A short documentary on Better Luck Tomorrow and Finishing the Game

For those of you who don't know, I really like Better Luck Tomorrow. And Justin Lin's new movie is coming out in New York next week. The documentary has three parts. Watch the first one here.

Jena 6

Pretty much anything I'm thinking has already been said. If you're around the same blogosphere that I'm in, you've probably heard the details. If you haven't heard about it, Vox has a nice summary and some nice editorial as well. She's also got links to petitions that you can sign. Here and letters you can send to the Louisiana governor here.

I'm glad things are finally moving in the right direction, and people are noticing and paying attention. However, I almost don't want to identify too strongly because there's still so much possibility for this all to go back down the toilet where it was headed before. Still, do your part.

Oh Facebook

Apparently some idiots made an Anti-Asian Facebook group. Angry Asian Man as usual has a nice group of links covering the story.

I think most people will agree that this is quite fucked up. (If you're not willing to admit this, I'm quite willing to come to your home and beat you over the head with a hardcover copy of Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell.)

Why is it that when something goes wrong in America, we always blame the "foreigners"?

Paprika

I saw this movie a couple weeks ago, and I still can't get it out of my head. However, I don't know if it's clear enough in my mind to really think about it yet. So here are the opening credits for your enjoyment instead.

An article on socioeconomic based Affirmative Action

Schools Diversity Based on Income Segregates Some
By JONATHAN D. GLATER and ALAN FINDER
The New York Times
Published: July 15, 2007

SAN FRANCISCO — When San Francisco started trying to promote
socioeconomic diversity in its public schools, officials hoped racial
diversity would result as well.

It has not worked out that way.

Abraham Lincoln High School, for example, with its stellar reputation
and Advanced Placement courses, has drawn a mix of rich and poor
students. More than 50 percent of those students are of Chinese
descent.

"If you look at diversity based on race, the school hasn't been as
integrated," Lincoln's principal, Ronald J. K. Pang, said. "If you
don't look at race, the school has become much more diverse."

San Francisco began considering factors like family income, instead
of race, in school assignments when it modified a court-ordered
desegregation plan in response to a lawsuit. But school officials
have found that the 55,000-student city school district, with Chinese
the dominant ethnic group followed by Hispanics, blacks and whites,
is resegregrating.

The number of schools where students of a single racial or ethnic
group make up 60 percent or more of the population in at least one
grade is increasing sharply. In 2005-06, about 50 schools were
segregated using that standard as measured by a court-appointed
monitor. That was up from 30 schools in the 2001-02 school year, the
year before the change, according to court filings.

The San Francisco experience is telling because after the recent
United States Supreme Court decision restricting the use of race-
based school assignment plans, many districts are expected to switch
to economic integration plans like San Francisco's as a legal way to
seek diversity. As many as 40 districts around the country are
already experimenting with such plans, according to an analysis by
Richard D. Kahlenberg of the Century Foundation, a nonpartisan public
policy research group.

Many of these experiments are modest, involve small districts or have
been in place only a few years. But the experiences of these
districts show how difficult it can be to balance socioeconomic
diversity, racial integration and academic success.

Only a few plans appear to have achieved all three goals. Others
promote income diversity but not racial integration while still other
plans are limited and their results inconclusive. Those who have
studied them say a key to that outcome is how aggressively a plan
shifts students around and whether there are many schools that can
lure middle-class students from their neighborhoods into poor ones.

"Systemwide programs are more effective than piecemeal programs,"
said Mr. Kahlenberg, who has studied plans like these.

The purpose of such programs is twofold. Since income levels often
correlate with race they can be an alternate and legal way to produce
racial integration. They also promote achievement gains by putting
poorer students in schools that are more likely to have experienced
teachers and students with high aspirations, as well as a parent body
that can afford to be more involved.

"There is a large body of evidence going back several years," Mr.
Kahlenberg said, "that probably the most important thing you can do
to raise the achievement of low-income students is to provide them
with middle-class schools."

Economic integration initiatives differ from each other, and from
many traditional integration efforts that relied on mandatory
transfer of students among schools. Some of the new initiatives
involve busing but some do not; some rely on student choice, while
some also use a lottery. And so it is difficult to measure how far
students travel or how many students switch schools.

The most ambitious effort and the example most often cited as a
success is in the city of Raleigh, N.C., and its suburbs.

For seven years the district has sought to cap the proportion of low-
income students in each of the county's 143 schools at 40 percent.

To achieve a balance of low- and middle-income children, the district
encourages and sometimes requires students to attend schools far from
home. Suburban students are attracted to magnet schools in the city;
children from the inner city are sometimes bused to middle-class
schools at the outer edges of Raleigh and in the suburbs.

The achievement gains have been sharp, and school officials said
economic integration was largely responsible. Only 40 percent of
black students in grades three through eight in Wake County, where
Raleigh is located, scored at grade level on state reading tests in
1995. By the spring of 2006, 82 percent did.

"The plan works well," said John H. Gilbert, a professor emeritus at
North Carolina State University in Raleigh who served for 16 years on
the county school board and voted for the plan. "It's based on sound
assumptions about the environment in which children learn."

The Charlotte-Mecklenburg school district, North Carolina's largest,
has also tried an economic integration plan, but with less success.

Students were once assigned to schools in Charlotte and its suburbs
based in part on achieving racial balance, but that system was struck
down in federal appeals court in 2001.

The school board then created an assignment plan based on income and
choice; a low-income student could transfer to a middle-class school
if he came from a high-poverty, low-performing school. But such
transfers could occur only if there was room, and there seldom
was. "There are not a whole lot of seats available and so there is
not a lot of choice available," said Scott McCully, the district's
executive director of planning and student placement.

Within several years, said Roslyn Arlin Mickelson, professor of
sociology at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, "the
schools became markedly more segregated."

In the smaller school system in Cambridge, Mass., children apply to
the city's 12 elementary schools and socioeconomic status is an
important factor in ultimate assignments. The system has been phased
in gradually since the fall of 2002.

Last year, 75.8 percent of Cambridge's low-income third graders were
judged to be progressing toward reading proficiency. That was higher
than the statewide average for low-income students, 71.3 percent, and
better than the rate in more than a dozen other cities in the state.

Other districts have not seen such results. One district in San Jose,
Calif., switched to using family and neighborhood income instead of
race for assignments two years ago, giving a preference to students
in low-income areas who try to transfer to schools in higher income
areas, and vice versa.

But in the first year, the number of students switching schools
declined significantly and has only begun to recover in the last
year.

San Francisco had been under a court order to desegregate for more
than 20 years, with no school allowed to have a majority of students
from one racial or ethnic group. But after Chinese-American parents
whose children were kept out of certain elite schools sued, the
district switched in 2002-03 to a plan that sought socioeconomic
diversity.

Students apply to the schools they want to attend, and the district
uses a "diversity index" for assignments when a school is
oversubscribed. The index considers the language spoken at home,
whether a child qualifies for free lunch or is in public housing, a
child's academic performance and the quality of a child's prior
schools. But it has not resulted in racial integration.

"We were hopeful that the diversity index would work," said Stuart
Biegel, a law professor at the University of California, Los Angeles,
who was the district's court-appointed monitor. "No one was rooting
against it. But it didn't work."

Officials say one problem is that many students apply to neighborhood
schools, which do not recruit enough students from outside their
area. Another problem is demographics. Mr. Biegel said public school
students in San Francisco were relatively low income over all,
whatever their race or ethnicity, so the diversity index produced
less mixing than hoped.

The wide ethnic diversity in San Francisco's schools, which are about
one-third Chinese, also introduces calculations among parents that
make it easier to get income diversity without racial or ethnic
diversity.

At Willie L. Brown Jr. College Preparatory Academy, a fourth- through
sixth-grade school in the predominantly black neighborhood of
Bayview, 75 percent of the students are black. Most are poor.

Tareyton D. Russ, the principal, said students from other
neighborhoods did not seek to go there so the diversity index did not
even apply. "Poor Chinese kids don't want to go to school with poor
black kids," Mr. Russ said flatly.

Conversely, one white parent interviewed as she dropped her child off
at summer school said some white parents avoided schools with a heavy
Chinese concentration, like Lincoln, believing they would be too high-
pressure for their children. She declined to be quoted by name.

David Campos, the general counsel to the school district, said the
resegregation was so disappointing that the school board might try to
test whether Justice Anthony M. Kennedy's opinion in the recent
Supreme Court case left open the possibility of using race if other
methods of integration fail.

"We stopped using race at some point," Mr. Campos said. "And then for
a number of years we have tried to use a number of race-neutral
factors to achieve racial diversity, which methods haven't worked.
Should the board decide to use race, and they may or may not, we are
a very good test case."

The article, which it itself admits, is not offering definitive conclusions on whether socioeconomic based affirmative action is less successful in terms of race as the old system of race based affirmative action. Perhaps it's just too soon for that. However, I found it interesting to see the remark that low income Chinese parents don't want their kids to go to school with low income black kids, white people of unspecified economic background don't want their children to go to school with Chinese kids.
Ironically even though they're trying to deny that race should be a major factor in influencing the school's decisions, it's still clearly influencing the decisions of the parents.

Jena Six Petition

There's a petition you can sign for the Jena Six. You should do it.

If you haven't been following the Jena case, here's a good set of links.

Just so Everyone Knows the Score

http://www.falloutcentral.com/news/2007/05/22/editorial-coverage-of-
queens-hate-crime-sentencing/

The trial of the second defendant in a Queens, N.Y., bias attack has
come to a close, but news outlets are showing some bias of their own
in their reports on the sentencing.

Paul Heavey, 21, got off with five years of probation and 75 hours
of community service for the attack in the Douglaston neighborhood
last August. He and 19-year-old Kevin Brown rammed a car carrying
four Chinese American teens and then beat two of the occupants when
they got out to check the damage, at one point using a metal wheel
lock that victim Reynold Liang had taken up in self-defense. All
throughout, the two shouted racial slurs like "stupid gook" and
statements like "get out of our neighborhood." (In March, Brown was
sentenced to three and a half years in prison for his role.)

As part of his sentence, Heavey was required to make an apology,
which we would guess is a standard, token gesture for a trial like
this. But an overwhelming number of news sources are giving undue
weight to Heavey's words, as you can see in these headlines by New
York-area outlets:

"Student apologizes for racial attack": Newsday
"Student Offers Apology For Queens Hate Crime On Asians": WNBC
"Little Neck man apologizes for Doug hate attack": Times Ledger

These headlines gloss over the lightness of the sentence and seem to
imply that Heavey exonerated himself with his apology, as if that's
all the victims could have hoped for or deserved. And they overlook
that the apology was mandatory. Seriously, how sincere could the
statement have been, under the circumstances? At the very least, it
wasn't "offered," as WNBC put it.

Also, check out this header that a few outlets, including the
globally distributed International Herald Tribune, are carrying:

"College student offers apology for hate crime on Asians"

Again with the offering. And is that his designation, "college
student"? That almost makes you think Heavey was wearing a cardigan
and carrying an armload of books when he decided to attack the teens.

Maybe these news outlets think rehabilitation starts with the
reporting.

The New York Post, on the other hand, prefers to see Heavey's story
as it is:

"NO PRISON FOR QUEENS BIAS BEATER"

http://www.nypost.com/seven/05222007/news/regionalnews/no_prison_for_
queens_bias_beater_regionalnews_ikimulisa_livingston.htm

So just so we're clear, you can either get 5 years of probation and have to apologize to "the Asian American community" (or do 3.5 years in prison, which is marginally worse), for beating 4 Asian Americans with a wheel lock and calling them "gooks". However, you can go to prison for 8 years for selling Coca Cola's secrets to Pepsi.

God, I demand a do-over.

Chinese Exclusion Act 2

I should be angry, instead I'm just sort of sad. Because this thing's really going to pass, I think. If we look at history, it'll tell us as much. The economy's bad, jobs are scarce. And rather than blame the corrupt, incompetent government who's responsible, we blame the swarthy folk, who are "taking our jobs" and doing them, I might add, better than us as well. but I don't know, American immigration has become ore and more weighted towards highly educated professionals, and the HB1 Visa, which looks and smells like a guest worker program to me.

Perhaps the whole "not allowed to bring families" part of the "reform" stings, since my family actually was subject to this over one hundred years ago. And it did split up our family. And we were lucky, because we were Japanese, most other people, Chinese and Filipinos particularly, had it even worse. And you know, I'm not a really big believer in America. In fact, most days, I really hate America. But I guess deep down, I never thought we would do something like this again. Well, I'm clearly a sucker. And America has never been very kind to the suckers of the world.

But then the cynical part of me says, well, America was built as a plantation. America has become powerful, not by being dedicated to freedom as we say, but on the backs of those swarthier than they. And perhaps it is only through a hell of a lot of luck that some of the descendants of those swarthier than they have managed to get some goddamned rights.

Maybe we've never left the plantation.

And the whiny American in me says well that's not fair. My grandfathers worked for the MIS (Military Intelligence) translating for the American army, so that the army could kill their cousins better and more efficiently, and all that stuff in the Japanese American History museum tells me that they did this to prove that they were American. They fought, and the boys and men of the 442nd died so that this would be better for us.

But it isn't better, and it's more than a hundred years since they passed the Chinese Exclusion Act, and we're at this door again. Begging to keep the right for immigrants to unite with their own fucking families. When the first solider who died in Iraq wasn't even a goddamn citizen.

I'm just waiting for them to institute the quotas again, just watch them do it too.

Depressed Asians

Probably as a result of both API history month and V Tech, we have news stories reporting on an old statistic. That Asian American women 15-24 are the most likely of any ethnicity in that age group to commit suicide. I say this is an old statistic, I've written about it before. However, it is startling statistic nonetheless. I'm at the very very outside of this age group. So maybe this means it hits a little closer to home for me.

The author of the article Angry Asian Man links to seems to want to put the blame to Asian culture. I thought the prof that they quoted was actually a bit better, in that she admitted that they don't really know for sure. Could be Asian culture, could be the pressure of the model minority stereotype, could be genetic, they don't really know.

There are times when I feel like being the invisible minority is not so bad, given the demonization of other ethnic groups. At least they don't say bad things about us, right? But it's times like these when I feel how much invisibility really hurts us. How many young Asian American women know themselves to be at risk? How many of our well intentioned white mental health practitioners know that Asian American women are at risk?

I don't know that I buy that the the self-imposition of the model minority stereotype is what causes young women to want to kill themselves. Could be those family expectations, but I'm inclined to think that those are a different animal entirely. The model minority stereotype is most pernicious, I think, not among Asian Americans, but among other people. That the quiet Asian kid is quiet, not because there's something wrong, but because that's just the way Asians are.

Being a Good Ethnic

Within my narrow 範圍, I have been reading a bit about how rap goes too far and may or may not covertly foster crime.

And it got me thinking. The objections to the sexism and misogyny in hip hop made me wonder? Is it the sexism that they are practicing that is really the issue here, or the fact that they are vulgar, or to put it more pretentiously, they're being bad ethnics.

(Quick definition of terms: I generally subscribe to Rey Chow's definition of ethnic in her book The Protestant Ethnic, which if you haven't read, you should go out and read- right now. In her book she dissects the term ethnic, which if we take the technical definition then anyone and everyone has an ethnicity, however, only certain people are considered ethnic. That is, mostly people of color. We don't consider white American speech and clothing to be ethnic. She says it a lot better than me. I'd go into detail, but although the main outline of her argument is burned into my brain from obsessive rereading the details are not. And the book's in America. So for the pop culture definition of ethnic, anyone whose ethnicity could possibly sell a movie about a wedding with ostentatious cultural trappings.)

The talk about "snitching" strikes me as even more indicative of the gap between white progressive thinking and ethnic thinking. White, presumably progressive, Anderson Cooper talking to ethnic Cam'ron about reporting crime to the police, it's pretty clear even from the quotes I read that the two are coming from two different worlds. And once again, ethnic thinking is being held to a white standard and found lacking.

So to bring this together, it got me thinking about what it takes to be a good ethnic. In some ways conservative white thinking is easier to talk about, since they just want to subjugate any and all and then assimilate us, or run us out of town all together (God, my grandfather actually gave money to Pat Robertson. Yeesh. My alleles feel dirty right now.). Liberal or progressive white thinking is a little bit slipperier to grasp. According to this thinking, ethnics are allowed to have our own cultures, but they have to be modified to be palatable, sometimes literally, to white tastes. This often involves ignoring or condemning parts of our cultures which do not fit into the Happy Rainbow Let's All Join Hands and Sing paradigm.

Ironically, many people at the head of ethnic movements, tend to be progressive people of color. Who similarly are committed to working against racism, sexism, homophobia, classism, ablism (etc. at least in theory.) However, the key difference between white progressives and their counterparts of color is that, at least in theory, we're less judgmental about the less than politically correct aspects of our communities, however much it ticks us off. And I think most of us recognize that the majority of our ethnic communities tend not to see eye to eye with us on sexism, and homophobia for starters.

Aaanyway, the point I was attempting to make was that in this case, hip hop artists appear to fall into the category of a bad ethnic. Propagating crime, violence, and misogyny, and horrifying older white people with their vulgarity, while delighting other white people with tales of the mean streets of Wherever. Being a professional ethnic can be a minstrel show, and for sure there are hip hop artists, who play up their ethnicity, dramatize and perform it.

However, although hip hop is a white financed business now, that's not to say that all rappers are simply performing for a white audience. I found this which helped me sort some things out for myself. Because, it seems to me that we pay a lot of attention to hip hop's portrayal of women, and we don't pay all that much attention to why. Some people may be following a trend, but I'm inclined to think that for at least some artists, they are expressing the way that they think about the world. Even if I don't agree with their vision necessarily, considering that hip hop is such a far reaching phenomenon, I think it's worth trying to find out or at least ask what factors contributed to them seeing the world that way.

The world's a messy place, and not all ethnic voices fit into a progressive vision of what the world should be like. Instead of telling people what they should be saying, maybe we should figure out why they're saying it first. Then work to change their minds.

Update: Crap I forgot to mention that Magniloquence's analytical lens and Nezua's post about progressive blogs were originally what brought everything together for me. (I've been waiting to try to think of an intelligent comment for Nezua's post, but fuck it, I just really really like it. That's about all I can manage at this point.)

Immigration

The Fighting 44s really do make me think. This post on immigration is kind of old, but I've been mulling it over for a couple weeks. (Actually it's a reprint of an article from The Economist) Something struck me as not right from the get go, and now I think I've finally put my finger on what bothers me. I think I'm being taken for a ride.

The premise of the article seems to be calling for reform to the immigration system. Particularly in favor of high tech, highly educated Asian professionals. The article uses the film The Namesake as a reference point. As well as an illustration of the new immigrant experience, according to the author the classic American dream, 2 kids, a white collar job, and apparently a rich white girlfriend for his American born son.

Mr Ganguli is part of a huge army of immigrants who have brought their brains and enthusiasm to the United States—not just Indians and Pakistanis but also Chinese, Koreans and Europeans. America’s high-tech industries are powered by foreign brains.

He talks about a number of things. In reading it, there are several opinions which occur to me. The biggest one being not what he's talking about but what he's leaving out. The quote above lists the nationalities he's talking about. South Asians, Northeast Asians, and Europeans. It's interesting who he's leaving out, Mexicans, Haitians, Africans, Filipinos, Vietnamese, to name a few.

The model minority stereotype, which has plagued many an undergraduate Asian studies class, as well as Asian American rap CD has reared its ugly head. We're being paid a compliment here at first blush. Well those of us who are smart enough, and white collar enough, and educated enough anyway. Apparently the rest of us just don't exist. According to this author, we're getting a ticket to suburbia, complete with the white girlfriend if we buy into this whole deal. (I really just can't get over the equation of the white girlfriend to 'an American success story.' Does that mean that if Gogol takes her with him to the airport he won't get 'randomly' searched as much?)

It's clear that he's not unaware of some of these other groups, he does mention fence building as evidence of anti-immigrant sentiment. However, they are invisible within the larger discussion. And anti-immigrant sentiment is just an inconvenience to him, because it creates obstacles in the pipeline of immigrant talent. It seems to be the author's view that immigration has been heavily skewed towards reuniting families rather than recruiting these eager young citizens of the world.

The author mentions HB-1 Visas, I am not that familiar with this topic, although I have heard that it has been criticized as exploitative. Import a bunch of fresh-off-the-boat techs, employ them at lower wages than American workers expect. When they become experienced and uppity enough to demand a more equitable salary, their limited Visa has run out and you can ship in a fresh batch.

Which brings us to the other half of the model minority myth, which would be The Glass Ceiling. The author fails to mention the fact that Asian Americans remain the most overeducated but underpaid ethnic group. We're educated enough to be the programmer or the lab tech, but we don't make manager. This is true for American born Asian Americans, it goes doubly for immigrants whose lack of fluency in English or different cultures can make even more difficult to "network."

I'm not sure what to make of the fact that the author doesn't really talk about how non-white collar immigration fits into his world view. Perhaps it's low class of me to ask. I also feel like this is proof that the "Asians are honorary whites" meme is still out there. We're good enough, white enough, non threatening enough to be gain some of the access and benefits. But we still don't qualify for the whole deal. However, some evidence has surfaced that seems to prove that we're not the tools that everyone thinks we are. So I'm not going to waste my time wringing my hands about how some of us may buy into this. Some of us probably will, I'm going to hope that most of us are smart enough not to.

Japan (This is going to get heavy.)

I've been sort of depressed recently, and this kind of all came to a head yesterday, when I ran into a student of mine and her younger brother, who's maybe 5 or 6. And he said "Didn't the Japanese attack the Chinese?"

It demonstrated with a problem I've been wrestling with for a long time. That would be my relationship to the motherland. How do I relate to a land that my family rejected, but we're still marked by, and a legacy which involves, as highlights, ethnic cleansing, imperialism, rape, mass murder, and wartime atrocities on a large scale?

I guess I'll start at the beginning and when I come to the end I'll stop. I remember as a kid, watching the Olympics. I was cheering for the Japanese, I mean they looked like me right? And my mom said, "You're not Japanese, you're American." It was set out for me pretty early on that there was a distinction, a separation between my family and our place of origin.

That of course would be World War 2, and my family's internment. The experience divided us, between those who had been interned and those who had not. It was portrayed to me as a difference between Japanese and American. The passive Asian people who went behind barbed wire without a struggle, and their righteous American children who made redress possible for them later. I only see now that this is quite racist against ourselves. But I digress, I was clearly marked, as American.

And there were the little things too, switching from saying "Banzai" at weddings to saying "Kampai" because Banzai recalled the kamikaze pilots in World War 2. And this was told to me in the 90s. But I kind of figured this was all over. My grandfathers had paid their dues by fighting against their cousins in World War 2. Showing America that we were American (yeah right).

However, when I was in middle school, I used to get a lot of Korean kids telling me they hated me, because I was Japanese. Once I found out why, I never really knew what to say. I couldn't deny that they had a very legitimate reason to be angry. And I still feel vaguely responsible, especially as Japan continues to deny that it has done. However I often also feel quite resentful, how many times has my family taken the fall for Japan? How many more times will we continue to take the fall for Japan? And what was the mother country done for us anyway?

It's weird to be the collateral descendant of the Japanese empire, with its host of war crimes. Should I feel guilty? I don't really benefit from Japanese imperialism. Arguably, I have in fact been disadvantaged by it. However I certainly look Japanese (I've also been told I look Chinese, by Chinese people, whatever), I've probably benefited in some ways. (Ok in concrete ways, the history geek in me will point out that due to the superior political position of the Japanese government they did enact the Gentlemen's Agreement which banned Japanese men from immigrating to America, but managed to keep a loophole open which allowed Japanese women to continue to immigrate, allowing the Japanese American population to grow significantly in comparison to Chinese, and Filipino populations of around the same time, whose countries had no such bargaining power with the US. Thank you Ronald Takaki.) However, at the same time, y'know, my grandparents did not kill those people, my grandparents' cousins killed those people. So where does that leave me?

What exactly is the right thing to do here?

History, doomed to repeat, perhaps you've heard?

So, this recently came to my attention, as all things do, via Angry Asian Man. Apparently the White House is considering a new type of immigration "reform" which would grant more visas for undocumented workers, but apparently prevent American citizens from bringing non citizen spouses, children, or parents to the US.

It's being compared to the Chinese Exclusion Act, which not only restricted Chinese immigration, but also prevented the children or wives of Chinese residents from joining in the US. For fear they would spawn.

Angry Asian Man as usual has all the information here.

Apparently there's an organization organizing a write in, as well as a call in. Considering how much illegal stuff that the White House pulls these days, I can't say I'm optimistic about the chances of success, but hell I'll do it anyway. And so should you, if things were different, or if my ancestors had not been successful in navigating or evading exclusion acts and immigrant quotas, and that goes for anyone not purely of northwestern European ancestry pre-World War 2, this could be me, it could be you. Or maybe it is you.

An Open Letter to my Asian Brothers

Stop embarrassing yourselves on TV! Seriously though, I'd kind of been avoiding this whole Kenneth Eng thing, but poplicks.com had a Fox News video and I couldn't help myself. If you don't know about Kenneth Eng yet,
Poplicks has excellent coverage here and here.

I'm not really going to even touch Kenneth Eng's articles. There's a reason that no one is defending him or his views. After seeing the video of his interview on Fox, my first thought was "Oh great. A wonderful representative of Asian Americans. At least he speaks English fluently, that gives him one up on William Hung." However, his nerdery, obsession with dragons, inability to make eye contact, and antisocial behavior seem to play into some of the worst Asian American male stereotypes.

Throughout the interview, the interviewer kept asking him why he was so angry. Mr. Eng talked a lot about dragons and his views on how dragons related to evolution. At the same time, I'm pretty sure that Kenneth Eng, like William Hung, is going to get much more air time than Jin or John Cho.

At the same time, it seems to me that he sort of taps into a cultural fear that William Hung also played into. They're like caricatures of what people always thought we were, but that we desperately tried to prove we aren't. At the same time, guys like these prove that these stereotypes do exist. There's nothing much we can do about our buffoons and bigots, they will probably continue to make asses of themselves. Just another round of one step forward, five steps back.

"For the greater good"

I read this on a forum somewhere. Someone was asking whether or not it would be justify to kill someone or commit torture in order to save a large number of people. Their examples, I believe, were if a serial killer were loose in the city and the police decided to frame a bum in order to relieve social tension and prevent a riot (and presumably loss of life and property), or if a kid saw some terrorists, would you torture them to get the information and save lives.

According to the way I think both of these examples are somewhat flawed because in both cases it's really impossible to determine the outcome of either of these situations. Who can really predict if the city will riot or not? Information obtained during torture is similarly unreliable. Will it save lives, or will you just be stuck with a charge of crimes against humanity and nothing to show for it. (This would be if my country even acknowledged the Geneva Conventions, and y'know international law, but I digress.)

That said, there are other situations in which a similar question might be asked. If there was someone who was carrying a deadly disease in the general population, would you kill them in order to eradicate the disease and save lives?

This is sort of a high school question, and in some ways I really hate these kinds of questions, because they have this "do or die" switch built in. In real life, choices are rarely this clear cut simply because life is fundamentally unpredictable. However it made me think, and I'll take intellectual stimulation where I can find it.

The needs of many over the needs of the few is a dangerous one. I've heard it used to justify the atomic bombing of Japan. We would have spent a longer time conquering Japan and therefore more people would have died etc. so bombing civilians without warning was justified. When they talk about more people, are they talking about American lives, Japanese lives, or both? And from their (American) perspective, which lives are more important?

The question I always end up asking in these situations is the needs of which many and the needs of which few? People in this day and age are impossible to separate from the various markers society assigns to them. It's easier to bomb a city full of women, children, and old people, if they are not OUR women, children, and old people. It's easier to scapegoat a person if they are disenfranchised by our society, poor, homeless, "crazy," or young.

These factors go through the minds of decisionmakers and they go through the mind of the public. I had a conversation recently with FireflyNightLight in which both of us noted that it's easier to feel an empathetic connection with someone if you feel that they are somehow "like" you. It's human nature on some level I think. However, I do think that this response on our part makes it impossible to simply divide people up into the many and the few.

The few that people choose to sacrifice will probably always look the least like "us." Whoever "we" happen to be at any given time. Were those few to look more like "us" the choice to sacrifice them would be unthinkable.

So what conclusions have I come to exactly? That it's impossible to define the many and the few in a way which transcends societal markers? That human nature is fundamentally bad. Maybe I've been reading too much 荀子. Have I been chasing my tail this whole time? Damn, this really is like high school.

Hooray for Soapboxing

So FireflyNightLight called my attention to this kid who needs a bone marrow transplant.
http://www.helpsamiam.com/
The site above lets you know more about his story and also gives you several useful links to registering. So register!

Also if you are Asian or partially Asian, this website
http://www.aadp.org/
will also help you register, since this issue is of particular concern for Asian Americans. Something you're probably aware of if you read Angry Asian Man as obsessively as I do. In case you don't that's why I posted it here.

You can also read more about the guy here
http://kimchimamas.typepad.com/kimchi_mamas/2007/02/seeking_bone_ma.html#more

And even if you're not Asian, register anyway. I found out I was 10% Native American, your ancestry may surprise you and therefore save a life!

Gandhi and other saints

Salman Rushdie is one of my favorite writers. Although, like Virginia Woolf, one of my other favorite writers, sometimes I like his essays more than I like his novels, probably because they make me think.

His review of the film Gandhi in Imaginary Homelands "Attenborough's Gandhi" really made me think. The implications of the essay have been with me for quite some time. The essay itself is so good I'm tempted to just quote all of it, but I'll restrain myself. Rushdie asks the question of why the British would want to deify Gandhi and then answers himself.

The answer may be that Gandhi ... satisfies certain longings in the Western psyche, which can be categorized under three broad headings. First, the exotic impulse, the wish to see India as the fountainhead of spiritual-mystical wisdom. Gandhi, the celluloid guru, follows in the footsteps of other pop holy men. The Maharishi blazed this trail. Second, there is what might be termed the Christian longing, for a 'leader' dedicated to ideals of poverty and simplicity, a man who is too good for this world and is therefore sacrificed on the altars of history. And third, there is the liberal-conservative political desire to hear it said that revolutions can, and should, be made purely by submission, and self-sacrifice, and non-violence alone.

The most interesting point, to me, was the third point. Because it sounded quite familiar. Isn't that what we learn in elementary school when we learn about Gandhi? It's a simplistic story, but it's one that's been fed to schoolkids in America for decades. And often the story that we hear is the one that Rushdie cites, that through non-violence, and shall we call it submission, the civil rights movement or Indian independence, or whatever struggle of your choice, was accomplished. What kind of effect has this had on our thinking? On the strategies of activists? It seems slightly conspiracy theorist-ish but really, does the American education system choose to valorize this type of thinking on purpose so that when the masses rebel they're easier to squash?

The message of Gandhi is that the best way to gain your freedom is to line up, unarmed, and march towards your oppressors and permit them to club you to the ground; if you do this for long enough, you will embarrass them into going away. This is worse than nonsense. It is dangerous nonsense. Non-violence was a strategy chosen for a particular people against a particular oppressor; to generalize from it is a suspect act. How useful would non-violence have been against, say, the Nazis? Even in India, the leaders of the independence movement did not succeed because they were more moral than the British. They won because they were smarter, craftier, better fighting politicians than their opponents. Gandhi shows us a saint who vanquished an Empire. This is a fiction.

Rushdie's discussion of Gandhi puts me in mind of America's treatment of Martin Luther King. Their stories are remarkably similar if you think about it. Men dedicated to nonviolence who were assassinated by someone. Both of them had rather significant character flaws, but were later sanctified by history. This seems like a variant on The Noble Savage. The native nobly demonstrates his dedication to a strict set of ideals, which which results in his death at the hands of his own people. And in the end the white man survives to tell his story, The Last Samurai is an excellent example of this.

This is not to say that Gandhi and Martin Luther King themselves would have advocated this. But after their deaths, their images have been manipulated in order to fit this model of martyrdom. Whereas revolutionaries who advocate violence, such as Malcolm X, or Nelson Mandela are not handled with the same ease. They make people nervous, and generally they find acceptance only by their late conversion to nonviolence. Why mus all good revolutionaries be nonviolent?

What does this mean for us exactly? I think it raises some interesting questions on how we've been taught to think about acceptable resistance. For example, most left wing activists use peaceful means of self expression. How much of this is due to the rhetoric of nonviolence? Maybe we should rethink how we think about resistance and the struggle and how we intend to go about this.

The Super Sign

Damn Magniloquence, making me think in the morning. It strikes me that perhaps a healthy discussion of what these words, like equality, diversity, and equal opportunity mean. Recently I read The Clash of Empires: The Invention of China in Modern World Making by Lydia Liu. Some ideas from there resurfaced when I was thinking about equality, and now again when Magniloquence and her link bring up diversity. Liu brings up the concept of the super-sign "a linguistic monstrosity that thrives on the excess of its presumed meanings by virtue of being exposed to, or thrown together with, foreign entymologies and foreign languages."

Equality and diversity don't necessarily fall under a strict definition of a super sign since this is an English language term, being used in relation to the English language. However I think Liu's discussion of the super-sign could be useful in a discussion of what equality has come to signify to various parties, as well as the discussion of what diversity means to the academic establishment.

"What is a supersign? Properly speaking, a super-sign is not a word but a hetero-cultural signifying chain that crisscrosses the semantic fields of two or more languages simultaneously and makes an impact on the meaning of any other discrete verbal phenomena that linguists can identify within particular languages or among them. The super-sign emerges out of the interstices of existing languages across the abyss of phonetic and ideographic differences." (Liu, The Clash of Empires, 13.)

Again, equality and diversity, these complex terms don't fully qualify as super-signs under Liu's definition because they exist in one language. However, I think Liu's term does articulate, to some extent, the questions of ownership and the struggle for mastery of a word.

She mentions as the struggle between the British who sought to ban the Chinese word 夷 from use, because they identified as "barbarian." The two words then became lumped together, although historically, 夷 did not have the same derogatory meaning as "barbarian." In this case, the Chinese word came to be identified by its English "translation" and banned.

In terms of equality and diversity, people may be talking about entirely different concepts or values which are just lumped under the same word. When I talk about the need for more diversity, does this mean the same thing as some college administrator talking about "diversity"? And also, more importantly, whose interpretation of diversity is ultimately winning out?

I'll leave the question of what I think diversity means myself for another time.

Place settings

So now that I've taken care of equality and race, I promised my friend I'd go back to his original intent which was to discuss the possibility of equality between the genders. As much as Wendao Jinxin will attempt to get me to talk about gender once in a while, I've never felt all that qualified to talk about it. It's probably due in some part to my discomfort with feminism, or at least the feminism that I've run into in my small life.

This is a topic that Magniloquence or Little Light could probably do better. However, since both of them are probably a lot busier in more productive ways than I am right now, I'll give it a shot.

Much like my ramblings about minority equality, I'm hard pressed to figure out what true gender equality would look like. Equality, as Magniloquence points out, should not mean the same thing as sameness. Although the two are often conflated. It also depends on what you think equality is.

According to some people's world view, the genders are equal. Each gender has its own assigned role, passive and active, aggressive and submissive, strong and weak. It was always an argument that the sexes had separate but different spheres, each completing one another. According to this world view, the sexes are already equal.

What makes this theory problematic is its rigid definition of gender roles and its assumption that all men perform their masculinity in the same way, and all women perform their femininity in the same way. And of course that all men are 100% masculine and all women are 100% feminine. It's too rigid a theory to allow for "deviancy" from the norm.

Also according to contemporary, progressive ways of thinking, the problem with the theory lies in the difference in status between the two. Their roles may be complementary, but their places at the table are not equal.

While the silence in the comments section indicates that many of you are rather bored by what I've been doing recently, I would, as always enjoy hearing comments on this.

Equality in Atlantis

Recently a friend of mine started two separate conversations with me and another friend of ours about equality. On my end, the conversation began with the question, "can we ever be equal? and if not why then do we strive for equality?"

First of all, my first impulse, as a person trained by the institution-of-higher-learning-that-I-went-to, is to unpack the terminology. Who are "we" and what are we talking about when we talk about "equality"? And how do we define equality? Anyway, I wrote back about political power in relation to racial minorities. And as it turns out, what my friend meant was in terms of gender equality.

Meanwhile Wendao Jinxin, thinking along similar lines, posted his thoughts on his blog. I'm curious what you, all 9 readers who visit multiple times, think of this.

My conversations with both people are worthwhile. For the moment, I'll follow my original line of thinking, which was about racial equality and what that would look like, if we could attain it?

First of all, who are "we"? I'll take this as all underrepresented, underprivileged people, poor people, women, queer people, racial minorities of all kinds. Anyone who doesn't consider themselves to be equal right now, and lives in fear, to some extent, of repercussions that might result from who they are.

Equal to what? Defining it as The Man, would be too easy and too simplistic. I'll define it as those people, who can live without fear of oppression due to who or what they are. This definition is still problematic, but I'll let it stand for right now.

And finally, what is equality? Equality, at least in terms of social justice-y types, has become a signifier for equal rights and equal opportunity. When did equal rights for all citizens become an right, and a signal of an enlightened state? Certainly America did not begin as a society based on equal rights for all. I'm vaguely aware of the debate about man's natural rights, and the inherent rights of all human beings. Those of my 9 readers who are better versed in the Western canon than I, please feel free to enlighten me.

Equal rights and opportunity for everyone? What does this mean and what would this look like? To me it's almost inconceivable. Please show me a society which was truly equal. Even states which have been founded with the intent to create an equal society have failed to live up to their ideals.

So if it is impossible, or perhaps it's better to say improbable, why should we work for an equal society? In my opinion, the idea of creating an equal society is a bit like the idea of travelling to Atlantis (I am totally stealing from W. H. Auden's poem "Atlantis" and from Brooks Hansen Perlman's Ordeal). Although as Wendao Jinxin says, the old timers make the realistic decisions that actually help people, many activists initially became interested in social justice of some sort because of this idea of the equal society. The fact that Atlantis doesn't exist doesn't make make its presence any less powerful in our minds.