By Arturo R. García

A number of ads during the Super Bowl Sunday night focused on the good things about Detroit and the auto industry. But the worst commercial of the day, aimed at Michigan voters, didn’t make the national airwaves.

The ad shown above for Republican state senatorial candidate Peter Hoekstra hinged its attack on incumbent Debbie Stabenow (D-MI) on Orientalism. The actress, playing a “Chinese national,” says:

Thank you, Michigan Senator Debbie Spenditnow. Debbie spend so much American money. You borrow more and more from us. Your economy get very weak. Ours get very good. We take your jobs. Thank you, Debbie Spenditnow.

The commercial, slated to run for two weeks, pointed viewers to its own website, of course, covered in a matching decor, with the video displayed front-and-center. The only mention of any of Stabenow’s policies comes at the very bottom of the page.

This marks the second major political ad in little more than a year to use xenophobia as a primary tactic, after Citizens Against Government Waste’s “Chinese Professor” spot from October 2010:

Hoekstra defended his commercial in an interview with WMMT-TV before the game, saying, “If it’s got their attention we must be doing something right.”

Unfortunately for Hoekstra, it’s getting the wrong kind of attention, too: not only is the ad getting rightly pilloried in media circles, but at least one in-state consultant within his own party, Nick De Leeuw, has criticized the spot, saying, “Stabenow has got to go. But shame on Pete Hoekstra for that appalling new advertisement. Racism and xenophobia aren’t any way to get things done.”

Funny thing, though: even though Hoekstra’s ad accuses Stabenow of letting jobs and money leave their home state, as Politico reports, the commercial wasn’t even filmed in Michigan; it was made in California, something state Democratic party chair Mark Brewer quickly seized upon, calling it “nothing more than a hypocritical attempt at a Hollywood-style makeover.

“The fact is, Pete spends a lot,” Brewer said. “Hoekstra voted for the $700 billion Wall Street bailout and voted for trillions more in deficit spending before quitting Congress to get rich at a Washington, D.C., lobbying firm. Hoekstra is using the big game to play games with Michigan voters, covering up his real record on deficit spending and rigging the rules for the big money insiders he serves.”

Juan Williams, Fox News: Speaker Gingrich, the suggestion that you made was about a lack of work ethic and I’ve gotta tell you my email account and my Twitter account has been inundated by people of all races who are asking if your comment was not intended to belittle the poor and racial minorities … you saw some of this reaction during your visit to a black church in South Carolina by a woman who asked why you refer to Barack Obama as a “food stamp president.” it sounds like you’re trying to belittle people.

Newt Gingrich: first of all Juan, the fact is that more people have been put on food stamps by barack obama than by any president in americanhistory. I know that among the politically correct, you’re not supposed to use facts that are uncomfortable. Second, you’re the one who, earlier, raised a key point: the area that oughta be I-73 was called by Barack Obama a “corridor of shame” because of unemployment. Has it improved in three years? No. They haven’t built a road, they haven’t helped the people, they haven’t done anything. One last thing … so here’s my point: I believe every American, of every background, has been endowed by their creator with the right to pursue happiness, and if that makes liberals unhappy, I’m going to continue to help poor people learn how to get a job, learn how to get a better job, and learn someday to own the job.”
- Video via The Grio

The growth partly reflects an increase in need, as millions of Americans have lost income and lost jobs or remain out of work. In addition, food prices have increased, eligibility has been expanded, and the 2009 economic stimulus law temporarily increased benefits.

Before Mr. Obama took office, food stamp participation was rising, in part because of federal policies that encouraged low-income people to seek aid for which they were eligible.

Nearly half of food stamp recipients are under age 18. Nearly 30 percent of food stamp households have earned income. Only 15 percent of such households have income above the poverty level ($18,500 for a family of three in 2011).

– Robert Pear, New York Times

“Do you see how these remarks might offend people?” Williams asked.

Newt replied, “No, I don’t see that.” He then defended his position, citing anecdotal accounts of young people who prospered as janitors, or as doughnut deliverers. Gingrich went on to say that he got the idea from a Joe Klein article about New York City schools, which is true.

“Only the elites despise earning money,” Gingrich said. But as Benjy Sarlin points out, if you hired 30 kids for one janitor contract, those kids wouldn’t be able to form an emotional attachment to earning money, because they wouldn’t earn very much.
- Jason Linkins, The Huffington Post

- Video via Buzzfeed

The audience at the South Carolina GOP debate interrupted a question to Mitt Romney that referenced his family’s ties to Mexico with an audible boo from what sounded like several people as the question was asked.

Romney’s father was born in Mexico, where his parents were part of a Mormon enclave that had moved temporarily from the United States.
- Benjy Sarlin, Talking Points Memo

In New Hampshire last Sunday, Romney mentioned that his father, George, was born in Mexico and came to the United States at age five. On Wednesday he took to the airwaves in Florida with a new Spanish-language ad entitled “Nosotros,” meaning “us.” The Republican National Committee got in on the act, too, announcing a beefed-up outreach effort to Hispanic voters.

But it may be too little, too late. Even before his DREAM Act comments, Romney faced an uphill battle with Latinos. A poll conducted by Latino Decisions for Univision in November found that among registered Hispanic voters in the 21 most Hispanic-heavy states, Obama held a whopping 67 percent to 24 percent lead over Romney.

While Romney could make up some ground among Latinos by selecting someone like Cuban-American Florida Sen. Marco Rubio or former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush as his eventual running mate, the GOP may have missed a golden opportunity to swing the 2012 election by earning the backing of Latino voters.
- Matthew Jaffe, ABC News

From the TV cutaways they seemed clean, well-dressed, and drug-free. And yet their reactions would scare off any sane, sensible person. In previous debates the right-wing GOP audiences booed a gay soldier. Someone shouted “Let him die!” in response to a question about an uninsured person.

But in South Carolina they took the cake. The crowd booed the mere mention of the name of the country of Mexico. Just the name. I might understand it if they booed, say, North Korea or Iran or Texas A&M—centers of evil. But Mexico? Good luck with that Latino vote in November, guys.

Then, when Ron Paul said the Golden Rule should guide our foreign policy, the crowd booed. They booed the Golden Rule. Apparently nobody told them that Jesus wrote the Golden Rule. On second thought, they’d have booed Jesus.
- Paul Begala, The Daily Beast

Here’s what should have happened in the 17 years since then: Cape Town, the country’s oldest city with its reputation for being cosmopolitan, ought to have led the way in racial unity. It didn’t happen. Far away from verkrampte Pretoria and even more conservative Bloemfontein, Cape Town failed us. Her people withdrew into their racial enclaves and passed each other warily on the street.

I spent two and a half years in Cape Town before I fled for Johannesburg, like so many other black professionals (ahem). It wasn’t just the stories you’d hear about people of colour being turned away from nightclubs, or how the only other black people in your work place were generally the cleaners. It wasn’t even the near complete absence of racial integration.

What drove me slowly mad was how racism was an elephant in the room that you could not talk about. How white Capetonians would cringe and turn away when the topic came up, or look at you in blank confusion and ask why you were so obsessed with race. It was how, yes, there is racism everywhere in South Africa but in Cape Town it is not possible to even discuss it. And how Cape Town, with its pristine beaches, its lofty Parliament buildings and history of activism, was somehow supposed to be better than that.

And in our haste to one-up each other in the Being Right game, South Africans have singularly failed to stop and listen to each other. It’s the black professionals like myself who fled the city, generally for Johannesburg, and didn’t consider what the glib statement “Cape Town is racist” really meant, and how a generalisation like that was itself prejudiced.
- From “The black professional is not dead,” in The Mail & Guardian.

By Guest Contributors James Braxton Peterson and David J. Leonard

Some days it seems as if the GOP candidates are competing to be the governor of Alabama, circa 1960, rather than running to be President of the United States in 2013. Since the republican process to elect a nominee commenced, we have been treated to an endless string of racially awkward moments. Whether instances of ignorance or ignorant instances of institutionally racist ideology, too many of the republican Presidential candidates have re-revealed for us the colorblind fact that we are NOT post-race. In fact, judging from some of the candidate’s miscues and the underhanded pandering directly to the racial Right, we might actually be Pre-Race.

During a campaign stop in Sioux City, Iowa, Rick Santorum, responded to a familiar question about government spending with a longwinded diatribe that ultimately led him back to the GOP’s sweet spot: demonizing (and tacitly racializing) the social safety net. Focusing on the size of government and spending, Santorum stated:

It just keeps expanding—I was in Indianola a few months ago and I was talking to someone who works in the department of public welfare here, and she told me that the state of Iowa is going to get fined if they don’t sign up more people under the Medicaid program. They’re just pushing harder and harder to get more and more of you dependent upon them so they can get your vote. That’s what the bottom line is.

But this was not the “bottom line.” Santorum went on to ‘clarify’ the links between government spending and race, rehashing the accepted argument of the right that the federal government, especially under President Obama, is dedicated to taking money from hardworking white Americans and giving it to lazy and nonworking African Americans. He argued, “I don’t want to make black people’s lives better by giving them somebody else’s money; I want to give them the opportunity to go out and earn the money. And provide for themselves and their families. The best way to do that is to get the manufacturing sector of the economy rolling again.”

Santorum’s seamless transition from government spending to blacks on welfare is a non sequitur; it is indicative of the power of a white racial framework that consistently imagines African Americans as welfare queens and unproductive parasites on/in society. These stereotypes of African Americans stand in juxtaposition to the vision of middle and working class white folk as the racial model of hard work, virtue and dedication. While only 9% of African Americans in Iowa are on food stamps (nationally, 39% of welfare recipients are white, whereas 37% and 17% are black and Latino), Santorum’s comments resonate with the GOP’s vision of race and policy. His comments complemented Newt Gingrich’s recent lamentation of the deficient work ethic of black youth, his recycling of the culture of poverty/Moynihan Report, and his constant references to President Obama as a “food stamp president.”

Not surprisingly, Santorum and his fellow candidates have denied the racial implications here. Arguing that he did not actually say “black,” that some of “his best friends are black,” and that he was merely giving voice to the issues raised in Waiting for Superman, Santorum his been dealing the race-denial card from the top, bottom, and middle of the deck.

Despite the denials, the comments fit a larger worldview seemingly shared by Santorum and the entire field. Earlier in his campaign, Santorum argued that President Obama, as a black man, should understand the dangers of the government deciding who is and isn’t a person. “The question is — and this is what Barack Obama didn’t want to answer — is that human life a person under the Constitution? And Barack Obama says ‘no,’” Santorum argued during a television interview. “Well if that person — human life is not a person — then I find it almost remarkable for a black man to say, ‘we’re going to decide who are people and who are not people.’” This effort to invoke race and to analogically integrate his pro-life agenda with anti-black racism isn’t just a campaign strategy. It reflects a larger worldview and ideological foundation. Shortly after entering the race, Santorum gave lip service to the notion that America was great before 1965 (before integration, before great society programs, before the 1964 civil rights act, before the 1965 voting rights act):

Social conservatives understand that America was a great country because it was founded great. Our founders, calling upon in the Declaration of Independence, the supreme judge, calling upon divine providence, said what was at the heart of American exceptionalism…’We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal and endowed by our creator with certain inalienable rights.

Similarly, Mitt Romney has based much of his campaign around racial nostalgia, often arguing that America’s greatness resides in “The freedom to choose one’s course in life, to be an opportunity nation, a merit-based society” as opposed to one based on entitlement. As Melissa Harris-Perry points out, Mitt Romney has centered his campaign in the “land of yesteryear.” Commenting on his campaign advertisement and its racial homogeneity, Harris-Perry reflects on the dialectics between “Taking Back The Country” and “Mitt Romney’s Nostalgia For an “All White America.”

This should be of no surprise as Santorum, Gingrich and Romney are also all in the party of Rick Perry. With a family ranch named “Ni–erhead” and support for the confederate flag, as well as policies to match, it is no wonder that MSNBC anchor Chris Matthews referred to him as “Bull Connor with a smile.” Before dropping out of the race, Michelle Bachman has expressed her fondness for yesteryear, joining many of her fellow GOP presidential candidates in signing the Family Leader “Pledge,” which declares: “Slavery had a disastrous impact on African-American families, yet sadly a child born into slavery in 1860 was more likely to be raised by his mother and father in a two-parent household than was an African-American baby born after the election of the USA’s first African-American President.” This is the kind of drivel that passes for populous ‘outside-the-box’ thinking in the 21st Century Republican Party.

And then there is Ron Paul. Too many of Paul’s supporters are confused by his political brand and too many are quick to defend him against accusations of being racist. Just for the sake of argument and to hedge against any racist hate mail from Ron Paul supporters, let’s set aside the infamous newsletters. Let’s table the fact that part of Ron Paul’s original base of supporters was militia groups and white supremacist sympathizers.

Consider his policies and what the real outcomes of those policies will be. Paul wants to abolish the Department of Education, the EPA, and ANY so-called entitlement programs. (By the way, entitlement is code for poor people, old people, and people of color living off the tax dollars of upstanding working Americans.) Amazing trick how this particular code works since the VAST majority of actual entitlement resources goes directly to the 1% and the corporate subsidies, tax breaks, no-bid military contracts, etc. that they command via an entrenched lobbyism that dominates the political and legislative processes.

Dismantling the DOE, eliminating corporate regulations and oversight, destroying Medicare and Medicaid, eradicating welfare, WIC, and food stamps will disproportionately impact poor folk, which inherently (and disproportionately) impacts black and brown people. That may be an unintended consequence of Paul’s libertarian views, but that does not make these outcomes any less institutionally racist. The fact that we even have to have these conversations; that we have to listen to Santorum tell us that he really said “blah people” or that Gingrich can double down on his “food stamp President” comments; or that Perry can still campaign beyond “Ni%$er Head;” or that Bachman can believe that enslaved children are better off than free children – means that anti-black racism is still squarely entrenched in America’s political and public sphere. To think (or to argue) otherwise is just taking us back to an era where racism was more widely accepted as this country’s modus operandi.

By Arturo R. García

Last fall, MSNBC told Pat Buchanan to go have fun selling his new book. Today, it looks more likely the network changed the locks behind him.

The network’s president, Phil Griffin, was content to leave Buchanan twisting in the wind this past weekend, when he told The New York Times,“The ideas he put forth aren’t really appropriate for national dialogue, much less the dialogue on MSNBC.”

Of course, it’s been apparent for years that Buchanan’s views weren’t “appropriate” for any place outside of the right-wing fringe. But despite what Griffin said, his latest book might not have been the only factor in his apparent dismissal.

It’s not like Griffin had any room to be surprised by Buchanan’s latest round of printed bile, called Suicide of a Superpower: Will America Survive to 2025? Really, it’s the same tune he’s been singing since the 1970s. Because not much separates this speech:

There is a religious war going on in this country. It is a cultural war, as critical to the kind of nation we shall be as the Cold War itself. For this war is for the soul of America. And in that struggle for the soul of America, Clinton & Clinton are on the other side, and George Bush is on our side. And so to the Buchanan Brigades out there, we have to come home and stand beside George Bush.

From this passage in Superpower:

If that is what a nation is, can we truly say America is still a nation? The European and Christian core of our country is shrinking. The birth rate of our native born has been below replacement level for decades. By 2020, deaths among white Americans will exceed births, while mass immigration is altering forever the face of America.

At every turn, Buchanan has blamed the same groups of people – immigrants, LGBT people, Jewish people – for, in his mind, sullying his idea of what America should be. During his political career, the press at large gave giving Buchanan a wide berth, according to Slate:

Since Buchanan first ran for president in 1992, the press has largely treated him as a legitimate candidate rather than an extremist canker on American politics, á la David Duke or Louis Farrakhan. Part of the explanation for this is that he’s one of us. Though few journalists have any sympathy for Buchanan’s views, some find it hard to reconcile evidence of his bigotry with the friendly guy they know. For those covering his campaigns, there are other disincentives. Once you brand him an anti-Semite, a racist, and a fascist, it’s not much fun riding around New Hampshire with him in a minivan. What’s more, there is a dimension of self-conscious theatricality to Buchanan’s performances that makes his views easier to dismiss. He’ll uncork a zinger about not buying any more chopsticks until the Chinese quit dumping cheap imports, and then cackle at his no-no. You can write this kind of thing off as just Buchanan tomfooling around and building his brand for TV, rather than dyed-in-the-wool bigotry.

And that column was written in 1999, three years before MSNBC and Griffin gave him a national platform, where he would go on to claim that America “has been a country built, basically, by white folks;” that “only white men” died in the Battle of Gettysburg; and so on.

So what changed? According to an InsideCableNews column at Mediaite, it sure wasn’t Buchanan – it was the platform around him:

On the other hand, MSNBC has changed. It openly courts Progressive views and news. It puts out job ads asking for candidates with a progressive news background. Its pundit host class is all progressive and the network lets them show up en masse at the White House for off the record get togethers. The network is openly and aggressively courting the African American viewing audience so much so that it now notes how big it is in African American viewership in its releases.

Add all these things together and you now have a scenario where MSNBC, which used to be able to handle a Pat Buchanan and his intransigent controversial views, can no longer afford to do so without alienating core constituencies it covets.

The theory makes more sense now than it would have a few years ago: even after Keith Olbermann’s acrimonious departure, MSNBC has rebuilt a good portion of its’ talk show brand around Rachel Maddow, Lawrence O’Donnell, and Chris Hayes, and has added Melissa Harris-Perry, even if it keeps Joe Scarborough around in the morning.

Unfortunately, the nature of cable punditry virtually guarantees that even if Buchanan gets tossed on his duff by MSNBC, some other network will scoop him up and tout him as being “hard-hitting” or whatever the euphemism du jour is for reactionary bigotry. But even if this respite is brief, hopefully it leads to something better for his (apparently) former employers.

• Top image courtesy of Crooks & Liars
• For a more thorough collection of Buchanan’s views over the years, please visit Media Matters

By Arturo R. García

Well, that didn’t take long.

Gene Marks’ “If I Were A Poor Black Kid” piece for Forbes led to justifiably angry responses. Among them was Baratunde Thurston’s “Letter from a poor black kid” for CNN:

Thank you Mr. Marks. You have changed everything about my life. Thanks to your article, I worked to make sure I got the best grades, made reading my number one priority and created better paths for myself. If only someone had suggested this earlier.

But that was just the beginning of how your exceptionally relevant, grounded and experience-based advice changed my life. Thanks only to your article, I discovered technology.

Why did my teachers not teach this? Why isn’t this technology mentioned anywhere in popular culture? I don’t understand, but you do.

You listed so many different websites and resources, at first it was overwhelming. But I didn’t let that deter me. I thought to myself, “If a successful, caring, complicated, intelligent man like Gene Marks says to do it, then I’d better head over to rentcalculators.org right now!”

As Colorlines reported Thursday, Marks posted a response at CNN. The somewhat underwhelming transcript is under the cut.

Hi Baratunde,

Thanks for your piece – I thought it raised great points and continued the discussion. I wish you success with your new book too. And I read The Onion every day.

What do I know about being a “poor black kid?” Absolutely nothing. I’m a middle class white guy. But I went to school. So I know about that. And I’m in the business of technology. So I know about that.

How can any inner city kid even have the chance to overcome the inequality that our President spoke about and have a chance at some opportunity?

1. Study hard and get good grades.

2. Use technology to help you get good grades.

3. Apply to the best schools you can.

4. Get help from a school’s guidance counselor.

5. Learn a good skill. This is what I said in my blog. I said this wasn’t easy. It’s brutally hard. And, unfortunately, it’s not funny.

Will any of these kids read what I wrote in Forbes? Probably not. I’m hoping that educators, bloggers and most importantly parents do. Because it will be very tough for any kid to do it alone.

Regards,

Gene Marks

And that was it. Of course, Marks might just be conserving his strength; CNN reported he would post a follow-up piece this coming Monday, and we cannot wait. In the meantime, because the Internet is still a wonderful place, enjoy some more pics from the mandatory meme that just sprang up, If I Was A Poor Black Kid:

By Guest Contributor Marissa Lee, cross-posted from Racebending

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

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

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

Is Warner Bros on a racebending roll?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Impact on Performers and Communities of Color

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

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

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

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

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

Not confidence inspiring.

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

By Guest Contributor Mattie Brice, cross-posted from Kotaku

Tamagotchi. Remember those?

They became popular when I was in 4th grade. Sometimes my mother took me to a nearby Target to pick a toy- she told me it was for good grades, but I knew it was because I got bullied often at school. One of these times, I raced to find a Tamagotchi, as all of my friends were getting them. I liked the idea of something with me at all times, to take care of it and make me feel like something needed me.

And there it was, a whole wall of glittering purple eggs. I remember that exact, uncreative display panel to this day, and my mother stopping me. She told me to wait, that my aunt wanted to get that for my birthday when she visited. I protested, but the answer was the same: be patient, you’ll get it soon enough. We went a week later and all of them were gone, sold out from every toy store in our area. For some reason that memory is lodged in my brain. I brought it up to my mother recently, but she’s forgotten.

The stray times I visit Kotaku, it’s like I’m seeing an empty panel that the reward for my sitting, smiling, and internalizing should be. I was supposed to find somewhere to escape to, maybe even a place that needed me a little. You told me to wait, and I did. Where’s my Tamagotchi?

There is only a wrong way to go about this. So let’s just get to why I’m here:

Me too.

I’m part of the gaming community, but Kotaku doesn’t see me as a gamer. No, instead I’m a multi-racial transgender who-knows-sexual possibly-feminist woman gamer. A boogie monster. Someone who uses too many –isms and –ists in their daily tweets to actually enjoy anything. I don’t think I’ve ever had anyone ask what it’s like to be me in this pocket of society.

You know that invisible ink in detective movies? If you could get an internet lighter, you’d find “This site is for heterosexual white American men gamers.” Kotaku will never include me until it’s figured out that “gamers” is skewed to one identity and asks me to deal with that. No. Me too.

Gamer culture isn’t Kotaku’s fault. That skewing Japan as a land of weirdoes is humorous. That gamers like to look at galleries made up of T&A shots of women in cosplay. So what if someone like me doesn’t fit in with typical gamers? The editors are just providing what gamers want, how is that a bad thing? Are you using that lighter?

When I wasn’t bullied as a child, I was creating games. My favorite thing to do was to give my friends superpowers based on their personalities. When we played, they were empowered to be themselves. It was always fun because each one of us mattered. I mattered. Ever since, I knew I wanted to be involved with games, maybe even make them. I contemplate what I would say to kid-me now that I figured out what a gamer is. What kind of treatment I would receive if I ever got into the industry. Would it be more humane to convince my past self I didn’t actually matter?

I’ve turned away from Kotaku because it doesn’t like my answers. There’s a reason I can’t find you bountiful resources of sexually liberated cosplayers not posing for straight guys. [I had asked Mattie to help me find some sources of cosplay images more in line with what she would like to see on the site. — Kotaku Editorial Director Joel Johnson] Why there’s a scant amount of criticism of manchild culture. How the LGBT community is still the elephant in the room. We haven’t thought of what a gamer community that assumes diversity instead of homophobic adolescent dudes looks like. There are plenty of stats of who the “average” gamer is, what the actual demographics are. However, the image in our mind hasn’t changed in decades.

There’s a taboo against saying that. Me too. It’s radical liberal talk, an attempt to kill everyone’s fun. The common denominator response is “Why won’t you just go somewhere else?” I usually do. This attitude polarizes the community between large, mean-spirited marches of “the old guard” and a few impenetrable bastions of rigid but progressive niche philosophies. I’ve run to places like The Border House because “me too” isn’t deliberated upon, it’s the law. I turn away because Kotaku doesn’t ask me “Why are you leaving?”

Me too.

I’ve stared at those two words and deleted them often enough that I forget what they mean. I can’t say those words here without preparing myself for the sling-fest, and some days I just can’t summon the strength. This is after I go through my life dealing with crap society presents me just because I exist. And you know what sucks? That many times, my words are shrugged off, or given the fatal “I’ll think about it.” That isn’t inclusivity. Being benign doesn’t help. Letting commenters spew toxic isn’t inviting. Looking to defend yourselves doesn’t solve anything when it’s so obvious there’s a problem. I’m not looking to shame you, I just want to set things right.

Must I be a martyr? Must you be a machine? Are our only choices to become symbols and lose our humanity? Do you understand what you’re asking of me when you tell me to be patient? Do you know how long I’ve been waiting?

The games I play now won’t let me be myself. No game dares to feature a transgender character that isn’t on the wrong end of a joke. Sometimes I pretend that my party members know, but are too scared to ask. God, I don’t even know if most actual people know what it means to be transgender. Or multi-racial. Or anything other than what they are. I don’t know if they know it’s okay to ask. Then maybe we could figure out what a gamer really is. Halfway isn’t enough, but I will accompany you on the journey.

I wish Kotaku would tell me “We don’t want you to go away.” You’ll have to scroll down a bit to see if that comes true.

Me too.

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

Mythili Rajiva is associate professor of Sociology at Saint Mary’s University (Halifax, Nova Scotia). Her research focuses on girlhood, the Canadian South Asian diaspora, and racialized identities. Her work has appeared in such journals as The Canadian Review of Sociology, Girlhood Studies and Feminist Media Studies. She is the co-editor of Reena Virk: Critical Perspectives on a Canadian Murder.

BCP: Why a book on Reena Virk?

MR: The idea of working on the case had been in my head from about 2004 onwards, maybe because of a shift in my own identity from being a graduate student just starting a ph.d. in 1997 to where I was in 2004, finishing my thesis. I think it was Salman Rushdie who once said that the journey creates us; writing a thesis on South Asian Canadian girls’ experiences of racism in adolescence made me realize how much I cared about social justice issues.

The case had always haunted me, but up to this point, it had been at a visceral level. When I started analyzing it through the scholarship on racism and identity that I’d read for my thesis, I realized the case mattered to me deeply, both at a personal as well as a political level. But when I started doing research, I found very little academic work.

What little there was, was excellent, and informed much of my thinking around the topic; but the scholars who were offering a more complex and critical reading of the case seemed to be writing into a void, as if no one was listening. It seemed even stranger to me that such a highly publicized case would not be taken up at the very least by criminologists or other researchers in a more sustained fashion. But it wasn’t. Before we published this collection, the only book available on Virk’s murder was Rebecca Godfrey’s True Crime novel, which, as a couple of authors in our collection point out (see Atluri; also see Byers), offered a problematic re-telling of the story.

So I was reading this great scholarship, and wondering why there wasn’t more, and then I met Sheila and we talked about doing some kind of project together. I decided that we needed to encourage more critical scholarship on this case, a next generation so to speak, and even more crucially, we needed it not to disappear from public view, as most academic work does, in a single article in a journal or book. I initially considered a special issue in a journal, but this didn’t seem to offer enough scope, especially since I felt that anything written on the case would have to locate itself in relation to the earlier material. I wanted to bring both the existing and new material together; I think like any solidarity movement, there’s strength in numbers. People are more likely to pay attention to a bunch of people yelling about something than one person, right? So that’s where I got the idea for the book, and then all I had to do was talk Sheila into it, which wasn’t that hard!

BCP: What was the process in putting this book together?

MR: Once we decided we were going to do a book, and that it was going to be an anthology that included the existing material, we got in touch with the scholars and asked if they’d be willing to have their work included as reprints. I have to say that they were incredibly gracious and very supportive of the project from the beginning. Then we sent out a call for papers on the internet, on both social activist and scholarly websites. We got a lot of responses, and some great abstracts, and for awhile we were worried that the project was getting too big.

However, like with any project, life happens; not everyone who originally signed on was able to complete but we were really pleased with the final chapters. Our job as editors was to shape the process and guide the work along, but our contributors really made the substantial contributions.

BCP: How long had you been thinking about ReenaVirk before the book came about?

MR: As I’ve already mentioned, the case had been in my head since it first happened, kind of like those terrible stories you hear and no matter how much you try to excise them from your mind, they linger. It was also a personal thing. My thesis subject was on South Asian girls and racism, and I was a South Asian Canadian girl who had experienced racism in childhood and adolescence, in the form of racial epithets or having “friends” make racist comments or jokes around me.

Obviously, though painful in their own way, I’m not saying that my experiences are comparable to Virk’s, but I think it’s important to point out that they’re on a continuum of racism that people of colour have experienced and continue to experience in our supposedly tolerant and multicultural country. The book is about making links between the ordinary everyday experiences of racism and the more serious acts of violence against people of colour. So I was personally invested in the case, from the beginning.

BCP: Who, or what, are your influences and reasons for doing this kind of work?

MR: That’s tough because there have been so many. But I could name a few scholars that have given me a theoretical lens through which to interpret my own struggles with belonging, as a racialized minority girl growing up in a primarily white society.

Frantz Fanon’s moving work on the pychic violence of racism; Homi Bhabha’s writing on the “unhomeliness” of the immigrant experience and the trauma of the ordinary: when who we choose to love, where we are allowed to sit, what streets we are allowed to walk down etc. become points of political contestation; Chandra Mohanty’s beautiful call to arms, “to make feminist analysis dangerous to empire”, which I sincerely hope is part of what we’ve done in this book; and queer feminist philosopher Judith Butler’s work, especially her post 9/11 writing, where she asks what role grief plays in the service of the national imaginary; why we grieve for some lives but not others, and how we might conceive of a politics of grief that does not justify violence, and retaliation but instead recognizes the mutual vulnerability that constitutes us all as human beings, that we are all capable of being injured and committing injury. According to Butler, “the struggle against violence accepts that violence is one’s own possibility.”

An ethical stance in the world is, therefore, about recognizing one’s own rage and then seeking to limit the injury you might cause through this rage.

BCP: The book is raw at some points, challenging, honest, and stimulating. What are you as co-editor trying to convey to your readers with these 9 selected essays?

MR: So many things but I guess, overall, I want readers to re-think the discourse of violent girls on the playground perpetuated by the media and certain “experts”. Instead, I would like them to think about how Reena’s life and death are a troubling reminder of the racism that pervades Canadian culture, as painful as that may be to acknowledge.

When “we”, which is to say, members of the dominant group (white, Christian middle class, Anglo Canadians), view certain groups as “immigrants” regardless of how long the community has been in Canada; when we see brown or black skin as the opposite of “Canadian”; when we construct certain communities as having barbaric cultural practices without looking at our own social problems, we create an “us” and “them”, with the former being constructed as superior. It’s a seamless transition then to treating those we think don’t really belong as second class citizens. And this sense of superiority is false anyway.

The Canada that we think we know through our mythologies (“the true north, strong and free”, the peacekeeper, the multicultural democracy), is a nation founded on the brutal exploitation and marginalization of indigenous peoples, built through the labour of many migrant groups, not just French, English or European, but people of colour, some of whom paid the high price of alienation, explicit state racism and even violence and death. This history has to be acknowledged so we can have a radical revisioning of what makes someone a “real” Canadian.

BCP: How long were you working on your essay “The Killing Season: Interrogating Adolescence in the Murder of Reena Virk”? Can you briefly give the crux of it?

MR: I wrote and presented a draft of the paper in the fall of 2005 at a conference on child rights, so the final chapter was a long time in the making and went through several iterations before it was published in the book. The main argument is that the Canadian media’s ubiquitous descriptions of growing girl violence and the refusal to ask whether social relations such as race, gender, class or sexuality played a part in the murder, were influenced by a discourse on adolescence pervasive in North America.

So, when incidents like the Virk murder take place, we have a moral panic where people talk about girls becoming more violent and adolescents in general being out of control with boredom, hormones and a lack of moral subjectivity. This really pathologizes teenagers, as if they are the only ones capable of bullying, aggression and murder.

Last time I checked, adult society was winning that competition, but this reality gets erased systematically in news coverage. The teenagers involved in the case were treated as if they symbolized the degeneration of youth in general. But who raises youth? Who schools them? Who offers particular media frames and images up to youth that tell them who belongs for what reasons? Who implicitly encourages the social and peer hierarchies that develop so strongly in adolescence? Adult society does, and then it wants to blame young people as solely responsible for violent behaviour.

For example, children and adolescents don’t learn racism in a vacuum. Sure, children identify differences among themselves at a very young age, but at what point do they realize which differences are important and which are not? They learn it from parents, teachers, larger culture and peers. They pick up very quickly that adult society values certain people and not others, and then they create their own social hierarchies that are partially informed by larger social relations. But this can’t be acknowledged at a societal level, because then we would have to say we are actually not doing a great job of raising children who see others as equals, regardless of race, ethnicity, class, sexuality or ability. In the Virk case, this played out in the media’s refusal to acknowledge racism as even a possible motive. The handful of times that racism was raised in either tv or newspaper articles, it was immediately dismissed, as if it was impossible that these white kids could be racist. They could be vicious, murderous and without remorse, but not racist, because of course, then that might mean that the larger adult society that they were learning their values from, was racist too.

BCP: While reading the book I had to put it down several times because of them descriptions of the murder and the horrific way the media represented the case. Was writing and putting the book together a painful experience?

MR: Yes it was a very painful experience. I didn’t realize how hard it would be when I started.

I was reading and watching all the media, and encountering the brutality that characterized the case. I think being forced to live day in and day out with a recognition of the horror that people are capable of inflicting on one another left some scars. On the other hand, I think that my reaction also speaks to my own first world, middle class privilege. My life is, and has always been, far removed from contexts of brutal and violent domination; I know that a significant portion of the world, including people in Canada, are not so lucky. Violence is simply a daily part of their lives.

So the case threatened my comfort zone, and that is a good and necessary thing for people with any kind of privilege to experience. I felt a similar wrenching at the end of the project.

Alongside a pride in the work and relief at its completion were worries about whether I had ever had the right to embark on this project, and whether it was fundamentally exploitative – stealing Reena’s voice, as it were. I spent a lot of time thinking about this as we wrapped up the introduction to the manuscript as well as a lot of time interrogating my own privilege in relation to Reena. I think none of that is particularly surprising; it’s a form of survivor guilt for those of us whose identities are not simply fashioned through the myth of the western liberal subject. Women, racial, sexual or other minorities, those people who belong to marginalized groups, are always seen and see themselves as something more than individual selves. Their “I” is always linked to a “We”.

In my case, being second generation and South Asian, and experiencing racism growing up, was what made me feel a connection to Reena Virk, a sense that this could’ve been me. But part of my discomfort stemmed from the fact that alongside my marginalization, I had certain forms of privilege that Reena didn’t have access to and, so, in another sense, maybe it couldn’t have been me. I think it’s both my marginality and privilege that pushed me to do this book in the first place, and it’s where I think real social change has to take place. It’s not enough to focus on the forms of marginality we encounter as individuals or groups. As black feminist scholar bell hooks points out, we also have to acknowledge and surrender our own privilege and participation in forms of domination, if we want to change the world.

BCP: What was most disturbing to me was the fact that Reena was not only erased in books and media, as was race, and Reena was not being mourned. The focus, and sadness, was that white girls were on a social decline as opposed to a young Brown woman being killed by such girls and a boy.  What disturbs you most about this case?

MR: I think you’ve summarized exactly what I find most disturbing. Whenever I saw or read media reports on the case, I would feel so angry. While Virk’s image appeared repeatedly, and her tragic story was re-told, it was always through a politics of pity; she was presented through a framing that implicitly constructed her as an Other; as not belonging to Canadian peer culture because she didn’t look like a “normal” girl. She was killed because she failed to fit in. For myself, and I think many other subjects who live their marginality through their embodiment ( racialized, transgendered, poor or differently abled bodies, to name a few), it was pretty easy to read the code behind this hegemonic storyline: she wasn’t thin, white, middle class, heteronormative, she wasn’t the ideal Canadian girl. But the media simultaneously used these images and storylines and yet refused to ask if there might be a problem with the ideal itself; that maybe a lot of Canadian girls didn’t “measure up” to this standard. That maybe the standard was racist, homophobic, elitist and ableist. They never asked if there was a problem with the ideal, just as they never explored whether a group of mainly white girls viciously beating up a Brown girl might raise some serious doubts about our success in fostering racial equality among children and adolescents, let alone in adult society.

BCP: Do you teach this case at your University? If so, what do you make sure your students get from your work? And how do you get them to understand the brevity and complexity of the case? How do white female students respond?

MR: I have taught the case a little bit recently as the manuscript was wrapping up. In some ways, I think I was too close to it, and living with it for a good four years made it kind of an obsession. I needed to have spaces where I could teach and think about other forms of oppression otherwise my concerns with social justice would’ve shrunk to this particular case. Some of the class discussions that did take place were difficult; like most Canadians, the students were horrified and felt very sad that this could’ve happened, but they wanted to keep it at the level that the people involved must’ve been monsters, rather than the murder being an inevitable, if extreme, consequence of both the history and contemporary reality of racism in Canada. The focus was often on whether or not the girls involved in the beating or its witnessing had ever said anything racist, because if not, clearly racism was not an issue.

The fact that Virk was an outcast, at least in part because she was brown, was something many students didn’t want to see. For some white female students, they pointed out that even among white girls, there is a lot of “mean girl” behaviour if a person doesn’t fit in in terms of looks, weight or clothes.

The Virk case for them was another example of this, rather than anything to do with racial belonging. One way I tried to get them to complicate this was to ask if there is an ideal girl image to which Canadian girls aspire. There was often a general consensus that there was, and then I would ask them to describe this girl as she appeared in their minds. After the descriptions, I would ask them whether the fact that this ideal girl was always white, often blonde, thin, middle class and heterosexual, told us anything about how difficult it might be to fit in if you couldn’t meet some or all of those standards.

I think this type of exercise was helpful, because some students did begin to see what I was trying to get at.

BCP: To me, Reena Virk was first a face without a name and later a name without face. That might be the case for many people. Why is there no picture of Reena Virk in the book?

MR: The media continually flashed one particular picture of Virk over and over again. We thought about using this picture maybe as a cover, but almost immediately felt that it would sensationalize the book. Many people are familiar with that picture, but we didn’t want to “sell” the book in this manner. We also did not want to use the picture because it seemed to us that Reena’s appearance was the focus of media attention and the implicit reason given for why this happened (she was awkward, a misfit etc.), yet this was not accompanied by any explanation of what she didn’t fit into. We wanted to move away from this line of thinking to focus on the systemic issues in the case.

BCP: Does the Virk family know about the book? Do the killers? Media and authors critiqued in the book?

MR: I don’t know whether or not the family knows. We thought about contacting them initially, but we also felt that as an act of scholarship, we needed it to be honest in ways that might not have pleased Reena’s family. I also don’t know whether or not Warren or Kelly knows about it. The mainstream media has, for the most part, ignored the book, which is not unusual for an academic book. Of course, given that it’s a searing critique of their hegemonic “take” on the case, it wouldn’t surprise me if that’s why they’re not interested. But it’s hard to say.

Watch a roundtable discussion on the Reean Virk case with Rajiva’s co-editor Sheila Batachary, book contributor Tara Atluri, and community member Mandeep Kaur Mucina.

20-year-old Eiman from Darfur sought shelter at the UNHCR-run Chousha camp on the Tunisia/Libya border

By Guest Contributor Simba Russeau

With more than 140 tribes and clans, Libya is considered one of the most tribally fragmented nations in the Arab world. Despite modernization, tribalism remains a prominent force in a country now awash with weaponry.

In the aftermath of Gaddafi’s reign, nearly forty different independent militias that reportedly emerged during the rebellion remain at large.

Raising questions as to whether the National Transitional Council (NTC) has the ability to reign in all the various groups, many of which have competing interests like settling scores from the past.

For Libyans from the far south this daunting picture has already become a reality.

Tawergha – which lies some forty miles south of Misurata along the western coast of the Gulf of Sirte – was home to an estimated population of over 20,000 people. Now it’s become a ghost town.

According to some Libyans, the name Tawergha was given to the towns black population because they had dark-skinned features like the original Tuareg.

The Tuaregs, who inhabit the border area of Libya, Chad, Niger and Algeria, were historically nomads that controlled trans-Saharan trade routes and had a reputation for being robbers.

During the seventies, Gaddafi assembled the Tuaregs and other African recruits into his elite battalion known as the Al Asmar. Ironically, Al Asmar means “The Black” in Arabic.

Under Gaddafi¹s supervision, these militias were oftentimes sent on military expeditions into neighbouring countries and at the onset of the country’s revolt in February of this year many Tuaregs were unleashed on protestors.

20-year-old Eiman from Darfur sought shelter at the UNHCR-run Chousha camp on the Tunisia/Libya border

As a result, racial hatred fuelled by unconfirmed rumours that African mercenaries had been hired by Gaddafi to squash discontent created another common enemy – dark-skinned Africans.

In the eyes of Misuratans, Tawerghans were the perpetrators of some of the worst human rights abuses during Gaddafi¹s siege on Misurata in March and April.

On August 15, in what human rights groups are calling reprisal attacks, rebels forces going by the name of The Brigade for Purging Slaves, black Skin have reportedly detained and displaced hundreds while other Tawerghans have disappeared without a trace.

“If we go back to Tawergha, we will then be at the mercy of the Misurata rebels,” a woman, who has been living in a makeshift camp with her husband and five children, told UK-based Amnesty International.

“When the rebels entered our town in mid-August and shelled it, we fled just carrying the clothes on our backs. I don’t know what happened to our homes and belongings. Now I am here in this camp, my son is ill and I am too afraid to go to the hospital in town. I don’t know what will happen to us now.”

Also caught up in the crossfire of vengeance are economic migrants, refugees and asylum-seekers from sub-Saharan Africa, many of which have sought refuge in neighbouring Tunisia or Egypt.

For them, Libya was a transit country but for others it had become a place of rebuilding.

“Fearing for their life, my parents who are from Al Fasher City in Darfur fled to Tripoli in 1998. I had never lived outside Libya before the conflict started. My father worked as a cook and my mother was domestic worker. Before fleeing I was in my third year of University pursuing a degree in the medical field,” 20-year old Eiman told Witnessing Life.

“Unfortunately the uprising in Libya took a bloody turn because people no longer respected the law and started raping women, taking hostages and killing people. For two months my family remained trapped in our house. They were accusing and killing all black males caught on the street of being mercenaries, which meant that our mother had to try and gather food but there were many days that we starved.”

In an article published in September, the Wall Street Journal quoted Jibril as saying, “regarding Tawergha, my own viewpoint is that nobody has the right to interfere in this matter except the people of Misurata. This matter
can’t be tackled through theories and textbook examples of national reconciliation like those in South Africa, Ireland and Eastern Europe.”

Calls by human rights groups urging the NTC to protect black Libyans in the newly liberated Libya seems to have fallen on death ears, which could set a precedent of what is to come.

Back when Warner Bros. greenlit their Americanized Akira movie everyone was buzzing that Tron Legacy star Garrett Hedlund was the lead contender for the role of Kaneda. Now it seems he’s been offered the part. Gah.

Listen, we don’t have anything really against Hedlund, he’s nice to look at on screen and his acting certainly wasn’t the only reason Tron Legacy failed so dreadfully. But come on, Hollywood, this is just boring. Can we at least consider an Asian actor, just one? And are we really going to call this guy Kaneda? Or are you going to Americanize all the Japanese names as well? Will Shotaro Kaneda be turned into Kenny, and Tetsuo Shima into Timmy?

- From “Garrett Hedlund offered lead role in Akira. Crap,” by Meredith Woermer

Mother Jones recently published “My Summer at an Indian Call Center,” which looked at the other side of the “these people are stealing our jobs!” outsourcing scenario. It was written by Andrew Marantz, an American who spent a summer in India and took a training course for call center agents, and focused on his experiences during this training and his views of the industry. Some parts were interesting, such as the strange and amusing anecdotes from his cultural training bootcamp, and it provided a much needed counter to the idea that the current system of globalization brings greater happiness and prosperity to everyone.

Points like this were particularly insightful:

Call-center employees gain their financial independence at the risk of an identity crisis. A BPO salary is contingent on the worker’s ability to de-Indianize [16]: to adopt a Western name and accent and, to some extent, attitude. Aping Western culture has long been fashionable; in the call-center classroom, it’s company policy. Agents know that their jobs only exist because of the low value the world market ascribes to Indian labor. The more they embrace the logic of global capitalism, the more they must confront the notion that they are worth less.

But its critique was ultimately limited, full of over-generalizations, and at times contradictory. Below are four reasons I found it so, and why I would hesitate to recommend this article.

(1) Near the beginning of the piece, Marantz quotes a 2003 Guardian article which states: “The most marketable skill in India today is the ability to abandon your identity and slip into someone else’s.” It’s factually correct that this is a marketable skill, but by labeling it the most marketable skill the article is overreaching. It also fails to make a distinction that few Indians overlook. Namely, that there’s very little money that a middle class urban Indian can earn by slipping into the identity of, say, a villager in Orissa, or a farmer in rural Nigeria. The marketable skill is the ability to slip into an affluent Westerner’s identity.

By itself, this is a small omission and overgeneralization, but there are similar ones throughout this article, forming a pattern indicative of a lack of awareness or concern for the underlying hierarchies that govern many aspects of a call center employee’s life, as well as a lack of nuance.

(2) The most interesting, as well as most questionable, parts of the article were those which talked about the cultural training call center agents are required to undergo. In this training, Marantz says,

trainees memorize colloquialisms and state capitals, study clips of Seinfeld and photos of Walmarts, and eat in cafeterias serving paneer burgers and pizza topped with lamb pepperoni. Trainers aim to impart something they call “international culture” — which is, of course, no culture at all, but a garbled hybrid of Indian and Western signifiers designed to be recognizable to everyone and familiar to no one.

While in this instance learning “international culture” is obviously corporate doublespeak for “If you sound too Indian, you’ll be fired,” to claim that there’s no international culture seems similar to the claim that white people have no culture, especially in its glossing over of underlying hierarchies. The point of this culture training, it must not be forgotten, is to give the Indians at these call centers names, accents, mannerisms, and cultural signifiers that help them to pass for Westerners, to circumvent the “protectionism” instincts of the callers. This isn’t a melding of two cultures into something no one is familiar with; it’s the attempted erasure of one to avoid instigating the anger and scorn of those from the other.

Furthermore, to say the signifiers of this “international culture” are recognizable to everyone and familiar to no one is to imply that the playing field is equal, that there’s no hierarchy in the making of said signifiers or in the awareness/consumption of them. It glosses over the history of colonialism as well as current economic inequalities, and implies something that’s partly disproven by the author’s own experience: that an American, walking into a call center recruiting office, would have the same chances of being hired as an Indian.

Marantz further exacerbates this by characterizing call centers, where Indians are pressured to pass as Westerners, as “one of the largest intercultural exchanges in history.” And the unacknowledged irony is that in this globalized world, it’s Westerners such as Marantz — who have spent a semester in Nepal, or gone through some call center training, or have had their jobs outsourced — that largely define for international culture what it means to be an Indian call center agent.

(3) The author makes statements that seem factually questionable, such as the following:

Every month, thousands of Indians leave their Himalayan tribes and coastal fishing towns to seek work in business process outsourcing, which includes customer service, sales, and anything else foreign corporations hire Indians to do.

Most workers in the BPO industry, of which call centers form a part, are not from Himalayan tribes or coastal fishing towns, but are “urban English-speaking youths“. One of the prerequisites of working at call centers, as Marantz himself states, is complete mastery of English, which is difficult to achieve in most schools to which Indians from Himalayan tribes and coastal fishing towns have access. Here, it seems like Marantz is trying to shove the lives of call center agents into a certain assimilation narrative — ambitious young men leave their traditional communities to make a name for themselves in (increasingly Westernized) cities, and in the process lose their identity — whether or not all the facts fit.

There are two other problems with this. The first, to paraphrase Charles Ramirez Berg, is that this assimilation narrative endorses the very system it sets out to criticize, because the only happy ending sends the ethnic/non-Western Other back to where he began, leaving him to cope with the negligible opportunities that exist for him there. The second is that it presents an oversimplified, binary view of the world. This is also evident in other parts of the article, where Marantz makes quite sweeping generalizations. For example, when describing a call center trainee, Marantz writes, “Growing up in rural Haryana, Nishant got his picture of the world from grainy Sylvester Stallone movies on a neighbor’s TV. Like all the boys in his village, he dreamed of living in California.”

For many young men and women, particularly those living near poverty, globalization has displaced nationalism as an ideal. For them, success is defined not in climbing local hierarchies, which can be quite rigid, but in bypassing them entirely and reaching affluence by finding work abroad. That said, I would have suspected at least one or two of the boys in Nishant’s village to have dreams of becoming, say, world famous cricket players, professions that would not require living in California. That Marantz doesn’t makes me wonder at the absoluteness of his perceptions.

And from parts such as this –

Twenty years ago, before India opened its markets to the world, career prospects were bleak. Men might have been laborers or government workers, but even the most ambitious women often gave in to social pressure and stayed home.

– it’s clear that Marantz sees pre-1991 India as having almost nothing to offer ambitious men and women. That this statement ignores doctors, businessmen, professors, etc, is perhaps belaboring the obvious. What is also questionable is the implication that the last twenty years have brought nothing but progress. For while it’s true that middle and upper class urban Indians, on average, have become more affluent in this time period (and not always, or even mainly, by adopting Western identities, even in the BPO industry, despite the impression this article gives), the same can’t be said for others. When India bowed to international pressure and began opening its markets, some of the largely ignored consequences were greater income inequality, increased poverty, currency shocks, food insecurity, and a “crisis of extinction” faced by small rural farmers.

(4) The concluding paragraph of the article comprises the main reasons that I’m hesitant to recommend it. It begins:

In a sense, Arjuna is too westernized to be happy in India. He speaks with an American accent, listens to American rock music, and suffers from American-style malaise. In his more candid moments, he admits that life would have been easier if he had hewn to the traditional Indian path.

As stated above, I believe that this article contains a much needed — though limited — critique of the justifications of global free market capitalism. However, it often implicitly and explicitly reiterates the same essentialist East/West binary that such justifications rely on, the worldview that the East is conservative, traditional, stagnant, and ultimately (and deservedly) powerless against the dynamic, modern, independent, and ruggedly individualistic West. The statement that Arjuna is “too Westernized to be happy in India” contains an unthinking reliance on this East/West dichotomy — which is also present in the statements quoted above — and works to undermine Marantz’s critique of Western-style free market capitalism not being the path to happiness and prosperity.

I know of desis who were born and brought up in America who are now living quite happily in India, as well as Indians who are unhappy with their “traditional Indian” path and those who are happy with their “modern Western” one (I put these in quotes because I would be quite curious to know the exact criteria that distinguish a traditional Indian path from a modern Western one). The crucial difference, it seems to me, isn’t the degree of Westernization, but the available career opportunities. And however lucrative call center jobs might appear in the short-term, in the long-term such jobs are physically- and emotionally-demanding career dead-ends.

From the facts stated in the article, it can be inferred that Arjuna is highly educated and comes from a relatively privileged family. The problem isn’t that such a person became too “Westernized to be happy in India,” but that even with all his education and privileges, there were few options available to him. All that he — and hundreds of thousands of other Indians — have to show for their efforts are graveyard shift call center jobs that leave them physically and mentally disconnected from the world outside. Jobs where they’re required to speak English even among themselves, where they must take timed bathroom breaks and don’t have the freedom to step outside, where they’re minutely judged on their ability to pass as those more valued in global hierarchies and passively endure whatever abuse the customer throws at them. And the problem is that these are some of the people who are considered globalization’s success stories, and the hardships others face — those, say, from “Himalayan tribes and coastal fishing towns” — are generally greater and far more pressing.

I’m back, America.

I have been home, on U.S. soil, for the past 3 weeks, and it has given me some time to reflect on being a black woman in U.S. vs. being a black American woman in France. Living in France for the second time was rather colder than the first but a bit more illuminating in terms of race. That can be attributed to the fact that while Aix-en-Provence, the first city that introduced me to the entrancing world of French culture, is an international student-city in the sunny south, Vannes is situated in Bretagne, in the rainy north-west of the country. Aside from the nonstop rain, Vannes was whiter than white. Not to say I didn’t see black people – indeed, I noticed black women on my daily bus route to work, but many public spaces, like the port, the library, and the grocery store were lacking in color. Admittedly, there were actually two black hair stores and a café Afrique that shut down while I was there, but that was about it.

Binta, the young Senegalese woman who did my hair, broke it down for me one day, “There’s no black people here because it’s too small because there are no jobs. But a lot of them marry French.” By “French”, she meant white men, and her sister, the owner of Ebene Cosmetique, was one such example. I noticed, with a certain amount of chagrin, that many Europeans of color refer to their privileged compatriots as the standard of that country, while they are specifically marked by their race. “English” are white, but English blacks are, well, black. The same goes for conversations I have had with German blacks. I suppose we hold the same standard in America, but because of our sordid misdealings with the social construction, although blacks may not be considered true “Americans” we do not refer to our white counterparts as simply “Americans”. Indeed, we are obsessed with race but rarely given the proper tools to talk about, much less acknowledge, our race problems. And white Europeans know it, effectively allowing them to ignore their own issues, I discovered.

When I first arrived in Vannes, I befriended a couple of local boys, and we often went out to bars since there is little else to do in the city. Amazed at the utter whiteness of the venue, one night I asked my friend, “Do you ever notice that there are essentially no black people here – why is that?” and he said, “There are some, just not many. But it’s very different in France, we are much less conscience of race in France than Americans.” He smoothly side-stepped my question and turned the focus to America’s racism. Because America is a popular topic in the media, the nightly French news frequently reported breaking American news. Thus, the world beyond our borders is informed of how race issues are part and parcel to American culture.

While visiting Budapest, Hungary, a completely inter-ethnic group of us twenty-somethings went to smoke hookah – an American, two Portuguese, an Indian, and a Hungarian native to be exact. The inevitable subject of Barack Obama was broached and the U.S.’s fixation on race quickly followed. I mentioned how racist America truly is in its practices – on institutional and structural levels, as well as individual, and Pedro said, “Well of course this is because of your history with slavery, but it is absurd because America is a nation of immigrants.” Once again, we were able to discuss America’s hot-button issue, illegal immigration, without a mention of colorism in India or the Neo-Nazi march in Hungary last year.

Although I am the first to extol Europe’s interracial dating practices, it is no less difficult to have real discussions about xenophobia, racism, or Islamophobia as it is here in the U.S. And Europeans seem to have the ultimate trump card: America is the first and the worst of them all.

During a brief visit to Bordeaux, a beauteous, sparkling gem in the south of France, I paid a visit to the Museum d’histoire naturelle, The Natural History of Museum. I was pleasantly surprised to see there was an extensive exhibition of Bordeaux’s slave history. To my dismay, French historians downplay and minimize slavery parallel to American history. I have been to many history museums in the U.S., but none to my memory have put such a heavy emphasis on tribes selling their own into slavery.

Transcript:

Like many other civilizations, African societies practiced slavery. European demand boosted this practice and, from Senegal to Angola as well as in East Africa, African rulers and dealers made substantial profits from the slave trade. Most of those who were enslaved were captured in battles or were kidnapped. Some were the children of slaves, or were sold by their parents during times of famine. As demand in Europe increased, the African dealers carried out raids further into the interior and many of the captives died before reaching the coast. In time the slave trade moved to new areas and after 1780, the dealers from Bordeaux started buying slaves in Mozambique and Zanzibar. The slave shops spent 3 to 6 months traveling to different parts of the coast buying their cargo. Mortality rates were highest amongst those who were embarked at the start of the voyage.

Slavery has been practiced by all civilizations down the ages [first written record in Mesopotamia]. Often, as in ancient Rome, ‘slave’ was a synonym for ‘foreigner’, since most societies were repelled by the idea of enslaving people who belonged to their culture. Slavery was therefore sustained by wars and since captives had to be displaced or transported, the slave trade was developed. The African and Arab slave trades pre-date the arrival of Europeans. However, the European demand for the slave labour to exploit the resources of the New World saw this trade in human beings rise to the unprecedented levels over a short period. In the New World, slaves were considered to be property, no more than a raw work force.

Although it was probably futile, I attempted to re-read these descriptions from the perspective of someone who was unaware of slavery in Europe. These re-made versions of history would have us believe that slavery happened because it has been happening and Africans wanted to make money from it. Europeans merely wanted to take advantage of what was already going on. To my chagrin, beyond in-depth diagrams of slave ships and maps of the trans-Atlantic, there was no mention of the extant racism embedded in French culture. Like the new ban on veils, which reeks of Islamophobia but is also the status quo for Nicolas Sarkozy and his administration.

While I did receive a few stares, and the same questions about ethnicity over and over again, I never had overt experiences with racism: being followed around stores, out of pocket remarks or foreign hands touching my hair. As before, I strongly encourage all people of color to travel or live abroad, if it is feasible. Just know that the racial ‘baggage’ you take with you will be greeted with a brand-new, dare I say it, exotic version: racism exists abroad, you know, just not as bad as it is in America.

By Guest Contributor Kristen Wright

On June 15, the Boston Bruins defeated the Vancouver Canucks 4-0 in Game 7 of the Stanley Cup Finals. And on the previous Sunday, June 12, the Dallas Mavericks beat the Miami Heat 105-95 in Game 6 of the NBA Finals to secure the franchise’s first championship. The media has celebrated both victories as a triumph of grit and hard work over finesse and pure talent.

The streets of Vancouver may have erupted after the Canucks’ loss, but the team’s most potent offensive weapons – twin brothers Daniel and Henrik Sedin – were relatively silent throughout the Finals. The twins combined for two goals, three assists, and a minus- 4 rating during the Finals, but multiple writers came to their defense when commentator Mike Milbury referred to them as ‘Thelma and Louise’ (an inaccurate and offensive reference to their poor play) during a broadcast. Miami Heat superstar LeBron James has his defenders, but much more ink has been spilled over his shortcomings. While Dallas role players like JJ Barea and DeShawn Stevenson played over their heads, LeBron failed to live up to his hype.

Drafted 1st overall by the Cleveland Cavaliers in the 2003 NBA Draft, James was supposed to be the savior of a struggling franchise. He initially appeared to deliver on this promise, leading the Cavaliers to the playoffs every season between 2006 and 2010. The Cavs even made the 2007 NBA Finals, where they were swept by the San Antonio Spurs.

Last summer, LeBron became a free agent. After being courted by numerous NBA organizations, he announced his decision to join the Miami Heat during an hour-long special entitled The Decision. The program was widely ridiculed as a lengthy and unnecessary spectacle, and basketball greats like Michael Jordan argued that it was inappropriate for LeBron to join a team of rivals in an attempt to chase a championship.

But other criticism of James has come from the hockey world. Sam Fels, a Chicago Blackhawks blogger, wrote a piece on his blog Second City Hockey entitled “Viewing LeBron” (on NBC Chicago later cross-posted the piece under the title “What Hockey Fans Think of LeBron”). In his piece, Fels argued that hockey fans are turned off by the “bombast” of LeBron’s free agency and of the basketball culture in general.

Fels’ argument is not completely without merit. Many people believed that LeBron should have committed to Cleveland for a few more years. And if the team still did not appear to be championship material by the end of this period, he could have left with a clear conscience. I believe that if he was set upon leaving the Cavaliers organization, he could have informed them earlier (instead of minutes before the ESPN special aired), and avoided the televised special entirely.

It is important to emphasize that LeBron’s mishandling of his free agency was a personal mistake. Yet, Fels believes that the “bombast” of LeBron’s free agency is endemic to the culture of the NBA. The scandal surrounding LeBron’s free agency could be compared to the fracas surrounding Wayne Gretzky’s 1988 trade from the Edmonton Oilers to the Los Angeles Kings, or Bruins legend Ray Bourque’s 2000 trade to the Colorado Avalanche. Yet, the reputations of Gretzky and Bourque have remained intact. This is partly because the trades of Gretzky and Bourque were engineered by third parties. Gretzky had no idea that he was about to be traded, and during his tearful press conference, he was clearly reluctant to leave the Oilers. Bourque had expressed a desire to win a Cup before he retired, but Boston’s GM set up the trade with the Avs without consulting his star player. And in his piece, Fels argues that there is nothing wrong with leaving a cherished team to pursue a championship; LeBron and his fellow NBA players just lack tact.

Fels argues that some hockey fans’ disdain for the “bombast” of basketball comes with an “undercurrent of racism,” but for most fans, it is the ‘me first’ ethos of the NBA – its emphasis on becoming ‘The Man’ – and not its black players, that is a turnoff. Hockey is a team sport, not a sport that is intertwined with hip-hop culture and the “glorification of oneself.”

I believe that the NBA sells the game by marketing its stars, but any team sport requires contributions on all levels. Dirk Nowitzki may be the star of the Dallas Mavericks, but when he struggled to hit a 3 during the first half of Game 6, Jason Terry’s scoring touch bailed the team out. Jason Kidd is not a flashy player, but he is one of the NBA’s finest point guards. And Brian Cardinal, a career role player, used his body to foul Heat players at crucial moments.

And despite his self-expressed appreciation for ‘hip-hop culture,’ Fels’ analysis of basketball culture is limited. The “bombast” that he identifies in basketball players is often a form of self-expression. For young, disenfranchised black men (and women), the basketball court (or blacktop/parking lot) is a place to come alive, a place to vent frustration, and a place to learn about life. For many of these young people, the court is a place where they can be irreverent, and where they can show flash and swagger without fear of censorship. The black socks, bald heads, baggy shorts, and courtside celebrations of the University of Michigan’s ‘Fab Five’ (Chris Webber, Juwan Howard, Ray Jackson, Jalen Rose, and Jimmy King) were eviscerated in angry, racist letters by ignorant alumni (go to the 3-minute mark of the linked video). What these alumni failed to realize was that these young black men were injecting a new freshness into an old game.

Ice Cube reflected upon the cultural impact of the Fab Five in the titular ESPN documentary, arguing that “in the cultural sense, the [Fab Five] represented the homeboys and the homegirls.” Their undiluted boldness was appropriate for an era characterized by the Watts riot, the Rodney King beating, the twilight of crack epidemic, and, of course, NWA. And at the time, the Fab Five harbored a special disdain for Duke and its star forward, Grant Hill. Jalen Rose generated a huge amount of controversy when he called Hill an “Uncle Tom” in the documentary. Hill was also a young black man, but he was the product of a wealthy, two-parent home, and attended an elite, private university with a reputation for recruiting clean-cut players. The tension between Rose and Hill ignited a conversation about class dynamics within the black community, but it also showed that there are multiple ways to be a black basketball player, and that generalizations and stereotypes are fruitless.

There are many criticisms that could be leveled at the NBA, but Fels’ essay does not make those criticisms. He uses evasive language to express his discontent with the NBA, but the disdain that he feels for NBA players is the same disdain that the Michigan alumni felt for the Fab Five. The sentiments expressed in Fels’ essay are culturally racist; that is, they operate under the assumption that black NBA culture is fundamentally flawed, and inferior to the predominately white NHL culture.

The cultural landscape surrounding hockey is very different. NHL fans celebrate the grittiness of their athletes. Hockey players are expected to play through severe pain, and in the playoffs, injuries are not disclosed until the end of a series. NHLers are supposed to be polite to reporters and fans, and controversy is avoided at all costs. There aren’t supposed to be any characters in the National Hockey League (i.e., Ron Artest). The reality doesn’t always fit the image, but regardless, it is embraced wholeheartedly.

On average, hockey fans are wealthier than NBA, MLB, or NFL fans (with an average yearly income of $104,000), are more educated than fans of other sports (68% of hockey fans have attended college), and are more likely to be fully employed than other fans (64% hold full-time jobs). 2010 data from SportsBusiness Journal Daily shows than NHL fans are more likely to be male (63.6%) and white (86%) than MLB, NBA, NFL, MLS, or NASCAR fans. And these fans gravitate towards athletes that display the white, male upper-middle class propriety that they probably attempt to replicate in their own lives.

It is worth noting that there are prominent blacks in the NHL. Biracial Canadian Jarome Iginla is the captain of the Calgary Flames, and has won every major hockey award except the Stanley Cup. Iggy, as he is called, is beloved for his on-ice grittiness and off-ice generosity. Canadians PK Subban and Evander Kane are promising young talents. All three men are well-respected, though Subban has received heavy criticism for being “a pest” on the ice (many have also wondered if the controversy surrounding Subban is racially motivated).

When I connected hockey fans’ dislike of basketball to racism in the comments section of Fels’ piece, I was met with immediate backlash. Some commenters did acknowledge that hockey fans’ animosity towards basketball could be connected to racism, but they expressed similar disdain for NASCAR and white ‘Southern culture’ (which varies from state to state), or expressed frustration with what they perceived as poor NBA officiating.

Another commenter believed injecting race into the conversation was “insulting,” and he was rewarded for calling me out by another individual who believed that people are afraid of sticking up for their “actual thoughts because they are afraid of being called racist.”

Others argued that hockey players are more respected by their communities than NBA players, and that players would “knock [each other] down a peg” if they displayed the selfishness of NBA players. The same man said that one could “call him racist, envious, or whatever,” but that he “could not get behind the theatrics of the NBA and its players.”

Similarly, another commenter said that NBA culture does transfer “the worst traits of American society like no other sport does.” The Vancouver riots – both the 1994 and 2011 editions – incurred over a million Canadian dollars in property damage, and showed us that people of all races can embody the ‘worst traits of American society.’ But the discourse surrounding the riots has focused on the cleanup efforts. There have been no sweeping calls to change hockey culture, and no one would suggest that the population of Vancouver is fundamentally depraved. Some rioters have been demonized on social media sites – incriminating Facebook statuses have been reposted and ridiculed on Tumblr – but public disdain has focused on the rioters’ deeds and not their racial identities.

The racially-charged comments about Fels’ piece continued. One commenter argued that he couldn’t be racist because some of his favorite Chicago athletes were black. And my favorite quote expressed frustration with NBA players who were “ensconced in their own bubbles of luxurious isolation, replete with a retinue of hangers-on and mooches from their younger days.” This particular commenter said that NBA players were incapable of showing generosity like Washington Capitals forward Brooks Laich, who stopped to change a woman’s tire after being eliminated from the playoffs last year. (Laich is also a prized UFA, and the embodiment of the NHL aesthetic).

I don’t know of any NBA players who have pulled over to change a fan’s flat tire, but retired Alonzo Mourning’s foundation, AM Charities, is one of the best-run NBA player organizations. Under the auspices of AM Charities, Mourning has raised funds to build the Overtown Youth Center in Miami and sponsors the Honey Shine mentoring program for girls. AM Charities’ flagship event is “Zo’s Summer Groove,” a five-day event – in its 15th year – that has raised over 7 million dollars for youth programs in South Florida. Many current and former NBA stars, including Mourning’s former Heat teammates Dwyane Wade and Gary Payton, have participated in the event. And Mourning’s work has also inspired younger NBA players like LeBron James and Chris Paul to do charity work.

However, none of the Second City Hockey commenters mentioned NBA players’ charity work during their critiques of the league. They continued to insist that hockey fans are not racist, and argued that any discussion of race and sports was only meant to “ratchet up angst” by people who did not have a strong argument to make. Yet, their comments tell another story. There is nothing wrong with disliking basketball, but the commenters used code words (and sometimes didn’t use them) to mask contempt for black NBA players. If Sam Fels and the SCH commenters can express admiration for the gritty, ‘team-oriented’ ball of the Dallas Mavericks, they can surely acknowledge the positive actions of other black basketball players. And maybe, they’ll see that LeBron isn’t such a bad guy.

Top image courtesy of Barstool Sports

“First Class” is set in 1962. That was the year South Carolina marked the Civil War centennial by returning the Confederate Flag to the State Capitol; the year the University of Mississippi greeted its first black student, James Meredith, with a lethal race riot; the year George Wallace was elected governor of Alabama.

That was the year a small crowd of Americans gathered at the Lincoln Memorial and commemorated the 100th birthday of the Emancipation Proclamation. Only a single African-American was asked to speak (Thurgood Marshall, added under threat of boycott). In “First Class,” 1962 finds our twin protagonists, Magneto and Professor X, also rallying before the Lincoln Memorial, not for protest or commemoration, but for a game of chess. “First Class” is not blind to societal evils, so much as it works to hold evil at an ocean’s length. The film is rooted in its opposition to the comfortably foreign abomination of Nazism.

This is all about knowing your audience.

I am reminded of the House Republicans, opening the 112th Congress by reciting the Constitution, minus the slavery parts. I am reminded of the English professor last year who, responding to Huckleberry Finn’s widespread banishment from public schools, was compelled to offer the Mark Twain classic, minus the nigger parts. I think of the Pentagon official, who this year justified the war in Afghanistan to soldiers by invoking the words of Dr. King, minus the “ultimate weakness of violence” parts. I am reminded of whole swaths of this country where historical fiction compels Americans to claim the Civil War was about states’ rights, minus the “right to own people” part.

This is all about a convenient suspension of disbelief.

- From The New York Times, June 8

By Arturo R. García

Another week, another head-scratching study result. Or so you’d think, right?

The study, conducted by researchers at Tufts and Harvard Universities, concluded that white people think the prejudices blacks faced during the Civil Rights era are literally in the past. But it’s not all rosy, apparently, for the majority of the 209 white people (alongside 208 blacks) surveyed. From the abstract:

We show that this emerging belief reflects Whites’ view of racism as a zero-sum game, such that decreases in perceived bias against Blacks over the past six decades are associated with increases in perceived bias against Whites—a relationship not observed in Blacks’ perceptions. Moreover, these changes in Whites’ conceptions of racism are extreme enough that Whites have now come to view anti-White bias as a bigger societal problem than anti-Black bias.

But, setting aside questions regarding the size of the survey group and the focus on white/black relations in an increasingly diverse country, one has to wonder: is this really a surprise?

Researchers Michael I. Norton and Samuel R. Sommers say as much in a column for the New York Times:

One outcome of granting rights to traditionally marginalized groups has been to leave many whites feeling marginalized themselves. What are the consequences of this sense of marginalization? For one, the very same developments that some would point to as evidence of progress toward equality (an African-American president, a Latina Supreme Court justice) are seen by others as further evidence of the threats aligned against them.

Consider the rhetoric associated with some members of the Tea Party, whose emphasis on the perceived values of the founding fathers implicitly centers on the notion that the founders were white heterosexual Christians. Or the oft-voiced concern that political correctness has stifled traditional American values, as with the idea of a “war on Christmas.”

As a result, there’s a “jockeying for stigma” among groups in America today. This competition is surprising because being marginalized often equates to being powerless, yet many whites now use their sense of marginalization as a rallying cry toward action. Already, this sentiment is affecting political discourse, as shown by the rise of the Tea Party and the growing number of lawsuits alleging “reverse racism.”

Besides the larger political and historical examples, though, haven’t we seen some of these fears play out on a smaller scale? Consider:

• People who makes it a point to tell you they “like all types of music, except rap,” and radio stations who use that statement to advertise themselves.
• Privilege-Denying Dudes.
• Basketball fans who call, say, Jimmer Fredette “a gamer” while decrying Allen Iverson as “a ballhog” and “a thug,” or lament that the game is “all about who jumps highest.”

But potentially even more disturbing is a Cal-Berkeley study highlighted by Joan Walsh at Salon:

In an experiment known as “Me/Not Me,” respondents were asked to quickly rate whether a series of terms having to do with race, ethnicity and diversity had anything to do with them personally. It found that the white students related more favorably to the terms associated with “colorblindness” — equality, unity, sameness, similarity, color blind, and color blindness – than to words associated with “multiculturalism”: diversity, variety, culture, multicultural, multiracial, difference and multiculturalism.

What does this tell us? The study authors (as do I) take for granted that it matters — it would be a good thing — if whites embrace diversity and multicultural initiatives, whether in schools, workplaces and community groups, and they therefore suggest that people designing such programs consider that “whites’ reactions to multiculturalism … are rooted in the basic social psychological need for inclusion and belonging.” Stressing that multiculturalism encompasses the wide variety of white ethnic and class experiences might help. Emphasizing words with positive resonance like “equality” and “unity” might too.

But when does inclusiveness become self-erasure? Did the white people in these studies ever learn to accept that there’s some experiences they probably just won’t get to totally understand because of their privilege? And what happens – for everybody – if they don’t?

By Guest Contributor Crunktastic, cross-posted from The Crunk Feminist Collective

Today, we had initially planned to bring you a review of the new groundbreaking book Hey Shorty: A Guide to Combatting Sexual Harassment in Schools and on the Streets. And you can read it here. But in light of the SlutWalk movement that broke out in Toronto earlier this year and the embrace of the movement in U.S. feminist mainstream over the last few months, I would like to add a few more thoughts to the discussion, in light of recent and much-needed calls on the part of feminists of color for a much more critical race critique in the SlutWalk movement.

SlutWalk Toronto started as an activist response to the ill-informed, misguided words of a Toronto police officer who suggested that “women should avoid dressing like sluts in order not to be victimized.” Women in Toronto were enraged and rightfully so, and SlutWalks have become a way to dramatize the utter ignorance and danger of the officer’s statements. And on that note, I fucks very hard with the concept and with the response, which is creative, appropriate, and powerful.

What gives me pause is the claim in SlutWalk Toronto’s mission statement of sorts that because they are are “tired of being oppressed by slut-shaming; of being judged by our sexuality and feeling unsafe as a result,” they are reclaiming and reappropriating the word “slut.”  Um, no thank you?

Here’s the source of my ambivalence: as I read the mission statement, I was struck by the righteous indignation these women had over being called slut. While that indignation is absolutely warranted, it also feels on a visceral level as though it comes from women who are in fact not used to being fully defined by negative sexual referents.

Perhaps my cynicism reflects my own experience as a Black woman of the Hip Hop Generation in the U.S., or a Black woman who’s a member of the Western World period. It goes without saying that Black women have always been understood to be lascivious, hypersexed, and always ready and willing. When I think of the daily assaults I hear in the form of copious incantations of “bitch” and “ho” in Hip Hop music directed at Black women,  it’s hard to not feel a bit incensed at the “how-dare-you-quality” of the SlutWalk protests, which feel very much like the protests of privileged white girls who still have an expectation that the world will treat them with dignity and respect.

The first activist response I ever heard to such mistreatment was Queen Latifah’s 1993 Grammy-winning song, “U.N.I.T.Y.”

It energized a community and opened a space for much needed conversation. But sisters did not line up to go on  symbolic, collective ho strolls. And for good, and I think, obvious reasons.

So maybe the best way to deal with the debates about re-appropriating the term “slut” is the way I deal with the whole n-word debate. As a Black person, who occasionally uses the n-word (with an ‘a’ on the end), I am admittedly ambivalent about whether or not the use of the term among Black people really does constitute a reappropriation. I’ve heard and read most of the arguments, and I remain…ambivalent but generally think the word is unproductive. That said, I balk at older Black folks who act as though the Hip Hop Generation are the first Black people to toss the word around. Read any 19th century Black literature and you’ll know different. What I’m clear about, however, is that to use or not to use is a decision that  lies solely within Black communities. White people simply don’t get a say; the word is off-limits to them. Black folks have surely won the right, long held by white folks, to struggle and determine amongst ourselves how we will refer to and define ourselves. Period.

For me, so it is with the word slut. It is off-limits to me. But for those who have been shamed, and disciplined, and violently abused on the basis of its usage, they have the prerogative to determine whether to reclaim or not to. As a word used to  shame white women who do not conform to morally conservative norms about chaste sexuality, the term very much reflects white women’s specific struggles around sexuality and abuse. Although plenty of Black women have been called “slut,” I believe Black women’s histories are different, in that Black female sexuality has always been understood from without to be deviant, hyper, and excessive. Therefore, the word slut has not been used to discipline (shame) us into chaste moral categories, as we have largely been understood to be unable to practice “normal” and “chaste” sexuality anyway.

But perhaps, we have come to a point in feminist movement-building where we need to acknowledge that differing histories necessitate differing strategies. This is why I’m somewhat ambivalent about accusing my white sistren of being racist. If your history is one of having your sexuality regulated by the use of the term “slut” for disciplinary purposes, then SlutWalk is an effective answer.

What becomes an issue is those white women and liberal feminist women of color who argue that “slut” is a universal category of female experience, irrespective of race. I recognize that there are many women of color who are participating in the SW movement, and I support those sisters who do, particularly women who are doing it in solidarity and coalition. But rather than forcing white women to get on the diversity train with regard to the inclusivity of SlutWalk, perhaps we need to redirect our racial vigilance. By that I mean, I’d prefer that white women acknowledge that they are in fact organizing around a problematic use of terminology endemic to white communities and cultures.

In doing so, this would force an acknowledgement that the experience of womanhood being defended here–that of white women– is not universal, but is under attack and worthy of being defended, all the same.

Perhaps, also, if white women could recognize SlutWalk as being rooted in white female experience, it would provide an opportunity for them to participate in coalition and solidarity with similar movements that are inclusive and reflective of the experiences of women of color.

One example is the Stop Street Harassment movement– a multiracial movement that has led to “Stop Street Harassment” campaigns throughout the U.S. and abroad. It is that movement which is the subject of Hey Shorty!  This movement, too, works from the premise that streets and schools should be safe for women, but it recognizes that challenges to that safety while similar in some respects, can differ across race and class. And as I said, earlier, different histories necessitate different strategies. In that regard, I don’t think sisters will be lining up to go on a symbolic “Ho Stroll” anytime soon.

We’d like to hear from you. What are your feelings on these two movements and the connections and divergences between each?

Satoshi Kanazawa’s Monday blog post about black women and beauty standards, since taken down, was only the latest in a string of questionable contributions to both Psychology Today and his field.

In 2006, Kanazawa was accused of reviving eugenics-era theories after publishing a paper in England blaming low IQ levels for low life expectancy and high infant mortality rates in the continent of Africa – seemingly ignoring decades worth of political and social unrest. This led to him being called “the great idiot of social science” by renowned biologist PZ Myers in an article last year on Alternet.

Daniela Perdomo’s piece for Alternet focused on another study by Kanazawa, this one alleging that atheists are “more likely to acquire and espouse evolutionarily novel values and preferences (such as liberalism and atheism…) than less intelligent individuals.” Perdomo writes:

… Not only does Kanazawa wax over structural inequalities that may lead to varying IQ levels in American society, even the disparities he finds in this imperfect measure of intelligence are relatively miniscule. For the most part, he is not speaking of a difference of more than six IQ points between liberals and conservatives, atheists and believers — a negligible difference one would never notice in real person-to-person interactions.

Kanazawa isn’t the first to study the intelligence-religiosity nexus. Other studies have also found a three- to six-point IQ difference between atheists and religious believers, in the atheists’ favor. But those studies didn’t claim that atheists were more evolved, as Kanazawa presumes, and merely conclude that they are more skeptical due to a certain kind of schooling and cultural exposure (which might also account for why some people perform well on IQ tests), leaving room to account for why so many people — say, like William F. Buckley, Jr., the late conservative public intellectual — can be so religious and conservative and yet quite intelligent.

In February 2008, Kanazawa defined his position as “extremely purist” in a post in Psychology Today, saying findings can only be either true or false:

No other criteria besides the truth should matter or be applied in evaluating scientific theories or conclusions. They cannot be “racist” or “sexist” or “reactionary” or “offensive” or any other adjective. Even if they are labeled as such, it doesn’t matter. Calling scientific theories “offensive” is like calling them “obese”; it just doesn’t make sense. Many of my own scientific theories and conclusions are deeply offensive to me, but I suspect they are at least partially true.

Once scientists begin to worry about anything other than the truth and ask themselves “Might this conclusion or finding be potentially offensive to someone?”, then self-censorship sets in, and they become tempted to shade the truth. What if a scientific conclusion is both offensive and true? What is a scientist to do then? I believe that many scientific truths are highly offensive to most of us, but I also believe that scientists must pursue them at any cost.

It is not my job as a scientist to “use” scientific knowledge in any way to improve the human condition; that’s the job of politicians, policy makers, physicians, and other social engineers. Their goal of helping people and improving their lives is a noble and important (albeit nonscientific) one. Any successful intervention, however, must be based on the true understanding of nature. If these social engineers don’t know the true causes of what they are trying to create or eliminate, how can they possibly hope to succeed? By opposing and entirely disregarding certain scientific theories and conclusions a priori on ideological and political grounds, because they believe they could not and should not be true, they risk the chance they might not achieve their goal of helping people.

Less than a month later, however, he engaged in a rather unscientific – and genocidal – bit of speculation as to how the United States could have ended the “war on terror” more quickly, emphasis his:

Here’s a little thought experiment. Imagine that, on September 11, 2001, when the Twin Towers came down, the President of the United States was not George W. Bush, but Ann Coulter. What would have happened then? On September 12, President Coulter would have ordered the US military forces to drop 35 nuclear bombs throughout the Middle East, killing all of our actual and potential enemy combatants, and their wives and children. On September 13, the war would have been over and won, without a single American life lost.

That post is still active on PT’s website, while Monday’s has been pulled – justifiably, according to fellow PT blogger Mikhail Lyubansky. But it wasn’t because Kanazawa’s work arrived at an unpopular confusion, emphasis his:

The point is that there are also group differences, not in attractiveness (as Kanazawa claims), but in cultural messages about what is and is not attractive. Standards of beauty, like most other beliefs, are socialized and change not only from place to place but also over time. In both the United States and England, (where Kanazawa lives and works), standards of beauty are essentially “White” standards, because whites comprise the majority of the population and have disproportional control over both media and fashion. And while it is not just White respondents who are socialized this way (internalized racism has been well documented), it is certainly the case that White Americans and Europeans (who are less likely to have received more positive messages about Black beauty) would show the strongest anti-Black bias.

As long as this is understood and framed accordingly, there is no problem with the data Kanazawa reports. What they show is that because Black faces and bodies don’t fit mainstream White standards of physical attractiveness, both respondents and interviewers show an anti-Black bias. Unfortunately, Kanazawa fails to consider either sample bias or socializing effects. Even if he believes, as he apparently does, that human behavior is entirely “evolutionary”, good science requires a careful analysis of sample bias and an explicit discussion regarding the study’s generalizability. Without this kind of methodological analysis, Kanazawa’s entire premise — that there is such a thing as a single objective standard of attractiveness — is fatally (and tragically) flawed.

It is worth noting that Kanazawa repeats this same flaw of omission when he explains that the attractiveness results are not due to race group differences in intelligence, as though there are no scholarly critiques of IQ measures in general and their racial bias in particular.

These are not trivial omisisions. They are the necessary context that gives readers the information they need to draw their own conclusions.

By Guest Contributor Simba Russeau

Libyan President Muammar Gaddafi’s use of African mercenaries to quell the uprising against his autocratic regime has revived a deep-rooted racism between Arabs and black Africans.

Though most will deny its existence, in Libya discrimination is common not only against migrant black Africans, but also against darker-skinned Libyans, especially from the south of the country.

“Against this background, one needs to be a little wary of the accusations of ‘African mercenaries’ or even ‘black African mercenaries’ that have been bandied around. Certainly, Gaddafi has used, in the past, mercenaries from other parts of Africa, and our information is that some of these are likely involved in the current situation on Gaddafi’s side,” Na’eem Jeenah, executive director of the Afro-Middle East Centre in Johannesburg, South Africa told IPS.

“Mercenaries, of course, are extremely useful because the regular army forces include conscripts — who can easily leave their posts and join the uprising. Mercenaries work for money and have no compunction about whom they kill.”

About one and a half million sub-Saharan African migrants and refugees, out of a population of nearly two to two and a half million migrants, work as cheap labour in Libya’s oil industry, agriculture, construction and other service sectors.

However, this is not the first time Libya’s most vulnerable immigrant population has fallen victim to racist attacks. In 2000, dozens of migrant workers from Ghana, Cameroon, Sudan, Niger, Burkina Faso, Chad and Nigeria were targeted during street killings in the wake of government officials blaming them for rising crime, disease and drug trafficking.

In response, the United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD) expressed concern over Libya’s practices of racial discrimination against dark-skinned migrants and refugees. In 2004 it accused the country of violating Article 6 of the 1969 International Convention on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (ICERD), and for failing to implement proper mechanisms safeguarding individuals from any racial acts that circumvent human rights.

“However, it is also possible that many of those identified as ‘African mercenaries’ could be darker-skinned Libyans. It is easier for people to project their problems onto outsiders than on their own people,” adds Jeenah.

A case in point is Karim, an African-Lebanese. After a day of visiting relatives, he was traveling with his African mother on the bus back down to Beirut when the vehicle was stopped at a military checkpoint. Soldiers entered the bus and asked for everyone to show their identity papers. While he was searching the bag for his wallet to find his military standby card and identity papers, one of the officers in charge ordered his arrest.

During several hours in custody, Karim was subjected to continuous physical and verbal abuse; not a single soldier even bothered to check his identification.

“It wasn’t until my mother shouted that they call a relative who is known in the military that the soldiers stopped mistreating me and checked my papers,” says Karim in an interview with IPS. “Even then they tried to save face by claiming that my military card was new though in fact it has been standard for over ten years.”

Experts argue that though a taboo subject, racism is not confined to Libya; it is found throughout the Arab world, and stems from historical linkages of the Arab slave trade to the way blacks were used during European colonisation in the region.

In his study titled, ‘Perceptions of Race in the Arab world’, Mark Perry says: “The past and present trade in African slaves to the Arab world has left a long and bitter memory in African society to this day. Black Africa was the earliest source for slaves and the last great reservoir to dry up; already in the 640s slaves were part of the ‘non-aggression pact’ between Arab conquerors and Nubian rulers, while as late as 1910 slave caravans were still arriving in Benghazi from Wadai (in Chad).”

Scholar Elizabeth Thompson adds that French colonisation of Syria and Lebanon was charged with racial overtones due to the use of West African soldiers. “The Senegalese would become a regular target of nationalist propaganda in sexualised and racialised imagery that fused men’s gender anxieties with outrage at French domination.”

As the world marks the 2011 International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, which has been dubbed the ‘International Year for People of African descent’, uprisings sweeping the Arab region should include a social transformation to shift perceptions of dark-skinned Arabs and non-Arabs to put an end to racial discrimination and xenophobia, experts say.

Otherwise, they warn, a violent backlash by anti-Gaddafi forces in Libya who link black skin with the regime could lead to a massive genocide once the long-time leader is ousted.

Image courtesy of شبكة برق | B.R.Q

Readers, you can imagine our surprise when we received an email inviting us to the screening of CNN’s latest documentary for the latest in their In America series.

After all, we had a lot to say about the first few:

Thoughts on CNN’s Black in America Series
Going For Broke: The Racialicious Review of Black In America: Almighty Debt
Latinos Under Siege? A Look At CNN’s Latino In America
Latino In America goes out with a whine
The Fallout from Latino in America

But hey – they offered an advance screening, free breakfast, and a Q & A with Soledad O’Brien and the producers afterward. How could I resist? So Art RSVP’ed and I hopped on the Boltbus and made it to NYC in time for the 9:00 AM screening.

The newest addition to the In America family is called Unwelcome: Muslims Next Door. Here’s the trailer:

The Unwelcome: Muslims Next Door special revolves around the town of Murfreesboro, Tennessee, situated about 35 miles from Nashville. According to O’Brien, her team first heard about the tensions flaring in Murfreesboro when researching the “Ground Zero Mosque.” While the proposed Islamic Center in New York made national headlines, the drama playing out in Murfreesboro illuminated a different issue: how smaller towns were coping with the Islamaphobic rhetoric currently in vogue and how local Muslim populations were beginning to feel the heat.

Unwelcome begins by looking at the community of Murfreesboro, where even amid the fever pitch of hateful rhetoric, the citizens describe each other as neighborly, and defend Murfreesboro as one of the best places to live in America. For decades, Muslims in Murfreesboro have been free to worship as they see fit – there is one Islamic center in the town and around 250 currently practicing Muslims. Some of the Muslims interviewed in the documentary remarked that Murfreesboro remained peaceful and civil even after 9/11 – the idea of Muslims living and worshiping in the town was just a non-issue.

That is until plans to expand the existing Islamic center came to light last year.

The residents cited all kinds of issues to back up their claims as to why the Islamic Center should not be built – many of which were based in bias, ignorance, or just straight up bigotry. Here are a few quotes:

• “Here is this enormous building which is going to be occupied by people who are of the same religion that the people are who we’re fighting in Afghanistan.”
• “Why are they building a mosque and needing 53,000 square feet? That is a lot of square footage.  And it’s going to be a very expensive thing.  Now how are 200 families – or 200 muslims, however many there are – how are they gonna pay for it? I know when we expanded our church, we’re still paying for it.” [Ed Note: The documentary explains what the footage will be used for - in addition to a 10,000 square foot mosque, there will be a gym, cemetery, swimming pool, basketball court, tennis courts, and a small school.]
• “In a post 9/11 world, we should be a little suspicious of any group trying to relocate to this community.”
• “I didn’t say to hate ‘em – I just said we don’t need ‘em here!”
• “It wasn’t Baptists and Catholics that put bombs in the bottom of the World Trade Center.”

The documentary follows a few different people in Murfreesboro looking at how the controversy has impacted them.  Lema Sbenaty, a nineteen year old practicing Muslim sheds a crucial light on all of the controversy, noting that she’s grown up in Murfreesboro and is suddenly seeing an entirely new side of the townsfolk there. Sbenaty’s story is heartbreaking – numerous times during the show, people talk right past her or through her, ignoring her experiences to talk about Sharia Law and the oppression of women in the Middle East.  The documentary also speaks with Imam Osama Ballul (sp? – there were no titles for the correct spelling of surnames in the doc).  Imam Osama (as he is referred to in the doc) talked about his journey from Egypt to the US, landing first in Texas and then moving to Murfreesboro.  Along the way, Imam Osama wed Ivy, a white Methodist who had converted to Islam.  The two have a daughter and led a fairly peaceful life in Murfreesboro, up until recently.  The documentary also interviews opponents of the new center.  Most notable of these are Kevin Fisher (who sites traffic and corruption of the ground water by the cemetery as reasons why he would oppose the construction) and Sally Wall, a longtime Murfreesboro resident who doesn’t believe it is bigotry to oppose the onset of sharia law – which again, is not the issue at hand.

But facts don’t seem to hold the weight they should in the case. In addition to the marches in the street and heated community meetings, some people in Murfreesboro decided to resort to violence and vandalism. Initially, the vandalism began by someone spray painting “not welcome” on the sign proclaiming the site of the new Islamic center. The sign was replaced for free by the sign makers, but eight months later, it was hacked at until it broke in two. Then, after the groundbreaking on the site, someone set fire to the construction equipment:

We’ve often criticized the In America series for presenting stereotypes and providing little to no context for what is happening.  O’Brien and her team have acknowledged some of those issues, and responded by tweaking the idea – instead of doing a bad job of telling multiple stories simultaneously, they instead are drilling down to tell one or two stories that could translate into a variety of contexts.  The shift was immediately evident in this documentary.  The people who were profiled felt real and relatable – even the misguided residents of Murfreesboro reveal more about their own fears than they intend to.  We heard from women both in an out of hijab, from practitioners and imams, received a view of one of the most diverse depictions of Muslims ever seen on television. and

At the end of the hour, most of us in the room were impressed by what was covered, though a few questions arose that I will get to in another post.

Outside of the documentary, CNN’s Belief Blog seeks to fill in some of the stories that didn’t fit into the hour long special. One of these stories is Matthew Miller, a 30 year old convert to Islam who currently lives in Murfreesboro:

Ultimately, the special reveals how easy it is for bigotry to triumph over common sense – and the difficult road facing those in Murfreesboro, who are suddenly considered outsiders in their own hometown.

Unwelcome: Muslims Next Door will air on CNN on Sunday, March 27th, at 8PM ET.  Racialicious will be hosting a live chat and post the rules for the drinking game to those who wish to play along.