By Arturo R. García

Dwayne McDuffie left a lasting legacy on the world of comics that many writers can only aspire to. He will not only be remembered as the extremely gifted writer whose scripts have been realized as comic books, in television shows and on the silver screen, but as the creator or co-creator of so many of the much-loved Milestone characters, including Static Shock. The industry has lost a true talent.

- Dan DiDio, co-publisher, DC Comics, Feb. 22, 2011

This June, Felicia Henderson, Denys Cowan, Prentis Rollings, Eric Battle, John Rozum, Matt Wayne, John Paul Leon and others will contribute to a STATIC SHOCK Special, with a cover by JH Williams III.

This Special is our way of acknowledging the industry’s loss. It is not a tribute comic intended to raise proceeds for charity.

We regret if there was any confusion regarding our intentions caused by the solicitation of this project.

- DC Comics statement, March 16, 2011

The short answer is, DC Comics doesn’t have to do anything to honor Dwayne McDuffie, who suddenly passed away last month. But the disconnect between the two statments above show that, even if the company’s intentions are good, its’ approach in this case came off as tone-deaf.

Word about the special issue got out this week following this tweet from comic-book artist Tommy Lee Edwards, which was picked up by David Brothers at 4th Letter:

Two days later, statements from McDuffie’s family and Milestone Media President Derek T. Dingle were posted on McDuffie’s website:

From Dwayne McDuffie’s family-

Dwayne’s family would like to publicly thank DC Comics for their plans to publish a special homage issue to Dwayne – STATIC SHOCK SPECIAL. Not only is it a kind gesture, but we feel it is a fitting tribute to Dwayne’s memory and his legacy.

While some have questioned DC’s motives or actions, Dwayne’s family does not share those sentiments.

Dwayne’s family supports the project.

We want to thank Dwayne’s friends who are contributing their skills to the project, Dwayne’s fans for their support over the years, and the editors and management at DC Comics. Dwayne was extremely proud of the Milestone line. We look forward to the comic and many more DC Comics featuring the Milestone characters.

…

From Derek T. Dingle-

As President of Milestone Media, I thank DC Comics for initiating the development of Static Shock Special #1 to recognize and celebrate the extraordinary work of Dwayne McDuffie. We are honored to have the assemblage of so many creators and colleagues that he worked with and, in some cases, mentored, to serve as contributors. We look forward to the release of Static Shock Special #1 and our ongoing relationship with DC Comics with the creation of future titles featuring the Milestone characters.

The fact that McDuffie’s family and collaborators are behind the project is somewhat reassuring; since he created Static, one would presume McDuffie’s estate would receive royalties every time the character is used. But when placed in the context of how DC treated the writer in the past – the promised and nearly-discarded integration of the Milestone characters into the “proper” DC Comics universe; his firing from the Justice League of America book for daring to speak out about his creative frustrations; the company’s subsequent white-washing of that book’s cast; and the micro-managing and cover-altering of his Milestone Forever mini-series – while continuing to cite his name in defense of diversity … I don’t know Dan DiDio enough to question his intentions. But I’ve read enough about the comics business over the past few years to believe Brothers when he cites “Industry Rule 4080″: Record company people are shady.

By Arturo R. García

The main character and narrator of the story. Katniss is slender with black hair, grey eyes and olive skin. She is sixteen years old and attends a secondary school somewhere in Appalachia, known in the book as District 12, the coal mining sector. She is often quiet and is generally liked by District 12′s residents, mostly because of her ability to provide highly-prized game for a community in which starvation is a constant threat. Katniss is an excellent hunter, archer, gatherer, and trapper, skilled just like her deceased father. She and her father shared singing ability, too. Since his death in a mine explosion, which killed Gale’s father too, Katniss has been the sole provider for her family, a role she was reluctantly forced to assume at the age of eleven when her mother’s grief overcame her ability to function. Katniss is surprised when her sister is chosen to compete in the Hunger Games, and willingly steps forward to take her place out of love.

- Character profile for Katniss Everdeen, via Goodreads

Does that description – more specifically, that physical description – sound like it matches Jennifer Lawrence, pictured above?

Only in Hollywood.

It was announced yesterday that Lawrence, coming off an Academy Awards nomination for Winter’s bone, had been chosen to play Katniss in a film adaptation of The Hunger Games, the first story in a three-book series that sees the character become a folk heroine, then a revolutionary leader, in a post-apocalyptic North America.

According to Racebending.com, Katniss’ skin tone is of specific interest to her character’s backstory: she shares that description with other residents of The Seam, an impoverished area in the Appalachian district where she lives. Among them is her father, a mixed-race miner. By comparison, her mother and sister stand out in the community of the Seam precisely because they are blonde and white-skinned. Which makes Racebending’s conclusion nothing short of accurate:

Given this story takes place hundreds of years into the future, Katniss is almost definitely of mixed ethnicity–making her one of very few protagonists in young adult fiction who would be considered biracial or multi-ethnic by “real world” standards.

Of course, as Marissa Lee notes, Paramount Pictures, which is financing the film, stacked the casting deck right off the bat, saying candidates for the role, “‘should be Caucasian, between ages 15 and 20, who could portray someone ‘underfed but strong,’ and ‘naturally pretty underneath her tomboyishness.’”

Director Gary Ross justified the choice to Entertainment Weekly by saying the series’ author, Suzanne Collins, gave him her blessing:

Suzanne had no issues with Jen playing the role. And she thought there was a tremendous amount of flexibility. It wasn’t doctrine to her. Jen will have dark hair in the role, but that’s something movies can easily achieve. [Laughs] I promise all the avid fans of The Hunger Games that we can easily deal with Jennifer’s hair color.

Whether the series’ fans respond as positively has yet to be seen. If Paramount and Ross aren’t careful, they might have another Airbender mess on their hands.

Meanwhile, the updated version of Red Dawn, the 1984 action-cult “classic” is getting another update, this time behind the scenes: The Los Angeles Times reported that the remake, which was to feature China as the invading force in place of the original Soviet Union, will now cast China as a smaller player in a coalition led by North Korea, with digital trickery being used to minimize the Chinese threat.

But don’t go thinking this decision is based on an outpouring of sympathy toward the Chinese people by MGM. The studio, which has had the film on the shelf while sorting its’ financial affairs, is hoping the switch will make the new Dawn easier to sell in the increasingly-important Chinese film market:

A number of Hollywood studios are deepening their business ties to the world’s most populous nation. Disney is building a theme park outside Shanghai, Sony Pictures co-produced the recent “Karate Kid” remake with the government-affiliated China Film Group, and News Corp.‘s Fox International Productions recently made the Chinese-language hit “Hot Summer Days” there. Even independent studios like Lionsgate and Summit Entertainment will release their films “Killers” and “Red” in China in coming months.

Dan Mintz, whose DMG Entertainment is a leading producer and distributor of movies in China, said the “Red Dawn” story dramatizes how Western companies can fundamentally misunderstand how the nation works. If the picture had gone out without redacting the Chinese invaders, he said, “there would have been a real backlash. It’s like being invited to a dinner party and insulting the host all night long. There’s no way to look good…. The film itself was not a smart move.”

Mintz, who met with the producers of “Red Dawn” to offer some suggestions on how they could proceed, said that doing business in China requires a partnership approach. “The more you reach out, the better your relationships will be,” Mintz said. “This is bigger than a single film.”

So, a movie about Communist invaders is being edited so as to not offend a Communist nation. Instead of WOLVERIIINES, maybe the battle cry in the remake should be IRONYYYYYYYY!

Top image courtesy of Celebrity Pictures

By Guest Contributor Yvonne Yen Liu, cross-posted from Colorlines

Juan Baten came to this country from Guatemala seven years ago in search of a better life. A bus in Cabral, Guatemala, hit his father so Baten left home at the age of 15, to make the journey north. He made his way to Brooklyn, N.Y., where he found work in a tortilla factory in an industrial corridor along the Brooklyn-Queens border. He worked six days a week, nine hours a day, from five in the evening until two in the morning, operating the machines that churned out tortillas. The $7.25 per hour he earned was sent back to his family in Guatemala, supporting his four brothers.

Baten also found love. Seven months ago, his common law wife Rosario Ramirez gave birth to daughter, Daisy Stefanie. They dreamed of a day when they could move their family back to Guatemala.

However, one Sunday, Baten’s arm got stuck in the blades of a dough-mixing machine and he was crushed to death. The 22-year-old dad’s story splashed across the pages of the New York tabloids, and his death led to investigations by the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration and state Department of Labor. The Workers Compensation Board discovered that the factory owner was not offering worker’s compensation to his employees and issued a stop-work order. The factory is now closed, pending payment of insurance and fines by the owner, according to news reports.

Daniel Gross, executive director of Brandworkers International, noted in response to the case that the workers at the tortilla factory were not organized into a union. Neither had the facilities ever been inspected by OSHA prior to Baten’s tragic death. Many more questions remain unanswered: Were Baten and his colleagues adequately trained to use the dangerous food machines safely? Were they given breaks during their graveyard shift? What access to health care did Baten have to ease the fatigue he undoubtedly experienced from working six days a week?

But what we do know is that Baten’s workplace wasn’t unique. Workers suffer from low wages and hazardous working conditions throughout the food chain.

Rinku Sen wrote this week about a series of studies released on Valentine’s Day by the Restaurant Opportunities Center United. The studies describe the conditions for restaurant workers in Washington, D.C., Los Angeles, and Miami. The service and retail sector of the food system pays the lowest wages; restaurant workers earn an average of $15,000 a year and nine out of ten workers lack employer-sponsored health insurance, according to the studies. And workers are forced to labor when sick, therefore further endangering their health and that of the food consumers, too.

The studies reinforce findings from new research by the Applied Research Center, Colorlines.com’s publisher. We recently embarked on a broad survey of the food system, to map out the race, gender and class of workers along the supply chain. Our findings, detailed in the new report “The Color of Food,” were sadly not surprising.

People of color typically make less than whites working in the food chain. Half of white food workers earn $25,024 a year, while workers of color make $5,675 less than that. This wage gap plays out in all four sectors of the food system—production, processing, distribution and service—with largest income divides occurring in the food processing and distribution sectors. Women working in the food chain draw further penalties in wages, especially women of color. For every dollar a white male worker earns, women of color earn almost half of that.

Few people of color hold management positions in the food system. Whites dominate high-wage professional and management occupations; three out of every four managers in the food system are white. Almost half of white men working in the food chain were employed as managers, while less than 10 percent of workers of color held comparable positions.

People of color are concentrated in low-wage jobs in the food chain. According to the 2008 Census, people of color make up 34.6 percent of the population (that percentage is expected to rise as 2010 Census data becomes available). But workers of color are represented at a level almost one and a half times that in sectors of the food chain. For instance, 50 percent of food production workers are people of color. This includes farm workers, 65 percent of whom are Latino.

Great advances have been made to ensure that our food is locally sourced and sustainably grown. Communities of color across the nation are taking food production in their hands, by converting abandoned lots in urban deserts into fertile, urban farms and gardens. But a movement for food justice must also encompass the food workers that currently toil in sweatshop-like conditions, the often-invisible labor that help bring our food to the table.

By Guest Contributor Aymar Jean Christian, cross-posted from Televisual

Note: To see Part 1, which featured a breakdown of several of the box-office performances of several leading black actresses, go here.

III. The State Of The Black Leading Lady

It’s hard to be a woman in Hollywood. It’s hard to be black in Hollywood. So, obviously, it stands to reason it’s hard to be a black woman. It can be boring to hear — “black women have it tough, huh, what else is new?” — but it’s true!

One good place to start is New York‘s new “Star Market,” which is a great resource for people wanting to know more about how stars are made and unmade by the throngs of publicists, casting directors, producers and studio execs in Hollywood. One theme from the feature rings clear: it’s much tougher for women. The 2000s haven’t been bad to black actors and actresses: stars like Will Smith and Queen Latifah rose in power; 22 actors and actresses were nominated for and 7 won Academy Awards — in the previous 70 years, only 36 had been nominated and 6 had won. But the overall picture for black women is less rosy than for their male counterparts: most black-led independent and mainstream films are centered on men.

It’s hard to assign blame. Surely, the industry’s partially at fault: too few black/women directors, screenwriters, people above/below the line. But the industry also responds to what America wants, and year after year, movies led by white/men top the box office. Every once in awhile, something shakes the conventional wisdom — Sex and the City, or films by Sandra Bullock , Tyler Perry and Will Smith — but the conventional wisdom more or less remains because Hollywood is congenitally cautious. Once again, who’s to blame? Most films fail, and job security is hard to come by, so how much can we blame industry workers for not taking risks? I don’t know. Let’s talk about it.

Nevertheless, a small group of black women have been given a chance and few have proven themselves marketable; many of them — six on this list — have Oscar wins and nominations. None of them can touch $4 billion Will Smith, but a number can pull in audiences. We’ve come a very long way, but we have a long way to go!

IV. How I Went About It

How do you measure star power? There are many ways to do it. For the black actress, so often overlooked, the issue of measuring value is particularly acute. I wanted to come up with a way that honored the diversity of roles these actors played that still highlighted the imbalances in the industry. Hence the focus on “leading” roles, and the downplaying of other factors — like salary, box office gross and average production and marketing budget (which are the real industry standards).

Most black actresses do not get to play leading roles, even fewer get leading roles in blockbuster films. For this reason, I thought it was important to count equally roles in independent, art-house and blockbuster films — so a leading role in a Tyler Perry film counts as much as a leading role in a Michael Mann film. Even still, most of the women on the list, nine out of fifteen, spent most of their time not in a leading role. Even some of those with scores over 50% have to be qualified: Beyoncé Knowles, Jennifer Hudson and Mariah Carey do not work that often, nor is acting their primary profession.

I started counting what films each actor had been in, relying on IMDB Pro. I also tracked the budget and gross of each film using BoxOfficeMojo and IMDB Pro — and of course information on either wasn’t always available.

I categorized the actor’s role in each film based on five “types:” Leading Lady, Best Friend, Mother/Family, Love Interest and Professional.

Leading Lady – Integral to or featured in the marketing of the film. The character has a back-story or is integral to the plot.
Best Friend – A character who is a friend, confidant, or villain who is there only to serve emotional fulfillment on main character.
Mother/Family – Mother or family. Includes “mammy” and “strong ghetto mother” types: a maternal figure or a guide of some sort, there to emotional/psychologically fulfill leads.
Love Interest – A character who is there as love interest to fulfill romantic, sexual needs primarily of the lead or other major character.
Professional - A character who is valuable primarily for their expertise or profession, intended to further the plot and journey of the protagonist.

Basically a “leading lady” could be any one of those types, or a character without any specific type, but the crucial aspect was the actor’s role in the film’s marketing, prominence in an ensemble cast, or being the integral attraction in the film.  This is not to diminish the importance of supporting roles, which are some of the best parts, but if we’re invested in creating stars, the fact is that stars lead. So I gave Mo’Nique a “leading lady” for Precious, because her performance basically sold the film, IMHO. Queen Latifah’s role in Valentine’s Day too counted as leading lady, because she was a big star in a big cast. But Halle Berry didn’t get an LL for X-Men (I’d say the franchise, plus Hugh Jackman, Patrick Stewart and Anna Paquin really sold the films). In the end, all this is subjective, so feel free to disagree and change my mind!

I should say that the original list was much, much longer. I started by generating a list of actors in film and television who have worked or been buzzed about for about throughout the 1990s and 2000s. That list got to about 40 actors. Too long! So then I decided to focus on film, where there’s more money and a higher profile, and to limit it to the 2000s, for the sake of my sanity. That led me to the 15 actors above. Missing from this list are whole bunch of actresses who either a) did most of their work in 1990s; b) mostly do television; c) are, sadly, too old to really deliver films anymore; d) don’t work consistently. Some of them, however, could still be huge, or are huge in their own right, but I’m only one person!

The actresses I did not look at for time and other constraints: Anika Noni Rose; Jill Scott; Jada Pinkett-Smith; Paula Patton; Alicia Keys; Janet Jackson; Angela Bassett; Vivica A Fox; Tia and Tamera Mowry; Kimberly Elise; Raven-Symoné; Lisa Bonet; Regina King; Janet Jackson; Robin Givens; Whitney Houston; Aisha Tyler; Lynn Whitfield; Ruby Dee; Vanessa Williams; Alfre Woodard; Phylicia Rashad; Sherri Shepherd; Audra McDonald; Loretta Devine; Gabourey Sidibe.

By Arturo R. García

Soledad O’Brien and Almighty Debt come closest to the program’s stated goal toward the end, when she asks Pastor DeForest “Buster” Soaries if he “pulled strings” to help one of his parishoners, Fred Philp, get into college, leading to this exchange:

Soaries: I picked up the phone to make sure that nothing got lost in the sauce and that Fred didn’t fall between the cracks.
O’Brien: What’s that mean, “lost in the sauce”?
Soaries: well, Fred was not your classic college applicant, and he was not heavily sought after in colleges. He had academic challenges, financial challenges, and I didn’t want to trust his high school counselors to be his primary advocates. And so when I heard that Fred was having some difficulty with the college of his choice, I thought it probably would help if I let the president know that Fred is with me.

Unfortunately, aside from that sequence and a couple of other statements later in the show, the issue is ignored. The irony of her church-oriented report is, the devil isn’t in the details – it’s in the lack thereof.

Though O’Brien’s latest Black In America special is, supposed to be another “conversation-starter” piece, she spends most of her time derailing her own story. In the opening seconds, she declares African-Americans to be “the most religious group in the United States”  and the (Christian) church to be “the soul of black life in the United States.” It’s possible she’s alluding to studies of church attendance by race, like this one, or attempting to explain her approach to the story, but these statements, bereft of context or even sourcing, come off as bombastic.

The show’s biggest misstep is ignoring almost everything that is particular about the situation to the community; we get snippets of commentary regarding the misuse of programs like the G.I. Bill to exclude African-Americans from greater participation in the housing market, but otherwise, experts like Dr. Melvin Oliver of UC Santa Barbara (Black Wealth/White Wealth) and Bennett College president Dr. Julianne Malveaux make all-too-brief appearances. In one infuriating moment, Dr. Malveaux is explaining the principle of generational accumulation of wealth when O’Brien tries to finish her sentence for her, bogging down the rest of the clip.

Instead, O’Brien takes the viewer through the stories various members of the congregation at First Baptist Church of Lincoln Gardens, New Jersey, led by Soaries, a former New Jersey Secretary of State.

Though the people profiled here are sympathetic, and, as author Terrie Williams points out late in the show, courageous for allowing themselves to be seen in the midst of their struggles, O’Brien – as she did in the Latino In America mini-series – neglects to ask them crucial questions:

• Why would the Jeffries, upper-middle class by profession if not earnings before the recession affected them, seemingly wait two years before calling on the church’s foreclosure-prevention program?
• What makes them and their daughter think they’re going to be able to pay for her to attend Georgetown or Princeton or any of her other “dream schools”?
• Has Carl Fields, seen with a stack of hundreds of applications, considered freelancing or temporary employment to supplement his regular job search?
• And why is young Fred relying more on the church’s youth minister in his ill-defined quest to attend Kean University, when his school guidance counselor could tell him “his C grades” – as described almost derisively by O’Brien – would probably be good enough to get him into a junior college, where he could continue his education with far less pressure and debt than at a four-year university?
• Furthermore, why would his pastor distrust professional educators, who might have agreed with him that Fred would have to get a job and take out student loans to afford to study at Kean?

As the program’s narrative portion closes, by which point we see Soaries step in to help Fields meet with potential employers and attempt to act as a surrogate landlord for the Jeffries, O’Brien declares that he’s been doing what the church has been doing for decades. But, again, without much of any historical sourcing over the preceding hour, other than the requisite MLK images, O’Brien lets the matter drop.

Soaries is also featured during the show-closing “town hall” question, but it’s telling that no economists are included in the discussion; neither are educators Malveaux and Oliver. Instead, he’s joined by Bishop T.D. Jakes, leader of The Potter’s House in Dallas, along with Williams, Washington Post columnist Michelle Singletary and Democratic pollster Cornell Belcher, who contributes nothing of note. Frankly, O’Brien squanders another opportunity to ask some good questions of both Soaries and Jakes:

• Do they both “make calls” to make sure everyone who asks doesn’t get “lost in the sauce”?
• Is it ethical of them to use their position as leverage in a case like Fred’s? What if he can’t handle the strain?
• Will their churches use their membership and economic resources as recruitment tools?
• What if they each find themselves “making calls” on behalf of students applying to the same school?

It’s fitting to learn on Halloween week that O’Brien’s next project will be called Muslim In America. Because given her history, that’s a legitimately scary prospect.

By Guest Contributor Rob Fields, cross-posted from Black As Love

It was close to a year ago when I started research that would begin to answer the question, “so, who exactly is the audience for black rock?”  Of course, the unspoken part of that question was the assumption that this was and continues to be, something fringe.  But we know that’s hardly the case.  In fact, the audience for black rock and black alternative music is growing, and that growth is powered by an ongoing cultural shift.

I won’t bore you with the demographic recap of those who took the survey (50/50 male/female split; 76% African American), as you can read it in the executive summary below.  What’s most interesting to me is the psychographic—or attitudinal stuff—that the research uncovered.  After all, attitudes drive actions.

These attitudes are important to note for another reason: It speaks to the need/opportunity for broader institutional and, yes, corporate, support for black rock and black alternative music.  There’s still the belief out there that

1. Black folks are monolithic and;
2. We can all be reached by using hip hop.

The first supposition has never been true.  As for the second, hip hop, particularly in its commercial form, is easily a shadow of what it could have been.  Moreover, by virtue of its inclination for entertainment over substance, it has abdicated any right to say that it’s representative of black folks.

Anyway, here are 6  key attitudes–culled from 316 fully completed surveys–that put you in the headspace of those who are into black rock and black alt music & culture:

• Highly individual. 63% indicate that expressing your individuality takes precedence over allegiance to group identity.
• No need for commercial radio. 78% say the time you spend listening to commercial radio has decreased over the past two years.

• You seek artists who break the mold. Nearly 90% of you say that you at least often seek out black artists who defy convention.  Over half of you do on a consistent basis.

• Music buying.  Contrary to conventional wisdom that people are mostly buying singles, over 60% tend to purchase whole albums. Nearly 40% of you spend between $11-$30 each month on music.

• Feelings about hip hop. Nearly 74% of the overall respondents and 77% who identified yourselves as African American say that your feelings about hip hop have become indifferent or more negative.

• What you’re listening to. The chart below speaks for itself, but here are the key points: 73% say that the amount of hip hop you’re listening to has decreased over the past two years. 52% say the same about R&B. There’s an increase in black rock and world music (70% and 46%, respectively).

Finally, some context before you jump into the executive summary: I wrote it with an audience of marketing professionals in mind, especially those who are already using music to build their brands.  I’m currently developing a few Boldaslove.us initiatives for 2011, and those need corporate support.  The bottom line: Supporting the further growth of this community makes good business sense for any number of companies.

You can view, print or download the entire executive summary here: Black Rock Music and the Emerging Urban Mindset

I am living in Toronto for the summer, where the press is going wild over a local case of sympathy-fraud:

Ashley Anne Kirilow, a 23-year-old Burlington native, admits she faked cancer, ran a bogus charity and collected thousands of dollars from hundreds of people. She shaved her head and eyebrows, plucked her eyelashes and starved herself to look like a chemotherapy patient. She told anyone she met she had been disowned by drug-addicted parents, or that they were dead. Both parents are alive and well, each in separate marriages with three young children… While volunteers claim she raised $20,000, she said it was less than $5,000.

Since this newspiece a fourth fraud charge has been added to Kirilow’s list.

Kirilow is young, thin, sweet-faced and white: over the year that she convinced people to donate money to her cancer cause, she was given trips to Disneyworld and took a paradise trip to Australia; she is alternately described as an angel and a princess.

When I first saw this news case, I thought to myself (yes, rather cynically): there is no way that anyone other than a young, attractive, normative person could have pulled this off. If Kirilow had been—for example—fat, in her 30s, plain-looking and homeless, few would’ve given her the time of day. Much of Kirilow’s success seems attributed to the fact that she easily roused pity with her little lost girl story and her brave smile. Kirilow embodied a version of white womanhood that we want to believe in (or at least we’ve been socially conditioned to embrace it): pretty, plucky, determined, and in need of rescue.

Kirilow is a prime example of a sympathy grifter: a grifter who uses racist/sexist/classist/etc beliefs in their favor, to get money, affection and attention, or to (literally) get away with murder.

While Kirilow’s case has only covert markings of the way that biases around race, culture and gender enable fraud, another highly publicised “it wasn’t me!” case from a few years back was more overt: Belgian teenager Kimberley Vlaminck accused her tattoo artist, Rouslan Toumaniantz, of putting 56 stars on her face without her permission. The case got a huge amount of press which only escalated when it came out that Vlaminck had lied; all along she had requested the stars. This is the twist to this case:

The Belgian [Vlaminck] blamed the Flemish-speaking tattooist for not being able to understand her French and English instructions.

There has long been tension in Belgium between French and Flemish-speaking communities in Belgium: in other words, Vlaminck appealed to linguistic tensions to rouse sympathy for the fact that she’d had 56 stars tattooed on her face “against her will.”

And another sympathy grifter—Amanda Knox, an American student who was convicted of murder in Italy—deconstructed by my fellow Racialicious blogger Nadra Kareem:

I’ve no idea if Amanda Knox is innocent or guilty of the charges leveled at her—a jury’s already deemed her the latter—but some American journalists decided that she was innocent long before a verdict was reached. What’s disturbing about some of these journalists is that Knox’s race, gender and class background played central roles in why they considered her innocent…

While waiting to be interrogated, Knox reportedly did cartwheels. [American journalist Timothy] Egan chalks this up to Knox being an athlete. But if Donovan McNabb or LeBron James were being investigated for murder and did cartwheels during an interrogation, would their behavior be taken as that of a benign athlete or make them look unfeeling and flippant? Egan attempts to undermine Italy by making it appear as if sinister Italians were angling to punish this girl who not only reminds him of numerous girls from the Pacific Northwest but also of his own daughter…

…The problematic racial overtones in the reporting of the case not only involve Italians but black men. Following her November 2007 arrest, Knox wrote to police that bar owner Patrick Lumumba killed Kercher…Because of Knox’s repeated insinuations that Lumumba murdered Kercher, he spent two weeks in jail. Police ended up releasing him because he had a solid alibi. Lumumba sued Knox for defamation and won.

While Egan has mentioned that Knox mistakenly linked Lumumba to Kercher’s murder, he quickly let her off the hook for it, as did a commenter at women’s Web site Jezebel who remarked:“I don’t judge her for that at all. She was held in an Italian prison, questioned for days, and encouraged to ‘confess.’”

But to ignore Knox’s transgression on this front is to ignore the history of sympathetic (but guilty) white Americans fingering black men for crimes the men never committed. In 1989, for instance, Charles Stuart shot and killed his pregnant wife, Carol, but told police that a black man was responsible. Two years later, Susan Smith murdered her young sons but told police initially that a black man had carjacked her and kidnapped the boys.

A sympathy grifter succeeds (at least temporarily, since Kirilow, Vlaminck and Knox were all eventually caught in their lies) by using and fulfilling “positive stereotypes.”

A “positive stereotype” is any generalized belief about your gender, race, ethnic, class etc group that is positive, rather than negative. So for example, both the beliefs that Asians are intrinsically spiritual, (please see the Buddha of Suburbia) or that white women are docile, are positive stereotypes. I put quotes around “positive stereotype” because it is an an oxymoron to me, in that it is never positive to have a stereotype applied to you; whether a stereotype suggests something pleasant or unpleasant, it is a vast generalization that dehumanizes you and ignores who you are as a person.

There’s a huge range of people for whom sympathy grifting is just not possible: those for whom primarily “negative stereotypes” exist. It is fairly unusual for a young man of color to get away with sympathy grifting, since our cultural stereotype of young men of color is that they are violent and criminal. There are exceptions to this; for example David Hampton, the young gay black man that the the movie Six Degrees of Separation is based on.

While sympathy grifters then, more often than not, are young white women, Korean American Kari Ferrell—also known as the hipster grifter—hit the news pretty hard last year after scamming a total of $60,000 off of suitors and admirers, largely by fulfilling every hipster yellow fever wet dream across the Eastern Seaboard and beyond. Google her even now, you’ll find naked pictures of her on hipster news sites labelled AZN p****. On second thought, don’t google her.

Because a “positive stereotype”  is complete nonsense, a lie, it makes an excellent scaffolding for a web of lies. And while I have zero sympathy for Kirilow, Vlaminck, Knox, and Ferrell, I am fascinated by how they managed to turn stereotypes that delimited them, into weapons. A bizarre byproduct of each of these strange and sad cases is that all these women consciously or not (I’m going to go with not) punished their advocates for having preconceived cultural notions; their notions made them dupe-able.

While these women’s successes must have relied heavily on personal magnetism, I really cannot believe they would’ve gotten as far without the fuel of stereotype.

Just one more reason to dismantle the kyriarchy.

By Guest Contributor Aymar Jean Christian, cross-posted from Televisual

Watching the previews for Salt, I had what appears to be a common experience. The trailer for an elevator-themed film came on. It seemed strange: what is this movie? What’s it about? My confusion grew into clarity when the words “From the Mind of M. Night Shyamalan” preceding the title Devil came on the big screen. I sighed, recognizing the trademark “things are not as they appear” quality to the trailer. The rest of the audience, however, groaned.

Groaning at the sight Shyamalan’s name has been reported from screening to screening. The phrase “box office poison” is now repeatedly being associated with the director’s name. Shyamalan is only credited as creating the story for Devil, but already people are asking if the film can redeem his credibility. Shyamalan has hit a nadir, causing people to question his career and brand him a failure, a has-been riding off The Sixth Sense. My question: is it true?

First let me say I’m not really Shyamalan fan. His genre is not one I regularly frequent at the theater and I’ve only seen a few of his films (the early ones).

There are at least two ways to examine a filmmaker’s success: critically and commercially. Critically, it’s near incontrovertible: Shyamalan is not doing too well. Consider the graph showing the writer-director’s steadily declining reviews since the acclaimed Sixth Sense. They are bad.

But we have to ask the question: if Shyamalan’s films are so bad then how does he consistently get funding to make them? The answer must be in his box office receipts.

Hollywood accounting is complex, to say the least, and really all the numbers industry outsiders have are suspect and basically guesses. But judging from what we have, it’s clear Shyamalan is hardly box office poison — yet. Instead, it seems his early successes have bought him some leeway for a few recent misses, suggesting he doesn’t have a lot of wiggle room in the future, but it’s not irrational he keeps getting big budget projects.

Using BoxOfficeMojo, Wikipedia and other random web sources, here’s what I’ve gathered about Shyamalan’s past pics. I have estimated production budgets for each, but I’m missing distribution and marketing for many.

The Last Airbender (2010): $280 million to make and market; $150 million gross so far.
The Happening (2008)  – $57 million to make ($70 million to market?), $163 million gross
Lady in the Water (2006) – $150 million to make and market, $72 million gross
The Village (2004)  – $71 million to make, $256 million gross
Signs (2002)  – $72 million to make, $400 million gross
Unbreakable (2000) – $73 million to make, $248 million gross
Sixth Sense (1999) – $40 million to make, $672 million gross

Let’s assume, reasonably I think, that the distribution and marketing for Sixth Sense, Unbreakable, Signs, Village and Happening came in on average at 100% of production (consistent with what we know from Lady in the Water and Last Airbender, though it may be an over/underestimation depending on the film).

With that assumption, a more complicated picture emerges. Five out of seven of Shyamalan’s movies have been successful, and his earlier films — especially Signs and Sixth Sense — were undeniable global blockbusters.

I could be wrong, of course, very wrong. I’m making a lot of assumptions. Certainly Airbender is a huge bomb, and his most expensive bomb to date. Lady in the Water was a failure and The Happening failed to make any meaningful mark. These three facts explain the “Shyamalan is box office poison” thinking at the moment. To be sure, when audiences recoil at the mention of your name, your career is not headed in the right direction.

What this also might suggest, however, is the bar for a Shyamalan comeback might be considerably lower than critics and journalists may think. One more big hit could easily restore faith in the director.

Shyamalan has a number of projects in development at the moment. I’m sure he feels the pressure. His mojo is gone, but not yet ancient history.

Please note, this is part five of a multi-part series on the Lifting As We Climb: Women of Color and Wealth report released by the Insight Center for Community Economic Development. Please carefully read part one and review our comment moderation policy before participating in the comments.

Over the course of the Women of Color and Wealth series one question has come up time and time again – what about Asian women? Native women?  Other, more specific breakdowns of different racial/ethnic groups?  Is there data for queer women of color?  For transgender women of color?  Sadly, the answer is no.

The report includes a separate break out discussion of Asian and Native American women, saying (all emphasis mine):

Because Asian Americans and Native Americans comprise a much smaller proportion of the U.S. population than blacks and Hispanics and because most surveys that measure wealth do not oversample these groups, our knowledge about their wealth is less robust—particularly for Native Americans.

According to 2004 data from the Survey of Income and Program Participation, Asian Americans have a higher median net worth than white non-Hispanic households ($144,000 and $137,200, respectively).  Much of this is due to their home equity, as the Asian population is concentrated in a few cities with very high home values. When data is adjusted for these and other factors, Asians have less wealth than whites on similar socioeconomic characteristics. In interpreting the high home equity of Asian Americans, it is also important to bear in mind that they are likely to own and occupy the home with extended family members and are more likely than whites to contribute more than half of their household income to housing costs.

Moreover, it is important to take into consideration there is a great deal of variation within the Asian-American group, with Asian Indians, Chinese, Japanese, Koreans and Filipinos much better off than Vietnamese, other Southeast Asians, and other Asian groups, who are much more likely to have immigrated as political refugees than as highly-educated workers.

However, studies to date on Asian American wealth have not examined differences between men and women. Data on women ages 65 and older (see page 8), indicate that Asian women are more economically vulnerable than white women. But additional data and analysis is necessary to understand the wealth holdings of Asian women.
Much less is known about the wealth of Native Americans. They are an even smaller population than Asian Americans, rendering their presence in surveys extremely small. An exception to the lack of information on the wealth of Native Americans is research conducted by Jay Zagorski that uses the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY79), which contains some wealth questions and information on Native American ancestry.

Based on this data, in 2000 the median wealth for Native Americans in the survey was $5,700 whereas the median wealth for the sample overall was $65,500, a ratio of only 8.7%. Native Americans were much less likely to own different types of assets and when they did own an asset, the value was much lower than for the survey sample overall. But, like the vast majority of research on wealth, data were not provided for men and women separately.

In addition, Native people view assets differently than the general population in the U.S. They are more likely to identify education and family as assets and also to identify communal assets such as natural resources and the environment. Land – all that nature provides – is “wealth,” it is communally owned, and the goal is stewardship.

The information about Asian Americans begs for more analysis.  The oft-touted “model minority” appears to do better financially than other minorities – let’s take another look at the median income chart from the report:

From the looks of the chart, Asian American men are actually doing the best, income wise – they edge out white men by $1,035.  Asian American women are in second place, trailing their male counterparts by over $10,000 thanks to the income gap, but still putting up a higher income than white women by $4,266.  So does this mean that Asian-Americans have achieved the American dream?  Not quite.

In 2007 and 2008, Racialicious ran a series of posts looking at an emerging phenomenon impacting Asian Americans in business termed “the bamboo ceiling.” Ultimately, the reports showed that while Asian Americans were faring better than other minorities, things still weren’t equal.

Angry Asian Man wrote most of the pieces, and over time, it paints a grim picture of the workplace realities facing Asian Americans.

From Silicon Valley’s Bamboo Ceiling:

A survey of local executives reveals that while Asians make up more than a third of the work force at some of Silicon Valley’s biggest tech companies, they only represent about 6 percent of board members and about 10 percent of corporate officers of the Bay Area’s 25 largest companies.

According to a new study, among the 25 largest Bay Area companies by revenue, 12 had no Asian board members, and five had no Asian corporate officers. Despite the growing prominence of Asians at Silicon Valley tech companies, they’ve made no gains in the share of seats on the boards of large tech companies since 1999. What’s up with that?

From Asian American Employees Underreport Discrimination:

The report, which was released earlier this month, says that Asian Americans face a number of misperceptions and stereotypes, factors that have become “the framework of barriers establishing glass or bamboo ceilings which present [Asian American and Pacific Islanders] from moving into the upper tiers of an organization.”

A 2005 Gallup poll found that 31 percent of Asian respondents said they had experienced discriminatory or unfair treatment on the job. But the EEOC noted in its report that enforcement actions reveal that Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders file only 3.26 percent of discrimination [complaints].

From Comprehensive New Report on Chinese Americans:

According to the study, Chinese Americans, one of the most highly educated groups in the nation, are confronted by a “glass ceiling,” unable to realize full occupational stature and success to match their efforts. The returns on Chinese Americans’ investment in education and “sweat equity” are “generally lower than those in the general and non-Hispanic White population.”

But again, the lack of data floats a ton of questions (why do Asian women have higher incomes, but are more economically vulnerable in retirement?), but provides few answers.

And the information about Native American wealth – and the subsequent pushback about the framing of wealth and assets from the community provides a lot more to ponder.

There is also a larger question here, about data and the census, but I will leave that for later this week.

In the meantime, let’s reflect on what is missing.  What data should be considered vital, but is missing?  What questions are still remaining in your minds?

Please note, this is part four of a multi-part series on the Lifting As We Climb: Women of Color and Wealth report released by the Insight Center for Community Economic Development. Please carefully read part one and review our comment moderation policy before participating in the comments.

Heaping trays of Indian food were laid out on the long table. A large, happy crowd gathered in clusters, piling food onto their white Chinet plates. Men made jokes about one another’s love handles and spare tires – things women would never say to one another despite thinking them. Walter handed her a thick paper plate before taking his own. “Get what you like, but we gotta head back soon. Okay?” He spoke to her affectionately, as if she were a little kid.

The food made her mouth water. All around, people spooned food onto their plates, grabbing pieces of warm naan bread. There were pans of bread everywhere. The trays emptied gradually. The group dispersed.

Kevin and Hugh had already returned to the desk. Casey had managed to grab a cocktail-size Samosa and a scoop of biriyani but had hesitated to fill her plate during an interview. Walter’s plate was crammed with a taste of everything.

“Gosh. Girls eat so little,” Walter said with wonder in his voice.

“It happened so fast,” she remarked, her free hand resting at her side.

Walter swept his right arms to the ceiling, gesturing like a ringleader, and said “It’s free food for millionaires.”

She wrinkled her brow, amused by his dramatic movement.

“In the International Equities Department – that is Asia, Europe, and Japan sales – the group you’re interviewing for -”

Casey nodded okay.

“-whichever desk that sells a deal buys lunch for everyone in the department. We finished a big deal last week – a big power plant outside of Bombay. So today we bought Indian. Get it? If Japan finishes a sales deal, then we get sushi.”

“Gotcha,” she said.

“The funny thing is that if you were a millionaire like some of these managing directors shaking down seven figures a year, you’d have known to push your way ahead and fill up your plate. Rich people can’t get enough of free stuff.” Walter shrugged. There was no reproach in his tone; in fact, there was a wistful admiration in his voice, as if he were beginning to understand how the world worked.

“So this is the game, Casey. You have to take what’s offered.” He spoke like a mentor.

“If you say so,” Casey replied. But she didn’t know how she felt about money or free things. Her father always said there was no such thing as a free lunch.

–Min Jin Lee, Free Food for Millionaires

The first time I picked up Free Food for Millionaires, I could immediately relate to the protagonist Casey Han. She is the child of working class parents, exposed to the lives of the wealthy through education and proximity. However, Casey was different. Her first marker was her race. Her unseen marker were the scars of having grown up lower middle class, and understanding that there were some things that were just not within reach, or possible for someone like her. And throughout the book, each time she forgot that she was different, she paid a heavy price. Min Jin Lee’s novel is a smart commentary on the shifting influences of race and class on the lives of the Korean-Americans (generation 1.5 or 2 in the book) and follows Casey throughout life’s trials and tribulations. Even though she is a Princeton graduate, she finds herself ostracized from family, homeless, and jobless. Her childhood friend Ella takes her in, but also exposes Casey to her sadistic fiancé, Ted. Ted likes to screw with Casey, as he thinks she is acting above her station in life. In one chapter, Ted assesses Casey’s character, thinking:

[E]ventually, with her qualifications, she could have gotten a far better position than sales assistant from one of the letters she’d sent out, but few companies hired a person based on sheer resume, and it was nearly the end of July – a dead time for hiring. The girl had no cash left and no backup plans. The most hilarious thing about this girl was that she was too proud to use whatever connections she might have made. Her arrogance stunned him; he almost admired it. She was one of those Korean girls who thought she was as good as white and that the world was fair, and it tickled him to see her reduced to this position – to have to ask a member of the immigrant tribe for a patch of floor to sleep on and to ask another member to pull a favor on her behalf. Where are all of your little white friends now? he wanted to say to her. She was acting like a rich white girl, and Ted knew that life did not let you lie to yourself for very long. In that way, you had to admit, life was quite fair.

Reading through the Women of Color and Wealth Report, there was one aspect of wealth building that was absent from the pages. And the Insight Center could not have measured it, since by nature, these things are intangible. However, as a person mired in the American class struggle, the three other factors loom fairly large: networks, access, and acceptance.

These three things also influence how someone is able to amass wealth. Networks play an important role, as Ted points out above. Even if someone has the correct qualifications and experience, without networks to unlock the doors, it can be difficult to access positions on the higher levels of the scale. Also, access speaks to the idea that you can reach levels of decision makers and speak with them in order to turn things in your favor.  But most important is acceptance – the ability to appear as if you belong, so that networking comes naturally, so that the decision makers you meet will accept and want to work with you, and so you do not mark yourself as too different and strange.

In the excerpt above, where Casey is at a job interview, she is literally starving, having exhausted all of her funds. Even though she is living off of rationed cigarettes and one pack of ramen noodles a day, she doesn’t fill her plate.  Her prior training has taught her to be careful what you eat and how much you eat at a job interview, so she pushes her personal desires aside in order to make a good initial impression.

This part of wealth building isn’t often discussed – the idea that some people are able to game the system better than others.  In a world in which bias can work for or against you, it is the dirty little secret of our so called meritocracy that the better connected tend to win out over the better qualified.  Once again, networks and access hold the key.

Thinking through your own network connections (parents, parent’s friends, schoolmates, peers), how easy it it to find someone who:

• Can loan you fifty dollars?  Loan you $500? Loan you $5,000?
• Owns a business with more than nine employees?
• Has an executive level job?
• Can sell you weed?
• Does not have a bank account?

Since Fridays are for reflection, let’s ponder the following:

How does who you are connected to impact how far you can go professionally?  How much information can you find out from your networks? In what circles do you feel the most comfortable, and how does your race/class/gender impact your social and professional circle?

Please note, this is part three of a multi-part series on the Lifting As We Climb: Women of Color and Wealth report released by the Insight Center for Community Economic Development. Please carefully read part one and review our comment moderation policy before participating in the comments.

I’m fightin for strength, in the street grindin for cents/
I know I’m ahead of my time but I’m behind on my rent/
Askin Kanye for money just to pay on my gas bill/
He asked me for it back, nigga brush up on your math skills/
Nothin plus zip equals zero; he couldn’t relate/
That nigga ain’t been broke since “H to the Izzo”

–Rhymefest, “Devil’s Pie“

For many of us who grow up lower middle class or in poverty, the issues began before we were born. Parents struggling to make ends meet rarely find that things get easier once a child arrives – in general, already strained resources are required to stretch even further. Economically devastated parents generally do not have the resources to pass on to their children – indeed, the children may be asked to help participate in taking care of the bills, or once another income is flowing, provide funds to take care of other members of the family.

Looking at the chart above, single black and latina female households are hit the hardest by these disparities – but what does it really mean when a household has zero or negative wealth? How does it impact a child’s upbringing and future?

I’ve been reading Anya Kamenetz’s DIY U: Edupunks, Edupreneurs, and the Coming Transformation of Higher Education (more on this when we get into the debt section of the report) and her discussion of the interlocking issues involved are fascinating. Kamenetz reveals that starting out low income tends to have a dire effect on all parts of your life course, including getting into college:

A 2006 study found that the highest achieving students from high-income families – those who earned top grades and took all the AP courses – are nearly four times more likely than low income students with the same academic accomplishments to end up in a highly selective university.

And once students – at all levels – begin to attend college, income constraints figure heavily into whether someone will have the financial support necessary to finish school. Kamenetz interviews Wick Sloane (a professor at Bunker Hill Community College, contributor to trade mag Inside Higher Ed, and advocate for abolishing the four year bachelor’s degree) who explains that money is a major issue – but not in the way many educators think:

“Many people think, and I might have been guilty of it, that we need $25,000 per year per student and that’s what it takes to get through college. But really it’s very often $50 problems that knock them out: a car breakdown, a dental bill, a changing shift in their job. So really helping these students, as a policy matter, is a lot cheaper than people think.”

The students Sloane refers to are the ones lacking an economic safety net. With family wealth, a student can receive a loan or loner vehicle from their families, have a parent pay for needed dental work, or choose to focus solely on their studies instead of working. For those who grow up in households with zero or negative wealth, often those problems are not solved.

Even after college, the disparities continue to mount. I was always amazed at the friends who could rely on parental support during tough times, who could impulsively make a decision to spend a year backpacking, or leave their job and return to school with no prior savings. And these issues continue into the homes of the children, now adults, who may be called upon to help support family members even further due to on the job accidents, job loss, workplace discrimination (heightened for older, less-skilled adults), or chronic illness. Often the quest to climb out of poverty is a long uphill battle – not only is it up to the individual to make smart financial choices, but often to make these decisions while supporting others. As Sloane explains, it’s often the $50 dollar problems that derail someone on the path to financial stability.

So what kind of solutions can we find to solve the miscellaneous misfortunes of every day life?

Friday: Measuring The Intangibles.

Because so many women of color have such little wealth other than the value of a vehicle, the rest of the paper uses the definition of wealth that excludes vehicles in order to capture the economic vulnerability experienced by women of color.

Excluding vehicles, single black women have a median wealth of $100 and Hispanic women $120 respectively, while their same-race male counterparts have $7,900 and $9,730. The median wealth of single white women is $41,500. To put it another way, single black and Hispanic women have one penny of wealth for every dollar of wealth owned by their male counterparts and a tiny fraction of a penny for every dollar of wealth owned by white women. With so little in reserve, half of all single black and Hispanic women could not afford to take an unpaid sick day or to even have a major appliance repaired without going into debt. The precarious financial situation of women of color is also evident when looking at those with zero or negative wealth, (negative wealth occurs when the value of one’s assets is lower than the value of their debts). Nearly half of all single black and Hispanic women have zero or negative wealth (see Figure 2).

Pre-retirement wealth disparities for women of color affect them drastically in their retirement years. According to federal poverty standards, poverty rates for people age 65 and over are highest for women of color. In 2007 16.7% of white women living alone were poor, but 26% of Asian women living alone, 38.5% of black women living alone, and 41.1% of Hispanic women living alone were poor. 21

What does it mean when we talk about the difference between wealth and income?  These two terms are not to be conflated.  Someone can be a high earner, but still have no wealth at all – it is as simple as spending more than you earn.  It doesn’t matter what the money is spent on – it can go up your nose, on your feet, to your landlord or thrown in mass amounts on a stage.  However, if you manage to make a million dollars a year, and you spend $1.5 million, you are not wealthy.  Not even close.

This is why this median figure of $5 is so important to understand.  At various points in the course of the report, the data for women of color (again, defined as black and Latina, unless otherwise indicated) tends to fall around zero or five dollars, depending on the unit of measurement.

It is also important to understand the difference between a median number and an average number. I emailed report author Mariko Chang to clarify why the median number was generally used in the report:

In wealth research, it is conventional to use the median instead of the average for the following reason:  Because wealth is so unequally distributed, with a few people owning extremely large amounts of wealth and the rest owning much smaller amounts, the few very wealthy people pull the average higher.  The median, on the other hand is a better indicator of the wealth of the more “typical” case.  (If we rank people or households on a continuum from least wealth to most wealth, the median is the point at which half have more wealth and half have less.)  Because the median is a better indicator of the more typical case, people and organizations that study wealth report the median (although some report both).

Since today is Friday, we are going to ease up on the data and instead take a moment to reflect:  how did you learn your lessons about wealth, income, and money?

Monday: Differences in financial starting points and class mobility

I called up a fellow young black professional friend of mine and told her about the findings of the study.  “Is it messed up that I’m kind of glad in a way?” she asked, “I mean, all this time I’ve been wondering why I can’t get my shit together, but it turns out I’m normal.” We both laughed at her small attempt at gallows humor around a situation many of us know a little too intimately – when it comes to our white counterparts, women of color are light years behind in wealth.

The study is a new report from The Insight Center for Community Economic Development, titled “Lifting as We Climb: Women of Color, Wealth, and America’s Future.”  The report is an in-depth look at the issues in wealth accumulation particular to black women, Latinas, Asian and Native American women.  However, even as this report is one of the most comprehensive I have seen on the subject, the limited data for Asian American and Native American women means that their statistics are limited from entire sections of the report, and discussed in a subsequent section about the need for better stats.  The report’s title is should be a familiar refrain to many black women, but the author of the report, Mariko Chang, kindly includes an explanation of the origin of the phrase:

More than a century ago, the National Association for Colored Women was founded by African American women leaders in response to a vicious attack on the character of African-American women. A few decades distant from the abolition of slavery, the intensification of poverty, discrimination, and segregation impelled these women to action in defense of their race. Their motto was “Lifting as We Climb,” signaling their understanding that no individual woman of color could rise, nor did they want to rise, without the improvement of the whole race. At the top of their agenda were job training, wage equity, and child care: issues that, if addressed, would lift all women, and all people of color.

The lift as we climb refrain was implanted into some of us from birth and a lot of my earliest lessons about black empowerment focused on financial empowerment.  Yet, these adages about saving money, investing in the community, and being a conscious consumer was like propping a footstool against a fifty foot high sheer rock wall.  Insight’s report focuses on the wealth gap, not the well documented income gap, for a good reason:

The current economic crisis has revealed why wealth is so important to the stability of households. Wealth, or net worth, refers to the total value of one’s assets minus debts. Without savings or wealth of some form, economic stability is built on a house of cards that quickly crumbles when income is cut or disrupted through job loss, reduced hours or pay, or if the family suffers an unexpected health emergency.

As the current crisis continues to unfold, it has become all too clear that it is not just “poor” people who are losing their homes to foreclosure in record numbers; even households with some wealth found that they did not have enough to ride out the still unfolding economic downturn. Wealth impacts not just current economic security, but retirement security as well. With concerns over the solvency of Social Security and the shrinking number of jobs that provide pensions, it is of increasing importance that people have the means to save for their own retirement. Wealth is also tied to the well-being of the next generation, as it provides parents with the ability to help pay for their children’s college education, and can also be passed down from generation to generation. In fact, the intergenerational transfer of wealth is one of the reasons why racial wealth gaps from policies long ago have become entrenched. [...]

Wealth and income are related, but they are not the same. Income refers to the amount of money received by an individual or household during a specific period of time, such as a month or year. It usually comes in the form of earnings or wages from a job, but can take other forms as well such as interest on savings or investment accounts, Social Security, transitional assistance (welfare payments), pension benefits, or child support. Wealth, or net worth, refers to the total value of one’s assets minus debts. Typical types of assets include money in checking accounts, stocks or bonds, real estate, and businesses owned. Typical types of debts include home mortgages, credit card debt, and student loans.

So how did we get to the five dollar figure? Page seven of the report explains “While white women in the prime working years of ages 36-49 have a median wealth of $42,600 (still only 61% of their white male counterparts), the median wealth for women of color is only $5.” A more complete answer is revealed in Insight’s wealth of charts discussing the gaps:

Since there is so much data (the full report is well worth a read, but clocks in at 28 pages) we will discuss small sections of the report and related issues over the next week.

The topics covered will include: the wealth gap (with and without vehicles); how marriage* impacts wealth building (and how stereotypes and fear mongering about single black women ignore the larger issues at play); parenthood and wealth building; differences in financial starting points and class mobility; a discussion of types of assets acquired by women of color; the rising levels of debt; Asian American and Native American women’s wealth, and barriers to understanding the full scope of the problem; issues of data collection and minority participation in the census; prior institutional factors contributing to the wealth gap for women of color; the “wealth escalator”; government assistance and its impact on wealth building; retirement; subprime home loans and the mortgage crisis, particularly as it relates to Latinas; citizenship and immigration status and how that impacts wealth building; cultural expectations of women; policy recommendations to end the wealth gap; and non governmental/community based solutions.

Tomorrow: Looking at The Wealth Gap

*There is no data included about queer POC. We will discuss this a bit more when we discuss the limitations of data, but the discussions of marriage and wealth building for POC provides an interesting element to the discussions surrounding same sex marriage rights.

by Special Correspondent Wendi Muse

Continued from “Bela or Bust: Part 1: On Gender” . . .

Author’s note: My apologies for the delay between part one and part two! I have recently moved back to the United States and in between re-adjusting and job hunting, I had not had the chance or the mental clarity to sit down and actually write!

The popular anecdote goes “Cleanliness is next to Godliness.” If I were to rephrase this expression to fit Brazil, I’d say “Beauty is next to Wealth.” Though Brazil has grown considerably with tourism, natural resources, and factory-based goods as its largest sectors of revenue, on the ground, the class divide is evident and going strong. One ironic way to overcome class and bridge the class divide, at least superficially, is through a well-kept appearance. I say ironic here because in order to appear a social or economic equal, one must continue to consume, thus depleting one’s income, even if it is far from disposable.

Luckily for many Brazilian women, maintaining one’s physical appearance is not so heavy a financial task. Even in large cities, one can get an amazing manicure/pedicure for less than $20 reais ($10 USD), a facial for $50 reais ($25 USD), a “Brazilian” wax for $15 reais (known there as “depilação de virilha”; $7 USD) and multiple sessions of lymphatic massage for $100 reais a month ($50 USD). In comparison to the cost of aesthetic maintenance in the United States, Brazilian women are the fortunate ones. In some ways, the cheap costs, even for the average Brazilian, allow for a democratization of access to beauty, whereas in the U.S., this is not so much the case. And when one can find cheap beauty related services in the U.S., the question of service, quality, and even employee rights follows the far too reasonable price tag.

With relatively equal access to stellar services, many women have access to maintaining an image that puts them physically on par with their wealthier counterparts. In other words, she may not be rich, but at least her looks are equal to if not superior to someone with greater material wealth. In the United States, this “phenomenon” of sorts, democratization and equality by way of the physical, can be witnessed in the purchase of clothing and vehicles by those of a lower income. As quality attire is not nearly as expensive in the States as it is in Brazil (due mainly to import taxation and trade issues) and the intellectual property rights of high end designers are often violated by chain stores like H&M and Forever 21, people of the working and lower middle classes have greater access to some of the same clothing styles worn by the rich. As wealth, at least in the past, seemed less of a precarious state in the U.S., the preoccupation with “looking rich” was not evident. In fact, I would go as far as to argue that in many cases, the wealthy in the States can be indistinguishable from the general public (look at stores like Urban Outfitters, which peddles the image of tattered, vintage, and reconstructed clothing at a high price). This is not the case in Brazil, where the wealthy can be spotted from miles away.

Beauty can also mean an escape for some Brazilian women living in poverty, hence the idea of being good looking and well-groomed being given such high cultural value. There are frequent favela (slum)-based beauty pageants, model searches, and even the same video model industry seen in the states, one of them being the ever-present competitions for the next “it” girl in funk carioca (known as baile funk in the U.S.). Named for the most abundant parts of their bodies, the Mulheres Fruta (“Fruit Women”) are famous for their physical beauty. Take Mulher Melancia (“Watermelon Woman”). Famous for her backup dancing for MC Creu’s “Dança do Créu” (NSFW) and her more than generous backside, Andressa Soares (pictured above, right, with Mulher Melão (Melon Woman), left) has been in Brazilian Playboy and even a European tour all as a result of her bottom. Amazing. But it sure beats poverty any day, I suppose.

While beauty may not involve a direct translation into fortune and fame, it nevertheless serves as a surrogate for wealth in the social realm, calling for positive attention that would otherwise be absent in the face of poverty. It also can become an exportable currency, a stereotype for which Brazil is famous (beautiful women), but one that has also led to destructive and exploitive relationships between women who use their beauty as a source of income and the tourists who flock there to consume it.

Even novelas, Brazilian soap operas, repeatedly regurgitate the same Cinderella stories, creating the framework for the myth that beauty is a ticket out of the slums (or at least can allow for a temporary vacation with a wealthy benefactor). But this dream, just as many other rags-to-riches narratives often do, falls flat when translated to reality. Class mobility, while a possibility, is a rare occurrence in Brazil. So even though beauty could be considered a temporary equalizer, the end result of glaring poverty and a large percentage of the wealth staying within a small percentage of the population is what continues.

Next: On Race (Part 3)

At the airport bookstore, I immediately overlooked Bruce Willis’ and Emma Hemings’ smoldering stares on the cover of this month’s W. My attention went directly to the top left: “Meet the Neighbors: the Persian Conquest of Beverly Hills.”

Knowing the history of glossies and their historic portrayal of racial ethnicities more as props than as cover stories, I was simultaneously worried and intrigued—how would W fare as documenters rather than voyeurs?

A patio party introduces us to the Persians of Beverly Hills: with lounging guests, designer duds in the pool, and lavish tents, the spread is vaguely reminiscent of a harem bath scene combined with a Sultan’s caravan theme. The font for “The Persian Conquest” is done in an Arabesque font, with sinewy flourishes and random dots evocative of the Aladdin soundtrack. “Here we go,” I say to myself.

But reading the introduction, I learn that these aren’t just any Persians W is profiling—they’re Persian Jews, who are a large part of Los Angeles’ huge Iranian diaspora.

The use of the term “Persian” didn’t surprise me much. A large segment of Iranian immigrants and subsequent generations use “Persian” rather than “Iranian,” for varying political, ethnic, and ideological reasons. But with Persian Jews, the use is given another dimension: “Persian” does not connote any specific religion, whereas the term “Iranian” definitely conjures images of Shi’a Islam: ayatollahs, chadors, and the Islamic Revolution of 1979.  “Persian” also conjures images of lazy cats, sumptuous carpets, and fat sultans surrounded by glittering palaces—stereotypical images of an Orientalist fantasy, but one that most likely suits Persian Jews better than menacing stereotypes of dour women in chadors and grim-faced Khomeini.

The story, written by Kevin West, gives a brief history of Persian Jews’ presence in L.A., from when many families first fled to the city during and after the Islamic Revolution, to the present day, when the Persian Jewish community wields serious business and political clout. But for the most part, this isn’t a rags-to-riches story: West notes that,

“Although disposed, the thousands of Iranian Jews who flocked to Beverly Hills in the coming years had assets most immigrants lack: advanced education, business experience and, in the majority of cases, some cash in overseas accounts.”

The embarrassment of riches image is fortified with lavish pictures of local heavyweights and symbols of the fortunes they’ve amassed. One image shows a “Persian Palace,” the nickname given to huge, ostentatious houses built and designed by Persians in their new home. Another image is the sweeping view of Los Angeles from Sam Nazarian’s penthouse, or his “$1.6 million Bugatti Veyron”.

While W is a luxury magazine, all of this wealth made me uncomfortable. Of course, W would never profile an ethnicity that wasn’t rich, but I had to wonder why they would profile any specific group at all. West chartered the difficulties that the Persian Jewish community has gone through: racial tension with others in the community, religious tension with other Jewish groups, etc. It was almost as if W wanted to dispel stereotypes about Persian Jews.

But the road to hell is paved with good intentions, right? In attempting to dispel stereotypes, W simply backed them up: showy images of wealth and references to media and real estate empires are uncomfortably close to the stereotypes of “rich Jews” and “Jews running the media and the banks.”
The Persian side of things didn’t fare much better, either:

“Thanks to their wealth and numbers, Persians didn’t need to adapt. Instead, they developed a self-sufficient Farsi-speaking enclave, complete with grocery stores, restaurants, and even taxi services. And, rather than courting the local social establishment, rich Persians stuck to their own social world, which revolved around lavish 1,000-person bar mitzvahs and weddings.”

The article has combined the rich Jewish stereotype with the filthy rich Persian stereotype, and wrapped it up with a gilded segregated bow.
And it gets better: one of the article’s central themes deals with the new generation of Persian Jews in Los Angeles, the born-and-breds. West repeatedly draws generational differences: describing the immigrant generation as miserly (“…since the older generation by and large has not adopted the American ethic—and tax strategy—of giving money to nonprofits.”) and clannish, whereas the younger generation is more “Americanized,” and thus more generous, social, and acceptable.
But is the article doing all the stereotyping? West references Parviz Nazarian, the first in Beverly Hills to build a “Persian Palace,” saying that, “A different all-American motto, however, has been fully embraced by the Nazarians and many other Persian families who have earned fortunes here: If you’re got it, flaunt it.” It wasn’t W who purchased Bugattis or constructed homes that look like “a particularly frothy wedding cake propped up by a forest of fluted columns.” Have rich Persian Jews internalized their own stereotype?

No. Anyone who has money uses it. And herein lies the problem: applying the term “rich” to a specific ethnicity implies that this community’s money is somehow unearned or unacceptable. While being showy with it is optional, the Persian Jewish community has worked hard, and spend their money no differently than musicians with platinum albums or white moneyed families. One man’s Bugatti is another man’s tricked-out  ’67 Pontiac Parisienne.

W doesn’t make much of an attempt to demystify the Persian Jews of Beverly Hills: though the article traces the community’s history, difficulties, and hardships, the takeaway message has nothing to do with tradition or how the community has bolstered the area. The magazine plays up luxurious, powerful images of Persians and Jews, and the major messages are of stereotypes.

I think I have fallen in love with Camus (a dead white Algerian philosopher who argues that the death penalty is premeditated murder) and Anthony Hamilton simultaneously.

What does this have to do with being an artist? Everything, simply because over the last few days I have been apart of a few conversations on the tension between art and commerce.

Two days ago, on Twitter, Indieplanet and I were having a discussion about art, commerce, Joe Budden/Vlad flap up.

indieplanet @mdotwrites Its a bigger issue of basic ethics.
Too many blogs/video sites decide at some point to exchange
ethics for page views. 10:06 AM Jan 11th from web in reply to
mdotwrites

indieplanet @mdotwrites Re: Budden/Vlad – What are your
thoughts on the whole situation. I think its a bigger picture that
video sites should consider. 11:51 PM Jan 10th from web
in reply to mdotwrites

indieplanet @mdotwrites Shouldnt it be possible to make a
contribution AND get paid?? It is possible (not common)
to change the game & have morals 12:17 PM Jan 11th from web
in reply to mdotwrites

@indieplanet Its like running with the Dope man. Sooner or
later, someone is going to test you, and you are going to have
to choose. 12:23 PM Jan 11th from web in reply to indieplanet

Yesterday, Dart Adam’s sent me a link to an essay of his which outlined, amongst many things, how the The Telecommunication’s Act spearheaded mergers and acquisitions in radio and how these changes impacted hip hop.

To cap it off, yesterday, Brooklyn Bodega posted a Facebook note asking “Does Money Ruin it All?” He wrote,

the other day one of our family posted a comment that he was no fan of ‘Notorious’ because too many people had profited from its production. He cited Memebrs of Junior Mafia, Puff and I assume he also had a problem with Ms. Wallace as she looks to have been in charge and arguably received the largest check.

So the question is does the presence of money make it impossible to produce a work of pure artistic integrity?

The responses ranged from, “as long as the Wallace family is compensated then it is all good” to “making money is practical for everyone including artists”, and finally “this is a less of an issue of the evils of capitalism and rather a question of authenticity.”

Many of the comments reflect a fundamental lack of understanding of capitalism and both how it has historically impacted art and how it impacts hip hop and Black artists specifically. Because capital is productive property, there will always be a move to exploit the the property to obtain the most returns.

This is why we have 5 CSI’s, 6 Indiana Jones’s and Hannah Montana dish towels.

Quality be damned.

Think about it, art is referred to as intellectual property for a reason.

And here is where the tension arises. If our music, our precious Hip Hop music began as a voice for the under represented, what does it mean for us to be so silent about its current state of affairs? And, if we are silent, do we deserve better than what we receive? Why are we so reluctant to admit the way in which the market has impacted our art?

I have watched both Saul Williams and KRS rationalize getting money with Fortune 500′s. And I thought to myself why be coy, why not just say, “Ya’ll, I got bills to pay.”

Lets be clear, I do not claim to be on a pedestal. If Coke/Sony/Steve Madden/ came calling and wanted to work with me and I chose to do so, I wouldn’t turn around and say to you “Well the executives at Coke/Sony/ like me, so this is a great partnership.” I would understand that they want to rock with me because they feel that I may be able to enhance their shareholder value. Simple as that.

So if you see my face and big {teeth} smile on the back of a Brooklyn Erotica anthology at the end of the year, lets be clear, I had to pay some bills and I am okay with that.

I guess, I am really perturbed at the fact that we all clearly understand the nasty bottom line of the Dope game, but when it comes to analyzing the ways in which the nasty bottom line of Capitalism affects our art we get shook.

Statement was very similar to another statement that I read by Camus (pronounced Cam-moo, like shampoo.) In the essay
The Wager of our Generation, Camus writes,

The aim of art, the aim of life, can only be to increase the sum of freedom and responsibility to be found in everyman and the world. It cannot, under any circumstances be used to reduce or suppress that freedom, even temporarily….

No great work of art has been based on hatred or contempt. There is not a single true work of art of art that has not in the end addressed the inner freedom of each person that has known and loved it.

In an interview on Verbalisms, ran by the phenomenal and formidable (wink) Raquel Wilson, Dan Tres OMi interviews Wise Intelligent of PRT on the role that art and music plays in our culture. He writes,

There are quite a few people who feel that music that is created to raise the consciousness of a particular community is irrelevant in the age of what William C. Bansfield calls the post-album age wherein the music created is commercially driven and marketed to a specific segment of society. Wise Intelligent, the front man for the influential hip-hop group Poor Righteous Teacher, always felt and continues to feel that he was galvanized by the spirit of the people to take up the mic to educate the masses. It is a tragedy that Wise Intelligent, who penned one of the best odes to Black women with “Shakyla,” is forgotten when it comes to bringing knowledge of self beat up and compressed into hip-hop form.

Where does Anthony Hamilton fit in? His album is the first one in a very long time, that both instrumentation wise and lyrically, has helped me make sense of my life. He has helped me be okay with my new found freedom. The irony is that it isn’t Hip Hop, and because I am notoriously boom bap oriented and it feels weird. I will add that Q-Tip’s The Renaissance has been in rotation as well.

Anthony Hamilton also comes into play because the title of his album connects to an essential question asked by Camus, which is what is the point of life? While I do not have an answer to that, I have been thinking about the role that music plays in affirming who we are.

In 1992, I had Death Certificate to make sense of what was going on in LA, in the Streets of Oakland and in my family life. What music do the young bucks of today have to help them make sense of their lives?

What music do they have to help them make sense of the rage that they feel about the murder of Oscar Grant?