How can you call something “BlakRoc” when the black folks on the project only rap and the rockers are all white?
BlakRoc is the name of Damon Dash’s upcoming project, a collaboration between white rockers The Black Keys and rappers such as Mos Def, Q-Tip, Ludacris, and Raekwon, to name a few.  Ordinarily, I could care [...]

Making queer Chicana experience comedic affirms our pains and glories – hijole, just the fact that we exist and thrive. If I flip the dynamic around and poke fun at whiteness or heterosexuality, that’s the work of resistance, because I’ve inverted the paradigm and I’m using comedy to laugh at those structures that work [...]

Though the word Namaste has been a South Asian greeting for centuries, now every yoga student, celebrity (check out Al Gore’s picture in the wiki entry) and creepy guy trying to hit on an Indian woman thinks it’s fine to use it as a way of saying “hey” or “I’m so in touch with what [...]

Three ships on the horizon. What do they bring? Many today are proud that the Niña,, the Pinta, and the Santa María – which brought Christopher Columbus and his men to Cuba on Oct. 28, 1492, on their first trip to the Americas – also carried with them European scientific advances and the [...]

It is beautiful that people can open their lives to human beings of any background, but I think that all of us – every human being – runs the risk of being commodified in a hypercapitalist culture. For example, I feel that as a biracial person I have more social currency now that we [...]

BIKINI
You’re weird.
BURQA
I think you’re pathetic.
BIKINI
I think YOU are oppressed.
BURQA
You call this oppression, I call this my liberation.
BIKINI
Haven’t you ever worn a bikini? Not just once? Aren’t you curious what it feels like to be almost naked, standing on the beach and having all these guys look at you like they want to eat you-
BURQA
I’ve never [...]

One of the insidious benefits of being a person of color raised in Minnesota is to be acutely aware of how race impacts you on several different levels.  The fact that I have to explain much of my story before people can even accept that I have the right to call myself a Minnesotan is [...]

Excerpted by Latoya Peterson

A Chinese American journalist on an interview is assumed to be making a food delivery. Thomas Lee reported that he was wearing a dress shirt, black slacks and black dress shoes. When he later related this story to others, he was given advice about how to avoid being mistaken for [...]

Excerpted by Latoya Peterson

Left out of the ensuing tangle of commentary on race and class has been the increasing impoverishment—or, we should say, re-impoverishment–of African Americans as a group. In fact, the most salient and lasting effect of the current recession may turn out to be the decimation of the black middle class. According to [...]

OK, I have a bunch of stuff I want to say about the infamous Japanese proverb “the nail that sticks up gets hammered down” that gives this post its title. And it is infamous ― it’s one of those sayings that has spread throughout the English-speaking world as a way of characterizing Japanese culture. I’m [...]

When I first came to the U.S., Americans asked me about that “dot on the forehead.” Now, Madonna wears a bindi. Bollywood borrows Hollywood plotlines (well, two or three for one three-hour film). Now, the Kronos Quartet reinterprets Bollywood composer R.D. Burman. Birthday cards are reproducing old kitschy Indian matchbox covers. Body-hugging T-shirts worn by [...]

Excerpted by Latoya Peterson

In a January 2006 article published by the Village Voice, Jon Caramanica ended a largely celebratory piece on reggaeton with a somewhat sudden, cryptic remark: “Fuck a Slim Shady,” he quipped, “Hip-Hop’s race war begins here.” Caramanica thus suggests that the most prominent “racial” tensions around hip-hop are not between African [...]

Excerpted by Latoya Peterson

On Jan. 23, 1973, when the Supreme Court struck down laws criminalizing abortion in Roe v. Wade, President Richard M. Nixon made no public statement. But privately, newly released tapes reveal, he expressed ambivalence.
Nixon worried that greater access to abortions would foster “permissiveness,” and said that “it breaks the family.” But [...]

Excerpted by Latoya Peterson

This recipe for femininity looks, to me, as if it is aimed toward a stereotypical Hong Kong billionaire’s wife. The clothes evoke a demure, under-control, decidedly non-rowdy (read: non-Western) type of woman who appreciates her role as an ornament of great value, and sits prettily and quietly in Gulfstream jets.
—Cintra Wilson, “Critical [...]

by Special Correspondent Thea Lim
Ok full disclosure: I’m a rabid Mariah Carey fan. Don’t hate.
We’re a little late on this breaking news from early May, when reports started to arise that Mr Mariah (also known as Nick Cannon) had posted a viciously worded blog entry about “Bagpipes from Baghdad”, the leaked track from Eminem’s [...]