#rapeculture hurts everyone. The same rhetoric VSB spouted is used in court to make sure less than 20% of all rapists do time.

Say what?

Turns out, Damon (a.k.a. The Champ) decided to create a really flip response to Zerlina Maxwell’s Ebony.com piece “Stop Telling Women How to Not Get Raped.” Despite Maxwell writing lines like these:

Our community, much like society-at-large, needs a paradigm shift as it relates to our sexual assault prevention efforts. For so long all of our energy has been directed at women, teaching them to be more “ladylike” and to not be “promiscuous” to not drink too much or to not wear a skirt. Newsflash: men don’t decide to become rapists because they spot a woman dressed like a video vixen or because a girl has been sexually assertive.

How about we teach young men when a woman says stop, they stop? How about we teach young men that when a woman has too much to drink that they should not have sex with her, if for no other reason but to protect themselves from being accused of a crime? How about we teach young men that when they see their friends doing something inappropriate to intervene or to stop being friends? The culture that allows men to violate women will continue to flourish so long as there is no great social consequence for men who do so.

Damon still decided to write his piece, essentially asking this question:

But, why can’t both genders be educated on how to act responsibility around each other? What’s stopping us from steadfastly instilling “No always means no!” in the minds of all men and boys and educating women how not to put themselves in certain situations? Of course men shouldn’t attempt to have sex with a woman who’s too drunk to say no, but what’s wrong with reminding women that if you’re 5’1 and 110 pounds, it’s probably not the best idea to take eight shots of Patron while on the first, second, or thirteenth date? Yes, sober women definitely get raped too, but being sober and aware does decrease the likelihood that harm may come your way, and that’s true for each gender.

It seems as if the considerable push back again victim-blaming has pushed all the way past prudence and levelheadedness, making anyone who suggests that “women can actually be taught how to behave too” insensitive or a “rape enabler.” And, while the sentiment in Maxwell’s article suggests that victim-blaming is dangerous, I think it’s even more dangerous to neglect to remind young women that, while it’s never their fault if they happen to get sexually assaulted, they shouldn’t thumb their noses to common sense either.

Damon’s already (somewhat) apologized and been raked over the coals by folks on his site, Twitter, and Tumblr.

So my goal in writing this piece isn’t to hold him accountable–that’s already gone on. My goal in writing this is to answer his question. And since I recently gave a talk at Swarthmore on rape culture, I just so happen to have a bunch of examples and facts right at my fingertips.

First, the primary premise is flawed.

Damon seems to think that reinforcing to men that circumstances and consent are different things means that we are also letting women off the hook for reckless behavior. However, most men aren’t privy to all the rape prevention tactics women employ everyday, as a matter of course. (For the purposes of this discussion, the framing will be around cisgender, heterosexual men and women, though we are not the only people impacted by this type of thinking and this type of violence.)

I could share stories about being told from the time I started going out to always cover your drink with a napkin, never be alone after dark, always have your keys out in case of an attack, to never be alone with a guy you don’t know. I was also told not to open the door for boys I didn’t know, but in my case, it was the boy you kind of know that gets you. But I digress.

We could tell our stories all day, but where’s the data? When I presented at Swathmore, I ran a little experiment based on a question I had. How do men talk about rape? So I took it to the newsstands.

Cosmopolitan Magazine is best known for it’s unrelenting focus on sex tips, meeting men, and the ubiquitous “75 new ways to make him pop!” feature. However, in each issue, Cosmo always has something on rape prevention. Since they are the most popular magazine sold on college campuses, they just rolled out an initiative on stopping campus rape, encouraging their readers to lobby their schools and Congress for changes. If you search the content on the Cosmo website, a search for rape pulls up 24 action oriented articles–however, that is misleading as the majority of Cosmo’s content in magazine exclusive, so a lot of their monthly features aren’t in there. I’ve been reading Cosmo since I was 17–if they run one article on rape prevention each month (and sometimes, they run two), I will have consumed 132 of them. And that’s just Cosmo. Other major women’s magazines, like Essence, Marie Claire, and Glamour also cover rape, but not with the same frequency as Cosmo.

In my talk, before I got into the rape-culture nitty gritty, I asked students to consider a scenario:

[A] spends a late night drinking heavily at a bar. After going a few rounds [A] meets a group of people that includes [B]. [A] continues to hang out with the group for a while, drinking more and more. Later, [A] ends up with [B] alone. [A and B] are both dating other people. Something went down – but [A] was so drunk [A] doesn’t remember exactly what happened. Neither does [B].

I asked who was at fault. There are no easy answers. If I say A is female, a lot of people responding to Champ’s post might have said that she needed to take responsibility for drinking so much. But what if I say A is male and B is female?

This is the rape story in Details, about a guy named Kevin Driscoll who was brought up on rape charges. He’s the person I condensed into the A story.

As he was packing the car, Driscoll got a call on his cell phone. “I don’t know if you know who this is or not,” the caller said, “but, um, this is the girl from the other night.” He remembered her as the pale brunette with the big smile he’d picked up two nights earlier at the Tumble Inn, a dive bar a couple of miles from his home in Redmond. They talked for a few minutes. The woman said she was in a relationship and was freaked out about contracting an STD. Driscoll assured her that he was clean but promised he’d get tested again. “Like, why didn’t you just stop, like, when I was trying to tell you no?” she casually added. “Well, you didn’t say no,” he responded. Soon the woman wished Driscoll a good day, and he hung up, perplexed. He got everyone in the car and started to drive, but he didn’t get far—a police car pulled him over a few blocks away, in front of Pappy’s Pizzeria. Moments later, four more squad cars appeared. The officers, their hands on their guns, ordered Driscoll and Dunn out of the car. One took Driscoll aside and told him he’d have to come down to the station. Driscoll asked for a minute to talk to Dunn, who was getting visibly upset. “That cop told me you beat some girl to death and raped her,” Driscoll recalls her screaming as he walked toward her. “What the fuck is going on?!”

And so began Kevin Driscoll’s nightmare. Charges of first-degree rape—three counts. A very public humiliation. Two trials. And the loss of just about everything he valued in life. After two years, Driscoll was acquitted of all charges—when the not-guilty verdict was handed down, each of the jurors shook his hand—but to him that’s no more than a footnote to the fact that he will forever live under a cloud of accusation, a pariah. Last Halloween he ran into two friends who hadn’t spoken with him since he was taken into custody. “I heard everything worked out for you,” one had said. “Yep, that’s what I heard too,” Driscoll said.

“You didn’t say no” is not a “yes.” And somehow I doubt that people tsk-tsked Driscoll about taking responsibility for how much he was drinking and going home with people he didn’t know. That’s almost exclusively reserved for women. Ultimately, a jury decided to clear Driscoll of the charges–but reading that story as a feminist, I wonder what kind of messages Driscoll received about rape and consent. (Not to mention fidelity.)

Moving on from Driscoll, the crux of my talk was that pop culture helps to normalize rape culture by painting problematic behavior as okay, and even laudable or romantic. Case in point: The Twilight Series. There’s a lot of questionable content in there, that has been discussed for years and years at this point. But it is fascinating to contrast a scene that made it into the movie and the book.

You know what’s so bad about that scene? Besides the fact that you have a man literally forcing himself on a woman (just not with his penis)? The one in the book is actually worse!

Why is she using the type of tactics that rape survivors describe to escape from the situation to talk about this kiss?

But Jacob is still one of two heroes, and he and Bella go on to share a consensual kiss later in the series.

Films and books aren’t the only places where rape culture is normalized.

It also occurs in music videos. In the talk, I illustrate these points with clips from Byron Hurt’s Beyond Beats and Rhymes, and from Sut Jhally’s Dreamworlds 3. (Some images NSFW.)

Sut Jhally takes a multi-genre look at how rape culture is encoded in our society, with seemingly innocuous choices in music videos. While Jhally makes powerful points by just stripping away the sound, but he really drives the point home at 4:12, where he contrasts the images of women being assaulted in Central Park with popular music video tropes.

To expand on an earlier point, here’s the full Limp Bizkit video:

At this point, people who haven’t spent a lot of time thinking through rape culture will be screaming. “All men aren’t like that!” Yeah, most of us are aware of that. But it only takes one to change how you approach other interactions forever. It only takes one to destroy your trust in the inherent goodness of other people. And it only takes one to fuck up your life.

The men reading this probably aren’t that one guy. (Then again, you could be…to someone else.)

But most of us have already met him.

Women are told, over and over again, that it is their responsibility to keep themselves safe. And in the event that you fail, rape culture will ensure that people will blame you for dropping your vigilance, while directing little, if any attention to the person who actually acted without consent. And this is why we started shifting the conversation to speak to men directly.

Because all the words aimed at us still aren’t keeping us safe.

Created by Graydon Sheppard and Kyle Humphrey (and boosted by the star power of Juliette Lewis), “Shit Girls Say” went viral by taking a male perspective on common things “women” do and presenting it as humor. Internet forums filled with comments like “Omigod, all my friends do that” or “that is so me.” The sketch proved to be so popular, there are now three episodes, probably with more in the pipeline.

However, everyone wasn’t laughing at “Shit Girls Say.” Quite a few people noticed that the “girls” referred to in the top video were a certain type of woman, an experience that was not shared by all. Others noted that the humor that made the video funny was actually rooted in sexist stereotypes. Over at Feministing, Samhita explains:

While, I usually applaud men in drag, I can’t help but be critical of these characterizations of women. Are some of these stereotypes uncannily true? I’m sure they can be. But that’s the problem with stereotypes, it’s not about whether they are true or not, it’s that they are used to disempower people or deny them certain privileges. And I get that it is comedy, but it’s like the most boring and lazy comedy possible. You know, let’s make fun of girls cuz we already know everyone thinks they are dumb and annoying tee hee. These videos might as well be beer ads.

And Lynn Crosbie, writing for the Globe and Mail, notes:

Girls, or young women, who already speak largely in the interrogative and treat the world of men as another, completely inscrutable species, have enough on their minds already. They are already sexualized to the maximum. Must their every word be a potential joke?

Girls speak casually about inane things. Girls speak, too, about sexual violence and quantum physics. They talk about fear and art, children, murder and opera; philosophy, blood, sex and mathematics.

The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing is also some stuff a girl said.

In an interview with the Onion A/V Club, the two creators explain their reasoning:

AVC: Formally, the videos are great because they work like the Twitter feed—they’re just little one-liners stitched together. The obvious precedent would be something like Shit My Dad Says, and the TV show, which spins these sayings into 22-minute episodes. Were you trying to keep things a bit more rapid-fire, in the spirit of the Twitter feed?

GS: I think we were aware of Shit My Dad Says, and we wanted something that would live in the same Internet world as the Twitter feed. In a way, with Shit My Dad Says, it makes sense to do something longer and more anecdotal, because that was Justin [Halpern]’s story: his life with his dad. It was biographical, and there was a lot more material. But [our] tweets aren’t necessarily a single character. They’re not one woman. They’re a specific kind of woman. We don’t in any way purport to represent all women, and I think people understand that. I think our next video goes a little further than the tweets. It’s not a narrative, necessarily, but it’s a little more abstract.

AVC: Some of the criticism your project has received seems to miss this “certain kind of woman” concept that you mention. Something that refers to “girls” as an idea is essentializing, but it doesn’t seem like the concept would work if it were called Shit A Certain Kind Of Woman Who Has Been Socialized To Behave A Certain Way Says. How are you responding to criticism suggesting that the project is sexist or misogynist?

GS: You can’t really respond to it, other than positively. We respect women; we love women; we grew up around women; the people who helped us on the project were women. Obviously we can’t critique anyone for critiquing us in this way. Everyone has the right to critique it. It’s a really interesting dialogue that has come up because of the people criticizing it. It’s tricky territory. It’s sensitive territory. But people have the right to be offended. It’s par for the course, especially if something goes this big, which we never thought it would.

But I’m gay, and Kyle’s gay, and people put things out there about gay people. There are television shows about gay people, and I think we try to not let that define us. We know they don’t necessarily speak for us. I think it’s a really interesting topic. We’ve been learning a lot.

So while there was critique, there was also quite a bit of creation. The next sensation to hit YouTube was a racialized version of the first, “Shit Black Girls Say” clocking in at close to 5 million views.

Comedian Billy Sorrells portrays a character named Peaches, which also proved to be a sensation, though for more puzzling reasons. Naima Ramos-Chapman flinched at some of the humor, noting:

When the meme got a racialized twist with Billy Sorrell’s “Shit Black Girls Say” version, I choked mid-chuckle. Both videos refer to adult women as “girls,” and portray them as weak, stupid, silly, bad with technology, and helpless. And in Sorrell’s version, a part about black women being stuck in abusive relationships is too disturbing given that they are more likely to be victims of domestic violence than white women.

Then came “Shit Asian Girls Say,” which surprisingly saw very little in terms of critique:

Some of these videos sparked heavy internal debates, like “Shit Spanish Girls Say:”

The comments on the YouTube video ranged from “This video = all my Spanish friends” and “I am puertorrican and I found this video extremely hilarious and right on! :0 OH MAA GAAD MAAAAAAAA! I do it all the time!” to “BTW all this shit is Nuyorican and Dominican shit. Don’t disgrace my island.” Many commenters tried to distance themselves from the video:

@mymailbox4404 Yeah, I agree. It’s super embarrassing for Latinos. Caribbeans in particular. Now with that title, they get to attach some ghetto to my people too, lol. No biggie though. Most people on here know these are not Spanish people. But even to classy Puerto Ricans, this must be embarrassing. Did you see all the comments saying “This is sooo my family” or “I talk and act just like that”, like they are proud of this trashy lifestyle. It’s embarrassing.

IslenoGutierrez

And some good old ethnicity and nationality based prejudice:

@mymailbox4404 You are right. It’s taking the title of my people (Spaniards) and attaching ghetto trash to it for the world to see on youtube. All I can say is wow. que vamos hacer? Lol.

But while there are some interesting interpretations of racial stereotypes (white girls eat chips, black girls eat Cheetos, Asian girls eat Pocky, and I couldn’t quite make out what was on the bag in the Spanish video) and some annoyingly persistent gender stereotypes (CAN NO ONE USE A COMPUTER WITHOUT ASSISTANCE?!?! Oh wait, Spanish girls can.) I’m a bit more interested in the aftermath when people started using the meme for social commentary. While there were definitely people using the meme to advance their racist opinions of certain groups of people say, without the wink-nudge insider cred that the above videos rely on to be funny, the meme started mutating, turning the stereotypes in on themselves.

First, the original videos sparked some rebuttals, from women parodying men. Reminiscent of battle (of the sexes) rap popular in the 1990s, the videos featured women performing in drag giving commentary on the men in they know (accompanied by the inevitable “women just aren’t funny” comments).

There’s “Shit Guys Say” – which I have to admit feels like a quicker version of Jersey Shore:

And then there’s “Shit Black Guys Say:”

(Notice the commentary on how often men comment on women’s bodies in both of the videos.)

There are also challenges to the ideas of a unified experience for any group. Look at all the variations on “Shit Gay Guys Say”.

There’s this one:

There’s “Shit Black Gays Say:”

And a part 2:

And “Shit Southern Gay Guys Say:”

It’s notable that these videos are the principals representing themselves (as opposed to someone else’s interpretation of them) – perhaps since these groups are still so invisible in the public eye that no one else but them could speak to their experience.

With a slight tweak, the meme becomes social critique. Just by adding “to” and a second group, the meme found new life.

There’s the hit “Shit White Girls Say to Black Girls, ” which we’ve pointed out before:

and the follow up:

There’s also “Shit White Girls Say to Arab Girls:”

“Shit White Girls Say to Asian Girls:”

“Shit White Girls Say to Brown Girls:”

And “Shit White Guys Say to Asian Girls:”

As our own Thea Lim recently explained in The Guardian:

[T]hings took a turn when Franchesca Ramsey released Shit White Girls Say … to Black Girls, which quickly inspired Nicola Foti’s Shit Girls Say to Gay Guys, and Sameer Asad Gardezi and Kosha Patel then unleashed Shit White Girls Say … to Brown Girls”. Each video showcases a bewigged Ramsey, Foti and Patel reeling off a list of the most awful things your best white girlfriend has ever said. These videos skewer that verbal equivalent of friendly fire: friendly prejudice, if you will.

What’s friendly prejudice? The most common defence of racism is: “But I didn’t intend to be racist.” This response relies on the idea that if we didn’t intend to offend someone, then their feelings can’t possibly be hurt. The Shit X Says to Y videos are delightfully validating because they show that those with the genuinely lovely intentions of being your friend and seeking commonality with you can still be rude and hurtful.

Unsurprisingly, the Shit X Says to Y meme has itself been called offensive. As a commenter on the NPR blog says, “if the roles were reversed … Jesse [Jackson] & [Al] Sharpton, would be involved, lawsuits filed, perhaps riots …” But the roles can’t be reversed. The reason why relationships between white and non-white people, or straight people and gay people are fraught, is because of our history – long gone, recent or ongoing. Racist, homophobic or simply thoughtless comments are insulting not just in and of themselves, but because they are a bilious reminder of the times when straight, white people have dehumanised and denied other groups their human rights. Of course, non-white and gay people can say nasty or even prejudicial things to white and straight people, but those things don’t deliver the sting that comes from decades of being on the wrong end of an unequal relationship (and could I recommend further viewing on this topic: comedian Kumail Nanjiani’s “Racists”).

What bothers some viewers about the Shit X Says to Y meme is that it targets only white women. Critics have said of Foti in particular that it is always sexist when men use women as the brunt of any joke. But privilege does not work in debits and credits, whereby your lack of cultural power as a gay person is paid back by your stores of cultural power as a man. A white woman can be racist to an Asian man, just as a straight black woman can be homophobic to a gay white man. These videos are important because they ask all viewers – regardless of what power they have and what power they lack – to reconsider if their best friendship with non-white and gay people grants them licence to cross the line.

Due to the popularity of the meme, people are reconsidering the impact of their words to their friends, which is the point of this next batch of takes. Exploring the dynamics of relationships between friends can be painful, but what these users created basically amount to humorous public service announcements.

“Stuff Cis People Say to Trans People:”

“Shit Girls Say to Gay Guys:”

And, finally, the ultimate activist mutation of the meme, Shit Everybody Says to Rape Victims:

Outside of “Shit Black Girls Say to White Girls,” none of the other videos got anywhere near the amount of play that “Shit Girls Say” and “Shit Black Girls Say enjoyed.” Maybe that’s because, as a culture, we are accustomed to laughing at stereotypes, but we aren’t prepared to unpack how we perpetuate them.

In September, I wrote a piece describing my perspective as a disabled woman of color and psychiatric survivor. I explored how race-specific self-killings are differentially represented by the media to demonstrate how public perceptions of suicide depend on social and political contexts. My intention was to de-sensationalize model minority suicide in order to draw attention to how particular non-white bodies are often presumed to be volatile and violent.

This month, I look more closely at clinical explanations of ethnic minority suicide and respond by citing current non-clinical and community-based anti-racist reflections on the significance of emotional pain and anger.

Before I proceed, I would like to draw attention to how the term suicide is invoked by the viewer rather than the subject of suicide: the neighbor who calls 911 rather than the person exhibiting suspicious behavior. This can have negative repercussions on the “allegedly suicidal” that we don’t often think about. In fact, daily we are surrounded by public campaigns that encourage us to report at-risk behavior with the intention of saving lives: we believe it is our civic duty to do so. This is especially true in communal living environments such as campus residences.

The “peril of help” arises in (1) how we, as the public, determine what is suspicious or at-risk behavior and (2) how our social infrastructure then deals with the people we “call out.” Behavior can be “cut out” of context, of an individual’s life history, when it does not make sense to onlookers, including family, friends, and employers. Behavior might not make sense and alarm us because an individual’s actions are inconsistent with social rules and, furthermore, associated with narratives of harm we are taught to recognize daily by institutions around us. For example cutting is strongly associated with suicide. Seen in the absence of context, most of us would be compelled to stop this action and probably call on professional expertise to intervene and solve what we identify as a threat.

However, a growing number of self-advocacy groups and allies assert that attention-seeking and attempted suicide are professional myths about self-harm. According to Mark Cresswell, these groups critique the underlying pathology and disease assumed with self-harm, despite there being socially acceptable forms of self-harm such as smoking, body modification, and waxing. More importantly, he notes that people with experiences with self-harm identify strongly with the concept of survival. Activists such as Louise Pembroke have spoken about needing to self-injure to stay alive and survive the pain of sexual violence and institutionalization.

Thus, when a mobile crisis intervention team is called because someone appears to be a danger to himself, it is important to reflect on the potentially negative effects this can have on self-harm survivors because of existing mental health laws.

When mobile crisis teams work jointly with the police, the police — regardless of the outcome of an intervention — may keep a record, which can affect civil liberties. According to Ryan Fritsch, legal counsel for the Psychiatric Patient Advocate Office in Ontario, there have been eight recorded cases of non-criminal contact between police and Ontarians with various psychiatric histories appearing in the Department of Homeland Security in 2010. None of this actually benefits the well-being of persons in distress and can create numerous lifelong barriers, all thanks to one phone call. By equating mental health records with violence and criminality, border control has prevented people from traveling and immigrating.

Combined with the criminal justice system’s unsavory history of racial profiling, this link has at times produced deadly results. For instance, in 1997 police shot and killed Edmund Yu after he raised a small (toy?) hammer over his head on a bus in Toronto. Psychiatric survivors in Toronto have remembered Edmund Yu through memorials such as Edmund Place, which provides supportive non-medicalized housing to ex-users of psychiatry, who are typically discriminated against in other forms of housing.

As someone who has a psychiatric history and who identifies as “mad,” my survival hinges upon having a network of loved ones who can approach the subject of distress with an open-mind and willingness to learn about other “rhythms” to our existence — on knowing people who will not assume that X or Y thought or behavior will equate with danger to myself or others. Besides the everyday violence of medical records and police reports, increased suicidality has been associated with the use of various anti-depressant medications, such as the selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor fluoxetine.

This kind of evidence complicates the professional consensus that ethnic minorities are at higher risk of suicide in North America and in need of specialized services. McKenzie and Crawford argue that rates of ethnic minority suicide have been consistently higher than those of the majority group in the USA and Australia, especially in areas where there is a lower concentration of ethnic minorities. They suggest this is because of “a relative lack of support by people with similar social situations or the perception of a more hostile social environment,” and that on an individual level “socio-economic stress, thwarted aspirations, racism, acculturation, culture clash with parents, loss of religious affiliation, difficulty with identity formation, and loss of family and community support may have effects on suicide risk.” While I would like to examine these claims carefully in separate post, what concerns me are the solutions that McKenzie and Crawford propose.

They suggest that untreated mental health problems in ethnic minorities (due to factors such as a reluctance to seek services, conflict with services, and poor compliance) exacerbate rates of ethnic minority suicide. They combine the above with “skewed age distribution” towards “younger age groups,” and recommend further investigation of risk factors to develop youth-focused prevention strategies.

The ever-expanding circle of “risk” factors turns an increasing number of people and whole communities into disabled targets of mental health services, and helps to justify psychiatry’s expertise and expansion at the exclusion of suggesting or fostering other kinds of explanations for distress or other types of support for racialized communities. McKenzie and Crawford assume that the community is incapable of developing its own strategies to prevent death and that they have already failed due to second-generation suicides. What if we reconsider rates of “death” beyond sensationalized self-killing and reflect on how we get to live day to day — what Jasbir Puar refers to as the unevenness of our rights to a certain lifespan? For example, poor housing infrastructure changes the everyday bodily comportment of marginalized communities, displacing long-term goals such as education with the immediate need for shelter.

In the context of the myriad ways in which racialized people slowly die, educating “at-risk” individuals redirects us to be happy in conditions that are reasonably unhappy. What possibilities exist for us to grieve this everyday struggle without the imposition of becoming normal — indeed, “civilized” — and okay with our conditions? I don’t have any fast answers. However, I can say that non-clinical modalities such as community acupuncture can illustrate some of the possibilities growing across North America. In an account I shared with Six Degrees Community Acupuncture, I described how community healers who work in solidarity with queer, Indigenous, and people of color political organizing are sensitive toward the bodily labor of resistance and anger, accepting rather than rejecting the need to put our bodies in potentially compromising situations for social change. Here acupuncture has served as a tool to mediate how strong, yet informative emotions register on the body. I am amazed by how acupuncture can be a thread of connectivity between different communities of color who all want alternatives to Western medicine — a source of dialogue.

There have also been non-pathological ways developed by artists and activists to talk about and speak out about our distress, such as Yolo Akili’s perspective on emotional justice. Rather than drawing conclusions about how oppression leads definitively to illness or suicide, Akili encourages people to explore the emotional texture of social inequity by transforming the way that activist work typically occurs. In activist spaces, Akili suggests we challenge misogyny by revealing our feelings and intuition, as a way to begin our intellectual work while at the same time mediating that expression by avoiding hurtful tactics such as interrupting, yelling, and belittling. His objective is to address, but not remove, pain by thoughtfully expressing it within our support networks, which include activist networks.

On the West Coast, there is also Creative Collective Access (CCA serving the Bay Area), a group of disabled queer and trans people of color working to create interdependent care networks. One of their goals is to resist the culture of individualism through resource sharing. Their most recent project is The Living Room Project, a multi-disciplinary space for healing, wellness, art, and youth events — founded by Micah Hobbes, a somatic doula and healer.

Anthropologists such as Miriam Ticktin have begun to trouble how “biology plays in the politics of immigration,” determining who is worthy of citizenship and asylum. Scholars should likewise trouble “psy” technologies (such as the criteria for “competency”), as they are deployed by institutions like mental health and law to determine who has freedom of movement — to determine who is fully human. This relationship between psychiatry and detention, from forced institutionalization to border control, particularly affects the lives of people of color.

Ironically, as social workers and psychologists (many of whom are African American and Asian American themselves) seek to use mental health as a tool to fund anti-racist community services, their research fortifies an ever-growing body of knowledge about race-specific mental illness, knowledge that can be appropriated by other institutions to increase the surveillance of ethnic minorities. We are left with the question of how service providers who are critical of the power relations between helper and user can be better allies to (take greater ‘risks’ with?) patients who are looking for support, and not be another source of barriers. Though the alternatives I have described are largely grounded in social justice movements (which may or may not appeal to your needs), they demonstrate just some of the possibilities that exist for living.

* * *

Louise Tam is a graduate student in Sociology and Equity Studies in Education at the University of Toronto.

(Image Credit: “Image of a Lonely Lady,” Low Chin Han, via Shutterstock)

Taja Lindley is a full-spectrum doula, performing and tactile visual artist, and reproductive justice activist addressing the challenges of women of color through creativity, personal transformation and entrepreneurship. She is the founder of Colored Girls Hustle, an initiative that uses art as a tool to create affirming and celebratory images, messages and adornment for, about and by women of color. You can find her on facebook, twitter, tumblr and Etsy.

By Guest Contributor Tami Winfrey Harris, cross-posted from What Tami Said

For the past few weeks, as part of my project exploring black women, relationships and marriage, I’ve been immersing myself in books, films, blog posts and other media on the subject. Last week I read Act Like A Lady, Think Like A Man and am still trying to wash off the film and stink of patriarchy. I told my husband over the weekend that I am unbelievably proud of black women. As a group we are able to hold our heads high in the face of the relentless narrative that there is something wrong with us that needs to be fixed; that, for us, admirable qualities like independence, only make us more unlovable–a narrative not only championed by the mainstream, but, too often, by members of our own communities.

So, singer, actor and (God help us) author Tyrese decided to drop a little wisdom on the black lady folk during a recent interview with NecoleBitchie.com. (above) He warns us about being “too independent.”

Huh.

There is nothing about the descriptor “independent” that is negative on its face, at least not based on Merriam-Webster’s definition above. My parents taught me to be independent. When I became old enough to drive, my father taught me how to check my tire pressure and oil and how to change a tire. I keep my AAA membership payed up, but I know if roadside service can’t get to me, I can take care of myself. To be independent is to be free. Because I can handle an auto emergency, I’ve felt free to crisscross the country on road journeys points southwest to northeast.

What could be wrong with being free? Nothing, unless, of course, you believe that it is not advantageous for women to be “not subject to control by others” or “not requiring or relying on others (as for care or livelihood).”  Would Tyrese caution men this way? Would he warn them against not needing women.

Sexism lies at the root of the actor’s monologue. In the regressive language of modern black relationship advice, it is not enough for a black woman to want a man deeply, with all her heart and soul. Male egos must always be fed with the idea that women are unfulfilled and incapable of living without a man. We must avoid being uneducated free-loaders, sayeth Tyrese, while being sure to remain needy and helpless enough to be attractive to men like him.

Tyrese’s “helpful” advice carries the condescension and arrogance typical of mansplaining, plus a dash of amorphous homophobia. What was that weird sidebar about homosexuality? No doubt, some ill-spoken repetition of the idea that gay black men harm black women’s marriage chances with their gayness. Silly.

But here’s another thing Tyrese’s advice is: racist. It is specifically black women who are singled out for some of the most dehumanizing and denigrating messages about their lovability and marriageability. Indeed, Tyrese directs his comment “especially” to black women. Our culture remains in a place where it is acceptable to assume black women, apart from other women, are intrinsically wrong and in need of correction. It is not just mainstream sources like ABC News that serve up “What’s wrong with black women?” programming. Black men like Steve Harvey, Tyrese and Jimi Izrael are getting in on the action. And no one blinks an eye.

Can you imagine comedian Jeff Foxworthy holding on to his largely white audience after penning a book and taking to the airwaves telling white women how their faults are keeping them single? Would Josh Duhamel, who appeared with Tyrese in Transformers, be getting many calls in Hollywood after, apropos of nothing, derailing an interview to to talk about how white women are too damned self-sufficient for their own good? Could Ira Glass say: “[White] women’s unrealistic standards are probably born of bedtime stories about handsome, rich men on majestic horses delivering damsels in distress. Girlfriends often tell similar apocryphal tales about the friend of a friend who nabbed a rich, hung sugar-daddy who saved them from a life of dishpan hands and lower-middle-class drudgery. Through the influence of popular media and the misguided advice they give each other, sisters combine these images and presumptions to draw a composite of a perfect [white] man.” and keep his job at NPR? His coworker Jimi Izrael wrote that and more about black women and is not only featured on National Public Radio, but was excerpted on The Root, where he once penned a column.

Sexism is real for all women. But the combination of femaleness and blackness is particularly devalued, sadly, too often among even black men. Tyrese reveals his expectation that women must bend to meet male needs. I don’t see in the above video a man who values black women and loves them. I see a man concerned that black women might be too capable, too free. Independent women have options and demands, as men do. Independent women are choosy, as men are. A strong man has no problem meeting partners on an equal playing field, but a weak man needs a weaker partner to feel strong. Any man preaching against independence for women unwittingly lays himself bare.

On Thursday, June 9, I attended a Gen-Art sponsored screening of Victoria Mahoney’s independent feature Yelling to the Sky in Manhattan. Starring Zöe Kravitz and co-starring Gabourey Sidibe, this film has had significant buzz. It made its debut at the Berlin Film Festival and was workshopped via Sundance Institute’s Screenwriters and Directors Lab. Based on synopses I read prior to the screening, I was curious to see if the portrayal of black women(hood) would be complex and fresh (as it was in Ava Duvernay’s wonderful I Will Follow) or if it would stick to the usual, shopworn portrayals that sometimes plague even independent feature films. I was especially interested to see whether Sidibe’s character would be similar to the one she played in Precious or if that image would be turned inside out (Sidibe was actually cast as Latonya Williams in Yelling before being slated to play Precious Jones).

In Yelling, Kravitz plays Sweetness O’Hara, a biracial high school student coming of age in New York City while managing a difficult home life. Quiet (at least for the first part of the film), sensitive, introspective, and intelligent, Sweetness has to contend with an alcoholic father, a mother with emotional (and possibly mental) issues, an older sister coping with young motherhood, bullies at school, and urban poverty. Zöe Kravitz did a great job with the script she was given; her performance was nuanced and quite believable. Actually, most of the actors in the movie were strong (including Tariq Trotter, better known as Black Thought of The Roots). However, despite the actors’ efforts, they could not overcome the disjointed storytelling nor the director’s inability to avoid well-worn tropes of the “coming of age in the ‘hood” drama. And whether intentionally or not, the director played into common cinematic (and real-life) racial memes. There were four that stood out.

Dark(er)-skinned black people are mean and like to victimize light(er)-skinned black people. The opening scene of Yelling involves Sweetness, accompanied by a friend of similar complexion, riding her bicycle right into a group of kids from her high school who in short order take her bike and beat her down in the street. Gabourey Sidibe’s character Latonya is the ringleader of this group, initiating the bullying and fighting, and ultimately ordering her boyfriend to viciously finish the job. The assault only stops when Sweetness’ sister Ola, who like Sweetness is very fair, brutally assaults her sister’s male attacker. While the director may not have intended for this scene to evoke intraracial stereotypes and conflict about skin color, it certainly looked that way on screen. Also, while Sidibe’s character was well put together (her hair was laid and her makeup was popping), she was still an (physically) intimidating bully.

Girls/teenagers/women who are “authentically” black are bad. They fight, party, don’t care about achieving anything in life, and use illicit substances. After yet another incidence of family trauma, Sweetness reinvents herself. She starts selling drugs, begins cutting class, seemingly abandons her aspiration to attend college, and gets a makeover courtesy of two of the (darker-skinned) girls who were involved in her initial beat down. Her new look involves rocking doorknocker earrings, sashaying down neighborhood streets and school hallways in tight jeans, putting on lots of eye shadow and lip gloss, and a wearing a cornrow on the right side of her hair. She also enacts revenge upon Latonya, again with assistance from her two new friends, beating her bloody between classes. Near the end of the movie when it seems that Sweetness in trying to return to her old ways of being, she distances herself from her friends, apologizes to Latonya for beating her up, and pleads with her school’s guidance counselor to get her into any college that will accept her. Sweetness’ trajectory is not uncommon to young people of all races and ethnicities, especially when dealing with challenging life circumstances. But in this particular film, her journey to and return from darkness are literally marked by her association with and ultimate dissociation from those who are dark (of skin).

Dark(er)-skinned black male patriarchs mean well even when they’re doing bad, and they always abandon their kids in the end. When Sweetness wants to get into the drug game to supplement her family’s meager (non-existent?) income, she seeks out Roland (Black Thought’s character). He’s an educated hoodlum…you know, the black man that would be a CEO, were it not for America’s racist brand of capitalism. Roland resists Sweetness’ initial requests for him to put her on. But after being worn down by her relentless requests, he acquiesces and becomes her mentor and supplier. His daddy-figure drug dealer status is cemented when he also rejects Kravitz’s character’s romantic advances after a night of partying. Contrasted with the stoner sellers that Sweetness sometimes works alongside in her school’s stairwells, Roland’s selling of illicit substances seems almost righteous. In that way, he’s not dissimilar from other sympathetic drug slingers like Ice Cube’s Doughboy (Boyz ‘N The Hood) and Chris Tucker’s affable Smokey of Friday fame. But in the end, Roland puts Sweetness in harms way when he brings her to a drug pick-up that goes wrong. He ultimately ends up bleeding on a neighborhood basketball court after getting shot in retribution for the deal gone bad. Sweetness witnesses his murder after playing ball with him minutes earlier. But it’s not surprising. Black men always end up leaving their children to fend for themselves.

Interracial relationships are dysfunctional and make everyone involved unhappy. Sweetness and Ola have a white, alcoholic father and a black, emotionally impaired mother. Their mother seems shell-shocked and is actually missing-with little explanation-throughout most of the movie. Earlier in the film, it seems that she literally abandons her children, but later it’s hinted that she was in a mental institution. The father physically assaults everyone in the house at least once during the film and regularly metes out verbal punishment. Near the end of the film, again with little in the way of explanation, Sweetness’ father decides to actually attempt to parent her. He tries to keep her off the streets and pull her off the dark path she’s started to follow, becoming her savior. The O’Hara’s family dynamic embodies three classic celluloid tropes: black mothers are bad and/or incompetent, white people/men are the ones who save the day, and (female) children who are the products of interracial relationships have tragic lives.

Zöe Kravitz as Sweetness, good girl gone bad.

Though I enjoyed the visual quality of this film and at times, the lyrical storytelling, I felt that Victoria Mahoney tread well-traveled ground. Yelling to the Sky seemed to me a mash-up of Kids, Larry Clark’s tale of urban teenage nihilism, and Proenza-Schouler’s controversial Act Da Fool; visually captivating, emotionally brutal, and unstereotypical in its presentation of stereotypes of black/biracial women and urban blackness.

While Mahoney is black and/or a woman of color (she was profiled in the April 2011 issue of Essence in an article about black independent filmmakers, “Independent Women”), that does not mean that she is incapable of promoting prosaic images of black women and people. I was unable to unearth much about Mahoney’s background, except that she worked as an actress, then moved into directing/writing/producing. I have no idea what her experience as a non-white woman has been. However, whether or not she meant to make statements about race, the images she has put forth still speak to some “truths” held by her and/or a society steeped in white supremacy. As bell hooks said in Outlaw Culture, “Whether we like it or not, cinema assumes a pedagogical role in the lives of many people. It may not be the intent of the filmmaker to teach audiences anything, but that does not mean that lessons are not learned.”

So, last week Jill at Feministe has a post up on the first real-time spanking study.

Time Magazine reports:

[I]n the course of analyzing the data collected from 37 families — 36 mothers and one father, all of whom recorded up to 36 hours of audio in six days of study — researchers heard the sharp cracks and dull thuds of spanking, followed in some cases by minutes of crying. They’d inadvertently captured evidence of corporal punishment, as well as the tense moments before and the resolution after, leading researchers to believe they’d amassed the first-ever cache of real-time spanking data. [...]

The parents who recorded themselves represented a socioeconomic mix: a third each were low-income, middle-income and upper-middle-class or higher. Most were white; about a third were African-American.

Researchers broke down the data, detailing each spanking or slapping incident, what led up to it, what type of punishment was used and how much, how a child reacted immediately and then several minutes later.

“The idea is this data will provide a unique glimpse into what really goes on in families that hasn’t been available through traditional methods of self-report,” says Holden.

About a year ago, I got a request to talk about spanking on Racialicious, from the perspective of a black parent wondering why other black parents were so quick to put their hands on their children.

Renina has written about this in the broader context of policing masculinity with violence. She said:

In this video I just watched today a Black Uncle whoops his presumably 13 or 14 year old nephew with a belt for “Fake Thugging” on Facebook. He then forced the young man to put the video on Facebook. #triggerwarning.

I have long been reluctant to talk publicly about Black parents beating Black children, however, it needs to be done. Honestly, its one of the things that I have been scared to write about and I don’t scare easily.

bell hooks has said Black feminist’s lack of writing about how some Black parents, spank, whoop and beat their children is one of the ways in which Black Feminist have failed Black families. We analyze domination between men and women and Black folks and White folks and even global violence but we don’t closely analyze how parents dominate children.

Conversations around spanking, particularly in progressive spaces, take a very hard line around corporal punishment. Renee, of Womanist Musings, has written dozens of posts about why spanking is wrong. Some of the commenters on Jill’s post (somewhere back in the 100s) brought up differences in what is considered culturally acceptable. Most of Jill’s commenters came to an agreement dominating the thread – there is never, ever a reason to discipline your child physically. But most of these conversations assume certain things. That these are interactions solely between adult and child, and that generally, the household is in an atmosphere of peace. What isn’t raised is the reality of raising children in environments where random street violence or drug use is commonplace.

One of my favorite movies – we’re talking top 10 of all time here – is I Like It Like That, written and directed by Darnell Martin. There are a thousand and one reasons for why I love that film so much, but the scene where Chino (one of the protagonists) finds out his son has been dealing drugs and taking new clothes from the local drug dealer is one of them. The beginning of this has been removed due to copyright claims from Sony, but the action starts after Chino finds out that Lil’ Chino is dealing drugs, strips him of the shoes and jeans, and spanks him with a belt in the middle of the street. The sign Chino is holding Lil’ Chino up to is a memorial to his deceased brother, a cop who was killed by drug dealers.

Chino stops beating the kid who deals drugs (note – AFTER knocking the gun out of his hand) because he hears what the kid is saying. Through his tears, the kids is saying “he can’t hit me man – he’s not my father.”

Chino lets the kid go, and leans against the wall with his dead brother’s mural. He slams his fist against it – shame, rage, anger, frustration all play on his face. He walks away and the camera cuts to Lil’ Chino under the stairs, scared and remorseful, waiting for his mother.

This isn’t the end of the scene, but I want to stop here and talk about the fear and consequences in families struggling to raise their children against a backdrop of violence.

The assumption of peaceful environment probably makes sense. I grew up in a mostly peaceful area – you weren’t fighting for your life all the time, like my cousins had to. But at the same time, it was kind of unfathomable to me to not learn how to fight and defend yourself. I lived in DC around the time when they were warning parents to make sure your kids weren’t wearing brand name clothes (anyone else remember that?) because there were way too many crimes happening over Northface Jackets and Timberland boots. I couldn’t afford these things anyway, but wearing no brand names was a step to reduce the likelihood of violence happening to you, even if it didn’t reduce it completely.

So that’s one aspect of the question. Despite some parents desire to be peaceful, their children are still operating in a violent world. So even if you raise a home that is nonviolent, how do you keep violence away from your door? How do you teach your children to respond to a violent world? The idea that violence begets more violence is a true one – but at the same time, blocks and neighborhoods can be taken over by very small groups of determined and violent people. Suddenly, all the neighbors live in fear of a handful of people. That public spankfest Chino initiated in the video above would be really welcome in communities I know and remember, though some would probably cringe to hear that said aloud. But I think it’s important to reflect on the place that violence has in our lives, and ways in which we navigate its boundaries.

I’ve heard quite a few of the grown folks talk about gun violence by discussing the way fights used to work. A certain type of fight is prized above all others – the one on one show down kind of fight, just fists and stamina. The way they tell it, there was no need for gun violence since conflicts were resolved through fisticuffs. I don’t think reality was ever that neat or honorable. But earlier this year, I watched kids from a nearby high school gang up repeatedly on their classmates, 6-on-1, 8-on-1. Everyone in the neighborhood was concerned. On three different occasions, a child cut up my block, running for his life, pursued by an angry gang of classmates. Other times, the fights started a few blocks from school grounds. Each time, adults had to figure out how to intervene. We would all come out of our houses. Some neighbors took the initiative to call the police, which we all had mixed feelings about, but all of us together couldn’t have broken up a group of 30 or so kids. With smaller groups, a few of the adults would go out yelling. Sometimes I would come downstairs with my dog, who is a good visual deterrent, and who accidentally broke up a few of these when we were out on walks. But all spring, the violence kept increasing. Quite a bit of it made the news. I am not yet a parent, but I wonder about this often. How do I teach my child to exist in this world? And how do I teach them to defend themselves in environments like this?

But then, I need to flip the question around. For every child that is targeted by bullies, there are the children who are acting as the bullies. Or the young drug dealers. Or the young adults that got set in their ways and have grown up to be the drug dealers. So when you are raising a child, and they head down that path, I often wonder: what do you do when words don’t work?

I was raised by, with, and around black men. My father, uncles, cousins, grandfathers and their friends rarely ever disciplined us girl children – that was a task left to mothers and aunties. But the boys? The boys got in coming and going.

My cousin used to have to wake up at 7 AM on Saturday to cut the grass, and help do yard work. This was part of my father’s hopes to impart discipline, and he would often say things like “Real men take care of their responsibilities.” (This was probably a way to compensate for the fact that my cousin’s father was on and off drugs and in and out of jail for most of his life. It is very easy to start repeating destructive patterns.) I’ve overheard story after story from all of my grandfathers talking about their time in the drug game, why they got out, and why it isn’t worth it. I saw my uncles teaching them to play football, basketball, fishing – anything to keep them away from the streets of South East, Washington DC in the crack era and it’s aftermath.

So discipline wasn’t all physical. Large parts of it are modeling, intervention, appealing to reason. But sometimes, kids don’t want to hear it. And it’s one thing to ask an eight year old to heed what you say – yet another to ask a willful fifteen year old to do the same.

So what should parents do, when words fail and their children are on a collision course with the criminal justice system?

This problem becomes particularly necessary for communities in crisis. I wrote about NAACP’s report on Misplaced Priorities for the Root, noting:

In 1988 President George H.W. Bush created the Office of National Drug Control Policy, which was elevated to the Cabinet level during the Clinton administration. The policies championed by ONDCP actually opened the floodgates for nonviolent offenders to become institutionalized, a trend that resulted in the war on drugs taking an outsize toll on black and Latino communities, as well as impoverished communities around the nation. “Misplaced Priorities” reveals:

While Americans of all races and ethnicities use illegal drugs at a rate proportionate to their total population representation, African Americans are imprisoned for drug offenses at 13 times the rate of their white counterparts. [...]

According to “Unlocking America: Why and How to Reduce America’s Prison Population,” if African Americans and Latinos were incarcerated at the same rates as whites, today’s prison and jail populations would decline by approximately 50 percent. [...]

There are a variety of reasons for racial disparities in the prison system — the NAACP cites disparate sentencing for crack- and powder-cocaine offenses and a greater focus of public spending on imprisonment than on subsidizing drug-addiction treatment. “Misplaced Priorities” also notes that low-income whites are starting to suffer also from the rise of incarceration culture; it is estimated that one in 10 low-income white males will also be incarcerated, some because of the rise of methamphetamine.

I am an adult now. Most of my friends (luckily) made it to adulthood with me. One was incarcerated. Most are now in the military, or working various jobs. Some have families. But it is always amazing to me how many of my black male and Latino male friends have had terrible, terrible interactions with police. Most of them were not doing anything in particular – when I was sixteen, my friend was harassed for sitting on a park bench with a discarded cup underneath it and was threatened with incarceration – he chose to end the issue by throwing the cup away, even though he did not place it there.

My other friends have drawn police interactions from speaking too loudly in public places; have been arrested over disputed traffic stops; have been dick checked* for drugs in their neighborhood since the officer claims they saw them throw drugs in the bushes after giving a friend dap. One of my friends was almost extradited to New York on someone else’s warrant for arrest. He was searched after running a stop sign, caught with a joint in the car (clearly, his fault), sent to lock up, tagged with the wrong name and social security number, spent 72 hours in jail begging everyone to believe him and to go check his ID in his wallet back at the precinct , hauled off to court anyway, and held until finally, some prosecutor decided to just run the check and found out he was not the person on his ID cuff.

And this doesn’t even start discussing all of the other things that happen. Women and transpeople in my neighborhood (many of the transkids are black teens) have also felt harassment from increased police presence and patrol. (This is why our neighbors has varying opinions on calling the police to intervene in the violence I referenced earlier.) DC also has a curfew in place for teens, meaning anyone who looks young on the street after midnight can be stopped and asked for identification. (This has happened to Renina.) We just have so many more encounters, and with every encounter is the chance that your life will alter forever. (R.I.P Oscar Grant.)

So the question for parents in these environments is a terrifying one – how do I prevent my child from being caught up in these huge systems, being caught up in this life that will ruin them?

To some, spanking is a cut and dry issue. Some will never, ever believe its necessary. Some people will never, ever believe you can raise a decent person without spanking. But its that scene from I Like It Like That that cuts the closest to how I understand why some parents choose hit their kids. Sometimes, you need your child to fear you because they cannot understand the consequences of the life they are choosing. I watched this happen time and time again, particularly with the men I knew. There was discipline, there were beatings, but then there were also those beatings with the undercurrent of fear behind them. Fear that you are going to lose control of your child to this other, evil, more seductive world. Fear that despite your best efforts as a parent, your child is heading down a path that leads to prison, drug addiction, or life as a drug dealer or street thug.

I know parents who regret not taking harder lines with their children. They watched them spend decades on drugs. They watched them screw up their own kids, throwing multiple lives down the toilet. They wonder where they went wrong, if they could have changed something.

I don’t think these parents are thinking “I should have kicked his ass when I caught him with weed back in the 8th grade.” But I have watched the desperation in the eyes of those who see that the streets are more alluring than the boring ass life of working hard at school and finding a job, and I can understand why people would turn to violence when words and logic aren’t enough.

I’m not saying I condone physical punishment. But I am not yet a parent, and I’ve never been confronted with those kinds of issues. I still carry scars of a parent’s abuse from my childhood, and spent the last decade on my own learning not to hit people. Not to solve problems with violence. Forcing myself to swallow all the things I want to do and say, because I’ve learned that a lot of what I internalized as normal is wrong.

However.

If the choice ever came down to putting my hands on my child because I am fighting for their life? I’d probably do the same thing I’ve seen all my relatives do.

I’m ultimately not inclined to use any kind of violence other people these days. I know how seductive and easy that starts to feel, the exertion of control through physical means. And I know how easy it is to just allow yourself to react and react and react. So my solution is not to do it at all.

But I’m not going to take some Leave It to Beaver style moral high ground. I’m going to be raising black children, and I need to make sure they survive. If my child is on the path to start having run ins with the police, they’re going to have to go through me first.

Because unlike the criminal justice system, I care.

The problem, though, still persists. Violence is (at best) a temporary solution, and it carries with it a very high potential to slide over from discipline to abuse. So remember, the clip above? Lil’ Chino’s auntie, Alexis, is the one who takes the child and begs Chino to stop hitting him. She’s the one trying to reconnect Lil Chino with his mother. And she’s the one trying to advocate for not hurting the child – based on her own history as growing up with a father who didn’t want to accept that his little boy wanted to be a girl.

The story of Alexis is an interesting counterbalance to Lil’ Chino’s. Later in the story, after Alexis fights with Lisette about rejecting her son, she decides to confront her mother and father about her life, and how she has chosen to live as a woman. Her father comes to the door – and delivers a punch in the eye. Lisette is horrified – but Alexis points out that she was treating Lil’ Chino in the same way their parents treated them. To the viewer of I Like It Like That, stories of violence are told in complicated, complex ways. Should Chino have spanked his child on the street? Should Chino have spanked a child not his own, who was luring other kids to deal in the drug trade? In some ways, it was interesting to see how quickly that tough-kid facade fell away when Chino didn’t back down – which ruined his reputation with the other neighborhood kids. But by the same token, if we can accept that violence, the violence involved in trying to “save” a child, then how can we condemn Alexis’s father for trying to beat his queerness out of him? And if we say we accept no violence at all, how should Chino have solved the drug dealing problem? And, would he have been able to solve the situation without losing his son or becoming a casualty, like his brother?

Violence is a way of asserting power. Violence is also a method of communication. And this is what makes this conversation around spanking so complicated. The questions around spanking mirror the questions we have around use of force – and how we cope (both on a personal and a societal level) with the messiness of life.

–

*Edited to Add: A dick check is when police check your genital area for drugs. Occasionally, officers will do this in public, as a power thing or a humiliation tactic. It is normally done after someone is incarcerated, similar to the cavity check. Yes, the friend this happened to filed a complaint. No, nothing came of it.

**TRIGGER WARNING**

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

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

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

Transcript after the jump.

Dark Girls: Preview from Bradinn French on Vimeo.

Voiceover: Rise, dark girls.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Child: Because she’s white.

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

Child: Because she’s black.

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

Child: Because she’s black.

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

Child: Because she’s light-skinned.

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

(Chokes back tears)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Man #2: You like what?

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

Man #2: You’re a moron.

Man #1: I can’t help it.

Man #2: What? Being a moron?

Man #1: Yeah, that too.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Interviewee #9: Rise, dark girls. Rise.

(Music)

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

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

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

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

Photo credits: Courtesy of Andrea (AJ) Plaid

by Latoya Peterson

Last week, the internet was in a tizzy over Aliya S. King’s article for Vibe. The piece, titled the Mean Girls of Morehouse, explored how Morehouse’s change in dress code was really a reaction to a small group of genderqueer students on campus.  The article dove into the lives of these students on campus.  Vibe and King were both blasted for attacking Morehouse, a bastion of the black community, and a video was quickly uploaded to the internet showing a spirited discussion at Morehouse around the content of the article, exploring everything from lack of queer perspective to the representation of Morehouse.

However, through this whole debate, two things have stood out to me:

1. We aren’t hearing very much from those profiled.
2. Most of the conversation has swirled around representation – but what about solidarity? Particularly among groups of color?

The lengthy article alludes to this issue, but doesn’t delve deeply into the issue of solidarity and support. King speaks to other members of the Morehouse gay community:

Of course the Plastics are only a part of Morehouse’s openly gay community. What about those men who don’t wear heels and makeup?

Gathered in a two-bedroom, off-campus apartment are several members of Safe Space, an organization dedicated to supporting the gay community at Morehouse, whether or not the flout the appropriate attire policy.

Michael J. Brewer, 24, is a 2009 graduate of Morehouse who currently works in the office of Georgia State Representative Alisha Thomas Morgan. The former president of Safe Space, he still serves in an advisory capacity. There’s not a swishy bone in Brewer’s body. If he doesn’t tell you he’s gay, you wouldn’t know. In his off-campus apartment, he’s joined by Kevin Webb and Daniel Edwards, the current co-presidents of Safe Space. “In any culture, there will be divisions,” explains Brewer, choosing his words with care as he describes attitudes toward the Plastics. “Yes, there is some dissonance against the more eccentric, ostentatious and flamboyant members of the gay community.”

Kevin chimes in. “In some ways, it’s like it’s okay to be gay. But not that gay. Or it’s okay to be queer. But not that queer,” he says. “There is homophobia even within the gay community—which is something we have to deal with if Morehouse is going to progress.”

Brewer insists that Morehouse’s future hinges on its ability to deal with students like the Plastics and finding a place for them. “My hope is that Morehouse can step into the space of the most progressive colleges in the nation. Morehouse can be a beacon of light. Morehouse can find a place for the LGBT community. Even the ones transitioning to the opposite gender,” says Brewer. “If a student comes to Morehouse as a man and plans to transition to a woman, yes, there should still be a space for that student. It may sound radical. But that’s what Morehouse has always stood for—radical change in the face of injustice.”

But Brian “Bri” Alston has his doubts about whether Morehouse will ever achieve that level of enlightenment. “We know our lives aren’t really reflective of the Morehouse gay black experience,” says Brian. “And Morehouse has enough issues dealing with just the gay community. They don’t know what to do with us.”

While this was the most interesting section of the piece, the narrative around the article has been consumed with more on the reputation of Morehouse and gender identity and a lot less on what we owe each other as members of marginalized communities. In 2008, Jafari Sinclaire Allen wrote a piece for us that begins with “Congratulations, Michael Brewer.” In the piece, he is speaking to an out and proud Morehouse man, one who was able to reconcile his identity with Morehouse’s ideals. But Allen notes:

In return for the “crown,” which we are told Morehouse holds over the head of its sons who endeavor to grow tall enough to wear it, we are asked to buy a bill of goods that include fidelity to image and representation. But what—and whom– does this respectability betray?

Who pays the price for this shoddy mimicry- the picture in which the Black man takes up his “rightful” place at the head of a family with a dutiful longsuffering well-educated but decidedly under-employed light-skinned wife, and children with good hair?

[To each, her and his own, of course. My point here is not to point a finger, but to shine a light.]

How do these images and longings for certain types of lives, mates and relationships get shaped? To whom do we look for examples and for approval? My point here is that Black angst over appearing freaky, weird, less-than, or too Black shape our decisions and the ways we treat each other. Perhaps—the logic goes—if I speak, act and embody the White middle class heterosexual standard, or at least closely approximate it, I will finally be accepted as levelly human, as worthy, employable and loved.

But what violence takes place outside the picture’s pose, in order to frame this ‘just so’ story, in which Black men get to borrow the crumbling crown of the White patriarch? We rarely call into question the concept of “leadership,” or the assumption that an elite college education and middle class status qualify us to take the reins of a community putatively deemed “out of control.” And where do we turn, but to places like Morehouse, where suited and well-spoken men stand poised to do so? [...]

Today, it seems the news at the Atlanta University Center these days is hopeful. As the newly inaugurated President of Morehouse College, Robert Michael Franklin, begins his second year, his support of the “No More ‘No Homo’” campaign is inspiring. There is reason to be cautiously optimistic that the self-appointed makers of Black leaders will finally take up its work of producing 21st Century Black men with open and affirming gender and sexual politics.

There simply is no excuse not to do so.

Now is no time to turn our backs on the work left to do.

And yet, here we are.

Allen’s call to action wasn’t just intended for the Morehouse community – it should be heard by all of us who care about social justice. These are members of our community, who are often suffering in silence, afraid of our judgment and our backlash.

My friend Kavitha posted a link to a depressing article in Mother Jones, aptly titled “Queer and Loathing: Does the Foster Care System Bully Gay Kids?” Considering the plight of many young people caught in the understaffed and overtaxed foster care system, the additional hurdle that young queer kids of color have to go through is gut wrenching. Jason Cherkis reports:

Nothing frightened Kenneth Jones more than the prospect of his first real date. He prepped for it like a court appearance, saving up for a black button-down shirt and for a salon treatment to tame his spiky locks and paint his nails with intricate black-and-gray swirls. He still remembers those last anxious teenage moments. “A lot of mirror time,” he recalls. “Tons of mirror time.”

He needed this to go well. As a gay foster child in Washington, DC, Kenneth spent most of his weekends alone. By the summer of 2009, the isolation had gotten so bad that he’d started calling his cell-phone carrier’s help line with imaginary complaints, just so he could vent to somebody about something. He would even text himself encouraging messages, like “Good job,” or “Damn you so strong.”

He needn’t have worried. Kenneth and his date took an afternoon swim, made out during G.I. Joe, and finished the evening at Chipotle. More dates followed. After a few weeks, taking his new boyfriend home seemed like the natural next step. And so it was that James, Kenneth’s foster father, returned to the apartment one night to find the boys talking and laughing in the front room. The introductions immediately turned into what Kenneth calls a “life-or-death situation.” [...]

Across the nation, social workers and children’s advocates have their own Kenneth stories—the gay youth in Jacksonville, Florida, who tore through 48 placements in four years; the lesbian teen in Connecticut who made a pinky promise with her social worker to “not be gay.” The changes in mainstream attitudes that have made life easier for gay adults in recent years have also made it easier for gay teens to come out of the closet. But that doesn’t mean foster parents and child-welfare agencies have kept pace with the times. Kids “question their sexual orientation more” nowadays, says Cindy Watson, who directs a center for gay youth in Jacksonville. “That’s a dangerous place to be. And the system is not a safe place.”

According to the American Bar Association’s 2008 guidebook (PDF) for child-welfare lawyers and judges, virtually all lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and questioning kids in group homes had reported verbal harassment; 70 percent had been subjected to violence; and 78 percent had either run away or been removed from a foster placement for reasons related to their sexuality. “They are the one population thrown out of their home because of who they are,” says Gerald P. Mallon, a professor at New York’s Hunter College School of Social Work.

There is so much pain. There is so much hurt. And this is coming from our people, members of our communities.

We have to work harder to bridge these gaps.

Dan Savage’s “It Gets Better” Campaign has made its way around the internet and the mainstream media a few weeks ago, pulling together a wide range of people to assure queer kids that life does get better – if they live long enough to see it out.  One video, Kristel Yoneda from Honolulu, HI, really struck me for her openness in reminiscing about that period in her life:

Kristel said:

I remember as a junior, one day I got called into the office in the middle of class. I thought maybe my mom had left me a message at the office or something, but it turns out the counselor wanted to speak with me. So we sit down, and we make small talk for a little while and she says “You know, there are these rumors going around that you’re gay. You’re not gay, are you?” And I remember it wasn’t with that tone where it was like “ok, you’re gay, it’s ok, this is a safe environment,” it was that tone that tells you, “You better not be gay, don’t tell me that you’re gay.” And I was shocked. Before I could even process the question properly, before I could really even answer, I remember denying it. Flat-out denying it, which was a lie of course. And she asked me again, “Are you gay, are you gay? Are you gay with your friend? I heard she’s gay too. So here I was, denying it. I’m not gay, my friend’s not gay, we’re not together, none of us are gay.

And I remembered she just looked at me and said “Well, I heard she’s a slut.”

And I didn’t know what to say, you know? Had this conversation happened now, it would have gone so much differently, you know? I would have stood up for myself. I would have stood up for my friend. But the truth is, you know, I was fifteen years old. And I was speaking to someone who was supposed to be someone I could confide in. They were an authority figure I was supposed to feel safe with, and in that moment she shattered all my faith in that system.

Some folks have criticized Savage’s campaign, saying that we should not ask gay teens to stand by and accept their own bullying. I can understand that criticism, but at the same time, I can hear the message Savage is trying to convey. Adolescence is a strange, awkward period of time for most of us – we are in the process of discovering who we are, and we are still learning to navigate our peers and parents/guardians. We are starting to learn some of life’s harshest lessons, and beginning the journey toward adulthood. For those of us who have left this phase in our development, we can say that it does get better. It isn’t guaranteed to do so, but most adults have one thing teens lack: control over their lives. At some point, the decisions you make become those you determine. And that kind of control and autonomy does make a world of difference.

But still, as adults, as those who’ve been through it (or similar rough situations) we can always do more.

Last week, reader Tomee Sojourner sent in a video campaign to promote an alternative campaign, saying:

In light of recent mainstream LGBTQ response to LGBT/Queer youth suicides in US and other parts of the world, the Embracing Intersectional Diversity Project (EID Project) wanted to shine a spotlight on how homophobic/transphobic and racist violence manifests itself in our communities. In particular, how racialized and intersectional identities need to be visible in how narratives are shared, mourned, and calls to action are made. The EID Project team feels that the lack of discussion about the affect/impact of racism on how bullying and homophobia take shape, is not only dismissive, it is in fact irresponsible.

The Embracing Intersectional Diversity Project is a not-for-profit organization based in Montreal, QC. Our team decided to generate a call to action and campaign, ‘I AM PROOF THAT IT GETS BETTER’ to get folks to situate racialized and intersectional identities in the discussions, debates, dialogues, and movement building around challenging homophobic bullying, violence, and empowering queer youth.

The EID Project campaign places race, gender expression, and the lived experiences of queer folks of colour and two-spirited folks at the centre rather than on the periphery. The project asks folks to step up to do MORE and ACT.

As Director of the Embracing Intersectional Diversity Project, I created a brief youtube clip in response to the EID Project’s call to action.  On a personal note, Ihave had enough of the erasure of racialized, gendered, and intersectional violence and forms of oppression that queer folks of colour and two-spirited folks face on a daily basis. I have also moved in too many spaces where folks feel that they have very little option but to no longer exist. As a Black, masculine-identified queer woman, Social Justice Activist, Artist, Social Entrepreneur, former College Professor, Auntie, Femtor, and Partner, I move in this world with intersectional identities. In addition, I have experienced intersectional violence.

This campaign will generate spaces where folks can share knowledge, ideas, skills, and engage in difficult dialogues for the purpose of growing progressive, sustainable social change, one connection at a time.

To non activists, this just sounds like a mouthful.  But all Tomee is really asking for is for us to ensure that we are examining what is going on in the lives of others.

So please. Do something. Reach out. Read queer writing, theory, poetry. Add some queer POC blogs to your feed reader or rotation.

We can’t afford to leave so many members of our community out in the cold.

Hard to believe, but I was born bald. Not cute little peach-fuzz bald. Not skinhead bald with a chance of stubble. No, I was born with a head as bald as a baby’s butt. What’s more unbelievable—I grew up with straight hair. Of course, if you look at me now, the first thing you see is what happens when Ireland and Iran decide to come together to have a baby—curls that put even Shirley Temple to shame.

My hair went curly in early adolescence, right around the time I hit middle school. I was a small, petite tweenster, and instead of fretting about breasts, which were hardly there, or periods, which were nonexistent, I poured my angst and energy into my newfound mop of kinky hair that sprung itself on me almost overnight. My father hated my curly hair. He said it made me look black. This is a problem to some Iranians, who hold a great pride in the purity of the Persian race. Iran is actually Farsi for Aryan. To this day, when people meet me, their first impression isn’t that I look Persian; it’s that I look black. My Arabic first name doesn’t help. It makes people assume that I’m one of “those black people” whose parents named her something from the homeland. Persians have lustrous hair, but usually it’s straight with a slight little wave. Mine is too kinky to scream and dance “Iran!” Even when I met Shirin Neshat, the most famous Iranian artist outside of Iran, who has made a career out of photographing Persian women, it wasn’t apparent. She didn’t realize I was Iranian until I mentioned my last name.

There is a racial element to the picture here—hair that is curly, kinky or even nappy is commonly associated in American culture as “black.” Silky, straight hair, on the other hand is usually seen as “white.” As comedian Paul Mooney put it, “If your hair is relaxed, white people are relaxed. If your hair is nappy, they’re not happy.” Herein lies the paradox of many ethnic women in America, black and otherwise—the pressure we curlyheads feel in assimilating into a dominant image of lustrous, straight hair that will seemingly make us look more well-kept or better-groomed in a culture of brushes, perms and irons designed to give straight hair what we already have. Yes, curly hair is sexy—at times. Usually the sexy sirens with curly hair are actually straight-haired women who know how to use a curling iron. The grass really is greener on the other side.

This ideology is pervasive, to the point that many times, we don’t even realize we’re buying into it. Beauty requires an acknowledged ugliness in something else, so in order to look damn good, someone else has to look like a train wreck. I remember being told as a child that curly hair is really a genetic mutation. I remember thinking I was a freak. When I was in high school, a classmate once told me that race is actually determined by hair type. If your hair is straight, then you’re Asian. If it’s wavy, then you’re white. And curly hair makes you black. I stood there dumb-founded that a straight-haired, freckled white guy was telling me this. The physical contradiction between him and his theory was so obvious. Even with a democratically elected black President, there are people in our country who still think that the American image should still lean towards white. And if you think that’s outdated, just look at this past summer when 11-year-old Malia Obama wore here hair in twists during a trip to Rome. The conservative blog Free Republic called her unfit to represent her country because her hair wasn’t straight. The blog has since pulled that thread from their site.

How is a young, ethnic girl with curls supposed to feel good about her body if the images she’s being told are sexy are those of women who either have straightened hair, or are women with straight hair that has then been curled? Google “curly hair celebrities,” and most of them are straight-haired women who have gone through a curling iron. I’m sorry, but end-of-hair flips do not constitute curly. Beach waves are called waves for a reason. They don’t count either. In Hair Matters, Ingrid Banks wrote, “Certainly white women have concerns with their hair, but their concerns do not involve the actual alteration of hair texture to the extent that is an expression of their cultural consciousness (Banks, 38).” There are naturally curly celebrities out there, but looking back, the only ones I have never seen with straightened hair are Bernadette Peters and Howard Stern. I hate to say it, but Howard Stern is keeping it real here. Guys seem to have it easy here—all they have to do it cut their hair super-short. It the world of curly hair, it really does seem as if you’re damned if you do, and you’re damned if you don’t. Even Michelle Obama straightens her hair, and Malcolm X tried, before he came to consciousness about it. In his autobiography, he writes on what he calls his “first really big step toward self-degradation:”

I’d seen some pretty conks, but when it’s the first time, on your own head, the transformation, after a lifetime of kinks, is staggering.

Now picture me in the quaint, white, cookie-cutter homes and gardens, picture of Littleton, Colorado, where almost every girl in my middle school sported sleek-straight locks with bleached highlights, suntanned over the summer and walked around dressed like the latest advertisements from Abercrombie and Fitch. I stuck out enough before with my dark hair and tan skin. But my curls made me stick out as if I were in a picture of a Where’s Waldo book. A hairstylist once told me I have an irregular curl pattern, and never was it more pronounced than in middle school. There was no fighting it. Every strand went whatever way it decided that morning, and brushing it only made it look worse. Classmates would come up to me during lunch hour and tell me my hair was too curly. They labeled me as the Iranian girl, and that mindset stuck with me into my twenties, that because I looked different, I was Iranian before I was American, and that was a status I would have to subscribe to because there was no way I could change my looks. In our inherent, but rarely caught habits of racializing appearance, curly hair commonly seems to get caught somewhere in the middle. It is, but sometimes, it isn’t. I remember hearing girls tell me, “This weekend, I saw a girl with really curly hair, but not kinky curly like yours, really pretty ringlet curly.” Even my mom, my number-one fan, called my hair kinky, a term commonly reserved for black hair. That never bothered her though. She said she loved my hair because she loved the look of African hair. It was exotic to her. She just wished she knew how to take care of it. At the same time, Iranians weren’t laying any claim on me either. To them, I looked more mullato than anything else. My father hated looking at me because he said I didn’t look like an Iranian child. It wasn’t enough that I was a scrawny, underdeveloped child with glasses and braces. No, that was too easy because too many other kids in my school had glasses and braces too. But I was the one with the out-of-control hair. By the time I reached high school, I saw girls all around me, left and right, getting asked out on dates and dances, but I was getting glossed over like the big white elephant in the middle of the room. I was positive my hair had something to do it, and that was when I bought my first hair relaxer kit. I’m not alone in this endeavor. According to the market research firm Mintel, home relaxer kits made $45.6 million in sales in 2008. And that’s just a temporary fix.

Hair relaxing wasn’t my first attempt at taming my curls. I can’t even to begin to count how many nights I would spend doing homework with jumbo curlers in my hair, hoping they would at least smooth the strands. They never did, so then I would pull my wet hair back into a ponytail, hoping to at least straighten the top part of my do. My mom once told me that puberty made her hair a little curly, but then it calmed down. I clung onto that, thinking that if straightness came back to her, it was only written in my genes to come back to me as well. I was in such denial, I would still insist on having my hair cut into layers as if it were straight, so that the moment my hair decided to behave, it was already cut to look perfect.

I relaxed my hair for the first time one spring weekend during my freshman year of high school. I didn’t tell anyone. I wanted the new me to be a surprise. Quite honestly, the chemicals are the worst smell ever, but beauty isn’t painless, and I was willing to deal with the smell if it led to me looking normal again. Of course, it didn’t straighten my hair. It only loosened my curls by about ten percent. What the fuck is wrong with my hair? That was when I pulled out a paddle brush and a hairdryer, and I yanked it until it dried moderately straight. Then I ran the flat iron through it. You have to realize how many products are involved in making curly hair look naturally straight. First, there’s the relaxer kit. Then there’s the moisturizing shampoo and conditioner, because curly hair is naturally thinner and drier than straight hair. After that is gel, and handful goops of it, followed by the heat protectant spray or lotion. Sometimes, a serum is thrown in right here. John Frieda was my choice, but that was mostly because of the before and after pictures. My hair never settled like the models, but I was convinced with regular use, it finally would. Then you have the brush, hairdryer and flatiron. After that is the conditioning gloss spray, which really doesn’t condition so much as it coats your hair with a silicone-like film that reflects the light and distracts you from obvious follicle damage. All this, just to hide the fact that you just willingly burned your hair and your scalp for the sake of aesthetic hygiene. The whole process can take all evening, and because I had teenage grease, I would have to repeat the process from shampoo and conditioner on down once or twice more that week. When I walked into school after my first relaxed experience, everyone did a double-take. Not too long before, I did a video project with a friend for our government class that covered the Monica Lewinsky scandal, Jerry Springer-style. I played Monica Lewinsky. I don’t know how that casting worked out, but when my friend saw me in class, the first she said was, “I wish you did this two weeks ago. Now you look even more like Monica Lewinsky!”

The relaxer addiction lasted all the way through graduate school, into my mid-twenties. Boys and theatre roles only made it worse. University of Denver, where I went to college, was ranked by US World News and Report as the least ethnically diverse campus in the country. It shouldn’t come as a surprise. According to the Census Bureau, Denver is just over 50% white. Somehow, I kept on finding myself dating white guys who were scared of me when my hair stepped out of the shower. One boyfriend said when I let my hair go natural, I looked like I had just be electrocuted. Another boyfriend, a Jewish violinist who had a fetish for Middle Eastern girls, used to always call my hair frizzy. Hairstylists thought I wasn’t going far enough. Repeatedly, I was pressured into thinking about Japanese thermal straightening, which after shelling out anywhere from $500 to $1500, will leave your hair sleek, soft and bones-straight for the next six months. By the end of that half-year bliss, your roots have grown out, and it’s time to pay another $250 for a touch-up, which ends up becoming more of an arduous process than the original straightening itself. No secrets? I did consider it. Multiple times. But I never followed through.

Roles on stage didn’t help with the curly hair psychosis. In American society, where the public body is so important in gaining profit, the commodification of looks is even more magnified in performance. On stage, good looks are a demand, because if people are going to be looking at you for two hours, you better be something they want to look at. Yet there’s no qualitative definition for good looks. It changes from person to person, so the most reliable gauge is what you see most represented in media, and most hair in the media is straight. I was much more likely to get a role with straight hair than I was with my natural hair. Curly hair not only invokes racial biases, but age biases as well. Shirley Temple had curly hair, and so did little orphan Annie. Remember when Chelsea Clinton was seen at the 2002 fashion show with straight hair? Everyone went nuts. The Guardian wrote:

It is the hair that summons most interest. There is something expressly attention-seeking about it. As Chelsea knows, relaxed hair attracts spectators: there is an element of suspense to it that you just don’t get with other hairstyles.

What is it with the news media scrutinizing the curly hair of first daughters? This translates to theatre, where to walk into an audition with a mop of curls can make you childish, funky, and not really well-rounded. With straight hair, I looked older, more mature, and with my tan skin, the catch-all ethnic actor. Most actors have European and Southern dialects listed on their resumes. I have Indian, Persian, Arab and New Orleans. I think the only ethnicity I haven’t been cast for is Pacific-Asian. Something tells me that’s where my hair would draw the line. When I was asked to play an Indian woman one time, I told the theatre that I didn’t even look Indian. They simply replied, “Well, your skin and your hair (straight at the time) look close enough. Audiences will never be able to tell the difference.” There’s a Foucault-like power element here, when you look at the racial and particularly age prejudices of curly hair. For him, power is acted upon and through the body. Ja’Nean Palacios goes on to elaborate that

power manifests itself through the relationship between curly hair and beauty. Since curly hair is regarded as being less than beautiful, this hair type becomes the site of the body that requires discipline.

I cannot tell you how many people have told me I look older and more mature with straight hair. And it’s the lack of discipline in my curly hair that makes me look younger and less mature. One time, a young girl asked me how I get my curly hair. Her mother replied, “She doesn’t brush it!” Curls equal a lack of discipline, a habit of letting those strands go and allowing them to dry and settle however way they feel. Throughout history, there has always been a very deep relationship between discipline and beauty. Just look at our cosmetics industry. How many different types of foundation does a woman need to put on before she looks like a piece of dry, flaking cake? So when we’re confronted with opposing images of a woman with straight hair that’s styled with a curling iron, and a woman with free-styled kinky curls, the one with straight hair is going to come off as more mature, because her beauty routine takes more discipline.

Anti-feminist as it may sound to say this, it was a boy who finally made me feel comfortable with my hair. I was twenty-four, in my last year of graduate school. I went in to model one summer evening for figure drawing class that was run by a guy I would later fall in love with. My hair was pulled back, and he could see the ringlets in the back of my ponytail. Sometime that evening, he asked me to let my hair down. I was terrified—I had no idea what it would look like. He didn’t care, and he asked me again to take it down. Turns out, he loved it. That night, while he held me back after class to chat, he couldn’t stop telling me how much he loved it. I didn’t know at the time that I was going to date or even marry him, but his excitement over my curls made me want to try to make peace with them. The next day, I found a salon in Denver with hairstylists specially trained in cutting curly hair. The haircut is called the DevaCut, because the method came from the Devachan Salon in New York City, which specializes in curly hair. The cut works with the curly hair pattern, and instead of cutting wet hair straight across, the stylist cuts each individual dry curl so that the curl pattern isn’t disrupted. I also learned how to break product addiction—all I needed to style my hair was conditioner. When I got home and realized how much of my bathroom I could empty out, I saw how much time, energy and money I was sinking into achieving an image that was so completely against what was natural for my body. I realized that a lot of my justification for it came from being a performer. I had gotten so used to playing other women, I completely lost the ability to play myself.

Then a weird thing happened. Somewhere along the way, I stopped calling myself Iranian-American and started referring to my ethnicity as American-Iranian. I honestly don’t know where it started, except that it was after the night the artist I would fall in love with raved about my curly hair. Sometime after that, I realized that “American” does not equal just white. Maybe in the past it did, but look at our country. America is a catch-all phrase, and when minority Americans acknowledge themselves as equally American as white Americans, then our images of racial beauty in this country can truly change. It’s interesting to see stuff categorized as African-American, Asian-American, Hispanic-American, and so on. But American-American? It seems like a politically-correct code word for “white.” Any time a race is unspecified, we’ve been conditioned to assume it’s white. People think sometimes that it’s ironic for me to have this viewpoint, because technically speaking, I’m purely white. While that’s true, practically speaking, I’m not, because it really comes down to not genetics, but how you appear to other people. Unfortunately, we’re still a society that looks first, and then maybe learns later. The fact of the matter is that because I have kinky hair and tan skin, most people encounter think I’m black, and their projection of racial residue has really pushed me to look at race and ethnicity from a more black and less Eurocentric standpoint. I wonder what it’s like for purely white women with curly hair. Obviously, they’re not assumed to be black, but I wonder to what extent they feel the pressure to look and feel racially “normal”?

The audiences with the loudest voices aren’t always minorities. And I’m pretty sure they have straight hair. Political leadership, magazine fashion spreads, advertising—I can count the natural tendril appearances on my hand. Curly hair, naturally curly hair, is just as American as straight hair. Why do we need to feel the pressure and expectation of physically altering ourselves so that we can fit into a more homogeneous picture of ideal or perfect beauty? How is hair straightening really any different from a breast lift or a nose job? You can argue that hair alteration is more temporary, but even boob jobs need some level of surgical maintenance. It’s not, and I think it’s seen as less severe because in plastic surgery, you see a lot of white women trying to look more refined. In hair straightening, you see black women looking more white. I have a way of looking at the politics behind appearance, and I think it’s the Iranian in me that brings that out. Iran is a country where one of the few ways a woman can express herself publicly is through her looks, so everything she does to it, from letting hair show to getting a nose job, is a conscious political decision. In a way, embracing my curly hair was my own conscious political decision. For the first time, I was consciously making the choice to depict myself on stage the way I naturally look, not alter it to accommodate to how mass media tells me I should look. David Mamet wrote that the hardest role a performer can play is himself, and it’s when a performer does so that we can see the vulnerabilities that make us approachable and understandable human beings on the stage. For me, that role came through my curly hair. What’s ironic is that audiences respond more strongly to the curls. My hair sticks with them. What’s more, I chose to label the image of my curly hair as American. Feeling like I belong to this country shouldn’t lie in how I look, but how I act.

I haven’t straightened my hair since then, and quite honestly, I don’t really care to. To many people recognize me this way now. Now that I’ve moved from straight theatre to one-woman shows that are written by me, there’s no need to alter my appearance to better fit into potential roles. I’m the one who writes them now. My hair has now become my trademark, usually the first thing people notice or remember about me. Isn’t that what performers (and people) strive for? A definable characteristic that sets them apart from the crowd? Turns out, I had that all along, and fight it I did, until I realized that self-esteem, at least in performance lies not so much in portrayal as it does in self-acceptance. Perfection, or ideal beauty is really a distraction, especially amongst minorities, because instead of guiding us to look inward, it manipulates us to focus on outside projections that tell us how we should look and feel, and we become white-washed, so to speak; formulaic, sterile. The more Euro-centric you look, the easier it is to get taken seriously. Think about all the hair health that’s been compromised, and for what? Assimilation? Attractiveness? I don’t find anything attractive about chemically-burned hair. Just because you can cut it doesn’t make it any less traumatizing than burned skin. Appearance is either in compliance or reaction to dominating media images, which is destructive, because it gives one margin the entitlement to marginalize anyone who doesn’t fit in that clique. What a boring landscape to see America dominated by the same hair type, which goes deeper to imply that we ‘re also the same (white-dominated) racial landscape and the same personality.

I can go on an on about the problem, but the solution is an action that one person can’t take on alone. Collectively, we need to see more images of ethic Americans in their natural state. By that I mean no weaves, no airbrushing to make everyone look like they have a ballet body, but a media movement that redefines the aesthetic appreciation of the human figure, the most basic common denominator every race shares. Don’t portray the differences; accept them. “I am not my hair, I am not this skin,” goes India.Arie’s hit single I Am Not My Hair, “I am the soul that lives within.”

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.

I meant to write this post a long time ago – kept saying that I would – but it just didn’t happen, finally fell on the back-burner. Recently, however, I read another post (here) that addressed this topic, but in a manner that felt – to me – to retain the very same “Us vs. Them” theme that’s gotten us here in the first place. The angle taken, the examples given, some of the comments, etc. allow for a dangerous misunderstanding to continue (not the author’s intention, but nonetheless . . .). So I felt it’s time. Let’s do this.

A while back, I was talking to a friend of mine (a black female, which is relevant) – we’ll call her “W.” She’s telling me about this guy she ran into at some store; this Vietnamese guy (“or Chinese or Korean or something”) comes over and starts chatting her up, hitting on her, trying to get her number and all that. She’s not feeling it. She gets irritated on a number of levels. But her primary annoyance is that she feels like he’s just messing with her, so she ends up telling him “give me a break, you don’t date black women,” and (tamely) telling him about how racist Asian guys are.

She finishes her story, looks at me, and, laughing, says “can you believe that?”

I give a one-word response. “Yes.”

But my mind was reeling – because there was so much going on in this one interaction (sort of two interactions, including the re-telling) that just sum up the state of oppression-related affairs in the U.S. First, there’s a (black) woman getting hit on by some random guy, which always carries a tinge of objectification, dominance, etc. In this case, it’s an Asian guy – so we’re bringing together two notoriously “undesirable” race/gender combinations in this country. Then there’s her confusion over the exact ethnicity of this Asian dude. Then there’s her belief (based on real past experience) that he’s not really interested in dating her; that he’s more or less mocking her, because – as an Asian man – he’s probably crazy-racist against black people. And, finally, the beauty of it all – she’s casually relating this story to me, her friend – an Asian (okay, mixed-Asian) male.

And it all made perfect sense to me. Because, you see, I happen to be a sort of connoisseur of the black-Asian interracial experience, and everything that happened in that story follows the confusing, tense narrative of a relationship that has been being shaped for the last couple-hundred (maybe far more) years. It’s a long story – with a lot of loops and twists – but it’s one worth reading, so I hope y’all follow me to the end.

Prologue – “Setting it Straight” (aka “Prepare to Have Your Mind Blown”)

We “all know” that there’s this big rivalry between Asian and black folks. The “opposites” of the PoC spectrum, there just is no bridging the divide. I’ve heard it a million times (from both sides).

And so the look of shock on the faces of this one particular group of Asian folks I was with shouldn’t have surprised me when I asked what should have been a stupid question: “You all realize that there are black Asian people, right?”

But, you see – that’s what this post is about. In spite of all the claimed “differences” between the two groups, there are black Asian people. There are Asian black people. There are actually quite a lot of them. When I talk about my mixed background with my students, it never fails to bring a grin to my face (and give me hope) at how many of my “black” students tell me that they have Asian blood, as well. Filipino and black mixes are the most common, but there are so many other mixed-race black/Asian people out there. Because, get this – the communities are entwined.

Problem is, we’ve been conditioned for so long to buy into the whole concept of the division between the two, that we can’t even see it. No matter what I say here, no matter the evidence out in the world, in the end you’re all still going to believe that these communities are not connected because the messaging has been so strong in the other direction. Black folks with Asian blood will just call themselves “black,” and nobody ever knows otherwise, because they never think to ask (or even consider the possibility). Asian folks won’t reach out to Asian-blacks because of the same reasons. They blame each other, call each other out, and love to throw stereotypes at each other. Each group desperately clasps to racist notions to make sense of a frustrating world where they’re oppressed by racist notions.

One more situation where the epic construct of racism in this country prevails because of its genius simplicity. So huge. So obvious. We’re in the same boat. Working together would be a giant step in actually solving both of our problems. But the system’s power is in its knowledge of history, and employing the dividing tactic so brilliantly.

But I, for one, am tired of hearing (from both sides) about how different the black and Asian communities are, culturally-speaking. The stereotypes and media-based prejudices fall out differently – yes. But damnit – I lived in Tanzania (in East Africa). I currently live in China (in East Asia). I’ve lived in the SF Bay, California, Michigan, and Portland, Oregon (in central North America). I’ve run with all-Asian groups, all-black groups, all the mixes in between. I’ve mentored African refugees, Asian-American immigrants, and “at-risk” youth of both shades. There’s no epic, insurmountable divide in history and culture – it’s the opposite, actually. So often, I find myself having pieces of black (African and African-American) culture slap me in the face as being so eerily similar to Chinese (and other Asian) cultural practices. So many connections, right in front of our eyes. Yet most people are too damn lazy to see it – because accepting media-inflicted messaging is so much easier.

Because the truth is hard to dig up. It’s hard to see if you’re used to having your eyes closed and opened for you by outside teachers, mentors, newscasters, etc. It takes time. It takes some real thought.

Well – today’s your lucky day – because I’m going to give you a crash-course in history and explain to you the unbreakable ties between black and Asian folks (and others) in the United States of America. Read it, digest it – but don’t just take my word for it. When it’s all said and done, feel free to think for yourself and dig up your own truth, as well.

Part I, “Jews and the Creation of the Buffer Class”

Historically, it begins with the Jewish people and the beginnings of their persecution. A strange way to begin a story about Blacks and Asians, yeah? But stay with me – everything’s connected.

We’re in Europe, around the time of the first Crusades, early 1000s A.D. (*1) Christian scripture has been largely standardized at this point, and Jews are now – almost universally – determined to be a people rejected by God. Leaders of the European nation-states issue decrees and laws that effectively prevent Jews from being fully integrated into Christian community. However, various Christian tenets leave gaps open – jobs that “good” Christians should mostly avoid – and, out of a lack of other options, the Jewish people fill those gaps. They start handling the money – they become merchants, bankers, accountants. Would they like to hold other jobs, make their livelihoods in other ways? Sure. But they can’t – it’s not allowed. And they have families to feed.

So they get good at what they do. They make it work. And now, there are actually Jews who – in spite of oppression against them – are doing quite well for themselves. Other folks look on, and don’t like what they see. “They” shouldn’t have that kind of money. Something fishy must be going on.

Bring on the First Crusade. As the Christians invade the Holy Land, Jews shift over from “tolerated” to becoming “the enemy” (along with Muslims, of course). Suddenly, oppressive laws and decrees change to outright violence. The “huddled masses” of Christian have-nots are spurred on by the haves to take it from the Jews. Massacres. Pogroms. It has all begun.

More options are taken away, job-wise. The only “gap” left is that of “money-lender,” and so the Jews take on that role. This is convenient for the ruling classes, of course, because it’s easy to deflect class-rage aimed at themselves (the true perpetrators of this inequality) by having the oppressed target the people who are seen to be directly handing out the money (and asking for it back, as well).

This method of keeping the poor and oppressed from demanding real change by encouraging them to take out frustrations on a “buffer class” works so well, European leaders more or less make it state policy. (*2) Stereotype development as public policy has begun.

Part II, “the Age of Imperialism”

Hop-skip ahead to the so-called “Age of Imperialism” (as if it’s one that ended): the UK (and other countries, but we’re focusing on Britain here) has spread its grip over the world, with colonies in Africa, Asia, and the Americas. As they murder and subjugate the more-pigmented peoples of the world, they butt up against a little problem – the more they devastate and debase the peoples they’ve conquered (and now – enslaved), the more likely it is that those people are going to someday snap and realize that there are just too many of them, and too little British, to let this continue. How to blunt that rage and frustration?

They look to the Jews and their historic use as the Buffer Class. Of course, they’ve effectively kept the Jewish population down through this technique, so there just aren’t enough alive to spread around the world like they need. So they look abroad (to their conquered peoples) and decide to import a new Buffer Class: the East Indians. Brilliant.

Suddenly, all over the British colonies East Indian folks are running little shops, small businesses. In the day-to-day, it’s the East-Indians that subjugated peoples (never mind that the East Indian people are also subjugated) see taking their money. Living a little bit better than themselves. Dots are connected (with the subtle support of the colonizers), so that now – when violence erupts – it’s mostly aimed at the new Indian buffer class, and the colonizers hold onto the spoils for a little longer.

In Africa, especially, it falls out like this: Stereotypes are created. Enforced. Inequality is demonstrated and questioned. Mistrust goes both ways (the Indians don’t trust the Africans because they’ve been attacked by them, the Africans don’t trust the Indians because they appear to be in all snug with the colonizers and are taking African money). All the while, the British are laughing their asses off and crushing both peoples under their heels.

“Independence” is eventually attained, but it’s too late. The damage has been done. To this day, tension and mistrust continues between the Indian “buffer class” and African peoples. In fact, this exact same racial scenario (between those of Asian descent and those of African descent) remains strong on a new continent.

Part III, “A Brave New World”

Okay. So now we’re ready to move over to the Americas – the “New World.” The U.S. has gained its “independence,” and the British monarchy no longer holds sway. But alas – their influence is most sorely felt.

In their zeal to achieve “Manifest Destiny,” the government has murdered too many indigenous Americans. They wanted to use them as their slaves to handle all the manual labor, but there just aren’t enough of them left (can you see a theme developing)? So what are these barbarians to do? Well, they look to the past as their guide and they find a solution – they import their slave labor from elsewhere (in this case, Africa). Great. Plantation life can carry on as planned and “equality and justice for all” can continue for the rich white men who coined that phrase.

Absolute tragedy and mental scarification of an entire race of people ensues. More stereotypes are developed and enforced that carry their weight into the present day.

Eventually, the Civil War erupts, and black slaves become “free.”

But that creates a problem – because how is the U.S. going to continue its rapid development without all that free (the only kind of “free” that really matters in a society like ours) labor it was relying on back in the day? And, suddenly, with “freedom,” these black Americans suddenly want to have equal rights? Get paid real wages? Be counted as real citizens? Hell no. But how can the top keep ravaging these “free” black folks without some heavy repercussions on down the line?

Once again, the dual-pronged solution is imported from abroad: immigrant labor. In this case, largely Chinese immigrant labor (among other Asian ethnicities as time rolls on). See – immigrants are a great solution because they aren’t citizens. They have no idea what to expect out here. Hell – they don’t even really speak the language. So you can do all sorts of evil sh– to them without them ever having the ability to do something about it – because you can always threaten to send them back, send their family back, randomly imprison them, kill them . . . the sky’s the limit. (*3)

Even better – you’ve now got that buffer class you needed to keep the “free” black folks from fully blaming those who deserve the blame. (*4) Because – don’t misunderstand – black folks are still on the bottom around here. And the best way to keep that going is to deflect their frustrations – so once again, the Buffer Class plays its role. (*5) With just a tiny bit of rhetoric, the ex-enslavers get black folks pissed at the Asian folks living in more or less the same squalid conditions as themselves, so the real oppressors can focus on more important matters – like rolling in money, for example.

Due to various lack of opportunities, Asian folks start getting pushed into certain roles (ala the Jews in Europe). The power-structure encourages Asian-black interracial tensions. Asian folks are slapped around but given a few bones to seem a step “above” black folks so, from the bottom, Asian people seem to be all cozy with “the Man;” while Asian people are encouraged to look down on black people and do all they can to exaggerate their “difference” (so as not to give light to the truth – that we’re all getting f—ed).

Stereotypes are developed. Enforced. Etc.

Part IV, “The Common Era”

And now here we are: here. Now.

Black folks are still a subjugated people in the States. Asian folks are still playing the role of the buffer class/model minority – subtly pushed into filling gaps that those at the top don’t want to be in – hence, all these Asian shopkeepers in predominantly-black neighborhoods. Young black folks are rightfully frustrated and angry about their place in this country. Yet where is that rage going to go? Not to the top, of course – because you’ve got these Asian folks directly taking their money right there in front of them. Do the math. (*6)

On the flip – Asian folks living in these neighborhoods are trained to mistrust the very black folks they are relying on for a livelihood. The messaging isn’t accidental. So you get Asian shopkeepers stereotyping black folks, to the point of murdering them in perceived “self-defense.” (*7)

On a less-dramatic level, you have ridiculous tensions between various Asian and Black communities throughout the U.S. You get recent spates of violence in schools. In communities at large. And the media has a field day with it all – because misdirection is the best way to keep oppressed people from doing anything constructive about it.

Because we have this tendency to throw ourselves into this one, taking sides, getting right into the middle of it. Black folks (rightfully) reference the massive color-based racism of many traditional Asian communities. Asian folks (factually) cite instances of black folks targeting Asians. You’ve got the two “least-desirable” romantic partners – Asian males and black females – lamenting their lack of love then each explaining why they “just aren’t interested” in dating the other. It’s too personal. So frustrating. Somebody needs to bear the brunt of this frustration . . .

Oppression Olympics. “We’ve got it worse than you because . . .” “You’re just as racist as white people because . . . ” “I’m not racist, just telling it like it is . . .”

Bla, bla, bla – back-and-forth, forth-and-back until both sides just prove each other right and reinforce stereotypes over and over again. So caught up in how this other group of oppressed peoples is so dangerous, so racist, so different. Meanwhile, “They” are laughing their asses off because these groups are so similar that “They” can use the same simple tactics to oppress both of them. Oppressed people are just so easy to manipulate . . .

Part V, “Open Your Eyes”

So I’ll tell you what - y’all need to just back the f— up and get some perspective for a second. Because, by being so caught up in the middle of the storm, we’re missing some huge, glaring points that are just so incredibly obvious when we look at the bigger picture (which is, of course, exactly as the top wants it).

If there’s all this tension between the two communities; if there are all these incidents where they clash – in schools, communities, corner stores, etc. . . . If that’s the case, what’s one very obvious reason that that is possible? Well, because the two communities are entwined. Asian and black folks live in the same neighborhoods. They’re going to the same schools. Which means that – well, they’re actually going to be facing a lot of the same challenges. And these similar challenges are going to create a lot of the same frustrations. These frustrations breed similar pressure, and a similar mis-directed backlash . . . etc.

Historically? Pretty much anywhere there was black slavery, there were soon to be Asian immigrants living within the black communities (and, yes, living as part of those communities). And that has continued to this day.

But that can’t be true, right? Cuz “we all know” that black and Asian people are so completely different. There’s no overlap. Asian people live in the suburbs and black people live in the “inner-city.” Right?

Here’s my answer to that:

F— the stereotypes. F— what “we all know.” Stop watching tv shows and movies for your understanding of race in the U.S. If Asians are really doing so well on a large level – if they’re all really the well-off “model minorities” that “They” all want us to think they are- why are the majority going to the same underfunded, over-crowded, gerrymandered public schools that all the other brown folks are relegated to? If all Asian-Americans are living the “American Dream” and getting rich at the expense of black folks, why do the majority live and work in the same societally-ignored (and avoided) neighborhoods? There are Asian-American gangs, too. Violence. Poverty. Oppression.

On the flip side – if all black people are criminals and die young, how come there are so many old black people living in real houses, far from prisons? If all black folks are uneducated, what’s with all these historically black colleges and universities I’ve heard about? If they’re all poor, how come I keep hearing about all these black politicians being called “elitists”? And isn’t that “Obama” character a perfect example of a “Model Minority”? There are tons of black folks who are doing just fine. Who have never been involved in violence or any sort of crime. Black kids raised by two parents. Going to good schools. College. Yuppies. Republicans.

You getting me? In both cases, these communities are entwined. Sharing challenges and struggles – and successes.

But, in spite of that, I still have to ask stupid questions like – how can Asian people be all pissed off about false stereotypes and depictions of Asians in the media and then completely buy into stereotypes about black people peddled by the exact same media? How can you read only the articles about black criminals or violence (in relation to Asian folks) and feel satisfied that you actually know anything about what’s really going on? Asian-American organizations completely dismiss or ignore the plight of black folks in this country – and then we get mad that black organizations don’t support us?! Flip all those statements (to regard black folks with Asians), and it’s all the same damn thing. Have we all gone mad?

It’s a crazy, frustrating situation – where there’s so much reason to work together and fight against shared problems, but all this faulty history, all this brainwashing, all this careful manipulation by the dominant classes turns us into self-defeating hypocrites.

And yet . . . and yet . . .

There’s hope. Things can change. It will take a lot of work and a lot of understanding how the system created this infighting for us. But there is hope.

Which brings us all the way back to the story that began it all: “W” and her “Vietnamese” suitor. When you first read it, you probably thought I cited it as an example of the divide between black and Asian. The misunderstandings. The unavoidable conflict. How the two can “never get along.” An Asian guy hitting on a black woman, and racism is assumed . . .

But that actually wasn’t it. Because that story was one of hope. It’s an illustration of how the divide just really isn’t that big. Because, in spite of all those assumptions and defenses, etc. revealed in that story, “W” was sharing it with me, her friend – an Asian guy. At the time, her first and only Asian friend. The very same Asian friend that came over and celebrated Thanksgiving with her and her family. Needless to say, I was the first Asian guy to share a special occasion with her family like that. Of course, I was the only non-black person there. And I’ve never felt more welcome.

Because we’re friends. And with friends, you’re able to get over the B.S. weight of stereotypes and other assumptions and go with what the person is actually like. What they actually know, do, etc. You give each other a real chance, instead of letting some self-interested third-party tell you who the other person is.

So all of you – take a step back. Breathe deep. Stop buying into the nonsense and open up your minds the same way you ask others to about you. Black AND Asian. And Jewish, even. We’re all connected. More so than we’ll ever even know.

And that doesn’t mean that individuals – on both sides – aren’t going to have racist notions. It doesn’t mean that communities – acting in concert- aren’t going to further the misunderstandings. What it means is that if you really want to represent, then represent – your own community AND oppressed peoples as a whole – and give yourself and others a big-picture view. It’s going to take work – but it’s far from impossible. Stop being lazy and only touching the surface. Do something real.

Stand up. Head up. Fist up.
Use your free hand to shake hands with the causes across the way,
And then – and only then – can you honestly say:
“I want to get free.”

(*1) I use the “A.D.” label most intentionally here.

(*2) And be damned-sure that Hitler was taking notes on that one.

(*3) That’s another standard-play that’s been in the Inequality Rulebook for centuries.

(*4) Do I really have to point out that this continues today?

(*5) At this point, you should realize that the “Buffer Class” and “Model Minority” go hand-in-hand.

(*6) It’s an indication of how the media plays into this feedback loop that I don’t need to cite anything here for y’all to know exactly what I’m talking about.

(*7) Latasha Harlins being the most well-known example.

(*8) If you’re wondering at the lack of citations for this article – I keep asking y’all to not be lazy and do the work yourselves (not even just taking my word for it), and giving you citations wouldn’t accomplish that. Because then you’ll just stick to that. So put some work in. Find your own answers (but look on both sides and in between), and then hit me up with your comments, questions and concerns: “choptensils AT gmail DOT com”.

I’ve been thinking about Max Reddick’s post, “Oh, the places we could go…,” which we crossposted last week on Love Isn’t Enough:

A couple of months or so ago at the end of the summer, my wife and I planned a trip with a few other African American couples we know just to have one last bit of fun before summer ended. When we first conceived of the idea, we bandied about several suggestions, but all of them seemed so absolutely done.

Someone suggested a cookout at the beach, but I was beached out, and I don’t particularly find the beach all that fun. Of course, Disney and/or Universal Studios in Orlando were offered, but we go to Orlando several times a year already so that was out. And in that same vein, someone suggested Busch Gardens in Tampa, but that too was voted down.

Then my wife suggested that we go somewhere and do something none of us had ever done, something unlikely. And we finally decided on a destination and an activity. But on the eve of our trip, one by one the couples and families called us to say that they had to cancel, that they would not be going. And each couple and family proffered the same excuse: “We all talked and decided that that’s just something black folk don’t do.”

Evidently, all of the black folk got together, or at least enough to form a quorum, and decided that black folk didn’t do such things. Read more…

I thought about this–what black folk don’t do–while driving to and from Washington, D.C. this week. I love a good road trip. Driving allows a glimpse of the country and the way people live in a way that flying over does not. There are so many hidden treasures to be found–kitschy shops, little towns nestled in the mountains, frozen in time. Of course, you also see the bad, not just charming Americana. But the bad–the urban blight and rural poverty–are as much a part of the American story as the good. Perhaps we would be better at governing our country if we took time to stretch our legs in another person’s space from time to time–stand on a corner in a city deserted by industry or have lunch in one of those picturesque old-fashioned towns with flags lining mainstreet. It’s all America.

When I was a kid, I had this dream of driving cross-country in a really cool convertible. I haven’t achieved that dream exactly, but, in our 20s, my girlfriends and I took annual 10-day road trips during the summer. We piled in a rented minivan and did it on the cheap. We slept five or six to a room and ate at inexpensive local places. Our goal was exploration. We’d pick a direction–east, south or west–and plot points along the way where we might want to spend a day or two. If we saw a sign for a little-known historical sight or the world’s biggest ball of twine along our route, and seeing it struck our fancy, we’d head off down the trail. On the way to New Orleans, we took a detour to see the campus of Ole Miss, because of its place in civil rights history. On the way to Vegas, we toured the Painted Desert and Petrified Forest. I count that time touring the country with my girls among the best times in my live. We had a ball, learned a lot and saw amazing things. There was one night, driving through Texas and New Mexico on a desolate, dark road with the moon shining full, tinting everything blue, that I will never forget.

There is another thing I will not soon forget: That nearly everyplace we went, the Grand Canyon; Salem, MA; Tombstone, AZ; the Garden District of New Orleans; we were the only black people there. Not surprising, I guess, because when I talked about my travel plans with black friends and coworkers I received the same message that Max did: “Black folk just don’t do that.”

I know that I occupy a privileged place in many ways. My family took trips when I was growing up. I am educated and have a career path that allows me to take a couple weeks off to travel. I have the resources to afford travel. I know not every other black person can claim these things. But, the thing is, the people I was talking to could. These were eduated black professionals with knowlege of all the places they could go and the resources to get there. Black people are less prohibited in our ability to move about this country today than we have ever been. So where did the idea come from that even if we have the ability we are not to allowed to explore the country our ancestors built with their sweat and blood?

Where do notions of what black folks do and do not do come from? Have we been so tempered by racism that even when we aren’t faced with racial restrictions, we create our own?

Rightfully, a lot of ink and effort is expended on pointing out the lack of equity between black people and the majority culture in education, good housing, safety, opportunity and other resources. But I think we don’t talk enough about what happens once those things are achieved, at least in part.

We cannot stand at the rim of the Grand Canyon–one of the seven wonders of the world–because “black folks don’t do that.” We cannot travel overseas. We can’t be marine biologists. We can’t listen to rock music.

It’s like that grasshopper in the jar story (which could be total BS) that says if you catch a grasshopper and place it in a jar with a lid on it that eventually the grasshopper will eventually tire of smacking against the jar lid and will stop trying to get out. You can eventually remove the lid and rest comfortably knowing that the grasshopper will not escape.

Through most of our history in this country black people have lived within limits imposed by the majority culture. And, I should add, as we discuss often on this blog, we still do live with limits. It worries me to see those limits embraced as “black culture.” Take away the limitations and there will still be things we will not allow ourselves to do, even when they are good for us. We will create our own oppression. Every time we say “black folk don’t do (fill in the blank),” we become complicit in our own bondage, barriers to our own freedom.

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Photo Credit: Ranjay Mitra

I was going to begin this post be talking about Mohandas Gandhi. I was going to chastise Bernice King, daughter of slain civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr., and new leader of the civil rights organization Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), for her hateful pronouncement, recounted in The Guardian: “I know down in my sanctified soul that [MLK] did not take a bullet for samesex unions.”

I was going to point out that Gandhi, who is said to have inspired MLK, did not take a bullet for black Americans. His cause was the oppressed people of India. But the universal truth of his message–resistance to tyranny, nonviolence and the fundamental equality of all people–was as applicable on the North American continent as the Asian one. Bernice King’s father realized that. How small and hateful and contrary to the legacy of Mahatma Gandhi it would have been if, during the height of the U.S. Civil Rights movement, a surviving family member had proclaimed that “down in their souls” they were certain that Gandhi didn’t take a bullet for Negroes to ride on the front of the bus.

To my surprise, while doing a little research on the martyr known as “The Great One,” I discovered that, though time has cemented Gandhi in the public consciousness as a loving but determined champion for world equality. He may well not have supported civil rights for all marginalized people.

From Wikipedia:

Some of Gandhi’s early South African articles are controversial. On 7 March 1908, Gandhi wrote in the Indian Opinion of his time in a South African prison: “Kaffirs are as a rule uncivilized – the convicts even more so. They are troublesome, very dirty and live almost like animals.”[14] Writing on the subject of immigration in 1903, Gandhi commented: “We believe as much in the purity of race as we think they do… We believe also that the white race in South Africa should be the predominating race.”[15] During his time in South Africa, Gandhi protested repeatedly about the social classification of blacks with Indians, who he described as “undoubtedly infinitely superior to the Kaffirs”.[16] It is worth noting that during Gandhi’s time, the term Kaffir had a different connotation than its present-day usage. Remarks such as these have led some to accuse Gandhi of racism.[17]

and…

In 1906, after the British introduced a new poll-tax, Zulus in South Africa killed two British officers. In response, the British declared a war against the Zulus. Gandhi actively encouraged the British to recruit Indians. He argued that Indians should support the war efforts in order to legitimize their claims to full citizenship. The British, however, refused to commission Indians as army officers. Nonetheless, they accepted Gandhi’s offer to let a detachment of Indians volunteer as a stretcher bearer corps to treat wounded British soldiers. This corps was commanded by Gandhi. On 21 July 1906, Gandhi wrote in Indian Opinion: “The corps had been formed at the instance of the Natal Government by way of experiment, in connection with the operations against the Natives consists of twenty three Indians”.[22] Gandhi urged the Indian population in South Africa to join the war through his columns in Indian Opinion: “If the Government only realized what reserve force is being wasted, they would make use of it and give Indians the opportunity of a thorough training for actual warfare.”[23] In Gandhi’s opinion, the Draft Ordinance of 1906 brought the status of Indians below the level of Natives. He therefore urged Indians to resist the Ordinance along the lines of satyagraha by taking the example of “Kaffirs“. In his words, “Even the half-castes and kaffirs, who are less advanced than we, have resisted the government. The pass law applies to them as well, but they do not take out passes.”[24]

I was wrong about Gandhi having a message of world equality. At least early in his life he believed that some people are more equal than others.

What is it about us that makes us fight for our own freedom and equality, but sit comfortably with the bondage and oppression of others? Even the man heralded as one of the world’s greatest civil rights leaders believed “all men are created equal”…but for those over there.

My discovery convinced me of two things:

The greatest battle for marginalized peoples may not be the biases of the majority culture, but the way those biases are embraced by minority cultures. How much stronger would all of the equality movements be if we were working together to cement the idea that EVERYONE, regardless of gender, race, sexuality, ability, etc., deserved basic human rights and respect? Instead, we learn to hate ourselves, while fighting to demonstrate our superiority over other marginalized people. We fight each other over scraps. We fail to leverage our own dehumanization as a tool to empathize with the dehumanization of others. Instead, we seek to demonstrate, as Gandhi once advocated in South Africa, “See, majority, we’re just like you. The pair of us are equally better than those people.” I deserve rights; they do not.

The fight for equality and human rights might well be over if marginalized people worked together. But we do not.

I think, this is also true: it does not matter what Gandhi thought of black people or what Martin Luther King thought of gay people. For all the deification, they are both just men, fallible men–men of a different time and place (Mohandas Gandhi was born in the 19th century, for goodness sake.), men who were just as influenced by the biases of their day as any of us are, men like those who wrote “all men are created equal” and yet owned men, women and children as property. Do we even know whether MLK would have approved of a woman (his daughter or no) as head of the SCLC? His views and treatment of women were not exactly enlightened. That Gandhi did not believe in the inherent equality of all brown people; that King may not have approved of gay marriage–I couldn’t care less.

TODAY matters. It matters that we come to understand that “divided we fall” in the battle for human rights. It matters that we learn that if you are not about justice for all, you are not about justice and that a civil rights organization that does not advocate for across the board human rights is not a civil rights organization. (This goes as much for homophobic black civil rights groups as it does for gay rights groups that marginalize people of color and transgender people.) And that a civil rights leader who takes time out from advocating for equality to call out who, in fact, should not be equal, is not much of a leader at all–pedigree be damned.

Since I’ve been living in Brazil, I have suffered from memory loss. On occasion, I simply forget that I am black.

Let me explain . . .

I was born in the United States, in the South to be exact, during the early 1980s, to a mother with very fair skin who, along with her seven sisters and brothers, had witnessed and undergone Jim Crow segregation. My great grandmother and grandfather, a teacher and farmer, respectively, who both had dark skin, had given birth to a light-skinned child, my grandmother, who would then go on to marry a man of equally light skin who was raised to distrust black people who looked like his in-laws. My father, on the other hand, came from a family where the emphasis on high cheekbones and dark wavy hair was made more frequently than that of slightly flattened noses. We have Native blood, they’d say.

You see, colorism was alive and well in my family.

And yet years later, when I still feel compelled to remind my mother that her coarse, nappy hair is beautiful or that there is no need to insert the words “but” or “despite” as my family refers to model Alek Wek’s ebony-skinned beauty, I know that the remnants remain. At the end of the day, we are all of African descent, and in our slavemasters’, old legislators’, and white domestic terrorists’ eyes, we were all black. Yet within that category, we found various ways of re-categorizing ourselves to fit our own neat little model of racism. We created a home-kit, if you will, of silly divisions of what was acceptable and what was not in terms of appearance and behavior.

My maternal grandfather warned his daughters of the dangers of the villainous, malicious dark blacks. Of course, there were exceptions, my dark-skinned aunt and uncle being visible reminders of our inescapable heritage, and the only dark people my grandfather ever truly accepted beyond a superficial level (his race track buddies do not count). But for the most part, darker blacks were to be avoided, despite my family’s shared plight with them in a segregated south.

My mother, though quite young during the segregation period, still bears irrevocable memories. She has recounted stories of slapping a young white girl who had stared at her in a hospital bathroom because she had “never seen a Negro girl up-close before,” of thinking that “colored only” fountains would one day magically transform into a spring of rainbow-infused water, and of remembering her confusion as to why her older sister spent so much time “marching” in the street when she was not wearing her majorette uniform. And presently, in her work as a geriatric social worker, she is reminded of the divisions the period and the long-lasting subsequent effects they have had on the black community when her older, darker-skinned black patients assume she is “stuck up” or cannot be trusted because of her light skin.

Having grown up in a family like this, race inevitably became a daily topic of discussion.

Sure, we were undoubtedly on the privileged end of the spectrum. We had light skin, we were middle class, we owned property. My mother, father, and some of their siblings had coveted college degrees, no small feat for the select few blacks who made it through the southern university system in the 1960s and 70s. And even the family members who never made it to college still have successful, fulfilling careers of which they can be proud. Of course, my family, like any other, has its flaws, but nothing that was inherently linked to our skin color.

Yet again, race comes up all the time. My family holds the same hostility as other blacks towards those involved in the perpetuation of systematic, institutionally sanctioned racism. We are reminded of our race all the time by co-workers’ exclusionary behavior, by being followed around while patronizing clothing stores, and by merely having tastes, food traditions, and vernacular speech that differed from whites. Despite our color privilege, we existed in a third world of sorts, our own little space between “black,” as designated by whites, and “not quite black enough,” (or “almost,” as I was once called) by other blacks.

My going to a predominately white all girls’ school did not exactly alleviate this feeling. As the sole representative of blackness in my grade, I was a piss-poor example of the kind of black girl my white peers may have anticipated. I was not like the black people they saw on television, nor was I quite like their maids who, in some cases, had provided the only contact the girls had with other blacks. Yet despite my being “different” from other blacks, I (along with several of the black students from other grade levels) had to serve as a delegate for the race. I got the usual questions about hair maintenance, “ghetto” vocabulary words, and whether or not blacks are capable of tanning. Needless to say, the job was tiring.

Following high school, college led me to New York City where, despite the city’s never-ending layers of diversity, I was still confronted with lots of questions, comments, assumptions, and externally-assigned categories related to my race, the race of my partners, and the race of my friends. So considering my family background, upbringing, and personal history that warranted my admitted preoccupation with race, you can imagine my surprise at my ability to go days at a time during which I completely step outside of my skin and do not feel the often heavy weight of being a person of color.

That is the only way to describe my experience here in Brazil. I have never had so much time go by in my entire life during which I am not faced with unwarranted expectations, assumptions, and characterizations associated to my race. Why? Mainly because what I consider “my race” does not exist within the same box as it does in the United States.

In Brazil, the term “black” (“negro/a”) is often relegated solely to people of African descent who have much darker skin and/or used for political purposes (i.e. as a unifying, symbolic reference by people with invested interests in community building among blacks/Afro-descendants). So whenever I discuss race with my students (which occurs a lot considering that a discussion of race is inseparable from a discussion on American history and culture) and I declare myself as black, they get confused.

“But, Teacher, you are not black,” they often say, noting the lightness of my skin as the most salient piece of evidence. “You’re morena or mulata, but not black.”

Following their usual assertion, I have to explain that in the United States, the three terms are not mutually exclusive. As a result of the “One Drop Rule” and, later, the politicization of the term during the Civil Rights Movement, black was a term reserved for the majority of people who have African heritage in the United States, no matter the lightness or darkness of their skin. I then go on to cite the color gradation within my own family and that, in spite of their lightness, many much lighter than I, they still consider themselves black in both race and culture.

Considering that race in Brazil is dealt with mainly on a phenotypic level (based on physical appearance), you can imagine their surprise at what they consider an oversimplification of race in the United States. I recall once that when a Brazilian friend of mine came to visit New York, he remarked that he was surprised by the large black population in Brooklyn.

“There are soooo many black people here,” he proclaimed, leaving me a bit dumbfounded. “But you’re from Brazil. What are you talking about? There are plenty of black people there. Why are you so surprised?” I asked.

Then I realized; “Black” for him and “black” for me were two totally different things. In my eyes, he and I were both black, along with the other millions of people in Brooklyn whom he had singled out as having shocked him in their abundance and millions more brown-skinned people I had seen in Belo Horizonte, Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo, and Salvador in Brazil. Yet to him, “black” only meant people with very dark skin and decidedly black African features. That term was reserved for a very small group of people in Brazil, some of whom continue to be marginalized in many ways on account of their color.

“Espero que nosso filho não seja preto,” (“I hope our son isn’t black” — “black” in this case being referred to by way of the now offensive term “preto,” which is used sometimes to refer to very dark black people) I once heard a white expecting mother jokingly say of her soon to be born biracial child. The father, moreno. The grandfather, according to the couple, preto, hence the fear. While the statement was harsh and said a lot about Brazilian race relations, I cannot exactly say I was surprised. It is just that normally I am not privy to such racist admissions. As a result of my appearance, I had been cast in the shadow of privilege and provided a front row seat to the racism circus, a performance I often missed in the United States because I was still black there. At home, I was not placed in some imaginary bubble of protection simply for being a few shades lighter than some others. Black was black was black. Brazil is a different story entirely.

Here, I have begun to recognize that privilege takes many forms, all of them unwelcome on my part. For one thing, I am American. While this aspect of my being is not immediately recognized, as most Brazilians assume I am one of them and/or have a parent who is, once this fact becomes known, how attractive, interesting, and accepted I am in public places skyrockets in ways that would never happen if I were simply a brown-skinned Brazilian.  In a country where many of the imports come from the Land of the Free including entertainment in the form of music and film, some of the most powerful mediums of cultural dominance, you can imagine what my presence means, whether I like it or not.

The other point of privilege lies in my appearance, at which I have already hinted. Being more caramel-esque than dark means I am afforded treatment that is strikingly different. I do not get followed around retail stores or profiled by the police. People who look like me are profiled in advertisements, have roles in novelas (soap operas), and are spokespeople for high end products. I am included in colorist, racist discussions and jokes as if people who have the same origin as I are separate species. I am pursued romantically and openly considered attractive by people of many different races. In relation to quite a few of the aforementioned, I cannot say the same with regards to my experience living in the United States.

The next aspect of privilege I have had to assess is one that is far more powerful than skin color and nationality: class. In the United States, I am middle class. Here, despite my weary checking account, I give off signs of wealth unintentionally. Clothes like those one could buy at H&M, Forever 21, and other popular chain stores are taxed to the hilt and marked up to the degree that they are almost inaccessible to anyone who is not upper middle class to rich. The same goes for items from Zara, which they have in larger Brazilian cities, but with price tags that would give any New Yorker, Lisboan, or Madrileña a heart attack. Electronics, international food, and even books can be added to this list of overpriced goods in Brazil, but to which I have easy, cheap access Stateside. With that said, my possession and consumption of the aforementioned put me in a higher class than many Brazilians who share my skin color, as the wealthy class in Brazil is decidedly white. 

With all that said, there are other recognizable differences in the way race is dealt with in Brazil that allows me to take a mental vacation, including but not limited to, a heavy presence of interracial relationships (and not necessarily those of the same racial pairing), multiracial families, and phenotypic diversity within groups of friends of all ages, all things still seen in smaller quantities in the United States, even in major cities.

All of these things make it almost too easy for me to “forget” that I am black, to not spend my days preoccupied with my race as I do in the United States. Yet, there is something unsettlingly unhealthy about that, mainly because it means one of two things: the United States has a long way to go, or I am temporarily blinded by a non-existent ideal steeped in privilege. I am going to go with option two. Of course, the States has a long way to go in terms of improving its domestic state of race relations, yet one has to be careful not to read those in Brazil as being utopian, as they, too, have a complex and somewhat dark past, one of them being the goal of ethnic cleansing by way of miscegenation to which I often reference. I have enough common sense to read between the lines and assess personal situations from an objective standpoint, and this is no exception.

I find that many Americans of color, upon traveling to another country, often remark on the striking differences between the treatment they receive abroad versus the treatment they receive in the United States, myself being one of them. But we must also employ the critical thinking necessary to realize that our experience is through the tinted lens of privilege, be it via nationality, skin color, class, and any other unrecognized differences that set us apart culturally from our international peers. I have to recognize that while the story I tell of my experiences in Brazil as an adult may be different from the experiences I underwent as someone who grew up in the South, someone somewhere in Brazil has a similar story that is going unheard or unrecognized by the thousands of Americans who travel to Brazil and deem it a racial paradise, a vacation spot for the oppressed.

____

*drawing courtesy of amazing French graffiti artist/cartoonist Fafi, whose work can be found here: www.myspace.com/fafinette

An ugly blame game ensued after the passing of California’s Proposition 8, which restricted the definition of marriage to a union between a man and a woman. With exit polls reporting 70 percent of Blacks and 53 percent of Latinos/as supporting the ban on gay marriage, many white members of the LGBT community blamed people of color for the ban’s success.

The December issue of gay news magazine The Advocate stepped into the fray. The cover of the issue provocatively announced, “Gay is the New Black.” Although the cover story’s author, Michael Joseph Gross, dismissed blaming Black voters as a “false conclusion” and a “terrible mistake,” comments posted to the site took him to task for other reasons. Most comments strongly disagreed with Gross’ Black/gay comparison, but many others asked why communities of color and queer communities are still considered mutually exclusive in the mainstream LGBT rights movement.

A comment posted by “Greg J,” pointedly charged, “Gays of color, transgender, and yes, even lesbians are missing from the larger discourse of the gay rights struggle – primarily the gay marriage issue. The gay right’s movement was and remains the ‘gay, white, middle class’ movement!”

The Prop 8 fallout shows how much work remains to be done to connect the LGBT rights movement with other struggles for social justice across a spectrum of issues. Unfortunately, it may have taken the brutal murder of Ecuadoran immigrant Jose Oswaldo Sucuzhañay to highlight the invisibility of queer people of color – particularly queer immigrants – in LGBT rights discourse. His murder will hopefully provide an impetus for coalition building.

Jose Sucuzhañay and his brother Romel were attending a Sunday evening church party on December 7, 2008. They later decided to end the night with some drinks at a local bar in the Bushwick section of Brooklyn. The two brothers left the bar at 3:30 a.m. and walked home arm-in-arm to support each other. Three men drove up to the Sucuzhañay brothers, one man got out of the car and began to shout anti-gay and anti-Latino slurs at them.

The man then attacked Jose Sucuzhañay and broke a bottled over the back of his head causing him to fall to the ground. His brother Romel ran to call the police. Romel saw the attackers kick his brother’s prone body and beat him with an aluminum baseball bat. The beating stopped when Romel returned and told the attackers that he had called the police. Jose was rushed to Elmhurst Hospital and remained in critical condition until he passed away five days later. He was 31 and left behind two children.

Sucuzhañay’s killing comes a month after a group of Long Island teens fatally stabbed Ecuadoran immigrant Marcelo Lucero; it also follows the murder of Luis Ramirez, who was beaten to death last July in Shenandoah, Pennsylvania.

The increased violence and surveillance against immigrant communities has coincided with violence against queers of color, including the murder of Duanna Johnson, a Black transgender woman. Johnson was beaten by two Memphis police officers last February. Nine months later, she was found shot to death in North Memphis.

Blogger Angry Brown Butch reflected on Johnson’s murder: “Just to be trans, just to be a woman, just to be a person of color in this country is enough to drastically increase one’s exposure to hatred and violence; when oppressions overlap, violence tends to multiply.”

Although Sucuzhañay was not gay, his murder represents the danger and uncertainty facing queers, people of color, immigrants, and other marginalized communities. For the most part, however, both mainstream LGBT rights groups and immigrant rights groups have failed to recognize the potential for collaboration and coalition, even in the wake of Sucuzhañay’s murder.

Immediately after the attack, media outlets discussed the homophobic and xenophobic nature of the attack against the Sucuzhañay brothers. But as time went on, reports began to only highlight either the anti-gay or the anti-Latino/a nature of the attack rather than seeing the two as joint-causes.

“I have seen some members of the Latino community express indignation at some outside the Latino community using the attack for political gain,” notes Andrés Duque of the Latino/a LGBT site Blabbeando. “I have also seen a Queens-based Ecuadorian community organization put out a call for a vigil highlighting the xenophobic nature of the crime while not mentioning that it might have also been a homophobic crime.”

Indeed, rather than illuminating the vulnerability that both Latino/a and LGBT communities face and interrogating the systemic inequalities that enable that marginalization, some are more concerned with shaping how the incident is described and remembered in the media. One example of this is Diego Sucuzhañay’s denial that the attack on his brothers was homophobic in nature. Although Romel told the police that anti-gay and anti-Latino slurs were shouted at them as they were assaulted, Diego denies that homophobia was an aspect of his brothers’ attack.

Diego told New York’s El Diario/La Prensa that, “My brother Romel told me that they shouted insults against Latinos, that they shouted ‘Hispanic sons of bitches,’ but not anti-gay insults.” But Romel has not publicly retracted his statement regarding anti-gay slurs. And other family members have spoken about the murder in terms of homophobia also being a motivating factor. So some observers following the case wonder whether Diego’s statements to the press are an attempt to disassociate his brother’s murder from any implications of queerness.

Still, many others are people speaking out against Sucuzhañay’s murder by clearly connecting issues of racism, homophobia, and xenophobia. At his brother’s funeral in Cuenca, Ecuador, German Sucuzhañay told the Associated Press, “The brutal killing of my brother Oswaldo is the result of xenophobia, of homophobia and racism that our compatriots are experiencing in these times.”

Ecuadoran President Rafael Correa condemned the xenophobia and homophobia behind Sucuzhañay’s tragic death. Correa told the press that Sucuzhañay was “vilely murdered because of xenophobia and homophobia. They confused him for a homosexual…” The President called on the public to fight against “xenophobia, homophobia and all types of phobia, all types of discrimination, all types of violence.”

While a number of U.S.-based organizations including Bienestar, The Audre Lorde Project, People of Color in Crisis (POCC), and Incite! have all been working to address the intersections between multiple forms of oppression, both the mainstream LGBT and Latino/a rights movements remain remarkably single issue oriented.

The killing of Jose Sucuzhañay, however, challenges Latino/a and LGBT leaders to build a broad-based vision for social justice that acknowledges the linkages between various communities and struggles. Hopefully, both immigrant rights group and LGBT rights groups will begin to see the parallels between a number of these ballot initiatives sponsored by right-wing groups – whether they are anti-immigrant, anti-choice, or anti-gay.

The fight in 1994 to repeal California’s Proposition 187, which sought to prevent undocumented immigrants from accessing state benefits, can perhaps serve as inspiration for those working to overturn Prop 8 and provide an in-road for collaboration between these intersecting struggles. Though not identical, these grassroots struggles provide a crucial space for collaboration between marginalized communities.

According to census data and information provided by mosques and community centers, Muslims in America make up .5% of the total population in America. Keeping it conservative, that equals just under 2 million. Some estimates go as far to say that there are 5 million Muslims in America. I tend to stay on the conservative side because I don’t believe that boasting in numbers serves any cause.

Still, 2 million is a lot of people. And there have been multiple and contradictory narratives about American Islam. Who has the right to speak for American Muslims? Who are the real Muslims? Who will define the agenda for American Muslims? Last year, a huge debate exposing the immigrant Black American divide rocked the Muslim American community and we’re still reeling to recover from it. And when I speak of community, I talk about it in the broadest sense. I am not making any claims that Muslim Americans are a monolithic group. I’m not trying to be a downer, but the reality is that Muslim Americans do not vote in a unified way, have various political and economic interests that often conflict with their co-religionists, nor is there a central authoritative religious head that guides us all. Rather, this diverse group of people from various socio-economic, ethnic, and cultural backgrounds with different political and social orientations comprises a community because we believe that There is no God but the one True God and that Muhammad is his prophet. Therefore, we share daily patterns of worship, rituals of birth, marriage, and death, etc. Mosques are also diverse, which contributes to a greater sense of community. And there are some national organizations that do work to defend Muslims’ civil liberties, foster community development, and create a forum for interfaith understanding.

I’ve written in the past and have been interviewed about the silencing of Black American Muslim voices in the past decade. Some national Muslim organizations have been critiqued for their failure to include issues of interest to Black American and other indigenous (I sort of cringe to use that word because I do have Native American relatives who might take umbrage with its use) Muslims such as white American and Latino/Hispanic Muslims. However, in many ways I don’t like how the public conversation has developed in the past year. I am troubled when some Black American Muslims use the same rhetoric and language that Islamophobes use to critique mainstream Muslim organizations dominated by first and second generation immigrants or those organizations that have an internationalist outlook. I am also bothered when I read or hear immigrant or second generation Muslims dismiss the tremendous sense of marginalization that some of us Black American Muslims have experienced in their communities.

I know that some of my Arab and South Asian friends are bothered when they are called privileged. This is not an easy pill to swallow because in American identity politics the only privileged people are supposed to be White Americans. However, there are many different types of privileges and some groups are more privileged than others. And in one community, one group can be dominant and marginalize or economically exploit another. The reality is that in America, there is fierce competition over resources. This competition has led to some voices getting silenced in deciding the agenda for American Muslims.

CAIR reports that the ethnicities of mosque participants can be broken down to 33% South Asian, 30% Black American and 25% Arab, 3.4% sub-Saharan African, 2.1 European (Bosnia, Tartar, etc.) 1.6% White American, 1.3% South-East Asian, 1.2% Carribean, 1.1% Turkish, .7% Iranian, and .6% Latino/Hispanic.

Within mainstream media, the Muslim American experience is about the immigration and assimilation experience. I don’t see much press coverage or interest on converts or the multi-generational Black American Muslim families. You have some sunni communities dating back to the 60s. I don’t want to dismiss the struggles of Asian American, white American, and Latino/Hispanic American Muslims struggles. White American Muslim converts seem to be the darlings of the community, Latino/Hispanic Muslims exotic curiosities, and East Asian or Pacific Islander Muslims occupy some weird zone and most people can barely even believe they are Muslim.

If we Muslims in America believe in democracy and enjoy the privileges of democracy, then we need institutions that allow for more open participation in decision making. At the same time, democracy entails protecting the rights of minorities. I think before we start a discussion about exclusion or inclusion, we need to start to ground our understanding sociological, historical, and political data. I am not claiming I’m doing that in this article. Rather, I used a few statistics to make a point. In the past decade, there has been increasing integration between Black American Muslims and immigrant Muslims. But that integration has led to in some ways to that silencing that I’m talking about. And this had led to a divide in mentalities between Muslims. It is not so much ethnic anymore, but rather, Muslims in America whose primary political interests are foreign policy issues and those Muslims in America who want to focus on domestic issues and establishing Muslim communities in America. I personally don’t see them as exclusive categories. But it is jarring for converts to all of a sudden be forced to adopt some psuedo-marxist third world liberation ideology the minute they take Shahada.

This brings me back to the convert issue. According to the CAIR report, nearly 30 percent of mosque participants are converts. I think it is important to discuss the three major categories of American Muslims: 1. American converts, 2. immigrants, and 3. the children of converts and immigrants. There is a need to develop programs in order to meet the needs of these three categories. The challenging thing for us converts is that when we do convert, we often sever ties with traditional means of networking that assists in social mobility: the church, fraternities and sororities, masonic lodges, networking events and happy hours, etc. The conversion process can alienate converts from different avenues and so they do look to their co-religionists in hope of reconstituting and reconfiguring new networks of social support. Immigrant and second generation Muslims often have their ethnic networks in tact. They just have to navigate the treacherous terrain of assimilating without losing their Islamic identity. Converts, on the other hand, are challenged with becoming Muslim without losing their American identity. At the same time, the way they experience fellowship is through service in the Muslim community. But at the end of the day, they find that few of their “brothers” support them when times are bad.

A lot of converts burn out and become disillusioned after they become Muslim because they have the expectation of full membership in the Ummah. They are not making unfair expectations. These are universal ideals that are in Islamic texts. Plus, you won’t have to search too long in any Islamic bookstore to find a pamphlet on brotherhood in Islam, making promises of charity, trust, mutual respect, and support. And immigrant Muslims have also been inspired by the civil rights and black nationalism, which has some intellectual linkages with Third World liberation. Part of the anger and backlash you see from some American Muslims is that they feel like some of their co-religionists have fell short on their promises. Black American Muslims who were struggling to put themselves through school or raise a family using no riba became distraught when their immigrant co-religionists happily circulate money in their family and ethnic networks, but refuse to build economic ties with converts, let alone consider intermarriage. Immigrant Muslims are now distraught that Black American Muslims have started to say they’d rather vote for a Zionist who will promote universal healthcare rather than march in the streets and divest from Israel. Honestly, I think if you surveyed most Black American Muslims, you will find that they still sympathize with Muslims overseas, but they have developed a political pragmatism. I think Barack Obama’s election and the reaction to it is testament to shifting attitudes about politics. Even for upwardly mobile Black Americans and Black American Muslims, we are deeply aware of our historic legacy and our responsibility to make a positive contribution to our families and neighbors.

I am not trying to force my own narrative down anyone’s throat. Nor am I arguing that we should have just one narrative. Rather, I am saying that we have different interests and each Muslim in America has an obligation to follow his/her calling. If you are moved to join the Peace Corps in the Moroccan Rif, by all means, do your thing. If you want to start an interfaith dialog in your local community, do your thing. Or if your big struggle is putting yourself through school so you can take care of your momma, grandma, and be a positive example for your family, do your thing. For once, American Muslims who see their fates tied to the future of America are beginning to talk. I think we can come together and find common ground, but that takes real dialog. Some have been hurting over the past 5, 10, 15, 30 years as they existed on the margins. And yes, when you have been hurting that long, you are going to have some words that are going to sting. It may even get nasty. But if we are going to deal with the divide, I think we need to listen to how we have hurt each other and work to rectify the pain we have caused each other so that we can move on to the next challenge.

Sources:

Islam 101

The Mosque in America: A National Portrait

*Editor’s Note: Aziza’s blog name has changed to The Bridezilla Blog. Congratulations (though I am afraid of this new moniker)!

I noticed a funny thing while visiting my family in D.C. for Christmas. Simply put: every female in the house (my mom and aunt, who are African-American, and me and my cousin, who are interracial) was either involved with or married to a White man.

Hmm…

That’s curious.

The truth is, the topic of interracial dating is always bubbling in the back of my mind. I went out on a limb and wrote a post about it some time ago on this blog, which got me into some deep water with a few of my readers (a disagreement that I haven’t fully resolved in my mind).

But just recently, the issue resurfaced during a conversation I had with a fellow blogger (a White male) about how personal Obama’s candidacy was to many Americans. I know, I know… interracial relationships? Obama? The two are linked, sure, but they don’t really go together. Which is what made the conversation so poignant.

My friend asked me whether or not Obama was well liked among the African-American side of my family.

“Of course!” I exclaimed. “My family has always held a fondness for Obama. But what truly won our hearts – well, mostly for my mother and aunt – was his marriage to a dark-skinned African-American woman.”

“Wow, really? Even though they’re both married to White men?” My friend was baffled. “That’s… strange.”

Before that point, I had never thought of it as strange at all. But maybe it is. And after that, a troubling question began creeping into my mind: do some Black women hold an interracial relationship double standard?

Most Black women who I am close with approve of, and even cheer on, a Black female/White male interracial relationship. But one that’s the other way around evokes a feeling far less warm and fuzzy. For example, if Obama had been married to a White woman… eek. I’m sure we wouldn’t have been as quick to embrace him (and actually, I’ve talked with men and women of every color about this hypothetical situation, all of whom expressed a similar “cringe” – perhaps a topic for a different post).

I’ve been trying to figure out WHY this is for some time. Talking with my family has helped a bit. My aunt, who grew up in the 50’s and 60’s during Jim Crow, gave me this bit of insight:

At age five, I knew I was black. (At that time in 1950, the term was “Negro.”) I also knew that “my kind” of black – luscious dark chocolate – was not valued one iota. I was in that strata of folk to be relentlessly taunted and derided – the least desirable folk in the whole of the United States of America – BLACK-SKIN FEMALES.

Being called ugly by my childhood peers – other Negroes – was an everyday experience. …At monthly dances, (wearing my prettiest felt skirts with the poodle-on-a-leash design and for-the-occasion “straightened” hair with ever-so-neat bangs and Shirley Temple curls) no boy ever asked me to dance. Not once. No boy ever asked me for a date. No boy took me home to meet his family. No boy would dare to be seen with me. Far too risky.

What we did to each other is ‘our shame’.

I also spoke with my cousin a bit. She grew up in D.C. as well, only during the 80’s. She hung out with and dated Black guys, but oftentimes found that many of them were looking for something “not quite her”: long nails, thin straight hair, etc. Which is the façade that most of her female cohorts put on. But she wasn’t interested in pretending, and, interestingly, discovered that the few White guys she dated were much more eager to accept her as she was – thick bushy hair and all.

So what does this all have to do with Obama’s marriage to Michelle? He’s African-American, she’s African-American – no interracial relationship there. So why was she the reason my family members so embraced his candidacy?

Well, it’s this—a simple statement voiced by my cousin at the end of our conversation that slid all the pieces in place:

“I guess we just love men who really love Black women.”

Wow. The conversation never had anything to do with men (of any color) and everything to do with women. Black women.

So maybe we do hold a seemingly illogical but deeply personal double standard—one rooted in experiences that go back decades. From hearing about my grandmother’s experiences as a dark-skinned Black woman in the 30’s and 40’s to my aunt’s to my cousin’s to mine, I’ve grown an intense fondness for any man who appreciates a brown-skinned lady…

…and I’m half-White. Go figure.

This weekend, I was interviewed for a magazine article. Nothing to do with my book, or even writing, for that matter. The topic of the hour was body image. This is a topic I could go on and on and ON about (and have, on several occasions), but I’ll refrain just this once.

Before the interview, all sorts of thoughts went through my head about what I might talk about — will I do the usual issue of weight and body size/shape? Would I go to the more familiar topic of areas of my body I’ve waged war with? Or would I go into the skin shade territory? So many areas to cover (no pun intended), not enough interview time . . .

So, when the lovely interviewer called me, we had a fantastic, lively, friendly discussion. It was fun and hilarious. We were about forty-five minutes through when I realized all I’d talked about was my hair. My hair. Not the usual trilogy: butt, boobs, belly. Not flab, sag, and lumps. Hair. And not body hair, either.

I had no idea what a huge issue hair has been all through my life. But as I talked to Ms. Lovely Interviewer, I realized that as a Sikh girl-child, then young woman, so many battles over control and power in my house were fought around the territory of my hair. I was not allowed to cut it, there were certain hairstyles I could not wear, and there was just so much IMPORTANCE placed on what I did or did not do with my hair.

As a little girl, I thought cutting my hair would be the answer to all my problems. I thought not being allowed to cut it was what kept me apart from the “rest” of the world. It was what kept me from connecting. And that was something I so very much longed for. Later, as I began to question things, I wanted to know why the religion allowed my father and brothers to cut their hair, but not me or my mother. Obviously, the religion intends both men and women to keep long hair, but in my house this was not the case. (That’s a whole other post, though.)

Also interesting was just how much the interviewer and I could relate on the hair topic. She happened to be African-American and went through many different periods in her life where she struggled with the “Natural or straightened?” question. Her hair was a site where many inner and outer battles were fought, too.

I thought about movies where whenever someone wanted to change their identity, or get a fresh start in life, the first thing they did was cut off their hair. Even with makeovers on popular daytime talk shows, the biggest way to make a difference in one’s appearance (thereby, in one’s life?) is to change the color/cut/style of their hair.

Through my conversation with Ms. Interviewer, it hit me that whenever I wanted things to change in my life, whenever I felt smothered, or not in control of my destiny, I went to a salon. And later, I bought a good pair of scissors and clippers and took matters into my own hands. Doing what I wanted with my own hair felt like a kind of freedom. It was a defiance and a breaking and a challenge.

“This is mine,” was the message.

And the message got across alright. Not only did the message get across, but it also found its way straight into a whole heap of punishment when I lived at home.

Ms. Interviewer said she had thoughts like that now, as well — that if only such and such were different, her whole life would somehow be better. We wondered if this was something others experienced in terms of body image. I had a friend who, whenever she wanted to feel pampered or taken care of, she’d go to a salon and have them wash her hair. That’s it–nothing else–just a wash.

I also marveled at the fact I could meet another woman from any other racial, social, economic, or political category, and we could easily have identical body image stuff. The article I was being interviewed for will include the experiences of seven or eight women from all walks of life and is set to hit the stands soon.

In the meantime, I’d love to know what your experience has been with body image. Has it even been an issue? If so, where did it center around? Where are you at with it now?

“That’s colonialism all over your face!”

The quote is from one of my favorite Asian American Studies professors on eyelid surgery, nose bridge implants, and any other kind of cosmetic surgery that transforms Asians physical features into more Caucasian ones. She meant that there is one standard of beauty—the Western one—that gets imprinted on our faces, our bodies, and our senses of self.

It’s easy to see that the Western ideal of blond-haired, blue-eyed, All-American (or Ayran, if you’re more sinister) beauty is the dominant standard. Look no further than the all-present world of popular media. Advertisements, TV, and movies glorify beautiful faces, but these beautiful faces don’t look anything like me—or you, probably. Every billboard says, “This is Beauty, and you are not quite it. Envy my bag, my hair, my look and my, uh, eyelids.”

Racialized plastic surgery is a popular topic on talk shows like Tyra and Montel. They raise the question: does eyelid surgery erase or enhance race? The audience nods along in agreement that eyelid surgery is a way for Asians to conform to white prettiness. The plastic surgeon and his patients say that they are just enhancing Asian looks. I may not have big, round eyes, but I can see perfectly well what’s going on here.

These girls feel really bad about themselves. Liz and Keyounga (the guests on Tyra and Montel) both say they were “the only Asian girl at school” and remember being called “chink.” They have memories of face-to-face racism. I can sympathize with that. Eyelid surgery is not simply a matter of wannabe white, it’s also about trying to remedy their experiences of racism.

The crease, that coveted fold, is such a small thing, but it has come to mean so much. This is because the eye is the quintessential sign of Asian difference. The “Asian” eye is the focus point of racial taunting, like “slant-eyed” you-know-whats and “ching chong” jokes with the accompanying hand gesture. Going into surgery, Keyounga says, “Maybe I won’t get called chink anymore.”

Plastic surgery offers a way to hide those physical features that have been denigrated. Getting new eyelids or a new nose is a form of racial covering. The term is Kenji Yoshino’s, who explains that to cover is to tone down a disfavored identity to fit into the mainstream. And covering is something everyone does because behaving mainstream is a social necessity. (I’m not a plagiarizer, so you can read this on page ix of his book Covering).

So, in effect all this westernizing plastic surgery is a form of assimilation. You can swim in the mainstream instead of upstream by transforming your appearance. The slanted monolid eye is the marker of Asian difference, so changing it brings you closer to sameness. Does it really?

Liz and Keyounga are aware that plastic surgery doesn’t make them look white. “I’m still Asian,” says Liz, but she doesn’t seem too happy about it. Eyelid surgery patients are probably not trying to pass as white, but they are at least trying to appear part white. They come out of surgery Eurasian, with a few European features like a “tall” nose or slighter bigger eyes added to their generally Asian faces. It’s a double-bind of wanting to be Asian, but not too Asian. In other words, wanting to be different and the same as “everybody else.”

Getting cosmetic surgery is a personal choice, but even our most personal choices are influenced by dominant culture. Internalizing western notions about what is beautiful (and what is ugly) happens almost subconsciously. Knowing that Western beauty is dominant, has helped me question its standardization. I guess that means I won’t be getting my face “colonized” any time soon.

This story has been reprinted with permission from the Asian American Journalists Association.