“Though we tremble before uncertain futures/ may we meet illness, death and adversity with strength/ may we dance in the face of our fears.”
― Gloria E. Anzaldúa

Mosquita y Mari is a slow paced exploration of being a teenager peering over the brink of adulthood. Set in a Mexican-American neighborhood in Los Angeles, Mosquita y Mari follows the lives of two very different Chicana teenagers. Yolanda (Fenessa Pineda) is a studious high-achiever, a dutiful daughter from a loving home. Mari (Venecia Troncoso) is rebellious and volatile, with a chip on her shoulder that crowds out most of the world. Circumstances toss them together again and again, and they embark on a deep and intense friendship.

In her press kit, writer/director Aurora Guerrero writes:

The inspiration behind my debut feature-film, Mosquita y Mari, was my own adolescence. Initially, when I decided I wanted to write a feature-length script I kept coming back to a series of complex, same-sex friendships I had while growing up. When looking back, long before I identified as queer, I realized my first love was one of my best friends. It was the type of friendship that was really tender and sweet but also sexually charged. Despite the fact that we had the makings of a beautiful teen romance we never crossed that line. The beginnings of Mosquita y Mari was reflecting back on that time and asking myself the questions, why didn’t we cross that line and what kept us in “our place”? I didn’t grow up in a household where my parents forewarned me that if I turned out to be gay they would disown me. They didn’t wave the Bible in my face saying it was wrong. Instead the message was subtle. It was hidden in the silences around sex and desire; it was implied in society’s expectations, you know, like you only experience those feelings of love and desire with the opposite sex. I think all of us are subject to society’s rules so I think many people can relate to this story of censored friendship. That was the initial inspiration. [...]

This process of self exploration that I embarked on while writing this script led me to position this budding love story within the immigrant world. The core conflict in the story of Mosquita y Mari isn’t a homophobic parent getting in the way of their experience but rather the pressures that come with surviving as an immigrant or coming from a legacy of self-sacrifice for the sake of family and status in society. In the end, what I ended up writing was a coming of age story where both my protagonists find themselves paving a new path for themselves and their families.

And you know it’s serious when the credits include a thank you to Cherríe L. Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa.

The movie is in Spanglish, almost as if Guerrero hung this quote on her wall while she was writing:

“Until I am free to write bilingually and to switch codes without having always to translate, while I still have to speak English or Spanish when I would rather speak Spanglish, and as long as I have to accommodate the English speakers rather than having them accommodate me, my tongue will be illegitimate. I will no longer be made to feel ashamed of existing. I will have my voice: Indian, Spanish, white. I will have my serpent’s tongue – my woman’s voice, my sexual voice, my poet’s voice. I will overcome the tradition of silence.”
― Gloria E. Anzaldúa

Interestingly, much of the scenes in MyM are specifically constructed to rely on a teen’s body language to convey how they are feeling. The film is constructed with care – showing the struggles between the two girls to grow into who they will become. For Yolanda (semi-affectionately termed mosquita by Mari), her relentless quest for good grades was becoming less and less satisfying, yet the world of drinking, getting high, and boys offered by her old friends doesn’t appeal to her. She finds a third way in Mari’s “live in the moment style” and soon finds herself navigating that difficult boundary between a passionate friendship and romantic love.

Mari, on the other hand, already has one foot into the adult world. After her father dies, her mother has problems making ends meet. Mari routinely blows off school to try to raise money for the household. Her mother is caught between wanting Mari to focus on school and to make a better life for herself, but the money Mari provides is too important to go without. Mari, bright but full of rage at her impossible circumstances, finds solace in Yolanda’s simplicity and steadfastness but doesn’t always know how to balance their idyllic relationship with the demands of the real world.

Interweaving themes of family, duty, love, and belonging, MyM succeeds in revealing the inner lives of teenage girls. The most devastating parts of the film revolve around the petty betrayals that anyone who has been through adolescence will remember – the betrayals by others, desperately trying to assert their identities, and the scarring betrayals of the self, knowing you are trying to be someone you are not. While the heavy emphasis on hazy, lingering shots may have some viewers wishing to hit fast forward, Guerrero nails the messy inner lives of teenagers for what they are. And unlike 2005′s Wassup Rockers, MyM places the burden of the story squarely on the teenagers telling the tale. As it should be.

Courtesy of Illume Magazine

By Guest Contributor Sara Yasin

The Arab Spring shattered everything that I thought I knew about the Arab world. As unrest broke out in the region, and regimes fell, I realised how little I knew. As a Palestinian-American, it has been routine to reference my heritage, from explaining why I do not look like Princess Jasmine, or distancing myself from suicide bombers. The politics of the land of my parents always frustrated me, and I suppose what I understood was mostly gleaned from exhausted conversations overheard in our home or headlines.

To my shock, even though I proved to know very little about what caused the Arab Spring, many seemed to automatically think that the first half of my hyphenated identity automatically made me an authority on the region. While I feel tied to and interested in the struggle for change across the Middle East and North Africa, this is not my Arab Spring.

I last visited my family in Amman around 1995, as a pint-sized feminist homesick for cereal and episodes of Boy Meets World. While I seemed to be fluent in some Southern variation on Arabic, my cousins lived in an entirely different world than I did. The most noticeable difference involved religion; my own culture seemed to incorporate more Muslim values, and I remember my cousins being shocked at my declaration that I would soon wear hijab. Visiting my relatives made me realize I would forever be caught between two worlds.

Despite being identified through my Arab identity in the United States, I was “the American” abroad. Growing up in my hybrid Muslim and Arab American communities, my peers and I routinely referred to new immigrants as “boaters,” swearing that we would never marry a “FOB” (fresh-off-the-boat), in fear of a wife-beating stereotype who could not speak English. Since I never felt that I could entirely belong to the Palestinian or American communities, I launched myself into the world of the mosque, and – particularly after 9/11 – I spent much of my time harping on the fact that Muslims were diverse in faith and views, and blamed a lack of progress on culture, rather than religion.

I eventually learned that the lines between religion and culture could not be as easily separated as I would have hoped. The Arab Spring, as well as meeting friends that actually grew up in the Middle East made me realize I was projecting my own experiences onto an entire region. It did not occur to me that the world that my parents spoke about, and perhaps many of the cultural norms they adopted were part of a world that they left long ago – one that grew and changed after they left. Their views of culture are stuck in nostalgia, embalming their history and identity in a foreign world.

Courtesy of Associated Press

My parents, and many of their friends, had resigned themselves to the fact that the Arab world was rife with corruption and inconsistencies, and that mentality was passed along to us. I did not think that would change, and I suppose I thought that the Arabs without hyphens resigned to the same inevitability. After the fall of Hosni Mubarak in Egypt, I remember calling my stunned father, who said that he never thought he would see such a thing during his lifetime. While attempting to express his trademark amount of pessimism, I swore that in that moment, I heard hope in his voice. That was when I realized how out of touch he and I really were.

Though previously disengaged with the politics of the region, I feel passionate about expanding my understanding. However, I think it is important to make a distinction between my own culture, and that of those in the Arab world. As the children of immigrants, our lives are complicated by a number of cultural notions, rules and norms that can be tied to the lands of our parents, but they grow and change on an entirely different plane. Therefore, my lived reality is far different than that of a cousin living in the West Bank, despite our shared heritage. It is dangerous to fall into the trap of thinking that my shared heritage would automatically make me understand the situation better, or have the authority to speak on it.

I think it is also important to make this distinction, because I feel that many changes need to occur in the respective Arab and Muslim communities that I grew up in. I am proud of the victories of the Arab Spring, but I do not take ownership of them; not only because they are not my lived reality, but also because we need our own shake ups and changes in many Arab-American communities. We cannot claim those victories as our own – if anything, they just show how much work we have left to do.

While I still have an opinion, take an activist interest in the Arab Spring and continue to learn more, this still is not my reality. My childhood involved a world of hummus, fried chicken, Islamic studies, Southern Baptist churches and a world away from war and dictators. While being identified as an Arab in the United States is a large part of who I am, treating me like a voice of Arabs across the globe encourages a static notion of culture, a detrimental thing to reinforce when thinking about issues of history and identity. Treating me like I am not American, only serves the right-wing, closet-Jihadi fantasies of the Anne Coulters and Newt Gingrichs of the world, and only serves to hasten our Arab-American Spring.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

and the Black woman

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

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

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

and the zombie one

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

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

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

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

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

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

From “Jerry Stein” at Autostraddle

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

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

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

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

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

Mohamhead from GOOD

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

didimydoe3, also at GOOD

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

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

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

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

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

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

I’m a full-time remote worker. Most of the people I work with on a daily basis have never seen my face, and know me only by my emails and my phone voice. I often wonder about what these people picture, of the face they try to attach to my name. And I wonder if they’d be surprised to know I’m Asian.

I’d been a little conflicted about my name since getting married (as evidenced by this comment I posted on this blog long ago), but my maiden name did not sound particularly ethnic either, and since the baby came before the wedding, I had, in my mind, changed my name to match my family’s — not just my husband’s.

Before all that, my husband (then boyfriend) and I had tons of added baggage about naming our daughter. We didn’t want to give our child a name too similar to any family members, and we wanted to steer clear of any names on a Top 100 list. We wanted to ensure our kid wouldn’t be stuck in a class with five other people of the same name, and have to take on an awful nickname like “Mike Jones 2.”

Additionally, I wanted a meaningful Asian-sounding name that would flow well with Jones, the 5th most common surname in the United States. Truthfully, and probably because I went to a predominantly white school system in the 80’s and 90’s, I was picturing a teacher reading “Firstname Jones?” off of a roster on the first day of school, seeing an Asian kid raise his or her hand, then saying, “That’s not funny; where is Firstname Jones?”

When our daughter was born in December of 2007, we had already agreed on a name that miraculously melded Filipino and Korean cultures. In one culture, it was the name of an ancient goddess; in another, it translated to “new one.” The name had come easily to us and it fit her perfectly.

Well, we’re expecting our second child’s arrival in February of next year and having this debate all over again. We haven’t started seriously considering any names yet, as it’s still too early to tell if we’re having a boy or girl, but I’m revisiting all the questions I’d previously asked myself about what made a good name.

I’m unexpectedly having to face some old prejudices too.

Of the boys’ names we’ve thrown around so far, we’ve strangely been agreeing on Biblical ones. And we’re still trying to steer clear of any Top 100 names, meaning no Aidens, Jadens, Haydens, Bradens, Maddoxes, Jaxons, Hunters, or Camerons.

But back then, I was concerned about choosing a name that sounded “too white.” Admittedly, I wouldn’t have had a problem naming our child “Michael” if we had a Korean last name — even if it were as common as Lee.

I’m tempted to drop the “ever-so-slightly ethnic” rule of we end up having a boy, but mostly because it really narrows the pool of desirable names. I felt (and still sort of feel) that more liberties can be taken when naming a girl. Although I have no evidence to back this up, my extended family has told me that boys with “weird” names would be more susceptible to ridicule, more subject to beat-downs. But this also comes with the baggage of growing up Asian American in a predominantly white suburb.

And maybe it is because of those ingrained prejudices, but when first considering names, I had come to think that those just-different-enough boys’ names — something like “Bayani Jones” — somehow sounded un-masculine, even though Bayani means something as badass as “hero” and is considered a “truly Filipino” name predating Spanish colonization.

I find it mostly troubling that I think it would make a beautiful name for a girl-child, but not for a boy, and it is documented as a boys’ name. I’m trying to unpack why I feel that way, although I should mention that Bayani did get vetoed by my husband, simply because he didn’t like the name.

If you’re a parent, did you consider or struggle with the idea of giving your child an ethnic name? Do you think this is an issue unique to third-generation babies, or multi-ethnic households?

Guernica: Even through your adolescence, you felt like an outsider, both with your family and in your neighborhood. Could you talk more about these feelings and how they shaped you? Did they heighten your powers of observation? Or make it easier to drift like a spy through certain social and ethnic groups?

Oscar Hijuelos: Well, I had a kind of double whammy. I didn’t comport myself like a Latino, and I didn’t particularly look like one either.

Guernica: You mentioned that people continually commented on the lightness of your skin.

Oscar Hijuelos: Oh yes, I have very, very light skin. I didn’t fit into the general image of what a Latino was supposed to look like. I remember riding buses in the Bronx on my way back from high school, and the Irish kids on the bus would say “spic this” and “spic that.” But then when I was fourteen years old, I tried to get in touch with my Latin roots by joining an organization called ASPIRA, but I was given a frosty reception by these kids there who were pissed off at “whitey.” That’s the thing: it doesn’t take much to push you away if you’re already shell-shocked. I always liked being around Spanish-speaking folks who I already knew, but when I started to go out in the world, I saw that prejudice really is skin-deep. Of course, there are other layers, but much of it is just race and appearance.

—Oscar Hijuelos, “Recovering Cubanness“, Guernica

“Two things are important to me,” she says over a sushi supper in downtown Corvallis. “Justice and love, and both of them clicked for me in Islam.”

Fakhraie grew up in a family where religion was respected but not forced on her or her younger brother, Anayat, 24. Her father, born in Iran, did not practice his faith. Her mother, a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, studied religion with another woman but didn’t attend services.

“I was raised as a white girl with a funny last name and a foreign dad,” she says. As an adolescent, she was “the black cloud” over her parents’ house. “I was sullen. I hated everything.” Today she says she and her family are close, but her brother, a screenwriter in Los Angeles, remembers her black cloud days.

“At Christmas, we’d be opening presents and she’d be sulking in the corner,” he says. “She didn’t want anyone to take pictures. ‘Do we have to do this?’ she’d complain. She embodied the quintessential teenager angst.”

“I was a ‘why’ person,” she says. “I always wanted to know why.” Why, for example, was her father so strict with her when it came to boys? An avid reader, she began reading about Persian culture, which led her to the subject of Islam. She kept on reading. When she got to college, she read Fatima Mernissi’s “The Veil and the Male Elite: A Feminist Interpretation of Women’s Rights in Islam.”

It was a breakthrough moment for her.

“I could be a feminist and a Muslim,” she says. “I was a feminist before I knew what a feminist was.” Fakhraie’s mother was the family breadwinner and her dad was “Mr. Mom.” She remembers being upset that her mom came home from work and picked up household chores.

“It was like a double shift,” Fakhraie says. “Fairness has always been an integral issue with me.”

–Excerpted from Fatemeh Fakhraie: A Feminist Muslim Breaks Stereotypes

Photo Credit: Utne

Sometimes there’s love in laughter. And the cast and crew bringing the new web series East Willy B have a lot of love for the real-life neighborhood of Bushwick, Brooklyn, and (most) of the fictional characters.

The series’ heart is Willie Reyes, Jr. (Flaco Navaja) the 30-something Puerto Rican-proud bar owner who inherited the business from his dad, including the barfly crushing on him, Giselle (Caridad “La Bruja” de la Cruz). Wille is trying to keep his bar, which has served as the nabe’s hangout and nerve center, from closing down due gentrification in the form of his ex-girlfriend Maggie (April Hernandez) and her new white beau (and Willie’s longtime rival), Albert (Danny Hoch), and the incoming white hipsters looking for cheap(er) rent.

Transcript of the premiere episode after the jump.

(Music plays in the background. Willy and Gisele laugh. )

Willie: What do you need, Gisele?

Gisele: What I need or what I want? ‘Cause, if you ask me what I want, I’ll tell you.

Willie: OK, what do you want?

Gisele: I want me…a little bit of what you got going on right down there.

Willie: You’re crazy! You want another one?

Gisele: You asked me what I need? (Laughs)

Willie: (under his breath) Jesus!

Gisele: (Grabs for Willy) Oooo-hooo—

Willie: Hey hey heeeey! I’m working here!

(Gisele laughs)

Maggie: …yeah. (Laughs.) Si, mi amor. I’ll talk to you later. ‘Bye. (Blows kiss. Sighs.) I saw you, Willie.

Willie: Maa-ggiiiie!

Maggie: We need to talk.

Willie: Yeah, I’m sure we do.

Maggie: So. I was thinking: I have some ideas on bringing this bar alive.

Willie: Yeah, where’d you get ‘em? From your mom?

Maggie: Funny. OK? You know I’ve been taking classes—

Willie: Where at? Nuyorican College? That shit ain’t school.

(Maggie sighs)

Willie: That’s like ghetto babysitting or something.

Maggie: (exasperated) OK, anyway. Listen: I’m thinking…we can make this bar? More. Emo.

Willie: What the fuck is “emo”?!

Maggie: “Emotional!” You know: slightly depressive dive. We can have some 80s video games, some confederate flags. You also need to start selling $6 malt liquors. Those rich white hipsters love that shit!

Willie: This is still a Latin bar, aiight? I don’t know why everybody’s trippin’.

Maggie: Because no one cares, Willy. OK? You need to let go.

Ceci: Oh hell no! The dog run is around the corner.

Maggie: Whatever, Ceci.

Ceci: Por favor, Willie. You’re not still sweating this bougie-ass bitch, are you? She dumped your ass! Really?

(To Maggie) Looook, whatever it is you’re selling? We ain’t buying it.

Maggie: Shouldn’t you be chasing dudes with tattoos and bulldogs?

Ceci: Are you going to kick her out or do I gotta to do everything around here?

Maggie: Look! Mama? I own half this bar, and I’ll come here whenever I want.

(To Willie) This is what I’m talking about. If you want more people, get rid of these hoodrats.

Gisele: You bitch! (Screams)

Maggie: You know what? I don’t need this ghetto shit anymore! As a matter of fact, I’m gonna sue your ass.

Willie: For what?!?

Maggie: I am going to get controlling interest in this bar.

Willie: Like hell you are!

Maggie: Yeah? OK. You’ll be hearing from my lawyer.

Willie: Fine! All right? ‘Cause I got your Colby and Meyers, and they got TV commercials and all that. So bring it!!

Ceci: Yeah? When you gonna grow your balls back?

Gisele: Don’chu worry, Willie. I’ma get her next time!

I’ll admit it: it took me a minute to get into East Willy B. Part of it is simply being an ethnic outsider: I’m not Latina and felt odd laughing with—and sometimes at—the jokes. Then I had to check myself: like I couldn’t recognize That Alcoholic Lecherous Auntie in Giselle (don’t lie: I know some of y’all Racializens have a Giselle in your fam and y’all love her antics at the family gathering); got-your-back (and sometimes gotta-be-in-your-face) Ceci (played by EWB co-creator Julia Ahumada Grob) ; or even soft-hearted-though-over-his-head Willie. And like I couldn’t recognize laughing in the face of New York City’s ongoing gentrification.

What I think East Willy B does best is put a biting laugh on the class politics aggravated by gentrification, ongoing colorism and “authenticity”, and ethnic pride (which comes out sometimes as ethnic chauvinism). Yes, there’s the leitmotif of the white hipsters seen as invading Bushwick, but for the most part, they are a joke in absentia. (And we can argue about the presence of hipsters and other gentrifiers of color.  However, it’s also real that the face of this demographics shift is white for quite a few communities. This definitely holds true for Bushwick.)  And Albert, the “token white guy,” isn’t viewed as “white” (the website describes him as “browner-than-thou,” complete with Latina girlfriend). White gentrification, says East Willy B, is aided and abetted by people from within the community who may see the financial and social upsides of it but may get caught up in some form of false consciousness due to getting some post-high school education (Maggie) or just overall sleaze (John the Realtor). (It’s also that awkward relationship with education that’s my biggest critique of East Willy B.)

And what I love about East Willy B is that it’s a complete online experience, reflecting Internet use among Latin@s. Yes, there’s the show and a vid of the on-camera and off-camera crews, but there are spot-on commercial spoofs and an emerging web series about the real Bushwick, with local activists speaking about the changes. (I like what Jesus says in the vid: “We’d love to have more people come by and see us, but don’t replace us.” I think the same holds true for enjoying East Willy B.) More importantly, the viewer is invited to be a part of East Willy B, both online and offline: the creators asks us to get the word out about the new web series (they have more episodes lined up for the summer) by hosting viewing parties and attending upcoming East Willy B-related events during the summer.

If the events (and the viewing parties) are anything like the series, then I think you’ll have a great time.

Photo Credit: John Walder

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

Being mixed race always has its challenges: isolation, language barriers, not fitting in, not being ‘enough’, and the many forms of racism that come with all that.

Every time I tell people that my mom is Peruvian and my dad is Lebanese I get:

1. Exotic!
2. Interesting.
3. How did that happen?
4. You look more…

One time a famous playwright of colour stroked my cheek and whispered “exotic” in my ear after I identified myself to him.

When I break it down even more (Mom: Indigenous/Spanish/Chinese + dad: Arab, moved to South America in his teens) I get the insult that people think is funny and acceptable: “you’re a mutt.”  It gets worse when I say my dad isn’t in my life, but I really don’t want to go there right now.

Reading Fireweed #75: “The Mixed Race Issue” was not only fun it was refreshing.  Its contributors wrote about a lot of what I have experienced over the years; and they wrote from the heart, holding nothing back, and well.

Published in 2002 and guest edited by Lisa Amin, Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, and May Lui, all mixed race women, Fireweed # 75 was a follow up to a similar anthology, Miscegenation Blues, published in 1994.  Amin writes in the intro, “This one is for the beige babies.”  It’s that and more.

“Heinz 57,” by Anne-Marie Estrada, is my life story.  Except, I’m not Anne-Marie and she isn’t writing about me, she’s writing about herself.  A very short piece, “Heinz 57″ speaks to many of us mixies. Broken down into two sections, “HERE.” and “THERE.”, twelve questions Anne-Marie constantly gets are displayed throughout, many of which a lot of mixed race people get:

1. Where’s your accent from?
2. Are you…?
3. Did you go to school in…?
4. What do you speak at home?
5. What do you eat at home?
6. What do you know about your family?
7. How did she come to marry a man from…?

Marie writes:

When someone sees my name they think one thing.

When they hear my voice they think another.

Then they see my face and are mildly confused.

Marie ends her short, fast paced, punchy piece with: “Because you just can’t tell by looking.”  True!

Jesse Heart has two pieces in Fireweed #75: “Pinky Rant” and “Really/Not Really.”  “Pinky Rant,” a non-fiction piece – short essay really, possibly an Op-Ed, goes deep in a small space.  Heart explores race and gender and colonialism better than most academics in a concise, cutting manner.  Heart starts off with a solid slap to the ear:

I think I am reaching a point of exhaustion.  I am tired of explaining…explaining my orientation…my identity as trans, as butch, as boi, as dyke.  Explaining my “origin”…?

The explaining is tiring but not as bad as what Heart so beautifully calls “Colour f-cking adjectives.”  Heart is referring to comments like “drunken native” when people find out about their Indigenous ancestry.  And then there’s the ogling on public transit:

And if it’s not my “origin”, it’s the public debate I must witness, like on a fucking subway, “is that a man/dude/guy…or woman?…**giggle, giggle**.

Heart shines again in their simple yet poignant statements in “Really/not really:”

In her untitled essay, Lisa Weiner-Mahfuz (a half Arab and half Jewish woman) explores hypogamy, racism, the intersection of Zionism and racism, and the ever present racism in feminist/activist circles.  It’s deep, hard, honest, and sad.

As a half Arab who doesn’t fit in with the Arab community I love Weiner-Mahfuz’s essay.  And I can see why it’s untitled; some things can’t be named or labeled such as many experiences in mixed race life.

Being a different shade of brown, speaking Castellano (the Spanish dialect) and not Arabic, raised by a single mom, eating South American food my entire life, and using my mothers Spanish-colonial surname has left me outside of the Arab box.  Trying to explore my Arabness in university I joined the Arab Student Club (really a Palestinian solidarity movement that has gone through many names and is now Toronto’s biggest Palestinian activist group).  Although I met some good people, every problem written in Fireweed #75 surfaced: questions and explanations, lateral racism, misogyny toward female members, colour f-cking adjectives, tokenism etc.  Weiner-Mahfouz had similar experiences in feminist activism and at a race conference.

While recently talking with another mixed race friend (Native American and Black) about not fitting in with the Toronto Arab activist scene she said, “You’re too Indian for them.”  I prefer the word Indigenous, and I identify my indigeneity as Mestizo (Indigenous and Spanish; read Gloria Anzaldua for a much more detailed explanation).  But I got what she meant.  How can I relate to middle to upper class Arabs, who speak francais and Arabic, and hang mainly with other academics involved in activism, many of whom are white skinned and pass in the white world?  I grew up with Blacks and Latinos and Persians, all of colour, who’s parents, like my mom, worked in factories, restaurants, hotels, and as delivery people and taxi drivers and janitors.  I’m one of two in my crew who have gone to university; more of us have been incarcerated!  I don’t think that’s a coincidence.  And most of the friends I have, old and new, mainly of colour, have never heard of Edward Said, Ward Churchill, bell hooks etc.  And they don’t care too.

Weiner-Mahfouz writes of the exclusion she experienced in family circles for being both Arab and Jewish.  And she painfully writes of literally having a door slammed in her face at a race conference in Boston titled “Race and Racism in the 90s:”

I raised my hand and asked where mixed race people were to go…The white women in the room, including the white facilitator, said they felt I should caucus with them because  I could pass for white.  Most of the women of colour concurred with this…

The discussion proceeded with the facilitators spending ten minutes talking to the group about the privileges of being able to choose—as if I were not in the room…Finally, the group resolved that I could choose where to go…

It was not resolved for me.  I felt alone.  I felt that regardless of where I chose to go it would be the wrong choice.  I felt like the illegitimate bastard child that no one wanted and/or knew what to do with.  Many of the women of colour were angry with me.  Many of the white women felt as if they had made an anit-racist intervention by challenging me on my racism.  Still as the group broke up, I made a choice and walked towards the room that the women of colour were to meet in.  As I approached the door it quickly slammed in my face.

Not only do I believe that most of the contributors to Fireweed #75, and most mixed race people, have felt like Weiner-Mahfouz, but they’ve probably had real doors slammed in their faces like her.  I understand where the women of colour were coming from but that was cold.  Weiner-Mahfouz’s experience at the conference was horrible and one that continues today.  And so do all the problems laid out in the journal.  How far have we come along?

Weiner-Mahfouz poetically states that as mixed race peoples we are feared:

“We are feared because interracial relationships are still taboo in our culture.  We are feared because our mere existence often calls into question the status quo and the way that race is constructed in our society.  We are feared even by people on the Left who propose to be working to challenge these deeply rooted beliefs and constructs…We are not considered whole just as we are.”

The Mixed Race Issue has many brave, honest, entertaining and emotional pieces.  Karleen Pendleton Jimenez writes an erotic piece exploring her life as a white skinned Chicana and the complexities of skin politics in her dating life; Billie Rain’s essay title explains her piece: “The Myth of the White Jewish Race;” Lisa Amin writes about passing and failing as a mixed race person; Kim Trusty writes about her white mom; and there is so much more in this extraordinary and important collection.

Although we mixed race people are not considered whole, we are.  And this issue of Firewood shows that.

By Guest Contributor Allegra, cross-posted from The Border House

Over the past few weeks I’ve been preparing myself for the release of Dragon Age 2, which is set for release on 11th March. I only managed to get my hands on the demo today, but already there are a few problematic elements bubbling away in the background.

The demo begins with a Chantry seeker named Cassandra calling on Varric, a dwarf who she knows spent time with Hawke – the game’s protagonist. In response to her questioning, Varric begins narrating a story in which Hawke and his/her sister Bethany are fleeing the darkspawn only to encounter a dragon. At this point, Cassandra calls shenanigans on Varric’s story, and he promises to relate ‘what really happened’.

The problem, however, is that BioWare have chosen (at least for the purposes of the demo) to give you the character creator only after this initial opening sequence. In fact, the beginning of the game gives you a simple choice between male/female and warrior/mage/rogue before throwing you into the action. This means that the first ten minutes of the game are always going to be played as BioWare’s default male or female Hawke, which in turn means that they are going to be Caucasian.

At the time of posting, the discussion on BioWare’s forum about this issue is already over twenty pages long (and really not recommended reading for the most part, with a lot of people making the point that this opening sequence presents Hawke as a legend, rather than who they really were. However, this raises the uncomfortable subtext that, while the real Hawke may be customized to suit the player’s tastes, the Hawke that people know from legends is always going to be white. Personally, I can’t help but be reminded of Jesse Houston’s assertion that BioWare’s female characters are less iconic than the male ones, and Stanley Woo’s utter failure to handle racial issues surrounding the Dragon Age games in the past couple of months.

BioWare’s reasoning behind this bizarre choice seems to be that they have concluded that they’re losing a lot of players who don’t want to be confronted with a character creator at the very start of a game. As Mike Laidlaw says in this interview:

We saw a lot of people disengaging at hour one, hour two [...] You get to an RPG and fire it up, and it hits you in the face with a thousand stats. Those stats are very cool, but you may not be mentally or emotionally prepared to deal with them as your first thing to do in the game.

He also goes on to add:

Part of the glorious advantage of the frame narrative is [that] Varric kind of lies about you. We establish how people perceive the Champion. This figure is of some import to the world.

And, apparently, the way people perceive the Hero of Kirkwall is as a white man or white woman, regardless of their actual ethnicity. Granted, this could make for a very interesting plot device should BioWare wish to use Dragon Age 2 to challenge this assumption in game, but unfortunately the demo makes no sign of doing anything of the sort.

Granted, there has been some progress since the days of Dragon Age: Origins, where your Warden of color was furnished with an entirely white family. According to the Dragon Age Wiki, the skin tones and facial structures of Hawke’s family members will now adapt themselves to compliment your customized character. However I can’t help but feel that this is at least a small step back from Mass Effect 2, where the pre-character creation sequence has been craftily put together to only show Shepard in full armour obscuring her/his skin tone and facial features until you’ve played through the opening scene.

I have to wonder: would that have been so difficult to do this Dragon Age 2, as well? Why choose to present a legendary version of the main character, and their entire family as potentially whitewashed versions of themselves, without challenging or questioning it? Will this depiction of the Caucasian Hawke of legend appear in the full version of the game? And, if so, is it plot device that BioWare have used in a ham-fisted attempt to ‘hit the ground running’, or will we be seeing more cutscenes featuring the default versions of Hawke throughout the game?

by Latoya Peterson

Charlie Sheen is a fucking trainwreck.

I caught about five minutes of an E! True Hollywood Story on the man, and saw references to drug abuse and rehab, domestic violence, and a very pissed off Heidi Fleiss, noting that while Sheen is one of the top paid sitcom stars of our time, she was stuck in jail.

Charlie Sheen has been on a downward spiral for a good while now, and it’s clear from comments like these that things are only going to get worse:

Both Today and GMA asked Sheen, who says he underwent private rehab at home, if he is now on drugs. As he told the latter, “Yeah, I am on a drug. It’s called Charlie Sheen! It’s not available, because if you try it once, you will die. Your face will melt off, and your children will weep over your exploded body. … I woke up and decided, you know, I’ve been kicked around, I’ve been criticized. I’ve been this ‘Aww, shucks’ guy with this bitchin’ rock-star life, and I’m finally going to completely embrace it, wrap both arms around it and love it violently. And defend it violently through violent hatred.”

I could normally care less about the troubles of Charlie Sheen, but one of his recent verbal misfires is interesting on a few different levels. Sheen referred to Two and a Half Men creator Chuck Lorre as Chaim Levine in an angry open letter, protesting the cancellation of the show, widely rumored to be because of Sheen’s erratic behavior. After receiving pushback for his remarks, Sheen offered this gem to TMZ:

While Charlie spilled his guts to TMZ yesterday about his hatred for Chuck Lorre, he referred to the “Two and a Half Men” creator as Chaim Levine — the Hebrew translation of CL’s birth name — which many people felt Charlie used in a mean-spirited attempt to denigrate the Jews.

Now Charlie tells TMZ … “I was referring to Chuck by his real name, because I wanted to address the man, not the bulls**t TV persona.”

FYI — Chuck’s birth name is Charles Levine … and his Hebrew name is Chaim.

Charlie added, “So you’re telling me, anytime someone calls me Carlos Estevez, I can claim they are anti-Latino?”

Oh, readers, where do we start?

“I was referring to Chuck by his real name, because I wanted to address the man, not the bulls**t TV persona.”

Number one – Chuck Lorre’s birthname is Charles Levine. So why not just address the letter to Charles? This is where folks are picking up an anti-Semitic vibe. It is a really ugly thing when folks point to your difference as a way to denigrate you, even if they try to play their way around it. Oh, I didn’t use a slur or anything… Uh-huh. It’s hard to pick up tone from a written document, but check out the context where Sheen is trying to address “the man:”

What does this say about Haim Levine [Chuck Lorre] after he tried to use his words to judge and attempt to degrade me. I gracefully ignored this folly for 177 shows … I fire back once and this contaminated little maggot can’t handle my power and can’t handle the truth. I wish him nothing but pain in his silly travels especially if they wind up in my octagon. Clearly I have defeated this earthworm with my words — imagine what I would have done with my fire breathing fists. I urge all my beautiful and loyal fans who embraced this show for almost a decade to walk with me side-by-side as we march up the steps of justice to right this unconscionable wrong.

Remember these are my people … not yours…we will continue on together…

Charlie Sheen

(Sidebar: Wait, I thought we were getting real here. So why not sign that letter Carlos Estevez, since we’ve gone to people’s government/Hebrew names?)

This isn’t a calm, rational discussion Sheen is calling for, especially if you start calling people maggots. Now, some folks have pointed to Lorre’s self-identification on a vanity card as the reason for Sheen’s usage of Chaim Levine. But once again, check the context. Entertainment Weekly explains:

…[S]pecifically, vanity card #327, that aired Feb. 7 after an episode of Two and a Half Men.

On the card, Lorre talks about his visit to Israel and feeling comfortable while “surrounded with DNA much like my own.” Then he concludes:

“Which raises the question, why have I spent a lifetime moving away from that group? How did Chaim become Chuck? How did Levine become Lorre? The only answer I come up with is this: When I was a little boy in Hebrew school the rabbis regularly told us that we were the chosen people. That we were God’s favorites. Which is all well and good except that I went home, observed my family and, despite my tender age, thought to myself, ‘bull$#*!.’”

So Lorre talks about examining his identity, after “a lifetime” of distancing.

And interestingly enough, this is where he and Sheen have common ground.

Charlie Sheen’s father, Martin Sheen, was born Ramón Gerardo Antonio Estévez. The elder Sheen uses both names, one for public life, and one for private. IMDB credits him as saying:

Whenever I would call for an appointment, whether it was a job or an apartment, and I would give my name, there was always that hesitation and when I’d get there, it was always gone. So I thought, I got enough problems trying to get an acting job, so I invented Martin Sheen. I’ve never changed my name; it’s still Estevez officially.

[on changing his name] I never changed it officially. I never will. It’s on my driver’s license and passport and everything: Ramon Gerard Estevez. I started using Sheen, I thought I’d give it a try, and before I knew it, I started making a living with it and then it was too late. In fact, one of my great regrets is that I didn’t keep my name as it was given to me. I knew it bothered my dad.

His sons chose different paths – Charlie Sheen chose to retain the Hollywood surname. Emilio Estevez, his brother, chose to use the name he was born with, but mentioned that is was more to avoid riding his father’s success – and because he liked the initials.

The common thread here is racism and discrimination.  While many people in Hollywood opted to take a stage name for a variety of reasons, actors of certain racial or ethnic backgrounds were under even more pressure to assimilate, in order to even get their foot in the door.  Names become anglicized, roles are carefully selected to avoid being typecast, and people are careful to avoid anything that would provide an excuse to discriminate.  Over time, these changes and deals become habitual.  Toning down one’s given name to be seen as more palatable or acceptable is beginning to fall out of style – but in this comment Sheen reminds us of why this practice began in the first place.  When the simple act of calling someone outside of their chosen name has heavy racial or ethnic undertones, it is because of our nation’s history and how we have historically treated people who were different.

So Sheen’s last line becomes particularly absurd.

“So you’re telling me, anytime someone calls me Carlos Estevez, I can claim they are anti-Latino?”

As with most things, context matters. And I have a feeling that if Sheen were the subject of a hate-filled rant, he would want us to consider the context as well.

But at this point, it appears we aren’t going to hear much out of Sheen, except for the same old, same old.  Check out this apology, which is begging for us to break out a racist apology bingo card:

He apologized to co-creator Chuck Lorre for referring to him by his Hebrew name in radio interviews (he said it was a joke). “Sorry if I offended you,” Sheen said during his sit-down with ABC News’ Andrea Canning (the full interview airs Tuesday on ABC’s 20/20). “Didn’t know you were so sensitive. I thought after you wailing on me for eight years, I could take a few shots back.”

A “Latina spin on Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility,” Pantelion Films (a collaboration between U.S. distributor Lionsgate and Mexico’s Televisa) is hoping that From Prada to Nada will inspire a Latino demonstration of box office force. According to an article in Fast Company:

Released at the end of January, Pantelion’s first film, From Prada to Nada, focuses on two formerly rich sisters — one of whom proudly quips “no hablo español” with an Anglo accent — who are forced to move in with relatives in a scrappy, Latino part of East Los Angeles. While the movie is in English, many of the punch lines are in Spanish.

Hollywood’s previous attempts to market Spanish-language and Latino-centric films have largely failed. Even though movies in Spanish like IFC’s Y Tu Mamá También and Focus Features’ The Motorcycle Diaries found success in the art-house market, they did not broadly appeal to the Latino population. Those teenagers McNamara chats up in movie-theater lobbies generally opt to see commercial blockbusters in English. Language is not the company’s key strategy — only about half of Pantelion’s releases will be in Spanish.

“When a movie is in Spanish, if a Puerto Rican is speaking Spanish, or a Mexican is speaking Spanish, it identifies them,” Pantelion’s chief executive, Paul Presburger, says of the language’s countless dialects and geographically diverse slang. “Whereas when we do a film with Latino stars in English, it unifies.”

From the looks of the trailer could either upend stereotypes or confirm them. The story backdrop is one of class, family, and culture – but there are also more than a few border and immigration jokes that could either play into stereotypes or work as intimate commentary on current events. Still, there is cause for alarm – Lionsgate wants to apply the Tyler Perry model to Latino films, which could stoke more controversy:

Pantelion will let the target audience decide if something is offensive, executives say. “African-Americans are going to see Perry’s films; they’re the ones enjoying them,” Presburger says. Nonetheless, the Pantelion staff reads scripts with a careful eye for hackneyed images of Latino life and culture. “We get out of the stereotypes of narco kings and drug dealers and gang members,” Presburger adds.

From Prada to Nada opens January 28th.

By Arturo R. García

Since we noted it in the links last month, the controversy surrounding a TV adaptation of Alisa Valdes-Rodríguez’s book The Dirty Girls Social Club book series went from escalation to cease-and-desist orders to, now, an apparent cease-fire.

The novel, the first of two books dealing with a sextet of Latinas (the “Dirty Girls” nickname stems from one of the girls being referred to as “Sucia” by her family; a third book will be released this fall) who become friends while attending Boston University and stay in touch as their lives take them in different directions. In a series of blog posts, Rodríguez accused the parties to whom she optioned the television rights – producer Ann Serrano López and screenwriter Luisa Lechin – of distorting her characters’ ethnicities and transforming them from sex-positive characters into sexually-irresponsible caricatures.

Neither López (reportedly getting a divorce from comedian George López) nor Lechin have publicly responded to Rodríguez’s series of posts and tweets over Christmas weekend, which have since been taken down. In one, Rodríguez said López and Lechin told her nine months ago that their prospective script included a lesbian character, Elizabeth, being re-written to be bisexual. Rodríguez said producer Lynette Ramírez told her at the time, “No one trusts a bisexual.” From the post:

I took that moment to tell the ladies at the table that I was, in fact, bisexual, and very trustworthy. Bisexuality, I informed them, did not mean a person had a compelling need to screw everything in sight. It means only that we are attracted to SOME men and SOME women and, just like straight or homosexual people, monogamous and normal when we commit to a person we love.

The women around the table seemed very uncomfortable with me after that. I’m not sure if it was because I’d objected to the change in my character, or because I was bisexual, a condition they clearly saw as pathological and depraved.

Rodríguez later posted what she called a portion of the script for a Dirty Girls pilot. Emphasis below is hers:

INT. COLLEGE DORM HALLWAY – NIGHT

The camera follows a young GIRL’S tight ass down the hallway to a closed door. The hand-written sign on the door reads: The Dirty Girl’s Social Club – Don’t enter unless you want to get dirty! Grooving to the music, she opens the door and enters…

INT. DORM ROOM – CONTINUOUS

The smoky, four-bed dorm room is jammed with a dozen of so co-eds, partying hard.

Let me take a break from the script here for a moment to point out that none of my characters are “partiers.” They don’t smoke. Further, the idea that the very first we would see of them is a “girl’s tight ass” is so overwhelmingly stupid and offensive it gives me heart palpitations and keeps me up at night. Anyway, let’s see the rest of the opening sequence, shall we?

On one of the beds, a pretty Cuban girl, carrying the ‘freshman twenty’ in hotpants and a camisole, slurps a jello shot off her supine boyfriend’s six-pack abs. As she reaches for another jello shot, FREEZE-FRAME: the name LAUREN (19), is written in cursive.

Let me intercede again for a moment. Lauren is the main character in my novel. She is half-Cuban and “half white trash,” from Louisiana. She is white. (Hispanics can be of any “race,” according to the census bureau, and ARE of all races, according to REALITY.) To simply call her a “pretty Cuban girl” leaves this wide open for her to be played by a stereotypical actress. But that is the least of my concerns.

Lauren would not wear hotpants, nor would anyone I have ever known. She wouldn’t got to a “party” in a camisole, either, or slurp jello shots off anyone’s belly. Lauren’s appeal, as I wrote her, is that she is an insecure everywoman, prettier than she realizes, and bulimic. That Luisa describes her in this way is ridiculous, and panders to the outdated “Animal House” view of college life that has nothing whatsoever to do with the studious, insightful, conflicted and almost Holden Caulfield-like person I created.

Following that post, Rodríguez wrote on Dec. 24 that the network sent her a cease-and-desist letter.

As noted in a Dec. 26 thread at Julio Varela’s blog, this is not the first time Dirty Girls has faced issues in being developed for the screen: option deals with Columbia Pictures and the Lifetime network fell through (the latter, Rodríguez said, because an executive told her her script “wasn’t Latin enough”), and a deal with Cienfuegos Films did not pan out due to a lack of financing. Rodríguez added this comment:

It was then that Ann Lopez called, promising to let me look at every script before submitting it, swearing she and her team were the right ones for the job, that they would stay true to the book. That obviously didn’t happen. My mistake in signing a deal with them. It is sad to say, but you really can’t trust ANYONE. I trusted Ann. She sold me out.

On Jan. 1, however, she added another post asking supporters to refrain from criticizing NBC, saying “people are listening”:

It is important to note that I have received respectful emails of support for my creative vision and voice from within the network in recent days. The tone the executives have taken with me is one of understanding, not enmity. I have no doubt the network shares my desire to see this project made well, and I know from correspondence with NBC that people there loved the book and my voice and vision, which is why they chose to develop the project in the first place.

“People are listening” might turn out to be the key phrase in this instance. If this newfound attention by NBC produces something satisfactory for Rodríguez, might other POC creators find encouragement in social media as a means to leverage fan support against Hollywood encroachment?

By Arturo R. García

A report re-published this week in The Quarterly Journal of Economics suggests a racial bias among NBA referees. But the bigger story might be watching the league get forced out of its’ defensive stance on the issue.

According to the study by Joe Price and Justin Wolfers, based on analyzing 13 years’ worth of data on referee calls, the refs are 4 percent less likely to call fouls on players of their own race. (No wonder Kobe looks so surprised there.) Also, players score 2.5 percent more points during games involving ref crews of their own race. But don’t tell that to NBA Commissioner David Stern.

As Price told ESPN’s Henry Abbott, the idea for the study stems from his reading of Blink, Malcolm Gladwell’s book about what goes into split-second decisions in a variety of situations. As Abbott explains it:

Sports presented a special opportunity to learn a lot more, because referees make quick decisions — the kinds that reveal implicit bias — every night.

“If I had as good a set of data on judicial sentencing, or hiring decisions, I would have gone and looked at those,” says Price, who was then getting his Ph.D. at Cornell, and is now an assistant professor at Brigham Young. “In my mind, I don’t have any issues with the NBA. I actually think they’ve achieved racial equality in so many dimensions. They just happen to be a lab setting in which I get quasi-random assignment, I get lots of interactions between a small number of actors. I get a perfect setting to look at racial bias. And in some ways, if it’s happening on a court in front of thousands of people, then it’s probably happening when you go to make purchasing decisions, or hiring decisions, or whatever decisions we can think of as more important.”

But ever since the New York Times reported on Price and Wolfers’ findings three years ago, the NBA and Stern have gone out of their way to knock it, going so far as to say racism “doesn’t exist” in the league:

“This is a bum rap, that’s all,” Stern said after the study’s initial release. “This is a bum rap, and if it is going to be laid on us it should be laid on us by basis of some people who are purported to be scholars in a publication that purports to hold us up to a higher standard — a little bit more should have been done.”

Stern has also said the league conducted its’ own study into referee bias, and crowed about it to Time Magazine:

I can count the days following Fashion Week on two hands, the same abacus I could use to count the women of color featured on its runways. Despite constant cries from communities of color, models, the press, and even many designers to increase diversity on the catwalk, progress is slower than the careful steps taken in a pair of Alexander McQueen heels. The fashion world is working at a snail’s pace to color its image, and even then, only by way of appeasement, tiny bits to the masses so that they are temporarily satisfied. But among those scraps, people become desperate, sometimes seeing glimmers that hope that are far from it, and yearning for some acknowledgment from those who have little connection to their plight despite presumed allegiance.

To cite a specific example, one need look no further than the coverage of one of the most poignant protests of fashion’s alienation and exclusion of black fashion editors (and, not-so-tangentially, models and designers) on the opening day of Fashion Week. One of the participants noted that the only prominent woman of color in the business and publishing side of the fashion industry was Marie Claire Fashion Director and Project Runway judge Nina Garcia (pictured, at top).

I stopped reading for a moment. Since when is Nina Garcia a woman of color?

In the United States, color is a strange marker, particular because it rarely has as much to do with phenotype as it does one’s past. Of course facial features, skin color, and even speech patterns may be indications of racial and/or ethnic background, but it goes far beyond what is in the eye of the beholder. Beyond the factor of family trees, parentage being one of the biggest indicators of race (i.e. one may appear phenotypically white, but with one non-white parent, the possibility of whiteness dissolves), region, nationality, and language play huge roles as determining factors in the race game. In fact, despite markers of everything BUT non-white heritage in all other facets, including one’s appearance, like in the case of Nina Garcia, a last name of non-English origin can mean more than what literally meets the eye.

If you do a Wikipedia search on Garcia, you’ll see she grew up in Barranquilla, Colombia, home to many European immigrants. She was afforded many luxuries from an early age due to her wealthy parents and had a privileged upbringing that involved studying in the United States and France before going into fashion. At this point, you might find yourself asking, “What does this have to do with race?” Everything, in fact, considering that class has an almost direct correlation with race in Latin America. Though race in the United States is often times though of as “fixed,” despite one’s class, racial mobility is a reality in Latin America, particularly when tied to class and education. Make no mistake: Nina Garcia would not be considered anything but white in Latin America. Additionally, even if in some alternate universe Garcia were black, her class level alone would allow her to “transcend” the racial category, placing her – at least on a social level –as something other than black.

But Garcia aside, the issue of assigning race as a means of coloring Latin@s or people of other ethnicities who do not fall easily into the “white” and “black” racial categories we have configured for ourselves in the United States is a difficult one, fraught with a need to classify and, more than anything, create allies in the fight for social inclusion and recognition, even when there is not an understood alliance on both sides. The process is complicated, and I can imagine quite confusing for many who may have been considered one racial category or possibly not of any particular category at all beyond their nationality in their country of origin, only to come here and receive a racial categorization that is not only inaccurate, but also applied for the sake of ease. It’s much easier to lump all Latin@s into one category of non-white or non-black than to consider that within every single nation in Latin America, there are specific racial categories and groupings that directly correlate to the respective national histories therein.

This is not to say, of course, that Latin@s who may have considered themselves one racial group within their country of origin but who conform to or accept their newly assigned category within the U.S. do not exist. If anything, the general acceptance of a new racial category (and consequently, labeling others in new ways as well) is a part of the assimilation process when one immigrates to a new country, be it the United States or elsewhere. But for many, particularly those who have never had to think about race, the process of receiving a racial category, and usually one that does not directly correlate with their respective national equivalent, can be an unwelcome form of identity alteration.

In the case of those who come from higher class backgrounds and, in particular, are deemed white in their home countries, the shift can be disarming and a blow to one’s sense of racial self-esteem, particularly if the new racial category indicates a “descent.” While certainly a humbling experience, it is nevertheless one that, in its own way, a form of forced assimilation. It’s also a classic example of what I refer to as “identity imperialism.” By re-categorizing groups from other countries based on our own groupings, we show not only a general lack of familiarity with the world beyond our borders, but also a limited understanding of ourselves. An example can be found in the embracing of Brazilian models as a welcome “alternative” in the fashion world a few years ago. The dozens of Brazilian models gracing the runways? Still white. Their nationality does not dictate their race. Why many fail to understand this, despite “American” as a nationality not being an indicator of racial categories, is beyond me.

As I mentioned in a piece I wrote long ago about race in Latin America entitled “We Want You . . . To Think Just Like Us,” despite our lazy re-categorization of immigrant groups and their racial identities, we don’t have it all figured out on our home turf:

In discussions (from an American perspective) related to race in other countries, there tends to be a forced application of American racial categories and norms, as if our identity grid fits each racial landscape without a need to vary its shape. And though we like to pretend that race is clear-cut in the United States, it’s obvious that concepts of race are more mutable than we like to admit.

Take the category “people of color.” What does it actually mean? Is it truly a useful term for the sake of building community within marginalized groups if some of the people within it benefit from privilege? If you consider black Americans, for example, studies have shown that despite blacks of all shades being categorized as one group racially (something that happens with less frequency in Latin America, as there are often categories for the people of multiracial backgrounds who phenotypically may not be easily placed squarely within the categories of black and white), blacks with lighter skin, if separated from their darker peers statistically, have more economic success (included therein, higher levels of education and higher paying jobs). Despite our not separating light-skinned blacks and dark-skinned blacks in comparative race studies, the statistics hint at skin color-based privilege in action. The same could be said of studies on Asian-Americans, which often lump together all categories of ethnicities therein, ignoring some of the problems of poverty and access troubling certain communities.

That said, can we legitimately force people from other countries into our own specified categories for them, despite our having yet to fully grasp the complexities therein? As we move to a more explicit and open multiracial America (and I say this as we have always been a country with people of multiracial backgrounds, just not one where we could openly embrace that due to the circumstances of racism in our country), it is time for us to reconsider the categories we have, and analyze whether or not they are still working as a means of building community, particularly when our presumed allies are technically playing for other team, lacking any connection to the experience of marginalization based on race (and/or class).

Miss Wendi’s voice? She now writes exclusively about music and fashion at her site Retail DJ.

Hard to believe, but I was born bald. Not cute little peach-fuzz bald. Not skinhead bald with a chance of stubble. No, I was born with a head as bald as a baby’s butt. What’s more unbelievable—I grew up with straight hair. Of course, if you look at me now, the first thing you see is what happens when Ireland and Iran decide to come together to have a baby—curls that put even Shirley Temple to shame.

My hair went curly in early adolescence, right around the time I hit middle school. I was a small, petite tweenster, and instead of fretting about breasts, which were hardly there, or periods, which were nonexistent, I poured my angst and energy into my newfound mop of kinky hair that sprung itself on me almost overnight. My father hated my curly hair. He said it made me look black. This is a problem to some Iranians, who hold a great pride in the purity of the Persian race. Iran is actually Farsi for Aryan. To this day, when people meet me, their first impression isn’t that I look Persian; it’s that I look black. My Arabic first name doesn’t help. It makes people assume that I’m one of “those black people” whose parents named her something from the homeland. Persians have lustrous hair, but usually it’s straight with a slight little wave. Mine is too kinky to scream and dance “Iran!” Even when I met Shirin Neshat, the most famous Iranian artist outside of Iran, who has made a career out of photographing Persian women, it wasn’t apparent. She didn’t realize I was Iranian until I mentioned my last name.

There is a racial element to the picture here—hair that is curly, kinky or even nappy is commonly associated in American culture as “black.” Silky, straight hair, on the other hand is usually seen as “white.” As comedian Paul Mooney put it, “If your hair is relaxed, white people are relaxed. If your hair is nappy, they’re not happy.” Herein lies the paradox of many ethnic women in America, black and otherwise—the pressure we curlyheads feel in assimilating into a dominant image of lustrous, straight hair that will seemingly make us look more well-kept or better-groomed in a culture of brushes, perms and irons designed to give straight hair what we already have. Yes, curly hair is sexy—at times. Usually the sexy sirens with curly hair are actually straight-haired women who know how to use a curling iron. The grass really is greener on the other side.

This ideology is pervasive, to the point that many times, we don’t even realize we’re buying into it. Beauty requires an acknowledged ugliness in something else, so in order to look damn good, someone else has to look like a train wreck. I remember being told as a child that curly hair is really a genetic mutation. I remember thinking I was a freak. When I was in high school, a classmate once told me that race is actually determined by hair type. If your hair is straight, then you’re Asian. If it’s wavy, then you’re white. And curly hair makes you black. I stood there dumb-founded that a straight-haired, freckled white guy was telling me this. The physical contradiction between him and his theory was so obvious. Even with a democratically elected black President, there are people in our country who still think that the American image should still lean towards white. And if you think that’s outdated, just look at this past summer when 11-year-old Malia Obama wore here hair in twists during a trip to Rome. The conservative blog Free Republic called her unfit to represent her country because her hair wasn’t straight. The blog has since pulled that thread from their site.

How is a young, ethnic girl with curls supposed to feel good about her body if the images she’s being told are sexy are those of women who either have straightened hair, or are women with straight hair that has then been curled? Google “curly hair celebrities,” and most of them are straight-haired women who have gone through a curling iron. I’m sorry, but end-of-hair flips do not constitute curly. Beach waves are called waves for a reason. They don’t count either. In Hair Matters, Ingrid Banks wrote, “Certainly white women have concerns with their hair, but their concerns do not involve the actual alteration of hair texture to the extent that is an expression of their cultural consciousness (Banks, 38).” There are naturally curly celebrities out there, but looking back, the only ones I have never seen with straightened hair are Bernadette Peters and Howard Stern. I hate to say it, but Howard Stern is keeping it real here. Guys seem to have it easy here—all they have to do it cut their hair super-short. It the world of curly hair, it really does seem as if you’re damned if you do, and you’re damned if you don’t. Even Michelle Obama straightens her hair, and Malcolm X tried, before he came to consciousness about it. In his autobiography, he writes on what he calls his “first really big step toward self-degradation:”

I’d seen some pretty conks, but when it’s the first time, on your own head, the transformation, after a lifetime of kinks, is staggering.

Now picture me in the quaint, white, cookie-cutter homes and gardens, picture of Littleton, Colorado, where almost every girl in my middle school sported sleek-straight locks with bleached highlights, suntanned over the summer and walked around dressed like the latest advertisements from Abercrombie and Fitch. I stuck out enough before with my dark hair and tan skin. But my curls made me stick out as if I were in a picture of a Where’s Waldo book. A hairstylist once told me I have an irregular curl pattern, and never was it more pronounced than in middle school. There was no fighting it. Every strand went whatever way it decided that morning, and brushing it only made it look worse. Classmates would come up to me during lunch hour and tell me my hair was too curly. They labeled me as the Iranian girl, and that mindset stuck with me into my twenties, that because I looked different, I was Iranian before I was American, and that was a status I would have to subscribe to because there was no way I could change my looks. In our inherent, but rarely caught habits of racializing appearance, curly hair commonly seems to get caught somewhere in the middle. It is, but sometimes, it isn’t. I remember hearing girls tell me, “This weekend, I saw a girl with really curly hair, but not kinky curly like yours, really pretty ringlet curly.” Even my mom, my number-one fan, called my hair kinky, a term commonly reserved for black hair. That never bothered her though. She said she loved my hair because she loved the look of African hair. It was exotic to her. She just wished she knew how to take care of it. At the same time, Iranians weren’t laying any claim on me either. To them, I looked more mullato than anything else. My father hated looking at me because he said I didn’t look like an Iranian child. It wasn’t enough that I was a scrawny, underdeveloped child with glasses and braces. No, that was too easy because too many other kids in my school had glasses and braces too. But I was the one with the out-of-control hair. By the time I reached high school, I saw girls all around me, left and right, getting asked out on dates and dances, but I was getting glossed over like the big white elephant in the middle of the room. I was positive my hair had something to do it, and that was when I bought my first hair relaxer kit. I’m not alone in this endeavor. According to the market research firm Mintel, home relaxer kits made $45.6 million in sales in 2008. And that’s just a temporary fix.

Hair relaxing wasn’t my first attempt at taming my curls. I can’t even to begin to count how many nights I would spend doing homework with jumbo curlers in my hair, hoping they would at least smooth the strands. They never did, so then I would pull my wet hair back into a ponytail, hoping to at least straighten the top part of my do. My mom once told me that puberty made her hair a little curly, but then it calmed down. I clung onto that, thinking that if straightness came back to her, it was only written in my genes to come back to me as well. I was in such denial, I would still insist on having my hair cut into layers as if it were straight, so that the moment my hair decided to behave, it was already cut to look perfect.

I relaxed my hair for the first time one spring weekend during my freshman year of high school. I didn’t tell anyone. I wanted the new me to be a surprise. Quite honestly, the chemicals are the worst smell ever, but beauty isn’t painless, and I was willing to deal with the smell if it led to me looking normal again. Of course, it didn’t straighten my hair. It only loosened my curls by about ten percent. What the fuck is wrong with my hair? That was when I pulled out a paddle brush and a hairdryer, and I yanked it until it dried moderately straight. Then I ran the flat iron through it. You have to realize how many products are involved in making curly hair look naturally straight. First, there’s the relaxer kit. Then there’s the moisturizing shampoo and conditioner, because curly hair is naturally thinner and drier than straight hair. After that is gel, and handful goops of it, followed by the heat protectant spray or lotion. Sometimes, a serum is thrown in right here. John Frieda was my choice, but that was mostly because of the before and after pictures. My hair never settled like the models, but I was convinced with regular use, it finally would. Then you have the brush, hairdryer and flatiron. After that is the conditioning gloss spray, which really doesn’t condition so much as it coats your hair with a silicone-like film that reflects the light and distracts you from obvious follicle damage. All this, just to hide the fact that you just willingly burned your hair and your scalp for the sake of aesthetic hygiene. The whole process can take all evening, and because I had teenage grease, I would have to repeat the process from shampoo and conditioner on down once or twice more that week. When I walked into school after my first relaxed experience, everyone did a double-take. Not too long before, I did a video project with a friend for our government class that covered the Monica Lewinsky scandal, Jerry Springer-style. I played Monica Lewinsky. I don’t know how that casting worked out, but when my friend saw me in class, the first she said was, “I wish you did this two weeks ago. Now you look even more like Monica Lewinsky!”

The relaxer addiction lasted all the way through graduate school, into my mid-twenties. Boys and theatre roles only made it worse. University of Denver, where I went to college, was ranked by US World News and Report as the least ethnically diverse campus in the country. It shouldn’t come as a surprise. According to the Census Bureau, Denver is just over 50% white. Somehow, I kept on finding myself dating white guys who were scared of me when my hair stepped out of the shower. One boyfriend said when I let my hair go natural, I looked like I had just be electrocuted. Another boyfriend, a Jewish violinist who had a fetish for Middle Eastern girls, used to always call my hair frizzy. Hairstylists thought I wasn’t going far enough. Repeatedly, I was pressured into thinking about Japanese thermal straightening, which after shelling out anywhere from $500 to $1500, will leave your hair sleek, soft and bones-straight for the next six months. By the end of that half-year bliss, your roots have grown out, and it’s time to pay another $250 for a touch-up, which ends up becoming more of an arduous process than the original straightening itself. No secrets? I did consider it. Multiple times. But I never followed through.

Roles on stage didn’t help with the curly hair psychosis. In American society, where the public body is so important in gaining profit, the commodification of looks is even more magnified in performance. On stage, good looks are a demand, because if people are going to be looking at you for two hours, you better be something they want to look at. Yet there’s no qualitative definition for good looks. It changes from person to person, so the most reliable gauge is what you see most represented in media, and most hair in the media is straight. I was much more likely to get a role with straight hair than I was with my natural hair. Curly hair not only invokes racial biases, but age biases as well. Shirley Temple had curly hair, and so did little orphan Annie. Remember when Chelsea Clinton was seen at the 2002 fashion show with straight hair? Everyone went nuts. The Guardian wrote:

It is the hair that summons most interest. There is something expressly attention-seeking about it. As Chelsea knows, relaxed hair attracts spectators: there is an element of suspense to it that you just don’t get with other hairstyles.

What is it with the news media scrutinizing the curly hair of first daughters? This translates to theatre, where to walk into an audition with a mop of curls can make you childish, funky, and not really well-rounded. With straight hair, I looked older, more mature, and with my tan skin, the catch-all ethnic actor. Most actors have European and Southern dialects listed on their resumes. I have Indian, Persian, Arab and New Orleans. I think the only ethnicity I haven’t been cast for is Pacific-Asian. Something tells me that’s where my hair would draw the line. When I was asked to play an Indian woman one time, I told the theatre that I didn’t even look Indian. They simply replied, “Well, your skin and your hair (straight at the time) look close enough. Audiences will never be able to tell the difference.” There’s a Foucault-like power element here, when you look at the racial and particularly age prejudices of curly hair. For him, power is acted upon and through the body. Ja’Nean Palacios goes on to elaborate that

power manifests itself through the relationship between curly hair and beauty. Since curly hair is regarded as being less than beautiful, this hair type becomes the site of the body that requires discipline.

I cannot tell you how many people have told me I look older and more mature with straight hair. And it’s the lack of discipline in my curly hair that makes me look younger and less mature. One time, a young girl asked me how I get my curly hair. Her mother replied, “She doesn’t brush it!” Curls equal a lack of discipline, a habit of letting those strands go and allowing them to dry and settle however way they feel. Throughout history, there has always been a very deep relationship between discipline and beauty. Just look at our cosmetics industry. How many different types of foundation does a woman need to put on before she looks like a piece of dry, flaking cake? So when we’re confronted with opposing images of a woman with straight hair that’s styled with a curling iron, and a woman with free-styled kinky curls, the one with straight hair is going to come off as more mature, because her beauty routine takes more discipline.

Anti-feminist as it may sound to say this, it was a boy who finally made me feel comfortable with my hair. I was twenty-four, in my last year of graduate school. I went in to model one summer evening for figure drawing class that was run by a guy I would later fall in love with. My hair was pulled back, and he could see the ringlets in the back of my ponytail. Sometime that evening, he asked me to let my hair down. I was terrified—I had no idea what it would look like. He didn’t care, and he asked me again to take it down. Turns out, he loved it. That night, while he held me back after class to chat, he couldn’t stop telling me how much he loved it. I didn’t know at the time that I was going to date or even marry him, but his excitement over my curls made me want to try to make peace with them. The next day, I found a salon in Denver with hairstylists specially trained in cutting curly hair. The haircut is called the DevaCut, because the method came from the Devachan Salon in New York City, which specializes in curly hair. The cut works with the curly hair pattern, and instead of cutting wet hair straight across, the stylist cuts each individual dry curl so that the curl pattern isn’t disrupted. I also learned how to break product addiction—all I needed to style my hair was conditioner. When I got home and realized how much of my bathroom I could empty out, I saw how much time, energy and money I was sinking into achieving an image that was so completely against what was natural for my body. I realized that a lot of my justification for it came from being a performer. I had gotten so used to playing other women, I completely lost the ability to play myself.

Then a weird thing happened. Somewhere along the way, I stopped calling myself Iranian-American and started referring to my ethnicity as American-Iranian. I honestly don’t know where it started, except that it was after the night the artist I would fall in love with raved about my curly hair. Sometime after that, I realized that “American” does not equal just white. Maybe in the past it did, but look at our country. America is a catch-all phrase, and when minority Americans acknowledge themselves as equally American as white Americans, then our images of racial beauty in this country can truly change. It’s interesting to see stuff categorized as African-American, Asian-American, Hispanic-American, and so on. But American-American? It seems like a politically-correct code word for “white.” Any time a race is unspecified, we’ve been conditioned to assume it’s white. People think sometimes that it’s ironic for me to have this viewpoint, because technically speaking, I’m purely white. While that’s true, practically speaking, I’m not, because it really comes down to not genetics, but how you appear to other people. Unfortunately, we’re still a society that looks first, and then maybe learns later. The fact of the matter is that because I have kinky hair and tan skin, most people encounter think I’m black, and their projection of racial residue has really pushed me to look at race and ethnicity from a more black and less Eurocentric standpoint. I wonder what it’s like for purely white women with curly hair. Obviously, they’re not assumed to be black, but I wonder to what extent they feel the pressure to look and feel racially “normal”?

The audiences with the loudest voices aren’t always minorities. And I’m pretty sure they have straight hair. Political leadership, magazine fashion spreads, advertising—I can count the natural tendril appearances on my hand. Curly hair, naturally curly hair, is just as American as straight hair. Why do we need to feel the pressure and expectation of physically altering ourselves so that we can fit into a more homogeneous picture of ideal or perfect beauty? How is hair straightening really any different from a breast lift or a nose job? You can argue that hair alteration is more temporary, but even boob jobs need some level of surgical maintenance. It’s not, and I think it’s seen as less severe because in plastic surgery, you see a lot of white women trying to look more refined. In hair straightening, you see black women looking more white. I have a way of looking at the politics behind appearance, and I think it’s the Iranian in me that brings that out. Iran is a country where one of the few ways a woman can express herself publicly is through her looks, so everything she does to it, from letting hair show to getting a nose job, is a conscious political decision. In a way, embracing my curly hair was my own conscious political decision. For the first time, I was consciously making the choice to depict myself on stage the way I naturally look, not alter it to accommodate to how mass media tells me I should look. David Mamet wrote that the hardest role a performer can play is himself, and it’s when a performer does so that we can see the vulnerabilities that make us approachable and understandable human beings on the stage. For me, that role came through my curly hair. What’s ironic is that audiences respond more strongly to the curls. My hair sticks with them. What’s more, I chose to label the image of my curly hair as American. Feeling like I belong to this country shouldn’t lie in how I look, but how I act.

I haven’t straightened my hair since then, and quite honestly, I don’t really care to. To many people recognize me this way now. Now that I’ve moved from straight theatre to one-woman shows that are written by me, there’s no need to alter my appearance to better fit into potential roles. I’m the one who writes them now. My hair has now become my trademark, usually the first thing people notice or remember about me. Isn’t that what performers (and people) strive for? A definable characteristic that sets them apart from the crowd? Turns out, I had that all along, and fight it I did, until I realized that self-esteem, at least in performance lies not so much in portrayal as it does in self-acceptance. Perfection, or ideal beauty is really a distraction, especially amongst minorities, because instead of guiding us to look inward, it manipulates us to focus on outside projections that tell us how we should look and feel, and we become white-washed, so to speak; formulaic, sterile. The more Euro-centric you look, the easier it is to get taken seriously. Think about all the hair health that’s been compromised, and for what? Assimilation? Attractiveness? I don’t find anything attractive about chemically-burned hair. Just because you can cut it doesn’t make it any less traumatizing than burned skin. Appearance is either in compliance or reaction to dominating media images, which is destructive, because it gives one margin the entitlement to marginalize anyone who doesn’t fit in that clique. What a boring landscape to see America dominated by the same hair type, which goes deeper to imply that we ‘re also the same (white-dominated) racial landscape and the same personality.

I can go on an on about the problem, but the solution is an action that one person can’t take on alone. Collectively, we need to see more images of ethic Americans in their natural state. By that I mean no weaves, no airbrushing to make everyone look like they have a ballet body, but a media movement that redefines the aesthetic appreciation of the human figure, the most basic common denominator every race shares. Don’t portray the differences; accept them. “I am not my hair, I am not this skin,” goes India.Arie’s hit single I Am Not My Hair, “I am the soul that lives within.”

The doors slid open to another frost covered morning as I left work. I took a deep breath and shivered as the crisp air invaded my lungs. In contrast, the sky defied the dead cold with its deep red and orange streaks. Mesmerized by the flaming sky, I stood in the doorway for a moment taking time to absorb the world outside.

The morning breeze carried a mixture of odors, the most distinguishable being of car exhaust and frying chicken. The adjacent streets echoed with the hum, squeak and whine of the early rush to get somewhere. I was in no hurry but was content to let life flow around me like flood waters around a tree.

As the sun rose higher, the warm hues reflected off of the still frozen dew enveloping everything in the color of warmth. It had been a long time since I’d stopped to enjoy a sunrise.

“What are you doing?” a co-worker approached, “Go home.”

“I will,” I smiled, “Just taking time to remember that life can still be beautiful.”

“Okaaaaay, spit it out,” he joked, “What did you take?”

“Look you,” I turned my head to glare at him, “can you not drag me out of my happy place today?”

He laughed, “Let me guess. It’s a Zen thing, right? You got some feng shui thing going on?”

I raised a fist and shifted my weight, “Wanna die, white boy?”

“Oh gawd,” he exclaimed in mock terror covering his head with his arms, “She’s whipping out the kung fu! Don’t hurt me, ninja girl!”

“I will stab you in the face, you pale piece of shit, ” I replied through my teeth in a low, threatening tone.

We paused to exchange the most menacing looks we could muster before he cracked a smile and assaulted me with a bear hug.

“See you tonight,” he said as he walked away.

“See you,” I replied.

“Get some sleep today!” he yelled over his shoulder, “You busted your ass last night.”

“Yeah, yeah,” I said and began to make my way to the car.

Sitting down in my car made me realize how tired I really was and suddenly, I couldn’t wait to get back to the apartment. People from the day shift were still sifting in, and a few waved as I drove away. Some of them looked exhausted even though they’d were just beginning their day. Maybe it was the look of working too long in a job one didn’t really enjoy. Would I look like that in a few years? Would I even be there in a few years?

I was still a baby in the eyes of the old timers. Only just recently completing my first year, I had seen so many come and go. It was hard to believe a few had stayed for as long as they had. Some I knew had been there for a decade or more. I could no longer imagine living in one state for that long, much less working in the same job – especially one that required so much physical exertion.

I wondered how long my body would put up with the way I abused it. Sometimes, it was like going to the gym and working out for eight hours. The plus side was that I’d whipped myself into shape in less than six months. It was like getting paid to lose weight and tone up.

The pace at night could be grueling and hectic or just plain blah. It was a joke among some of us that the night would either bore us to sleep or drive us to the point of collapse. Either way, we ended up unconscious and drooling. Some of us seemed to thrive on the chaos, the pressure and the push to exceed our limits.

We all bitched and moaned, but for some, the complaining was a perk. After spending two decades as a stay-at-home wife and mother (the last three of those trying unsuccessfully to maneuver myself into a job), being able to talk and complain about work felt good. I drew a weird kind of satisfaction out it.

Quite a few of my coworkers were at least half my age. They were younger and had more energy reserves which forced me to drive myself even harder just to keep up. It was easy to get discouraged, but I was determined to keep pace and excel if possible.

The social dynamic posed its own kind of challenges. Not only was I the old geezer in the bunch, but I was the only Asian woman. I was more than familiar with the scenario, but wondered how I’d adapt to it being in a work situation. The group I worked with came from varied backgrounds, a few of them being a bit rough around the edges. Most were good people that I genuinely liked , but there just wasn’t room for the suburban, stay-at-home-mom I’d become.

It was also a joke among some of us that the last thing you wanted to do was show weakness or let each other know the one thing that really makes you mad. It would be the one thing we’d all pick on with very few exceptions. We tested each other and quickly learned individual limits. We pretty much knew who we could and couldn’t badger. It was done in good humor, but there were times it could go too far. I’d been yelled at and done my own share of yelling over jokes being taken past the limits of tolerance.

The previous exchange is a prime example of where they focused their attention when it came to me. The first time it happened, I was furious. A co-worker made a crack about Asian drivers which sent me into a rant about Asian stereotypes. I might as well have lit up a huge, red, neon sign that said, “PUSH THIS BUTTON!” Luckily, one of the guys I’d befriended suggested I fight back.

“Don’t get mad,” he advised, “Give it back to them. They can take it. It’s the way it works here.”

One might wonder why I didn’t just go straight to management and complain. I could have, but what would that have gotten me other than further alienating myself from the group? Besides, I wanted to handle things on my own terms which I’m glad I did for two reasons. The first being that it took a while, but I had to learn to distinguish between an intentional jibe and a statement made out of genuine ignorance/prejudice. They are the same to me. The second being that I also had to learn their teasing was their way of showing their acceptance.

That’s not to say there wasn’t racism at work. Where ever there is diversity, there is at least some measure of racism and prejudice. It seems to be a human thing from everything I’ve experienced. My goal at the time was not to let any of it hold me back from doing what I needed to do at work, but it was in the back of my mind. I did everything possible not to be seen as the old, fragile Asian lady.

I learned to be near ruthless in verbal volleys and as a last resort, use physical force as part of my arsenal. One morning as I was leaving work, I surprised myself when one of the guys referred to me as the “kung fu chic” as he was walking away. Not willing to let it go, I walked up behind him intending to act as if I were going to kick him in the face.

“I’ll show you kung fu,” I said as I came up from behind and slightly to the side of him. I swung my leg into the air and was surprised when I felt my foot come into contact with his face.

“What the hell!” he exclaimed, putting up a hand to cover his eye, “Did you just kick me in my face from behind my back?”

“Ooops,” I laughed, “I think I overshot that a little.”

Honestly, I hadn’t meant to really hit him, but it didn’t seem to matter. By the next day, people were asking me about it.

“You do know you’re just perpetuating the stereotype, right?” said one of my friends.

“Probably,” I laughed, “but it shut him up, didn’t it?”

It did for a while, but never for long. From that moment on, we all had something else to joke. The poor guy wasn’t the last to get an up close and personal introduction to my foot.

Adaptation 101 – Sometimes, you just have to own it.

I know there are problems with playing with the stereotypes, but this particular group of coworkers are people I’ve befriended. I’ve grown close to a few of them, and we have an unspoken understanding. When it comes down to it, we know we can count on each other for support. But who knows? Maybe I’ll look back later and think, “Ugh, I was awful.” It wouldn’t be the first time.

The whole experience makes me wonder if I’d had the same tools and the nerve to confront and deflect racism and prejudice as a child, might I have fared better? I can never really know, but some part of me thinks so. Back then, everything pointed to something being wrong with me, and I felt helpless to “fix” myself.

Not white enough. Not Asian enough. Not pretty enough. Not tough enough. Not smart enough. Not tall enough. Not nice enough. Not happy enough. Not American enough. Not *insert family last name* enough. Bye, bye self-esteem, and it was all downhill from there. I saw everything through that perspective.

It took my descent straight to the the bottom of self-hate hell in order for me to realize that sometimes something was wrong with other people. I wish I’d understood that the first half of my life. If I had, maybe the loss I’d experienced as a result of my adoption would have stopped at my birth parents and my culture. Instead, it flowed into my adult life and into those of my children in ways I’d never even considered.

But I suppose that’s a subject for another day…

(Image Credit: myrthezz13)

A lot of people don’t realize that I’m Latina, which is fine. One thing about being Latina is that there isn’t one look that comes with the territory. I don’t expect people to know my cultural background just by glancing at me. I do, however, expect that when I tell people my family is from Puerto Rico, that I will be believed and not accused of trying to be something that I’m not. It usually goes something like this: a person having a conversation with me discovers one way or another that I’m Puerto Rican and fluent in Spanish. That person then expresses their shock over these realizations for any number of reasons–common responses are, “You don’t look Latina” and “I thought you were black!” I never said I wasn’t black. And since when does being black and being Latina have to be mutually exclusive? [...]

As I start to get my feet wet in Hollywood, I already know that there are certain parts I won’t even be considered for. The character can be Puerto Rican and speak Spanish just like me, but Hollywood defines Latina as Jennifer Lopez and Sofia Vergara. As beautiful as they are, we’re not all one race in Latin America. But I don’t go to auditions so that I can give history lessons to film executives. I’d rather skip the entire process.

—From “Personal Essay: Yo Soy Boricua” on the LaLa Blog

(Thanks to N for the tip!)

But first, I want to begin by thanking the Facebook data team for actually making this data available for public dialogue. Far too few companies are willing to share their internal analyses, especially about topics that make people uncomfortable. I was disappointed that so many academics immediately began critiquing Facebook rather than appreciating the glimpse that we get into the data they get to see. So thank you Facebook data team!

There are many different ways to collect quantitative data involving categories like race, ethnicity, class, gender, sexuality, etc. None of them are perfect. Even asking people to self-identify can be fraught, especially when someone is asked to place themselves into a box. Ask a self-identified queer boi to identity into the binaries of “female/male” and “gay/straight” and you’ll see nothing short of explosive anger. Race certainly isn’t any prettier, let alone ethnicity or class. The salience of these qualities also depends on what we’re trying to measure, what we’re trying to say. For example, if we’re talking about people who experience being targets of racism, should we concern ourselves more with self-identification or external labeling? At the coarsest level, we often assume race to boil down to skin color, meaning that we have to take into account how people read race, how they experience race, how they identify with race. We must always remember that race is a social construct and one’s experiences of race are shaped by how one perceives themselves in relation to others and how others perceive them. And the very notion of race differs across the globe.

Of course, this is bloody messy. And ethnicity and class are even harder to locate because self-identification isn’t always the best measure. Heck, while Americans have learned to self-identify with race (thanks to countless forms), we aren’t typically asked to self-identify with ethnicity or class. So these are pretty murky territories. As a result, scholars and demographers and marketers and many others have different ways of trying to measure these categories. None are perfect. We can debate endlessly about which is better but, personally, I think that does the conversation a disservice.

In trying to measure race (and, partially, ethnicity) of its users without having self-identification, Facebook decided to use a statistical technique known as mixture-modeling to make a best guess as to the racial makeup of its user base. They go to great lengths explaining what they did, but it is this graph that we should be attentive to:

This graph highlights that those American users most likely to be white were overrepresented on Facebook until last year while those most likely to be Asian have been overrepresented as far back as they are measuring. Yet, the two lines that should pique our interest are the blue and red lines, highlighting that those most likely to be black and Hispanic have been underrepresented until very recently. In other words, 2009 is the year in which Facebook went “mainstream” among all measured racial/ethnic groups in the U.S.

Folks keep asking me if this surprises me. It does not. This very much matches what I’m seeing in the field. (It also confirms what I was seeing in 2006-2007.) But it also doesn’t tell the whole story. Numbers never do. MySpace has definitely declined among young users in the U.S., especially in the last 12 months, but race – and ethnicity and socio-economic status – still inflect people’s experiences with these technologies. Just because Facebook has become broadly adopted does not mean that what everyone experiences on Facebook is the same. I would LOVE LOVE LOVE to see Facebook data that broke down app usage by demographic data (age, location, gender, and their measure of race). Given what I’m seeing in the field, I’d expect you’d see variation. I’d also expect to see variation in terms of how the service is accessed – via mobile, web, 3rd party APIs, etc. As young people tour me through their Facebook experience, I’m regularly reminded that different groups have wholly different experiences with the same service. As Facebook has become a platform, it is no longer reasonable to simply think about access. There’s also a different issue at play… perception. People perceive certain practices to be universal because “everyone they know” is doing it that way. One of the hardest parts of my job is to explain to people that what they are seeing, what they are experiencing, is not the same as what others are. Even if they’re using the same tools.

When the “digital divide” conversations started up, folks boiled down the discussion to being one of access. If only everyone had access, everything would be hunky dory. We’re closer to universal access today than ever before, but access is not bringing us the magical utopian panacea that we all dreamed of. Henry Jenkins has rightly pointed out that we see the emergence of a “participation gap” in that people’s participation is of different quantity and quality depending on many other factors. Social media takes all of this to a new level. It’s not just a question of what you get to experience with your access, but what you get to experience with your friend group with access. In other words, if you’re friends with 24/7 always-on geeks, what you’re experiencing with social media is very different than if you’re experiencing social media in a community where your friends all spend 12+ hours a day doing a form of labor that doesn’t allow access to internet technologies. Facebook’s data provides a glimpse into how Facebook access has become mainstream. It is the modern day portal. But I would argue that what people experience with this tool – and with the other social media assets they use – looks very different based on their experience.

Many folks think that I care about access. Don’t get me wrong – access is important. But I’m much more concerned about how racist and classist attitudes are shaping digital media, how technology reinforces inequality, and how our habit of assuming that everyone uses social media just like we do reinforces social divisions that we prefer to ignore. This issue became apparent to me when doing fieldwork because of the language that young people were using to differentiate MySpace and Facebook. Adoption differences alone were never the whole story. Ever since I released my controversial blog essay 2.5 years ago, I have been working to write up my data and analysis in a meaningful way. Doing so has not been easy. I’ve been very uncomfortable handling my own data, trying to treat it in a manner that is respectful of the teens that I interviewed and the dynamics that I witnessed. Thankfully, Lisa Nakamura and Peter Chow-White gave me the space to work out these issues. The fruit of my labor will be published in an upcoming Routledge anthology edited by them called Digital Race Anthology. With their permission, I am sharing with you a working draft of the article that I have struggled to produce:

“White Flight in Networked Publics? How Race and Class Shaped American Teen Engagement with MySpace and Facebook”

In this article, I explore the themes I’ve been discussing for years but focus specifically on the language that young people used to differentiate MySpace and Facebook and how that language can be understood through the historical dynamics of segregation in the U.S. My decision to use the “white flight” frame is meant to be provocative, to encourage the reader to think about the rhetoric that we’re currently using and its parallels to earlier times. For example, how we employ “safety” as a way of marking turf and segmenting populations.

Given the conversations prompted by Facebook’s data, I felt the need to share this work-in-progress. Please feel free to comment or share your thoughts in whatever format makes sense to you.

(Image Credit: captain simon’s mandolin’s photostream on Flickr)

Reader Ilana tipped us to this Details article back in December – sadly it got lost in the holiday shuffle. But wow, is this article a winner:

White friend: Are you offended [by the article]?

Ilana (Jewish): Um, yes. I don’t like it when people fetishize ethnic groups, especially one to which I belong.

White friend: I think a lot of people in that article do fetishize jews, but don’t you think it’s possible that some people just consistently find themselves attracted to Jews/African Americans/ French people, etc?

Korean friend: Ilana – I hate it too…I feel as if they treat my group as a bunch of ‘toys’ =(

White friend: No one should be treated like a toy, and if anyone ever treats someone like an object then they’re racist, creepy and morally wrong.

Ilana: Agreed!

Korean friend: I think it’s possible, sure, but I also think that if someone finds themselves consistently attracted to an ethnic group not their own, they must examine the possible reasons behind that attraction- any latent racism… Even a positive stereotype can be harmful. I know this only too well.

White Friend: I don’t see how that’s a terrible thing unless they have latent racism or are motivated by a stereotype. (For me, it only seems to take a nerdy guy with glasses, humor and awkwardness.) My father’s friend has always dated African American women and there’s nothing like that in him. There’s always some weird amount of racial awkwardness in a cross … See More ethnic attraction, but I don’t see how anyone involved is doing something wrong, or has something wrong with them if it’s a consistent fixture in their lives. If they have a happy, healthy loving relationship, then why make them feel guilty about it?

Ilana: I am a huge proponent of interracial relationships, so long as everyone in the equation is happy and healthy. The issue, as I said, is consistent attraction regardless of personal attributes- if, for example, a white man is a serial dater of Asian women (to the exclusion of other women), it’s a little weird. There’s a big difference between being equal-opportunity and fetishizing someone.

White friend: I don’t want you to think I’m an asshole. I’m just really interested in sexual fetishes from a psychological perspective. What about a preferred set of physical attributes?

Ilana: I don’t think you’re an asshole. Given that I don’t have any background in psychology, sexual or otherwise… Preferred set of physical attributes? That’s tricky. I guess it depends on whether you associate your ideas about what kind of person the individual is with what they look like (i.e., “black men are all really aggressive and good in bed”), and apply those assumptions across the board.

White friend: Now I completely agree with you- if someone doesn’t pick and choose and will go after anything that’s breathing as long as he/she fits into their racial fantasy is a weirdo and a sexual predator waiting to burst open. That article was written in a disgusting way.

Granted, conversations about sex and race are generally difficult – everyone has different things they will accept or tolerate in relationships, and one person’s idea of fetish is someone else’s coincidence.  However, where Details fails (yet again!) is by trying to slot sexuality into easily digestible bits of stereotype.