By Guest Contributor Mattie Brice, cross-posted from Kotaku

Tamagotchi. Remember those?

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

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

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

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

Me too.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Me too.

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

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

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

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

Me too.

Pacquiao makes boxing lovable by being lovable: He overcame immense poverty to become an international phenomenon worth millions. He is monstrously fast in the ring. He named his newborn Queen Elizabeth just because he likes Queen Elizabeth. He is humble and sweet-faced and appears amazed by his own success.

But dig deeper and you see something else about Pacquiao that is an unexpected gift. For Asians and Filipinos who were born and live in the West, Pacquiao offers a space where a diasporic people can feel closer to somewhere hardly ever seen. For a few hours they are united with all the other Asians in the world hunkered down in Pacquiao caps, socks and hoodies, trying not to gnaw off the rim of their beer glasses. Pacquiao closes a distance of thousands of miles so that they are at home.

…

For Asian fans, there is something exceptionally thrilling about Pacquiao: the joy of seeing ourselves whenever he is on TV. During an interview on “The Jimmy Kimmel Show” in 2010, Pacquiao sang “Nothing’s Gonna Change My Love For You,” for no reason really, other than that he wanted to. I was transfixed by his warbling; he employed the exact same karaoke style as my Singaporean uncles. I had never seen such a comforting, familiar and unabashed presentation of Asianness on American TV.

…

It is Colin’s happiness at seeing a bona fide, nonfictional Asian hero for his friends that draws him to Manny. When I ask the group if they think it’s OK to experience enjoyment at the sight of an Asian man beating a white man, Aruna, Christian and Anthony search for a tactful response. But Colin says, “Doesn’t it sort of feel gratifying though? I’m just thinking of all the times we’ve seen Asian men emasculated, and I just think Pacquiao can be symbolic of Asian pride. It’s kind of cool and satisfying to see one of us — ” Colin stops to correct himself here, pointing out that he can’t say “us” because he’s not Asian. But it’s clear that Pacquiao means something to him directly, not just via his friends. He continues, “For me, when Obama won the presidency, it was one of the greatest moments of my life: to see a black guy, a biracial guy reach the highest levels. You can dispute Obama’s policies or whatever, but seeing that win, I cherish that. I don’t think it’s wrong to necessarily feel a little pride, a little racial pride maybe, in seeing Pacquiao knock out a white guy out.” He pauses dramatically. “He put that guy to sleep.” Everyone laughs.

…

Despite the fact that Asians are an enormous community, the perception that they are soft-spoken and submissive, and therefore a “model minority” preferred by the white ruling classes, can create rifts among communities of color. It is ridiculous to state that over 2 billion people share a deferential nature; yet in the case of Manny, the irony is that the description fits. All the Pacquiao fans at my disposal describe him as incorrigibly gentle. Ryan says, “He is a tough guy within the ring, and that confronts stereotypes about Asians, but outside of that he seems sort of nonthreatening, and maybe that fulfills a stereotype. But that’s because he just does him.” Yet contrast this with the way African Americans are stereotyped and how Mayweather appears — loud, arrogant, violent — and when two boxers who both match a racial bill come up against each other, it’s war. In an echo of the Jack Johnson treatment, perhaps Pacquiao is forgivably Asian. But neither being forgiven nor unforgiven for your ethnicity seems so hot.

It ain’t no fun/if the homies can’t have none. – Snoop Dogg

You know, there are a lot of people weighing in on this Amber Cole thing. But most of the conversation is about her, as is par for the course in our culture. The boys involved are still anonymous in the eyes of the world. For me, I always wonder why there aren’t open letters to these kids? There are tons to Amber Cole – people saying they could be her father, people saying STFU with all that victim-blaming and feminist-scapegoating madness – but no one seems interested in writing letters to the boys involved.

But hey, maybe it’s just me. I guess when one of your friends – along with a person who sexually assaulted you – ends up in jail for gang rape, you start thinking about things a bit differently.

After I wrote the Not Rape Epidemic, right after I submitted the essay, but before it was actually published, I ran into an old friend at my local library. I hadn’t seen this friend in a decade – indeed, I didn’t remember her name until I left the library. Yet somehow, we both happened to be in the same library, at the same time, on the same day, after not seeing each other for ten years. We say hey, make small talk.

And then she asks me: “Did you know T got out?”

We both were silent for a second. We hadn’t talked since before the incident. She didn’t know that I had been to that trial. She didn’t know I had seen the girl. And I had forgotten she was far closer to him than I was. When T and the other kids were sentenced, we calculated they would get out when we were in our 30s or 40s. We didn’t realize how the system works, and how a lot of people end up released early. T had been incarcerated from age 14 to about age 24.

“His sister called me,” my friend continued. “She asked me if I wanted to come to his his welcome home party.” She looked at me, stared hard so I could feel the weight of her pain.

“How am I supposed to look at him after he did something like that?”

Folks have been largely silent on the role of boys and men in all this. Who, exactly, taught this young kid that the right way to treat a girl who likes him is to ask her to perform a sex act in public? (If the rumors are to be believed, she was attempting to win his affection.) Who taught the boy with the camera that they could video record sex acts and upload them to the internet without consent of the principals? Who the hell is the third kid who is just watching? Why is he hanging around while this is happening? Is anyone concerned that the things these boys learned, either explicitly from their peers or implicitly from society? That these actions got two of them arrested? Started them down the pipeline for incarceration? May have them branded as a sexual offenders for the rest of their days?

Oh, but that’s cool right?

When Jimi Izrael writes:

I am Amber Cole’s father and this should go with saying: I am angry with those boys. But I knew those boys. Those boys were my friends. I grew up with those boys, hung out with those boys.

He writes that he is the other guy. But there are no other guys. My friend didn’t have problems with gathering female attention. He didn’t seem like the type to do something like a brutal gang rape ending in sodomy. And, if what I knew about his personality wasn’t completely wrong, he probably did not participate. But he was there. He watched. He did not help this girl, being beaten bloody by one of his friends. He didn’t stop the act. Maybe he tried to intervene, maybe he didn’t – I don’t know, he had already been tried and sentenced. But he was there. And he left with the other perpetrators. That’s why they have accessory charges.

And that’s why I don’t want to think about him, and that’s why my friend didn’t want to look him in the face. Because he was there and said nothing.

Our culture teaches boys that this is okay. That it is okay to use people. That you are expected to disregard a woman’s feelings, to do what you want with her, to find women who are pliable who you can mold, who will seek your favor and happily trade a few moments on her knees for her affection. Our society teaches boys that this is ok, that this is what you do with women. The onus is on women not to be used. Men do not hear “don’t be an abuser” in the same way men don’t hear “don’t be a rapist.” The onus is always on women keeping themselves safe, on women not putting themselves in positions to be attacked or exploited. And when something does happen, when teenagers being teenagers suddenly becomes a nation newsstory, everyone wants to talk about what the girl should have done to prevent herself from being in the situation.

Once again, we aren’t talking to the boys.

So if the boys don’t know what is wrong, or why what they did was wrong, they will never know. Because we don’t talk to boys in that way. We want them to muddle through on their own, we allow them to consume messages that say the path to proving your masculinity lies in dominance, in the subjugation of women for sexual means. Because that’s all this really is. A boy, thinking he could be seen as cool, if he could get this girl to do this thing while his friends watched. A girl, thinking she could win this boy, by doing this thing, not realizing this wasn’t a game she could ever win.

We talk about the school to prison pipeline. We don’t talk about this.

We don’t tell boys what they learned is wrong. So we shouldn’t be surprised if they repeat the behavior, if that behavior becomes habit. We tell them, in our actions and words, that this was okay. Because there’s little outrage directed at these boys. So if they draw the conclusion that “she shouldn’t have let me do it” instead of “that whole situation that I orchestrated was wrong, and I hurt someone else very badly, and I hurt myself,” we shouldn’t be surprised.

And if these boys then repeat that behavior, then we shouldn’t be surprised.

Because we are too busy lecturing Amber Cole. We don’t know what’s going on with these boys. And so, it is only a matter of time before the women who know them cannot bear to look at them either.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Photo and image credits: What Tami Said

Aside from the fact that Ashley Judd has no clue about Hip-Hop as an art form and a culture, her comment shows an underlying prejudice towards black men. She says that Snoop and Diddy’s participation in YouthAIDS raised a red flag for her. If she knew anything about Hip-Hop or maybe even had a conversation with either one of these men, she’d know that neither condone rape or create violent music (at least not in the last decade), both are intelligent and savvy media moguls, and both are fathers (each has a least one daughter). So why wouldn’t they use their star power and influence to spread the message to young people, and especially the Hip-Hop community, about the importance of HIV/AIDS prevention? Shouldn’t they be lauded? If their music is so sexually irresponsible, isn’t it a good thing that they are talking about safe sex considering that HIV/AIDS transmission rates are so much higher among African-Americans?

I have looked closely at the feedback I have received about those two paragraphs, and absolutely see your points, and I fully capitulate to your rightness, and again humbly offer my heartfelt amends for not having been able to see the fault in my writing, and not having anticipated it would be painful for so many. Crucial words are missing that could have made a giant difference. It should have read: “Some hip-hop, and some rap, is abusive. Some of it is part of the contemporary soundtrack misogyny (which, of course, is multi-sonic). Some of it promotes the rape culture so pervasive in our world…..” Also, I, ideally, would have anticipated that some folks would see only representations of those two paragraphs, and not be familiar with the whole book, my work, and my message. I should have been clear in them that I include hip-hop and rap as part of a much larger problem. It is beyond unfortunate that I am talking about some, for example, of Snoop Dogs’ lyrics, an assumption has been spread I was talking about every single artist in both genres. That is false and distorted. Here, I am again aware that it would be impossible for me to get this “exactly right.” Some will find fault, no matter how careful I am, no matter what my intentions.

“Why don’t we [help] end rape culture instead of getting mad that we’re getting called out on it?”

On March 30 hip-hop producer Calvin “Mr.Cee” Lebrun—he of Notorious B.I.G.’s Ready to Die fame–was busted by New York City police allegedly receiving oral sex from a sex worker. Reports said Lebrun supposedly received the sexual favors from “a man” .  This got some people feeling some kind of homophobic way, complete with saying that “we all should have seen this coming” because of his alleged “golden showers” kink.  As Sister Toldja wrote earlier this week :

To be totally fair, this isn’t the average gay rumor; not only was the other person in the case allegedly paid for the act, the writer who dropped this gossip also claimed that Mister Cee has a thing for urinating on female strippers. So while much of the chatter is about Mister Cee being (allegedly) infected with The Gay, folks are aghast by this pee thing, too. Considering our attitudes about sexuality, that’s no surprise.

With homophobia and anti-kink sentiments roiling—and Lebrun and his supporters doing the NYPD Hip-Hop Conspiracy Step —hip-hop artist and critic dream hampton provided some level-headed analysis about the situation:

While highly regarded in the hip hop industry and in New York, Mister Cee is not necessarily famous. Still, his arrest gave opportunity to talk about the persistent poking around hip hop’s “closet,” where speculation about sexual orientation is practically a sport. Charlamagne actually elevated the conversation by asking why a married 44-year-old man was seeking sexual favors from a 20-year-old, professional or otherwise, and if that, then why in a parked car? I argue that none of this would be a discussion, viral or anywhere else, had Cee been arrested with a 20-year-old woman, be she prostitute or not. I also don’t believe, 2011 or not, that hip hop is a safe space for anything other than aggressively heterosexual public behavior or affirmation. While obviously lesbian women MCs and personalities remain silent if not closeted about their sexuality, there is even less space for men to appear bisexual or homosexual.

I believe that Mister Cee’s sexuality is a personal matter, one he must reckon with himself and his wife. But Charlamagne’s co-host Angela Yee took the position widely held by heterosexual women—that closeted bisexual men are a health hazard, exposing trusting women to AIDS and more. While I’m not dismissive of those concerns, particularly in a marriage, where condom use is expected to be abandoned, I do know that we heterosexual Black women don’t exactly offer safe spaces for bisexual men to express their desires.

I’m also far more concerned that the transgendered 20-year-old who allegedly serviced him be safe, particularly if he is a sex worker. I wished aloud on my own Twitter feed that the discussion about Mister Cee would be one about decriminalizing sex work and focusing on harm reduction rather than speculating if Mister Cee is closeted.

Hampton is right in this respect.

The sex worker who is said to have provided the service, it turns out, is–based on the clues and cues I have picked up on from the media as well as personal education around trans issues and media literacy–a trans woman named Brooke-Lynn Pinklady not a “transvestite” that the first link’s source and other news and gossip sites—both cisgay and presumably cisstraight–thought to misgender as “a man.” (Even hampton refers to her as a “transgendered male.”) There’s a difference—a big difference—between a cis man, a “transvestite,” and a trans woman. (And, for the 50-11th time, the word is not “transgendered.” As several trans activists have point out, no one says “gayed” or “heteroed.” It’s “transgender” or “trans.” And I’m not going to go there about the word “trannie.” Suffice to say: don’t. It’s a slur. Don’t.)

To make the whole matter much worse, several outlets—and even the NYPD, never known at the bastion of tolerance, let alone acceptance and advocacy of trans people–refer to Brooke-Lynn by her government name instead of, like this post, honoring her as how she presents gender-wise.  Since too few people accorded her any sort of respect around her gender identity, we’re getting transphobia–specifically transmisogyny–twisted in the homophobia. Because of the constant misgendering of Brooke-Lynn as a “he,” out comes the assumption that Mr. Cee supposedly had sex with a “man.” No, Mr. Cee had sex with a woman, full stop—regardless of how he sexually identitfies. As Monica Roberts at TransGriot writes:

Many of us still have ID’s with mismatched name and gender code info or are in states that despite us having legal name changes, refuse to change gender codes until the person undergoes GRS.

…

SRS is not the end all and be all to determining gender identity or when a person transitions to the other gender.

As far as I’m concerned, the second you swallow you first hormone or take your first shot of testosterone, begin living in the opposite gender and make moves to harmonize your body with that gender role that may or may not include surgical options, you ARE that gender.

Many transpeople who would like to have it either aren’t able to afford genital surgery or have health issues that prevent it. There are many transpeople successfully living in our new gender roles despite possessing neoclits in our panties.

To break this point down for you: gender is between your ears, not your legs.

With that said, let’s bring this back to hampton’s concern.

According to a landmark report from the National Center for Transgender Equality and the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force , sixteen percent of trans people of color (TPoCs) who responded to the organizations’ survey have turned to selling sex and drugs in order to survive. Furthermore, the report states:

• Respondents who were currently unemployed experienced debilitating negative outcomes, including nearly double the rate of working in the underground economy (such as doing sex work or selling drugs), twice the homelessness, 85% more incarceration, and more negative health outcomes, such as more than double the HIV infection rate and nearly double the rate of current drinking or drug misuse to cope with mistreatment, compared to those who were employed.
• Respondents who had lost a job due to bias also experienced ruinous consequences such as four times the rate of homelessness, 70% more current drinking or misuse of drugs to cope with mistreatment, 85% more incarceration, more than double the rate working in the underground economy, and more than double the HIV infection rate, compared to those who did not lose a job due to bias.

I agree the cruel parlor game of Suspecting Teh Gayz, especially on spurious reasons like being down with kink, needs to cease within some Black communities as well as a conversation around decriminalizing sex work needs to open up.  I also think what happened with Mr. Cee is a perfect opportunity to talk about transphobia, gender identity, and gender policing, too—which, as an ex-friend pointed out to me, tend to be the “what’s really going on” when some want to go homophobic because they want to judge what a “real man” or a “real woman” is supposed to look like and act like.

We’re wrecking too, too many lives with this basic disrespect.

Photo Credit: thesmokinggun.com

As soon-to-be-former UCLA student Alexandra Wallace packs her stuff and leaves the university due to fear for her life, I’ve watched how some people and the press reacted to her.  As Colorlines and other blogs noted, combating her anti-Asian racism with life-threatening misogyny really wasn’t the best social-justice idea:

Nor combatting racial stereotypes with…racialized sexual stereotypes:

and

Or even having a “yeah, you’re racist, but I’d still fuck ya” vibe, a la the guitar-strumming crooner, in an otherwise witty comeback song:

As blogger and GRITtv ‘s senior writer/web manager Sarah Jaffe said, the move of some Asian American men who “stereotypically not seen as sex objects, putting the white woman in her proper place AS sex object or, ‘Shut up bitch, you’re just there to be fucked’ in essence…”–which the Black woman expounds on in her clip–is just a kyriarchal pile-on.

I do believe is Wallace could have been criticized in terms of one of the most taboo—yet most needed—conversations: white female privilege.

Of course, when this phrase is put into the public square of ideas, quite a few white women, both feminist and non, will storm in with their vociferous exceptionalizing  to this privilege—more specifically, how their individual selves are the exceptions to this because of mitigating identities and circumstances: they aren’t able-bodied; they don’t fit the blonde-and-blue phenotype; they aren’t slender and/or or buxom; they are poor or come from poverty; they are not educated and/or hipsters; they are in interracial relationships; so on and so forth.  Usually, the exceptionalizing derails the conversation into silence.  But for a person without that privilege, especially if the privilege is based on that person’s degradation or erasure, the mitigated advantage is still an advantage.  The mitigation(s) shape(s) the privilege as that of gradation, not kind. 

But, as Audre Lorde said, silence doesn’t protect … in this case, the privilege getting read.

So, if I had to unpack the White Female Privilege, it would look something like this (and I’m citing and paraphrasing heavily from Alienation, Peggy McIntosh, Mary Dee Wenniger, Nsenga Burton, and ballgame, and this list isn’t exhaustive):

• Can benefit from their association with white men as a wife, daughter, sibling, and mother.
• Have all their faults and flaws into perfect imperfections.
• Easily buy posters, post-cards, picture books, greeting cards, dolls, toys and children’s magazines featuring women like them.
• Can swear, or dress in second-hand clothes, or not answer any communications without having people attribute these choices to the bad morals, the poverty, or the illiteracy of their race.
• When told about our national language or about “civilization,” they are shown the people of their color made it what it was.
• Can turn on the television, open a newspaper, or go online and see people of their race widely represented.
• Can remain oblivious of the language and of persons of color who constitute the world’s majority without feeling in their culture any penalty.
• Are feel free to exhibit a wide range of emotions, from tears to genuine belly laughter, without being told to shut up.
• Can use the “sheer fear of tears” to their advantage. (Sarah Jaffe calls this “White Lady Tears.”)
• Are not compelled by the rules of their gender to wear emotional armor in interactions with most people.
• Are allowed to be vulnerable, playful, and “soft” without calling their worthiness as a member of their race being called into question.
• Are seen as the embodiments of value and purity and, due to their phenotypes (especially if it’s close(r) to the blonde-and-blue-eyed ideal), be considered worthy of protection—including having nations go to war over this purity and piety–and instantly become the objects of universal desire.
• They are seen as the default and the ideal embodiment of physical beauty and sexual attractiveness.  This idea(l) is replicated, despite the efforts of visual diversity, in all form of media, from paintings to plays to porn.

But don’t just take my word for it. As a couple of people pointed out on Tumblr a while ago:

we here on tumblr have found every single way imaginable to admire white girls. soft white girls, fat white girls, dreadlocked white girls, naked white girls, bicycling white girls, hairy white girls, clean white girls, white girls in shower, white girls catching butterflies, white girls cooking, white girls cooking naked, white girls with babies, white girls with kittehs, white girls with tats, white girls in catholic school girl dresses, white girls with hippy clothes….what fucking other ways in heavens green earth and jesus can we find to admire white girls?

… and yet i still see a whole lot of “admire my hotness” white girl shit. and a whole lot of it involves white girls appropriating ish and acting innocent while doing it.

Or, in Wallace’s case, post a virulently anti-Asian rant (complete with her “innocent” claims of having hometraining and how her rant isn’t about her “Asian friends”) on YouTube then fauxpologize with some nonsense about “not knowing what possessed her to do it.” To that, I’ll say here what I said in a comment section regarding this: “At some point, even the Devil would roll up and say, ‘That one’s on you, homie.’”

And what’s on her is her unchallenged white female privilege.  To me, Wallace’s tirade pivots on Jaffe calls the Sarah Palin Thing, “where you can say more outrageous shit because you’re a pretty white lady.”  Wallace visually presents as the physical and sexual ideal of the “all-American” blonde white girl-next-door doing something so not-PC, the “pretty white lady” who thinks she can get away with this verbalized racism—which Wallace attempts to get across as some sort of racial “truth-telling”–because it would be more “palatable.”  I also wonder if she thought—since she seems to deeply believe in some anti-Asian stereotypes, like they function in “hordes” bent on “taking over” her beloved UCLA with their familial “ways”—that Asian Americans wouldn’t push back because of the stereotype of their being “quiet.”   (She found out quite differently.)

Combine all this with, at the time, what Wallace may have perceived as having a platform for more of her racist views due to her newfound “internet fame” with her first clip and the revealed bikini photos—her father admitted on his Facebook page that she was creating a vlog of similar rants–probably reinforced something Arturo observed about the photos: “After all, there’s a certain sector who’s perfectly willing to forgive/accept her views because she’s ‘hot.’”  Again, Wallace found out quite differently, with UCLA Chancellor Gene Block speaking against it in a video as well as in an email along with other people responding to it with sometimes life-threatening viciousness.

At this point, though, this particular saga seems over: even though UCLA stated Wallace was within her free-speech rights as a student, she is gone.  But that doesn’t mean that white female privilege left with her.

Image courtesy of You Offend Me, You Offend My Family

By Arturo R. García

And I am
Whatever you say I am
If I wasn’t, then why would I say I am?
In the papers, the news, everyday I am

- Eminem, “The Way I Am”

My first thought while watching Chris Brown’s debacle of a Good Morning America interview: WTF is up with his hair?

My second thought: This is horrible. Didn’t his media people give him a better gameplan than this?

My third: … What if this is the gameplan?

It’s fair to mention Brown’s tweet about how he’s being treated vis-a-vis the Charlie Sheens of the world. But it’s at least partially inaccurate to accuse THE MEDIA for that disparity. If the past decade should have taught us anything, it’s that there is no One Media anymore. Sure, the power and influence centers might be depressingly consolidated, but there’s too many individual media outlets catering to too many individual tastes these days to believe Brown and/or his publicists couldn’t lead him toward a network show more willing to ignore his past violence against Rihanna.

By comparison, one of the reasons Sheen is getting a pass in the Tiger Blood era is that his appearances have been limited to strategically-sound outlets. Did anybody really think he would get any intelligent questions from Piers Morgan, who makes Larry King look like Edward R. Murrow? Did anybody really think Jimmy Kimmel, who makes Piers Morgan look like Larry King, would call Sheen out? Even if Sheen is rightly excoriated across the blogosphere, he, or whoever is coordinating his PR blitz, is steering him toward shows catering to patrons of his brand of misogyny. It might be reprehensible, and cunning, but you can’t say it’s not better for his brand than, say, trying to match wits with Rachel Maddow.

So, this post from TMZ, saying Brown “insisted” GMA host Robin Roberts ask him about the expiration of the restraining order put on him by Rihanna, is suddenly just this side of plausible, even if trusting anything from TMZ requires three grains of salt, a thorough hand-washing and 100,000cc of penicillin. So why would a guy with the top album on iTunes and three hit singles, whose career is actually rebounding in spite of what he’s done, give himself a Sisqórectomy and then swing a chair more recklessly than a pro wrestler? Kevin Powell might have unwittingly given us a clue in his open letter to Brown:

Why are they often forgiven, given a pass, allowed to clean themselves up and to redeem themselves in a way Black males simply cannot, Chris? It is because, to paraphrase Tupac, we were given this world, we did not make it. And it is because of power, Chris, plain and simple. Whoever has the power to put forth images and words, to put forth definitions, to determine what is right and what is wrong, can just as easily label you a star one day and a thug and a has-been the very next day. Or make you, a Black male, the poster child, for every single bad behavior that exists in America. Just ask Black males as diverse as Tiger Woods, Kobe Bryant, Mike Tyson, O.J. Simpson, or Kanye West.

What Powell doesn’t say is that, aside from Simpson, nearly all of those men he name-checked were able/allowed to use their offenses as part of a more marketable persona: Tyson has traded for years on spoofing his image as a Boogeyman in boxing gloves; the Kobe who emerged after his sexual assault case in Colorado was embraced as the ruthless, title-winning “Black Mamba”; the payoff to Kanye’s Borat job on Taylor Swift was his most critically-acclaimed album yet; and don’t think for a second that the golf world won’t rejoice if and when Woods starts winning more consistently.

So maybe these new touches – the bad dye job, the extra ink on his arms, the stunningly arrogant name for his album, and creepily nonchalant remarks about handling “girl business” and the Rihanna saga being “not really a big deal” – are not just a plea for help or publicity. Maybe they’re a way for him and/or his team to gain control of his story.

Maybe they’ve decided that, as long as Brown is going to be held accountable for what he did to Rihanna (as well he should be), then he’s better off using the implied threat as part of his package. As Roberts pointed out in her ill-fated interview, Brown had a number of supporters in the studio; how many were there just to see him sing “Yeah 3x,” and how many were there wondering, I wonder what he’s gonna do next?

As a plan, it’s far from original. But a hyper-fast news cycle and a fanbase with less of an attention span and more of a willingness to blame the victim in abuse cases can only work to Brown’s benefit. If the idea behind this outburst is to embrace his inner “thug,” his team might be thinking it’s better to be a sideshow than to not be in the show at all. At least for now.

When I first started in EMS, I was struck by how many domestic violence calls we got. Within weeks, it became a regular part of the night, just another bloody dispute amongst the asthma attacks, strokes, shootings etc.

I’d like to say there was a moment that shook me out of complacency – the woman whose father had beat her so badly she couldn’t open her eyes but she still wouldn’t go to the hospital or press charges, the decayed body of a nameless girl we found wrapped in trash bags in the backstreets of East New York – but revelations don’t usually come in single sudden bursts. It was a slow and painful movement towards recognizing that the everydayness of men’s violence against women, the sheer normalcy of it, is the most insidious, dehumanizing part. That something must change.

They say that understanding privilege is a process much like accepting death – you cycle through a haze of stages from Denial to Bargaining to Blame and finally Acceptance. But of course, nothing’s ever that linear. As the ugly truth about what men do played out in my ambulance night after night I got angry, I tried to separate myself from all that mess by holding tight to some concept of being a “good man,” I tried to invent some perspective that would make it all a little more okay, make it make sense, rationalize it. My social scientist side kicked in and tried to fit it into some theories that’d water down all that blood but I kept going in circles, bouncing between all the stages, overlapping a few at once and getting nowhere.

Acceptance came when I finally shut up and listened to what women around me were saying, what they’d always been saying, what my own life was telling me: that the physical, mental, spiritual violence that men commit against women is so wrapped in the fabric of society that it seeps into our subconscious, poisons our relationships to each other and ourselves. It’s a matter of life and death, not just because of the enormous amount of men that kill women every year but because of the lethal fallout of the patriarchal mindset, which asks us to make insanely unhealthy choices in the name of ‘manning up.’

Even though it’s the last stage, Acceptance is only the beginning of the struggle. I finally got to a point where I could put words to my process, make some more sense of privilege and responsibility than just being speechless or awkward, move forward. Fell into a collective of like-minded people of color working on intersecting oppressions – true, brave hearted people that I learned along side, laughed with and argued with and stayed up all night unfurling crazy plans with – and we started doing workshops in schools, churches and community organizations around Brooklyn.

We used the Gender Box exercise that they outline in Beyond Beats and Rhymes, which looks at the way we play out stereotypes even today and what forces keep us in those boxes. We broke down how male privilege plays out on institutional and interpersonal levels and how white power plays on images of manhood to turn us against ourselves. We taught in Riker’s Island and the District Attorney’s office, spoke with judges, doctors, business people, priests and gangmembers, but mostly we worked with young black and brown kids, and this is what i learned:

Despite what we’re told, people are hungry to talk about how privilege and power keeps us apart and holds us back. Young men know what’s going on, feel the strain of what they’re supposed to be, but our institutions won’t give them the language of how to talk about it, how to make sense of it, how to survive. What we’re left with is locker room banter and bad tv, an epidemic of crap media culture telling us how to be who we are.

This is what I believe: in our heart of hearts, men are not the monsters we’ve allowed media to make us. We are infinitely wiser, more compassionate and more complex than that. Fighting against gender violence really means ending patriarchy, which for men means finding that place beyond what we’re told we’re supposed to be, beyond “manning up,” and becoming what we really are.

The following day, I attended a workshop about preventing gender violence, facilitated by Katz. There, he posed a question to all of the men in the room: “Men, what things do you do to protect yourself from being raped or sexually assaulted?”Not one man, including myself, could quickly answer the question. Finally, one man raised his hand and said, “Nothing.” Then Katz asked the women, “What things do you do to protect yourself from being raped or sexually assaulted?” Nearly all of the women in the room raised their hand. One by one, each woman testified:

“I don’t make eye contact with men when I walk down the street,” said one.
“I don’t put my drink down at parties,” said another.
“I use the buddy system when I go to parties.”
“I cross the street when I see a group of guys walking in my direction.”
“I use my keys as a potential weapon.”

“I carry mace or pepper spray.”
“I watch what I wear.”

- From “Why I Am A Black Male Feminist”

Image courtesy of The Root

“But in the terms of the power discussion, what if, in fact, you are power? What if in fact you are powerful, in that you feel like you make the decisions about the man that you’re going to sleep with, and whether you’re going to use a condom with him or not? What if you’ve got the power in deciding? But we know this is not the case for so many of our young women, and yet we’ve grown up with prevention that presumes and assumes, and that incorporates the idea of giving women power. We’re asking — we’re needing — power over primarily an organ that we don’t even have attached to our body.

“The other piece of the discussion, of course, that’s always been missing, long been missing, is: AIDS, Inc., does not know what to do with heterosexually identified men….AIDS, Inc., does not know what to do with sexually active men who are not exclusively gay — let me put it like that. Unless you are exclusively gay, out, or even a little bit kind of halfway what society labels as “down low,” AIDS, Inc. doesn’t know what to do with black men’s sexuality. It just doesn’t. We don’t have the right studies for it. We don’t have the right access for it. We don’t have any idea, except prison — which is my whole other issue — of where you can have an opportunity to engage men around health literacy, right? Sexuality addiction that plays into factors; sex that happens with men that does not mean, or does not reflect, an orientation. We don’t have the places to have those discussions. The good thing about what we’re doing with the girls is that we’re able to have those venues to have that discussion.

“But as long as we’re able to access health care, mostly around our reproductive organs, and men don’t have a similar place where they even ever have to come into care, unless they’re coming into care for prostate cancer — and that’s a sure sign that they’ve come too late — we’ve been doing one-hand clapping for a long time. So it’s not even about what works, or what doesn’t work; we’re still trying to figure it out.”

~~Tracie Gardner, Founder and Coordinator of the Women’s Initiative to Stop HIV/AIDS NY at the Legal Action Center

Read the rest of the interview here.

Image Credit: News One

See collectively, we as men are taught to have less value in women, to view them as property and the objects of men. We see that as an equation that equals violence against women. We as men, good men, the large majority of men, we operate on the foundation of this whole collective socialization. We kind of see ourselves separate, but we’re very much a part of it. You see, we have to come to understand that less value, property and objectification is the foundation and the violence can’t happen without it.

So we’re very much a part of the solution as well as the problem. The center for disease control says that men’s violence against women is at epidemic proportions, is the number one health concern for women in this country and abroad.

So quickly, I’d like to just say, this is the love of my life, my daughter Jay. The world I envision for her, how do I want men to be acting and behaving? I need you on board. I need you with me. I need you working with me and me working with you on how we raise our sons and teach them to be men — that it’s okay to not be dominating, that it’s okay to have feelings and emotions, that it’s okay to promote equality, that it’s okay to have women who are just friends and that’s it, that it’s okay to be whole, that my liberation as a man is tied to your liberation as a woman.

Full transcript available at Restructure!

My ex boyfriend would stop canoodling with me, as soon as his elder brother came into the room we were in (they were roommates in a house together).

He’d snuck up on me, pressed the length of his body against mine in the kitchen — sweet warmth and closeness radiating between us two — all the while, keeping an ear open, or both, for the tell-tale sounds of his brother’s movements and whereabouts. And I could tell. I could feel the slight edge beneath the love-up. There was no real reason for his brother’s movements to inadvertently police his behavior, other than his own perception of what such behavior would reveal about himself. And anything connected to softness wasn’t good. Even, someone you have been seeing for a while. I got hip to that real quick. Anything remotely in the vicinity of softness just wasn’t good.

Neither one of us lived with parents or elders, we were not engaged in an illicit affair (as far as I know!); it was well known that we were seeing each other, my friends knew him or of him, and his brother (and his few close friends) knew me and was comfortable with talking and hanging out with me when I was over. I could tell there was something bubbling under the surface behind all this and I realized that it wasn’t directly connected to me.

It was him.

Even when I called, I could always tell when the fellas were liming home by him, (even if I hadn’t heard them yet in the background) the threesome: his bro, their other homeboy and sometimes, a couple other or select various young men. I finally told him this once at his “hello”, that I could already tell he was around company but we never fully unpacked that observation. In fact, the entire pitch of his voice would change, harden, but ever so slightly, but enough still, like vivid colors getting sucked out of a portrait. The warmth fervently sealed out of his voice — on purpose, lest it betray him in the proximity of other men. It was so bloody pronounced to me, I wonder why he didn’t hear it himself (I asked, he said he didn’t) and why he didn’t hear the way it made me cringe and shrivel a little on the inside.

Of course, I wanted to hear the same level of sweetness, kindness and quirkiness in his voice and conversation, as when we were one-on-one, whether the trio of guys happened to be watching a basketball game or football, or shooting the breeze. It bothered me that this mask of masculinity, a particular kind, would come on in this way, always, in certain circumstances. Invariably, we always “could not talk” if The Guys or another guy was around, and he would have to pledge to call me back. Sometimes, it wasn’t even a live game in progress on TV, sometimes it was just an intense video game battle amongst them or some Guinness in hand, liming with the guys and therefore, an attendant conversation with me in that space, just could not take place. It wasn’t about attention to me, it was about spaces and access and most of all vulnerability.

In public spaces, the facade governed his interactions with me and the world. He smiled a lot less (if at all), he yielded to me less, his body was tenser, the whole vibe radiating off of him changed and I felt it acutely. This was a guy who could not, would not, casually caress me, even inside his home space, before his own kin. He wasn’t mean or anything like that in the interim, just off, like a switch. Until he was free to reactivate. And I wouldn’t push him to either. When all I wanted was to cover him in cuddles (no matter who was around or within ear-shot), I found myself tempering and adapting my own behavior and my own wants. Like him, cool while the front descended over him, then on again when it was lifted, softly squeezing my hand, tracing the lines of my inner palm, once out of sight of certain folk. This — all rooted in these rigid notions of “manliness”, against the backdrop of dancehall music and its rules and regulations about the performance of masculinity, black masculinity, West Indian and Caribbean manhood — its rules and regulations, predominant religious doctrines and stringent gender socialization.

Pseudo-nationalistic narratives of Caribbean/West Indian masculinity intersect with black masculinity (because not everyone in the Caribbean in black) and these form part of the nexus of larger systems of masculinity and identity. (Not that I am implying that any one kind is better or worse than the other.) When you add migration into the mix, you have Caribbean masculinity converging with black masculinity, inside of an arguably more peculiarly racialised space in some ways. My ex, for example, would see certain aspects of his own expression of masculinity, as firmly yoked to being an island man. As a West Indian woman living in the states, I would almost want to take some of these as a given at first, which doesn’t mean that there aren’t problematic or that I should accept them.

I know too, that there is something about the stereotype of stoicism inside my learned construct of masculinity which unfortunately, attracts me at times.

Very, come into my parlour-esque.

Then I am boggled by, and or frustrated by the very thing that attracts me.

I learnt to deal with this more and more, because we really did love each other. And what’s a girl to do, right? We did connect and open up to each other in a myriad of ways, some of which, have never happened before in my life and maybe not ever again. We talked about race in America, black masculinity, my issues with it. How, as a black woman, I both loved it, loathed it and grappled with it. I could see and feel and in some instances, hear, how loving me, how the fear of loving me and the vulnerability of that terrified him. But still, I coaxed him. It’s okay. The first time he said he loved me, was like pulling teeth. I will never forget the utter look of anguish and resignation that contorted his face. It was like watching wooden Pinocchio fight not too lie — but couldn’t. Not because I think he could lie about that to my face but he didn’t want to acknowledge, to make real the feelings that had grown between us. He didn’t want to say it and he was at odds internally with my compulsion that he do so.

It’s like it physically hurt to discard the mask and admit love.

To him at any rate, the two were practically mutually exclusive.

And I demanded to know, to hear it articulated. Yes, I did. It was the early morning hours after my Halloween party, last year. I was dressed like a leaf-cutting ant. He was dressed like a graduate (after admonishing me that they, The Guys didn’t do costumes but he showed up in costume anyway to my surprise).

“Do you love me?” I asked him point-blank to his face.

His brother and friend were loading music equipment back into their rental, five floors down on ground level.

My two girl-friends from out of town had retired to my bed behind a closed door to overnight.

“Well, do you?” I wouldn’t let him side-step me without saying. I already knew the answer but I had to hear it verbalized out loud. Only then, did it become more real. I was also annoyed that he was about as marginally uncomfortable with having sex with me inside my laundry room before, where we scrambled into in the early aftermath of my party. The DJ tables, abandoned by him and his brother, several people were still milling about the place as I giggled and we skirted away. It wasn’t so much bashfulness on his part, than another silly code of masculinity. All this selective aloofness was driving me up the wall. Who cares if you want to whisk away with me out of sight and that makes you giddy and happy?

Bringing feelings to the surface with a certain kind of man entrenched in a relentless code of masculinity is sometimes like this: a whole lotta coaxing and assuring, before any actual declaration of anything (if there is any at all). It sometimes feels like their own codes of behavior, the rigidity that is required, will lock them away from experiencing you — love — if they let it. It can also be very exhausting for all parties involved. Loving shouldn’t be so hard! But sometimes it is.

So, I dangled a metaphorical carrot (but we love each other) and coaxed. I promised that I would never do X, Y, and Z — like I needed to promise anything. I cajoled and in all of this, never once stopped to require anything of him. The only thing I wanted was love reciprocated and articulated.

It was like my own other needs didn’t exist. And at the time, they didn’t. I was so focused on making him feel safe, on erasing his terror and his paralyzing vulnerability — I ceased to even think about myself. And you say all those things you say to make your man feel safe: no, I won’t hurt you and the like, even though nothing is promised to any of us in the grander scheme of things.

There are few guarantees in life.

I have dated a variety of men: black American men, multi- / bi-racial American men, East- Indian Trini, white American men, mix Trini, black and mixed Jamaican / Trini / Bajan / Crucian/ St. Lucian, mixed Latino, Argentine — no one has a monopoly on masculinity or how it gets articulated.

Some men were more flexible on certain aspects, some less so. Race, national culture, socioeconomics, pop culture and other forms of culture intersect at different points to make each guy a little different in some ways but there are always those threads of connection too.

My ex, by his own admission, represented a particular kind of version of masculinity at work and he knew this. We’d joke about it. Sometimes the jokes weren’t really jokes at all. “I have hair on my nuts, you know,” he would say to me, in relation to something that he perceived as especially infringing on the hirsuteness of, not to mention possession, of his testicles. And I would say, “yes I know. I’ve seen them.” During the time we were together, he often lamented in jest, the sobering effect that I had on it — his masculinity. It was like I “made” him do cute things, much to his chagrin. Next thing you know he was referring to my beloved child-hood bear (Paddington) in the second person too. Not because I told him do this, or do that; this is what happened when he was free to be. To drop the mask and just be. All those sides are already there in him. Could he have benefited from not compartmentalizing so much? Or from being able to fully engage with all aspects of himself with his male friends and male family members around? Probably. Who knows? It may not have saved us though.

Later he said he couldn’t be with me because our religious views didn’t match up. Additionally, he was a homophobe, who had weaned “faggot” out of his vocabulary at my frequent urgings.

Meanwhile, I’ve attended Pride parades and I have Tanya Chalkin’s “Kiss” up on my bedroom wall.

From my vantage point, I saw how the stifling bind of masculinity, on top of race in America, coupled with minimal job prospects frustrated him no end. His much-professed return to his church came almost as a direct response in part, to all these. But shit kind of did hit the fan even before that discussion. His inflexibility on certain things, his closed off worldview on some matters were directly connected to his construction of his masculinity. Anything less, was not being a man, and that was the one thing that he was.

He had staunch unyielding views on gender roles, giving oral sex: “no gyal can’t sit down pon mi head / if a gyal try dat she dead” and all that, femininity and what that entails; he believed that a man did not “talk” about some interior things, even as it stifled him visibly. He repeatedly espoused info passed on from his father like the perennial favorite, “doh truss a woman who has too many friends” (apparently, I was one of them, so I was already a wily woman from the jump). He didn’t share his pain. He couldn’t unpack himself emotionally with his lady. Why? Because a man — and a black man especially — didn’t do that. Last I heard from him — he’s still a man with hair on his nuts. Meanwhile, I’ll be taking the lessons and experiences with me, wherever my next relationship (when it arises) goes. Unflinching masculinity be damned.

Still love it too bad though.

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

There’s a new zine out that’s kick ass: “Broken Arrow”.  Its fifty-two pages are comprised of poems, plays, short stories, photos, and artwork; all of which bring the reader to the many different lives of its twenty-eight contributors.

For the last year, Toronto writer Emily Pohl-Weary has given a weekly workshop to the men at the Sagatay Native Mens Residence in Toronto’s west-end with the final result being “Broken Arrow”.

In her introduction to “Broken Arrow” Weary writes, “Working with the writers at Sagatay for the past year has been the highlight of my life.  Each Thursday, my mind came alive with new ideas and stories.  I could be having the most difficult, busy week, but after spending a morning with them, suddenly life felt manageable again.  I only needed to take time to slow down and appreciate the power of sharing our stories.”

Everyone has a story but not everyone is willing to share his or her story.  The men at Sagatay don’t hold back.  Honesty, bravery, and humility are displayed throughout the pages of “Broken Arrow”.  Whether writing of street life, different forms of abuse, loves lost, and the ever present colonization of Turtle Island now known as Canada, these men shoot arrows at their targets with perfect aim.

Since Black Coffee Poet is dedicated to poetry, the focus of this review will be on the raw, self-revealing, and healing verse displayed in the zine.

Tim Renollet’s poems show readers who he is while having them think about how we all have vulnerabilities and similarities.  ”Little Raccoon” is a short prose poem about Renollet’s encounter with a drunk raccoon.  He watches as the raccoon stumbles and rolls around for forty-five minutes.  Really, he is watching himself, as will many a reader who have put too much back during a party or two.  Renollet ends the poem with “I was there to watch over it, to see that it didn’t get run over.  I did this because I would have wanted someone to do that for me when I was like that in the past.”

“How The World See Me vs. How I See Myself”, another of Renollet’s short and powerful poems, will see many readers identifying with his words.  Many of us know who we are, what we are made of, and what we think while the rest of society sees us in a different light.  Describing society’s view of him, Renollet writes:

I see kindness, they see rudeness.

I see understanding, they miss that.

I see a helpful person, they couldn’t give a damn.

How one sees him self as opposed to how he is seen is a theme throughout the collection.  Explorations of the attempted colonial assimilation by the Canadian government, white on red racism, hyper-masculinity and violence, and poems about Native identity are written about by various “Broken Arrow” contributors.

Many of the poets use repetition and rhyme, others use prose, and some write extremely short poems that are entertaining and leave you thinking and hoping for more.

Derek McColgan’s poem “Downtown” is seven lines and had me reading it seven times over.  It takes place at the welfare office and sees a couple addicted to heroine waiting to see their intake officer.  McColgan’s sentences are short and crisp, and his images have you sitting in the office alongside the couple.  Reading McColgan’s pomes you can see why many believe that poetry and short fiction are cousins.  McColgan takes you to a place, has you turn your head from side to side, and takes you out fast.  “With her under his arm they scamper off,” writes McColgan at the poems end.

The main constant throughout “Broken Arrow” is truth; not only through its writers making themselves vulnerable on the page, the truth seen in the zine is how the poems are time sensitive and call it like it is.  ”Broken Arrow” has come out in a recession.  People are being laid off everyday, companies are shutting down and leaving the country, and assistance is being sought by thousands daily.  In his untitled poem, Rain Keeper writes of a scary reality that most don’t believe, or realize, can happen to them: “You are just one pay cheque away from being homeless.”

Kevin D. writes of the many prisons that exist in ones life.  He explores how many of society’s condemned are not behind bars, him being one of these people in the past.  “Self-destruction” and “inner scars” can keep someone captive just as easily as the colonial prison system.  Through bravery, honesty, and his refusal to be a victim, Kevin D. shares the cause of his past pain:

Prisoned not by a fallen soap bar

But prisoned by a pedophile, down the hall

Kevin D. cleverly plays with the crude, cruel, and common joke of dropping the soap in the prison shower and shows the reader the reality of child rape.  He educates readers by telling them that it’s not the guys you don’t know in prison, or the street, that most people have to worry about, it’s the friend, relative, or neighbour that is the cause of most rape in our society.

Emily Pohl-Weary ends her intro by saying, “Many times it felt as if I was the student and they the teachers.”  There is much to learn in the pages of “Broken Arrow”: stories from the street, poetic technique, and the courage to write about oneself.  I hope “Broken Arrow # 2″ is on the way, and I hope a similar zine comprised of Native women’s voices gets published soon too.

Just because you enjoy something doesn’t mean you’re able to do it. Example: I’m an NCAA basketball fan. Doesn’t mean I’m qualified to run the point at Cameron Indoor Stadium anytime soon.

By that same token, though I’m willing to believe that Jimmy Fallon sincerely enjoys hip-hop, well, somebody should’ve stepped in before this Late Night With Jimmy Fallon sketch made air:

There’s little doubt that The Roots are to Fallon what steroids were to Alex Rodríguez – performance enhancers for an otherwise bland personality. And Timberlake is still genuinely more humorous than virtually the entire cast of SNL these days. But otherwise this whole thing came off like Ludacris’ “Greatest Hits” skit from long ago. Also, I have to wonder how many of Fallon’s fans follow The Roots beyond their appearances on Late Night. Think a lot of them rushed out to buy the group’s collaboration with John Legend?

From the allegedly amusing to the downright weird, your friends’ Facebook pages probably blew up Friday when the Wayne Brady-Mike Tyson team-up hit the web. On the surface, the idea of Brady doing a ’90s riff should’ve been a home run; all he really needs to pull off a Brown impersonation is a fade wig, since anybody who’s seen him on Whose Line Is It Anyway? or playing Billy Flynn in a production of Chicago a few years back knows that musical comedy is one of his strengths.

And then Tyson appears and the vibe just sort of fades out. The key question here is, what’s so damn funny about Mike Tyson doing anything? The same question came to mind watching him appear in The Hangover. Okay, so he can’t dance. Lulz? Is the joke that he’s being shown chasing after young women? ‘Cause that’s an image we want to revisit, right? And then there’s Bobby Brown, looking more like ODB every year. Huh? Help me out here, dear reader(s). Is this Brady trying to play at being “from the ‘hood” again? ‘Cause that’s been done more effectively elsewhere …

Tara: Trauma and Healing

Thea: Ok, so after all the hating on this show’s treatment of Tara – or, as has been argued, heterosexual women in general – there were definitely things that True Blood did this week which I actually liked. For one, I appreciate the way the show is allowing Tara continuous episodes to show grief and trauma over what happened to her. I also like the way Rutina Wesley has been able to (finally! and consistently!) show other sides of Tara. There were multiple quiet and delicate moments this episode and last, where Wesley did an amazing job of communicating, through that quiet, the anguish that Tara was/is feeling. To me those sorts of scenes required much greater acting chops than any of the shrill, yelling stuff that Wesley was given for the first two seasons. So nice to see Wesley finally given the chance to show how great she is.

What did y’all think of the rape survivor group scene? What did you think of Holly’s speech? I was slightly taken aback to see Tara visit a rape survivor group — just because it disturbed me (and we discussed this in detail) how much Franklin’s abduction and rape of Tara was treated as comedy…I questioned at times whether or not the writers even knew they were writing rape scenes. So to see the writers flip that upside down, and validate that this is what the character went through, was surprising to me.

And then, after both Holly’s speech at the rape survivor group and her reproductive choice moment with Arlene, could it be that Holly’s supernatural power is that she’s a…feminist? What’s this week’s verdict on Holly?

Tami: Agreed. I think the aftermath of Tara’s kidnapping, bondage and rape is being handled well by both TB’s writers and actors. In fact, this treatment brings the early poorly-drawn relationship between Tara and Franklin in stark relief. I think the problem lies in what TB did to the character of Franklin. His first interaction with Tara was laden with menace. He was sullen, dark, attracted to violence and clearly a bad man to know. Once the pair arrived in Mississippi, Franklin was drawn as comic relief–a lovesick loon who happens to also be a predator–even as Rutina Wesley continued to portray Tara as a woman in fear for her life. Sunday, menacing Franklin returned. I think this is why, on True Blood threads not located on sites that analyze race and gender, some folks are mourning the death of Franklin, despite his role as the abuser of a main character. True Blood’s portrait of Franklin allowed viewers to be ambivalent about Tara’s abuse.

Andrea: I think that Tara’s kidnapping, bondage, and rape all falls under the umbrella of “abuse,” which is the term we’ve been discussing ever since we saw Franklin go that route in his interactions with Tara after he glamored her into getting into Sookie’s house and getting the information that Sookie was in Mississippi. To that end, we’ve had hearty discussions about Franklin’s abusive behavior and how we weren’t cool with that.

Which brings me to Tara going to the rape survivors’ meeting: I. Loved. This. Scene. It rang true for several reasons: 1) as a Black woman who survived rape and felt a bit goosy about seeing a therapist for a while, I know that I received a lot of support attending such “lay” meetings, where I learned a way to form a vocabulary for what happened to me; 2) yes, I learned that vocabulary from white women because, like Tara, I grew up in a town where the people who were having such discussions and support were white. That doesn’t mean, ergo, that white women are “better” at it than black people or other PoCs. It simply acknowledges a reality that people will seek their healing in imperfect spaces that may not “make sense” racially speaking but makes perfect sense to them…as well as speaking to the simple fact of demographics; 3) it reminds me of the connections I’ve made on- and offline with women, especially women of color, who are surviving abuse and simply seek a voice that resonates with their own. Also, Tara was finally given space to tearfully lay her burden down and not be chastised for not being a Strong Negress, which sometimes happens at these meetings, too. Spot on, TB creatives…whether y’all realize it or not.

Thea: I was reading the round up over at Jezebel and was surprised – just because it’s a feminist blog – to read that they found that scene boring and flat.  Someone asked why Tara couldn’t get more scenes that were campy and funny, like Russell’s. Here’s hoping that’s up next. I do remember her getting to do a bit more comedy in Season 1.

Joe: I keep going back to the theory that True Blood is treating the Tara/Franklin storyline like the archetypal abusive relationship. Anyone who’s had personal experiences with abusers like Franklin will always tell you that their personal perception of the relationship is extraordinarily fickle. A lot of the time it’s horrible, but sometimes its great. Hate, lust, and comedy can make short or lengthy appearances- even, maybe, at the same time. I think the way that they handled the character of Franklin fits that description, at least a little. To me their scenes (and his character) were so circuitous, so shifty and such a rollercoaster, I had trouble seeing where it was going. This I’m sure of: I’m so glad Jason had wooden bullets. Especially, since Tara doesn’t seem to know Vampire Homicide 101.

Franklin Meets a Wooden Bullet

Thea: What did we think of Franklin and Tara’s final confrontation?

It was pretty amazing to see Tara stand up to Franklin after having to literally grin and bear his barrage of abuse. But I felt very conflicted about how that scene ended. On the one hand, because it came directly after Jason carrying on about Crystal, I felt horrified that there was no one to help Tara. On the other hand, when help finally did come in the form of Jason’s wood shotgun rounds (I have to say Jason was really breaking out that dumb blonde mold that Latoya assigned him a few weeks back), I felt disappointed that we didn’t get to see Tara herself kick Franklin’s ass.

Tami: I too wish Tara could have saved herself, especially since I think we’re supposed to see Jason’s saving Tara as a make good for shooting Eggs in the head.

Andrea: Yeah, I also needed the catharsis of Tara’s annihilating Franklin–perhaps a revenge-against-the-abuser fantasy I apparently harbor in my heart’s recesses. At the same time, I’m going to give this one to Tara: she’s just starting her healing journey and she’s straddling that head- and heart-space between victim and survivor, which is a pretty vulnerable place. Tara’s just learning to harness the energy from exploding outward to weaving inner protection–and both are necessary for her to defend herself. To Tara, telling Franklin that hes a “psychopath” who “violated” her–which is what abuse does–and daring him to kill her is her way of speaking from that sense of inner protection, as strange as that sounds.

English Accents & Exotification

Thea: I would like to say — perhaps controversially, considering the James Frain Fan Club muscle in the room — that I am not into the way the entire Franklin storyline pivoted around Frain’s English accent. Not that I think Frain should’ve developed an American accent for his True Blood stint, but that I don’t like the way that the English accent is used to make his character sexy. What is it, other than his accent, that makes Franklin dishy? I think…nothing. Note I said “Franklin,” not James Frain.

Assigning value to accents is xenophobic, (for example, saying that a French or English accent is sexy, while an Indian accent sounds hilarious – you cannot separate ideas about accents from ideas about their countries of origin) and it is off-putting to me when television shows do that, and encourage their fan base to exoticise and sexualise an accent in that way. (Did you ever think I would use the word “exoticise” to apply to something English? Well there you go.)

And in the context of True Blood, I believe that a lot of Franklin’s behaviour would’ve been more clearly coded as abusive, if he had simply done it all in an American accent. I feel like I hear fans going, oh wow, yeah he’s kind of creepy…but oooo, that accent! Who cares?

Tami: You have a point, Thea–as much as I would argue James Frain’s non-dishiness. Having the actor use his own accent was a specific choice by Ball. In fact, in an interview, Frain said he came to the set prepared to use an American accent (which he does often), but was asked to keep his English accent. I wonder why this is so.

Thea: Aha!

Tami: On a note related to our earlier discussion, the interviewer in that same Frain interview says “It almost feels like Franklin and Tara are a good match.” (Remind me not to have this woman match making for me.) This does highlight the problem that I mentioned before–an ambivalence toward the relationship and a lack of willingness to see it as abusive, driven by the shaping of Franklin and his hot accent.

Also, this is probably not the time to mention that I was glad to see Rene and his faux-Cajun drawl back…I was really gutted to learn that Rene was the villain in season one.

Thea: Interruption sustained. I loved Rene. Dreamy!

Andrea: ::Muscles in with the James Frain Fan Club lurve:: I feel where you’re coming from with the accent critique with Fraanklin, and I think you’re right on that tip. I think USians think British voices in particular sound “classy,” which is also coded as “sexy.” It’s that love/hate thing we have for ye olde former colonizers–sort of like some of us think we’re cooler/more cosmopolitan on the strength that we prefer British TV shows than US ones. With that said, I’m sorry, but I’m a sucker for voice timbre–the deeper, the better. And my future husband has that pitch I wanna listen to waking up and going to sleep and especially–especially!–while fucking, British or not.

Brown and Black Religions: Homage or Insult?

Thea: More and more I am not sure what to think of the regular appearance (reappearance?) of references to religions that are culturally marginalised. This week, Jesus uses the Olmecs and Mayans to make his dorky high school tattoo seem cooler than it is. He’s caught in his untruth and the moment is played for laughs, and to show how he is a bit of a fool (well, a hunk of burning burning fool) – but is True Blood guilty of Jesus’ sin, i.e. using these religions to make itself look cooler than it is? Have we had enough of this spiritual name dropping, or is it positive mainstream inclusion of black and brown religions?

Tami: The incessant referencing to brown people’s religions is getting me worried. I heard two women discussing Jesus and they were certain the character was shady based on his knowledge of “strange idols” and “voodoo stuff.” I fear this is exactly the reaction True Blood wants to provoke: Either the “woo woo, evil, non-Christian, jungle magic” reaction or, possibly, the “Aren’t brown people all deep and mystical and shit (with their crazy pagan religions)?” reaction.

At this point, they’ve dropped so many bits of religion in the mix–from Inuit prayers to Yoruban Gods–I’m not sure how whatever they are going for can turn out well.

Joe: I don’t know… to me it seems like this around-the-world view of religion is something that is very typical of the freethinker aesthetic. Whether or not you feel off put by it may correlate to how religious you are in general. I’m not particularly religious person (being a C&E Catholic – Christmas and Easter), so I just take it with a grain of incredulity, kind of like “Oh, those hippies. Aren’t they silly.”

But… you know what hippies seem to have in common a lot of the time, though? Wicca. I’m holding on to the “Jesus/Laffy/Ruby Jean/Tara as witch” theory like a dog with a bone.

Sam & Masculine Violence

Thea: What did y’all think of Sam’s storyline this week? It was clear that his brutal (and confusing – why didn’t anyone separate them sooner?) attack on Crystal’s dad was some serious misplaced rage. It seems like Sam is constantly mocked for being caring – e.g., trying to take care of his little bro, trying to be chivalrous to the bevy of hapless blonde beauties who cross his doorstep, and unpredictably, he is the only one Tara feels able to spill her guts to – at the end he finally explodes under the pressure of being punished for doing the right thing. Since the entire final exchange hinges around the insult “pussy,” it seemed pretty clear to me that this is about masculinity, and the disparity between how masculinity defines a Good Man, and what it actually means to really be a good man.

This was particularly engaging to me because in the first season I felt like Sam was only interested in being a Good Man in the mainstream masculinity sense of the word, i.e. a gross, Edward-style, paternalist. As a character I found him pretty boring, a bit of a wet lettuce, as my mother would say. But the revelation of his own painful past, and now this conflict between what it means to be manly and what it means to be good, is making me root for him much more than I thought I would. (Of course that’s not to say I was all for the violent beating. That was a little much.)

Tami: I think Sam’s violent outburst sent a maddening message re: masculinity. Sam has always been positioned as a “nice guy.” He is shown being easygoing and caring to family, friends and co-workers. He is one of a very few people, save Lafayette, who truly engaged with Tara and offered her solace. This, it seems, makes him a “pussy”–a label he can escape only by dispensing a righteous beat down to Calvin Norris, sending him to the hospital. Yeah, I know violence and masculinity are often intertwined in public consciousness, but Sam’s storyline Sunday gave that harmful idea credence.

Andrea: All I could think of was a paraphrase from the X-Men movies: that was a helluva reactionary show of testosterone on Sam’s part. And I mean that in the worst way possible, for the exact reasons Tami stated.

Thea: I agree with this, except that I don’t think that we are meant to see Sam’s beatdown as “righteous.”It becomes clear by the end of the scene that he is taking out his anger over Tommy – as well as other things that have happened – on Calvin, and that the beating is unacceptably brutal. This is what makes me think that the whole scene is a comment on masculinity — to the point of saying that the demands masculinity places on men are cruel, and drive them to violence.

Tami: True, but I think the fact that he kicked the ass of a meth dealer from a squalid side of town, I think, made the violence more acceptable.

Joe: He did push Crystal, though. And hard. That took it from acceptableness into something he might need to see a shrink about.

Thea: It is interesting to contrast Sam’s masculinity with Eric’s whole “why should I have burdened you as well?” thing to Pam. Serious heartstrings there (and I have a cold and shrivelled heart). Eric is the best vampire daddy ever. And also very sexy, which confuses me.

Russell’s Moment + Vampires as Analogy for…?

Thea: And…open mic. I LOLed at Russell carrying around Talbot’s, uh, remains in a crystal jar, though maybe that part was not supposed to be funny…And his final scene with the spine and the eat-your-children stuff was just fantastic TV.

You know, this is the one thing I have thought about this show’s murky vampires as analogy for gay people (or people of colour) from the very first episode: it is not such a good analogy. Because, unlike same sex couples who want to get married or black people, vampires actually will brutally eat and murder you and your children. Meanwhile gay people and black people are just trying to get by. So that analogy actually kind of sucks.

Joe: I’ll try saying this in the most diplomatic way possible: maybe True Blood is showing what the sheltered public thinks will happen if full equality is reached. Alan Ball has said that True Blood is not an analogy for any group but you have to think that he might put something in here and there just to keep us thinking.

Andrea: I’m calling bullshit on Alan Ball’s declaration that this isn’t an analogy of any group. Though I’m not sure which group he’s symbolizing with vampires–that goal post keeps moving almost every damn week–he’s most definitely making an analogy about marginalized groups. Russell’s bloody, murderous bogarting of the national airwaves plays on the fear that some privileged folks have of marginalized people, given equal rights and equal oppotunities, will use it for bloody, murderous payback.

Tami: Long live King Russell! I know this character is gonna have to go down by the end of the season, but I’m gonna miss Denis O’Hare’s brilliant, equal parts menace and campiness portrayal.

Watching King Russell go rogue on national TV made me think of the dread many POC feel when the media spotlights a member of our race doing something bad, dysfunctional or stereotypical–that sense that the bad behavior of another will stick to you in a society that lumps every brown person together. I just pictured vamps across the States watching Russell and shaking their heads. Aw, shit! This motherfucker…My neighbor is going to be giving me all kinds of side-eye tomorrow!

Joe: All I can think of is how much I wanted him to put that spine down. I think I was covering part of my screen with a coaster for most of the end!

Andrea: And I just wanna cuddle with Hoyt’s ever-loving self. He devastates me with his confessing to Jessica that he’s dating Biscuit Lady because “it beats sitting around thinking of you.” Dammit, he’s just full of win, even without the bassy voice.

Thea: Everything is dolls and showtunes!

Most of the time, I’m like just about everyone else in at least one way — I don’t much care who occupies the position of “Alabama Agricultural Commissioner.” In fact, I didn’t even know such a position exists. But then I saw a couple of ads for Dale Peterson, a current GOP candidate for Alabama Ag Commish. Peterson’s ads immediately register as very, very “white” to me, and now I’m trying to count the ways.

Among the most obvious appeals to conservative white voters here is the nostalgic evocation of the Independent (White) Cowboy Myth. If you say “cowboy” to most white Americans, they’ll immediately think of a hat-wearing, horse-riding white man. And yet, as Mel at BroadSnark explains (in a post on “White America’s Existential Identity Crisis”), real cowboys weren’t actually all that white, nor all that independent:

There is a certain segment of the American population that really believes in the American foundational myths. They identify with them. They believe that America was built by a handful of white, Christian, men with exceptional morals. Their America is the country that showed the world democracy, saved the Jews in World War II, and tore down the Berlin wall.

These people have always fought changes to their mythology. They have always resented those of us who pushed to complicate those myths with the realities of slavery, Native American genocide, imperial war in the Philippines, invasions of Latin American countries, and secret arms deals.

And we have been so busy fighting them to have our stories and histories included in the American story that we sometimes forget why the myths were invented in the first place.

No myth illustrates the slight of hand behind our national mythology quite like the myth of the cowboy. In this mythology, the cowboy is a white man. He is a crusty frontiersman taming the west and paving the way for civilization. He is the good guy fighting the dangerous Indian. He is free and independent. He is in charge of his own destiny.

Peterson’s follow-up ad is even, um . . . better?

As Mel goes on to explain,

Read Richard Slatta’s Cowboys of the Americas and you will get a very different picture. In reality, the first American cowboys were indigenous people trained by the Spanish missionaries. In reality, more than 30% of the cowboys on Texas trail drives were African American, Mexican, or Mexican-American.

And cowboys were not so free.

Cowboys were itinerant workers who, while paid fairly well when they had work, spent much of the year begging for odd jobs. Many did not even own the horse they rode. Frequently, they worked for large cattle companies owned by stockholders from the Northeast and Europe, not for small family operations (a la “Bonanza”). The few times cowboys tried to organize, they were brutally oppressed by ranchers.

I think Dale Peterson (or rather, his handlers) may also be consciously echoing Ronald Reagan’s cowboy persona. In turn, Reagan may have been consciously echoing another rough-and-tumble political poser, Teddy Roosevelt. In all three cases, a white male politician evokes a myth that seems even more “white male” than the man himself. And a crucial part of that white myth is the direct exclusion and erasure of non-white people.

In her book-length study of Roosevelt’s self-fashionings (Rough Rider in the White House), Sarah Watts explains the political reasons for periodically dusting off and deploying this hoary white-male myth — it’s a recognition of, and pandering to, ordinary white-male American anxieties, anxieties that still exist today:

Roosevelt emerged as a central purveyor of the cowboy-soldier hero model because he more than any man of his age harnessed the tantalizing freedom of cowboys to address the social and psychological needs that arose from deep personal sources of frustration, anxiety, and fear. More than any other he sensed that ordinary men needed a clearly recognizable and easily appropriated hero who enacted themes about the body; the need for extremity, pain, and sacrifice; and the desire to exclude some men and bond with others. In one seamless cowboy-soldier-statesman-hero life, Roosevelt crafted the cowboy ethos consciously and lived it zealously, providing men an image and a fantasy enlisted in service to the race-nation.

In keeping with changing models of masculinity . . . mass-circulation magazines began to feature a Napoleonic “idol of power,” a man of action who used iron will and “animal magnetism” to crush his rivals and dominate nature. Biographers of plutocrats and robber barons encouraged readers to envision themselves in a social Darwinist world of ruthless competition where character alone appeared effeminate and sentimentalism dangerous. Earlier notions of manliness had counseled reason over passion; now the hero must unleash his “forcefulness.”

Enter a new type of charismatic male personality after 1870, a cowboy-soldier operating in the new venue of the American West on sheer strength of will and physicality. Eastern readers instantly recognized him as more masculine precisely because he met the psychological desires in their imagination, making them into masters of their own fate, propelling them into violent adventure and comradeship, believing them at home in nature, not in the hothouse interiors of office buildings or middle-class homes.

Writers pitched the cowboy ethos against Christian values of mercy, empathy, love, and forgiveness, against domestic responsibility and the job demands that complicated men’s lives and dissolved their masculine will. The cowboy was not interested in saving souls or finding spiritual purity or assigning meaning to death. His code of conduct arose as he struggled against the overwhelming wildness of men and beasts and carved out a prairie existence with guns, ropes, and barbed wire. Readers suspended ordinary morality as they fantasized about life at the margins of civilization and sampled forbidden pleasures of taming, busting, subduing, shooting, hanging, and killing.

In addition, and more to the (“swpd”) point, the falsified racial identity of this ideal cowboy-soldier effectively erased the fact that demographically disproportionate numbers of “cowboys” were not white.

“Many real cowboys were black ex-slaves, whereas the Hollywood heroes were always white.”
Nat Love, African American cowboy, 1876

At the same time, the cowboy myth was imagined in opposition to darker, dehumanized Others. Whitened cowboys of yesteryear were lauded in Roosevelt’s time for having helped to vanquish Indians, of course. However, as Watts explains, a growing nostalgia for antebellum Southern plantation life, including the racial control it represented, also helped fuel the collective desire for such a virile, specifically white ideal:

Northerners adopted a more sympathetic view of Southern white manhood, one in which Southern elites came to be admired for their racial acumen. Northerners abandoned critical views of slavery for nostalgic reminiscences of plantation life in which white Southern men had effectively managed a racial society, keeping blacks where they belonged and protecting white women’s virtue. In the theaters, novels, and traveling shows of the 1890s, popular themes of happy plantation slaves reflected Northern acceptance of the Southern white view of race and the Jim Crow limitations on suffrage, mobility, education, and economic life.

Even if many, though not all, Northerners drew the line at excusing lynching, Silber observes, they nevertheless accepted the idea that Southern white men lynched black “rapists” in the attempt to prove themselves men. Concerns about protecting Southern womanhood reflected Northern men’s anxieties about promiscuous sexual behavior and the preservation of women’s proper sphere. Finding a common ground of white manliness among former enemies . . . helped Northern whites to “cast African-Americans outside the boundaries of their Anglo-Saxon nation,” to romanticize Southern notions of chivalry, and to justify turning Southern race relations over to Southern whites entirely.

Born into a wealthy Eastern family, Teddy Roosevelt was a physically weak and asthmatic child. When he joined the New York state assembly at the age of twenty-three, Roosevelt struck others as “unmanly.” As Watts also writes, “newspapers and his fellow assemblymen ridiculed his ‘squeaky’ voice and dandified clothing, referring to him as ‘Jane-Dandy,’ ‘Punkin-Lily,’ and ‘our own Oscar Wilde.’ . . . Duly insulted, he began to construct a new physical image around appropriately virile Western decorations and settings, foregrounding the bodily attributes of a robust outdoorsman that were becoming new features in the nation’s political iconography.”

In a move reminsicent of George W. Bush’s brush-clearing photo-ops on his own “ranch,” the young Roosevelt moved to the Western frontier, in order to “harden” his body, but also to wear a series of conspicuous, meticulously detailed frontier costumes. Like the younger Bush, Roosevelt also bought a ranch, apparently for similar self-staging purposes (it’s worth noting that the retired George W. Bush now spends most of his time in a suburban home outside of Dallas; he rarely visits his ranch anymore, and if the New York Times is right, when he does, he spends most of his time there riding a mountain bike instead of a horse).

Teddy Roosevelt posing as a cowboy (at the age of 27)

As Watts writes of this photo,

In 1885, returning East after a bighorn hunting trip to Montana, Roosevelt had another studio photo made. This time he appeared as a self-consciously overdressed yet recognizable Western cowboy posed as bold and determined, armed and ready for action. “You would be amused to see me,” he wrote to Henry Cabot Lodge in 1884, in my “broad sombrero hat, fringed and beaded buckskin shirt, horse hide chaparajos or riding trousers, and cowhide boots, with braided bridle and silver spurs.” To his sister Bamie, he boasted, “I now look like a regular cowboy dandy, with all my equipments finished in the most expensive style.” Only the fringed buckskin shirt remained from his Leatherstocking outfit.

Buckskin, he said, represented America’s “most picturesque and distinctively national dress,” attire worn by Daniel Boone and Davy Crockett and by the “reckless, dauntless Indian fighters” who led the “white advance throughout all our Western lands.” Buckskin and whiteness notwithstanding, this 1885 image still seems forced, and his attention focused on the costs, accoutrements, and style of cowboy life. He does not even wear his glasses, without which he could see only poorly.

All of which makes me wonder just what kind of man Alabama’s Dale Peterson really is, behind the pose of that everlasting, gunslinging, and white cowboy myth. The pose he’s striking in cowboy drag just seems so obviously that — a pose, and a mighty forced one at that.

Nevertheless, claims are now being made that Peterson actually is that cowboy. As Ladd Ehlinger, Jr., the writer/director of Peterson’s ads, explains,

“I decided to stick him on a horse, give him a gun, and make it a John Wayne movie. . . . Some jerks are saying, ‘Oh, it makes us look like rednecks!’ Well, maybe in New York you wouldn’t make an ad like that, but this is Alabama, and here, people ride horses and shoot guns.”

When Peterson saw the ad, he “loved it,” Ehlinger says.

“Because I was basically doing a portrait of him,” he explains. “Not a campaign ad, but a portrait.”

To which I can only say . . . O RLY?

Let me tell you, I have an almost supernatural (some would say neurotic) capacity for remembering the most embarrassing moments in my life.  Walking into a women’s bathroom by mistake when I was about 7 years old and lost at the mall, crying for mommy. Bursting into tears of hunger at Taste of Minnesota when I was 10.  In 4^th grade I sat next to one of the few other Asians I saw at a class assembly because I thought she was so friendly, cool, and cute – then being told I couldn’t sit there because it was for student council members only.  I can’t remember my own parents’ birthdays, or which days to put out the recycling.  But that time I walked face-first into a brick pillar in broad daylight on a busy shopping day?  Yep.

My extreme discomfort towards public embarrassment is why I avoid reality television like the plague.  I don’t get any pleasure or joy from watching humiliating public spectacle, even when it doesn’t involve me.  Shame is something I have in spades, but is not something I enjoy.

Shows like American Idol are horrifying to me.  Because if someone embarrasses themselves or does poorly, I feel terrible for them.  However, I’ve been watching the pop phenomenon in recent years because my partner, who doesn’t enjoy reality television either, happens to enjoy watching American Idol: not to laugh at people, but because there’s always a chance that someone unique, and with genuine talent (hello Adam Lambert) will make it on the show.  I’ve been trying to watch it with her.  It’s only fair.  If I ask her to watch trash like Ninja Assassin and Iron Man, I can suffer through some bad singers and mangled songs with her.

Someone I always think about when I watch American Idol is William Hung.  A Berkeley student, Hung auditioned in 2004 with a pretty terrible rendition of Ricky Martin’s She Bangs. Even though I wasn’t watching much television at all during that time, I couldn’t escape the notoriety of this pop culture disaster.

Most likely, you couldn’t either.  In the internet age, public spectacle has even more venues for participation  than ever.  You know what happened: William became something of a famous figure despite his mangled performance.  Much of this was credited to Hung’s unabashedly positive attitude: after being laughed at and humiliated by judges Randy, Simon, and Paula, William famously stated, “I already gave my best, and I have no regrets at all.”

Despite his admirable pluck, many of us Asian Americans, especially Asian American men, shuddered whenever we got sent that link of William warbling his way through Ricky Martin, or someone mentioned it at work or at school.  It was a collective cringe weighed down by a ton of racial and gendered baggage.  I’m going to say this: America loves humiliating Asian men.  Whether it be racist assumptions about the, shall we say, relative size of certain parts of our anatomy believed to be true, to the mockery of stereotypical accents, to the continued belief that we are short, backwards, nerdy, and unattractive, Asian American men have a very specific history and experience in regards to gendered race dynamics here in the States.  And what makes it worse, is that there seems like there is very little discussion, criticism, or challenge when these racist stereotypes of Asian men rear their ugly heads.  I’m not saying we have it worse than others.  But I know I’m not alone when I say as an Asian man, it sometimes feels like we receive the brunt of racist hatred while having few avenues to defend ourselves and having even fewer allies and defenders willing to have our backs.  Hurt our feelings, ridicule us, insist that all the stereotypes are justified because they’re at least partly true – sometimes as an Asian American man, you sometimes get the sinking feeling that you’re alone out here with a target on your forehead.

Added to that, there are few opportunities for Asian women and men to speak out about any gendered racial stereotypes, whether they target women or men.  We have little access to pop and mass media outlets to discuss such things.  For those of you who, at this point, think I am a hypocrite because I have this blog on the Twin Cities’ largest paper to talk about these things, my reply would be: why do you think I said “yes” when they asked me to blog for the Strib, even though I knew full well that the vast majority of commentators would lash out at me for doing so?   Because there are so few opportunities for Asian Americans to publicly challenge racism – often we take those opportunities even when we know people will hate us for it.

Those of us who face challenges of representation in this country (people of color, women, and LGBTT’s) know very well the burden of stereotype-laden imagery: marginalized people have very little say or control about our image, and representations of us are so few that one image is applied to all of us whether it resembles us or not.  And no, it’s not the same for everyone.  I don’t go around thinking all straight white men are like Fred Durst.  No white dudes are expected to apologize for his existence.  But when, for example, William Hung rose to fame, many of us Asian men couldn’t help wondering who would shout his name out of their window at us.  How many people would see us and start shaking their bodies and belting out their accented impersonation of William singing She Bangs.  How many people would see us and unconsciously and wordlessly shape us into his image.

And unfortunately, instead of speaking out and challenging this racism, we often turn on the ones closest to us: ourselves.  Instead of having an informed discussion and exploration of William Hung and exactly why America is so comfortable embracing and selling such a (perceived) cartoonish caricature of an Asian man, many Asians dissed William Hung.  Joined in on the mockery.  Forwarded the links, perfected their own impersonation of him, laughed loudest at him.  Because in dissing him, we hoped to distance ourselves from him.  As if to say, I’m not that clueless Fresh Off the Boat Asian like William Hung, man -  I’m American.  Clowning William Hung was a familiar survival tool for Asians.

This goes far beyond William Hung.  Before him, there were already plenty of Asians who were apologists for racism.  It’s all in your head, they say.  There were numerous times when I would try to create a discussion around this topic, and Asian men and women would counter with such statements like, “well, Asian men should just stop whining and work out, get some nice clothes, learn how to dance.”  Or, “Asian women really are gold diggers who only date guys with money.”  As if gendered, racial stereotypes were all our fault, instead of a reinforced history of colonized hatred.  As if lifting weights and learning some dance steps would eradicate institutional racism towards our people (for the record, I’ve done both – racism still exists).

Why should Asians be so quick to concede to internalized racism and diss Asians like William Hung?  Sure, he benefited from riding that wave of racist demeaning stereotypes that continue to haunt Asians.  But is he the person to blame?  Should we focus our resentment towards a dude who just wanted to sing and dance?

This is especially perplexing given how willing the general American public is to forgive celebrities for their mistakes.  Take Mark Wahlberg, for example.  The former leader of  The Funky Bunch and Oscar-nominated actor, in his youth, attacked two Vietnamese men in racist hate crimes  – shouting racial epithets at them, hitting one over the head with a wooden stick, and attacking one of them so viciously that he put the man’s eye out.  After he was arrested, he made many comments about “gooks” and “slant-eyes.”  I know plenty of men and women, of all races, who love Mark Wahlberg despite these horrors.

Sure, I shouldn’t be too righteous – I really do believe most of us, at some point in our lives, will need to ask for forgiveness for something, including some atrocious things.  But who we forgive, and for what, says a lot about who we are.  I’m not saying, don’t forgive or forget.  I have no right, nor power, to decide who you forgive and for what.  What I’m saying is, let’s hope we all can be forgiven, whether or not we have flawless pecs and a six-pack.  Can we all show just a little bit of empathy for William Hung? At least put who he is, and what he tried to do, into context?

As much as I am arguing we shouldn’t demonize William Hung for racism, I also think we need to see how certain recurring racial images are constantly brought back to the front of America’s pop culture consciousness.  I am absolutely sure that many people who are fascinated with William Hung, really did admire his positivity, his courage, and his pursuit of a dream.  Just as I am absolutely sure that many relished in the ability to make fun of William because he represented the image of the nerdy, FOB-by, non-threatening Asian man that goes back to Long Duk Dong in Sixteen Candles and beyond.

Adding to the perplexity of it all, I was disappointed when some journalists and commentators discussed race in American Idol without mentioning William Hung or, in the case of contestants like Jasmine Trias, lumping Asians in with whites as if they had the same advantages and privileges that white contestants did.  And I was disappointed when little was said about the open, scathing hatred heaped upon Sanjaya Malakar during his stint on American Idol.  Sure, he wasn’t the best singer, and his choice of hairstyles was, to put it kindly, perplexing. But does the world really need to see the brother get attacked by a hive of bees?  (If you don’t know what I’m talking about, Google it – long story).  I know I wasn’t alone in wondering how such hate heaped upon a man of color could go without criticism.

Then came the rumor that William Hung was dead, started as an internet joke.  Ladies and gentlemen, regardless of race, gender, sexual orientation and political opinion, I think we can all agree that this was thoroughly distasteful.  Nothing William Hung did should ever make him feel as ashamed as whoever started the rumor that he killed himself.

I will tell you, as much as I was filled with dread when I thought of the racist baggage that would be heaped upon Asians during William Hung’s dubious ascension, I also admired – and envied – William’s courage and guts.  Let’s not be overly romantic – as a lover of music and dance, I would never buy any of his albums, even to support a fellow brother.  I can barely sit through one of his songs.  Just can’t go there.  But I will say I was fortunate enough at the time, maybe because of my own capacity to neurotically remember and punish myself for every embarrassing thing I’ve done in my life, to really envy the dude’s bravery.  He wasn’t frozen into inaction by fears of what other people thought of him.  He didn’t let the opinion of the ‘expert’ judges sway him from his dream.  Dude got up there, shook it, and sang.  To hell with popular opinion.

Good for him.  His rise to infamy made me check my own internalized hatred, and question the power of humiliation that the mass media in this country can wield, and how many of us consume it with vitriolic glee.

I know it’s not all a sob story, and I’m not suggesting he’s simply a victim.  He probably was able to get farther in his dream because of all this hubbub.  There are plenty of more talented people, of all races, who don’t have a record deal.  And his short cameo appearance on Arrested Development as Judge Reinhold’s courtroom backing band The Hung Jury? Awesome.

The story of his strange ascension is a dizzying collision of media hype, gendered racism, hatred – and honest-to-goodness optimism.  He doesn’t exist in a vacuum – we marginalized people understand that we don’t even have a choice in the matter.

When it comes down to it, I just really hated how mean people were to the dude.  It was like America had become one collective bully pointing a finger and laughing at a dude who was not in on the joke.  Well, for William Hung, I hope he sings most beautifully when he’s by himself, with no one else having the ears to listen.  I hope he understands that the beauty of it is, those who mock him the most would envy him, if they had enough of a heart to do so.  And I could see that he would make a great partner to someone, and a really great father.  I could see him lifting up his little baby boy or little baby girl and telling that child, you can do anything.  And no matter what he sounded like, no matter if he was right, that child would believe him.

A while back, I wrote a post (here and at Racialicious) that covered my tendency to channel emotions like anger and frustration into my art and teaching, using those so-called “negative” feelings as fuel for anti-oppressive works. I made references to being “violently peaceful” and how I often thought of my words as verbal punches against oppression.

My readers had a lot of different thoughts on that piece, positive and otherwise, but one Racialicious commenter’s words, in particular, really stuck with me. In short, this commenter basically touched on – what should have been – an obvious point: that my piece, although I intended it to be applicable to women as well as men, came from a very “standard” masculine point of view; a male culture that is taught to embrace violence in many ways. With that in mind, my intentions meant little in regard to the fact that I was really playing up to a “masculine” ideal and quite possibly dismissing half of the world’s population. (*1)

Let’s just say I’ve been digesting and working over these thoughts for months now (doing other things, too, of course), and I think I’m finally ready to write about it.

This post is going to examine the culture of violence in one man’s life (mine), with a focus on this question: “How does a man of color struggle against oppression without using violent imagery?”

There are probably a ton of readers out there that have an immediate, obvious answer to this question, but it’s one I’ve had a very hard time answering for myself. Why? Because I grew up in the States. As a male. And the media and people around me very much encouraged me to make violence a part of my identity.

From the very beginning, a concept of manhood was pressed on me (by my environment, not my parents) that made fighting and imitation-violence a major focus. Toys “for boys” were GI Joes and other fighting-type “action figures.” The movies aimed at me (and that I enjoyed) generally involved shooting and fighting. The “manly” heroes were generally the ones who could beat up the most people.

When I was a little kid, I thought ninjas were the sh– (I actually kind of still do). I’d run around all day, trying to walk like a ninja, throwing imaginary weapons at faux enemies, and then jump-kick and punch them to an early demise. I would then make some sort of Bruce Lee-esque “whaaaa!” and move on. (*2)

As I got a bit older, “Big Trouble in Little China” became my all-time favorite movie. (*3) I moved from ninjas to a different form of martial arts bad-ass-ness – imaginary swordplay and pretending to be able to shoot lightning at attacking hordes.

I also started reading a lot of fantasy novels involving magic and knights and battles and wars – and, in my daydreams, I would put myself front and center as the most-skilled warrior of all. I would spend hours outside with my favorite stick, attacking weeds and battling to victory.

I watched a lot of action movies. I played “Sniper” with my b-b gun. My friends and I created a game we called “Hostage Situation,” in which one or two of us would play cops trying to deal with “terrorists” who were holding a couple civilians hostage. (*4) It involved a lot of shooting and killing of each other. And we loved it.

In elementary school, I got into a few fights.

In middle school, I got into a few fights.

In high school, I got into a few fights.

I never really felt like I “started” any of those fights (even though, in hind-sight, some of my actions led to them), but I found myself in them, nonetheless. Because I was encouraged to “stand up for myself” and not let other people “push me around.” No matter how much bigger than me somebody was, if I felt like I needed to stand up, I stood up, and I wasn’t going to back down. And “not backing down,” in my mind, usually meant getting ready to throw blows.

I played football through high school- a cornerback, my strength and willingness to really hit somebody stood out to my coaches, opponents, and even some college scouts. Asian kids can’t play football? Every week it was my goal to prove that that was a load of B.S., and I took out some of that pressure on opposing players (always cleanly, but hard). And I enjoyed it. It felt good. The rush that coursed through me after I knocked some other guy on his ass? Beautiful.

But high school ended, and I had to make a direction-changing (at that point) decision – in picking between two colleges, I had to choose either to continue playing football at one school, or to focus on academics at another school. After a lot of deliberation up until the midnight deadline, I chose academics. And, with that, my little “outlet” for violent tendencies disappeared.

Interesting thing is, I found myself in the middle trying to break up fights throughout college – never getting into one, myself. I was the cool head. I was the one pissed off at my stupid (usually drunk, but not always) friends trying to “be a man” by getting into it with some other idiot. I was throwing my “friends” out of strangers’ parties because they were trying to start sh– with people for no reason. When a group of my friends loaded up the car to head over to stomp some frat kids for threatening another friend . . . I went out for pizza. I found myself hanging out with groups of female friends more often – because, with them, I knew I wouldn’t have to deal with that kind of crap.

I’d like to say that that’s all there was to it. That, from then on, I was this enlightened, non-violent guy who went around defusing fights. But that was hardly the case.

Because I still had it in me to “never back down.” There were a couple times when I was breaking up other people’s stupid fights when one of the guys involved would run their mouth and threaten me. In those cases, I never swung, but I definitely puffed up a bit, did the “glare” and responded with less-than-peaceful words. It was ingrained. It was in my blood. I couldn’t “let” somebody talk to me like that. I wasn’t going to get punked by some fool who I was keeping out of a fight. And afterwards? I hate to say it, but I’d imagine kicking that guy’s ass, in detail.

Ultimately, I was glad that I hadn’t actually fought, but there was a part of me – always – that kind of wished I had.

And I struggled with that. Still do. Because I have absolutely zero respect for those guys who have to prove themselves with violence. Guys too insecure to just let people be. Who pick on smaller, physically “weaker” people. Who prey on others. Who even joke about laying a hand on their partners. Who ruin lives due to a need for some sort of never-achieved “masculinity.”

And yet . . . I still have these little violent daydreams . . . some f—-er drops some racist ish in a conversation, and I gleefully imagine breaking his nose. Some guy puffs up on the subway with somebody half his size, and I fantasize about knocking him out. I watch a movie, and I get all pumped up when the protagonist gets violent revenge on the enemies that killed his family . . .

It’s in me. This secret affair with violence – while I’m walking through the world, consciously trying to eliminate the violence of oppression; trying to teach my kids peaceful alternatives to physical fights; mentoring kids in the arts, so they can engage their emotions instead of just letting them out. How can I reconcile these two extremes? Because I honestly, fully believe that changing the culture of violence in the lives of kids of color (especially) is a huge key to leveling the playing field. I whole-heartedly believe in being a male role model who celebrates non-violence and defines manhood by being confident enough to let somebody puff up without needing to do anything about it.

But then I play some competitive football and hit somebody . . . and I revel in it. I watch (and enjoy) violent movies. I put aggressive passion into my poetry and other writing.

And I talk about anti-oppression work as if it’s a war. That’s the kicker for me. The other stuff is mostly internal work that is going to take me some time to deconstruct and move away from – but at least I have no need or inclination to actually act on it. But when I think – and talk – about oppression? I think violently.

I think about “fighting” oppression. I think about “choosing my battles” in order to save my strength and more effectively “fight back.” I talk about being on “the front lines” and “battling” it out. I talk about “hitting back” against oppressors, “knocking the privilege out of people’s mouths,” “bringing the top down,” “blowing up” stereotypes.

Even when I think about oppressed peoples standing up for themselves (which is positive and necessary), I’m still using the “can’t back down” mentality that got me into all those physical fights as a kid. I get stubborn and dug in. That ignorant, sub-conscious racist guy I work with? I’ll show him what’s up.

And it’s all making me start to wonder. Because I largely think (and explain myself and the world) in metaphors and analogies. I come up with a strong metaphor for a situation that is difficult, and I use the mechanics of the metaphorical situation to help me solve the problems of the literal one.

What does that mean? Well, say dealing with racism is walking through a windstorm. You’re constantly buffeted by gusts and little crap that’s being flung through the air – but if you put your collar up, get a forward lean going, you can still make some progress and be somewhat unaffected by it. But then some bottle cap gets flung up and hits you in the ear, and it really stings. And that’s the last straw – that’s it – that pain from such a little thing just makes you lose it, and suddenly you’re cursing this windstorm, tearing up, frustrated, and you just stop moving forward and kind of wallow in how much you hate dealing with this. You want to quit.

That’s being a person of color (in the States, at least). So I use this metaphor to explain why “just a joke” is never “just a joke” – because we’re in a freaking windstorm, and there’s so much sh– flying through the air. I also use it to build myself up, to not let one bottle cap keep me from pushing forward to my goals. To find ways to buffer myself against the wind while keeping that forward, positive momentum. Because, once you stop and let your body give up a bit, it’s so much harder to get moving again.

Right. Metaphors. So my problem here is that my metaphor for the struggle against oppression, in general – is a war. Is violent. Standing up for myself is great, but not if I’m thinking in terms of showing somebody else what’s up. It changes the dynamic. If I’m talking about race, and every white person becomes my enemy – how the Hell am I ever going to get enough help to bring real change? If I’m looking at this as a running battle – a war – that means I’m looking to inflict damage on some sort of “enemy.” And that comes through in how I speak, how I interact, the particular solutions I tend to find most feasible. And it becomes apparent to that “other side.”

And, suddenly, they have good reason to fear me. To feel threatened by me. To get defensive and start fighting themselves.

And then what?

That cycle of violence (even if it’s just metaphorical). Because, ultimately, it goes like this – violence – in any form – only breeds a need for revenge in the victim. That revenge may be aimed at the perpetrator, but it is most often aimed at the nearest, easiest target, instead. Which then breeds the need for revenge in somebody else, totally unconnected to the original crime. And it never ends.

And thinking of the anti-oppression struggle as a violent act (war, battles, etc.) does the same thing. It just creates this cycle of “Us” vs. “Them.” Me trying to win at their expense, them getting theirs at somebody else’s cost. The Oppression Olympics. Divide and Conquer. The lack of true unity . . . because we’re all fighting, all stuck in the cycle of violence.

I need a new metaphor. One that accepts no violent imagery. One that rejects it. But, as I’ve detailed above, I’m far too conditioned to think in violent terms – even as I consciously reject violence – to be able to come up with this new metaphor. I would guess that most males (at least in the U.S.) are, too.

And so I turn to the female, non-masculine half of the world to set me straight. I am not creative enough to think differently, but I believe that many of you are. What is a useful, non-violent metaphor for the struggle against oppression that all of us (especially the men) can use as a mental model to finally break the current cycle we’re stuck in?

I need to think differently. I’ve finally worked through to that point. But I’m stuck. I need help.

Ladies? The patriarchal, pissing-contest system we have in place is largely at fault for the state of the world – and it shouldn’t be your jobs to bail us out (again), but I don’t know what else to do on this one. I’m not qualified or capable of finding this new metaphor (which is probably so very obvious to you all) due to my “masculine” conditioning.

So I’m asking you for your help in developing this new model for reducing oppressive systems. This new way of thinking. (*5)

I hope what I then do with it will be more than sufficient re-payment . . .

(*1) Obviously, I’m not going to call this commenter out (even in the positive way I intend), but I’m sure that those who want more detail on the comments in question can puzzle it out for themselves.

(*2) Yes, I am very much aware that Bruce Lee is/was in no way a ninja. Ninjas were Japanese. Bruce Lee was mixed-Chinese – like me. However, as a little kid, I did not have that distinction, therefore the mixed-imitations.

(*3) I wrote a post a LOOOONG time ago about why that movie worked for me (and still does), but for now let’s just boil it down to – I actually had Chinese heroes to look up to in the movie, with a bumbling white sidekick.

(*4) Interesting “historical” sidenote – in this game, we imagined the “terrorists” as white guys like Hans Gruber and the crew in the first Die Hard movie (even though not all my friends were white).

(*5) And by “new,” I mean “new for this particular male” – it’s likely common-sense old for some (or many) of you.

Ambitious high school senior Efrain Rodriguez dreams of escaping the South Bronx for an Ivy League college like Harvard or Yale. But how is his family going to afford to pay for a prestigious university when Moms has to work insane hours to put food on the table as it is? And Efrain wouldn’t dare ask that good-for-nothing father of his who has traded his family in for younger models. Left with few options, Efrain chooses to do something he never thought he would. He embarks on a double life—honor student by day, drug peddler at night—convinced that by temporarily capitulating to society’s negative expectations of a boy like him, he can eventually defy them.

Sofia Quintero makes a stunning debut writing for young adults with this gritty, complex, and real exploration of the life of an urban teen whose attempt to leave one world behind for a better one could cost him everything.

In all honesty, I am a friend and fan of Sofia Quintero . She gave me a review copy of her latest young adult (YA) novel Efrain’s Secret after we attended a morning taping of The People’s Court with her father. When she shared her next book was a YA novel focusing on young men of color, I knew LIE readers would want (and need) to know about this text. Many of us on LIE have shared numerous times how difficult it is to find good books for young men and boys of color that affirm their identity and encourage them to be excited about reading.

Sofia is very much aware of these issues. This is her first YA novel, but when I worked for a program to encourage literacy among youth in East Harlem, I purchased all three of the hip-hop fiction novels she wrote under the name Black Artemis. She also graciously joined a group of 7th and 8th-grade students who chose her text to read for the semester. They were able to ask her questions about her characters and writing. It was a highlight of my time working in East Harlem.

It took me about two weeks to finish Efrain’s Secret. The first six pages had me tearing up because I knew I had in my hands a very important piece of literature for young men of color. The character dialog alone–Sofia’s choices of sentences and words–is affirming.

Sofia agreed to answer some questions about the text, which is NOW IN STORES! If your bookstore does not have it, ask them to get it.

Sofia often offers readers a sample chapter to read online for FREE and has done the same with Efrain’s Secret. Read the sample chapter here.

What was your motivation for writing Efrain’s Secret?

The story for Efrain’s Secret has been incubating within me since 1985. That summer, a high school senior from Harlem named Edmund Perry was shot to death by a plain clothes police officer in Morningside Park. It caused a great deal of controversy because Eddie had just graduated from Philips Exeter and was going to start college at Stanford that fall. And yet the police officer and almost two dozen witnesses stated that Eddie and his brother had mugged and assaulted him. It was such a tragedy. No winners in that one. This was the summer before my senior year of high school. I was an honor student myself, hoping to attend an Ivy League college, but I wasn’t oblivious or immune to the forces that could derail me. I had classmates like Eddie who were leading double lives, and this fascinated me. What compels people to attempt to reconcile what society insists is irreconcilable? This and related questions are recurring themes in my work, and Efrain’s Secret is my first exploration of this theme from the perspective of a person who is young and male.

You have Efrain narrate the story and events to us. Why did you decide to have him tell us his story?

I have come to realize and embrace that my voice as a writer is strongest in the first person. It doesn’t mean that I have not or will not ever again write in any other voice, but with this story, I did want to play to my strengths since I knew there would be other things to challenge me. One that I welcomed was the challenge of writing in the voice and from the perspective of a teenage boy since obviously that has never been my experience. In a way, writing the story in Efrain’s voice helped me to maintain the compassion that’s necessary to keep judgments and didacticism at bay. Finally, Efrain’s Secret might be my first novel with a male protagonist, but I still think of it as every bit feminist as any of my previous work. In that regard, I wanted this novel, in part, to be one exploration of how patriarchal constructions of masculinity wound boys – especially boys who are already vulnerable because of racism and classicism – and it just intuitively felt right to let Efrain tell his own story. Something told me that even when he’s conflicted, unaware, misinformed or otherwise unable to articulate precisely what Efrain thinks or feels at a given moment, the first person would provide more space for the reader to understand him. More so than in third person which sounds counterintuitive even to me. I can’t explain fully why I made this call, but I think it was a good one.

One of the things I’ve noticed is that for a young person to have high expectations of themselves, others in their life must have the same expectations. Who do you think in the book was the most influential in encouraging Efrain to pursue higher education? To seek to attend Ivy League institutions?

In my mind, Efrain has always been surrounded by people who value a good education. The most influential of these is his mother Dolores who herself never finished college, and that is revealed early in the story. While not explicit in the book, Chingy’s parents are college graduates, and it was a given that their sons would go to college. In fact, Chingy’s older brother Baraka who is attending Morehouse is a model for Efrain as well as his own brother. Even Rubio who Efrain suspects discouraged Dolores from finishing her college education initially put his own children through private school for a period of time. I remember in the 90s when there was a major political battle in New York City over public education, and one member of the board of education made a very racist, classist, xenophobic comment to the effect that working-class children of color in immigrant families were failing because their parents did not care about their education. This was years before Herman Badillo lost his liberal mind and spewed that same nonsense in his book. My own parents never finished high school, but that is precisely why they pushed my siblings and I to go to college. So I hope it comes across that a parent’s own educational level or financial ability is no indicator of whether or not s/he wants values a good education. And I also wanted to show that even at an academically challenged high school, there exist teachers like Mr. Sweren and Señorita Polanco who have high expectations for their best students and give them their all as educators because I myself had teachers like that. As for the Ivy League aspirations, I have been asked how did the Ivy League land on my own radar as young student. I really cannot tell you definitively, but that still goes to show you that the power that these schools have to influence their graduates’ life outcomes is known to even those who are the least likely to attend them. I have talked to urban, working-class children of color and they know what Harvard is and how it can effect your life to attend it. Mind you, they may have never heard of Phillip Exeter or Andover. But they at least know Harvard, Princeton and Yale.

The book had me in tears at times, reading some of the statements, thoughts, dialogue of the characters (my first emotional reaction was on page 6 when Efrain and his mother are filling out financial aid forms and Efrain thinks: “See how she says we? My moms believes in me, all day, every day.” Were there emotional parts of the book for you to write? Moments in the story that were emotional to create?

I’m glad that the book moved you, and yes, there were parts that were emotional for me to write. If your own work doesn’t effect you, don’t expect anyone else to be moved by it. Funny parts should genuinely make you smile, sad parts should choke you up. Now that’s no guarantee that the parts that move you as you write them will move all readers the same way if at all. However, you can pretty much count on the fact that if you’re not impacted by your own words at some point, chances are you’re not going to impact any readers either. There were many emotional moments for me, and I can’t spell them all out. Not only are there too many to list, I don’t want to give spoilers. I, too, cried at critical turning points in Efrain and Dolores’ relationship, and let’s just say that the last third of the novel was as anxiety-producing for me to write as it was for you to read. I think in every story I have written there’s a male character who sneaks up on me and steals my heart, and with Efrain’s Secret that character was Nestor. Chingy made me laugh out loud more than once. But the deepest emotional impact for me did not only in “big” scenes but in small moments like when Efrain bonds with his little brother or Candace. One small moment that was really charged for me and unexpectedly so was the one between Chingy and Efrain in the principal’s office. Maybe it’s because you have these two young men who have been best friends since kindergarten and have come to love each other like brothers and are now in the fight of their lives. Each wants to say so much to the other than society allows boys and men to express, and their practice of talking around their conflict or speaking plainly about their feelings because that feeling is anger doesn’t suffice. It was very painful for me to write and still heartbreaking for me to read. I’m choking up now as I write this.

In the first 4 pages you have Efrain think: “Deserving a [class] ring and being able to afford it are two different things, and a man has to set priorities and make sacrifices.” I smiled so hard when I read this because Efrain is already identifying as a man, and a responsible one at that. Will you share a bit about how this idea/belief of “a man has to set priorities and make sacrifices” is a part of the story?

That’s interesting that you smiled at that. When you develop a character well, s/he will take over his or her role in the story, and you basically just become a transcriber. When Efrain says that, I myself had mixed feelings about it. My initial reaction was to smile, too, like a proud mother. But because I also know some of the reasons why Efrain feels this way and where this attitude is going to lead him, my heart also broke for him. This is because Efrain is at once a man and is still a boy. To some extent, he’s being pushed to be a man before he’s ready and before he has completely figured out what manhood means to him. He has some ideas, and some of those ideas are resistant to patriarchal tenants of masculinity, and that’s what made me initially smile. But by the same token, I’m was also thinking, “No, please be a boy. Just a little longer! It’s not right that you have to figure this out just yet and all on your own.” That’s because this particular belief – that a man sets priorities and makes sacrifices – is rooted in his own father’s failure to do just that! Rubio didn’t do it, and it hurt his family so now Efrain at the age of seventeen feels that he needs to do it when, like I said, he should not have to be thinking about that or navigating this by himself.

I wanted to punch Mrs. Colfax, the high school college advisor, in the face! Will you share why you created her character to be so “small fish in a big pond” with the students in the story?

This is an element of the story that was taken from my own experience. In high school, I had a college advisor that attempted to level my aspirations. She wasn’t as transparent as Mrs. Colfax, but she made it clear that she was overly concerned that I was setting my sights too high when I was applying to Ivy League colleges and even some smaller, private colleges like Hamilton, Swarthmore and Wesleyan. I once remember telling another teacher, “It’s like she’s surprised that I want to go to school that doesn’t advertise on the back of matchbook.” Her recommendations were not based on any knowledge of my interests and talents. Believe it or not, I can actually accept today that she genuinely believed she was protecting me. It doesn’t make her paternalism any less wrong, and maybe I have the ability to do consider this because I had enough gumption to ignore her and ultimately prove her wrong. Now the person who told me “small fish in a big pond” was the admission counselor at my high school. I didn’t want to go to my neighborhood high school, but all the alternatives that I was aware of at the time were unavailable to me. I was very upset, feeling condemned to go to a school where I thought I was going to do more fighting than learning. The African American woman who enrolled me said, “Sofia, if you had gotten into the Bronx High School of Science, you would’ve been a little fish in a big bowl. Here you’re going to be a big fish in a little bowl.” Unlike Mrs. Colfax, she was saying this not to level my aspirations, trivialize my feelings or make me resign myself to my circumstances. I felt this then and I feel this way now, she was trying to help me change the only thing I could in the moment and that was how I saw the situation. She was also trying to console me and let me know there would be more available to me at James Monroe High School if only I opened myself to it. And she was absolutely right. I still told myself I would make the most of my first year of high school at Monroe and transfer someplace else, but at the end of that year, I no longer cared about going to the Bronx High School of Science or any other specialized high school. None of my fears had come to pass, and now I can see how silly they were. I had many teachers who encouraged me to excel, and my friends were other students who cared about doing well, going on to college, being involved in extra-curricular activities and avoiding things that could jeopardize their futures. I never regretted going there. By the way, the girl in the story who held the record for the highest SAT score at Pedro Albizu Campos High School before Efrain breaks it is Sra. Polanco… and me. I mean, I gave her my SAT score – 1060. 1060. That’s far lower than the incoming student at Columbia where I went to college, but at Monroe the word spread about my score, and folks acted as if I were a genius because I broke a thousand. Teachers and students alike congratulated me like they were proud that I was a member of their school. Not a bad place to go to school, wasn’t it?

Many of the instructors that Efrain has are women, Sra. Polanco, his Spanish teacher, he identifies as having educated him on his own radical cultural history as a Caribbean and Latino man through using various forms of texts in her classroom (books, films, music, etc.). Did you plan to have the women in the novel be the primary people who transmit culture and communal history in the book?

I sure did, and then some. I see Baraka playing this role, too, but he is away at school acquiring his own knowledge. There’s much ado about young men of color going astray because they do not have male role models in their lives, it bothers me when this is driven by a sexist devaluation of what female adults can offer boys. Sure, we lose too many boys because their fathers and other male role models are not present in their lives or are present in a toxic way. But there also are many amazing men who were raised, taught and otherwise loved and nurture primarily by women. For the record, I think boys and girls alike need both masculine and feminine adult influence in their lives. Again, influence of a certain type. I know quite a few men who are healthy and happy because (1) a dysfunctional parent kept his or her distance and (2) other loving adults filled the void. I hope the adults who read Efrain’s Secret have dialogues, among other things, about whether Rubio’s fleeting presence in Efrain’s life – especially given the choices he made as a husband and father – is truly a “better than nothing” proposition. Was this a model of masculinity that served Efrain? What kind of difference might Rubio have made if he were a better financial provider yet still the same social model? What if he were a different social figure yet no better an economic influence? What kind of difference would that have made if any? I myself don’t have definitive answers on any of these questions, but that’s why I raise them. I’d love to hear what others think.

I loved how you created the friendship between Rashaan (Chingy) and Efrain. It was clearly built on love, respect, and trust. Often stories about young men of color don’t describe the love they have for other men in their life, which I think is a problem and huge disservice. Will you share how creating their relationship was important to this text?

Interestingly, many of the reviewers of Efrain’s Secret have discussed the racial and class dynamics of the story, and I deeply appreciate that because those issues are and always will be important to me. I’m particularly happy that those dynamics transmitted, however, because in writing Efrain’s Secret, I came with a specific desire to explore gender socialization. All my work is unapologetically feminist work, and I didn’t want Efrain’s Secret to be any different because it was a young adult novel or a story with a male protagonist. If anything, that made it even more important. The primary question, I wanted to explore with this novel was what are the mixed messages that boys get about masculinity and how does that impact them. Of course, there are complex intersections with race and class that I hoped would emerge, but since none of the reviewers to date have raised the gender aspects of the novel, I wonder if I had lost that intention along the way so your question is a relief! Anyway, I always envisioned Efrain as character who, because he suffered from certain expressions of patriarchal masculinity, was intent on defining his masculinity on his own terms which means negotiating those mixed messages. So naturally, he would gravitate towards friendships with boys who are also on a similar journey. Are Chingy and Efrain conscious on this journey and are they explicit in their communications about it? No. They still live in a patriarchal world that does not allow for that. But one way they resist, whether they know it or not, is to show each other that love, respect and trust as well as an abiding loyalty and understanding that goes unnamed even when their friendship is strained. In fact, the challenge for me was to show these boys engaged in a feminist resistance to the limiting, unwritten codes that govern male bonding while still rendering them realistically as boys. This is why, for example, when Chingy and Efrain are on the outs, they do not process their disagreements. They either talk around their conflict or pretend it never occurred. They only speak explicitly about their emotions when the prevailing feeling is anger because that’s the only emotion that patriarchy allows boys and men to express. Ultimately, I wanted to depict boys needing to give to and receive love from others, especially with other boys and men, and how it affects them when that love is denied, rejected or mocked and how nourishing it can be when that need is fulfilled even in small ways.

Efrain develops a relationship with Candace, a young black woman who is from New Orleans and relocated to NYC after Hurricane Katrina. I love you for this. Will you share why you chose to include this specific and devastating event in the story?

The variety and depth of social and political interaction between African Americans and Latinos in New York City is like no other. It’s one of the many things I love about being a New Yorker, and it gives me tremendous pleasure to represent these cross-cultural friendship and romances in my novels. I always saw Efrain’s best friend and first love being African American or Afro-Caribbean. While he is incredibly attracted sexually to GiGi, I knew that Efrain would connect emotionally with a young woman who like him was studious, edgy and independent and had a secret or two of her own. When I began writing the novel, Hurricane Katrina and the classism and racism it brought to the surface was still relatively fresh, and it just clicked that Efrain would fall for a girl who had her own ongoing battle with institutional and individual racism and classism. I had but cut a conversation between Candace and Efrain on Thanksgiving about the never-ending legal battle her family was having with the insurance company to compensate them for the loss of their home in New Orleans. It dragged down the scene which is ultimately about their growing closer as Efrain finally opens up to Candace about his father. My hope is that even without it, young readers will remain interested in the effects of Hurricane Katrina and be inspired to learn and do more about it.

The interactions the young men have with young women/potential partners are fabulous! Can you share what messages were important for you present for young readers to capture?

Even though the main characters in this novel are young men, I wanted to take care that the young female characters were fully formed with their own wants and needs. I hate when I read novels or watch movies where the men are layered and complex, but the women are little more than plot devices. Popular images of young men of color often depict them as hypersexual to the point of predatory with no desire for emotional intimacy with young women or even the capacity to interact with them as human beings and not objects. I personally know so many young men who are the antithesis of that image, and I wanted to give them some representation. I also hope that Efrain’s Secret gives young women hope that there are young men who will love, respect and appreciate them for all of who they are so that there’s no need to settle for less. I attempted to do this mostly through the character of GiGi, and her relationship both to Efrain and Nestor. As a young woman attempting to direct the impact of her sexual power on the males around her even though she herself does not fully understand it, I could have devoted an entire novel to GiGi. She’s as fascinating to me as Candace is which is why it made sense to me for their relationship to change as the story unfolded.

You make an amazing argument for the importance and crucial role the public library plays for working class and working poor communities. Was this intentional?

Of course! The public library was a big part of my life when I was Efrain’s age, and even though I write books, can afford to buy them and frequently have them given to me, I still put my library card to regular use. If not for public libraries so many poor and working-class people would be without literature, technology and information. My neighborhood branch is always teeming with people of all races and ages. It’s truly a community center. One of the employees recently began a scrapbooking club that meets twice per month, and I can’t tell you what a joy it is to meet such diverse women who walk the same streets I do, take the same bus and train, shop at the same stores. We crop and politick for hours.

I was not expecting the violence in the story by the characters who engaged in it (I’m being vague on purpose so not to spoil the story for readers.). Although I assumed some form of violence would occur, you made it clear violence was NOT a character or the norm. How did you come to choose to use violence in this story?

Although Efrain chooses to place himself in an environment where the likelihood of violence is high, it interested me more to address the role that violence has in the construction of masculinity. It’s hard to answer this question without giving away some critical events and diluting their impact. One scene I suspect readers will see coming, and whether they do or not, is fine by me. There are several scenes – one in particular – where I play with the potential for violence. In fact, I can honestly say that even in writing them, I had ideas of where they could go but really did not commit to any given direction until I was actually executing them. I usually went with what felt right in the moment, true to the story. Finally, there is one particular scene that I do hope knocks readers completely off their square. The point of all this variety is to pose this question: how can we socialize boys and men that it is their prerogative – that we even expect them – to engage in violence and believe we can govern their violence so that it is contained and predictable and otherwise to our liking?

Will you talk a bit about the concept of “delayed gratification” which I think is central to the story. How do you see this concept as tying into Efrain’s ability to set goals and expectations and meet them?

While he can be naïve about certain things despite his obvious intelligence, Efrain is relatively mature and that shows in his ability to delay gratification. There is a part of this ability that is a matter of nature. This is just the way Efrain is. There is another part, however, that is a result of nurture. Efrain never forgets how his family suffered as a result of Rubio’s unwillingness to forgo instant gratification to preserve the family he created. So the concept of delayed gratification becomes an intricate part of Efrain’s developing sense of masculinity. To him one of the things that makes a man is his ability to honor the commitments he makes to his loved ones even if that means forgoing instant gratification. Just the fact that he even desires to make those commitments, sets goals, surpasses expectations and otherwise thinks of the future – a future that includes other people – rather than being lead through life by his short-term needs and desires makes him a man. So in some ways Efrain is right that he is a man unlike his father. But Candace is right, too, when she suggests that Efrain is more like his father than he would care to believe.

Nestor has some valuable information to share with Efrain just as Chingy does. He says on page 87: “Man, just the fact that he has a job—no matter what it is—says something about the kind of man he is.” I interpreted this as Nestor, who made different decisions than Efrain and Chingy, is also intelligent and has knowledge to share and give. Was this intentional?

Absolutely! I always had a clear vision of the kind of young man Nestor was, and that was the scene where he went from being a collection of traits, opinions and experiences in my notes into a fully dimensional character. One of the biggest mistakes we make as a society is that we write off the corner boys and ‘hood chicks. Not all of them do what they do because they aren’t intelligent enough to do otherwise. Many of them are quite intelligent – they have to be in order to survive – and the real tragedy lies in the socioeconomic circumstances that diminish their life choices. There are also different types of intelligence. Nestor’s EQ – his emotional intelligence quotient – is off the charts, and he deserves respect and love for that. When it comes to being self-aware and managing relationships, no one else in the novel can touch him. Under different circumstances, Nestor had the natural abilities to become an excellent businessman, social worker, community organizer, and, yes, husband and father.

You’ve been asked in the past about the use of the n-word by the characters in your hip-hop fiction novels; especially its use by Latino and Caribbean characters. You mention it here when Efrain and Nestor have a double date with Candace and GiGi. How did you choose to have Candace come to the decision about the words use?

The use of the n-word is always tricky for me as are any slurs. There is such a fine line between keeping it real and keeping it right. I agree with artists like Aaron McGruder who once said that it’s difficult to write “around” the n-word. Speaking for myself, it does feel false to not use it in certain stories because, like it or not, people use it for whatever reasons that they do. That said, it also feels false to use it gratuitously. After all, not everyone uses it, and those folks aren’t more or less authentic than those who do use it. So it’s important to me when I have a character who uses it to provide a counterweight via a character that does not. Being an African-American girl who survived Hurricane Katrina and continues to endure the racist neglect of its aftermath, Candace seemed like a fitting character to be that counterweight. One of the regrets that I have with Efrain’s Secret now that it’s published is that I did not provide a similar counterweight with the homophobic remark. Even though they are rare – used far less than they actually are given the context in which they are used – I still wish I had some character take issue even in a small way. If I could rewrite it again, I’d do that. I’ve been toying with the idea for another YA novel where I can make that up to the queer community.

You shout out The Bronx Defenders in the book. Why did you choose to have them represented?

While researching the legal aspects of this story, an attorney for the Bronx Defenders named Leana Amaez was very generous with her time and knowledge. But I knew to call the Bronx Defenders to see if someone there could answer my questions because I have met people who work for them and know they are a great organization. I could have made up the name of an organization, but what if I have a reader for whom this group will be a critical resource? As an activist, I know many wonderful organizations across the country and wish I could give them all a shout out in one story or another so that folks become aware of their existence. I have a lot more writing to do!

A part of Efrain’s story is about his interaction with a father who is not present yet tries to be later in his life. In many ways I see this as Efrain coping multiple things about his family: what does family mean? How does he define family? Etc. Will you talk a little about what challenges you chose to portray for him as he interacted with a “blended” family formation?

Family structures like Efrain’s common. Sadly, too many result for the same reason as Efrain’s family: a father’s infidelity. I wanted to explore how it might impact a boy’s sense of family, masculinity, etc. when he has been sold the traditional family structure only (1) to have it and all its benefits taken away from him and (2) to have that disruption justified as a man’s prerogative i.e. for the fulfillment of temporary sexual needs to override any emotional and financial commitments he has made to a woman and the children he has had with her. Efrain’s “blended” family results from his father’s repeated betrayal of his marital vows, and what bothers Efrain as much as the choices his father made is the rationale he gives for womanizing. If Efrain had his initial way, the two families never would have been blended or at least not under those circumstances. He’s a young man who believes that family is important which is why he feels betrayed on multiple levels by his father’s actions. Yet he is also a very compassionate boy who prides himself on having more integrity and sensitivity than his father. So on the one hand, Efrain resents that Rubio began another family (and in the way that he did) as if he did not already have one. On the other hand, having been a child who has suffered from those actions, Efrain could not bring himself to hold his father’s behavior against the other children once he meets them. This is why he avoided them for so long. He had resolved to steel his heart against Rubio’s attempts to remain a father to him, and in order to maintain that posture, he had to see the other family as “them” instead of “us” which is the way his younger sister Amanda views them. His views are further complicated by his exposure to Nestor’s family who in some ways is similar to Efrain’s family and, in fundamental ways, is quite different. And so does Chingy’s family to a lesser, more subtle extent. Chingy comes from a two-parent, dual-income, middle-class household with the emotional and material advantages that offers. Now if Rubio had been a faithful husband and had started a new family some time after he divorced Dolores, would Efrain still have had the same resentments toward him? What if Rubio had been more affluent and had enough money to send Efrain to college? Would Efrain have been less resentful of his father then, regardless of whether his parents split over Rubio’s infidelity? As the writer, I have my thoughts about it, but I will let readers decide that for themselves.

The book is called Efrain’s Secret, yet I think Efrain has a lot of secrets. Will you talk a bit about how those secrets impact him from your perspective?

You’re absolutely right that Efrain has many secrets, some of which he is not aware at the beginning of the novel. The deliberate choice he makes to have one particular secret eventually forces him to come to terms with all those other secrets. All of Efrain’s secrets prevent him from being whole. They are not the kind of secrets that one can keep if one is to have an healthy, intimate relationship to one’s self. On the contrary, they are the kind of secrets that are maintained by lying to oneself which inevitably leads to lying to others and keeping those relationships from being as healthy as possible as well. In one of my adult novels Picture Me Rollin’, I quote bell hook’s All About Love where she writes that patriarchy teaches men that to be honest is to be soft. One of the things I hoped to explore with Efrain’s Secret is how that socialization is damaging to boys and why it is necessary for them and all who care about them to heal that.

The last 1/3 of the book produced so much anxiety for me I had to stop reading right before going to bed! The ending was unexpected and it kind of made me sad, although not a negative outcome for the main characters. Will you share why you chose this ending for Efrain?

How do I talk about this without giving it away? It is a bittersweet ending because even though Efrain rights his relationship to everyone he loves and as well as with himself, it is at multiple and tremendous costs. There had to be consequences for his choices. Realistic consequences. That is what the story demanded, and as a writer, I have to stay true to that. By the same token, I wanted there to be hope for Efrain. As an activist and educator, I needed to be able to give that to my readers who may see themselves or someone they love in Efrain. An ending that reconciles those two demands cannot help but be sad even if not negative.

How have young men of color who have read your book responded?

The book was just released so I’m still waiting for feedback from any young person. All the feedback that I have received so far has been very positive, but it has all come from adults. I did want Efrain’s Secret to be appreciated by adult readers so hopefully the primary intended audience will like it as well.

21. In your Acknowledgements you thank “the brothers of the Urban Assembly Academy of History and Citizenship for Young Men” will you share how they helped you with this text?

I met them and their teacher Chris Slaughter at a Black History Month event at Penguin Books which had published all my Black Artemis novels to date. I did a short workshop for the staff on hip-hop literature and the young men of Urban Assembly were reading their poetry. When I began working on Efrain’s Secret, I reached out to Chris – who is a fierce poet in his own right and goes by Pohetic – and asked if his students might be interested in helping me workshop the manuscript. After they had read the second or third draft, I went to their school and held a focus group to gather their feedback on just about everything – characters, plot, slang. Of course, there was one suggestion that I didn’t take and that was to change Efrain’s name to one of theirs. I wasn’t going to get myself into trouble by playing favorites.