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Clinton v. Trump: What If & What Do We Do?

There’s been a lot of speculation about what will happen if Trump is elected. Less discussed, but no less consequential is what will happen if Clinton is elected. This past summer, a group of progressive activists were gathered from across the country at White Salmon, Washington by ChangeLab, a national racial justice thought laboratory, to discuss the implications of the Trump and Clinton candidacies. This article is based on that discussion and subsequent observation and analysis of the odd, frankly frightening, events that have unfolded in this election season since then:

One popular thread suggests that if Trump is elected … Read more “Clinton v. Trump: What If & What Do We Do?”

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What the Bundy Acquittal Can Teach Us About Race

Some days it’s hard to be an Oregonian. Yesterday became one of those days when an all-white jury in Portland, the whitest major city in the U.S., acquitted the Bundy militia, the group that staged an armed takeover and illegal occupation of a federal wildlife refugee in Burns, Oregon last winter. The Bundy militia became political martyrs of a growing white nationalist paramilitary movement in the U.S. when they were arrested and charged. Now they’re likely to become a beacon of hope to the white right.

But all of the above has already been said repeatedly since the acquittal. The … Read more “What the Bundy Acquittal Can Teach Us About Race”

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We Need to be Prophets of the World As it Should Be

At the second presidential debate, after a weekend of scandalous news, Donald Trump spent the night flicking shit at the pundit class in order to create a distraction. The pundits duly responded, and…you know how this goes from here.

Don’t let the scandals distract you. This election should be understood in a much broader, world historical context: We are in a time when old norms are falling and new ones are being established, and through a multidimensional fight in which all sides appear to be attacking the middle.

The right wing has gone off the rails. Years of attacking liberalism, … Read more “We Need to be Prophets of the World As it Should Be”

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Jeh Johnson, Can You Hear Us Now? #15YearsLater Queer & Trans Muslims and South Asians Demand an End to Racial and Religious Profiling

“I’m going to need you to step aside for additional screening.”

As queer and trans Muslims and South Asians, this phrase is deeply familiar to us. We live in a time when the color of our skin is cause for suspicion, our names are reason enough to deny our civil liberties, our bodies are assaulted with impunity. Our hearts are weary and bruised. This past Sunday, on the 15th anniversary of 9/11, we collectively spoke back.

“Up up with the people, down down with Jeh Johnson!”

On that day, the National Queer Asian Pacific Islander Alliance (NQAPIA) and KhushDC took … Read more “Jeh Johnson, Can You Hear Us Now? #15YearsLater Queer & Trans Muslims and South Asians Demand an End to Racial and Religious Profiling”

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Uncle Bob’s way: love and power

 

The day Uncle Bob passed away, I was in a car with a few young Asian American activists. We had just spent the day at the API Cultural Awareness Group’s (APICAG) annual banquet at the Clallam Bay Corrections Center. It was an intense day filled with joy and grief, but mostly love. We celebrated and broke bread with our friends at the APICAG, most of them young men, all of them with tremendous human potential, locked up with decades-long or life sentences. Visiting them always feels like an intimate crash-course on humanity. The group, led by Felix Sitthivong and … Read more “Uncle Bob’s way: love and power”

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The Rise of the Right Isn’t All Just About Class

You know how everybody and her sister are saying that Trumpism (not to mention Palinism and Buchananism, etc.), white nationalism, and the rise of authoritarian movements on the right is all about class? They want us to believe that the racism of the right is just a ruse, that their real agenda is a class agenda, and responding to it as racism is just hollow liberalism.

Don’t listen. They don’t have their eyes on the long game.

Right wing movements have powerful class implications. We should be concerned about those class implications. In fact, politics should be understood as the … Read more “The Rise of the Right Isn’t All Just About Class”

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#snowblindness

I highly recommend this feature in the Atlantic – The Racist History of Portland, the Whitest City in America. We can learn a lot about racism by looking at those places that are the whitest.

In Portland, the belief that we are “post-racial” is largely unopposed, and those who point out problems of racial injustice are often treated as if they are just seeing things, as delusional or “divisive.”

In Portland, the city I’ve often referred to as Whitelandia over the 30 years since I first moved here in 1986, there is very little to contradict these ideas and,

… Read more “#snowblindness”
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Baton Rouge, Falcon Heights, Dallas

A thick strand in the history of U.S. policing is rooted back in the slave patrols of the 19th century. Patty rollers were authorized to stop, question, search, harass and summarily punish any Black person they encountered. The five- and six-pointed badges many of them wore to symbolize their authority were predecessors to those of today’s sheriffs and patrolmen. They regularly entered the plantation living quarters of enslaved people, leaving terror and grief in their wake. Together with the hunters of runaways, these patrols had a crystal clear mandate: to constrain the enslaved population to its role as the embodiment … Read more “Baton Rouge, Falcon Heights, Dallas”

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Identity Politics, the Brexit Vote, and the American Election

What went down in England yesterday was a surprise to a whole lot of pundits and political analysts. Many of them missed the mark, believing the Leave side of the Brexit vote would fail. Obviously, it didn’t.

Why the surprise? I think they underestimated the power of identity politics.

All politics is identity politics. Identity is the beating heart of every social movement and the ticking time bomb of governance in the modern nation-state system, a system that too often attempts to marginalize ethnicity and other identity markers in support of singularizing national narratives. To understand what I mean by … Read more “Identity Politics, the Brexit Vote, and the American Election”

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A time of hope and danger: On the 101st birthday of Grace Lee Boggs

As I ponder the significance of the 101st birthday of Grace Lee Boggs, it is nearly impossible to convey in words how much she changed my life and how much she helped thousands of others find their path in life and activism.

Grace’s first birthday without her presence on Earth is a time to thank her once again for blessing us with everything she had to give. It is a time to honor her by carrying forward her struggle. But it is also a challenge to those of us who worked with her to do the best we can to … Read more “A time of hope and danger: On the 101st birthday of Grace Lee Boggs”