Reader Kheng sent in this video, currently being aired in California. Kheng writes:

I am watching TV and I come across this commercial. It made me sick to my stomach. I don’t know if you want to feature it on the blog, but I found it quite offensive and I am surprised it even aired.

After checking out the video, I can see what she means:

Text:

Californians are a compassionate people.

Our sanctuary cities defy state laws, so we can protect illegal aliens – even though they are named in 95% of outstanding homicide warrants in L.A.

Even though they are wanted in up to two-thirds of fugitive felony arrest warrants. Illegal alien gang members get back on the street because our cops can’t ask immigration status.

Have sanctuary cities taken our compassion too far?

Share your opinion at Capsweb.org.

Paid for by Californians for Population Stabilization.

I know y’all loved the standard issue Latino gang member (complete with red bandanna and mustache) and promises of property crime. They even made sure to show they were not being racist – they used a picture of a black cop! (But, on second glance, that cop looks kind of blatino…maybe the LAPD is on the side of the illegals!)

Okay, all joking aside, I’ve been seeing this “illegals are murders” meme popping up a few different places now. So let’s focus on the statistics that are cited in the video. Are the numbers cited true?

There has been a lot of discussion about the cost of undocumented im/migrants in California. The governor, Arnold Schwarzenegger, broke with his state party interests earlier this year when he condemned scapegoating California’s budget woes on undocumented workers.

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger called it a “big mistake” Wednesday to blame illegal immigrants for the state’s looming $8 billion budget gap, just as Republican lawmakers have proposed a rollback of benefits for illegal immigrants to save money.

The Republican governor was pitching his long-term budget solution in San Luis Obispo when Diane Blakeslee, mother of GOP Assemblyman Sam Blakeslee, asked Schwarzenegger how the state should handle financial burdens created by illegal immigrants.

“There is, you know, always a time like this where you start pointing the finger at various different elements of what creates the budget mess, and, you know, some may point the finger at illegal immigrants,” Schwarzenegger said. “I can guarantee you, I have been now four years in office in Sacramento, I don’t think that illegal immigration has created the mess that we are in.”

Assembly Republicans this week promoted nearly two dozen bills they said would reduce the “negative impact” that illegal immigrants have on the state budget and border security.

The financial cost of illegal immigration has been a hotly debated topic, particularly in California, which receives some of the highest rates of entrance in the country. There are some estimates on how much illegal immigration costs California each year, but these numbers are often debated because the calculations are based on a few different assumptions, as it is difficult to supply hard census data.

The Public Policy Institute of California published a “Just the Facts” paper on immigration with the following note:

Note: No representative national or state surveys provide an accurate direct count of undocumented immigrants and their characteristics. The most credible estimates use a residual technique in which undocumented immigrant populations are estimated based on subtracting estimates of legal immigrants from estimates of all immigrants

So, the population of undocumented migrants is difficult to pinpoint. And yet, somehow, the CAPS video was able to definitively state that undocumented immigrants compose “95% of outstanding homicide warrants” in L.A.

Unsurprisingly, I was unable to find any information to back up this claim. However, I did start investigating homicide rates in California. The most recent data from the Office of the Attorney General, California Department of Justice indicates some sobering statistics:

From 1997 to 2006, the largest percentage of homicide arrestees and victims were Hispanic.

Hey wait, what’s that? Homicide arrestees and victims? Interesting.

The report goes on to mention:

* Of homicide arrest rates, 41.7% of males arrested were Hispanic (820/1732) and 4.6% of women arrested were Hispanic (90/235). (p.8)

And another note of interest:

Comparing 1997 to 2006:

* The male homicide rate decreased 9.0 percent and the female homicide rate decreased 21.4 percent.
* The white homicide rate decreased 12.9 percent, the Hispanic homicide rate decreased 25.2 percent, and the black homicide rate was the same (p. 12)

So, just from the limited data available, I am finding it hard to see where that 95% number would be accurate by any stretch of the imagination.

I logged on to the CAPS website to try to get a data source. Nada. I was able to see tiny print during the video that mentions the 95% figure which looks something like “2008 Congressional…” Does anyone have any idea about where this report could have come from? A Washingtonian myself, I tend to be skeptical of Congressional Reports, as half are written by the people/lobbyists/corporations trying to influence policy in their favor.

Thoughts?

A friend of mine from college recently sent me a link to an AfterEllen.com article about the movie Bitch Slap coming out in December 2008. She asked me for my thoughts and here they are…

I think I might be the wrong person to ask.

Reason being I love gratuitous sex and violence in movies, within reason of course. I loved Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino’s Grindhouse movies. A woman with a gun for a leg killing military created zombies – count me in! Sexy ladies exacting revenge on a psychopathic-misogynistic-vehicular-homicide-loving Kurt Russell – more please! I loved these films so much that after returning them to Netflix I promptly ran out and purchased them, and then made all my friends watch the films with me repeatedly.

I know what you’re thinking that I’m a horrible queer feminist of color, right? Well, I’m going to have to respectfully disagree. And here’s why…

While I hate the way that closet racist and annoying hipster elitist try to use satire to reinforce their supposed superiority and avoid being called bigoted while doing it, I think satire when it’s done right, or at least when it’s read in a critical way, can be extremely subversive. Smart satire can often effectively challenge concepts of power, race, sex, and gender among other things.

There’s a famous example of effective satire that is brought up in Charles Ramirez Berg’s Latino Images in Film: Stereotypes, Subversion, Resistance, known as “stereotypical reversal.” Stereotypical reversal occurs when a movie plays on and invalidates a well-known stereotype by making the viewer confront their own prejudice and bias. The example that Ramirez Berg uses is from the film Flying Down to Rio, when Roger and Belinha are stranded on an island and a bare-chested black man emerges from the surrounding bushes and confronts the couple. Audiences are trained to expect a danger scenario given the location and the fact that the man is black, the viewer might wonder if this “native” is going to kidnap them or harm them in some other way. When the man steps away from the bush it becomes visible that the man is wearing golf slack and shoes, carrying a set of clubs, and when he opens his mouth has a British accent. Turns out they landed in Haiti right next to a country club and the gentleman was looking for a lost ball in the brush when they stumbled upon him. Everyone is made aware of their ignorance and as a result the stereotype is deconstructed.

Satire by its very nature is something that disarms you, most often through comedy or ridicule, and makes you take a hard look at yourself and your fears and biases. The ultimate purpose of satire is to bring about improvement by bringing ones flaws to the surface. So how do B-movies and neo-exploitation films bring about improvement? Well, often they don’t, or at least they don’t at first glance. We’re trained to be passive viewers, but if you’re willing to do the work as a viewer and think critically you’ll see that even the most seemly inane of movies like Death Proof are a comment on systems of power and hierarchy in American culture.

I think a really good recent example is Harold and Kumar. Although on the surface it’s your basic stoner buddy comedy, if you scratch below the surface its actually a very intelligent commentary on masculinity, race, sexuality, and leisure time in American culture. That is not to say that the film doesn’t have its problems, but I think there are moments in the film that are very smart and valuable

While, I can’t conclusively say whether Bitch Slap is a clever neo-exploitation or just stupid and offensive since it hasn’t come out yet, I’ll leave you with what the Co-writers and directors Eric Gruendemann and Rick Jacobson to say. They call Bitch Slap a “feminist, thinking-man’s” exploitation film with a mysterious female narrator who “comments periodically on the folly of humanity, the plight of the human condition and the vagaries of life and love through quoting the likes of Dostoevsky, T.S. Eliot, Sun Tzu and even Buddha.”

Sounds promising.

Check out the trailer and AfterEllen.com article for yourself and let me know what you think.

Interracial and interethnic dating has as much, if not more, to do with “Family Matters” as my own family. So, in order to try to describe the experience of being in an interethnic relationship, I have to first evaluate the culture popping up all around me. Grab some Cheez Puffs or chicharrones, put aside your distaste for cheesy, alliterative snack food references, and let’s get to this.

Should you ever feel inclined to Google “Interracial Dating,” as I do not do often on a Tuesday night, you’ll find a lot of dating sites aimed at hooking you up with someone of another race. Not information about interracial dating, not tirades against it, not advice, not thoughtful writing on the subject, but, rather, dating sites with names like “Salt and Pepper.” Discovering this made a little light blink on and off in my mind’s eye reading “Fetish! Fetish! Fetish!” I’ll admit to feeling conflicted about interracial dating as it relates to the fetishization of a group. Who am I to make the distinction between preference and prejudice? That concern always takes the form of a certain cringe I’m never without when thinking about the subject, but when I see evidence of people actively going out and searching for someone of another, specific race or ethnicity, well. That action toes the very fine line between personal preference and …and what, exactly?

This isn’t racism in the traditional sense of hating or fearing a group of people, but there does seem to be the impression that the fetishized group is somehow either aesthetically or sexually superior to other groups or that, taking that a step further, they are somehow subhuman, objectified, interchangeable receptacles for sex and attention. I don’t want to advocate the idea that there are different levels of racism, but this particular brand is so hurtful because it occurs so subtly and, for the most part, disguised as a compliment. When a man who is darker than me compliments me on the paleness of my skin, as I often encounter with Latino men, it insults and devalues both of us. I’m reduced to my body parts, and he buys into the idea that white skin is inherently beautiful. And I am left feeling disgusting. Utterly, completely disgusting. Because I am both a victim and a perpetuator of this ongoing war against people’s skin. Why don’t I find this man attractive? Is it his look? His attitude? His beliefs? Am I also guilty of fetishizing, of being racist? How am I implicated in all of this; what is the level of my culpability?

So, when I approach a subject like interracial or interethnic dating, I have to first question those who seek it out and the motives for why people enter into such couplings. People, as it turns out, like me. “Love! We’re in love!” is the simple answer coming from couples tightly clasping hands. But, you know. That’s just not good enough. Love means different things for different cultures, at different points in a historical timeline, for people of different ages.

Chemistry, then, makes sense to me. Pheromones and closeness and, in some cases, an open bar featuring really cold Vodka on a really warm night. Attraction makes sense to me, but, like love, it’s never simple and never exists in isolation from the culture we live in. TV commercials, catalogues, perfume ads, romantic comedies, heroes and heroines in coming-of-age novels – these have all had a part in coloring, literally and figuratively, my idea of what is attractive. And, although I am attracted to wit and personality and thoughtfulness, those are not things that will necessarily make me cross the line from friends to… half of a couple, clasping hands, yelling “Love! We’re in love!” despite my inability to intellectualize that impulse.

I have been asked whether I think that minorities, especially women, choose white partners once they have reached a certain level of success, monetarily and/or socially. To which I respond, “Sure. Maybe. Sometimes?” I think, however, that while this may prove true for some couples, a lot of interracial and interethnic couplings are more the result of being raised in, and thus being more comfortable with, a culture that is created by and caters to White Americans. In my own family, my two youngest aunts, one of whom was born in the U.S. and the other who moved here when she was a toddler, have both married Anglo men. And, true! They do happen to be very successful women, in terms of their careers. But they also happened to have grown up immersed in American culture, with American friends and American TV shows that presented a picture of what relationships should be like – an ideal that is different from the ideal my Cuban grandmothers and Spanish great-grandmothers were raised with.

Having grown up in Miami, I feel like I’ve been raised in – at least – two different worlds. As such, I’ve gotten to sample what I like and what I don’t care for in terms of relationships. I know that a lot of what I don’t particularly care for are qualities most often associated with machismo. While I understand this is a cultural construct and not something inherent in Latino men, it is ingrained in the Latino community in ways both subtle and explicit. It’s a concept that is nurtured and intensified in places like, say, Miami, where, more and more, people are expected to, and often do, behave according to socially mandated roles that I have always found ill-fitting. That particular identity, a Miami Latina as I had felt it had been defined for me, was not something I wanted.

So, I don’t find it terribly surprising or groundbreaking that I’m dating a White, Anglo-Saxon Protestant. We’ve grown up watching the same cartoons; we speak in the same highly complex code formed of song lyrics, movie references, web comic characters and internet memes. And we both like spicy chicken sandwiches. We have a common language and enough cultural touchstones between us to bind us together. You guys. It’s love.

My family, however, is a different story. It’s not that they are necessarily put off by my insistence (as they see it) on dating a non-Latino, it’s that they worry for me and that worry manifests itself in a way that makes me want to scream.

The funny (horrible) thing is, I would never have been able to predict their reactions to my boyfriend. But Americanness is seen as something so far removed from their own identity and experience, that they seem to fear I’m stepping into some void from which I’ll never return. When, in truth, this stepping across occurred the first time I watched, enraptured, as Mr. Rogers traded one sweater for another and tearfully joined Feivel, singing “Somewhere Out There” entirely by heart. I was already long gone. It wasn’t that I never felt Cuban or Latina, it was that I never knew what it meant to feel these things. I was into books and TV shows and oldies. Pop culture didn’t include salsa music or flan or Noche Buena dinners. These were part of my childhood narrative, sure, but they weren’t the guiding factors. I didn’t realize I was supposed to be Latina until I took a summer course in Spain and was promptly informed that I did not resemble or act like Jennifer Lopez. Seriously?

But back to my family. I was asked, half-jokingly why my uterus was not yet brimming over with future Cubans. I smiled demurely while inhaling two margaritas and a beer. “I’m practicing,” I slurred. My family, very kindly, ignored me. Then I was grilled about my boyfriend.

“Is he Cuban?”

“Nope.”

“But he’s Catholic?”

“Hiccup.”

A worried pause. I crammed one or seven nacho chips into my mouth.

“Is he…?”

“Mmmf?”

“The J word?”

The string of expletives that immediately swirled around my alcohol-soaked brain was decidedly Cuban.

But what can I do? I know my family loves me, completely and unequivocally, and have what they see as my best interests at heart, always. I know they care that my boyfriend and I are bonded together by common values. They want him to respect me, all of me, and that includes my Cuban family and my identity as a Cuban-American. I know the idea of racial or ethnic purity pales (God, whatever) in comparison to a common set of values and morals.

But.

Therein lies the disconnect. My values are complicated. They have much to do with my upbringing, sure. I would never deny that. But my upbringing has been shaped by more than being Cuban, than eating purée de malanga for dinner and being doused with Agua de Violetas after bath-time or being able to recognize a photo of Jose Marti before I could name the President of the United States. My upbringing is also the Mr. Clean jingle and The Ninja Turtles and Full House and the Babysitters Club series. And although these things may not be definitely American, they are definitely White, Upper-Middle Class America, no matter who consumes and enjoys them. They are, as it so happens, definitely me. And while I’m sure many Cuban-American boys in Miami and elsewhere carry around the same cultural reference guide, I haven’t met one. I met a guy who happens to be White, who happens to be Protestant and who happens to speak the same language I do. That’s just what happened in this particular episode.

Associate Editor Alex Alvarez, befuddled to find that her boobs and hips, or lack thereof, seem to fall in and out fashion like leggings and stirrup pants and poppers, takes a look at the American women’s magazine industry in an attempt to decipher just how, exactly, they can get away with telling women their bodies are ok – if only they’d look more like white girls. (Take The Quiz On Page 62!)

My name is Alex Alvarez. And I hate women’s magazines.

Don’t get me wrong: I like fashion and I’ve worked at several magazines over the past couple of years. I can talk about Courrèges and Two Girls, One Cup in the same breath. But so many women’s magazines, both “fashion” mags like Glamour and Vogue and “sexy” mags like Cosmo and Horse & Hound do women so much more harm than good.

Women’s magazines have long been accused of creating a standard of beauty that will forever be just out of the grasp of most women – prompting them, of course, to wait until next month’s issue for more advice on how to be perfect. (Hint! Transplant your face with this other face.) Selling women this promise not only keeps magazines on newsstands and subscriptions in the mail, it also helps appease the real driving force behind all magazines — advertisers and Satan. And what women end up purchasing is cosmetic “whiteness.” You know you’ve made it, baby, when you wake up looking like you faceplanted on Plymouth Rock.

In this feature, I’ll take a look at women from four, over-simplified ethnic or racial backgrounds and see just how, exactly, magazines are fucking them all up. Then, after a few dozen sex quizzes and several minutes of trying to figure out how you can both “Love Your Body!” and orient yourself on the latest “Plastic Surgery Tips Every Woman Should Know!” without wanting to gag yourself on an exclamation point, I’ll give the magazine industry a few tips on how to talk to women.

Latina

Brief Overview: Latinas are portrayed as being sultry and seductive. They can get away with playing the “bad girl,” possibly because they are allowed – and even encouraged – to have more overtly sexual bodies, with an emphasis on curves, dark eyes and bright, plump, shiny, slick, wet lips shown in loving close-ups, usually while the face to which they’re attached is growling or purring or doing something else that’s totally fierce. They also give better head. Oh. There goes my attempt at subtlety.

The ideal: Jennifer Lopez

Hair: Often enough, Latinas have “big hair” with lots of volume, possibly as a middle ground among the various hair textures found among Latinas of different races.

Skin: Latinas are often depicted as having an olive complexion, with lighter or darker generally ignored or unmentioned by mainstream media.

Ass: Big, round. Makes a “ka-ching ka-ching” sound when bouncing in time to a song about cars and beach houses.

Breasts: While Latinas are generally depicted with large backsides, breast size is allowed to vary. As long as they’re big.

How magazines fucked up: “Latina” is not a race. It’s a diverse group made of many racial, ethnic and religious groups. Some who don’t even look like J-Lo. Additionally, women can’t have it both ways. While Latinas have been “en vogue” for a period of time, certain celebrated icons of “Latina beauty,” such as Jennifer Lopez and Salma Hayek, have whittled down their once-celebrated curvy figures as the years have gone by. Wait until Jennifer loses all that baby weight. She’ll look so much better without Marc.

Black

Brief Overview: While black women can come in a variety of shapes and complexions, those who are most often represented in mainstream American magazines are often, for lack of a better, equally descriptive phrase, “white-washed” in appearance. Features that are seen of characterized of black people, like curlier hair textures, wider noses and fuller lips, are often downplayed in American magazines, conforming to a white standard of beauty.

The ideal: Halle Berry

Hair: There was quite a controversy surrounding a Glamour magazine article that portrayed “ethnic” hairstyles, such as afros and cornrows, as being inappropriate for the workplace. This works to politicize the black body, hair included, and also upholds the standard that in order to be neutral, apolitical and inoffensive in the public sphere, one must become as white as possible. As such, many black women in magazines have relaxed hair, extensions and weaves.

Skin: Lighter-skinned black women are more often represented in magazines than those who are darker complected.

Ass: While black women are “allowed” to be more overtly sexual than those who are white, many “high fashion” black models are quite thin and thus their backsides are smaller and the object of less focus than black women represented in other areas of mainstream entertainment. Like in any rap video that airs after midnight in between commercials for “Girls Gone Wild: Preschool Edition.”

Breasts: The more high fashion the magazine, the less busty the models. After all, even your eyeballs’ll look fat in a Hervé Léger bandaid dress.

How magazines fucked up: While Halle Berry is a stunningly attractive woman, she happens to have a white mother. And while Latinas are allowed to “fiery” and “seductive,” the magazine and fashion industry seem confused about how, exactly, to portray black women, choosing instead to whitewash them and choose only light-skinned women with whittled-down figures, or very dark “exotic beauties” that are treated more like sculptural objects than flesh and blood women.

Asian

Brief Overview: Asian women hold a curious place in the beauty stratum. Often, what is perceived as their “natural” physical traits are encouraged and often emulated by White women trying to achieve a certain standard of beauty. The idea of a natural physical ideal is a harmful one, because those who do not possess such traits are ignored or considered somehow inferior, physically. The Asian ideal, as perceived by American fashion magazines and elsewhere, revolves around the idea that one must be petite, slim, fair and delicate. Doll-like would be the best way to describe this ideal, both in terms of physical appearance and attitude.

The ideal: Ziyi Zhang

Hair: Straight. What was interesting to me, actually, was that a former Korean roommate of mine had all these magazines that featured girls with curly hair all dyed a sort of reddish color. Seriously, every. Single. Girl. In her magazines had the exact same hairstyle. She also had one magazine dedicated to Japanese girls who wanted to emulate the style of American Black women -this included wearing afros. Also interesting? Girls in Japanese and Korean magazines are generally much, much thinner than in American ones.

Skin: Clear, light. Although there are many, many ethnic groups prevalent throughout Asia, only porcelain-skinned girls find representation in American fashion mags.

Ass: N/A

Breasts: N/A

How magazines fucked up: Some Asian girls are chubby. Really! Some are muscular, some are tall, some are dark, some are doughy, and some are boney and awkward.

White

Brief Overview: The gold standard of white beauty is a woman who is thought of as being the least “ethnic” and most “neutral” as possible. Fair skin, fair hair and thin, often lacking in curves that would be considered vulgar or distasteful (or exotic?) the stereotype of corn-fed Midwestern girls or sun-kissed, muscular athletic girls are eschewed for fair, tall, boney girls – often with what is described as a “boyish” figure, one without the tell-tale markers of womanhood – hips, ass. Personality.

The ideal: Gwyneth Paltrow

Hair: Hairstyle changes with the season but barring avant-garde styling, styles are usually pretty tame, alternating from loose ringlets to super-straight, shiny, sleek hairstyles. Comes in a variety of haircolors, again, depending on the season.

Skin: Pale or tan, depending on the season and the style of the photoshoot. Like to mix colonialism and cultural oppression with your couture? Bring a healthy glow!

Ass: N/A

Breasts: Depends. In magazines focused on middle to upper-middle class women, breasts are often normal to large. In high-fashion magazines, however, fuller bustlines are used to indicate “plus-size” or “seductive” women like Eva Mendes, not necessarily elegant or stylish ones.

How magazines fucked up: There’s been a long tradition of a “fight for white,” meaning that various ethnic groups over the years have had to struggle for the chance to be seen as normal and neutral. Irish-Americans, for example, who are today almost synonymous with the concept of what it means to be white (fevered dancing without the use of hips or shoulders, the consumption of potatoes), were very much “the other” for a very, very long time in America. Jewish and Italian Americans were also not always considered white folks here in the old U.S. of A. This isn’t mentioned to encourage anyone to wait whiteness out, it’s meant to highlight the fact that whiteness is a culturally manufactured concept and is only given meaning by a certain segment of society in a certain slice of history.

Sigh. What can you do? Well, for one, you can stop reading fashion magazines.

No, ok, calm your ass down. (Ooh! See what I did there?) And remove your stiletto from my cornea. You can still celebrate fashion and enjoy girlyness without conforming to patriarchal and Anglo-centric standards of beauty. There are some magazines out there that will let you know you’re fine, and even beautiful, exactly as you are without telling you to lose five pounds in three days to fit into a bathing suit you can’t afford. Dig around. Put effort into being a consumer, and be discerning in your taste. Women make up the majority of the U.S. population; it’s not far-fetched to say we drive a lot of the economy. So why do we give up all our power to the beauty and fashion industries, only to be rewarded with the idea that we’re still not good enough? These standards and fads only have meaning if you elect to give it to them.

—

Latoya’s Note: In the comments to the original post, Alex addresses something that appears to be an omission in her piece:

I purposefully used these four, generalized groups because these are found most often in mainstream media / American fashion magazines. Your statement on not being able to find Middle Eastern or South Asian women in such magazines is exactly why I chose not to include these groups in my feature. It’s the same reason I didn’t include, say, Native American women or ethnic groups in China who didn’t fit the “pale, small” stereotype.

Additionally, I did not mean to include South Asian women under the “Asian” header at all, on purpose, because there is almost always a distinction in popular culture and language between “Asian” and “South Asian.”

The General Market ad shows the Kleenex being hurled like a snowball. The Latino version? A soccerball, of course.

Fast Company recently profiled Alicia Morga, founder and CEO of online-marketing firm Consorte Media.

The opening paragraphs of the article reveal exactly what is wrong with the advertising industry:

Every marketer, pollster, and advertiser knows this much about Hispanics living in the United States: They are deeply family oriented, and their families are big. So when Alicia Morga, founder and CEO of the Hispanic-focused online-marketing firm Consorte Media, first started working with ad agencies on home-financing campaigns, she was told to use cheery images of happy, home-owning families. Problem: “The pictures of the big, brown family turned out to be the lowest-performing creative among Hispanics,” Morga says with a laugh. “By far.” What worked instead were simple shots of well-kept homes with white fences and lush lawns. “It’s aspirational,” she explains. Who knew?

Anyone who bothered to think outside the caja would know–and Morga does. In less than two years, she and Consorte Media have changed the thinking on how to find Hispanic Web surfers in the United States and convert them into customers, replacing the stereotypes that often typify minority-targeted marketing with insights gleaned from rigorous data collection and analysis. And she has built a business that’s already profitable, scored big-name clients including Best Buy and Monster.com, and completed two rounds of venture funding worth $10 million. Her secret: “Data works. There’s too much of the anecdotal in this marketplace.”

I am not sure why marketers want to overolook things that are fairly obvious. Perhaps it is the need for quantifiable, packaged data. I used to work for a market research aggregator and some of the reports that came across my desk for loading were sketchy, at best. Much of the research targeting specific ethnic/racial/gender/age demographics were heavily biased, used to essentially justify pre-existing stereotypes.

A coworker and I occassionally amused ourselves by opening some of the reports and laughing about what the researchers said our demographic wanted. Apparently, according to an older report targeting the African-American market, I am supposed to be single, very religious, overweight, and respond well to food images and church choirs. I guess that’s what the deal was with this Nivea ad.

As a gamer, I was socially awkward and probably spent a lot of time alone. (I was also a guy. Girl gamers had a very small segment near the end explaining how we need pink to relate to video games and we prefer games that were more feminine with a focus on relationships, cooking, or shopping. No I’m not kidding.)

I am not saying all market research is bad – on the contrary, there were some very well researched and thorough reports out there that did crazy things like actually poll the market. Or observe trends. Or conduct focus groups. Still, there were a great many companies who seemed like they couldn’t bother to even do that basic amount of research.

So, I can’t say I was surprised to see the language barrier brought up in the article as another key stumbling block:

The language barrier is obstacle enough for many marketers–the most infamous example is a Spanish-language version of the “Got Milk?” campaign, in which the mangled-in-translation tagline ended up meaning something akin to “lactation.” But Morga emphasizes that the demo “is not monolithic”: One-third of U.S. Hispanics are English-dominant, one-third speak primarily Spanish, and one-third are fully bilingual. And Forrester Media analyst Tamara Barber adds that “it’s not just about language. It’s about culture.” U.S. Hispanics are incredibly diverse, hailing from more than two dozen countries–and that jumble of mores, traditions, and cultural quirks renders generalizations problematic.

What? Latin@s speak English?

¿Desde cuándo?

And Hispanics/Latin@s in the US are diverse? (Meaning everyone isn’t Mexican?)

I think I just heard the sound of heads exploding on Madison Avenue.

[Image taken from the Fast Company website]

I’ve been waiting for this shoe to drop.

Last August, a former Glamour editor found herself in a hailstorm of controversy after she gave a speech to a law firm where she indicated that an afro was not an office appropriate hairstyle. Jezebel had the scoop:

[A] recent slide show by an unidentified Glamour editor on the “Dos and Don’ts of Corporate Fashion” at a New York law firm shed some light on the topic, according to this month’s American Lawyer magazine.

First slide up: an African American woman sporting an Afro. A real no-no, announced the ‘Glamour’ editor to the 40 or so lawyers in the room. As for dreadlocks: How truly dreadful! The style maven said it was ‘shocking’ that some people still think it ‘appropriate’ to wear those hairstyles at the office. ‘No offense,’ she sniffed, but those ‘political’ hairstyles really have to go.

In November of that year, Glamour tried to make amends to its readership by hosting a panel to discuss Women, Race, and Beauty. The March Issue of Glamour contains the transcript from the panel as well as some extra information about the panelists and some sidebars.

Reading the finished product, I notice I am left feeling unsatisfied. It’s kind of like when I saw The Fast and The Furious: Tokyo Drift soundtrack advertised. DJ Shadow, Mos Def, Verbal from M-Flo, Dragon Ash, The Far*East Movement, and N.E.R.D. were all featured but after I previewed the tracks, I ended up leaving the CD in the store. How did something so right go so wrong?

I got the same feeling from this Glamour article. All the all stars are here: Farai Chideya (NPR, News & Notes), Vanessa Bush (Essence), Jami Floyd (TV Anchor), Daisy Hernandez (Colorlines), Lisa Price (Carol’s Daughter Hair Products), Venus Opal Reese (PH.D, University of Texas), Mally Roncal (Celebrity Make Up Artist/make up creator), and Barbara Trepagnier (Professor of Sociology). And yet…

The Panel

With Farai Chideya moderating, the panel got off to a quick start. The panel answered questions on the perception of natural hair in the workplace, self-acceptance, community pressure from both perspectives, and hair and identity. The audience also chimed in, lobbing questions about intra-community hair politics, adding more woman of color in the beauty business, and instilling confidence in teenage girls.

The conversation that resulted was good, but very surface level. The panelists used a lot of anecdotal evidence to make their points and generally stayed away from any topic that would seem a little too controversial.

What Was Missing

There were two comments that broke from this mold, one from Venus Opal Reese, and the other from Mally Roncal:

REESE: I’d like us to consider how we see things. When it comes to race, we’re looking from the past. When people see me with my natural hair, they don’t see Dr. Venus Opal Reese who has four degrees, they see an historical idea of what natural hair means. And that’s what it meant in the 1970s and 1960s; it equaled black nationalism and was linked to the Black Panther Party. It was considered militant. That doesn’t mean it’s true now, but that’s how it’s linked.

RONCAL: But you have to be comfortable with yourself before it can be about having fun. With my makeup line I work with everyday women, and obviously I give them tricks to enhance their own beauty. But I get a lot of Asian girls saying, “My eyes are too slanty. How do I make them look rounder?” And African American women asking, “How can I make my nose or lips look smaller?” I tell them, “We all deserve to feel as beautiful as we are. But I don’t want to hear you say, ‘I want to look more like a white girl.’”

With the exception of Roncal’s comment, the prevailing dominance of the white beauty ideal was not mentioned. Most of the discussion focused around corporate ideals of what is acceptable and what is not. Many of the panelists talk about straightening their hair to fit into a certain corporate culture or to advance. However, not much was discussed as to why certain people conform to the prevailing beauty standards and others do not. The corporate culture piece is an important one, but this panel happened because a group of lawyers thought there was something wrong with a beauty editor condemning natural hair. So there is a corporate component, but I would have liked to have seen a little more about individual attitudes.

Individual attitudes towards different kinds of beauty are immensely important in these kinds of conversations. It is quite telling that Dodai from Jezebel can post monthly articles about the lack of models of color in fashion magazine spreads, advertising, and on the runways, and still get comments like this one:

“It’s not the modelling agencies or fashion designers fault that black chicks aren’t as hot as white chicks. But this article in itself is racist. Maybe they were rebelling against these people trying to force them to diversify.”

There are institutional forces who propagate the idea that the white ideal of beauty is the only acceptable ideal of beauty. And then there are those individuals who are willing to disregard all other information to prove that the way things are is what is natural and right. I am not sure which of the two is harder to fight.

Now, I understand that there are different levels of racial conversation. Glamour is a national magazine that reaches two million women through paid circulation (subscriptions and newsstand). So a hard targeted conversation may not have played too well with their targeted readership. But their responses seem a little anemic considering the situation that sparked the panel.

Other Bits of Strange

This was Glamour’s response to their readers after a hurtful comment came from one of their staffers. (It should be mentioned that the staffer in question, Ashley Baker, says the comment was taken out of context. Her version of the story has not yet been revealed.) And Glamour has had other staffers make questionable statements that fly against their self-proclaimed belief “in the beauty of all women.” For example, touting the assumption that no one in their right mind would ever want a larger rear end.

So there is a bit of history here.

But I have to say I do find it interesting that a major article like this one wouldn’t merit a cover line. This is Glamour’s way to make amends and instead of promoting their discussion on race and beauty, they choose to go with the following cover lines:

“Pssst! Why guys love your body exactly as is”
“Sexy Hair in 10 Minutes or Less”
“99 Juicy New Secrets of Hollywood!”
“Find Your Best Birth Control”
“The Fashion, the Fun, the Dos & Don’ts”
“Spring Clothes for You”
“Naomi Watts: On the ballsy move that got her the man she loves”

Seriously? Y’all couldn’t take the corner spot you dedicated to the same old birth control article I read in every other women’s magazine and plug this panel?

I guess Sexy Hair grabs more attention than Icky Race Issues.

I also noticed some attempts at inclusiveness in the article, manifested through the sidebars. While the panel focused mostly on black women and hair issues, there were small glimpses of the experiences of others along the margins. N. Jamiyla Chislom talked about embracing the versatility of her hair, saying “Whether it’s ‘locked, Afroed, twisted, or straightened, we have the option of any and every style.” Serena Kim explains the single-fold eyelid and cultural pride. (It reminded me of Carmen’s earlier post asking if this issue was the number one concern in the Asian community. From my outsider’s view, I think this issue gets so much play in American magazines because it is (1) uniquely Asian and (2) something many Americans would find strange and exotic.) Laura Checkoway writes about wanting to trade her size zero figure for a larger frame to emulate “the two hottest black girls in my class, who had all the boys’ attention when they strutted by.” Taigi Smith writes about letting her hair be what it is. And Shirley J. Velasquez confused me with an article about facial hair and Latinas:

Latinas have two ideas about facial hair: that it makes a woman look dirty and that it’s sexy. When I was 13, my mother began taking me to a salon to get my upper lip threaded. “Now you look clean,” she’d say, and I’d feel good. I liked Frida Kahlo’s striking appearance, but I didn’t want facial hair like hers. One day, I noticed the woman attending me. She was beautiful with her facial hair, not despite it. I realized that I am too. I love the way my skin glows when it’s bare, but I know that there’s nothing embarassing about my body doing what it’s supposed to. Now, instead of continuing time-consuming waxes, I had laser hair removal. I was proud that it was less about shame and more about practicality.

Umm…I love my facial hair, so I got it permanently removed? Ok…I guess. My hair doesn’t grow that fast, so maybe she had to hit the waxer once a week? I dunno – someone please enlighten me.

At any rate, these perspectives were interesting soundbytes but not much else. I think they were intended to add some other ideas of race and identity, but left nothing substantial to hold on to.

The short segments did remind me of another piece that I had read about beauty – which accidentally brought race into the mix. Over on the Fat Acceptance blog, Shapely Prose, Kate Harding penned a piece called the Fantasy of Being Thin. Though the entire piece is excellent (and well worth the read), it can be summed up in this sentence:

Because, you see, the Fantasy of Being Thin is not just about becoming small enough to be perceived as more acceptable. It is about becoming an entirely different person – one with far more courage, confidence, and luck than the fat you has. It’s not just, “When I’m thin, I’ll look good in a bathing suit”; it’s “When I’m thin, I will be the kind of person who struts down the beach in a bikini, making men weep.”

There are now 471 comments to that post, but this one knocked the air from my lungs:

Tracy, on November 27th, 2007 at 8:13 pm Said:

I have been thinking about my thin fantasies for a while and the biggest one to come to me is probably particular to women of color:

If I were thin, I would be white…well as close as possible.

That was the biggest and most heartbreaking revelation for me. I always considered myself the exception to the rule about black folks and maybe it was my way of separating myself from my peers.

And then another one:

lactose intolerant lisa, on December 6th, 2007 at 7:08 pm Said:

I had an eating disorder based on my fantasy of being thin. For me, it was completely outrageous expectations: that my mom and dad would not get divorced, that I would be popular, that I would be worthy of all of the things I wanted to do, that I could finally wear the clothes I wanted to make, and the most outrageous one: that I would be white. I’m half white, and I so internalized all the racism I’d encountered that I always fantasized that when I was thin, I would be white. Talk about impossible. I’ve come very far on beating my eating disorder, but my fantasy of being thin seems like one of the very last things to go.

We can discuss differences in hair texture.

We can discuss differences in body type.

We can discuss differences in facial features.

But this does not change the reality that “white” is considered the golden standard and that everything else is deemed unacceptable. Straightened hair, fairer skin, keener features are all considered beautiful while anything else is automatically considered unattractive. If you are a woman of color, you suddenly find yourself under enormous pressure to compensate for that you “lack.” The situation isn’t hopeless. As Afrobella writes in Black Woman, Know That You Are Beautiful, there are ample resources created by and for women of color that need our support. While most of us can and do support the endeavors of our community, does that mean we have to stop advocating for inclusion and support in mainstream publications?

Going back to the Glamour article, I find myself a bit sad. Rarely does a mainstream magazine decide to tackle race directly and so Glamour should be commended for putting the panel and article together. However, the piece feels like a wonderful beginning, a springboard to a multi-part series, the small start that leads us into a more enlightened conversation. It deserves more follow up, discussions, check-ins, maybe even a small monthly feature.

But I can’t shake the feeling that this article – as well as the conversation it sparked – ends on page 246, never to be mentioned again.

(Image taken from the Glamour website)

by Guest Contributor Alisa Valdes-Rodiguez, originally published at Multiplicative Indentity

In 2007, Mexican-born author Reyna Grande’s first novel, “Across a Hundred Mountains,” is released to critical acclaim, and wins the American Book Award – yet Grande’s San Diego bookstore appearance is canceled after anti-immigrant patrons call the manager to protest their support of a novel by and about “illegals”.

In 2004, the South Coast Repertory Theater in Costa Mesa, Calif., kills its Hispanic Playwright’s Project, in part to appease donors who fear “illegals” benefiting from their money.

In 2007, Touchstone Pictures pulls the plug on “Deep in the Heart of Texas,” a feature film starring Eva Longoria, about a fully assimilated Mexican American woman, saying there is nothing particularly “Latina” about an educated, professional shopaholic from Texas; meaning, the character is “too American” for audiences to believe as “Latina”. (Meanwhile, Texas is no longer a majority-white state, and most Latinos there speak English…)

In 2005, the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles dismantles all four of its minority playwright development programs.

In 2008, People magazine puts Latina singer Christina Aguilera on the cover and sees the average number of copies sold drop by more than 100,000.

The Latin Grammys, created in 2000 with a mainstream English-language CBS audience in mind, have since been downgraded to Univision only, in part due to protests from anti-Latino viewers.

In 2007, ABC decides to pull the plug on The George Lopez Show, even though the show had better ratings than at least two other series that were renewed; he is replaced by a short-lived sitcom about cavemen.

Also in 2007, Jennifer Lopez wraps filming on the Gregory Nava movie “Bordertown,” about serial killings of Mexican women along the US-Mexico border, only to find that it will not be released in the United States after all; hostile anti-Mexican reaction in screenings relegate the film to release in Europe only. Variety magazine savages the film’s anti-NAFTA stance. The film goes on to win several awards at the Berlin film festival, including one from Amnesty International.

I, meanwhile, have seen my publisher decide to stop printing my books simultaneously in Spanish for the domestic market, citing a waning interest from booksellers for such material. Latina authors in my circle of friends all say times have gotten harder and harder for them over the past two or three years, with several telling me they, like I, have been on the receiving end of more and more hate-mail through their web sites and blogs. Personally, I have seen the advances paid on my books decline by 80 percent, and the size of my book tours slashed from 14 cities to 4.

Taken separately, these anecdotes might appear to be nothing more than bad luck, or flukes, a the natural ebb and flow of a career in the fickle entertainment industry. But taken together, and held up against a shifting corporate media climate that increasingly scapegoats and targets immigrants and Latinos (a trend both the ACLU and FBI blame for drastic rise in hate-crimes against Latinos), they paint a frightening picture of an increasingly hostile America for all Latinos – creative artists included.

There are more than 30 million Latinos in the United States – that is more than the entire population of Canada. We make up the fastest-growing segment of the nation, and make up the largest slice of the demographic pie in cities like New York, Los Angeles, Miami, Houston. We are consummate consumers, spending more than we save, and we are the first in line on opening night at the movies. We watch more TV, and buy more beauty products. In other words, in a capitalist society, it makes no sense to overlook us and our $686 billion spending power – which is growing at twice the rate of non-Latino spending power. Our economic muscle in the United States is expect to reach $1.2 trillion by 2011.

And yet we are being ignored – and maligned. And if we are artists, it seems, punished.

While Latinos make up close to half the population in Los Angeles and New York, UCLA’s Center for Chicano Studies has found that prime-time portrayals of these cities on TV do not come close to reflecting reality. The vast majority of programs on TV have no Latino characters at all, said the study, and the numbers are declining. We are the single most underrepresented group on American television. The only prime-time program featuring a cast of Latinos is currently “Cane,” which is mafioso and violent, and as of last week CBS had made no move to renew the show for next season – meaning it is all but canceled.

Mary Beltran, of the Univ. of Wisconsin, took a similar look at Latino roles in movies. Her conclusion? That Hollywood still portrays “Latinas as exotic, sexually hot, passionate ‘spitfires,’ for example, or language-mangling comic relief.” While Latinos “seldom play fully realized characters. Although there may be more jobs available, they are basically the same roles that Latinos have assumed for the last 80 years.”

So it was that, after toiling for years to learn the screenwriting craft, I finally sold the DIRTY GIRLS SOCIAL CLUB movie script, and got two amazing producers signed on, with high hopes. Our numbers are there. The need for this sort of material is there. The book is a mega-bestseller. Latina actors are hungry for real, meaty roles. Studios would jump at the opportunity, right?

Well, not quite. It turns out that to get financing, we have to have at least one famous actress signed on. When it comes to A-list Latina actresses, you’ve really got few enough to count them on one hand. We approached them all. And they all said no. We were, in a word, shocked.

Several of them (and several, when you are counting a handful, is telling) said with great apology that they had been advised by their handlers and management NOT TO PLAY LATINAS in movies that were ETHNIC, because that was seen as being too political a statement at the moment. In other words, they could play the exotic Latina love interest of an action hero in a “white” movie, but they could not play self-actualized Latinas with depth in a Latina movie. These actresses, many of whom have complained in interviews about the lack of exciting roles for Latinas, in private meetings said they were unwilling to play Latinas in a Latino project lest they be seen by the powers that be as “going the JLo route.”

Now, I know I am not supposed to talk about this. I am supposed to keep it quiet. I am expecting calls from my producers telling me to can it. They don’t want me to do anything to make the movie seem risky. Right? Me. Like the problem here is ME making it look risky. Yeah.

But here’s the conclusion I’ve come to: Hollywood, America, the mainstream media, they have already decided the DIRTY GIRLS project is too risky – just like “Bordertown,” just like “Deep in the Heart of Texas”. This one, and every other one like it. Look at what is happening across the country, to all of us who are Latino and creative. We are, in a word, screwed, because America has been on a hatefest against immigrants, and the media confuses the words “immigrant” and “Latino,” and the resulting effect is that over the past few years, Americans have been trained to see all of us as a huge threat to their well-being, at the very same time the economy has tanked. We are the face they blame.

So I’m not worried about screwing the movie over by telling the truth. The truth will set you free. This movie won’t get made anyway. Not in Hollywood. Not this way. If you can’t get an A-lister, you can’t get financing. If you can’t get financing, you can’t get a movie made. If you can’t get a movie made, you can’t control the images. If you can’t control the images, the climate is in the hands of others, like Michael Savage, Lou Dobbs and Glenn Beck and those who canceled Lopez’s show. The climate, in the hands of others, has led us here. And so, here we are. In a resounding, terrifying silence.

I don’t know what the answer is. But I do know the question: What the hell do we do now?

Author’s note: Before anyone jumps all over me, I use “brown” here as a general term for people of African or indigenous American descent, not solely South Asians or Central Americans, though the article discusses issues for all POC travelers, not just the ones with darker skin.

Ah, Madrid.

I had decided that for spring break in 2005, instead of going to Memphis as planned, I’d take a week-long trip to Paris and Madrid instead. After all, in a weird twist of fate, the plane tickets to Europe were only about 100 dollars more than those I had bought to go to the place Elvis and I both called home. I figured as I could speak, read, and understand Spanish and French, I’d be fine. I’d been to Paris before, and loved it, and had heard awesome things about Madrid from my friends, so I thought, “Why not? Just breathe, and take a chance.” So I did, though I wasn’t exactly prepared for the less than warm reception in one of the liveliest cities in the Iberian Peninsula.

Paris was no problem, possibly due in part to the city’s expressed love (read: borderline fetishizing) of black folks (Josephine Baker, anyone?) or the running assumption that I was Moroccan/generally North African and not a black American. Most people just treated me like I was French, before I opened my mouth, of course (despite my perfect French accent, my occasional pause to find vocabulary words from my high school French mental database was a dead give-a-way). No one was rude to me or my friend with whom I went out on occasion (who is half white American, half indigenous Mexican, and clearly “of color”).

Madrid, on the other hand, completely did me in.

On a super basic level, I wasn’t a big fan of the traditional Spanish food, and, instead, flocked to the numerous Middle Eastern restaurants like water in a desert mirage. And though I was only there for three days, these little hole-in-the-wall, family-run eateries ended up being my surrogate safe havens as walking around on the street proved, well, difficult. I would say the city, overall, was far from receptive. While I understood having a pride in being Spanish, or a Mardileño, to be more specific, what I did not understand was why that translated into racism. I faced constant stares, and I mean constant, many of which were steeped in anger or confusion, despite my more than proper attire (I was not one of those fanny pack-wearing, head buried in a map, incapable-of-speaking-the-native-language types of tourists, trust me). I was cat-called, a lot, and though I was conditioned to that from having lived in NYC for four years at that point, what I hadn’t been exposed to was the overtly sexual racist epithets thrown my way (none of which I will repeat here). I tried to search the eyes of other people of color for an explanation. People of Asian descent seemed happy, even moreso there than in Paris. And people clearly from Africa also seemed OK, though I am sure their black skin proved problematic at times (look no further than the Madrid soccer related racism or even the recent Formula One racing incident in Barcelona). It was the somewhat racially ambiguous brown folks who seemed to run into trouble.

El Salvadorans, Guatemalans, Mexicans, and other phentoypically outcast Latin American immigrants (along with black Africans) held lower-echelon jobs and noticeably received stares and a little street harassment as well. Their spoken Spanish was a reminder of Spain’s colonial past that history had erased, glossed over, or simply euphemized, much like textbooks of Japan, the United States, or any nation, and their appearance even more so—typically indigenous and/or African features blending with those of the Spanish conquistadores and settlers of yore rendering many of the Latin American immigrants who had come to Spain in search of work easy to spot. I noticed that Caribbean Latinos and mulatos caught hell too, receiving the same sets of glaring eyes that I did when on public transportation or simply andando a pié.

To put it nicely, it was an awkward existence I led, at best, ceasing my outdoor activities more or less once the sun set because I had been propositioned more than once in the day time, and didn’t want to risk full on sexual assault at night due to my having been assumed to be a prostitute on account of my skin color. The hostel employees (all of Latin American descent) and the falafel bar owners loved me, but they were about the only ones in Madrid who made me feel somewhat human. On the cab ride to the airport, a place where I would later be racially profiled (read: separated from a line of a ton of other people, searched, forced to weigh my carry-on, a small backpack, and made to pay 60 Euros for it being a few kilos overweight on account of an art book I had bought for a friend from the Museo del Prado!), I vowed never to come back and counted down the minutes until I’d return to Paris for my departure to New York.

But during this cab ride, I learned a few things to which I was not initially privy prior to going to Madrid. The cab driver asked me how I liked Madrid, to which I replied, “I liked it, but I don’t think it liked me too much,” which led to our discussing (no kidding) race relations in Spain. The driver, born and raised in Spain, offered a perspective I had not fully considered. He mentioned the abject poverty and limited knowledge of Spanish that plagued African immigrant communities, and in many Spaniards’ minds, the state, as they were paying taxes to support unwelcome refugees. He also discussed the cause for my frequent run-ins with men who had less than Puritan intentions in their approach: that many women from the Dominican Republic and North Africa became prostitutes in Madrid to make ends meet. His explanation for the differing treatment of Asians vs. people of indigenous or African descent boiled down to the ability to assimilate.

“They come here already speaking Spanish,” he said. “. . . and with money” he added. He didn’t agree with how I was treated, and noted that I “seemed fine,” but was sure to note that “a lot of Madrileños aren’t ready for that kind of change. The young people, maybe, but their parents and people my age, not so much. They think they are pure, and forget about the years the Moors were here. They want things to stay the same. Come back in ten years, and maybe things will be better.”

Though I was back in Paris a few hours later, I thought about what he said for a while after that. While comfortably nestled in the plush leather-upholstered seats of the Swiss Air flight back to New York, I wondered if my little trip to Spain would have been different if I possessed a lower level of melanin, or even if I looked noticeably more African instead of bearing an appearance that confused people. Upon returning to the United States, the same friends who had recommended Madrid felt a tinge of regret for not having mentioned “the racism thing” or at least not having forewarned how it may have affected me. In retrospect, they all noted, as whites, they had never thought about it. They had only heard stories, those they had selectively compartmentalized in a place far away in the back of their brains because they didn’t really have to worry about it in Europe or in the United States in the same way, say, someone visually different from the majority would.

The experience and the discussions I had in the aftermath of my time in Madrid made me reflect on the privileges, or lack thereof, we have while traveling. Though I had a bad experience in Madrid, that is not to say every person of color has a comparable story. In fact, I know a few black women who loved Madrid and who have gone back several times, stating that they experienced a few incidents of racism, but mainly that it was more an issue of mistaken national identity than anything else. I think, too, of what the cab driver expressed in relation to his (and, arguably, the city’s) impression of Asians. Even my white friends had expressed a considerable sense of alienation in Madrid at times, not due to language, but mainly in relation to cultural differences or even physical ones (being super tall or Nordic in appearance, you name it). In looking back on the experience and after hearing those of others, I was able to put things more into perspective.

Even I am “privileged” (in a physical sense) in some locations, notably northern and central Brazil, where my appearance did not garner unreasonable attention, many assuming that I was just “one of them.” I even thought of my experiences in the United States. I didn’t feel as if my physically assigned racial characteristics made me stand out in some Brooklyn neighborhoods, whereas my white or Asian-American friends expressed extreme discomfort on account of stares and even statements geared toward them. I find myself losing sight of how powerful my appearance can be at the right place and at the right time, but never forget how much of a burden it can be in other situations.

In reflecting on my previous travel experiences as I prepare for an upcoming trip to Portugal, I began thinking about how many additional things I have to consider as a woman, and, in particular, a person of color before I travel. It’s amazing how many things travel guides leave out when it comes to the treatment a person of color may receive in a certain country, how to react to incidents of racism, or even whether or not what you are experiencing has nothing to do with race and all to do with cultural miscommunication. Though maybe I should expect it by now as many of the travel guide writers are white. Then again, only white people travel, right? (kidding, though on average, whites DO travel more widely and frequently than blacks, at least.. . though, given, this could be due to a series of factors that would lead me into an entirely new post, so I’ll shelve this for now).

Besides consulting the Minority Travel Forum on Rick Steve’s Graffiti Wall with posts from travelers of color (including people involved in interracial relationships, who have adopted children of a different race/ethnicity from their own, etc), which I highly recommend, it’s worth considering the following:

1. The travel guide will most likely leave out information about the reception, or lack thereof, you may experience as a person of color. This includes common words/sayings with which you may not be familiar, but that are actually not racist (i.e. if someone in the Dominican Republic were to call you “negrito” or “indio,” it would not be meant as a racial slur, rather a term of endearment based on your skin color and/or heritage).

2. Expect the unexpected, and don’t go into the situation assuming your experience will match those of your white peers and/or friends and family of color. Your command of the native language, body language, familiarity with the culture, style of dress, etc can alter how you are perceived and treated.

3. Don’t always assume racism is at play. As a result of the history of the United States, people of color and whites alike have been rendered into sensitivity machines, often analyzing things at a level of sociological sophistication that may not be of issue in some other countries. Also, bear in mind that every nation has its own respective history and deals with race and ethnicity accordingly. Don’t attempt to color their history with your own. Think of these things before you jump the gun.

4. Find out what you can do if you ARE a victim of racism. There are several anti-racist groups (i.e. SOS Racismo in Spain and Portugal) that hold workshops and do outreach based on race-related issues. Sites like this may be worth checking out prior to taking a trip.

5. Reconcile your prior experiences with those of the present. The United States and/or your home country more likely than not has witnessed acts of racism, many of which continue. Don’t assume that it’s only the country you are visiting that has problems. If we think of the Amadou Diallo case or the Jena 6 or Vincent Chin, the U.S. is a scary and ugly place for POC too. It doesn’t make racism here or elsewhere any better, but it definitely makes you realize that every country has its problems, so you can’t let a few instances of racism frighten you away.

6. If traveling by yourself and feel threatened as a result of your race/ethnicity, try to remove yourself from the situation, if possible and find a place where you feel more welcome. You may even want to try to get to know other people like yourself in that country, depending on the duration of your stay, to get tips on places to avoid, how to behave in the case of a threat, etc.

7. Do your homework. Before traveling anywhere, ask around and look up information detailing the experiences of people like yourself. As I mentioned before, their experience may not entirely mirror the one in which you are about to partake, but it may offer some helpful advice.

8. Have a good time, despite any adversity you may encounter. If anything, I learned to laugh at the experience in Madrid in retrospect, and in a weird case of Stockholm syndrome, have considered going back one day, though with a friend this time. If you have spent the money to go somewhere else, you might as well try to get as much out of it as you can!

Last week I wrote about the furor surrounding Michelle Obama’s comments about being proud of her country. Some folks just don’t understand how one could not be proud of the United States of America. Luckily, Bill O’Reilly, that paragon of journalistic virtue, is reserving his judgement. Here is what Bill-O (TM Keith Olbermann) said on his radio program during a call from a listener who claimed to have inside knowledge that Obama is an “angry” and “militant” woman:

“I don’t want to go on a lynching party against Michelle Obama unless there’s
evidence, hard facts, that say this is how the woman really feels.”

Oh, how gracious of you Bill O’Reilly! Now, about that lynching thing. If David Shuster gets an indeterminent suspension for talking about Chelsea Clinton being “pimped out” by the Clinton campaign. How much time will O’Reilly get for talking about “lynching” a black woman, indeed the wife of a candidate for the United States?

Read the full story and hear the audio at Media Matters.

And why don’t we show Fox Noise what angry, militant women sound like. Contact them:

viewerservices@foxnews.com
rmurdoch@newscorp.com
Feedback@foxnews.com

The REALLY real deal

Speaking of Michelle Obama’s comments…why are some folks in the media attempting to hide what she really said. (Even I have it wrong in yesterday’s post and I pulled the quote directly from a news site.)

Let’s compare what Obama is reported to have said and what she really said:

Now, I would stand by Obama if she could not say she felt “proud” of America. (See yesterday’s post.) But that is not even what she said. I mean…REALLY!

I have seen and heard numerous comments from the mainstream about Michelle Obama’s supposed “attitude.” I fear, folks, that this accomplished woman is going to be prey to black woman stereotype number 6,938: The ANGRY black woman. You hear the sentiment from Bill O’Reilly’s wingnut caller above, but I’ve heard from the left, too.

Sigh.

In the immortal words of Michael Jackson as the Scarecrow in “The Wiz”:

“You can’t win chile…
You can’t get even
and you can’t get out of the gaaaaame.”

(Cue singing crows.)

Sick of the race war hysteria in mainstream media? Yeah me too.

Check out this 3-way IM conversation I had with Lauren from Stereohyped and Maegan from VivirLatino, breaking down race and the presidential election, and that pesky question of just why Asian-Americans and Latinos voted for Clinton, not Obama.

Here’s a tidbit, but head on over to Stereohyped to read the whole thing:

Lauren: i know…finding all the black women in the salon or outside of church
Carmen: I didn’t know you all hung out outside those venues Lauren
Lauren: I know..the only place a reporter could find me is on my couch behind my laptop.
Carmen: LOL
Lauren: But i guess I’m not the sort of black woman they’re looking for
Maegan: I’m at the corner bodega….they got wireless now!!! But back to the point about the whole Latinos afraid of black Barack, they totally miss a whole chunk of Latinos that are black!!!
Carmen: Um, yeah
Maegan: Which is a pretty fucking huge chunk
Carmen: Latino and black are not mutually exclusive…

“We could make history by being the first time in a very long time where a grassroots movement of people of all colors — black, white, Hispanic, Asian — rose up, and went up against the princes, the powers, and principalities, and actually won a presidency.”
–Barack Obama, January 13, 2008

It’s official — Racialicious is endorsing Barack Obama as president of the United States. Read on for statements from Carmen Van Kerckhove, Wendi Muse, Fatemeh Fakhraie and Latoya Peterson.

From Carmen

If you’ve been reading Racialicious for any time, you probably know that I have an irrational love for dance movies and an irrational dislike of red bean soup.

One thing you might not know about me, however, is that I’m not a U.S. citizen; I’m only a green card holder. I’ve never been bothered by the fact that I’m not able to vote in this country — until now.

For the first time ever, there’s a candidate whom I really, really want to see elected as president: Barack Obama.

Does Obama appeal to me because he’s multiracial, like myself? Because many of his relatives are Asian? Because in living abroad, he’s had the same international Third Culture Kid (TCK) experiences as me? In part, yes.

But what really excites me about Obama is that he is completely in touch with how race in America is lived in 2008. He understands that race is not just about who’s black and who’s white, or who’s a victim and who’s an oppressor. He’s fearless about addressing institutional racism, but is absolutely uninterested in playing oppression olympics. His message is one of hope and change, yet he doesn’t sugarcoat the realities of racism or insist on engaging in meaningless celebrations of diversity. He proudly identifies as a black man, yet is committed to bringing together people of all races.

In short, Barack Obama epitomizes the core beliefs that drive everything I do.

I believe that this country will fundamentally shift the way it thinks and talks about race if Obama wins the presidency. And I’m filled with excitement and hope when I think about the possibility for that sea change.

From Wendi

I’ve been fairly quiet with regard to my support of Barack Obama as the Democratic Presidential Nominee mainly because I wavered so long between him and Hillary Clinton. I respect them both and would honestly be really happy if either of them gained the nomination. No matter who makes it to the final election (and, hopefully, the White House), history has been made.

However, for me, there are two things that have influenced me to support Obama. Some asked if it had to do with my racial background, understandably, considering that so many Americans for centuries have voted based on their racial background . . . then again, all the last presidents have been white males, if that says anything. No, it wasn’t about race, I assured them, as I fully acknowledge that people of color can make just as great or just as poor leaders as whites; perfect examples of the aforementioned can be observed throughout the “Global South,” where people of color are often in the majority and, save for their respective colonial periods, hold political office.

For me, what compelled me to consider myself an Obama supporter was his approach to foreign policy and his adherence to keeping a clean campaign. The candidates are so similar on certain issues, but these two things are some of the few that really stood out to me as their being strikingly different.

Barack voted against the War in Iraq at a time Obama did not support the war in Iraq at its inception when a substantial portion of America was convinced that going to war was the right thing to do. I greatly respect a leader who can see through the clouds of illusion that politics often create. And when it comes to foreign affairs in the Middle East, there is no better time than now to be incredibly diplomatic and make decisions with our country’s best interests in mind. Bombing additional countries won’t help the damage we’ve already done, nor will building additional military bases (which, as demonstrated in South Korea and Okinawa, can often lead to more problems with regard to security for the host nation’s citizens than before).

I also feel that in considering a candidate, I want someone whom I can trust and who stands by courtesy as an important personality trait, even in the heat of competition and debate. Obama is very much a reflection of the America I want to see in the future, and with that said, I express my support and faith in Barack Obama.

From Fatemeh

Obama has this aura around him: it’s not charisma or his nice smile or anything like that. It’s hope. I feel really hopeful for this country when I think about Obama.

And it just gets better when I look at his stance on the issues: on foreign policy, he’s never supported Iraq. He supports diplomacy with countries that Bush has threatened to bomb. On civil rights, he supports the reinstitution of habeas corpus, shutting down Guantanamo, expanding hate-crime laws, and ending racial profiling.

From Latoya

Simply put, I support Barack Obama in this election for three key reasons:

1. His policies show a unique understanding of what disadvantaged communities need to advance themselves and how helping those communities to succeed will allow our entire society to move forward.

2. He is willing to radically depart from the politics of fear that various people have used to justify the need for military might and instead work toward global community and understanding.

3. His focus is on community empowerment, which may include government assistance and initiatives. His focus is on service. His focus is on improving America through its citizens.

I love my country, dearly. But I have been sick over the last seven years. America has fallen far short of its own expectations.

Barack Obama’s vision for this country will put us back on track.

by Carmen Van Kerckhove

Those of you who will be watching the Superbowl this weekend should brace yourself for this stinker of an ad from Taco Bell. Don’t say we didn’t warn you!

(Hat tip to MultiCultClassics)

Am I the only one who finds this Bill-Clinton-has-black-cred story in today’s New York Times ridiculous?

While the blogosphere and commentariat rang this weekend with angry declarations that he had crossed a line in his criticism of Barack Obama, many in Harlem seemed to mull it over, shrug their shoulders and say they understood, even if they didn’t quite agree.

“What Bill Clinton said — well, his wife is running for office,” said Tonya Burnett, who was waiting outside the building to visit a city housing office. “He’s got to represent just like she represented when he was running. I don’t think it’s such a big deal.”

To be sure, interviews conducted on a single day, in front of a single building, are apt to produce a narrow point of view. Yet the building, at 55 West 125th Street, is an important piece of real estate in Mr. Clinton’s world.

To be sure, interviewing a handful of people is largely meaningless, but we’ll still go with the headline blaring “In Harlem, Backing Up Bill Clinton.”

Just in case the story was too subtle, and you didn’t quite get the Bill-Clinton-is-blacker-than-Obama subtext, they chose to end the story on this note, emphasis mine:

Bruce Gordon, 47, had visited a notary inside the building. He said the criticisms might even sharpen Mr. Obama.

“These questions have to come up. If Obama gets the nomination, folks will ask, ‘So who are you?’ So far, he’s a nice white middle-class guy,” said Mr. Gordon, acknowledging the cheekiness of his remark with a cagey little smile. “You try to pull a black thing on Bill Clinton, he’s going to say, ‘Now wait a minute now.’ ”

The blackness olympics are on!

It’s almost as bad as the story earlier this month in the Times about how Latinos won’t vote for a black man. Cause you know, Latino and black are mutually exclusive categories. Not like there are any black Latinos, or anything.

Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez brilliantly broke down exactly what was wrong with that story:

The article quotes a random 20-year-old woman on the streets of Los Angeles as their only legitimate source for the headline screaming about Obama’s lack of support among Latinos, ostensibly because of his “blackness.” This is your source? Natasha Carrillo of East Los Angeles? Holy crap. Are you joking? Is this the best you can find? Why not go the CUNY, and talk to the Dominican and Puerto Rican studies experts there? Why send reporters to a freakin’ taco stand in East Los Angeles? I’ll tell you why: The story was written in the minds of the editors before it was reported; that’s why it WAS NEVER reported. It was made up. And because it was on the front of the NY Times, you are going to have pundits from coast to coast quoting it as the gospel truth, all because Natasha Carrillo, 20, of East Los Angeles, said so.

I am by no means an expert on porn, nor do I pretend to be. Yet considering the volume of hits on xtube.com or youporn.com that could be traced back to my IP address, one would assume so. If not that, one would at least be able to mentally file away my name with all the other people in the “creepy” category. Some of you may be wondering about this new obsession of mine that has developed during my period of hiatus, but I can fortunately hold someone else partially responsible.

In November of 2007, Courtney, a contributing blogger for Feministing, reviewed a book aptly titled Getting Off: Pornography and the End of Masculinity by Robert Jensen. Much like fellow feminist theorist, the late Andrea Dworkin, Jensen considers pornography a visual manifestation of misogyny—hatred of women captured on film. With sexual arousal distracting the viewer, acts of violence and subjugation of women are interpreted through a different lens than, say, if they were portrayed minus the element of sex. Yet also like Dworkin, Jensen’s work borders on misandrist, stating as his major thesis that “If men are going to be full human beings, we first have to stop being men.” Using pornography as a microcosmic representation of the world as a whole, at least insofar as relationships between men and women are concerned, Jensen proposes that masculinity must be abandoned altogether as, in his opinion, it is inextricably linked to a world in which women are viewed as stupid, submissive, and deserving of abuse.

I agree with Courtney in her mention of the many loopholes within the book, in particular her comments regarding women who enjoy submission or even pain during sex. I also concur with regard to her discussion of images and scenarios within pornography playing out in real life. Many once-taboo subjects and sex acts, including, but not limited to, threesomes or multi-partner sex, anal sex, BDSM, and even the use and purchase of sex toys, have become mainstream. Porn is not entirely the culprit, but its proliferation has certainly aided Americans in their burgeoning sexual open-mindedness. With an orgasm only a click away, pornography has experienced a similar transformation to that of the music industry, with the creation of mp3s and pirate sites, and the film and tv industry, with the onslaught of youtube and bootleg dvds of sidewalk entrepreneurs.

After reading Courtney’s review of Getting Off (which you can read, in full, here) I wanted to take Jensen’s argument a bit further. Despite my disagreeing with him on some points, I felt that Jensen’s thoughts on gender roles in porn could be easily applied to the use of race in porn, particularly interracial porn. Following his thesis, in short, that masculinity by definition supports a system of misogyny, a characteristic clearly demonstrated in (straight) pornography, and the only way to progress beyond this conveyance of hatred toward women is to eradicate masculinity in its entirety, I came up with the following:

Race, at least in the terms that we define it presently, supports a system of hatred toward people of color, as demonstrated in (interracial) pornography, and the only way to progress beyond this conveyance of hatred toward people of color is to eradicate the use of race in its entirety.

The word “race” could easily be replaced with a term like “white supremacy,” but considering that several genres of interracial porn include couples of color (though considered different “races”), I felt it prudent to stick simply to “race,” as whites are not the only ones guilty of acting out on and consuming films related to such fantasies. Much like my research on Craigslist personal ads, I decided to search for films based on racial categories like “Latina,” “Asian,” “Black,” and “White.” Also, considering that there are several categories within each, I narrowed my search to nationalities and regions in some cases, searching for films based on categories like “Brazilian,” “Mexican,” “Chinese,” “Korean,” “African,” “Eastern European,” etc. The results were hard to stomach at times, but they were nothing short of the usual. My search provided me with a plethora of racial and regional stereotypes—all, of course, essential to one’s sexual prowess (or in some cases, lack thereof; the descriptions of “Mandingo” porn films often included a line about a white woman’s presumably white husband not being able to satisfy her).

The themes I uncovered were strikingly similar to those I enumerated in the Craigslist ad article, furthering my aforementioned statement on porn finding its way into real life, though with a few twists. For example, there were far more films with black women in submissive roles than I had expected, especially considering the stereotype of black women being incredibly domineering. Given, most of these films included multiple white male partners in a group sex scene, often with a description detailing the black woman’s sexual hunger, so the aspect of the stereotype regarding black female libidos was left in tact. Other deviations from the common stereotypes included black men in submissive roles (though these were more common in gay films regarding “homothugs” than in straight films). Also, bearing in mind that sites like youporn and xtube allow for the uploading of both professional and amateur films in full and clip form by members worldwide, certain American concepts of race had to be altered to accommodate more international ideas, for example “Asian” in England is a term representative of people of South Asian descent, whereas in the U.S., the term more commonly describes people from East Asia.

For the most part, however, despite the inclusion of porn uploaded from other parts of the world, racism was rampant in terms of stereotyping and essentialization. In accounting for the hundreds of hung black stallions, bored and docile white MILFs, barely legal, small-chested Asian “girls,” and desperate, sex-hungry Latinas longing for citizenship, I couldn’t help but wonder: if we rid ourselves of race, would porn like this exist? What would we even call racism at that point?

The hypothetical situation I posed above is clearly as far-fetched as Jensen’s advocacy of ending masculinity, but in the long run, especially with so many supporters of the eradication of race and the installation of colorblind institutions, could an erasure of race as we know it lead to an altering of our fantasies and their portrayal on screen?

To be continued next week . . .

Really, I say, has your skin color hindered you that much?

Alba shoots me an exasperated look.

Yeah, I could let this be the beginning and the end of this post. Jessica Alba is being interviewed by Andrew Goldman in the February issue of Elle Magazine and he poses the question to launch a thousand eye rolls.

Hello – have you read the last 50 or so interviews with any woman of color in the film industry?

Everyone from Maggie Q to Nia Long has complained about the lack of good roles for non-white folks. More times out of not, you’re auditioning for a niche role in an indie film that targets xxx community, competing for a high profile role playing a stereotype, or trying to nail the audition and convince the director that you can add your own brown flavor to the film and still make it work.

Still, I must admit, the coverline did hook me a bit: “Jessica Alba on race in Hollywood, using sex to get ahead, and why actors make bad boyfriends.”

Considering Perez Hilton’s long term diatribe against her and the professional penalty actors may pay when they find themselves speaking out against domestic injustices, Alba was the last person I expected to go on the record about her feelings on race. I wondered if the text would be some watered down version of “It’s not about my race, it’s about talent.”

A page or so into the article, it becomes clear that Alba has not been drinking the Tiger Woods Kool-Aid:

As assimilated as Alba’s upbringing was, she never felt there was a well-defined place for her in Hollywood. “Nobody really knew what to do with me,” she says. “Everyone wants to categorize you and pigeonhole you. I’m half Latin, but I grew up in the States, and I can’t get roles playing a Latina because I don’t speak Spanish. And I didn’t want to be the best friend, or the promiscuous girl, or the maid, because those stereotypes still exist with Latin roles. I wanted to be a leading lady. And I thought that because I have brown skin shouldn’t make any difference. Why should only Aryan-looking girls be that girl?”

Really, I say, has your skin color hindered you that much?

Alba shoots me an exasperated look. “How many leading leadies are you aware of?” she says. “Lindsay Lohan, Kate Bosworth, Scarlett Johansson, Jessical Biel, Rachel McAdams. We have Jennifer Lopez, Halle Berry, me, and who else?”

Uh, Eva Mendes?

“Mendes,” she says flatly. “But is Mendes greenlighting movies?”

A good point.

So often in these kind of conversations, people only look at the superficial representation of the problem (As in, “But I know of at least three black characters on major shows! Why is this such a big deal?) rather than thinking about the power dynamics in the entertainment industry. The reporter in this piece implies that she is exagerating the problem by quickly naming another lead woman of color – without thinking about how representation without power or influence is kind of a hollow victory.

What is most telling about this piece – whether it was by whim of the reporter or whim of the editor – is that after Alba makes a critical point power and race, the piece jumps to her personal history.

Her question to the reporter is left hanging.

Seven paragraphs later, the piece ends. Race is never mentioned again.

by Carmen Van Kerckhove

Ugh! I keep encountering this god-awful commercial at random times while watching TV. It’s sooooooooooooo bad that I just had to share. Why is it that when companies feel the need to appeal to people of color, they create such gross ads??

First things first. Of course, there is the expected bombshell unleashed in the MLB world from the Mitchell Report which implicated dozens of ballplayers for performance enhancing drug use. Notably, players such as Miguel Tejada, Andy Pettitte, Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens were named for violations ranging from steroids to human growth hormones. What’s interesting to read now are reactions to seeing Roger Clemens throw into the fold. We expect to see Bonds there (even now, there’s a separate article stemming from the report describing just how sneaky Bonds and conspirators must’ve been to never have been caught by the MLB) but to see in many ways the Brett Favre of the MLB put under suspcion leads some to say that “Baseball has its white Barry Bonds.”

Also in baseball news, there have been whispers about this for along time but it’s starting to catch wind on blogs and magazines. That is, the “Latinization” of the New York Mets by their GM Omar Minaya. It started with bringing in Pedro Martinez, then Carlos Beltran and then Carlos Delgado, throw in a historic late season meltdown and you have some very angry fans who I think are just starting to hold onto anything to blame. So what better to do then to stick to the old “you’re not playing enough of our boys!” (read: you need to play and sign more white players) approach? First i’ll state what I would hope to be the hugely obvious fact that when White GMs are signing, trading for, drafting, and building franchises around White ballplayers, nobody accuses them of racism. Well, actually, some Black ballplayers do but then they get ostracized by the media of being “angry” and just plain batshit Milton Bradley crazy. Jesus, look at the Oakland Athletics. They seriously have one of the Whitest teams in the entire MLB and yet Billy Beane gets praised for his shrewd trades and knowledge of the minor league farm systems. Secondly, almost every MLB franchise actively recruits in South America with farm system academies. They’re the ones going down there and putting dollars in for prospective talent while also maintaining the vast number of A, AA, AAA baseball teams in the states. So this whole “they’re taking our jobs!” suggestion is just getting tired.

And you thought you’d heard the last of Jayson Williams. Not “I will shoot all you Asian mother******* Jason Williams” but the guy who actually killed a guy Jayson Williams. Turns out that in the current retrial, a judge is reviewing evidence which includes the role of an investigating officer and the use of a racial slur by that officer. The Assistant Prosecutor was quick to point out that this was not the equivalent of, you know, Mark Fuhrman.

It’s been over two weeks since Sean Taylor’s death and a lot of articles, think pieces and rush-to-judgment columns have been written. At first, the media made it seem like the man deserved to die by talking incessantly about his troubled past. Then there was an interview with a friend of his that made it seem like he constantly lived in fear his whole life. A lot of folks I think are embarrassed and ashamed about how they and their news agencies handled this. Jim Trotter can explain it a lot better than I can.

If you took the time to read the Trotter piece, I think it’s worth reading the article also by SI about “ghetto loyalty.”

What? An ad full of Latino people and tacos and stuff, and nobody uttered the word “caliente?” I’m so disappointed!

Luckily there were plenty of other stereotypes to take its place. (Thanks Jessica!)

Heroes Volume 2, “Generations,” is over.

The season began with an exciting change of scenery, as Hiro Nakamura accidentally teleported to feudal Japan and met the legendary Sword Saint, Takezo Kensei, who turned out to be a lying, cheating, spiteful scoundrel of an Englishman named Adam Monroe. As Hiro tried to repair history and turn Adam into the heroic Kensei of legend, his brave deeds won the heart of their mutual love interest, the swordsmith’s daughter Yaeko, and Hiro himself became immortalized (figuratively speaking) as Kensei. Hiro and Yaeko’s love incurred the wrath of the jealous Adam, who swore on his life that he would bring misery and suffering to Hiro and all that he held dear.

Adam, the first man to discover his special ability, has survived through the ages because of it, and four hundred years later, he has founded a Company dedicated to finding and tracking others with special abilities. But Adam has a hidden agenda – fueled by his desire for revenge on Hiro and his bitter cynicism as a result of living through four centuries of human suffering, Adam plans to use the vast talents and resources of the Company to destroy most of humanity and “wipe the slate clean.” When the Company realizes this, they lock up Adam and throw away the key. Thirty years later, Adam recruits Peter, a son of Company founders Angela and Arthur Petrelli, in his quest to escape and release the deadly Shanti virus.

The season finale begins with the other bad guy’s quest to regain his powers. Sylar has recruited Maya Herrera, an irritatingly naive Dominican who has journeyed with him to Dr. Suresh’s apartment in Brooklyn to ask the good doctor for a cure to her cursed powers. Maya feels a kinship with (and attraction to) Sylar because they have both killed people with their powers, but she does not realize that Sylar is only using her to get to Dr. Suresh so that his powers, neutralized by the Shanti virus, can be restored.

Mohinder knows full well that Sylar killed his father, and having battled Sylar before, wants to be sure that Maya understands exactly what Sylar wants. Ever faithful, she believes that Sylar only wants to be cured of his sickness and lets slip that his powers are gone. Upon hearing this, Mohinder tries to attack Sylar with a knife, only to be met with a Company gun. Sylar reveals his true intention of regaining his abilities so that he can continue his power-hungry murder spree, and forces Mohinder, Maya, and Molly to Mohinder’s lab, formerly the apartment of precognitive artist Issac Mendez, one of Sylar’s many victims.

Maya is furious with Sylar, and she finally realizes, upon asking Molly to find her brother, that he killed Alejandro. Sylar shoots Maya and makes Suresh prove the effectiveness of his cure by using it on her. It works. Just when it seems that all hope is lost, Elle, having noticed the situation on the Company surveillance monitor, comes to their rescue, but loses track of Sylar, who escapes with the cure.

Meanwhile, in Odessa, Texas, at Company front Primatech Paper, where the Shanti virus is stored, Adam has Peter use his telekinetic ability to force open the Company vault. Peter believes that Adam wants to destroy it before the Company can unleash it on the world. Hiro and Matt try (unsuccessfully) to stop Peter, but ultimately, Nathan convinces his brother to see the truth – that Adam is a dangerous murderer who manipulated him into opening the vault for him so that he could wipe the world clean. Peter realizes this just as Adam enters the vault and finds the virus. Just in the nick of time, Hiro teleports inside to confront Adam, and once again defeats the villain. He buries Adam alive in a casket in the cemetery where his parents are buried. Peter has learned to control the radioactive power that almost destroyed New York last time, and uses it to destroy the virus. Hiro, having put an end to his father’s killer, seems to have taken an important step towards becoming the gravely serious Future Hiro we’ve looked forward to since the beginning. Peter, having redeemed himself and regained his memory and control of his abilities, also seems to be turning into the scarred hero that Future Hiro foretold.

In New Orleans, Monica has been captured by a nameless thug while attempting to retrieve Micah’s stolen backpack, and the thug has left her for dead in a building he’s been hired to burn down (for some reason). Even though she’s lost her super-strength, Niki beats up the thug and rescues Monica, but doesn’t make it out of the exploding building in time. I was disappointed that both Monica and Niki turned out to be so helpless. But perhaps there is still hope for Monica – the cover of prophetic comic book 9th Wonders! appears to feature her as St. Joan the muscle mimic, holding a crossbow and a distinctly-shaped dagger that was among the collection of strange items in the Company vault.

Throughout the show, there has been an important conflict in the minds of people with special abilities – what should one do about being special? Claire and Nathan want to show everyone what they can do, so that they no longer have to hide. West believes it’s not in their best interest to reveal their powers except to each other. Adam wants to use his powers to “play God.” Micah and Hiro want to emulate comic book heroes and fight for justice. All around, there is plenty of moral ambiguity – Suresh began trying to bring down the Company and found himself fighting on their behalf. Noah Bennet lied and murdered in order to protect his daughter Claire, even if she didn’t want to be protected.

Like our Heroes, I think minorities often feel conflicted about what it means to be different. We cherish our specialness at times, and curse being different at other times, and often want nothing more than to be like everyone else and fit in. Heroes is the latest in a long line of stories that are concerned with the struggle to find peace and acceptance within society and with oneself when one is different.

To what extent are people of color, or people with disability, or gifted people, special, and to what extent are they ordinary? Is it possible or desirable to live an ordinary life and blend in completely? Or does one have a responsibility to be an activist and to do more and accomplish more than other people, even at personal risk?

We all have different sets of privileges that come from our race, nationality, skin color, gender, language, family background, etc. I think it’s important to be mindful of these “powers” and how we use them. On Heroes, each character tries to do what he or she believes is right. It’s fun to think of Sylar and Adam as “evil” and root against them, but we should remember that they’re not the only ones with power, and they’re not the only ones who have done “bad things” in service of what they believe.

At the end of Volume 2, Nathan Petrelli gives a speech to the press in Odessa, Texas. He is about to reveal his ability to the world, when he is shot several times in the chest by a mysterious gunman. Nathan is dead.

Angela Petrelli is on the phone, apparently with someone responsible for her son’s death. She acknowledges that it was “unavoidable,” but warns them that they’ve “opened Pandora’s box…”

Volume 3, “Villains,” begins with a shot of Sylar in an alley injecting himself with a mixture of Claire’s blood and Mohinder’s antibodies – the cure for the Shanti virus. His wounds heal and he stretches out his hand. A discarded can of spinach wobbles slightly, then flies into his grasp.

“I’m back.”

None of us can be sure when Heroes will return, so I will say goodbye for now and thank you for reading. If everything goes well, I will be graduating from college very soon, and would I would appreciate it very much if y’all would let me know of any positions where I could continue exploring issues of race, pop culture, and identity. I hope that when the show starts back up again I’ll be able to write recaps for you once again, but who can say what the future will bring?

To read past Heroes recaps, click here.