building relationships with the more enfranchised, we should never have to tolerate that kind of oppression, least of all in the spaces where we are trying to fight it.

Photos courtesy of Kwong Eng

Click here for coverage about the march and vigil.

Editor’s Note: Shortly after this one, Esther wrote a second piece. She wanted to center Danny Chen and the struggle for justice and not OWS. Also, in the time between the articles, eight soliders were charged in the death of Danny Chen, meaning that some progress was made. Click here to read “Private Danny Chen and threats to justice everywhere.” Next time the Chen case surfaces up in the news cycle, we’ll post the full piece here. – LDP

In September, I wrote a piece describing my perspective as a disabled woman of color and psychiatric survivor. I explored how race-specific self-killings are differentially represented by the media to demonstrate how public perceptions of suicide depend on social and political contexts. My intention was to de-sensationalize model minority suicide in order to draw attention to how particular non-white bodies are often presumed to be volatile and violent.

This month, I look more closely at clinical explanations of ethnic minority suicide and respond by citing current non-clinical and community-based anti-racist reflections on the significance of emotional pain and anger.

Before I proceed, I would like to draw attention to how the term suicide is invoked by the viewer rather than the subject of suicide: the neighbor who calls 911 rather than the person exhibiting suspicious behavior. This can have negative repercussions on the “allegedly suicidal” that we don’t often think about. In fact, daily we are surrounded by public campaigns that encourage us to report at-risk behavior with the intention of saving lives: we believe it is our civic duty to do so. This is especially true in communal living environments such as campus residences.

The “peril of help” arises in (1) how we, as the public, determine what is suspicious or at-risk behavior and (2) how our social infrastructure then deals with the people we “call out.” Behavior can be “cut out” of context, of an individual’s life history, when it does not make sense to onlookers, including family, friends, and employers. Behavior might not make sense and alarm us because an individual’s actions are inconsistent with social rules and, furthermore, associated with narratives of harm we are taught to recognize daily by institutions around us. For example cutting is strongly associated with suicide. Seen in the absence of context, most of us would be compelled to stop this action and probably call on professional expertise to intervene and solve what we identify as a threat.

However, a growing number of self-advocacy groups and allies assert that attention-seeking and attempted suicide are professional myths about self-harm. According to Mark Cresswell, these groups critique the underlying pathology and disease assumed with self-harm, despite there being socially acceptable forms of self-harm such as smoking, body modification, and waxing. More importantly, he notes that people with experiences with self-harm identify strongly with the concept of survival. Activists such as Louise Pembroke have spoken about needing to self-injure to stay alive and survive the pain of sexual violence and institutionalization.

Thus, when a mobile crisis intervention team is called because someone appears to be a danger to himself, it is important to reflect on the potentially negative effects this can have on self-harm survivors because of existing mental health laws.

When mobile crisis teams work jointly with the police, the police — regardless of the outcome of an intervention — may keep a record, which can affect civil liberties. According to Ryan Fritsch, legal counsel for the Psychiatric Patient Advocate Office in Ontario, there have been eight recorded cases of non-criminal contact between police and Ontarians with various psychiatric histories appearing in the Department of Homeland Security in 2010. None of this actually benefits the well-being of persons in distress and can create numerous lifelong barriers, all thanks to one phone call. By equating mental health records with violence and criminality, border control has prevented people from traveling and immigrating.

Combined with the criminal justice system’s unsavory history of racial profiling, this link has at times produced deadly results. For instance, in 1997 police shot and killed Edmund Yu after he raised a small (toy?) hammer over his head on a bus in Toronto. Psychiatric survivors in Toronto have remembered Edmund Yu through memorials such as Edmund Place, which provides supportive non-medicalized housing to ex-users of psychiatry, who are typically discriminated against in other forms of housing.

As someone who has a psychiatric history and who identifies as “mad,” my survival hinges upon having a network of loved ones who can approach the subject of distress with an open-mind and willingness to learn about other “rhythms” to our existence — on knowing people who will not assume that X or Y thought or behavior will equate with danger to myself or others. Besides the everyday violence of medical records and police reports, increased suicidality has been associated with the use of various anti-depressant medications, such as the selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor fluoxetine.

This kind of evidence complicates the professional consensus that ethnic minorities are at higher risk of suicide in North America and in need of specialized services. McKenzie and Crawford argue that rates of ethnic minority suicide have been consistently higher than those of the majority group in the USA and Australia, especially in areas where there is a lower concentration of ethnic minorities. They suggest this is because of “a relative lack of support by people with similar social situations or the perception of a more hostile social environment,” and that on an individual level “socio-economic stress, thwarted aspirations, racism, acculturation, culture clash with parents, loss of religious affiliation, difficulty with identity formation, and loss of family and community support may have effects on suicide risk.” While I would like to examine these claims carefully in separate post, what concerns me are the solutions that McKenzie and Crawford propose.

They suggest that untreated mental health problems in ethnic minorities (due to factors such as a reluctance to seek services, conflict with services, and poor compliance) exacerbate rates of ethnic minority suicide. They combine the above with “skewed age distribution” towards “younger age groups,” and recommend further investigation of risk factors to develop youth-focused prevention strategies.

The ever-expanding circle of “risk” factors turns an increasing number of people and whole communities into disabled targets of mental health services, and helps to justify psychiatry’s expertise and expansion at the exclusion of suggesting or fostering other kinds of explanations for distress or other types of support for racialized communities. McKenzie and Crawford assume that the community is incapable of developing its own strategies to prevent death and that they have already failed due to second-generation suicides. What if we reconsider rates of “death” beyond sensationalized self-killing and reflect on how we get to live day to day — what Jasbir Puar refers to as the unevenness of our rights to a certain lifespan? For example, poor housing infrastructure changes the everyday bodily comportment of marginalized communities, displacing long-term goals such as education with the immediate need for shelter.

In the context of the myriad ways in which racialized people slowly die, educating “at-risk” individuals redirects us to be happy in conditions that are reasonably unhappy. What possibilities exist for us to grieve this everyday struggle without the imposition of becoming normal — indeed, “civilized” — and okay with our conditions? I don’t have any fast answers. However, I can say that non-clinical modalities such as community acupuncture can illustrate some of the possibilities growing across North America. In an account I shared with Six Degrees Community Acupuncture, I described how community healers who work in solidarity with queer, Indigenous, and people of color political organizing are sensitive toward the bodily labor of resistance and anger, accepting rather than rejecting the need to put our bodies in potentially compromising situations for social change. Here acupuncture has served as a tool to mediate how strong, yet informative emotions register on the body. I am amazed by how acupuncture can be a thread of connectivity between different communities of color who all want alternatives to Western medicine — a source of dialogue.

There have also been non-pathological ways developed by artists and activists to talk about and speak out about our distress, such as Yolo Akili’s perspective on emotional justice. Rather than drawing conclusions about how oppression leads definitively to illness or suicide, Akili encourages people to explore the emotional texture of social inequity by transforming the way that activist work typically occurs. In activist spaces, Akili suggests we challenge misogyny by revealing our feelings and intuition, as a way to begin our intellectual work while at the same time mediating that expression by avoiding hurtful tactics such as interrupting, yelling, and belittling. His objective is to address, but not remove, pain by thoughtfully expressing it within our support networks, which include activist networks.

On the West Coast, there is also Creative Collective Access (CCA serving the Bay Area), a group of disabled queer and trans people of color working to create interdependent care networks. One of their goals is to resist the culture of individualism through resource sharing. Their most recent project is The Living Room Project, a multi-disciplinary space for healing, wellness, art, and youth events — founded by Micah Hobbes, a somatic doula and healer.

Anthropologists such as Miriam Ticktin have begun to trouble how “biology plays in the politics of immigration,” determining who is worthy of citizenship and asylum. Scholars should likewise trouble “psy” technologies (such as the criteria for “competency”), as they are deployed by institutions like mental health and law to determine who has freedom of movement — to determine who is fully human. This relationship between psychiatry and detention, from forced institutionalization to border control, particularly affects the lives of people of color.

Ironically, as social workers and psychologists (many of whom are African American and Asian American themselves) seek to use mental health as a tool to fund anti-racist community services, their research fortifies an ever-growing body of knowledge about race-specific mental illness, knowledge that can be appropriated by other institutions to increase the surveillance of ethnic minorities. We are left with the question of how service providers who are critical of the power relations between helper and user can be better allies to (take greater ‘risks’ with?) patients who are looking for support, and not be another source of barriers. Though the alternatives I have described are largely grounded in social justice movements (which may or may not appeal to your needs), they demonstrate just some of the possibilities that exist for living.

* * *

Louise Tam is a graduate student in Sociology and Equity Studies in Education at the University of Toronto.

(Image Credit: “Image of a Lonely Lady,” Low Chin Han, via Shutterstock)

Graphic courtesy of Sepia Mutiny

The citizenship rate of foreign-born Asian Americans has also increased, from 50% in 2000 to 57% now. India has one of the greatest number of legal permanent residents eligible to become citizens and 57% of foreign-born Pakistanis have been naturalized. Yet, there are still language and cost barriers associated with citizenship and this remains a hurdle to full civic engagement.

These results and more can be found in the report. But as an electoral advocate, these findings are the most fascinating in how they pertain to civic engagement. As part of the federal Voting Rights Act, Section 203 requires bilingual voting assistance to be required to particular populations, based on Census data. 2002 was the last time an assessment was determined. Due to the results of the 2010 Census, Section 203 now covers Asian American populations located in 22 counties, boroughs, census areas or cities, including 17 new population areas. For the first time South Asian languages are included as a mandatory language for particular counties. The South Asian jurisdictions covered by Section 203 now include:

• Los Angeles County, California – Asian-Indian
• Cook County, Illinois (Chicago) – Asian-Indian
• Queens County, New York – Asian-Indian
• Hamtramck City, Michigan – Bangladeshi

As can be inferred from the above charts, the increase in South Asian populations as well as the higher proportion of naturalized South Asians means that more South Asian Americans are eligible to vote. Providing bilingual assistance will allow the South Asian community to get fully engaged in a process which they wouldn’t have otherwise.
- From “It’s Confirmed – Desis Are Growing,” by Taz

Illustration by Gary Bedard

By Guest Contributor Chris Fan, cross-posted from Hyphen Magazine

Last Monday, Oakland’s mayor Jean Quan ordered the forcible eviction of the Occupy Wall Street movement’s Oakland encampment, which had been situated directly outside of her office at City Hall off and on for the past two months.

Wakened in the early morning by an army of police outfitted in riot gear, demonstrators remained peaceful as more than 100 tents were destroyed, and dozens of arrests were made. The action precipitated the resignation of two of Quan’s top staffers, bringing the total resignations in response to her handling of Occupy Oakland to three. It also deepened this writer’s disappointment and embarrassment over the actions of someone who, not too long ago, could have been described as embodying the best of the Asian American movement of the ’60s and ’70s.

As an undergraduate at UC Berkeley, Quan was intensely involved with the Third World Liberation Front’s (TWLF) radical efforts to create ethnic studies programs, ultimately spearheading the establishment of the Asian American Studies program there. After graduating, she continued her activism in New York’s Chinatown, and, much later, joined Oakland School Board, and City Council, where she fought for a variety of progressive causes. Last summer, when large-scale demonstrations broke out in protest of a lenient verdict handed down to BART police officer Johannes Mehserle — who was on trial for shooting Oscar Grant while the latter was face-down and restrained — it was hardly a surprise when Jean Quan joined in a human chain to protect demonstrators from riot police. She was just dusting off an old skill set.

So, when Quan won the mayor’s seat last November, I and so many others were overjoyed not only that she had become Oakland’s first Asian American and first female mayor, but that Jean Quan the progressive activist had become mayor.

Why she decided to step onto the other side of the riot shield is a question that cannot be adequately answered now.

My disappointment and embarrassment for her aside, it would be unfair to characterize Quan as a tyrant, or unequivocally beholden to business and police interests. In fact, it’s been precisely her ambivalence over Occupy Oakland that has provoked resignations and her alienation from city agencies — especially the Oakland police. She has explicitly expressed support for the movement (as, to be sure, have so many mayors who also justified their endorsement of excessive force in the same gesture), and her husband (Floyd Huen, also a TWLF alum) and daughter have been considerably less ambivalent in their support of it. We might even take the divisions within the Quan family as a kind of parable of the American left.

Monday’s eviction was, of course, not the first. Quan’s first attempt at permanently dismantling the camp came early in the morning of October 25, when she authorized hundreds of police officers to evict its residents with a “shock and awe” strategy. In just a few hours, they cleared and destroyed over 150 tents, as well as an elaborate system of services that had maintained the encampment for more than two weeks: including a fully operational kitchen, medic tent, library and children’s area.

Later that afternoon, Occupiers marched from the steps of the city’s Main Library (which librarians, in solidarity, refused to close, in defiance of police orders) back to the encampment site with the intention of re-occupying it. This resulted in large-scale confrontations with police, in which the latter employed an excessive amount of force that resulted in serious injuries, including the critical wounding of Iraq war veteran Scott Olsen. Widely circulated videos depict a police officer tossing an exploding tear gas canister directly at Olsen’s head, after he had already been rendered unconscious by a projectile fired by police moments beforehand.

In a painful example of precisely the kind of tragic irony that the Occupy movement is trying to highlight, that same night, just a few miles from the thick of the demonstrations, Oakland’s school board voted to close five elementary schools in an attempt to save $2 million. The cost of the police actions for that day alone ran well over $1 million.

Along with the cost of last week’s actions, the total cost of police services rose to over $1.5 million. Considering how Occupy Oakland has made every attempt at cooperating with health and safety standards, and how its demonstrations have been largely peaceful, the costs seem not only unjustified, but somehow idiotic. I say “idiotic,” because it reminds me of that paradigmatic scene of idiocy from Steve Martin’s film The Jerk, when a barrage of gunshots fired at the main character miss him, hitting piles of cans instead, and which we can paraphrase like this: “They hate the tents! Stay away from the tents!”

Quan’s involvement in the decisions of October 25 prompted international condemation, as well as ridicule by the likes of Jon Stewart and Keith Olbermann. But perhaps the most damning criticism came from a group of Asian American Oakland residents who were just as excited about her election as I was. A few days after the eviction, they circulated an open letter in which they wrote: “It is a sad day. We once believed you to be an ally to low-income, communities of color; to progressive politics; to real democracy. What happened?”

What happened?

I’ve been following Occupy Oakland since it pitched its first tent on October 10. Unfortunately, with an infant son vigorously engaged in his own protest against sleep, it was impossible to join the encampment, and difficult to spend a significant amount of time at Frank Ogawa Plaza (renamed Oscar Grant Plaza by the Occupiers). Nonetheless, my wife and I donated what we could, and I stayed involved via Twitter — something that, prior to this Spring, would have sounded ridiculous.

Even with my meager involvement in virtual and meat-space, I have never in my lifetime seen the American Left so invigorated, so hopeful — or so unified. The movement certainly has its problems, not least of which being its demographics (although as our own Tammy Kim reports, Zuccotti Park is an exception). And with the onset of winter — and the Bay Area’s own rainy version of that mythical season — the question of demands, thus far strategically deferred, is becoming all the more pressing. If there’s anything we’ve learned, however, it’s that the movement’s astonishing resilience is generated more by its form than its content. And it’s not like Occupiers aren’t unaware of their contradictions; they’re working through them slowly and earnestly.

Occupy Oakland shuts down the Port of Oakland during the Nov. 2 general strike

As encouraging as the past two months have been, the tragedy of Mayor Quan stands as a sobering reminder of what a movement like Occupy risks becoming as time wears on. She is precisely the kind of future the movement resists when it militates against co-optation.

In a way, Quan also signals the incoherence of “Asian American” as a radical coalition. No other public figure dramatizes more powerfully just how distant those heady days of action and idealism have become.

This may seem like an odd claim to make, with Asian Americans so much on the rise just across the Bay in San Francisco. Two weeks ago, Edwin Lee became the first elected Asian American mayor of that city, making him the latest instance of an ascendant and formidable wave of Asian American political influence there. But that influence flows from a largely Chinatown-centered voting bloc that is either more closely associated with the Chinese-language press and China’s international political dynamics, or would more readily identify as Chinese and American than Asian American.

Also consider the example of Occupy Oakland’s renaming of Frank Ogawa Plaza to Oscar Grant Plaza, a deliberate displacement of Asian American politics for a narrative of white-on-black state violence.

Ogawa, a gardener by trade, was Oakland’s first Japanese American and longest-standing city council member, as well as an internee at Topaz Camp. He was known for his moderation and record of breaking racial barriers. It’s possible that his conservative politics would have clashed with the Occupy movement’s values — but that doesn’t seem like a strong enough reason. What’s more telling is the startling lack of commentary on this issue (with very few exceptions).

The fact that this move could be passed over in silence is perhaps the most poignant epitaph to a coalition that once I so lovingly knew.

But, alas, Quan herself is the best evidence of what I want to call, polemically, “the Death of Asian America.” The idea of the “Asian American” was born in the ’60s with Quan and her Third Worldist comrades. If it still had any life in it, it died this fall, along with her political career. To use a clunky sociological term, Quan has become a symbol of Asian America’s broader “embourgeoisiement” over the past forty years.

Rather than despair, I believe that, at this moment, we should gauge our optimism against the endurance of the Occupy movement itself. We need to risk it.

Help them through the winter.

What hope is left for us is to be found in solutions that haven’t been formulated yet. We need new coalitions. We don’t yet know what they are, which is why we need the space — indeed, the interruption — to think these things through clearly and honestly. It’s precisely that space and time that the Occupiers are putting their bodies and selves on the line to create and defend.

Those chains of students linking arms and getting pepper sprayed by the officer John Pikes of the world aren’t defending tents, or the spaces they occupy. It’s ridiculous to think so. They’re defending our time to think.

Floating signifiers. A scene from Occupy Cal. Photo by Aaron Bady.

Update, 11/22/11

 It’s been brought to my attention that there has, indeed, been lively discussion on the Frank Ogawa/Oscar Grant renaming issue.

The best commentary on it is from the artist Kenji Liu, who designed two posters — one with Ogawa’s image, and the other with Grant’s — emblazoned with the caption “Memory is Solidarity.” These were widely distributed during the Occupy demonstrations and general strike at the beginning of November. Liu writes:

We can have a more complex and nuanced movement for economic and racial justice by honoring both Ogawa and Grant, not as equivalents but in solidarity. This is not just about inclusion, but about having a complex analysis from which to act together. As Audre Lorde has written, “difference must be not merely tolerated, but seen as a fund of necessary polarities between which our creativity can spark.” We can recognize the different ways capitalism has attacked each of our communities. We can bring this imagination to our aspirations for our places, our movements and our society.

For me, this is the crucial point: that solidarity and a “complex analysis” of capitalism are more fundamental than the identity politics at the heart of the renaming issue. That doesn’t of course make Asian American-specific or black-specific politics disappear; it forces them to incorporate a broader analysis than identity politics can accomodate.

In the case of Oscar Grant, the discourse has evolved from outrage over a long history of white-on-black violence, to a critique of police force, to a critique of the police state, and then to a critique of the police state’s inextricabile link to capitalism. This evolution, for me, is what I hope will be one of the most enduring legacies of the OWS movement. And what I believe we need to do is risk accepting that broader critique, even if that means letting go of some aspects of those old identity-based coalitions.

I know, I know. It’s just a clothing line! Lighten up! And it’s so kawaii as the ads keep telling me, forcing the word on me like a pacifier to the lips of a crying, reluctant babe. (Wouldn’t be surprised if Gwen Stefani had tried to trademark the Japanese word for “cute” some time in the last 5 years or so. She’s already pretty much got “Harajuku”–the name of a Tokyo neighborhood–locked down legally.) And look, the Harajuku Mini for Target children’s clothes collection, which launches Sunday online and in stores, is“kawaii,” in a “What if a little panda cub who was part skater-punk threw up and it looked like lollipops and rainbows?” sorta way.

But, you know, I can forgive, but I can’t forget. Wait, who am I kidding? I can’t forgive either! Because when I see this ad plugging Gwen Stefani’s latest business venture…

…all I see is this:

And that is still, always, and forever whatever the Japanese word for “bullshit” is.

[The Stir: Gwen Stefani Harajuku Mini Arrives in Target Sunday!]

Pacquiao makes boxing lovable by being lovable: He overcame immense poverty to become an international phenomenon worth millions. He is monstrously fast in the ring. He named his newborn Queen Elizabeth just because he likes Queen Elizabeth. He is humble and sweet-faced and appears amazed by his own success.

But dig deeper and you see something else about Pacquiao that is an unexpected gift. For Asians and Filipinos who were born and live in the West, Pacquiao offers a space where a diasporic people can feel closer to somewhere hardly ever seen. For a few hours they are united with all the other Asians in the world hunkered down in Pacquiao caps, socks and hoodies, trying not to gnaw off the rim of their beer glasses. Pacquiao closes a distance of thousands of miles so that they are at home.

…

For Asian fans, there is something exceptionally thrilling about Pacquiao: the joy of seeing ourselves whenever he is on TV. During an interview on “The Jimmy Kimmel Show” in 2010, Pacquiao sang “Nothing’s Gonna Change My Love For You,” for no reason really, other than that he wanted to. I was transfixed by his warbling; he employed the exact same karaoke style as my Singaporean uncles. I had never seen such a comforting, familiar and unabashed presentation of Asianness on American TV.

…

It is Colin’s happiness at seeing a bona fide, nonfictional Asian hero for his friends that draws him to Manny. When I ask the group if they think it’s OK to experience enjoyment at the sight of an Asian man beating a white man, Aruna, Christian and Anthony search for a tactful response. But Colin says, “Doesn’t it sort of feel gratifying though? I’m just thinking of all the times we’ve seen Asian men emasculated, and I just think Pacquiao can be symbolic of Asian pride. It’s kind of cool and satisfying to see one of us — ” Colin stops to correct himself here, pointing out that he can’t say “us” because he’s not Asian. But it’s clear that Pacquiao means something to him directly, not just via his friends. He continues, “For me, when Obama won the presidency, it was one of the greatest moments of my life: to see a black guy, a biracial guy reach the highest levels. You can dispute Obama’s policies or whatever, but seeing that win, I cherish that. I don’t think it’s wrong to necessarily feel a little pride, a little racial pride maybe, in seeing Pacquiao knock out a white guy out.” He pauses dramatically. “He put that guy to sleep.” Everyone laughs.

…

Despite the fact that Asians are an enormous community, the perception that they are soft-spoken and submissive, and therefore a “model minority” preferred by the white ruling classes, can create rifts among communities of color. It is ridiculous to state that over 2 billion people share a deferential nature; yet in the case of Manny, the irony is that the description fits. All the Pacquiao fans at my disposal describe him as incorrigibly gentle. Ryan says, “He is a tough guy within the ring, and that confronts stereotypes about Asians, but outside of that he seems sort of nonthreatening, and maybe that fulfills a stereotype. But that’s because he just does him.” Yet contrast this with the way African Americans are stereotyped and how Mayweather appears — loud, arrogant, violent — and when two boxers who both match a racial bill come up against each other, it’s war. In an echo of the Jack Johnson treatment, perhaps Pacquiao is forgivably Asian. But neither being forgiven nor unforgiven for your ethnicity seems so hot.

I really, really wanted to like CNN’s Black in America 4: The New Promised Land: Silicon Valley (which premiered last night) as well as Miss Representation, a documentary currently airing on OWN. Both, however, left me feeling the same way, which looks something like this:

A couple of synopses before I state why I felt this way:

Black in America 4 explores the rarely discussed facts and stories of Black people in digital technology, especially those who are inventors, innovators, and entrepreneurs. Host Soledad O’Brien frames this through the stories of eight African American entrepreneurs who move into together as part of digital business owners Angela Benton’s and Wayne Sutton’s NewME Accelerator program, which provides Black entrepreneurs time and (relative) quiet space—and possible connections with venture capitalists—for their business ideas.

Jennifer Siebel Newsom’s Miss Representation connects some of the dots between the stats, the personal stories, and media images about women and how those images affect not only those in the media— Margaret Cho recounts the fatphobia and other drama around her 1994 comedy All American Girl — but also those consuming the media, meaning the rest of us.

Now, I know that both shows are, respectively, very much Black Studies and Women’s Studies 101, presented as and for those who may know very little to nothing about either Black tech innovators and owners or media literacy and feminism. So, I can see both try to provide a “hook” for their audiences with that in mind. However, the way their respective creative teams frame their stories does both topics a disservice.

When I asked O’Brien about the aim of this installment at a preview screening, she said, “First of all, [Blacks] are clearly using the technology, but we’re not innovating the technology. And Silicon Valley keeps saying how colorblind it is. So, this part of the series examines that statement.”

Watching BiA4, I felt like I was watching O’Brien trying to mash a news report with a reality show. (“Watch what happens when tech-y Black folks get real…with Soledad O’Brien!”) I can understand that the NewME Accelerator was a good (and, from a seeing-news-as-a-business standpoint, a fiscally feasible way) for CNN to gather a group of Black tech business owners (and the non-Black people who attempt to help and/or comment on them) to tell a relatable narrative about the dearth of Black people in the field.  (BiA4 states early on that less than 1% of digital entrepreneurs are Black. The majority, it says, are white, young, Ivy League and first-tier university drop-outs, which, as pointed out in the post-screening Q&A screening I attended, is a privilege unto itself as far as starting businesses.) But I actually think a better way to tell both stories is to decouple them. If I could reconstruct the story, I would have had O’Brien, say, follow one or two Black digital entrepreneurs in depth as they attempted to get investors and utilized Benton and Sutton as pundits— along with angel investor/philanthropist Mitch Kapor, who directly refutes Michael Arrington’s claim of the digital ownership as “meritorious.” Or I would have followed the NewME Accelerator crew as the main subjects of a full-length documentary to air on CNN.

Also, another questionable point is how Asians and Asian Americans are considered in this report. The show starts off by saying that the tech-innovation worlds are “white and Asian.” Though the presence of Asians and Asian Americans should not lead to Arrington’s erroneous conclusion that the tech world is, therefore, “colorblind,” the presence of Asian and Asian Americans shouldn’t be discounted as failing to bring racial diversity to tech communities. The more subtle equation BiA4 makes, however, is “Black=racial diversity.”

At least BiA4 addresses, albeit imperfectly, race and racism in the tech field, Miss Representation — for all of the visually racial diversity (you see Cho, former Secretary of State Condeleeza Rice, Dreamworlds director Sut Jhally, media-literacy advocate Malkia Cyril, and Newark, NJ mayor Cory Booker, among others) — fails to talk about the issue of race and racism. When I asked why at a post-screening Q&A, the response was “We only had 90 minutes, though we’re planning a second movie to deal with race.” (Refer to image at top of this post.)

However, there were places in the film where race and racism could be mentioned, and it would have taken about 30 seconds. For example, a young Black woman talks about her hair and how media images make her feel about it. The narrator could easily say something like, “Far too many images we see in the media are of white women swinging long, flowing hair. Imagine how that would make a woman of color, whose hair may not do that, feel?”

I timed it: the quote took all of 15 seconds to read out loud. (I’ll be generous and give it about 30 seconds to account for dramatic voiceover.) Or even acknowledge that the majority of media images—both in the film and in entertainment itself, from news to shows to porn—are mostly of white women as both idealized and in variety of roles…and these are, quite a bit of the time, functioning in tandem. Again, all of a thirty-second voiceover or a statistic that could be one of many the film uses to further its argument on how the media hurts women and other people. The silence about race (actress Rosario Dawson is the only person who explicitly mentions “people of color”) — as well as class, gender identity, sexual identity, and  and physical ability, though the film does give a nod at how the media, especially television, fails to acknowledge women above the age of 35 as an audience or as characters — flattens the documentary’s discussion about women to the category of “woman,” as if female-presenting people all suffer from media images the same way. Of course, we don’t.

And I just quite can’t with Black in America 4 and Miss Representation.

Image credit: Bossip

Longtime Racialicious readers know this time on the calendar has prompted the R to read someone (or several folks) about their racist costumes or some other Halloween-related foolishness. Well, this year, Ohio University’s Students Teaching about Racism in Society (STARS) put on posters what we’ve been putting into words for quite a while.

I think that, for the most part, the campaign deserves the accolades, coverage, and support it’s been getting around the web, from Angry Asian Man to the 17,575 (and counting!) responses on the STARS president’s Tumblr to The Root to Bitch to the former Racialicious owner Carmen Sognonvi .

Of course, we can argue, among other things, that phenotypes don’t equal culture and cultures aren’t static or even talk about the historical-religious appropriation of Halloween itself.

My only quibble with the campaign is that I may have chosen photos where the models conveyed different body language. Not that the models didn’t pose how they wanted, being a student-driven campaign. What I do think is quite a few photographers rarely get The Shot in one shot; in fact, several photographers submit several photos for clients/collaborative partners to choose from.

I would have chosen, say, the Latino looking down at the photo, the East Asian woman giving the “geisha” picture the side-eye. Or all of the models giving their respective photos the side-eye. Or all of them looking out at the viewer. Or all of them looking down. As is, the photo of the East Asian woman looking down may suggest non-confrontation (“meek Asian girl”)

juxtaposed with the men of color (the photo at the top of the post and this one)

and the Black woman

may  inadvertently suggest stereotypes of anger and aggression (“angry Arab,” “Latino with a temper,” “aggressive Black woman”). Just a thought if and when STARS decides to tweak this incredible campaign.

But, again, that’s my only quibble. STARS did a wild-applause-and-rose-tossing job with this campaign.

Others, however, have taken this serious and timely message and parodied—if not downright attacked–it. (Color me unshocked by this, Racializens.) Now, some of the parodies made me chuckle, like this Avatar-based one

and the zombie one

mostly due to the ideas of the creatures being symbols for people of color.

The ones about white people, especially poor whites, produced mixed results mostly because the parodies don’t quite grasp that, yes, poor white people do have a mitigated privilege via their skin color and that white people of various class standings making fun of poor whites may be viewed as “inside joking,”

but white poverty is also thoroughly ridiculed and dismissed—and, therefore erased–in US society by that very same mitigated privilege.

Oh, and let’s not forget the sexism and the fatphobia in these parodies.

As we’ve witnessed in our posts about racism in costuming, people have rushed to defend their choice to dress up in racially offensive Halloween garb in some of the comment sections about the campaigns, with the usual mixture of the “I got my rights!”, “my best [insert race and/or ethnicity here] friend/partner/co-worker/neighbor didn’t find my costume offensive,” (bonus points if the person saying this is a person of color wears the stereotyping costume of a PoC culture), “y’all are being oversensitive/overemotional/hostile,” “you’re the racist for calling out my racism,” and other derailing techniques.

Some of the Derailing/Apologist/Other-Blaming hits and remixes?

From “Jerry Stein” at Autostraddle

OMG, get a life. This is pathetic. Would an Asian woman be OK to go as a Geisha on Halloween? If not why not? And if so are we now saying that only people of the exact origin or race can have fun dressed as a CHARACTER on Halloween? Stop being so sensitive. If America is to get passed all of this nonsense then it needs to get some perspective and start smiling again.

Watch any movie or TV show and you will see a racial stereotype. Are all stereotypes negative NO! Why is it that this campaign only sees that.

This country is dividing itself. Nobody wants to be American. Everyone is so narcissistic and self important it makes me sick to my stomach. Bring back people with humility and a sense of humor before we all end up selfish deluded idiots thinking the world owes them something.

Based on this all costumes which feature Cowboys, Irish Leprechauns, Michael Jackson, Lady GaGa, Bin Laden, OJ Simpson, Madonna, Jersey Shore cast members will all now be banned because they offend the Irish, African Americans, Italians and Muslims. Thats pretty much Halloween cancelled.

This country is becoming a laughing stock for the wrong reasons.

Mohamhead from GOOD

I am not white myself but I don’t see what’s wrong with people doing that kind on stuff on Halloween. I might even dress up as a white guy. Is that racist too? Or is it only racist if white people do it? Hypocrites.

didimydoe3, also at GOOD

I don’t mind stereotypical costumes of my race because I’m mature enough to know it’s a costume.

Sometimes it is offensive. Mine is. It’s the only reason I’m doing it. I’m going blackface.

Oh, I could go on and on and on with these kinds of comments–because these comments are out there ad nauseum–but you get the jist.

But see, here’s the thing, People Who Defend Racist Costumes: you all are proving STARS’—and Racialicious’—point…and quite well. You’re welcome.

As Bitch’s headline says, don’t mess up as you dress up, and have a Happy Halloween!

Image credits: Uproxx and Hard to Be Humble When You Stuntin on a Jumbotron

By Guest Contributor Jen Wang, cross-posted from Disgrasian

The Chinese Progressive Association organizes low income and working class Chinese immigrants in San Francisco. Some of their youth members have come together to tell their stories in solidarity with the Occupy movement, and I keep seeing their photos shared on Facebook. Their stories are heartbreaking, enraging, depressing, and, at the same time, inspiring. These kids should be wallowing in despair but instead they’re still fighting for a better future for themselves and their families.

A reality check for all of us, especially in light of the backlash against the Occupy movement and this kind of bullshit.

[Chinese Progressive Association website]
[Chinese Progressive Association on FB]

With the timing and awareness of the new Harold and Kumar movie, everyone in America who likes to smoke out will be watching the episode and even better–they’ll be too wasted to find the remote and switch the channel even if the show sucks. I noticed on your upcoming schedule that no host has yet to be confirmed for either the October 29 or November 5 episodes—either date would be perfect to take advantage of the Harold and Kumar synergy.

You also have the added insurance of two hosts so if one of them sucks, you still have a good shot that the other can carry the show. ‘Cause I’ve seen episodes where the lone host sucked and it was not a pretty 1 ½ hours. At the least, two Asian guys have to be worth one Matt Damon, right?

And lest you mistakenly think that having an Asian host will negatively effect the ratings and a segment of the audience (i.e. in-bred racist hicks in the South) will not tune in, Let me remind you that one of the highest-rated episodes in ALL of SNL’s history was when Jackie Chan hosted on May 20, 2000. That show received a 7.3 audience share. Compare that with the Justin Timberlake-hosted episode from this past May, which was considered one of the highest-rated in recent years. That outing “only” netted a 7.0 share.

Now that I’ve addressed your business concerns, let me turn to the artistic ones. Having both John and Kal co-host will definitely open up your creative options because between these two guys, you’ve pretty much got everything covered. You can do ethnic jokes, you can do stoner jokes, you can do 3-D jokes, you can do Star Trek jokes, you can do political jokes (remember Kal worked for the Obama administration), you can do musical comedy (John fronts his own band)—the possibilities are endless. Hell, you can finally do sketches like this with actual Asian people in them.

- From You Offend Me, You Offend My Family

By Guest Contributor Jonathan Vogeler

This summer, Citibank began running an advertising campaign that features three young men embarking on a project, financed by the bank, to photograph Earth from space, using a weather balloon and off-the-shelf equipment. The advertisement taps several currents of our national mythology – independence, ingenuity, discovery, and superiority in space (which is itself an extension of our glorification of colonial conquest).

This is not an entirely fictional story. Two years ago, Justin Lee and Oliver Yeh, two Asian-American MIT students, made international headlines when they used inexpensive, readily available materials to photograph near-space orbit on a $150 budget. They describe their project here, and received national media coverage.

There is a remarkable visual similarity between the Citibank ad storyboard and the real-life project documented by Lee and Yeh on their blog. But there are a few key differences.

As you can see in the commercial above, the most obvious discrepancy is that Lee and Yeh have been replaced by two young white men and a third who appears to be African-American. Within this group there is also a clear racial dynamic: the white men initiate and execute the project, while their friend drives the vehicle and points appreciatively at their success.

America has a long history of mis-attributing credit to white men. But the specific erasure of Asian-American men is indicative of deep cultural paranoia toward the challenge that Asian-American success poses to white hegemony. If the ad were to feature the real-life heroes of this story, many white Americans may read it, not as a feat of American ingenuity, but a dangerous manifestation of their loss of power. This fear is evidenced both internationally, in apprehension toward the rising economies of Asia, and domestically, as resentment of Asian-American students at elite universities. The narrative of enterprising white men achieving success (with an assist from a person of color) is less threatening, because it reinforces the identity that white American men like to imagine for themselves.

A second, less-apparent difference between the commercial and the real story is the source of funding. Citibank positions itself in the commercial as a benevolent patron of small-scale innovation. You may have the idea, the ad says, but the big banks make it feasible. Therefore, white people have an interest in allying themselves with big banks, in the same way that Citibank is tacitly allying itself with the cultural demands of whiteness.

One of the most inspiring aspects of this story, however, is that Lee and Yeh were able to compete with NASA on a budget of only $150. They did not need a bank loan; their seed money was a $200 donation. As they describe it, the specific barrier that they faced was a lack of access to resources. They simply could not afford the expensive equipment that would be needed for near-space photography (and presumably no bank would have lended them the money). Their accomplishment was not only an expansion of scientific knowledge, but the pioneering of a technique that allowed them and others who imitate them to overcome the financial obstacles that restrict scientific access.

The story of ordinary people achieving their goals by tapping small donations and economizing is just as threatening to banks as Asian space-flight is to many white Americans. So this inspiring all-American tale of hard work and ingenuity is rewritten as an alliance between white hegemony and the banking system. Sadly, this the only version of the story that most Americans will ever hear.

In some ways, The Monogamy Experiment is very much a comedy “in the moment.” Like many modern comedies, it hinges on ultra-dry awkwardness – so much it almost seems like a Britcom at times. And there’s a few compelling elements to this webseries, but five episodes in, it’s still not quite clear how they all fit together.

The trailer, and slight spoilers, are under the cut.

The show’s first episode introduces us to Amy (Amy Rider) and Nigel (Brayden Pierce) in home-movie style, in the aftermath of a caffeine malfunction instigated by an (unsuccessful) wedding proposal. As an unseen friend films the scene, Amy is inspired to begin a documentary on monogamy.

“I think the whole reason why I said no is because I don’t really believe in monogamy,” she explains. “I was told my whole life that monogamy is, like, a lie. My friends are all telling me that I shouldn’t get married, that I’m too young or something.” In the midst of her epiphany, the most refreshing thing about the show comes out right away: TME is build around an interracial relationship, but it’s not strictly about interracial dating – at least not for our protagonists.

Amy’s idea gains another layer not long after the spill, when a therapist (Tohoru Masamune) recommends the couple open their relationship for a month – he wants Amy and Nigel to stop sleeping with each other for 30 days, while still pursuing “intimacy” with other parties. Pierce and Rider do a good job showing us Amy and Nigel’s emotional shift here, a change that accelerates once Amy comes across an early prospect to, uh, work out her issues on.

Since then, most of the series has focused on Amy’s misadventures in dating, which have been complicated both by the kinds of guys you’d see in reader Caitlin’s video and her assistant (Liisa Evastina), who makes a costly error on her online dating profile. For the most part, Rider and company play it with the right amount of deadpan, even if one joke veered perilously close to Hangover II territory.

All the while, maybe the most compelling part of the show is taking place away from Amy and Nigel. For reasons yet to be explained, Amy is apparently making her documentary in the midst of her trial separation. Footage from a number of interviews are mixed into each episode, and she appears on-camera in a few of them. But while they’re interesting, these mini-segments bring up questions that threaten to disconnect the viewer from the story: is Amy the interviewer the same Amy who came up with the idea? If so, how will the insight from these conversations play into her new dating life? And how did she and her invisible friend wrangle James Kyson-Lee into appearing?

So far the show’s been savvy enough to avoid playing either Amy or Nigel as a villain, but we still haven’t gotten to see Nigel really enjoy his newfound freedom, so that might be about to change. In fact, the upcoming stretch of episodes might be the most crucial to the story, as we will presumably see whether Nigel and Amy “get theirs” with each other or somebody else, and, hopefully, where Amy ends up on her other journey as a budding documentarian.

By Arturo R. García

Labor Day weekend brought with it the opening strains of the college football season, and according to Deadspin, Fox Sports wasted no time in going to the bottom of the “coverage” barrel.

In a segment at which only Alexandra Wallace could’ve LOL’ed, “investigative reporter” Bob Oschack set out to give the Universities of Colorado and Utah “an All-American welcome” to the Pac-12 Conference by going to the University of Southern California. The twist being, he only talked to non-white students.

More specifically, Oschack – a comedy writer by trade, if you’re generous enough to call Mind of Mencia “comedy” – focused his mock-report on what appeared to be international students who weren’t football fans. I say “appeared to be” because the students are given a textbook Othering: they’re never identified, nor are their studies mentioned. But that’s not what Oschack is going for here, of course. As Deadspin’s Emma Carmichael put it, “in the world of misguided network television humor, foreign accents and unfamiliarity with good old-fashioned football is funny.”

As Media Matters reported, Asian students made up just over 20 percent of the USC undergraduate student body as of Fall 2010, with international students making up 11.2 percent. About the only thing Oschack got “right” was the fact that USC’s enrollment is more diverse than Utah’s (75 percent white enrollment, according to a “Fast Facts” PDF) and Colorado’s (77 percent white, per CollegeProwler).

Fox quickly pulled the video from its site (although you can still watch Oschack’s compelling – and by “compelling” I mean “creepy wanna-be Daily Show” – report on why Oregon’s cheerleaders are “so f-cking hot”) and issued an apology promising to “review the editorial process” and the usual boilerplate expressions of contrition. No response from Oschack himself, but I’m betting he won’t get the chance to deliver it on any Fox Sports shows anytime soon.

UPDATE 9/7/11: The Associated Press is reporting that Fox Sports has cancelled The College Experiment, the program that aired Oschack’s segment, “effective immediately.”

DC Comics’ Deadman brought to television by the folks behind Supernatural? Makes sense, if the story holds up.

Much like SPN’s Winchester brothers, Deadman (aka ghostly acrobat Boston Brand) would give showrunner Eric Kripke another outlet for his horror/comedy stylings. Since Boston has to possess people to do anything in the physical realm, one can only hope a Deadman TV show, if it actually gets past the pilot stage, would actually feature more people who aren’t white.

But we wouldn’t bet on it.

Still, the biggest problem with Deadman is, before recent miniseries like Blackest Night and Brightest Day revived interest in him, DC played Boston as more of a “professional” guest-star, to be called upon for stories involving demons, posession and whatnot, crack wise with the core characters, then shuffle off back to the afterlife. And with DC’s “New 52″ relaunch starting tomorrow, it’s a good time to highlight characters who have come into greater prominence than Deadman over the course of the past decade, only to get passed up for bigger media opportunities.

1. Blue Beetle

Jaime Reyes is ready for prime-time right now. He’s been promoted on media platforms besides his own critically-acclaimed comic, and the test footage above, which made the viral rounds last year, showed us his extraterrestrial battlesuit can be done for the small screen – in fact it already was, even if it was for Smallville.

Besides that, DC’s animation division has already provided a blueprint for how to handle Reyes’ story arc, after featuring him on Batman: The Brave and The Bold.

In fact, there’s not that much separating Jaime from the Clark Kent we saw in Smallville: Midwestern setting? Check. Friday Night Lights proved that people will follow a series set in Texas – Jaime lives in El Paso – if the story’s up to snuff. Young hero dealing with his legacy? Check. In fact, you could do what BATB did and bring in Wil Wheaton as Jaime’s predecessor, Ted Kord, for flashback sequences or a time-travel arc. And Jaime’s trajectory is still malleable enough to open the door to the kinds of Guest Superhero appearances Smallville gorged itself on in its’ final season.

2. Static Shock
Before there was Jaime, there was Virgil Hawkins, who has gone from being the most-popular character from the dearly-departed Milestone Universe to his own eponymous solo series in the DC relaunch. And in between, he was exposed to a whole other fanbase in a critically-acclaimed animated series, where he was written to stand alongside – and stand up to – some of DC Animated’s bigger guns:

Virgil’s best friend Richie – aka Gear, the kid in the glasses in the clip above – could add another dimension to a Static show. Static’s creator, the late Dwayne McDuffie, said he considered Richie to be gay, even if he couldn’t acknowledge it on a kids’ show. But that relationship could be explored on a show skewing toward the crowd that’s grown up in the years since the cartoon aired.

3. The Question
The unlikely success and subsequent renewal of Nikita should make DC take notice: there is still a market for female-driven action stories outside of basic cable. A series following Renee Montoya’s adventures could provide The CW with a good complement to Maggie Q’s show.

Not only can Renee explore the seamier side of Gotham police procedural-style (or anywhere, really,if you must get her away from the Bat-brand), working with or against former police colleagues, but DC elements like Intergang and the Religion of Crime open the door for creators to do stories that won’t encroach on Nikita’s spy-vs-spy setting.

4. Mister Terrific

Leverage showrunner John Rogers has coined the phrase Competence Porn to describe his show. You could also apply the label to programs like Burn Notice and White Collar, where it’s generally accepted that the leads are 1) good at what they do; 2) not prone to doing something dumb for the sake of “conflict.” And a character like Michael Holt – in DC canon, the third-smartest man in the world – fits that description to a tee, according to Eric Wallace, who will be writing Holt’s solo adventures in the upcoming series Mister Terrific.

“He’s a brilliant scientist with a whole bunch of degrees,” Wallace told Buddy TV. “He spreads his science knowledge all over the world, and at the same time his job is insuring our future. His job is keeping an eye on science gone mad, so that we still have a future. That’s what he does as a superhero, so you have a setup — it’s very clear — but then it’s off to the races.”

Wallace already has experience writing brainy do-gooders from his work on Eureka, which gives him a leg up on charting Holt’s course. Hopefully, if the new series takes off in the midst of the hype, it could give Mister T some consideration for greener media pastures.

5. Vixen

The ranking “veteran” of this group, Mari McCabe was introduced in the comics way back in 1981, and has gone on to be written into various incarnations of the Justice League of America. But as with Static and Blue Beetle, it was her inclusion in DC’s animated universe that enabled creators to give her a bigger showcase.

As she was written on Justice League Unlimited, Vixen was able to reconcile her glamorous side with her superheroics, and entered a relationship with Green Lantern without being scripted to be The Other Woman. Beyond that, though, the hook should be a gimme: she’s a model who saves the world. As lead-ins go, America’s Next Top Model could do far, far worse.

And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Characters like Ryan Choi, Cassandra Cain, Swift and The Engineer, Orpheus and Onyx, to name just a few, are, at this point, sitting around unused. If DC’s Chief Creative Officer, Geoff Johns, is serious about changing the game for his company, he needs to accept that characters from the Silver Age are not the only valuable properties he can steer outside of comics into other media. In fact, he would do well to remember that it wasn’t Spider-Man or the X-Men or even Iron Man that made Marvel Comics properties palatable for the movies – it was Blade. Is Johns willing to believe in nostalgia that might not necessarily be his own? Let’s hope so.

But we’re not betting on it.

Welcome back to the Asian panel on Interracial Dating. Our panelists are:

N’Jaila Rhee, the mastermind behind BlaysianBytch.com (link NSFW); Elton, long time commenter and friend of the blog; refresh_daemon, blogger and occasional contributor; Christina Xu, friend of the blog and occasional contributor; Eric Zhang, occasional contributor; and Holly, contributor at Feministe.

refresh_daemon: Agreed. Plus, as far as population goes, Asian Americans are smaller and consequently less visible overall. Furthermore, I think Asian Americans even now tend to be less vocal and prominent in mainstream media, so it really has to do with our general lack of presence, combined with the perpetual foreigner concept that gets attached to us.

N’jaila: I also know a lot of Asian Americans that see themselves as “White Minorities” who don’t need to be counted outside of the White mainstream. I think these people are insane.

Elton: I agree. But when institutions treat Asians as practically white, and downplay the fact that Asians experience racism, what do you expect? Especially in higher education, there is an invisible asterisk beside “minority” or “diversity” that says *actually we mean non-Asian minorities, and our definition of diversity is “fewer Asians.”

Eric: I specifically remember the moment on Tyra when a gay interracial Asian-white couple made an appearance.

About halfway through the clip, a gay Asian man in the audience and confronts the Asian man on stage. His speech mirrors many discussions I have heard about “self-hating” Asian women, and in particular the debate around eye widening. Growing up, I had always been aware of the epicanthic fold and “double eyelids,” but it had never registered to me as a beauty standard until high school when I met Asian girls who wore eyelid tape.

Seeing this discussion on a national television show was pretty groundbreaking to me, even if I first watched it with a bit of contempt considering the kinds of melodrama that gets milked – not just on Tyra – but on daytime talk shows in general. And I think bringing these kinds of questions – about self-hate and about racism in the gay community – to a national audience is a pretty bold move for groups of people who already receive very little recognition in the mainstream (gay interracial couples, gay Asians, etc.). On the other hand, and I say this knowing that talk shows like this aren’t really the best resource for having meaningful, thought-provoking discussions, the portrayal of the relationship and of the two gay Asian men was a little hokey and did very little to talk about interracial gay relationships other than “people are racist towards us and think I hate myself.”

I think people don’t know how to speak about these issues, especially in the Asian American community, because we are taught about racism against blacks and rarely about racism against Asians. I don’t believe that many people understand that racism against Asians happens in the first place, or that interracial relationships with Asians can be strife with racist attitudes. People ask me why I consider it racist for a white man to have a “thing for Asians,” or straight up tell me it isn’t racist in the least, and I often have trouble talking about it with them.

Holly: I’m nodding my head reading everything that everyone else wrote. Racism against asians gets buried easily. You can get away with a racist restaurant name, chinese laundry jokes, stereotyped accents. I’m not saying that because I think racism against other groups should be ignored! And in fact, it’s probably true of many groups besides asians too — but I think it does contribute to asians being “invisible minorities” and a lot of asians really like it that way. They want to be the successfully assimilated immigrants, even if the “difference” stigma won’t ever really fade away in the minds of way too many people who see us always as foreigners first and foremost. There’s also an aspect here that has to do with sexuality and gender — I think the hideous treatment of black women by our culture and its beauty standards is more of a “guilty secret” that a lot of well-meaning people would immediately admit exists. Liberals feel bad about this; it’s how we got “I Love My Hair” on Sesame Street. Asian women have a different problem that doesn’t create as much liberal guilt — exotification and another flavor of ridiculous idealization, fetishization, etc. It’s the fallout of a “positive stereotype”; although most people would agree that gross anime-chasers are disgusting, they see it as part and parcel of a typical problem that any “beautiful woman” would face. And Asian men are a total afterthought, because the liberal political culture isn’t even aware that racist stereotypes are constantly affecting Asian men’s gender too. Complaints mostly surface on forums where Asian guys are complaining about how nobody will date them — and it’s way too easy, in the mainstream discourse, to simply dismiss that as a bunch of dudes whining instead of looking at it as a symptom of racism + sexism.

N’jaila: When I was younger I very much felt like the “normal” group of men for a woman to like was White. I felt abnormal because I had a strong preference for Black , Brown and Yellow men. I think for many people that’s always going to be true, White partners are going to be the most accepted because in this country they are considered “normal”.

I remember in high school one of my close friends was a Latina who basically told me I was “too smart” to like Black guys. It was so shocking and deeply offensive that our friendship pretty much ended right there.

refresh_daemon: Agreed with N’jaila re: white people as the default partner. But this also brings up a bit of the point that Elton touches upon below. Until recently, the general visibility of Asian men in pop culture has been very limited and rarely in the context of relationships. Most Asian men I’ve seen in pop culture have largely been paired with Asian women as well (John Cho being the only immediate positive counterexample that comes to mind in “Flash Forward” and “Harold and Kumar”–I would like to forget about the Donger and all the Yellow Peril films of the early 20th century.) Consequently, I do think that it reinforces, to some subtle extent, the idea of Asian men, in particular, staying within Asian populations when it comes relationships.

Elton: It’s frustrating that non-white women are rarely portrayed as equally attractive as white women.

It’s frustrating when I am attracted to a white woman and have to wonder if Eurocentrism is warping my perception.

It’s frustrating to worry about whether someone I like will return my affections because I am Asian.

Being an Asian male is like perpetually seeing a “look but don’t touch” sign.

Holly: It’s just generally disgusting, although I feel like I’ve watched this grow during my lifetime. When I was a kid, there were almost no representations of families that looked like mine — one white parent, one Asian parent. When I saw this start to appear, I felt relieved and less weird — but then it became the MOST well-represented type of interracial relationship, because it’s so innocuous for a white man to have a woman “invisible, feminized minority” on his arm. These representations really hastened the rise of “I want an Asian girlfriend too” throughout my teen years, and it wasn’t really an improvement. I think it’s made it much easier for Asians to date white people, that’s for sure — and that’s an improvement my mother would have been grateful for in her early years (before she decided she hates my dad and pretty much all other white guys.) One of the most disgusting flip-sides, however, is that “dating an asian woman” is the #1 low-committment way for a white guy to show that he is Not A Racist according to some really boring, minimal, conservative definition of racism. Look, he loves people that are NOT WHITE! He eats tofu! Isn’t he amazing? And yes, I have to admit that I’m also thinking of my own father here. It’s not WHY he married my mother in the mid-70s, but it was definitely a benefit, and it still is for such guys.

Eric: If anyone has read “Paper Tigers” by Wesley Yang, from New York Magazine, he follows the “Asian pick-up artist” who holds white women to the ideal. In Romeo Must Die, Jet Li and Aaliyah had a kiss scene that was cut because audiences did not respond well to an Asian man and a black woman being in a relationship. While it is certainly the case that media representations of interracial relationships in general, not just Asian ones, typically feature a white character, I am interested in the disparity between these representations and the visibility of mixed race Asian celebrities, like Naomi Campbell, Tyson Beckford, Cassie, Bruno Mars, Nicole Scherzinger, Chanel Iman, and Tiger Woods. It’s strange that there are so many highly successful mixed race black-Asian, Latino-Asian, etc., celebrities out there, and yet we rarely see couples who could be their parents.

I will say one of my favorite black-Asian interracial couples from television is Manila Luzon (who I wrote about previously) and Sahara Davenport from Rupaul’s Drag Race, though I recognize that they are really an exception to the rule.

N’jaila: I think you rarely see discussions of Blasians because to many people they aren’t considered mixed. Not to mention there’s sometimes very negative reactions to non-Asian looking Blasians like Naomi Campbell and Tyson Beckford. Growing up I felt very alienated from Asians, it felt almost silly to embrace a group I was part of that I felt constantly rejected me.

Also I think most people assume that if someone is Blasian that their mother is Asian and their father is a Black guy in the military. Growing up I NEVER saw a family on TV that looked like mine.

I actually got to sit in with J.T Tran’s workshop. I actually think is a naturally sweet natured guy, but his workshop made me depressed for a good month or two. #

refresh_daemon: The cynic in me wants to say that the reason why interracial couples who would resemble the parents of those multi-racial celebrities don’t really get featured in pop culture is quite simply because a white person isn’t part of the equation and the mainstream doesn’t care if there’s not a white person involved. Also, I think the mainstream tends to ignore the Asian heritage of most (all?) of those celebrities, regardless of how they choose to self-identify.

Is there anything else you want to add that was not covered above?

Elton: The difference between the way Asian men and Asian women are assimilated into Western society manifests itself as the interracial dating disparity. The Asian man is depicted as the foreign other, while the Asian woman is more welcomed and accepted by the West. Patriarchy places a greater onus on men to carry on the family line, so the dating choices of the Asian man are restricted by Asian culture (which wants him to refrain from dating altogether until he has completed his education, then enter an arranged marriage) and by Western culture (which wants him to avoid marrying Western women). Is this why it seems to be more permissible for Asian women to date outside their race or even to date at all?

N’jaila: I don’t know if I agree that Asian women are assimilated into Western culture. I think White male privilege allows White men more opportunities to date any race he pleases. You still don’t see Asian women being seen as examples of standard beauty, something exotic maybe but Asian women are over represented as only sexual objects for White men. #

refresh_daemon: I do think that, at least earlier on in mainstream media, Asian women were more openly accepted than Asian men in the sense that they were more visible in leading and ensemble roles on television and, to a lesser extent, in film. I think as of late we are closer to reaching parity between the two genders, at least in terms of presence (particularly in commercials), but there does seem to be a lingering disparity in terms of representations of interracial relationships with Asian women and men, with Asian women more frequently interracially partnered (usually with white men), but Asian men more frequently depicted with Asian women than with other groups.

Holly: I tend to agree that commercials are leading the way, but I still don’t see anywhere near as much representation of Asian men in fiction film & television. Reality TV is a little closer to parity, for obvious reasons. And I think this goes back to the whole gender + race question, where Asians are the “feminized minority,” and so Asian women (of a certain class status and adherence to western beauty ideals, obviously) are treated as “even more feminine than white women,” a package that comes with fetishization, de-humanization, and more representation.

Elton: Is it ok if I pose a question? As we know, who we are “allowed to date” (by parents, culture, society, and just plain who returns or rejects our affections) differs from who we’re actually attracted to. Much ado is made about the Asian man’s unrequited love for white women. Do you find that there is a difference between the kind of person you prefer (whether for friendship, romance, or sex) and the kind of person you are “allowed to date”?

Holly: That’s a very interesting question, although I probably have a weird answer as a multi-racial Asian with one white parent. I think my early upbringing and exposure to racism made me think of my Asian parent as the “weird, mean one that nobody liked, who ate smelly food and couldn’t speak English as well.” But I also identified much more strongly with her in terms of how I felt relative to my peers: that I was the weird outsider. On top of that, I was also unequivocally taught by my family that inter-racial relationships and kids were a good thing, no matter what anyone else said; they wanted to make us resistant to anti-miscegenation messaging even more than they thought about more pervasive racist ideas about non-whites. So I remember thinking when I was younger that I’d be following in my family tradition if I was in a relationship with a white person, because I wasn’t white, and that my kids wouldn’t be either. (This might be have been influenced by the fact that the first person I dated in high school was ¼ Japanese.) But I’m sure I also unconsciously thought of that as “dating up.” When I got older, I dated more and more people from other backgrounds — indigenous, Latina, South Asian, and a lot of them mixed in one way or another. I guess I still thought of that as “interracial dating” since almost any pairing would be interracial dating for me, and therefore kind of positive. I’ve only dated one person who identified as 100% East Asian, though, and I often wonder why — is it because of negative messages I received about my mother when I was little? Or because I spent a lot of my youth not feeling “Asian enough” either? Probably both and more.

N’jaila: I’m in a weird position where I feel like my natural feelings are going against nature. I feel like if I say “I won’t date Asian men anymore” I’d be doing so because so many people have told me that I shouldn’t be dating them. I don’t want to live my life according to other people, but at the same time most people do. So I feel like my entire romantic life I’ve been trying to box with God, I’m doomed to fail.

Welcome back to the Asian panel on Interracial Dating. Our panelists are:

N’Jaila Rhee, the mastermind behind BlaysianBytch.com (link NSFW); Elton, long time commenter and friend of the blog; refresh_daemon, blogger and occasional contributor; Christina Xu, friend of the blog and occasional contributor; Eric Zhang, occasional contributor; and Holly, contributor at Feministe.

N’jaila: I only know the perspective of the “forbidden” partner. My skin is brown and my hair is curly, my breasts are large and my booty is big. For many of my partners I was something sexually alluring and “dangerous” that was my main selling point. I was forbidden fruit.  I think a good number of my sexual partners took me as a conquest to prove their virility.  Asianness and Blackness is almost synonymous with sexual deviancy for many people.

Growing up I think that white partners felt the most off limits because they were so outside the realm of what was familiar to me.  If they were so alien to me I couldn’t imagine them looking at me and not seeing a laundry list of stereotypes either a dragon lady, mammy , Jezebel or otherwise.  I guess you can say I did not trust white men to make the distinction between genuine attraction and fetish exploration.

Eric: This may be a little bit contradictory to what I said above, but I remember one specific moment, the only moment I had where my mother specifically addressed interracial relationships. She told me and my brother that we were not allowed to marry a black or Japanese woman. My brother took it as a challenge, because he is very much involved in Japanese subculture, but I really just refused to say anything about it. To some extent, my mother’s racist beliefs about black people may have affected me subconsciously, because I remember one time mentioning to my friends that I had a crush on a black classmate, and that he was “the first black guy I’ve ever liked,” which in retrospect was not entirely true. As soon as I said it, though, I realized that I had been brought up to believe that I should not be attracted to black people, whether because of my mother or media representations.

The Japanese part is a result of long-standing resentment in many Chinese of my parents’ and grandparents’ generations towards the Japanese during WWII. I think on an academic level this type of discrimination fascinates me even more, because I have a friend who is half-Chinese and half-Japanese, and she would talk about how her grandparents were scandalized when her parents got married. These kinds of interethnic hostilities are often unspoken about, I think, but many of us who grew up with Chinese, Japanese, or Korean parents have these beliefs instilled in us, so my Chinese friends understand more personally why I was surprised about this girl being half-Japanese than, I think, many of my white friends do.

I often do explicitly wonder what my parents think about interracial relationships, and in particular about my interracial relationships. However, I try to keep them as separate as possible from my dating life, because I think they are uncomfortable with the idea that I date men in the first place, although I believe they accept it on an intellectual level. The only time I’ve told them about my partner was when I came out to my mother, and she was more concerned with the fact that he was a boy than that he was white.

On the other hand, I think many people expect me to date outside of my race, probably because of this common perception that Asian men aren’t sexy, or that they’re not my “type” (which is odd because I don’t think I have a “type,” but I believe that people expect gay Asians to be twinky feminine boys, and rarely think of them as more “straight-acting,” and that, in turn, my preference would be for a more masculine, non-Asian boyfriend, which is untrue). I think my friends especially would be surprised if I were to have an Asian boyfriend, because so far I have only been with non-Asians (though not for lack of interest). I secretly suspect that my parents similarly expect my brother and me to end up with white partners, but hope we will marry Chinese.

Holly: I’ve definitely had the experience of being the “weird, unexpected” partner, because sometimes people (and I guess I tend to think specifically of partners’ families) don’t know how to categorize me racially, and sometimes haven’t been able to make sense of my gender either. Sometimes I think the weird mixture of things has actually helped throw the radar way off: I had one partner whose mother was really upset that her daughter was gay and dating me (and I was her third girlfriend) but was also super-interested to talk to me about my family and Japanese background, plus the fact that she saw me as a “successful professional” relative to the lower-middle-class white surroundings of her family — I don’t know, maybe it was an exotic package that was both good and bad? I’ve had experiences of being seen as too masculine for some partners and too feminine for other partners — and those kinds of things always intersect with race in both predictable and unpredictable ways. Asians are stereotyped and unconsciously perceived as “more feminine” and that sets people’s expecations, which in turn means that they can disapprove of you because you meet the expectations, or be confused and dismayed that you don’t.

Elton:  I have not dated.  A perspective missing from the interracial dating conversation is that of Asian men raised not to date and to focus on education.  Not having a girlfriend deeply troubled me as a teenager, but now I look at the modern Western pressures and expectations regarding romance with much more skepticism.  Am I less of a man because I’m Asian American?  Hell no.  Am I happy being single right now?  Hell yes.

Latoya: I’m going to break the mod wall for one hot second, since you brought up something often not represented in dating conversations, which is not participating. To speak personally for a sec, one of my close friends is Korean American – she’s been on exactly one date, and its one I set up for her. (She expressed interest in dating a few years ago – we are all in our late 20s now.)  She has a lot of trouble picking up dating signals – in our conversations, she told me that a LOT of her friends have never been on a date and never had a boyfriend and were now wondering about marriage as we approach 30.  I have no idea how to cover that though, its so far from my experience…

Elton:  It’s a big unspoken issue–not everyone conforms to the modern Western romantic “plan” for dating and marriage, which is a very, very recent invention.  So how can we deal with intercultural dating when different cultures have different concepts of dating itself?  We can’t just assume that assimilation (Asian men need to ask more women on dates, problem solved) is the only way.

Latoya: True. But in that case, that raises more questions. (And perhaps this needs to be its own conversation, in another post.) So exactly how large of a factor are cultural norms, even in framing this conversation? And how widespread is this exactly? Last time I checked, there was something like a 15% outmarriage rate among Asian Americans; do we need to do an “opt-out” rate as well?

Elton:  I would be very interested to see a post on this topic.  I think many young people are skeptical of traditional concepts of dating and marriage–not because we want to be promiscuous, but because we want to be independent and possibly childfree, we’ve seen how much misery the institution of marriage has caused our parents and others, and the conservative “defense of marriage” agenda has made us wary (and weary) of marriage, period.

Besides, who can afford to date or get married anymore?

refresh_daemon: Like Elton, I’m a non-dater and in my youth, it was because my parents strongly discouraged (but didn’t outright prohibit) me from dating so that I can focus on my studies and getting into a good college. And likewise in college for getting a good job. I was always a bit of a straight arrow, so I complied with their desires.

However, why I am not actively seeking a relationship at the moment is simply because I don’t have the time to invest in one: I have more projects than I can handle at the moment on top of my day job and I’m very aware that were I to engage in a relationship with someone, I would very much be a boyfriend only on paper, which is something I would rather not be.

Were I to actually start dating, despite my parents preferences, I am not opposed to interracial and cross cultural dating, although I would personally also prefer to be in a relationship with someone who can relate well to my parents and someone who would be willing to adopt and learn some elements of Korean culture if they don’t already have it, as well as learn or know the language. Note, it’s just a preference, but I foresee the possibility of working in Seoul as well as the US and so an ability to navigate both worlds is important, as it’s also important to me that a potential spouse would be well integrated into my family.  And, I would likewise be willing, if she is of another culture, to learn and practice critical elements of her culture as well as learn the language of her parents in order to foster deeper communication with them and become a better integrated part her family as well.  Of course, this is an ideal scenario and I understand that in real life, you can’t get everything you want.  And I know that pragmatically limits me primarily to Koreans in terms of an ideal, but I’m probably more than willing to overlook these considerations if I meet a woman of another ethnicity or culture of great character that I share mutual attraction and compatibility with.

N’jaila: My parents forbade me to date when I was younger, it wasn’t until I was 17 that I was allowed to have a boyfriend. Of course my parents didn’t know that I was dating since I was 14 years old. I think It just taught me be secretive and feel a bit shameful about having relationships. Almost ten years later and I still can’t imagine taking a man to meet my parents.  I can talk to my mother about going on dates, but never my father. Its just not spoken of.

refresh_daemon: I am kind of curious as to those who are unwillingly single versus those who choose to be single.  It does explode my brain to think that someone (particularly women, given mainstream dating paradigms) could stay single into their 30’s without willfully choosing to do.  It can’t be for a lack of interested partners, right?  But, I do think that this is a bit off topic and more suited to a separate discussion about singleness.

N’jaila: I actually think that the similarities with Asian men and Black women have been emphasized by grossly oversimplifying issues. I think most people think we are in the same boat because of the disparity that supposedly caused by Asian women and Black men choosing White partners. I think that how each group sees the “problem” is very different.

I think for a lot of Asian men , this is more of an annoyance than a life altering issue. Statistically speaking most Asian American men get married. Do they marry less whites than their female counterparts, no. I think there’s a very vocal minority of Asian men that make attaining a white woman a sign of manhood and belonging. Asian men on the Internet and the Asian men that are in my friends and family seem to see this issue very differently. Of course I grew up in Bergen County NJ where seeing mixed marriages and couples is nothing shocking or of note. So I might have a skewed view of this.

I think many Asian men are angry about being excluded from the white dating pool because they’ve been fed the line that they are the “white minorities” and if anyone was the most qualified to marry into whiteness it would be them. They’re finding that not to be the case. So I think for Asian men its more of a ,”Hey where’d my privilege go?” than with Black women.

I think the much hyped “Black Male” shortage for Black women has a lot more to do with Black women’s reluctance to marry non-Black men. A man of color with a White woman is seen as progress, a Woman of color with a White man is seen as regression. I think many Black women also see marriage and the need for a “traditional on paper” home as something a bit passe. Black women also seem to get married a lot later in life so when people talk about that figure that 42% of Black women are not married they fail to ask what age demographic these numbers came from , usually they are talking about women 18-25 , when you raise the age to 35 the amount of unmarried Black women drops dramatically.

refresh_daemon: The position exists simply because the rates of out-marriage (or it just out-relationships?) mirror each other between Black women and Asian men (in comparison to Black men and Asian women). And I do think there is some correlation in terms of how the mainstream views Black femininity and Asian masculinity in particular, but I think that some Asian men and Black women unfairly take shots at their intraracial counterparts for some kind of perceived betrayal, rather than direct their attention to the overwhelming and subtle messages given by mainstream culture about what is desirable in a partner and who that partner should be.

In terms of cross-cultural discussion, I do think that, at least on the internet, this kind of discussion does tend to happen, but only in hotspots where people of different racial and ethnic backgrounds collide, like on Racialicious. Otherwise, the bigger question that’s begged is: why aren’t we all in more cross-cultural discussion altogether?

Holly: I have a tendency to see this as intrinsically linked to gender stereotypes as well. With white people as the hegemonic “norm” against which everyone else is measured in a white-supremacist society, all the “others” are either seen as more submissive, feminine, smaller, weaker, but maybe smarter (asians, generally) or as more dangerous, threatening, bigger, more masculine (black people, generally). (Of course with the way stereotypes work, contradictions operate simultaneously and manage to both deny and reinforce these things — as with the “angry asian misogynist business-samurai” stereotype and the “emasculated submissive ass-kissing black man” stereotype.) But generally, I think that the hegemonic view is that asian = “more feminine” and black = “more masculine.” Maybe it’s too simplistic, but this also handily explains why asian men and black women have lower rates of out-marriage. Black women are too loud, threatening, angry, big, belligerent, masculine. Asian men are too small, weak, feminine, hairless, whatever.

Eric: (I am going way off topic with this!!)

Within the gay community, which has historically and still presently does at times reproduce many of the same kinds of roles as in heterosexual relationships (perhaps the biggest point of contention being topping/bottoming, which some activists have argued reproduces heterosexist views that one partner must be the “masculine” top and the other the “feminine” bottom), I believe Asian men are often seen as automatically the “woman” in the relationship. Nguyen Tan Hoang’s work “Forever Bottom!” documents the tendency in gay pornography, for example, to cast Asian men as the bottom. There have been exceptions, particularly in amateur gay porn, which seems more open to casting masculine Asian men as tops, but for the most part in mainstream gay porn, the Asian man almost always bottoms. Of course, we can get into a whole discussion about whether bottoming necessarily equates to feminine, and the gendered/sexualized questions about that, but let’s just say for the sake of argument that, at least in mainstream porn, the bottom represents the more feminine partner. Similarly, the fascination and exotification around the phenomenon of the ladyboy, or Thai transsexuals/feminine boys (depending), has created a market around Asian men as feminine.

Although Asian men historically have been marginalized and desexualized, I see that a lot of attitudes have been starting to change. Aside from gay porn, I also mentioned earlier that K-pop has become increasingly popular, to the extent of turning a particular type of Asian men into sex symbols. Obviously there’s still a far way to go, but with the success of actors like Daniel Henney, Daniel Dae Kim, or Harry Shum, Jr., I think people are beginning to see Asian men as sexy. In a way, we’ve always been sexy in the gay community the way that Asian women are marketed as desirable to white men, but the stereotypes persist. In the most basic way, I have noticed that talk about Asian male sex symbols often tend to make mention of penis size (like on Glee, did we really need Tina to say that about Mike Chang? There was also a minor controversy about an amateur gay porn site that described a mixed-race model as getting his exotic facial features from his Asian genes and his “big dick” from his Polish side).

I can’t speak that much to the experiences of straight black women or even gay black men, but while gay Asian men are often cast as effeminate, submissive bottoms (an obvious analogue to the geisha figure), black men in gay porn are often the complete opposite. They are large in all senses of the word, they top more often than not, and usually they do not conform to stereotypes of the fairy fag. More often than Asian men, black men (and white men) are cast as “gay-for-pay” actors to fuel stereotypical gay fantasies about “turning” straight men. What does this say about non-effeminate, straight Asian men?

refresh_daemon: Eric, I know I’m answering a rhetorical question, but I believe that would mean that non-effeminate straight Asian men simply don’t exist. I think you are Holly are on the same track in noting the feminization/masculinization of race in mainstream culture, with white people being “normal”, Black people being “masculine” and Asian people being “feminine”. (Where do all the other people fit on this spectrum?) But I have an issue with the masculine/feminine binary to begin with, especially as many modern cultures are exaggerating these aspects to cartoonish degrees and overemphasizing femininity and masculinity in identity and perhaps how the problem relates to Black women and Asian men having a dearth of relationships is connected to the hyper-masculinization/feminization issue when combined with those racial perceptions of gender.

Holly: Since white people get to be the unmarked, assumed-ordinary norm and actually experience subjectivity and individuality… who do you think has to play the roll of “cartoonishly overemphasized icons” in the cultural formulation of gender? Black people, Asian people, everyone else. It’s part of being the other.

This week I’m starting a new feature on this blog called “Web Series Spotlight.” I regularly get pitched series by creators and find it difficult to write about all of them, because I often write about trends and bigger ideas, sometimes good, indie series just don’t fit. No longer! The web series market has a larger, oft-discussed curation problem, something which networks and news sites are trying to fix. I figured I’d pitch in.

First up is Chrysalis, an urban web series by filmmaker Nia Malika Dixon. Dixon is a new independent filmmaker, who a few years ago decided to pursue her passion. She didn’t go to film school, instead she learned the old-fashioned way: on set (how refreshing!). Chrysalis is her third short, a five-episode crime drama intended to build investor interest in a feature-length film.

Chrysalis, whose title refers to the cocoon a caterpillar creates before it transforms, tells the story of Jamal, a young Muslim man living in Baltimore with an infant child and a less-than-desirable career choice: drug dealing. The series kicks off by introducing Jamal’s world and an act of violence which sends it into chaos.

The series is dark and moody, intimately shot and confident. It’s worth a look. The first episode, recently released for early fans, is below. But first, let’s hear from Dixon:

Dixon’s passions are thrillers and crime, along the lines of The Wire and Law & Order: SVU. What she adds to the genre is a focus on spiritual struggle: people who have made morally complicated choices at odds with their faith — in this case, Islam. She focuses on strong female characters, though Chrysalis stars a young man.

“I haven’t seen a film in my life where an African American woman stars in it and has to do with that struggle,” Dixon said, referring to a crisis of faith. “I wrote the story that way to show that not just men deal with that.”

Dixon was born and raised in Baltimore, and while the series is not autobiographical, she does understand the circumstances facing her characters. “It’s not my life. It’s the life of others that I’ve grown up with that I know.”

For now, Dixon is enjoying her outsider status as an indie filmmaker telling her own stories. “It’s very difficult to get funding as a director,” she acknowledges, but she adds, “I didn’t want to be a part of the corporate culture of making movies.”

Projects like Chrysalis are small, Dixon understands, but for her are part of a broader project for media change. “You can make change on certain levels, and the entire construct itself is so big. It won’t actually change. That sounds so bleak!”

“I don’t consider myself trying to do an overhaul of the entertainment industry, but I do see myself trying to inject myself as a virus.”