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The Line Between Solidarity and Appropriation: Learning from Jewish Blackface in History [Essay]

Guest Contributor — Thu, 17 Nov 2011 18:30:03 +0000

by Guest Contributor Wendy Elisheva Somerson

“I remember your grandfather leaving the house in blackface to perform at the local Jewish community center,” my mom told me. “They just didn’t know what it meant back then,” she explained, “not until after WW II.” As an activist involved in contemporary solidarity work across racial lines, I was shocked to discover this racist history in my near past. As an Ashkenazi Jew* (of European descent) whose grandparents immigrated to the US around the turn of the century, I don’t always see myself implicated in the American legacy of slavery, but I was forced to reconcile the fond memories of my jovial grandfather with this haunting image of him performing racial minstrelsy. Trying to make sense of this image, I began researching the history of Jewish blackface between WWI and WWII and was surprised to discover a connection between my current activism and this history of blackface: When we are not rooted in our Jewish identities, we risk stereotyping, appropriating, and over-identifying with other cultures.

To understand the complicated history of alliance, disconnection, and overlap between Ashkenazi Jews and African Americans in between the world wars, I turned to Eric Goldstein’s The Price of Whiteness: Jews, Race, and American Identity, which considers how Jews negotiated competing claims on their identities and Michael Rogin’s Blackface, White Noise: Jewish Immigrants in the Hollywood Melting Pot, which looks more specifically at the role of blackface in Americanizing Jews. As European Jewish immigrants arrived in the US, their presence intersected with the dominant black/white system of racial relations in various ways. At different times, Jews and African Americans were linked tightly together in American consciousness as evidenced by the case of Leo Frank (1913-1915), which sets the stage for Jewish-Black relations in between the wars. A Jewish factory manager in Georgia, Frank was accused of raping and murdering a white girl who worked in his factory. Frank was found guilty (in spite of flimsy evidence) and sentenced to death, but the Governor commuted his sentence to life in prison. A journalist warned in a headline: “The next Jew who does what Frank did is going to get exactly the same thing we give to Negro rapists” (Goldstein 43). Frank was then kidnapped from prison and lynched by a white mob.

In the wake of the Frank trial, Jews who followed the case became “increasingly sensitized both to the danger of comparing blacks and Jews and the possibilities of deflecting anti-Semitism by emphasizing their whiteness” (Goldstein 65). During the trial, Frank’s legal team repeatedly emphasized Frank’s whiteness by downplaying his Jewishness and tried to shift the blame onto a black janitor who was also implicated in the murder. Even as they tried to underscore their whiteness in this time between the wars, Jews were being held responsible for a variety of issues that troubled Americans including communism, immigration, and the rising tide of war in the 1930’s. Articles about “The Jewish Problem” proliferated in the press, and quotas and restrictions were enacted to limit the number of Jews allowed into universities, clubs, and neighborhoods.

Not surprisingly, Ashkenazi Jewish immigrants had a contradictory relationship to African Americans. On the one hand, identification with whiteness allowed Jews to experience “what it was like not to be the focus of national hostility and resentment” as they were in Europe (Goldstein 145). On the other hand, Jews identified with the suffering of African Americans and continued to display empathy for them. The most assertive statements of identification with African Americans in the US occurred in the Yiddish press where non-Jewish readers could not chance upon them. The Yiddish press roundly condemned segregation and racism by comparing race riots against African Americans to the pogroms against Jews in Europe. At the same time, the Yiddish press read Jewish blackface solely as a means of identification by saying about that Jews “knew how to sing the songs of the most cruelly wronged people in the world’s history” (Goldstein 154).

Blacking Out Jewish Identity in The Jazz Singer

In Blackface, White Noise, Rogin discusses how Jewish blackface plays out in The Jazz Singer, one of the first “talkie” films, which came out in 1927 and starred a Jewish actor, Al Jolson, whose life parallels that of the protagonist in the film. The film’s central character, Jakie Rabinowitz, the son of a cantor, is expected to follow in his father’s footsteps by becoming a cantor at their synagogue on Manhattan’s lower East Side. Jakie Rabinowitz, however, wants to sing jazz, which enrages his father, who, in turn, disowns him. (Al Jolson, also the son of a cantor, turned his back on tradition by performing in theater and film). After running away from home, Jakie changes his name to Jack Robin, finds himself a Christian girlfriend, and becomes a singing success on the stage, often performing in blackface. When his father is dying, Jack is called to take his place to sing Kol Nidre, a solemn song performed on the eve of Yom Kippur, the holiest of Jewish days. Forgoing an opening night appearance on the stage, Jack takes his father’s place in the synagogue, and his father forgives him before he dies. The film, however, ends with Jack performing “My Mammy” in blackface at the Winter Garden Theater (where Al Jolson often performed) with his mother and girlfriend in the audience. Singing directly to his mother, Jack gets down on one knee and sings a song about coming home to his “Mammy” in “Alabammy.”

In Rogin’s analysis, he argues that politically oriented Eastern Europe Jews in the US between WWI and WWII identified with African Americans as a persecuted, Diasporic people. While this identification often resulted in political solidarity, it also took the more problematic “form of either cultural or literal blackface as Jews attempted to become American by taking on black-derived music, along with the plantation myth of American belonging” (66). Witnessing anti-Semitism on the rise in both Europe and in the US, US Jews attempted to escape their shtetl pasts by using the mask of blackness. Thus their ability to re-make themselves in the New World as white came at the cost of African Americans, who had to remain immobile and fixed in stereotype.

In The Jazz Singer, Jakie leaves behind his immigrant past (represented by his dying father) through his performance of blackface. Interestingly, very few movies at this time made by Jews (and often starring Jews) actually represented Jewish themes; Jews in Hollywood generally succeeded by erasing Jewishness in their films. Jakie’s story, however, is definitely a Jewish story—one of assimilation. And as Rogin argues, Jack can only express his sadness about leaving his cultural motherland (the lower East Side and Eastern Europe) through a black-white racial lens by equating his Jewish mother with a Southern “mammy.” In the final “Mammy” scene from the film, the camera keeps cutting between Jack singing with great emotion and the face of his crying mother.

As Goldstein observes, Jewish blackface became a means to express emotions that could not be expressed as Jews; blackface obscures the performer’s Jewishness through stereotyping African Americans who became a mask for Jewish expression. This performance blends identification and admiration with racism. Many of the Jews, including Jolson, who performed in blackface, began their careers as Jewish comedians and turned to black material as their urge to assimilate made it less desirable to do comedy about Jewish themes and personas. Of course what they end up taking on isn’t actually African American material, but the white culture’s nostalgia for an even more racist past of very clearly defined racial roles. The “Mammy” stereotype grew out of the reality that African American mothers were often forced to nurse the master’s children during slavery (and then, post-slavery, forced to take care of them as servants) often at the cost of their relationships with their own children. This reality translated into the stereotype of the happy, loyal, desexualized “mammy” whose happiness made white people feel that slavery was a benevolent institution.

Unmasking Jewish Histories

How, then, does my Grandfather fit into all this? His father Max (my great grandfather) came to the US from Poland in 1900 as a shoemaker because his house in Warsaw was burned down in pogroms. Enjoying his life in the New World, Max didn’t want to send for his wife Cecilia and six year old son (my Grandfather) back in Warsaw, but family pressure intervened. When his family did arrive, Max was embarrassed by his wife’s Old World Yiddish speaking ways and began isolating her. He wouldn’t give Cecilia any money, and he didn’t want her to learn English. He apparently refused to let her eat when she was pregnant. The family story is that he drove her crazy, and then put her into an insane asylum. It’s unclear how much English Cecilia could even speak and how much of her diagnosed “craziness” was a result of being an isolated immigrant with limited language skills. Max then put my Grandfather and his sister into an orphanage until he remarried years later.

During my mom’s childhood, her father Maurice–always quick with a joke–never spoke about his childhood, and told both my mom and my aunt that their grandmother (Cecilia) was dead. As an adult, my mom found out that her father and his sister used to go visit their mother at the asylum–a secret that only came out after Cecilia’s death. As part of his own assimilation, Maurice obscured his own sad family history by refusing to let his children meet their grandmother.

Although I don’t know the circumstances surrounding my Grandfather’s use of blackface, I wonder how or whether his own sadness about the loss of his mother and motherland played into it; was he singing to a “mammy” or was he just trying, like his peers, to become a white American? Given that my Grandfather came to the US as a child on a boat from Poland, he certainly didn’t have a plantation past in the South. Neither did Al Jolson, also an immigrant from Eastern Europe, who was known for performing with and fighting discrimination against African Americans on Broadway and later in Hollywood. Was Maurice taking on white America’s nostalgic imagination for a racist past that Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe had little part in? What is gained and what gets erased by swapping out these histories? Taking on the history of American racism, Jews also lost connections to our own history and culture.

History Lessons for Solidarity Work

The image of Jews doing blackface represents a sad and pivotal moment in Ashkenazi Jewish American identity. At various moments because of historical cycles of anti-Semitism, Jews have been bribed with material privileges and public positions of limited power to appear as the visible face of an oppressive system. What does it mean that this time the face that they put on was blackface? In these exchanges, Jews are often encouraged to take on a middle “buffer” position, and thus get pitted against other oppressed groups. With blackface, Jews occupied the middle ground once again, this time the ground between African Americans and white Christian culture. We both chose and were encouraged to choose whiteness that came at a cost to our relationships with African Americans and disconnected us from our own culture.

As an adult, disconnected from my own family history, I began asking more questions about my Grandfather and learned even more about sadness and loss in his history. Most of his father Max’s siblings stayed in Poland, and most of my Grandfather’s cousins died in Auschwitz, probably around the same time that he was performing in blackface. It’s hard to fathom how both these things could be happening at the same time; in the US, Ashkenazi Jews were being encouraged to assimilate into whiteness, a process they probably accepted, in part, because in Europe they were being killed as a “race.”

The image of my Grandfather doing blackface embodies a moment when Ashkenazi Jews exchanged our deep connection to our cultures, histories and families in order to gain whiteness. While I want to be clear that blackface has obviously been the most damaging to its targets, African Americans, there has also been a cost to Ashkenazi Jews as well. We have inherited the privileges of assimilation—class and race privilege—as well as some incalculable losses–of culture, community and solidarity/connection with other oppressed people.

Through my involvement in Jewish anti-racist organizing over the last decade, I have come to realize that as Ashkenazi Jews who identify as white, we still face the dual dangers of distancing ourselves from other oppressed groups or over-identifying and appropriating their struggles. Jews doing blackface is an extreme example of this tendency: Ashkenazi Jews moved toward whiteness at the expense of African Americans while using the mask of “blackness” to explore alternative ways to express their emotions from the dominant white Christian culture. Because Ashkenazi Jews have more or less “achieved” whiteness, there is clearly still a tendency to distance ourselves and ignore other oppressed groups’ struggles.

But I have also seen the opposite force at work among anti-racist Ashkenazi Jewish activists. When we do not have any grounding in our own culture, however we define it, it is easy to over-identify with others’ struggles, whether those of Palestinians or other oppressed groups. In our attempts to build alliances, we sometimes overreach and take over other people’s struggles as a way to find culture and meaning for ourselves. At anti-Occupation protests, I have seen many Jews wearing Palestinian symbols, such as keffiyehs as a sign of solidarity. There is nothing inherently wrong with this as long as we are simultaneously working to make space for Palestinian voices in this conversation and not filling up all the space ourselves. I personally find it even more effective to see Jews wearing traditional Jewish symbols at these protests, thereby insisting that we can be our full Jewish selves as we stand up against the Israeli Occupation. Even as we reach out to work in solidarity, it is important stay rooted within our own histories and cultures, as complicated and compromising as they may be.

So while there is no simple lesson to be taken from this messy history of Jewish blackface, I believe that our challenge is to remain connected to Jewishness, whatever that means to us, even as we use our privileges to work toward ally-ship with others. Although I still feel a sense of shame when I picture my Grandfather in blackface, I also try to remember the historical context surrounding his losses and choices. As someone who has reaped the benefits of my ancestors’ compromises, I am lucky that I have the choice to attempt reaching toward solidarity, and resisting appropriation as part of my modern Jewish identity.

–
*Throughout this essay, I am referring to Jews of European descent who “became” white in the US through a process of assimilation at a particular historical moment. I recognize that not all Ashkenazi Jews identify as white; some folks are both Jewish and African American; and finally that Jews of color, including Jews with Sephardic and Mizrahi heritage, may have very different experiences.

Quoted: Jaswinder Bolina on Poetry, and Writing Through Identity

Latoya Peterson — Thu, 17 Nov 2011 13:00:53 +0000

[Back then, I was] only a year or so into an MFA. I stop by the office of a friend, an older white poet in my department. Publication to me feels impossible then, and the friend means to be encouraging when he says, “With a name like Jaswinder Bolina, you could publish plenty of poems right now if you wrote about the first-generation, minority stuff. What I admire is that you don’t write that kind of poetry.” He’s right. I don’t write “that kind” of poetry. To him, this is upstanding, correct, what a poet ought to do. It’s indicative of a vigor exceeding that of other minority poets come calling. It turns out I’m a hard worker too. I should be offended—if not for myself, then on behalf of writers who do take on the difficult subject of minority experience in their poetry—but I understand that my friend means no ill by it. To his mind, embracing my difference would open editorial inboxes, but knowing that I tend to eschew/exclude/deny “that kind” of subject in my poetry, he adds, “This’ll make it harder for you.” When, only a few months later, my father—who’s never read my poems, whose fine but mostly functional knowledge of English makes the diction and syntax of my work difficult to follow, who doesn’t know anything of the themes or subjects of my poetry—tells me to use another name, he’s encouraging also. He means: Let them think you’re a white guy. This will make it easier for you. [...]
To the poet, though, the first question isn’t one of class or color. The first question is a question of language. Poetry—as Stéphane Mallarmé famously tells the painter and hapless would-be poet Edgar Degas—is made of words, not ideas. However, to the poet of color or the female poet, to the gay or transgendered writer in America, and even to the white male writer born outside of socioeconomic privilege, a difficult question arises: “Whose language is it?” Where the history of academic and cultural institutions is so dominated by white men of means, “high” language necessarily comes to mean the language of whiteness and a largely wealthy, heteronormative maleness at that. The minority poet seeking entry into the academy and its canon finds that her language is deracialized/sexualized/gendered/classed at the outset. In trafficking in “high” English, writers other than educated, straight, white, male ones of privilege choose to become versed in a language that doesn’t intrinsically or historically coincide with perceptions of their identities. It’s true that minority poets are permitted to bring alternative vernaculars into our work. Poets from William Wordsworth in the preface to Lyrical Ballads to Frank O’Hara in his “Personism: a manifesto” demand as much by insisting that poetry incorporate language nearer to conversational speech than anything overly elevated. Such calls for expansions of literary language in conjunction with continuing experiments by recent generations of American poets are transforming the canon for sure, but this leaves me and perhaps others like me in a slightly awkward position. I don’t possess a vernacular English that’s significantly different from that of plain old Midwestern English. As such, it seems I’m able to write from a perspective that doesn’t address certain realities about myself, and this makes me queasy as anything. The voice in my head is annoyed with the voice in my writing. The voice in my head says I’m disregarding difference, and this feels like a denial of self, of reality, of a basic truth.
It isn’t exactly intentional. It’s a product of being privileged. In the 46 years since my father left Punjab, the 40 or so years since my mother left also, my parents clambered the socioeconomic ladder with a fair amount of middle-class success. We’re not exactly wealthy, but I do wind up in prep school instead of the public high school, which only isolates me further from those with a shared racial identity. Later I attend university, where I’m permitted by my parents’ successes to study the subjects I want to study rather than those that might guarantee future wealth. I don’t need to become a doctor or a lawyer to support the clan. I get to major in philosophy and later attend graduate school in creative writing. Through all of this, though I experience occasional instances of bigotry while walking down streets or in bars, and though I study in programs where I’m often one of only two or three students of color, my racial identity is generally overlooked or disregarded by those around me. I’ve become so adept in the language and culture of the academy that on more than one occasion when I bring up the fact of my race, colleagues reply with some variation of “I don’t think of you as a minority.” Or, as a cousin who’s known me since infancy jokes, “You’re not a minority. You’re just a white guy with a tan.” What she means is that my assimilation is complete. But she can’t be correct. Race is simply too essential to the American experience to ever be entirely overlooked. As such, I can’t actually write like a white guy any more than I can revise my skin color. This, however, doesn’t change the fact that if a reader were to encounter much of my work not knowing my name or having seen a photograph of me, she might not be faulted for incorrectly assigning the poems a white racial identity. This is a product of my language, which is a product of my education, which is a product of the socioeconomic privilege afforded by my parents’ successes. The product of all those factors together is that the writing—this essay included—can’t seem to help sounding white.

— Excerpted from “Writing Like a White Guy,” by Jaswinder Bolina, originally published at The Poetry Foundation

Baratunde Thurston on Donald Trump, Obama’s Birth Certificate, and the Degradation of Americans

Andrea — Thu, 28 Apr 2011 12:00:03 +0000

By Andrea (AJ) Plaid

With all of the jokes about “Birthers” and Donald Trump’s toupee as well as the leftysphere excoriating the mainstream media for not taking Trump to task for his antics, Jack and Jill Politics’ Baratunde Thurston breaks down what we lost due to Trump’s BS.

Transcript after the jump.

It’s been a very difficult morning for me. Got the news that President Obama released his long-form birth certificate due to the increasing media circus surrounding claims that he is not one of us. That he is not an American. And it comes at a very interesting time for many reasons, one of which is, it’s April 27 2011 and this just happened. So that’s really interesting to me. Also because I’m reading, right now, a book by Manning Marable called Malcolm X a life of reinvention and he unearths a lot of amazing detail and correspondence around this exceptional American. But through this book you also get a window into the civil rights movement throughout this country’s history – especially the 40s 50s and 60s and you are reminded if you read this book or see a documentary special or know anything about the complete history of the United States, you’re reminded of the extraordinary level of sacrifice that has been involved in allowing all Americans to exist as, be treated as, participate as Americans. To be that which they are took a lot of work. A lot of tears, a lot of pain, a lot of death.
There were people who dropped out of their ordinary lives, sacrificed their personal safety, their reputation, their ability to earn money, to intervene on behalf of those who they also saw as American. They got on buses and Freedom Rides. They sat in, they died in waves and waves of domestic terrorism so that someone like me could go to a voting booth and not be asked by some racist poll worker to pay a tax or prove that my grandfather wasn’t a slave or pass a literacy test that got increasingly difficult the more I passed it. And today, the President of the United States had to prove that he was an American, to the satisfaction of the 75 percent of Iowa republicans who doubt that or the 43 percent of National Republicans who believe that or the one heinous low-class individual who took credit for it after: Donald Trump.
A man who was given every advantage – who inherited millions and lost it all twice but had that opportunity because no one’s ever had to ask him to prove anything. A man who lacks intelligence, compassion, common sense, respect, decency, or an understanding of WHAT THE FUCK it means to be an American that he would come out moments after the President of the United States – and I stress that: the President – released his long-form birth certificate – and Donald Trump comes out moments later and says, “I’m really proud of myself – but it shouldn’t have taken so long. I wanna see the birth certificate for myself. I want to test it for authenticity. I don’t want the press asking me about birth certificates anymore.”
I find it hard to summarize in mere words the amount of pain and rage this incident has caused. It’s humiliating – not just to Barack Obama, not just to the office of the President, not just to Black Americans who died and those who supported our quest for freedom. It’s embarrassing to the entire nation that we would sit and let this nation. We have all been debased by this incident. By a charlatan, by a con man, by a mere promoter of himself. And for him to take credit for this, and for him to revel in it, and yet not be satisfied makes him no better than a Klansman. No better than a Bull Connor. No better than an anonymous, privileged white man in the 1950s who, regardless of his position in society, knew his position was higher than that of a common nigger. And that is what the fuck Donald Trump has done to the President of the United States. To the office of the President of the United States. To me. And to you.
I am disgusted. I have cried, because I know my own ancestors paid a very high price, and never would have imagined that we might have the President that we do, but certainly, part of their joy in the ancestral, celestial skies right now has been greatly diminished by what has happened here today. I hope that eventually, not just in the post-mortal world of karma and spiritual justice, Mr. Trump pays an exceptional price. I hope that price comes during his life. To then be able to walk around, a super-free, super-white, super-privileged man lording over all who would pay attention – which is far too many – at what you have done has got to cost you something in this life, as well.
I don’t wanna hear about The Apprentice. I don’t wanna hear about your new cologne. I don’t wanna hear about the new tower you’re building in whatever fuckin’ town. That cologne smells of racism. That tower is built on the blood of disrespected slaves and freedom fighters, and that show is merely a showcase for the dishonor you have brought among anyone who would call themselves an American.
My name is Baratunde Thurston. I’m heartbroken over this.

Coloring Whiteness: POC Community Building and Mistaken Racial Identity

Wendi Muse — Wed, 06 Oct 2010 14:00:48 +0000

by Former Special Correspondent Wendi Muse

I can count the days following Fashion Week on two hands, the same abacus I could use to count the women of color featured on its runways. Despite constant cries from communities of color, models, the press, and even many designers to increase diversity on the catwalk, progress is slower than the careful steps taken in a pair of Alexander McQueen heels. The fashion world is working at a snail’s pace to color its image, and even then, only by way of appeasement, tiny bits to the masses so that they are temporarily satisfied. But among those scraps, people become desperate, sometimes seeing glimmers that hope that are far from it, and yearning for some acknowledgment from those who have little connection to their plight despite presumed allegiance.

To cite a specific example, one need look no further than the coverage of one of the most poignant protests of fashion’s alienation and exclusion of black fashion editors (and, not-so-tangentially, models and designers) on the opening day of Fashion Week. One of the participants noted that the only prominent woman of color in the business and publishing side of the fashion industry was Marie Claire Fashion Director and Project Runway judge Nina Garcia (pictured, at top).

I stopped reading for a moment. Since when is Nina Garcia a woman of color?

In the United States, color is a strange marker, particular because it rarely has as much to do with phenotype as it does one’s past. Of course facial features, skin color, and even speech patterns may be indications of racial and/or ethnic background, but it goes far beyond what is in the eye of the beholder. Beyond the factor of family trees, parentage being one of the biggest indicators of race (i.e. one may appear phenotypically white, but with one non-white parent, the possibility of whiteness dissolves), region, nationality, and language play huge roles as determining factors in the race game. In fact, despite markers of everything BUT non-white heritage in all other facets, including one’s appearance, like in the case of Nina Garcia, a last name of non-English origin can mean more than what literally meets the eye.

If you do a Wikipedia search on Garcia, you’ll see she grew up in Barranquilla, Colombia, home to many European immigrants. She was afforded many luxuries from an early age due to her wealthy parents and had a privileged upbringing that involved studying in the United States and France before going into fashion. At this point, you might find yourself asking, “What does this have to do with race?” Everything, in fact, considering that class has an almost direct correlation with race in Latin America. Though race in the United States is often times though of as “fixed,” despite one’s class, racial mobility is a reality in Latin America, particularly when tied to class and education. Make no mistake: Nina Garcia would not be considered anything but white in Latin America. Additionally, even if in some alternate universe Garcia were black, her class level alone would allow her to “transcend” the racial category, placing her – at least on a social level –as something other than black.

But Garcia aside, the issue of assigning race as a means of coloring Latin@s or people of other ethnicities who do not fall easily into the “white” and “black” racial categories we have configured for ourselves in the United States is a difficult one, fraught with a need to classify and, more than anything, create allies in the fight for social inclusion and recognition, even when there is not an understood alliance on both sides. The process is complicated, and I can imagine quite confusing for many who may have been considered one racial category or possibly not of any particular category at all beyond their nationality in their country of origin, only to come here and receive a racial categorization that is not only inaccurate, but also applied for the sake of ease. It’s much easier to lump all Latin@s into one category of non-white or non-black than to consider that within every single nation in Latin America, there are specific racial categories and groupings that directly correlate to the respective national histories therein.

This is not to say, of course, that Latin@s who may have considered themselves one racial group within their country of origin but who conform to or accept their newly assigned category within the U.S. do not exist. If anything, the general acceptance of a new racial category (and consequently, labeling others in new ways as well) is a part of the assimilation process when one immigrates to a new country, be it the United States or elsewhere. But for many, particularly those who have never had to think about race, the process of receiving a racial category, and usually one that does not directly correlate with their respective national equivalent, can be an unwelcome form of identity alteration.

In the case of those who come from higher class backgrounds and, in particular, are deemed white in their home countries, the shift can be disarming and a blow to one’s sense of racial self-esteem, particularly if the new racial category indicates a “descent.” While certainly a humbling experience, it is nevertheless one that, in its own way, a form of forced assimilation. It’s also a classic example of what I refer to as “identity imperialism.” By re-categorizing groups from other countries based on our own groupings, we show not only a general lack of familiarity with the world beyond our borders, but also a limited understanding of ourselves. An example can be found in the embracing of Brazilian models as a welcome “alternative” in the fashion world a few years ago. The dozens of Brazilian models gracing the runways? Still white. Their nationality does not dictate their race. Why many fail to understand this, despite “American” as a nationality not being an indicator of racial categories, is beyond me.

As I mentioned in a piece I wrote long ago about race in Latin America entitled “We Want You . . . To Think Just Like Us,” despite our lazy re-categorization of immigrant groups and their racial identities, we don’t have it all figured out on our home turf:

In discussions (from an American perspective) related to race in other countries, there tends to be a forced application of American racial categories and norms, as if our identity grid fits each racial landscape without a need to vary its shape. And though we like to pretend that race is clear-cut in the United States, it’s obvious that concepts of race are more mutable than we like to admit.

Take the category “people of color.” What does it actually mean? Is it truly a useful term for the sake of building community within marginalized groups if some of the people within it benefit from privilege? If you consider black Americans, for example, studies have shown that despite blacks of all shades being categorized as one group racially (something that happens with less frequency in Latin America, as there are often categories for the people of multiracial backgrounds who phenotypically may not be easily placed squarely within the categories of black and white), blacks with lighter skin, if separated from their darker peers statistically, have more economic success (included therein, higher levels of education and higher paying jobs). Despite our not separating light-skinned blacks and dark-skinned blacks in comparative race studies, the statistics hint at skin color-based privilege in action. The same could be said of studies on Asian-Americans, which often lump together all categories of ethnicities therein, ignoring some of the problems of poverty and access troubling certain communities.

That said, can we legitimately force people from other countries into our own specified categories for them, despite our having yet to fully grasp the complexities therein? As we move to a more explicit and open multiracial America (and I say this as we have always been a country with people of multiracial backgrounds, just not one where we could openly embrace that due to the circumstances of racism in our country), it is time for us to reconsider the categories we have, and analyze whether or not they are still working as a means of building community, particularly when our presumed allies are technically playing for other team, lacking any connection to the experience of marginalization based on race (and/or class).

Miss Wendi’s voice? She now writes exclusively about music and fashion at her site Retail DJ.

Quoted: Anna on Mixed Race and Filipina Identity/Lulu on Shared Struggles

Guest Contributor — Mon, 24 May 2010 15:30:00 +0000

It seems we don’t talk a lot about it, but to be sure, there are distinct pains, complexities and privileges associated with mixed heritage people. And I’m realizing that these distinctions can be quite fruitful to discussions of race and gender. For I realized that mixed heritage families are a perfect example of “families on the fault lines.” In other words, mixed families undergo a unique experience that may reflect and deify notions of privilege and hierarchy. At the same time, they hold vast potential to resist narratives of the normalized body.
In my case, I’ve experienced both privilege and oppression with my identity and family background. For instance, while folks in the Filipino community might easily classify me as one of them, this isn’t the case for those outside this community. Filipinos are so underrepresented in the media and other forms of public representation that people don’t seem to understand what it means to be a dark-skinned Asian. They seem to only think of East Asia when they hear “Asian” (as if the region of Southeast Asia doesn’t exist!). I’ve gotten Latino, Chinese, Indian–you name it. (And to be fair, I’ve inherited some of my father’s bi-racial characteristics which further confounds people.) There’s a sort of erasure and concomitant exotification that occurs just by virtue of being Filipino or any other underrepresented ethnic group.
On the other hand, there is a distancing from this Otherness that happens through my last name. I’m clearly not white, but my name–Anna Sterling–sure does sound white. It never fails as a conversation starter; by rote I explain that my paternal grandfather was an American soldier stationed in the Philippines during WWII. My father was bi-racial, hence the last name. I know for a fact that this last name has conferred privileges onto me throughout time–everywhere from fitting in with my white suburban friends a little bit more than those with more traditional names like Magpantay or Danganan to perhaps having eyes linger on my resume in job searches a few seconds longer.
Then again, I’m brought back to my physical appearance and the significance of it. My father married a full-blooded Filipina woman when he got to the states and as my mom says: “he fell in love with my native Filipina beauty!” My light-skinned father and “native-looking” mother (read: dark!) created a rainbow-colored spectrum of children. My other two sisters obtained my father’s light skin while I inherited my mother’s dark skin. It’s really sad to think about the policing I went through as a child: my own sisters would say I was dirty and that I needed to shower; family friends had the audacity to ask immediately upon seeing me “Did you just come from the pool? Why you so dark?!”; I’ve had people “compliment” me with, “You’d be so pretty if you weren’t so dark!” Even more, if you flipped your TV over to the Filipino channel, you’d be shocked at the total whiteness of those given space in the media. No matter how many times I watch Filipino TV, the almost geisha-whiteness of the actors and personalities continues to astound me. It’s made strikingly clear– whiteness is beautiful. (In fact, so many of the most popular actors are half-white that I’m beginning to think it’s a prerequisite!) I absolutely hated my skin color growing up (and no wonder!). Another dark skinned friend of mine would literally wear turtlenecks in the blazing summer heat. And I’ll never forget the time I bitterly told my mom through clenched teeth, “I hate you for giving me this dark skin.” My mom wasn’t defensive and angry, but instead replied in the most gentlest way, conveying sadness and deep disappointment. Thinking of that breaks my heart.

—by Anna, excerpted from “Dark Skinned White Girls.” Read the rest at Feministing.

I identify as Filipina and black. I do this to give honor to the struggles both my Filipina mother and my black father have had to endure. I give respect by learning both heritages and never denying one or the other. My identity is heavily influenced by both society and my parents. Both influences intersect to make me who I am. I feel that both my parents have endured a great deal due to society’s conscious and unconscious views on race and class. The way society works has developed my parents into hard working people that took the only paths offered to them. For my father, it was entering the military and escaping the harsh life of Jacksonville, Alabama. For my mother in the Philippines, it was working at an Air Force base. Their paths would cross and they would marry and have four children of which I am the youngest.
My parents are still together and talk openly about racial issues that they have to deal with. The funny thing is that they do not connect their struggles. My father understands about black oppression, but not about Asian and Pacific Islander struggles and vice versa for my mother. While my mother is coming to a certain consciousness about not wanting to be called “Oriental,” my father has to be gently reminded that the term is rather offensive.

—by Lulu, published in “Blended Nation: Portraits and Interviews of Mixed Race America.” Read the rest at Filipinas Magazine.

(Image Credit: Lulu Carpenter, Filipinas Magazine)

Black AND Asian (and Jewish?)

Guest Contributor — Thu, 29 Apr 2010 14:30:03 +0000

by Guest Contributor CVT, originally published at Choptensils

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

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

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

I give a one-word response. “Yes.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Part II, “the Age of Imperialism”

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

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

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

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

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

Part III, “A Brave New World”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Stereotypes are developed. Enforced. Etc.

Part IV, “The Common Era”

And now here we are: here. Now.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Part V, “Open Your Eyes”

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

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

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

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

Here’s my answer to that:

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

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

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

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

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

And yet . . . and yet . . .

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Wopajo

Guest Contributor — Tue, 06 Apr 2010 14:00:06 +0000

by Guest Contributor Brandann R. Hill-Mann ( OuyangDan)

I grew up a happy, well loved child. I spent my summers resisting shoes and with water-logged skin, insisting I wasn’t cold, even when my lips were purple. My world was a moose’s walk from Canada where I straddled two worlds, never knowing it because I was blissfully unaware until I was much older that I was any different than the other people around me.

One world was that of my Mother’s family. Just off of a Reservation, humid and sweltering in the summer and man-high piles of snow and ice in the winter. We built houses with doors on the second floor, and two mailboxes to make sure you could reach one in the winter. A Northern Michigan Tribe with roots shared in Southern Canada’s First Nations, we were just emerging from that place where it was embarrassing to be ‘injun’. A Native fishing family, we were not exactly well off, but we had floors in our houses and indoor plumbing in an area where owning your own septic system was a sign of great privilege. My grandparents were well respected in our community for being fair and honest, if my Grandfather had a bit of a reputation for a temper if you were trying to be unfair to someone less fortunate than he was.

My mom met my dad when they were very young, and the stories varied depending on who did the telling – and I can’t ask him anymore since he’s been passed away ten years, but I know that my mom was about ten or so. She was about thirteen when they snuck smokes together, and I don’t know how old they were when they realized that they were dating. I do know that they spent about a year apart after my mom graduated high school, and when she showed up with me in her arms, my dad didn’t flinch, and adopted me straight away. Biological or adopted, I was fathered by a white man of European descent.

My Dad’s family was another world. His parents were first generation immigrants — depending on who did the defining — with my grandfather an unexpected surprise to his parents who had just immigrated from Italy, and my grandmother of Dutch parentage. My dad grew up in a privileged white world to a smart businessman of a father who ran a fair business in beer distribution. Every one owed my grandfather,or Papa Joe, a favor at one point or another, even if he had a bit of a temper if you were trying to be unfair. This family loved and doted on me, and I never knew that I was not of their blood until I was a much older child in need of a full medical history. My grandfather even created a unique nickname for me: wopajo.

You won’t find a proper definition if you look it up. It might actually stump the Google Gods. I didn’t even know that it was a racial epithet until I had the luck to say it in front of a nice Jersey Girl, to which she responded “Wha-wha-wha?”. I had never even heard anyone refer to people of Italian ancestry as “wops” so I was surprised, apologizing profusely. To me it was a term of affection, as every one I had known growing up had laughed whenever someone used it in reference to me. I had never heard it any other way, and wow, was I embarrassed. I know that no one ever meant me any malice, but to form a child’s memories around a racial slur…I look back now and wonder just how accepted I was among the adopted half of my family (yeah, that, too). But isn’t it cute now, an “Italian Indian” (get it? wop-ajo)?

But it sums up my life perfectly: Too white to be Native and too Native to be white. And that is only the surface of my racial conundrum. Always on the edge of two identities and never quite belonging to either. I don’t look like anyone else in my family; I am lighter and my hair brown, not the silky black that you see in some popular movies, and is sometimes a little curly, and my eyes are partially green. I don’t look like my own family, and when I tell someone that I am in fact not White, I get the sympathetic “oh, yes, I see it now, you do have remarkably high cheek bones!” stamp of approval.

Feminist circles were difficult to figure out for me when I began navigating conversations on race, because race didn’t make sense to me for the longest time, and this was the first place that I was even allowed to have race discussions, but they were always about someone else’s race. I didn’t fit into racial discussions because I wasn’t really White. I knew that, and yet, I had heard my whole life that I had to accept that I was. I wasn’t Black, and Blackness was the crux of racial discussion in the feminist blogosphere (there are very good reasons for this, don’t misunderstand me), or so it seemed to me. Discussion on race on most big feminist blogs seem to be a binary; Black or White and little else. About the only thing I was picking up was that mainstream feminism was focused on talking about race, but not really to anyone for whom it was actually about, and certainly not anyone outside that binary.

So, where did a body like mine fit? I wasn’t Black or White. Did I even exist? Or was I supposed to sit down and shut up and just nod when people told me I was White? Didn’t I get to decide how I identified? Except that growing up near a Reservation you learn early on that the White community doesn’t really want you either, so where do you go? From what I understand, people of mixed race heritage who present as Black and are not of White ancestry have this same conundrum. I could be wrong, though, because that is not my experience on which to speak.

It only got worse the more I delved in. I quickly became frustrated in discussions that were meant to privilege bodies that were neither White nor Black. The discussion always seemed to be railroaded back to one or the other, leading me to conclude that if you weren’t one or the other, or at least passing for one or looking like the other, then you had best pass in your Person of Color Status Card, because your voice was not welcomed. If you identify as Non-White, everyone assumes you must be Black. Even Brown is a start, such as South Asian or Latin@… but you had best be prepared to assert your Brownness at every opportunity lest anyone forget that you are that Strange Other. The part of me that is Native begins to disappear as I try to engage. I find no comfort in non-U.S.ian communities, such as trying to find camaraderie with Indigenous people from Down Under, and instead find that my allies are further alienated by assumptions that they must be not only Black or White, but from the U.S. as well. Yes, even in numbers we find that the world must be centered on the U.S. and its center of the Universe complex.

My own blog isn’t safe, either, as anyone who reads my words feel free to tell me that I am expecting too much of others, that I must just accept that the perceptions of the world are the truth. That I am 90% European and that I must get over it. I say that I have a right to grasp ahold of my heritage and cling tightly. I am not ready to tell my family that we are all doing it wrong. (Well, maybe about the nickname…)

The world isn’t full of dichotomies and binaries, no matter how much we want to shove everything into an either/or container. Girl/boy, male/female, Black/White, gay/straight… life just doesn’t fit that easily into checked boxes. People are designed on a spectrum, literally and figuratively, with variances and individualities. The color of my skin or eyes doesn’t give away my racial identity, at least not in a stereotypical way. A photograph of me isn’t telling, and I would argue that this is true of many people, bi-racial, mixed-race and otherwise. My hair and features, unusual for even a Northern tribe, lighter than most commonly iconic tribes, other me from almost every one I know. I don’t know where I fit. I don’t know how to talk about race, because I have never been allowed to fit into one.

(Image Credit: Suave)

“Respecting Your History:” Jessica Yee on being Asian, Aboriginal, and Canadian

Jessica — Wed, 27 May 2009 14:00:56 +0000

by Special Correspondent Jessica Yee, originally published in Ricepaper Magazine

Being mixed First Nations and being raised in the urban centre of Toronto, I’m often faced with the question of “Am I Indian enough?”:

Do I attend ceremony here?

Can I really understand what it’s like to be Native not living on the reservation now?

How am I going to learn my traditions?

Being also Indigenous from Taiwan and continuing to live in Toronto makes me ask myself other questions:

Should I even partake in the prevalent Chinese culture here?

Aren’t those the colonizers?

Where are my people?

So for much of my early life, I shut off being any race, and dove head first into the world of grassroots activism. It was a welcoming and friendly environment where everyone was pissed off at something, and collectively we stood to fight back against it (whatever it was). This led me to focus my energies principally on sexual health and reproductive rights. I realize now that the core values of bodily rights and ownership of oneself in these movements were a really good fit for a young Native girl trying her hardest to find her identity.

“People can’t tell you what you are or aren’t. That’s the colonizers job,” my 88 –year-old Gitxsan adopted auntie May told me when I was 20. “If you don’t start being proud of who you are and identifying with your Aboriginal heritage out loud, how is our culture going to survive?”

Today the definition for Aboriginal in Canada includes those of First Nations, Inuit, and Métis heritage. The 2006 Stats Canada census revealed that more than 60 000 Aboriginal people live in Toronto itself, and that there are currently more than a million Aboriginal people across Canada. These were considerable increases from the previous census counts in 2006, and it is no doubt because more people were able to identify as Aboriginal with the changing regulations around the mixed European/Native ancestry of Métis.

However, it’s still hard to maintain your legal Aboriginal identity in North America if you ever get together with someone outside your community. Blood quantum systems and generations of oppressive legislature mean that after one or two interracial marriages, your status as an Indian can disappear. This is worrisome for the sustainability of our culture for future generations, considering that more than half of our population is now under the age of 25 (myself included). In fact, the National Aboriginal Health Organization (NAHO) estimates that in 15 years if status laws don’t change, only 60% of Aboriginal youth will be legally recognized, while the rest vulnerable to assimilation and cultural genocide.

There are too many stories of internalized racism in our Native communities, where being half or a quarter Aboriginal means you might not be fully accepted by your community. You also might not receive equal benefits compared to those who count as biologically “full”. As Tracey Deer, director of the film Club Native says, “The colonizers sure taught us well, because the same system they used to annihilate our people to classify who was Indian or not, we are now using against each other.” I’ve always found this view interesting, especially when I see people who are legally registered as a “full-blood” even though their parents are from two different reserves or multiple nations. Even way back in the day, we used to look at each other as separate countries if we were a different nation, but now we hang on for dear life to anything that appears totally Aboriginal.

The diversity amongst ourselves as Aboriginal people is also something that needs to be thoroughly understood. There are over 700 Native nations across what we now call North America and it’s unrealistic to think that we’re all the same, or have some magical system where we automatically know everything about each other. Time and time again I’m asked about Indigenous land claim issues or the latest environmental movement, which I may not always have the answer to. My work is in sexual and reproductive health, am I supposed to expect the same proficiency of knowledge from everyone else about these domains?

But where do you go to even learn about your culture? The mass assumption usually is that as Indigenous peoples, we must have been living with our Elders and were raised in our home communities with the abundance of rich land and resources where we might have learned everything about who we are, and speak our language. That is very untrue for many of us, not just because of environmental degradation, but because colonization is still very real and happening to us each and every day. Many reservations aren’t even traditional territories, they are cut out land marks that we got the sore end of the deal of to try and make a living on. 60 Indigenous languages are disappearing all over the world, every day, and we need to focus on our young people now to get back what we’ve lost.

We’re still reeling from 500 years of colonization, and have only started to come out of it and begin the healing process in the last 50. We need to re-learn our culture and who we are as a people, and no longer be ashamed of the means and processes we do to get there. I am personally trying my hardest to gather as much information as I can about my culture and my traditions, and it’s by no means an easy process. Especially in the work that I’m involved in, I know that so much of it is rooted in Indigenous, matriarchal societies who were living with the very principles of healthy sexuality, but many of those I try to learn from don’t know about this since their teachings were erased in residential schools. I remind myself that “traditional” means before colonization happened, and that there is still a lot of deconstruction that has to take place.

“There are gaps in all multicultural societies,” says Lily Chow, author of the First Nations and Chinese historical accounts Sojourners in the North and Chasing Their Dreams. “These older generations regret that they didn’t know how to appreciate one and other. There are so many similarities if you look a little bit closer. We need more education on where we come from.”

It’s true that nowadays we don’t really sit down and discuss our culture with one and other. We see it represented mostly in festivals or conferences, but we have the ability to do more than that. As Ms. Chow puts it, “You don’t just look at the foods and colours of people if you want to know about their culture, you have to understand wholly where the person comes from. It’s more than just their country.”

But where do I fit in with all of this? I have listened to the great stories of the Chinese and First Nations unions, dating back to the construction of the Canadian Pacific Railroad, or later on during the gold rush years. I empathize with several friends of mine who are the offspring of these unions, feeling that they too have to suppress part of themselves to be accepted into one or the other side, while they listen to their own families bash and stereotype the other.

“I’ve never had a problem being both Chinese and Native,” says Raymond Lazore, president of Students for Multicultural Alliance. “I’ve actually always found them both to have a lot in common and even complement each other. It’s everyone else that seems to have a problem with it.”

I’ve always had to do a little extra explaining myself because I am Indigenous—but that ancestry doesn’t only come from one place. And to the surprise of many of those questioners who approach me, Aboriginal people don’t only live in North America. There are Indigenous people all over the world, and those that live in what we now know as Taiwan, China, the United States, and Canada are all part of my ancestry.

Not being 100% of something or a “pure blood” as the cliché goes, makes you wonder where your place is and who you really belong to. Those “pure bloods” with a less complicated ethnic history and an easier shot at finding a racial identity are still revered in many cultures for their oneness and ability to breed more “pure” offspring with a fellow “pure” mate.

I’m also Indigenous from the land that China colonized. It’s still difficult for me to find any semblance of Indigeneity within the mainstream Chinese culture that exists in Canada, and a lot of it has to do with the reality that just like in this country, Native people are pushed out of sight and out of mind in China. Even in my research for this article, I heard comments such as, “I really like the Natives here in Canada. You know, our Chinese men did not treat the First Nations women right when they came over here. We need to make up for that.” My response? “Um, you know there are Indigenous people in China too right? Who also got screwed over by the Chinese? What about them?”

I believe what it boils down to is the importance of our right to self-determination, and of knowing and reclaiming our history. Especially as youth today, we were not alive when initial colonization happened, but we are alive now, and indeed it’s still happening. We may not have been able to choose what our ethnicity was going to be, but we can own it now and stand as allies with other communities of colour. We can work together in our common struggle for the autonomy to live as our authentic selves in the face of oppression and bigotry. We need to celebrate our rich heritages in peaceful solidarity so we all survive, while together honouring the ancestors who lived so courageously to give us those few bits of raw culture we cling to today.

At the end of the day, Cree rapper Eekwol’s song, “Respect your history” pushes me to move forward, brining everything I am to the table, as she reminds me that “History is fact. Truth. Take it back. From the ground building up on every single track”.

Searching for My Pakistani Identity

Guest Contributor — Fri, 17 Apr 2009 13:00:20 +0000

by Guest Contributor Jehanzeb Dar, originally published at Broken Mystic

It started off funny. I was at the mall buying a birthday gift for a friend of mine and, as usual, the store manager was friendly and conversational. After she took a good look at my gift, the following conversation took place:

ME: She’s not my girlfriend.

MANAGER: That’s an awful lot of money for just a friend.

ME: (smiles) Well, maybe you can lower the price for me.

She laughed as she scanned the item through. Another customer approached the counter and waited patiently. She decided to chime in:

ME: (smiles) Yeah, it’s for my friend’s birthday.

CUSTOMER: Aww, that’s so romantic, your girlfriend is going to Love it.

ME: She’s not my girlfriend.

CUSTOMER: Hmm, maybe she’s a special friend!

I laughed at how both of them were teasing me while I waited for the manager to package the gift. The manager was really helpful that day, so I asked her if there was a number I could call to give her an “outstanding” customer service rating. She showed me the number on the receipt and thanked me for asking. As the manager wrote her name on the receipt, the customer waiting in line caught me off guard with an unexpected question:

“What country are you from?”

For some reason, the question struck me in an odd way, as if it triggered an alarm in my head and sprung forth countless things I’ve been ruminating about over the past few weeks. It wasn’t a new question at all. I have brown skin; it’s easy to notice, so I understood. People ask me where I’m from all the time, but it was different now.

Almost immediately, I thought about the current crisis in Pakistan, I thought about the corrupt Pakistani president Asif Zardari, I thought about the Taliban taking control of Swat Valley – a beautiful place that I visited once – and I thought about the U.S. drone attacks in Pakistan and my sheer frustration with Obama’s foreign policy. Even though it only took me about two seconds to respond, I still had more thoughts and feelings swell inside me. I feared that disclosing my nationality would disrupt the friendly interaction I had with the manager and customer. I worried that their response would be offensive or ignorant and that I would go home feeling like an “outsider.” It was too late for that. And it wasn’t their fault.

“Pakistan,” I said slowly with an unfamiliar discomfort in my voice.

I was shocked at the way I responded, it sounded like I was ashamed of it. I noticed the shift in her body language when she replied with a simple, “Oh.” It was the typical response I usually get after I tell people I’m Muslim. An awkward silence followed before she politely said, “cool.” Again, it was nothing new to me, but when I nodded and forced a weak smile, I suddenly felt the urge to leave. I left quickly after the manager handed me the gift. “It’s ok” I told myself as I heard the fast paced rhythm of my shoes walking on the marble floor, “they didn’t say anything wrong.” I thought about the possible conversation that took place behind me. Maybe they said something ignorant. Maybe they didn’t say anything at all. Maybe they had negative thoughts about Pakistan, maybe they didn’t. Maybe they wondered where it was on the map. Whatever they said or thought didn’t matter. What mattered were the countless thoughts that surfaced in my mind.

As I walked to the other side of the mall, my memory traveled back to January of 2008.

Former Pakistani Prime Minister, Benazir Bhutto, had been killed in late December and it was the hot topic for a while in the mainstream media. I was on my way out of a post office one afternoon, minding my own business, when an older man smiled at me and placed a hand on my shoulder. “Are you Indian or Paki?” Caught off guard by the random question and his use of the word “Paki,” I smiled at the silliness of the question. “Umm, I’m Pakistani…” I said. The man’s face turned grim. “Shame on you!” he growled. Since there were so many things I was going through at the time, my grief reached a point where I couldn’t even get angry anymore. I laughed instead. “Excuse me?” I asked. He threw his hands in the air, “Your country is a mess! You guys are killing your leaders and your women!” You can’t be serious, I thought to myself. I couldn’t believe I was standing in a post office and listening to a man flipping out on me just because I’m from a certain part of the world.

I stood my ground and called him out on his ignorance. I told him he was generalizing about me, as well as the people of Pakistan. I also told him that it wasn’t fair for him to treat me as if I had control over what country I’m from. He apologized, “I’m sorry, you’re right. See, you’re good because you’re here. You’re good because you’re an American.” Right. Typical “melting-pot” remark. Let’s mix everyone together, cut them off from their culture and heritage, and give them one identity: American. “So what about my family members who live in Pakistan?” I asked him. “Are they ‘bad’ since they’re not American?” He replied, “Well they should come over here.” Yeah, like that’s a piece of cake. And besides, what’s up with the assumption that people living in the Muslim world want to come to the United States (or any Western country)? He apologized again and then asked, “Are you Muslim?” Oh boy. “Yeah,” I said. Before I know it, he was going on about Christianity and how democratic values are also Christian values, so Muslims could benefit a lot from Christians. I tried to enlighten him about Islam, coexistence, and how we’re all created by God, but it didn’t seem like he was receptive to what I was saying. He ended up making an insensitive remark about Muslims standing at the end of the line in the afterlife. He was trying to be funny. I couldn’t stay there. I shook my head, “whatever.” As I walked out the door, I heard him say “Ah, I’m just kidding!”

I had to disengage from the conversation because it brought back memories of something that happened to me in the summer of 2007. I was working a part-time job in the photo lab at CVS Pharmacy. I Loved my job, which is why the managers always called me first whenever they needed help. It was a really happy time in my life, I had friendly relations with my co-workers, and I was really good with customers. We were incredibly low on help that day though and at one point, I was the only person on register. The line only got longer and longer, and eventually, a cranky customer started swearing at me for moving too slow for her. I ignored it at first, but then she cursed at me again and told me that I “shouldn’t work here.” I explained that we were short on help and I politely asked her to stop cursing at me. It only made things worse. “Who the f*** are you to tell me to stop talking?!” she shouted.

Finally, my manager rushed back to the front of the store. He couldn’t help but notice the angry customer and her friend. “What’s the problem here?” he asked. Before I could answer, the customer pointed at me and said, “You better watch out for this kid otherwise he’s going to blow up the store.” I froze in utter disbelief. I felt the anger rushing through my blood and then I broke out, “What did you say?! Are you judging me by the color of my skin?! Why did you say something like that?!” She shouted back, “man, just do your f***ing job!” My manager intervened and told me to take a break. I listened and began to the break room, but I heard the customers talking behind me, “if he’s going to wait for us in the parking lot, we can take him! There’s two of us.” I was so outraged and furious. I turned around and said, “Who’s talking about violence here?” She said I threatened her first because I told her to “stop talking.” I shook my head, “No, I told you to stop cursing.” My manager stepped in between me and the customers. He pushed me back, as if I was going to hit the customers or something. “Just stop,” he said to me, “Just ignore them.” The customer’s friend stepped forward and said, “F*** you, terrorist!” I was so angry that I just stormed out of the building and drove home. I was notified a week later that I was terminated because the incident “created a problem” for the store and I was supposed to “bite my tongue” just like the “company policy” expected all employees to (how I handled the case, with the help of CAIR, is another discussion!).

I reflected on these two experiences as I walked out of the mall with my friend’s birthday gift. When I started my car, I sat and spaced out for a while. I thought about how my past experiences sometimes make me so tense and uneasy whenever non-Muslims ask about religious and/or ethnic background. With the current crisis in Pakistan, I worry that the ignorant and offensive remarks will only get worse, but amidst all the politics and personal fears, I am also bothered immensely by how distant I am from my ethnic background.

The next morning, I stood in front of the mirror and felt so unusually distraught. I stared at my brown skin, my black hair, my half-Kashmiri and half-Punjabi nose; I thought about my suburban-American accent and my inability to speak Urdu and Punjabi fluently. I felt a mismatch, like I was some kind of cheap import. I felt fake and counterfeit. I thought about all the times I see older South Asians working at local stores and feeling terrible for speaking to them in English when I could be speaking in Urdu or Hindi. When I walk away, I always wonder if they’re thinking, “oh the kids in this country forget their culture and their language, it’s such a shame.” In South Asian culture, we always refer to elders as “Auntie” and “Uncle,” so whenever I see elderly South Asians, I want them to know that they are “Auntie” and “Uncle” to me. Sometimes, it feels like my skin color and name are the only Pakistani things about me. What does it mean to be Pakistani? I can put on my shalwar kameez (traditional South Asian dress) and attend a South Asian event on campus, enjoy the music, dances, and food, but does that make me Pakistani? What do I know about Pakistan – the history, the culture, the people, the great mystics, thinkers, and leaders of the past, or even the politics? Although I’ve made attempts to re-connect with my Pakistani identity in recent years, I feel that current events (as well as things I’ve observed in other Pakistani-Americans) have caused me to turn inward again in efforts to attain a richer understanding of what my ethnic identity really means to me.

I was born in Lahore, Pakistan. My father’s family descends from Kashmiris who migrated to Lahore, and my mother’s family is Punjabi. Although I’ve never experienced what it’s like to live in Pakistan (since my family moved to the United States shortly after I was born), I’ve stayed there on long visits. The first time I visited Pakistan was in 1999 and I remember hating it. The bumpy roads, the crowded traffic, the poverty, the pollution, the electric cutting out randomly – it all made me miss the United States. At the time, as a 15 year-old, I admit that I felt better than everyone else because I was an American citizen. When I returned to the U.S., I would tell my White non-Muslim friends how proud and grateful we should be to live in America. Like many other Pakistani-Americans that I knew at the time, I made fun of Pakistani/Indian music, culture, language, accents, and dress. I associated all of those things with my parents; it had nothing to do with me. I was American.

I went to Pakistan again in 2000 for my Uncle’s wedding and my opinion of the country didn’t change much. I still thought it was backwards and uncivilized, although I remember seeing something that struck me as oddly positive. On our way to the wedding, a truck accidentally hit one of our party’s cars. The respective drivers – complete strangers – got out and shook hands! Then, we invited the truck driver to the wedding! That was something I don’t ever recall seeing in the United States. Still, I longed to leave Pakistan, so much so that I couldn’t even appreciate the fact that my Uncle’s wedding lasted for three days (as opposed to the typical single-day weddings I would see in Hollywood films). I couldn’t appreciate the decorations, the dancing, the beautiful South Asian dresses, or the immense amount of preparation that went into it all. I regret that now.

It wasn’t until I visited Pakistan in early 2002 when I really learned to appreciate it. As many of my friends know, 2002 was a special year for me. It was the year I discovered my inner voice. I remember sitting in the car while the driver navigated us through the busy traffic of Lahore and without warning, a question struck me in such a profound way. The question didn’t come from someone, it came from within: I asked myself, “Why do you hate this place so much?” I stared out the window and saw people walking with their spouses, children, and friends. They were going somewhere. To school, to work, to buy something, to have fun with their friends – every day activities that my friends and I would do except in a different part of the world. This place was home to them. “This is where you were born,” I said in my thoughts, “This place is in your blood.” It helped that I had a great time with my family that year too, but I also believe that these questions didn’t come to me randomly or without meaning. For the first time, when I left Pakistan, I was sad. Sure, I was happy about going home and seeing my friends again, but I also felt like I didn’t get enough of a chance to explore more, i.e. explore more about myself.

Since it was post September 11th, I was already experiencing a lot of hostility and prejudice in my predominately White non-Muslim high school because of my religious background. When I returned from Pakistan, classmates and teachers asked a lot of ignorant questions. Questions like: “Why do they have weird names?” or “Are they Taliban?” or “Don’t they hate America?” The most insulting one probably came from my friend’s mom, “Are they very pro-bin Laden over there?” I told her that Osama bin Laden was the last thing on my mind when I was there and I also added that she should visit Pakistan some time since it’s a beautiful place. As a result of my new appreciation for Pakistan, I started to become more religious and spiritual. It was the first time in my life when I read the Qur’an on my own free will and it was the first time I prayed without anyone instructing me to do so. It was a very special turning point in my life since I began to contemplate religion and spirituality in ways that I never did before, but what I didn’t realize was that my attempts to become a better Muslim actually distanced me from my ethnic identity rather than compliment it. In actuality I was doing something that many young Pakistani Muslims do these days: I was trying to be Arab.

Over the years, I’ve found that discussing Pakistani identity is quite problematic and controversial at times because it’s often perceived as “religion versus culture.” Generally speaking, we Pakistanis try to distance ourselves from India as far as possible because we think India is synonymous with Hinduism, therefore “kuffar” (nonbelievers/infidels). It’s silly actually considering that (1) India has the third-largest Muslim population in the world and (2) prior to the partition in 1947, Pakistan was part of India; therefore the similarities in culture, dress, food, and language are inescapable. In any case, many Pakistani Muslims in America cut themselves off from India and Indian culture in pursuit of an “authentic Muslim” identity, which happens to point to the Middle-East. In other words, we take on a pseudo-Arab identity.

So many times, I’ve heard fellow Pakistani Muslims saying that we should abolish culture completely because there is no culture in Islam. We’re Muslim and that’s it. I bought into that for a while. “Yeah, we Pakistanis watch too many Bollywood movies,” I would say, “We have girls dancing at our weddings, that’s not Islamic!” As I condemned Pakistani culture, I didn’t realize that I was adopting another culture: Arab culture, or at least what I perceived to be “Arab culture” (saying “Arab culture” is inaccurate since the Arab world is filled with diverse cultures, religions, and dialects, it can’t be narrowed down into “one culture”). In my freshmen year of college, I would wear my keffiyeh (traditional Arab scarf), drive around blasting Arabic music, and making enormous efforts to learn Arabic. To give you an idea of how much I studied Arabic, I can put it like this: my Arabic pronunciation is much better than my Urdu and Punjabi pronunciation. I don’t regret learning the amount of Arabic I know now; I admit that it helps understanding your prayers a lot better, but I feel a tremendous amount of shame when I make pathetic attempts to speak Urdu. When I throw in some Arabic phrases when I meet Arab-speaking people, they smile and tell me how good my accent is. When I try to speak Urdu with South Asian friends and family, they laugh because they can hear it mixed with my American accent.

I became discouraged when I saw the same Pakistani Muslims who despised culture taking dabkeh lessons (folk dance of Lebanon, Palestine, Syria, Jordan, and Iraq), smoking hookah, or wearing thobs (traditional Arab dress for men), as if there wasn’t anything cultural about those things. They would also rebel against the South Asian pronunciation of their names and pronounce them the “correct Arabic” way. It dawned on me that we weren’t getting rid of culture; we merely getting rid of South Asian culture – our culture. As Fatemeh Fakhraie writes in her brilliant article, “The Arabization of Islam:”

What is troublesome about all this is that most Muslims who are non-Arabs complain that they’re not seen as Muslims because they’re not Arab (or ethnically Middle Eastern, in some cases). But when non-Arab Muslims take Arab names or wear Arab clothes under the guise of “Islamic authenticity,” we’re all reinforcing the idea that we’re not really Muslims unless we have some link to Arab culture.

I have seen many Pakistanis Muslims using Arabic words like “akhi” (brother), “ukhti” (sister), “wallahi” (I swear to God), and even non-religious words like “yanni” in their conversations. There’s nothing wrong with this, but if they inserted Urdu words instead of Arabic words, they wouldn’t be taken seriously. Why? Because we don’t take Urdu seriously. The only time we’ll use Urdu is to be funny. It’s like, “haha, you sound like a FOB!” The only time we’ll use Urdu in a serious manner is when we’re speaking to elders (because it’s an “older people” thing, right?). Speaking Arabic, on the other hand, is taken seriously and even makes you look like a better Muslim. We attribute more religiosity to Muslims who can give khutbahs or speeches with “proper Arabic pronunciation.” Even at the recent CAIR event I attended, one of the guest speakers was a South Asian Muslim woman who made sure she pronounced every Arabic word and Muslim name “correctly,” as if not doing so would lower her credibility. It was interesting because I didn’t hear any of the Arab speakers pronounce Pakistan correctly (they said “Pack-istan” rather than “Paak-istaan”), and yet you see young South Asian Muslims striving to pronounce Arabic correctly.

But it’s not just pronunciation that’s changing. Words are changing and being replaced too. The best example is how the Urdu phrase, “Khuda hafez” (God be with you), has been replaced with “Allah hafez.” They both mean the same thing, but thanks to the growing influence of Salafi movements among Sunni Muslims in Pakistan, the use of “Khuda hafez” became gunah (sinful). “Khuda” comes from the Persian word for God (pronounced “Khoda” in Farsi), but since Arabic is taught to be the “Muslim language,” it has been replaced with “Allah hafez.” I remember, on one of my trips to Pakistan, I heard some of my relatives say, “don’t say ‘Khuda hafez,’ it’s gunah! Say ‘Allah hafez.’” As Pervez Amirali Hoodbhoy elaborates:

Persian, the language of Mughal India, had once been taught as a second or third language in many Pakistani schools. But, because of its association with Shiite Iran, it too was dropped and replaced with Arabic. The morphing of the traditional “Khuda hafiz” (Persian for “God be with you”) into “Allah hafiz” (Arabic for “God be with you”) took two decades to complete. The Arab import sounded odd and contrived, but ultimately the Arabic God won and the Persian God lost.

And of course, there’s nothing wrong with saying “Allah hafez.” I say it now and then, but why are we labeling “Khuda hafez” sinful? Is one “more Islamic” than the other? Have Muslims forgotten that God teaches logic and reason? Does it make any sense that God can only understand Arabic? The same kind of propaganda was used against those who followed Jesus, peace be upon him, when they were told that Angels could only speak Hebrew and not Aramaic. Consider this Qur’anic verse:

“Call upon God, or call upon the Merciful; by whatever name you call upon Him (it is the same), to Him belong the most Beautiful names.” (17:110)

Avoiding the use of “Khuda hafez” is also an example of how Salafi Muslims strive to abstain from biddah, or innovation, which in turn explains their strong opposition towards culture. Subsequently, we see Salafi Muslims seeking to purge Sufism (Islamic mysticism) out of Pakistan. The Sufis are Islamic mystics, who do not see Sufism as a separate sect of Islam, but rather an inclusive and necessary mystical dimension of Islam that explores one’s inward journey for God, self, and Divine Love. The Sufis often express their Love for God and the Prophets through music, dancing (notably whirling meditation), and Divinely-inspired poetry. Conservative Muslims perceive this as “Indian Islam” and accuse the Sufis of committing biddah and even shirk (associating partners with God), even though the Sufis, like all Muslims, don’t worship anyone else besides God. Qawwali music, for example, is a Sufi musical style of South Asia, but since Salafi Muslims condemn music, many Pakistani Muslims don’t learn to appreciate Qawwali for what it is. I remember one of my dad’s Pakistani co-workers was sitting in my car and he heard me listening to Qawwali music. He said to me, “man, why are you listening to this? You’re not supposed to sing about Allah in songs, that’s a sin.” I couldn’t help but think about the times I sat in his car and heard him listening to hip-hop music with excessive profanity and pornographic lyrics – he’s telling me that listening to Qawwali is sinful? This is just an example of how deep the conservative Salafi brainwashing is on Pakistanis. As is evident from my father’s friend, the conservative teachings even affect those who aren’t as vocal about their Muslim identity. As Sufi Muslims teach to be accepting of others, I’ve often found that conservative Muslims tend to be more about conformity, and this is a huge problem because it’s not only an attempt to pull us away from ethnic identity, but it’s also a way of “infidelizing” Sufi Muslims or anyone else who doesn’t agree with Salafi interpretations of Islam.

Recently, I gave a Pakistani cricket jersey to a friend of mine who became Muslim earlier this year and a couple of Pakistani Muslims in their mid-twenties made silly remarks about the jersey. They said, “We should get him a shirt that says ‘Islam.’” I felt like responding, “If he wore a shirt that said ‘Free Palestine,’ you wouldn’t say anything, right?” And it’s true, we see Muslims – both Arab and non-Arab – wearing Palestinian keffiyehs or “Free Palestine” shirts in the Mosque and no one makes an issue about it. No one accuses them of being more cultural than religious.

The little secret about us Pakistani Muslims is that we like when people mistaken us for Middle-Eastern. We get all flattered. Really? You thought I was Arab? Wow, thanks! But when people ask if we’re Indian, we respond in disgust. The first time I noticed this difference was in college when my professor felt like bashing on Muslims one day (she was one of the most Islamophobic teachers I’ve ever had). She asked, “Where are all my students from the Middle-East?” She immediately looked at me because she knew I was Muslim. “I’m actually from South Asia,” I said, “but thanks for the compliment.” Smile. I said that in defense of Middle-Easterners since there’s such a negative perception of them in the media (and also because Middle-Easterners get lumped together with Muslims). About a week later, I remember asking a non-Pakistani girl if she was Pakistani, and she responded with disgust, “No! I’m not! Why does everyone always think I’m Paki?!” Well, excuse me, I didn’t mean to offend you. I mean, ew, Pakistani? Who wants to be Pakistani? Ask us if we’re Palestinian, Lebanese, Egyptian, or even Iranian, and we’ll totally be cool with that. Why? Because we don’t want to look like Pakistanis. We don’t want to look like what we are.

The “Arabization” of Islam has gotten to the point where religious scholars from immensely popular Islamic websites like SunniPath.com teach that Arab Muslims are superior to non-Arab Muslims and that praying behind Shia Muslims will invalidate your prayer!

If Malcolm X was Pakistani, he’d have a lot to rip into us about. On one hand, we have Pakistanis completely emulating the images and behavior they see in Western pop culture and on the other, we see Pakistani Muslims trying to behave Arab in order to “authenticate” their Muslim identity. Either way, we’re distancing ourselves from our Pakistani and/or South Asian roots. Where did all of this internalized racism and self-hatred come from? Malcolm X was Muslim, but he also taught African-Americans to be proud of their roots and heritage. Why can’t Pakistani Muslims do the same? When bombs fall on Gaza, Pakistani Muslims throw on their keffiyehs, pump their fists in the air, and chant “free Palestine,” but where are they for Pakistan? Now, our country is in trouble. There are U.S. drone attacks killing innocent Pakistani civilians in tribal areas. The Taliban have taken control of Swat Valley, imposed their oppressive Taliban law, and destroyed over 200 schools, mostly girls’ schools. Did you read that? Good. Read it again. According to Tariq Ali, Pakistani author of “The Duel: Pakistan on the Flight Path of American Power,” the majority of Pakistanis are not only anti-Taliban and anti-extremism, but 70% of them perceive the U.S. as the greatest threat to peace in Pakistan. Will we Pakistani Muslims in America start educating ourselves about Pakistan or will we do what most of the Pakistanis at my Mosque do when I tell them the latest news from Pakistan: shrug their shoulders, shake their heads, and simply say “yeah it’s crazy”?

I have always told people (and myself) that I am Muslim first. I still say this, but it doesn’t mean that I can’t be appreciative or proud about being Pakistani. I am not encouraging fellow Pakistanis to support the Pakistani government – that’s not what I’m suggesting at all since the government is absolutely corrupt. What I am encouraging is that we care about the country we come from as much as we care for the country we live in. As Tariq Ali writes, the people of Pakistan cannot be blamed for the failure of their politicians or the recent violence that is unfolding. I am not saying we shouldn’t learn Arabic either. I still want to learn Arabic, I still wear my keffiyeh to represent the Palestinian people, and I still listen to Arabic music, but not at the expense of forgetting my South Asian heritage.

I try to make as many efforts as I can to brush up on my Urdu and Punjabi, and I also read about the history of Pakistan and India. I know all humanity descends from Adam and Eve (peace be upon them both), but why do I have to ignore the people in between? I am not ashamed of my Buddhist, Hindu, or possible Jewish (many Kashmiris claim to be one of the ten lost tribes of Israel) ancestry. I embrace that. Why should we ignore the great mystical poetry of Amir Khosrow, Mirza Ghalib, Bulleh Shah, and Allama Muhammad Iqbal? Why should we ignore the beautiful architecture of Shah Jahan (he built the Taj Mahal)? I remember when I was listening to a Qawwali song by the legendary Pakistani singer, Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, I felt like I was reconnecting with a missing part of me. I would constantly listen to his beautiful wailing and hear so many emotions being expressed: Love, yearning, pain, sorrow, grief, joy, and happiness. “This is the voice of my soul,” I would think to myself, “this is that other side of me that I have forgotten.”

The last time I went to Pakistan was in 2004 and it was the first time I visited the country with respect and appreciation. I hope to visit again someday. I often wonder if the country will recognize me as the child of its land or as some tourist just passing on by. I know I stand out when I go to Pakistan. It’s in my body language, the way I walk, the way I speak, but all that doesn’t matter to me because I know that I am striving to re-connect. I know I am making an effort. I would like to revisit the Tomb of Jahangir in Lahore to reflect on the timeless history. I want to see the city of Muree again and enjoy the beautiful mountains. I want to visit the Sindh and let my heart mourn with the tragic Love story of Sohni and Mahiwal (depicted left). I would like to visit Mohenjo-daro, one of the largest cities of the ancient Indus Valley Civilization. I would like to trace my ancestry, visit Kashmir and then India.

I am a Pakistani who has grown up in the West and I know that my experiences may be completely different from what people in Pakistan experience, but it still hurts me to see what is happening in Pakistan today. I still care. It hurts even more when I see such a strong anti-Pakistani sentiment in the United States. Discussing Pakistani politics is another blog post, but I would like others to know that Pakistan is a beautiful place filled with a rich culture that is struggling to survive amidst Westernization and heavy Salafi influences. I find hope in the fact that the majority of Pakistanis are strongly against the Taliban and the corrupt politicians governing them.

Prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him, said in his last sermon: “All humankind is from Adam and Eve, an Arab has no superiority over a non-Arab nor a non-Arab has any superiority over an Arab; also a white has no superiority over a black, nor a black has any superiority over a white- except by piety and good action.” The Prophet would not have addressed this issue if there weren’t noticeable differences among human beings. As the Qur’an says: “Another of His signs is the creation of the heavens and earth, and the diversity of your languages and color. There truly are signs in this for those who know” (30:22). There is also this famous verse: “O people, we created you from the same male and female, and rendered you distinct peoples and tribes, so that you may know one another.” (49:13)

In closing, I would like to share that as I wrote this reflection on Pakistani identity, I found myself asking, “Why is Pakistan so important to me?” I responded simply: I was born there. Many of family members are there. My ancestry is there.

Those answers suffice for me.

Khuda hafez.

Russell Peters: Still Got It?

Thea Lim — Fri, 20 Mar 2009 10:53:56 +0000

by Special Correspondent Thea Lim

A little over half a year ago, I wrote a fawning article about Russell Peters, trying to justify why I love him in spite of the fact that he could easily be criticised for making racist comedy.

I said that I loved Peters because his comedy is (unintentionally?) subversive: it highlights the relationships communities of colour have with each other instead of speaking to, or centering the experiences of white folks. And many commenters on my original piece pointed out, Peters often talks about his sibling communities of colour with fondness rather than ridicule. But then the other night I sat down and watched Red, White and Brown, Peters’ 2008 DVD.

Russell, you cut me deep.

So what’s wrong with Red, White and Brown? Last year Latoya posted an excerpt from a Kate Rigg interview, where Rigg explained very eloquently what makes racist comedy racist:

I’m offended when I see comics get onstage going “…and then I went to the Laundromat. Ching-chong, ching-chong, ching-chong!” Then I’m fucking offended. When someone tells a joke about Asian people and there’s no actual joke – the joke is the Asian people. The joke is [racist-comic voice] the funny way they talkie-talkie! “They don’t use proper diction! Only verb and noun! Verb and noun!” I just heard a comic that I respect doing that fucking joke the other night. An Asian comic. And I was like, “Dude! Write a punch line or you’re just being racist!”

Peters’ seems to have lost his punchline. There’s lots of different things you could criticise in Red, White and Brown. Peters throws in some shallow Michael Moore style criticism of the war in Iraq that still manages to be Arab/Islamophobic. Sepia Mutiny has an interesting analysis of Peters’ jabs at deaf people. Red, White and Brown gave me a lot to think about, and I’d like to address Peters’ “hatred” for deaf people and his comments about Indian authenticity in a later post. But right now I’m gonna focus on that stupid “Chinky” accent.

Peters opens Red, White and Brown with five minutes of his Chinese accent. And hey, I guess people love his Chinese accent. But where it once highlighted a very funny bit about the way Indian and Chinese people do business together, it’s now become the joke. When the only thing Peters is doing is talking Chinky, it’s not a joke anymore.

He starts by pointing to random Chinese-looking people in his audience, and talking in his Chinese voice. But chances are at least one (if not all) of the Chinese people in the front five rows of his New York audience are Chinese Americans. As in, they don’t talk like that. They’re Americans, you jerk.

But you know what? There is a Chinese American accent. Just like there is an African American accent. There’s a WASP accent: I think Dave Chappelle is famous for having perfected it. So why can’t Peters learn the Chinese American accent, and then do that? That would be bringing it back to the arena that Peters once did so well – giving us something in mainstream comedy that we can relate to.

But it’s almost like success has made Peters sloppy. He doesn’t have to learn how to do a Chinese-American audience, he doesn’t have to work as hard with the rare and affectionate insight. He’s already packing houses, so why should he try harder? And the sad fact of the matter is that in North America, you can fill a house just by doing a stupid racist accent.

So I guess my second criticism is moot. But the next misstep Peters makes, distancing himself from his old lovable self, is when he talks about playing Dance Dance Revolution in Singapore. And then he does his Chinese accent again. Ok, Chinese people in Singapore don’t talk like that.

(Sidebar: the accent Russell does well is some imitation of a Cantonese person who speaks English as a second language. But the Chinese diaspora is huge! There’s probably at least 20 different Chinese accents. You can’t just use one to fit everybody. We’re a complex people, thankyouverymuch. It may seem strange to ask a comedian for racist accent accuracy, but part of what made Peters’ act so genius was the accuracy.)

And what kills me is that Peters is talking about his time in Singapore. In other words, Peters has been to Singapore, he knows Chinese Singaporeans don’t talk like that.

The Singaporean accent is very distinctive and easy to tell apart from the Cantonese accent. (In fact Singlish is a pidgin language that is studied and marvelled at by linguists all over the place. Just Google it: you can even find multiple online dictionaries.) Almost anyone, but definitely someone with Peters’ ear for accents and culture, can hear it.

Yet he still chooses to make the joke. Because he assumes that for the most part his audience won’t know the difference. And then he goes on to joke that a Chinese Singaporean makes fun of his DDR skills, suggesting that he should go play a game his people are good at – the Taxi Game. Again, the joke fails, because the South Asian taxi driver is not a stereotype that exists in Singapore; it’s unlikely a Chinese person in Singapore would use that to insult an Indian person in Singapore. And he chooses to make the joke anyways because he assumes his audience wouldn’t know that.

So he’s gone from making inside jokes that are all the funnier if you’re a person of colour familiar with the context, to making jokes that are only funny if you don’t know the context. Le sigh.

And you know what? It’s not just that it’s racist. It’s also just bad comedy. Good comedy takes a fact of real life and magnifies it, holding it up for us to see it and laugh. But when a comedian like Peters gets lazy, their comedy begins to base its jokes on inaccuracy. It’s good comedy gone bad. And that’s why ableist/sexist/homophobic/racist/… jokes aren’t funny: it’s a skewed version of real life.

I’m not gonna say I didn’t laugh a few times during Red, White and Brown. It wasn’t so awful that I would organise a boycott. And if I’d never seen Peters’ earlier stuff, I probably would’ve liked it a lot more. But it seems like that good-natured ribbing and clever analysis that was once the hallmark of his act is gone.

And Peters not even particularly subversive anymore. The one edgy joke he makes is about Jewish people and Arab people, and that’s not exactly an original joke. It lacks the unexpectedness of his early acts, where his nudging of the status quo was subtle and smart; a joke about Israel/Palestine is not uncommon ground.

Ok Russell. Maybe you are not a Racialicious reader. But if you are listening, I have something to say to you. If you’re not just in it for the money, if you’re really trying to make brilliant comedy, do something new with that tired accent. Those people who loved you solely for the Chinese accent you did? They were missing the pure, buoyant genius of your act. Don’t let them dictate the kind of comic that you are. You’re better than them, and I still believe you can come back.

In your own Chinky-ass words: be a man and do the right thing.

Binary Soul

Guest Contributor — Tue, 17 Mar 2009 16:24:35 +0000

by Guest Contributor John Jihoon Chang

I often feel as though I’m two men living one life. Many of my peers and contemporaries from an immigrant background have learned how to blend their twin heritages, their cultures passed down from their parents and their cultures locally acquired and somehow become a coherent whole. In my case, an Asian American or more specifically, a Corean American. I won’t say this is true for everyone or even most people, but many have navigated this tricky path or perhaps have chosen one culture to adhere closely to in neglect or abandonment of the other.

Growing up, I was one who had never nurtured the Corean in me, rather concentrating on the present reality that I faced as a young person growing up with almost entirely white American peers. There was little value in my Coreanness, especially as it served to distance me from the only society I’d known. It was an inescapable part of my identity, as my genes had mapped my Asian roots upon my face, but it provided little to no advantages in my daily life, rather often distancing me as a “stranger”, though the life I’d known was, outside of food, language and minor household traditions, largely the same as my peers. Nevertheless, the appearance of difference combined with the few elements that my household practiced always seemed to divide, even as each white American household, I found, had different sets of cuisine, traditions and even occasionally the use of language.

As such, I was an all-American type, as it proved the path of least resistance. My sister naively would label me as “whitewashed” or a “banana”, claiming my abandonment of my Corean heritage while she, all the same adopted the similarly American “AZN” identity, one of the Asian American subcultures defined by heavy adoption of urban mainstream American media tied together with that of a mainstream Asian media as well.
Such a moment left me defensive at the time, but to some extent, she was correct.

Back to that later.

After high school, I’d move on to college and discover my Asian American identity. I found myself socializing a lot more with other Asian Americans, built upon the shared experiences of being differentiated from mainstream white America and often (but not always) upon the shared upbringing by immigrant parents. It’s certainly a comfortable place, where those around you don’t expect you to be different and share the same racial angst as you. And it also created a space for a new part of me to grow: the Corean me.

As I came to more fully embrace the Corean in me, I found myself insatiably curious about my heritage, the differences that used to exclude me. I was drawn to the stories of my parents and the history that they had grown up with. Being authoritarians, they weren’t very forthcoming with stories of their own lives prior to their roles as parents and failing to have good relations with them, I turned to the artifacts of their culture; its history, its media and its present state. I found that it all came easily to me, the identity. It was never anything I struggled with, but rather, absorbed it as though it was always a part of me.

And that’s where my sister’s words came in. But, rather than suppressing or abandoning the Corean me, I had just simply ignored it. But it was always a part of me as my parents ingrained the culture deep into me by their own practice of it, even as I myself was rarely a participant. As my typical 20-something identity crisis occurred, this hungry soul within me gobbled up all which it had been deprived and continues to do so to this day.

At the same time, a new thing occurred. You see, my father lives in Corea and to see him, I often have to travel there to visit. The new thing that occurred to me was that I became comfortable there, although initially, I approached the place as any other non-Corean American, the more I drank from the wellspring of my heredity, I found myself more and more understanding of it, to the point of seeming innate. Now, when I walk the streets of Seoul or the gardens of my father’s home province, I feel a strange sense of belonging that I’d perhaps never felt in the United States, a country that accepted me by my birthright, but continues to struggle with me as a true constituent.

But the one thing that failed to happen, is for these two components of myself to synthesize into a whole. As such, I constantly feel like I’m trading my body between two different selves. These days, an American me primarily walks in my shoes. Though some do occasionally question my grasp of English before speaking with me, my tongue speaks the language with ease. I stand in its norms and while I still grapple to be accepted as a member, different from the mainstream as I might be, I’m at ease here, as this nation is the one I’d known the most of my life.

But the other part of me lives all the same. In fact, the Corean me is a very different me. My mindset is different when he comes out. The things that amuse and interest him are different. He’s more respectful, less sly. And I can’t seem to reconcile the two mes. Each feels more comfortable in their respective homes; I’ve become a man whose heart’s been divided by the sea.

I don’t feel whole in Corea. When I’m there, the Corean me lives and breathes and the American me lies dormant. Here, in America, the Corean me is a perpetual foreigner, misunderstood and unaccepted, unable to communicate with society. And so, the whole of me becomes a binary soul, either one or the other, divided but with a solitary presence.

I’m not certain what it will take to incorporate me. I often long for someone else who understands these two separate strands in me. For, while I am Asian American by definition, I’m not entirely comfortable with the moniker, for as much as one of me feels American, another feels Corean. I feel ownership of both, but being incapable of being both simultaneously.

Anyone else out there feel me? That in-betweenness, that binary soul that divides the presence from the present?

A mode-switch that turns you from one person to another, but never the twain meet?

Finding others unable to relate to you completely, since no one understands the other part of you?

I can’t be the only one who dreams in two languages, of two countries, with two hearts, two minds and two souls.

Identity is something that’s always shifting; we grow, we change, and if we look closely enough, we’ll always find something new about ourselves as well as parts of ourselves that have molted away. Have you incorporated? Do you live a binary life? What are your stories?

Losing My Religion

Fatemeh — Tue, 10 Mar 2009 12:00:06 +0000

by Racialicious Special Correspondent Fatemeh Fakhraie. A longer version of this article appears on altmuslimah.

I finally got around to watching AmericanEast this weekend. Full disclosure: I had originally read Tariq Nelson’s review, which was a pretty good rundown.

AmericanEast is an attempt at mainstreaming American Muslims and attempts to portray the struggles Muslims face in the United States. In my opinion, they overdid it and never established a coherent plot. And on top of that, I found that the characters had no depth and some were cartoonish caricatures.

The movie centers on Mustafa, an Egyptian immigrant who owns a café in a heavily Middle Eastern part of Los Angeles. His life, and the lives of several close to him, is one problem or tragedy after another: at one point during the movie, I asked myself whether anything good was ever going to happen to anyone.

Mustafa has a sister, Salwah. Tariq outlines her character:

Salwah Marzouke, Mustafa’s sister, was a nurse that styled hair in the back of her brother’s restaurant and was arranged to marry her cousin Sabir. However she did not like him and they did not get married. But the cousin was never informed (at least not on camera) and the story was dropped. Salwah was also interested in a doctor at her hospital who was not Muslim.

The movie stresses over and over that marrying Salwah off is Mustafa’s duty (or so he believes). Sabir comes from Egypt to marry Salwah and take him back home with her, although she is less than excited (that’s an understatement) about this arrangement. Even though she often fights with her brother, she gives off major submissive, dutiful vibes that plague many female Muslim characters in the form of wide-eyed, helpless stares contrasted with humbly averted eyes and lowered chin.

She is attracted to a white, non-Muslim doctor who works with her at the hospital, and after the arranged marriage “thing” magically goes away, she agrees to let him cook Japanese food for her at his house. They start getting hot and heavy, but Salwah asks him to stop suddenly. She nervously apologizes, stammering that she thought she could “do this” but she can’t, and gives him the whole “it’s not you, it’s me, you wouldn’t understand” before rushing out.

Because Salwah’s character isn’t developed enough for us to know what she’s thinking (did she realize that she’s just not that into him? Did she decide that he was going too fast for her, and maybe she’d like to begin again under different circumstances? Did she think that maybe she should give Sabir a chance? Or maybe she realized she was on her period?), the viewer must fall back on the dutiful vibes and assume that she’s backing out of sex or maybe a relationship with this doctor out of an obligation to culture or religion or tradition, despite the fact that one of her friends stated that Salwah is “no Virgin Mary” earlier in the movie.

Salwah’s inclusion in the movie symbolizes The Great (and imaginary) Conflict between America and the “Muslim World” or a clash between tradition and modernity. The movie sets up these false dichotomies through Salwah, having her arranged marriage illustrate tradition (which is often synonymous with religion) and her career and brief date illustrate “modernity.” The burden of “marrying her off” is a traditional one her brother feels he must carry, although she is not interested in being such a burden. In fact, because Salwah has two jobs and supports Mustafa and his rapidly failing café, it is he who is the burden.

Mustafa also has a daughter. Tariq explains her role in the movie:

Leila Marzouke, was Mustafa’s dope smoking/dawah giving daughter. She had a scene that was like an infomercial in which she is talking about Islam and Middle Eastern history with her friend while smoking marijuana. That seemed to be her only purpose in the movie. Came off as very forced and as if the movie was preaching to the audience.

I definitely agree with Tariq’s analysis of her character, and have serious issues with the cartoony “history/philosophy” lesson about Islam and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. First, having all the Arabs in the movie be portrayed as brown dudes with turbans and huge noses was incredibly off-putting.

Second, condensing an entire region’s millennia of history into a cartoon is mistake enough, but so is leaving out everyone but American, Israeli and Arab players, as if Kurdish Saladin was the only non-Arab/non-Israeli/non-American to make a significant difference in the area’s politics. Whatev.

What irked me the most, however, was when the Crusades were over, and supposedly everyone was cool. The cartoon showed Christian and Muslim man alike at a huge party, complete with camels and I Dream of Jeannie-inspired women ornaments. Camels and bellydancers. Really? Perhaps here’s where I should remind you that this movie is intended to break down stereotypes. I guess that doesn’t extend to racial or sexist ones.

But, as Tariq says, this is the largest reason for Leila’s inclusion in the movie. The other main reason is to get ordered around by her father (“Leila, see what the customer wants”) or serve as a catalyst for escalating troubles for her father (like when she irritates a consistently rude café regular, who then yells at her father).

In fact, women in general seem to be nothing more than props or catalysts in this movie. Murad, an anti-Jewish café regular, uses women to establish a connection with Jewish Sam as they smoke a hookah pipe: “The best sex I ever had was with a Jewish girl and a Muslim girl at the same time. You know how people fight over Jerusalem? That’s how they fought over my dick.”

Classy. And it also helps break down the stereotype that Arabs and Muslims are sexist pigs who have little regard for women. Oh, wait…

Despite the fact that this movie really did bother me long after I saw it, the aim of Hesham Izzawy, the director, was a noble one. The movie, however exaggerated and exclusive of women, does highlight issues and problems that Middle Eastern Americans and Muslim Americans often face in a country whose mainstream gives us “War on Terror” products like 24 and Obsession, which vilify Muslims and Middle Eastern people through flat characterizations of “angry bearded terrorist #1” or “captive veiled woman #5”.

The movie does so while addressing uniquely American issues. Fikri, a café regular, states that all this hatred toward Muslims and Middle Eastern people is because of our newness: “This happened to the Italians, the Irish, the Jewish when they were new here. Now we’re the new ones.” A definitely interesting and relevant historic observation that hints at a brighter future.

Ray Hanania might be a little more rosy on his assessment of the movie and it’s impact than I (the film wasn’t picked up by theaters), but I believe that this movie, written and directed by Arabs and Muslims, and featuring a large Middle Eastern American cast, is part of a larger media movement by Middle Eastern Americans and Muslims designed to mainstream themselves into America’s culture. Television shows, movies, books, and comedy tours featuring Middle Eastern Americans and Muslim Americans are actively working to get their voices heard and represented. Though the waves of immigrants from Ireland and Italy had to wait for generations to be accepted into the mainstream, Middle Eastern and Muslim Americans like Izzawy are refusing to play the same waiting game.

ALO Again: New Lifestyle Magazine More of the Same Old Orientalism

Fatemeh — Fri, 13 Feb 2009 11:00:48 +0000

By Special Correspondent Fatemeh Fakhraie. An expanded version of this piece can be found at Muslimah Media Watch.

Last summer saw the launch of ALO Hayati, “America’s Top Middle Eastern Lifestyle Magazine.” Thanks to a gracious donor, I finally got my hands on a copy of the July 2008 issue.

All lifestyle magazines have an aspirational feel to them, and this one was no different. Chock full of advertisements for Dubai hotels and Swiss watches, ALO wasn’t particularly different than any other lifestyle magazine. Considering the economic situation of magazines, it doesn’t seem like an incredibly auspicious time to launch one aimed at a materialistic lifestyle. I wasn’t able to find any updates about the magazine’s publication on the website, and as far as I’m aware, this is the only edition, though in the magazine they refer to an earlier issue in some places.

As someone who enjoys a good glossy every now and then, I delighted over advertisements with Kim Kardashian, and interview with exclusive designer Bijan, and a fluffy piece on intercultural relationships (though I did not care for the cover teaser: “Shocking Intercultural Stories”).

The magazine featured an interview with Leila Ahmed, which was a great one, likening the current western media representation of Muslim women to the same patronizing Orientalism that played out in the first wave of colonialism in Middle East. Her interview shed lots of light on the history and future of the headscarf. Despite the educational qualities of her interview, I kept thinking, “Who is this educating?”

While not every Middle Eastern person is going to be familiar with the history behind the headscarf, it seems sort of odd to have an educational feature about hijab in a magazine aimed at a demographic that has a fairly lengthy history with headscarves, even if many of them aren’t Muslim. Something about this piece tugged at me. It almost felt as if it was aimed at people who were not Middle Eastern.

Other pieces confirmed my suspicions. A photography section, entitled “Faraway Faces” (cue Aladdin soundtrack!), featured lots of “natives.” Lots of women wrapped up with only their eyes showing, lots of traditional attire, wizened old men, and even a camel. And the website isn’t any better. There are tons of shots of women wrapped up to look mysterious in glammy scarves (one such example is pictured at left).

This wasn’t even the worst part. This issue featured a special section on weddings, complete with all the typical wedding stuff (dresses, rings, honeymoon destinations). But it also contained coverage of an actual wedding. Neither the bride nor groom had Middle Eastern heritage. I assume that if they had, the magazine would have mentioned it, because otherwise, why would they be in a magazine about Middle Eastern lifestyles?

Because their wedding was entirely Ancient Egyptian themed.

(sigh)

Now, I don’t want to go dogging anyone’s special day. I know people who’ve had themed weddings of other time periods. And I can even dig that they have a lot of interest in Ancient Egypt (when I was in sixth grade, I would devour anything and everything related to the time period. It was interesting.)

But this? In a Middle Eastern lifestyle magazine? I mean, they did their homework and everything (the article mentions that the bride wore custom-made accoutrements modeled on those of ancient Egyptian queens), but the cake was in the shape of a step pyramid. Come on. It’s like attempting to have a traditional Mexican wedding with a cake in the shape of a sombrero. It just plays up the stereotypes that they’re (hopefully) trying to avoid.

The article conjured up not only some major Orientalist vibes, but reminded me of a similar craze in the Gulf: Arab brides dressing up in saris for their wedding celebrations. The dynamic is further complicated by the fact that many of them have South Asian maids, lots of whom aren’t treated well. It’s called cultural appropriation, people.

Fuckery aside, I did like a lot of the articles in the magazine. They profile not only legendary designer Bijan, but also civil rights activist and author Jack Shaheen. They interview not only Jordanian princess Sumaya bint El Hassan, but also Lebanese chef Viviane Chamieh.

I like the aim of the magazine: peace, regional association (despite the region being an ambiguous Western-defined term), and intercultural and interfaith collaboration. I liked the emphasis on “Middle Eastern” rather than religion or lineage (profiling those who are both born/raised in the Middle East as well as those born in the U.S. with Middle Eastern heritage on either side of their family). I liked a piece on double standards when it comes to sex that I found on the website (yes, admittedly fluffy, but we already covered that). I liked the fact that the wedding section had designs by Middle Eastern designers (more of that, please! There are plenty of them!). I liked that ALO uses Middle Eastern Americans as their cover models. So I really wanted to like this magazine as a whole.

If ALO can cut down on the exoticizing and play up the actual Middle Eastern angle of things (wouldn’t hurt to incorporate more Middle Eastern writers on staff, would it? Or cover things actually happening in Middle Eastern countries rather than covering countries themselves as tour destinations? And profiling more Middle Eastern Americans, like you did in your interview with director Mark David?), it can fully live up to its name.

Andy Garcia: “I’m Not A Latino Actor.”

Guest Contributor — Wed, 11 Feb 2009 13:00:37 +0000

by Guest Contributor Alex Alvarez, originally published at Guanabee

In a press conference for his latest movie, The Pink Panther 2 (Why, God, why?!), Andy Garcia was quoted as saying, “I’m not a Latino actor, sincerely.” And, well. We think he has a point!

At the press conference, Andy said that, while he is known for being immensely proud of his Cuban heritage, he has tried (unsuccessfully, perhaps) to shed the label of “Latino” from being tacked in front of “Actor Andy Garcia.” He explains:

Everyone knows that I love my culture and that I’m Cuban, but I don’t consider myself a Latino actor, nor do I want other to classify me in that way. All actors should be classified in the same manner.
Dustin Hoffman isn’t described as “Jewish, American” actor. I don’t think heritage has anything to do with acting ability; in reality, we’ll all actors. In my case, I happen to be actor who is American with a Cuban heritage that’s given me a certain sensibility and point of view that maybe others might not have.

Andy also went on to address one of the stereotypes of Latino actors that we most love to loathe:

It’s possible that I’m thought of this way, but I’ve never accepted a script where I’ve had to play the “Latin Lover.” I’m not interested in that type of film.

Personally, we tend to agree with Andy. While we can totally see the importance of choosing to classify oneself as a “Latino ____” in order to open doors for others in a particular industry that might not be especially welcoming or accepting, we have to wonder at what point does one stop being considered an ethnicity – or a race, or a gender, or a political party, or a religion, or a sexual orientation – and start becoming a multi-dimensional, complex human being that simply happens to belong to a number of different groups.

Andy’s point about being offered – and then rejecting – certain stereotypical roles also touches upon the idea that marketing oneself as one’s ethnicity might come with certain expectations: Latino writers being expected to always write on or be inherently interested in “Latino issues,” Latino musicians being expected to play salsa or bachata or… reggaeton.

Self-identifying as Latino does not necessarily equate to being, for lack of a better term, “a professional Latino.” Then again, when so-called Latino actors like Andy Garcia continue to take on roles that undermine stereotypes or preconceived notions of what a Latino actor’s career must look like, they can work to change public perception of what Latinos are expected to do and be.

What do you all think?

Disability & Music

Guest Contributor — Thu, 15 Jan 2009 10:00:55 +0000

by Guest Contributor Bianca I. Laureano

I can’t remember where I was or whom I was with when I heard and realized that we are all temporarily able-bodied. I’m sure it was this decade, perhaps 2003, because I really had not thought about my privilege as an able-bodied person until I began my graduate work and met Angel, a woman in my cohort who was focusing on women of Color with disabilities. I also didn’t think about it until I lost one of my abilities.

Being trained as a scholar specializing in intersectional theory and thought, disability was a “difference” rarely mentioned and discussed unless Angel brought it up. We can see the continued absence and exclusion of people with disabilities in popular culture. Yet, if they are present, we mostly see how people with disabilities are considered anything but “normal,” and usually there is a level of wanting to find a “cure” to become “normal.”

What would images that view disability as a social construction look like? How can those of us who are educators incorporate discussions of disability into our teaching? Where are resources for us? How can we use popular culture when we teach about disability?

In response to these questions, my small cohort of friends and scholars working within an intersectional framework started to share resources. I’ve spoken with Angel about the song “Blind Mary” by Gnarls Barkley and how there are positive aspects of the song and some problematic areas, yet it is one of the better teaching tools involving music we have to show how disability is a social construction.

Last week Angel shared two YouTube videos with us that focused on disability in Zimbabwe and Lebanon. Her friend who runs the website Krip Hop Nation where you can find information about hip-hop artists with disabilities around the world, shared with her these videos. The videos center respect and acceptance of all bodies and the messages in the videos are powerful.

The first clip is part of a documentary in progress about an Afro-fusion band from Zimbabwe named Liyana. The documentary’s working title is “iThemba: My Hope,” directed by Roger Ross Williams. Liyana are touring in the United States and their full touring schedule can be viewed here. Unfortunately, this film does not have full translation. Here is a clip from the film called Liyana: The Band.

The second film is a music video directed by Rania Rafei and is part of the Sprout Touring Film Festival which focuses on films about developmental disabilities.

This video is called Difference Is Normal, which uses hip hop to share the collective testimonies of youth in the Arab world. There is a discussion of the youth led filming and writing of lyrics for the film at the Sprout Touring Film Festival site. Today, their work has expanded as war has lead to more people living with disabilities. The video includes English translation.

How do you see these films being utilized to expand our understanding of difference? In what ways can we implement an intersectional framework to discuss able-bodied privilege through popular culture?

Perception Through the Lens of Slumdog Millionaire

Guest Contributor — Wed, 14 Jan 2009 14:00:20 +0000

by Guest Contibutor Sulagna

First, I have to say that this isn’t a critique.

It’s a serious of observations, an analysis of my viewing, and a reflection on one of the warmest and most electrifying movies I’ve seen in a while. Slumdog Millionaire wasn’t perfect, but I know that after I saw it, I felt incredible. I had already known I would like it before I had gone in, because it fit the type I liked—the interesting premise, the quirky storytelling device, and, of course, the overall familiarity of the subject matter, but it defied my expectations. The hopeful, love-themed story was at Bollywood levels of intensity (though better made), and I easily identified with the setting and characters.

Here is where I realized that I saw this movie differently than how perhaps my non-Indian college friends at college did. I saw layers underneath certain scenes in the movie that I doubt they would’ve.

When Jamal answered the question about the Hindu god Rama, I predicted the clash of religion. As the pulsing beat of the music and the main character’s mother’s anxious face forecasted the riots, frustrated emotions burst in my chest, the fatigue of the age-long conflict between Muslims and Hindus in India and Pakistan pressing me with its weight.

Wasn’t it just a little more than a month ago that my family and I had watched the news about Mumbai on fire during our Thanksgiving holiday? I had felt uncomfortably separated from it—India felt so far away, but I still felt a scrambling anxiety at the events, nervous about what this changed.

Pakistan used to be part of India. When the British set up arbitrary lines dividing the country, these lines were religious as well. After the Partition, there were violent riots between the Hindus and Muslims in both countries and along the border. This history deeply affects relations between the countries today. What followed the Mumbai terrorist attacks indicated the changes that it would have: tensions between Pakistan and India rose, and the idea of “conflict” frightened me, when I allowed myself to think about it.

The scene of the Hindu extremists yelling with their weapons and the scurrying Muslim children were very easy reminders of these past events and facts.

And then there was Maman’s gang of children, trained (against their will or knowledge) to become expert sympathy seeking beggars. My mouth went dry as I felt a cavalcade of anguish inside. I had seen these children in the street when I would visit India, imploring me for a rupee, because as their belly-rubbing and palms pressed together suggested to my non-Hindi speaking self, they were poor and hungry—unlike me. There were so many of them too; crowding around us as we walked down the street, squished together and crouching across from the idols in temples, patting and pulling our clothes when traffic stopped. Their presence and suffering in the movie gave me guilt—it almost felt like my fault, because I knew this sort of thing happened, and these kids existed, but I hadn’t done anything to help them.
With this tumult of emotions, I came to a realization: most of the other people who would see this movie wouldn’t feel so much, or as deeply, as I did. They would view this scene with a certain amount of distance that I couldn’t have, because of the knowledge that I possessed.
The guilt went deeper—that I couldn’t just feel sympathetic to the characters and wonder at their predicament; instead I saw them in a different perspective, examining the world that director Danny Boyle presented through a filter of my own experience.

If this story had been set somewhere else, I would’ve just felt the usual consideration in the characters and the interest in the culture. But it was set in India, infusing the story with that which was permanently ingrained in me. My view was set to a certain slant of light that I couldn’t stop myself from seeing.

But as I ruminated on this idea, I wondered if this difference was actually a bad thing. My study of media in college had revealed the idea of “active audiences,” where certain people would see media in different ways, creating their own impressions and making their own conclusions. Everyone had their own special filter through which they viewed the world, and this film; it was a lens built from their own experience and personality and mind process, and it wasn’t the wrong way of seeing, just a different one.

However, there are ways to analyze this type of differences in perception. With these “active audiences,” there are three basic ways that people can take in certain types of media.
First, there is the preferred and usually dominant position, which is how the producer of that certain type of media wants you to absorb the media. Most people recognize Danny Boyle’s vision as one of a fiercely hopeful movie that would be uplifting and beautiful, which is evidenced by its critical acclaim and box office status.

Then there is the viewpoint of the opposite side, the oppositional position, which sees the movie in the opposite respect that Danny Boyle had in mind. They might find the movie to be a mere “feel-good” movie without any real value in its story or construction. There are also others who see that Boyle’s incorrect depiction of India is one of extreme poverty and corruption. Some of these people may even go as far as saying it “ennobles [this] poverty”, as Owen Gleiberman does in his Entertainment Weekly review of the movie, because it “turns the horror of broken Indian childhoods into a whooshingly blithe, in-your-face picaresque.”

Then there is the third type, the negotiated position, where the interpretation is independent of the producer’s intent. I didn’t need to be influenced into feeling for the characters or properly informed of Jamal’s life hardships and sufferings. I already identified with the people onscreen because of their familiarity and the background they shared with me, even with the multitude of differences between us, and I recognized the hardships as problems my parents would discuss with other family members or ones I would witness when I visited India.

And then there were the cultural additions that Boyle added to the film that were more than pieces of artistry and added more than worldliness for me—I knew them. Little things would make me smile, like the way I sometimes didn’t even need the subtitles (though my Hindi is still hazy), and how the main characters exclaimed over famous actor Amitabh Bachchan (and how Salim’s character mirrored the “Angry Young Man” archetype the actor always played in his youth), and the wondrous music composed by the much loved and well known AR Rahman, especially the usage of Sonu Nigam’s “Aaj ki Raat” and the earnest Bollywood-like dance sequence at the end.

I also realized that I would always hold this “negotiated” position in my view of any media that referenced India and its culture. There was an everlasting connection between us, not just because of my family, but also because I felt a certain amount of responsibility to it, having visited India constantly and seen its separate existence outside of the usual American perspective, but grown up here with that said perspective.

Similarly, every one of us sees the world through their own lens; mine is just markedly unique in this instance because of the different and distinctly Indian American experiences that affect it, and the importance these experiences play in viewing this type of media.

Multiple Narratives and Contestations Over the Righteous Struggle

Guest Contributor — Tue, 13 Jan 2009 10:00:11 +0000

by Guest Contributor Margari Aziza Hill, originally published at Just Another Angry Black Muslim Woman*?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sources:

Islam 101

The Mosque in America: A National Portrait

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

Mixed Messages: On Bi-Racial Siblings

Fatemeh — Tue, 23 Dec 2008 16:01:57 +0000

by Special Correspondent Fatemah Fakhraie

My brother likes to push my buttons. When I bring up women’s issues, he tells me to get back to the kitchen. When I bring up Iranian culture, he cracks jokes in a fakey Middle Eastern accent.

I love him anyway.

We’re pretty close. We look alike, family members often confuse our voices on the phone, and we crack jokes to keep each other entertained when things get tense or boring. I feel very blessed to have him, and to have the relationship that we do.

Since high school, I have been striving to reconnect with my Iranian and Muslim identities; he hasn’t shown the same inclination. This isn’t to say that he’s remained the same person since high school: he and his interests have developed and evolved, but they have not done so in a direction that seeks to connect with this half of his ethnic identity. He is just as Iranian as I am in his biological makeup, but his identification doesn’t mirror mine.

When we talk about where our lives are going and what we aspire to, he shows astonishment at my life. “You’re not where I thought you’d be,” he says with an incredulous tone that belies some sort of disappointment. “I always envisioned you somewhere else.”

Which always confuses me. Where else am I supposed to be? Yes, I slowly extinguished my lifelong dream of becoming a fashion designer (stop giggling!), but I don’t feel like I drastically changed who I was when I set new professional goals for myself. “I always pictured you in pantsuits, very professional,” he confessed.

“What the hell?” I thought to myself. “I have a closet full of pantsuit separates! That is who I am!”

I realized that it wasn’t I who had changed; it was his perception of me. Since openly constructing and defining myself under the labels of “Iranian” and “Muslim,” those were the only things my brother seemed to see, which is why I felt so puzzling, so foreign to him. And, indeed, those were the things he always expressed so much confusion about and argued with me about the most.

“You’re the one that got all the ‘culture,’” he says to me. So that’s it, then: I’m the Iranian one and he’s the “white” one. He feels it, too. Since I was the one who shows the most effort in “being” Iranian, I am the Iranian one. His lack of interest seems to automatically make him unmarked as Iranian, or “white.” (For the purpose of this essay, I’m setting aside the idea that many Middle Eastern people define themselves as white).

The idea that one child is more inclined to a certain ethnic identity and the other is less so interests me. Do any bi- or multi-racial readers find this to be true in their familial relationships? How would this idea play out among several children instead of just two?

As for my brother and I: though we’ve both felt that we occupied different (but somehow complementary) ethnic identities for quite some time, the realization that my ethnic and religious identities have served as an obstacle for my brother is new.

Since it’s the ethnic and religious identities that he gets stuck on, I worry that his perception of these identities (and thus me) is clouded by stereotypes and inaccuracies. I’m not really sure where to go from here. How do you normalize yourself to your own blood?

Nappy love: Or how I learned to stop worrying and embrace the kinks

Guest Contributor — Wed, 17 Dec 2008 10:00:02 +0000

by Guest Contributor Tami, originally published on What Tami Said*

My hair is nappy. It is coarse and thick. It grows in pencil-sized spirals and tiny crinkles. My hair grows out, not down. It springs from my head like a corona. My hair is like wool. You can’t run your fingers through it, nor a comb. It is impenetrable. My hair is rebellious. It resists being smoothed into a neat bun or pony tail. It puffs. Strands escape; they won’t be tamed. My hair is nappy. And I love it.

Growing up, I learned to covet silky, straight hair; “bouncing and behaving” hair; Cheryl Tiegs and Christie Brinkley hair. But as a young black girl, my appearance was far from the American ideal. Making my hair behave meant hours wriggling between my grandmother’s knees as she manipulated a hot comb through my thick, kinky mane. The process stretched my tight curls into hair I could toss and run my fingers through, something closer to the “white girl hair” that so many black girls admired and longed to possess.

My beautiful, straightened hair came at a price. It meant ears burned by slipped hot combs and scars from harsh chemicals. It meant avoiding active play and swimming pools, lest dreaded moisture make my hair “go back.” It meant having a relaxer eat away at the back of my long hair until barely an inch was left. It meant subtly learning that my natural physical attributes were unacceptable.

I was not alone in my pathology. Pressing combs, relaxers, weaves and the quest to hide the naps are part of the fabric of black beauty culture. It is estimated that more than 75 percent of black women straighten their hair. In the book “Hair Story: Untangling the Roots of Black Hair in America,” Ayanna Byrd and Lori Tharps write: “Before a black child is even born, relatives speculate over the texture of hair that will cover the baby’s head, and the loaded adjectives “good” and “bad” are already in the air.” In the same book, a New York City dancer named Joicelyn explains: “Good hair is that silky black shit that them Indian girls be havin’…Good hair is anything that’s not crazy-ass woolly, lookin’ like some pickaninny out the bush.” Too often, black women find their hair hatred supported by media, men and the rest of the mainstream.

Cultural and professional pressures kept me relaxing my curls for 20 years. In the late 90s, the neo-soul movement caught fire in R&B. Young, bohemian singers like Jill Scott, Erykah Badu and India Arie were rocking stylish natural looks, and I began seeing more natural heads strutting down Michigan Ave. in Chicago, where I lived. Two of my close friends took the plunge, shearing their permed hair to start anew. Suddenly natural black hair was fashionable—at least for a small group of people.

Seeing more women, however few, freed from the tyranny of constant straightening, inspired me. I began poring over books about the care and politics of black hair. I became a member of a popular Web site devoted to championing natural hair. I learned about the toxic ingredients in chemical relaxers and the lasting damage they do. I discovered the origins of negative myths about black hair. I learned how to properly care for natural locks and discovered the myriad styles that can be achieved. I met women of all ages who embraced “nappy” as a positive description. And I slowly came to realize the inherent foolishness of believing black women’s hair, apart from that of all other races, needs to be fixed—pressed, weaved and manipulated into something it isn’t.

In August 2006, after years spent admiring the growing number of nappy heads around me; fretting whether my husband would still find me attractive; worrying whether my unruly ‘fro would frighten my co-workers; I chopped my near shoulder-length hair off, leaving barely an inch of kinky curls. I was free!

Going natural was one of the best things I have done. And while I respect the right for all women to make decisions about their appearance and personal care, no one proselytizes like the converted. Now that I have had my follicular epiphany, It dismays me that most black women choose to obsessively hide their true nature from the cradle to the grave. Earlier this year, a fellow blogger very smartly observed that black women may be the only race of women who live their whole lives never knowing what their real hair looks and feels like. Think about that.

And think about the many things that some black women deny themselves to keep their hair fried, dyed and laid to the side. We will avoid working out, vigorous sex and a good night’s sleep. We will devote entire Saturdays to the hair salon and spend our last dime to ensure roots are touched up every six weeks. We will weave “better” hair from women of other races into our hair. Few of us can even successfully care for our natural hair, as much of what we’ve been taught involves minimizing our hair’s natural qualities, not working with them.

You may say “it’s just hair” or merely “preference.” But surely it means something when the vast majority of women of a certain race “prefer” to mask physical characteristics associated with their ethnicity. The doll test, oft-mentioned in anti-racist circles, revealed black children’s preference for white dolls with European features. There is a clue here. Societal norms don’t stop influencing us just because we’re too old to play with dolls. It pays to examine your preferences.

Today, my preference is for a natural me.

My hair is nappy. It is soft and cottony, a mass of varying textures. My hair is fun to play with. I like to pull at the spiral curls and feel them snap back into place. My hair defies the laws of gravity. It reaches energetically toward the sky. My hair is unique. In a fashion culture that genuflects to relaxed, flat-ironed tresses and stick-straight weaves, my fluffy, puffy, kinky mane stands out. It is revolutionary. My hair is natural. It is the way God made it. My hair is nappy. And it is beautiful.

*Please note, the essay presented here is an updated version of what originally appeared.

Comprehensive new report on chinese americans

Guest Contributor — Thu, 11 Dec 2008 17:00:40 +0000

by Guest Contributor Angry Asian Man, originally published at Angry Asian Man

In November, the University of Maryland’s Asian American Studies Program, with support from OCA, released a major new study on Chinese Americans in the United States. Based on extensive U.S. Census data and independent interviews, A Portrait of Chinese Americans offers the most comprehensive and current portrait of the country’s diverse Chinese American population: Major Study of Chinese Americans Debunks ‘Model Minority’ Myth.

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

The study also found that the Chinese American community is characterized by extreme diversity. It’s split nearly 50-50 between poorly educated recent immigrants from China and a more settled, acculturated, educated and prosperous group of older immigrants and second generation Americans. These earlier arrivals came mainly from Taiwan and Hong Kong.

Among the study’s other significant findings about Chinese Americans:

Fastest Growing Immigrant Group:

Largest Asian Ethnic Group: Chinese Americans represent the largest ethnic group among Asian Americans (about 25 percent).

Higher Education Clustering: Chinese Americans cluster in a small number of colleges and universities (about 85 percent of Chinese Americans who go to college cluster at only three percent of all higher education institutions).

High Levels of Higher Education: Twice as many Chinese American adults have college degrees than the general population.

Lacking High School Education: Conversely, recently arrived Chinese Americans represent the largest number of U.S. adults without the equivalent of a high school education.

Occupations: Chinese Americans are more heavily represented in professional and managerial occupations than the general population (53 percent vs. 34 percent).

Industries: Chinese Americans cluster in industries associated with health care, food services, manufacturing and professional/scientific fields.

Pay Equity: Chinese American men earn less in salaries than majority Whites for the same level of education.

Geographic Clustering: 60 percent of all Chinese Americans live in a handful of cities, beginning with New York City, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Chicago, Philadelphia, as well as the Washington, D.C. metropolitan area, the Boston metro area and the Dallas metro area.

Suburban Migration: In the past 20 years, Chinese Americans have settled increasingly away from traditional ethnic enclaves characterized as Chinatowns. Many of the more affluent Chinese Americans now reside in suburban communities commonly known as “ethnoburbs” or mixed “Asiatowns.”

Citizenship: Three out of four Chinese Americans are U.S. citizens and exhibit very high rates of naturalization. However, this is less true among the recent immigrants who have been slower to seek citizenship.

Multiethnic/Multiracial: One in ten Chinese Americans are multiethnic and/or multiracial.

Divorce: Once they marry, Chinese Americans tend to stay married – with a divorce rate less than half that of the general population (4.4 percent vs. 10 percent).

The full text of A Portrait of Chinese Americans (including a brief executive summary and conclusions) is available as a downloadable PDF here.

By the way, the Asian American Studies Program at the University of Maryland is one of six universities to receive the Asian American Pacific Islander Serving Institution (AANAPISI) grant that was awarded by the U.S. Department of Education for $2.5 million dollars for two years. That’s a pretty huge deal: UM Becomes U.S. ‘Minority-Serving Institution’ for Asian Americans.