TR: What role would you like the U.S. to play?

NS: I don’t expect the power or support or interference of anyone, of any government. We here in Egypt are fed up with U.S. colonialism. Obama is a pragmatic person and thinking of the interests of his country; I understand this. But now he is confused: One minute he supports Mubarak, one minute he doesn’t; one moment he is afraid of the Muslim Brotherhood, the next he is not. Now I believe in the people of Egypt only, I depend on the people of Egypt only.

~~Excerpted from interview with Rebecca Walker at The Root. Read the rest here.

Image Credit: myhero.com

By Arturo R. García

Most of the stories we’ve read about the now-infamous opening sequence prepared for The Simpsons by artist and documentary subject Banksy include a sentence along the lines of:

The extended sequence was apparently inspired by reports the show outsources the bulk of their animation to a company in South Korea, according to the BBC.

Not exactly breaking news; the show’s Wikipedia tells us its’ creators has been employing South Korean studios since its’ very first season, starting with AKOM Studios’ work on “Some Enchanted Evening.”

What is interesting is an allegation in the Asia Times by Chinese-based businessman Jing Kim that animation duties for many outsourced U.S. projects is actually outsourced again, to North Korea:

On one occasion, for example, North Korean animators employed by Shin came to Beijing from Pyongyang to work exclusively on several US animation movies, staying there for months, according to Kim.

When asked whether any of the movies were actually broadcast in the US, Kim said, “Oh, a lot, a lot. The ones that I participated in were as many as seven.”

But Kim declined to name the US films, citing the sanctions imposed on North Korea. “If the names of the US companies are known, they will be screwed,” said Kim.

Kim said “many people will be hurt” if he went into details, adding, “We worked very carefully.”

When asked whether the US film companies involved actually knew that their cartoons had been made by North Koreans, Kim said: “They don’t want to know. If they knew, it wouldn’t be fun. After they make contracts with the South Koreans, they just assume that it is made there. They only care about the delivery [of the products] and their quality. It is too much for them to ask where they were actually made. We don’t have the obligation to tell them, either. The only thing they claim is the copyright.”

Though The Simpsons isn’t directly named or implicated in the story, shifting the sequence’s focus to North Korea – already the target of economic sanctions – sharpens the intended satire; in the Asia Times story, Kim further alleges that animators in the country are denied medical insurance, welfare and overtime while they work “without complaint.”

Unfortunately for the audience, Banksy leaves himself some comedic “outs” that aren’t terribly original. Anybody else remember Clerks: The Animated Series?

No lie, I laughed at the unicorn sequence for the same reason I laughed at the British version of The Office: it’s gallows humor. But it doesn’t go far enough in its’ muckraking, no matter what MTV might say. How much leeway Banksy and the show’s creative team actually had is hard to gauge – after all, Fox will probably take only so much rattling of its’ cage. But in the end, the biggest winner in this whole affair won’t be whatever animator is or isn’t toiling under inhumane conditions, but the network itself. Because let’s be honest, when was the last time we had a good reason to talk about The Simpsons?

By Deputy Editor Thea Lim

I am from Toronto, though I now live in Houston.  I get most of my Toronto community news through Facebook, and I have been watching with disgust and amazement for the past two months as my Facebook feed has filled up with reports about Pride Toronto, Blackness Yes! – a community organization that celebrates black queer and trans history – and Queers Against Israeli Apartheid (QuAIA).

Long story short: Pride Toronto, which is an internationally famous week-long celebration of queer and trans pride, has made conscious or unconscious attempts to curtail the wholehearted participation of queer and trans folks of colour and their allies in Pride. They have attempted to relocate and shrink black-identified spaces, and they have banned QuAIA from participation in Pride 2010.  This year queer & trans people of colour (QTPOC) and their allies may participate in Pride, but only as long as they check their histories and politics at the door.  Short story long? Hang on to your hats, this is an epic tale.

Blackness Yes!

The first news I heard of this mess was in April, when the Blackness Yes! Blockorama party was asked to move by the Pride Toronto organizing committee for the third time in 4 years.

Blackness Yes! organizer Syrus M. Ware describes Blockorama and Blackness Yes!:

Since 1998 Blockorama has been a party at Pride where black queer and trans folks, their allies, supporters and people who love them came together to say no to homophobia in black communities and no to racism in LGBTQ communities. To say Blackness Yes at Pride – loud and proud…We have built Blockorama out of love, through sweat and toiling. For 12 years, we have claimed space, resisted erasure, found community, shared memories, built bridges, embraced sexuality, and found home. Blockorama is not just a party or a stage at Pride. It is a meeting place for black queer and trans people across North America- Blockorama is the largest space of its kind at any Pride festival on the continent.

Yet Pride Toronto has multiple times tried to move Blockorama further away from the main events, or relocated the party to smaller spaces that will not fit the huge crowds Blockorama draws.  Blockorama is a hugely important part of Pride, not only a black space where queer black folks go to party, but also a space that has always been immensely welcoming to non-black folks of colour.  Pride Toronto’s moves – whether or not they are racist – indicate a lack of sensitivity, care or even basic awareness of the size and meaning of Blockorama.

University of Toronto professor Rinaldo Walcott wrote this letter to the Pride Toronto organizing committee, upon news that Blockorama was to be moved again:

…at the same time that Pride Toronto has moved Blocko three times, Pride Toronto has also taken on the mantle of global human rights as its signature issue.

It is in fact the discrepancy between Pride Toronto’s treatment of local black communities participation in pride events and its attempt to position itself as a global player in the LGBTQ global rights movement that I find particularly offensive, disrespectful and unmindful of the very communities residing here that Pride Toronto would seek to champion overseas.

How can this be? How could it be that Pride Toronto did not see this ethical dilemma before it? Is it because Blocko is the last non-commercial space at pride? Is it because like much else in this country Pride Toronto too believes that black people as a constituency can be ignored? These are genuine questions, not accusations.

…We will not as black people here and globally stand to be exploited by white folks who now want it to appear that all is well at home, but not elsewhere.

On April 13 Blackness Yes! held a community meeting to protest these moves.  Deviant Productions, an alternative youth media collective, made a video of the meeting:

You can read a transcript of the video here.

In many ways this community mobilisation was successful.  3 days after the meeting, Pride Toronto agreed not to relocate Blockorama to a smaller venue for this year, and agreed to work with Blockorama, starting in July, to put a stop to the yearly migrations and find a permanent home for Blocko at Pride.

However negotiations are stalled around the matter of a dancefloor. This is a queer dance party, after all.

Blockorama site coordinator Syrus M. Ware says of the Blockorama site for this year: “Where we have been put is lovingly refered to as the ‘swamp’”: Blockorama requires temporary flooring in the park to ensure the safety and accessibility of its dance space.  Pride Toronto agreed to find funding for said dancefloor, but it is two weeks to the party and the money has yet to come through.

Ware says, “The sponsorship ask has still not been sent to me. I worry that this will not come through this year –  it does not seem to be one of Pride’s priorities. We have not yet been contacted about a date to plan for a better site for next year…we will wait and see what happens on the day of.”

He continues, “We have deliberated very long and very hard about whether or not to pull out of Pride this year. After our meeting, we met and strategized with QuAIA…We have decided to stay in the festival for this year- but we dont know about next year. We are committed to creating space to celebrate and shout Blackness Yes!, and we will do this with or without Pride Toronto.”

Israeli Apartheid

At the very same time as they were dealing with Blockorama drama, Pride Toronto was doing some shady dealing around another group of QTPOC and their allies. A letter dated April 14th (as in, the day after the Blockorama meeting) from the City of Toronto’s executive director of culture detailed a conversation where Pride Toronto’s board discussed ways to ban Queers Against Israeli Apartheid (QuAIA) from marching in the Pride parade. On May 25, Pride Toronto announced that QuAIA would not be allowed to march in the parade or participate in Pride, due to the City of Toronto’s complaints over the term “Israeli Apartheid”:

…the participation of Queers Against Israeli Apartheid (QuAIA) may contravene the City’s own anti-discrimination policies in relation to “place of origin” and that Pride Toronto, as a recipient of City of Toronto funding, is required to adhere to said policies…

QuAIA states that they use the word “apartheid” because it is the best way to describe a system of differentiated (queer) rights based on race. On their website they explain:

Today, in response to increasing criticism of its occupation of Palestine, Israel is cultivating an image of itself as an oasis of gay tolerance in the Middle East. As queers, we recognize that homophobia exists in Israel, Palestine, and across all borders. But queer Palestinians face the additional challenge of living under occupation, subject to Israeli state violence and control. Israel’s apartheid system extends gay rights only to some, based on race.

QuAIA is a diverse group, their membership including Jewish, Muslim, Arab, Palestinian and white queer and trans folks.

This ban hinges entirely on language – QuAIA would be allowed to participate in Pride and even articulate solidarity with queer Palestinians, if only they would stop using the word “apartheid.”  After expressing her distaste for the ban, Ellie Kirzner, editor of a leftist entertainment weekly in Toronto wrote:

I think it’s time to try the window; Queers Against Israeli Apartheid, change the name of your organization…I fear the use of [the word "apartheid"] has unmindfully offered a lever to the other side. It’s time to declare less and deliver more…Would the sky fall if Queers Against Israeli Apartheid became Queers Against the Occupation? Or Queers for Mideast Justice? Or just about anything that would advance the plot on behalf of Palestinians?

While I understand Kirzner’s just-do-whatever-works-for-the-movement approach, doesn’t the kerfuffle kicked up by a single, shocking word – because again, it is about the word, not the existence of the group all together – mean that we should talk about why this word upsets us so much?

In the world history of oppression, we often like to attach fixed definitions with specific illustrations to fluid terms. And so our definitions are too small to capture our terms; we have the language to describe our world, but we don’t know how to use it. For example, we attach “American slavery until 1865″ to “racism” – so anything that happens in America that isn’t on the level of the enslavement of others based on race, cannot be racism. Or we attach “assault in a darkened place by a stranger” to “rape,” so that when a woman is attacked by a man she trusts, it cannot be rape. Or we attach “South Africa before 1994″ to “apartheid”, so that anything that does not involve the worldwide horror at South African apartheid, cannot be the systematic separation of rights by race – even when it is.  Oppression, racism and systemic cruelty are ideas and machines that work by changing shape.  If we hope to confront and dismantle them, we need to blow open our definitions.

Depressingly, money is at the heart of Pride Toronto decision to ban QuAIA. From the CBC:

The use of the words has put the Pride organizers on a collision course with the City of Toronto, which says the name of the group ‘Queers Against Israeli Apartheid’ violates its anti-discrimination policy.

In 2009, the city gave the Pride festival $121,000 to help defray costs.

Xtra! quotes Pride Toronto board co-chair Genevieve D’Iorio:

D’Iorio says city and corporate sponsors are threatening to pull funding, and banning the phrase “Israeli apartheid” is the best position PT organizers could take. Pride simply wouldn’t happen, she says, without the city’s financial and in-kind support.

Pro-Israeli groups in Toronto have been pushing for QuAIA’s ban since last year; the May 25 decision has been on the table since last November.  A group called Reclaiming Our Pride argued that QuAIA was a “disgruntled group using Pride as a platform to further their own political agenda…only groups supporting gay rights can be in the parades.”  This stance seems to miss the point that QuAIA’s mandate is to support gay communities in Palestine (key word: gay).  The whole “this Palestine stuff is diluting my parade” line is unpleasantly close to the whole “anti-racism is making feminism lose its focus” argument that we are all so tired of hearing.  Both gay rights activists who only want to talk about sexuality, and feminists who only want to talk about gender, forget that there are many women and queer & trans folks who are also…people of colour. You can only parcel out sexuality and race when your worldview is imbued with white privilege.

Lobbyists who pushed for the banning of QuAIA have also complained that QuAIA is trying to make Pride “political.” Yet the nature of Pride is political to begin with and that is inescapable: pride celebrations exist around the world to celebrate and take space for a identity that is political because it is politically marginalised.  And yet in Toronto Pride is contorting itself to betray its own purpose, as it attempts to silence members of its community when Pride is supposed to be about coming out into the open.  In an gruesomely ironic turn, the slogan for this year’s Pride Week is “You Belong.”

And the commercialisation, depoliticisation and white-ification of Prides worldwide has become a matter of grave concern. San Francisco has an alterna pride called Gay Shame; this year in Toronto a counter-Pride celebration called Take Back the Dyke has been set up in order to, organizer piKe Krpan says, return Pride to its political roots and reject the commercialism, police escorts and censorship policies of Pride Toronto. On Sunday, an international group called No Homonationalism announced that superstar academic Judith Butler has refused her Zivilcourage (civil courage) Prize from Pride Berlin, saying

the parade had become too commercial, and ignor[ed] the problems of racism and the doublediscrimination suffered by homosexual or transsexual migrants.

3 days after Pride Toronto announced their decision to ban QuAIA, the grand marshal for this year’s Pride parade stepped down. Dr Alan Li wrote:

I was a keynote speaker at the second Pride celebration in 1982. I thus remember very clearly our communityʼs battles against censorship that attempted to invalidate our concerns, minimize our struggles and silence our voices. I remember struggles to ensure that the many diverse voices in our community were heard.

Prideʼs recent decision to ban the term “Israeli Apartheid” and thus prohibit the participation of the group Queers Against Israeli Apartheid from participating in Pride celebrations this year is a slap in the face to our history of diverse voices. Prideʼs choice to take preemptive step to censor our own communitiesʼ voices and concerns in response to political and corporate pressure shows a lack of backbone to stand up for principles of inclusiveness and anti-oppression.

In early June, 23 recipients of Pride Toronto awards – honoured dykes, grand marshals, special award honourees and international grand marshals – returned their awards in protest of Pride Toronto’s banning of QuAIA.  You can read a full list of their statements here.  This is a video of the event, also from Deviant Productions:

A surprising addition to the list of honourees returning their awards is Matthew Cutler, who identifies as a Liberal Zionist and makes the argument for why the term “Israeli Apartheid” should be allowed in the parade, despite the fact that it causes distress to some members of the Toronto queer and trans community. At 3:48 he states:

[The] use of a term “Israeli apartheid” continues to offend me, but has led me to conversations Israel, Palestine and the Middle East…conversations which have helped me to become a more engaged and informed Liberal Zionist. [I return my award] with the hope that generations of young people like myself will continue to be offended, will continue to grow learn and discuss difficult ideas and issues…

The Guardian (a UK paper – news of Pride Toronto’s ban  has reached far) makes similar criticism:

At a time when many countries are becoming more critical of Israel’s policies, Canada seems to be moving in the opposite direction. A general reluctance to engage in open debate about the Palestinian issue is exacerbated by pro-Israel groups’ efforts to shut down discussion…Since the beginning of 2010, the federal government has systematically cut funding to Arab-Canadian organisations and to UN relief works in Gaza. In March, the Ontario provincial legislature issued a unanimous condemnation of Israeli Apartheid Week, while the federal government considered introducing a similar motion.

However, self-censorship reached new heights last month when Toronto’s Pride Committee – which organises one of the world’s largest gay pride celebrations – announced it would be banning use of the term “Israeli apartheid” at the festivities…But when asked, neither Pride Toronto nor Giorgio Mammoliti – the Toronto city councillor mainly involved – could explain in detail what was discriminatory about describing Israel’s privileging of its Jewish citizens over others as a form or racism and apartheid.

QuAIA plan to march in the Pride parade anyways.

Sticking Together

While news of the active exclusion of queer and trans folks of colour and their allies from Pride Toronto has made me feel depressed and tired – this is my hometown, and many of those excluded are people I love – I also have been deeply moved by the mobilisation of my community, and the solidarity across communities of colour.

Ware from Blockorama told me a grisly tale about attempts to fracture Toronto’s QTPOC communities:  ”We were approached by many ‘Blocko supporters’ after [our April 13 meeting]…the most concerning was an ally from TD Canada Trust.  This ally has been a great supporter of Blocko…during the weekend of April 19, 2010, while we were considering whether or not to accept Pride’s offer and to stay in the festival or not, we were contacted by the TD rep. They indicated that they would offer us their full support, but wanted to know first, ‘what was our position on QuAIA.’”

In other words Blockorama were offered funding that they desperately needed to keep their black-identified party afloat, in exchange for breaking rank with a queer Muslim, Arab and Jewish group. Ware says TD’s support would’ve been enormous for Blockorama, to the point of putting pressure on Pride to treat Blockorama better, since TD is a huge sponsor of the entire Pride celebration.

Blockorama declined TD’s offer. Ware and Blackness Yes! say

Our liberation and freedom will not come at the expense of another communities. We stand in solidarity with QuAIA and all of the other groups marginalized within Pride and also broader LGBTTI2QQ organizing.

Blockorama and QuAIA have been working on a Pride Community Contract together to strategise a way forward.

What truly depresses me is how the battles that both Blockorama and QuAIA are fighting are just so normal. Which is why I called this post “an everyday epic battle” – all this debacle with Pride Toronto is typical of the struggles that people of colour face every single day to make themselves a space, even within supposedly inclusive spaces. The insensitivity, meanness, attempts to divide and the silencing are cruelly banal.

But it also warms my little heart that these everyday violent putdowns so often meet a Fight: a kicking and screaming refusal to back down, and a determination to stick together.

–
Apologies that transcripts are not available for the posted videos. I contacted the creators of the videos and they hope to have transcripts eventually, so I will come back and add them in if that is possible at a later date.

Thanks to Elisha, Syrus, piKe, Alexis and Michelle for all their help with this piece!

UPDATE: The Blockorama Displaced video now has a transcript. Thanks Lali and Deviant Productions!

UPDATE:

23 June 8:30 pm: Pride Toronto has lifted its ban on “Israeli Apartheid.” From Xtra:

Pride Toronto (PT) has reversed its May board resolution banning the term “Israeli Apartheid” and will instead require all participants to sign and abide by the City of Toronto’s non-discrimination policy.

Queers Against Israeli Apartheid (QuAIA) — the target of the ban — has declared a victory and congratulated the queer community for pushing PT to reverse its censorship decision

“This is a victory for the Palestine solidarity movement, which has faced censorship and bullying tactics from the Israel lobby for far too long,” said QuAIA member Tim McCaskell in the release…

Brad Fraser, another member of the coalition, says that the ban would not have been lifted had it not been for the popular revolt of queer people over the last month.

“It’s a tremendous victory for anyone who dared to speak out,” says Fraser.

It took me a full day to believe that this headline was real and not just something Tila Tequila got mixed up on her blog:

It refers to South Korea’s plan to use songs and videos from groups like Wonder Girls and Girls Generation to infiltrate and ultimately beat down North Korea.

Girl bands are the new Weapon X? Badass!

From The Chosun Ilbo:

An official in charge of psy ops at the Joint Chiefs of Staff said no decision has been made so far. “It will take months to set up the big screens to use in psychological warfare operations and a wide range of contents will be shown,” the official said. “I don’t know whether songs by girl groups will be included, but there is that chance since pop songs were used in the past.” But he added the content of propaganda broadcasts will not be limited to girl bands.

Oh, the propoganda broadcasts won’t be made ENTIRELY of girl band materials? Well that’s dumb.

Gosh, this concept makes me think of Latvia’s now-annual Blonde Parade–created to raise morale in the small country, which has been devastated by the global economic crisis.

If you mixed ‘em all these “national activists” up in a blender, it would be like a strawberries-n-cream banana milkshake that sweetened all the world’s problems without all of the red tape/torture/dick swinging/unflattering military garb. When the world is clearly going to shit (it’s that time, guys–look around), ladies always find a way to fix it!

[The Chosun Ilbo: Girl Bands To Assist In 'Psychological Warfare']

I guess there are days when I’m thankful for having been an ice-skating fan in my younger days, though I was absorbing some floaty, dreamy, and cornball heteronormative crap against the white-ice backdrop.  So, as much as I did enjoy figure skaters Oksana Domnina’s and Maxim Shabalin’s technical excellence, I can honestly say they should have applied all that technique—and subsequent press–to another routine that didn’t involve offending people of color.

Here’s their original routine, if you missed it:

Bev Manton, a Worimi woman and chair of the Aboriginal Land Council, sums up the outrage:

From an Aboriginal perspective, this performance is offensive. It was clearly not meant to mock Aboriginal culture, but that does not make it acceptable to Aboriginal people. There are a number of problems with the performance, not least of all the fact both skaters are wearing brown body suits to make their skin appear darker. That alone puts them on a very slippery slope.

Australians know only too well the offence that can be caused by white people trying to depict themselves as black people during performance pieces. Last year’s domestic and international furore over the blackface skit on Hey, Hey it’s Saturday’s Red Faces is a recent case in point.

That said, I don’t think it’s the most offensive part of the performance. That honour belongs to some of the claims by Domnina and Shabalin that have accompanied it.

They are not, as they state, wearing “authentic Aboriginal paint markings”. They are wearing white body paint in designs they dreamed up after reading about Aboriginal Australians on the internet. The designs are no more “authentic” or “Aboriginal” than the shiploads of cheap, “Aboriginal” tourist trinkets that pour into our country from overseas.

This is not a particularly difficult concept. For art to be Australian, it must be painted by an Australian, and for art to be Australian Aboriginal, it must be painted by an Australian Aboriginal. Russian art is not painted by Italians, and I doubt Russians would be impressed if someone tried to pass it off otherwise.

And just as the designs are not Aboriginal, nor is the music to which the dance is being performed.

I acknowledge that Aboriginal people do not own the sound of the didgeridoo. That is one of our gifts to the rest of the world. Everyone is free to use it. But that does not mean it should be sampled and then presented as something it is not — traditional Aboriginal music.

Al-Jazeera English reports :

“The dancers have defended the routine, saying it’s not intended to represent Australian culture, but a mélange of ethnicities.”

Before anyone starts in with “but Domnina and Shabalin are racially ignorant exceptions” or that they don’t “get” racism because they’re Russians (or globe-trotting sportspeople), I’d say that, like many other human societies, Russia isn’t an othering-free country, though people of color in that nation may not call what they’ve experienced “racism” as how USians understand it:

But black skin remains extremely rare in Russia. One estimate says that there are between 40,000 and 70,000 Russians of full or mixed-African heritage.

That distinction has singled many black Russians out for treatment that they say swings between curiosity, at best, and open hostility, at worst.

Grigory Siyatinda, an actor at the Sovremennik Theater in Moscow, grew up as the only black man in his hometown of Tyumen in the 1970s. His experience was that of an object of fascination in an isolated Soviet society where foreigners, and especially black foreigners, were exotic.

“How to put it? It wasn’t racism, what I experienced during my childhood in Tyumen,” Siyatinda says. “I was the only black person in Tyumen — Tyumen is a Siberian city and there were no black-skinned people at all. No one had ever seen one. That’s why there was simply this heightened curiosity toward me. It was heightened so much at times that it crossed over the borders of tact.”
….
Racism, long officially denied under the communist regime, is a reality in modern-day Russia, where nationalist groups and xenophobia are on the rise.

Russia’s Sova center, which tracks issues related to race and ethnicity, reports that 97 people were killed in racist attacks in 2008. Statistically, Central Asian migrants have become the primary victims of attacks in recent years. But African-Russians and African students remain constant targets as well.

…
Khanga notes that there was a very small percentage of mixed-race and black people in the Soviet Union.

“I was part of the first generation — now, of course, there are a lot more,” Khanga says. “But…we did not have the history of racism as they did in America. Not everything was easy, and I can be the first to tell you what kinds of problems we had. But, of course, you can’t compare them to the kinds of things that happened in America.”

Still, the few black Russians who have risen to prominence in their country have done so through sports or the entertainment world.

Of course, Domnina and Shabalin offered the usual no-intention-to-offend, we-swear-we-researched-this fauxpology and attempted to “lighten” the “tone” of their costumes:

”We heard some opinions about it being offensive, and we tried to do it lighter,” Shabalin said last night. ”We changed it a little bit to make it more authentic and less theatrical.”

The pair lightened the ”skin colour” of their costumes and slightly changed the attempted tribal markings daubed in white paint. The red loincloths were retained but more fake leaves were used.

”We changed our routine about 5 to 10 per cent, but we always do this after every competition to try and improve,” Shabalin said. ”Our whole intention when we chose this music was to be fair and friendly, we didn’t want to offend anyone.”

Domnina and Shabalin said earlier this week that they had wanted to ”pay tribute to the culture of South-East Asia” and said their routine reflected an indigenous culture that was ”1000 years old”.

Shabalin said after performing the routine last night that it had been well thought out and coach Natalia Linichuk had researched the topic thoroughly.

”Natalia had a lot of research with people who know this culture. We did big research in the beginning of the season,” he said before adding: ”You can’t be 100 per cent authentic.”

So, the Russian skating pros aren’t going to apologize sincerely for the mush-mess that is their routine…or for lumping and coding “ethnicities” (and Aboriginal, really) as “You colored folks look and dance alike, all ‘tribally” and stuff.  Ethnic enough for us!  Let’s daaaaaaance!”  And sorry, but lightening the costumes’ skin tone doesn’t equate to an apology…..

…oh yeah, Domnina and Shabalin won the bronze for their interpretive routine.

Now, before we go on (and on and on) with tirades about “those Russians,” Jennifer at Mixed Race America mused about the silver-medal winning American pair, Meryl Davis and Charlie White, who incorporated an Indian folk dance and a Slumdog Millionaire track:

Davis and White Indian folk dance routine

Jennifer sums up my initial feelings:  What’s the difference, really?

And I guess one question I have is, how authentic can any of these skaters actually be? I mean, I’m not trying to quibble for the sake of quibbling–we’re talking about ice dancing after all–not exactly a natural thing. And I do think it was smart for [Davis and White] to hire someone who knows Indian culture intimately and who could provide them with some guidance. But is this authentic? And is this appropriation? I mean, clearly the Russian pair is completely and clearly inappropriate, but the American pair? What do you think?

Because, as Jennifer points out, the potential for the racialized foolishness that Shabalin and Domnina exhibited—and were awarded for–is built into this competition:

…one of the things you have to know is that all the pairs competitors around the world had to develop a routine for their national finals around the theme of “folk dance or ethnic dance.” OK, right THERE is the root of the problem. Because it’s a fine line between honoring a folk or ethnic tradition to parodying that tradition, especially if this is something you are learning rather than something you were raised with.

A while ago, Latoya introduced a series on cultural appropriation by discussing global hip-hop.  While other commenters focused on the who/what/when/where/how/why of global hip-hop—especially the use of the n-word—contributor and frequent commenter atlasien offered an insightful working framework for dealing with cultural appropriation itself, which I think answers Jennifer’s question:

I think it’s much better to define cultural appropriation based on the people it affects. Does it hurt them in some way? If so, it’s probably cultural appropriation. If not, it’s probably just cultural borrowing or cultural drift.

There’s never going to be a 100% sure way of deciding that something is cultural appropriation, because the people being stolen from/borrowed from aren’t always going to agree. But you can make decisions informed by their arguments and weight of numbers.

There was a good conversation about this a while back at Rachel’s Tavern… someone who didn’t believe in cultural appropriation came up with the example “what about cooking Italian food if you’re not Italian?” The counterargument was that there’s nothing wrong with cooking Italian food if you’re not Italian… but if you go to Italy and start lecturing Italians that their way of cooking food is inferior to your more authentic Italian cooking style, then yes, you’ve crossed the line and turned into a rude and obnoxious cultural appropriator.

If you use this standard for global hip-hop, you could ask a series of questions… how is it hurting the group of people from the originating culture? How are these people being damaged or insulted or disrespected or taken away from, and to what extent? Are the people who view it as appropriation versus borrowing a minority opinion, or a majority opinion? And what is the level of power disparity between the originating culture and the appropriating/borrowing culture… the power disparity that determines the relative attention being paid to people who complain?

So, by this standard, Domnina and Shabalin screwed up, full stop. As for Davis and White, wellllll…

Thanks to readers Vanessa and Zora for the links!

From time to time, we at Racialicious discuss the stickiness of trying to talk about race in the context of cultures we are not familiar with.  It’s easy for us to talk about the U.S. and Canada, since members of our team live solely in these two countries. But when it gets to trying to talk about other countries, it’s hard for us to do that with as much right, or sensitivity.  Because there is nothing worse than getting xenophobic while you are trying to be anti-racist; in other words making assumptions or presumptions about a racial culture that you know nothing about.

So when reader Frida sent us in a tip about Carnival in Germany (roughly equivalent to Mardi Gras in the U.S.) I wasn’t quite sure how to handle it.   Frida noted that snide and politically satirical floats were par for the course at Carnival, and this year was particularly rife with floats mocking “fallen saviour” President Obama.  Nonetheless, this float caught her eye:

Frida did a good job of interpreting this bizarre float, explaining:

On this particular parade float, Obama and Hu are depicted in bed together, with Obama handing Hu cash– a remark on the tremendous loan debt America owes China. Note how Hu, dressed in yellow, is depicted as wearing a yellow stereotypical “coolie” hat.

I know very little about Germany’s racial culture that is informed by real, on-the-ground knowledge.  Out of context, this image is maddening for so many reasons.  Like the sex for cash motif: how much do the races of each leader play into the choice of this image?  Both African Americans and Asians have been target of distressing sexual stereotypes to do with sex work for eons, in a way that also dehumanises sex workers.  But perhaps there is no history of that in Germany, which makes this image more difficult to dissect than if it was an American image.

But then there is the drawing of John Lennon and Yoko Ono in a heart on the side of the float (yes, whaaa’?).  Frida writes:

In the picture above, there seems to be a painting of John Lennon and Yoko Ono (?) on the side of the float, bordered by a heart. Representing what exactly? Is it some remark on the relationship between “Orientals” and Westerners? What do John and Yoko have to do with Obama and Hu?

Uh, interracial pairings involving Americans and East Asians all look same?

And of course, there is the dreaded coolie hat, that universal indicator of Chinese culture; everyone except Obama and  Uncle Sam are wearing coolie hats.

Sigh.

But we’re not just dealing with German culture here, we’re also dealing with Carnival/Mardi Gras culture.  And the point of this culture is inversion.  It’s a time for adults to invert sexual and racial mores without consequence, even though this float seems loaded up with racial stereotypes that are very much grounded in the uninverted status quo.

Every year at Mardi Gras and Carnivals worldwide, racism comes to play.  For example we can look at the ubiquitous Voodoo floats featured at almost any U.S. Mardi Gras (Grases?), and be troubled by the reductive and inaccurate representation of “voodoo.” For example, I recently saw a Voodoo float staffed by white people, where everyone was dressed like the cast of Flintstones, with bones in their hair and leopard print loincloths.  I imagine that that representation of Voudou, which is an important part of Louisiana culture and history, is about as respectful as the coolie hat.

At the same time, I recognise that there is a huge tradition behind these representations, one that people of colour or black folks are often active in. As much as the representations trouble me, as a total outsider to both Louisiana and Mardi Gras culture, there is some racial playing there that is way over my head, connected to the fraught racial history of black and white people in the south.

Still, it seemed worthwhile to write up Frida’s tip.  And I have to admit that I have an ulterior motive: this isn’t the first time this Mardi Gras season that I’ve seen a coolie hat at a Mardi Gras parade, and I’m fishing for someone to explain to me why vague East Asian culture is being plonked down in the middle of the racial minefield of Mardi Gras.

About two weeks ago I had the pleasure of attending a Galveston Mardi Gras parade.  We watched countless marching band and floats of every variety imaginable – 60′s music, 20′s gangsters, a frat float made solely of couches, and that sorry Voodoo float I described earlier.  And then came some lion dancing.  Nice, I thought, there must be a sizeable Chinese community in Galveston.  And it was also one week to Lunar New Year, so the lion dancing didn’t seem totally incongruous.

Except that right after the lion dancing, came an “Oriental” float.  And everyone on the float – apart from one woman, as far as I could tell – was a non-Asian person with a Geisha wig, fu manchu moustache, or “oriental” robes.  Now, if there is a big enough Chinese community in Galveston to warrant a Chinese float, why not let the Chinese people do their own float?

Again, in the inverted context of Mardi Gras, this float definitely was not as bad as going to something like the St Paddy’s Day parade and seeing a bunch of leprechauns wearing coolie hats (or leprechauns dressed up as “voodoo”).  While there is a precedent for the voodoo float, it was still cringe-worthy.  The lack of discernable precedent for the Mardi Gras yellow face got me even more puzzled.

We can try to hold our tongue, give the benefit of the doubt, and not scream bloody racism when confronted by images that are troubling but have meanings we do not know, because they are a part of cultures unfamiliar to us.

Nonetheless, all those white folks in colour face put a bit of a damper on this yellow person’s parade.

]]> http://www.racialicious.com/2010/02/22/race-in-the-carnival-and-mardi-gras-colour-face/feed/ 16 http://www.racialicious.com/2009/11/18/couples-retreat-advertising-now-you-see-poc-now-you-dont/ http://www.racialicious.com/2009/11/18/couples-retreat-advertising-now-you-see-poc-now-you-dont/#comments Wed, 18 Nov 2009 13:09:15 +0000 Arturo http://www.racialicious.com/?p=4264 By Special Correspondent Arturo R. García

Let’s play a little game of Photoshop sleight-of-hand. See the poster up there for Couples’ Retreat? Now look below:

Presto! Somewhere over the Pond, Faizon Love and Kali Hawk disappeared from the poster, as the 2nd version was the one used to promote the film in the U.K. As reported…

Two weeks after the much-publicized death of Iranian protester, Neda — whose final moments were famously captured by a cell phone camera and distributed the world over — a couple dozen performers put together a music video tribute slash “non-violent resistance” anthem filmed (appropriately?) with nothing but a cell phone camera. Described by CNN as “a call to action against human rights violations by the Iranian government against Iranians,” the video’s creators/stars rap and harmonize about non-violence, their fuzzy, pixelated faces crooning between clips of the now historic footage of Neda’s death.

The graphic clips excerpted by the creators of the video for the the purpose of spreading their message of solidarity and pacifism have generated a cacophony of international outrage, sympathy, outright disbelief, and controversy since their initial circulation a few weeks ago. While the footage has galvanized protesters in Iran, creating for them a martyr to rally around as they strive for real, lasting change, it has also prompted enthusiastic Americans to wear green and tweet about revolution in what has already been described by numerous commentators as a superficial and ineffectual display of “solidarity.” The “United for Neda” video, as well-intentioned and misguided as any green-clad American, seems to fall into the latter category. Like Americans who continually replay the Neda footage in order to sustain a dimming sense of shock, outrage, and civic duty while imagining a connection to a less complacent world, the music video appropriates the controversial images of Neda with the aim of fostering activism through the propagation of sensational violence.

Plenty has been written on the subject already. Virtually every reporter covering current events in Iran has addressed the issue of Neda’s death in some way or other — sometimes dramatically (in the case of CNN, who broke the story) and sometimes tenderly (in the case of Roger Cohen, who never fails to convey a sense of humanity and compassion in his thoughtful articulations of the events unfolding in Iran). Some have gone so far as to suggest that the Neda video was a hoax based one source’s “obvious rhetorical flourish” when recounting the event, while others have criticized our macabre fascination with the woman’s death (as evidenced by the video’s propagation).

Perhaps the most interesting bit of commentary I’ve read on the subject, however, is a piece on a personal blog which suggests that Americans’ sense of humanitarian duty is only activated by their vociferous consumption of violence against people of color:

On blog threads, commenters are thanking bloggers for posting the video of Neda’s death [...]

I understand these readers’ sentiments, but why? Why must we see an Iranian woman die on a city street in order to understand the gravity of the country’s political upheaval? Why must we see brown bodies bloated and floating to give a damn about the tsunami in Myanmar or the hurricane in New Orleans? Why did we have to see Oscar Grant killed in cold blood by police on a BART platform to talk about racism and the justice system? Why did it take the mangled body of 14-year-old Emmitt Till to give America an inkling of the tyranny and danger that black folks faced in the South every day?

I think Americans are fetishizing video of Neda Soltani’s death in a way they would not if she were a young, blonde, American college student shot down on an American street. We do not need to see the lifeless bodies of those women in order to care for them. But people like Neda owe access to their deaths so Americans can access their own humanity.

While I take issue with the author’s easy assertion that the phenomenon described above is based entirely on racial dynamics, there’s value in her overall argument. I have often wondered about photojournalists’ depictions of the third world which often disproportionately emphasize the negative — particularly as compared to depictions of the first world. I’ve also been troubled by our apparent preference for images of the third world that seem to affirm our perceptions of its brutal nature. Take a look at Pulitzer Prize winners over the last decade, for example…it’s a scrapbook of third world suffering and devastation: Kevin Carter’s controversial photo of a Sudanese baby being stalked by a vulture, Stephanie Walsh’s photo series depicting a Kenyan woman’s circumcision, Carolyn Cole’s images of the effects of the Liberian civil war, Adrees Latif’s photograph of a fatally wounded man lying in a street in Myanmar, and the list goes on. Patrick Farrell, this year’s Pulitzer Prize winner for “Breaking News Photography” similarly depicts “provocative, impeccably composed images of despair after Hurricane Ike and other lethal storms caused a humanitarian disaster in Haiti.”

What leads me to argue that this is not simply a race issue, however, is our culture’s reverence for photos like those of Damon Winter — also a Pulitzer Prize winning photographer — which consist of triumphant, inspiring images of Barack Obama campaigning during the presidential primary. We love heroic depictions of America(ns), regardless of skin color — emphasis on the “heroic,” because that is how we love to see ourselves, especially in relation to the rest of world.

That’s the issue at hand, really. We craft our own national and cultural identity in opposition the that of the rest of the world; the more devastating and woeful they are, the bigger and brighter we are by comparison.

The Neda video affirms this dichotomy of the world for us, depicting “them” as either brutish or helpless while reifying our sense of superior self and, in so doing, activating our sense of entitlement as the the third world’s savior. And, while indulging a savior complex is never a productive starting point for activism, at least the intention is noble however misguided the articulation of that intention proves to be in the long run….

Changing our facebook profile pictures to the color green and disseminating a video of a dying woman within circles that have absoultely no stake in the conflict that led to her death aren’t the most fruitful (or respectful) methods of supporting a cause. And while photojournalist depictions of third world devastation may expose us to issues that desperately need international support and attention, one hopes that we are evolved enough to support humanitarian (and other) causes without having to get off on images that would be considered no less than exploitative and cruel if they depicted the last moments of our own loved ones’ lives.

The kind of “activism” that is motivated by a short-term visceral response is superficial and similarly fleeting — and the artists responsible for creating the “United for Neda” video ought to make themselves aware of that fact. They, like us, should support a cause because, intellectually, we understand the ethical implications of our action and inaction, and have cultivated a sense of civic duty based on our sense of civic justice….and not because we had an emotional reaction to a moment of violence suspended in time.

(Image Credit – We Are All Neda.com)

While at SXSW, I made sure to attend quite a few panels.

One of the more intriguing panels was titled Appfrica: How Web Applications Are Helping Emerging Markets Grow. (That link also leads to the podcast.) While all the panelists were engaging and informative, one of the speakers stood out – Rose Shuman. After explaining that she was not a web developer, she related tales of working in various areas around the globe and realizing that the ideas formulated in think tanks do not necessarily translate into solutions that every day people can handle. Her latest project, Question Box, seeks to bridge the communications barriers that prevent people from harassing the power of the internet.

As explained on the website:

Question Boxes leap over illiteracy, computer illiteracy, lack of networks, and language barriers.

They provide immediate, relevant information to people using their preferred mode of communication: speaking and listening.

As such, Question Boxes combine the ease of using mobile phones with the enormous information and communication power of the Internet.

Below is a quick interview with Rose Shuman, the Founder of Open Mind and the idea behind Question Box on technology, developing communities, and information.

—

Why did you start Question Box?

I had worked with various development agencies for 12 years. I’ve always been interested in tools, providing ways for people to use your tools in ways you never imagined because you aren’t those people. At the same time, I became interested in mobile phones and how they exploded in different parts of the world. The internet is not popping in the developed world for various reasons – the low literacy rates in adults and beyond that, language barriers. Question Box was designed for people who are used to phones, placing a heavy emphasis on comfort of users.

How do people use Question Box?

In India [the location of the pilot program], it looks like free standing metal box with push buttons. [If you press the button,] it speed dials to an operator who speaks in your local language – [in the area of the pilot] Marathi – and talk to someone who speaks your language. You tell them what you need, they look it up, translate it and convey it back.

Each box has a core user group of several hundred people. It will expand to more when we start to market the service. We are also designing pictographics to go with the box to help assist with the reading barriers – as well as other service graphics like the weather, or frequently asked questions.

In all of your work, what has been your largest takeaway in terms of the challenges with developing technology like this?

If you’re designing a technology for people to use, you have to know who those people are and how they behave. It’s really easy to get infatuated with a tech solution without understanding how people will actually use it. It may be cool, but will it be useful?

What do you hope to accomplish?

The huge scale mission is to make information available for everyone in the way we want to get it. To take the pilot running in India and expand it out to the whole country. [And Question Box] is a way for organizations to reach out and communicate with our user base, who are hard to reach populations.

You [also] have these enclave of populations that are being left behind in American society. There may be a place for Question Box in community centers and immigration centers. The basic question still remains: How do you get information to people you are trying to reach?

Today, I got three text messages in rapid succession from my friend Hae.

“Check out the new MV from 2ne1 called Fire!”

“Song is addicting!”

“Street version is better than space version!”

I knew YouTube wouldn’t let me down, so I headed over there to see if someone posted an English translation:

2NE1 is just one group in a long line of Korean hip-hop (or hip-pop, according to some, but more on that later*) artists that I have enjoyed thanks to JYP Entertainment and YG Entertainment. While YG is credited with popularizing the hip-hop sound in Korea, both companies have received major success with their artists.

There’s the Wonder Girls:

And Big Bang:

Back when I first discovered Korean hip-hop, I was quite fond of showing my friends this video by 1TYM, called “Do You Know Me?”:

After watching the video, my friends had a range of reactions everything from “Who knew Koreans rolled hard?” to amazement to laughter. But some people weren’t quite as accepting, posing the question “Why do they have to take our stuff?”

Is there a such thing as “our stuff?” I grappled with this question in the specific context of a global hip-hop culture. Six years ago, I was looking up scholarly articles on hip-hop for a research paper when I stumbled across an obscure article in a random journal about the spread of hip-hop in Japan. The article posited hip-hop’s growth was fueled by young Zainichi who keenly felt their second-class status and could relate to the lyrics and culture of American hip-hop.

Ever since then, I’ve looked to see where hip-hop flourishes around the globe in hopes of understanding its appeal. Before hip-hop was recognized as a major influence on youth culture , I found articles, documentaries, and mixtapes from places like Palestine, Thailand, Cuba, South Africa, and Haiti. Seeing what I felt to be “my culture” reflected back at me in so many ways was a jarring experience – everything, good and bad had been replicated and remixed and each hip-hop scene emerges with a style all its own.

While preparing this series on Cultural Appropriation, I realized that the dialogue around cultural appropriation and global hip-hop culture follow similar lines of argument. What constitutes appropriation and what is an homage? When are we borrowing versus flat out stealing? What are the power dynamics involved in this conversation?

The idea of cultural appropriation is one fraught with misunderstandings, minefields of misinterpretation, and other issues. I’ve been struggling with how to launch this series for a while now – exactly, what can one say? The Angry Black Woman opened up a conversation back in January, asking her readers to define cultural appropriation. After 103 comments, there were still more questions than answers.

So, in launching this series, I hope to provide points for discussion, but not necessarily firm solutions. The idea is not to provide a go to guide on appropriation, but to illuminate some of the issues in these types of conversations.

—-
*I’m not talking about the different views on what’s “real” hip-hop in this post. Later, when I started taking a serious look at the trends and representations of hip-hop abroad, I found out that the same battles that happen here occur elsewhere. While reading some back information on Jinusean, I saw the message boards filled with those who claimed that Jinusean was hip-pop and the real hip hop in Korea was represented by groups like Drunken Tiger and the whole Movement crew.

Here’s one of Drunken Tiger’s videos, called “Do You Know Hip Hop”:

It’s also worth noting that Drunken Tiger had a mega-hit in Korea from their song “Sweet Talk,” which uses the same melody as Camp Lo’s “Black Connection.”

—-

“Fire” actually isn’t 2ne1′s debut song – their first one was with the boys of Big Bang, called “Lollipop.” I have no idea why this video makes me so happy. Maybe it’s all the colors. Maybe it’s because one of the girls is obviously getting her Snork on. Or maybe it’s because the whole video is 80s-a-licious. Either way, I love it so here it is:

For those of you who are interested in learning more about Brazil beyond what I cover here, which is mainly from the pop culture/race perspective, check out this awesome site: Eyes on Brazil . The author and blog moderator Adam covers many facets of Brazilian life and culture, and gives the perspective of an estrangeiro (“foreigner”) without patronizing, belittling, or exoticizing Brazil and its people. It’s also a great site if you have general questions about Brazil and/or want to work on your Portuguese as Adam is highly responsive to comments and posts short video clips on Brazilian Portuguese colloquial expressions and slang. Here’s a bit more about the site from the author:

Eyes On Brazil exists in order to give a deeper understanding of the Brazilian arts (as well as all things Brazilian) to an English-speaking audience. Personally, I’ve spent almost 10 years studying (and dreaming of) the sleeping South American giant known as Brazil. Seven of those 10 years were focused teaching myself Brazilian Portuguese, and as such, I consider myself fluent.

Adam also has sibling sites on Belem (Brazil), Salvador (Brazil), and even Colombia.Veja já!

Tim, a Brazilian digital communications provider (cell phones, internet service, etc), recently launched an ad campaign entitled “Você, Sem Fronteiras,” which means “You, Without Limits.” “Fronteiras” is a Portuguese word* that means limits, borders, or restrictions, and is often evoked in reference to behavior, culture, and access to resources. In this ad campaign, Tim is encouraging its current and prospective users to think of all three contexts.

The first page of the ad reads: “ALGUMA COISA ESTÁ ACONTECENDO” (“something is happening”):

The second page reads: “UM HOMEM NEGRO COM NOME MUÇULMANO É PRESIDENTE DOS ESTADOS UNIDOS” (“a black man with a Muslim name is the President of the United States”)**:

The third page reads: “O PRÊMIO DE MELHOR JOGADOR BRASILEIRO DO MUNDO É DE UMA JOGADORA” (“the award for best Brazilian soccer player in the world belongs to a woman”)***:

The fourth page reads: “QUALQUER PESSOA PODE CARREGAR SUA PRÓPIA REDE” (“anyone and everyone can access their own wireless internet network”):

The fifth and final page of the spread reads: “É TEMPO DE MENTE SEM FRONTEIRAS” (“the time has come to have an open mind / a mentality sans limits”):

When I first saw the ad, a series of thoughts crossed my mind, but before I prejudice you, the readers, with my thoughts, I wanted to hear your first impressions. I will leave mine later via the comments section.

*I translated the Portuguese to make sense in English, not word-for-word, as that never quite works!
**Clearly, here they are talking about President Barack Obama.
***On page 3, they are referring to Marta Vieira da Silva, a Brazilian female soccer player who is considered the best female soccer player in the world.

Advertisement courtesy of Veja Magazine, March 19, 2009

The Daily Mail has published an article about a British postmaster’s controversial move: He’s refusing to serve customers who don’t speak English. Complicating matters is that the postmaster, who works in a culturally diverse section of Nottingham, is of Sri Lankan decent. He became a naturalized British citizen 17 years ago.

“I tell them if they don’t speak the language and they can’t be bothered to learn, then don’t bother coming here,” the Daily Mail quoted Deva Kumarasiri as saying.

In making this statement, Kumarasiri ignores his background of privilege. For instance, later in the article, we discover that he learned English in school in his native Sri Lanka. This is an opportunity that scores of immigrants never receive.

The author of the article doesn’t say what age Kumarasiri was when he began to learn English, but studies have shown that the younger a person is when introduced to a language, the better chance the person has of mastering it. So, if Kumarasiri was a minor when he learned English, he has an additional edge over the immigrants he accuses of not “bothering to learn” the language. And is it fair to say that the immigrants in his area haven’t bothered to learn? I could argue that Kumarasiri didn’t bother to learn English either. He had to speak English by virtue of being a student in a school that instructed him in the language.

Throughout the article, Kumarasiri continues to make arguments that are downright shoddy. He resorts to using offensive clichés when he says, “If you don’t want to be British, go home.” Even when he puts more thought into his explanations for banning non-English speakers from his shop, his points are flawed. For example, Kumarasiri argues, “The fabric of the nation begins to unravel if we don’t all speak the same language.”

Really? Well, how does he explain Canada, an officially bilingual country? It hasn’t unraveled because some of its citizens speak French and others speak English? I’m not denying that there has been much tension in Canada over this issue. There’s even been talk at certain points of time that the country would split over the language issue, but ultimately that didn’t happen. Canada remains intact. And in early 20th century America, Western and Eastern Europeans did business in their native languages and sent children to schools where they could be taught in those languages. There’s also Nigeria, Africa’s most populous country. A former British colony, English is spoken throughout the country but so are about 400 other dialects. If a country were to unravel because not everyone spoke the same language, Nigeria would certainly be at the top of the list.

Despite the holes in his argument, Kumarasiri has received overwhelming praise from Daily Mail readers, with many arguing that a white person would have been called racist for taking such a stand.

“Thankfully he has been allowed to make his point without fear of being branded as a bigot!” one reader wrote. That reader also remarked. “If all immigrants [who] came to this country were like this marvelous man, would anyone ever have a problem with them? I think not. Unfortunately too many seem determined not to embrace this country in any way, shape or form.”

With the last point, the reader strikes the subtext of the article and of Kumarasiri’s claims. The argument here isn’t simply about language but about assimilation and the “threat” posed by Britain’s immigrants from the Indian subcontinent’s Muslim countries. Kumarasiri has to be a Union Jack waving, English-speaking immigrant to show that he is “safe,” much in the same way that Barack Obama cannot express anger without fear of alienating white America.

“When I left Sri Lanka I left behind that country’s culture, customs and language,” Kumarasiri explained. “I have done my utmost ever since to be part of this country’s culture.”

I feel empathy for Kumarasiri if I view him as a brown man who is attempting to “belong” in a white imperialist nation that may consider him a threat if he doesn’t assimilate. Moreover, as Britain increasingly becomes the home to the natives of countries it once colonized, it is suffering from an identity crisis that has made Brits increasingly resentful of immigrants. Hence, Kumarasiri’s very public declaration of his allegiance to English customs and language can be taken as a plea for Brits not to resent him as they do other brown immigrants. “I’m not like them,” he seems to be saying with this move.

While I can empathize with Kumarasiri, I take issue with his characterization of immigrants who don’t speak English. Yet, I’m aware that many Americans have the same views of non-English speakers in the U.S. My perspective on language politics was forever changed when, a decade ago, I accepted a teaching position with the Los Angeles Unified School District straight out of college. My task? To help 30 fourth graders at an elementary school in South L.A. become fluent English speakers.

Most of my students’ parents, who came from Mexico, El Salvador and Guatemala, spoke even less English than their children did but routinely implored me to turn their kids into fluent English speakers. That said, the idea that some immigrants are willfully determined not to learn English is ridiculous to me. These parents knew that having their children master English would create countless opportunities. If given the chance to learn English themselves, I have no doubt that the parents would have seized the opportunity to do so. However, most parents were working class or poor and could not pay to take an English class or be tutored in English. The work schedules of parents often impeded them from taking English classes as well, which suggests to me that more businesses which employ non-English speakers should create opportunities for such workers to learn the language.

The other obstacle to learning English is fear. Even the nine and 10-year-olds I taught feared that they would be ridiculed for making mistakes when speaking English. It is a fear that I shared when trying to converse entirely in Spanish with their parents. Wondering if I was rolling my R’s properly or if I was using the subjunctive when I should have been the using the preterite or another tense could all too often trip me up when speaking Spanish. And for Spanish speakers, using words in English that contain the “th” sound or begin with the letter S were just as daunting. The problem is that many of the fears my students had about speaking English were valid.

People in U.S. who speak English with a foreign accent are often dismissed, ridiculed, rudely received or told amazingly that they are not speaking English. These blows to the psyche make it easy for an English language learner to simply withdraw and give up on speaking English.

Because of the chilly reception English language learners receive in the States, I was surprised to visit Spain and Italy several years ago and encounter people who didn’t care if I spoke Spanish and Italian imperfectly. They just wanted to communicate with me because I was a fellow human being. Italians, in particular, went on and on while speaking with me, despite the fact that I couldn’t understand much of what they were saying. But a funny thing began to happen. The more they spoke to me, the more I was able to comprehend and the less self-conscious I felt about attempting to respond to them in Italian. If English speakers want to facilitate a growth in the amount of English being spoken in their communities, they need to embrace non-native speakers of the language rather than shun them.

(Thanks to reader Ama for sending this in!)

(Photo Credit: The Daily Mail, via Raymonds Press)

As mentioned by countless writers who dare to venture into the dangerous territory of race and ethnicity, racism is a tricky animal. There are moments when racism stares one right in the face, begging to be confronted via the most obvious of responses, then there are moments when racism hides in the shadows, only to be perceived by the most observant, sometimes the victim alone. Yet what is to be done when considering racism when it has literally crossed borders, cultures, and history? Does it become a new species?

I was faced with this difficult question just last week. On Wednesday, I walked into our teachers’ lounge/meeting room to ask if anyone knew of any Asian restaurants in the city. This inquiry, by the way, is not completely out of left field. Brazil has a large and thriving Asian population, composed primarily of Japanese immigrants and their descendants, in addition to smaller Chinese, Indian, and Thai communities, and many cities in the region in which I live happen to have restaurants that serve Asian food or some Brazilian-Asian fusion dishes. The dialogue that followed, however, was far more out of left field than my request:

Brazilian Teacher (male, white, 25): “Yeah, there is a Chinese restaurant downtown. They have yakissoba and sushi.

Me: Oh ok. I thought yakissoba was Japanese, no?

BT: Meh, Japanese, Chinese, same thing, right?

Proceeds to do the “Miley Cyrus” (also known as “a derogatory gesture that involves using one’s index, and sometimes middle, fingers to stretch the skin around his or her eyes horizontally, in order to make one’s eyes appear like those of people who are of Asian descent”…just in case anyone was lost). Laughs hysterically.


Me: Takes a deep breath in order to remain composed. Um, no. They have some things in common, sure, but to say they are the same is not exactly correct. I mean the culture is different, the language is different… sometimes the foods have similar origin, but are still different . . .

BT: Yeah, but Korean, Japanese, Chinese…they all look alike right?!?!? “Miley Cyrus,” proceeds to laugh again.

Me: Disgusted. No, they don’t actually. Some people may have similar features because there was a lot of mixing going on in Asia for generations…(so flustered at this point, because I am thinking of thousands of years of civilization, and how exactly to explain that to someone in 30 seconds), but there ARE differences. It’s like if I said everyone from Spain, Portugal, and Italy look JUST alike and are all the same just because the majority of people are white. I mean people are different!

BT: All the same! “Miley Cyrus,”AGAIN

Towards the end, I decided to return to the original subject to preemptively extinguish a potential fight.

Me: Ok, whatever. Where is the restaurant?

So by this point, clearly I was fuming. But after the fact, I began to reflect on the exchange. Was I being overly sensitive? Did I miss something in my Brazilian history lesson about it being socially acceptable to derisively mimic people with Asian ancestry in public places? Was I being a “typical American” (read: over-reacting to the tiniest of issues)?

At first, I thought maybe so. I had carried around my own country’s baggage of sullied race relations and unpacked it in another place. I was analyzing the situation through the gray lenses of the United States and our racial past. But then I considered something that had a simple answer, but not exactly the easiest of solutions:

Is racism culturally relative?

The immediate answer is, “yes,” but in terms of addressing this version of cultural relativity or, in other words, the variation across different societies and cultures of what is considered of value, good/bad, and/or acceptable, there is no easy answer. Different countries may have similar histories, but the nuances of each nation’s respective past often yield a strikingly different present.

With Brazil carrying the heavy weight of being considered not only one of the most ethnically and racially diverse nations in the world, but also the most “utopian” in terms of race relations, to analyze the issue of racism becomes doubly difficult because to consider race at all is a bit complicated*. There are fewer fixed ideas of race in Brazil than in the United States. For example, there was never a “one-drop” rule here, nor was there legislated segregation following the abolition of slavery (though they abolished slavery in 1888, much later than the United States, many Brazilians cite the Jim Crow Laws when condemning the U.S. as a racist country). These factors, when coupled with pre-existing ideas allowing for slightly more social acceptance of miscegenation (“race mixing”), mean that race is a far more muddled category. Though complex, the Brazilian racial spectrum tends to be far more “open” in terms of racial categories and even provide for what one could consider racial transcendence, meaning that after a day involving a lot of sun exposure or a property inheritance, I can go from being considered one race to another.

The complexities of Brazilian racial history and general race relations I will leave for another article, as it is too extensive to discuss at this moment, but it is important to consider the aforementioned when thinking about whether or not the statements I heard and gestures I witnessed were racist or not. If I were raised in Brazil, there is a possibility that I may not have found my co-worker’s impromptu comedy routine racist, but I wanted to test this theory by running by a few of my Brazilian friends of various races.

The majority of my friends said it came down to a matter of city vs. country. In larger cities, much like in the United States, there is less tolerance for racial stereotypes and discrimination thanks to the increased diversity within the population who keep everyone, including the government, on their toes. Though there are residents of Asian descent in the town in which I live, there are thousands more in cities like São Paulo, which is where most of my friends live. They noted that the heightened political awareness and education level of larger cities may also be a determining factor in the response to my co-worker’s behavior.

But to add to this consideration, I also thought of how I deal with the majority of cultural norms I find outside of my comfort zone (i.e. female circumcision, socially sanctioned domestic abuse, or the exclusion of certain ethnic and/or religious groups from voting rights). I usually resort to using the Harm Principle, a concept coined by one of my favorite thinkers, British philosopher John Stuart Mill.

The Harm Principle rests on the basic premise that one should be allowed to do as he or she pleases, so long as his or her actions do not harm other human beings. In my own personal version of the harm principle, however, I extend the definition to go beyond the physical. I include the prospect of psychological “violence.” If you engage in an act of racism, by my definition, you are conveying a pre-existing stereotype you hold of one group of people in the presence of others. And even if those present are not of the group you seek to insult, the general affect on the listener is harmful because it results in the spread of stereotypes, which in turn can result in the spread of hatred and/or lead to discrimination (“Active” racism, i.e. legal restrictions for certain racial groups or hate crimes).

In other words, my co-worker passed my racism test. By considering all Asians to be the same, primarily based on a sole physical characteristic that most, though not all, East Asians share, and then, in addition, by relegating the cultural and culinary traditions of all East Asians to the same category, one that he then proceeded to ridicule, he scored pretty high on the b.o.b. (big ole bigot) scale. So while I fully recognize that race and the way we think about race-related issues varies across cultures, it does not mean, in my opinion, that we should give license to those who choose to engage in the perpetuation of stereotypes or complete misconceptions about one group or another. From one country to another, feeling as if your respective group is not considered equal or that your culture is somehow funny, strange, or insignificant in comparison is all the same: unacceptable.

I found it interesting last year that a young Indian transwoman has gone somewhere that transpeople in the States haven’t. But what else is new for us here?

Last year Karpaga made history in India as she became the first transwoman to be cast in a lead role in a commercial film. She was cast as the lead in a Tamil language film called Paal, which means gender in the Tamil language.

While Indian transpeople are justifiably proud of this cultural step up since they have been dissed for far too long in movies like their American cousins, at least they actually have transwomen playing transwomen in their films.

And based on the plot synopsis for this one, Paal looks pretty interesting. She’s playing an intellectual filmmaker who falls in love and faces the ‘do I tell’ dilemma.

What we’ve gotten here in the States, be it the silver screen or television is cisgender actresses scooping up those role. The recent announcement that Nicole Kidman is set to play pioneer transwoman Lili Elbe in the indie film The Danish Girl only heightens our annoyance about this.

It’s not like we don’t have transgender actresses in Hollywood. Candis Cayne, Calpernia Addams, Aleshia Brevard, Jazzmun and Alexandra Billings are some of the ones that come to mind. Candis recently had her groundbreaking role in the now cancelled Dirty Sexy Money that ended predictably in her death, but that’s another post.

It would be nice if Hollywood would actually put a transwoman in a transgender role, but they still can’t get it right with cisgender women of color either.

What’s going to have to happen is that transwomen are going to have to write, produce and direct their own stories, and one of those indie films is going to have to make enough money and garner enough awards to get the peeps in Hollywood’s attention.

As for Paal, here’s hoping it’s an artistic and commercial success in India and beyond, and it leads to a nice career for Karpaga and other Indian transwomen who follow in her pumps.

Japan is a giant in terms of its economic, technological, industrial, and medical prowess, but when it comes to treating transgender people lagged behind the rest of the world. The first sex reassignment surgery in Japan (for an F to M) didn’t take place until 1998 and was followed up by the first M to F surgery a year later.

If you’re an anime fan there are numerous titles that have transgender characters such as my fave series You’re Under Arrest which features transgender Tokyo police officer Aoi Futaba. But unfortunately real life transgender people in Japan have been reluctantly hiding in the shadows in a culture that prizes conformity.

Things are changing in Japan as it make moves to grant more personal freedom to its citizens, and the Japanese transgender community is a beneficiary of this openness.

It’s estimated that there are 7,000 to 10,000 transgender people in Japan, and while it seems that the ascension of Japanese transpeople has been meteoric, much of what has happened was the result of years of behind the scenes work.

In 2003 Aya Kamikawa became the first (and so far only) transgender person elected to public office in Japan when she won a place on the local assembly for Setagaya, one of Tokyo’s biggest local government areas. She has played a key role in lobbying for changes at both the national and local levels, including the 2004 gender change law. Kamikawa has also successfully lobbied to eliminate unnecessary mentions of gender in public documents and was reelected in 2008 to serve a second four year term.

Following on the heels of Kamikawa’s historic political victory were groundbreaking legal reforms in 2004 that allowed some transsexuals to change their officially registered sex. Unfortunately the law only allows unmarried, childless applicants to change their official gender. In addition, applicants also must have had SRS and been diagnosed by two doctors as having gender identity disorder.

That has resulted in only 151 people officially changing their gender codes between July 2004, when the law took effect, and the end of March 2005, according to Japan’s Justice Ministry.

Despite the victories, there’s still some stigma attached to being transgender in Japan, although that is slowly being overcome. “As long as we keep silent, nothing is going to change,” said Kamikawa. “We need the courage to make a society which respects diversity.”

Pecah Lobang is a documentary by 24 year old filmmaker Poh Si Teng about Muslim transgender sex workers.

Pecah lobang means ‘busted’, and Malaysian transwomen because of Sharia law increasingly find themselves harassed by fundamentalist adherents to the faith and negative attitudes from Christians as well.

One of the reasons is that crossdressing became a crime under Sharia law with severe penalties to match, but that wasn’t always the case.

Teng’s award winning documentary not only focuses on Natasha’s struggle to honestly live her life, but explores why Malaysian society has turned repressive on transwomen through interview with a religious scholar, a physician who conducted sex change surgeries, a sociologist, three attorneys and an outreach worker.

It’s also another reminder for transgender people all over the world that no matter what part of the planet we inhabit, we still fight the same battle for acceptance.

IWD is like Christmas time for me. Although I’m certainly not religious, I definitely enjoy the gathering of folks, the general merriness in the air, and the giving and receiving of presents (big or small!)

IWD is like that too. I look forward to it every year, and like any loyal family member, try to make it out to as many events as possible with something in hand to contribute. I walk away in an attempt to not indulge too much, and deal with the never-ending frustrations of the many differing perspectives on how this day should be celebrated.

So as the good ole tune goes, in my original remix, all I want for International Women’s Day is…

What do you want?

Since the turn of the 21st century, China has begun making another ‘Great Leap Forward’ in terms of modernization and putting itself in the world’s spotlight.

We got a glimpse of just how much it has progressed during the recently concluded Beijing Games, and its space program continues to take giant leaps as well toward their ultimate goal of becoming the second nation to put a man on the moon.

One interesting thing that has come to light is that China, like ‘errbody’ else on our planet, has an estimated 400,000 transgender people in their midst. Over 1000 of them have had surgery, and we in the West have been getting introduced to them and their stories as well.

It’s not unusual now to Google ‘china transsexuals’ and see many links to various stories about transpeople in China. But all Chinese transsexuals probably owe a major debt to internationally acclaimed dancer Jin Xing. Her struggles and eventual SRS in 1995 basically opened the door that has made life easier for other transpeople across China to follow.

Chinese society has become more open and tolerant towards transsexuals to the point where in 2004, Chen Lili won the Miss China Universe pageant and was poised to become the first transgender contest in the 50 plus year history of the event that was being staged in Ecuador that year. But rules were quickly passed limiting the event to cisgender women and Chen was barred from participating.

Maybe the Donald should rethink that ban. Some of the biggest traffic days I get on TransGriot is when I post video or photos from various transgender pageants around the world.

As the examples of Jin Xing and Chen Lili show, Chinese transpeople are being fully integrated into society. They can now change their ID cards without hassles, their civil rights are protected by law, and after they have surgery can get married and have those marriages recognized by the state as valid.

They are examples that the rest of the judgmental Western world would do well to emulate, especially in my own country.

(Photo Credit: China Daily)

Before I utter any statements of depth in this piece, I have to present a bias. Though not meant to offend those who believe in proselytizing, I find myself firmly standing on the side of those against it. If you feel that religion and/or a faith tradition of some sort is your source of hope, guidance for life, and possibly even your ticket to eternal salvation, so be it. I respect that, and I fully honor the right we each have to practice some form of the aforementioned. However, the second you start telling me or someone else which form is best (read: which version will prevent me from burning in hell for the rest of eternity), we’ve got beef.

With that said, I want to go ahead and put it out there that I take issue with the bulk of missionary work (past and present), especially that which takes place in developing nations. It is a reminder of the power of nations who sit firmly and comfortably in their G8 seats, spectators in a game of international tennis. Only in the case of missionary work, the victory comes at a higher price, one that can mean not only renouncing one’s culture, but also one’s religion (or at least denouncing it in public) as a means of attaining vital resources. This is not to say that missionaries have not done good work. There are countless records of missionaries who have helped others in excellent ways, minus all the religious rhetoric. However, even if the message of faith lies in no more than an utterance or the simple presence of the mission’s name, missionary work nevertheless boils down to a political campaign in the name of God.

In light of my objection to this line of work, I find myself dealing with a mental conflict almost every day of my present job. My campaign has nothing to do with God, but in terms of international influence, the English language and American culture come pretty darn close. Though I have been teaching English in Brazil since July of 2008, there are still a few things about my current profession that rub me the wrong way. The source of my discomfort in teaching my mother tongue lies in implications more so than tangible, empirical evidence, thus making my inner turmoil all-the-more “inner.” Much like a mosquito bite on the sole of your foot, my conflict has been an itch I can’t quite scratch.

Before enrolling in the program in which I am involved, I already knew I wanted to live in Brazil for a few months to a year to have more exposure to Brazilian culture, particularly an aspect of it that involved more of the quotidian variety. I was looking to go beyond the favela-riddled, bikini-clad, beach bathing, rainforested Brazil with which we are presented on our television screens and in our Netflix queues. I wanted to be forced to speak Portuguese on a regular basis and pushed a bit beyond my comfort zone. I was not looking for a spoiled, privileged, escapist ex-pat experience of the Eat Pray Love genre.

The easiest way to achieve my goal was to teach English here, but I knew in the back of my mind, I would be presented with interesting challenges that I may not have faced if I had chosen another route to secure a job in Brazil. For one, I would have to be a de facto representative of American Culture ^TM. My language and my country would be placed center stage during class, but what Americans do, eat, buy, and think would be the main topic of conversation at all other times as well. I would be reduced to a living, breathing souvenir. Yet in actuality, I find myself to be a bit of a disappointment to my students and the Brazilian English teachers, not for lack of teaching skills, but for lack of conforming to their ideas of Americans and American life.

Before moving to Brazil, I lived in New York City for six years, so even my view of most Americans was one I took with foreign eyes. I often considered myself somewhat isolated from what most would consider “American culture” mainly because I had lived in NYC, which is clearly more of an international city than say Memphis, Tennessee, the city of my birth. I listen to Metronomy, Surkin, and J*Davey instead of Rihanna, Fall Out Boy, and Snoop Dogg (all of whom have achieved considerable success in Brazil thanks to MTV). I have a considerable amount of tattoos. I am a vegetarian who likes international food. I am agnostic. I am not a fan of Nike, Tommy, or any popular clothing brands. I am not a classic American beauty. And on top of all that, I am black, which still throws some people for a loop here in Brazil because most people assume I am Brazilian until I open my mouth.

Though Brazil’s access to American media has expanded rapidly thanks to globalization, the films, music, and popular culture to which Brazilians are exposed is clearly the dominate culture, of which I do not really consider myself a part. The idea of Americans that many Brazilians have as a result of this type of media is not exactly the most accurate. We are considered arrogant, ignorant, and overweight on the one hand, but filthy rich, glamorous, and perfect on the other. There is very little room for anything from the margins, and even what is thought to be “alternative” is still the same old simulacra. Nevertheless, I have to put on a happy face and endure countless questions related to the subjects above, only to be followed by my response, which is usually something like “I have no idea who that is. I download my music from European blogs. Sorry!” or “Well, no, I don’t eat bacon in the morning, because I don’t eat meat, not even the white kind, which I know is not considered meat here.”

And though the questions can be tiring, I can understand why they are asked. What is more exhausting is processing the reality that as a result of the onslaught and heavy influence of American mainstream media by way of music, films, and other forms of entertainment (including sports), many elements of Brazilian culture are becoming a non-entity in the eyes of many young Brazilians. Brazilian televised news devotes about a fourth of their broadcasts to American politics. Brazilian culture, as the world becomes flat and so easily navigable because of the internet, is being quickly altered to closely resemble ours. Unfortunately, I am caught in the middle. I represent another side of American culture, which can be a good thing for my students, but I am American nonetheless, and some will never see me as anything more than that.

I have somewhat come to terms with my curio status, and at times celebrate it, mainly when Americans show a sign of intelligence in their choices (ahem Obama), but other times, I feel that my presence symbolizes a modern neo-imperialism, though through culture and language as opposed to direct territorial or financial dominance (albeit, those still play a major part in the case of Brazilian/American relations). There are zillions of English schools throughout the country, some of which have a direct link to the United States Embassy, and many Brazilians see learning English as a means of improving their lives, especially in terms of career success. Many of my adult and teenage students alike say that they are taking English in hopes of securing a good job in the future.

Yet in this time of greedy linguistic and cultural consumption, I worry of the looming backlash. I have some students who explicitly reject any and all aspects of American culture and are generally disgusted by Americans, save me (as an exception because I am their teacher), but who are begrudgingly taking English as language skills are seen as one of the few ways to separate oneself from the competition. Even some of my youngest students admit that they are only taking English because their parents are making them, unaware that their budding skill may help them put food on the table in a decade or two.

Seeing this saddens me and further fortifies my personal belief that though clearly beneficial in the long term, teaching English is its own form of missionary work. The parallels to missionary work that are demonstrated in terms of some students’ reluctance to learn when coupled with a frightening pressure to do exactly that in order to simply stay occupationally and culturally afloat worry me. In addition, access to recreational English classes are afforded only to middle and upper class Brazilians, which has previously caused a rift between some English teachers applying to work in Brazil and a few of the Brazilian consulate offices who believe that access to learning English and the skills thus acquired are deepening the divide between the rich and the poor. From what I have seen, I find it hard to disagree. And that’s speaking toward language studies in both Brazil and the United States.

In New York City, maniacal parents have infants who can barely articulate basic monosyllabic words in English taking baby French and baby German so their children will have a better chance of entering elite, private academic and hyper-selective public schools, and even then, nothing is guaranteed. Yet in general, beyond the basic needs met by pre-vacation language book purchases, i.e. how do you say “where is the bathroom?” few Americans are breaking their necks to learn any other language, despite our growing immigrant population. We barely have a handle on English, so God forbid we make an effort to devote attention to some foreign “babble” that we don’t need to speak anyway, right? “This is America. Speak English,” so goes the motto. Yet in our stubbornness to learn another language and general indifference to the prospect of our society and culture changing dramatically as a result of immigration and the expansion of 2nd-generation families in the next few decades, we are doing ourselves a grave disservice.

As a teacher of English in Brazil who already speaks Portuguese, I am a rare breed. Even my students were shocked that I had taken a time to learn a language that, in their words, everyone always just confuses with Spanish. In addition to the language surprise, my students were also interested in the fact that I had been to Brazil several times before, and knew that Brazil was about more than Carnaval. But despite these differences, the things that set me apart from other teachers they had previously had, I still wondered if intent mattered at this point.

In being an “unusual” American to them, there is an obvious benefit, but the shame that sometimes comes with my nationality, due mainly to the international reception of our behavior and the aggressive promotion of our culture abroad, can outweigh any good I intend to do as a teacher. In recognizing the big picture, I may be overanalyzing, but in being a part of this neo-imperialist process, whether or not I have direct control in it, I still have days when I am uncomfortable with my work. I know that I am empowering my students with a valuable skill that will earn them considerable respect in the future, but I wish that more of my fellow countrymen were making an attempt to be more connected to the world as well, instead of continuing to spread American culture with their blinders on.