can't even to begin

so a while ago, one of my girls brought a couple blog posts to my attention written by a young asian girl, Lillian Wu. one of them is affectionately entitled "how to get girls for asian guys" and the other "how to date an asian girl (for white guys)." where to begin, where to begin?

i don't think there is a sentence on either on of those posts that isn't highly problematic. it would be funny in its ridiculousness if it wasn't so frightening. in all honesty, i had to read through some other blog posts to make sure it wasn't some "tongue in cheek" commentary... it isn't. even worse, she seems to fashion herself as critically engaging with the idea of false stereotypes while replicating all the problems of stereotyping and essentializing a racial group. the fact that she does this to herself makes the entire project more disturbing.

i'm not even sure how to engage with her. or if i want to at all. what i will say is that it is a great example of self-hate, a lack of education about the history of people of color, and an extremely childish racist view of relatioships, power dynamics and cultural practice.

in her first post, aimed at helping asian men secure girlfriends her solution is to defy stereotypes in order to date women, this said while she simultaneously emasculates them and tells them the stereotypes are more often than not true. for some examples:

• she says that asian men need to try and emulate white men
• she refers to non-asian women as exotic
• "the rumor that Asian guys are bad in bed does not help. The negative stereotypes will continue to be an obstacle, especially the ones that carry truth"
• "The drastic difference between white guys and Asian guys is state of mind. White guys score dates because they act like men and take command."
• "Stop being the nice guy if you want to be the one who takes her home."
• "If she is straight, she will not be into a man who is more feminine than she is."

in her second post, aimed at white men who want to date asian women, she essentializes asian women as greedy, spoiled, manipulative and shallow. while acknowledging it's a stereotype, she says it's one that's quite true!

and while, i can go on and on about how messed up wu's view is. i think the bigger question i can pull out of this is how children have become so hateful. instead of brushing aside negative stereotypes, they embrace them. what is the best way to teach children to be more critical (of the themselves, their social and identity groups, and the world around them)? i know that i didn't concretely develop a critical conscious until i went to college and i was taught how to think. and it seems that this lack of critical thinking skills is due in large part to the emphasis on high stakes standardized testing where the correct answer isn't always the critical one.

for example, in middle school we often practiced responding to writing prompts for the standardized tests. two sides of a story were presented, and you had to pick the one you agreed with and argue your point. i distinctly remember my ILA (english) teacher telling us that we shouldn't weigh or consider both sides nor make concessions of any kind for the other side. when we wrote, we had to be 100% on one side, or we wouldn't score well on the test. similarly, students have become less politically active and less willing to challenge group norms in order to pursue "success" in school. pressure from all sides, raising rates of tuition (and debt), etc. create a climate that doesn't encourage critical engagement with material.

i think we need to have a complete reimaging of education, and with that which skills are valued. i strongly believe that if miss wu would have been taught to make critical assessments and to understand her role in either combating or perpetrating negativity and essentialism, the only way that would have been written would be as tongue in cheek commentary to someone else!

tumblr

here's my thinking:

where my blog is a place where i write and share. i made a tumblr account - live from noel - as a place where i can store things that i think about but don't really belong anywhere else.

there's also a live feed on the link above. though not as nice as the real thing.

check it out if you're interested.

love,

khl

"Post-Racial" Politics and History

check out my boss - Kim Crenshaw - on GRITtv talking about "Post-Racial" Politics and History

a word from your humble editor

here is my guilt-ridden sad-face (in a scrum cap!) for not keeping my blog updated the past couple of days. i am truly sorry if you had navigated to my blog to read the daily updates and have found nothing. today, however, i am putting up a four new posts to try and make up for what was lacking. i will try my hardest not to let that happen again.

and, in pursuit of that, i am going to post sunday-thursday instead of monday-friday. fridays just are a bit hard for me. what can i say? i like to go hard on fridays. i love new york. i adore brooklyn. 

and for those who somehow haven't heard the ill cooking soul remix of hello brooklyn - enjoy. you can thank me now*! ha!

and as always, thanks for your continued patronage.

love,
khl

*check out cookin soul's collaboration with drake on an instrumental version of his album, which includes the phrase "you can thank me now" so it's a double nod to cookin soul. got it. 

anger misdirected

so, first, two personal vignettes to frame this post.

- i was riding the metro north train from new york to new haven on a friday evening after work. i had a business suit on because i, at the time, still worked at a corporate firm. the train was very pretty full, but i found a seat in a 3 person row where there was only an old white woman sitting there. to put it lightly, she looked pissed and uncomfortable when i sat down. i framed this by what i looked like, in other words, professional-looking asians usually don't even get noticed by anyone, nor are they really the target for racist white people because of our model minority status. but this woman was not feeling me sitting next to her. i could just feel her discomfort and there was something telling me it was because of my race. not surprisingly, a couple minutes later she got up and walked throughout the (crowded) train to find a new place to sit. i felt like shit. and i have to admit that i cried. it was cruel. it was racist. and i ended up being really angry with myself for even caring.

- yesterday, i was supposed to go out with this man i met. he seemed cool and i thought the little time we spoke at the bar, we connected. apparently not. anyways, day of he starts texting me comments that i felt were sexually inappropriate and disrespectful. it's funny odd fucked up how a man can make a woman feel objectified and, frankly, dirty through a couple of choice words. even worse, he feigned being offended when confronted. and he insinuated that i was just a non-sexual person because i refused to respond to his sexual advances. it was fucked up. and i was upset. i felt dirty, used, gross, and objectified. i wanted to cry. and i ended up being really angry with myself for even caring.

so, i was talking to my boss about how i had been having a bad day and was just ashamed that this worthless man was able to make me feel any kind of way about myself. at the time, i had immediately discounted his words as worthless and sophomoric, but i still was affected. i still felt bad. and it made me sad that i couldn't control my feelings enough to not let insignificant people effect them. but she told me that my anger was completely misdirected. why would i be mad at myself when the only person i should be mad at is him. it was just another example of gender imbalance, when i should be blaming a man, i end up blaming myself for not being able to brush off his disrespectful de-feminizing comments. it reminded my of my first vignette and how i was so angry with myself for even being upset, when really i should've been angry with that woman for making me feel like i was worth less because of the shape of my eyes and the color of my skin.

why do we so often turn back social injustices that occur because of power differences on ourselves instead of critically examining the power dynamics working behind the scenes? will the eventual disruption of these imbalances change how i would feel? or am i just too sensitive? (which would be another example of blaming myself for the deliberate actions of others... ugh a habit that's difficult to break.)

lessons from brazil

first off, a huge thank you for those who were able to come to the event i organized on Monday night, "Does Race (Still) Matter? Reconsidering Affirmative Action in the US and Brazil." to be honest, i woke up in the middle of the night the day before tossing and turning and making mental lists because i was so worried i'd fuck it up. luckily enough, it went pretty smoothly and all things considered i was happy with the turnout. i definitely learned things that i didn't know before (like the fact that GWB didn't know that there were Blacks in Brazil... smfh).

if you weren't able to make it, check out our live twitter blog feed. eventually, i'll get some video and flicks up as well.

anyways, i would like to quickly explore the thing that i found the most interesting and thought-provoking. a recent law was passed in Brazil that mandated that Afro-Brazilian history and culture be taught in public schools. this was to combat the otherwise lack of knowledge about Afro-Brazilian culture and to begin to shift from a white-centric history. yo, this is an amazing idea. something that i believe the U.S. should adopt. what would an education that included and celebrated the history and accomplishments of Blacks, Asians and Latino Americans? how would such an education contribute to a shift in public perception, acceptance and call for affirmative action programs specifically and racial power dynamics more generally?

how can we begin to confront our violent history? we learn of the attempted genocide of the Jewish people during the holocaust, but not of the genocide of the indigenous population in america. we learn of the england's mistreatment of us as a colony, but don't learn about either our violent history of colonization or our de facto colonization in Puerto Rico and the Phillipines. how would teaching our bloody history effect the way our children think about power dynamics?

would a history that includes Asian-Americans help to counter the myth of "forever immigrants?" would a history that includes cross-racial coalition building, such as Asian and Latino coalitions in the sugar fields of hawaii, help us to understand the importance of banding together toward a common grievance?  


and, in english, what if we read more books by people of color than by white people? since we will be the majority-minority soon, right? how would a reading of say Zora's "Their Eyes Were Watching God" effect the way in which we understand language, dialect and the hierarchy of it all? 


and, not just a celebration of the history and culture of other races, but what if we began to look at the history of racism and power in the united states throughout the disciplines. for example, learning how statistics was created by eugenicists in order to prove white superiority? or in science exploring how faulty "scientific processes" were used to bolster eugenicist arguments?


i think that we often look at Brazil as being much more behind us on the issue of race, because of the failure to confront it. yet, now that they are confronting it, we are pretending it is no longer an issue (it is!). and, in some ways, they are far outpacing us.

as a side note: my brother was telling me the other day that there are only 2-3 major textbook publishers in the united states that provide the educational materials for the entire country. they are based in texas(? - i think) and are controlled by one curriculum board comprised of mostly white, mostly conservative members. these are the people that control what the entire country learns. we must demand that this be changed by demanding a larger curriculum change within our public schools.  

words from my people illuminated

a a little bit of cross-posting/cross-promoting/celebration of my talented friends. coming from my boy's blog poetsnvandals and my love of new york, here is "this is fashion":

We took our love for fashion and people to the streets, catching up with NYC's most stylish residents.  Check out part one in a two part series about original new yorkers and their take on fashion.  Produced by Juan Carlos Mendoza and shot by yours truly.

pause. most stylish residents. where am i at? .......... kidding! enjoy!

Book Review: Glorious, Bernice L. McFadden

Glorious, Bernice L. McFadden's latest book, is a glimpse into Black life during the Harlem Renaissance through the eyes of Easter. Although she is a fictional character, McFadden has obviously done her research, placing Easter into a rich historical backdrop that begins to show how complicated the "question of race" was in the period following slavery. On one hand, McFadden describes Harlem in the time of Marcus Garvey, questions of miscegenation, and whiteness and on the other hand in the South little has changed in terms of overt racist thinking about "natural" racial hierarchy. I found it difficult to imagine how Easter after having connections to Marcus Garvey and to the promise of Black rights could have seem so easily to consigned herself to a later life as a white person's maid. McFadden's exploration of race is especially relevant when juxtaposed with the myth of a "post-racial" America. Many of the same attitudes regarding race are played out in such a way that it is easy to forget that this was over 80 years ago.

McFadden's exploration of the whiteness is also especially relevant. Easter is funded by a "benevolent" benefactor whom posits herself as another wealthy white person who is helping Black people. This relationship becomes more and more problematic as the story unfolds. It is obvious that she never sees herself as equals to the Black characters. Other White characters are portrayed as disloyal traitors and naive "white knights." McFadden paints the white liberal as quite the same in days past as today. However, it is interesting that none of the white characters are "good" or even neutral. Each is cast in a harsh, negative light, and while I don't feel like there is any particular need to have white people cast as saints or benevolent friends in a Black novels, McFadden creates white caricatures with no complexity at all.

While, I felt like the novel made me pause and think as I paralleled the world that McFadden recreates to the state of race in America today, I felt like the book in some places felt undeveloped or cliched. A lot of the issues were well thought out: colorism, Black sexuality, white paternalism, etc. but the characters didn't seem as nuanced, and thus the issues weren't brought to maturity the way they could have.

Yet still, I think it was worth reading.

*** Liked it!

Event: Back to Brazil: Transnational Mobility and Education Among Japanese-Brazilian Migrants

Hi All-

Just wanted to mention an event that I'm planning on attending tonight hosted by the Forum on Migration at Barnard. One of my intellectual topics of interest in college was identity politics in Asian-Latino communities. Although the Asian population is huge in Spanish-speaking countries, there is little discussion or acknowledgment of them in popular context. There, at point, was not an unsubstantial community in New York. If you're from the city, you must have seen a couple of the Chino-Cubano spots like Flor de Mayo - a lot of those are owned by Chinese Cubans who immigrated to Cuba in the 19th century. Cristina Garcia's fictional novel called Monkey Hunting is a cool portrait of multiple generations of Chino-Cubanos and their struggle to fit in.

 *********************************************

FORUM ON MIGRATION

BACK TO BRAZIL
Transnational Mobility and Education Among Japanese-Brazilian Migrants

A PANEL

Thursday, 09/23 6 PM
Sulzberger Parlor
3rd Floor Barnard Hall

Home to the largest Japanese community outside of Japan, Brazil has again become a destination for migration from Japan. Once privileged with high wages, now struck by the economic crisis, thousands of Japanese-Brazilian immigrants in Japan have suddenly been forced to return. Professors María E. Torres-Guzmán and Christian Münch discuss the social and cultural consequences of return migration, focusing on children born and raised in Japan and their position within the educational systems of Japan and Brazil. Torres-Guzmán is professor of bilingual/bicultural education at Teachers College, Columbia University. Münch, visiting assistant professor of bilingual education at Teachers College, Columbia University, is a linguist trained in French, Spanish, Catalan, and Portuguese.
Sponsored by Forum on Migration

************************************************

UPDATE:

 

as planned, i attended the talk. a bit disjointed and some parts more interesting than others. here are my thoughts:

- never really considered circular migration (does this just make sound stupid? oh well) in this context up four generations of japanese-brazilians have moved from brazil to japan to brazil yet again, while consciously deciding to keep options open should they want to move back to japan.

- the idea of the trying to claim a geographic location as home. torres-guzman claimed that in a way the japanese brazilians were home in both places, but i disagree. really, they aren't home anywhere, and i guess in that way they can be thought of as home everywhere. 

- the japanese government's accomodation of japanese brazilians. this was shown most poignantly through signage. for example, many of the station signs and other directional signs in public transportation were written in both japanese and portuguese, even though japan is a heavily monolithic culture. i always (maybe mistakenly) think of the japanese government as proud and exclusionary, so it really came as a surprise that there were any efforts at all to transition this population into japan.

- i was also surprised to see how proud the japanese-brazilians living in japan were of their brazilian identity. they were really repping hard. i figured that since they left brazil, they were kinda over it. i also assumed that the brazilian-asians were very insular in brazil, so the transition to japan wouldn't be much of an adjustment. but, the community seems a lot more integrated and a lot more brazilian than i thought. (side note: the reason i thought this was because i have done a bit of research on asian latinos and some communities living in south america are quite insular)

- what i wasn't surprised at, however, but still want to mention is that japanese-brazilians are thought of in japan as somehow dirtier, louder, etc. because of the "stink" of brazil

anyways it was cool. i felt like i was furthering my ed-u-ma-ca-tion. holla.

ethnic food and "but, i have a black friend"

after dinner tonight, my brother, his girl woman girl (woman just sounds funny) and I went for some bubble tea. my brother's girl is still fresh to the states (about a month in), but when she said she never had bubble tea before, i was taken aback. what?! how could she not have had bubble tea? isn't it super-asian (hah! coming from the asian adoptee)?!

i had taken for granted something that i think most asian-americans and, for that matter, americans in general have tried before. milk tea with little tapioca balls in it. so, i asked okay then where did bubble tea originate? taiwan. hm, ok. then, i started to think about how special asian-americans were what with our bubble tea, karoke, korean bbq, tea iced tea, sushi, dim sum, bah minh and pho -- food that i take for granted as transcending their national origin and becoming just "american food." and then after all my constant hate of racial inequality and the social reality of america, i figured tonight's blog post will be different. i'll talk about what i enjoy about american culture.

but, then when my drunkeness wore away a bit, i realized that all of these items that i enjoy so much have really just been commodified and packaged for american consummation and removed from the culture they came from. in a way, they are quintessentially american. where people just assume that most people know about them in an ambiguous "that's asian" type way and all asians are really supposed to know about that.

was i slumming for food? or in other words, was i pretending to be cultured because of my enjoyment of some foods that are marketed to american culture? do we, as americans, think that because we've tried a certain cultural's food that we are all of the sudden culturally sensitive, culturally relative and culturally knowledgable. we go to ethnic restaurants and try ethnic cuisine and all of the sudden we fancy ourselves cultured. like trying the most americanized dish in the culinary repertoire is somehow going to give us insight into a culture.

in what ways does saying "i'm down with taiwanese culture because i'm down with bubble tea" mean exactly the same thing as saying "i'm down with 'cultural diversity' because i have a black friend." instead of understanding and appreciating a culture or a race, we boil it down to an auxilory food or peson that in our head speaks for the race and makes up for our complete lack of cultural or racial understanding. being versed in a variety of cuisines doesn't make you cultured or tolerant or any closer to being knowledgable about the intricacies of group culture. yet, somehow we think it does.

but, in what ways can being introduced to a culture through food help others to appreciate other peoples more? i think that in a very narrow (very very narrow) sense, food can be a foot into the door. but, nothing more than a foot. you can have an introduction to a different culture through the food but you must consciously seek more. otherwise, you're just enjoying food.