Katie Price, also known as Jordan, is a British TV personality and former model. I’m Australian, so I can’t claim to know much about her. The one solid thing I came into this piece knowing is that she is the subject of a lot of ire in the way only British tabloids can produce. Her eldest child, ten-year-old Harvey, was fathered by a former Trinidad and Tobago football player called Dwight Yorke, and is blind and autistic. You can see how this is going to go already.

In December 2010, a comedian called Frankie Boyle performed a routine on the UK’s Channel 4 poking fun at Katie Price through Harvey. It was pretty awful in a number of ways, but the bit I want to focus on is the following joke, which refers to Katie’s former relationship with Alex Reid: “I have a theory about the reason Jordan married a cage-fighter: she needed a man strong enough to stop Harvey from fucking her.”

This isn’t the first joke about Harvey, even if it is the first one calling him a sexual predator, and it certainly isn’t the first about Katie. Harvey is so much in the spotlight as part and parcel of the usual potshots at his mother, whose sexualised image is the subject of a lot of media ire. He’s also a prominent subject simply because, fat, disabled, and black as he is, Harvey is far from the kind of “celebrity baby” the tabloid public like to fuss over and photograph.

I never thought I’d link to the likes of the Daily Mail, but that’s where Katie wrote a response to this, in her 30 June piece promoting her show Katie: Standing Up for Harvey. I’m really uncomfortable with this piece on a number of levels, particularly in that it’s promoting yet another campaign “on behalf of” disabled people, run by a parent, rather than, you know, in support of the activism we disabled folks do ourselves, thanks. In any case, from the piece:

“Imagine if the reason Boyle gave for saying Harvey was capable of raping me was not because of his disability but because he is black. People would understand how discriminatory that is. It is just as discriminatory when the joke is based on someone’s disability.”

Sad to say, lots of people can and do make that kind of joke. I’m not as sure as Katie that we can entirely separate out Harvey’s disability from his blackness here. Even though the focus is on his being disabled, there’s a silent and potent message about the scary black man. This joke was made in a context in which black male sexuality is seen as inherently threatening and violent. So uncontrollably so, in fact, that one’s own mother might be subject to the sexual violence one mindlessly inflicts. That idea of mindless aggression positions a marginalised and vulnerable person as the true threat, and it’s an idea that is common to both how blackness and disability are figured. And, on top of that, he’s just a kid, and he’s being sexualised in a really horrific way. Harvey, as a young black man of nine, is being subjected to a multiple whammy here, and, while his race didn’t explicitly come up, only one referent was necessary to spark a set of associations.

There’s a lot more to that joke. Katie needs a big strong (possibly white; I’m not sure of Reid’s identity) saviour to protect her from the scary black guy? Really? More than that, Katie Price is a survivor of sexual violence, and here her relationship with one of the people she loves best in the world is being painted with that. That’s completely unacceptable. You don’t get to use the relationship between a mother and son to inflict racist, ableist, horrible rubbish on them in the name of satirising celebrity. They’re human beings.

According to Mark Sweney at The Guardian, “The Channel 4 chief executive, David Abraham, has admitted that he personally signed off” on the joke. “We obviously recognise that in that particular case a piece of humour that was contextualised in the programme late at night was then passed on in the media and out of context and did cause a reaction we had not intended,” said Abraham. I don’t think there’s a context that makes that right, buddy.

(Image Credit: The Sun)

I have experienced a general ignorance about racial and Indigenous issue in queer and femme communities, and an expectation that anti-racist activism be considered secondary to feminist, anti-homophobic and anti-femmephobic activism, when queer femmes of colour often experience our identities to be one holistic piece. It is an impossible request for a femme of colour to separate her experiences as a person of colour from her experiences as a femme or her experiences as a queer, and it is unreasonable to ask us to prioritise racism last simply because it is not something that affects white femmes. Significantly, this attitude promotes the idea that femme is an identity that cannot co-exist with an identity of colour, that one must choose between being a person of colour and being a femme, or that being femme is a “white thing”. This drives femmes of colour away from femme community, from femme organisations, and possibly away from femme itself as an identity and a self-label. If femme communities and organisations are to acknowledge and embrace the diversity that exists amongst femmes, we must make an effort to be deliberately inclusive, to work to have femme viewed as something other than a white identity, and to acknowledge that working against racism should be something done by everyone.

As a femme of colour who is read as white, I’ve experienced a lot of white queers simply misracialising me. Queers who know quite well that I’m Indigenous will ignore this fact, either through their own white privilege, through refusal to correct their ignorance of Indigenous issues, or through a kind of blindness where they cannot see past my skin. While recent years have seen an attempt by many Australian queer communities to address issues of internalised racism and become more inclusive of racially diverse members, they often still remain white centric and exclusionary to people of colour. The only answer to this is for every member of these communities to actively address inclusivity as a priority, to work at addressing their own internalised prejudices and biases, and to aim for a diverse community as an ultimate goal. I strongly encourage everyone here to take the time to read a little of the awareness-raising work being written by some of the amazing femmes of colour and other queer women of colour, even if most of it is coming out of the US, where there is a far more established femme of colour community than there is here. Hopefully we’ll start to see some homegrown voices soon.

- From Feministe, June 15

By Arturo R. García

Now that DC Comics has announced all 52 books for its’ upcoming reboot/relaunch, it can be said that, yes, the company looks to be featuring a more diverse group of characters as protagonists – for now. But what happens after the new DCU debuts in September will be the key.

A round-up of the titles announced after June 6, and further analysis, follows under the cut.

Title: Static Shock (pictured above)
What We Know So Far: Following a long-delayed integration into the DCU and a tribute issue honoring his creator, the late, great Dwayne McDuffie, Virgil Hawkins – the best-known character from the Milestone Comics universe – will get a chance to shine on his own. His new series will be written by Milestone alum John Rozum, who has been writing the adventures of another POC hero, Xombi.

Title: Legion Lost, featuring Dawnstar
What We Know So Far: This spin-off of the long-running and frequently-rebooted Legion of Super-Heroes franchise will deal with a group of Legionnaires stuck on present-day Earth. Dawnstar has been identified as a descendant of a Native American tribe abducted by extraterrestrials long ago. Besides her, however, it looks like the character in the goggles, who has not been named yet, might be another POC.

Title: Blue Beetle
What We Know So Far: Fulfilling DC Chief Creative Officer Geoff Johns’ pledge to protect the character, the new Beetle, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jaime_Reyes_%28comics#Jaime_Reyes“>Jaime Reyes whose profile has been boosted thanks to appearances on the Batman: The Brave & The Bold animated show and an episode of Smallville, will live on in the realigned DCU. Hopefully, the extra emphasis will propel this series, the character’s second solo book since debuting as part of the Infinite Crisis story in 2006.

Title: Birds of Prey, featuring Katana
What We Know So Far: There’s concern regarding this title on a couple of levels. Katana’s addition to the team is encouraging – she’s been established as one of the DCU’s more professional heroes for years, most prominently with The Outsiders, but the reimagining of her costume makes her look like Fuji, from Wildstorm’s version of the Stormwatch series.

Besides Katana’s new appearance, some readers have shown concern regarding the removal of Barbara Gordon, who anchored the team as the super-hacker Oracle. Following years of serving as quite possibly comics’ best hero in a wheelchair ever (surpassing Marvel’s Professor X), Gordon will be re-cast as Batgirl for her own solo title.

Longtime Birds writer Gail Simone, who has scripted part of Barbara’s journey to providence over the past few years, undeniably has an enthusiasm for the character; in an interview with Newsarama, she referred to Gordon as her “spirit guide character” into the business. Simone also has a track record supporting diversity: she created the second Atom, Ryan Choi, with writer Grant Morrison, and has participated in pro-diversity panels at San Diego Comic-Con. That said, even though Simone will be writing Gordon’s new adventures, the move is a gamble for DC for two reasons: the company is apparently wagering that a) new readers will gravitate toward a Batgirl who hasn’t been active since the critically-acclaimed story Batman: The Killing Joke; and b) that current readers supporting Bryan Q. Miller’s work with the newest Batgirl, Stephanie Brown, will follow the Bat-brand toward a character they’ve known for years as Oracle.

Title: Batwing
What We Know So Far: Maybe the most surprising new book involves the Batman of Africa, David Zavimbi, spinning out of Batman Incorporated. While having a black character use the Mantle of the Bat with Bruce Wayne’s endorsement is worth cheering about, DC’s approach still has red flags surrounding it. Hopefully, not only will Zavimbi get a more detailed home than “Northern Africa,” but readers will get an explanation as to how one guy is supposed to cover a whole continent. Hopefully, writer Judd Winick will handle the situation more gracefully than Johns and DC did last month. Also: Batman Incorporated will be relaunched in 2012, which is encouraging.

Overall, out of the 52 new comics, five of them feature protagonists of color in a solo series: four Black characters and one Latino, all male. Add in team books like Justice League International (featuring Vixen and August General In Iron) Green Lantern Corps (John Stewart) New Guardians (Kyle Rayner), Legion Lost (Dawnstar and the unidentified other character) and Birds of Prey (Katana) and the number of featured POCs increases to thirteen. On the LGBT front, Batwoman will have her own series again; and writer Paul Cornell, who will pen a new version of Stormwatch, blogged that two gay characters last seen in The Authority, Apollo and Midnighter, “will remain out and proud.” As part of the Wildstorm universe, the two characters fell in love and eventually married. Whether that holds true now that Wildstorm has apparently been folded into DC continuity remains to be seen.

Still unaccounted for are Batwing’s fellow operative Cassandra Cain – the only adopted child of Bruce Wayne to not be featured in a new series; the rest of August General in Iron’s team, The Great Ten; DC’s resident spymaster, Amanda Waller; the new Aqualad, featured in both the Brightest Day storyline (with an alternate version of the character on the Young Justice animated series); detective-turned-vigilante Renee Montoya, who had been appearing in Birds of Prey as The Question; Singapore native Jenny Quantum, New York Latina The Engineer and Tibetan flyer Swift, who had appeared in The Authority with Apollo and Midnighter, and as noted above, Static is the only Milestone character so far slated to appear in the new DC continuity.

Even with those absences, though, the previews released over the past two weeks do point to a more racially diverse set of featured characters for the company – at least, compared to DC’s previews for comics released in both September 2010 and September 2009.

But then what?

According to Bleeding Cool, the company plans to run a nationwide TV ad campaign promoting the new titles. But if Batwing or Mister Terrific are positioned as being as important to this new status quo – heck, even mentioned as being in the same universe – as Superman or Batman, or if Blue Beetle is featured in ads on Univision, it will be a pleasant surprise. And it might be unscientific, but it’s not a good sign when Batwing and Mr. Terrific rank among the “leaders” in a “deadpool” thread run by Bleeding Cool over the weekend, where readers predicted, among other things, which title would get canceled first. How long will DC stick with these characters, or with Static, if sales fall below whatever projections DC has established? What indications are there that the company will even attempt to reach out to the POC audience?

Most importantly, what about current readers of color? Are you encouraged by these new titles? Are you optimistic Batwing, Static, or Mr. Terrific will see solo success?

Later this week, we’ll take a look at the trickiest – and perhaps most crucial – aspect of DC’s initiative: the creators behind the comics themselves.

Hosted by Arturo R. García

In one sense, “2.0″ kicked off what’s sure to become one of the show’s major plot points: Who’s really running Alex’s agenda? The episode veered back and forth between showing her being rescued and cleaned up by Nikita in preparation for infiltrating Division and, in the present, getting rushed into – ahem – service while the department tries to protect a smarmy former despot.

Sure, right now Alex is firmly in Nikita’s corners for reasons not-quite-known, but with Michael once again “getting too close” to the rookie agent, there’s sure to be a triangle of some sort developing in the weeks to come. Which still might mean bad news for Maggie Q’s title character, but in the meantime, at least she still gets to shoot people – seeing her blast a fool into the wall was fun – and crack a joke here and there. But not all the Table members are as high on the show anymore …

I’m glad we got to see more of the backstory between Nikita and Alex this early. Good work by both MQ and Fonseca.
Diana: I was glad to see their back story too, but that sweat chamber freaked me out a little.
Mahsino: I’m just going to go ahead and guess now that Nikita killed Alex’s parents. Yeah, it’s heavy handed and played out, but it’s also the CW.
jen*: That is totally possible, Mahsino.  And a little Jason Bourne-y. This show really recycles.
Andrea: Hmmmm…I’m feeling this show slightly differently two episodes in. I feel I’m watching a little too much of Alex and not enough of Nikita, even though Nikita is supposed to be the lead character/protagonist/main ass-kicker on the show.  Like True Blood, what I’m seeing is yet again, another spunky white girl whose pluckiness causes more danger than gets people out of danger. And, to be honest, I think Alex is a mole for Division or will turn so very soon.

Speaking of Maggie, that last encounter between Nikita and Michael was a nice moment for her – the character got to be funny and competent while completing her objective. But how’s the Michael character coming along for you?
Diana: He waited a little too long to go in after that creep beating up on Alex.  But I still like him.  He’s just the right amount of conflicted for me.
jen*: I am just not feeling him.  Everything about him is ‘too little, too late’ for me. [Especially waiting to help Alex.]  And I’m also not into Shane West.  So I’m a tad biased.
Andrea: West is trying to hard to be a hard-ass or conflicted or whatever anti-hero vibe he envisioning getting an Emmy for. Whatevs.
Arturo: That’s the problem with being The Guy In The Middle, I guess. Dude’s so serious he makes Michael Westen look jolly.

Meanwhile, Jaden’s antagonistic role seems to be progressing at a good pace. I don’t mind that she’s angry if she’s got good reason to be – and it makes sense for her to resent Alex at this stage, no?
Diana: It was a metaphor of corporate America and stereotypical all at once.  Strong, but angry black woman gets passed over in favor of the new blond girl with less experience.
Mahsino: To be fair, I wouldn’t call Alex a blond (*shrugs*I’ve been yelled at for calling people with lighter hair blond), but the white privilege still applies. The reasoning was probably something like: “Alex has more appeal” or  “Alex has better extensions” or some tired excuse.
jen*: Truth: Alex has better extensions.  Also, it seems pretty clear that Jaden’s gonna find out about the partnership with Nikita, unless the writers decide to make her an idiot.  I’d kinda like her to be a worthy opponent baddie, instead of a sidekick.
Andrea: Wait, Mahsino, didn’t Michael tell Alex in the pilot that Division chose her because she was an attractive young white woman?  And I sort of think that’s why the creative team’s giving a liiiiiittle too much face-time with Alex.  But the larger point about Jaden’s upset is well taken.  I just wanna know if she shops at the same wig store that Gabourey Sidibe shops at.  They wear some *atrocious* hair thangs.  (Yeah, I said it.)

On the not-so-good side, the Dollhouse comparisons are becoming harder to avoid, between Birkhoff’s Fran Kranz impersonation and the nature of Alex’s first assignment. But was I the only one surprised they didn’t tie in Alex’s past as a victim of female/sex-trafficking to the subplot?
Mahsino: Yeah that was weird and a little sloppy on the part of The Division- taking an unstable recovering drug addict and putting her back in the position that made her turn to drugs. Smart.
Diana: Well, the people who run The Division are supposed to be bastards and assassins are apparently expendable, so in that sense they probably didn’t care about her weaknesses that much since she was just there to be a sexual diversion and a punching bag.
jen*: I liked Dollhouse.  It had issues, but it had better story.  This was sloppy, and is turning the director of the Division into an almost cartoonish villain.  Is he really already evil-incarnate?  It’s episode 2.

Open Mic!
jen*: This show has already wriggled under my skin – notwithstanding my cringing at Shane West, I am invested.  That says a lot for Maggie Q and the girls.  I’m gonna guess that Birkhoff is helping Nikita, knowingly or unknowingly, and that Alex doesn’t know yet.  Cuz I’ve been getting that vibe.
Andrea: As boring as I find Michael, I do think he’s figured out that Alex is working with Nikita with the shoot-out.  He’s going to play along until he gets definite proof, but yeah.  Unless he figured that out by ep’s end…I fell asleep towards the end.
Arturo: One touch I thought was nicely played; the reveal that Amanda the etiquette instructor also works as an interrogator, without changing her on-camera demanor. I’m sure there’s other levels to that discussion, but for the sake of propriety, I’m just gonna keep mum.

Images courtesy of The CW

Reginald Hudlin summed up a lot of fans’ concerns about DC Comics’ recent storylines during his annual “Black Panel” in his response to a fan’s question: “DC Comics is very much into the nostalgia business,” Hudlin said; later in the hour he called it “bad business.” No one in the room packed full of POC fans disagreed with him.

And make no mistake – POC fans and cosplayers abounded at the convention. From my perspective there were more of us at the convention compared to last year. The sad thing, however, is that heroes of color were under-represented, either in cosplay (Isaiah Bradley there was an exception) or in the news; the biggest announcement regarding a POC superhero – unless you’re counting Robert Rodriguez’s Machete, and that character’s a whole other ball of wax – concerned DC’s kicking off a new Static ongoing series next year, with a black writer, Felicia D. Henderson (Fringe, Teen Titans) at the helm. But Henderson’s run on Titans garnered several negative reviews, prompting an equally bad response on DC’s own website.

With the Teen Titans themselves going through a cast white-washing under Henderson’s replacement, J.T. Krul, the status of most diverse cast in the DCU now falls to Eric Wallace’s Titans For Hire, a series which generated its’ own share of controversy when the Atom, Ryan Choi, was murdered in the first issue. I got the chance to talk to Wallace about Choi’s death, his own experiences as a black comic-book fan, and on diversity in DC’s stories.

Although I have been both black and disabled my entire life, for years I lied to myself about being disabled. I could appreciate the pride that accompanied the black experience, the historic and perpetual triumphs and tragedies that inspire the progress of a people. But disability was different. Disability was a curse much worse than the curse of Ham, and instead of accepting it I fled into a lie of being someone I could never be and should have never wanted to be. I became a victim of an able-bodied orthodoxy, one memorialized into my memory, derived from the seeds of my lived experiences and the veil of myths through which those experiences are strained. I believe we all succumb to societal orthodoxies in some way, because the procurement of favor demands it and it allows us to live without troublesome confusion. But for many of us, orthodoxies become a memorial, a shine at which we pray and to which we cling, all the while privately acknowledging that the shrine is not of our making, not to our liking and that it segregates and kills us very casually, very privately and very slowly. This photo helped free me from my denial.

Feeling starved, sunken, gaunt and untouchable, I long held certain conceptions of who or what I had and wanted to be, but could not, and thus did my best to hide it from others and myself. For me, poverty is fundamentally about not only the absence of choices, the impossibility of choices and the consequences of that impossibility. I decided to take this photo as a challenge to myself to confront the poverty of my own body and to better understand the costs of my negotiations with my own public and private identities. Many of us fear how easily we parade and perpetuate our public selves, while at the same time fearing the vulnerable, deviant and shameful self we can only be in private. When I saw the photo for the first time I was both shocked and surprised because even though I had lived with that person my entire life, I could never before accept how spent he was. Nothing had ever frightened me more than having to face the nakedness of my own indigence.

The photo, titled “undesirable,” is essentially about me ultimately beginning the journey of accepting my disability as I have my blackness. More broadly, it is to protest what I refer to as the negative fetishism of poor bodies, bodies that are deemed broke and broken, crooked and criminal, dilapidated and degenerate, ugly and useless. It was influenced in part by depictions of Holocaust victims – persons with disabilities among them – determined by the Nazi regime to be “undesirable” and anathema to the Aryan archetype because they did not and could not conform. “Undesirable” is also meant to invoke sexuality and how poor male bodies navigate the difficulty of being sexually desirable because of the physical valuation males and females deploy to determine sexual attraction. These are issues and feelings that I have dealt with and I used the photo to embody both my struggle and progress.

For me, the photo represents a minimalist confrontation of the intersections of not only race and disability, but also class and sexuality, as seen through my own experiences as a disabled Black man who at one point earned a six-figure salary. At various times and places, one or some of these identities would protrude publicly, others would recede into privacy, not always consciously and not always willingly. Sometimes, however, protrusions and recessions were purposeful. In my own confusing quest for acceptance I could fully embrace being Black, and to a lesser extent being formally educated, but to be disabled was to be diminutive and I could not stand having to crane my neck upward and be forced to be jealous at how tall the world is. I am now coming to realize that there is in fact a difference between being big and being tall. To explore the heights of my own physical vulnerability, I took the photo to make all identities so collectively and simultaneously prominent that I could no longer choose to focus on one and leave another peripheral. At my request, the camera made the choice for me.

The “I AM A MAN” sign represents a protest of how labor, disability and masculinity had come to define my own conception of manhood. It was borrowed from signs held by AFSCME workers at a 1968 Memphis sanitation workers strike. Orthodoxy teaches us that muscles are the currency of masculinity, a constant reproduced through labor, production and provision. Manhood is tightly rolled in wads beneath the skin, casually inspected by others to estimate worth and value. Men work. And for those flimsy and flaccid males who cannot, who cannot pronounce manhood loudly, highly and in concert, but are instead forced to be mute, low and isolated, how are they to define their manhood? Cracked and splintered male bodies cannot perform the masculine ethic, and this inability to perform an identity that is inculcated illegitimately and relentlessly, can place a disabled male at the perilous risk of being emasculated at best and feminized at worst. And for a man, or for a male who wants to be one, convention dictates that the only thing worse than being a eunuch is being a woman because to be a woman is to be an expletive.

I’m starting to love air travel. It is really the only time where I actually have to disengage from the internet, which becomes time to read actual books.

On this trip, I packed Kenji Yoshino’s Covering, a book I had been intending to read for quite some time. In Yoshino’s gut-wrenching combination of memoir and legal study, he brings a lost concept back into the lexicon to allow us to use new language when discussing issues of race and assimilation. The term he uses is called covering.

“Covering” is sociologist Erving Goffman’s term for how we try to “tone down” stigmatized identities, even when those identities are known to the world. In my work, I describe four axes along which individuals can cover: appearance, affiliation, activism, and association.

Appearance concerns how an individual physically presents himself to the world. Affiliation concerns his cultural identifications. Activism concerns how much he politicizes his identity. Association concerns his choice of fellow travelers — spouses, friends, colleagues.

So a person with an X identity can cover by making sure he doesn’t look like a stereotypical X, disaffiliating himself from X culture, not engaging in activism about X causes, and distancing himself from other Xs. It’s probably easier to see how this works in concrete cases. Those can be found below.

But why do we cover?

As Yoshino explains in his introduction:

Everyone covers. To cover is to tone down a disfavored identity to fit into the mainstream. In our increasingly diverse society, all of us are outside the mainstream in some way. Nonetheless, being deemed mainstream is still often a necessity of social life. For this reason, every reader of this book has covered, whether consciously or not, and sometimes at significant personal cost. [...]

I recognize the value of assimilation, which is often necessary to fluid social interactions, to peaceful coexistence, and even to the dialogue through which difference is valued. For that reason, this is no simple screed against conformity. What I urge here is that we approach the renaissance of assimilation in this country critically. We must be willing to see the dark side of assimilation, and specifically of covering, which is the most widespread form of assimilation required of us today.

Covering is a hidden assualt on our civil rights. We have not been able to see it as such because it has swaddled itself in the benign language of assimilation. But if we look closely, we will see that covering is the way many groups are held back today. The reason racial minorities are pressured to “act white” is because of white supremacy. The reason women are told to downplay their child care responsibilities in the workplace is because of patriarchy. And the reason gays are asked not to “flaunt” is because of homophobia. So long as such covering demands persist, American civil rights will not have completed its work.

Over the next few weeks, we will discuss in depth the ideas posed in Yoshino’s book.

Ideas on format or requests on specific sections are welcome.

Mia Mingus
Age: 28
Co-Executive Director, SPARK Reproductive Justice Now

Why she’s influential: Because she’s an agent of real-world change in the reproductive justice movement. Mia Mingus is a queer, physically disabled Korean American transracial/ transnational adoptee, living and organizing in the Southeast. She currently serves as one of the Co-Directors of SPARK Reproductive Justice Now in Atlanta and believes that reproductive justice is crucial in the struggle for social change and the fight to end oppression.

Mia is an activist, organizer, thinker, writer, artist and speaker who’s not only in the middle of it all, but connecting it all together. Through her work on disability, race, gender, reproductive justice, sexuality, transracial and transnational adoption, and intersectional identities/politics, she recognizes the urgency and barriers for oppressed communities to work together and build alliances for liberation.

If you’re at all involved with the queer, API, and/or disability social justice movements, you know that Mia is a transformative figure. Maybe you saw her speak at the US Social Forum Plenary on Gender and Sexuality or attended her workshop on Reproductive Justice at NAASCON 08. Perhaps you heard her speak as the keynote of the Western Regional Queer Conference 09 or receiving the Creating Change Award from the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force.

Though her activism changes and evolves, her roots remain firmly planted in ending sexual violence. On top of all that, everyone I spoke to about Mia describes her as a warm, thoughtful, accessible, and incredibly nice.

I’ll leave you with a quote from Steph Lee, one of several people who nominated Mia: “The fierce leadership of a young, queer, disabled, transracially/ transnationally adopted Korean woman should be recognized so that we can continue to more lovingly and effectively connect, break shit down, and keep building shit up.”

See the rest of the 30 Most Influential Asian Americans Under 30 here.

Angry Asian Man reports on the story of Xiu Ping Jiang, a 35 year-old Chinese illegal immigrant diagnosed with a mental illness who has been stuck in immigration limbo for over a year. From the New York Times:

[Jiang] has spent more than a year in jail, often in solitary confinement, sinking deeper into the mental illness that makes it impossible for her either to fight deportation or to obtain the travel documents needed to make it happen, according to a pending habeas corpus petition that seeks her release. It contends that she is suicidal, emaciated and deprived of proper medical treatment.

More distressing is the report of her first court appearance in the NYT, which led to her deportation order:

Twice the immigration judge asked the woman’s name. Twice she gave it: Xiu Ping Jiang. But he chided her, a Chinese New Yorker, for answering his question before the court interpreter had translated it into Mandarin.

“Ma’am, we’re going to do this one more time, and then I’m going to treat you as though you were not here,” the immigration judge, Rex J. Ford, warned the woman last year at her first hearing in Pompano Beach, Fla. He threatened to issue an order of deportation that would say she had failed to show up.

She was a waitress with no criminal record, no lawyer and a history of attempted suicide. Her reply to the judge’s threat, captured by the court transcript, was in imperfect English. “Sir, I not — cannot go home,” she said, referring to China, which her family says she fled in 1995 after being forcibly sterilized at 20. “If I die, I die America.”

The judge moved on. “The respondent, after proper notice, has failed to appear,” he said for the record. And as she declared, “I’m going to die now,” he entered an order deporting her to China, and sent her back to the Glades County immigration jail.

As Angry Asian Man says:

The situation illustrates the vulnerability of the mentally ill in the immigration system. While Immigration and Customs Enforcement keeps putting increasingly strict enforcement measures in place, more and more people with mental illness are being put into detention — and no one is really looking out for them.

In a bizarre twist, the only reason Jiang’s case is getting attention is because she happens to have the same name as the ex-wife of Jiverly Wong, a Vietnamese American who shot 13 people in April at a Binghamton immigration services center. In looking for Wong’s ex-wife, reporters stumbled across Jiang.

Yet Jiang is by a long stretch not the first (or I imagine) the last immigrant of colour with a health issue to be forgotten within the double prejudice of a system that is both xenophobic and ableist. Jiang’s case is a disturbing 2009 echo of something that happened in 1935, when the government of British Columbia deported 65 Chinese nationals back to China. The documentation of these men, kept by the courts and their psychiatrists, is for the most part is so paltry and dismissive that it is difficult to tell if all the men were actually struggling with mental health. In any case the men were deported because they fit into neither the ethnic nor medical norms of their day.

The level of bureaucracy under which Jiang is struggling multiplies when we look at the conditions under which she came to be in the US in the first place:

In their home village in Fujian province, in southeastern China, the sisters said, Jiang was married under age. She hid in their mother’s house when she was pregnant with her second son, they said, because under China’s one-child policy, the village government would have forced her to have an abortion.

“She did not deliver in a hospital, and she almost died,” said the younger sister, Yu, 33, the first to emigrate. A few days after the birth, she added, officials found Jiang, sterilized her and imposed a heavy fine. Later, divorced and desperate, Jiang borrowed the equivalent of $35,000 to be smuggled by boat to the United States, hoping to find political asylum and bring over the young sons she left with their grandmother.

But grueling months at sea left her emotionally fragile, and in the summer of 1997, about a year after her arrival, she became so despondent about her separation from her children, and the burden of her debts, that she tried to kill herself by drinking bleach, her sisters said. The police took her to Bellevue Hospital Center.

“She was afraid of being arrested, so the next day she ran away,” Yu recalled. At times over the next decade Jiang seemed better, as she moved from work in Manhattan garment factories to waitress jobs in Chinese restaurants across the country. But an effort to bring her younger son into the United States through Canada when he was 8 or 9 backfired: he was caught by Canadian officials and placed in foster care.

“He intended to join up with her,” the younger sister said of the boy, now 16. “Now it’s impossible, because he’s being adopted.”

It is impossible to disentangle the different strands of prejudice; where the psychiatric system is used to persecute people of colour, the justice system or immigration system persecutes people with disabilities, and inhumane systems in general combine to drive people to madness — or as in the case of Jiang and Junius Wilson, a combo of all of those things.

In 1932 Junius Wilson (pictured right), a 24 year-old deaf black man in North Carolina was castrated and imprisoned in the state hospital after being found guilty of rape. In 1990s, when Wilson was in his 80′s, after 65 years he was cleared of charges and released. He did not actually leave the hospital though – after all that time it had become his home.

It is not a coincidence that both Jiang’s and Wilson’s story involves the brutal violation of reproductive rights; the role forced sterilisation has played in the dehumanisation of both people of colour and people with disabilities is nauseating. You can go here, here and here to read about how the forced sterilisation of indigenous people has been used to colonise the land we live on, and you can go here to look at how contemporary birth control programs are used to try and restrict the reproductive choices of young indigenous women.

Our history is rife with examples like Jiang and Wilson; but for the most part people are forgotten in a system where it may be easier to keep someone institutionalised, rather than probe the massive bureaucracy and prejudice that keeps them there.

The original articles I have linked use the term “mentally ill” to refer to Jiang; I choose not to use that language. As with Wilson, in Jiang’s case it seems more important to recognise that it is the illness within our system that creates the real tragedy, not Jiang’s condition itself. A huge part of ability rights activism (which, as is painfully clear in both Jiang and Wilson’s case, has innumerable links with anti-racist activism) is recognising that the problem is the system, not the person with the disability; it is not our bodies that are the problem, but how we culturally define health, and how we treat people who don’t fit with that definition. In the words of Jiang’s sisters who have been fighting to Jiang’s deportation order overturned:

The exact nature of Jiang’s illness is unknown, and immigration authorities would not release her medical records, even to her lawyers, saying she had refused to sign a privacy release. Her two sisters, who live in New York, describe her as a sweet, quiet woman whose mind broke under the strain of life as an illegal immigrant seeking asylum.

When it is clear that the catalyst to madness lies just as much within the systems we have in place to deal with bodies as it does within the bodies themselves, terming something simply a “mental illness” and placing the onus only on the body just doesn’t seem to cut it.

A little over half a year ago, I wrote a fawning article about Russell Peters, trying to justify why I love him in spite of the fact that he could easily be criticised for making racist comedy.

I said that I loved Peters because his comedy is (unintentionally?) subversive: it highlights the relationships communities of colour have with each other instead of speaking to, or centering the experiences of white folks. And many commenters on my original piece pointed out, Peters often talks about his sibling communities of colour with fondness rather than ridicule. But then the other night I sat down and watched Red, White and Brown, Peters’ 2008 DVD.

Russell, you cut me deep.

So what’s wrong with Red, White and Brown? Last year Latoya posted an excerpt from a Kate Rigg interview, where Rigg explained very eloquently what makes racist comedy racist:

I’m offended when I see comics get onstage going “…and then I went to the Laundromat. Ching-chong, ching-chong, ching-chong!” Then I’m fucking offended. When someone tells a joke about Asian people and there’s no actual joke – the joke is the Asian people. The joke is [racist-comic voice] the funny way they talkie-talkie! “They don’t use proper diction! Only verb and noun! Verb and noun!” I just heard a comic that I respect doing that fucking joke the other night. An Asian comic. And I was like, “Dude! Write a punch line or you’re just being racist!”

Peters’ seems to have lost his punchline. There’s lots of different things you could criticise in Red, White and Brown. Peters throws in some shallow Michael Moore style criticism of the war in Iraq that still manages to be Arab/Islamophobic. Sepia Mutiny has an interesting analysis of Peters’ jabs at deaf people. Red, White and Brown gave me a lot to think about, and I’d like to address Peters’ “hatred” for deaf people and his comments about Indian authenticity in a later post. But right now I’m gonna focus on that stupid “Chinky” accent.

Peters opens Red, White and Brown with five minutes of his Chinese accent. And hey, I guess people love his Chinese accent. But where it once highlighted a very funny bit about the way Indian and Chinese people do business together, it’s now become the joke. When the only thing Peters is doing is talking Chinky, it’s not a joke anymore.

He starts by pointing to random Chinese-looking people in his audience, and talking in his Chinese voice. But chances are at least one (if not all) of the Chinese people in the front five rows of his New York audience are Chinese Americans. As in, they don’t talk like that. They’re Americans, you jerk.

But you know what? There is a Chinese American accent. Just like there is an African American accent. There’s a WASP accent: I think Dave Chappelle is famous for having perfected it. So why can’t Peters learn the Chinese American accent, and then do that? That would be bringing it back to the arena that Peters once did so well – giving us something in mainstream comedy that we can relate to.

But it’s almost like success has made Peters sloppy. He doesn’t have to learn how to do a Chinese-American audience, he doesn’t have to work as hard with the rare and affectionate insight. He’s already packing houses, so why should he try harder? And the sad fact of the matter is that in North America, you can fill a house just by doing a stupid racist accent.

So I guess my second criticism is moot. But the next misstep Peters makes, distancing himself from his old lovable self, is when he talks about playing Dance Dance Revolution in Singapore. And then he does his Chinese accent again. Ok, Chinese people in Singapore don’t talk like that.

(Sidebar: the accent Russell does well is some imitation of a Cantonese person who speaks English as a second language. But the Chinese diaspora is huge! There’s probably at least 20 different Chinese accents. You can’t just use one to fit everybody. We’re a complex people, thankyouverymuch. It may seem strange to ask a comedian for racist accent accuracy, but part of what made Peters’ act so genius was the accuracy.)

And what kills me is that Peters is talking about his time in Singapore. In other words, Peters has been to Singapore, he knows Chinese Singaporeans don’t talk like that.

The Singaporean accent is very distinctive and easy to tell apart from the Cantonese accent. (In fact Singlish is a pidgin language that is studied and marvelled at by linguists all over the place. Just Google it: you can even find multiple online dictionaries.) Almost anyone, but definitely someone with Peters’ ear for accents and culture, can hear it.

Yet he still chooses to make the joke. Because he assumes that for the most part his audience won’t know the difference. And then he goes on to joke that a Chinese Singaporean makes fun of his DDR skills, suggesting that he should go play a game his people are good at – the Taxi Game. Again, the joke fails, because the South Asian taxi driver is not a stereotype that exists in Singapore; it’s unlikely a Chinese person in Singapore would use that to insult an Indian person in Singapore. And he chooses to make the joke anyways because he assumes his audience wouldn’t know that.

So he’s gone from making inside jokes that are all the funnier if you’re a person of colour familiar with the context, to making jokes that are only funny if you don’t know the context. Le sigh.

And you know what? It’s not just that it’s racist. It’s also just bad comedy. Good comedy takes a fact of real life and magnifies it, holding it up for us to see it and laugh. But when a comedian like Peters gets lazy, their comedy begins to base its jokes on inaccuracy. It’s good comedy gone bad. And that’s why ableist/sexist/homophobic/racist/… jokes aren’t funny: it’s a skewed version of real life.

I’m not gonna say I didn’t laugh a few times during Red, White and Brown. It wasn’t so awful that I would organise a boycott. And if I’d never seen Peters’ earlier stuff, I probably would’ve liked it a lot more. But it seems like that good-natured ribbing and clever analysis that was once the hallmark of his act is gone.

And Peters not even particularly subversive anymore. The one edgy joke he makes is about Jewish people and Arab people, and that’s not exactly an original joke. It lacks the unexpectedness of his early acts, where his nudging of the status quo was subtle and smart; a joke about Israel/Palestine is not uncommon ground.

Ok Russell. Maybe you are not a Racialicious reader. But if you are listening, I have something to say to you. If you’re not just in it for the money, if you’re really trying to make brilliant comedy, do something new with that tired accent. Those people who loved you solely for the Chinese accent you did? They were missing the pure, buoyant genius of your act. Don’t let them dictate the kind of comic that you are. You’re better than them, and I still believe you can come back.

In your own Chinky-ass words: be a man and do the right thing.

I can’t remember where I was or whom I was with when I heard and realized that we are all temporarily able-bodied. I’m sure it was this decade, perhaps 2003, because I really had not thought about my privilege as an able-bodied person until I began my graduate work and met Angel, a woman in my cohort who was focusing on women of Color with disabilities. I also didn’t think about it until I lost one of my abilities.

Being trained as a scholar specializing in intersectional theory and thought, disability was a “difference” rarely mentioned and discussed unless Angel brought it up. We can see the continued absence and exclusion of people with disabilities in popular culture. Yet, if they are present, we mostly see how people with disabilities are considered anything but “normal,” and usually there is a level of wanting to find a “cure” to become “normal.”

What would images that view disability as a social construction look like? How can those of us who are educators incorporate discussions of disability into our teaching? Where are resources for us? How can we use popular culture when we teach about disability?

In response to these questions, my small cohort of friends and scholars working within an intersectional framework started to share resources. I’ve spoken with Angel about the song “Blind Mary” by Gnarls Barkley and how there are positive aspects of the song and some problematic areas, yet it is one of the better teaching tools involving music we have to show how disability is a social construction.

Last week Angel shared two YouTube videos with us that focused on disability in Zimbabwe and Lebanon. Her friend who runs the website Krip Hop Nation where you can find information about hip-hop artists with disabilities around the world, shared with her these videos. The videos center respect and acceptance of all bodies and the messages in the videos are powerful.

The first clip is part of a documentary in progress about an Afro-fusion band from Zimbabwe named Liyana. The documentary’s working title is “iThemba: My Hope,” directed by Roger Ross Williams. Liyana are touring in the United States and their full touring schedule can be viewed here. Unfortunately, this film does not have full translation. Here is a clip from the film called Liyana: The Band.

The second film is a music video directed by Rania Rafei and is part of the Sprout Touring Film Festival which focuses on films about developmental disabilities.

This video is called Difference Is Normal, which uses hip hop to share the collective testimonies of youth in the Arab world. There is a discussion of the youth led filming and writing of lyrics for the film at the Sprout Touring Film Festival site. Today, their work has expanded as war has lead to more people living with disabilities. The video includes English translation.

How do you see these films being utilized to expand our understanding of difference? In what ways can we implement an intersectional framework to discuss able-bodied privilege through popular culture?