When I looked at “Soul Train” host Don Cornelius back in the ‘70s, I didn’t see a pro-black entrepreneur who would become the “African American” Dick Clark.

I saw my dad. And his entire generation.
- Eric Deggans, Tampa Bay Times

“‘Soul Train’ created an outlet for black artists that never would have been if it hadn’t been for Cornelius,” said Kenny Gamble, who with his partner, Leon Huff, created the Philly soul sound and wrote the theme song for the show. “It was a tremendous export from America to the world, that showed African-American life and the joy of music and dance, and it brought people together.”

News of Mr. Cornelius’s death prompted an outpouring of tributes from civil rights leaders, musicians, entrepreneurs, academics and writers. “He was able to provide the country a window into black youth culture and black music,” said Lonnie G. Bunch III, the director of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture. “For young black teenagers like myself, it gave a sense of pride and a sense that the culture we loved could be shared and appreciated nationally.”
- James C. McKinley Jr. New York Times

The genius of it all was THIS was the first time that black people were proud to be called AFRICAN.

Psssh. Before 1971? — I mean on the real – ’til like the early 80s on some schoolyard insult game ish? If someone called you “african” that was the most insulting degrading lower than low, “I’m finna f**k you up” type of insult.

I know right? Why?

To control our mentality during the slave period we were taught we were the lowest of low.

To control us AFTER slavery during the Jim Crow era we were taught we were the lowest of low.

The first introduction to entertainment (of which we were allowed to participate) was minstrel entertainment an over exaggerated buffoon display of shame and ugliness that we STILL CARRY TO THIS DAY (minus the makeup) (hello hip-hop….but that is another piece altogether).

To say with a straight, dignified face that BLACK IS BEAUTIFUL was the RISKIEST radical life-changing move that america has seen. and amazingly enough for one hour for one saturday out the week, if you were watching soul train….it became contagious. next thing you know you are actually believing you have some sort of worth.
- Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson, from The Roots, on OKPlayer

The ’70s and ’80s were just the period during which the best soul music was created and the best records were done. Whenever I walk into a store or any kind of environment, these kinds of songs from that period still play and I wonder if it’s a “Soul Train” tape. Because during those two decades, we were on top of them all in one way or another, either presenting the guests or playing the records. We were just flat out in love with the music.
- Don Cornelius, as quoted in The Los Angeles Times

Cornelius’ reported suicide, alas, tells us something about the nature of American success. All the man’s equity, affluence and well-deserved public acclaim were not, in the end, of enough comfort to salve his private pain — a struggle with illness, a nasty divorce.

To the people who make up the community that Cornelius created, the man is nearly a saint. We can see it now: the double line of dancers forming just beyond the pearly gates, awaiting the ingress of soul’s earthly impresario.
- Dan Charnas, NPR

“I remember your grandfather leaving the house in blackface to perform at the local Jewish community center,” my mom told me. “They just didn’t know what it meant back then,” she explained, “not until after WW II.” As an activist involved in contemporary solidarity work across racial lines, I was shocked to discover this racist history in my near past. As an Ashkenazi Jew* (of European descent) whose grandparents immigrated to the US around the turn of the century, I don’t always see myself implicated in the American legacy of slavery, but I was forced to reconcile the fond memories of my jovial grandfather with this haunting image of him performing racial minstrelsy. Trying to make sense of this image, I began researching the history of Jewish blackface between WWI and WWII and was surprised to discover a connection between my current activism and this history of blackface: When we are not rooted in our Jewish identities, we risk stereotyping, appropriating, and over-identifying with other cultures.

To understand the complicated history of alliance, disconnection, and overlap between Ashkenazi Jews and African Americans in between the world wars, I turned to Eric Goldstein’s The Price of Whiteness: Jews, Race, and American Identity, which considers how Jews negotiated competing claims on their identities and Michael Rogin’s Blackface, White Noise: Jewish Immigrants in the Hollywood Melting Pot, which looks more specifically at the role of blackface in Americanizing Jews. As European Jewish immigrants arrived in the US, their presence intersected with the dominant black/white system of racial relations in various ways. At different times, Jews and African Americans were linked tightly together in American consciousness as evidenced by the case of Leo Frank (1913-1915), which sets the stage for Jewish-Black relations in between the wars. A Jewish factory manager in Georgia, Frank was accused of raping and murdering a white girl who worked in his factory. Frank was found guilty (in spite of flimsy evidence) and sentenced to death, but the Governor commuted his sentence to life in prison. A journalist warned in a headline: “The next Jew who does what Frank did is going to get exactly the same thing we give to Negro rapists” (Goldstein 43). Frank was then kidnapped from prison and lynched by a white mob.

In the wake of the Frank trial, Jews who followed the case became “increasingly sensitized both to the danger of comparing blacks and Jews and the possibilities of deflecting anti-Semitism by emphasizing their whiteness” (Goldstein 65). During the trial, Frank’s legal team repeatedly emphasized Frank’s whiteness by downplaying his Jewishness and tried to shift the blame onto a black janitor who was also implicated in the murder. Even as they tried to underscore their whiteness in this time between the wars, Jews were being held responsible for a variety of issues that troubled Americans including communism, immigration, and the rising tide of war in the 1930’s. Articles about “The Jewish Problem” proliferated in the press, and quotas and restrictions were enacted to limit the number of Jews allowed into universities, clubs, and neighborhoods.

Not surprisingly, Ashkenazi Jewish immigrants had a contradictory relationship to African Americans. On the one hand, identification with whiteness allowed Jews to experience “what it was like not to be the focus of national hostility and resentment” as they were in Europe (Goldstein 145). On the other hand, Jews identified with the suffering of African Americans and continued to display empathy for them. The most assertive statements of identification with African Americans in the US occurred in the Yiddish press where non-Jewish readers could not chance upon them. The Yiddish press roundly condemned segregation and racism by comparing race riots against African Americans to the pogroms against Jews in Europe. At the same time, the Yiddish press read Jewish blackface solely as a means of identification by saying about that Jews “knew how to sing the songs of the most cruelly wronged people in the world’s history” (Goldstein 154).

Blacking Out Jewish Identity in The Jazz Singer

In Blackface, White Noise, Rogin discusses how Jewish blackface plays out in The Jazz Singer, one of the first “talkie” films, which came out in 1927 and starred a Jewish actor, Al Jolson, whose life parallels that of the protagonist in the film. The film’s central character, Jakie Rabinowitz, the son of a cantor, is expected to follow in his father’s footsteps by becoming a cantor at their synagogue on Manhattan’s lower East Side. Jakie Rabinowitz, however, wants to sing jazz, which enrages his father, who, in turn, disowns him. (Al Jolson, also the son of a cantor, turned his back on tradition by performing in theater and film). After running away from home, Jakie changes his name to Jack Robin, finds himself a Christian girlfriend, and becomes a singing success on the stage, often performing in blackface. When his father is dying, Jack is called to take his place to sing Kol Nidre, a solemn song performed on the eve of Yom Kippur, the holiest of Jewish days. Forgoing an opening night appearance on the stage, Jack takes his father’s place in the synagogue, and his father forgives him before he dies. The film, however, ends with Jack performing “My Mammy” in blackface at the Winter Garden Theater (where Al Jolson often performed) with his mother and girlfriend in the audience. Singing directly to his mother, Jack gets down on one knee and sings a song about coming home to his “Mammy” in “Alabammy.”

In Rogin’s analysis, he argues that politically oriented Eastern Europe Jews in the US between WWI and WWII identified with African Americans as a persecuted, Diasporic people. While this identification often resulted in political solidarity, it also took the more problematic “form of either cultural or literal blackface as Jews attempted to become American by taking on black-derived music, along with the plantation myth of American belonging” (66). Witnessing anti-Semitism on the rise in both Europe and in the US, US Jews attempted to escape their shtetl pasts by using the mask of blackness. Thus their ability to re-make themselves in the New World as white came at the cost of African Americans, who had to remain immobile and fixed in stereotype.

In The Jazz Singer, Jakie leaves behind his immigrant past (represented by his dying father) through his performance of blackface. Interestingly, very few movies at this time made by Jews (and often starring Jews) actually represented Jewish themes; Jews in Hollywood generally succeeded by erasing Jewishness in their films. Jakie’s story, however, is definitely a Jewish story—one of assimilation. And as Rogin argues, Jack can only express his sadness about leaving his cultural motherland (the lower East Side and Eastern Europe) through a black-white racial lens by equating his Jewish mother with a Southern “mammy.” In the final “Mammy” scene from the film, the camera keeps cutting between Jack singing with great emotion and the face of his crying mother.

As Goldstein observes, Jewish blackface became a means to express emotions that could not be expressed as Jews; blackface obscures the performer’s Jewishness through stereotyping African Americans who became a mask for Jewish expression. This performance blends identification and admiration with racism. Many of the Jews, including Jolson, who performed in blackface, began their careers as Jewish comedians and turned to black material as their urge to assimilate made it less desirable to do comedy about Jewish themes and personas. Of course what they end up taking on isn’t actually African American material, but the white culture’s nostalgia for an even more racist past of very clearly defined racial roles. The “Mammy” stereotype grew out of the reality that African American mothers were often forced to nurse the master’s children during slavery (and then, post-slavery, forced to take care of them as servants) often at the cost of their relationships with their own children. This reality translated into the stereotype of the happy, loyal, desexualized “mammy” whose happiness made white people feel that slavery was a benevolent institution.

Unmasking Jewish Histories

How, then, does my Grandfather fit into all this? His father Max (my great grandfather) came to the US from Poland in 1900 as a shoemaker because his house in Warsaw was burned down in pogroms. Enjoying his life in the New World, Max didn’t want to send for his wife Cecilia and six year old son (my Grandfather) back in Warsaw, but family pressure intervened. When his family did arrive, Max was embarrassed by his wife’s Old World Yiddish speaking ways and began isolating her. He wouldn’t give Cecilia any money, and he didn’t want her to learn English. He apparently refused to let her eat when she was pregnant. The family story is that he drove her crazy, and then put her into an insane asylum. It’s unclear how much English Cecilia could even speak and how much of her diagnosed “craziness” was a result of being an isolated immigrant with limited language skills. Max then put my Grandfather and his sister into an orphanage until he remarried years later.

During my mom’s childhood, her father Maurice–always quick with a joke–never spoke about his childhood, and told both my mom and my aunt that their grandmother (Cecilia) was dead. As an adult, my mom found out that her father and his sister used to go visit their mother at the asylum–a secret that only came out after Cecilia’s death. As part of his own assimilation, Maurice obscured his own sad family history by refusing to let his children meet their grandmother.

Although I don’t know the circumstances surrounding my Grandfather’s use of blackface, I wonder how or whether his own sadness about the loss of his mother and motherland played into it; was he singing to a “mammy” or was he just trying, like his peers, to become a white American? Given that my Grandfather came to the US as a child on a boat from Poland, he certainly didn’t have a plantation past in the South. Neither did Al Jolson, also an immigrant from Eastern Europe, who was known for performing with and fighting discrimination against African Americans on Broadway and later in Hollywood. Was Maurice taking on white America’s nostalgic imagination for a racist past that Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe had little part in? What is gained and what gets erased by swapping out these histories? Taking on the history of American racism, Jews also lost connections to our own history and culture.

History Lessons for Solidarity Work

The image of Jews doing blackface represents a sad and pivotal moment in Ashkenazi Jewish American identity. At various moments because of historical cycles of anti-Semitism, Jews have been bribed with material privileges and public positions of limited power to appear as the visible face of an oppressive system. What does it mean that this time the face that they put on was blackface? In these exchanges, Jews are often encouraged to take on a middle “buffer” position, and thus get pitted against other oppressed groups. With blackface, Jews occupied the middle ground once again, this time the ground between African Americans and white Christian culture. We both chose and were encouraged to choose whiteness that came at a cost to our relationships with African Americans and disconnected us from our own culture.

As an adult, disconnected from my own family history, I began asking more questions about my Grandfather and learned even more about sadness and loss in his history. Most of his father Max’s siblings stayed in Poland, and most of my Grandfather’s cousins died in Auschwitz, probably around the same time that he was performing in blackface. It’s hard to fathom how both these things could be happening at the same time; in the US, Ashkenazi Jews were being encouraged to assimilate into whiteness, a process they probably accepted, in part, because in Europe they were being killed as a “race.”

The image of my Grandfather doing blackface embodies a moment when Ashkenazi Jews exchanged our deep connection to our cultures, histories and families in order to gain whiteness. While I want to be clear that blackface has obviously been the most damaging to its targets, African Americans, there has also been a cost to Ashkenazi Jews as well. We have inherited the privileges of assimilation—class and race privilege—as well as some incalculable losses–of culture, community and solidarity/connection with other oppressed people.

Through my involvement in Jewish anti-racist organizing over the last decade, I have come to realize that as Ashkenazi Jews who identify as white, we still face the dual dangers of distancing ourselves from other oppressed groups or over-identifying and appropriating their struggles. Jews doing blackface is an extreme example of this tendency: Ashkenazi Jews moved toward whiteness at the expense of African Americans while using the mask of “blackness” to explore alternative ways to express their emotions from the dominant white Christian culture. Because Ashkenazi Jews have more or less “achieved” whiteness, there is clearly still a tendency to distance ourselves and ignore other oppressed groups’ struggles.

But I have also seen the opposite force at work among anti-racist Ashkenazi Jewish activists. When we do not have any grounding in our own culture, however we define it, it is easy to over-identify with others’ struggles, whether those of Palestinians or other oppressed groups. In our attempts to build alliances, we sometimes overreach and take over other people’s struggles as a way to find culture and meaning for ourselves. At anti-Occupation protests, I have seen many Jews wearing Palestinian symbols, such as keffiyehs as a sign of solidarity. There is nothing inherently wrong with this as long as we are simultaneously working to make space for Palestinian voices in this conversation and not filling up all the space ourselves. I personally find it even more effective to see Jews wearing traditional Jewish symbols at these protests, thereby insisting that we can be our full Jewish selves as we stand up against the Israeli Occupation. Even as we reach out to work in solidarity, it is important stay rooted within our own histories and cultures, as complicated and compromising as they may be.

So while there is no simple lesson to be taken from this messy history of Jewish blackface, I believe that our challenge is to remain connected to Jewishness, whatever that means to us, even as we use our privileges to work toward ally-ship with others. Although I still feel a sense of shame when I picture my Grandfather in blackface, I also try to remember the historical context surrounding his losses and choices. As someone who has reaped the benefits of my ancestors’ compromises, I am lucky that I have the choice to attempt reaching toward solidarity, and resisting appropriation as part of my modern Jewish identity.

–
*Throughout this essay, I am referring to Jews of European descent who “became” white in the US through a process of assimilation at a particular historical moment. I recognize that not all Ashkenazi Jews identify as white; some folks are both Jewish and African American; and finally that Jews of color, including Jews with Sephardic and Mizrahi heritage, may have very different experiences.

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.

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

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

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

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

—Oscar Hijuelos, “Recovering Cubanness“, Guernica

It began when Activist X posted a link to this article about the Mixed Roots Film and Literary Festival and noted with some irritation that despite the festival’s claims to inclusivity, there were no Latin@s mentioned in the article. X asked: if Latin@ people are the largest group of multiracial people in the Americas and the festival is supposed to be open to everybody, why weren’t Latin@ people included? A few people agreed with X, and some people who had been at the festival said that they thought Heidi Durrow and the festival were great, but that they could see X’s point.

Enter Activist Y: after expressing some trepidation, Y said that the festival was using the term “mixed race” or “multiracial” to refer to people who had parents of two or more different racial categorisations. Activist Y said that if your whole family shared the same ethnic identity, then you were not mixed in the way the festival intended.

Dear Racializens, I am sure you can imagine what happened next: a veritable Facebook wall brawl — albeit one that was highly intellectual and restrained. Most people sided with X (it was X’s wall to begin with) and Y, after making several long attempts to explain themselves, eventually left in a digital huff.

This exchange brought back some of the most difficult writing that I have ever done on Racialicious: where readers challenged my right to call myself, as a mixed race person with parents of two different races, mixed in a separate way from those who are mixed race but share the same identity as their whole family, for e.g. folks who are mestizo, Creole, African American, Metis, Peranakan…

(From here on in I will refer to people who come from mixed lineage as MRs, and people who have parents of two different and separate racial categorisations as MR2s.)

So here is one of the most important things I have learned from all my years of toiling in the anti-racist trenches here at Racialicious: when you are talking about race with anti-racist people of colour, you are speaking from a place of pain, to a place of pain. (Ok obviously we are about more than pain, but pain is always on the table.) Many of us come to anti-racism through struggle. We are used to having things taken away from us, and we turn to anti-racism to try and arm ourselves against the corrosion of racism. We are sensitive, and we come by it honestly.

Both of my parents are – to the best of my knowledge – the first members of generations and generations of their families to marry outside of the race. When I first started writing about mixedness on Racialicious, I had never heard of mixed race being used in any way other than to refer to people who had parents of two different races. I grew up in Canada and Singapore, and while, as a postcolonial nation, there are many MR communities in Singapore, they refer to themselves as Eurasian, Peranakan or Straits-born Chinese, not mixed race. It was never suggested to me that I might have a similar experience to these folks, and neither did the Eurasian friends I had seem interested in me as an identity buddy. More than this, in Singapore the term “mixed race” was restricted not simply to “a person with parents of two different and separate races”: it was used to specifically refer to people who had one white parent, and one parent of colour. (Obviously, this happens not just in Singapore.)

Through some big f-ups (which you may read here and here and here, though I am sorry to say the comments might be missing on some of those), I learned that many Americans of colour — often African Americans and Latin@s — have a problem with “mixed race” being used solely to refer to MR2s.

Using the term “mixed race” in this narrow way is to systematically erase ethnic histories that bear witness to slavery and colonization; or simply, to erase ethnic histories, period. To do so can be read as an act of white supremacy: it covers up the fact that many Americans, regardless of skin colour or the stories elders are willing to tell, have mixed lineages. To do this silences a whole community’s right to express their experience.

And another thing: it is grating to hear the term “mixed race” applied solely to MR2s, as if we invented mixedness. Cultural forces (usually — though not always — powered by white folks) that select MR2s as somehow unique, or the antidote to racism, or hybridly vigorous, or exquisitely beautiful, are just pouring salt in the wound. After generations of MR folks being ostracised or having to commit violent contortions to have a peaceful life, being mixed is all of a sudden hot – and this is the very moment that the label is being rescinded from MRs. You don’t even get invited to speak at the damn mixed race festival.

And let us note that a lot of this friction gets even hotter when we are talking about MR2s who have a white parent and a parent of colour, because we are talking about people of colour who also have white privilege and/or light-skin privilege.

There are other reasons why MRs get angry when MR2s say that being MR2 mixed is different from being MR mixed – and you are welcome to chime in in the comments, if you are so inclined – but these are the ones I have come across, time and again.

After my Racialicious education, I tried to be sensitive to the fact that “mixed race” can mean MRs or MR2s. To acknowledge this widening of the category, in a post I was writing about Alicia Keys and her warped presentation of historic racial relations, I referred to Alicia Keys as a first generation mixed race person. To my dismay, this language was deemed just as offensive as my original ignorance. Because, a commenter said, the language of generations is offensive and recalls such awful categories as quadroon and octoroon, and because, why, after everything, did I have to keep on insisting that there was a difference between mixed race people from long lines of mixedness, and mixed race people who were racial anomalies in their families?

It wasn’t, I started to realize, that MRs were solely mad that MR2s and the dominant culture didn’t recognize them as mixed. They were mad that a distinction was even being made between themselves, and MR2s. (Perhaps my very decision to say “MRs” and “MR2s” is aggravating this tension right now.)

When you are dealing with sensitive people who are reeling from cultural rejection, distinctions feel like rejections. Why do MR2s think they are so special that they can’t possibly be in the same club with MRs?

So I will dig deep into my horrible well of childhood pain to explain what this distinction business is about.

I come from a nation of two. There’s me, and there is my sibling. When I was growing up, I had no language to explain my experience. I did not know people who were mixed. And these problems were exacerbated by the fact that I was a TCK in a postcolonial nation that was still dealing with a lot of (justifiable) anger towards Westerners, and I was read as white, and I was given a hard time because of that. This was all without a real knowledge of race or racism, but simply a sinking feeling that I was hopelessly and sometimes offensively different from everyone around me, and that those gaps could never be bridged. Until I was in my mid-20s, this was what being mixed was for me. In my family of origin I  did not know a single person — not my grandparents, cousins, my mother and father, or even my sibling (who, thanks to the genetic lottery, came out looking a different race from me and so had their own experience altogether) — who could understand my ethnocultural identity.

Note: I am not saying that only MR2s understand true isolation. Pulllease. I am just saying that this was my experience, and I am sure, sadly enough, that there are many other roads to that kind of loneliness.

So when I meet MRs who come from long and often proud lines of family members who share the same ethnocultural experience as them, I can’t imagine that they could have shared my particular brand of racial isolation. It is not about thinking myself better or even, as some people have alleged, more authentically and mixedly mixed than folks who share a more complete heritage with their family. It is simply that I can’t imagine they could have had the same experience.

Part of this has to be the emo-as-heck tragic mixie inside of me who is too terrified to hope that, after all this time, my nation of two is a nation of millions. I swear, that stupid Blind Melon video where the weird little bee finally finds all the other little bees gets me every time.

I know I could be wrong that there is a yawning distance between MRs and MR2s; but we can never get past the front door of fighting over what I should call myself and what I should call them, to find out. Like I said at the beginning, I’m a sensitive brotherpucker.

Like so many other things, some of this is about the amount of space the dominant culture is willing to allot the people it has marginalized: we are fighting for table scraps because we know the right to tell our own stories is in slight supply. It both frustrates and saddens me that my attempt to assert my identity causes pain to other people who are just trying to do the same thing.

We become possessive over our suffering. There is something that MRs and MR2s definitely have in common: we are fighting over the right to this label and the right to make distinctions, because any concession feels like giving up the history that we fought so hard to survive. I can only wonder at the experience of mixed race people who are both MRs and MR2s. Again, chime in from the comments if you’d like to weigh in.

I guess what I am giving you here is my thought process so far. I have no conclusions when it comes to this fight. Do I think that folks who come from a mixed lineage are mixed? Of course I do. Do I think that they should have the right to call themselves mixed, without qualification? Definitely. Do I believe that we are mixed in the same way? This is something I still struggle with. Do I want to be allies? Do I want to search for kinship where I never thought to look before? Do I want to have a mixed race festival and invite everyone?

Yes. Yes. Yes.

I had a great Twitter conversation yesterday with @AndreaPlaid, @AnnaHolmes and @Amaditalks. We were talking about Julie Klausner’s recent post on Jezebel, “Don’t fear the dowager: a valentine to maturity.” Klausner’s post, lamenting the trend of grown women adopting childish personas, is sort of a companion to all the similar pieces about modern men living in a state of perpetual boyhood. She writes:

There’s so much ukulele playing now, it’s deafening. So much cotton candy, so many bunny rabbits and whoopie pies and craft fairs and kitten emphera, and grown women wearing converse sneakers with mini skirts. So many fucking birds.

Girls get tattoos that they will never be able to grow into. Women with master’s degrees who are searching for life partners, list “rainbows, Girl Scout cookies, and laughing a lot” under “interests, on their Match.com profiles. Read more…

The Klausner article generated a ton of push back on Jezebel. I suspect because the manic pixie dream girl persona is “in” right now and everyone wants to feel like they choose their own choices. In this case, that means that some women want to believe that their predilection for rompers and kittens and baby voices reflects their individual personalities and not some trend toward retro, non-threatening femaleness. But no one chooses their choices in a vacuum and certainly it means something that so many women seem to be finding this super-girlish, childish part of their personalities at the same time, while Katy Perry’s sex and candy persona is tearing up the charts and actual little girls are being bombarded with pink, purple, princesses, tulle and sparkles.

Zooey Deschanel is the poster girl for this sort of womanhood. Frankly, I find a 30-something woman with a website called Hello Giggles and a penchant for tweets about kittens a little off-putting, as I would a grown man with a website called Girls Have Cooties and a Twitter feed about Matchbox cars. But then we find creepy in a man the kind of childishness we fetishize in women.

I also find it worth noting that the persona that Klausner writes about is bound by class and race. The cult of domesticity defined idealized womanhood centuries ago–and that definition included both perpetual childhood and whiteness. The wide-eyed, girlish, take-care-of-me characters that Deschanel inhabits on film are not open to many women of color, particularly black women. We can be strong women, aggressive women, promiscuous women…we can do Bonet bohemian and Earth Mother (as Andrea pointed out), but never carefree and childish. Even black girls are too often viewed as worldly women and not innocents.

Also, the affectations of the manic pixie are read differently on black women. A streak of pink in the hair goes from quirky and youthful to “ghetto” on a black body. Thrift store clothing leads to a host of class assumptions.

Am I wrong about this? Is there a black Zooey? A manic pixie Latina? Is this a persona that women of color can inhabit?

Photo and image credits: What Tami Said

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

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

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

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

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

It was a breakthrough moment for her.

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

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

–Excerpted from Fatemeh Fakhraie: A Feminist Muslim Breaks Stereotypes

Photo Credit: Utne

**TRIGGER WARNING**

I recognize the women in this preview: these women were me when I was growing up. The kids at my mostly black Catholic school called me just about every black-related perjorative ever since 3rd grade, letting me know and telling others within my earshot that I was physically inferior solely because I was dark-skinned. I even remember a boy in my 7th grade class drew a picture of me being nothing more than a solid black square. Even though the same kids voted me 8th grade class president…I was still considered in their estimation an ugly (vis-a-vis my skin tone) girl. Even had the only boy who was my boyfriend (we were in 8th grade) dump me for a lighter-skinned and younger girl, to the mocking laughter of the lighter-skinned students.

My mom—a dark-skinned African American herself—told me something that didn’t make any sense through my woundedness: “You know those light-skinned girls people think are pretty in school? Wait ‘til you’re grown and see where you’re at and where they’re at.” Added to this was my mom’s constant admonition to “get an education.” Well, sure enough, what my mom said came to pass. I’ve had photographers approach me and ask to photograph me. I had lovers of various hues—even had a husband. (He was white.) And women of various hues, races, and ethnicities have given me love on the streets, at the job, and at workshops.

I’m not sure how—or even if—some of the women in the clip worked through the pain some black people have inflicted on them. But, instead of the usual devolving, derailing, and erasing conversations of “that’s happened to me, too, though I’m a lighter-skinned black person!” (that’s a thread for another post) or “it wasn’t me! I’m a down black person!” (will be met with an exasperated eyeroll)…it would be a really good thing to simply listen to these women’s truths, as uncomfortable–sometimes, as implicating–as they may be.

Transcript after the jump.

Dark Girls: Preview from Bradinn French on Vimeo.

Voiceover: Rise, dark girls.

Interviewee #1: I can remember being in the bathtub, asking my mom to put bleach in the water so that my skin could be lighter. And so that I can escape the feeling that I had about not being as beautiful, being as acceptable, as lovable.

Interviewee #2: If we’re all just hanging out and a dark-skinned girl walked by, [some would say], “oh, she’s pretty for a dark-skinned girl.” And I’m like, “What’s that supposed to mean?”

Interviewee #3: I’d used to wish that I would wake up one day lighter or would wash my face and think that it would change. I thought it was dirt and would try to clean it off but it wouldn’t.

Interviewee #4: Just doing something small as standing in front of class to do show-n-tell, I wouldn’t look up or make eye contact with anyone. I would hold my doll really tight because I knew my toy loved me even if they didn’t.

Interviewee #5: “Here comes Blackie”…”here comes Tar Baby”…I remember one in particular: they’d say, “You stayed in the oven too long.” And that was really hurtful.

Interviewee #6: And they would do it every single day without let-up: on the playground, in the classroom, in the cafeteria. Constantly you got it, so I really didn’t have a high self-esteem.

Interviewee #7: It was so damaging. It made us feel like we were unwanted, that we were less than…

Interviewee #8: My mother and her friend, we were driving somewhere. And she bragging on me: “My daughter is beautiful. She’s got great eyeleashes; she’s got the cheekbones; she’s got great lips.” And she’s going on, and she adds,”Can you imagine if she had any lightness in her skin at all? She’d be gorgeous!” And just that last little part…all that pride I had about, you know, her bragging on me, just dissipated. Just dissipated. And I think that that moment I really became aware.”

Questioner: Show me the smart child. Why is she the smart child?

Child: Because she’s white.

Questioner: OK. Show me the dumb child. And why is she the dumb child?

Child: Because she’s black.

Questioner: Show me the ugly child. And why is she the ugly child?

Child: Because she’s black.

Questioner: Show me the good-looking child. Why is she good-looking?

Child: Because she’s light-skinned.

Interviewee #9: I think I remember most saying, you know, if I have a little girl, I just…I didn’t want her to be dark.

(Chokes back tears)

I remember saying that. I didn’t want her to be dark like me.

Interviewee #1: When you’re around so many people that you trust, you know, just because you’re looking at another black person, and you’re thinking, “I’m black, you’re black. They’re not going to have anything derogatory to say about me.” But when you live so many years with people having certain judgments relative to your skin tone, you start to believe it.

Interviewee #10: A friend of mine had a baby. It was my first time seeing the baby. The baby was beautiful. [The friend ] said, “Gurl, I’m so glad she didn’t come out dark!” and when she said it, it felt like a dagger, like someone took a dagger and stuck it in my heart because I was used to expecting hearing things like that from other races. But this was someone I considered to be my sister.

Interviewee #11: Skin color amongst the black community is a huge issue in our time

Voiceover: This is not a phenomenon, It’s just the reality in the black culture.

Interviewee #12: I believe we didn’t like ourselves. Sure, it started in slavery, but we kept the vicious cycle going.

Man on the street: I mean, you know, dark-skinned women…I really don’t like dark-skinned women. They look funny beside me. So, you know, I’d rather not date a dark-skinned woman.

Off-camera interviewer: You’d rather [date] a light-skinned girl?

Man on the Street: Yeah. Light-skinned pretty girl. Long hair.

Interviewee #10: My experience with Black men is I’m exotic, I’m beautiful…they’re fascinated by me—behind closed doors. But when it came to dating, coming to the front door and taking me out in public? Doesn’t happen.

Interviewee #1: The darker you are, it’s more of a sexual approach. It’s more of a relationship-without-much-meaning sort of approach more than I-could-get-married-to-that-woman-and-have-a-few-kids.

Interviewee #7: All my lighter friends had those boyfriends. They were always seen together. But if someone wanted to date me, it was “I’ll meet you after school.” It was more of a hidden thing. Nobody ever just wanted to be with you.

Intervierwee #5: There’ve been places I’ve gone that there are just a lot of whites, and they would tell me, “You have such beautiful skin! Is that your hair? Did you dye it? Is that your natural hair?” It’s really questionable to me that they think I’m so beautiful and my own people don’t see any beauty in me at all?

Interviewee #13: I was once on CNN, debating the whole controversy about Beyonce ‘s L’Oreal ad. When a picture of her in motion was placed against a picture of her in print, everyone said there’s no way that they didn’t lighten her skin. And I don’t want to believe that that’s still happening in this day and age.

Man #1: And she’s got that good hair, too.

Man #2: You like what?

Man #1: I like girls with that light complexion.

Man #2: You’re a moron.

Man #1: I can’t help it.

Man #2: What? Being a moron?

Man #1: Yeah, that too.

Interviewee #14: Several years ago, I had decided I wanted to, umm, wear a ‘fro. I remember one young lady said to me if she ever had hair look like that, she’s had to cover it. I said to her, “Well, if you take the perm out of your hair, that’s exactly what it looks like.” And she said she’s never seen her natural hair because, from when she was small, her momma had always put something in it.

Young woman: It doesn’t look clean, I feel like. It looks, like, nasty almost. If you just roll out of bed and your hair is nappy, it’s, like, the most disgusting, most unclean thing.

Interviewee #11: I’ve had issues with having longer hair since a small child. And it did come from black kids.

Interviewee #1: Being in school, there was just such a separation among girls who were lighter-skinned and girls who were darker-skinned

Interviewee #15: It was really bad in junior high school. With Nair, I knew people who threw bowls of it in their hair just to take it. So, yeah, we were separated, and it caused a lot of friction among children. Which now, as an adult, just seems stupid to me.

Interviewee #16: The racism we have as a people, among ourselves, is a direct backlash of slavery. The “house niggers” versus the “field niggers.” The paper-bag rule: if you’re darker than a paper bag, the whole thing. We as a people were so disenfranchised that we adopted some of that. A lot of that.

Interviewee #17: I think the problems within the black community has to do more with our lack of unity. We really don’t see each other as being part of the community, partly because we don’t have a language or have something tangible besides our skin color to say, “I am a part of you. You are a part of me.” In the black community it’s, “No, I’m not black! I’m Caribbean,” or ‘No! I’m not black! I’m Haitian.” No, you’re black.

Interviewee #9: Rise, dark girls. Rise.

(Music)

Yes, these women in the clip remind me of myself, where I could have gone mentally (emotionally, spiritually, etc.) if I didn’t have the mom I have. Watching this clip made me want to loan my mom to each and every one of them so they could hear her intervening message and wipe their tears. Moms may even update her advice: “And I’m going to tell you what I just told my own daughter: look at the First Lady and tell me that a dark-skinned woman is unattractive and unloveable.” I may even send Moms over to the house of Interviewee #8’s mom to verbally whup her ass.

At the same time, as I told sex blogger/filmmaker Arielle Loren in our Facebook conversation about the preview, I feel a bit skeeved by the clip. Even though the conversation about shadeism and its particular effects on darker-hued black women is needed, it also plays on the “pitiful, unloveable dusky Negress” trope that can be emotionally exploitive for the participants and for the viewers…and seems to be a new spin on the “unattractive and unmarriable black woman” trope that’s been on the uptick for a minute. As Arielle said in the thread, “While I don’t want to shake the finger at something “positive,” if the director still is in the editing process…It’s important to also show dark girls who were empowered and managed to build strong self-esteem despite the overwhelming negative opinions of our community and society at large.” I responded, “ But what you’re saying makes me wonder if 1) the doc makers (Bill Duke and D. Channsin Berry) even interviewed anyone with an “empowered” perspective or 2) when this clip was edited for the ‘ad campaign’ the thought was ‘let’s use the trope of the ‘unloveable, pitiable dusky Negress’ to get the buzz going and, eventually, to get people to watch it.”

But again, this is a preview. According to the Vimeo page, the film won’t be released until Fall or Winter 2011. I think this film is participating in a conversation that’s so necessary—if, for no one else, for the women in the documentary and for quite a few darker-skinned black women carrying and maybe destructively acting from this wound. But, as we say in these parts, Black people—and that definitely includes Black women—aren’t a monolith. So, I hope this film presents more sides to this issue, more and varied voices of dark-skinned black women to speak about this hurtful issue. And that this clip will be re-edited to reflect those women’s experiences.

If need be, I’ll happily volunteer my mom and me.

Photo credits: Courtesy of Andrea (AJ) Plaid

When we embrace our curvy bodies, we’re told we’re fat. When we accept our thin frames, we’re accused of lazy or bad cooks. We’ve been charged with nursing and caring for  the children of our white employers from Antebellum times through today, but we’re constantly being portrayed as bad mothers. We put a weave in our  hair trying conform to a beauty standard that has nothing to do with us and we’re still called “nappy-headed hoes”. When we go to school, get degrees and a career, we’re “un-marry-able”. If we work and have kids early instead of going to school, same thing happens. When we or others decide to celebrate us, white women scream out “REVERSE RACISM” but we have to comb through 50-11 magazines with white women on every page to find ONE with a Black woman on the cover. We bare it all in a video or keep condoms in our nightstands and we’re called  sluts. We dedicate ourselves to The Church or are decidedly single and we’re prudes or “bitter”. All too often, we are forced to choose our race over our gender or risk feeling the wrath of our Brothers, despite having to live with the realities of both. From Saartjie Baartman aka “Venus Hottentot” to Satoshi Kanazawa’s “scientific” study claiming Black women being less physically attractive than EVERYBODY else, we’ve been studied like freaks of nature instead of just regarded as human beings with the same value as all others.

We’re pretty much damned if we do, damned if we don’t. So, the stereotype of “The Angry Black Woman” is rooted in a very visceral truth. We’re tired of this shyt. Stop telling us to stop getting upset. Stop telling us to not be mad despite having to deal with this crap  ALL THE TIME. Why are we supposed to put up with this reckless disregard for our humanity with a smile on our face? Because we’re women? Because we’re Black? Please, miss me with that bull. We are HUMAN first. This anger is righteous and all ignoring it and the causes of it will do is create a dyspeptic breeding ground for spiritual, psychological, social and physical dis-ease.

–Excerpted from “The Matriarchal Legacy of The Black Woman’s Anger”

Photo Credit: Lynette’s Two Cents

ETA: Please note, we got an email from NYMag saying they want us to take down this post. I pushed back asking them about their definition of fair use, and we are working it out. So if you access this post over the weekend, and it has changed, that’s what happened. I’m going to go through and prune it down a bit – good faith and all that – but we are still going to run the other pieces on Monday, regardless of what actually ends up in this space. – LDP

Earlier this week, readers Elton and Tomi alerted us to this front page New York Magazine piece called “Paper Tigers,” by Wesley Yang. It is remarkable in that it’s one of the broadest examinations of Asian American identity to be prominently placed in a mainstream outlet. The article made a huge impact – on Facebook alone, it was liked by 31,000 people. However, reading the piece left a lot of questions to be answered, and for every “hell yeah!” there was an equal *head desk*.

We’re putting together a reaction post from our friends and contributors, but in the meantime, please set aside the time to read all of Yang’s article.

To start you off, here are some points that jumped out at me.

The Good

• Yang’s discussion of Asian American invisibility in face of stereotype: “A conspicuous person standing apart from the crowd and yet devoid of any individuality.”
• The frank discussion of Thomas Epenshade’s work, which calculated how Asians generally must score higher on the SAT than white applicants to have the same chance at admission.
• The disparity between Asian American representation in higher education and under-representation in the board room. (We’ve covered this before, under the title of the bamboo ceiling.)

The Interesting, but Questionable

• Yang looks at the bamboo ceiling, but attributes it mostly to unconscious bias, not actual racism.
• The absolute absence of Asian American female perspectives, despite the higher rates of suicide for Asian American women.

The WTF

• Yang appears to have a love/hate relationship with being Asian-American; using the term “banana or twinkie to self identify and saying he’s “devoid of Asian characteristics.”
• The piece challenges some stereotypes, but reinforces others, perhaps because of the divided feel of the narrative.
• Yang quotes JT Tran, the Asian American pick up artist, who essentially says Asian American (heterosexual men) should pick up white women in order to…well, it’s not exactly clear how Tran thinks that is going to fix the school/boardroom gap.

Stay tuned for more perspectives from our APIA contributors.

As of last week, I had never heard of Bomba Estéreo, despite the fact that they were busy tearing up stages at Coachella, SXSW, and working the club circuit. The Colombian group consists of five members: Simón Mejía, the founder of the group, works the electronic side of the sound, Liliana Saumet sings the vocals, Diego Cadavid works percussion instruments, Kike Egurrola is on drums and Julian Salazar rocks the guitar. Signed to Nacional Records, the group is currently touring in promotion of their second album Blow Up (originally released as Estella) and their 2011 EP Ponte Bomb.

Their sound is described as “electro-tropical” with roots in traditional Colombia folk music called cumbia. According to Afropop Worldwide:

Cumbia, Colombia’s most famous musical genre is actually a term for a number of musical rhythms including porro and puya, with its essence in African percussion. Its highly flirtatious dance is thought to be derived from the festival of La Virgen de Canderia, held every February in Cartegena. The dance is traditionally a couple’s dance. The men dress in all white with a red handkerchief around their necks, while the women wear long flowing skirts. The women also hold a candle, which follows the men in a romantic pursuit, and often fan the flames by fanning the long skirt.

As recently as the first half of the 20th century, the cumbia was considered a vulgar, lower class (i.e. black coastal) musical form by the Colombian government, who also shunned it for its foreign (especially Cuban) elements. It is ironic that in the decades since, it has gone on to become Colombia’s national sound. This coastal fishing music has gone on to incorporate waves of influences along the way, from mambo-cumbias of the 50s to hip-hop cumbias of today. It has also gone on to become one of the most popular genres in Latin America.

Interestingly enough, in some ways, Bomba Estéreo is in the business of both music and activism – using music’s ability to transcend cultural barriers to introduce more people to the sounds of Colombia and showcasing the lives of Afro-Colombians in their videos and songs. In an interview with Sounds and Colors, Simón Mejía explains:

It’s amazing to see how people who don’t talk Spanish get connected with our music, it’s a way of seeing how a so local music can be universal at the time, it’s all about Africa, and about dance music, which connects the whole world around one same feeling.

And in our divided times, it’s fairly amazing to see people consciously seeking connection. In the most passionate review I’ve read of Bomba Estéreo thus far, Sean L. Maloney writes for the Nashville Scene:

The Colombian quartet’s music has been dubbed “electro tropical” and “psychedelic cumbia,” but is really best described as “world music” — not because they fit into standardized, overcurated concepts of non-Anglo-American music, but because they pull influences from the entire fucking world. Equal measures of dub, electronic and hip-hop meet with the transcontinental roots of traditional Colombian folk styles to create a music that is truly global in scope.[...] Blow Up has an emotional resonance that’s found in few records — it’s the sort of record with which one’s barely passing, middle-school-level Spanish comprehension can translate what’s going on. Yes, there’s a language barrier, but it’s more like nylon barricade tape than a razor-wire fence — the literal translation is less important than the universal feelings it conveys. And it’s got a beat you can dance to, which is the most universal of all vocabularies.

But how is this playing out across America circa 2011 — an era when, if you spend much time keeping track of politics, you’ll notice that folks seem to be enthralled with extreme nativist posturing? If our, um, esteemed state legislature is any indication — and dear God, let’s hope it’s not — Americans at the moment are far more interested in stocking their bunkers with assault weapons and Andy Griffith DVDs, making bogeymen out of major religions and polishing their tinfoil hats, than engaging in dialogues with different cultures. Granted, all of this is coming from old white people who seem to think all of the answers can be found up their own ass, but they claim to be speaking for all of America. How is a fiercely political, fiercely progressive Latin band going over in a country that’s, well, a little on edge about all things foreign and different?

“We didn’t know what to expect,” says Salazar. “For instance, we are going to Louisiana for the very first time, and we’re going to North Carolina too. But in Texas, it was really well-received from the very beginning, as well as in New York and San Francisco. … I don’t know about Nashville — maybe all your friends are as excited as you are?”

Maloney is right in many ways – music, like other forms of art, finds ways of leaping across whatever boundaries or divisions we have drawn for ourselves. I don’t speak Spanish but that didn’t diminish the enjoyment of the album at all. When Bomba Estéreo headed through to DC, I grabbed a few friends and headed down to check out the concert. As soon as the set started, the club went wild with people needing to carve out space to move. The beats grab you by the hips and just don’t let go, so it was interesting to watch people meshing salsa moves, grind moves, and trance dancing all in the same space.

Unexpected surprise of the evening? Bomba Estéreo’s tribute to the Technotronic’s 1990s mega smash club hit, “Pump Up The Jam“:

Bomba Estéreo is on MySpace, and Blow Up is available through Nacional Records. Their EP, Ponte Bomb, is available on ITunes.

I fucked up.

In my post about the transphobia stinking up the Mr. Cee/Brooke-Lynn Pinklady arrest, I referred to Brooke-Lynn as a trans woman.  This I gathered from the reports and from how I was taught to recognize how the media tends to misgender trans women and other female-presenting people, complete with the public humilation of referring to their government names, vicious transmisogynistic slurs, and misuse of pronouns.

Come to find out that I was wrong.  In this video (NSFW alert: language) that Bossip just released, Brooke-Lynn not only self-identifies but also discusses the arrest:

A transcript is under the cut.

Hi everybody this is Brooke-Lynn Pinklady. I’m sure by now everybody’s heard of me, and what supposedly happened. And I just wanted to set the record straight and let everybody know that nothing in deep happened in that car. Pretty much I feel like this is an internet blog that got totally out of hand, and a lot of things of things I’ve read are totally not true about me and my character. I can’t speak on his behalf. Basically, I’m not a transsexual, I’m a drag queen – I don’t do this all the time, I don’t dress like this all the time. Those of you who have seen my face (inaudible) probably know that. I feel like the media has this like, made me out to be this person, I feel like, just to get at him for some reason, make it a story, and that’s definitely not true. I’m definitely not a prostitute. I’m not in any way or shape or form easy – I don’t do things like that. I don’t have sex for money. I don’t need to have sex for money. I make enough money on my own.

Pretty much the situation I have right now is, I’m kind of trying to rebuild my life and try to get over the situation, you know, life goes on, and try to do bigger and better things, and not let this bring me down – all of the things that people are saying or doing. Basically – I don’t know, I’m not really upset. I was really devastated when I seen all the things that were online, I was really like, “who could do something like this?” I was really upset. I feel like people nowadays will do anything and everything for money. This whole thing was like, I feel, like a big-ass entertainment scheme. And I don’t understand why I was brought into it, just to be … The whole thing is just crazy to me. I decided to do a video in drag because … oh, ’cause everybody’s seen it, I didn’t see the need to do it every other way. Basically people are trying to make me into this infamous celebrity now. And although that would be nice, I would rather not be known for something I didn’t do. Or even if I was to do it, who wants to be known for something like that? It’s really not my thing. I did an interview and people are talking, wanting me to host parties, host events. And that would be nice and all that, but I don’t want to make this something to be proud of.

But like I said, none of these things that you’re reading are true. None of these fake-ass blogs are me, definitely. I don’t have a Twitter. Actually, I have a Twitter, but I don’t use it. But the little stupid-ass Twitters that you’re seeing, please don’t believe it, ’cause it’s not me. I don’t do shit like that. I don’t got time for infinite drama. I don’t got time for people on the internet that feel the need to run their mouths. It’s not my cup of tea. I don’t deal with shit like that. If you see me, say it to my fucking face, and that’s all I wanna say.

I don’t even know what else to say. I know one thing’s for sure: I’ve totally lost all respect for NYPD. That’s for damn sure. Like I said, I feel like people will do anything for money nowadays. Literally anything, and it’s just ridiculous. Who would wanna bring out somebody’s name just to make you happy, or make you rich. I realize that you have to live with yourself, and so do I so we’re not gonna deal with that … I kind of don’t know what else to say. I’m gonna reactivate my Facebook in a couple of days. I just wanted things to die out, ’cause I was getting so many adds, and it was just crazy. Everybody looking at me, asking me questions, men hitting me up, I was like, “Yeah.” Tomorrow I’m probably gonna make a Twitter of my own, and I’m not gonna reply to any of these little things that I’ve been hearing, ’cause like I said, it doesn’t matter to me what anybody on the outside thinks, ’cause at the end of the day, you don’t know me, and you never will know me. The only people that know me and how I am is the people that I’m close to – which is my family and my true friends. Throughout this experience, I feel like I’ve learned a lot. I’ve learned who I can trust and who I can’t. I found who my real friends were in a situation like this. Granted, I never thought anything like this would ever happen to me. The whole thing is just weird to me … but I want it to be gone.

The whole thing needs to stop now, and people need to move on with their lives, ’cause really it’s none of anybody’s business what [inaudible] at the end of the day it’s really not … initially, when I made this video, I was gonna act like a complete faggot, or whatever you wanna call it – like a total, complete bitch. But … I don’t know, I just feel like I should be a bigger person about the situation. I don’t have the time to respond to ignorant-ass people who don’t know anything about me or who the situation is. Basically, my thing is, where I’m gonna leave it is, don’t believe everything that you hear, don’t believe everything that you read, because people exaggerate to get better stories. And, at the end of the day, if that’s what you think is gonna make your pockets fatter, do you. But just know when you do things like that and write shit about people that’s not true, it kinda shows what kind of person you are, that you sell yourself out for money, end of the day. I’m gonna move on with your life and just do the things I wanna do. I’m trying to sing, rap – all of these things that I wanna do, and I’m not gonna let anything deter me. Stupid shit like this is definitely not gonna affect me anymore. It’s crazy that I even have the strength to do this video … This is my first time even being at a computer in a few days – in a week, actually. I was just so not wanting to see the little bullshit on it … my privacy has been totally invaded, and I don’t know how I feel about the Internet anymore. This kind of scarred me, I feel like. Anyway, to those that know me, love you. Shout out to Pinklady. Shout out to all my friends that helped me through this – I couldn’t have done it without you, and family. Hopefully you’ll be seeing me in the future – there’ll be good things coming out of it, and not bullshit … Bye!

So, on behalf of myself and for Racialicious, I deeply apologize to you, Brooke-Lynn–and to anyone else I upset–for my own misgendering and for any other hurt I caused with not respecting how you self-identify.

1. Diversity is content knowledge and text: as stated earlier, there is a wealth of information, lessons, techniques, and vocabulary that diversity has unearthed and exposed for all people to draw from. Much of my own Latinidad was informed by W.E.B. DuBois’s introduction of double-consciousness to American culture. Gloria Anzaldua’s notion of borders can help higher education look at how they frame “global” “intercultural” and “internationals” as it has informed me with understanding the intra-group dynamics between Latinos who come to school as International Students, and those who are U.S. domestic.
2. Diversity provides a set of tools: When I first designed a Latino Leadership course for the University of Maryland, I introduced leadership halfway through the semester, not until we laid out a vocabulary of what Latinidad is in relation to social consciousness, followed by a survey of social issues affecting Latinos. Reappropriaton, code-switching, critical thinking, inclusion, dealing with difference, combating oppression, dialogue, and the third-eye feeds directly into Leadership as a tool for social change, a hybrid, not an addendum to be added afterward. Resulting models would inherently have these components within their DNA. Early Hip Hop is another example of a set of tools designed by a certain few, carrying on the ability to be held and utilized by many outside.
3. Diversity a continuous process with an outcome to be seen and felt: building blocks and  masonry must result in the creation of a building. But what does it look like? Take into account which voices were present, what conflicts arose and how were they addressed, what processes and structures were reframed for inclusion, what knowledge was unearthed, what issues of power and privilege eradicated in the process. In addition, the process of diversity means constant revaluations of the questions, which are answered and used again as a new equation to be recalculated again.

I may be off here. But, I hope future events can take into account the entire scope and range of the “D” word. It hurts when people walk with you, but still don’t get you. Again, I’m not a fan of the word. I use it alongside “equity,” “inclusion” “multiculturalism” interchangeably. I’m not championing the word, but advocating for a more comprehensive terminology that does not leave me as a checkbox, but a complete change agent and contributor to the new.

(Image Credit: “Unfinished Painting” by Keith Haring)

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

Racially complete. When you are racially silenced, you begin the process of being incomplete. Silence can occur when you are told to stop talking about race. The process begins early for children – through a loss of heritage from the process of immigration, to being racially silenced in schools, to being told, “you’re crazy” from friends and family — the silence around race is deafening. To become racially complete, you have to go backwards, go back to these moments when you were silenced and try to understand what those moments were about. Your voice is the beginning.

I found my voice during Black History Month. I was a sophomore in college and was very unhappy. My experience with race and racism was overwhelming. A predominantly white institution, the college I attended still had a lot of work to do around these issues. Not knowing what race-work was at the time, I was one of the students who discussed racism on our campus with other students, in the corner of a cafeteria. Then, Revolution was only part of my vocabulary and something others did. Not something I could do.

Until one day, my friend Aira, co-coordinator of Black History Month at the time asked me to sit on a panel to discuss the experiences of Women of Color. “You should talk about what it means to be Latina here.”

Oh hell no I thought. I don’t even know what that means. Where would I even start?

The truth, my friend Rahsaan said. Start there.

The truth meant reviewing my experiences with race and the college experience. How my version of being Latina did not match what others at the college thought what a Latina should look like, sound like, act like. Being Latina at home meant I was light-skinned and could pass for white in a mostly Dominican neighborhood. In college, I was not light enough, not white enough, spoke like Rosie Perez, and was so very “New York”. Some didn’t even know what a Latina was – some thought I was half white, half Black, or half white, half Asian.

Latina? Wasn’t even in some students’ radars. This was the early nineties.

That is the voice of what was happening. What being Latina meant on a predominantly white campus. But what is the history? Where is my history?

Latino roots. African. Native. European.

How does a light-skinned Latina woman even begin to understand her African and Native roots? How do you explain the work that rises in you – the confusion you see in the mirror – when your skin color says one thing, but your facial features say another, and your spirit screams out yet another? Am I insulting some by identifying as Afro-Latina? Am I ignoring my Native roots? From that speech, I declared my identity and formally began my search for its meaning.

I tried to do this by first gathering information about Latin Americans who had a voice. People like Sor Juana Ines De La Cruz, Frida Kahlo, the Mirabal Sisters … and as much as I enjoyed learning about Mexico, Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, Ecuadorian history was often ignored in Latin American art, history and literature courses. I learned how to do research and from then on I hunted for my own racial history, and for me this would take me back to Ecuador.

When I found Maria Chiquinquira I couldn’t help but be excited. For one, my knowledge of Ecuadorian history was a constant self-education, a journey that came in spurts, but a desire that continues to burn. A search for my roots to help explain some of the confusion I felt for a long time about who I am and why I looked a certain way. I saw Maria’s picture hanging in the Museum Of Nahim Isaias and I see my lips. I see my nose. And I see that she is Black.

Maria Chiquinquira is an African woman who was enslaved in Guayaquil, Ecuador in the 1700’s and was the first slave in Ecuador to win her freedom. She was enslaved by Presbyter Afonso Cepeda de Arizcum Elizondo. According to Sherwin Keith Bryant, author of an unpublished dissertation called Slavery And The Context Of Ethnogenesis: Africans, Afro-Creoles, And The Realities Of Bondage In The Kingdom Of Quito, 1600-1800 (2005) Maria Chiquinquira “entered a legal battle” for her and her daughter’s freedom in May 1794 (p224).

Although she was a slave, she was aware of some of her rights and fought for her freedom based on that information. According to Bryant, Maria (along with other female slaves in Latin America) won her freedom by accusing their masters of “…dishonorable acts including: siring children with slave women, requiring work on Sundays, withholding time for mass, and failing to provide instruction in the faith.” (p.225).

Although she is an important symbol in Ecuador, like most of our African and Native history, she has been buried under the rubble of the European destruction and colonial civilization. Rendering us racially incomplete.

When I saw her picture hanging in the Museum Of Nahim Isaias in Guayaquil, she was still buried under the pictures and maps and other artifacts that signified the colonial period of Ecuador. Not much has changed in regard to our African and Native lineage.

Who is Maria Chiquinquira? When I google her, not much is mentioned. Dr. Bryant’s dissertation is the closest someone has written on her in English. There are some books in Spanish, old, some outdated texts – still nothing extensive.

The little I do know of her is that she was born in Guayaquil, Ecuador like my mother. She was intelligent and understood her rights and had a history of being mistreated by men. She was a Black woman in a time when Black meant slave. She changed the course of her history and for thousands of women in Ecuador – but who would know?

She is like me. Perhaps I inherited some of this trauma, some of this intelligence, some of this fight for freedom. For many years, I looked to Sor Juana, Joan of Arc, Toni Morrison, Angela Davis and here I had my own Ecuadorian hero – and I am beginning to feel somewhat, racially complete. Because in addition to recognizing similar eyes, nose, and lips which could have been passed down to me too – who knows? – I also wonder how I inherited the spirit of freedom that we all share – just been buried by our own modern day colonialism of bad reality TV and Eurocentric education.

I am happy I found Maria Chiquinquira.

But the journey to feeling racially complete, my race-work, my race-love, continues…

as we celebrate the 100th anniversary of international women’s day i am reminded of a spoken wisdom in Tigrinya, my first language, which when written reads dance, dance but don’t forget your responsibility.

it is in this spirit that i offer my words.

as i participate in my graduate classes, organizational meetings and certain activist spaces my body feels what i theoretically know to be true – the battle cries of womyn of colour continue to only be heard if they remain in the margins – to be exoticized and then discarded.

this may seem disorienting considering that these spaces are often quick to announce themselves feminist.

if we consider the journey that feminism has taken we might find orientation by understanding that the foundations of mainstream feminist thought formations were informed by imperial and colonial viewpoints. historically the women’s movement in the global north has been designated as a building space firstly for white, upwardly mobile, heterosexual women. if womyn of colour were included in the discourse it was only to relegate us to in between spaces.

caught between white supremacy and patriarchy, we survived.

then came the waves of feminism.

first wave.

second wave.

third wave.

it is said that with each wave more of us were included in the movement but was the movement becoming less white-centric?

construction doesn’t always signify healing.

whiteness was still the bottom line narrative on which the mainstream global north feminist struggle was being built on. numbering waves did not change this.

prompted by love and rebellion womyn of colour expressed their refusal to engage a women’s movement that necessitated their subjugation in order to articulate itself.

situated in the margins womyn of colour were perceived to be safe. our elders, the very ones discarded by their white comrades, were no longer attempting to break down the doors which had kept them out for so long. they were building new doors. the margins were transformed.

destruction doesn’t always equal ruin.

he calls to action rang out- reverberating from the front lines to the home- feminism is not synonymous with whiteness. we have for far too long been the backbone of resistance movements while simultaneously being marginalized. we are not tokens to be used when a space/protest/panel needs to fulfill its diversity quota.

we are warriors.

we are organizers.

we are caregivers.

we are in and of the front lines.

we are womyn of colour in the most militant tradition of our ancestors.

we are ancestral beauty in the flesh.

our elders insisted and we continue to insist that our comrades in the struggle heed our calls to action.

so how then can we, learning from our past, interrupt and de-center the colonial and imperial trajectory of early feminist thought formations?

first we need to recognize that the mainstream global north women’s movement perceived itself as global simply because it included womyn of colour. it failed to consider that the points of intersection between womyn of colour and white womyn were defined while not recognizing the diversity of ideas surrounding feminisms. womyn of colour were not given the space to determine their own role in the struggle. in this sense the points of intersection, though they did and do exist, are not arrived at through an equal distribution of power.

convergence of ideas does not necessarily create a convergence of proposed actions.

unequal power distribution is not only confined to the relationship between the oppressed and the oppressor but also exists within the intersectionality that creates solidarity movements among and with oppressed peoples. if we are going to attempt the building of a global solidarity movement this does not absolve us from the responsibility of analyzing the power dynamics within solidarity movements themselves and determining their potential effects.

so as our agency as womyn of colour is continually being attacked (consider the recent brutal sexual assault of Sudanese activist Safia Ishaq or the recent racist anti-choice billboard ads in new york city**) i call on our comrades to fight alongside us, to act as allies, and to continually question the way they act on their politic.

on March 8th i will dance but i cannot forget the responsibility we continue to have in ensuring that the voices of all womyn in the struggle are not only heard but also honoured.

The Root: The experience of having your Miss Navajo Nation reign challenged calls to mind the debate over the Cherokee Freedmen. Is this a common issue across the Native community, of African-Native Americans having trouble finding acceptance?

Radmilla Cody: I grew up having to deal with racism and prejudices on both the Navajo and the black sides, and when I ran for Miss Navajo Nation, that especially brought out a lot of curiosity in people. It’s something that we’re still having to address as black Natives, still having to prove ourselves in some way or another, because at the end of the day, it all falls back to what people think a Native American should look like.

But there’s been many times when people have said to me, “Oh, my great-great-grandmother was an Indian.” I’ll ask them if they know what tribe, and they don’t. It’s very important because in order to be acknowledged as a tribal member, you have to be enrolled. So I can see where Native people are protective about defining who’s a tribal member, and are questioning of people claiming Native ancestry.

…

TR: Were you surprised by the backlash that you received?

RC: I wasn’t surprised. I knew it was going to happen. Right before I left to go to compete in the pageant, my grandmother sat down with me. She said to me, “My child, I just want you to know that there are going to be some people who are not going to be accepting of this.”

Growing up, I was taunted at school with racial slurs and would come home in tears. My grandmother would be there, waiting to console me. She always said, “Let ‘em talk. You are a Navajo woman. This is your land. This is how I raised you. You be proud of who you are.” Every time, that’s what she would say.

So this day before the pageant, when she cautioned me about people who wouldn’t be accepting of me participating, I turned around and told her, “Let ‘em talk, Grandma. I’m a proud Navajo woman, remember?” She had a big smile on her face. I think she felt content that I was ready for what I was going to be challenged with.

TR: Do you have any connection to African-American culture and community?

RC: I spent more time in the Navajo community growing up because my grandmother raised me. When I would come into town in Flagstaff, Ariz., to see my mom, who had black friends, and my dad’s relatives, I was in the black community more. I went to high school in Flagstaff, and one day a friend was wearing a T-shirt with a big “X” on it. I said, “That’s cool! I should get one that says ‘R’ for Radmilla!” I didn’t know anything about Malcolm X. He told me to join the black student organization. I had a lot to educate myself about and embrace, because I come from two beautiful cultures.

In the black community I also had my challenges. I was always told, “You think you’re cute because you got that long, fine hair,” and I would have to stand up for my Navajo side because of stereotypes placed upon the Navajo. When I’d go back to the Navajo community, I would have to stand up for my black side because of stereotypes.

Read the rest of the interview here.

Image credit: unieketrouwringen.nl

by Latoya Peterson

Charlie Sheen is a fucking trainwreck.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Oh, readers, where do we start?

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

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

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

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

Charlie Sheen

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So Sheen’s last line becomes particularly absurd.

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

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

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

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

I was going to work on an essay in response to Ms. Chua’s article. I had several pages of notes, and was going to take the two or three hours it took to condense those notes into some type of narrative. Since I have a guest spot on the Strib’s blog, I was thinking about posting it there, just because I think alternative perspectives from Asian Americans need to exist – but I was also a bit wary about the energy it would take to endure the hateful comments that were sure to be leveled at me. As a parent, these days I have little time and even less patience for stupidity.

Part of me was trying to talk myself out of it. Plenty of Asian American bloggers have responded, covering such issues as whether or not the controversial Wall Street Journal excerpt really did justice to her book (see Jeff Yang’s excellent article on that subject), to whether or not raising a child in this fashion is really a good idea.

So, why should I write anything at all? This is not my fight, I said to myself. Even though there seems to be some conflation of Chinese with Asian American, and you have some Chinese blood in you besides, why throw down and risk a flame war over this? It has nothing to do with you. It’s not like Ms. Chua cares what you think – after all, it’s clear that people like me are not her target audience.

But then, don’t Asian Americans like Ms. Chua, who have a large mass market platform to express themselves, have some power over how the perceptions of me, and my family, are shaped? And if so, shouldn’t I use my own platforms to express an alternative perspective?

Damn, it’s recycling night though. It just snowed and I still gotta shovel the walk. And tonight is my partner’s night to have writing time while I watch baby…

Okay, let’s do this.

In this essay, I was going to be careful to point out that my feelings and opinions were not an attack on Ms. Chua, as she has the right to write about whatever she wants. As I have the right not to read her book, a right I fully intend to exercise.

I was going to be careful to say that my critiques had more to do with representation, rather than a debate on parenting. Ms. Chua’s reality is her reality – this is not an attack on her authenticity. I am more interested in the reaction, from Asians and non-Asians alike. There seems to be an acceptance that there is some true essential “Chinese” (and “Asian”) way to raise your kids and some “Western” way, and by “Western” it seems the author means straight upper middle class white male, and no one seems to be talking about the problematics of such assumptions. That no one is talking about how these assumptions play into very specific consumptions of Asian Americans – culture without politics, as if we live in a vacuum devoid of things like race, class, gender, sexuality. At this point in my essay, I’d take my partner’s advice and say that the idea that there is an essential, Western (male) and Eastern (female) way to raise children, and the idea that the melding of the individualist male West and the feminine East as some sort of liberating, uplifting redemption narrative is a colonialist social construct straight out of Said’s book Orientalism…

Aw man, I really don’t want to write this.

Then I was going to talk about my own upbringing. How my parents literally saved my life, as a baby, as they shielded me from harm in their arms, bombs shaking the shelter we hid in with other Vietnamese families as the Communist Party tried to kill us and prevent our escape. How I grew up in America trying to understand contradiction: that people said this was the greatest country to live in, while as refugees we lived in a neighborhood made up of mostly impoverished and disenfranchised Native Americans, African Americans, Southeast Asians, and Chicano/as. How my parents wanted me to know my culture but lie about my ethnicity and tell everyone I was Chinese because they felt Americans would blame us for the war and hated Vietnamese people.

These struggles that my mom and dad (YES, my dad, America! Asian men and Asian fathers DO EXIST) faced. How my father sewed designer labels onto handmade clothes so we could pretend we were more well-off than we really were. How a group of kids stood on one end of a block for an entire hour and relentlessly shouted racial slurs and taunts at my mother as she worked outside of our house, knowing she could do nothing to them, knowing she did not have the words to shout back. How my father had to deal with the contradictions of being a war veteran invisible because of his race, and see two of his sons enlist in the American military.

And yes, those dynamics, combined with my parents’ own personalities, effected how we were raised. There were days I was scared of my parents, days I felt guilty that I disappointed them, days when I had no idea what they wanted from me, days I tried to run away from home and days I wanted to kill myself.

I’d also write about joy – how my parents would take me to work and I would sit in their break room, drawing pictures and reading books for hours while waiting for their 15 minute break so they could come hang out with me. How my mom would bike around town with me clinging to her, how my dad would sew stuffed animals out of bargain bin fabric for me. I was going to write about the magic of going to a friend’s birthday party and playing his Atari, how my dad taught me to ride a bicycle in an empty parking lot, how a Black Panther saw me get bullied on my block and offered to teach me martial arts. And how our poverty led to my love of books and stories, because loaning books from the library was free.

In this essay, I’d own up to my own privilege – both as a male and as the youngest son, and while I went through struggles of race and class, I’ll admit that expectations were less for me than for my sisters and my older brothers. I will not dismiss patriarchy or make excuses for it – at the same time I’d assert that patriarchy and male privilege is far from just an Asian problem, it’s a problem and has been a problem in many cultures the world over. And the expectations and gender roles for Asian men are also limiting and damaging, albeit in a different way than for women.

I’d also write how, as I got older, I came to understand that a lot of the pressure I felt to pursue a white collar career came from my parents wanting me to escape the life of poverty and violence that they lived through. Around us was gang warfare, drugs, injustice, genocide – and all this to a family who just lost their country to war. I can understand why they would want me to pursue anything that would get me out of there.

I’d write about how my parents have come to understand that I can survive while working at something called a “nonprofit.” Though sometimes my dad does suggest to me that it’s still not too late for me to go to nursing school.

Then I’d write about my own struggles, and joys, of being a father to an amazing, hilarious daughter. That if Ms. Chua’s book, or any book, could contain the answers on being a good parent, I’d have read it 10 times over by now. I would write about how this process has been difficult, challenging, amazing. That I fear how my past, both as a child and as an adult, may have negative consequences on how I parent. And how nothing scares me more than the things I want to protect our child from, in this world. Sure, my partner and I have a say and choices to make, we have a duty to make informed choices about how to raise our child.

But there are some things we can only try to prepare her for. Homophobia, classism, sexism, racism. How can we, as Asian American parents, prepare her adequately for these things? How do we teach her about tragedies like the recent death of young father Jason Yang, and young son Fong Lee, both to police brutality – how can I teach her about these things when I barely know how to deal with them myself, how these things effect me on an emotional level so intense that I want to retreat entirely from the world when I think about them? Jason Yang’s kids will never see their father again. Or how it seems trivial to me to think about piano lessons and sleepovers when I try to imagine what it’s like to be Fong Lee’s parents, dealing with indescribable loss as well as continued systematic injustice. Then I’d apologize for making references to piano lessons.

I was going to stress that I offer these things not as some type of authentic substitute for Ms. Chua’s experience, but rather to question if there are certain Asian American stories and voices are privileged and consumed, more than others. If certain perspectives and stories from Asian Americans that carry specific racial, gendered, class-based assumptions keep getting reinforced time and again, within our communities and outside of them.

My story and opinion are not meant to replace Ms. Chua’s, but to question perception and consumption of Asian American identity – an identity that we are often powerless to shape ourselves in the mainstream. And my story is not the only one being neglected: what about Asian American Adoptee parents and children, Queer parents, parents who have to deal with deportation of their sons and daughters? I’m not insinuating it is Ms. Chua’s responsibility to tell these stories – I am saying that these stories exist, and it is worth asking whether certain perspectives and stereotypes are constantly being reinforced and consumed.

And in the end, I came to a compromise. It would have taken me hours to write the essay I aimed to write. Instead I wrote this messy, and perhaps poorly written, essay, so that it exists. That my parents exist, that I exist. That many different stories exist.

And I plan on spending the time I saved by hanging out with my baby daughter and my smart, lovely partner. I don’t pretend to have the answers and for damn sure I’m not going to write a book about it. But my family and my people are worth fighting for, in the way we raise our child, the way I struggle to maintain my relationship with my parents, and at the very least throw down with some messy words on an essay. Because my family is worth it. They are absolutely worth it.

p.s. I should also probably go visit my parent’s house and see how that whole ceiling-falling-down-because-of-ice thing is working out. My parents are worth it, too.

(Image Credit: Matsoc01)

by Latoya Peterson

I thought I knew Oedipus Rex.

The first time I read Sophocles’ masterful Greek tragedy was in the 11th grade.  There, scribbling out an analysis as part of a 40 minute timed writing, I focused on what epitomized Oedipus for me – the struggle between fate and free will. After hearing from the Oracle that he was fated to murder his father and to sleep with his mother, Oedipus does what any rational person would do – he tries to put as much distance as he can between himself and the only family he knows. Unfortunately, prophecies are not so easily averted – Oedipus never knew he was adopted, and thus did not know the man he slew on the road to Thebes was his father; nor did he know the beautiful widow he would eventually marry was his birth mother.

Back then, I wrote about the icy hand of irony in Oedipus’ journey -  how he closed himself to what would have revealed the truth because of his hubris, but once he finds out he literally blinds himself.  But what really stuck with me was the idea of fate.  If your life is predestined – and all roads will lead to your eventual path – what is the point of having free will? Life never promised to be fair, but the fates are needlessly cruel, especially in Greek mythology.  And so, when I heard about a retelling of Oedipus Rex, set in the barrios of LA with a Chicano protagonist, I could immediately see the connection.

Indeed, the idea of being trapped by larger, unseen forces makes a lot of sense when thrust into a modern context. Oedipus El Rey bases its narrative in California’s penal system, with the title character Oedipus (also nicknamed patas malas due to the torture inflicted by his father at his birth) growing up in juvenile detention.  At one point, Oedipus confesses that after he was released at the age of seventeen, he robbed a Costco without a gun, just so he could be returned to jail.  It was a powerful admission – that so many boys who go into the criminal justice system at an early age come out without any sense of what it means to function in society, that there are people who come to prefer the steady monotony of incarceration than be forced to cope with the unstructured chaos of real life. The idea that regardless of your own intentions, one might still end up ensnared in forces beyond your control resonated with me. I could understand that.

So, playwright Luis Alfaro threw me for a loop when he replied to one of my questions, saying the play, at its core, was “about love.”

I stumbled over my next question, mind reeling. Love? Oedipus isn’t about love! It’s about the cruelty of the Gods! Man vs. spiteful assholes who would happily smite you to punish your father! It’s about hubris! Incest! Patricide! Defilement! What the fuck is love in the time of oracles?

But there is a reason why Luis Alfaro won the MacArthur Genius Grant. Having delved deeply into the works of Sophocles before, producing the Electra send up Electricidad, he knew the source material – and saw more than the obvious message.  Alfaro explained to me that the whispers of longing, of need, of separation and pain in the text were all about love.  From what I remember, Oedipus married Jocasta as a sort of thank you – “We, the people of Thebes, appreciate you killing the Sphinx, and hey, here’s our king’s widow! She’s a total MILF!” But Alfaro’s take was informed by the time he spent learning about the toll that California’s penal system had on people.  In an interview on the Woolly Mammoth blog, he explains:

Recidivism, it seems to me, is a symptom of a larger issue. Why is it that more than half of all Americans who end up in jail, when released, go back? A lot of times this happens within hours. My state, California, has the highest recidivism rates in the nation. As a playwright, interesting facts like this sort of lodge in my brain when I hear them. When they are coupled with some fascinating images or one’s own history—I have worked in the Juvenile Detention System as a poet and writer since I was young—they start to form the thread of an interesting story. When I think about recidivism among prisoners, I wonder not about what’s ahead, but what one leaves behind when they get out. The comfort of a family one never had, a structure where one might not have lived with rules, the need for protection in a world that seems unsafe. What fascinates me most about prisoner recidivism is that there might be an alternate society out there—actually in there—that functions differently from the one we live in, and for some this is a better place. [...]

I studied with Maria Irene Fornes, who in my first day of workshop asked me what kind of plays I wanted to write. I had already been arrested for civil disobedience a number of times, and I said that I wanted to write political plays. She laughed and said that she hated political plays! I was ignorant and didn’t know her work, so I didn’t realize she was lying. She said I should stop writing and go live these political ideas and then come back and write a play about nothing, a rock, and she promised me it would be political. So, I did just that. I spent over ten years protesting, working with at-risk youth in the California Youth Authority. At one point, I even worked for the ACLU teaching protesters how to get properly arrested! But sure enough, I came back to writing and wrote from my heart, and politics and humanity were simply part of a larger organic mix. People who have made really big mistakes in their lives are very complicated people. They represent the complexity we are looking for in our work. Incarcerated children are missing elements that many of us take for granted—a notion of family, security, love, or even intelligence about the world. The first gig I had in a youth prison was a poetry workshop with teen felons, 12-17 years old. Five minutes into it I realized that none of them could read and few could write—which didn’t seem to matter because I couldn’t use pencils or pens anyway. No one told me this beforehand. Out of sheer terror and desperation, we stood in a circle, created a rhythm with our hands and bodies, and each student had to tell their life story through rap. I set some parameters about language and violence, and they were able to adapt. I could not ask them to write down their lives and crimes, but there was no law saying that they could not say out loud their histories. And they did, and the stories were extraordinary and sad and full of regret and fear and lack of hope. And that is when I realized that everyone is a playwright. Some of us just have training.

Alfaro infuses this complexity with wit, heart, and inside jokes – definitely intended for the Chicanos in the audience. Oedipus El Rey has been produced before in other cities – here is a clip from an earlier production:

Still, the beauty of live theater is that you never truly see the same performance twice. The clip above is not familiar to me – the Oedipus El Rey I watched was a bit slower in pace and delivery. Michael John Garcés, directing this version chose a more contemplative mood, shot through with music and sound director Ryan Rumery’s selections of eerie, single voice a capella renditions of classics like “Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow” providing the background for Oedipus and Jocasta’s ill-fated tryst. Andres Munar’s Oedipus flows through yoga poses, holding plank while other men do chin-ups, balancing in shoulder stand until his body gives out, conscious of, but not defined by his disability, which Jocasta likens to “a cholo walk.” (Side note: I would love to see a PWD analysis of Oedipus El Rey.) And this interpretation marks the only tragedy where I’ve seen the chorus break to deliver a physical beat down to match the verbal one they normally spout from the sidelines.

Still, Oedipus El Rey isn’t quite perfect.  I never felt as if I connected with Jocasta, in all of her grief and sorrow.  Her character has the potential to be rich – and yet, Sophocles’ original also left her as a question mark, a tragic, devoted figure, but with little else underneath.  This may be due to Sophocles’ to the societal norms in his age.  In Aristole’s treatise on writing, Poetics, he refers to Oedipus, as well as other classic works. Being a fan of Sophocles, it is interesting that Aristotle makes a point to note (emphasis mine):

In respect of Character, there are four things to be aimed at. First, and most important, it must be good. Now any speech or action that manifests moral purpose of any kind will be expressive of character: the character will be good if the purpose is good. This rule is relative to each class. Even a woman may be good, and also a slave; though the woman may be said to be an inferior being, and the slave quite worthless. The second type of thing to aim at is propriety. There is a type of manly valour; but valour in a woman, or unscrupulous cleverness is inappropriate.

If Aaron Sorkin is correct in his assertion that Artistotle laid out all the rules of writing in Poetics, then it kind of makes sense that representations of women on screen and stage are still stuck in the hookers-victims-doormats loop, so eloquently exposed by Shirley MacLaine.

Other than those minor gripes, the update just works, providing a beautiful retelling of the quintessential tragedy. But still, I found myself sitting in the theater and relating most to Creon – brother to Jocasta, next in line for the throne before Oedipus showed up. While Alfaro’s interpretation revolved around the love between Oedipus and Jocasta, it is Creon’s anguished cry protesting the idea of a pre-destined life that stays with me:

If it is all simply fate, then why not me?

Oedipus El Rey, written by Luis Alfaro, is currently playing at the Woolly Mammoth Theater in Washington, DC. The show closes March 6th.

(Image Credit: Luis Alfaro)

The acrimonious custody battle between Halle Berry and Gabriel Aubry took a racial turn last week, when allegations surfaced that Aubry used racial slurs toward Berry, and acted with anger whenever a news story would describe their mixed-race child Nahla as black. One of Aubry’s exes added fuel to the fire, referring to him as “borderline racist.”

Nadra Kareem Nittle, writing for Bitch, takes the opportunity to examine the racial divide in the reactions to the gossip:

On the gossip website Celebitchy, one of the more civil celeb sites, the readership not only overwhelmingly sided with Aubry but also expressed disbelief that he may have used the N-word while arguing with Berry.

“Sounds to me like she’s trying to pull the race card, which is pretty low when you consider that the guy obviously has no problems being with a black woman, nor having a mixed race child with her,” one commenter wrote.

Another remarked, “I have to side with Gabriel here. He doesn’t seem to be the type who would throw out racial slurs.”

One more commented, “Disgusting that Halle is playing the race card. Gabriel is Canadian, and the N-word isn’t used here.”

Why am I highlighting the above comments? Because they all contain common misconceptions about race. I’m not on Berry’s side or Aubry’s side in the battle over Nahla, but I do want to point out that just because someone is romantically involved with a person of another race doesn’t mean he would never make racist remarks or behave in a racist manner. By that logic, Strom Thurmond, a staunch segregationist, would not be racist because he was in a relationship with a black woman and fathered a child with her. As for the second comment, who does seem the type to use racial slurs? If Aubry looked more like Jeff Foxworthy and less like a fashion model, would he fit the bill more? Lastly, the N-word isn’t used in Canada? Really? Someone better alert Canadian rapper Drake. He must be out of the loop, considering that his songs are littered with the word. Seriously, why does the belief persist that racism is a non-factor in certain countries? Unless the nation in question is completely racially homogeneous, racism is an issue.

Nadra is right – when it comes to discussing interracial relationships, it’s amazing how often people will dismiss the idea that one (or both partners) could still hold racist ideas and attitudes. Way back when, one of the flagship posts on Mixed Media Watch was “I can’t be racist, I have interracial sex!” Carmen wrote:

As I wrote in a post last year, just because you sleep with/live with/marry/date someone of another race doesn’t make you automatically not racist. After all, slave masters had no problem maintaining their racist beliefs against blacks while raping their slaves and fathering mixed children with them. Neither did Strom Thurmond. And all you have to do is read Susan Crain Bakos’s article to see that sex doesn’t cancel out racism. If anything, sex and intimacy have always been intricately intertwined with oppression.

But there’s a second side to the racial fallacies being thrown around – that people in mixed race relationships with white partners should expect to be treated badly as a matter of course. Nadra mentions seeing this dynamic emerge on black-focused sites like Bossip, but I also spotted the same sentiments aired on TMZ.

This dynamic also upholds racist attitudes – first, by assuming all white partners automatically hold racist beliefs about nonwhite partners, and by normalizing the idea that racist behavior is to be expected in interracial relationships. What, you expected him to treat you like a person? Well, yes – why is that so hard to understand?

Also complicating the narrative is Halle Berry’s past relationship relationship – which were unfortunately very public. She discussed being in abusive relationships before, and had a very public falling out with Eric Benet. So for many fans, this comes as a shock – many commenters brought up Halle going on Oprah to call Aubry a man of integrity. This adding further fuel to the fire is the idea that Berry is acting out of spite or anger – and also reinforces a common misogynist claim that a woman is in some way responsible for being abused. (Check out the number of comments asking how she provoked him into a rage.)

Regardless of what we may think of Halle Berry or Gabriel Aubry, there are two things that are clear: (1) we hope that Nahla ultimately ends up in an environment that is both physically and mentally safe for her, and (2) our alleged “post-racial” reality only allows for racism to continue to fester.

(Image Credit: WENN via Radar Online)