In the wake of unusualmusic’s ever-so-fun linkspam, let’s talk about cultural appropriation! Again. (C’mon, you know you love it.)

Or not. I’ve become aware in recent months of a growing movement in the creative world that I’m going to call, for lack of a better term, anti-appropriation. I’m seeing this mostly among fellow writers (probably because those are the circles I run in), some of whom are arguing that white writers should write only about white characters because they can never fully comprehend the experiences of PoC. But I’m seeing mutters about it in the filmosphere too, mostly in response to events like the amazingly racist casting of the Prince of Persia and The Last Airbender films, which take stories designed with PoC leads and replace them with white actors. (Except the villains.) There was some discussion along these lines in the comments of my last post on the Airbender film, suggesting that since no appropriation is without problems, maybe white TV and film producers just shouldn’t appropriate PoC cultures — instead they should open up their field to let more PoC creators in. I hear similar talk in the gamesphere: get more black people into game design, anti-appropriation folks argue, and that will prevent debacles like Resident Evil 5. We just can’t rely on white people (or Japanese people influenced by American culture, in the case of RE5) to do black people right. We have to take care of this ourselves.

This kind of thinking sounds good until you examine it more closely and notice the underlying assumptions. Namely:

• That the responsibility for incorporating PoC into white-dominated media — and stopping racism in same — lies solely with PoC.
• That all of us creator-types, despite being, y’know, creative, are incapable of understanding the experiences of people different from ourselves, so we shouldn’t even try.
• That there’s no need for consumers to see complete, multicultural worlds. Unless they’re designed by committee, anyway.

Here’s one big problem with insisting that it’s never OK to appropriate: the result is segregation. And here’s another: it’s a cop-out. The anti-appropriation argument applies a simplistic solution to a complex and nuanced problem — doing a good job of depicting The Other in fictional representation. It can be done, but it requires hard work. Research, self-examination, strategy. Rather than come up with this strategy, however, the anti-appropriation argument is a punt. Let the PoC handle PoC, while the white people stick to white people. Problem solved, the Jim Crow way.

(And yes, that’s a deliberate appropriation of “Jim Crow”. The same kind of thinking underlies the whole principle of separate-but-equal, anti-miscegenation laws, and so on.)

Now, I don’t mean to accuse the anti-appropriation movement of malice. In some cases, yes, adherents are simply trying to coat old racist notions with a veneer of thoughtful liberalism. But in many cases — particularly among PoC adherents of anti-appropriation — I think the problem is genuine misunderstanding. It’s the term “cultural appropriation” itself which causes this, I think. “Appropriation” just doesn’t ever sound like a good thing, especially not to those of us from individualistic, materialistic cultures, and certainly not to those of us whose cultures have had far too much appropriated in recent centuries. We’re still a little raw about it. So the logical assumption on the part of people who want to do the right thing is that appropriation is bad, period full stop.

But here’s the problem. If you’re reading this blog post, you’re doing so from an inherently polycultural position. (Avoiding “multicultural” here for clarity’s sake, since that term usually gets used in a very different way.) You’re reading it in English or a translation thereof, which has been exported all over this planet thanks to British imperialism and economic necessity, and which is itself a kind of lingua franca cobbled together from Germanic and Latin and some other tongues. You’re reading it on a computer, which probably contains components designed in Japan and manufactured in China and financed by Europe or the US. You might be listening to it or feeling it with software designed to make the web accessible to visually-impaired people as audio or Braille; whether you are or not, I’m using a text markup protocol (Wordpress, which uses W3C-standard HTML and CSS) designed to work with that kind of software, because I want my words accessible to all. Because that’s one of the values of the cultural matrix in which I live — American/progressive/pro-diversity/blogosphere. And while we’re at it, you’re reading the words of a writer who is, like 80% of African Americans, not 100% African. So every word I speak is laced with the multiplicities of my heritage — some of which I don’t even know.

Every culture that I mentioned in the preceding paragraph — and probably quite a few that I didn’t mention — contributed to this blog post in some way. It’s impossible to separate them; they blend and impact one another in infinitesimal and profound ways. There are all kinds of power dynamics and codependencies tied up in these interactions. So by writing this, I’m appropriating from nearly all of them. And by reading this, so are you.

Should we stop? I don’t think so. But if you go along with the idea that cultural appropriation is always wrong, no matter what, then you should.

Go ahead; I won’t be offended. Click elsewhere. I’ll wait.

Not gonna? Good — though obviously I’m biased. Because I think a healthy polyculture is critically dependent on trust. (How many of you have noticed that I’m appropriating the language of both biodiversity and polyamorous relationships here? But I digress.) The citizens of a polyculture — you and me and everyone else reading this — must make certain basic assumptions regarding the equality and good intentions and mutual benefit of all the people involved, and these assumptions must be borne out for the relationship to function. This is tough for a lot of us because those assumptions have been repeatedly violated in the past thanks to colonialism, racism, and so on. But the problem here is not appropriation; we all appropriate. The problem lies in how we do it.

So I think we need to get away from the simplistic question of whether to appropriate, and get back to the nuances of when and how to appropriate correctly. Because it can be done. We’re doing it already. We just need to do it better.

Speaking of which, I’m fond of Nisi Shawl’s take on appropriate appropriation, which you can find in abbreviated form here, and in highly-recommended longer form here.

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I’ve been hearing a lot lately about the terrifying scale of the racist hatred being directed toward Obama. Yesterday I saw this article, which implied that the Secret Service is struggling to keep up with threats against the president.

Since Mr Obama took office, the rate of threats against the president has increased 400 per cent from the 3,000 a year or so under President George W. Bush, according to Ronald Kessler, author of In the President’s Secret Service.

Some threats to Mr Obama, whose Secret Service codename is Renegade, have been publicised, including an alleged plot by white supremacists in Tennessee late last year to rob a gun store, shoot 88 black people, decapitate another 14 and then assassinate the first black president in American history.

And today there’s this article, about a creepy militia-like organization (one of several hundred just like it, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center [cited in the article]) that’s convinced Obama is Hitler and is therefore preparing to fight back against his impending “dictatorship”:

Oath Keepers is not preaching violence or government overthrow, Rhodes said. On the contrary, it is asking police and the military to lay down their arms in response to unlawful orders.

The group’s Web site, www.oathkeepers.org, features videos and testimonials in which supporters compare President Barack Obama’s America to Adolf Hitler’s Germany. They also liken Obama to England’s King George III during the American Revolution.

One member, in a videotaped speech at an event in Washington, D.C., calls Obama “the domestic enemy the Constitution is talking about.”

OK, none of this is surprising to me, nor should it be to anyone who understands just how racist this country is. This is simply the new face of the KKK — the sheets are off, the N-word is gone, and they’re using code-words like “patriotism”, but these people are preparing for a race war. They’re terrified that Obama’s election means… something. That PoC will enslave white people, maybe. The end of white dominance in the country’s bastions of power and privilege. The fact that these bastions are in no danger whatsoever of a mass “browning” is beside the fact; Obama is a symbol, and they’re terrified of the potential change that he represents. And to assuage their terror, they’re gearing up to kill… well, not just him, but pretty much anybody who scares them. I figure most of us ABW bloggers and readers are probably somewhere on that list, if you go far enough down. I mean, really — we’ve got radical Christianists* praying for the man’s death. These are the terrorists we should really fear.

But I found myself wondering, today, what Barack and Michelle Obama have told their children about this.

Because parents of black children have to do that. If they have any sense of responsibility, they prepare their children for the racism they’ll inevitably face. I don’t have kids, but I certainly remember my parents and grandparents carefully pointing out incidents and disparities and stereotypes, and talking with me about them. I remember my mother instructing me about how to act with the police — as a woman I’m not in quite as much danger from them as a black man would be, but I’m not safe either. Yet even with this advance preparation, I remember being shocked as I grew older and realized that racism had not ended with the Civil Rights Act, as I had been taught in school. It was still happening, still killing — still a near-daily threat to my personal health and welfare. My parents had done what they could to cushion this shock, but it was still painful, even terrifying, when I finally understood it as more than an intellectual exercise.

So what, I wonder, does the first couple tell Sasha and Malia? Do they try and prepare their daughters for the possibility that their father will be assassinated because of his race? Have they warned the girls that they’ll probably never be able to leave Secret Service or bodyguard protection, at any point in their lives? Do they keep the girls off the internet, for fear they’ll find out that Dad is getting 30 death threats a day? Or when they talk with the girls about it — how the hell do you talk to a child about something like that, without traumatizing them for life? How do you keep children, when they’re immersed in so much hatred and fear, from growing up hateful and fearful themselves?

I’m not a parent yet, so fortunately I don’t have to deal with these questions. (I am an official “auntie” to my best friends’ kids, but like a good auntie I get to defer the tough questions to Mom and Dad. To a degree.) But I cannot help empathizing with Michelle, who was younger than me when she had Malia, and wondering how I would handle the matter if I were in her position.

PoC parents: how do you do this? How do you prepare your kids for this fucked-up world?

* Using this term consciously to mimic the way most of American society refers to “radical Islamists.”

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(And feminist, and anti-classist, and pro-GLBTQI, and anti-ablist, and so on. It’s a human right.)

Apologies for being so quiet lately, ya’ll. I’m up to my ears in writing books and writing grants to help me keep writing books and writing resumes to help me get the grants to help me keep writing books. But I’ve also been dealing with some bullshit.

See, I’m one of the 25 million Americans who are underinsured. I have health insurance — pay $350/month for it — as part of a new policy that I switched to back in January when I quit my 9 to 5 to become a freelancer/fulltime writer for awhile. I’m pretty healthy and only in my thirties, but I have a family history of fibroids (like 50% of black women). So every year when I get my annual physical, I also get an ultrasound to check for those. This year the test showed small fibroids — too small to worry about, really, not even requiring treatment, though I need to keep an eye on them in case they grow. No biggie, I thought; my doctor’s efforts at preventative care had done what they were supposed to do, and detected a potential problem early enough that I can fix it easily if necessary. Health care at its best.

Except, not. See, because I’ve been on my health insurance policy for less than a year, my fibroids are automatically considered a preexisting condition — even though I didn’t have them on the last ultrasound I got, less than a year before. It doesn’t matter if they actually are preexisting, see; what matters is that they were discovered before I’d paid 12 months’ worth of premiums. For some insurers, it’s 18 months. This is a common feature of health insurance policies; even if you’re paying your premiums during that time, even if you can prove you didn’t have the problem before the 12-month period, if you come up with anything worse than a head cold, you’re fucked. Which is why I’m now looking at a bill for $3000 for the preventative ultrasound.

Like I said, bullshit.

I’m fighting this, of course, and hopefully will succeed in getting them to cover my care. And I’m praying daily that the fibroids don’t grow and nothing else major goes wrong with any part of my body in the next few months. Because even though I’m paying through the nose for health care, I now know I’m not really covered.

Now, multiply my situation several million, because 25 million Americans are underinsured and I know full well I’m not the only brown one of those. Consider the number of us who are disproportionately affected by poverty, and compare that against the fact that health insurance premiums keep rising by as much as 150% per decade while wages remain essentially flat (note: PDF). Consider how little media attention, medical research, and government funding is accorded to health issues that primarily or disproportionately affect people of color, like sickle cell anemia. Consider also how the intersection of race with gender or other factors, and the lingering effects of colonialism, cause literal epidemics of poor health care, addiction and/or violence in some PoC communities, like ongoing rape and involuntary sterilization among American Indian women. (See also unusualmusic’s insightful linkspams on women in prison, intersexed women of color, and more.)

This is killing us. It is killing us. The current health care system of the US kills people across the board, yes. But it’s killing more of us. And it’s leaving a greater proportion of us in abject poverty or lifelong trauma if we survive.

So we, especially, need to fight back.

I just joined this group, which along with similar groups is trying to organize protests in support of a single-payer plan. They recently sponsored a series of protests in New York at the headquarters of several insurance companies. They’re using the techniques of the Civil Rights Movement — sit-ins, civil disobedience, etc. But I couldn’t help noticing that all of the protesters’ faces, as shown in videos , were white.

WTF? I don’t know if this was yet another case of a white-dominated progressive group neglecting to reach out to PoC or what — but fuck it, we need to be out there. Whether you’re for single payer or a public option or just some kind of reform that doesn’t suck, whether with the group I mentioned or any other, we need to be the ones storming the gates at Blue Cross and United Health. We need to be writing to our representatives and Senators, and even President Obama. We need to be in the fucking street. We are dying, and as usual, it’s up to us to save ourselves.

So do something. Join a group, donate some money, write some letters, march in protest. Seriously. Fight back.

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Yes, that string of words in the subject line actually means something. Last Drink Bird Head is a charity anthology being put together by master anthologists Ann and Jeff VanderMeer. In their own words,

The purpose of the awards is to celebrate those in the genre community who enrich us with their time, energy, and words, often for causes greater than themselves.

Proceeds from the anthology go to ProLiteracy.org, for the promotion of adult literacy. The anthology’s a limited edition and has a truly star-studded table of contents, so order yours now if you want a copy. But back to the point — who have they nominated for this year’s “Gentle Advocacy” award? Why, it’s one of ABW’s own:

Gentle Advocacy
In recognition of individuals willing to enter into blunt discourse about controversial issues…

- K. Tempest Bradford
- Nick Mamatas
- John Scalzi

Throw your hands up for KTB! And cross your fingers so she’ll win.

Seriously, tho’ — 2009 has been The Year of Fail in science fictionland, as seemingly every other week the genre picks up its foot, sprinkles MSG on the toe, then shoves it deep down its own throat sideways. A lot of good people have been stepping up at last to say in unequivocal, loud voices that racism and sexism and homophobia and alllllll the other crap the SF establishment has gotten away with for generations is Not Acceptable. But some people in SFdom seem to think that this pushback is the problem, not the serious problems that caused the pushback in the first place. So it’s nice to see some of the most respected folks in the establishment acknowledging that the pushback is a good and necessary thing, and recognizing the ones who’ve been loudest and bravest.

Bravo to the nominees and the nominators.

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Via Angry Asian Man, a great article that makes a point about the ineffectiveness of protests about racism in mainstream Hollywood films. Basically, if we don’t patronize the good portrayals created by our own filmmakers, we’re unlikely to see much change in the racist dreck being cranked out by the Hollywood factories, because they pay attention only to money.

But then, the conversation turned to the work of Asian American filmmakers. And it turned out he had not paid to see any of the following films in the theaters—Better Luck Tomorrow, Saving Face, Finishing The Game, The Motel, In-Between Days, The Debut, Journey From The Fall. In fact, he couldn’t think of one Asian American indie he had paid money to see theatrically—the closest he came was the last Harold and Kumar movie, which hardly counts as an independently produced Asian American film. He was talking passionately about how we need to force Hollywood to change and show respect to our community, but even he admitted he had not done much to support our artists and our work.

Unfortunately, this brother’s story is not isolated. And herein lies the problem—it’s great that we’re willing to speak out when we see something that offends us. But until Asian Americans as a whole are willing to put down our money to support the work of our Asian American filmmakers—nothing will change.

It’s a good point. But something about it bugs me.

Because it assumes something that I’m not sure is true, and feeds into a bigger problem. What Phillip suggests is that if Asian Americans just go and view more Asian American films, this will show Hollywood there’s a significant demand for positive portrayals. The same reasoning, IMO, underlies African Americans’ patronization of black films (and African American Interest books, and so on) — we’ve taken to heart the racist rationalization that if we don’t make it ourselves, and go see it ourselves, we can’t expect the mainstream to follow suit.

Except… African Americans have been making it ourselves, since the Sixties. We’ve been going to see those films, too, enough to create several blockbusters, catapult several African American filmmakers to auteur status, and launch a few subcultural film/theater movements.

But has all this success — all this proof that we will support our own — really changed anything in Hollywood? We’re still getting slapped in the face with grotesque stereotypes, and “allegories” for the black experience of racism that Fail miserably. (I’m kind of dreading Cameron’s much-hyped Avatar, ya’ll. Looks like yet another “what these people need is a honky” derivation.) There’s still only one black male per generation permitted to reach A-list status — first Sidney Poitier, then Denzel Washington, lately Will Smith. And more often than not that black male is paired with a non-black female, out of the apparent belief in Hollywood that one black person on screen is tolerable, but two — especially if they’re showing love for one another — is just too damn many. (BTW, name a current black female A-list actress. Go on, try. Good luck with that.)

So basically, African Americans have been doing exactly what Phillip advocates for 50+ years now, and it hasn’t changed a damn thing in Hollywood. Which suggests to me that there’s a fundamental flaw in Phillip’s premise. He’s suggesting that money is Hollywood’s guiding philosophy. I think he’s forgetting the role that racism — some intentional, most aversive — plays in the way Hollywood people think. Money is just the excuse/rationalization that they use.

And to counter this racism, we have to do more than go and view films by demographic, as Phillip suggests. One of the justifications used by the producers of whitewashed films like 21 and The Last Airbender is that PoC aren’t “universal”. That actors of color might be able to appeal to audiences of color, but to really make the leap to broad mainstream (i.e., white) appeal, white actors must be inserted, even into PoC’s stories. This is racist bullshit, yes, but it’s racist bullshit that Hollywood keeps trying to support with numbers which show that PoC actors don’t pull the audiences that white actors do. So does it make sense to urge Asian Americans to go see Asian American films? That actually proves the Hollywood racists’ point — because of course those PoC actors won’t be able to pull big numbers if they’re only pulling an audience from within their respective communities. If only Asian Americans go to see Asian American films in any numbers, and only African Americans go to see black films, and so on, the racists can point at this and say, “See? PoC only appeal to their own.”

And yeah, I get the irony here. The whole reason these demographic-specific film industries have cropped up is because Hollywood has historically excluded us… but they’ll also use the existence of these industries to exclude us further. We’re damned if we do and damned if we don’t.

But here’s my proposed solution: all of us, regardless of race, need to go and see all good films, regardless of their target demographic. We need to see more Latino/a viewers attending events like the Asian American film festival. We need to see more black filmmakers creating films for that event, and more Asian filmmakers making stuff for black and Latino/a film festivals. We need to see more American Indians behind the camera, and sticking their shit into every festival with “American” in its title, regardless of the racial qualifier that comes before it. And so on.

And we as audiences need to attend all of it. Yes, I mean you, fellow black Americans. Put down that ticket to Tyler Perry’s next monstrosity; he’s gotten enough of our money and hasn’t done shit with it. (Well, except this. But he’s got to do a lot more before I’ll forgive him for all the rest.) Pick up your mouse and find a film by some other ethnic group that’s playing in your area. You can still stick to black people — we still need to support our own, especially given that there’s better stuff out there than Perry’s work. (If you can’t find anything recent, go see some older stuff that never got enough attention.) But in addition to work by African American filmmakers, maybe you can go see a Nollywood film too. Then branch out more. Did you go see Sleep Dealer when I told you to? Lazy ass. Now you gotta go buy it. (Shoulda listened to me, but nooo, you had to be hard headed.)

We still need to protest, IMO, because racism won’t change on its own. But I’m taking Phillip’s point to heart; we need the carrot as well as the stick. We’ve got to support the positive portrayals that are already out there. And that includes work by other PoC, because all this stuff feeds into each other. We’ll get more successful black actors in Hollywood once we prove that Latinos/as will go and see them. We’ll get more Asian actors when we can prove they appeal to black audiences. We’ll see fewer pretendians when audiences start going to see real Indians. And so on.

So. What films by/about another race are you planning to see this year?

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So there’s a minor tempest in a teapot at the moment because the Republicans’ racism slip is showing again. Shiny new Congresswoman Lynn Jenkins uttered a very Freudian slip at one of her public addresses, suggesting that “Republicans are struggling right now to find the great white hope.” Brava, Congresswoman! Way to step in it right out of the box. Predictably, the media’s given a collective gasp to show that it is shocked, shocked I tell you, that there is any whiff of open racism in the party’s agenda. Keith Olbermann has called for the congresswoman to face “some sort of sanction”, and the rest of the left is practically salivating for its pound of flesh. And of course, the congresswoman is hastening to fauxpologize and clarify that she didn’t mean to invoke deadly race riots and racist history, no, never, ‘course not.

Y’know what? I’m tired of this.

I want the Republicans to just stop dancing around the issue. Drop all the dogwhistles and “I know you are but what am I” crap; ditch the dramatic irony of using racists to cry racism. I want them to just come out and say that this is what they want:

From sea to bright, white, shining sea.

Because if that’s what they want, fine. There’s nowhere near enough white men in this country to win them another election. Once they’ve alienated all the PoC, all the women, all the GLBTQIs, everybody who doesn’t look and act like them, they’ll have relegated themselves to political obscurity. Then they won’t regain power and screw up our economy again, get us into another dumbass war, threaten to turn us into a theocracy, or make the rest of us feel ashamed of being American.

So I hope they find their Great White Hope. I hope they embrace their racism, and their neo-Southern Strategy, until it kills them. Then we can relegate them to the bin of history, and maybe a sane conservative party will take its place — or better still, several sane new parties. And maybe then we can actually start trying to become, y’know, post-racial. (Whatever the hell that is.)

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Personal disclosure: this guy is my first cousin. Which in no way invalidates what I’m saying below.

OK, so like many of you I’ve done my share of “diversity workshops”. Which were mostly, I have to admit, pretty good — generally because they were long enough (several days) to dig deep; hands-on and interactive; integrated into everyday practice thereafter; and run by extremely patient/knowledgeable workshop facilitators. This is one of the benefits of working in education versus the corporate world; most educators don’t expect to tackle a complex and emotional subject in a quick soundbyte.

That said, I have done some diversity workshops that reached fathomless depths of assitude. There was the one run by a very young, white, self-identified heterosexual and Christian, visibly anxious facilitator who gave me a blank look when I asked a question about privilege. (I didn’t bother asking any more questions after that; spent the rest of the session working on a short story.) There was also the one in which, after a fellow black woman shared a painful and powerful anecdote about being on the receiving end of some blatantly racist treatment as a college student, a white female participant shared her feelings about being so, so sorry “on behalf of white people” and then broke down crying, at which point everyone in the workshop started comforting her. (Except me and the other black women, who shared a deep spiritual eyeroll.) And then there was the diversity workshop that lasted only one hour out of a six-day, 48-hour training session. No matter how good that workshop was, the amount of time devoted to it sent a message on behalf of the trainers: reducing harm to non-privileged people means so much to us that we’re going to spend 2% of our time on it. Go us! (Yes, go. Please. Really.)

These kinds of workshops are a waste of everyone’s time — no, worse. They make the privileged participants feel better about themselves (for completing the workshop) without actually challenging their privilege, and they make the rest of us feel very fucking tired.

But I want to spread the word about the best short anti-racism workshop I’ve now seen: comedian W. Kamau Bell’s “Ending Racism in About an Hour”.

It’s not a comedy show. (As my aunt, Kamau’s mom, has very emphatically informed me.) It’s a solo theatrical performance… which just happens to be funny as hell. Kamau is the latest of a wave of black comedians who do more than merely exaggerate stereotypes and “keep it real”, whateverthehell that means; he openly confronts the issues of power and the status quo, and the LogicFails that allow racism to perpetuate itself. (I’ve been avidly following another comedian who does this too: Elon James White of This Week in Blackness.) Here’s an example of Kamau in action:

In his latest show, Kamau does everything I’ve ever seen in a good anti-racist workshop: he explains privilege and the power dynamics of racism; gives examples of aversive racism, objectification, and stereotyping; and doesn’t pull punches about the life-and-death impact racism has on politics, economics, health care, and more. But he does all of it without ever using the terminology, and without losing his audience. (Yeah, including Angry Black Women.) Well, scratch that — when I attended his performance on Saturday, he mentioned that a white guy once walked out on him, complaining of guilt. But one out of thousands ain’t bad.

Anyway, I’ve said all this to note that Kamau is in New York City this week for a limited run, as part of NYC’s International Fringe Festival. Most of the shows are already done — sorry, but I wanted to see it before I blogged about it, and I’ve been crazy busy lately — but he’s got one last NYC performance coming up on August 29th at 5 p.m. The one I attended was standing-room-only, so you might wanna buy tix early. If you can’t catch him in NYC, though, he’s a regular at the Punch Line in his adopted home of San Francisco (where he’s Best Comedian of 2008 according to SF Weekly).

Oh, yeah — and if you bring a friend of a different race, you get a free gift! (So if you’re stuck being somebody’s Special Black Friend, bring them to this show so you can get something out of it for a change.)

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…about all this “birther” crap, in which fine upstanding folk who are legitimate natural-born citizens of this fine country (the US of A, because we’re all from it or want to be from it, of course) incessantly and illogically question the fact that our president is also legitimately natural-born…

…is that they’re not crazy. They’re just fucking racists.

I mean, it’s obvious with the Republicans. They’re just using this shit (and other shit) to blow smoke over their attempt to scuttle single-payer healthcare. But all these individual teabagging crackpots who jump up at rallies and rant about Obama being from Kenya? They’re not really crackpots. They’re just the same old garden-variety racists we’ve always had, using “he’s not a citizen” as a euphemism for “he’s not completely white OMFG he’s got 50% black cooties straight outta Africa and I bet the White House smells funny now somebody go get a roooope!!!”

See, although African Americans are generally better-off than other racial groups in this one respect — we don’t get the “But where are you really from?” schtick quite as often as Asians and Latinos/as — there’s still quite a bit of feeling out there that we aren’t really Americans. Yeah, even though we built the place. Even though most of the people saying this aren’t really (Native) Americans either, if that’s how they want to play it. It all just comes down to one very simple fact: that “American”, in the minds of these people, equals one thing — white.

So it really doesn’t matter how much proof gets shown to confirm that Obama is too, really, truly, an American. The birthers aren’t going to buy it. Because the only proof these people will accept is a 100% European American genetic makeup, or 99.44% with the incriminating .66 hidden acceptably far back in the family tree. That worked for McCain — don’t see the “birthers” going after him, do you? But since that ain’t gonna happen in Obama’s case, they’re never going to shut up.

We don’t need a new term for the birthers. They’re just the usual plain, boring old racists wearing new clothes and chanting new slogans, because they’ve figured out that slurs and hate speech just don’t have the same cachet these days. But underneath the new trappings, they’re the same old shit. So can we please stop paying so much attention to them and get back to healthcare?

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I don’t have much time to analyze this, but I don’t really need to, because WHAT THE FUCKING FUCKITTY FUCK pretty much suffices:

Harvard Professor Gates Arrested at Cambridge Home

Friends of Gates said he was already in his home when police arrived. He showed his driver’s license and Harvard identification card, but was handcuffed and taken into police custody for several hours last Thursday, they said.

Oh, and don’t read the comments. Seriously. No, I mean it.

Brother Ta-Nehisi’s on it already, if you want something more coherent than FUNKY FUCKING JEFUCKIFUCK IN A FUCKBUCKET and so on. Also, here’s who Gates is, if you don’t already know.

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The History Channel’s “Life After People” is one of my favorite TV series, so I was amused to see this mention of an “Immortality Drive” that’s apparently in space at this very moment. The Immortality Drive is a kind of high-tech time capsule; put together by video game auteur Richard Garriot, it contains messages to our descendants/alien resurrectors, a list of humanity’s greatest achievements, and the digitized genetic data of “a select few” members of our species. All this is currently preserved on the International Space Station.

And who are these select few, meant to represent and possibly recreate us in case we nuke ourselves/get Raptured/are eaten by grues? Oh, you know where this is going.

These were the 10 names I could find:

Stephen Colbert (yes, the comedian; white)
Physicist Stephen Hawking and his daughter Lucy (included for charity; both white)
Matt Morgan (pro wrestler; white)
Jo Garcia (female, Playboy model; Latina according to Wikipedia)
Eric Johnson (musician; white)
Patrice Pike (musician; white)
Tracy Hickman (male, if you’re wondering, and white; fantasy author)
Scott Johnson (Olympic gold medalist; white)
Brian Crecente (Kotaku editor; race/ethicity unknown, but misogyny noted)

Also, here’s some photos of the folks whose DNA is being included, from the “Operation Immortality” Facebook page.

So OK, we’ve got 30% women here, one definitive Latina, and one disabled person. No African Americans, AFAICT. No Asian Americans. No Native Americans. So the future of humanity won’t be exclusively white and male… just mostly so.

Now, in Garriot’s partial defense, “Operation Immortality” actually includes 40 people; these were just the 10 names I could find. The whole batch might be more diverse than this sample. Also, although this thing got billed as putting “the best of humanity” into space, that was BS; Garriot specifically sought to put the DNA of gamers into space, to promote his latest game (which bombed). In reality the slots got sold to the highest bidder as a publicity stunt. But y’know what? Since this was meant to be promotional, I think some consideration should’ve been given to making the Operation Immortality list at least tacitly resemble the audience that might buy the game. Since black and Latina/o gamers make up a substantial proportion of the US gamer demographic — 50% of console owners according to this 2005 study, probably more since — you’d think there’d be a few more of us in that list. Actually, given that Garriot’s game was an MMORPG, PoC make up an even bigger proportion of those players; 5 million of World of Warcraft’s 7 million players are in China. And that 30% female thing? Should be more like 65%. So I can’t help wondering if a contributing factor to the failure of Garriot’s game was his failure to use this and other promo opportunities to really connect with his audience.

What really annoys me here is not Garriot’s shortsightedness — well, yeah, OK, that annoys me too — but the fact that my tax dollars are involved. See, while Garriot himself paid for the Russian mission that shot his and his friends’ spooge into space, it’s being stored aboard the International Space Station — which is partially paid for and maintained by NASA.

Now, I’m pro-space exploration (duh, see my avatar). I know a lot of ya’ll (speaking to the black folks here) feel like it’s a waste of money given the number of people struggling to get by in our society, but I’m with Octavia; I believe the destiny of humanity is to spread among the stars. That said, it still pisses me off when my destiny, and that of other people who look like me, gets excluded from or severely underrepresented on NASA-sponsored missions like this one. I think that if NASA would try a little harder to make sure space travelers — or their genes — represent the breadth and variety of Americans, then a greater breadth and variety of Americans might actually support NASA funding. (It’s not like there aren’t other wastes of money to complain about.)

Anyway, this marks the start of another series I’ll be periodically running here at ABW, which I’m going to call I, For One, DON’T Welcome Our New White Overlords. It’ll examine all the many ways in which our society’s so-called futurists repeatedly envision lily-white futures, and what we can do to smack those visionaries in the head until they see better visions remind them that the future will be — like the present already is — 50% female, and a lot browner than they realize.

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I haven’t said anything about the situation in Iran, mostly because I don’t feel qualified to speak about it. I’m watching it, though, following the Twitter feeds obsessively and learning as much as I can about Iran’s history. I’ve been finding fellow blogger Richard Jeffrey Newman’s posts over at Alas especially illuminating about the nuances not being covered in the mainstream media.

I had to think hard about posting this here at ABW, though, because for awhile I wasn’t sure whether the situation in a Persian-dominated country halfway around the world, which has its own entirely different racial issues, was on-topic. Then I remembered a book I’d read a few years back, and considered the historical context that’s a constant undercurrent of the Iran situation, and realized it’s completely spot-on for a discussion of racism.

Because modern racism’s roots, we must remember, lie in European and American imperialism. The many hideous dehumanizations of people of color started centuries ago as an attempt to justify the slave trade and its cruelties. These dehumanizations continue today for the purpose of justifying American financial interests (primarily in oil). We’ve seen this again and again, to most devastating effect in Africa and Latin America, but in other parts of the world as well.

Iran belongs in this category. I was aware that the CIA had helped to overthrow Iran’s last democratically-elected government in the 1950s, replacing it with the tyrannical Shah — which itself touched off the Iranian Revolution and seated the government that is now oppressing its own people. What I hadn’t realized was just how cynical and deliberate the imperialist process was, until I read Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, by John Perkins.

Now, I didn’t like this book. Perkins, who spent the 1970s and 80s working for Chas T. Main, an engineering consulting firm — think Halliburton today — spends a little too much of the book glamorizing himself as some kind of geeky James Bond, lunching with power players and banging his way through the fairer sex; he reads to me as a guy on an extended midlife crisis. That said, the book is spot-on in revealing the ways in which American imperialists function in the modern day. Perkins explains that the NSA, CIA, and US business interests have repeatedly worked together to bribe, blackmail, frame, addict, overthrow, and if necessary, kill the leaders of other nations, so that ours can make more money. He touches on Iran, though only glancingly, but he provides enough other examples in Latin America and Asia, and shows enough of how the pattern works, that anyone who reads this book will have a clear idea of how American fucked up Iran.

And then compounded the initial assault over the next 30 years. Like many of us, I grew up thinking of Iran as “the country of religious fantatics who took American hostages, had something to do with the Contras, and just generally fucking hates us.” This was the framing of Reagan and his cronies, who — as imperialists themselves — had a vested interest in “othering” Iranians. There was frequently a racial component to this othering*, although sometimes it was just matter-of-factly self-serving.

I read Perkins’ book years ago, but I have to admit — I kept thinking of Iranians as a somewhat scary “they” and “them”, even though the book illuminated many of the ways in which they were us. If the US could have done so, it would happily have enslaved the Iranian people — economically if not literally — and frankly, some Americans are still trying. This, I suspect, is what’s really behind the inexplicable demands by Republicans that Obama make a stronger effort to endorse the protesters in Iran, even though this would be the equivalent of shooting the protest movement in the back. My guess is that they want Mousavi’s supporters to be suppressed — so that they can later send in “hit men” like Perkins to offer the same Faustian bargain that got offered to the Taliban of Afghanistan, and Saddam Hussein of Iraq. This is their favorite tactic, according to Perkins: cultivate a disgruntled minority and then use their desperation for profit. The hit men arrive bearing gifts and a message of hope: Promise to support our interests and we’ll help you gain power, and then you’ll be free to keep that power in whatever fucked-up way you want.

But this is why I’m so hooked on the Twitter feeds. I no longer think of the Iranian people as “them,” and I don’t think I’m the only person to feel this way. Here’s an excerpt from Twitter Ripped the Veil Off ‘The Other’ — And We Saw Ourselves:

All the accumulated suspicion and fear and alienation from three decades of hostility between Iran and America seemed to slip away. Whatever happens, the ability of this new media to bring people together - to bring the entire world into this revolution on the streets of Iran - has already changed things dramatically.

Yeah. This.

So fight on, people of Iran. I know you don’t like me much; that’s cool. You got cause. I still wish there was more I could do to help — but I think the best thing I can do right now is write to my own American politicians, and urge them in the strongest possible terms to shut the fuck up. And I’ll keep watching. God be with you.

* I’m really, really sorry to link to a post on Michelle Malkin’s site, folks. Unfortunately, it’s a great example of the nastiness that’s out there.

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I was born in the Seventies, and my parents did the proper post-Civil-Rights-Era childrearing thing of bombarding me with Afrocentricity from birth, since they knew I’d get soaked in Eurocentricity once I hit school-age. So I didn’t read “traditional” Grimm-esque fairy tales until I was much older; instead I got stuff like “Why Mosquitoes Buzz in People’s Ears”. And when I started reading middle grade books, I didn’t get Anne of Green Gables or other classics as birthday and holiday presents; instead I got biographies of George Washington Carver and Frederick Douglass and other great African Americans. Read ‘em, too. But they were all men — a fact which I complained to my father about, eventually. The next bio he gave me was of Harriet Tubman.

The last one stands out in my mind for two reasons: a) the particular book I read had an especially striking cover. I can’t find it now, unfortunately — don’t remember the author — but the image was similar to this one:

So that was my first introduction to great black women of American history — a badass mama with a bigass gun. (I missed most of the heroines of the blaxploitation film movement, note; before my time. Tubman was badder anyway.)

The second reason this memory stands out is because I immediately identified with Tubman in a way that I had not with the other famous historical figures. Compared to hers, their stories seemed somehow… tame. That Carver boy was wicked smaht, right; and Douglass had escaped from slavery, become a great orator, and grown up to look amazingly like my father, sure. I’m not diminishing their achievements at all. But Tubman’s story spoke to the nascent militant in my soul — that part of me which read accounts of slavery and thought, If I’d lived back then, I would never let those fuckers break me! This was total bullshit; if I’d lived back then, I would’ve learned to endure the brutal work and the rape and the torture and the degradation of my soul, as the people who actually lived back then had to do. But already at that age — I was maybe 8 years old — I was beginning to see the monstrous injustice of the system of racism, from its historical roots to its modern reality. And although the real anger wouldn’t hit ’til later, when I was further along in my development, the seeds of it sprouted when I read about Harriet Tubman, because she did what I in my bravado like to think I would’ve done: she fought back. And she won.

I needed this role model, as a young black girl. Despite all my exposure to Afrocentric history, I got the same treatment as most other black girls whenever I showed my anger: the people around me tried their damnedest to suppress it. My mother insisted that anger wasn’t “ladylike.” An early teacher sent me to the principal’s office for my “behavioral problem”. (My crime? Rolling my eyes at something that sounded stupid. I was lucky; a lot of black girls got permanently mislabeled and stigmatized for stuff like that.) Meanwhile, my pastor delivered podium-thumping sermons about how my anger would destroy The Black Family ™ and maybe even turn black boys gay. (Yeah. I know.) Everywhere I turned, I got hit with the message: your anger is bad. Dangerous. The worst thing anywhere, ever. A menace to society.

But learning about Tubman taught me a different message: your anger is necessary and right. Channel it. Keep it hidden from those who are your enemies. Let them underestimate you. Let it give you strength. And then, when you’re ready, let it loose. Use it to help yourself, and others. Your anger can change the world.

So I give props to you, Harriet, for teaching me what real womanhood is all about.

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Heard about this through the Carl Brandon mailing list:

While the facts surrounding the kidnapping and rescue of the Maersk Alabama Captain Richard Phillips have been widely reported, less well-known is that ship which saved him was commanded by a black woman, Rear Admiral Michelle Howard.

Howard received the assignment of leading the U.S. Navy’s counter-piracy task force just three days before the Maersk Alabama was attacked by Somalia pirates.

“It’s probably one of the most exciting missions the Navy has been on in for a long while,” Howard told the Navy Times.

Did you know the Maersk captain was rescued by a black woman? I didn’t either.

On the one hand, I’m almost glad this wasn’t publicized; I could almost believe this means Howard wasn’t regarded as special or unusual by the media covering the Maersk incident. That’s what we want, after all — not to be depicted as a race of thugs and hoochiemamas that occasionally spawns a Morgan Freeman-like Messiah figure that will save all us from tsunamis terrorists the recession. We are ordinary people, with the same range of characters and behaviors as anybody else — good and bad. But I highly doubt Howard was overlooked by the mainstream media because she was “too ordinary”. I think Captain Phillips fit the image in the producers’/reporters’/editors’ heads of what heroism should look like: white, male, one brave man surrounded by black savages. And I think Admiral Howard defied that image, being black and female and in charge of a diverse team of competent people, so they discarded her. I think we still exist as nothing more than a collection of stereotypes and inaccurate assumptions in the eyes of most Americans — unfortunately including ourselves. We’re not ordinary enough to have ordinary heroes, not yet. Not according to them.

But fortunately, there is the blogosphere.

So. Admiral Howard’s a hero. Pass it on.

Obama has picked Sonia Sotomayor as the next Supreme Court nominee! …But already the bullshit begins:

“Judge Sotomayor is a liberal activist of the first order who thinks her own personal political agenda is more important than the law as written,” said Wendy E. Long, counsel to the Judicial Confirmation Network, an activist group. “She thinks that judges should dictate policy, and that one’s sex, race and ethnicity ought to affect the decisions one renders from the bench.”

Riiiiiight. Like sex, race, and ethnicity doesn’t affect the decisions rendered by the white men who’ve dominated the court for all these years. Uh-huh. Yeah.

I’m too tired to really analyze this; just got back from Wiscon, where I got to meet several dozen ABW readers in person (hi, ya’ll!), and where the possibility of Sotomayor getting the nom was the subject of quite a few conversations. But I have to say, I’m bracing myself. Even though some are predicting smooth sailing in the confirmation process, I just don’t see conservatives letting this one slide, because she’s their worst nightmare. They’ve already tried to trash her by appealing to the worst intersectional stereotypes, painting her as domineering, a bully, and “not that smart”. In other words, an angry brown woman, wielding her inferior brown intellect like a girl-cootie-infested bludgeon. I predict this is only the beginning. The mouth-breather chorus has only begun to clear its throat, and I don’t want to see what it’s about to vomit up.

But for the time being, I’m just going to cheer.

Note from nojojojo: One of the reasons I write for ABW is to get in touch with my inner angry black woman. This is because I’m not very angry outwardly — having grown up mostly in the South and being naturally mild-mannered, it takes a lot to flip my switches. I’m more inclined to do the Southern thing of smiling in the face of someone who’s pissed me off, and wish them a pleasant day even though I really mean, “Go to hell.” (There’s an art to this; I am still but a student.)

Still, anger can be healthy and effective, and I regard its other expressions as art too. So I’ve been studying other angry black women in history and the present, and the ways in which their anger has gotten things done. From time to time I’ll share my study of these Original ABWs — these sistas who’ve wielded their fury like a surgeon’s scalpel or swung it harder than John Henry’s hammer, and caused society to change as a result. So this is the first of a series.

I’m going to start with Nina Simone, one of my favorite jazz singers — not because she’s the angriest or most effective of the Original ABWs, but because I recently heard her song “Pirate Jenny” for the first time. Take a listen, if you haven’t heard it:

Pirate Jenny - Nina Simone

Still gives me chills. She means every word of it, too — you can hear that in her voice. The first time I listened to it, I thought, If I was white, I would sleep with one eye open. For the rest. Of. My. Life. Because it’s blatantly obvious from the barely-contained rage in this song that Simone is not singing about pirates, even though this song has relatively benign origins in the German musical The Threepenny Opera. Simone’s version has a whole other meaning when one considers the time in which she first sang it, as part of a series of concerts at Carnegie Hall in 1964. The year before, activist Medgar Evers had been assassinated and four little black girls were murdered in a terrorist bombing. Nina, like most black people of the time, was pissed off. In this context the metaphors of the song become clear: the narrator is not merely a pirate spy; she’s a black Everywoman, oppressed and resentful and ready to strike back against her oppressors. “The black freighter” is the revolution to come — and the revolution Simone has in mind will not be a bloodless one, oh no. “I ain’t ’bout to be non-violent, honey!” she says in one recorded concert — and the whole audience laughs and claps with her.

This was not the first time Simone had sung “protest music”, note. She was well known as a supporter of the Civil Rights Movement; at concerts she did shout-outs to the Freedom Riders, and she hung out with fellow protest artists like Lorraine Hansberry, the playwright of “A Raisin in the Sun”. Her songs were part of the inspirational canon for the SNCC and other young activists of the time. Music was as much a part of the Civil Rights Movement as marches and sit-ins; this much everybody knows. But Simone’s music was a whole other thing from the vague goals of gospel hymns like “We Shall Overcome.” Her message was a much more specific one: we shall kick your ass. In the same year as “Pirate Jenny,” Simone debuted her other big protest song, "Mississippi Goddamn", in response to the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham. "Mississippi Goddamn" is better known, in part because it got more attention — it was boycotted by radio stations all over the South ostensibly because of the profanity in its title, though the real reason was clear. In her autobiography Simone notes that one Southern dealer shipped back a whole crate of the singles with each copy snapped in half. (She thought this was hilarious.)

But what amazes me is that “Pirate Jenny”, a much more dangerous song, got no reaction. This woman is seriously advocating, albeit in metaphor, the wholesale slaughter of white people. That was the kind of thing that could get a black person lynched in those days — and yeah, black women got lynched too, usually with rape or some other form of sexual assault tossed in. The thing that saved her, I think, is that Simone didn’t perform the song often; she supposedly said that it took too much out of her, at one point joking that she had to recover for seven years after singing it. I know how hard it is to channel that much anger; I can totally imagine she might have needed some time afterwards to recharge. But I can’t help wondering if, in addition to recharge time, she was also motivated by a sense of self-preservation — if not her own, then fear for her daughter Lisa, a baby at the time.

Yet in this song Simone effectively captures the simmering rage of black America at that time, and she does it so powerfully that forty years later, we can understand what it was like to be there. We cannot help empathizing with the song’s narrator, nor sharing — maybe with a smidge of guilt, maybe not — her schadenfreude as the tables are turned on the oppressors. We, or at least I, hear this song and realize just how incredibly stupid it was for America to resist granting civil rights to blacks for as long as it did, because they were sitting on a fucking powder keg. It shifts my perspective on the events of the time from the benign, white-centered version taught to me in school; Kennedy was no visionary. He did nothing particularly brave. He was just yielding to the inevitable, hopefully before his country was torn to pieces by the kind of rage that Simone and millions of other blacks felt.

So I give props to you, Nina, for helping me understand.

Too busy for analysis right now, but submitting this for your consideration. I think most of us have noticed how right-wing pundits are using racist fearmongering tactics to blame the swine flu on illegals from Mexico — even to the point of referring to it as the “Mexican flu.” The fact that the carriers were actually a bunch of prep-school kids from Queens who went to Cancun for Spring Break seems to have been lost on them. Anyway, the Guardian notes another possible source:

Early today the US owner of an industrial pig production facility around 12 miles from La Gloria said it had found no clinical signs or symptoms of swine flu in its herd or Mexican employees. The world’s biggest pig meat producer, Virginia-based Smithfield, said it is co-operating with the Mexican authorities’ attempts to locate the possible source of the outbreak and will submit samples from its herds at its Granjas Carroll subsidiary to the University of Mexico for tests.

…

Smithfield, which is led by pork baron Joseph W Luter III, has previously been fined for environmental damage in the US. In October 2000 the supreme court upheld a $12.6m (£8.6m) fine levied by the US environmental protection agency which found that the company had violated its pollution permits in the Pagan River in Virginia which runs towards Chesapeake Bay. The company faced accusations that faecal and other bodily waste from slaughtered pigs had been dumped directly into the river since the 1970s .

The outbreak of respiratory illness in the area of the Granjas Carroll plant was first detected at the beginning of this month by Veratect, a company based in Washington state which monitors the spread of disease and pandemics around the world for corporate clients.

If this is confirmed, what will the Repundits call it then? “Colonialism Cough”? “Greedy Gringo Fever”?

Earlier this week, one of my radical writer friends alerted me to the existence of a little-known but award-winning Mexican sci-fi film called “Sleep Dealer”. So some of us went to see it this week — and I was blown away.

The story’s premise is simple. In the near future, the border between the US and Mexico is closed, fenced, and heavily armed. This doesn’t prevent US corporations from exploiting Mexican labor, however, as Mexico is now full of factories in which workers with cybernetic implants do “virtual labor” via a global network, connecting their minds to robots in faraway cities to do the same jobs in construction, nannying, orange picking, etc., that migrants and illegal immigrants used to do.

Memo (Luis Fernando Peña) is an idealistic young man who lives on a milpa with his tradition-loving father and family. The milpa is struggling, however, because a corporation has dammed up the river and now charges the local citizens for every gallon of water. Memo’s father, who once militantly resisted the dam and still hates it, settles now for trying to inculcate his values into his son. But Memo isn’t listening. He dreams instead of escaping his boring, simple life — so he hacks into the global network to hear of distant cities he will never be allowed to visit in person. Unfortunately, this earns him the attention of the US military, and they send armed drones to destroy his house and kill his father, whom they assume is an “aqua-terrorist”.

Memo is thus forced to travel to Tijuana to earn money for his family, where he moves into a slum and ekes out a living working in one of the factories. The locals have dubbed the factories “sleep dealers”, because the workers often grow so exhausted during their 12-hour shifts — using unsafe equipment that gradually blinds and occasionally fries them — that they collapse. Here, though, Memo meets Luz (Leonor Varela), a young woman trying to survive in the city too. Luz is a writer, and to earn money she sells her memories on the global net. Meanwhile both of them are being investigated by Rudy (Jacob Vargas), the Mexican-American soldier who cybernetically controlled the drones that killed Memo’s father. Rudy’s agenda is unclear as he first purchases Luz’s memories of Memo, then crosses the border into Mexico, looking for them.

This synopsis fails to capture just how powerful the film is, however. The messages about globalization and the exploitation of the poor are more subtly done than I’m describing here; that’s just the part that captured my attention the most. But it’s just done so beautifully. When Memo arrives in Tijuana, he needs to have cybernetic implants installed before he can work in the sleep dealers. So he seeks out a “coyotek” — the futuristic equivalent of today’s coyotes, who smuggle (and often prey on) would-be illegal immigrants. When Rudy crosses the border, he speaks with a robotic sentry being cyber-controlled by a customer service representative who speaks with a distinct Indian accent. Memo’s father is murdered on live TV, via a lurid “America’s Most Wanted”-like show (complete with John Walsh lookalike), the host gleefully glamorizes the military strike as “blowing the hell out of the bad guys!” At every level the American appropriation of Mexico’s resources, from water right down to the people’s thoughts, is shown as simply an extrapolation of what’s already happening today, carried to a logical — and chilling — conclusion.

But what makes this message sink in is that it’s so deftly delivered. Since it’s science fiction, special effects matter, and the ones here are mostly CGI. Obviously low-budget, but still well-done. I barely noticed the CGI, though, because the actors are so fantastic — especially Peña, who’s a newcomer to US film (but a veteran in Mexico), and Varela, who’s had a number of parts in US sci-fi TV and film (Blade II, Stargate: Atlantis, Jeremiah). The cinematography is subtly effective — for example, though natural lighting is used in most scenes, the factory scenes are eerily lit with fluorescents and washed-out colors to emphasize the dehumanization of the workers. The movements of the workers as they go about their virtual labor evoke an “exotic” dance, implying a unity between workers in Mexico and those in Asia, Africa, and other parts of the “Third World”. The plot moves slowly and delicately when dealing with its weightiest messages, such as the parallelism between Memo (a Mexican yearning to see the US) and Rudy (a Mexican-American who goes back to Mexico). The bulk of the plot is given over to the relationship between Memo and Luz, as she struggles ethically with her need to exploit him for her own survival, even as she grows to love him. I have to admit I found her story more compelling than that of Memo, the doe-eyed idealist, though it’s Memo who (fortunately) grows up over the course of the story.

All of this is especially impressive given that it defies the standard message of science fiction, fantasy, and other speculative fiction (SF). The most popular fantasy novels are those in which a deposed king is rescued or hidden, and the heroes fight to defeat the evil usurper and put the king back on his throne. The most lauded science fiction stories (and TV shows, such as “Star Trek” and “Stargate”) are written from the perspective of the colonizer who lands on an alien world and masters or helps the natives, rather than the perspective of the natives — who may not need mastering, or want help. Truly progressive speculative fiction, in which these old paradigms are challenged and new ones postulated, is comparatively rare (and becoming more so). So I can’t help hoping that more sci fi like “Sleep Dealer” — emerging from a non-American perspective, capable of looking frankly at issues like racism and classism and imperialism — will eventually help to reboot the genre. This, IMO, is what speculative fiction should be.

So go see “Sleep Dealer”, and help make it a hit.

A few years ago I went to see “Avenue Q” on Broadway, mostly because I’d heard its funniest song used in a World of Warcraft machinima vid and thought any play that makes a song out of internet porn was a must-see.

(…Yes, I’m a geek. If you didn’t know, now you know.)

There was another song in the play, called “Everyone’s a little bit racist”. This one wasn’t funny — not to me, anyway, though lots of people in the audience laughed. A sample of the lyrics:

Everyone’s a little bit racist
It’s true.
But everyone is just about
As racist as you!
If we all could just admit
That we are racist a little bit,
And everyone stopped being
So PC
Maybe we could live in -
Harmony!

The core flaw of the song lies in its unquestioned flattening of the power structure of racism. It equates racist jokes with acts of historical discrimination; the attitudes of an oppressed group with the attitudes of its oppressors; and doesn’t address the continuing systemic aspects of racism at all. Racism, this song suggests, is just about people’s ordinary dislike for others who are different from them, and if we’d all just relax and let it all hang out, we’d get over it.

So yeah. ‘Bout as funny as a fart in a crowded room, or so it seemed to me. Needless to say, I was silent and uncomfortable during that song, while the theater full of white people laughed around me and had a grand old time.

I cite this admittedly old incident because I keep seeing the chorus of that song in the apparently-spontaneous mass-spewage of racist stupidity across multiple media formats that’s taken place over the past few months, and the debates that have resulted therefrom.

It’s probably not a new iteration; it’s probably just that I’m only now noticing this particular response pattern. But you can see several examples of it in this, one of the later conversations in the “RaceFail 2009″ debate that occurred on science fiction author John Scalzi’s blog. This particular convo was hosted by our very own ABW in her Srius Authar guise, with some peanut-gallery chiming in by Yours Truly in her Srius Authar guise. It was all terribly serious. Now, you should really take this conversation in context, if you can, though RaceFail was massive; here’s yet another summary and two preceding conversations that may help you understand what was going on. My own interpretation: for the previous two months, the speculative fictional blogosphere had been afire with conversations about race which incorporated some healthy helpings of racist behavior by noted authors, editors, and so on. An ongoing complaint in this debate had been that if it was only nicer, politer, less angry, then maybe some real conversation could take place. …Yeah. I know. So, the Scalzi conversations were an effort to generate this nice polite discussion. You’ll notice that in all three examples, the PoC in the conversation gradually just stopped talking.

Anyway, the thing that I kept seeing in these discussions was a refusal on the part of some white-identified folks to accept the “authority” that people of color have in discussions of racism. (Using scare quotes because I’m not sure authority is the right word. The earned wisdom of experience. Moral superiority, maybe. Agency? I dunno. I’ll go with authority for now.) PoC aren’t always right about what is racist, goes the refrain; sometimes they’re too angry to be reasonable, or too emotional to see the big picture, or too personally-involved to have the necessary detachment when they’re evaluating a situation. (Not like those always-rational white folks.) Some of them have hidden agendas which require them to make a racist mountain out of an innocuous molehill because their finances or their egos or whatever depend on holding a position of moral superiority. Or sometimes the problem is White Guilt, which leads white people to anxiously accept everything a brown person says as truth. We should all just talk as equals, these authority-resisters insist, rather than having PoC lecture whites about right and wrong in the case of race. Because after all, Everyone’s A Little Bit Racist ™.

There’s some truth in this. (No, really.) We’ve all seen the Al Sharptons of the world profit from others’ misfortune, and we’ve all seen white people who go overboard, seeking expiation of their sins rather than dialogue. The problem with this denial of PoC authority in matters of racism, however, is that like the Avenue Q song, it flattens the power structure of racism, again suggesting that everyone’s experiences are equal and therefore we all have important things to bring to the conversation.

This just isn’t true. Everyone’s experience of racism is not equal. And too often white people bring defensiveness, fetishization, exotification, implicit associations, and their own hidden agendas to the conversation, which just fraks things up on both sides. To be fair, some PoC bring these things to the table too; unfortunately we’ve all been hit with the racism stick. But one of the commonalities of the PoC experience in colonized/white-dominant countries is that eventually, most of us look around and notice the system, because its negative effects become impossible to deny. And in noticing the system, we do assume some moral authority. The system discourages acknowledgment, after all. It works best if it remains semi-visible, “silent but deadly”; even to notice it is a challenging act. The white experience has the opposite commonality — denial of the system’s existence, and of its beneficial effect on their lives. So even when whites begin to acknowledge the system, the habit of denial is hard to break. Denial of PoC authority is just another manifestation of it.

So the next time you encounter someone who cites the Avenue Q chorus in a discussion of racism, I suggest the following refrain:

Everyone’s a little bit racist
It’s true
But some are still more so than others
Like you!*

(Yeah, OK, I’m not a musician, shuddup.)

I’ve been continuing to follow the casting controversy re “The Last Airbender” film by M. Night Shyamalan. The two main organizations of fans that arose to fight it, Aang Ain’t White and it’s sistercomm Racebending, have been working hard to try and get the word out about the casting and why it’s a problem, though they’ve run into a lot of brick walls. Some “The Last Airbender” (TLA) online communities won’t let them discuss the issue, dismissing their concerns as (wait for it… oh, whatever, you’ve heard this before) race wank. They’ve gotten no response at all from the film’s producers, beyond a vague insistence that TLA will be more diverse than the TV show was, somehow.

It took a professional advocacy group, the Media Action Network for Asian Americans (MANAA), to actually get a clear response:

The Director’s vision for this film is one of world, influenced and inspired by the Asian undertones of the series, and that is both diverse and inclusive in the make up of the four nations represented in the film’s cinematic world.

Early casting includes an Indian actor, born in Mumbai and raised in the UK and the US; a Persian actor born in Tehran and raised in the UK, Switzerland and the US; a Maori actor born and raised in New Zealand; a Korean-American actor, born and raised in Chicago; an American actress of Italian, French and Mexican heritage; among several others of varied nationalities from around the world.

The four nations represented in the film reflect not one community, but the world’s citizens. These societies will be cast from a diversity of all races and cultures.
In particular, the Earth Kingdom will be cast with Asian, East Asian and
Africans.

Emphasis mine. Now, to provide a little context for people who aren’t fans of the show and don’t realize what’s happening here:

• There are no black people in the original cartoon. I’m OK with that, actually. As a fantasy and science fiction fan and writer, I get bombarded with all-white secondary worlds all the time*. It’s kind of refreshing to see an all-PoC one, even if those P aren’t my particular C. (Plus, opens the door for all-black fantasy worlds in the future.)
• All the PoC actors mentioned above? Are going to play villains, bit parts, or extras. The three “heroic” leads are still white.
• In the cartoon, the three heroes (represented by white actors) come together from two “good” nations to fight against an evil nation (represented by the Indian actor mentioned in the letter) which is oppressing and eventually tries to “ethnic cleanse” a fourth nation (which will be represented by “Asian, East Asian, and Africans”). So with this casting, we have two nations of heroic white people fighting genocidal brown people to save other poor downtrodden brown people. And black people. Can’t forget us when you’re casting victims.

So in the name of diversity, the film’s producers are ignoring the diversity that was in the original cartoon — characters who evoked cultures as wildly disparate as the Inuit, Mayans, Indians, Koreans, Chinese, Pacific Islanders, Arabs, Japanese, Tibetan, Ainu, and probably a dozen more. They’re replacing it with “Diversity: American Style”, in which all those ethnicities get lumped together into “one community” and stripped of agency, a few black and multiracial people get sprinkled on for flavor, and white people get the best parts and the most screentime.

I cannot begin to explain how revolted I am that black people are being used to justify this shit. Fortunately, MANAA explains it for me, in their response:

After dealing with Hollywood studios for the past 17 years, we are more than familiar with the justifications used to cast white actors instead of actors of color. Other film productions have previously used the same pretexts, touting diversity through the casting of supporting roles–but only after first discriminating in casting the lead roles.
…
MANAA is a strong supporter of studios’ efforts to increase diversity, but it is absurd to use that as an excuse to make a project more white and to say the original concept wasn’t diverse enough when the cultures of the four Asian nations clearly were.

Emphasis mine again. Because that’s the thing: there weren’t any white people in the original series, either. And clearly the producers were not OK with this, despite the many, many all-white fantasy worlds that already exist. So all their “diversity” bullshit is really just a cover for their primary goal, which was to shoehorn white people into this world. But the creepiness of this goal would’ve been far too obvious if they’d only inserted white folks, so they tossed in some other races too.

There’s no conscientious commitment to diversity in this. This is diversity done as an afterthought, an excuse, something to point out and shout, “What in the world can that be?” as a distraction. Then while our backs are turned, boot PoC from primary, non-stereotypical roles into their traditional place at the back of the bus.

I want black actors to get a paycheck as much as anyone, but I don’t like seeing my people used in such a transparent ploy to hurt other PoC. That shit doesn’t help any of us.

* And I have no problem with them, either! See? I like White People Movies!