From New America Media

A trend of targeted violence is erupting.

When you hear “immigration,” most people think of Mexico, or the Latino population. I can’t disagree that even I tend to focus on the plight of our Latina/o sisters and brothers when I see their peaceful protests raided by police, or racist signs about immigrants needing to “go home,” or when I witness billboards like the one I pass everyday that has a picture of a White man, arms folded staring into the camera, wearing a sheriff’s outfit that reads, “NO ALIENS ALLOWED HERE. We do not support illegal immigration.”

I am a child of immigrants. My parents came to this country from the Philippines over thirty years ago and have endured more stories of racism, shame, and forced assimilation than I can possible communicate or fathom. Their stories are real yet unbelievable. Most people wouldn’t believe that my father lost his front tooth because a stranger threw a glass bottle at his face while he crossed the street. Most people wouldn’t believe that my mother received a failing grade in her nursing clinical courses, not because of academic performance in which she was receiving good scores, but because her instructor wrote, “Language Difficulties” in the side margin and she was asked to leave the program after years of academic slaving. Never mind the lawyers who told her she’d never win a case in Ohio about racial and ethnic discrimination, “the jury would think exactly like the instructor,” they advised. And they were right. My mother is perfectly bi-lingual and speaks English more frequently than Tagalog. Whose story would you believe?

When I think of immigration I think of my father’s frequent fights he had with strangers who demanded he return to his own country. I think of my parents strength and how often even I have overlooked their stories of survival and bitterness. When I read stories like the one above, I think of my father’s angry retort to that racist demand to go back to one’s own country.

He replied, “I’ll go back to mine if you go back to yours. This isn’t your country. It was founded on stealing it from Native Americans. This is their country. So I’ll go back, if you go back, that is, if you know your history. Do you?”

Mabuhay ang Pilipinas!

Original Link Found Here

Announcing:

The Carnival of Radical Action

Most of us are organizers or activists in our real lives. Or at the very least, we think about it an awful lot and wish we had the skills and/or knowledge to organize. But contrary to the images of protest that make front pages and cause our hearts to swell–actual organizing is not as easy as it looks–nor is it very glamorous.

More often than not, the process it takes to actually get to the glamorous protest part is boring, tedious, filled with infighting, or done by one or two overburdened people who haven’t quite figured out how to say no.

And yet, the organizing part is so vitally important to achieving liberation (whatever that may be). It was through tons and tons of grass roots organizing and hard work that the right managed to come to power in the U.S. the way it has. The Zapatistas and the U.S. based Civil Rights movement both also have a history of achieving goals towards liberation through grassroots organizing.

So how does one go about doing this grassroots organizing?

That’s what this carnival is all about. I will be accepting any posts/submissions that have anything to do with organizing on a grassroots level. Some topic ideas that you might feel inclined to think about:

How do you do radical leftist organizing in the Midwest [or wherever you are]? How do you confront racism/sexism/disableism/homophobia/classism etc within your group? How do you work with a community instead of on a community? How do you confront accessibility issues (that is, you’re all working class mothers and there’s rarely a time to meet or the site where you meet is not wheelchair accessible etc)? What’s been the major problem/setback your group has faced? How did it over come it? What has been a successful tactic in your organizing (for example, you found that taking pictures of violent cops and posting them online is more successful in stopping the abuse than reporting them to their superiors)? If you’re a life time activist, what are some problems you see today with organizing compared to when you first started? Or, if you’ve never organized before, write about why you never have.

This carnival will be about sharing strategies more than finding a “right” answer. In the world we face today where there are so many intersecting forms of oppression, one answer will not fit every community. But something that worked for one community might work for another if they alter it and adjust it to suit their own needs.

[…]

DEADLINE: MAY 25th
and the carnival will be posted on May 27th.

I’ll be waiting!

and many thanks to fire fly for motivating me to organize this!

You can post links to your submissions in the comments or e-mail them to me at sylviasrevenge at gmail dot com.

Let’s turn this idea into an excellent carnival in honor of BFP and our dedication to human rights.

Every now and again, I blow the dust off my cultural critic pen and lend my lens to shows, music, theater, food, and literature.

Broadway Musical: Hello, Dolly!
I purchased tickets to a community theater show in which a friend was performing in Hello, Dolly! As community theater is to Broadway what independant films are to Hollywood, I try to support art in these venues and believe that non-commercial creativity is the bed of great idea, inspiration, and rejuvenation.

That, however, does not excuse bad community theater, unfortunately. Hello, Dolly! is a comical musical that explores the intersection of lives through a match-making busy-body socialite wannabe in the 1800s. Think of a nauseating Paris Hilton superficiality inside the look of Queen Elizabeth.

Written with high right chords and a splittingly boring storyline, actress and actor must possess an unsual talent to sell this production. Adorned with baby cries of a lovestruck teen, corsettes, and vocal bravado, Hello, Dolly! had me buying a rare caffeinated beverage at intermission. On a thematic level, Dolly exudes Broadtriarchy, where Broadway meets patriarchy: women/actresses who are in the role of crying, pathetic, lovelorn elbow gloved damsels waiting with high scrunched foreheads for their men to wisk them away. The men/actors appropriately feed the Broadtriarchy with songs like It Takes a Woman with lyrics that warm the Conservative soul, such as:

O yes it takes a woman
A dainty woman
A sweetheart, a mistress, a wife
O yes it takes a woman
A fragile woman
To bring you the sweet things in life
And so she’ll work until infinity
Three cheers for femininity
Rah Rah Rah…Rah Rah Rah
F. E. M. – I. T. Y

This was perhaps the fifth or sixth time I have seen a production of Hello, Dolly!. Now that my 28 years of maturation has resulted in highly selective tongue of entertainment, I can assure you, this will be my last. I can swallow Broadtriarchy every once in a while in good humor, but, should I decide to be entertained in such a manner, I really should head to 42nd street in NYC instead. At least there it will be only the highest quality of patriarchy performance.

Hollywood Film: Notes on a Scandal
If a 30-sumthin male sleeps with a 15 year old girl, what do we call that? I call it statutory rape. What do we call a 30-sumthing female who sleeps with a 15 year old boy? We call her Sex Teacher and label the behavior Unacceptable.

Is it just me or is there some form of imbalance when movies show “love scenes” between adults and 15 year olds without the blatant theme of RAPE? In fact, this movie, which is based on actual events, calls the rape of the 15 year old boy an “affair.” Um, no, it’s rape. And had the “rapist” been a man, the shock of the crime would not be overshadowed by Cate Blanchett’s, “I don’t know what’s wrong with me,” cries.

Obviously entertaining, in a disturbing Euro-manner. Judi Dench plays a Virgina Woolf wannabe writer, insanely isolated and dry who develops a psychotic connection to the new art “Sex Teacher” at her school (Blanchett). Think Single, White Female meets Mary Kay Laterno.
For as much as I love listening to those accents, when the “love” scenes are framed with unbridled lust with no mention of crime, I tend to squirm in my seat and wish I’d chosen Love Actually for the umpteenth time.

A great resource for those whose interest peak interracial marriage.

Which of the following happened in the last 2 weeks?

A) While pulled over, a policeman asks me if I have the frontal license plate because the state requires both. Upon my nod, he asserts, “Ok, well, just ask your husband to put it on for you.”

B) At the DMV to purchase a license plate frame, the employee greets me by saying, “Do you speak another language because we have a gentleman here who doesn’t understand the road test? I hope that doesn’t offend you.”

C) Needing a ‘grade change form,’ from the department to adjust a grade for a pupil in my course, an employee looks me up and down and says, “Sorry, we don’t give these out to just any students. You have to be an instructor, you understand, right?”

D) An acquaintence, after hearing that I am in an interracial marriage and hears our differing ethnic backrounds, chirps into my ear, “Your kids will be like a science experiment!”

E) At a Peruvian restaurant, I am repeatedly spoken to in rapid Spanish and met with a blank look when I utter a stumbled, “S-s-sorry?”

F) At a party, I sit down and the indivual next to me leans in and confides, “You know what? The only other Filipino I know is pregnant.”

G) All of the above.

Go with G.

A great article articulating the difference between “diversity” and “racial justice.”

What do you think?

Written by: A/PI Across America Blog. Asian American Road Rules.
The N word vs. the C word

OK so this has long been a debate in my worlds including academia, comedy and writing: Nigger. Chink. Spic. Kike. etc etc. Do these words have equal value in terms of a) offensiveness b) racism c) ability to be parodied and subverted.
I was onstage at carolines comedy club a few years ago watching a pretty popular headliner tell the audience that she would say any racist word, any and all of them because she was an equal opportunity offender, a lenny bruce, a politically incorrect rebel defending our right to say these words and parody them, she said she would tell all kindsa jokes and make fun of everybody equally EXCEPT that she would never say nigger. (the N-word as she called it) Now picture smoke coming out of my ears. All you fearless users of language to politicize your experience, all you comics defending your right to poke fun at stereotypes and curse and be shocking onstage, I applaud you in your use of scary language, your ability to make people laugh, gasp etc. But to quantify hatred, to suggest that one racist epithet is MORE damaging, MORE hateful than any other, to me is the most offensive, RACIST brand of hypocritical nonsense and deserves the most scathing censure there is. I know that these words: chink, nigger, spic, jew, chinaman, paki, towl head, fag etc etc all have different histories in terms of how they entered our culture and our consciousness. But they all come from the same stupid fearful hateful place which seeks to oppress, to dominate and to disenfranchise whomever is on the receiving end and to suggest that it is ok to say chink spic etc hahaha so funny, but not nigger ohhhhh no you cant do that, is essentially to deny the experience of alienation loss and shame that actual human beings have felt because of racism in the world. If you say chink on stage you HAVE to at least be pro saying nigger otherwise you are actually a total biggot. You cannot quantify hate. If you are one of those, who like me chooses to address issues of race in this country by exposing the ridiculous language of bigotry, by reclaiming it through satire or humor or even through its usage such as when groups reclaim a word like nigga and fag, you cant become precious and !!politically correct! because you are afraid of being seen as racist– coz guess what, in cherry picking which races you take on, you are being a fuckin racist.

I did shows at carolines 2 weeks ago and sang my mixed race call to harmony “My boyfriend’s black and there’s gonna be trouble” (see tracks posted on myspace) where the lyrics are about how hypocritical asian parents and people of color in general are about racism. And this fuckwad comic gets up on stage after me, this guy who laid out misogynist language, kill whitey jokes (just like everybody else and so fuckin what it was a comedy show not my point) so he says : well she had me till she said nigger, and then proceeded to tell everyone that I sudednly became ofensive in that moment. After an entire set where i also must have said chink (in context my friends, of course) and a bunch of other stuff designed to expose and subvert our own complacency towards things like misogyny and racism. This will happen from time to time. Someone will hear me say chink, and act like i created the word and am not actually exposing the users of the word and deconstructing it in the context of a discussion of stereotypes. Cant be helped. And it is part of my job to start a discussion. So I could care less that someone found fault in my original premise that to use a word, really USE it is a way of reprogramming it into culture in a new context that will eventually make it redundant. Like I said before, at least now people are talking about their own relationship to these words even if I am vilified in the process. Whatever. But to say it is ok to parody every race except african americans/caribbean americans/black americans is actually like a rally for racism to continue. For hate to be permissible. For everyone to be equal, but some are more equal as our friend george orwell warned us.

So fuck white guilt, fuck inter racial racism, fuck race activists who are homophobic, fuck christians who hate gays and arabs, fuck people who claim to be pro life then go kill peoples rights to have the life they choose/ bomb people, fuck everyone who says americans are the devil, fuck people who hate george bush but drive a hummer, fuck all yall and everyone i have forgotten, equally, in the spirit of total anarchic refusal to find anyone more correct than anyone else as we try to get on living and laughing at ourselves and figuring out how peace can play out in our own little lives.

There’s nothing that gets people fired up like another log of racism and normally, I don’t post cutesy kinds of things, but I couldn’t resist. Got it from someone else.

We can always use some creativity in our lives.

Taken from COLORLINES

Issue #37, March/April 2007

The Segregated Blogosphere

By Celina De León

“Whenever issues of race come up, it’s seen as a distraction.”

Chris Rabb’s life as a blogger started with an e-mail. For four years, he sent out an e-newsletter to thousands of names in his address book. The newsletter eventually became his blog, Afro-Netizen, which provided Rabb’s commentaries on politics and news, with a focus on Black communities. Since then, Rabb has become one of the most outspoken voices on the racial divide in the blogosphere.

“As bloggers of color, we are such a smaller number of people than our white counterparts. That makes reaching the volume of traffic much harder, and the lack of social and financial capital also makes this harder,” Rabb said.

People of color make up 40 percent of bloggers, but only 26 percent of Internet users. According to the Pew Internet & American Life Project’s “Blogger” report, which was based on findings from their February through April 2006 tracking surveys, 11 percent of bloggers are Black, 19 percent are English-speaking Hispanic and 10 percent are some other race or ethnicity.

There are no bloggers of color with the kind of exposure and influence of superstars Matt Stoller of mattstoller.com or Duncan Black of atrios.blogspot. The result, according to Rabb, has been a typical white liberal/left dialogue in the political blogosphere.

“They won’t talk about the racial element of anything that’s been deracialized by mainstream media. They’re not going to talk about affirmative action, about the racial element of the immigration issue,” Rabb said. “Whenever issues of race come up, it’s seen as a distraction.”

Meanwhile, people of color face more barriers to accessing web-based technologies and are less likely to have the type of jobs with the flexibility and support to, for instance, blog as part of their work. As Rabb puts it, a bus driver is probably not going to blog as much as a professor.
***

The Internet’s element of anonymity has allowed both relief from racism (people of color who shop and do business online don’t experience the racism they do offline) and, at the same time, emboldened racists hiding behind the mask of virtual reality.

For bloggers of color who reveal their racial identity and whose blogs tackle race and cultural politics, this has meant contending with hate mail.

Kortney Ryan Ziegler, 25, shut down her blog, Blac(k)ademic, because of the onslaught of negative comments she received last summer. Ziegler, who lives in Chicago and is pursuing her PhD at Northwestern University, blogged under her alter ego, Nubian, about the racism, sexism and homophobia she experiences and observes in her life and in the media.

“I just think people really don’t want to hear the truth They instead attack you on your character, your writing style, and not your argument. They distract from what you just said by saying you can’t spell, or that you should have put a comma there,” said Ziegler.

There have also been hateful comments when she posted about her frustrations with being asked by a white grad student whether her Black skin tone attracted heat. Then, Ziegler reached her breaking point. She did an interview with Feministing.com discussing her experiences of “Blogging While Black.” As a result of the interview, she was accused of believing that race trumps gender, and mistaking “plain assholishness for racism.”

Ziegler took a leave of absence after the posting of that interview and then stopped blogging altogether.

“Every time I would log on to read the comments, there was always something hurtful,” said Ziegler. “And it got me thinking, Wow, I put myself out there. There’s my photograph. There’s my school information ‘ I felt more vulnerable, not being anonymous. I now don’t have any pictures on my blog, or my name.”

***

Ziegler acknowledges that for all the distress, blogging also proved to be beneficial to her. She has made multiple academic connections and met many women of color from her participation in the Radical Women of Color Carnival, which she helped to start. A carnival is a collection of writings on a specific topic that is usually hosted by alternating bloggers. There are multiple carnivals throughout the blogosphere focused on different themes. The Radical Women of Color Carnival dedicates itself to publishing women of color who write for social change.

Susana, a 32-year-old Chicana who doesn’t want to give her last name, goes by brownfemipower on the Women of Color blog. Her writing has been published on the Radical Women of Color Carnival. Pursuing a master’s degree in Creative Writing at Eastern Michigan University and a single mom of two, Susana usually blogs late at night. She started blogging late last summer, but didn’t start making community until sometime in September.

“I was like, there’s nothing else going on staying at home with my kids. So, I decided to start trying it. As I figured out more about how to actually use blogs, then I started to get more into it,” said Susana.

Blac(k)ademic was the first blog that Susana found, and she connected right away with Ziegler. Susana was always interested in how different forms of media can contribute to a social movement. It was after attending workshops at the Color of Violence Conference hosted by Incite! that Susana was inspired and armed to make her own media contribution.

“I consider my blog to be within the context of a movement,” said Susana. “Whether I make posts, I’m always thinking at the back of my head how could this be used to further a movement, and focus on radical women of color It’s more of the idea of transferring that discussion that academics get to have into a real-world setting.”

Susana blogs regularly about social unrest and disparities domestically and globally. She’s written extensively about the Oaxaca protests and the organizing of women in the Middle East. Susana’s discussions have also received numerous critics and attacks. Like Ziegler, Susana leaves her blog open for comments. One highly disputed post on her site received 113 comments. Susana had commented that criticizing what a woman chooses to wear in the United States is not the same thing as imposing a burqa on Afghani women. Susana thought such a comparison derided the choice and agency of many Afghani women.

“I pointed out some different things, and right away I got some really positive feedback from feminists of color who read my blog. But then I also got really, really, really challenged all over the place by the liberal white feminist bloggers who came over to my site,” said Susana. “It was a constant, I’m not going to believe you until you prove it to me. Prove that Afghani women are aware that the burqa is viewed as misogynist and oppressive.'”

Many discussions on popular blogs often spread like wildfire all over the Internet. This discussion spread from Susana’s Women of Color Blog to other blogs.

“I didn’t personally comment on a lot of the other boards because they were just personally offensive to me,” said Susana. “But I did go over to a bunch of other boards to see what other people were saying, and they were violently defensive: I don’t care what any of these Afghani women have to say. I’m looking at it this way because I know better, and I know that this is oppressive.’ They really didn’t even care what women of color had to say. Like women of color don’t really understand that they’re being oppressed. They took away any work women of color have been doing for years.”

According to Susana, many liberal white bloggers attack her because they don’t want “their precious movement” to be overtaken by “stupid identity politics.” Susana also feels many white feminists view her as a threat to the “sisterhood” they are promoting. It is this disconnect that has frustrated Susana as well as kept her blogging.

Susana and Ziegler attended the Women of Color Blogging Caucus meeting at the Allied Media Conference this past summer where they were able to vent and mobilize with other women-of-color bloggers facing similar issues. Strategies that came out of that meeting include mobilizing together as a community of women of color bloggers to market each other’s blogs, protecting each other’s blogs from trolls (a blog terminology for obnoxious commenters), and helping each other to bridge the technical divide.

Lack of social capital and the wealth gap stand as the real obstacles to people of color accessing the blogosphere, according to Chris Rabb. Despite these challenges, he said, blogging is an important tool, given the corporate control of most media and the lack of independent outlets owned by people of color.

“Blogging is very low-hanging fruit that will allow us to have a broad range of expression without great expense and offers us the control, autonomy and creativity we’re not getting elsewhere,” Rabb added. “This is a great benefit to underrepresented groups.”

A great read, “An Open Letter to Mrs. JV and those Two Asian Girls on ‘The View'”