It’s a different day than what I experienced as a kid.
This is a day of high interconnectivity, instant and constant information from just about any source. I’m not just restricted to the TV and/or the newspapers to see what’s big. Today its google, blogs, tweets, message boards, UStream, youtube feeding me information about any and everything. With such interconnectivity comes more of an aura of global consciousness, and seamless integration of diverse-LOOKING individuals into advertisements, everyday news ephemera, and populist conversation.
That was very difficult to find as a kid. The news on TV, the people whose stories were talked about were all white people. I wondered why my family or other people of color wouldn’t be interviewed by Dateline or 20/20. Guess we were not interesting enough? We weren’t real Americans to be talked about? It was such a feeling of invisiblity.
As a preteen, pre-internet, as I mentioned in this post about Filipino male role models as a kid, I used to keep an eye out for Filipinos who “made it,” that is Filipinos who’ve been seen by lots of people, doing something cool and somewhat positive.
I was cheering my ass off when I saw Ernie Reyes Jr. make a slight appearance in the Rock’s crappy movie, the Rundown. And that was as a grown-ass 19-year old kid in 2003.
Why have “role models” in the first place?
Perhaps as a source of inspiration to do something.
Why a celebrity?
Because they’re doing it for lots of people to see. It’s nice seeing them being validated in the public and popular spheres like the newspaper articles, the TV shows, etc, and it makes me think, “hey I kind of have the same background as that guy, I can do like he does! Perhaps even better!”
Why did it have to be a celebrity emphasizing a racial or ethnic connection or kinship?
Because it’s hard to imagine yourself doing something successfully and/or finding inspiration if the people doing what you want to do don’t exactly look, talk, perhaps even think like you.
If you haven’t seen people with whom you can identify with do something successful, you’re probably susceptible to an inferiority complex — you’re not tall enough to play basketball, you don’t talk white enough, you don’t know much about politics, you don’t sound that “professional” to really fit in with this program — this is all stuff that has crossed my mind plenty of times.
While Filipinos were coming up in boxing, now that we have the mega-superstar Manny Pacquiao, there seems to be more Filipinos interested in boxing, and more opportunity in general for Filipinos to be in conversation. As a result of this fight, anyone think that these Filipino news reporters are even given the same platform on HBO to speak their opinion on what will happen in the fight?
If its true that I’d be susceptible to inferiority complexes if I don’t see anyone someone I can identify with, why can’t I just identify with anybody so I can get over my obssession with other Filipinos?
I’m not sure if its a conscious decision to choose anyone I can identify with.
I identify with plenty of people that are not Filipino, but usually only after I’ve come to learn their story. I particularly identify with Albert Einstein’s story of working as a lowly patent clerk while drawing up his theory of relativity. I identify with Nobel Prize winner Eric Kandel’s story of being a humanities student entering the sciences and being acknowledged for his work on neurobiological memory. I can identify with Kirk Hinrich’s habits on the basketball court, the Unabomber’s thoughts on technology — just as I get to know more stories, there’s usually something I can identify with in another human person.
However, the ethnic category of “Filipino” instantly brings to those of us who’ve grown up with Filipinos a sense that we share the same story. “Instantly” is the key word. I don’t have to go out and bump across an individual story to identify with if someone identifies themselves as Filipino (at least in the American context of where I sit), I can sort of understand where they might be coming from already, so I’m going to bust out my Tagalog and hopefully they can get what the hell I’m saying. It’s exciting that there is now consciousness of the word “Filipino” worldwide and its associated stories can be brought out for the rest of the world to see. I never felt as much chill in the back in Lupang Hinirang until that group sang it before Pacquiao-Cotto.
Didn’t have anything to do with the greatness off their voices, it’s just a great feeling of having something that may act as a hindrance in some context (like fitting in with job interviews, social situations) being acknowledged and respected.
The Filipino boxer Manny Pacquiao, the Filipino-Americans in the Jabbawockeez, that Filipino-Irish basketballer Erik Spoelstra, all are people I can sort of look up to as strong, cool, knowledgeable, and they all roughly come from where I come from. These are Filipinos who have appeared at one time or another on the New York Times, LA Times, Wall Street Journal, Good Morning America, Regis and whoever, ESPN, CNN, MTV, channels, networks watched by a diversity of people, who have to acknowledge our existence.
I can infer those Filipinos, Manny, the Jabbawockeez, and Erik Spoelstra probably may have eaten some adobo, are hardwired to play basketball, can bust some lines in Tagalog — stuff that I do! And that’s where I feel connected to their stories even though I might not know it as well as I do an Einstein or an Eric Kandel. The trajectory of their storylines as Filipinos are shooting towards success and widespread acceptance by other respected people in what they choose to do. Brian Urlacher, Magic Johnson, Derek Jeter, Mario Lopez, P.Diddy, Jay-Z, Mariah Carey, all people I’ve seen and admired at one point or another coming out to see this 5′6 cross-eyed, humble, happy, simple-seeming brown guy knock out another relatively small brown guy.
Said 5′6, cross-eyed, humble, happy, simpelton is now entering conversations and comparisons to icons like Muhammad Ali, Joe Louis, Sugar Ray Robinson — boxers I’ve only known through pictures, stories, and myths. Whoever thought a lil ugly brown guy with boxing gloves could hold such sway and become so admired?
We have a much clearer idea of what it is to follow scientists and engineers in action.
We know that they do not extend “everywhere” as if there existed a Great Divide between the universal knowledge of the Westerners and the local knowledge of everyone else, but instead that they travel inside narrow and fragile networks, resembling the galleries termites build to link their nests to their feeding sites. Inside these networks, they make traces of all sorts circulate better by increasing their mobility, their speed, their reliability, their ability to combine with one another. We also know that these networks are not built with homogenous material but, on the contrary, neccessitate the weaving together of a multitude of different elements which renders the question of whether they are “scientific” or “technical” or “economic” or “political” or “managerial”, meaningless.
Finally, we know that the results of building, extending, and keeping up these networks is to act a distance, that is to do things in the centres that sometimes make it possible to dominate spatially as well as chronologically the periphery – Bruno Latour, Science in Action
In this post-modern, post-colonialist, post-whatever, we value the concept of de-centralization. The de-centralized Los Angeles, the de-centralized government, de-centralized authority. De-centralized authority means that everyone else can assert their own authority. Their own authority means they can make their own decisions impacting a whole bunch of people.
Yet to establish their authority, everyone still needs to be at the center of…something. The center is where things come together. Centers are where groups of people pull things together in service of a mission: the Center for Nonprofit Management, Center for Public Interest.
Imagine a grant application by some nonprofit like Search to Involve Pilipino Americans (SIPA) saying “we are the periphery of youth development and education.”
No, you want money from foundations and corporate entities! You want them to trust you. So, you have to say that you are at the center of some kind of important-sounding category. Flip it around and say this
“We are the center of youth development and education in all of Historic Filipinotown.”
I did two things to change that statement and make it look like it would appear in a grant writing proposal:
1) I switched the word “periphery” with “center.”
The “center” is a place where people want to be at and help out because it has connections to a lot of things that you might want to be connected to and it has more of a chance of bringing together tangible results.
2) I added that this nonprofit did this “in all of Historic Filipinotown”, as if to say that they do what they do in an important thoroughfare.
The addition of the location, Historic Filipinotown, makes it seem like the space and the place are something not to be glossed over. Without any details about this entity, Historic Filipinotown, you have to acknowledge this certain space and place like it is just like any other space and place. It is potentially as big and important as another space and place entity, like Los Angeles itself.
Centers are usually the main point of focus, at least in American culture. That appears to be a bit of a contrast to what was found within Japanese cultures in psychological experiments, where the context is what matters more than a central point of focus. So perhaps the centers aren’t always the main point of focus? Or perhaps in certain situations, the Japanese and/or Americans won’t focus on the center?
So I used to be pretty good at math in high school.
Got an A in Freshman Algebra. Skeeted by with B+’s in Honors Geometry. Then I took Honors Algebra II…and was consistently scoring the lowest in class. Never felt like I belonged, like I was a pretender. To avoid further embarrassment, I sent myself down to regular Algebra II.
Never again was I the same.
My confidence in regular Algebra 2 was extremely high at first considering that I had learned what they learned and was breezing by what they were doing, but soon as I got acclimated, I trended downward with the rest of the class. To this day, occasionally, I will still have nightmares where I am in that regular Algebra 2 class in that classroom either chronically forgetting homework, not doing it, or failing some test.
Because of those experiences and because I felt perennially behind, I structured my academic experiences thereafter away from math.
Nowadays however, I wish there was some way where I could’ve re-engaged in math.
Not that I want to be a mathematician and/or that I regret anthropology in the least, but I feel like I’ve been missing something in my repetoire. Especially when I find myself drawn to stuff like ethnomathematics and the cognitive and computational properties of individuals.
So, what exactly is wrong with my math abilities?
As I commence studying for the GRE, here is what I feel at this very moment of powerlessness:
1) Every single concept and exercise seems to be so disconnected. Where I used to be pissed off at having placed “only” in precalculus out of high school, getting one question in percentages and ratios (at least in Barron’s edition) right seems like an accomplishment.
2) What I seem to have trouble with are word problems, ironically enough. Barron’s study guide seems overly thorough and has a lot of principles. The trick is trying to understand some of the word problems and knowing which principle to apply. For example, knowing exactly when to use certain specific formulas to word problems such as
percentage decrease/original amount
vs.
original amount (1-%)
3) I’m experiencing shock every time I encounter a new question.
4) I reach dead-ends until I look at the back of the book for answers.
5) I skip around a lot. Skip steps, skip to the answers in the back, when with a little patience, I feel like I could just answer the question correctly. The remedy: perhaps slow down, and ride and enjoy the math wave.
Perhaps I need a better sense of sequentiality than I currently employ.
Mathematics presents a different case because basic skills are dependent upon rigid sequential
mastery. It is difficult to advance independently in arithmetic because much guidance is required
6) I want to get to a point where I enjoy the fluidity and can answer question by question
Possible Underlying Problems and Solutions
a). The worst possible scenario: a diagnosis of dyscalculia.
From a thesis on dyscalculia.
… there are a great number of students who have serious difficulties in learning
mathematics, but find the rest of academic subjects easy. These students have high IQ’s, are
excellent readers and creative writers, and learn quickly. They are frustrated by a paradoxical
condition. Superior performance is easily demonstrated in thinking, verbal, reading and writing
skills, and in every subject where these skills are the predominant modes of learning and
assessment.
I don’t think I have dyscalculia, perhaps that the connection to my skills have been pruned off. I don’t know what my skill is, but I just know that my confidence is still a bit shaken and then tends to trickle down to my slowness in solving GRE-level, barely high school level math.
b) I wonder why there almost always has to be this tension between excellent language arts skills and being able to do math. Math is a language too! By association, however, excellent language arts skills are correlated to “emotional” behaviors whereas math is correlated to “rational” behaviors. I also wonder if this condition related to autistic human calculators and/or super-social Williams syndrome sufferers.
c) Perhaps I’m too emotional. I wonder if emotional coding that preserves my episodic memories gets in the way of carrying out principles and procedures.
Maybe emotion forces you to jump all over the place and out of sequence?
d). I feel like my former math abilities are hanging around somewhere, just that I do not have any access to them. Like Marvin Minsky’s theory of mind says, when we activate concepts, we activate networks of concepts.
If I can make a metaphor of my current struggles in math with past struggles in re-learning other skills, it would be my re-discovered ability to bike — starting off all awkward, very tentative, I almost crashed a few times, I would’ve been on the verge of quitting. The first time I used my bike, it took almost 30 minutes to travel one mile, and I did it via sidewalk.
My bike also kept breaking down, my pants kept getting caught, I couldn’t keep up with anyone. I also got paranoid over my tires, my brakes — it was overwhelming!
The turning point happened once I biked from Compton to LA accompanied by my partner and then 8 miles home by myself, in the dark at 5 am in the morning from the North Hollywood Bus Station to my house.
Now, I can ride from my house in the Valley to East Hollywood (about 20 miles) or Westwood (well, hopefully with gears on my bike, next time I try it) in about one hour and a half. I can race the recreational bikers.
The thing is it never looked like I would have been able to ever do any of that from the initial problems. And that was all within the span of one week, just 2 months ago.
When I was 9 years old, I knew that unless it was news-related or on Filipino news, it was a bit of a pipe dream to see Filipinos regularly on television, magazines, or newspapers.
It was as if no one knew my race and ethnicity existed, though I did see a lot of them in grade school and was surrounded by them. But I knew that they wouldn’t be on the LA Times (least till my sister got into the Orange County Edition in 1994) or Eyewitness News or anything. That was a black and white dominated world. And if they did have to acknowledge Asians, it would be the Chinese. Filipinos, in my opinion, were too ordinary and boring to do anything cool.
It would be an event every time I saw some Filipno on any kind of any medium at all. I was thrilled to see Mr. Dante “Bang-a-Rang” Basco play Peter Pan’s sidekick, even though he was kind of a bad guy.
But that was only one time. Basco played a fictional character, and kind of a bad guy to boot. That was all there was to him after that movie. He never showed up again. Back in 1993, there was no sense of character to him, there would be no back-story, there wasn’t any googling his name to see what he was up to now. That was the end of Dante Basco, at least until the explosion of the internets and community events. So for a while, he was just kind of an afterthought of a Filipino.
Same thing with Ernie Reyes Jr. whose had one of the more successful careers in Hollywood as a Filipino martial artist and played the protagonist in Surf Ninjas, my most favoritest movie of all time as a 9-year old.
In my most formative preteen years, there weren’t many real-life Filipinos to look at over and over again as heroes. I thought Filipinos were really boring people who would always be ignored until…
This guy…
Conrado Baylon Fiel!
Found…
In this book…
I knew clearly that this was a bad guy book and other than Street Fighter it was the first time I remember seeing Latinos and Middle Eastern people being in print as well.
“Victor Manuel Gerena, that guy looks like the Mexican who lives next door!”
“Ramzi Ahmed Yousef, kinda looks like Scottie Pippen, but he comes from the Middle East. You know *a far away place where they cut off your eat, if they don’t like your face (quoted from Aladdin)”
It was compelling reading. Or perhaps intent staring and voyeurism – trying to see the criminal traits inherent within their faces. Very 1890s-esque, except adjusted to reflect America’s trans-national diversity. It was also interesting how they didn’t put any of the women on this cover, even though there was one in the book.
The statistics and descriptions this book gave about each of them made it look like a Street Fighter Profile or a basketball card
Place of Birth
Height
Weight
Highlights
Of course none of these individuals were heroes, nonetheless it was compelling for me.
The Filipino guy’s profile (2nd place was the Chinese guy following him) is what I stared at the most, complete with Street Fighter II-esque attributes and descriptions.
That “swarthy, heavyset” Fiel could’ve been an uncle of mine! Matter of fact, every time I ran into Mr. Galicia, one of my friends’ dads, I thought of Conrado. His skin color probably looked like my dads, and he was born around the same time my mom and dad were born too! In the 2nd picture, he even actually kinda looked like my dad. Filipinos wouldn’t be just boring, regular people who liked to folk dance and become nurses, they could be murderers on the FBIs Most Wanted List as well!
I didn’t see too many Filipinos at all in print unless it was in the Los Angeles Asian Journal, but this one book was different. It was 25 cent pocket book that was in wide circulation! It would be read by lots of people, even white people, standing in line at the supermarket.
Far as I know, it’s a universally accepted thing throughout the networked world to say that we ought to “kill” cancer. Just from a google search, there are several non-spiteful “kill cancer” foundation type websites. There are a few articles about new cures that can “kill cancer.” In my public lecture cancer class at CSUN, a retired breast cancer expert nonchalantly hammered on with the phrase “killing cancer.”
Not many people give the phrase “killing cancer” a second thought.
Normally, killing of living things in this society is looked down upon. You can’t kill your neighbors, your neighbors’ dog, other animals, some plants. But when it comes to “killing cancer”, people won’t even blink when you say that.
I fully understand that when people say that we have to “kill cancer” means that we have to get rid of and/or stop the effects of cancer on a living thing before it dies. I have no problem at all with “getting rid” of cancer or minimizing cancer’s effects on its human hosts.
However, I wonder how doctors, researchers, science writers and the media, schools, the public using the dramatic language of “killing cancers” plays into researchers and doctors’ thinking and problem solving. How do they perceive of the problem of cancer if they think it needs to be “killed”, and subsequently, how do they approach research and treatment?
Some guiding questions that I would eventually like to answer with some preliminary thoughts:
Does talk about “killing cancer” focus research interest on ways to “kill cancer cells?” Conversely, if the doctors/researchers did not talk about “killing cancer”, how then do they perceive the problem of cancer? Is it about “stopping” or is it about “mitigating” the uncontrolled growth of ‘abnormal’ cells?
The breast cancer expert told us about some guy who died by using microwave thermotherapy used to heat up the tumor in hopes of “killing” the tumor cells. Mission completed…the tumor cells were killed!
But unfortunately, the normal cells would be overheated as well and the dude died.
That guy seemed to think that “killing” the bad would cure him of his cancer. I wonder if that guy would’ve benefitted if he was told that it wasn’t about “killing” the tumors but about mitigating the effects of those tumors. Would that guy have gone to such drastic measures if he did not think that he had to “kill” those tumors?
Perhaps not.
If doctors and researchers perceive cancer as something that needs to be “killed”, does that mean doctors and researchers prescribe a “zero tolerance” treatment in their patients for invasive abnormal cells?
It seems like doctors and researchers have a zero tolerance treatment towards cancer or the malignant tumor. Unless they find the tumor benign, it’s like there is absolutely no way to “compromise” with it. With no compromise it seems like they limit the search to finding solutions for stopping cancer.
If they characterize their work as “stopping uncontrolled growth” does that mean their research would focus on simply “stopping” the deleterious effects of cancer? On the cons side, would describing the treatment without saying they needed to “kill” something bring less perceived urgency to the problem?
Obviously my little linguistic nitpicking sounds stupid, weird, and kind of a waste of time, given the busyness of researchers and doctors, the number of patients suffering through the disease, neither of whom could care any less about such semantics.
However, I think it’s interesting and somewhat important to get a window into how researchers perceive the problem and subsequently respond to it. Investigating their language use is just one way of getting into their thinking and thought patterns, and can inspire insights from both people interested in cognition and cancer researchers/doctors.
I hate Las Vegas. I hate being there, I hate the crowds, I hate the traffic on the strip, I hate the douchebags and whores scattered across the place.
No, I wasn’t in Vegas on my own volition; I was there to show my cousin and aunt from the mother Islands around.
While I was doing that, I couldn’t help but wonder about the Las Vegas’ and the strip’s culture’s propensity for disconnecting, and connecting community and hacking and re-creating memory.
The architecture of New York, New York, Paris, Miracle Mile, are some nice simulatons of small samplings of each but offer little in the way of history or heritage. By creating these simulations of real places, these architects filter out the grit, the homebums, the basketball playgrounds, the street cart vendors that are also offered in those cities. Ain’t no graffiti or murals. Ain’t no public parks. Ain’t no libraries. Ain’t no real room for public or green space. Ain’t no place to bike. It’s a sterilized, privatized, well-run enterprise designed specifically to take your money as opposed to a communal, public, vibrancy.
The strip is an economy built on the transience of ordinary people. What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas. Hotel, motel, holiday Wynn. It’s a never-ending movement of faces from all over coming here to do the same damn things.
Unless they’re authors of a book these people by and large will ignore the lives of people actually living in Las Vegas. The image of “average” Americans don’t live here. It’s hard to imagine people carrying out their cycles of life, their average American habits here without making a witty remark. As is my nature to invert popular thinking, I wonder about the lives of the dancers, the waitresses, the Latino card hander-outers, that drove em to be these cogs in the Vegas machine. Per the usual narrative, did they come from these “broken” families just to work in Vegas? How did so many of these Asian women become card dealers? How did all these Latinos come to handing out cards of nude women promising sex and how do they get paid doing it? Those are questions never asked.
The people who work there seem not to be subjects to be thought of, but mere objects, automatons who serve the function of dealing you, serving you, playing you, so that in the end they can take your money. It’s a place to temporarily, but excessively satiate your appetites or your assumed unfettered appetites for food, the promise of sex, and the promise of money. That’s the culture of Vegas.
The Vegas strip is a public space used by individuals to “act out,” which usually means, gamble, drink, do drugs, have tons of sex. You are supposed to temporarily forget anything you might consider tiring, heavy, or negative. Forget the everyday “grind”, forget what you might do there, forget the slutty dress you might wear that you wouldn’t wear anywhere else, forget that you’re drinking in public, shouting, and acting a fool.
Since you can’t remember and/or you’re not supposed to or expected to, you don’t have to be accountable for anything “deviant” you might want to do in Las Vegas. The cultural expectaiton is to behave deviantly and forget about it. It is a tourist spot, but a tourist spot which encourages hyper-consumption of American cultural vices. American cultural vices such as drinks, gambling, sex.
With human automatons at work in the Vegas strip, in combination with a culture of transient forgetting, the physical space of the Las Vegas strip is the perfect space of disconnection as opposed to that of long-term connection and community-building. It is a permanent space to be temporary.
However, in the cyberspace that isn’t the case. Las Vegas is a place of connection. What people in my facebook network (mostly CA, so-cal-based people of all races and ethnicities) had most in common was that they would all go to Las Vegas. And announce it via status updates and group pictures. Las Vegas in facebook’s case seems to be a common thread for a lot of people in my network.
VEGASSS all weekend!!!!!!!!!
VEGAS pt. 1, pt. 2
When the statues are updated and the pictures uploaded, all that’s left to remember and see is pictures of people and their friends engaging in acts, people sometimes go out of their way to announce these memories they make with each other in the space that is Las Vegas, but not in the space to experience Las Vegas and its culture and heritage itself. The remembrance is not of Vegas itself, but of transients who migrate for a weekend. People in my network who seem hellbent on forgetting, yet remembering to show on a quasi-public space that they can act in a culturally expected deviant way. It’s all about them. Hyper individual-focused They want to remember to show that they indeed experienced something, but everything else is something to disconnect and forget from. They want to prioritize their connections and almost irresponsibly cut connections and possible connections to people there.
I almost feel bad for Las Vegas’ permanent infrastructures and people there.
But I assure you, I want to go back to visit this place called the Cleveland Clinic – the Lou Ruvo Center for Brain Health, a center who’s mission is to “Keep Memory Alive.” I understand needing a space to forget bad memories and whatnot, but it would be cool if within that culture of hyper-individualism there was some space to remember that there are people’s lives there, and that there is always more important shit in the world going on than what temporarily happens there.
This post is mainly a link for people in Mestizo Revelations or who want to be a part of Mestizo Revelations. I am helping edit the project.
Mestizo Revelations is a collection of essays, poems, and visual art from mixed-race writers and artists expressing their narratives and perspectives on being mixed race in America. Ms. Allison Mannos, who is Chinese and Jewish, UCLA Asian American Studies and Urban Planning student is the visionary behind this work. This collection is slated to be published with an ISBN-Number through the writing collective, the Undeniables by June 2010.
What do you need to do to be involved?
Since everyone who is receiving this email is starting from scratch, we’ll give you a full month to submit something. Submit in email and/or word doc to me bdelasa@gmail.com by October 31st, 2009.
What are we looking for in the pieces?
People who can write a creative piece about examining the facets of their identity. Write about race, class, gender, sexuality, what those have all meant to you. How has being mixed race helped/hinder you? How has being lower or middle-class helped/hinder you? Maybe being a straight mixed male gives you extra privilege?
What we want to achieve with the totality of your works, Ms. Allison Mannos says in her own words: “the primary objective [of this project] would be to obliterate race and identity while calling out the badness in the world that is based on the reinforcement of these artificial identities. I want [readers of the Mestizo project] to see how mixed people can use their “mixed” status as a platform to destroy racial identity, by not falling under easy boxes, how that is positive, not falling under the trap “non-mixed people” do by calling themselves and really believing in being latino, asian-am, black, etc. Its about being mixed but then again its really more about the bigger question of [racial] identity being/becoming irrelevant.”
Essays, poems, visual representations.
This post and its collection of excerpts, multimedia, and links is about raking your forehead with emotions. This is about making people react! You can choose to react adversely, negatively, or use the emotion to turn things into something beautiful.
The list is by no means finished, if you have suggestions, please comment or email me at bdelasa(at)gmail(dot)com!
“the multiracial group is not a group bound together by race. Our only common element is the way society responds to us–the common ways we’re marginalized.
“On the most basic level, it reminds you that you are the ‘other’ and that you’re outside the norm. The default for this is that if you were white, then I wouldn’t have to ask that question. So really, what they’re asking is about power. They want to know what team you’re on–it’s about power and who has it. They need to know what stereotypes they can apply so they can feel safe.”
Instead of asking, “What are you mostly?”–which can be construed as a confrontational question that tries to pigeonhole a person–ask an open-ended question — “Do you identify with one culture more than the other?”
Apparently those who identify, identify mostly in Hawaii.
One might argue that there are many more “multi-racial” people throughout the country if the question were changed to ask if a person knew of having ancestors from more than one race.
I think that a whole lot of “African-Americans” are multi-racial, but identify themselves as “African-American”, and not “multi-racial”. Similarly, I think that many “Caucasian” peoples are likely to be “multi-racial” by descent, but identify themselves as only a single race.
3) Has Multiracial Identity Become More Accepted by Carmen van Kerckhove
In the video at the post, Carmen has really poignant quotes about being mixed race:
“People have to know your race so that they can react to you.”
Honestly, I’d never see that as a bad thing, I’d love messing with people’s heads about what I actually am.
“Mixed people” will end racism simply by existing”
The quote is a continuation of all the “you’re the hope of the future” and I believe it ties in nicely with the video below from ill-doctrine located in the Post-Racialism and Transcending Race section of this post.Americans think that these racial issues can be solved by simply not caring and/or ignoring race.
4) Who Are We? New Dialogue on Mixed Race by Mireya Navarro
Being accepted. Proving loyalty. Navigating the tight space between racial divides. Americans of mixed race say these are issues they have long confronted, and when Senator Barack Obama recently delivered a speech about race in Philadelphia, it rang with a special significance in their ears.
people of mixed race said their decision about how to identify themselves was deeply personal, not political; it is influenced by how and where they were reared, how others perceive them, what they look like and how they themselves come to embrace their identity.
The mixed-race terrain is full of such bumps and tricky balances. But at least, many multiracial Americans say, they are no longer seen as oddities. Ms. Zaloom expects that her 6-year-old daughter and 4-year-old son will experience a different journey to self-identity than she did. At times while growing up, Ms. Zaloom recalled, she struggled with questions about whether she was white enough or attractive. She rebelled against Chinese language lessons, her mother’s Chinese food and eating with chopsticks.
But when her daughter was born, she named her Mei Lan, like her maternal grandmother, to honor her Chinese roots. Then she named her son Kyle in deference to her paternal Irish side. Her wish for her children, she said, is that they realize that the benefits of a mixed identity outweigh any challenges. “Ultimately,” she said, the goal is “to not have to check a box.”
When I turn to the mirror in my bedroom to admire us together, I am shocked. She seems so alien. With her long, dark eyelashes and shiny, dark brown hair, she doesn’t look anything like me.I know that concentrating on how my daughter looks is shallow. She is a person in her own right, not an accessory to me. But still, I can’t shake off the feeling of unease.
I didn’t realise how much her looking different would matter and, on a rational level, I know it shouldn’t. But it does.
it’s freakin’ rude – NOT progressive – to make helpful hints as to how others should identify. So back off already.
Because we live in a racist society where the dominant culture is white, and all sorts of people of colour are asked to deny their backgrounds – except for when it comes to giving tips on the best “ethnic” restaurants and posing for sexy, exotic photos.
I’m proud of who I am. I’m glad that my parents made the choices they did. But stating ownership over my own freakin’ body is tricky in a climate where it seems like everyone, from parents, to journalists, to anthropologists, to constituents, to lovers, to creepy American Apparel CEOs, sees the bodies of mixed people as blank canvases on which to project sickening, racial fantasies.
8 ) Ask Racialicious: Am I Overreacting to Ignorant Assumptions? by Racialicious Team
The term “people of colour” was thought up because we needed a way to recognise that all non-white people share a common experience, despite their vast ethnic and cultural experiences. At least as I understand it, it’s intended to emphasise the solidarity we have with each other.
10) Mixed Race People and the Language of Fractions by Thea Lim
There are no parts of my experience that are solely white, or solely Chinese. I don’t have one compartment for Chineseness in my brain and another compartment for Whiteness, living side by side and sometimes visiting but ultimately existing separately. Every single part of me is a 100% white/Chinese mash-up, all the time. There ain’t no separating these things from each other.
Many of the issues that plague the mixed race identity have to do with feelings of inadequacy and inauthenticity. Maybe some of that has to do with the fact that people are always telling us (and we often tell ourselves) that we are half of things. I mean, that has to have some kind of impact somewhere.
Media Depictions of being Multiracial/Mixed
1) Maury Paternity Test for biracial Child by Carmen van Kerckhove
It’s an old episode of the Maury show where they do a paternity test to prove what everyone in the audience already thinks: there’s no way this white man can be the father of this mixed-looking child. It’s depressing that to much of America, depictions like these form their impressions of interracial relationships.
Fictional characters is a different story, though many white men were angry that Halle played Catwoman. I wasn’t happy that she was cast in “Nappily…” either, because it was supposed to be about black womens experiences in life, not 1/2 black, which can be and might usually be different although maybe not entirely. Still, she was able to tell the story in both movies. But what about when we start to see more bi & multiracial and minority cartoons, comics, and other fiction works? Just when we start to see an increase in them, would we then want to see these stories turned into movies by non bi & mutiracial and minoriy people? You can’t say “Oh, let Halle play Catwoman” now, then get mad when 20 years from now, a non-biracial woman plays Halle in a movie about her, when an East Asian plays Selena, when a Latino plays Collin Powell, an Indian plays Bruce Lee.
3) Kanye West Calls Mixed Girls Mutts by Anthony Springer Jr.
In the December 2006 issue of Essence magazine, West sounds off on video girls and “race mixing”.
“If it wasn’t for race mixing there’d be no video girls. Me and most of our friends like mutts a lot. Yeah, in the hood they call ‘em mutts”.
4) Biracial Women Who Hate Their Identity by Latoya Peterson
The video features Jenna, who is half black and half white, who denies her blackness; Tabitha, who is half latina and half white, who denies her whiteness; Jaselle, who is black and Puerto Rican, who denies her PR heritage; and Sohn (her segment was not included in the video I watched.)
5) Can a Mixed Race Contestant Become a Chinese Idol? by Simon Elegant AND Cheng Cheng Jiang
But as the children of that first generation of mixed-race marriages now come of age, their moves to gain acceptance in society – like Lou’s participation in the TV show – have exposed a deep-running vein of xenophobia in Chinese society.
The mixed-race Simpson (she’s Black and Filipina) took this as inspiration for her newest performance piece, Mixed Messages, featured this weekend at ODC Theater in San Francisco. Simpson wants to convey through the dance the emotional tug-of-war that mixed-race people often experience.
1) The Logic of Empathy: How Obama Is Like Spock by John Dickerson
http://www.slate.com/id/2218596/?from=rss
Obama, Jenkins points out, positioned himself in the primaries as a man “at home with both blacks and whites, someone whose mixed racial background has forced him to become a cultural translator.
Interracial people can be “cultural translators?”
2) I Love Fake Interviews: About Obama and Race by Jen Chau
This brought up the question of who Obama identifies as.
While your appearance may help to construct your identity, it typically isn’t the only thing that determines identity. Barack has every right to identify as he is identifying. Any mixed person who is mad at him for identifying as a black man is a serious hypocrit[e] in my eyes. If we have had such a hard time with people demanding we pick ONE box in the past, we shouldn’t demand that others pick more than one box. Mixed people should understand better than anyone else that identity is a personal thing, and is a complicated thing. It isn’t as easy as color-coding each other.
1. Give more credit to mixed race people and to Obama.
2. Mixed race people should not have to defend the way that they identify. Those who are mixed are always up for public scrutiny, and this is problematic.
3. One-person solutions to racism are not reasonable or realistic. We all have a lot of work to do together (whether Obama is our next President or not).
With high school kids in Long Beach, being multiracial is a positive thing!
Results showed that, compared with multiracial individuals who identified primarily with a low- or high-status group, those who identified with multiple groups tended to report either equal or higher psychological well-being and social engagement.
2) Does It Matter If Black Plus White Equals Black Or Multiracial?
Some evidence from social psychology about how Americans will assess you based on your looks.
Should such racial characterizations of people like Obama — who have one black parent and one white parent — really matter?
According to a new Northwestern University study, they do matter.
The findings suggest that the immediate response of non-black study participants is to categorize a racially ambiguous person as black when it was known that one of the person’s parents was black and one was white.
Most people think that unstable or changing racial self-identification is an issue largely confined to a small group of multiracial individuals. This is a country, after all, of the one-drop rule. But research, including our own, shows that that isn’t so.
In a supplementary analysis of the 2001 Census Quality Survey (CQI), we showed that the racial self-identification of “whites” is also surprisingly unstable.
4) Adopted Multiracial Children by Contexts Graduate Student Editorial Board
White parents of adopted multiracial children often believe that racial identity is not a big factor in their children’s lives. The children disagree.
Gina Miranda Samuels “Being Raised by White People”: Navigating Racial Difference Among Adopted Multiracial Adults
Journal of Marriage and Family, Volume: 71, NO: 1, PG: 80-94, 2009
AD: University of Chicago
US: http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1741-3737.2008.00581.x
a study by Thoburn, Norford, and Rashid (2000) indicates that Black children with one White biological parent are most likely to be placed with White adopters in the United Kingdom. Further, these same children dominate the sample populations within U.S. studies on transracial adoption of Black children (Miranda, 2004).
Multiracial children are more likely to be adopted?
Parents typically indicate one or more of four primary beliefs that support adopting children with a White biological parent even over African American children with lighter complexions: (1) they will have “more in common” with a multiracial child, (2) they feel a more legitimate (i.e., biological) tie to a child with whom they partially share a racial heritage, (3) they feel less guilt about “taking the child away” from the Black community, and (4) a racially mixed child will be less visibly different and “easier to explain” to relatives, neighbors, and friends (see McRoy & Grape, 1999; McRoy & Zurcher, 1983; Steinberg & Hall, 2000)
respondents described parental colorblindness as having the opposite effect, causing them to feel racially alienated with an unavoidable experience of racial stigma that was invalidated by parents.
5) Tragic Mulatto Is a Myth and Race Is Not Culture by Rachel
the “tragic” part in tragic mullato and in IR couples (it’s only tragic with a Black partner) is the continued demonization of anyone with visible African ancestry…no wonder a “mixed child” is goin’ through it. He or she may have a white parent, but the social “benefits” of whiteness are denied to them. On the other hand they are being penalized daily because of the so-called “taint” of their blackness…who wouldn’t go crazy under that kind of psychological/emotional assault!
the idea of “mixed” is a new term embrased by white people, in my opinion mainly white women with children by men of other races, to “protect” their children from being merely grouped with their darker ancestry.
i believe things like “mixed” races would be obselete if people just READ. geeze, this whole country is comprised of people who would be considered mixed in many contexts whether it’s catholic/protestant, anglo/german, yankee/dixie, or black/white. it’s all a matter of perspective, it’s as old as adam, and hardly worth all the drama.
Everyone is mixed, yet conversely, why do people hold onto this idea of “pureness?” Is there a such thing as being a “pure” American? A “pure” European? Idea of being a ‘pure’ anything smacks of Nazi ideology.
6) It’s Misconception That Opposites Attract by Dr. Ellen Weber
In reality, it’s often painfully difficult for people who choose differences. Just look at stigmatization of Amerasian children often lead to severe poverty and a lifetime of prejudice, according to Congressional Record. Daily ed. 4 May 1994 p.S5179-5194
7) The Plight of Mixed Race Children by Stephen D. Levitt
1) Mixed-race kids grow up in households that are similar along many dimensions to those in which black children grow up: similar incomes, the father is much less likely to be around than in white households, etc.
2) In terms of academic performance, mixed-race kids fall in between blacks and whites.
3) Mixed-race kids do have one advantage over white and black kids: the mixed-race kids are much more attractive on average.
The really interesting result, though, is the next one.
4) There are some bad adolescent behaviors that whites do more than blacks (like drinking and smoking), and there are other bad adolescent behaviors that blacks do more than whites (watching TV, fighting, getting sexually transmitted diseases). Mixed-race kids manage to be as bad as whites on the white behaviors and as bad as blacks on the black behaviors. Mixed-race kids act out in almost every way measured in the data set.
Retort by Racialicious who say that the study is more stereotype than reality.
Holy bucket of stereotypes, Batman! Number three is really killing me though – how the fuck did they measure that? By panel survey? Researchers opinion on hotness?
8)Bi-racial Asian Americans more likely to suffer pyshological disorder by IANS
Biracial Asian Americans are more than twice as likely to suffer from psychological disorders as their monoracial counterparts, according to University of California study. “We cannot underestimate the importance of understanding the social, psychological and experiential differences that may increase the likelihood of psychological disorders among this fast-growing segment of the population,” said Nolan Zane, a professor of psychology and Asian-American studies at University of California (UC) Davis.
Engaging the topic of mixed-race looks in this way is significant because it illustrates issues at the heart of the ethics of identity, such as recognition, authenticity, autonomy, individuality, and solidarity, and their interaction with self-presentation and aesthetic standards formed around major social categories.
Redefining America and “American”
1) Younger Generation to Define “American” by Dom Apollon
This one is a very short blurb, but asks this important question about the “Average American”:
Klein is also correct to point out the generational divide that exists in “a country that is struggling to be born – a multiracial country whose greatest cultural and economic strength is in its diversity.”
The question on my mind is: How soon and how hard will the younger, multiracial generations fight to redefine what it means to be an “average American”?
The positive progressive answer to that question: the change starts now!
2) “Where Whites Draw the line” by Amelia Cotton Corl
Key in on the word “unselfconsciously multiracial.”
Orlando Patterson, a professor of sociology at Harvard, argues that the one arena where black grievance is acceptable is in music, particularly in hip-hop, where an estimated 70 percent of listeners are white. But the generation exposed to hip-hop, mostly under 40, are part of what Mr. Patterson calls a growing “ecumenical” American culture that is unselfconsciously multiracial.
This Obama Generation came of age in the post-civil-rights age when color, though still relevant, had less impact on what one read, listened to or watched. It was the common crucible of popular culture, he said, that forged a truly American identity, rather than the “salad bowl” analogy cherished by diversity advocates.
How did we even get to this point of unselfconsciously multiracial? I take unselfconscously multiracial to mean “blending. “How does this blending happen in a space like Silver Lake but not as much as a place like Monterey Park? How does it happen in certain enclaves but not others?
This post at Rachel’s Tavern about the most and least segregated cities might help.
Mixed race literature is bound to mention something about “not being able to check off multiple boxes in the Census till 2000.” How will things be different for 2010?
Counting race matters because it makes visible the ways in which race determines haves and have nots. Without hard numbers, advocates and communities are not equipped with the “evidence” they need to paint the picture of what’s really happening. I leave the following yet unanswered questions for those of us in the multiracial community: will we play into the hands of those arguing that our increasingly complex racial rainbow means that race is irrelevant and thus shouldn’t be considered? Or will we stand in solidarity with others in communities of color working to ensure that we are counted and thus get our fair share of resources and political power? So long as our communities get shuffled to the bottom, it’s more than racial imagination we need. It’s justice.
4) Portrait of a New American Family: Mixed Race Children Suppress Part of Heritage by Marisa Moldonado
Rosy piece about ups and downs of kids being biracial in New England high school.
Despite the challenges, Michael and Margeret Cronin said being biracial can be an advantage. Margeret Cronin said she is better able to see multiple points of view and does not immediately judge people based on stereotypes, such as all blacks drink Kool-Aid and eat chicken.
“When it comes to the ignorance that some people have, you’re right in the middle,” Margeret said. “You don’t have to think down to either level.”
As a mixed-race Filipina, I have often felt like I was being implicitly judged by Filipin@s & found wanting: I don’t speak Tagalog (much)? I don’t go to church? I don’t… eat adobo??? To me, veganism is just one other thing to add to the list of things that make me feel awkward at times. It’s not enough to make me forsake the way I eat, of course, but I can sense the pressure, & can imagine how it could be even more intense for people who are more culturally connected than I.
As the offspring of two US Immigrant Filipino parents with Spanish grandfathers, I find myself eating “Filipino food” and find it a bit difficult to break into Veganism. I view it as kind of a white guy hippie kind of thing. None of my networks of Filipino friends engage in this.
6) Is a Burrito a Sandwhich? Exploring Race and Culture in Contracts by Marjorie Florestal
Florestal, Marjorie, Is a Burrito a Sandwich? Exploring Race, Class and Culture in Contracts (September 1, 2008). Michigan Journal of Race and Law, Vol. 14, Issue 1, Fall 2008. Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1430206
When people in America refer to class, they usually mean status rather than economic relations of power.
the law, by protecting the unequal distribution of property, does nothing to prevent freedom of contract from becoming a one-sided privilege.
The sandwich is unhesitatingly American, while the burrito is perceived as a hybrid Tex-Mex concoction that is neither fish nor fowl
Interestingly the wrap seems to have jumped the fence in a way the burrito cannot; despite their similarities a wrap is considered both American and a sandwich while a burrito is not
While Mexicans and their culture have become part of the American experience, their incorporation is as a hybrid rather than a seamless integration.
The last three quotes. Need. Commentary. We consider the burrito a “hybrid” of cultures, but the American is not. Hybrid seems to mean “newly made.” Everything blends together, but two strong different elements coming together need to be emphasized.
7) Proposal Adds Options for Students to Specify Race by Elissa Gootman
As immigration and intermarriage are redefining race across the country, a growing number of people who cannot easily place themselves in one category have become increasingly frustrated with having to do so.
Mixed Societies
1) The Brazil Files: Race &; the Runway – São Paulo Fashion Week Dabbles in Color by Wendy Muse
Despite Brazil being a nation with nearly 50% of its population composed of people with African descent (according to the 2007 study conducted by the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (O Instituto Brasileiro de Geografia e Estatística, or IBGE)), the catwalks were snow white.
I would like to co-sign everything that Ana said and agree that Brazil is a lot like 1950’s US but more discrete, as Wendi said. Although it may be more discrete, a waiter not speaking to you to serve you is on par with someone telling you to leave the establishment in my opinion. Despite the differences in the delivery, the feeling is the same .. you are not welcome. Unfortunately, instead of fully fighting the discriminatory practices in Brazil, many Black Brazilians choose to avoid places/situations of contention simply because they don’t see the benefit of fighting.
2) The Brazil Files: Busy Being Foreign – by Wendy Muse
In Brazil, the term “black” (“negro/a”) is often relegated solely to people of African descent who have much darker skin and/or used for political purposes (i.e. as a unifying, symbolic reference by people with invested interests in community building among blacks/Afro-descendants). So whenever I discuss race with my students (which occurs a lot considering that a discussion of race is inseparable from a discussion on American history and culture) and I declare myself as black, they get confused.
I am going to go with option two. Of course, the States has a long way to go in terms of improving its domestic state of race relations, yet one has to be careful not to read those in Brazil as being utopian, as they, too, have a complex and somewhat dark past, one of them being the goal of ethnic cleansing by way of miscegenation to which I often reference.
3) Apartheid in Brazil – Will We Ever See Past Brazil’s Pretty? by Malena Amusa
Here’s the telling part: despite the majority of Brazilians having more than 10 percent Black African blood, only 6 percent claim “black.” Because in Brazil being Black is a poverty sentence.
Postracialism and Transcending Race
1) Ill-Doctrine.com on Asher Roth via Post-Racial Hip-Hop by Hatty Lee
We start to act as if coming close together means not having to care how our words affect each other.
When people come closer together, the boundaries change, but you never stop have any boundaries in any healthy relationship.
In any healthy relationship, the closer you get the more you care about how you affect each other…
And yet somehow in our racial interractions, we tend to forget that, and start thinking that coming close together means we can care less about how we affect each other.
2) Race, Wealth, and Intergenerational Poverty: There Will Never be a Post-Racial America if the Wealth Gap Persists by Darrick Hamilton and William Darrity Jr.
Economists, Marcus Alexis, found that, after accounting for household income, blacks historically have had a slightly higher savings rate than whites. In 2004, economists Maury Gittleman and Edward Wolff also found that blacks save at a moderately higher rate than do whites, again after adjusting for household income. This indicates even greater black frugality because many higher-income blacks offer more support to lower-income relatives than do whites, further reducing their resources to save.
3) Racial Profiling in a Post-Racial America by Tony Muhammad
According to CNN, a 2004 Gallop Poll revealed that 67 percent of African Americans and 63 percent of Latinos believe they have experienced police discrimination. Amnesty International estimates that in the United States 32 million people (approximately the same amount of people that live Canada) have been subjected to racial profiling.
4) Why Are They So Biased by The Situationist Staff
In every field, it seems, people from underrepresented groups must prove themselves able to transcend their identity. “A person of color is immediately suspected of bringing bias and perspective into their decisions,” observes Luis Fraga, a political scientist at the University of Washington.
5) Reasons Why Only White Males are Supreme Court Material by Terry Keleher
White people are color-blind and can transcend race. Today’s racists and sexists are actually people of color and women who cling to their identity politics just for their own gain.
White American-born straight men have secure identities and don’t need identity politics.
Indeed, whites don’t even see race because they don’t really have a race. They’re just part of the human race. They prefer to blend in without calling attention to themselves. And they know that if we’d all just ignore race, then racism would disappear.
6) Filipino America’s Best Dance Crew by Ninoy Brown
Eduardo Porter writes in an editorial in the New York Times that racial and ethnic differences have always and continue to make it difficult for the country to unite around social welfare. He argues that the country should “transcend group interests for a common national cause.
In one study, Mr. Alesina, with Reza Baqir of the International Monetary Fund and William Easterly of New York University, found that the share of municipal spending in the United States devoted to social good — roads, sewage, education and trash clearance — was smaller in more racially diverse cities.
“Tens of thousands of people are living in a legal no-man’s land within our borders, and the government wants to keep it that way” – Michelle Chen
9)An Angry Black White Boy’s Post-Racial Attitude by Matthew Ledesma
http://www.wiretapmag.org/blogs/44051/
The novel, set in late ’90s Manhattan, is about anti-racist college student, Macon Detornay. Macon could best be described as the characterization of Jus Rhymes from ego trip’s The (White) Rapper Show, a middle class white hip-hop head ashamed of whiteness and white privilege. But more than this is the irony of Macon’s Jewish-American identity and the the numbers he has tattooed on his arm. The numbers: 042992, the date the Los Angeles riots broke out in reaction to the acquittal of the police officers who beat down Rodney King.
Having reached the breaking point, Macon begins robbing yuppie white businessmen in an attack on whiteness. After gaining notoriety, and after false media reports identify the robber as a black man, Macon haphazardly decides to stage a national Day of Apology for white people to say sorry.”
10) Can you be Racist and Vote for Obama by Isaiah Thompson
For the past couple of weeks, I’ve been talking to people in Fishtown, and I’ve found much the same thing. Obama’s skin color is a problem for many white voters in Philly — but with the economy in ruins, they’re turning to Obama anyway. Call it the Fishtown Effect.
Would race be an obstacle?
“Not at all — not for anybody who’s a working man paying taxes,” he assured, adding: “First of all, he’s not all black. And maybe if a black person gets in there to be president, it’ll keep all the crybabies from crying discrimination.”
McGowan, like many of the Fishtowners I spoke with, was ready to assess Obama on his merits as a candidate, even as he viewed blacks in general as a monolithic, possibly hostile group.
In her book Ethnic Options: Choosing Identities in America, Mary Waters discusses the ways in which White Americans are able to pick and choose among their various ancestries, deciding which (if any) ones to actively claim and in what context. Certain White ethnicities tend to be quite popular, so that people are likely to actively identify themselves as, say, Italian or Irish, whereas others, such as Scottish or Scots-Irish, are relatively unpopular and people are likely to drop those ancestries from their ethnic identity.
Would an Asian-American, Latino-American, African-American, American-Indian get away with that?
Whereas non-Whites often cannot get others to ignore or forget their race, Whites generally have the option of going unmarked–as just “plain” Americans, if you will.
This might make a good contrast to the ways in which Barack Obama’s race has been discussed in the presidential election. Whereas he has had to actively address issues of race, and try to downplay it and portray himself as a “post-racial” candidate, Delaney can actively bring attention to an ethnicity that would otherwise probably go unnoticed by most voters, and she clearly thinks that doing so isn’t going to harm her chances of getting elected.
We now return to…The country that won’t let you speak if you want some kind of health care reform. And even less if you speak Spanish.
During a town hall meeting on health care in Connecticut, Bishop Emilio Alvarez asks a question in Spanish and gets booed, yelled at, harangued by anti-health care people.
Some people might retort “I could understand why he got heckled. He should’ve spoken English, he was addressing an English-speaking audience.”
Just because you speak a certain language doesn’t mean you shouldn’t have a voice in a public town hall meeting in a so-called democracy. Believe it or not, other people who speak other languages other than English have opinions too! Perhaps with even more insight.
The purpose of the town hall is to give individuals floor space to speak with politicians and dialogue in a civil manner with politicians and fellow civilians.
‘Civil manner’ is something that the anti-health care people in the town halls seem to interpret loosely and/or altogether ignore.
Not sure why exactly the bishop asks his question in Spanish because he seems perfectly fluent in English, but sometimes it’s just more comfortable to speak in the native tongue.
As a grant-writer, it’s important to use language as carefully and precisely as possible. You don’t want to mince words.
Perhaps Bishop Alvarez had the same concerns when speaking Spanish. And perhaps his question wasn’t necessarily for the audience, but instead for the Representative.
When speaking a non-native language it’s not as easy to convey the emotion, the drasticness of your speech, and/or to be taken seriously. You can be more incisive and specific in your native tongue.
I can sort of speak Spanish if given a paper, and Tagalog, but I wouldn’t feel comfortable at all asking any sort of question in those languages. I can talk about basic, functional items, like asking where the bathroom is or how much something costs. But if I had to make a nuanced, educated respected point in somewhere like China or the Phillippines, and I had the green light to speak in English, I’ll take that opportunity and hope that the message gets across to the important people.
A poem about Chicago in response to my Chicago Road Trip and to the homey/undeniable K.Sao
Woke up that first morning to Chicago public transit
A space to get where we wanted to
A space to see a flatland built on bricks
A space to see Cubs fans
We had plugged into the city by means of an 80 MPH automobile
Staying in an area reserved for people who connected by means of flight
That could’ve been a lucid connection, would’ve taken at most 4 hours
But that lucidity and brevity would’ve put us out of touch
With everything
A long
The way
Not unlike an internet connection
With packets of information
Which do not have experiences to report back
We only care that the information that travels fast back and forth manipulated for its human masters
But when human masters do the traveling back and forth
They carry lots of baggage
Plenty
To
Smell, taste, touch, see, hear
Observe, read, write
The snaps of a finger
The smokes of 2 pack cartons
The nibs of a $1.00 packet of Twizzlers
The experience of
Destination to Destination
LA, city of uncontrolled growth
We left fires in its forests
Temporarily
To
Chicago, a second city,
Not to me
It was the one city that provided the space
For my parents to get it on and usher me into the human race
21 years removed
I was given a blank new slate
For me to fill the category of the “lived” Chicago with
Chicago Public Transit
Thru the tollways
Thru the every days
I stood, sat, walked, rode
Amazed at this extreme friendliness of bus driver
The helpfulness of the people
An aura of warmth and coolness
In a city of freezing snow and baking suns
The weather
No importa
de Los Angeles
I’d learned through a band of traveling information
This is the city of Michael Jordan
City of the basketball Chicago Bulls
This is a city of junk food
When the universe spoke to me just before the trip,
I was ordered to try Chicago style sausages and pizzas
Indulge the tastes and everything tactile
But beyond this blank slate
There was a past
A slate already filled
4 years of my early life
That I’d have to reconcile
I re-entered the places I’d been, recalling faces
From the early phases of my experience
Rough dots of episodic memory remain disparate but vivid
Whether it was throwing away milk at daycare or
Being taken away into the countryside for a dayfair
What person would I have been had I grown up there?
Would I have been fatter because of Lou Malnatis pizza?
Less sheltered because of the natural warmth and coolness?
Would I have experienced more because of Chicago public transit?
I was last there at an age of development
I came back at an age of discovery
Taking back with me a canvas
Embodied
Bringing back with me
Bits old and new that
I observed, read, and wrote
Stood, sat, walked, and rode
The next day we drove back to the fires of LA.
Now
Only
From a distance again
Recalling
Relaying bits
Represented by symbols
Manipulated over the computer, and the internet in certain patterns
Hoping the information I enter
travels without so much baggage and so much delay
But this is information and I hope that it travels more than one way
I’m hoping that what I say here can bring me back there
Ever since the days of the hypercompetition embedded in a certain Los Angeles, all-boys high school, I’ve always been anxious and insecure about how smart I was. I always felt “not as good as…” or that “someone else would do it better.”
As we are lead to believe via schooling and popular media, the most recognized smart people were quite interchangeably the most objective, logical, rational people. They were the people with the cold, hard facts. We left emotions and other ooey gooey shit to the vaginas at other schools and the people in theatre and music.
If there was anything to avoid, it was to appear “emotional.”
To be called “emotional” is one of the ultimate insults in argumentation, because it immediately calls into question your ability to make any kind of fair decision. Your decisions and any conclusion you make are now viewed as tainted and tinged with bias. If you’re emotional, you’re probably hot-headed, in no condition to make any “fair” assessment, and therefore shouldn’t be allowed to make decisions and/or judgments.
Despite the endless stream of ignorant comments I could find at newspapers and message board communities about how certain populations are carelessly labeled “violent” as if it was a genetically inherited trait, I had generally put my faith in the idea that “the truth” and the facts, as if the truth was a lil homoncular moral ethical being that would eventually and pragmatically overcome the evil non-truths.
But then as I’ve explored more into the structure of scientific revolutions, and social cognition, I’ve found that the truth doesn’t really overcome non-truths, at least not in a timely manner. I’m thinking in particular about philosophers and scientists who have become more popular post-mortem rather than when they were actually living and saying their shit. It took 11 centuries before Andreas Vesalius overturned the predominant establishments in Western human anatomy and medicine. It took almost two millenia before it was discovered that there was more to geometry than simple plane-to-plane 2-D Euclidean Geometry.
The truth does not eventually speak for itself.
But that doesn’t stop most of us from telling the story of the the ‘truth’ as if it does.
The ‘truth’ always somehow ends up at the top of the seriation of events. Everything that has already passed was somehow an evolution or de-evolution or culmination into the “truth(s)” we experience in the here and now.
One of the popular things message boarders say to justify something in the status quo. ” There’s a reason it’s like that” as if whatever happens in its current state is somehow inherent and natural. It is a high-brow logicians’ way of saying “of course,” as if they anticipate everything because of superior logic abilities.
There’s a reason Scott Skiles benched Ben Gordon. There’s a reason that there has never been a Latina Supreme court justice. It slides down the slippery slope and becomes there’s a reason why blacks, Latinos fill up the prisons and not the colleges.
Yes, there are reasons things may be the way they are, but they don’t strike me as particularly “good” reasons.
This post originally appeared on The Grio. Almost two years ago, Vincent, a slim 46-year-old black man dressed in a plaid shirt, worked as a maintenance technician in Detroit. He had worked for the company for almost three months, but five days before his position converted to full time with benefits, his employer ran a criminal background check and told Vin […]
My daughter and I had a lot of fun on Lamu island, off the coast of Kenya, earlier this year. One of the items we came across was this coconut handbag. Some had designs, some were raw, all were incredibly cool. If I remember correctly, I bargained poorly and bought it for 150/= ($2). The problem was that the merchant new how badly my daughter wanted it so he […]
I've just caught a short video by the brilliant behavioural economist Dan Ariely who explains the surprising effect of wearing fake goods on the likelihood of us cheating and for on much we suspect that others are being dishonest. Ariely is riffing on one of his recent studies that was led by psychologist Francesca Gino. It'll shortly appear in Psy […]
Sociologists predict that half of all U.S. children will be on food stamps at some point in their childhood, according to the Philadelphia Inquirer. In a stark and surprising finding, about half the children in the United States will be on food stamps at some point during their childhood, a new study of 29 years of data shows. One in three white children and […]
In the wake of Thanksgiving, Digital Journal describes a new twist on the problem of food waste. First, the context of food waste in the US: Three researchers from the Laboratory of Biological Modeling, National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases, Bethesda, Maryland, United States of America, recently published a study that confirms the […]
A recent New York Times article reported on some of the data that is known about gay and lesbian parenthood and how children of same-sex parents turn out. The Williams Institute at UCLA finds that approximately 115,772 American same-sex couples have children. Summarizing the state of the field: Until relatively recently, we didn’t know much about the chil […]
The Boston Globe also picked up on Devah Pager and colleagues’ findings about the persistence of racial discrimination in hiring: The study was run by sociologists at Princeton who recruited and trained white, black, and Latino “well-spoken, clean-cut young men” to apply for real entry-level jobs throughout New York City with fictitious, but essentially iden […]
Many broad claims about human behavior are based on experiments done samples drawn from western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic societies (i.e. WEIRD - the subjects of psychological experiments are mainly U.S. college undergraduates!). Henrich et al. argue in a Brain and Behavioral Sciences preprint (PDF here) that WEIRD subjects are particul […]
