Categories
Blog

Model Minority Suicide: Five Reasons, Five Ways

It’s time to kill the Asian American model minority myth, and I mean really kill it.

That myth is one of the tenets of American racism, used repeatedly for decades to promote the idea that racism and structural racial disadvantage are either non-existent or at least entirely surmountable, while suggesting that some people of color, and Black people in particular, are just whiners unwilling to pull themselves up by their bootstraps. And that belief, that the black poor are just entitlement junkies, has negative consequences for all poor people because the tough “love” solutions this belief inspires, like cutting back … Read more “Model Minority Suicide: Five Reasons, Five Ways”

Categories
Blog

The Right to Discriminate in Arizona: Where Freedom Meets Subordination

The following was written by Daniel HoSang and originally appeared on the website of the Mackenzie River Gathering Foundation. Please read his entire article here.

 

When Governor Jan Brewer announced in late February that she had vetoed Arizona’s odious SB 1062, activists across the country found good reason to celebrate. The bill would have would have broadened the state’s 13-year-old “Religious Freedom Restoration Act,” essentially giving businesses and individuals an open license to discriminate — even on the basis of race, gender, religion, or sexual orientation — all in the name of religious liberty. The bill was … Read more “The Right to Discriminate in Arizona: Where Freedom Meets Subordination”

Categories
Guest Bloggers

Obama Sent ICE to Their Doorsteps So They Are Coming To His

This week immigrant and LGBT civil rights leaders from the California Immigrant Youth Justice Alliance (CIYJA) sat down in the Democratic congressional offices of Rep. Xavier Becerra and Rep. Loretta Sanchez, demanding their leadership to stop the deportations. The action was in solidarity with the hunger-strike at the White House to call on the President to stop deportations, which started Tuesday.

Specifically, CIYJA engaged in this civil disobedience tactic with three specific goals:

Provide leadership within the Congressional Hispanic Caucus on ending deportations; Publicly call on the President to expand deferred action for all and stop all deportations immediately;… Read more “Obama Sent ICE to Their Doorsteps So They Are Coming To His”
Categories
Blog

The Many Lives of the “Culture of Poverty”

When Paul Ryan said,

…the tailspin of culture, in our inner cities in particular, of men not working and just generations of men not even thinking about working or learning the value and the culture of work, and there so there is a real culture problem here that has to be dealt with…”

another battle in the long racially coded ideological war over who is deserving and not deserving of being included as fully “American” was played out in Congress and in the media. It was fought on ground that is all to familiar, with weapons that have enjoyed only … Read more “The Many Lives of the “Culture of Poverty””

Categories
Blog

Anatomy of a Racist Joke

The whole kerfuffle that began on twitter and ended up inspiring articles everywhere when the hash tag #cancelcolbert trended got me to thinking about the place racist jokes, ironic and otherwise, have assumed in our supposedly post-racial society.

Now, I’m not on the #cancelcolbert bandwagon. Given his obvious good intentions (yes, there should be no place in our culture for a football franchise that uses a racist, anti-Indian epithet as their brand name), I would much rather educate Colbert than cancel him. I also think that humor can play a positive role in the struggle to end racism and other … Read more “Anatomy of a Racist Joke”

Categories
Blog Guest Bloggers

Beyond the #Hashtag: Movement Building Lessons from #CancelColbert

BY ESTHER WANG

If you’ve checked Facebook or Twitter since last Thursday, chances are you’ve seen something about the controversy that erupted over Stephen Colbert’s (neither successful nor funny) satire of Redskins’ owner Dan Snyder, and the rage that was unleashed upon him by online activist Suey Park and her Twitter followers.

For a good description of the #CancelColbert kerfuffle, go here. In short: The Colbert Report account tweeted a decidedly unfunny joke about Asians, smacking of out of context hipster racism. Suey Park leaped into action with the #CancelColbert hashtag. Michelle Malkin jumped on her bandwagon. Chaos ensued.… Read more “Beyond the #Hashtag: Movement Building Lessons from #CancelColbert”

Categories
Blog

The Movement Will Not Be Twitterized

I haven’t had the heart, energy, or time to read through the #CancelColbert tweets. From the resulting hullabaloo, it seems that on the whole, Suey Park’s intentions were completely missed. Also importantly missed was, you know, the whole genocide/ disenfranchisement/ misrepresentation of Native peoples thing, AND Colbert’s original gross display of anti-Asian racism, not just the “offending” Comedy Central tweet.

That said, I had the same reaction to #CancelColbert as I did last winter when I scanned the #NotYourAsianSidekick tweets. Thousands of young APIA women and allies were connecting virtually. My ambivalence about hashtag activism is that, while it has … Read more “The Movement Will Not Be Twitterized”

Categories
Blog

The Model Minority is a Lever of White Supremacy

The Asian American model minority myth has been getting a lot of attention lately. Articles like this one, in Colorlines, and posts here on Race Files like this one and this one are just a few among a growing number of attempts to speak to the origins and meaning of the Asian American model minority. To me, that’s great news. Anti-black racism may be the fulcrum, or pivot point, of white supremacy, but the model minority myth is one of white supremacy’s many levers.

The articles referenced here all make the important point that the model minority is … Read more “The Model Minority is a Lever of White Supremacy”

Categories
Blog

Segregation in Education: Reading Between the Lines

According to the national civil rights organization, Asian Americans Advancing Justice, students in the U.S. continue to attend schools organized by race. 69.9% of Asian American students, 85.2% of Black students, and 88.1% of Latino students attend schools that are majority non-white. Meanwhile, 29.7%, or less than a third, of white students attend majority non-white schools. This statistic matters, and not just because of what it tells us about the persistence of racial segregation 60 years after Brown v. Board of Education.

School segregation matters because $733 more will be spent per student at schools that are … Read more “Segregation in Education: Reading Between the Lines”

Categories
Arts & Culture Guest Bloggers

“Beyond Bollywood” But Perhaps Not Beyond the White Gaze

The majority of American museums are institutions of white male privilege. They usually “contemplate” a history of white male conquest uncritically, without space for alternative narratives. So when I heard of the new “Beyond Bollywood: Indian Americans Shape the Nation” exhibit at the Smithsonian Natural History Museum, I warily went to explore it with low expectations.

Among the bright red and orange hues of the exhibit, I found Indian Americans, but I also found whiteness on display as the exhibit struggled to walk the fine line between highlighting successes and mentioning the struggles of this rich and diverse … Read more ““Beyond Bollywood” But Perhaps Not Beyond the White Gaze”