Iason De Silentio

a new chapter: jasonchu.net

2011-09-06T12:53:00.000-07:00

hi, friends;

this blog has been useful, but has long since been replaced by my facebook artist page and other forms of social media.

as i prepare to launch my new project, THE UNCOOL, in Beijing and online worldwide, I've set up a new site to post music, videos, photos, and musings: www.jasonchu.net.

as i continue to grow as a servant, a brother, a son, a musician, a writer, and a friend, i hope you will also continue walking with me...

love

-jason

What I Noticed in My In-Flight Entertainment.

2011-05-14T10:23:00.000-07:00

American Ethnic Composition (2009 census data):

64.7% White
15.8% Hispanic
12.9% Black/African descent
4.8% Asian/Pacific Islander
1% Native American
1.7% Multiple heritage descent

Ethnic faces in American media (television + film), as represented by my United Airlines in-flight entertainment from Beijing, China to San Francisco, USA:

With 47 actors/characters pictured:

95.7% White
2.1% Black/African Descent
2.1% A Dog
0% Hispanic
0% Asian/Pacific Islander
0% Native American

What's wrong with these numbers?

What's wrong with this picture?

The Office - racist or revolutionary?

2010-12-03T08:15:00.000-08:00

"The Office, Season 7, Episode 10 – “China”
After reading an article about China growing as a global power, Michael decides China must be stopped before they take over the US. Everyone in the office complains about Dwight’s building standards and Pam threatens to move Dunder Mifflin to a new building."

I haven't watched it yet (queueing it up to stream right now, though...), but I'm already half-concerned, and half-hopeful, about the content of this week's Office episode about China.

Nationalistic and xenophobic "Yellow Panic" is just a reality of the times in which we live, where outsourcing and "The East" find themselves the scapegoat for Western concerns both economic and social. So it's natural that a show that has been increasingly explicit in capturing the American zeitgeist (the Glee episode from this season, anyone?) would turn its mockumentarian sights on Sino-American relations.

The Office is usually fairly on-the-mark with their biting look at middle-class middle American ignorance and panicked reactionism. So I'm hopeful that this episode, while probably not winding up in a treacly after-school-special message of hope and reconciliation, could actually turn out to be a fair treatment of the topic, if not even openly scornful of the ever-worsening tone of American public discourse regarding my country of residence.

Still, I've seen enough of how Asia has been treated in American media to be concerned. Once bitten, twice shy.

More to come after I've watched the episode.

The Price of Exotification

2010-04-21T01:48:00.000-07:00

This image (an advertisement for VH1's newest celeb-fronted "educational" vehicle) is problematic.

Why?

Three "ethnic" women - arrayed in traditional/ceremonial garb worn rarely, if at all, in modern-day Africa, South Asia, and East Asia - stand, heavily-made-up, behind Jessica Simpson, whose muted clothes and "natural" makeup suggest that she is the default - absent symbols of "color" or "ethnic" culture, we see her as the de facto norm, the standard by which "regular" beauty is judged.

The shot - progressing from "darkest" to "lightest", including a white-painted Asian woman - also supports the very unhelpful concept that race is reducible to skin color, which falls on a continuum between two extremes: Black and White, and everything in-between is precisely that, caught in between two points. The Asian woman isn't White, you see, but her face is painted white - with the White woman placed in front of the others, on the right side of the continuum, the implicit suggestion is that there is a progression, from native, uncivilized, exotified beauty, to the civilized, progressive, and modern.

Of course, Asian and African women very often do not dress like the women portrayed in the shot. But actual trends and fashions in Asia and Africa would actually clothe women of all colors similarly - and that just won't do, because this is a show about a White woman - who is, you know, normally beautiful - serving as tour guide on our little television expedition to the wacky, exotic ideas about beauty that those other cultures hold to.

If Ms. Simpson were to be wearing, say, a corset and lead facepaint, this ad would be significantly less problematic - simply a cross-section of historical fashion trends from all points across the globe. But as it is, Jessica Simpson stands, our modern (read: White, Western) touchpoint against the costumed, made-up exotic women of Somewhere Else.

A Prelude: "Race Doesn't Matter"?

2010-04-02T12:01:00.000-07:00

In prelude to any discussion of race, the question must be addressed:

Why talk about race?

another form of which is stated,

Why do you people always have to make it about color?

For starters - simply by the fact that this piece is going up where it is - I strongly suspect I'm gonna be preaching to the choir.

I don't want to, though.

(If you already see the effects of race on society - if you have come to a realization of the role of discrimination/objectification/disenfranchisement around you - if you have done your reading - I'm so thankful for you, but this isn't really "for" you. Please do stay and hang out, though.)

Instead, this one goes out to anyone who hasn't been thinking about race all that much - but might?

Who Are You?

Maybe you've been (A) lucky enough to never have it thrown in your face in a violent way - you grew up in an area where your ethnic group/culture was dominant, or you were fortunate enough to steer clear of the ugliness so often associated with the mixing of cultures. And so you haven't had to see the world through the lens of race and ethnicity.

Or maybe (B) consciousness of race has been forced on you in the past - you've had moments where issues of race have been insistently - even violently - brought up in ways that hurt or discomforted you. You were asked - "Where are you from?" - and when you replied, "New Jersey" or "Colorado", the response was - "No, I mean, where are you from?" Or one of the other thousand and one quirks of culture, upbringing, or family were brought up and used to mock or even simply separate you from the "normal" kids.

If this is so, perhaps your experience of engaging with a public racial identity has been so uniformly hurtful or uncomfortable that disengaging from race as a topic of discussion seemed to be the best way to move forward: to blend into dominant culture, with any differences from that culture fading away into self-selected obscurity.

If either of these cases is true - or, for some other reason, you've been withholding your voice in the discussion of race- then you may have the biggest part to play in the fight for justice. You see, the desire for equality and the value of human life, regardless of the circumstances of birth, growth, and death, is the kind of thing that is best promoted - and only maintained - when even those who are naturally disinclined to partake in or enjoy such a discussion agree that travesties of a gross and fundamental nature have been perpetrated and are continually affecting the body politic.

The reality, however, is that this very realization brings with it a laundry list of associated issues: admitting that things are Not As They Should Be entails, by the very moral diction therein, that one ought strive to restore the situation to things As They Should Have Been, even if doing so brings inconvenience to oneself. So if racism does exist as a Big Problem, then we as willful moral agents are compelled to act.

Beginning the Discussion - Where Are You Coming From?

The problem with addressing Race in America - and perhaps most pertinently for this community, addressing Race and the Asian-American Experience - is that a discussion of Race must be linked with an understanding of the context and history of race in this country. Experiences that may seem merely unfortunate are revealed as systematic, falling into a pattern, when seen with a broader perspective. Insults and stereotypes that seem arbitrary and confusing make sense when the history of racial conflict and oppression is considered.

One of my clearest memories of the past few years comes shortly after Mixed Company - a male/female a capella group from Yale, whose members included four Asian women and no Asian men - performed (and later released a music video online of) an reworking of Beyonce's "Single Ladies" - Single Asians. The entire song simply trots out one stereotype of Asian female sexuality after another, with verses like:

"Let’s make some noise
For all the boys
Who have yellow fever.
I’ll be Lucy Liu
Or Sailor Moon
A geisha just for you."

Of course, once the video leaked out beyond the walls of Yale - not to mentioned the furor caused within the Yale community - an enormous public debate erupted, with some people calling the video out for blatant racism, and others excusing it as collegiate humor, kids being kids, and so on. For their part, the group excused itself by retreating to the well-worn hideaway of closet racists and shock humorists everywhere: claiming that the song was, in fact, parodying the points of view presented. "It's not about being racist! It demonstrates how dumb racism is!"

At some point during the height of the controversy surrounding the "Single Asians" video, I was riding in a car with two other Asian-American Yale students. Discussing our responses to the video, I recall that both of them were highly confused as to why the song would be so hurtful to many of their classmates. Trying to discuss my own negative reaction, I realized that we approached the content of the song from very different perspectives: it offended me because it employed hurtful stereotypes (the sexually submissive ("geisha")/aggressive ("dragon lady") Asian woman, the one-dimensionally-academic Asian-American, etc.) for amusement without explicitly contradicting or dismantling those stereotypes.

On the other hand, my two friends didn't quite understand what to make of the video. One of them remarked that he was a little confused, but found it somewhat amusing; and the other simply didn't know how to respond to it. Discussing it, we realized that I, coming from suburban Delaware, grew up in a situation in which I often found myself as the sole Asian-American in a social setting, while they - having spent most of their formative years in Asian-dominated regions of California - were more familiar with engaging with race in situations in which they were members of the dominant culture. To them, these stereotypes were obviously untrue, even to the point of causing confusion, largely because they understood - and were surrounded by people who understood - them to be invalidated by daily experience. They could much more quickly assume that the song was an obvious and even harmless parody because, from their perspective, these stereotypes are precisely that: only stereotypes, with no real-world thrust behind them.

Continuing the Discussion - Why Are We Where We Are?

We realized something else, that day: both of these friends also had little understanding of the evolution of the sexual typecasting of the bodies of Asian males and females. For me, a large portion of the offensiveness of that video had to do with the historical role of the Asian female as sex object, from Madame Butterfly to military prostitution throughout the 20th century and the current trend of "Asian trophy wives". That Chinese men and women were referred to in the debate about the 1875 Page Act as "cheap Chinese labor and immoral Chinese women" has cast a long shadow over the rest of the history of Asians in America: Asian men as an emasculated work force, Asian women as promiscuous, submissive, and sexually exploitable, and both as subhuman. Jokes about Asian women's sexuality - or a perceived lack of Asian male sexuality - have to be handled cautiously, in ways broader jokes about dominant-culture sexuality don't have to.

Similarly, to make a joke about a friend's family dying is cruel - to make a joke about a Jewish friend's family being burned to death is tasteless in a much more complicated way, for reasons having to do with the complications of history. The Holocaust is well-known, and incalculably horrendous - the struggle of Asians in America, and its own share of blood and suffering, is less publicly acknowledged.

Why is this?

One of the chief views shaping the portrayal of Asian-Americans over the past 50-70 years has been the status of Asians as the American "model minority" - by which is meant, Asian immigrants are supposedly generally successful, with community stories of financial success, low crime rates, and familial stability. This view of Asian-Americans is, in some ways, a fabrication - and, in other ways, comes from the way that Asian social norms read into and are understood by general American society (for further background, read the above linked article). Regardless, for whatever reason, Asian-American complaints about limitations placed on their success are often marginalized by use of the model minority rhetoric - that, as Asian-Americans don't face the same degree or type of racial limitations that other American minorities do, we have less basis to view American society as treating us unfairly.

This is really the essence of the whole question: Why keep bringing up race? Well, we keep bringing it up because it is still a continual source of hurt and anger. And as long as society's approach to race really impacts human lives and experiences - our own, or those of whom you love - we continue engaging with it.

But what if we deny the premise? What if race doesn't have to be a source of tension? Maybe I am just too sensitive. Asian-American activists should get the chip off our shoulder, lighten up, and contribute something to society instead of dredging up the wrongs of the past.

Well, I think that race is and should be an arena within which Asian-Americans continually seek justice, for two reasons: (A) past injustices still remain to be amended and (B) very real, very present, wrongs still continue to be freshly committed.

(A) Many will admit that America's historical dealings with people of all ethnic backgrounds, including Asian immigrants, has been a horrific tale. And many of these people will concur that, when confronted with vast and horrific injustice, the reaction of a responsible government and populace will be to make amends for that injustice. And many will also agree that America's policy has since markedly improved - no longer can Asians not immigrate or become American citizens, are there large-scale massacres of Asian-Americans, and so on. But even granted this shared historical perspective, two viewpoints diverge: either American policy and public sentiment has been sufficient to make amends for the evil perpetrated on Asian-Americans, or it has not.

So here, we come to a question of standards: one might say, by way of analogy, suppose my father had beaten your father and taken his car. Later, he used that car to get a job. That job purchased him a house, which supported his family, and so on - and in the meanwhile, your carless father had descended into vagrancy, coped with alcoholism, etc. Now, if I were to make amends to you - to what degree do I owe you for the sins of my father?

Do I owe you your father's car, which is all my father technically took from him?

Do I owe you my childhood home? My childhood memories? Your lost childhood?

It's a difficult question. Certainly I owe you something - but I also cannot heal perfectly the sins of my father. What do I owe you? (for more on this subject, an excellent body of literature on White Privilege exists)

One area of great success in Asian-American activism has been the Japanese-American fight for internment reparations. It has been widely and publicly acknowledged by the American government that the internment of American citizens of Japanese descent during World War II was illegal and unconscionable, both by means of official apology and financial redress.

But it's not so simple as that (it never is, is it?). Some scholars still see the official position on internment as lacking - apologizing for bureaucratic oversight, but not for racist intent, as though the entire Japanese-American internment was a mere clerical error or hierarchical miscommunication. And even within the past month, conservatives in the Texas Board of Education - a particularly influential state Board whose decisions guide curriculum development across the nation - have selected a curriculum that de-emphasizes the racial aspects of internment, claiming that wartime sentiment against Japanese-Americans was no more severe or exacerbated by racial tension than anti-German or anti-Italian feeling. All this, despite the fact that there was no institutionalized, loyalty-blind internment of German- or Italian-American citizens.

(B) And the sad truth is that anti-Asian feeling still runs high, breaking out in ugly and shocking ways. A recent wave of violence was launched against first- and second-generation South Asian students in a South Philly school, Asian homes and businesses are targeted for crime, and, at least as recently as the mid-90s, the US Commission on Civil Rights acknowledged that Asian-Americans are "frequently victimized by violent crime" [Civil Rights Issues Facing Asian Americans in the 1990s].

And even when it isn't active harm that is being perpetrated against Asian-Americans, external limitations and boundaries are presented to Asian-Americans in ways that are subtle or invisible to outsiders. While Asian-Americans are perceived as highly successful in many fields, we find ourselves portrayed in media as "window dressing" - useful in ad backdrops, as supporting (or adversarial) characters, or as ever-young erotic objects.

And Whence From Here?

If you've stuck with me this far - well, thanks. You definitely didn't have to. But we have not reached the end of our conversation, I hope: this was merely the beginning.

Outrage, grief, and an awareness of the need for reconciliation are not themselves the products of the healing process, but the initial motivators toward it. In the following installments of this series of articles, I will address specific areas of communal brokenness in the shared American consciousness of Asian-Americans: specifically, the perception of (1) American men and (2) women of Asian descent, asking about the ways that perception - sexual, social, and more - has, is, and can be molded.

This is a conversation. I've just talked a lot - said my piece - but you also have much to say. The Asian-American experience is not a bad one, and it's not only characterized by grief, outrage, and righteous anger. To present it as reactionary in this way does as good a job as dehumanizing and flattening out our communal history and reality as Asian-Americans as any racist caricature. I have here presented a particularly difficult and painful side of our shared past and present; and I have done so only in the hope that, by bringing such a topic to light, our future progress might be buoyed up.

So if you agree, disagree, or wonder - please add your voice and thoughts in the comment section.

As Zac Efron once said, we're all in this together.

Our experience is coloured through and through by books and plays and the cinema, and it takes patience and skill to disentangle the things we have really learned from life for ourselves. - C.S. Lewis

Even the 3 Musketeers can't stop the whitewashing...

2010-02-19T00:18:00.000-08:00

The main man Combat Jack goes in over at his site, daily mathematics, about how the biopic for influential, iconic, and acclaimed French author Alexandre Dumas is whitewashing this noted Haitian-French figure's life.

well this is charming.

2010-02-07T01:33:00.000-08:00

In a stunning demonstration of a lack of self-awareness, Christopher Hitchens labels North Korea "A Nation of Racist Dwarfs" in a recent piece for Slate.com.

He does make some good points - but ultimately, I'm afraid, succumbs to pervasive hypocrisy. I don't see how Hitchens' rhetorically charged description of North Koreans - labeling suffering North Koreans "a sort of new species. Starving and stunted dwarves, living in the dark, kept in perpetual ignorance and fear, brainwashed into the hatred of others..." - is any different from North Korean propaganda used to dehumanize "Western imperialist pigs" in the inculcated minds of North Koreans who buy into the party line about the Western world.

By utilizing such loaded language in discussing the situation in North Korea, Hitchens actually talks at odds with his implicit goal: he wants, it seems, to make the reader sympathetic to the plight of the North Korean citizenship, physically and idealogically abused. But employing such lurid descriptions - attention-getting though they may be - evokes revulsion and distaste rather than empathy and compassion. Reading through his piece, it seems that Hitchens believes, somehow, that the oppressed North Korean citizenry, having adopted the worldview of their government by coercion, now presents a threat to first-world/Western hegemony. This is akin to victim-blaming: rather than addressing the oppressor (the North Korean regime) as the instability inherent in the oppressor-victim system, Hitchens' language aggregates the system and creates a monolithic problem out of both the oppressor and victim. Rather than attempting to heal the victim by removing the influence of the oppressor (admittedly an incredibly [impossibly?] difficult task), such an approach removes the problem by simultaneously denying the victim's innocence/suffering and (hopefully) removing the oppressor.

A discussion (prologue)

2010-02-04T20:31:00.000-08:00

This is a discussion that begins with a controversial question:

Why are Asian men emasculated and Asian women fetishized?

[dead. awkward. silence.]

Please, please, please. Try to trust me: I want to listen to you. To be humble. I promise that I will be as loving and open as I know how.

But I also want - need - to have this conversation. So, for my sake, if not for your own, please humor me.

This is a discussion that I know is incredibly rude, on several levels. I don't know all of them, but I think I am aware of some of them:

1) It's uncomfortable to talk about sex. Even more when it's about other people having sex. And especially when it's someone else [me] talking to you [you?] about the sex you're having [or aren't. Or will, maybe?].

2) It's uncomfortable to talk about physical bodies, or our perceptions and stereotypes, and how they affect our attraction to (potentially) significant others. It's hard to talk about attractiveness when we prefer to think that attraction is a mystical, innate, function of personal character and divine providence. I do think it is all of that; but I also believe that nurture and social pressures play a role in viewing certain qualities - or, even worse, certain people irrespective of their qualities - as "attractive" or "unattractive".

3) It's impolite (read: uncomfortable) to talk about race. More generally, it is always easier to leave well enough alone. Bringing up awkward questions about how structures of racial and social power function is a high risk proposition: I could easily offend or hurt someone whose opinion or well-being actually matter to me. Sometimes this is because people are benefiting from systems of marginalization that they - directly or indirectly - maintain. Sometimes this is because people are turning a blind eye, whether consciously or unconsciously, to systems that are hurting them.

To bring up race risks offending both sides of the coin: it reminds certain people that they are being hurt, and it challenges others, saying that they might be hurting others. No one wants to be thought of as cruel; and few people want to uncover abuse that lies in their past, or even hidden in their present. Ignorance, after all, is bliss.

4) This is not a traditionally "Christian" subject. For some of my audience, who don't give a hoot [or any more interesting -noun-] about religion, this point is moot [rhyme. ha.]. But for some of you, this is a very, very big objection. After all, isn't the duty of a faithful Christian to turn our eyes away from the world, and its petty concerns, and to fix them on Jesus Christ and His Gospel - His Good News?

Talking about this subject is a high-risk proposition: I fear that, even in the best case, I become typecast as "sensitive about gender and race issues". Already, I know, I have been treading that line care...- who am I kidding? I have been willfully hurtling towards the characterization that "JASON MAKES EVERYTHING ABOUT RACE" for the past year. Still, I fear that this discussion will just be another reason for me to be cast as a fringe, extremist, or - at best - highly biased voice.

At worst? I burn bridges, collapsing relationships with friends and family members. Friends of mixed race think that I condemn their parents for falling in love with one another; friends in interracial relationships think that I don't respect, admire, or appreciate their love. I lose jobs, respect, or even a future career in ministry because what I am bringing up is thought to be hateful, bigoted, or just too much trouble to deal with.

I know I can be hateful. It's one of many, very many, weaknesses. But I am hoping - praying - that this discussion is not one that comes from hate. I am hoping - praying - that this discussion comes from love. From wanting to understand why we are where we are, and wanting to talk with you about how we can go where we should.

In this discussion, I want to tread carefully. I don't want to fall into the traps of dehumanizing anyone: and it is very, very easy to dehumanize everyone. Please bear with me.

This discussion - a virtual who's who of embarrassing dinner table talk, from Race to Gender to Sex - is a high-risk one. But it is also, I think, a potentially high-reward one. If I - you - we - are able to keep our wits about us, be honest, and be humble enough to listen to one another, I think that this discussion can be one where we grow in love, understanding, and compassion and even, perhaps, start to change the world just a tiny bit for the Good.

This will be a discussion in four parts:

0) Prologue. This piece, introducing the theme and begging your continued attention and good humor.

1) "Race, Sex, and Gender Don't Matter"? - why should this conversation take place? I present social, moral, and religious reasons why open, even provocative, discussions of race and gender politics (politics being broadly defined) need to exist.

2) What If Asian Men Were Men? - inspired in part by Alienated Conclusions' What If Black Women Were White Women?, I begin with the question: why am I an "Asian Man," and not just a "Man"? And what does that mean?

This last piece will be the trickiest part. As a man, I am immensely unqualified to write about any female issue. I don't know how I'm going to do this. I might need someone's help. Does anyone want to volunteer? But for this discussion to be true to itself, it needs to be addressed.

3) Beautiful Asian Wives - All the Single Asians slapped us in the face with it, a comedienne is making a career trumpeting it, and even Marie Claire noticed. From "yellow fever" to "rice queens", what's going on with the fetish for feminized Asians?

I want this discussion to truly be a discussion. Please offer feedback via the comment section or a personal email, particularly if you feel like you are a subject in this discussion (i.e.: asian man, asian woman, or someone in a relationship with an asian man or woman). I will try to shape my discourse in such a manner that it addresses your concerns.

Hip-hop Is Saving Asian-American People...

2010-01-28T11:40:00.000-08:00

New York streetwear staple Mighty Healthy recently dropped this tee on an unsuspecting public... but really when you think about it, it was only a matter of time.

Inspired in part, at least, by this tee, the homey Dallas Penn went in over at ihiphop.com, his new jumpoff, with a blog article titled "Asian people are saving hip-hop..." (for the record, Dallas is Mighty Healthy extended family via the legendary 40 Diesel).

And you know what, I think Dallas is more right than wrong. Sure, hip-hop is bigger than race - after all, while dominated by Black culture, Hip-Hop's roots in 1970s inner-city New York sprang from a mixture of African, Latin American, and other cultures and influences - but our people have been getting it in in a major way, from streetwear (BAPE, Mighty Healthy, The Hundreds, Staple Design, and far more are Asian-owned, -designed, and -founded) to DJing (Qbert, Neil Armstrong, and Babu, to name some prominent heads) to hip-hop journalism and media empires (king of the hip-hop internets Miss Info, columnist/author Jeff Yang, the homegirl sooey). And while we have been slacking on the prominent emcee tip, don't get it twisted: Asians and Asian-Americans are out there hustling.

I'm not going to front like we were in the frontlines from the beginning though. The pioneers of hip-hop - while diverse - were, primarily, Black and Latino, with some White faces mixed in, and others representing occasionally.

The Asian-American population has existed for around 150+ years , since the mid-19th century, when Chinese and Japanese men came streaming over to the West Coast in search of opportunitites for railroad work and comparatively well-paying menial labor. With a high cultural value placed on the concept of "saving face", not to mention racist and aggressive barriers placed around new Asian immigrants - and even those Asian-Americans whose families had been in the country for generations - the Asian-American population adapted to its surroundings by, well, adapting. We shifted, settled in, got in where we fit in, and generally became a population that fit the role in Western society of the polite child: "seen and not heard".

For much of the history of the Asian-American, this was the role we played: silently adaptable, accomodating of social norms and roles. Cast as muscled brute labor, Asians in America labored and died working on railroads and washing clothes. Later recast according to the whims of society, Asians in America adapted, shifting ideas of success towards the sciences: computer scientists, engineers, medical doctors.

But the voices of Asian-American men and women were, throughout this process of casting and re-casting, broadly silent in the public forum. People spoke about Asian-Americans; they spoke at and even to Asian-Americans; but rarely, very rarely, did people bother to listen to Asian-Americans. The silent adaptability that had so long functioned as a strength of the community at large now found itself a detriment, that calm silence and careful studiousness taken as meek acceptance - even welcome! - of domination by larger cultural forces.

Of course, there have always been exceptions to the cultural stereotype, individuals whose voices spoke of the internal strife caused by the pull towards social conformation and the push toward individual dreams. But those voices rarely found an outlet; and when they found one, they were far too often unsupported - alone, with no one to carry on their movement once it had passed.

In recent years - at least since the early 90s - Asian-Americans, especially those growing up as children of poor, recently-immigrated families, have found themselves in the same urban environments as the fathers - and successors - of hip-hop, many attending the same poorly-funded inner-city schools as Black and Latino children. Raised in these surroundings, it is no surprise that the Asian-American population in the 1990s and 2000s found itself increasingly identifying with hip-hop culture.

The most beautifullest thing in the world is that hip-hop has a quality that provides the exact cure to the problem of silence and marginalization which so many Asian-American voices suffer.

The culture of hip-hop - including all its elements, from emceeing to deejaying, bboying to graf writing, beatboxing to fashion - is grounded exactly in the kind of brash and confident outspokenness that Asian-American voices long for. Emotion and expressiveness is a key component of Asian art, but often in an internal, community sense: pouring out one's heart and soul is respected, but to do so to the world at large is not seen as brave, but rather weak. However, American children of Asian families understand that, in the American public discussion, you have to project your voice to make it heard; sitting back and waiting for your turn is an invitation to be ignored and neglected. Our forefathers' silence may have set the economic foundation for this generation's existence, but now it's time to speak up - that our voices, rapped, written, scratched, and worn, can set the social foundation for the next generation's progression.

Asian America has been a people searching for a voice, a message searching for a medium. In hip-hop, we may have found all of that.

And Dallas is right, too: hip-hop in 2010, and throughout the last decade, has been a medium in search of a soul. While cats claim to worship authenticity, hip-hop is - and has been ever since the Sugarhill Gang bit rhymes from Grandmaster Caz to get bank - perpetually in a state of losing its heart to material interests.

But remember that silent adaptability that helped the first Asian-Americans survive? Similarly, Asians and Asian-Americans have quietly been working their way into the lifeblood of hip-hop culture. I have ridden around town in Beijing 8 Mile-style, bumping Tupac with a gang of Chinese kids - born and raised - who knew every overstressed rhyme (and not a word else of English). South Korea is home to some of the sickest bboy crews and battles in the world. And everyone knows that, right now, hip-hop fashion is entirely dependent on the Japanese street scene, with names like Nigo and Hiroshi Fujiwara ringing cash register bells in "streetwear" stores from DC to LA to NYC to Berlin. A few months ago, flipping through complex.com's style section, I came across a young Brooklyn kid who, when asked "Who inspires your style?", responded, "Koreans at my school."

Hip-hop has gone from Brooklyn, Staten Island, Philly, Detroit, and Atlanta to Beijing, Hong Kong, Taipei, Seoul, and Tokyo; and, even more impressively, it has gone from the South Bronx to the Asian enclaves in Flushing; from Black communities to Asian communities in Atlanta; from Southlea to Korean hoods in Houston. In the process of doing so, it has been both preserved and updated. There is something about its essence that has been specially loved and embraced by the Asian-American communities, even as its mainstream face goes from backpack to trap to crunk to snap; and, in return, it has given young Asian-American men and women a voice and a space for personal and financial empowerment and growth.

Asians may be saving hip-hop; but hip-hop may also be saving Asian-Americans.

Murders for gold in El Salvador

2010-01-28T09:57:00.000-08:00

A friend from church has been involved in some volunteer work in El Salvador, supporting local activist leaders in their struggle against an encroaching - and aggressive - development by the Pacific Rim mining company.

The El Dorado gold mine that would essentially rape their land and natural resources, pollute their water table, and destroy the local ecosystem. And of course, all the money and resources flooding out of the country would leave it even more impoverished than it already is when the company finishes and leaves. Naturally, Pacific Rim has its numbers in order: the feasibility studies, the details about development and profitability, and so on. Of course they can make the "high grade, vein-hosted El Dorado gold project" look reasonable and even justifiable.

But what is absolutely intolerable is the fact that, in the past 8 months, three protest leaders have been shot dead in clear assassination-styled killings, including an activist who was kidnapped, dismembered, and left in a well and a pregnant woman shot in the stomach in front of her two-year-old child. In all, five deaths have been chalked up to this struggle, five lives ended because (legally) exploiting a country's natural resources for corporate profit is more valuable than the lives of that country's people.

It is clear that this is not defense of a legitimate operation, but an organized campaign to terrorize and bully local citizens and peaceful families - and even an entire government. I don't want to speculate why it is ignored by mainstream American media; that's not my place. But if you and your communities aren't hearing about this through other sources, then passing information hand-to-hand must suffice.

David includes some information below, but I felt moved enough by this issue and the research I did into it that I wanted to pass it along with a personal note. After all, I do a lot of talking around here about being anti-imperialist and post-colonial; but talk is valuable only insofar as it leads to real, concrete ways to put love and righteous anger into action. There is a petition - what good it can do, only God knows - but just as if not more importantly, if this situation calls out to you, please pray and spread awareness to others.

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From:
Date: Thu, Jan 28, 2010 at 12:31 PM
Subject: request

hey peeps,

some of you all may have already received my semi-campuswide email, but i wanted
to send a specific email to you all about a matter. i spent several weeks over
the summer working with community organizers in the rural northern region of el
salvador, and over the past several months, due to their opposition to mining
projects in the regions, several of them were brutally murdered (one woman was
shot point blank while washing her clothes in the river).

all i'm asking is for you to sign a petition that will get sent to the mining
company to take action against the incidents. the website is:

http://www.change.org/actions/view/stop_the_assassinations_of_anti-mining_activists_in_el_salvador

though it's not much, we hope to receive enough signatures on the website for
them to feature it on their weekly emails, which will hopefully snowball and
generate more support.

thanks guys,
david

From first things.

2010-01-27T12:00:00.000-08:00

Even the humblest of things can spring from a humble beginning; and, as I have no ambition or desire to produce anything but the humblest of things, I'm hoping my audience (imaginary or no) might forgive me the humility of our settings - blogspot, of all places (not even a custom domain!) - and the content: thus far, merely a litany of recycled posts from my personal blog, the quality of which is redoubtably dubitable.

But I ramble on.

The title of this blog - Iason de Silentio - comes from the pseudonym of Danish existentialist philosopher Søren Kierkegaard, Johannes de Silentio, referencing the Biblical John the Baptist: a voice coming out of the silence, speaking into the world about him. A silent world, literally and prophetically: the backdrop of John's prophetic existence was the wilderness of 1st-century Judea, far from the urban centers of his time; and his voice came into the public sphere following four hundred years of prophetic silence, the oracular voices of the past growing increasingly distant and dim. John's voice - strident, urgent - was the wake-up call preparing the people for a new revelation.

Kierkegaard thought himself facing similar circumstances in 19th-century Denmark: in his case, he faced a doddering and overbearing church hierarchy, a numb national congregation, and inadequate, distant theologies. Kierkegaard's voice - writing under various nom de plume - awoke, aroused, and enlivened his people, Church, and philosophy forever, in his role as the Father of (Christian) Existentialism.

I hope that this blog will serve as one such wilderness voice. Though there is not, now, the deafening silence of John or Kierkegaard's time, still there is room, I think, for reasoned and reasonable inquiry into many issues. There are many allies in this work - but much work to be done.

And so I am so bold - I even dare - to raise my small voice and utter out what I can.

The long and short of it:
-Topics in ethnic studies, particularly Asian and Asian-American studies, hip-hop culture, and philosophy (primarily ethics).
-1 or more medium (1000-2000) to long (2000+) pieces a week. Short pieces as they arise.
-I am distinguishing this, my professional space, from my personal blog and my faith/theology/ministry blog.
--My personal blog will continue to exist as a photoblog and space for posts of personal interest (hip-hop, rap, streetwear, etc.).
--All (more or less) formal work on ethnicity, culture (Asian, Asian-American, and hip-hop), and philosophy will be directed to this very site.
--And last, reflections on the Evangelical Church, ministry, scripture, and faith will be found here.

Complex.com - 50 Most Racist Movies

2010-01-27T00:18:00.000-08:00

Full disclosure: my homegirl sooey is on her hustle over at Complex mag's digital division, so I have a personal stake in this...

Still I am not gonna front like complex.com's commentary is anything but 50/50 (at best) in their track record... half of the time, they're profiling dope outfits, brands, personalities, etc.; and the other half of the time, it's puerile attempts at lowest-common-denominator frat boy comedy that blow up in their faces (sorry, "ironic" misogyny is still misogyny...).

And this time, it looks like they got one mostly right, calling out 50 flicks that (more or less) deserve to be called out for their B.S.: Complex.com's 50 Most Racist Movies.

I'm not all that crazy about some of their choices - Passion of the Christ, for one - but all in all, I'll shoot off some props (none) where they're deserved.

I Don't Want To Be Racist Against White People.

2010-01-22T11:49:00.000-08:00

All my White friends, here's one to you.

Am I Being Racist Against White People?

There is a twofold concern for me as I explore ethnicity and the systematic, generational sin of oppression and cultural violence: (1) Am I demonizing and objectifying Whiteness, Western tradition/authority, and European culture? And even if I am not, (2) am I being perceived as doing so?

This question concerns me for several reasons: (A) if I am, I am being hypocritical. Hypocrisy is not only bad in itself, but it (B) leads to me, and other similar critics of power, being discredited or invalidated. This all contributes to (C) a widening divide of miscommunication or silence between those who are set to inherit the reins of traditional structures of power and contemporary voices who seek to point out the outstanding flaws in those systems.

If you'll bear with me - I'll try to be humble - let's examine these points:

The Natural Response to Violence or Assault

(1) A natural response to injustice is to render the unjust oppressor as inhuman. No one wants to think that someone who is in any way like me could do something so horrific to another; no, there must be something about a criminal, about a rapist, about a murderer, that makes them fundamentally different from me. This mental distance works both ways: slave masters, in order to justify the status of their slaves as property, dehumanized them along racial and cultural lines. If an African exists in a lesser form of being - whether a vastly inferior species of humanity, or not even as human at all - then, in a literal sense, it is not inhuman to claim possession over an African man or woman. Psychologists and historians who worked with post-war Nazi soldiers have noted that one of the ways that the German people coped with the horrific actions of the Holocaust was through a willing dismissal of the shared humanity between German Jews and German citizens of Germanic descent. [1]

Similarly, if, say, a close friend were to be murdered, I know that my temptation would be to see his murderer as a horrific, bloodthirsty, psycho bastard with no humanity, and nothing shared in common with myself. I think it's a general rule: we don't like to admit that we could share anything, even the slightest trace of fundamental humanity, with someone who could do such a thing. It is a natural coping mechanism, tinged with a trace of moral self-righteousness: how could anyone do such a thing? combined with well certainly, I would never be capable of such horrors.

This Is Wrong - What's Going On?

The problem here is twofold, both a problem of reality and effectiveness: first, the reality is that no entity or individual is blameless, and responding to evil by mentally distancing oneself from it is just wrongminded. Brokenness and perversity, when glimpsed in others, should not elicit my recoiling from them as diseased and inhuman, but rather my embracing them, knowing and acknowledging that I too have had my times of ugliness, hatred, anger, and violence. The reality is, as much as White, western cultural imperialism has hurt many people and cultures, I too, even in my short 23 years, have insulted, demeaned, and objectified many. To pretend that I am not also a participant in brokenness is to lie.

Secondly, by creating distance between myself and my oppressor, I lessen the possibility for her to reconcile herself with me and make amends to me, even if she desires to do so. As the saying goes, two wrongs don't make a right, and responding to a slight by slighting another only draws both parties further from reconciliation and mutual growth. Even if I were perfect, and my enemy were an incredibly spiteful person, distancing myself from him - while perhaps a useful coping mechanism, and a helpful step towards healing from the injury - ultimately does nothing to prevent the recurrence of the exact same slight, whether towards me or another.

Of course, the burden should be on the oppressor to make amends to the oppressed; even if the oppressed does not ask for apology, it is common human courtesy that if one has created a problem, one ought to fix it. If I kicked down your fence, appropriate apology is not to return bearing a hammer, hand it to you, and let you fix it; it lies on me to return, hammer in hand, and repair the broken fence.

But the simple and sad truth is that many people - myself included - are blind to the wounds we create for others. So to those of us who can be gracious - who have received grace from One who has been wounded by us, and are thus in turn in position to go to those whom we have wounded - it makes sense to do so. Just because I didn't create the problem, doesn't mean I can't be part of the solution.

In the Eye of the Beholder

(2) Tragically, even if I am just telling the truth - or, at least, the truth insofar as I understand it based on fact, evidence, and reasonable inference - I can be perceived as demonizing others. This is difficult.

One thing that I have learned, through reading accounts like Tim Wise's incredible White Like Me, is the unforeseen degree to which people coming from different backgrounds actually possess vastly different experiences. I am not talking about simple social distinctions, like a family only being able to afford bus passes vs. a family being able to afford an SUV. I am talking about completely different perceptions of social order. For example, I grew up with the explicit understanding that police exist to protect me and my friends: I was constantly instructed, in school, at home, and at church, to go to a police officer if I was scared, on my own, in trouble, or lost.

How far is this from the experience of an undocumented immigrant child growing up in, say, downtown Los Angeles! Disregarding the legality of her immigration, an undocumented immigrant girl not only cannot trust the police, but will likely actively distrust them - after all, the legacy of the LAPD is rife with scandal, corruption, abuse, blatant brutality, and more.

Imagine if eight-year-old middle-class suburban Chinese-American me could talk to that Los Angelena. When told about her view of the police, I would have considered her ill-informed, crazy, making up stories, and worse. And while, perhaps, her view of the police would be no more true than mine, I hesitate, now, to say that it is less worthy of consideration.

This is something that often concerns me when I disseminate information into the aether, as it were. I have no way to tell whether my audience is receptive or dismissive; and, while the information that I have uncovered is damning and even sickening to see, it is most terrifying to think that my desire to share the truth could be easily read as simple reverse racism. You can't handle the truth!(?)

After all, it is easiest to respond to an unpleasant message by disengaging from it: writing it off as fallacious, exaggerated, or irrelevant. Whether because a voice is too uncomfortable, too hypocritical, or personally offensive, it is very easy to be discredited, especially in circles into which you are speaking as a critic.

Vision for Reconciliation

But this is distinctly not what I want to do. I do not think that it is the time - at least, in the arena of racial reconciliation - for voices to only be present in the wilderness, crying out to those few who are attracted to them and who are willing to put up with their personal quirks. In this age, I think that the call is to go before not just those who want to listen, or are willing to listen, but especially to those who do not want to listen, and to convince, persuade, or somehow beg them to lend an open ear.

If the persecuted speak only to the persecuted, they cannot proclaim on behalf of the hurt and those crying out for justice. Proclamation comes into a community, and prophetic [2] voices and communities do not retain or hold in prophecy, but share it and spread a message of truth. The difficult, sad, and exhilarating mission for those of us who want to speak truth in love is that communication requires speaking to others, not merely at them.

[1] This is usually how it goes in war crimes: the object of one's transgression is seen as not human and, therefore, not possessing value on par with the subject's humanity. An alternative occurs in the case of child soldiers in Africa: there, instead of being taught that the targets of their violence are subhuman, the humanity of victims is often acknowledged, but simply devalued. Child soldiers are forced to rape, kill, and maim friends and family members, resulting in a general devaluation of all human life, rather than a specifically targeted dehumanization.

[2] Here I use "prophecy" in the general and original sense of "a true proclamation or statement," rather than the more contemporarily common sense of "a true statement about the future".

Repurposed words: Context and Content

2010-01-21T14:01:00.000-08:00

[In the hopes of continued agility of thought, and to spite mental atrophy, a present hope is to dedicate myself to writing of a substantial character. Once a week, generally on Thursdays, I will be sitting down to hash out some brief comments of varying rigor. Your mileage may vary.]

Words are undoubtedly powerful. Biblically speaking, the Word - Hebrew Dabar (), or Greek Logos (λόγος) - is centrally located. One could reasonably say, in fact, that the very essence of Christianity (and the Judaism from which it springs) lies in a theology of words: divine words given to humans from God (Inspiration/Revelation), words used by men to represent to themselves those divine words (Scripture), and words used to systematize, explore, share, and find application for those divine words (philosophical theology, mystical texts, etc.).

Socially speaking, as well, words bear power. Creating terms for systems of oppression and dismissal can serve to reinforce and legitimize them through lexical acceptance, as labels guide identity both overtly (i.e., "Illegal" vs. "Undocumented" immigrants) and subtly (i.e., the normative-neutral "White" versus the marginal and umbrella term "Colored").

This latter point may be unfamiliar to some of my readers, and - though initially I was hoping to cover this in a footnote - it is interesting to explore. You see, beyond the obvious connotations in Western societies - snow, purity, cleanness, and light - White is a generic default, aesthetically a "blank canvas". By creating Whiteness and identifying it with people of Anglo-Saxon European descent as White (rather than, say, Pink, Tan, etc.), the connotative implication is that non-Anglo/non-European persons are less of a blank slate.

I would like stress here that this is not a uniquely White, American, European, or even Western pattern, either. The same is present in modern Chinese: Anglo people are White (白人, bai + ren = white + person) [1], people of African descent are Black (黑人, hei + ren = black + person), but Chinese are 中国人, people of the middle kingdom. And humility is far from a trait of dominant cultures (Consider also the other common term for the Chinese diaspora, 华人, hua + ren = magnificent/splendid + person).

Whether identifying ourselves at the center of all things, or as White (and hence pure/unsullied/adaptable), so long as we have the power to do so, we nearly always ascribe normativity to ourselves. This is a fair move to make internally; after all, processing external input would be highly confusing were it not for the normative presumption of our own internal processes. However, to ascribe normativity to our own points of view in a broader sense overwrites and overrides the experience and authentic reflections of others, creating dissonant systems for those who are not-Us but subscribe (willingly or through coercion) to that prescription. For a majority member [2], most such suppositions pass unquestioned; but, for a minority member, it raises significant existential - even ontological - questions that express themselves as internal anguish and confusion.

Of course, words can also be recontextualized, forcefully and defiantly if need be. The homosexual community (and, increasingly, other communities as well), in accepting, embracing, and finally repurposing the label "Queer", has demonstrated, it seems, a praiseworthy amount of perseverance and deliberate, systematic, activism. It is also one of the rare examples of a community embracing marginalization, for the very etymology of the identifier names its referent as on the fringe.

The N word (as if you're going to get me to spell it out for you... get outta here) is an example of a slur with a far more controversial present usage. While some advocates of the word claim that the same process of acceptance-embrace-repurposing has been undertaken successfully, it is hard to successfully argue that the word has been rehabilitated in the same fashion as the Q word (if you would). To nudge this intuition, let me point to two pieces of evidence: first, that I am myself hesitant to type out in full "the N word", while having no such qualms about "queer" [3]. Second, the ongoing dialect debate over "the N word with a -a" and "the N word with a -er" suggests that the process of linguistic evolution and drift away from offensiveness towards repurposing is far from complete [4].

What separates the two? Without entering into a rigorous discussion, the apparent answer seems to be that "Queer" is a word that preceded its use as a slur, while the N word - though possessing a historied and not entirely negative etymology - springs up in its proximal form as a slur. When those who self-identify as Queer (or queer-allied) do so, they are actually not re-defining the word, but instead actually maintain the definition of the word while re-defining the moral landscape within which it is situated, shifting from normativity to a non-normative field. Not being queer is therefore descriptive, rather than normative, and so queerness becomes as normal as non-queerness.

My (self-)allotted time is drawing to a close and is, indeed, even now nigh. Interestingly, all the above was initially only to be a brief footnote to a larger discussion; at this point, I will turn to a summary of my intended discussion, and pick up on it when next we speak.

So, why all the thought about Words? A natural response would be: the author's hubris leads to an egotistical confluence of form and content, wherein his verbosity is buoyed by the ostensible topic of exploring the power of words.

But no.

Actually, the choice of topic upon which to spend my meagre reserves is prompted by some reflections on the recent Malaysian religious scandal. In short, Malaysian courts recently ruled that it was within the civil rights of non-Muslim organizations (read: Christian churches) and individuals to freely use the Arabic term "Allah" to refer to God - God the concept and God the being. As far as I understand, certain elements within society - pre-radicalized, and definitely not all of Muslim Malaysia [5] - seized upon this ruling as a foothold from which to launch an extremist agenda, including vigilante attacks on various Christian churches and schools.

Malaysia is, of course, a country with a complex history of diversity along ethnic, economic, and religious lines. I am ill prepared to speak on it in such fields, and thus reticent.

While the proximally inciting incident of word usage seems to be more a case of finding excuses than of actual outrage, I am still interested in the idea that word usage can be made into an excuse for action; an excuse that is, at the very least, not horrendously implausible. And even if, in this case, the implausibility of gross offense through word usage is very high, there are definitely cases - slander, defamation, and libel - in which words alone are legally acknowledged to have the power to harm and damage.

To be continued.

[1] It is undeniable that other societies also associate people of Anglo descent with the color white. An interesting study would be a linguistic excavation of Whiteness in other cultures: for example, modern Chinese refer to Anglos as White People. Was this phrase introduced by cultural transmission along with the concept of Whiteness during the opening of Sino-American relations, or does it stem from a natural response to skin tone? Consider also the association of white with death in Chinese cultures (hence, red wedding dresses and white in funeral rituals): in this case, arguments for the nonpreferential nature of white-connotative language seem to obtain more readily.

[2] Majority here, of course, does not necessarily connotate numerical majority, but instead a majority of power. As examples, the racial politics of South Africa and the religious politics of Hussein-era Iraq come to mind.

[3] This does beg the question: ought I be so free with my diction? So far as I understand, queer-sensitive allies are allowed to use this word in such contexts. I may be wrong.

[4] Naturally, as a straight Asian-American male, I am an outsider to both these debates, and I may be reading social cues entirely wrong. This raises another question: do Asian-Americans have a repurposed label? I suspect not. Why not? Interesting.

[5] I hope not to evoke a sense of the Muslim Panic all too familiar in Western rhetoric.

on lies

2009-12-27T00:12:00.000-08:00

"the Men of the Mark do not lie, and therefore they are not easily deceived" - Eomer, The Two Towers (44).

Over the past few days, I've been re-stepping through Tolkien's epic, inspired by my weathered but ever-fond memories of youthful journeys through its pages. Having just finished the first volume, I picked up The Two Towers tonight, to begin thumbing through its pages before slumber.

In doing so, I came across the comment made here by Eomer, and thought it an interesting one. Specifically, it seems to reflect a belief about Honesty - or Deception - that opposes what I often see as the default assumption.

There is a tendency, I think, for us to think that ears too accustomed to true tales will quickly assume the truth of falsehoods - that is, that hearing only the truth will make us more gullible, and susceptible to being misled.

But I rather like the point of view that Tolkien presents here: to him (or, at least, to Eomer), hearing truth doesn't dull one's ears to lies, but rather sharpens them to the scent of what is true. The innocent, in this case, are not gullible; rather, their very innocence preserves an innate and disarmingly natural propensity towards the true and lovely over the false and sham.

That my own ears might be filled with the truth, so that the darkness of lies might recede into unfamiliarity.

Avatar thoughts: 2nd pass, post-viewing

2009-12-25T13:16:00.000-08:00

This morning, after a round of in-house (literally) family celebration, my sister, father, and I went to see Avatar.

As you may have gathered from my previous post, I had some serious reservations about the film's narrative arc.

To simplify a host of fairly irreducible ruminations is difficult; long story short, the film is problematic, but still quite a good film. I would say that most of my concerns were found to have reasonable warrant within the film: some of them aren't so bad, but some - one in particular - are still troubling.

Just a few of the thoughts that I was having while I watched the film, and in discussion afterwards [spoilers to follow]:

1) The film's casting directors acquitted themselves well in presenting often-marginalized faces & bodies.
-While much of the primary cast is Anglo, at the same time, the protagonist is disabled (paralyzed), which is the first time that I can recall, off-hand, a film which has a - the - lead character handicapped throughout the entire film. Big thumbs up to that.
-Non-Anglo characters were present throughout the background and foreground. In my previous post, I was concerned that, of all the primary cast human characters, only two were people of color. This is true; but both had substantive roles, and Michelle Rodriguez' fighter pilot actually had my favorite character arc. There were also several minority faces throughout the background, weakening any charges that Dileep Rao and Rodriguez were token casting choices.
-Female characters were, similarly, represented well in both primary roles of intelligence, strength, and authority, as well as throughout the background.
-In short: Cameron's casting director(s) did a very good job of presenting a wide gender and ethnic spectrum, didn't shy away from presenting a handicapped protagonist, and managed to do so in a way that seemed to bypass typecasting boundaries (except poor Michelle Rodriguez, who just cannot shake the tough-girl image she's born since The Fast & The Furious).

2) I'm still unhappy with the story of Jake Sully's rise to prominence within the native tribe.
-He gets the girl, lives to see the future, rides the bad-shut-yo-mouth flying reptile-bird, and so on.
-Maybe this is more just my general concern with how Hollywood films treat their protagonists: with the universe-on-film revolving around them, every action, person, and event, whether past, present , or future. conveniently happening with them in the center of the action. If this is true, which it seems like it is, then I can't specifically cite this as a shortcoming of either Cameron or Avatar.

3) I'm more displeased than I thought I would be by the conclusiveness of the film's ending.
-The film concludes, seemingly, on a high note: the outsiders are banished from the edenic world of Pandora (an incredibly silly name for a developmentally high-priority planet, by the way: who in the universe would want to "open up Pandora"?), and the tribes, united, stand behind Jake Sully.
-First off, internally, this ending doesn't make much sense. If "unobtainium" (another incredibly silly placeholderish name) is actually so valuable ($20M/kg... although, with inflation in 2154, who knows how valuable that actually is?), then history - economics - and sociology all seem to point towards this not being a permanent victory, but rather an incredibly fleeting respite. But this is neither here nor there; it's more of a technical concern than critical commentary.
-Second, more importantly, this ending is a happy one. This is my major concern remaining after a first viewing:

-The film ends on a happy note: in a literal deus ex machina (or, more properly, ex natura), Eywa, the Gaia-figure of the film, unites the power of the planet (Earth! Wind! Fire! Water! Heart!) to save the indigenous peoples and herself from the plundering, pillaging earth-humans with their murderous technology. Even if the future is indeterminate, at least, for the moment, the victory has conclusively been won.
-This simply is not the way that things have always turned out: for most native peoples, facing encroaching empire or exploitative harvesting, there is no end to the story, and certainly no end that has turned out well. For the Australian aboriginal peoples, the North American first nations, and African native tribes, the story still continues. In some cases, progress has been made; for other peoples, however, the story is simply one of unvarying neglect, social marginalization, economic oppression, and widespread apathy towards their plight.
-This is why Cameron's Avatar is still, for me, so strongly redolent of White Guilt. To tell a story about native peoples is one thing; to mirror the true story of native peoples, as awkward, uncomfortable, or embarrassing as it may be, is quite another.

-I can understand that this film is a fantasy. But I hope that it is a fantasy that stirs us to action, rather than a fantasy that provides all-too-easy catharsis: after three hours in the movie theater, we leave feeling sympathetic toward native peoples, guilty about our own exploitative/imperialistic ways, but satisfied knowing that the Na'vi got their measure of justice - even while native and aboriginal people the world over have yet to see their reparations in kind.

But still, on this day, I celebrate with family and friends, rejoicing in - remembering - and hoping for - the presence of one among us who did not just come to save, but to suffer.
And, having suffered to the point of death, and having died, and having been given life again, he was not content that only he might have life, but did not see his work as complete until all poor, heavy-burdened, and unvalued people could come to share in that life. This is true.

Avatar: James Cameron's colonial - racist - fantasy

2009-12-19T19:59:00.000-08:00

This is an important one.

If you read no other entry that I ever write, please read this.

Why?

I'm sure that some - many - of you are used to me talking about racism by this point. You may have wondered:

Why is race such an issue for Jason? Does he see racism in everything?

Well, no. Not everything. But almost everything.

Can't he just get over it?

Maybe I could; but I won't.

I want to share how I see racism manifest in places that others don't; and why I am not willing to "get over it". Regardless of whether or not you agree with me: please hear me out.

What Are You Talking About, And Why?

What prompts this? Well, over the past couple days, I've been reading various commentaries [warning: both links have spoilers] on the current 20th Century Fox blockbuster, James Cameron's Avatar, and I thought that it might serve as an excellent example of how racial - racist - beliefs are interwoven into our daily lives, and exactly why I think it's so important to call them out when we see them.

Disclaimer: I haven't seen Avatar yet. I was, for a while, eagerly anticipating it, especially as I saw advance reviews - from reputable sources like Roger Ebert - excitedly calling it the best new sci-fi property in decades. But in the course of reading through various blogs and reviews, I grew increasingly uncomfortable with the film's themes, and sought out more information, hoping to be proved wrong, or at least have doubts allayed. This did not happen.

Just what are these troubling themes? Well, let's take a quick look at the narrative arc: it doesn't ruin the story to say that the film is about a race of peace- and nature-loving alien natives, who come under attack from menacing, technologically-advanced humans wanting to plunder their world. But, just as all seems lost, salvation for the natives comes from the most unlikely quarter: a human soldier who switches sides because, get this, he realizes how awesome the natives are. [Slight spoiler:] He woos their princess, out-competes their best warrior - her fiance - and takes headship of their tribes to lead them in battle against the evil imperialistic humans.

This lone hero, savior of the colored (literally) folk, is, of course, a Caucasian, Anglo-Saxon man.

In fact, all the primary Human roles are cast White, except for Latina Michelle Rodriguez, typecast as a scrappy soldier, and a single Indian-American, Dileep Rao, cast as - shocker - a scientist. The primary speaking Na'vi roles, on the other hand - the native people - are all filled by people of color, including Black, African, and Cherokee actors.

I've Heard This Story Before...

Avatar's story is, at heart, familiar. From the innocuous (Superman) to the insidious (The White Man's Burden), this metanarrative underlies much of Western thought: a community's salvation coming in the personal form of an outsider savior. Nothing is wrong with this version of the story and, in fact, it can be argued that it is derived from the Christian story, a narrative I cherish with great regard [1]. But what happens to the concept of a savior-from-outside when we write ourselves into the role of the savior? This is the root of Colonialist thought: when we begin to see ourselves as that outsider-savior figure, and see native peoples as fundamentally noble but backwards. These good-hearted but incapable (whether technologically, morally, socially, etc.) natives need someone else to map out their progress, and we do so by setting them on the path of integration into Us-ness.

This is the Colonialist story: they advance if we force ourselves on them. The twisted logic echoes the rationalizations of the overbearing boss, the abusive spouse, and even serial rapists.

Hold on, though. What I'm describing doesn't quite match what Cameron plots out in Avatar, does it? In fact, he is writing precisely the opposite kind of story: in Avatar, the literal colonizers - humans toting Science, Technology, and magnificently-rendered spaceships - are the bad guys. How is it a colonialist narrative if the protagonist turns his back on the oppressive ways of mankind and leads the Na'vi natives to victory?

Re-read that last phrase: the protagonist (who is, we are reminded, Human just like us) becomes the salvation of the native peoples.

Here, the story's thrust becomes clear: Cameron's Na'vi natives may be an exotic and attractive people, but they are still ultimately incapable, doomed without the leadership and capability of the Human outsider. And this is precisely the colonialist narrative, advanced to its next logical step. These more sophisticated works acknowledge the overt shortcomings of forced cultural conversion. But, in such cases, the reassurance that "we did it to them for their own good" is instead replaced by the more subtle triumph of seeing a character that we know is supposed to be dominant - a White, Male figure - rising to his natural place of leadership. As these stories draw near the end of their arcs, we can breathe a sigh of relief, knowing that the guy who was supposed to be the good guy, is; even if he or his people were the ones who caused the ruckus, in the end, he fixed it, atoning for his own transgressions in the process.

This is the story of white guilt, and it is a story told with increasing volume and insistence as the Eurocentric world has been brought face-to-face with the terrible legacy of the "Age of Exploration": genocide, pestilence (more), forced relocation, massive-scale theft, and more. Unable to deny the horrors inflicted by their forebears, the descendants of colonizers had to convince themselves that they could be the exception to the ancestral rule: as their fathers had destroyed lives and cultures, they would save and value them.

But What's So Wrong With That?

The problem with this is that, regardless of what the theme or internal plot rationale may be, in the end, the movie presents a White Man romancing the exotic princess and proving himself superior to the best warrior in her tribe. If we are White Men, this makes us feel good about ourselves; and if we are not, we either put ourselves in his shoes, or are forced to cast ourselves as a romantic object or inferior competitor.

In the end, Avatar still places "me" - if I understand myself to be Anglo, and Male - at the center of the story. And, in it, the oppressed native is valuable not because he is, but because I tell him that he is. If the sins of my ancestors have harmed others, whatever the damage, I am the one who has the power to set it right. Parallel arcs are traced out in a few sets of identical films: Fern Gully & The Jungle Book, where the White Male saves an exotic, magical Nature from his society's aggressive industrialization. Freedom Writers, The Blind Side, Radio, and Hardball - among many others - where an experienced, open-hearted, caring White authority figure mentors a minority kid or kids to success [2] . Films like Australia, Dances with Wolves, The Last Samurai, and The Last of the Mohicans, that all share two aspects: a White Male protagonist, and a dying, endangered culture whose future depends on him [3].

Of course, in our media, there are many stories of a person or culture in need, and not all can be traced to White Guilt. Films like The Patriot, Gladiator, Dirty Dancing, and Braveheart all share key aspects with the films listed above: a community in need, and a man who rises to the occasion. But notice two things about them: while heroes arise from within those cultures, the communities being portrayed in these films and others like them are exclusively Eurocentric, Western communities. Apparently, when the culture being portrayed is White, a cultural insider serves as a satisfactory hero. But, when the culture is not White - and instead Urban, Aboriginal, Native, or Japanese - then an outsider is needed to step in as savior. A White outsider.

At this point, I can well imagine someone saying: you're talking about the media, and the media is simply in the business of providing what sells. Since most people in the country are White, it is profitable to provide protagonists to whom a White consumer base can relate [4] . It's not about actively being a racist, but simply good business.

This objection is wrong. Is it not about race? Then name me a single film where the opposite happens, where a non-White character assimilates into a clearly White society and winds up in a position of power or leadership.

I can't think of a single one * **.

So, then, apparently the interests of the White consumer demographic are so strong that they completely drown out the interests of consumers of color. This is a problem for two reasons: first, if it were to be true, it is a textbook case of tyranny of the majority, where the dominant group exercises such complete power that the interests and even well-being of the minority are completely disregarded. Second, it suggests that the media believes that White audiences are incapable of doing exactly what they demand of their minority audiences: to relate to a protagonist who is not like them.

This may be good business; but it is immoral, unethical, and dangerous. It is not racist to the level of a hate crime or muttered slur, but negative public perception nurtures bias, and bias leads, in its own inexorable way, to violence.

In the end, for whatever reason, the message being communicated is that a White person - usually a man - will be a hero, regardless of whether he finds himself in his own culture or outside it. But rarely a woman; and never a person of color.

You're Thinking Too Much.

"Come on, Jason. They're aliens, not minorities. Why can't you just watch it for what it is: fun, entertaining, light action?"

Online humor site Something Awful has an article (note: about halfway through, it gets silly. But I points 1-9 are suitably insightful) pointing out how obviously Cameron cribbed bits and pieces of native peoples for the "invented" Na'vi culture, from their "primitive" weapons to piercings, tattoos, and more. And the phonetic proximity of the two terms (Na'vi + "ti" = native) makes for either an odd coincidence, or a clever - and damning - subliminal. And if it weren't already clear enough, Cameron himself has repeatedly drawn explicit connections between Avatar and White cultural fantasies like Dances with Wolves. He obviously wants desperately to be an auteur, producing work read as political, social, and ethnic commentary.

And, you know what, it's almost worse if this narrative has come about unintentionally. If Cameron set out to simply make the freshest, most interesting, most entertaining work that he could, and the themes of White Guilt just happened to manifest themselves in that work, this is immense justification for the post-colonialist critic. Such a scenario signals that the co-opting of other cultures has gone so far that it has ingrained itself into the grand narrative of Western culture, deeply enough that even the production of a new mythos (and there is reason to believe that Cameron hopes for an extended universe) has the fingerprints of eurocentrism and White Guilt all over it.

In Closing,

Avatar is a problem. It seems like a great piece of entertainment: eye-popping special effects (or at least, so my sister and Roger Ebert both claim), a fun ride, the event movie of the season. But, at the same time, to buy into Avatar is to perpetuate a harmful, oppressive story that silences many in favor of further empowering those who already hold power. White Men bed the alien princesses, and defeat colored alien warriors related to her (how novel), while anyone who is not a White Man... doesn't do anything, really, unless it's pertinent to the actions and viewpoint of the White Man.

And make no mistake: 20th Century Fox, James Cameron, and many others have a vested interest in our literally buying into the film. With a release not more than a week ago, the film (with a shooting & promotional budget of over 500 million $USD, the most expensive in Fox's history) has already been used to sell video games, a toy line, apparel, cross-promotional schemes, novels, and a budding franchise.

[Please comment, discuss, and share as appropriate. I am actively interested in feedback & critique.]

[1] Even if the Christian story is the original source of this trend, it has not itself been immune to whitewashing, with a White (if tanned) Jesus saving the colored Jews from their ignorance. The most recent and aggressively popularized portrayals of Jesus - Mel Gibson's Passion of the Christ and The Jesus Film - have seen the role of Jesus go to a Slovak-Irish American and Oxford-educated Englishman, not to mention the proliferation of decidedly Anglo, non-Semitic images of Christ. Such depictions raise few eyebrows, while portrayals of Christ as a colored man - usually Black - are still highly controversial in many Christian circles, despite African cultures and races being no more (and even perhaps less) distinct from early 1st-centruy Middle Eastern societies than European analogues.

I also feel compelled, as a Christian, to mention that Jesus, in utter contrast to the narrative of cultural subversion, became (a) an insider in order to (b) redeem culture, rather than removing a fetishized culture from its context as an outsider.

[2] In this genre, there have been a few films - Akeelah and the Bee and Stand and Deliver come come to mind - that provide hope, where mentors are cast with actors of color (Laurence Fishburne and Edward James Olmos, respectively). Still problematic is the proliferation of White women in this setting; initially, it may seem to be giving prominence to a female, but ultimately it winds up simply furthering another common Western trope, that of the nurturing, caring, emotional woman in opposition to the strong, aggressive, physical man.

[3] In all of these works, I notice a strong emphasis on the uniformly White outsider protagonist being termed the Last or the Best. This hints at a quasi-Hegelian progression, where a raw and basic culture (Native tribes, Samurai ways, Nature itself) gives birth to an advanced, more-evolved organism: the White man.

[4] This is, by the way, not a justifiable argument. Increasing amounts of data are available that may indicate (has this work been done?) that upper-class White consumers, while having more disposable income, actually spend less of their available leisure resources on purchasing entertainment than other demographics.

* I have thought of one: Prince Caspian, by C.S. Lewis. Take that for what you will.
**After Dallas kindly reposted this piece on his site, commenter 6 100 pointed out that Blade may stand in opposition to this trend - I think he's right, and Blade is actually, the more I think about it, a pretty great film in terms of racial statements.

An honest inquiry

2009-11-16T22:47:00.000-08:00

In short: why do so many people who say that we shouldn't force people to "do good", say we should punish people who "do bad"?

Some musings, hastily thrown together, on a subject that I've been wondering about since the summer, provoked largely by my readings on educational and income disparity. The following is neither exhaustive nor particularly cogent, and is barely logically coherent; it is not intended to be any of the above, but rather merely to verbalize musings, provoke thought, and request further input:

One of the more convincing arguments against positive social welfare policies* that I have been presented, is that the enactment of such policies equates, essentially, to the litigation of morality: making good action compulsory for a society - as a whole and, by extension, as individuals - removes the potential for individual moral action. The argument presumes that it is valuable, if not inherently necessary, to allow individuals room for real moral choice; take, for instance, the case of welfare**.

In such a case, I've heard it argued, the government should not act to provide for unemployed or unemployable individuals, because it should lie on the conscience of every moral actor within the state to do so. For the government to dictate that state funds should be used for the provision of aid to such persons is suboptimal, because, in such a case, the government is now overstepping its bounds: instead of providing its people with a stable framework within which to make ethical decisions, the state is now making those decisions on behalf of the people. Essentially, the argument seems to run, legislating morality reduces the ability of people to make moral choices.

OK, I can ride with that, at least to a certain degree.

My question arises from the fact that, as far as I can tell, there exists a sizable population of those who would use an argument similar to that presented above to argue against positive social welfare policies, but, when confronted with a negative social welfare policy***, seem to believe that thusly legislating morality is unproblematic. For example, I believe (with little evidence beyond the personally anecdotal) that there are many people for whom generous welfare policies are repellent because they compel agents into action without moral choice, who, at the same time, oppose gay marriage, precisely because it is morally wrong.

This seems contradictory to me.

Is it? Is there some fundamental difference between positive legislation of morality and negative legislation? Perhaps gay marriage - or strict gun control, the death penalty, harsh enforcement of Reagan-era drug laws, etc. - presents a threat to the very structure of the rule of law in a way that large numbers of unsupported, unemployed citizens (or, to touch on a hornet's nest: "illegal immigrants") do not; and, as such, should be legislated against in a distinct way, being that one of the necessary components for a stable state be a code of law that supports its own enforcement, rather than being self-undermining. In such a case, I would grudgingly agree that, while suboptimal, the necessity of such negative moral legislation is manifest.

But I don't see this argument for negative moral legislation obtaining, at least not in a way that is clearly distinguished from the argument for the necessity of positive moral legislation.

To sum up: There are people who say that certain aid policies (welfare, Affirmative Action, etc.) are wrong, as giving people support decreases the need for individual agents to take morally praiseworthy action. Of those people, however, many argue that morally proscriptive policies (anti-abortion, outlawing gay marriage, etc.) are necessary. This seems contradictory.

I'm sure that I have friends & readers who have put in thought, and have well-considered insight on this particular issue. Please, your thoughts?

*i.e., those policies that actively work to provide recompense for the unduly disadvantaged, rather than to eliminate the conditions which lead to social inequality (in broad terms: think affirmative action, as opposed to abolishing slavery).

**Note: this is not the only, or even the best, argument against welfare. My intent isn't to pronounce a stance on Welfare-in-concept or the current welfare system, simply to outline a single stance I have seen articulated.

***"Negative," in this case not meaning "bad", but meaning "preventative", as opposed to "positive" meaning "constructive"

Personal reflections on Chinese America

2009-08-12T10:13:00.000-07:00

A request from a friend taking a summer Ethnic Studies course at school served as the excuse to finally get some thoughts down that I've been hoping to commit to paper ("paper") for a while, now.

Thoughts are scattered, quite randomly arranged, and topics range wildly about. Many thoughts are unsupported, at best, and citations are nonexistent. This is more to have this on record and for those who care to get a stronger sense of my background and current stance on certain issues.

Reading over my thoughts - or, properly speaking, even as I typed them out in more or less stream-of-consciousness flow - I worry that I am myopic. My image of Asian America is gilded and almost universally positive: at least, my first responses to Chinese-American culture is always to assume that the minority has been victimized, is guilt-free, and has taken at most a passive part in the lead-up to the current state of affairs. I acknowledge freely, I think, that Chinese immigrants have been complicit in their own sufferings: but I do not first jump to the domestic abuse epidemic rampant in our communities (and countries of origin).

I tend to lionize the underprivileged and vilify the dominant. This is not wrong, but it is not right: worst of all, it is not true. The causes of current circumstances are manifold, and to simplify it down to Western imperialism (cultural, political, economic, and military) is to discredit my own claims. I worry about this, in the long run: I will have to become far more balanced and willing to critique China, Chinese America, and the Asian milieu if I am to be a credible and caring commentator.

I also have large holes in my discussions of gender. I make assumptions about female roles, rights, responsibilities, and representations (3 cheers for that alliterative streak) that are founded entirely on my male understanding of the female experience and role in society. This is dangerous, and I apologize if I wrongly offend. It's on my list of things to work on.

That said, the text of my response is presented below (cleaned up & edited in brief, most portions of the original text/questions remain):

1. experiences:
a. family traditions/customs/holidays
b. experiencing racism
c. basically, how was it like growing up chinese american?

(attempting to answer the breadth of a-c in one long breath:)

Basically, when I was young, being Chinese-American (which is, I might note, a different term than "American Chinese" or "American of Chinese descent") wasn't something that I thought about at all. There are a few factors that contributed to this: my parents were second- (or greater) generation, already, being born in Southeast Asia to families that had previously immigrated from China, so I was at least two degrees separated, on both sides, from direct ties to Chinese culture and heritage. I knew, on a fairly abstract level, that there was something tying my past to "China" - but that word, "China", referenced an empty concept, for me. Apart from Geography Bee-level details - the Yellow River, the Yangtze, Shanghai, Beijing, Hong Kong, etc. - I had no knowledge of China, and definitely no personal connection. The only glimpses of Chinese Culture that I received were in our shamefully irregular visits to my Nai nai/奶奶 (father's mother), who lives outside Washington, DC with her second husband (now deceased). There, I got my most transparent hints of the rich culture underlying our family's roots: conversations carried out in incomprehensible tongues; homecooked Chinese food utterly unlike my mother's Western cooking or greasy "Chinese" takeout; red envelopes of New Year money (that were, I realized much later, not months late, but simply operating according to a different calendar), watercolors of tumbling Chinese mountains, etc.

In short: our family traditions, customs, and holidays were as utterly middle-class, suburban American as one can get: dressing up for Easter Sunday, stockings on the mantle & gifts under the Christmas tree, ice cream cakes at birthday parties.

Which is why, I think, for me, racism was always a little bit of a surprise. After all, the far greater part of my upbringing was indistinguishable from your average American Dream: in the middle of the upper-middle-class, attending a Protestant church and Sunday School every weekend, straight-A report card, etc. But a few incidents stick out, in particular:

While growing ever-more-increasingly Westernized, my parents, throughout my youth, continued to frequent the local Asian Groceries (albeit more and more infrequently). One of the snacks they would occasionally purchase there - and which I found not so much tasty as intriguing - was made of this sort of cheeto-like material; except, instead of being coated in "cheese" and "cheese" flavoring, it tasted like shrimp. One time, during a kindergarden lunch, I made the mistake of bringing - or my mom made the mistake of packing, in the best of intentions? - a bag of them to school. The White girl with whom I usually traded sandwiches and snack foods turned up her nose at them, declaring them - I'm paraphrasing - "smelly" or "yucky". I must have been 5 or 6; that was, I believe, the first time I had ever been told that something which I considered normal - banal, even - might be Different.

Towards the end of my attendance of that Christian school (I realize, only at this moment, that the reason my parents probably entrusted me to them was that both my mother and father grew up going to Christian schools in Southeast Asia; and they were likely sending me to this school in hopes of my attaining the same education with which they had been bestowed), I recall that I came home one day and casually, after dinner, reading some book about geography or cultures or something of that nature, pulled my already asiatic eyes up into an exaggerated slant, telling my mom: "look. Chinese!" I can still remember her horrified response, the shock with which she realized that this so-called Christian education (I don't blame the church, of course; I do blame the ignorance and idiocy of young children, coupled with the race-blind/PC-disavowing/culturally underinformed nature of many well-intentioned evangelical communities) was actually driving a wedge between her son and her own background (I recently discovered that she had actually been planning, prior to the time she became pregnant with me, to go into law to help out asian-american and immigration issues). Shortly thereafter, for a host of reasons, my parents pulled me out of that school.

Something that's often echoed by various generations and varieties of Asian-Americans is the sentiment of being a "perpetual foreigner": a Japanese-American senator, whose family has been in this country for over 80 years, once remarked that he still continually receives compliments for speaking English "so fluently". As a youth, I too had these jarring encounters: trivial at the time, I brushed them off casually, dismissing them as isolated incidents of ignorance or misinformation. Of course, the fact remains, at 23, and with a far broader range of experiences in the intervening years, I can still remember, vividly, the repeated confusion of being asked by young White children, "So, where are you from?" and the frustration of having to, repeatedly, explain that I was from Illinois - or California - or Delaware. I knew who I was, and where I was from; so why couldn't these other kids? A dilemma emerged: either they were simply stupid and couldn't see the blatantly obvious (which seemed unlikely, given that my American-ness seemed to me overt), or the premises on which I had established my identity, with my internal concept of The Normal American Childhood derived from my own experience, were faulty.

2 & 3. as a chinese american, how do you identify yourself? what does being "chinese american" mean to you

Given the circumstances of my upbringing, and my parents' immigration, I think it wouldn't come as much of a surprise to hear that my view of myself, in my younger years, was basically that line about "diversity" that we were fed back in the day: "We want to be color-blind." I bought into the construal of Ethnicity that said the best way to accept everyone was to "just look at people as people, not as their skin color." So I applied this happily homogenizing view to myself, and those around me, and assumed that our points of view, personal experiences, and inculcated values more or less lined up. The emphasis in those days was definitely more on "American" than on "Chinese".

In recent years, I've been coming to hold a more subtle approach towards regarding my ethnic heritage: without running out the clock (because I definitely could), the basic outline of my thoughts go as such:

The term "Asian-American" is in itself dangerous, because it is an umbrella term for vastly disparate groups: in the same way that pitting inner-city Boston Irish youth with jailed parents against as Upper East Side, trust fund, private school kids is unfair in terms of social neediness, so is judging the children of Hmong, Vietnamese, Cambodian, and Filipino refugees against the kids of Chinese, Japanese, and South Korean businessmen, professors, etc. Not to mention that thinking that every Chinese immigrant is privileged, well-educated, and well-behaved - the "Model Minority" myth - is itself damaging in many ways to Chinese-American communities, for a whole variety of deep-seated reasons.

For those of us who identify as "American of Chinese Heritage," there is a fine balance to be struck between that "American" and "...of Chinese Heritage". It's foolish to think that I am Chinese: in China, I might be allowed to call myself a "hua ren" (华人) that is, one of the Han Chinese, but I am not a "zhongguo ren" (中国人) that is, a Chinese person. Culturally, in terms of my fundamental assumptions about the world, I am a product of the West. It's important to point out that I don't harbor unnaturally Sinocentric political sympathies, and I'm not going to be a threat to peace in the American homeland or abroad (well, I oppose American hegemony - but that's for entirely different reasons): it's important to remind myself, and others, of this, because the reality is that many still fall into the mindset of Executive Order 9066 and "Yellow Peril", where any Asiatic face is viewed as a potential defector to the long-left-behind "Motherland." Of course returning to China - or heck, even Asia - gives me a warm feeling. But I have White friends who acquire the same sense of Homecoming upon their return to England, France, or Poland; and there is no forbidding sense of fraternizing with the enemy that lies upon their journeys.

One interesting thing that I have realized is that "Asian America" exists: even as I decry the use of the term, the fact is, whether for right or wrong (I would say more wrong than right), we are seen as a monolithic group. But that makes certain connections possible in the American "melting pot" that otherwise may never occur: a Chinese person in China may never deign to bridge the gap and initiate a friendship with a Japanese individual. But my relationships with my Japanese and Japanese-American friends - heck, even your own parentage, right? - demonstrate that "Asian America" can serve as something of its own melting pot; even if we remain, perhaps, to the side of the rest of the "melting pot" (whether cultural, genetic, or otherwise), at least Asian America has served, it seems, to bridge divides that may not have happened in our mother countries.

There are other thoughts, but these are the ones that first come to mind.

4. how do you think "chinese american" is being represented? by AA? by the public? How accurate are these portrayals?

I think that the public image of Chinese-Americans is problematic, with the blame being distributed all around (though perhaps not equally): Chinese-Americans are at fault for playing into the role of a "Model Minority", passively or actively unwilling to speak out against a dominant and domineering culture, choosing to succeed by means of intellect or behind-the-scenes work instead of through protest and resistence (to generalize largely). Of course, Chinese immigrants' approach to a hostile culture is not to blame: given particular cultural values held by Chinese-Americans, this was the natural, moral, course. And the White media and government is at fault: anti-miscegenation laws, portrayals of the threat of "China Rising," anti-Japanese WWII propaganda (but no propaganda supporting our allies, no pro-Chinese or pro-Korean messages to counteract the inevitable conflation of our three sister cultures), E.O. 9066, all these were designed to Otherize and tokenize Asian peoples, to aggrandize the panic of American businessmen and laborers concerned with increasing competition from across the Pacific. The inherited reminders of these shackles - whether in popular culture or governmental representation - is still evident.

When talking about public, popular, media images of Chinese-Americans, three concepts spring to mind: Kung Fu Master, Exotic Asian Beauty, and Smart Chinaman.

These portrayals are all highly damaging. Exoticism has been dealt with in a lot of gender/ethnic studies literature, but, in brief: to describe someone as "exotic" is to claim that they are attractive because they are not-me: they are the Other. Exotification is objectification and tokenization taken, in many ways, to its height: a person no longer represents a valued individual Self, but instead an alien, unrecognizable, unable-to-be-sympathized-with culture.

Media obsession with Exotic Asian Beauties is particularly disturbing given that much contact between Americans and Asian women was in the form of soldiers interacting with wartime prostitutes during the Korean and Vietnam wars. The stereotypes of the Shy Asian Girl and the Seductive Asian Woman (the "Dragon Lady") conflate into a figure that is deserving of both moral scorn and sexual depredation. This is, of course, a faulty stereotype: it is an incredibly transparent attempt to remove en masse the femininity and womanhood of Asian females, in the same way that Black women were degraded by simultaneously being sexualized and defeminized by becoming the unacknowledged mistresses of slave-owners.

Of course, one subtype of the Exotic Asian Beauty, that deserves particular mention, is the Madame Butterfly: caught up in the wiles and victimized by her brutal countrymen, this woman must be saved by the noble White hero. This stereotype is particularly notable because it implies that the Asians can't be trusted with taking care of their own: whether the next generation, the land, the businesses, the government, or the military, the natives need to be rescued by the strong white Savior. While it's true that Asian - and, yes, particularly Chinese culture - has been incredibly behind in terms of gender parity, and while I am by no means an anti-miscegenist, I do worry about the more or less pervasive idea that an Asian woman's dream is to escape the bonds of her culture and fly away to Western civilization and, apparently, cultural enlightenment.

The Kung Fu Master is, in its own way, a dangerous stereotype. On one hand, it is fairly empowering and masculinizing. The downside of it is that any Chinese-American who shows strength will be associated with the Kung Fu Master. A strong Black man is not automatically compared to Mohammad Ali: but strong Chinese (or even broadly Asian) men will almost inevitably be compared to Bruce Lee. Again, this stereotype - while not necessarily negative - strips the target of his or her individuality, and places them within a narrowly defined role with little room for expansion beyond.

And the Smart Chinaman is the very type of the Model Minority myth: the backhanded insult, the barbed compliment. It can be simultaneously dismissive of individual accomplishment - "Of course you did well on the math test, you asian" - and concealment for more subtle racism - "OK, so maybe Chinese-Americans have some problems, but you guys are doing so well! Look at your college acceptance rates! How can you complain about a couple of movie roles and some jokes on the radio and TV?"

Reflection on Mulan (pun intended)

2009-08-07T11:03:00.000-07:00

I don't remember much about the summer that Mulan, Disney's 36th animated feature film, was released to theaters. Wikipedia (the most accurate source of information in the world, and my go-to facts checker) indicates that it must have been the summer of 1998, when I was 12 years old.

I remember that my family - dad, sister, me, and perhaps my mother - went to watch the film together in a small cineplex, during a summer vacation spent in Orlando, Florida, one of a small handful of favorite family destinations (along with Williamsburg, VA and the Poconos). Emerging from our dark A/C-cooled haven 87 minutes (plus previews) later, I charged out energetic and hyper - not an uncommon state for the 12-year-old me - and, naturally, my 9-year-old sister found that energy infectious.

That my younger self left a Disney movie with an excess of high spirits was little surprise, and I can't recall ever since sparing a second thought in analyzing that response. However, in light of my recent reflections on portrayals of Asian-Americans in popular media, plus a spate of personally-mandated viewings of selected minority filmmakers' works, I decided to take Mulan for a second spin, possibly (if memory serves) my first full viewing since that humid Florida midafternoon.

Watching the film, I'm struck by an uncanny déjà vu, as were I communing with my 12-year-old self. Of course, I'm quite the sophisticate now: at the time, I knew virtually nothing about China/中国 (now 2 summers' experience and frequent return trips), could speak no words of Mandarin/普通话 (8 semesters' study), had never studied kungfu/功夫 (6 years). But there is still something of the chubby, bookish 12-year-old Chinese-American boy in me that watches this film and marvels at it.

At the time, I had no lexicon with which to articulate my experience of the film, and so I relegated it to the same continuum as all other pop culture phenomena with which I had sated my indiscriminate whims: located at a point, indistinct, between my parents' collection of early-80s TIME/LIFE magazines (low interest, high availability) and my budding STAR WARS/Tolkien fanboyism (high interest, low pre-Internet re-release/film adaptation availability). I had no experience within which to locate the film's effect on me, simply because it was, at the time, pioneering for me: apart from the occasional visit from relatives, or yearly Christmas visits to the grandparents' in DC, my parents, sister, and I were the extent of Chinese America to me. Apart from a single hardcover volume describing contemporary (1995!) life in China (well-worn out of interest, with a rough red fabric cover under the dust jacket), for all I knew, we were the extent of Chinese.

Now, flicking through the half-familiar, hazily-remembered scenes of the film, I'm amazed by it on so many more levels*: the colors redolent of the Chinese countryside (glimpsed in my sojourns to 西安, 河北, 广东, and the like); a character sighing with the distinctly Eastern "Ai! /哎！" phoneme instead of the Western "Oh! / 哦"; the food portrayed - rice porridge (粥), Chinese noodles (面), still staples of Chinese food/中菜. And, most of all, the distinct, plastic framework of the Disney Fairytale (as opposed to a Fairy-story) fleshed out with Chinese faces and Asian voices: the Handsome Prince, instead of a wavy-locked blondie with light eyes, an almond-eyed, black-haired "Captain Shang"; the Model Father cast in a model not entirely unresembling my own paternal figure (albeit a far more svelte and, perhaps, picturesque figure).

I can only imagine the twofold impact on the psyche of young Asian-American girls: the dual revelation that a woman could be both Asian and, without renouncing her culture, a Disney Princess (the latter being, admittedly, a dubious and debatable distinction among gender critiques); and that her handsome prince could be an Asian male (yes, I know this statement can be problematized; humor me).

I am not now who I was then; but still, tonight's viewing of Mulan has reaffirmed for me - and this time, in a primarily affective manner - the importance of strongly positive portrayals of Asian-Americans (and, in general, minorities) in popular culture and the media. Eleven years after my first viewing of Mulan, watching this film still causes emotions to stir: the sight of Real Characters - not background characters, not secondary characters, not 2-dimensional jump-kicking, med-school-graduating, lab-coat-wearing ciphers - that look like my family and me? Astounding!

And how can it be that, in the intervening years, I have still not seen anything so well-produced, well-promoted, and ethnically true to itself (with little-to-no yellowface!)? If even Disney could get it right in the late 90s, how is it that another similar production has yet to surface? When the day comes - God help us - when I have a young daughter, or son, to what will I turn for aid when teaching my child to be proud and grateful for her, or his, features, family, and culture**?

*not least of which is that several members of the cast are related to one another through the network of the highly respected East West Players, the seminal Asian-American theater ensemble.
**I am aware of, and incredibly grateful for, the Ni Hao, Kai-Lan (你好，凯兰) series currently airing on Nickelodeon, a Chinese-American version of the similarly bicultural Dora the Explorer. I saw its content briefly at a friend's house, and was astounded at the extent of the multiethnic programming now available to her daughter, which I could neither have imagined nor hoped for as a youngster.

Regarding Judaism and Israel

2009-08-04T07:51:00.000-07:00

A quick thought, prompted by an exchange with a college friend, following an earlier (if not the earliest) post on hyphenated-Americans, along with beginning to watch (a process that will likely take a substantial amount of time) Spielburg's modern classic Schindler's List:

Whenever discourse includes a discussion of the Jewish people, it is vital that we separate the Jewish people and the modern nation of Israel. It is perilously easy to conflate (a) disagreement with the actions of the Jewish state in the geopolitical landscape and (b) Anti-Semitism. This is a form of an ad hominem, but one which seems to be more insidiously prevalent.

That's how it seems to me, anyways. Am I wrong, and (a) reduces to (b)? I strongly don't think so, but am open to arguments in the positive.

The question; and a thought.

2009-08-03T11:34:00.000-07:00

The Question

After a respectable (or thereabouts) deal of reading and thought (particularly reflecting on Frank Chin's repeated critiques of Maxine Hong Kingston), this is the question that presents itself:

How to be American without being White? How to be "of Chinese descent" without slipping into reactionist sinocentrism?

Of course the cultural inheritance of The West isn't to be lightly discarded or vilified, nor is the East (or even the immigrant experience) to be mindlessly embraced and valued. The answers' typeface is far from black-and-white. But among shades of grey (not shades of greige), where does one alight?

(Hint: God is the answer. [No, this is not just a flip answer; Yes, this is still a Christian, and not only ethnic theory, blog, appearances to the contrary])

The Thought
That said, another thought occurs to me at the moment (A few minutes ago, I jokingly told a friend that tonight was my Asian-American Film Studies night): while I have previously been a proponent of the narrative-as-description(e.g., NWA's Straight Outta Compton can be justified as a descriptive, not prescriptive, outline - "not a glorification, but a presentation"), I am increasingly understanding of the need to present balanced-but-idealized portrayals in the media, serving the function of a corrective to unbalanced and two-dimensional portraits of Americans of Asian/Pacific Islander descent.

I had a fairly strong and disconcerting response to viewing, Monday night, Justin Lin's modern Asian-American crime drama Better Luck Tomorrow: there is a scene in the film, in a backyard party, where the core group of four Asian-American protagonists (portrayed as and by a varied group of Asian-American males) confront a group of White antagonists. After a brief fistfight, instigated by implicitly racial (but only indirectly racist) comments, one of the Asian-American gang pulls a gun on the lead antagonist. The subsequent beating of the White varsity athlete - leaving him bruised and bloodied, but not permanently physically harmed - both signals the core group's increasingly rapid descent into crime and materialistic excess, and foreshadows the nadir of the film, where a similar beating takes place: this time, against a spoiled Korean-American private-school kid; and this time, to the death (based on an actual incident in early-90s Southern California).

What disturbed me about my response was that, in both cases, Lim took care to portray the Asian-American protagonists as complex, well-rounded characters: morally speaking, they were on neither the high nor low ground. In both cases, there were senses of moral indignation and vindication ("getting back" at the White bullies; retaliating against the rich prep school kid who treats his girl like dirt), and also a sense of excess and transgressed boundaries.

However carefully-laid-out the mores of the film, my responses were affectively discrepant with my moral construals of the situations, and I have little choice but to admit that the distinction was likely simply because of the race of the tragic protagonists: whereas I would unhesitatingly condemn the actions in abstract, the fact that violence originating from Asian-American sources, especially against a Caucasian figure, is contradictory to my construal of the stereotype of expected Model Minority behavior (albeit a malformed and, in fact, highly inaccurate stereotype) seemed to serve as justification for my emotional consent towards the action.

This is, I willingly and mournfully agree, evidence of a shamefully akrasic mental process, the ramifications of which I'm concerned, especially regarding my vocation as a minister, a profession part of the call to which is love for the Other above the Self, love for all facets of God-created diversity, and striving on behalf of reconciliation, healing, and understanding (Gal. 3:26-29, among others). However, it is not, I would guess, a drastically atypical response to such media depicting violence from an oppressed (or, more often, nowadays, suppressed) minority directed towards the dominant majority.

One thing that I always wondered, watching the incredible HBO series The Wire, a bastion of verisimilitude and narrative-as-depiction-of-reality, was how so many Black voices (not only, or even particularly often, academic Black voices, but definitely a predominance of street voices, as seen anywhere from nahright.com to the Smoking Section) could willingly applaud explicitly villainous figures, or at least what seemed to me at the time to be: the drug lords (Marlo, Stringer, Avon), shooters (Snoop, Christ Partlow, etc.), and other Baltimore inner-city hood figures (the more complex morality of characters such as Omar Little, Bubbles, etc., is of course less cut-and-dry).

Of course, what I didn't understand at the time, on a subjective level (and am now only beginning to scratch the surface of, as I begin to analyze my personal response to depictions of violence by the oppressed), is that the characters are not usually being lauded for their actions: their actions are the signifiers of a larger motivation, that is, defying power and breaking stereotype. The problem is that reactive stereotypes - the clever, tactical, chess-piece-moving crime lord as a response to the dumb, happy, bumbling Sambo - are also a system of entrapment and limitation for minorities: we sketch out extremes, but fill in no grays, leaving room for the Huxtables and the Barksdales, but fewer and fewer Redd Foxxes in between [note: by "Redd Foxx," I meant, a sympathetically- and humanely-portrayed member of the honest lower class, i.e. in Sanford & Son. Not quite sure if this was too opaque a reference.].

So, another question: where do we locate the line between audience discernment and filmmaker's discretion? Certainly the filmmaker should feel at liberty to create Art: but, and this is a topic on which I've touched before (specifically, in my senior Philosophy thesis), what is the intersection between Morally Good Work and Good Art? In that previous work, I strongly advocated for the imposition of moral sanctions on a work of art (humor, in that case), due to both a priori and a posteriori factors that seem to fall in favor of morality being a determining factor for the quality of art.

But the question then becomes one of reasonable doubt, or burden of proof: does the filmmaker (or rapper, other musician, artist, etc.) presume an audience comprised of the Lowest Common (discerning) Denominator, and simply create art that is unabashedly moralizing? In such cases, films become preachy, and subtlety is specifized out of the equation.

But the alternative seems more and more distasteful: choices of presentation content and form are, implicitly, choices to condone audiences' viewing of particular material (for this reason, I recently started but could not finish both Bret Easton Ellis's American Psycho [novel] and Jody Hill's Observe and Report [film]). Previously, I held to a reasonably extremely high view of individual volition: I acknowledged the real occurrence of akrasic mind states, but did not pragmatically concern myself over them. More and more, I regret this: both personally, discovering the truth of the saying that "once seen, you cannot un-see" certain materials; and pragmatically, in terms of furthering social progress and harmony, realizing (as I did when watching Better Luck...) that portrayals of immoral or unconscionable behavior, even when within the framework of a largely critical work, have the potential to grasp the imagination in a much stronger net than I had previously wanted to believe.

Of course, the potential remains: I may merely be particularly weak-minded, an outsider. I am familiar with the major arguments: kids know the difference between DOOM and the halls of their High School, and killing a few hundred digital representations in GTA IV won't lead anyone to the slaughterhouse. In fact, proponents of the gaming industry argue, such artificial violence, far from promoting violence, actually helps those in whom rage and anger have built up to let off some steam, destressing and potentially averting a future tragedy.

Previously, I was highly sympathetic to such claims; in fact, I agreed (as do I still now, though with greater qualification) that freedom of speech was a paramount right. But, as recent developments in the video gaming world have shown, freedom of speech, as with any other freedom, can be abused, not for the sake of art, but for the sake of commerce: in such a case, use of freedom does, I increasingly believe, actually constitute abuse or exploitation of speech, leading to negative social repercussions and, ultimately, indirect disenfranchisement of or disconnection from the Other (whether Otherization occurs by race, gender, or simple emotional distance). That such depictions constitute a legal problem, as statutes currently stand, is highly unlikely, I assume; still, my concern is not with the present legality, but rather the present ethics of the situation and, based on an increasing understanding of the ethical landscape, future policy decisions.

Several other areas remain to be addressed. Among them: a persistent question, so far as I understand, in Asian-American Film Studies is the pragmatic response to limited roles for Asian-American actors: marginalized as "wimpy businessmen... or villains with balls", several Asian-American actors have chosen to play the "villains with balls" (Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa, The Slanted Screen). It's difficult to blame them; but it's also easy to be troubled by this response, on both sides of the racial divide (Us and Other). The Mortal Kombat villain Shang Tsung is, while not emasculated, possessor of a twisted and villainous strength: it is easy to see in him the same archetype as a Stringer Bell or Avon Barksdale, wealthy, organized, manipulative boogeymen. The choice (and I pray it is a false dichotomy) presented to Asian-American actors seems to be marginalization or villainization: is it a wonder that many chose to be villainized?

And of course, one doesn't have to look far to see why an Asian-American presence was Othered and, subsequently, villainized: the widely-documented phenomenon of Yellow Peril was a racial agenda explicitly furthered by the spread of anti-miscegenation laws in direct response to (among other factors) a fear of competition by the Other.

As a friend commented on one of my several earlier posts, the point is not to find a scapegoat: White American dominance, Asian American complicity, and industry/industrial greed have definitely all played key roles in bringing the place of Asian-Americans in the media to their contemporary position. The point is, however, to find the roots of a pernicious construal of an entire section of American society, to see how it insinuated itself into wider American culture, and to find a healthy, healing, reconciliatory means of mutual affirmation and support.

History lesson II: History lessons in paradise

2009-07-29T10:50:00.000-07:00

"The cartoon was made during World War II, and reflects the United States' attitude towards one of its main enemies at the time, the Empire of Japan. In the cartoon, Bugs Bunny lands on an island in the Pacific and is pitted against a group of highly racially-stereotyped Japanese soldiers.

"Bugs shows no mercy against the Japanese soldiers, greeting them with several racial slurs such as "monkey face" and "slant eyes", making short work of a large sumo wrestler, and bombing most of the Japanese army using various explosives, including grenades hidden in ice cream bars. The cartoon's title is a play on the verb "nip" as in "bite" and "Nip", a then-widely used slur for Japanese people, based on the fact that the Japanese word for "Japan" is "Nippon." - Wikipedia: Bugs Bunny Nips the Nips. Original footage here.

One of The Censored Eleven.

More on Affirmative Action

2009-07-29T07:49:00.000-07:00

Perusing the Wikipedia (there go any pretensions of scholarly rigor) article for Ward Connerly, I came across the following quote from Connerly, founder of the American Civil Rights Institute and, famously, anti-Affirmative-Action activist and campaigner:

"Because we have developed this notion of women and minorities being so disadvantaged and we have to help them... we have, in many cases, twisted the thing so that it's no longer a case of equal opportunity. It's a case of putting a fist on the scale."

Perhaps, Mr. Connerly. But when there is already the accumulation of generations and centuries of elite male privilege tipping down the other side of the educational scale, leaning a fist on this side is the least one might do in presenting a sporting chance.

The more I read, the more I realize the question of preextant advantage and Privilege lies near, if not at, the nexus of racial and gender activism: we all agree that the scales have been historically unbalanced in favor of a certain demographic. But what ramifications does this bias carry into the modern era? Depending on the answer to this question, continued attempts to rectify the mistakes of the past may either be an anachronistic oversight or an absolute prerequisite for continued progress in racial reconciliation.

-For added fun (think of this as the DVD extra), Connerly on the effects of the lack of an Affirmative Action policy (Sept. 2003): "I don't care whether they are segregated or not… kids need to be learning, and I place more value on these kids getting educated than I do on whether we have some racial balancing or not. [Emphasis mine]"

"Racism isn't 'stupid'".

2009-07-28T02:14:00.000-07:00

Abstract: An overly broad construal of racist actions leads to the belief that stupidity plays no role in racist behavior. While I concur that some, if not most, racists are so simply by virtue of malicious hatred or immorality, there also exist some unwilling racists. For the latter group, education and knowledge actually serves as an efficacious (if not perfectly so) corrective.

Harry Allen (the original "Media Assassin" and affiliate of one of the greatest hip-hop crews of all time) recently made an intriguing point on his blog. In a recent post discussing President Obama's quasi-but-not-really-an-apologetic public statement regarding the recent Skip Gates incident in Cambridge (if you haven't already heard of it, which I'm sure most of you have by now, take a look first), Allen makes the statement,

"[this is] one of the most frequently stated falsehoods about race: That people who commit racist acts are stupid."

Allen makes the point - and it is a valid one - that discussions of racism are often couched in the language of ignorance, the specious implication being that racists are not bad people, they are merely mis- or uninformed.

Allen is right, but he is also wrong: it all depends on the specific definition of racism under which one is operating. In the same way that it is wrong to talk about oppressed or minority populations as monolithic, it is inaccurate to describe all racists as similarly motivated. Racism can - and often does - arise from blatant spite or dislike of the Other. However, to entirely rule out ignorance as a contributing factor is to oversimplify the discussion (which already bears the potential for further complication by simply pointing out that actions can stem from multiple motivations).

"Why would people believe that the race system... works through “ignorance”?"

Professor Jerry Kang, in his 1993 Harvard Law Review publication, Racial Violence against Asian Americans, makes the point that there are two kinds of construals of Others that result in racially-motivated violence against them: one is an instrumental conception, and one is a moral conception. Instrumentally speaking, violence against minorities works because minorities are less likely to have in their power the means to strike back against an oppressive majority (or, heck, as in the case of Apartheid South Africa, occupied China, modern-day North Korea, an oppressed majority against an oppressive minority).

In such cases, the reasons for racist actions are simple: oppressed people are easy to exploit. This is precisely the cases that Allen is presenting to his reader: cases in which, even despite the realization of the victim's humanity, it is simply easier to continue victimizing the subjugated. I fully acknowledge and promote the need for us to realize that these sorts of cases - where a willing, oppressive, majority turns a blind eye to the suffering of a fellow human - are unconscionable and deserve to be ferreted out, pointed out, and prosecuted with the greatest dispatch and vigor.

But there is the alternative case: in which a moral conception is the cause of racism. For example, in the late 1800s, Americans and Europeans would, despite living in China for years, never adopt native garb, the reason being that Asian culture was seen as a corrupting, insidious influence. In this case, the Othering of China by Westerners (or rather, the volitional acceptance of Outsider status by Whites in China) was not solely due to malicious intent (though, I admit, the cocktail of causes and effects is impossible to unmix). Rather, there was, I believe, a genuine misconception that Chinese culture was immoral and deleterious to the health of contemporary American "Protestant" faith-cum-state-values.

In such an environment of ignorance actually leading to distancing and Othering, increased knowledge - decreased ignorance and "stupidity" - can actually have a corrective, curative effect. In the example of China, I point to cases such as that of Hudson Taylor, the British Protestant missionary who, upon arriving in China, "was known for his sensitivity to Chinese culture... . He adopted wearing native Chinese clothing even though this was rare among missionaries of that time...." Not only did he adopt the external signifiers of decreased ignorance, but Taylor also adopted the best interests of Chinese people over the financial interests of his land of origin: "Primarily because of the CIM's campaign against the Opium trade, Taylor has been referred to as one of the most significant Europeans to visit China in the 19th Century." (source [yeah, I used Wikipedia as a source. Take away my diploma.])

Breakthroughs such as Taylor's revelation among British Protestant circles are rare, but effective in counteracting this latter form of racism: racism based not on actual racial dislike, but based on misconceptions of a race. In the same way that the televised dehumanization of the Civil Rights marchers of the 1960s drove the point of universal claims to equal humanity before a nation as never it had been before (and, perhaps, never has since, save for the Rodney King tapes and other such incidents), the insistence upon promoting knowledge as a curative for racism is not incorrect; it simply must be insisted-upon as part of a solution for racism, rather than part and parcel. It must also be realized that it is only a highly specific kind of knowledge that is efficacious in bringing about this revelation.

In Lee Mun Wah's The Color of Fear, a seminal early-90s film documenting a racial discourse among eight men of varying backgrounds, a breakthrough moment comes when a White man, who has been angrily defending the veracity of his point of view to his Black, Hispanic, and Asian counterparts, sits back in astonishment when he realizes the discrepancy between their shared humanity and the basic inequality of their treatment in society. In that moment, unwilling racism has begun to be dismantled (I emphasize: the process merely began at that step) by the revelation of a certain kind of knowledge: the knowledge of shared humanity.

It is this kind of knowledge that counters the second type of racism: Racism that says, as a fact, we are distinctly, morally, better than they. No, this knowledge will not conquer the first sort of racism, racism born of exploitative malice or willing ignorance and complicitousness. For such brands of perniciousness, no amount of human knowledge will do. But in the case of "unconscious racists," who view other races as subhuman simply because they have never been opened to the possibility of the world being otherwise, such knowledge can actually make a difference.

Allen claims: "No one says this about rude people. No one says, “Rude people are just stupid.” No one would believe such a thing as an explanation for the history of rudeness."
-This quote illustrates precisely Allen's monolithicizing of racist behavior: there is no extant "history of rudeness," for exactly the reason that rudeness is not so easily generalized. Some people are rude, yes, because they are simply ill-humored or apathetic towards the well-being of others.
-But some people are rude for the simple fact of being unaware or unknowledgeable: the White American who doesn't remove his shoes when he enters a Chinese-American house; the inexperienced busboy who accidentally rushes into the wrong side of the restaurant doors; the illiterate American who doesn't realize he is sitting on the Senior-Citizens-Only seat on the Korean subway (i.e., me). In such cases, yes. Rudeness is, in fact, caused by stupidity.

pretty much the situation as i hear it

2009-07-27T09:27:00.000-07:00

"''There's a strange kind of infatuation [in South Korea] with North Korea,'' Professor Cha said. ''[South Koreans] see it as, at worst, a decrepit regime, or a crazy uncle in the attic; either way, not very threatening. Many people would argue there is great naïveté in that view.''"

-Man's Bridge To North Korea Is Seen as Link To Espionage, NY Times. Originally published November 5, 2003, available online.

History lesson

2009-07-27T05:45:00.000-07:00

"One of the unique and controversial variants of the Tom Shows was Walt Disney's 1933 Mickey's Mellerdrammer. Mickey's Mellerdrammer is a United Artists film released in 1933. The title is a corruption of "melodrama", thought to harken back to the earliest minstrel shows, as a film short based on a production of Uncle Tom's Cabin by the Disney characters. In that film, Mickey Mouse and friends stage their own production of Uncle Tom's Cabin.

"Mickey Mouse was already black-colored, but the advertising poster for the film shows Mickey dressed in blackface with exaggerated, orange lips; bushy, white sidewhiskers made out of cotton; and his now trademark white gloves." - Wikipedia: Uncle Tom's Cabin

Racial mutterings II: Electric Boogaloo.

2009-07-18T07:51:00.000-07:00

Watching some of this footage of Pat Buchanan on the Rachel Maddow Show, one of his comments arguing against affirmative action sticks out to me:

"[because of affirmative action,] Jennifer Gratz was discriminated against and kept out of the University of Michigan, which she set her heart on, even though her grades were far higher than people who were allowed in there." (1:24-1:34)

Because of my particular background and current expertise of employment, I feel particularly equipped to address this illustration of his greater "reverse discrimination" (the cool pejorative way to describe affirmative action) thesis. This illustration is, admittedly, one in a series of several, the others of which I am distinctly not informed about and thus must rule myself incompetent in their discussion. That said:

Buchanan's comment reflects an overly simplistic understanding of the nature of college admissions. He seems to be communicating that the thrust of Gratz's case against the University's form of Affirmative Action (Gratz v. Bollinger) lies in the idea that a student with a certain GPA or level of academic performance should always be accepted to a university

The Court's actual finding was not that Affirmative Action should be dismantled, but rather that the University of Michigan was at fault "[b]ecause the University's use of race in its current freshman admissions policy is not narrowly tailored to achieve respondents' asserted interest in diversity." In fact, arguing quite against Buchanan's point, "the Court ... reject[s] petitioners' argument that diversity cannot constitute a compelling state interest." The State is explicitly interested in affirming and creating opportunities for diverse representation in its academic bodies: the problem is not with Affirmative Action, but with monolithic and overly streamlined processes of evaluating students' racial (rather than cultural or ethnic) makeup.

The irony is that Buchanan's casting of the situation seems to reflect a similarly mechanistic understanding of grades as a factor in college admissions: that superior GPA conveys automatic superiority on a candidate's application for acceptance to a university. In an era of college acceptances becoming more holistic considerations of a candidate's "fit", personality, and resources, this is an obsolete understanding of How to Get Into College.

In fact, as I have pointed out before, I am a firm believer in the thought that a Minority Experience (whether Black American, African, Asian-American, Latino, etc.) is of positive benefit for anyone, whether that individual happens to be seeking office or, as in this case, applying to a university.

Universities in this era of college admissions are, at least according to all the resources to which I have been directed (both as a highly competitive high school student, as well as a college applications tutor), incredibly holistic: they are asking students what they bring to the campus not merely as intellects, but also as individuals; this focus benefits from reflecting a broader comprehension of the Successful Life as not merely a product of intellect, but rather of emotion, relation, and production. I personally know any number of students who were accepted to universities from which students with better grades were rejected; a few fractional points on one's GPA is simply not the only, or even the most important, factor in college admissions any more.

This construal of Success is born out in nearly every area of life, from job performance and satisfaction, to personal relationships, and even academic dialogue and progression: in all these areas, Human Intellect is not a quantity discrete from wider conceptions of Human Experience. It seems that more and more universities are happier to admit that the lone Professor, hunched over a desk producing publication after monograph - while a quaintly romanticized image - could well benefit from a better posture, better table conversation, a scion or two toddling about the nursery, and a thoughtful, doting husband [Yes, my Professor is female, confound your presumptive gender].

In short: The University of Michigan was wrong for their unsubtle and clunky handling of Race as a factor in admissions. That said, in all but the most clear-cut scenario of overt anti-White discrimination, I am very unwilling to concede that a White student with a high GPA, rejected in favor of a Black or Hispanic student with a lower GPA, has been the victim of anti-White discrimination, unless one could prove - beyond the burden of doubt - that the Black/Hispanic/other minority student has in no way brought to the table some other beneficial quality.

For what it's worth, I am similarly, though not equally, hesitant to conclude that a Black or Hispanic student in a position similar to our hypothetical White student has been discriminated against.

Racial mutterings

2009-07-17T05:37:00.000-07:00

"And what does it say about President Obama's claiming to be post-racial when his first Supreme Court nominee is Sotomayor, his attorney general, Eric Holder is a huge reverse discrimination supporter and his education undersecretary for civil rights, Russlyn Ali, so often calls people racist when they dare disagree with her reverse-discrimination advocacy." - Marty Nemko, May 31, 2009.

What does it say? That he's willing to consider people who hold certain views for certain positions. What do you think it means, Mr. Nemko? Oh, never mind - I've deciphered your ever-so-sly intimation: President Obama is a racist. That wasn't so hard to say, was it?

Being post-racial does not mean being post-race. Nemko is making the same disturbing mistake that I've seen several other commentators making when discussing race: he assumes that "being post-racial" somehow equates to the idea that "race is no longer an issue". This is the same fallacy that equates "diversity" and "being color-blind": Diversity is not the absence of color, but the affirmation of color. And, in the same way, moving past racism does not and must not equate to "no longer caring about or discussing race"; it must mean "affirming race and issuing correctives so that the roots of racism continue to lose their grasp on America."

The Commander-in-Chief is not some political Gordian Knot that, once sundered, signifies freedom and equality throughout the land. It is a sign - as there have been many, as there will be many - that the American people are beginning to progress as a community. It's wonderful that the country voted a Black man is president; it's wonderful that some minority citizens aren't cowering under the lash. But until every minority citizen can live out a life in this country with a reasonable expectation of freedom from the dictum that Your Race Isn't Welcome Here - whether suppressive, as in the case of the Asian "Model Minority" myth; or oppressive, overt racism - "post-racial" America is still an unfulfilled process.

So, what does it mean that Obama's Supreme Court nominee is a Hispanic woman? What does it mean that he supports certain policies on race?

Might it simply be that President Obama thinks that these choices will continue the push towards racial equality?

No?

Oh, OK.

Similarly, from right-wing blog View from the Right:

"[What does post-racial America mean?] It means a post-white America, an America transformed by the symbolic removal of whiteness as the country's explicit or implicit historic and majority identity. ..."

Guess what: America is post-white. In the last national census, 26% of responding Americans self-identified as something other than White Alone. Of course, the majority of citizens are White; English, a language with European roots, is the de facto primary language of the land. But what does it even mean for a country to have a "majority identity"? And what does it have to do with me? Sure, Whiteness is an explicitly and implicitly dominant part of this country's culture; but, and pardon my boldness in this, I assumed that the majority identity of this country was American culture.

You know: Muckrakers and Superman (created by 2 Jews), French fries (created by a Native chef), Jazz (no comment necessary), Rock (comment unnecessary again), transcontinental migration and bicoastal communication (a network built on the backs of Irish and Chinese immigrants). A melange of racial influence and scrappy do-it-yourself intuitive inventiveness. Yes, White influences served as the initial foundation for this country; and its further development was definitely fueled by waves of immigrants from Ireland, Scotland, Germany, France, and other countries in Western and Eastern Europe.

But, at some point, my dinner ceases to be a couple of carrots, two chunks of meat, a packet of spices, and a pot of water, to being a stew. A stew, a broth with distinct elements hinted-at but inextricable from the lot. Why can't "my" country be the same?

I fear - though I sincerely hope to one day be proven wrong - that the intimated answer of many commentators on ethnicity in America is simply thus: This Is Not Your Country.

This is what some say: "the anti-white policies and attitudes, from affirmative action to open borders for Hispanics to the multicultural rewriting of history [oh heavens no; History is anything but!] to endless compaigns against "white racial privilege," [a thorough myth] will remain in place. What will change is that whites will not protest these anti-white policies any more, will not mutter under their breath about them any more, will not even think about muttering under their breath about them any more. Instead, they will unreservedly embrace them, in the joy of racial unity and harmony."

And this is what I hear:

This is not your country; you're living in rented space.

This is not your country; you're living in the perpetual guest room, furnished similarly to - as comfortable as - the master bedroom, save for its lesser metaphysical status.

This is not your country; as long as you behave yourself and act like us, we'll grant you squatters' rights. But don't get too comfortable; and for (a Western Protestant) God's Sake don't put up your own decorations! Our paintings - our decorative coffeetable books - our carefully-selected DVD library are good enough for us. And they ought to suffice for you.

Well, I don't ask to remodel; I'm quite happy with the kitchenette the way it is, and the laundry machine works quite well (though the couple who used to own the house have mentioned that you've were a little underhanded in repurposing it from them). But if, as you say, this room is mine for the letting - indeed, not merely for subletting but actually leasing-to-own - can I please at least add a film or two to your library? What about removing some of the more dull or outdated magazines from the nightstand?

Can I, perhaps, cook the food in "our" kitchen - food that my wages bought - the way my mother taught me to cook?

Might I, at the least, hang up the pictures of my father from his youth?

No?

Oh, OK.

(Update: I was prompted on facebook to further defend the connection i draw between "affirming Whiteness" and "xenophobia". I did so by drawing upon the concept of white privilege; more information is in the comments.)

Question

2009-07-05T08:23:00.000-07:00

Why do we call ourselves "Asian-Americans" or "African-Americans", but I've never heard a single person described as a "European-American"?

"Irish-American," "British-American," and "German-American" all sound far more stilted than "Chinese-American" or "Korean-American," not even touching on the Black/"African-American" vs. African (Ghanaian/Ethiopian/Somalian/Nigerian/etc.) divide. (Irish-Americans, Polish-Americans, and Italian-Americans get something of a pass on this one; largely because, for much of the 19th and 20th centuries, they were also generally part of an oppressed, immigrant, working lower class)

This is largely a rhetorical question: I do understand the historical context for this distinction in usage (Caucasian Western Europeans showed up first! [well, no, they didn't]); but I would at least suggest, in the modern milieu of cultures and ethnicities that Today's America supposedly has become, that we begin to more finely distinguish between cultural heritages, and thereby both begin to assault the fallacy of a monolithic American Culture, as well as beginning to affirm the actual myriad of influences behind the widely divergent American Cultures that do exist.

This is your Fourth of July/American Independence Day blog, brought to you (a) late and (b) not from America. Feel free to leave comment or critique, but note that I've had Maino's Hi Hater on blast all day.

White Privilege

2009-07-03T22:25:00.000-07:00

This Week in Blackness's Elon James White defines and discusses the reality of white/majority privilege in America.

problematizing xkcd

2009-06-27T08:34:00.000-07:00

At this point, I've been reading online comics (so-called "webcomics") for over ten years, and still make time in my daily schedule for the habit of dropping by a handful of sites more or less frequently. In that time, I've seen several comics come and go; as some increase in popularity and quality, others begin to wane in both (sadly, often the quality goes before the popularity).

One such comic on which I started to pick up around 2004 was xkcd, Randall Munroe's self-described "webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language." Given my background in mathematics and science, and ties to nerd/hacking culture, I was fascinated and amused by Munroe's quirky insights on life, romance, and "common sense" notions.

As my academic pursuits and interests drifted away from the hard science side of things and further into the liberal arts/humanities, I continued to read xkcd. However, in recent years, I've begun to regard its humor as increasingly less amusing, and, simultaneously, more a matter of concern.

I was interested, upon a quick web search, to find the blog xkcd sucks, not a blind critique of xkcd, but actually a thoughtful criticism on xkcd's particular flaws. All the points which I would raise in a commentary on xkcd have already been raised there, and quite thoroughly.

As an example of my issues with the strip and a subset of its devoted followers, however, consider the following shirt:

(reproduced from the xkcd store)

What is the message of this shirt? In his store blurb, Munroe claims
"We finally figured out that you could separate fact from superstition by a completely radical method: observation. You can try things, measure them, and see how they work! Bitches."

My translation of his message is this: Science Works, and, by implication, Your Methods Don't.

It's a great slogan, except for the awkward fact that it's overly simplistic, and often simply untrue.

"Science: It Works." Works for what? The best answer that I can think of is, Science Works if I am trying to generate a scientific theory. Well, except when it doesn't. Superstring theory, a current promising candidate and hot topic in physics, is often criticized for being untestable and, hence, unscientific.

And even assuming that science always works to accurately generate good scientific theories, it must still collaborate with other disciplines - engineering, marketing, business, and sales - in order to make an impact on the greater scope of humanity. In fact, one could argue (I might argue) that the average individual's incomprehension of scientific advances is as much due to science's inability to disseminate information widely and simply as it is to the average person's apathy towards it or inability to wrap their unscientific minds around advanced scientific information.

I might be criticized for reading too much into Munroe's t-shirt: after all, it's just a handful of words on a tee, why raise my hackles for it?

The answer is twofold:

First, I'm not convinced that Munroe is simply making the claim that Science Works As Science; that is, I am not sure that he is saying "If you want to get scientific results, do science." I strongly suspect, based on the context of his strip, that Munroe is saying "If you want to get results, do science."
If you want to figure out love?
-Do science.
If you want to live a good life?
-Do science.
If you want to make an impactful, caring contribution to humanity?
-Do science.
Maybe this is too strong a reading; but even caricature is grounded in real observation. And my observation is that Munroe seems to be a man who holds the belief that society would be so much simpler, better, and more fun if we could just Do Science and be silly (in a "quirky, zany" way) and stop being such silly (in a stupid, unscientific way) complicated irrational beings.

The problem? Complicated irrationalities are not obstacles to humanity; actually, akrasia and cognitive dissonance lie at the core of humans' special cognitive identity. These complications Munroe seems to disdain are actually what make us human, a fact with which he seems to go back and forth on agreeing.

Second, even assuming that Munroe's intent in this shirt is to present a limited critique of the efficacy of "science vs. superstition" in the realm of generating scientific fact, I am concerned by how Munroe's fans will interpret this shirt.

I obviously wouldn't claim that anything except science has any role to play in, well, doing science: that's simple logic of identity (which, as a matter of fact, is not only a mathematical field, but actually lies well within the realm of philosophy). Superstition is an easy target, a straw man. But the polemic thrust of the shirt seems to be towards something rather less defenseless, proclaiming, in spirit, that "Doing anything except science doesn't work/works less effectively/is useless."

This is quite simply untrue. Even in the life of the most scientifically-minded and capable person, holistic well-being must be based on something other than the Scientific Method: Science, a perfectly good approach to theories, ideas, and empirical observations, is significantly less useful, or even outright disadvantageous, when applied to relationships, aesthetic interests (films, books, art, music), and the like. There are realms of the human experience which science is not meant to address, and testing claims to the contrary, while they are perfectly good hypotheses (it's scientific, after all!), does not result in emotionally and descriptively positive results. According to its own criteria, this thesis fails.

Unfortunately, I think this shirt promotes a unilateral valuation of one's approach to life, a point of view whose traces I've seen in some of my scientifically-minded friends and acquaintances. It saddens me to think of someone valuing any one discipline to the point of allowing themselves to adopt a one-dimensional, one-size-fits-all approach to the many splendors of life, whether the (obviously smart and thoughtful) Randall Munroe, or any of his fans.

Much respect for Sacha Baron Cohen

2009-05-28T12:21:00.000-07:00

"Jonah Hill: A lot of times I would write jokes for Brüno and Sacha would say, “You can’t use that joke unless you explain what it’s satirizing or what the hypocrisy in the joke is. What are you trying to point out in that joke?”"

Glad to see that, despite the horrendous onslaught of literally ignorant Borat quotes, the man behind the masks, British comedian Sacha Baron Cohen, has a strong understanding of the essential question of well-written, responsibly-performed comedy: at what is the punchline striking?

(from the Justin Monroe Complex magazine interview with Jonah Hill, archived online here)

ASIANS: The Asian Response to Asian Responders

2009-05-21T08:27:00.000-07:00

Well worth the watching:

Picture = 1000 words

2009-04-27T17:09:00.000-07:00

wtf.

Speaking today @ conference on Chinese-African Relations

2009-04-25T01:46:00.000-07:00

In other news, apart from the Living Water Spring jam going down tonight, I will also be speaking at a short panel discussion on hip-hop in China, as part of the Youth Forum on China-Africa Relations (YFOCAR) conference going down this weekend. I'll be discussing my background in hip-hop, experiences with my crew in China, and hopefully uncovering socioeconomic parallels between the adoption & flourishing of hip-hop in China and Africa.

More importantly, this marks the first time that I have ever been on a website as a "confirmed speaker". Pretty sure that I am both the least educated as well as, simultaneously, the least experienced on the list.

4:30-6:00 pm

Informal Discussion: Sino-African Parallels, Hip Hop in Africa and China
Mohammad Yunus Rafiq
Jason Chu

Branford College Common Room

The man with whom I'm sharing speaking time co-founded a Peace Village. For comparison's sake, let me remind you: I co-founded a rap crew.

Out of my league? Nah, right.

Dirty Paco, Slim Paul, Zhang Yi, Beibei... this one's for yall. 代表街头文化.

A mid-morning antiphon

2009-04-04T22:50:00.000-07:00

Hello hello
We're at a place called Vertigo
Lights go down and all I know
Is that you give me something

I can feel your love teaching me how
Your love is teaching me how,
how to kneel.

Bono: ''Grace defies reason and logic. Love interrupts, if you like, the consequences of your actions, which in my case is very good news indeed, because I've done a lot of stupid stuff''.

Assayas: ''I'd be interested to hear that''.

Bono: ''That's between me and God. But I'd be in big trouble if Karma was going to finally be my judge. I'd be in deep shit. It doesn't excuse my mistakes, but I'm holding out for Grace.

"I'm holding out that Jesus took my sins onto the Cross, because I know who I am, and I hope I don't have to depend on my own religiosity''.

Racism = alive and well

2009-04-02T12:37:00.000-07:00

(image by the talented Gene Yang)

"This past Monday, on Martin Luther King Jr.'s birthday, on the eve of Barack Obama's inauguration, I discovered that the casting of the four leading characters for the upcoming live-action movie, "The Last Airbender" (based on the TV show, “Avatar: The Last Airbender”) had gone entirely to white actors. I want—no, need—to say something about this." - Derek Kim, New Day in Politics, Same Old Racist World on the Silver Screen

"intentionally or not, they are adding another chapter to Hollywood’s long, sordid history of Yellowface. By giving white actors roles that are so obviously Asian - and by stating from the get-go their preference for Caucasians - they tell Asian-Americans that who we are and how we look make us inherently inadequate for American audiences, even in a movie that celebrates our culture. Like the schoolboy who pulls up the corners of his eyes at his "Oriental" classmate, they highlight our otherness." - Gene Luen Yang, The Last Airbender Casting Controversy

""What frustrates us most is that you had this amazing opportunity -- you've got a nation of fans who love this quintessentially Asian story," says Kim. "This could have broken down every barrier in the business, proving you can have an all-Asian cast and score three blockbuster successes. Instead, we just get three more chances to cringe."" - Jeff Yang, Bent Out of Shape

To get involved or read more about the organizing going on around this issue, visit Saving the World with Postage or Racebending.com, where the letter-writing and protest campaigns are centered.

Racism?

2009-02-18T17:20:00.000-08:00

On one of my commutes up the hill today, I passed a car with the following bumper sticker plastered across the rear window:

"It is just as racist to vote for a man because he is black as it is to vote against a man because he is black."

I firmly disagree, and here is the reasoning, in brief, behind my disagreement:

-There are two reasons why somebody's race will affect your support of their candidacy: (1) Either you are racist (defined as: you assume people have certain characteristics/qualities, whether positive or negative, simply because of their appearance and heritage), or (2) you believe that their experience of race has colored (ha ha... no.) their growth and point of view.

-I heartily concede that the sticker slogan applies to cases of (1). That is, it is equally racist to vote for a Black person on the assumption that simply being Black makes an individual better than, say, an Asian or White candidate, as it is to not vote for her on the assumption that Blackness, on its own, makes one worse than the alternatives.

-However, the sticker slogan fails in its consideration of (2): that is, that being Black grants a candidate a particular experience, for example, growing up as an ethnic minority in a very racially-charged (if not outright racist) society.

-In the case that (2) obtains, I see no reason that being Black - along with the experience of being Black in America that this brings along - is not a perfectly good (albeit yet insufficient) reason to vote for somebody. It is not racist to think that possessing the experience of being an ethnic minority in America will increase somebody's ability to serve as President.

-The opposite is not true, however. To not vote for somebody solely because of his or her status as a minority in America connotes an evaluation of the minority experience that settles on it as insufficient or detrimental to one's ability to serve as President.

Thoughts? There are arguments above that are highly undeveloped, largely due to time constraints and general laziness regarding rigorous thought post-graduation. Anyone want to push me on this?

Holla.

CSW affairs: An Alumnus Viewpoint

2009-02-10T22:37:00.000-08:00

A Public Letter to the Charter School of Wilmington Community.

The high school from which I matriculated, the Charter School of Wilmington ("CSW"), has recently been going through some highly public issues, stemming - as I understand - from personal and professional conflicts between the president (our principal figure), Mr. Ron Russo, and members of the school board. It is a matter that strikes deep into the heart of a community within which I struggled, grew, and lived for four of my most formative years, in which I still feel invested, despite having long since departed.

Background:

These are some of the pertinent details (feel free to skip to section 2, below, if you are familiar with the situation) that I have gathered from second- and third-hand sources (primarily here and here), a vague, if lengthy, public statement by the school board (here), and local newspaper reporting (here and here):

-Some time in the past few years, Russo had an affair with a fellow school employee.

-In February 2008, a complaint over repeated sexual harassment was filed against Russo.

-In July 2008, the school board held a poorly-publicized meeting, one of the purposes of which was to determine Russo's future role at CSW. However, he retained his position: sources disagree as to whether this result came from overwhelming student and parent support or because he agreed to change "inappropriate behaviors" at work.

-The board called another meeting for February 10th, the stated purpose of which was to allow Mr. Russo "an opportunity to meet with the Board in Executive Session to present his responses". The board also released a public statement further explaining this action (the harassment complaint, and noncompliance with the terms of his continued employment), as well as intimating to its intended audience that Russo presents a certain persona to the parents and students of CSW, and another entirely to faculty, board members, etc.

-After the closed Executive meeting, a public meeting was held, at which the board publicly voted to terminate Russo's presidency of CSW, with 7 for, 1 abstaining, and 1 (the parent representative) against. The board remains evasive about the particulars of Russo's transgressions.

Those are the salient facts, so far as I understand. For the moment - beginning tomorrow - the school's daily affairs will be under the guidance of another senior teacher and staff member, serving as interim president until a new president can be found, and this whole mess sorted out.

That's the background, setting the stage; now, for my personal thoughts on the matter.

My thoughts: the Board.

First off, I am not interested in judging the merits and injuries of Russo's particular actions. Indeed, I have to confess my own ignorance of the situation: I have not visited Charter for several months, and I know few, if any, remaining students. This is not about the veracity of the allegations against Russo: this is about the rather messy way that the community - students, parents, faculty, and board - has gone about addressing this whole matter.

My first, and somewhat lesser, concern lies in the general lack of credible information presented to substantiate the board's position: it seems that the board are perfectly willing to make allegations of Russo's indiscretions, but the stated facts do not match up with faculty, student, or parent response. The board, in its statement, claims that

"Mr. Russo presents very different behavior to students and most parents than he does to faculty, staff, and parents. This is very much an adult issue in which his behavior is materially and adversely affecting the workplace of the adults who spend significant time with our students."

First of all, this is confusing: Russo presents different behavior to most parents, than to parents? Perhaps this is true; but, if so, why does my only primary source say that there was "not a single speaker against [Russo]" present at the public meeting of February 10th?

Second, the board is setting itself up as an independent, impartial investigator of Russo's workplace conduct: if so, why is the staff member with whom he had an affair present on the board? Ethics demand, if not outright require, that she recuse herself on this matter. It is no surprise that the board warns parents that Russo is interested in a campaign of disinformation: that is precisely the tactics that have, thus far, been utilized by their side. The effect is a two-horned confusion on the part of outsiders who would otherwise grow involved: we cannot trust the board (they are too invested in this situation), but neither, apparently, can we trust Russo. And, in the absence or open undermining of outside support for Russo, the board possesses the power to make unilateral decisions. There is no check, and no balance.

Also potentially concerning is that another, less-well-publicized conflict in the school term immediately preceding the first attempt at ousting Russo was predicated upon his investigation of one of the board members for an unauthorized (and thereby illegal, according to the titular CSW Charter) expenditure of money. The expenditure? For a PR firm. It seems neat coincidence, then, that the Board's strategy on this current removal of Russo was founded upon a nice bit of public relations work to distance parents and students from Russo, by insinuating his untrustworthiness.

Also interesting is firsthand information that claims conflict between Russo and the Board is no new matter: "this all began three years ago when the board voted to cut all teacher bonuses without cause. The faculty and Russo strongly challenged the board and were shot down. It is only after his challenges that all the trouble began."

But, perhaps, the School Board is right, and Russo has acted unprofessionally (perhaps), immorally (likely), and unethically (?). However, the proper remedy to a bad headmaster is not deposing him by hook or by crook, but to do so professionally, morally, and ethically. The Board's actions may be moral; I do not think they have been either professional or ethical. With regards to ethics, my primary concern is that full disclosure of the history between Russo and certain Board members, and the ethically requisite subsequent recusion of Board members, has not happened. Russo's concerns about the board not only go unanswered, but unaddressed.

With regards to professionalism, the board says they want to keep the school running smoothly. Very well: but a smooth school requires relationships of trust between the guiding body of the school (whether a Board or a head), and disregarding parental and student requests for information is the precise opposite of such a trust. Must they disclose further information? I doubt it. Ought they? Indubitably.

Very well. This, then, is my response to the Board, at least that which I have composed in my few spare moments since this matter has begun: I beg, urge, plead with you to be transparent, for your own good, for the good of the school, and for the good of the students whose education you have chartered. If this requires the sacrifice of some personal dignity, of some of the Rights that the Board holds, still, for Heaven's (or not) sake, be open! It will be best, if likely humbling, and the school community can finally feel comfortable with, and not lorded over by, your corporate body. Ultimately, if or when a new choice for school head is brought in, the community will inevitably consider him or her to be "on their side": the more certain they can be that their interests lie not so far from ours, the smoother the whole deal should go down for all involved.

My thoughts: Student Responses.

On the part of the students, I have seen several sorts of responses, coming via various forms of public discussion. Some sympathize with Mr. Russo; others demonize; and some admit that they cannot know the entire story. All these responses, I must admit, resonate with me to some degree. But I would like to address, primarily, the discussion currently centred around the idea of some sort of "student protest," the most immediate and obvious of which is a "Sit in for information on the termination of Mr. Russo" being organized, at the time of this writing, for the first period tomorrow (Wednesday) morning.

I'm not interested in recounting my personal feelings on the matter at hand (whether the board has been forthcoming with information) - that is covered in the section above. What I am pleasantly surprised about, however, is the proposed reason for this sit-in: not in support of Russo, not in defiance of the Board, but in the interest of acquiring information, so as (I presume) to come, as a community, to a more fair and right-minded understanding of the situation. This is, I think, highly commendable. In fact, it illustrates one of the most valuable and crucial skills that Schools hope to impart: reasoned, objective thinking based on values applied in a real-world test.

This is why I worry about responses - whether from students or recent alumni - that condemn such actions as counterproductive, claiming, in the words of one message board post,

"If this is how we show our support to russo [sic], by rebelling against all he helped to build, even when new leadership takes over, all he work [sic] for seems in vain, no?"

No.

Now, such forms of protest would be in vain if what Russo "helped to build" was an institution simply established to pass on knowledge, to produce competitive students, and to garner a list of acceptances to A-list universities. If so, then, yes. So long as academics continue unimpeded, then, yes, we ought to be pleased with ourselves, and, yes, allow this transition to proceed on its way.

But academics cannot be equated with Learning, and facts and formulae are not the only goals of Education. The purpose of a School is not equal to its rank in the nation, to its college acceptance lists, or even to its students future pursuits. A School, at its best, is in the business of teaching life skills, among whose number we must count both values and virtue, both ethics as well as morals. And what pleases me so about much of the student and alumni response to the executive board's obtuse and occluded process is that it is an ethical response: protesting what seems to be an injustice done, while remaining humble and open to convincing otherwise.

Yes, it is difficult, often, to be ethical; it is certainly inconvenient; it is possibly even wrong to support Mr. Russo in this matter. But this protest, it seems, is not a partisan action: this is not about liking a president, or disliking a man. This is about due process, transparent governance, and proper polity. This is why I, both publically and personally, am in support of this sit-in, and any other future actions carried out in a similar spirit. This is precisely the sort of Test which schools cannot prepare, and only Life can offer: a test of character.

I will not discuss at length other historical protests. But I do not think it ludicrous to draw parallels between this action and those such as the boycotts, the sit-ins, the hunger strikes. It is not ludicrous because, despite the scale of this particular situation's effect being quite different from those others, the Ethics at stake knows no scale: If what has been done is wrong, is Unjust in any meaningful way, then this course of action is unqualifiedly proper. If one hopes to one day practice great virtue, then one must today discharge her or his duty in small ways.

So, to the students, to any alumni who may choose to take part in this: Go. Go! and do not leave, do not stop going, until this matter has been drawn up to the utter satisfaction of your conscience or rational understanding of what the Right Thing is in this instance. It will be inconvenient; it may be difficult; it may even be a little embarrassing, if, as it may turn out, there are many who are not so conscience-stricken as you. But, Go!

-Jason G.L. Chu (CSW '04, Yale '08)

Something I don't quite understand

2008-12-29T05:06:00.000-08:00

How is it, according to conservative minds, that welfare - supporting individuals who have failed in the marketplace, who can't take care of themselves and need the government's help - is a dirty word and an execrable practice, while large-scale bailout - supporting corporations who have failed in the marketplace, who can no longer handle hteir own affairs and need the government's help - is a necessary, requisite, and even noble part of the economic machine?

Man beaten in Shreveport, LA, for wearing an Obama shirt

2008-12-09T15:46:00.000-08:00

This shit is ridiculous... I could comment or say whatever, but the pictures and his account below bear witness on their own. All I have to add is that this story needs to be told... the word needs to be spread. Right now, a google search for "Kaylon + Shreveport" turns up no stories on major news outlets. Go here for more and the latest info, and blog, IM, email, and otherwise share what's going on.

Local Man Wearing Obama Shirt Beaten By Group of White Men

information from Mr. Johnson's family:

Kaylon was on his way home around 11 p.m. Saturday night (12/6). He was returning from a trip to the Natchitoches Christmas Festival where he was selling items from his newly opened Obama Shop.

Kaylon stopped at the Citgo station off I-20 and W. Bert Kouns (near Greenwood) to fuel up. A witness says the truck drove then came to a stop. The occupants of the truck were White men who shouted at Kaylon "F*** Obama" [I note: other accounts report racial epithets also being used] after noticing his Obama shirt.

The men got out of the truck, approached Kaylon and proceeded to attack him ... breaking his nose and seriously injuring his eye. Kaylon will have to have surgery later this week as a result of these injuries.

No other description is given other than they were "large" White men. The clerk in the station apparently was able to get the truck's license plate number.

Kaylon was not only assaulted, he was robbed as well. The suspects took his wallet before they fled.

***

"Kaylon was a key coordinator in the Shreveport for Obama campaign."

***

Gender in Judd Apatow's Superbad

2008-11-22T20:52:00.000-08:00

"have you ever seen a vagina by itself? Not for me." - Seth [Jonah Hill] to Evan [Michael Cera]

This quote, uttered in the closing lines of Superbad's opening dialogue by Jonah Hill's foul-mouthed libidinous child-man, points toward the underlying framework that Judd Apatow establishes for his sprawling discussion of gender roles and relations contained therein. The film creates and attempts to resolve a tension between two age-old rite-of-passage premises: that (1) it is desirable to relate to females, at least from the perspective of the movie's three pubescent male protagonists (and, by implication, the movie's pre- mid- and post-pubescent male audiences [the question of what and how a female audience is to relate to the movie is an interesting, and ancillary, issue]), and (2) relating to females is confusing, irreducibly so. In essence, Apatow is asking his audience: is it worth it? Does pursuit of the feminine define masculine coming-of-age, thereby validating such impulses, or is the essence of maleness (as Socrates, Plato, and Wilde might support) to cling to obtuse, crotch-grabbing masculinity, placing "bros before hoes" and rejecting the physiological and biological mystery of the female?

To complicate matters, the line quoted above is followed immediately by Jane, Evan's mother, emerging from their house to thank Seth for "taking care of [Evan]". The irony is palpable: thoroughly virginal as Seth and Evan are, despite their vulgarities acting as desperate protestations to the contrary, emergence from their mothers' vaginas has been their only first-hand experience with the female genitalia. Seth's sexualization of Evan's mother is expected, and telling: if Seth and Evan form a twin-headed protagonist (whose story throughout the night moves in counterpoint to the second protagonist, Fogell [Christopher Mintz-Plasse] a/k/a McLovin), then Seth is Evan's Freudian id acting out, in a way that Evan cannot himself vocalize or otherwise express. In essence, Seth is the opposite of a Jiminy Cricket: an anthropomorphicized anti-conscience, expressing the base desires that would be unthinkable - but not wholly unpalatable - for Evan.

Interestingly, in this scene, there is also a transferral of parental roles taking place: Jane, largely absent for the rest of the film, is asking Seth to take care of Evan. Seth's response to her is not that of a preadolescent, but rather a budding post-adolescent sexualization of the feminine. This brings to mind the Freudian stages of male maturation and development: while the female grows into womanhood by clinging to Mother, the male grows into manhood by rejecting - or being rejected by - Mother, and instead embracing a characteristically-male Society. Anything less results in crippling neurosis: and, while Evan may be awkward, I have no sense that he is supposed to be viewed by the audience as sexually repressed. Sexually desirous, yes, of a seemingly-unreachable goal (putting women on pedestals, and thereby objectifying and ironically denigrating them, is another theme of the film) but unfulfilled desire is a far cry from sexual repression.

Cera's character is himself a study in tension: quirky and callow in worldview and experience, he is oddly youthless in mannerism and speech. He is the anti-protagonist, the opposite of what society says is Cool and Teenage. While he wears a hoody - as iconically Mid-'00s Teen as tight white tees were in the Arthur Fonzarelli/James Dean era - it covers a boring, beige-striped polo shirt; Evan is a man concealed in the body of a child, and while his longings are awkwardly and childishly expressed, they are not awkward and childish longings (compare them, for example, to the musings of Hill's Seth, which are garishly explicit and thereby come off as a good deal more undeveloped than Evan's quiet romanticism and the muted sexuality of his courtship).

That addresses two out of the three (or one out of the two, given their existence as, essentially, two sides of the same coin) protagonists of the film: there is also Mintz-Plasse's Fogell, better remembered to audiences in his film-stealing performance as "McLovin". In his characterization, we again see Apatow's sense for incisive irony (demonstrated previously in his high school magnum opus, Freaks and Geeks) at work: Fogell, despite his pseudonymous loverboy aspiration, is the least overtly sexual of the three. Fogell's sexual quarry for the night, Nicola, is a cipher, a caricature next to the comparatively fleshed-out Jules and Becca, Seth and Evan's respective crushes. Fogell pursues Nicola not as part of a coming-of-age ritual, but in a muted mimicry of Seth and Evan's ultimately deeper and fulfilling relational desires. While Fogell, Seth, and Evan all begin the movie with the aspiration of Being Cool, their paths diverge in a twinned what-if scenario: as Fogell's creation of his McLovin persona (a meta-device if ever there were one, and likely conscious commentary from the screenwriter of the process of character-creation) spirals out of control into zany wackyness, his exploits growing larger-than-life, Seth and Evan's night falls out in the opposite direction. McLovin is a brand of teenaged wonderchild, a High School student's idea of a good time: shooting guns, blowing up police cars, getting drunk (we can note that, while Evan and Seth were toting alcohol around all night, it is Fogell who seemingly winds up the most inebriated), and so on. Tellingly, the epilogue only addresses Evan and Seth; Fogell, it is implied, has no denouement in this story, because he has had no character development, no arc to speak of. While the fictional McLovin has been created, grew, and climaxed, his experiences have no bearing on the (comparatively) real Fogell.

Evan and Seth, on the other hand, seem to reach a verdict on The Question, albeit a complex verdict within which remains much to be resolved. As the last act of the film draws to a close, Evan and Seth curl up in side-by-side sleeping bags, reaffirming their masculinity as defined by one another: Maleness, in Apatow's world, stands largely on its own graces, a conclusion demonstrated in his other films (particularly Knocked Up), in which men and women seem to operate in thoroughly defined and tangential spheres. However, in the epilogue, Evan and Seth, finally happy and settled into their roles as Men, are at the mall the following day (in what is likely a telling clue, the entire narrative falls neatly into the structure of a single day, from morning through dusk, evening, late night, and concluding on the following morning) when they run into Jules and Becca, also recovering from the previous night's debauchery. The parallels between the Boys and Girls in this scene come as a surprise: Apatow has spent the whole movie telling us that the lines between Men and Women are high, nigh-insurmountable, and affirmation of Self involves, to some extent, rejection of the Other. But Becca and Jules, in this final scene, are a mirror of Evan and Seth, hinting at a complete story, from their points of view, paralleling the journey of our boys (a movie I would be interested in seeing, as much for the technical aspects of how it would be put together as for its narrative), and intimating to the audience that, when it comes down to it, Boys and Girls are not so much different as simply distanced.

In the final moments of the film, Evan and Seth and Jules and Becca exchange their other selves for new counterparts: Evan gives up his libidinous (and vocal!) id - Seth - and stands with Becca on his own, while Seth replaces Evan - his "son" - with Jules, and the prospect of a budding relationship, courtship, and potentially actual fatherhood. This is the first time that they take leave of one another - physically and, implicitly, emotionally - without a sense that this, too, will pass; perhaps, this time, it will not. The boys have finally taken their initial steps into manhood, and they depart - throwing meaningful glances at one another - with their respective love interests. Having cemented their masculine bonds the night before (I do not, as many seem to do, take this film as having homosexual undertones, except in the broadest and least interesting sense possible. Rather, Evan and Seth are, to me, two halves of one whole teenaged Male character), they no longer have to cling to or strive for them, and they are free to go their own ways, secure in Male relationship and ready to explore the grown-up and altogether more confusing world of heterosexual relationship.

Fundamentally speaking

2008-11-21T00:09:00.000-08:00

The questions seem to proceed, in rational order:
Am I alone?
Where is the Other, the self, and the other self?
Are they sustainable?

If we cannot - do not - share in suffering, then do we share? (Is it categorically selfishness to share joy and not pain?)

From where does a conception of duty arise, and to what extent are its boundaries self-determined?

Grace must cover it all over.

Authority

2008-11-12T06:52:00.000-08:00

"They went to Capernaum, and when the Sabbath came, Jesus went into the synagogue and began to teach. The people were amazed at his teaching, because he taught them as one who had authority, not as the teachers of the law."

(Mark 1:21-22)

Authority: "The power to enforce laws, exact obedience, command, determine, or judge", from French, autorite, "book or quotation that settles an argument," (c. 1230), from
Author: "One who sets forth written statements," from Latin, autor, "father", "one who causes to grow," from Latin, augere, "to increase".

So, authority, at least in some vague etymological degree, means the power or quality of the father. ehhhhh

The Village Voice - 11.7.2006 - Yellow Fever

2008-08-30T23:01:00.000-07:00

I just stumbled onto this article by Vickie Chang from The Village Voice, dating back to late 2006, and, upon further inspection, was left highly impressed. It breaks down in fairly adequate detail (actually, to a highly satisfactory degree, given its mass-media limitations: I suspect that I would only consider a lengthy, if not outright doctoral, dissertation on the topic acceptable) the forms and root causes of Asian sexual and social objectification. The author, presumably a Chinese-American woman, seems to draw motivation and social rationale largely from personal experience, but does not ignore the ubiquitous nature of objectification: she touches, again to a reasonably contenting degree, on the complex interaction of other emasculative and exotificative threads, including those drawn tautly around Asian males and the gay Asian community.

Chang's article - again, presumably - for the reasons of (1) length constraints and (2) lack of personal experience, does have a limited (albeit wide-ranging) scope: she seems to rein in her criticisms to focus on a primarily White Other, not problematizing the behavior of any other ethnicities (self-problematic: I myself nearly wrote 'minorities', rather than 'ethnicities', before rebuking myself for thinking that Whites form the Majority; they do not, in a global sense). Of course, I understand to at least some degree (or assume I do): to discuss White stereotypes of Asians is largely an enterprise of digressing on the well-worn tropes of Imperialism/Colonialism that are well-established (if not outright cliche) in the world of Ethnic Studies, and to do so calls down on the author little scorn.

To discuss Black objectification of Asians (note: I saw recently - I don't recall where - Asians referred to as Yellow in the same way Black and White are used. Is this OK? Is there a memo I missed?) is to navigate entirely different waters, including the hypermasculization-/oversexualization-objectification (albeit largely predicated upon the action of Whites) of the Black male and female. Not to mention Latino/Native American/other ethnic populations whose interactions with Asians are more limited, and less likely to operate on easily-streamlined paths (for this reason, I strangely and broadly accept the limiting of discussion of Asian objectification to White and Black. Is this an oversight on my own part?). I have few qualms, however, about this: it is, given what the piece itself is likely intended to do (to wit: stimulate discussion, rather than serve as proxy for independently conducted discussion and thought), well within the author's perquisites to limit her discussion in such a fashion.

More potentially problematic is that the author overlooks the Asian lesbian community, instead focusing on the gay Asian population. Why is this more problematic? Well, I have two issues: one personal, one academic. By the former, I mean simply that, again, writings on the emasculating objectification of Asian males is unsurprising and fairly commonplace: another well-established theme of ethnic critiques, as widely known as the Sambo/Stepin Fetchit problem amongst Black ethnic commentators. I would have much rather learned more about the (at least relatively) unexplored topic of Asian lesbian fetishization. As for the latter, academic, critique, I feel that focusing on the emasculation of Asian gay males while simultaneously ignoring the (whatever) of Asian lesbians (a thought: should Lesbian and Gay be capitalized? Is there another memo?) may be treading close to expected - in a more sinister manner - and patronizing views.

Specifically, gay Asian men are often stereotyped (and desirable) as emasculated and ladylike "Bottoms", perhaps stemming from (or driving onwards) the popular ladyboy/hermaphroditic/transvestite fetishes of the Southeast Asian sex markets. Gay Asian women, on the other hand, are simply marginalized or often unspoken-of in broad discursive contexts (caveat: by "broad," I simply mean, that which I personally have read). Of course, this may have an innocuous and acceptable root: the author, interested in critiquing and broadening discussion on these topics may have constrained herself to stereotypes easily-accessible to a wide audience.

In any case, these minor qualms aside, I am quite satisfied with the article. Any coverage of Asian issues in mainstream or White-owned/-run publications without a disparaging sly wink or nod by an editor (or, even worse, a non-Asian author) is encouraging, especially in the White- and Hipster-voice skewed Village Voice. Even if it is two years old.

Thoughts in an airport

2008-08-22T18:16:00.000-07:00

I sit in the Incheon International Airport, a scant 9 weeks after my arrival in 韩国 AKA Ko Rea. It's been a halcyon, whirlwind penultimate week; with an ever-dwindling number of students, final meals to be shared, goodbyes to be said (most poignant: my bidding farewell to the bustling and cheap fried chicken stand near work...), and hella packing what to do up, I remained in constant (or at least, consistent) movement over the past four or five days.

I'm sure I'll later confront more directly my break-down of the summer, and those musings will comprise the cornerstone of another update; but, for the moment, I'm content to sit, satiated by the ever-passing moment. Let me paint a picture for those of you not embroiled, at the moment, in the unique, ubiquitous milieu of the international airport.

To my right: a dark sky gives way to rushing clouds. As piscine white scales slink by, the sun peeks coyly out from behind them, vacillating between hiding herself and teasing us with portents of glad weather.

In Korea, I've found her character to be that of a scintillating ingenue: in the last week, our relationship has been a tempestuous (though yet short of actually abusive) and attractive one. Three days of joyful, walk-about weather (we went running through the park Thursday afternoon; we'll always have that) gave way to a final Friday of fat, loud raindrops drumming in a cavalcade of tiny , frantic impacts against the windows of my building and the drenched Seoul streets outside. But she relented from her tantrum (my boss, at lunch yesterday: "I think Seoul is crying, that you are leaving"), coming out to bid me farewell today; I appreciate it.

Baby blue planes striped with white and emblazoned with the Korea Airlines symbol dot the runway, taxiing lazily into the gate. Below, airline workers bustle about, unhurried but efficient. From their pace and bearing, I imagine their conversation to be laconic, comfortable. Familiar.

I'm at my Gate. A line of passengers ebbs before me; from the demographics represented therein, I assume (is that ever safe?) that it is a midwest-bound flight. Obvious G.I.'s (a safe assumption, judging by the "JAMES" "ARMY" velcro-patch firmly attached to backpack) mingle with what looks like a college students' basketball team - ridiculous, in gym shorts, t-shirt, and tourist-issue rice paddy hat (he will never wear it in the States; it will lie in the corner of his dorm room, wind up as a frat house cast-off story, or in his basement) - and Korean mothers and fathers placating their hyperactive children. A White woman walks by me, bumblebee-yellow neck pillow already affixed: after the sartorial standards of Korea, it is hard to forget (but I will, I shall, forgive) the sight of loose sweatpants, threadbare ragged hems dragging under thin sandals, a loosely-worn hoodie bulging over a t-shirt one or two sizes too large.

The line empties. Two last basketball girls wait for their friend; she ambles out of the bathroom, gathering up her baggage. Her t-shirt (she looks like an M; it is an L; I notice these things now. Good or bad or what?) reads, in starkly white-on-black, off-centred, comedic (think Comic-Sans sans-cliche) typography: POLLY'S KITCHEN
SEOUL, KOREA,
an epitome of expatriated, exported culture(?). (I mean the t-shirt, and not the girl)

One last White woman jogs up, gulping for breath. An Asian man follows her, headphones askew and bouncing.

All is quiet on this front.

Then! Suddenly, out of nowhere, it seems, a rush. More out-of-breath travelers - the dilatory crowd - bolts up: a mother and her son, a tall Black man, and a few others. The procrastinators empty in, and again serenity takes her place in line. The people-mover scrolls by, travelers bound for other gates and destinations (Dubai? Mumbai? The Bay?) scanning past, as the waiting area lies dormant, deserted: floor lined with thin strips of cheap laminated-looking dark wood, cush L-back leather seats, and a sprinkling of early travelers either accustomed to caution or unaccustomed to traveling.

The Korean Job is over; now the Beijing Journey.

Post Scriptum, Visions of Seoul redux: A young girl in the airport passes, carting a small wheeled carry-on. Her shirt: AMERICANPIE AND FITCH. Clever parody or simply plagiarism? You decide.

Post Scriptum, Part Second: [excerpted from gchat]

Me: ...the 30-something woman with a young child sitting next to me is taking like 10 pictures of herself Myspace-style

P: hahahahahhahaa

awesome

are you in airport

how long until boarding

Me: like an hour

[a few minutes later]

Me: ....she's still taking photos

In the news: What the heck??

2008-08-21T17:53:00.000-07:00

"As the police gathered the mounds of bikes, they also found cocaine, crack cocaine, about 15 pounds of marijuana and a stolen bronze sculpture of a centaur and a snake in battle." (New York Times, archived online)

I would love to see that sculpture.

In the New York Times

2008-08-05T19:35:00.000-07:00

"What Is the Real China?

"Jason G. L. Chu, a second-generation Chinese-American, has spent the last two summers studying Mandarin in Beijing. He currently works in Seoul, South Korea.

"As a second-generation Chinese-American growing up with a dearth of cultural familiarity, my first exposure to Beijing came as one of the perennially rotating crowd of language immersion students. Amidst the framework of our effective — if rigid — curriculum of cultural and linguistic recital, the official China came vividly into view...."

-(New York Times, August 4, 2008; online archive, pgs. 2-3)

Louis this, Gucci that: thoughts on aspirational consumerism in Seoul

2008-07-22T06:54:00.000-07:00

[Disclaimer: this is written with the full knowledge that its very author may also be implicated as complicit in abetting and supporting the behavior critiqued within. See explanation below.]

The very first time I jumped on the subway from Ju-Yeop into Seoul, I was unprepared for the veritable flood of luxury items with which I was confronted. As, frankly, a confessed brand monitor, if not outright follower, I had thought that my trips around SoHo and Broadway/5th Avenue (not to mention, 4 undergraduate years at a ridiculously wealthy school) had inoculated me against the vast human drive to consume.

Not so, apparently. Over the course of my first trip into Seoul - not to mention subsequent jaunts around town - I am nigh-certain that I saw more Louis Vuitton monogrammata than in the preceding 22 years of my modestly accomplished (if overly self-congratulatory) life. My current estimation grants something like 1 in every 7 or 8 women (and 1 in every 15-20 men) on the subway/street in my corner of Korea (including in church, in the mall, on the bus, etc.) an aspirationally branded carryall, purse, or other sort of bag; not to mention the belts, wallets, etc. and the like which parade themselves in front of me on a weekly basis.

Aspirational brands? I hope not, for - if so - these Ko Rean citizens sleep fitfully and dreamlessly.

Far be it from me to criticize a foreign culture (I say as I prepare to plunge into exactly such a piece of critical work), and I do hold out hope that this one niche impression in a sole field of Ko Rean life is merely some quixotic quirk of the cultural milieu, but this overabundance of luxury goods has inculcated in me an instinctive reaction to the very hint of a Prada nameplate, the Gucci interlocked G's, or the brown/tan patchwork of a Louis bag: to wit, I have begun loathing the trappings of conspicuous consumption.

Actually and honestly loathing: my reaction has taken on a visceral note; I nearly (and occasionally literally) cringe at the sight of another overexposed high-fashion brand, and have been (thankfully, not often, and only, I pray, in exaggerated rhetorical jest) struck by the desire to bear down on the next bearer of such an item, wielding vengeance in my own fist.

Of course, this is an odd confession from an avowed fan of, well, consumption. Let's be blunt here. I am straight up a purchaser: I will subsist on $5 a day but then drop $40-80 on a pair of shoes like it is not even a thing. And perhaps, in some indirect way, this is an indictment of my own habits.

But I think there are some distinguishing features of this particular obsession which particularly sadden me, in ways that (I hope) my own spending patterns remain innocuous (though it still provokes thought). Mainly, my arguments fall into two categories: (1) that such an obsession, if not the actual physical ubiquitousness of such items, is a sad reflection on the status of popular culture and spending trends, and (2-4) that such acquisition is actually statistically self-defeating.

1) Statistics: either Koreans are madd rich, or people are far over-reaching their means.
The prevalence of Louis Vuitton bags is such that either 12-18% of the population in Seoul (at least, that part of the population within my sampled demographic) is wealthy enough to spend multiple thousands of dollars (that is, multiple millions of Korean Won) on a single cosmetic item; or what I consider the more likely scenario (and again, it is a presumption on my part that Seoul does not have precisely such a well-earning population), that a large percentage of the population considers the status of owning a Louis bag (what status is this? see below) to grant sufficient utility such that it outweighs the additional work required (or benefits sacrificed) to earn the extra few thousand dollars to purchase the item.

2) Removing the "luxury" from "luxury brand".
All the brands whose prevalence has been increasingly obnoxious to me are brands whose hallmark is that they are, definitionally, aspirational: that is, to own such an item from such a brand ought to be something to which one aspires, and then, in a culminating moment, in the apex of one's consumerism, attains. The permeation of such items into Korean society cheapens this aspirational aspect: if everyone has a Prada bag or a Louis belt or a Gucci wallet, then acquisition becomes no longer joyful. It is, in some perverted sense, mandatory.

3) "A little Louis better than no Louis at all"... nah.
The items which I have been seeing have, as a general rule (with several exceptions), been smaller-ticket items. A small belt, a small wallet, the smaller-sized (and more simply designed) purse or carryall. This is one of the points which seems self-defeating to me: the very idea of an aspirational luxury item is that it serves as an ostentatious display of wealth. LV and other aspirational brands produce small lower-price-range items for two reasons: (i) to provide corollary goods for those high-rollers wealthy enough to purchase the large-ticket items (i.e. you get the LV backpack... and you get the belt to match. You get the Gucci kicks, or windbreaker, and the wallet to match) and (ii) to cajole those without the financial werewithal to purchase the more expensive items into spending their money on secondary items. A preponderance of small-ticket items without a large-ticket item conveys a sense that the wearer/bearer falls into (ii): someone without the means to purchase a more expensive brand item, who wants, but cannot and does not actually have, the status associated with said brand. This is the epitome of ironic self-defeat: in purchasing and bearing supposed luxury goods, the consumer actually expresses their lack of economic status.

4) "Youse all biters!" (Beat Street); swagger jacking.
Stylistically, this seems self-defeating as well (a bone which I have to pick with much of Korean society at large... but I don't want to get too aggy on 'em at this moment yet [Please Hammer, Don't Hurt 'Em!]). The very essence of a luxury good lies in connoting to others the sense of classic style and coolness: that the {w,b}earer is sufficiently entitled such that they can afford time and money on something which is stylish, functional, and blings hella bread. By cheapening the idea of a stylistic luxury item to the level of a common accessory, the idea of good taste flies out the window: if you wear a Louis item like a nouveau riche, it is not serving to lend you an air of class; you are lending it an air of banality.

What does it all mean?
So, then, why do so many desire the status conveyed by these items? What do these items say about an individual, if anything?
As I touched on in (1) and (2), above, the status of carrying such an item cannot be that one is wealthy: the prevalence of such items likely (I suspect) implies that owning an aspirational item does not necessitate the purchaser's entrance into a particular social class. Rather, it only implies that one values such an item as greater than the utility of other goods, services, and benefits which could be purchased for an equal amount of money (which is a troubling realization, in general, regarding aspirational items, especially when compared against the cost of, say, feeding or educating children, widows, etc., in much of the third world... but more acceptable, for various reasons which I may later articulate, for those with immense disposable incomes; less so, perhaps, for those without).
Also fairly obvious (again: highly subjective words) is that the value of such items does not lie in their ability to serve as accoutrements to a certain style or fashion of attire. I have seen luxury items acting in blatant counterpoint to the dress of the person carrying them: in fact, such a use of said items seems purposeful, highlighting flamboyant wealth through stark juxtaposition. It's tacky and tasteless: worse than meaningless, it points out a deficiency of fashion sense and style.
So, it seems, this is the purpose of such items: the brusque display of gross wealth.
But again: isn't this simply the purview of the nouveau-riche? Or the rustic fakir, making pretense of wealth but spending grotesque quantities of money in the wrong places: the entry-level BMW with the baller status rims.

I submit, then, that this is the sad state of affairs: aspirational brands, due to overexposure in popular society (along with a lack of imagination and comprehension of the source of such brands' popularity), have transformed from status symbol to sign of misappropriated and likely misused funds.

Corollary I - Fakes, and the negligible effects thereof:
Of course, it has come (and been brought) to my attention: such items may be, in large part, fakes. A sham, a gilded brass ring.

But does this change my argument in the slightest? Not at all. In fact, it only advances my argument that aspirational brands' function as status symbol has been surplanted by their status as emblem of a tragic lack of sartorial imagination and farcical aspersion to wealth, for reasons that ought to be fairly obvious.

到时候再说，爷爷 / Goodbye, Grandpa.

2008-07-04T07:53:00.000-07:00

My grandfather (step-grandfather technically, but the only 爷爷 I
ever knew) died about a week ago.

Somehow, I am always off in Asia when my grandparents kick off
this mortal coil. (I'd like to think that they'd approve of my ever-
increasing activity in the motherlands.)

Last summer, my maternal grandmother died when I was in 北京,
and my mom didn't bother telling me until... December, I think it
was.

Sentimental family I got.

Anyways, the second funeral in half a year for my dad's side of
the family. Right before Christmas, my paternal great-uncle Fong
had a heart attack, so we went down to VA for his memorial
service (documented here).

I hope my 奶奶's doing okay. The old earth been through many a
sadness these last few days. But she is a pretty solid believer in
God's mercy, which loves and holds on to those He calls to Himself,
so I think she will keep on living proper-like. After all,

We ain't dead yet, is we???

"To live is Christ, to die is gain" - Paul, the Letter to Philippians,
Book 1, Line 21

Since I couldn't myself be at the funeral, consider this little joint on
the iNternets my tribute, catharsis, and respect paid.

All praises due to the Most High.

Grandma; Great-aunt.

Tori (sister); ma.

Every time I see a picture of her, I get surprised at how growed-
up Tori be looking. Man don't nobody be catching feelings or man
thoughts. I will straight up smack a dude, no games.

Photo credits: all pictures blatantly stole from Tori.

Grandpa.

I remember one of the last times that we were in DC (beginning of
last summer? Two Christmases ago? Spring Break?) and Grandpa
was still (比较) lucid and mobile.

We were putting on our shoes, grabbing all the mad food that
Grandma always insists on us taking home, and picking up our bags
to get out the door. As we left, Grandpa (already worn too thin and
easily tired to escort us downstairs, to our car) leaned in to hug me
good-bye.

"I'm getting old," he whispered in my ear. "Do you know how old I
am?"

"Ninety-seven, right?"

He continued right on, his hearing aid not picking me up: "Ninety-
seven. That's not bad. I'm very old."

I think he knew. No, of course he did; you don't live that long and not
know what's coming. You've seen it happening around you; I can
only imagine. The friends, the acquaintances, the familiar public
figures, disappearing one by one. The world growing young; un-
familiar.

I know he was tired, and I think he didn't mind, either. That's the
beautiful thing. Time to finally rest.

He loved that cap. For the last few years, every time
that we would go to visit him and grandma in DC, he
would be ailing to some degree. The wind didn't really
suit him no more in his last years, so he would usually
roll out with the ball cap on. I think it was an Army-
Navy game hat. Grandpa was a public servant for many
a year in D.C., which is why he and my grandma
wound up in Bethesda, MD.

Dead bodies always look thin.

One day we'll be filled up again.

儿子们 meet the 老朋友们.

My family's wreath.

Word is bond, though my dad was actually
Grandpa's stepson, dude was always real proper to
us. He was always real happy to see us when we
would roll through the area.

One of the things he was real proud of living to see
was me attending Yale. Ever since four years ago
(back when things was less hazy for him), when I
got accepted to the school, he started calling me
"Yale man".

(Of course, as dude had mad accent, it actually came
out more like "Yellow man" but that is all right too.)

I know he started losing a lot of things in the last few
years, including most of his English (you could tell...
as he regressed into second childhood, his first
language, 广东话, Cantonese, was his weapon of
choice), but one thing he always held on to was that
his grandson was at Yale. He told me (a couple times
actually... but that is also fine) that, sometime right
after World War II, he and his boss, also a Yale
graduate, visited Yale on some official business for the
State Department. This connection, the nigh-mythical
continuity of that Ivy League institution, was
something that he clung onto over the last few years.
It was a bridge for us, something we could hold in
common, even as reaching and tenuous as it was.

Uncle Jojo. As my dad's generation grows into their 40s and 50s,
I start to see them in each other.

Wonder how Tori, Sarah, Ryan and I are gonna look in 2040???

Aunt Mary, Uncle Fong's widow, and two of their girls.

Aunt Tanya; Sarah; Ryan; Uncle Jojo.

Ma, Tori, Sarah.

I remember that girl from when she was, like, 0 years old. The
fact that she now has an AIM screenname still bugs me out.

Great-aunt; Grandma.

Uncle Jeffrey & fam. I also remember Crystal from when she was
barely born. Snap.

You know how 中国人 do it... always gotta have the mad mad
crew up in the buffet. Birthday, funeral, after church, Wednesday
night, whatever!

Goodbye, Grandpa.

See you when things are made right.

How is this movie not being problematized?!!!!??

2008-05-19T23:52:00.000-07:00

The Love Guru.

How is this movie not a problem? Mike Meyers walks around for a few hours with a bad Apu accent and it's no big deal?

Homey done been getting a pass for way too long.

15,238

2008-05-12T07:09:00.000-07:00

15,238 words later, I am done with Yale.

A small sample (1 section):

3) A sense of “naughtiness” generated by racist beliefs in conflict with one’s “actual” mores. In my discussion thus far, I have been assuming that racist responses to humor are ethically undesirable so long as the premise that holding racist construals is ethically undesirable is granted. This is an assumption that the reader does not necessarily need to accept: I may be mistaken in associating those who are amused in a racist manner by racist humor with those who are actually racist. I take it that those who would claim me to make this sort of error are picking out, as counterexamples to my claim, that set of people who can laugh at racist jokes in the same way that racists do, but yet, in other areas of their lives, evidence fair, unbiased, and equanimous behaviors. I myself have had several friends, particularly in high school, who were fond of telling explicitly racist jokes, or referring to grossly offensive ethnic stereotypes, and laughed at them in much the same way a racist would, yet whom I am fairly certain were not “actually” racist insofar as they did not construe individuals of other races as inferior to or less human then they themselves.

I suspect that this scenario is somewhat like that which Bergmann refers to as a “sense of ‘naughtiness’ generated by sexist beliefs” (73): “Something is ‘naughty’ for adults when they believe it to be forbidden, prohibited, or not spoken of and they also think that indulging in it or alluding to it is harm[less] fun.” Bergmann, however, does not see a distinction between “actually” sexist humor and “merely naughty” sexist humor: she simply classifies the latter as an instantiation of the former, supposing that one must, at some level, harbor a hidden sexist belief in order to find such humorous content amusing. I think that this sells the argument short, though: Bergmann’s thought is that, to see any sort of racist joke as funny, you have to see it as a racist sees it, which is accomplished by your actually being racist. But my objector do not have to believe that people who derive humor from racist jokes in this way are all closeted racists.

The objector might instead claim that is some way in which one can actually not be a racist (i.e., not actually personally subscribe to any racist beliefs) and yet still find “naughty” racist humor amusing: that is, it may be possible to suspend one’s actual racial ethics for the duration of the enjoyment of a joke, then return to one’s initial ethical stance, with no harm done to anyone in the meanwhile. In fact, if this is possible, it may even be preferable, for the reason that amusement or a good sense of humor, all else held equal, improves one’s quality of life. What is wrong, the objector asks, with just trying to get a laugh, with no political purpose behind it, so long as everyone involved knows that the comedian and his audience are not actually racist?

Under this view, I may harbor no conscious or subconscious construals of superiority or ill-will towards African-Americans, temporarily take on the beliefs of someone who does feel superior or malicious towards African-Americans in order to find some racist joke (such as the poster in B.2) against Blacks amusing, then return to my own non-racist stance. Imagine also that I do so alone, with no chance of another ever discovering my momentary point-of-view shift, and having taken no actions within that that period of time with repercussions for myself or others: where does the ethical harm lie in doing so? It seems as though this might be a sort of best-case scenario: I may stake a claim to strong personal ethics, but also derive amusement in ways that would otherwise conflict with those personal ethics.

I, unlike Bergmann, accept that this situation is, in some way, distinct from the case of an actual racist responding to racist humor; but I am still ethically suspicious of this stance. Morality is generally construed to be consequentialist (i.e., things are wrong because they lead to bad outcomes), intrinsic (i.e., things are wrong for some inherent reason), or some combination of both. Regardless of one’s specific meta-ethics, however, I find it difficult to condone such behaviors as outlined above.

If morality is consequentialist, then my ethical concern centers around the claim that one’s actions in adopting, even briefly, the point of view of a racist, can actually have no consequences. Perhaps there are no direct ethical ramifications resulting from my amusement at the racist joke: I will likely not, for example, physically or verbally abuse or disenfranchise any Black individuals during the time I was feeling amusement at that joke. However, morality does not only concern itself with making one-shot moral judgments (“this joke at this time is wrong/right”), but also with the long-term effects of ethical choices in shaping one’s character and aesthetics: “I ought to make choices such that I become this sort of person,” or, in the case of humor, “I ought to/ought not be the sort of person who is amused by these types of jokes.” The role of morality as regards humor lies not only in evaluating an individual instance of a joke as harmful or harmless, but also in shaping an individual’s character such that she becomes the sort of person who finds racist jokes unamusing.

The root of this concern lies in the possibility that taking up a racist view, even in jest, might lead to actual desensitization towards that particular kind of racism. This is a controversial charge, and I have found myself, over the past few years, alternately accepting and questioning it. Certainly, I accept that one’s sense of humor can change. Growing up, I found certain things hilarious; after learning of new things, or simply through mental maturation, I realized that I no longer find those prior amusements hilarious. One’s humorous aesthetic can change, and it is overly simplistic[1] to say that such changes are out of our control. It is generally (though not universally) accepted that same way that upbringing received from one’s parents or other elements of one’s childhood environment (“nurture”) can balance out the effects of one’s natural tendencies (“nature”) in shaping one’s character. Similarly, find it reasonable to claim that a man who makes an ethical judgment that his sense of humor is “naturally” lacking can make moral choices to “nurture” a better aesthetic within himself. If this is so, it then falls well within the realm of morality to demand that an individual moral agent does, to some degree, attempt to effect character change on himself, and one of the best means by which such changes might be effected is through a forced separation from ethically questionable material, despite its retained potential for aesthetic fulfillment.

My critic might here interject that I am demanding more ethical stringency from an everyday moral comic audience member than the finest scholars: for certainly historians, biographers, authors, thespians, and other such academicians place themselves in the shoes of ethically contemptible individuals or characters all the time (imagine C.S. Lewis writing from the perspective of a demon in his Screwtape Letters, or a biographer of Hitler striving to peer through his subject matter’s own eyes). My response is simply that there is something that qualitatively and intentionally distinguishes between the scholarly adoption of a “purely academic” point of view for discussion or research and a viewpoint willingly adopted for reasons of seeking the emotive response of amusement: the concept of scholarly detachment, or a “purely academic” hypothetical question has been promoted precisely because of the need to separate the work of a scholar in exploring potentially unethical points of view from her own personal point of view. To wit, while an academic hypothetical may remain intellectual only, and otherwise unemotional, the danger of emotive responses is precisely that they are affective and emotional, affecting areas of the psyche in which it is far harder to remain divested: I am not even clear on what it means to experience an emotion “hypothetically”, which is very nearly what my critic is claiming a non-racist may do in experiencing amusement elicited by racist construals.

I have a second concern, about the intrinsic harmfulness of such points of view: Roberts, in his 1991, makes the point that “the sinfulness of the emotions is independent of the evil or absurdity of their manifestations” (quoting Harre, 13). Despite a “widespread notion among philosophers that feelings… are not the sort of thing that can be morally assessed,” Roberts evaluates the sort of emotions “that go by such names as ‘envy,’ ‘pride,’… ‘contempt, ‘self-righteousness’… and the like” as inherently censurable, “in themselves… morally offensive” (22). Roberts’s concerns regarding these emotions arise from considering them from the point of view of a family of moralities with the shared trait of highly valuing interpersonal relationships: friendships, brother- and sister- hood, and the like. Within such moral structures, Roberts argues, one’s ethical duty “is constituted not just of behavior of an appropriate kind, but of proper attitudes, and it is these attitudes that are above all contradicted in the wicked feelings [emphasis added]” (22).

The same point translates to racist construals: if one believes morality to be inherently derived, then allowing one’s self to be “temporarily racist” is no better than being “actually racist”. And, presupposing the immorality of racism, it is also immoral to adopt racist beliefs and racially-motivated attitudes of superiority towards others, regardless of whether one does so because of a belief that it is true or simply because it allows one to derive amusement from a particular joke, regardless of whether one does so for a shorter or longer period of time, and regardless of its impact (or lack thereof) on one’s actions and later thoughts. The later reversibility of one’s mental stance it does not alter the fact that one is presently engaging in that particular attitude or construal of other races, and this is in itself morally questionable. If morality about racism is intrinsic, then there are certain racist construals that ought not be accepted, even if only hypothetically and in jest.[2]

[1] A claim that requires support.

[2] The point can be made that there may be a substantive distinction between “being racist” and “pretending to be racist”, in a way such that whatever is inherently wrong about “being racist” is not wrong with “pretending to be racist”. I suspect, though, that Roberts’ paper again provides a response: in the same way that “being a moral friend” involves not only actually acting morally towards one’s friends, but also holding proper attitudes towards those friends, I think that “being non-racist” involves strictly holding non-racist construals of those other races. Given space constraints, however, I have chosen to not include full discussion on this point in this paper.

[Xanga] Little Miss Sunshine

2008-04-14T00:37:00.000-07:00

So, I watched Little Miss Sunshine last night at a friend's room, and I came away with mixed feelings. Best foot forward: it was rather well-shot, and the characters were interesting. I particularly thought Steve Carell was an intriguing casting choice, setting off the rest of the ensemble in a rather fine way.

However, I found the movie overall depressing. Not necessarily in a bad way (in the sense that it made for rather "good art"), but in the sense that the philosophy behind the movie was very empty. In the crucial finale scene (complete with choreographed/spontaneous dancing, the music of the late Rick James, and family bonding), characters found new self-awareness and even a measure of happiness, but with no foundation or grounds for the guarantee of its future continuance. Of course, this may just be a reflection of my general pessimism regarding human nature, but I felt as though the characters, though individually interesting, grew very little with regards to themselves. Charmingly two-dimensional they may have been, but two-dimensional they remained. Though less explicitly authorial, I was left with the same feeling made explicit at the end of The Graduate: the characters ride away, quaintly melancholic music swells, and their futures are left to the imagination of the viewer. In the latter movie, this is made obvious by a director's trick: rather than calling "cut!" at the end of the taping, he left cameras rolling, taping several seconds of awkward smiles and sighs which remain uncut in the final footage. But in LMS, that feeling is subtle, infusing the entire movie: it is an aftertaste, sitting on the palate but somehow still unexpected. Not that I'm saying the director didn't intend for us to have such a feeling; simply that he communicated it carefully and even, perhaps, subliminally.

And this feeling of irresolution, of oscillating expectations, confounds me. Not that I don't understand it; no, I understand it all-too-well. Rather, it denies my definition and expectations of art. This is more or less an obvious outgrowth of my Christian beliefs, but the fact of the matter is that I desire - and believe to have found - a firm hope for the future, in salvation granted in Christ. This transforms my life from one which is lived in uncertainty, to one which is lived certainly and with security. I understand how a desolate future suits itself better to the expectations of this world. My disconnect with the filmmakers' intent comes at a fundamental level, at the level of my not having any expectations of or in this world, but yet every positive expectation of the future. My future well-being is assured; to grant a movie's characters any less than this is not only contextually disheartening, but rings false to me, or at-least incomplete.

In general, this is my gripe with recent movies such as Napoleon Dynamite, Punch-Drunk Love (which I actually do rather enjoy), Garden State, Eternal Sunshine..., and the like. Mainstream indie movies (can such an oxymoronic creature even exist?), where soft twee-pop and ostentatiously independent music skitters and crawls around the edges of the viewer's frame of reference, where characters come to a Kierkegaardian revelation of existential angst and boredom... and continue on in the manner in which they came. Speak all you want of cinema verite and its ramifications, but I see no joy in this.

When experiencing art, I find the highest and keenest thrills to be communicated through a careful mixture of the real and ideal. I want to be connected to the art, to experience it not as an outside observer, but as a participant. Realism in art grants this: Tolkien's lengthy descriptions and pages-long histories immerse (to a level that Robert Jordan strives in vain to reach), rather than confound. Middle-Earth is fantastical, but its inhabitants, its geography, its specifics, are familiar.
The ideal plays as much a critical role, though, in my enjoyment of art. Merely representing life on the silver screen is not sufficient to enthrall: depicting a world, no matter how fantastical or improbable, devoid of the ideal, is mere documentarianism. Art requires more: We hope to reach beyond, to see things hinted-at in the world of experience. Art is the Platonic fire, the illumination in the cave of experience that grants us our only knowledge of the Forms. By reducing art to a verisimilitude, we willingly restrict ourselves.

My qualms with LMS, ultimately, reduce to a theological concern. Art must reflect God, and not man, or else we are merely representing to ourselves a facsimile of the already "dim mirror" of earthly experience. Our lives are imbued with hope and power, not because we are human, but precisely because we are not. The verisimilitude that movies such as LMS offers us grant us a fine portrayal of human nature, but they do no more; they are like a half-silvered mirror, reflecting our human qualities and letting loose that divine quality, that "image of God," that gives us the desire to see our lives from an external perspective. Making utterly realistic movies, devoid of idealism, is flat narcissism; making purely ideal movies, on the other hand, is disjunct from our experiences of that which is. In order to satisfy our soul's contrary desire of realistic hope, we must look through the lens of real experience at the glimmer of yet-unexperienced truth.

[Xanga] A confusing case of transworld identity

2008-04-14T00:35:00.002-07:00

Abstract: In the interests of questioning transworld identity, I outline a case of a possible world in which I, as an embryo, split into two and was born as identical twins.

I propose the following case as one where theories of transworld identity may run into complications or, in a best case, fail to explain the case adequately. I do not vouch for this case's novelty (as I have not reviewed the pertinent literature), nor its usefulness, nor the validity of my scientific description of the "facts":

Imagine a possible world where every physical fact up to one week beyond my conception is identical to the real world. However, at exactly one week after my conception, the embryo divides into two, and, instead of me being born, my mother bears identical twins. I further suppose that both twins grow to maturity, and each is genetically identical (or close enough that dissimilarities do not matter). With which twin (or both, or neither) do I have identity?

To add some complications to this account, what if I were to also imagine the following: The real-world me has an interest in martial arts, hip-hop music, and is a Christian. One of the possible-world twins, A, loves martial arts, but has no interest in rap music whatsoever. The other twin, B, could care less for martial arts, but is an avid listener of hip-hop music. One, both, or neither of them is a Christian (depending on whichever gives the most interesting account). With which twin (or both/neither) do I identify?

[Xanga] The uses of the first person possessive: a note to avert systematic error

2008-04-14T00:35:00.001-07:00

I would simply like to note that in the English language - and many other languages, I believe, though English (and perhaps Mandarin, on a good day) is the only language with which I have sufficient fluency - the first-person possessive has three uses: two specific and one vague. Actually, this is misleading. I would rather say that the first-person possessive has two specific uses, and we sometimes mix up the two specific uses and then proceed to use this conflated definition in a vague sense, hoping that the vagueness of our utilization will camoflauge our error.

The first case is that of the individual possessing something: this is the case in which I may accurately say "my hat," or "my chair," or "my computer." In this case, the relationship is one of simple possession: I am in an ownership relationship with the hat, chair, computer. The description of "hat" as "mine" is of unilateral ownership, and it runs vertically from me to the hat. This is, I feel, the common-sense or "folk" use of the word: ask someone to explain what "mine" means, and the description would likely be along the lines of, "owned by me" or "belonging to me."

The second case is that of something possessing an individual: this is the case in which I may accurately call someone "my boss," or a knight might have addressed King Arthur as "my lord," or the pious man addresses God as "My God." This use is less obvious, I feel, as it is a possessive only inasmuch as it is a descriptor of a relationship: when addressing King Arthur as "my liege," the knight is not saying that Arthur is a lord who belongs to him. As far as I can make sense of this descriptor (and, not trained as a linguist or a philosopher of religion, that may not be very far), it is possessive of the relationship between the knight and Arthur. Arthur is the lord of this knight, but that does not mean that Arthur is of this knight. Rather, the lordship relationship is one in which Arthur and the knight both participate, and insofar as this is true, the lorded-over/lord relationship is possessed by the knight, which allows him to address Arthur as "my lord." (I'm not particularly certain about this analysis of the use, but it is incidental to my point.)

The confusion of usage occurs in gray areas as follows: "My country," "my school," "my household." In these cases, there is no immediate understanding as to which of the above two relationships the first-person possessive pronoun refers to. In the case of "my country," does the descriptor imply that the individual owns this country? Perhaps it is contextual to the country - is it a democracy or dictatorship? Or perhaps the individual's political philosophy is relevant: does he, as Hobbes seems to in his Leviathan, view the government as existing contingent on his empowerment of it? But I disagree that this usage stands apart from the first and second cases. Rather, the vagueness in ascribing it to either the first or second type usage is drawn from vagueness in the individual's understanding of his relation to the country. I suppose that I am viewing this third case as subordinate to the first two: it stands on its own not because it is separate from the first two, but because, independent of context, it is both one and the other. Within context, of course, these statements may make perfect sense. If a dictator rules his country with an iron fist, of course his declaration of "this is MY country!" is a first-case usage. And a statesman who views his leadership of the country as mandated and empowered by the will of the people will of course say "this is my country!" with a usage of the second type. A politician uncertain of the source of his power and of his political philosophy will of course use the phrase, "this is my country," in a vague sense, meaning neither the first nor the second case: vagueness creeps into his speech not because the word is being used in a special way, but because it is being used in both ways.

Finally, I would note: I said, in the third paragraph above, that the pious man addressing God as "My God" addresses Him (and properly so) with a possessive of the second case: that of lorded-over/lordship. I feel that the systematic error associated with such uses as "my wife" is to also be zealously avoided in such an address of God. With overtly dominant descriptors of God such as "My Lord," it is not easy to forget His position of lordship over creation and the individual. However, Christianity, in particular, approaches God as a being, and not a title. The Greeks, Mayans, Hindus, and many other religions use "god" as a title for a being with a proper name (from Zeus to Quetzalcoatl to Ishvara); the Christian religion has no such title-relationship. Rather, "God" is our only "god," and thus, I fear, we easily forget that in such a title there is an inherently dominant quality to His character. It is not difficult to fall into a systematic error of addressing God with a possessive of the first case, or even, I propose, to consciously address God with a possessive of the second case but subtly and subconsciously begin to view one's relationship with Him as having qualities of the first-case possessive. We must be ever vigilant that our address of God as "my Lord" does not begin to slide into the third case, where our understanding of the relationship with Him grows vague and poorly-defined.

As a believer, one's view of God, and one's address of Him as "My God," must thus consciously be kept as an possessive descriptor of the second case, and not of the first: as akin to "My Lord," or "my boss," and not in the same usage as "my cup," "my home," or "my genie."