Finding Fernanda is a sobering story–even more so when you stop to think that it focuses on two women out of thousands at opposite ends of a corrupt system.

Journalist Erin Siegal’s book stretches across the continent: it examines the notorious child adoption business in Guatemala via the ordeals suffered by both Guatemalan native Mildred Alvarado, who loses two of her children not just to kidnappers but to her country’s legal and political processes, and Tennessee resident Betsy Emanuel, an American lured in by a Christian adoption agency when she begins the process of adopting one of the children, not knowing the dirty business behind her wish for another child.

Working with a local journalist over the course of three years, Siegal sheds light on the various players: the American agencies and their in-country networks of handlers and attorneys; the medical professionals and court officials who are either on the take or willfully negligent, like the Guatemala City pediatrician who sees his practice expand as he becomes a go-to resource for adoptionists:

On a child’s first visit to his office, Dr. Castillo would ask about his or her background and felt he had no choice but to take the answers provided to him by cuidadoras (caretakers) at face value. Every time one of the women hesitated, he felt chilled. More than half the children examined at his office didn’t have proper paperwork, such as a birth certificate. Sometimes the names would change. It wasn’t his responsibility to investigate, the pediatrician told himself; he was just there to make sure that the kids were being cared for.

Over time, cases like Mildred’s become a cause celebre in Guatemala, attracting more and more attention from the press and the underfunded authorities before a human rights organization represents her in court. For her part, Betsy also feels her own betrayal at the hands of the agency, pushing her to ask questions of her own, culminating in an encounter with Mildred.

In an e-mail interview with Racialicious, Siegal shared more details about the women at the heart of Fernanda, the industry that brought them together, and her own experience as an American journalist working in Guatemala. The transcript, which includes some spoilers, is under the cut.

Racialicious: Let’s start, literally, from the beginning: you went from wanting to do a human-interest piece on Guatemalan adoptions to finding out about the sordid industry behind it, to shifting your entire storytelling style to cover it. Could you tell us a little bit about your experience at Columbia University, and how it prepared you to put this book together?

Erin Siegal: Spending a year in an intensive program like Columbia’s Stabile Center for Investigative Journalism was a starting point, a shortcut of sorts towards assembling an investigative skill-set. Before this book, I’d written some freelance pieces, but mainly worked as a photographer. I wanted to feel confident taking on complicated investigative stories. A friend who’d finished the Stabile program ahead of me offered very sage advice: J-school is worth it only if you get into Stabile, and if Columbia underwrites your study. It was a huge privilege and a joy to be able to spend a year under the tutelage of Sheila Coronel, the director of the Stabile program. She’s an incredible investigative journalist, and a founder of the Philippine Center for Investigative Journalism.

As far as first-time book writing, “Finding Fernanda” had an intrinsic narrative structure—the book flows in chronological order, from beginning to end, as both women’s experiences unfold. Much of the time, it felt like my chief role as author was not to get in the way of the story.

I would have loved to write a book filled with sparkly, snappy writing, but it didn’t feel appropriate. Instead, I tried to reflect some of the awesome, understated grace and dignity of some of my sources; some of the book’s characters.

R: How long did it take for Mildred Alvarado to trust you with her story? What was going through your mind when you reached her on that initial reporting trip?

ES: Frankly, I was a bit terrified the first time I met Mildred. Her safety and the safety of her family was a primary concern. I also didn’t want to re-traumatize her or pry too much. I wanted her to understand that she didn’t have to speak to me, even though Norma Cruz had asked her to—Mildred feels deeply obligated to Norma, the director of Fundación Sobrevivientes, and I wanted her to understand that she could say no; that it was fine for her to say no.

When we first spoke, I didn’t know how much of Betsy Emanuel’s story checked out. I was still a student, trying to get a handle on what exactly had happened. Mildred and I had a slow conversation, without many direct questions. That first interview was brief in comparison to later ones, when highly specific, difficult details had to be drawn out. Much of the time, my interviews with Mildred were long and meandering; her story came out in chunks and pieces.

R: Throughout the process, you worked in tandem with a local journalist, J (Note: name withheld by request.) How long did it take you to feel comfortable living and working in Guatemalan spaces with J, the journalist who helped you?

ES: Dumb luck and mutual friends led me to find J. When we met, there was an instant connection. What was supposed to be a quick morning coffee turned into a day of hanging out, driving around and trading life stories. It’s rare to find a best friend so quickly, but that’s what J. became, faster than anyone I’d ever met. I still count my lucky stars that I not only had someone like him to turn to for help with context and insight for the book’s investigation, but that I have him as a friend. By the time of my last month-long reporting trip in Guatemala, I was sleeping on his couch. It was invaluable to be able to talk the story through with him, to see what he thought about certain hypotheses. It was also invaluable to have someone to crack stupid jokes with, as the investigation unearthed some incredibly sad situations. He also accompanied me to some rough neighborhoods to knock on doors. J. never admitted how he was scared was with me in certain situations until after the book was written.

R: We’ve talked about transnational adoption on Racialicious in the past but focused more on South Korea and Haiti. I know you mention Congo and Ethiopia in the book; have you gotten a chance to compare the “cultures” behind the adoption industries in various countries? Is this a case of one racket fits all?

ES: There are certainly parallels that can be drawn between the developing countries that have served as “sending” countries for adoption: endemic poverty; a lack of social structures or programs supporting women and families; deep-rooted corruption. Many, including Vietnam, Cambodia, and Guatemala, are postwar societies that have struggled with socioeconomic and governmental stability.

I’d say the “racket” is quite simply the lack of regulation—not abroad, but here in the United States. These gaps in oversight mean that child buying, selling, and trafficking for the purpose adoption can still happen today, with little consequence. No adequate legal framework exists in the U.S. for prosecuting adoption crimes, aside from trying to prosecute adoption agencies or facilitators based on money laundering or tax evasion charges. The definition of human trafficking relates exclusively to either forced sex or labor. There are good arguments both for and against expanding that definition.

During my research, I filed numerous public records requests for official U.S. government communication around the issue of adoption fraud. It took three years, but the State Department finally sent me hundreds of pages of previously-unreleased cables. I compiled them into a collection, The U.S. Embassy Cables: Adoption Fraud in Guatemala, 1987-2010, which exposes the U.S. government’s struggle, for over 20 years, tried to navigate the demands of providing fast “customer service” to adopting American families while avoiding complicity in cases of presumed child trafficking. The book of cables is available from www.findingfernanda.com or Amazon as one 718=page paperback or a 3-volume ebook.

R: I saw Adoption Today’s positive review of the book on the FF website. How has the adoption industry at large reacted to the stories you brought to light?

ES: Finding Fernanda has gotten a very positive reception from the adoption community; and I’m very surprised and happy about that, as I tried to make this book widely accessible. My colleague E.J. Graff from the Schuster Institute for Investigative Journalism warned me beforehand about the probability of receiving hate mail from adoptive parents after writing what some may call a “negative” adoption book. It pleases me to no end that adoption advocates are able to understand this book; to read it and take away information. If there’s a takeaway to Finding Fernanda, it’s that ignorance can and does perpetuate abuses.

Buying and selling children isn’t just an issue to the adoption community—it’s a basic human rights issue. We as Americans need to hold our own government accountable. Through the late 1980′s and 1990′s, the U.S. Embassy in Guatemala City faced serious problems related to adoption. As Guatemala’s adoption industry began to grow, so did fraud. Women mysteriously turned up dead. Unknown people relinquished children they weren’t related to. Adoption lawyers, whose profit margins depended on volume, acquired “orphans” in any number of creative ways.

R: Regarding your initial conversation with Betsy Emanuel, you wrote that you didn’t understand “how adoption hooked some families.” How close was the answer you got to Melissa Fay Greene’s statement that “we simply wanted more kids”?

ES: It was pretty close! Betsy felt called to adopt. Many other adoptive parents I spoke with related a similar sentiment.

R: Staying with Greene’s statement, it sounds like she came around to thinking about her own privileges and how those played into the adoption game. Did the Emanuels–who undoubtedly had their hearts in the right place–make any similar realizations during their experience?

ES: Betsy’s experience with Fernanda, and then Mildred, was an eye-opener for her in many, many ways. She was forced to confront the ugly side of adoption: entitlement, imperialism, greed, selfishness. She went head to head with people she had considered to be close friends and community when she chose to speak out. She lost friends in doing so.

Both she and Mildred are regular women, who made mistakes, acted naively at times, and then had to face the consequences of their actions. Their story is painful but important. Through the experience of Fernanda and her baby sister’s kidnappings, both women lost a great deal of innocence. Yet they both, Mildred especially, found an incredible amount of inner strength and bravery.

Today, Betsy Emanuel is much more savvy and worldly than she was before. She’s still so very warm, loving, and spunky as hell, but she’s definitely also more cynical; she’s lost her ability to blindly trust. The same is true, perhaps more so, for Mildred. She lives in constant fear that someone will take her children away from her again.

R: And speaking of privilege, companies like CCI seem to play on that, as much as a parent’s heartstrings, what with their focus on adopting children as part of “God’s plan” and whatnot. Is that a fair assessment?

ES: I’d say so. Many of the Christian adoptive parents I spoke to selected adoption agencies based on faith and the desire to do business with those who shared their values.

R: Finally, could you give us an update on the Alvarados? When was the last time you heard from Mildred? Have you gotten to talk much to Fernanda and Ana Cristina?

ES: I heard from Mildred this fall. She had a bad dream, about J. and I getting kidnapped and killed in her neighborhood, and she called to make sure we were OK. Communication isn’t easy: she had to have her sister take her to an internet café, pay to use a computer, and then send us an email asking to call her, since she didn’t want to write the dream out. I’ll be returning to Guatemala later this spring and will be see her then.

Today, Mildred and her family are doing well. Both kids continue to heal. Fernanda is still a beautiful little girl, she’s still crazy for Pollo Campero fried chicken and she attends school. Ana Cristina doesn’t really talk much, she’s a very quiet child. Both girls are close to their other siblings, too.

The last time I saw Ana Cristina, we were standing in Mildred’s patio, and one of the family’s two chickens strutted past. Ana Cristina reached out, quickly, and grabbed it—this tiny kid, who at age four still teeters when she walks and struggles daily with the aftereffects of severe trauma– she caught a chicken, effortlessly. Then she looked over at Fernanda, holding the bird, and grinned.

By Guest Contributor Blanca E. Vega, cross-posted from Race-Work Race-Love

“If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom, and deprecate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground, they want rain without thunder and lightning.” — Frederick Douglass

Writer’s block. This is how I woke up this morning. Confronted with the realities of beginning a dissertation and working full time as a college administrator, I came up with two words:

Writer’s Block.

I write about race and education. I research racial incidents on college campuses. Every day, in my inbox, I see some article about another racist incident, form of harassment, example of violence – I go to sleep with this, I wake up to this, I eat with this racial narrative.

I wonder about those folks who are color-blind. How do they wake up every morning?

So this morning I woke up with writer’s block. And I read on my twitter-feed that The Help received five Golden Globe nominations – a story about a young white woman who desires to become a writer and focuses her writing on her Black female housekeepers/maids.

Historians, sociologists, educators, and other writers have all critiqued the book that has turned into a movie. They have pointed out facts versus the fiction that one sees in the movie. Two very important critiques can be read here and here.

Essentially, The Help is a story about a color-blind, white woman who wants to be a writer. Someone who tells the story of Black women who are domestic workers. This is not the story of Black female domestic workers.

One need not look too far to see how the author’s standpoint affects her work. The movie’s title is a great example of the author’s perspective. An author who talks about Black women from a color-blind perspective wouldn’t be able to see her own white privilege in constructing the title. A color-blind author who writes about Black women won’t be able to see how she continues to reproduce a racist narrative.

She didn’t call it the ‘The Black Help”. She called it The Help. And I will add that when I caught a quick glimpse of a preview of the film and saw that the first person in the preview was a white woman, I thought “Wow. A movie about white female domestic workers. How interesting.”

Wrong. The Help implied The Black Help. Similar to using terms such as “disadvantaged”, “urban”, “Inner city” and “at-risk”, the title The Help is a manipulation of language to replace racial specifics. We use coded terms to mark bodies, construct race to make some bodies deficient (Black/Brown bodies) and others the norm (White).

This author, like many, is getting paid and rewarded to continue a cycle of racist reproduction. We are all involved in this kind of racist reproduction in one way or another. The Help is a great example of this: nominate Viola Davis and Octavia Spencer for their roles as maids in addition to having the author of the book get accolades, a movie deal, and a pat on the back for seemingly being racially conscious.

These kinds of stories reinforce the need to maintain a racial narrative that is pleasing for and thereby dumbs-down the audience. To see Black women, really wonderful actresses, reprise the role of Mammy from Gone with The Wind, and receive awards for it, is disturbing, but all too familiar. We are all in collusion with racist reproduction of who Whites are and who People of Color are. But some of us are more willing to fight this than others. These stories also lead some of us to think that racial progress is occurring, leading to a bifurcated understanding of racial progress. In fact, Richard P. Eibach and Joyce Ehrlinger (2006) found that there is a difference in perceptions of racial progress held by Whites and People of Color. They write:

\White Americans tend to spontaneously think about racial progress as movement away from racial injustices of the past instead of thinking of progress as movement toward a system of full racial equality. In contrast, ethnic minorities seem to spontaneously think about racial progress as movement toward fully realized racial equality, and their assessments of progress accordingly take into account the distance we have yet to traverse to reach that goal… our results reinforce the point that a balanced assessment of progress needs to consider both the distance we have come and the distance that remains as we travel along the path to a truly egalitarian community (Eibach & Ehrlinger, 2006, p.76).

And, I want to believe that maybe Viola Davis and Octavia Spencer have more choices than Hattie McDaniel did over 70 years ago, but nominations for this film tells us “not really”.

We have been fooled. They SEEM to have choices, but maybe they really don’t. The work that they have to choose from, work that reproduces racist perspectives is work that people will rely on for learning history. This kind of story is privileged. Why? Because it is easy.

And here I wonder why I have writer’s block.

Of course I have writer’s block! Writing against a racist system, such as the one that would dupe people into thinking The Help is great, accurate work means that I have to constantly fight what is normal.

It is easy for people to write books and produce movies like The Help. We all know the story like the back of our hands. Any of us could have written it! It is probably why some women love it so much. It is too damn familiar! We all know this racist narrative too well. It is in our novelas, it is in our history books, it has been made into law in Alabama – they have made concessions to allow for undocumented immigrant women to work as The Hispanic Help while making it illegal to go to school, drive, have utilities in their homes if there are no papers to prove US citizenship.

But undocumented women have permission to work as The Hispanic Help in Alabama. Walking around without papers is not legal. Being an undocumented immigrant domestic worker is legal.

As a race-worker, I have to constantly write against that kind of system that makes it legal to be racist. I have to reconstruct, re-write, and develop a new racial narrative. To be constantly conscious of this takes time and effort. Where the hell are the awards for that?

How do you interrupt the reproduction of racism? Luckily, we have our heroes. People who rarely get as much attention as do writers of racially-easy work. Critical race narratives like Professor Derrick Bell’s Faces at the Bottom of the Well written precisely in the spirit of racial justice by interrupting our post racial notions of race relations in the US. Geneva Crenshaw, a prophetic lawyer, does the interrupting by questioning, guiding, and empowering a young lawyer into thinking outside of the subtle racism that has come into existence since the Civil Rights Era. Could she be made into a movie heroine? Could an actress like Viola Davis play that role and still get a Golden Globe or Oscar nod?

Or will people say “That’s not real enough.” Not real enough that some have described critical race narratives as “sci-fi”. The “other-world-liness” of powerfully analytical People of Color is fascinating but not as fascinating as the description of Black maids by a color-blind woman.

There are people who are writing against the “Nostalgia Movement (Code for When we were Openly Racist)”. While some are desiring for The “Good Ole Days” (as some of our presidential hopefuls have freely expressed) there are others who are reminding us that a racist narrative is powerful to and desired by a mass audience because it is racially easy and nice (for more racially-easy work, go watch The Help).

Race–workers, race researchers, race educators remind us that the first step is to be racially conscious and aware – but this is not enough

They remind us that we have to think, write, and share about a racial narrative that isn’t deficient, deleterious, and disappointing.

They use Critical Race Theory, Culturally Relevant Pedagogy, Testimonios, Street Lit, to construct a more robust racial narrative.

Work like The Help is racially-easy. And we all know the recipe: Develop code words and people may call you complex. Add “heroic” Black characters and you will be applauded for being well-intentioned. Add a couple of white characters that then find their souls and you just may get a movie out of it. Tell a sanitized Black story through the eyes of an innocent White woman — will get you an Oscar.

So is being a race-conscious writer/researcher really writer’s block? Or is it constructing courageously, constructing outside of the racist narrative that we inherited, that we continue to privilege, that we continue to reward? What some like to call “thinking outside the [racist] box?”

I think I prefer writer’s block now than to be racially-easy. Any day.

The challenge throughout has been to tell what I view as the truth about racism without causing disabling despair. ~ Derrick Bell

By Guest Contributor Marissa Lee, cross-posted from Racebending

Warner Bros has finally glommed onto a lead actor for its adaptation of the Japanese science fiction novel All You Need is Kill.

Set in a post apocalyptic future, All You Need is Kill is about a young Japanese soldier, Keiji Kiriya, who serves on an international fighting force fighting an alien invasion. Keiji gets stuck in a “Groundhog’s Day” scenario where he keeps reliving the day he died.

Set to play the main character in the film adaptation? On December 1st, 2011, Variety reported: Tom Cruise.

Is Warner Bros on a racebending roll?

Throughout November, Warner Bros kicked around names for its adaptation of another property with Japanese origins: Akira.

After considering Brad Pitt and Keanu Reeves, WB nabbed Garrett Hedlund (Tron Legacy) for Kaneda, continues to evaluate a shortlist of unknown Caucasian actors for Tetsuo, and has offered Kristen Stewart (Twilight) the role of Kaneda’s love interest.

Gary Oldman and Helena Bonaham Carter were also propositioned for supporting roles. After Gary Oldman turned down his offer to play the antagonist in the adapted story, the Colonel, Japanese stage actor Ken Watanabe was reportedly offered the role. A casting call has also gone out for a “Japanese American” for the role of Yamagata, a side character from the manga.

Warner Bros is also jump starting an adaptation of the Japanese anime Death Note.

One of these films will have an Asian American lead, right? Or at least an actor of color in the lead role?

Why the All You Need is Kill casting isn’t subtle at all

In Hiroshi Sakurazaka’s novel, the lead character, Keiji Kiriya, is a Japanese soldier who is part of an international military unit. For the purposes of the American adaptation, director Doug Liman (The Bourne Identity)has said that the actors will be “totally American.”

And somehow, “totally American” ended up meaning “white,” even though characters need not be white in order to be American.

In the script, Keiji Kiriya’s name was changed to “Billy Cage,” even though named Keiji have been fighting in the American military for generations.

Sound familiar? That’s because history is repeating itself. Starship Troopers, another science fiction novel about an international army fighting aliens, featured a Filipino protagonist named Juan Rico. In the 1997 film adaptation, his name was changed to “Johnny” and he was cast with a white actor. An opportunity for an Asian American actor in the genre of science fiction was completely lost.

Science Fiction/Fantasy is a genre that has characters with names like Kal-El, T’challa, Worf, Neytiri, Teal’c, Cthulhu, Meriadoc Brandybuck, Leeloo, and Slartibartfast. Why was it necessary to change Keiji Kiriya to Billy Cage?

To add insult to injury, unlike Akira (a story that only contained Japanese characters), the original All You Need is Kill already featured characters who were white!

The other lead characters in the book are Rita Vrataski and Ferrell Bartolome, both from the U.S. Armed Forces. Even with an Asian American actor in the lead role, white actors would have had ample opportunities to play important roles in the film!

Instead, the production went out of its way to retool the script, erase Keiji’s name and ethnicity, and essentially, lock Asian American actors out of one of their only chances to star in an action movie this decade.

Impact on Performers and Communities of Color

Our concern is that Warner Bros casting practices employ racebending to reinforce the systemic racism that is already present in Hollywood. Setting Akira in neo-Manhattan could have been a great opportunity to reflect the diversity in modern day New York City, opening up lead role opportunities for not only Asian Americans but also other performers of color. There was ample opportunity for Warner Bros to demonstrate a commitment to diversity by finally casting a young lead actor of color.

Likewise, casting an Asian American in All You Need is Kill would not have locked out white actors from other lead roles in the movie, especially since nearly all Warner Bros movies feature white lead actors.

Harold and Kumar (from back in 2004) aside, it doesn’t seem like Warner Bros is interested in developing unknown Asian American talent–even though they are more than ready to whitewash several lead characters that were Asian to accomodate white actors.

Not to mention, Warner Bros will also be presenting a yellowface joke in it’s Christmas release, Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows.

(Awkward coincidence given the whitewashing of roles in Akira and AYNIKis a modern evolution of yellowface..)

Not confidence inspiring.

Maybe Asian American actors are like poor Keiji Kiriya: doomed to constantly relive missed opportunities. When the rare Asian lead character comes along…

MTV ruined my mom’s hope for the Good Black Life for me, she said: Black husband, Black children, Black neighborhood. All because of the pretty white boys dancing and singing before my eyes as my hormones coursed through my adolescent body.

She was right…sort of.

I’ve had lovers of various hues in my life, but my long-term partners were white—including my ex-husband. I just knew that my love life would not be monoracial. Duran Duran and Adam Ant simply sealed that fate.

When I tried to find advice to help guide me on that path—my mom certainly didn’t and couldn’t help, since she dated and married only Black men—I read Essence. No help there:  while I was dating the rainbow, Essence touted various admonitions on how to achieve the Good Black Life, including the Kente cloth-themed wedding. The advice and articles about interracial dating treated those relationships as, at best, aberrations.

Cosmo? Glamour? Beyond some “general” advice on “how to catch a man,” it was some variation of planning romantic evenings and Kegel exercises.

The first publications about interracial relationships—this was the Multiculti Late 80s and 90s–treated them as cure-alls for personal and institutional racism. I knew better than that, so that literature didn’t quite interest me. And I walked the other way — more like ran across the street and screamed down the alley — when Shahrazad Ali’s pro-intimate partner violence tome Blackman’s Guide to Understanding the Blackwoman became the dating manual and coffeeklatch topic du jour for Black women in the US. Nope, definitely not for me.

When I finally discovered Racialicious a few years ago, I finally found someplace that talked about dating and race, especially interracial dating, that wasn’t full of foolishness. About a couple of years the R ran a post about the racial implications–and racist assumptions–of dating-advice books. And we did a breakdown of how race and racism worked in the online-dating world. And, of course, we ran a series on interracial dating as a response to Essence trying to position them as the Next Cure-All for the Black Woman’s Marriage Crisis.

My biggest takeaway from all of this is—surprise, surprise—the media and some people in our communities deeply participate in the Dating Economics of Not OK. Part of that economy is advertising that having color is not OK, unless you’re planning to date and mate intraracially. (The logic: you’re all the same race, so you two should relate, right?) The realities are infinitely more intricate, but intricate doesn’t sell too well.

So, I’m hoping that Samhita Mukhopadhyay’s book, Outdated: Why Dating Is Ruining Your Love Life becomes a best-seller. Because she not only takes inventory of all those dating-advice books cluttering bookshelves and e-reader lists, she also takes that rarest of inventory: an anti-racist feminist inventory of the whole dating industrial complex.

Mukhopadhyay reminds the reader throughout her book that these books consistently erase those who are not cisgender and heterosexual  and able-bodied and middle-class. She also says that the dating industrial complex is also rather unkind to cisgender men–all of this because they’re trafficking in narrow stereotypes based on gender binaries. And if we believe in some sort of feminism? Well, Mukhopadhyay analyzes, these books try to make that belief the reason why we’re not getting laid, let alone married. We, to paraphrase DuBois, are the 21^st century problem to be solved because, so says this literature, we dare to exist–sometimes caring about being in relationships and sometimes not.

Her take, for example, on how these books—along with communities and porn—and their net effects on dating and race:

The mainstream media is ripe with oversexualized images of women of color, and policy often stigmatized and shames this same group of people. Women of color and poor women are blamed for their inability to keep their legs closed and for having too many children. For marginalized groups of women, sex is not linked to pleasure and freedom; it is demonized and used as an example of all the ways in which these women lack self-control. As a result, a lot of conversation around sexual freedom discount the experience of people of color, failing to take into account how much sexual freedom is assumed to hinge on a woman’s privilege—be it because of her race, economic status, or social standing.

Of course, not all women of color are sexualized in the same way. For example, while black women are considered lascivious, always consenting and out of control, Latina[s] are considered exotic or overly sensual and Asian women are considered childish and prude. These particular stereotypes are reinforced through popular culture and pornography (just Google respectively “Asian women,” “black women,” or “Latina women” and then “women” and see what comes up). The common thread here is that nonwhite women’s sexuality is seen as outside the norm of white heterosexuality. It’s therefore something to uniquely desired, manipulated, exploited or controlled. Within this rather toxic climate, being a woman of color who’s in touch with her sexuality is an act of resistance. Pushing past the negative media depictions and still finding a healthy, healing, erotic, and functional sexuality is no small feat.

I have often felt trapped between discourses of sexuality. If I’m overtly sexual, I’m a threat to what it means to be a good, pious South Asian lady and to the white norms of sexuality. As a result, when I am sexual, I am confronting my ethnic community and the norms of white sexuality. Finding a more authentic sexuality that’s just me means pushing past what is considered the appropriate way for me to be sexual based on my race, ethnicity, and gender. This has meant a lot of experimentation, sometimes playing up how “bad” I am or being tremendously secretive about my sexual transgressions (well, clearly not after this book). And it meant sifting through partners and figuring out which ones are a little too obsessed with my being Indian.”

Then Mukhopadhyay breaks out a list on spotting an exoticizer.

Yes. She. Does.

But that’s what she does throughout her book…and that’s what I thoroughly love about Outdated. It’s a great, intricate mix of feminist thought, media literacy, and a couple of tips for dating while feminist (of color) from your you-ain’t-never-lied friend who’s that romantic realist. Mukhopadhyay lets you know that whomever you date—if you even want to do that—is perfectly OK.

Image credit: Feministing

By Guest Contributor Roxie Moxie, cross-posted from Nerdgasm Noire Network

Last week the Hunger Games character posters were revealed to fans.

There were the usual complaints of actors not meeting book loyalist expectations.  However, among the usual complaints of “She doesn’t look as young as I thought” or “Where are Effie’s pink curls?”  There was a different kind of shock and surprise toward Rue & Cinna, who will be played by Amandla Stenberg and Lenny Kravitz, respectively.

”And most hauntingly, a twelve-year-old girl from District 11. She has dark brown skin and eyes, but other than that, she’s very like Prim in size and demeanor.“―Katniss Everdeen, while watching Rue’s reaping

- The Hunter Games Wiki

She is 12 years old, with dark brown hair, skin, and “golden brown” eyes.

- Wikipedia

Rue is pretty clearly described as African-American which has been confirmed by director Garry Ross and author Suzanne Collins.

Entertainment Weekly: In the books, Katniss is described as being olive-skinned, dark-haired, possibly biracial. Did you discuss with Suzanne the implications of casting a blond, caucasian girl?
Ross: Suzanne and I talked about that as well. There are certain things that are very clear in the book. Rue is African-American. Thresh is African-American.

So then, why did comments like these show up on the Hunger Games Facebook when Rue’s poster was posted? (SPOILER ALERT: IF YOU HAVEN’T READ THE BOOKS, STOP AT GRACE’S COMMENT.)

Everything from the innocuous ”She’s not how I pictured her” to “I was all sad and like “she’s black!’”

Seriously? My good nerds, what in the entire f-ck?

While it is true that Rue is described maybe only twice in the entire book, she is described as having brown satiny skin that is darker than Katniss’ own tan skin.  While it is also true that the Hunger Games books are a very quick and absorbing read I don’t find that any of this an excuse to post on Facebook ”Shes Black?”

It makes me wonder if we all read the same book.

How is it, when Rue is so clearly described that fans insist they believed her to be white? White people are considered the norm in society; the default person.  It’s as simple as when you hear the words “All-American”, I can say with certainty that you are not picturing a minority person of color.  This is white privilege.

I’m a longtime Hunger Games fan and have followed many conversations on the internet concerning the casting of the film. Whenever the conversation comes to Rue there is always (1) person who is surprised to find out Rue is black and (2) another person who is upset that Rue is black. Upset as if they have been tricked or as if something has been stolen from them. Upset as if they now have to reevaluate how they feel about Rue–a character many fans love dearly because of her incredible courage.

“OMG, THERE IS A BLACK PERSON IN MY BOOK!?”

And the one that really kills me is {SPOILER AHEAD–HIGHLIGHT TO READ} “Where’s Prim? Her death is the one that gets to me most.” As if Rue’s death is not even worth this poster, and it should belong to Prim.

The reaction to Cinna is even more harsh.

Cinna:

Most people who live in the Capitol follow very absurd fashion trends. This is not the case for Cinna. The first time he is seen in the book, he is described as wearing a simple black shirt with matching pants. His one strange fashion choice is gold eyeliner, which brings out the gold flecks in his green eyes and which Katniss describes as attractive. Other than that, Cinna looks very normal, with close-cropped natural dark brown hair and slightly dark skin. {The Hunger Games Wiki}

Cinna is very different from the other inhabitants of the Capitol; he does not use surgery to alter his features, wears simple black clothes, and leaves his hair its natural dark brown color, close cropped. His only evidenced feature is a slight touch of gold eyeliner that brings out the gold flecks in his eyes. {Wikipedia}

It’s true that Cinna’s description is vague. Cinna could be absolutely any race. I felt the lack of description was purposeful. Cinna could be a hero that looked like anyone. I can’t fault anyone too much for thinking he might look like them, however …

Really, fandom? You nearly make me want to revoke my love of this series with these comments! Especially those who pictured Cinna as “sweet and loving”–A statement that implies that Kravitz doesn’t look that way.

However, many fans get it

By Special Correspondent Fatemeh Fakhraie

Sir Richard Burton is most famous for sexing up The 1,001 Arabian Nights. Two centuries later, Craig Thompson has graciously provided some accompanying imagery.

I feel like I have no choice but to hate Thompson’s latest graphic novel, Habibi. I’ll admit that it was beautifully drawn, though some of the panels seem needlessly garnished with alchemy symbols or random Arabic letters. But I’ll let Robyn Creswell’s review for The New York Times handle the fact that Thompson clutters his story—my beef with Thompson is about his staggering Orientalism, which I’ll get to shortly.

Themes of longing and survival permeate Habibi. The protagonists, Zam and Dodola, long for each other, likening this to a yearning for the Divine – Middle Eastern poets have done this for centuries. Zam and Dodola endure horrible events in the name of survival, perhaps tying in with Thompson’s conservationist theme by implying that our disregard for the earth is tantamount to rape and castration of the planet. These themes, however, are often drowned out—no matter how much Thompson underlines them—by the towering gaffes of his misrepresentation. The country of Wanatolia may be fiction, but the cultures it mimics and clumsily muddles together are real.

When one opens Habibi, one might assume that it takes place a long time ago, in a fictional, far-away land that happens to look and feel just like Disney’s Agrabah. But, lo! Wanatolia has steam punk-themed palace guards and high-rise condo construction that flies in the face of a village’s pollution and resulting poverty and famine. Is it to represent the “Global South,” as Thompson claims in a Guernica interview?

No. It’s simply an Orientalist reimaging of a modern Arabia—Thompson needs modern machinery to further his conservationist theme, but he still wants his pre-modern harems full of odalisques with no cell phones and his pre-modern camel caravans crossing a desert that his very same construction companies would build roads through.

Thompson admitted to Guernica that he drew inspiration for Habibi from the Orientalist art movement. Orientalist paintings are a primary example of Orientalism as a racist point of view because they are Western depictions of Arab lands based on preconceptions of the painters (who often had never been to the region they were depicting). Thompson traps himself by not realizing that his magical land full of djinns and harems is exactly the kind of fantastical interpretation that many Middle Eastern people and Muslims have had enough of.

And then we come to the other huge problem: its portrayal of women and the sexualizing of rape. The female protagonist, Dodola, is raped constantly: as a child, by her first husband; as a child and teen, by men in the caravans she tried to steal food from; by the sultan whose harem she lived in. Dodola’s history is a history of rape, also falling into the Orientalist trope of brutal male savages and their oppressed women. And once Zam (or Habibi, the male protagonist) witnesses one of these rapes, both his consciousness and his dreams are plagued by sensual reenactments of her rape. Do I really have to make the point here that sexualizing rape is dangerous and unacceptable?

Tasnim at Muslimah Media Watch highlights the tired savage men/oppressed women dichotomy that Thompson’s novel rehashes: “Dodola’s narrative in particular features an endless array of savage men victimizing sexualized women, with hardly a page passing without nudity or brutality.” Every other page, Dodola was naked for one reason or another: being raped, bathing, birthing. The way Thompson portrays the female form is little more than a screen on which to project his Orientalist, new-agey crap. And with the current lack of female representation in comic books and graphic novels, you’d think he’d try a little harder to make his female protagonist more than a naked body.

I genuinely appreciated Thompson’s attempt to include the Qur’an in a positive way, which is why I wanted to like this novel. G. Willow Wilson, who has a foot in both worlds because she is both Muslim and a graphic novelist, tried similarly, writing, “the sheer dearth of sympathetic Muslim characters in western literature (and the fiercely secular world of comics and graphic novels in particular) makes me want to forgive a few small sins of inauthenticity.” And the beautiful drawings almost sway me before I realize that just because it’s beautiful doesn’t mean it’s okay.

But mixing Middle Eastern fairy tales with Qur’anic passages, new-age-y alchemist references, and a constantly naked female protagonist-turned-odalisque makes it apparent that Habibi is Thompson’s attempt to write his own Arabian Nights.

By Guest Contributor Tami Winfrey Harris, cross-posted from What Tami Said

The way our society talks about black women and marriage–from the daily paper to the pulpit to movies and self-help books–is flawed, sexist and damaging. When black women tell their own stories, a more thoughtful truth emerges.

I am working on a project juxtaposing the authentic experiences of African American women with the tragic common narrative about black women and marriage — a narrative that narrows lives, turns black female successes into failures and unfairly burdens us alone with responsibility for the success of black male/female relationships, black families and the black community. My goal is that my efforts will result in a published book.

I am currently working to identify black women to have frank discussions about how they navigate relationships, sexuality, singleness, marriage and divorce. If you, or someone you know, is willing to be a part of this effort, please contact me at Tamara@BackTalkBook.com.

Some things to know:

I am interested in interviewing black women of all ages, backgrounds, geographic locations and experiences. One goal of my effort is to illuminate the lives of women often erased in discussions of the black marriage rate, including married women, divorced women, women who don’t wish to marry, lesbian women, women in interracial relationships and others.

Subjects should be willing to participate in multiple one-on-one interviews both in person and through technology. Initial interviews will be conducted by phone in November. While I will not require an inordinate amount of time from interviewees, I will need to interact with them enough to understand their stories, experiences and perspectives.

Elements of participants’ stories, including quotes, will be included in a published work, written by me. Women have the option of being referred to by their full, real names; first names only or a pseudonym.

Beyond the ABC specials, “think like a man” romantic advice tomes and panic-inducing women’s magazine articles, exist the real stories of black women—too often told from another perspective and voice. Everyone is talking about black women and marriage. I want to talk back.

Please help by responding to and sharing this call for participants through your networks. Please direct questions about this project to Tamara@BackTalkBook.com.

By Arturo R. García

It seems at least one scene in the upcoming film Sherlock Holmes: A Game Of Shadows will involve Robert Downey Jr.’s Holmes disguising himself as “a Chinese beggar” for laughs. Because crude racialized cosplay is funny, y’see – especially if there’s a British accent involved!

At least, that seems to be the reaction from some movie bloggers: The Huffington Post breathlessly reported that Downey’s yellowface get-up signifies director Guy Ritchie “has his hero going multicultural — to great comedic effect.”

Actually, what this bit threatens to do is continue a disconcerting trend: the creative teams behind the most recent attempts to “reimagine” Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s detective stories can’t – or won’t – let go of some of their most xenophobic elements.

A similar issue emerged during the debut season of Sherlock, Steven Moffat and Mark Gatiss’ generally well-received modern spin on the detective. Last year’s episode “The Blind Banker,” written by Steve Thompson, went beyond using Chinese smugglers as villains to seemingly demonizing the whole of London’s Chinese immigrant community, as one viewer told Monique Jones:

Had it been based on a piece of canon that was rife with this kind of period-appropriate bigotry, I could have better understood it (although I’d have been deeply disappointed they weren’t capable of subverting it and reflecting the reality of London in 2010). But the fact is that this script is derived from a story which has NOTHING to do with Asia in the first place! So it was just egregious, lazy, stupid, reductive, racist codswallop. Which is a damn shame, because in other respects this is probably my favourite episode – but the whole thing is sullied by the racefail…I thought the mafia boss was fairly awesome, and she did a great job with her role, such as it was, and so I could have handwaved that. I like circuses, and so although it was fetishistic I was willing to work with them and handwave the Mysterious Oriental Circus thing. And I was trying to handwave the cliched depiction of the beautiful vulnerable maiden slain by her wicked brother.

But when they put OMINOUS MUSIC behind some normal footage of China Town, as if all the Londoners we were looking at were supposed to suddenly be Evil Scary Suspicious Figures just because they were of Asian extraction?

I wanted to punch someone in the face.

That portrayal was part of a bigger problem, according to 2010 Parliamentary candidate Philip Ling, who wrote in DimSum:

the next day after Sherlock Holmes, the current BBC Radio 5 Live advert for the new football season was on, and the Chinese character was a take away owner, celebrating in his shop. It makes you realise that actually almost all Chinese characters on British TV are:

• An illegal immigrant
• Linked to the criminal underworld
• Or a take away owner.

This despite the evidence that Chinese students in the UK are amongst the highest achieving academic group, many working Chinese are doctors, lawyers (not to stereotype here either), as well as bankers, IT experts, fashion designers, teachers, graphic designers basically any job you can think of that exists. Yet there is none of this on British TV.

Doyle wasn’t averse to orientalism in his original works: In his novel The Lost World, he name-checked Sir Richard Francis Burton, who made a living making his way thru South Asia. And in the Holmes story The Sign Of The Four, Doyle introduced the character Tonga in the most dehumanizing of fashions:

It straightened itself into a little black man – the smallest I have ever seen – with a great, misshapen head and a shock of tangled, dishevelled hair. Holmes had already drawn his revolver, and I whipped out mine at the sight of this savage, distorted creature. He was wrapped in some sort of dark ulster or blanket, which left only his face exposed, but that face was enough to give a man a sleepless night. Never have I seen features so deeply marked with all bestiality and cruelty. His small eyes glowed and burned with a sombre light, and his thick lips were writhed back from his teeth, Which grinned and chattered at us with half animal fury.

Moreover, colonialism informs how Holmes and Watson approach the case, which involves a set of gems from India that goes back and forth between the characters of Captain Morstan and Major Sholto. Sholto is criticized not only for killing Morstan to get them, but for stealing them from an Englishman. Morstan’s theft, however, is glossed over.

Despite this, Sign has been adapted no less than 12 times for the screen (although it’s possible an Indian adaptation, Neekkam (The Move), is more sympathetic to Tonga and Sholto), for its’ bigger contributions to the Holmes canon: it’s the first mention of his drug habit, and the debut of Doctor Watson’s future wife, Mary.

But both of these plot points were already in play when we met Downey’s Sherlock in the last Holmes movie, which makes this costume choice for Downey seem all the more arbitrary by himself, Ritchie and Shadows writers Kieran and Michele Mulroney. As IGN reports, the film is “influenced by” a Doyle story, The Final Problem, but isn’t “strictly based” on it. Of all the disguises they had to choose from, is this really the best they could come up with?

Which isn’t to say that Holmes’ reputation as a master of disguise shouldn’t be played on in any new interpretations of Doyle’s work. But put it this way: when Downey’s character in Tropic Thunder, Kirk Lazarus, went to absurd lengths to “credibly” play a black man, the absurdity of the choice was made plain. It’s possible the same will happen to Downey’s Holmes in this new scenario, but given what’s gone on before, it hardly seems worth it for the sake of a played-out sight gag.

This book will not just quietly die.

We first were notified about Kathryn Stockett’s The Help back in 2010. A few readers asked us if we had read it. If we had heard the NPR interview. One blogger, Onyx M, started a critique blog. We’ve been silent for a while on the book world – outside of Junot Diaz’s The Brief Wonderous Life of Oscar Wao, we haven’t reviewed a book in a long time. Probably because the stack of books that people have sent in still teeters on my desk. And all of the books are good, so they deserve a thorough discussion. But stealing time away to read a book, analyze it, and write about it doesn’t come easy.

And that process is even harder when one enters a book with as much trepidation as I enter The Help. Now that ads for the movie adaptation are all over TV, it’s time to go ahead and put this to rights. I have a new book review format that may help with timeliness. Now, if I can only get over my reluctance.

Even skimming the reviews makes me want to throw up in my mouth a little bit.

The Huffington Post checks out the controversy, noting:

Writing for Ms. Magazine, Erin Aubry Kaplan wonders, “Why must blacks speak dialect to be authentic? Why are Stockett’s white characters free of the linguistic quirks that white Southerners certainly have?” The Christian Science Monitor notes the same problem, wondering about the “decision to convey only black voices in dialect, with nary a dropped ‘g’ among her generally less sympathetic Southern white characters.”

Still, the Monitor and others generally seem to find that the novel rises above these flaws, and others don’t see them as flaws at all. In The Washington Post, Sybil Steinberg finds that one of “Stockett’s accomplishments is reproducing African American vernacular and racy humor without resorting to stilted dialogue.”

Why do I get the feeling that Steinberg’s idea of African American vernacular and a linguist’s opinion on the matter would be two entirely different things?

Over at White Readers Meet Black Authors, Trisha R. Thomas puts up a review of The Help noting:

It’s true that readers are a narcissistic bunch. We find the characters who most resemble us and our thoughts to agree with, cheer for, and feel for in their deepest pain. We celebrate their victories as our own. The Help tells an honest story of women taking a chance and stepping out of old beliefs. You can’t help but love a story when the ones you care about win in the end. Caring whether or not the author is black or white seems of no substance now. Would a black author have experienced living with a maid all her life and know the life of Skeeter, Abilene, or Minny? I don’t know about you, but my only care giver was my mother and the public school system. I’m black, an author, and could not have written The Help. We are who we are. This novel struck the nerves of both black and white readers. It especially hit mine remembering my first novel and being judged as not “black enough” What did I know about nappy? How dare I write on the subject at all? I soldiered on, ignoring the critics. I wrote what I knew to be true from my experiences. We write what we know. If we’re lucky, we do it well. Judging a book by it’s color has to end somewhere. We have to be the change we want to see in others. Open minds mean open pages. The door needs to stay unlocked for all of us. Freedom to write whatever we want. Freedom to read whatever, whomever we want.

Thomas brings up a good point – of empathy and honest storytelling. One does not need to have the same experience as a character to be able to identify with them. There are many books I love, stories of people I am not. I loved Oscar Wao, though I am not Dominican-American or from Jersey. It spoke to me anyway. I loved Free Food for Millionaires, though I am not Korean-American, nor did I go to college, nor do I work in finance. Spoke to me anyway.

But there is a difference, I think, between allowing yourself to embrace lives and experiences not ones own and being forced through what is essentially literary waterboarding. Thomas mentions the Secret Life of Bees as a book she enjoyed – I didn’t make it all the way through the book. There was something about being repeatedly plunged into the character of Lily, but being kept arm’s length from August, June, and May was aggravating for me. This didn’t happen when I re-read To Kill a Mockingbird – but perhaps it is because Scout’s world started white and stayed white. She merely observed what was happening most of the book, and did not act as an agent, until far later. In some ways, I found that less condescending. Mockingbird is still problematic, but in some ways, for the same reason I enjoyed it – it used scenes to describe what was happening to the black characters, instead of trying to recreate their voices in an extended, intimate narrative. I remember that my thoughts kept straying while reading the Secret Life of Bees – how Lily’s actions were dangerous, why she was so reckless when the lives of others could be on the line, what was going on in the minds of the other women? I kept drifting away from the character, my own experiences, past readings, and thoughts keeping me from sinking into her. So in that way, Lily’s narrative was like a straight-jacket I couldn’t escape from.

I think that’s my hesitancy about The Help. I have read stories where white authors can convincingly craft characters of color. When they do it well, I forget who is writing. But I generally that is not the case. I used to hate reading Patricia Cornwell writing black characters in her narrative. They were generally jerky side characters, and did things that were inexplicable to me, like “unraveling [their] long dreadlocks.” After I read that line, I spent hours trying to figure out what the hell she was trying to say. Did she mean braids? Unraveling was a weird word. Did she even know the difference between dreads, braids, and twists? It’s these little jarring moments that remind me that a writer is creating a world, and that world may not actually include me. James Patterson is better with Alex Cross. His portrayals were a bit lopsided at times – I remember the whole “blood and bones of my ancestors” speech in one of the early Cross novels that had me also perplexed. The way many white writers discuss and interpret racism is just straight up different – and it’s rarely ever subtle. Whereas reading Benilde Little’s Good Hair, the protagonist is trying to confront her white boss about favoring less seasoned white reporters over her without setting off the angry black woman alarm. Needless to say, she presses her boss, but race doesn’t come up in the actual conversation. Too risky. Just like in real life. Your boss may be racist, but you are the one dealing with the consequences.

This isn’t to say The Help does any of this – I can’t judge a book I haven’t read, full stop.

But I am not really looking forward to the experience. I hope I’m wrong, and we’ve come to a point in America where a white woman can write in a real authentic way about race, and other white women will love it, not because it’s been “properly translated” but because it allows them to access their thoughts and memories of a time in the not-too-distant past. Maybe this is a way of healing. To admit that things were fucked up and white women did their share in perpetuating that while still being oppressed by white men, and as we acknowledge this part of our pasts, we can start shaping our present and correcting for the future.

Then I read “Ten Issues that Tarnish the Help” (complete with citations from the text) and realize that I’m going to need a big bottle of wine for this one.

By Guest Contributor Simba Rousseau, cross-posted from Her Blueprint

Threatening emails, phone calls, constant surveillance by secret police and eventually prison couldn’t dissuade Randa, an Algerian transsexual and pioneer in the Arab world’s gay and transsexual movement, from going public with her life story.

“I returned home to Algeria from my last trip and that’s when the threats to imprison me started,” says Randa, who received initial threats via email and phone. “As a method of intimidating me, they started sending articles about me to my family, and they would show up at my workplace. Once, while being stopped at a checkpoint, one of the officers grabbed me in the car and told me that he could arrest and rape me and no one would know about it.”

Convinced by influential members of Algerian society, two of Randa’s friends were forced to present her with an ultimatum. Leave the country in ten days or things will get worse.

Ten days is not a long time, but as luck would have it, a feminist organization in Lebanon found out about Randa’s situation and offered to assist.

“I don’t regret speaking out because in the end I realized that the reason they were doing all of this was because they were scared. I managed to shake up their system and this is why they were lashing out at me,” she said in an interview with Her Blueprint. “Of course it was driving me crazy, and I knew that if I didn’t leave the country they would kill me. I decided to continue addressing the situation of LGBT in Algeria outside the country and accepted the offer to go to Lebanon.”

However, Randa’s troubles were far from over.

Once in Lebanon, Randa caught the attention of the Lebanese secret intelligence. One day while going to the General Security (Lebanese immigration), she was informed that she was under investigation because she shared a birth name with a man who had skipped out on military service. It seemed to be an unfortunate case of mistaken identity, though Randa believes the Algerian embassy in Lebanon was responsible for having her detained.

Randa, who had been living as a woman for years, was forced to dress in men’s clothes and confined to a cell alone in the men’s section of Adlieh prison.

Adlieh, a former underground parking lot turned detention center, houses thousands of migrants and refugees and is infamous as a harsh and inhuman detention center.  Human rights advocates have long called for the closure of Adlieh due to its inhumane treatment of inmates. Most detainees languish underground for years until they’re deported or until rights groups are informed of their whereabouts.

Randa was one of the lucky ones. She was able to send a text message to friends letting them know that she had been arrested. “It was a miracle that I got the call that I was going to be released. Almost 99% of the prisoners are deported. They kept me in the prison for over 60 days because they were trying to figure out any way to deport me,” says Randa.

Once Randa was released, she decided she had to take the opportunity to share her life story. By publishing a memoir, Randa hoped to gain closure around her experiences in Algeria and humanize the Trans experience, which remains a taboo topic in most Arab countries. Her biography, Memoirs of Randa the Trans, which is based on a series of interviews with her, was written by Lebanese journalist Hazem Saghyieh and is likely the first book of its kind to be published in Arabic.

Speaking to Her Blueprint, Randa says, “I wanted to say to the world that Trans people exist. We have dreams, feelings, pain–just like everyone else. Our suffering is that we’re treated like monsters and people think that we are just looking for sex.”

So how did Randa become the voice of the Algerian Trans community to begin with? Like the recent political revolution in Egypt, it began with the Internet. In a conservative Muslim country like Algeria, where the penal code and society severely condemns the LGBT community, Randa faced severe difficulties. Oppressed by her family, bullied at school and abused whenever she would tell her mom that she was a girl trapped in a male body, Randa decided at the age of fifteen that someone needed to address the issue of LGBT in Algeria.

“When the Internet arrived to Algeria it gave me an outlet to speak, so I started a personal blog writing about different issues I was facing. Then it started to take on a life of it’s own,” says Randa. “People around the world started coming to my blog and it became a reference for individuals to learn about issues concerning the LGBT community in Algeria.”

Although living in Lebanon as a transwoman has been easier than it was for her living in Algeria, discrimination and harassment still exists. As a certified nurse, finding work in her profession or landing any kind of respectable job has been a daunting task.

However, for Randa the bulk of the discrimination she faces in Lebanon is within the LGBT community. “Within the community you have this hierarchy of the gay male, then the feminine male, then the lesbians and then the lesbians are categorized according to their look and then there are the bisexuals and then the trans,” she said. “Of course there is also the class issue that also plays a role in dividing the community.”

By Arturo R. García

Yesterday, Moviefone’s Gabrielle Dunn wrote that this image of Jennifer Lawrence in character as Katniss Everdeen from the planned Hunger Games movie adaptation “calmed” any concerns about her casting. We beg to differ.

To be fair, Ms. Dunn was referring more to questions about the 20-year-old Lawrence playing a 16-year-old character. But the concerns regarding a white, blonde actress being hired to play a character many fans considered to be multi-racial won’t go away soon, as Racebending’s Michael Le illustrated on Twitter:

Meanwhile, movie blogger Ms. Go identified Lawrence’s unspoken “co-star”:

This isn’t to diminish Lawrence’s talents, but it’s not hard to figure that she required some cosmetic help to play Katniss, because even accounting for camera discrepancies, her skin tone on that Entertainment Weekly cover does not match the one seen in this picture she took for Elle:

Both the film’s director, Gary Ross, and Hunger Games author Suzanne Collins have gone out of their way to assure both fans of the book series and potential audiences that Lawrence is the only person who could play Katniss. But the truth is, while Katniss’ ethnicity was undefined in the books, the casting call for the movie called for Caucasian actresses from the get-go. That would seem to contradict Ross’ statement to EW that there was no “doctrine” regarding the character’s race.

The truth is, the doctrine has always been there in Hollywood, and – again, through no fault of Lawrence’s – it’s designed to give people like her a pass. And those concerns should not be ignored by anyone anymore.

I Speak For Myself is a collection about connections: the spiritual to the secular. The public self to the private. One community to another. The point is perhaps made most clearly by Nousheen Yousuf-Sadiq in her essay, “Half and Half”:

After all, I am made up of two parts: my Muslim and American identities. My Muslim identity defined half of my personality, character and individuality, while the other half has been determined by my experience growing up as an American. The balance of the two makes me who I am: an American woman who has discovered her hijab is the greatest beauty secret of all.

Though the contributors’ professions and locations are diverse, some commonalities emerge in the stories shared here: curiosity, confusion (usually some variant of the question, “Oh, you’re really from America?”), and the spectre of Islamophobia that flared up in earnest after the Sept. 11 attacks: “We felt our very identity as Americans was being subjected to scrutiny, challenge, and contestation,” writes Washington Post contributor Hadia Mubarak.

In her essay “Roots,” Muslimah Media Watch editor and Racialicious team member Fatemeh Fakhraie opens up with a raw account of the emotions she faces as she watches her parents age, and the prospect of “repaying the ultimate debt” in taking care of them as they get older:

Baba doesn’t take care of himself, his father had a heart attack at this age, he doesn’t exercise. Downwinders Syndrome could give Ma another type of cancer, what if she breaks something …

Who will take me to Iran? Who will take me to see my grandparents’ graves?

How can anyone really know me if they don’t know I have the same laugh and the same short temper as my Baba? How can anyone understand exactly why sounding like my mother freaks me out if they’ve never met her?

God, sweet God.

Fatemeh’s question – How can anyone really know me if …? – is echoed across the collection, as each of the contributors talk about the connections they make that help them weather the challenges they face: The renewed commitment to their faith, and the emergence of allies, both from within the Muslim-American community and from outside, sometimes unexpected places. Zainab Alwan is publicly defended by a teacher; Ayah H. Ibrahim describes a partnership between her Muslim student group and her college’s Hillel chapter; and Maryam Habib Khan’s experience seeing people she met in Afghanistan reconcile her identities as a Muslim woman who works as a supervisor in the US Army Corps of Engineers.

“Connections,” in fact, is the title of Samaa R. Abdurraqib’s contribution, where she talks about how her circle of Muslim friends helped open up her experience with her faith:

We talked about spirituality rather than behavior; we talked about the beauty of being a Muslim woman rather than the restrictions; we talked about the benefits of being in America and practicing Islam rather than the hardships. Islam became more than just simple and meaningless obedience to me. I learned Islam was about nurturing a strong connection with God, and that strong connection is what spawned my obedience.

The strengthening of the various ties described in these stories creates its’ own connection, between the women sharing their experiences and the reader, Muslim or not. As a learning tool, not just about a particular religion but about faith, strength, love and the value of community, I Speak For Myself succeeds, loud and clear.

I Speak For Myself is available for purchase at the book’s website and on Amazon and Barnes & Noble.

If you’re in the Washington D.C. area and want to meet some of the contributors to I Speak For Myself tonight, here’s some info for you:

Where: Busboys and Poets, 2021 14th St, Washington, DC
When: Monday, May 16, 6:30 p.m. EST
Who: Nafees Syed, Elham Khatami, Ayah Ibrahim, and Rima Kharuf

By Guest Contributor Mimi Thi Nguyen, cross-posted from Threadbared

Last Thursday, Reuters released photographs from the United States’ extra-territorial raid on Osama bin Laden’s compound in Abbottabad in Pakistan, which show “three dead men lying in pools of blood, but no weapons.” (Reuters purchased these photographs from a Pakistani security official, who entered the compound about an hour after the US assault.) Reuters described the three deceased men as “dressed in traditional Pakistani garb and one in a t-shirt, with blood streaming from their ears, noses and mouths.”

On Twitter, Pakistan-based journalist Shaheryar Mirza (@mirza9) pointedly asks, “Why are Muslims always in ‘garb’ and never in ‘clothes’?” In a related inquiry, South/South (@southsouth) has been critical of The Daily Show’s graphics following Osama bin Laden’s extra-judicial killing, featuring photographs of bin Laden’s head imposed upon a mosque, and another of bin Laden caption, “Bye Bye Beardie.”

Our theoretical and historical provocation (for this blog, at least) is thus to engage the question of clothing the “terrifying Muslim.” For example, we could easily observe that terms such as “garb” emphasize a civilizational distancing or confusion (one involving both temporal and spatial dimensions). Where naming these clothes as “garb” seems to act as “merely” an empirical description, the assessment of subjects and their clothing practices may coincide with, or become complicit with, colonial schema. (Shaheryar Mirza (@mirza9) and South/South (@southsouth) had an amazing, satirical exchange about putting on their “garb” that underlined so well the usage of the term as loaded with civilizational thinking. Highlights include Mirza’s “American business-casual garb for me today!” and South/South’s “Clothes might make the man, but garb makes the Muslim man.”) Related to this set of concerns, I’ve written here about the epidermalization of clothing and sartorial classification as a weapon of war.

This time, I thought I would turn to my brilliant colleague Junaid Rana. Rana is an associate professor in Asian American Studies at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, whose scholarship addresses the confluence of racism with concepts of “illegality,” especially through transnational movements of labor and war. He is also the author of the new (and sure to be important) book Terrifying Muslims: Race and Labor in the South Asian Diaspora, out on Duke University Press in the next few weeks. You can find out more about the book (and become a fan) here!

MIMI: In your new book Terrifying Muslims, you argue that racism and the criminalization of the Muslim body enacts the global war on terror in everyday life. You also incorporate a sartorial dimension into your analyses about the use of surveillance and racial boundary-making in relation to the Muslim body (drawing upon feminist theorists such as Sara Ahmed, one of my intellectual crushes). Can you tell us about your arguments about how clothing does matter?

JUNAID: It’s a fairly straightforward argument, although I’m sure it will be received with some controversy. The basic argument is about connecting Islamophobia to racism. Islamophobia is often seen as religious discrimination. And racism is usually thought of in terms of the body and particular kinds of genetic traits and phenotypic difference – that is, skin color, hair, eyes, etc. But as the scholarship on racism has shown, such biological determinism is almost always tied to culture. In the second chapter of the book I have an extensive argument about how racism and the genealogy of the race-concept is intimately tied to Islam and Muslims.

As for the sartorial elements, it’s an extension of the general approach in the book that combines material and cultural analysis. I look for my theoretical inspiration from a wide variety of intellectual approaches. I am without a doubt deeply indebted to the work of feminist theorists, who have in my mind always been at the cutting edge of critical race analysis. For example, many of my arguments in the book draw from a number of feminist theorists, including Sara Ahmed and Linda Alcoff, who for some time have talked about how clothes are a material register for the intersection of race and gender. The surface of the body is read by its accoutrements. It’s a certain kind of object analysis that is always already happening. How the body is fashioned with coverings provides for a particular cultural reading based on meanings attributed and related back to the body. Without a doubt, we size up people all the time by how they dress. We make judgments by what we infer from clothing – and this has much to do with a process of racializing and gendering, meaning we take cultural artifacts such as customs and costumes to have a particular naturalized and essentialized meaning that is centered on the body as a material and cultural archive. But this is also a choice and a political stance.

Not all clothing will have as much meaning as others. For some this choice is a mistake, and others a risk. (Remember when it was dangerous for Rachael Ray to wear a kefiyyah?) Culture and clothing, then, is a way to racialize and establish social boundaries of who belongs here and who doesn’t. Race in the context of Islam and the Muslim body is understood as a religious belief in which its adherents are thought of as inherently different. So I’m not saying this always happens, it’s a very specific process of racialization that imagines a group of people as essentialized in particular ways. You can find this in what people say and do all of the time. And that’s what I try to unravel in depth in the book.

In this particular moment Islamic clothing and bodily fashioning along with comportment imputes all kinds of meaning to Muslim bodies. Research has shown that veiled women [and girls] in the US are disproportionately endangered as threats to what I would call the white supremacist social order. Men are also targeted because of Islamic dress and facial hair as appearing Muslim-like. Louise Cainker’s study in post-9/11 Chicago with Arab Americans called Homeland Insecurity showed that veiled Muslim women were often targeted for harassment and racial violence. What she calls cultural sniping is a response to a gendered nationalism in which women are considered the bearers and reproducers of culture. So an attack on Islam in the publics of the US, is more easily a violent attack on Muslim women. Others have shown similar things in New York and San Francisco. In my book, I talk about how Islamic dress becomes a material register to discipline bodies into an imperial racial order. In the last chapter of the book I talk about how this comes together particularly in two vignettes of women who face forms of racial boundary making used to oppress them, and as a source of refusal of such dominance through the defiance of racialized and gendered stereotypes.

As for the pictures just released by Reuters, first it should be acknowledged what the three men are actually wearing. The website states the pictures “show two men dressed in traditional Pakistani garb and one in a t-shirt, with blood streaming from their ears, noses and mouths.” Two sentences later the report says: “none of the men looked like bin Laden.” What on earth does this mean? They didn’t look Arab? They weren’t Muslim enough? Terrorist? Evil? It’s not clear. The man apparently in a t-shirt is wearing an undershirt commonly worn under the “traditional Pakistani garb” referred to more commonly known as shalwar kameez. A unisex dress, the shalwar refers to the loose pants, and the kameez is a long shirt some of your readers might recognize as related to the chemise. Given that the photos crop the bodies of the dead mean from the waist up I’m not entirely sure how Reuters knows what they are wearing. You can more or less tell, though, from the details of the clothing.

What is more striking is the second comment of the men not appearing like Osama. Banal as it may seem, the comparison is astounding. What makes it necessary? If anything, I would point to the variety in facial hair. One has a short beard and the other two have moustaches, commonly worn in Pakistan. Beards in Islam, are considered a sunnah or Prophetic example of religious practice. Wearing them is an example of piety but not required. Many considered to be religious leaders are often judged by their pious dress.  Yet, the Reuters treatment of their bodies and their relationship to Osama reveals the kind of racialization I’m talking about. Either as adherents of al-Qaeda that are fictive kin, or as relatives that might look like Osama, the report is making judgments based on kinship and a distinct biopolitical logic of racism. That their deaths are commented on as blood streaming from their bodies only adds to the agenda of racism that ends in annihilation. In the third chapter of my book I talk about how photographs and terror alerts are used to incite racial panics and control them through the policing apparatus of the security state. In specific, I looked at the images circulated about al-Qaeda mastermind Khalid Sheikh Muhammad and his capture, also in Pakistan. Some of the readers of this blog will recall the heavily manufactured image circulating about KSM with him looking disheveled and in an undershirt (If not, it’s in the book!). These images matter because they import so much meaning and are able to convey a message without needing to say it explicitly. More often that not, that’s how racism can hide without being explicit, and justify death without needing to say so.

MIMI: Hijab describes a set of clothing practices that “adheres” a sense of alien being to the feminine Muslim body in North American and European visual cultures. Its criminalization is spreading, as you know, throughout West Europe in particular, even though hijab is of course much more complicated than such racial and civilizational discourses allow. What does this sense of criminalization tell you about the politics of Islamic clothing?

JUNAID: It’s ironic that many well-meaning folks with liberal, left, or progressive views can absolutely not understand how veiling in any of its forms from hijab to full niqab can be a choice and a radical critique of the contradictions of humanist values. They will say: “those women are so oppressed,” and chalk it up to patriarchy, a sort of passivity that requires a rescue narrative. As many postcolonial scholars and feminists have argued Muslim women veil for many reasons, despite the imperial hubris many have in thinking they need saving. The reality is we live in a patriarchal world in which the veil is a source of adhering to religious beliefs of piety and humility while also finding avenues of participation, and in the context of the US it is a source of protection in a general society that is Islamophobic. In the US, the increasing movement to veil comes in the context of the rise of anti-Muslim racism since the early 1970s. The hijab, in fact, has empowered many women in the US public sphere to deal with racism and the double standards of sexism that are structural and place them within the history in the US of dominating women and communities of color.  Although Europe and France in particular, have their own histories of colonialism and context of anti-immigrant racism that has led to growing discontent of the vast social disparities many of these communities face, Islam is seen as having too much culture in contrast to the demands of a liberated monocultural nationalism. The situation in European national publics is far worse for Muslims but there are similar logics that connect all of these places in terms of Islamophobia and racism – and the failure to adequately address these issues.

MIMI: What are your thoughts on the blog, “Muslims Wearing Things,” (subtitled “Muslims and Their Garb”) which is one activist’s response to the ways in which the Muslim body is always already rendered “alien” through certain sartorial signs?

JUNAID: I think what the website is about out is pretty self-evident, so I don’t have much to say. Instead I would point your readers to the work of Wafaa Bilal who has engaged in some amazing art practices regarding the body, geopolitical mapping, and death. In his performance art piece entitled “…And Counting,” he makes his body a site of the memory of war, killing, and art as activism. It’s some really heavy stuff that is surprisingly straightforward as an aesthetic practice. Ronak Kapadia, a graduate student at NYU, has been writing some brilliant things about this. He should be the next tie to this thread.

Many thanks to Junaid Rana for answering these questions! Again, Check out information about his book Terrifying Muslims here.

It is frustrating and disappointing to catch hell in mainstream society for being Muslim and also within the Muslim community for being African-American. When I am not perceived as an oppressed Muslim woman in need of liberation, I am seen as an ignorant and potentially unruly black woman.
- Jameelah Xochitl Medina, PhD candidate and author, excerpted from I Speak For Myself (via The Christian Science Monitor)

At a time when America’s Muslim communities are constantly under scrutiny by both the media and political figures, I Speak For Myself is an especially relevant – and especially necessary – work.

Edited by Maria Ebrahimji, an executive producer for CNN, and Zahra Suratwala, a writer and business consultant based out of Chicago, ISFM is a collection of 40 essays by American Muslim women. And I’m pleased to no end to report that among them is our friend, recognized badass and editor of Muslimah Media Watch, Fatemeh Fakhraie, whose essay was highlighted in MMW’s own review of the book:

Perhaps put most intimately by Fatemeh is the theme of longing for the country of our parents as a means to getting closer to our identity. She writes,

“Searching for himself and a better life drew Baba away from the Islamic Republic of Iran; searching for myself and my roots draws me nearer to it. Yet in reality, it is not the republic I am drawn to. Rather, I am trying to get nearer to my father through this land where my ancestors are buried.”

Other reoccurring themes include birth names, balancing hyphenated identities, the need to be validated by both Americans and Muslims and, of course, hijab.

While these themes seem to be woven, to some extent, into each narrative, the narratives themselves are varied in scope.

We’ll have more on ISFM in the coming days, but for now, we want to encourage you to order the book here.

Note: Trigger Warning

Since the days of Prohibition, Juarez has been a place for First World visitors to come and indulge in any number of illicit pleasures (alcohol, guns, drugs, sex). It is also the site where global capital has been making a killing to the tune of billions of dollars in annual profit…Because pollution laws are conveniently lax, the factories can emit fumes and dump waste without much concern or coversight. For all these reason, the U.S.-Mexico border has been made into something of an international sacrifice zone.

I’m not sure how old I was when I first heard about the women who were being sexually violated, horribly mutilated, and discarded like garbage in the desert surrounding Ciudad Juarez, Mexico. The femicide that has claimed the lives of hundreds of women–with thousands more unaccounted for–began in 1993, although no one can really know for sure. Looking at several of the time frames listed in Making a Killing: Femicide, Free Trade, and La Frontera and doing the math, I was stunned to realize that I’ve been hearing about this femicide for at least fifteen years now. Over the years, I’ve been even more stunned to learn how many people still don’t know that the murders are even taking place.

To give a brief overview: since 1993, hundreds of women have been found in the desert, deserted lots, and landfills, as well as in more public areas. Mexican government officials and various NGOs estimate that around 350-600 murders have occurred, though there’s no way to get an exact figure, especially since thousands of women have disappeared without a trace over the years. The youngest of the (known) victims are five years old and the oldest are in their seventies, but most of the victims are teenagers and young women in their early twenties, many of whom worked in maquiladoras along the border. Before dying, many of the women suffered through various forms of unimaginable cruelty–stabbings, burnings, beatings, rape, genital mutilation, breast mutilation. Because of the nature of the murders, the femicide has often been sensationalized by the media. But as one of the book’s contributors, a forensic psychologist named Candice Skrapec, writes:

[The crime scenes in Juarez] are like what we see in North America in cases involving the sexual violation of the victims…the motive may be less sensational, and, in fact, more like what we are accustomed to seeing: sexual violations of victims for purposes of personal gratification on the part of the offenders who then discard the bodies.

Yet to this day, the crimes continue to go unpunished. As more information about the femicide came to light, the victims were the ones who were initially blamed by the government, police, and the media for their own murders and disappearances; they were rumored to be prostitutes or wild girls who liked to stay out and party, leaving themselves vulnerable to attack.

Many of the victims were young women from rural areas in Mexico who had come to Juarez to find work in the factories; this influx of young women and the increased demand for a female work force challenged traditional gender roles, and the femicide was portrayed by many to be a result of this disruption of patriarchal norms. In the essay titled “Gender, Order, and Femicide,” the authors write:

If, for women, entrance into the paid labor force often meant acquisition of greater independence, increased status within the family, and freedom to socialize outside the home, it also underscored a process that required local and complex negotiations regarding how these changes would be understood and implemented….To the extent, then, that the failure of maquiladora development began to be written in terms of men’s absence from the maquilas, women workers were cast as a problem rather than another exploited group within Mexico’s struggling development plans, and all women became a target for male resentment.

Perhaps because I was born and raised on the Texas-Mexico border, perhaps because, for the entire time I’ve been aware of the femicide, I’ve also been in the age group that most of the murdered and kidnapped young women fall into, I’ve always felt drawn to the horrific events taking place in and around Juarez. One of the first papers I wrote in grad school was an analysis of media representations of the murdered women. I traveled to Juarez for that project (though I had been there before years earlier with my family), walking around and looking at the black crosses painted on pink backgrounds throughout the city in remembrance of the murdered women. In the years since, the only reports of violence in that area that I hear about have been related to drug cartels, and I’ve often wondered what effect this sharp increase in violence has had on the femicide and its (in)visibility to the rest of the world.

When I heard about Making a Killing, I was immediately drawn to it. Alicia Gaspar de Alba and Georgina Guzmán have put together a powerful book. Though it is mostly academic in nature, Making a Killing also has a very human aspect to it that might appeal to non-academic readers.

The book is divided into three parts: “Interventions,” “¡Ni Una Mas!,” and “Testimonios.” Part One provides a socioeconomic examination of the murders. Taking the effects of the global economy, NAFTA, the prevalence of maquiladoras along the border, and the influence of patriarchal ideals into consideration, this section gives readers a closer look many of the key factors that have allowed the femicide to continue. Part Two takes a closer look at the local and global activism that has developed in response to the femicide. The final section of the book gives some of the victims’ mothers a chance to speak out about their personal experiences. In this section, a forensic psychologist, Candice Skrapec, explains the femicide from a forensic perspective. An artist, Rigo Maldonado, closes this section with his testimonio on activism through art.

For the sake of brevity, I won’t go into detail on each essay in the book, though a full review can easily be written on every one. Instead, I will say that Part Two, ”¡Ni Una Mas!,” especially appealed to me. This section contained many critical readings of feminist and activist responses that have taken place over the years, and it raised many questions about ethics and the “othering” of the victims and their families. In 2004, for instance, a large V-Day march was organized by Eve Ensler. In “The Suffering of the Other,” the authors write:

[W]hen the call for the V-Day march was received, questions circulated in private conversations: What for? Isn’t it too late? Why not last year, when three more victims were found? Why not seven years ago, when we were struggling to prevent more murders? Why after hundreds of victims? Why’s benefiting from this march? Far or unfair, this is how the majority of the local activists felt and how they structured their feelings. The spirit had its reasons…[Several local NGOs] openly appropriated and misued Eve Enslers’ V-Day event in Juarez by erasing the main objective of agloval movement destined to stop violence against women and girls.

The authors, who themselves participated in the march, were also introspective about their involvement in any “othering” that may have occured as a direct result of the march. They raise many important points about privilege and the practices of using a victims’ pain in order to further one’s cause. This quote in particular stood out to me:

Juarense women cannot be seen as a homogenous group of “Third World subalterns.” This (mis)representation has had serious implications in that privileged women in the locality have been uncritically and socially constructed as the benefactors when they, intentionally or not, have perpetuated oppressive practices toward underprivileged women in Ciudad Juarez.

Other essays that were of high interest to me were the ones on the victim-blaming in government femicide awareness campaigns, as well as those that critically examined media representations of the victims. The mothers’testimonios in Part Three were also powerful–and painful–to read.

The only thing I wish the book had included is an update on the current status of things. Rarely a day goes by when I don’t hear about Juarez in the news, but all of those news reports are related to the cartel-related violence that claims the lives of thousands of people in the city each year. Though that, too, is a narrative that cannot and should not be ignored, it seems that reports of femicide-related news have been subsumed by those related to the drug wars. Because of that last fact, I am all the more grateful that this book was published.

By Guest Contributor Jorge Antonio Vallejos, cross-posted from Black Coffee Poet

We all have a noise in our mind at some point.  That thing we are thinking about, contemplating, frustrated over.  It buzzes in your ear and on your brain.  Rudyard Fearon’s Noise in my Mind is a collection of the thoughts that have the Jamaican poet up at night writing after a lot of thinking.  In his minimalist style the talented scribe says a lot with very few words.

Working at a library by day Fearon puts pen to pad at night.  He stays at work after his shift ends to read, write, re-write, and better himself at his chosen craft.  And you can see it in his short poems made up of five or so lines that leave you thinking for five hours.

In The Better Way, Fearon explores a reality that many hope never to witness: suicide on the subway.  You always hear rumors about daily jumpers; the codes spoken over the loud speaker get people thinking that every “emergency” at another station means death; and a couple of times a year the cover of the newspaper has a story about someone deciding their end, or worse, the end of another.

Fearon writes

“so little is said

of the man who LIFE

ends in a subway.”

Fearon spells life in capitals and points to life ending the person as opposed to the person ending their life.  Which is it?  Is it both?  Can it be both?  Is it one or the other?  Is Fearon exploring a spiritual idea?  Is Fearon slashing the possibility of spirituality taking play in such sad situations?

Fearon ends The Better Way with

“so little is said…

except in an alleyway.”

Alleyways are empty, dark, and hold large trash bins.  Those that live in alleyways are society’s discarded and forgotten ones.  Forgotten like those who LIFE ends on the subway.  If the numbers are as high as people suggest how can you remember all those people?  Still, there’s a poet who writes into the night and has such peoples on his mind.

Most people have heard of, and know, the acronym DUI—Driving Under the Influence.  Have you heard of driving while Black?  Better yet, have you heard of what I like to call WOC—walking while of colour?  Certain peoples not of the dominant class get harassed by those who are supposed to serve and protect because of the way they look and dress.  Fearon has experienced this and shares one of these instances in “Black Bud.”  Writing in patua, his mother tongue (with a glossary provided at the book’s end), Fearon shares what it’s like to walk while of colour:

“ah fraid fe walk pon street,

De way de cops dem a shoot,

Ah feel like black bud pon tree.”

Fearon writes of being surrounded by six cruisers and questioned for no reason.  A woman from a window yells that she is watching what the cops are doing.  Fearon is let go.  Later that night a young Black man is not so lucky.

“me never did realize me luck,

‘Til me read de next day bout de Barnett bwoy dat dem kill…”

Many poets question society.  They explore their surroundings.  And they speak out against injustice.  Fearon is one such poet.  It could have been Fearon that the papers wrote about the following day.  Knowing this, the poet writes of how fragile life is and how certain powers prey on certain peoples.

Fearon ends Black Bud by giving thanks for not following the instinctual urge to run.

“Fah if me foot did obey me brain dat night…

Me wouldn’t live to tell yu me story!”

There is a certain responsibility that comes with being a poet.  More than being disciplined to write, there is the responsibility to share story and write them well and in a way that people understand.  Fearon knows to whom much is given much is required.  This is why we get to read his story of walking while of colour.

Good writers are good readers.  Fearon is a reader who displays his vast knowledge on the page.  In the spirit of those who came before him, Fearon’s poem A Curve follows E.E Cummings’ 1a) (a leaf falls on loneliness):

Noise in my Mind has much to share with all readers and lovers of the written word.  Fearon uses traditional styles as well as experimenting with language, sound and form.  More important, he leaves you thinking.  His hard-hitting poems resound in your psyche.  His soft lullabies have you re- reading.  Whatever he writes leaves some sort of noise in your mind.

My, my, my. HBO is going all in with their fantasy acquisitions these days. First Game of Thrones and now Neil Gaiman’s American Gods. According to Deadline Hollywood:

The project was brought to HBO by Playtone partners Tom Hanks and Gary Goetzman, and it was brought to them by Robert Richardson. The plan is for Richardson and Gaiman to write the pilot together. [...]

American Gods, the 2002 book that won both the Stoker and Hugo Award among other prizes, lays out a battle between two sets of gods. One consists of the traditional gods and mythological creatures who got their power because people throughout history believed in them. They are losing steam as people’s beliefs wane and are in danger of being supplanted by a new set of gods who reflect America’s preoccupation with technological advancements and obsessions with media, celebrity, technology and drugs. The protagonist is an ex-con who becomes the traveling partner of a conman who turns out to be one of the older gods trying to recruit troops to battle the upstart deities.

The main character of American Gods is Shadow, a wandering ex-convict who finds himself in a battle of mythology – the older Gods of folklore, brought to America by waves of immigration and kept alive by their devotees are set to face off against the newer Gods like the internet and the media. But what is most compelling to me isn’t just the story line – it’s that once again, Gaiman has been explicit about which of his characters are nonwhite by design. Gaiman, writing on the WELL message boards, explains his thoughts around Shadow:

[I]n my head at least he’s one of those people whose race doesn’t read easily — in the celebrity world, Vin Deisel’s an example of the same kind of look. But it seemed appropriate in a book about America that the hero was of mixed race.

Gaiman is known for writing with racial politics in mind. Back when I read The Sandman series, I had assumed Dream and his cohort where generally intended to be white, though folks from other, browner mythologies would occasionally enter the world. After that, I read American Gods and Anansi Boys and was thrilled to realize there were characters of color all over the place. Anansi Boys took it to a new level, by specifically marking white characters as other. I also read Neverwhere, and coded the Marquis as white in my mind – so when I watched the BBC version, I was astounded to see there were *two* black characters cast in major roles. So, for that reason, I’ve always been a bit more fond of Neil Gaiman compared to other fantasy writers – even if every book isn’t inclusive, his worlds, overall, are far more inclusive than the average urban fantasy universe.

Now, this does not mean that Gaiman is immune from the occasional bout of race fail – Debbie Reese of American Indians in Children’s Literature had a very public go-round with him last year, about how he conceptualized the United States. In her initial post, “What Neil Gaiman Said“, she explains:

In a 2008 interview about his The Graveyard Book, Neil Gaiman said

“The great thing about having an English cemetery is I could go back a very, very, very long way. And in America, you go back 250 years (in a cemetery), and then suddenly you’ve got a few dead Indians, and then you don’t have anybody at all, unless you decide to set it up in Maine or somewhere and sneak in some Vikings.”

Really, Mr. Gaiman? Is that what you think?

I’m guessing (or hoping, perhaps) that Mr. Gaiman knows better, and might want to recall those words. Maybe he did recall those words, somewhere… Has anyone got info on that?

Neil Gaiman comes to her comment section, and they engage in a bit of a back and forth, prompting Reese to write a few more responses, including a timeline of how the conversation progressed on Twitter.

A while later, Gaiman responds on his blog with an apology, saying:

Over at http://americanindiansinchildrensliterature.blogspot.com/2010/04/what-neil-gaiman-said.html Debbie Reese correctly called me out earlier this year on something particularly stupid and offensive I said last year when I was asked at ABA about why I hadn’t set The Graveyard Book in the US. I think I mostly was trying to answer with my Author Head rather than my Being Interviewed Head — trying to describe how I perceived my potential cast of characters in a European Style graveyard in a small US city (like the UK one in The Graveyard Book). I remember thinking at the time that it was a remarkably stupid thing to have said, but stupid things come out of your mouth when you’re being interviewed, and you press on.

I was put out of sorts by Deb’s initial post (mostly because I was reading it going “but that OBVIOUSLY wasn’t what I meant”), and was idiotically grumpy on Twitter, but when I was called on it (by Pam Noles), and finally looked at the actual words recorded, I realised that people were perfectly sensibly taking what I said to indicate that I thought that a) the US was pretty much unpopulated before the arrival of the white colonists in the 17th century, and/or that b) I was being dismissive of the slaughter of Native Americans, or simply that c) Native Americans were somehow inconsequential in the history of the Americas. (None of which was my intention. But intentions only take you so far.) And you don’t use a phrase like “dead Indians” without summoning, wittingly or unwittingly, the shadow of the phrase “the only good Indian is a dead Indian”.

People have asked how I would have felt about the phrase “a few dead Jews” in the same place in the interview, which made me feel additionally guilty, as one of the things I missed about The Graveyard Book was that I didn’t actually put any Jews in my graveyard. I wanted to, but couldn’t make the history and the burial customs work.

Probably I should write a Graveyard Book story with some secretly buried Jews in it, and some dead Native Americans a very long way from home.

Anyway, apologies to all concerned, particularly to Debbie Reese.

Reese accepted the apology, but in a later post pointed out why she still had a problem with the conversation and reaction from both Gaiman and his fans:

As I wrote my post yesterday (Neil Gaiman on “a few dead Indians”), I went back and forth with myself as I thought about what Gaiman said. He offered an apology. A Miss-Manners-type-person would say I should accept his apology.

But, I didn’t want an apology. [...]

His reaction aside, he gave his readers three options as to how his remark might be read. Continuing with what I excerpted above, he wrote:

… that I thought that a) the US was pretty much unpopulated before the arrival of the white colonists in the 17th century, and/or that b) I was being dismissive of the slaughter of Native Americans, or simply that c) Native Americans were somehow inconsequential in the history of the Americas. (None of which was my intention. But intentions only take you so far.)

As I said when I first wrote about his remark, I was pretty sure he knew better, and I think what he said above is evidence of that. He’s told us what he thinks and he acknowledges that intent matters little.

I would have liked him to go further than he did. I would have liked him to say “I should have corrected myself right away. I should have said something when the interview was published. But, I didn’t.” He tells us that he knew it was a stupid thing to say, but that he just moved on. His decision to just move on is important for him and all of us to consider. WHY did he just move on? Did he think nobody would notice? Well, he was right, wasn’t he? Nobody noticed for over a year! How many times was that interview read? How many people read it and didn’t notice that he said “a few dead Indians”?!

That is the problem. Hundreds (thousands? millions?) of times, those words were read, and nobody pointed them out. What I wanted from Neil Gaiman was for him to say this:

PEOPLE OF THE WORLD WHO READ THAT INTERVIEW AND MY WORDS!!!

WE ALL SCREWED UP!

WHY DIDN’T WE SAY SOMETHING?

DON’T WE CARE?

ARE WE TOO BUSY TO TAKE A MOMENT TO SAY SOMETHING?

IF WE ARE TOO BUSY, DOESN’T THAT MEAN THAT WE’VE CHOSEN NOT TO INTERRUPT A CYCLE OF UNINTENDED WORD-VIOLENCE ON A GROUP OF PEOPLE WHO MANY OF US SAY WE RESPECT, LOVE, ADMIRE AND HONOR?

A GROUP OF PEOPLE WHOSE CHILDREN DON’T SUCCEED IN SCHOOL?

A GROUP OF PEOPLE WHOSE CHILDREN COMMIT SUICIDE WAY TOO OFTEN?

See what I wanted from Neil Gaiman? Due to his status, he is a person of influence. I wanted him to use that influence and that incident in a much larger way than he did. If he did, his words would be a powerful force that would work towards a decrease in the messed-up ways that American Indians and Indigenous peoples are portrayed in children’s and young adult books, and in society (like the Hilfiger ad), too.

How much influence does Gaiman ultimately have?

Quite a bit, actually. Another reason Neil earned my adoration was his conversation about why the book Anansi Boys wasn’t ultimately made into a film, though the screenplay was finished and the rights were optioned:

Gaiman had offers to make a film out of his 2005 best seller Anansi Boys, about the sons of an African god discovering their magical background while living in the corrupt modern world, but moviemakers wanted to change the lead black characters to white or drop the magical elements altogether.

“I don’t need the money,” Gaiman says. “Not needing the money puts me in a magical place because I can say no. I like the idea of having good movies made or having no movies made.”

So theoretically, he could flex his authority with HBO and Pantone to ensure that American Gods doesn’t become yet another white washed adaptation.

The Gods referenced run the gamut – Loki, Odin, Anansi, Kali, Bast, Anubis, and Ganesha all have roles. So, theoretically, this should be a windfall for actors of color who want to get into fantasy worlds. In addition, with the main character being mixed race with an indigenous woman as a love interest, all the producers would have to do is go by the descriptions in the book to have a racially balanced adaptation. And Gaiman, while not immune from all the issues that inform the worlds fantasy writers create, has shown a willingness to discuss and engage with critique in a way that other authors do not.

I’m going to be cautiously optimistic – but let’s all keep an eye out for casting notices.

(Note: For the purposes of this conversation, let’s leave his spouse – Amanda Palmer – out of this. She has her own set of race fail and ability fail, but it would be impossible to state as outsiders where her views and Gaiman’s views intersect or diverge.)

By Arturo R. García

Professor Manning Marable lived long enough to finish his life’s work. Marable, a prolific author, activist and academic, died this past Friday of complications from pneumonia in New York City, just three days before the release of Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention, a comprehensive revisiting of the life and times of the civil rights leaders he put together over the course of two decades.

As The New York Times reported, Reinvention provides a challenge to many existing stories about Malcolm, including his famous autobiography, written by Alex Haley:

Malcolm X himself contributed to many of the fictions, Mr. Marable argues, by exaggerating, glossing over or omitting important incidents in his life. These episodes include a criminal career far more modest than he claimed, an early homosexual relationship with a white businessman, his mother’s confinement in a mental hospital for nearly 25 years and secret meetings with leaders of groups as divergent as the Ku Klux Klan and the Palestine Liberation Organization.

“Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention” shows, for instance, that at a time when Malcolm X claimed in the autobiography to have “devoted himself to increasingly violent crime” in New York, he was actually in Lansing, Mich., his hometown. Mr. Marable attributes the embroidery of “amateurish attempts at gangsterism” to Malcolm X’s wish to demonstrate that the Nation of Islam’s gospel of pride and self-respect had the power to redeem even the most depraved criminal.

“In many ways, the published book is more Haley’s than its author’s,” Mr. Marable writes, noting that Haley, who died in 1992, was a liberal Republican and staunch integrationist who held “racial separation and religious extremism in contempt” but was “fascinated by the tortured tale of Malcolm’s personal life.”

The book’s completion, it could be said, was an exclamation point on a journey that, for Marable, began linked to another civil rights trail-blazer, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr, whose funeral Marable attended at the urging of his mother.

“With Martin’s death, my childhood abruptly ended,” Marable wrote. “My understanding of political change began a trajectory from reform to radicalism.”

In the academic arena, Marable’s trajectory led him to a Bachelor of Arts degree from Earlham College and a PhD from the University of Maryland. He would go on to be the founder of departments for African-American studies at both Colgate University and Columbia University, where, as Professor Melissa Harris-Perry – herself a noted commentator and activist – noted, he emerged as much more than a purely professional mentor:

“To be a student or a junior faculty member in Manning’s office was to wait for the smile,” she wrote in The Nation. “He would listen intently and seriously as you told him about the project you envisioned, the finding you made, or a conclusion you’d drawn. As you spoke, his face was a mask of stillness covering a never-resting intellect just below the surface. It was more than a little intimidating to present an idea to Manning. But if he liked what you were up to or thought you had uncovered a promising direction then his face would crack into a broad and compelling smile that made the whole nerve-wracking experience worth it. If you got the smile then you knew you could keep going.”

Marable is survived by three children, two stepchildren and his wife, Leith Mullings Marable who told The Root she thought he would want to be remembered for having contributed to what she called “the black freedom struggle.”

He would want to be remembered for being both a scholar and an activist and as someone who saw the two as not being separated,” she said. “He believed that both [callings] went together and enhanced each other.”

Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention is in stores as of today.

By Guest Contributor Shannon Riffe, cross-posted from The Interrobangs

My corner of the blogosphere erupted last week with the announcement that Jennifer Lawrence will play Katniss in the upcoming film versions of The Hunger Games trilogy.  I agree with a lot of the outrage, and found editorials like this one, obviously written by someone who has never read the book, infuriating. So let’s lay it all out on the table.

Why are so many people so upset about this announcement? It’s just a movie, right?

It is just a movie. And that’s exactly the point. It is a frivolous, entertaining, blockbuster of an action franchise that will be sure to draw big publicity and big crowds and probably major box office bucks. And that’s why this would have been an amazing chance to take a “gamble” on someone who didn’t look like the stereotypical Hollywood starlet. Can you think of the last time that a person of color fronted a big budget action movie? How about a woman of color?

One only need look at the endless parade of remakes and sequels to know that Hollywood doesn’t like to take risks. But a huge, devoted fan base has fallen in love with these books and with Katniss, described as olive-skinned and dark haired. Yet the director still couldn’t extend the casting call to include anyone other than Caucasian? Before the Harry Potter movies, no one knew who Daniel Radcliffe, Rupert Grint, or Emma Watson were. Why wasn’t an unknown actress of biracial, Latina or Mediterranean heritage given a shot? They could cast Tyler Perry in drag (*shudder*) in this role and it would still make buckets of money.

Katniss’ racial identity is left somewhat vague, we don’t know what she is, but we know what she’s not. She’s not blonde haired and blue eyed like her mother and sister and Peeta. She’s dark, like Gale (can’t wait to see who gets that part). And even though we know that the cinema magic that can turn handsome 40-ish Brad Pitt into 80-year old Benjamin Button can surely turn J.Law into the grey-eyed, black haired Katniss, that’s not good enough.

Because in a world where the majority of readers seem to not even understand that Rue is black (example A, example, B, example C – just read the comments on this one), a wig and a spray tan falls far short. Luckily the director has stated unequivocally that Rue and Thresh are black. So I guess we’ve got that to celebrate, even though it should have never been up for debate in the first place.

As a woman of color who reads and writes YA, I’m committed to seeing more characters of color in stories where their race isn’t the issue. I found a lot to admire in the Hunger Games and its subtle, smart treatment of race and class. And that’s why I am so disappointed with this casting choice, even though it’s just a movie. Ultimately, maybe the answer to this issue is that all of us who enjoy writing and reading YA fiction continue to work on our stories, continue to question and critique the who, what, and why of our characters’ identities. And maybe one day a bestselling YA book and its film remake will both feature girls of color in the lead role.

Image courtesy of NYMag

By Arturo R. García

Toward the end of Down & Delirious In Mexico City: The Aztec Metropolis In The Twenty-First Century, author Daniel Hernandez talks about encountering a group of seven muses. It’s a credit to his craft and this book that he’s able to weave the entire septet together skillfully, not just with each other, but with the whole other array of characters that inhabit the worlds he encounters as part of his own journey.

The title of Down & Delirious calls to mind Hunter S. Thompson’s more famous stories, and the similarity comes through in the content: the stories we get are part-journalism, part-diary and part-history lesson. But whereas HST dove headlong into chronicling the excesses of things he despised, Hernandez’s stories show him on the path toward becoming not just a visitor to Mexico City, but a full-fledged capitalino, is one of reconciliation: “Mestizaje became a material truth operating inside me, inside all of us,” he writes. “So Mexico City, teeming with millions and millions, as surreal as Los Angeles, as majestic as New York, a mighty city all its own, became both my crossroads and my destination.”

Along the way, in Hernandez’s hands, the megacity itself becomes a character, not just because of its’ size or its’ multitude of places to be and to do – though those get visited in depth – but because its’ somehow has produced a population of smoking enthusiasts despite its’ reputation as one of the world’s smoggiest cities:

During this extra-smoggy weekend in January, residents in my building make an effort to go outside as little as possible. We open beers and talk. In the darkened interior of an apartment upstairs, my neighbor Ponce, a cartoonist and illustrator born and raised in the capital, calmly explains the air of normalcy while smoking a few singles. “We’re mutants,” Ponce says.

I down my can of beer, ask for an extra smoke, and retreat back to my apartment. What Ponce says makes my eyes pop in recognition. To be raised in Mexico City, or to willingly assimilate yourself to it, is to relinquish control over your natural state. The environment physically alters you. Because we’ve physically altered it. Ponce has uttered a cosmic truth. The Mexico City mutation is real.

Hernandez’s own assimilation grounds the rest of his stories. He finds fast friends in the Federal District’s fashionista crowd (“I have never seen posing like this in Los Angeles, and people in Los Angeles carry posing in their DNA”); he joins the city’s old-school punk community in their hoyo fonquis; he watches people mourn their dead, then finds himself in mourning. Love and religion, crime and music, all collide around him. But somewhere in the middle, Hernandez manages to find the seven muses, add them to his own, and give us portraits of a city, and a people, on a constant search for its’ own redefinition.