An independent, at times iconoclastic, voice on behalf of topics or events that the just mainstream doesn't "get." These are typically at the crossroads of progressive politics, the media arts, and ethnicity. They often make people uncomfortable.
After having diligently, or tried to diligently, maintain a consistent presence and voice here, sometimes it just seems like the myriad voices and righteous opinions render mine less necessary.
To my mind, the most interesting news comes from Europe. In France feminism seems cooky and fickle. On one hand their politicians have taken another step forward (or backward) to banning the burqa in public, or at least in schools. On the other hand, France is going forward with a quota goal to move more women into certain leadershp positions.
So, if you’re French and Muslim life is frustrating. If you wear the burqa, it’s even harder. If you’re neither, but you are a woman, things might be heading toward truer equality?
The Golden Globes and the Oscars seem to loom before us – at least if you love film. Maybe you’re a cinéphile, or a cinéaste, or you simply love to go to films and talk about them over coffee, or something.
It’s great fun…unless you don’t have or take the time to “indulge” in going; whether you want to see Jim Carrey or George Clooney. It’s almost a shame. And what if you want to write about your film passion? You see the new Siskels and Eberts, you listen to film critics on National Public Radio’s “Fresh Air,” or you read the best of lists at TheRoot.com, if not all of these.
That’s me, except for “Fresh Air’s” film criticism. It’s too snobby. I’m chomping at the bit to reflect, write, and take part in these conversations (albeit the haute culture ones) – the fall, serious dramas are my season. The summer movies? Nope. Entertainment for me is what others see as work. I’m a film snob. Summer is when I’ll have to catch up on the DVDs of the independent and foreign films that I missed in the last…14 months.
I still haven’t seen “The Class.” The French documentary about a teacher working with either typical or at-risk students.
The ensemble of "An Education"
I saw the English film, “An Education,” only two weeks ago. I got out of it what I’d wanted; it means something to me; it made me laugh, think, and ask myself questions during and after. That’s almost always what I want. I’m on the edges of movie watching though.
“(500) Days of Summer” engages me. At least the title. It’s charming. I’d forgotten about Michael Mann’s “Public Enemies.” I haven’t seen the film, bit I did talk to Melvin Purvis’ son, an East Coast arts instructor, for a great radio segment this summer. Part of me wants to bear witness to the hype about “Precious.” I know about abuse. I’m curious about “Up in the Air.” The writing. The characters. Its footing in the 2008-2009 realities. All of these elements engage me.
A scene from the documentary "Good Hair"
I still want to watch “Good Hair.” The trailer sold me on it. But TheRoot.com’s criticism cooled my jets; according to them, the movie looks like a long-form docu-comedy – should that be a genre option? – not a documentary that examines and pursues candid answers. There are tough questions that the hilarious trailer opens and leave that way.
I have seen “The Hurt Locker.” I still have no love for it; my mind boggles at audiences’ exuberance and adulation. My expectations remain as high as when I criticized Roger Ebert’s fawning over it.
I have a faint and fading recall, other than these titles, of which films came out after last January. I feel horrible. I had to check a list of nominations to remember even that 10% or so of the titles. I love film, but I sure don’t show it. I feel culturally detached and unengaged.
People are talking about Oscar buzz and the Golden Globes. “The New York Times’” Anthony Scott and “The Chicago Tribune’s” Michael Phillips have breezed through a list of 2009’s worst movies on “At The Movies.” But as usual this coverage ignores whole other communities and some big uncomfortable questions.
People probably still ask themselves why the separate Black Oscars event was cancelled as a part of the exaltation that came with Denzel Washington and Halle Berry each earning Oscars in 2002 – 8-years-ago. Troubling questions and concerns about minorities’ progress and power positions in the film history remain. But other, subtler, even harder questions are out there.
Denzel Washington, Halle Berry earn Academy Awards at a "triumphant" moment
How often do you think about how multiethnic people of color or multi-”racial” people’s images in movies? It’s hard to think about the presence or overall representation of people of color in movies and then the proportion of constructive ones to those that are the absolute opposite?
There are relatively meager numbers of inter-”racial” families in the United States. According to the U.S. Census, 2004, less than 3% of all marriages in the U.S. are inter-”racial.” And so few people consciously call themselves multi ethnic, or multi-”racial,” or mixed, or something. Still most North Americans are mixed with at least two different ethnicities, even if it’s not obvious or alarming. Audiences rarely have to consider what it’s like to call at least two different ethnicities home.
Benjamin Bratt in NBC's "E-Ring"
The last or most indelible and implicitly mixed character may have been Benjamin Bratt on NBC’s “E-Ring” in 2005. He played Maj. Jim Tisnewski who was Polish, among other things. It was an interesting program, but not a film. Also during the heyday of that same network’s juggernaut, “ER,” Gloria Reuben starred in “Deep in My Heart.” The story’s core dealt with a mixed woman coming to terms with having had three different and vital women whom she could call “mom” as she came of age. But as special and compelling as that story was, it relied on the tragic mulatto theme.
None of these stories played at cinémas. So you might want to ask yourself how important it is to see perspectives on that experience at the movie theaters. How about some great stories where the mixed experience wasn’t the heart of the film, but simply and subtly provided the context?
If you call yourself mixed, biracial, multiethnic, or a mutt, or what, there was less to applaud than what you might anticipate. Many people saw 2009 as year of great change – some seeing it as grave because of Pres. Barack Obama’s inauguration and his choice of Sonia Sotomayor for the U.S. Supreme Court.
A young Barack Obama sits with some of his family
We want progress. I suspect that young bi-”racial” people want more. Mr. Obama could have been more than “simply” the first African-American president. If Pres. Barack Obama hadn’t chosen a group, but had more consistently emphasized that was not “simply” African-American…we don’t know what. But at least he would not have conspicuously, if subtly, omitted part of himself.
The first sign lays in how Pres. Obama describes himself – African-American – and the mass political and cultural realities that informed or dictated that choice. Barack Obama being black was an historical and epochal challenge for his ambition and his presidential candidacy. Had he been more emphatic about not just being African-American that would have opened up a whole nother aspect to the conversation…and more political peril.
Some multiethnic or bi-"racial" people probably come of like this
In a documentary some 15-years-ago, Harvard’s Prof. Henry Louis Gates, Jr made an observation about a pop cultural phenomenon – “The Cosby Show’s” cultural imprint on America – he said that you can’t expect any one phenomenon, no matter how dramatic or charismatic, to up-end and K.O. North America’s bigotry.
That is a historic pattern of engrained attitudes and behaviors. Just as that show couldn’t be expected to accomplish this feat, nor must we expect that from the Obama phenomenon. That’s too much of an effect to expect or demand.
At some point, many people want for the time when color and features do not mark against you. Ethnically ambiguous people want to be accepted as a blur without questions, confusions, and accusations.
In that Pres. Barack Obama is a harbinger, you might ask whether he is enough for the myriad Americans who seek a highly individual symbol in him or from him.
Of course the fact that few people probably note his features and confuse them for something foreign is a valid counterpoint. He isn’t ethnically or physically ambiguous; most people would just “know” that he’s Black. His features stoke no questions. Just like with Anglo (North American “whites”) people whose features are obviously “white.”
Still, that “said,” many young, ethnically ambiguous people are probably hungry for the president, for a U.S. President to stand in as an explicit bi-”racial” or multi-”ethnic” role model. Some people rely him as an icon and inspiration about how little bi-racial identity matters.
But Ms. Jing doesn’t go for that; she says she’s “completely Chinese.”
Lou Jing – "completely Chinese"
You can expect a bumpy, bizarre road if you don’t look “white” in the U.S. and you say that you are; confusions, misunderstandings, and even hostility will come. If you look brown or even darker, if you have a broader nose, lips, or ears (or if it’s the opposite) and call yourself “white…”
Ms. Jing recently declared herself “completely Chinese.” While this seems bizarre to many people, most particularly if you’re “white,” this isn’t so very new. Paul Seriodio is the “white” South African who chose to call himself African-American when pressed about a form.
Of course the U.S. must contend, and make clumsy peace, with the remnants of the African Holocaust (the Atlantic slave trade). China doesn’t have that history, that experience. It and Japan discovered their own biases against each other centuries ago, but that was very different.
Lou Jing as she poses for "Go Oriental Angel" – China's "American Idol"
Ms. Jing’s decision reminds me of when I chose to stop – or at least stem the flow of – my anger at Anglos. While people routinely break the inter”racial” down to a binary of Black and white, which just doesn’t carry much water anymore – to put it politely), I rebel against that. But that’s a whole nother story; a digression for a later time.
My heritage, as with most other peoples’, no matter whom they are and where they’re from, is more varied and complex than that. If I were angry at Anglos, and their heritages were a part of mine, then doesn’t that come back to me?
In my own multicultural or multiethnic experience, I’ve wondered, and mentioned in this journal, how surprised I am to be embraced as African-American. So I understand Ms. Jing’s choice, even if I can’t actually relate to it.
Here Anglos and people of color alike might call Ms. Jing nuts or deluded. But you have to ask how “race” operates in China. There are some scholars perspectives on Chinese biases or bigotry. While it only represents on, point of view and there is probably some bias, it might shed some light on a barely and rarely comfortable question.
What happened when she went to school? “She used to wonder why she had black skin,” said one classmate. “We thought about this question together and decided to tell her it’s because she likes dark chocolate. So her skin turned darker gradually.” Another classmate weighed in, “We said it’s because she used to drink too much soy sauce,” according to Cnn.com
Why did she not ask about her color or her father, who she’d never met, until she was 16-years-old? These are natural questions in the United States; they are a part of a coming-of-age.
The notoriety that Ms. Jing has received makes the way she describes herself so much more important. As with questions about what makes someone Black, or how they chose to describe themselves so, if they don’t look it, the same must be asked about being Chinese. These are questions that must be answered about how color biases work in China where there are very few people of color.
Apparently coming-of-age stories may be as foreign to China as the idea of a pretty, brown, Shanghainese woman calling herself “completely Chinese.”
In the face of “The New York Time’s” compelling and vital coverage in their Women at Arms series, they reprinted an AP wire story about criminal pregnancy. A two-star general, Maj. Gen. Anthony Cucolo, has made pregnancy in a combat zone, among other acts that disrupt esprit de corps and unit effectiveness subject to court martial. In another word: criminal.
An artist's rendering of court martial jurors
It is interesting to contrast this story with the “Times’” women warriors series; they represent very different perspectives and attitudes.
Most of the offenses are reasonable to non-uniformed eyes and minds, though I haven’t found a list of the less sensational ones. According to the AP/New York Times, “General Cucolo’s order outlines some 20 banned activities, most aimed at keeping order and preventing criminal activity, like selling a weapon or taking drugs.”
Despite some military leaders’ hunger for gender parity, the military remains a chronic and persistent testosterone zone. Gen. Cucolo’s decision reminds me of when the Army used to declare that, “If the Army wanted you to have a wife, it would’ve issued you one!”
As per “The New York Daily News” this means that “a husband and wife who are at war together could both be punished.”
This may seem backward, barbaric or whatever other progressive adjective you want to use. But… This isn’t the first time that a branch of the U.S. military has implemented policies at which their soldiers rolled their eyes.
Even if this is a simple matter of a commander doing what he must to ensure that he has the troops with the critical skills he needs, various interest groups will exploit this as a political and rhetorical fodder.
You might wonder if this squares with the U.S. Constitution’s fourteenth amendment, which provides for equal protection under the law. But the Uniform Code of Military Justice, which rules military lives, usually supercedes that.
A survey that asked how uniformed NYPD officers treated their undercover brethren made news; this, after an African-American undercover officer had been killed in a friendly-fire incident.
RaceWire.org, ColorLines magazine’s weblog, posted an item about it. But it omitted a link to the survey. When I clicked to the New York City news source, NY1, I found that they had omitted it too.
Before I shared this via Facebook, I refused to do so if I could find the survey; after some minutes of semi-zealous research, I found nothing.
This makes me wonder about what standard news audiences should expect or demand. A sometime mentor, who runs a national radio show, spoke a lesson that stuck in my head: “There is so much bad journalism out there!”
This isn’t a big deal, but…yeah it is.
All news organizations, including NY1 and RaceWire.org, need to abide by consistent rules. Either post the PDF, or a link to the survey, or explain why they do not. If your audience can peruse and scrutinize the survey, they can judge its worth; without it, they have to assume.
While the U.S. struggle with color preoccupation, even with President Barack Obama, China has its own surprising and terribly sensitive anxieties with this. China seems, in many ways, to be sophisticated, at least in business and financial contexts, but its dearth of people of color has placed it and one of its new celebrity citizens on a precarious and painful state of awakening.
I wrote, or commented, about this last month; many people have been keenly interested in this. It is strange that few of them have been journalists. The slight attention paid to this has grown a bit with Obama’s arrival today. National Public Radio’s All Things Considered had a story. Only a day or so ago “The Wall Street Journal” ran a piece. They were the two “blue-chip” mainstream outlets to file stories. But there was also Hyphen Magazine that published a somewhat different perspective.
By succeeding in China’s version of “American Idol,” a 20-year-old brown woman, Lou Jing, born of a Shanghainese mom and an absent African-American dad, has stirred concerns that touch on ethnic nationalism, foreign policy, and very personal identity. She has pressed her fellow Chinese to ask themselves what it is to be Chinese; to question how narrowly or how broadly they should define the idea or themselves.
Monday’s meeting with President Barack Obama bares very sensitive political and diplomatic questions may weigh heavily.
This begs fascinating questions about what color or “race” consciousness means when you step away from North American shores. Away from this heavy and perilous emotional and historical baggage of the African holocaust (the Atlantic slave trade), the U.S. does not hold all the cards and did not write “the book” in assigning meaning to or interpreting this. It makes you ask how is “race” assigned or color defined elsewhere where there isn’t that U.S. baggage.
This is fodder for a great, thorough feature story.
On October 7, The New York Times published a meager briefing, by The Associate Press, “A Symbolic Apology to Indians”, about Congress offering Natives an apology for their behavior (any number of vile offenses). When I hear about these events, I wonder, “who is supposed to embrace these?” It reminds me of prior offers to apologize for slavery, which you can also call the African Holocaust. I think that Congress may have also offered another apology, for having interned Japanese-Americans as WWII was ratcheting up.
Personally, when someone says, “I’m sorry,” on my more edgy, less patient, or polite days, I may say, “Well, ok, but frankly if you were, you would try to fix this (whatever it is) Since you aren’t doing that, I only have your words of remorse.”
I find the resolution – non-binding by the way – ineffective, impotent, and pointless. Congress waits generations – a century after their constituents’ immoral acts – to do this.
Remorse is the key. Acting on one’s remorse. Congress’ apology is a declaration of remorse; one without teeth. Without action, without an aggressive and consistent strategy to make that remorse a tangible reality, to revert grave wrongs and reverse course, why bother?
Who’s supposed to care? I’m sure that some African-Americans and some Natives care. Symbols are nice. Maybe like gift wrapping. But then, there has to be something worthwhile inside. As elders often remind young people, “talk is cheap.” They’ve offered that bromide for generations. Now generations after their violences and those of their constituents, Congress issues the wrapping paper without having used it to wrap something.
The Black Snob shared her incisive voice about the slavery version. And as she writes…”SO WHAT! It’s great that congress can say ‘we are sorry’ for an institution that many of them benefited from. But what does this apology really mean, what does it do?” Her invective is raw, vulgar, to-the-point and dead-on.
Anglos have established that few of them respect or value people of color as peers and equals. Are the apologies mostly about guilt, or about pacifying, or placating people of color? Those who may forget or ignore their “place” in contemporary North American society?
Questions remain:
What are these Congressional apologies supposed to accomplish…generations after after the act(s)?
Are Anglos supposed to feel good about having given voice to their regrets, to their guilt?
Are Natives, African-Americans, and whomever else is the eventual recipient, supposed to reinvest faith in Congress?
Are you a regular reader or are you trying to be one? Have you been waiting – and waiting – for more from my voice? Well, I work hard to write consistently, but I simply have not seen a topic that called for my voice to respond. There have been a few interesting items that were already being covered by TheRoot.com.
If you think that there’s something that’s just up my alley, tell me so. If I know what you want to see…
Away from the typical and belabored ethnic binary of Anglos and African-Americans in the U.S…. China has an ethnically mixed contestant in “Go Oriental Angel,” its version of American Idol. The contestant, 20-year-old Lou Jing, has stirred the main land into craziness. Her mother is Chinese. Her father, absent, is African-American. The Chinese are flummoxed by Ms. Jing’s brownness.
Is the question of, “what makes a Chinese” as loaded as the one that asks “what makes an American?”
A New York City-based diversity trainer’s writing often reminds me that people perform their ethnicities; people expect typical and stereotypical behaviors from others, whether they are Anglo, of African descent, speak Spanish, or are Indiginous. So how do you perform your Chinese-ness or your Blackness?
Lou Jing doesn’t have the typical or expected Chinese features, other than speaking Chinese. In the United States, you would think or assume that the only duo of peoples who were dating “outside of their races” (what an utterly ignorant and absurd phrase!) were black and white people.
From news reports, China’s racism seems to be even more agonizing that North America’s. China, as with many South Asian countries, has nearly no ethnic diversity, at least as American’s understand it. If you consider this, in-depth, much of this resembles North America’s preoccupation with ethnic or image purity.
In some ways “Go Oriental Angel’s” producers have presented her life story in a typically North American manner: they emphasize the stresses and the hard road that her still young life has been. But there are doubts about how hard her road was.
President Jimmy Carter’s observation about President Barack Obama’s foes is just as dead-on as the president’s was about Sgt. James Crowley. It shows very much an example of that divided, dissociative mentality that might mark Obama’s office. He must love, navigate, and live amid these two peoples – friends and others – whom would rarely invite one of the other over for Sunday dinner. The president is carrying the banners of (1) a deeply divided, color preoccupied citizenry while, (2) doing the job of representing, without real or perceived bias, that united duo; it’s a devil of a calling.
The first U.S. president of African descent finds that extraordinary pressures come from thoroughly competing, conflicting, and maybe confounding priorities.
Kenya flag resemblance
He faces extraordinary contradictions…
(1) a U.S. that wants President Barack Obama to lead them past “race” and toward a real and realized Camelot, that parents and grand parents dreamt about two generations ago,
(2) who can lift and revive a hacking, coughing, and hobbled U.S. economy,
(3) while ignoring the divisive contexts and questions from North Americans’ near obsession with color,
(4) and still being the standard bearer, for middle-class people of color, for ambition, achievement, and shedding what they and even the extreme conservatives would call “excuses.”
President Jimmy Carter
This is utterly complex and can easily confuse someone, even if they’re already “in-the-know” or in one of the communities that cares about this. This is an utterly Du Boisian dilemma; for readers who either don’t know who have a vague understanding of William Edward Burghardt Du Bois‘ prophesy about the “color line.”
Managing expectations, from two disparate groups, one half of whom are easily manipulated in an era where too many people sit before reality TV and the like, and the other half who routinely eat as a family and read books as a habit. This collection of mandates is too much for any one, even extraordinary and inordinately talented, leader to have to carry.
Having to be the United States’ savior in a great recession is too mean of a task when one must also be a conduit and the penultimate symbol of “race” no longer mattering. The latter especially when so very few North Americans seem to truly want to shed their bias against and prejudices toward any “others.”
Joe Wilson’s outburst and the way that it lifted the conservative, but very poorly informed protests, set a morose new low for public and political decorum. President Carter’s right-on observation of the timid fear, ignorance and prejudices which lay behind that showed the sand-in-your-underwear crisis of national unity that we have.
In The Root, Sophia Nelson reflects on this wisely in Jimmy Carter and the uppity negro: “My point is this: President Carter is speaking a truth that few Americans are willing to hear. He grew up at the height of Jim Crow in the Deep South—the man knows racism when he sees it. Most white Americans simply cannot face the ugly past of “race in America” and how much it is still with us today.”
President Barack Obama = snob?
Jeff Zeleny’s and Jim Rutenberg’s perspective in The New York Times, described how liberals and conservatives are responding to this climate and how much of it is “real.” “Even as several leading Congressional Democrats distanced themselves from Mr. Carter’s comments, some liberals pointed Wednesday to what they describe as an increasing number of racially tinged attacks.”
In this piece, fmr. Secretary of State Colin L. Powell reminded readers to step into many pairs of shoes before jumping to a conclusion that shouts, “color!”
Somehow the president must choose or guesstimate a comfortable space that satisfies North Americans who want him to be as Black as he can be and as they want him to be (two very different and percarious stepping stones), be as American as he can be (i.e. ignoring or deftly moving past the near color obsession); acknowledging that as a Kenyan-American, he isn’t “simply” an African-American, but someone of Kenya and Ireland, and probably at least a few further cultures. Acknowledge and cheer about his being mixed, not mono-ethnic.
Ultimately the president must respond to this cascading series of rhetoric in a way that leaves people feeling as calm and secure as possible about his work and how it serves them. It is too bad that he can’t or won’t respond to Rep. Wilson or at least President Carter (agreeing) with the same candor that he with Sgt. Crowley this summer. It is not that he is lying or misleading in response (although Joe Wilson thinks so), but that on CNN.com he emphasizes one vantage point on the truth as he sees it.
Few citizens seem to be as happy as they expected to be with the president’s work or how he defines or talks about his cultural self.
The United States have yet to see someone, certainly not its president, who can lead and comfort them while managing their near obsession with that which is supposed to have ceased to matter a long time ago– color.
The start of, and Anglos’ reaction to, President Barack Obama’s work also serves as a surprising litmus test about the complex and layered manner in which the United States’ biases and prejudices have not yet been outgrown.
Many North Americans, progressive and liberal-minded people, might have breathed long-awaited relief upon President Barack Obama’s inauguration. Some are even thrilled to have Barack Obama as their president. There are also those who are not – who cannot understand or accept that a brown man earned the role; cannot believe that he is as aggressive and commanding as they would insist that an Anglo man would be – that has the extreme conservatives suffering social and political seizures.
These outcries can be explained, if in round-about ways, by phenomena other than color, bias, and prejudice. That would be like trying to walk from point A to point C by hopping and skipping on and past points K, M, and Q before finally arriving at point C.
Be real. Get real: color and ignorance.
President Barack Obama's inauguration
It is morose, but just how surprising is it? I suspect that this is where colored communities separate from Anglos. Anglos do not have to live as either brown, dark, or permanently tan.
In part because of the power and potency of candidate Obama’s rhetoric, and his personal-professional mission of unity, citizens felt a Kennedy and Camelot-like feeling. They felt “a new beginning might come with this man,” who, in innumerable ways, showed that the United States had grown-up in crucial ways. But after the heady days when the United States patted itself on the back, the reality returned – like a stunning smack. A back hand shocked us.
Rep. Joe Wilson’s outburst during the President’s September speech before Congress, that which lawyers might easily describe as an excited utterance, summarizes and typifies this as well as others. Maybe it’s just in the most blunt and crass manner possible.
With all the coarse political rhetoric and conjecture, the haze of hot air makes it impossible to be clear on how many supporters he has and how many remain shocked that he earned the presidency.
President Barack Obama = communist?
This no matter whether one pays attention to the New York Times, CNN, The Root.com, Salon.com, or another. There are too many headlines and stories and weblog pieces that have chronicles and critiqued and criticized this coarseness.
When one pictures someone becoming upset at a woman wearing trousers, that image probably harkens back to the days when James Bond still wore a hat – in Dr. No – in the 1960s.
North American audiences are used to hearing about surprising and even backward third-world customs. And then there are those, which come off more like something from News of the Weird.
A Sudanese journalist, Lubna Ahmed al-Hussein, who had been working for the United Nations, was one of more than a dozen women who were arrested for wearing trousers this summer. They were simply enjoying a dinner party. To North American eyes this would be laughable, except for the routine punishment for offending the local Islamic sensibilities – a flogging of up to 40 lashes.
It is remarkable that Islamic law and custom demands that women not wear trousers. The typical punishment is what is extraordinary to North American sensibilities.
The work-a-day Khartoum people have described she and her peers as prostitutes and demanded that the lashings be meted out.
What lifts this story above the typical third-world cultural or religious barbarism are the chances that Ms. al-Hussein is taking to stand on her principle and win more publicity for this.
She resigned her UN position, so that she would no longer be eligible for diplomatic immunity in the matter. And she wanted this to be litigated; she wanted the Khartoumi court system to help her make her point. She preferred prison time over paying a $208 or 500 Sudanese pound fine.
Natives and local lawyers have insisted that the laws are questionable: they are vague and are enforced inconsistently.
This begs many questions:
Why are images of women’s suffrage and equality so disparate between countries, cultures and their customs?
Are Sudanese Muslim values backwards, even barbaric, as many North Americans would easily conclude?
How did women wearing trousers become a cause for alarm and gender tumult?
On foreign affairs, feminism,…and a “woman’s place”:
Is it reasonable to look at what happened in Khartoum, Sudan through North American cultural eyes?
How universal is feminism or are women’s rights?
It is rarely wise or simple to consider another people through ones own ways. The United States’ history, particularly in foreign policy, is littered with that and has often ended in shame and the loss of moral ground.
The list of cultural slights with which North American women must contend are daunting: only two out of the nine U.S. Supreme Court justices are women. The Equal Rights Amendment has sat on someone’s shelf long after the day when the electronic typewriter was boasted as cutting-edge. At least skirmishes over trousers ended 20-years-ago.
The news of Diane Sawyer’s 2010 promotion to anchor the ABC World News is great. It may, as some analysts and reporters have suggested, mean less pressure on Katie Couric. What is bizarre in its absence is that the coverage has mostly ignored the question of what skills and experiences Ms. Sawyer will bring to Charles Gibson’s anchor seat. She might refresh the program
ABC News' Diane Sawyer
The mainstream news coverage of the “sexier” angles about ratings, and celebrity journalists’ pay, from the likes of the New York Times – this distracts and misdirects audiences. If there is any coverage about the news content or that which asks why Bernard Shaw or Carole Simpson, who could not move out of ABC World News Tonight Sunday anchor position, were the only anchors of African descent, it is been below the proverbial radar.
The New York Times wrote in-part, “Both Mr. Westin (ABC News’ president, David Westin) and Mr. Banner (World News’ executive producer, Jon Banner) used the same expression, ‘the DNA of the newscast will not change,’ in saying Ms. Sawyer would make the newscast her own without changing it in any fundamental ways.”
One must wonder, particularly if one is any type of feminist (who among us has neither a sister, nor a daughter..?), what the change will mean for news content if the executives feel a need to assure viewers that Ms. Sawyer will keep the show the way that Mr. Gibson will have left it?
Just as people talk about how a judge’s personality or experiences inform their approaches and their decisions – just consider the absurd, hyperbolic, and hyperventilated anxiety over what Ms. Sotomayor would bring to the U.S. Supreme Court bench – so the same phenomenon works with network news anchors in their roles as managing editors.
When it comes to presidential politics, it’s often referred to as “pink telephone” politics.
a pink telephone
Why would ABC’s brass make a point to be preempt and placate viewers anxieties by implying that Ms Sawyer’s professional point of view would not affect or intrude on – and change – what Mr. Gibson has done?
Ms. Sawyer has a near sterling reputation as a serious, hard news journalist. Viewers should be eager to find what she will bring to ABC World News’ coverage and editorial point of view, inferring of course that she will also be its managing editor. There are many stories that are omitted or ignored from the news broadcasts because they focus on or emphasize women. That is a whole nother topic that can easily trigger ire or rage.
Former CBS News anchor Connie Chung threw in a surprise that, among other things reminds us that women will have diverse even disparate opinions on this.
A female columnist will quote another female journalist – Connie Chung– and report a silly, blind declaration when asked about gender, “The question should be, ‘How will Diane do against Brian [Williams] and Katie?”
Still, it is disappointing when female journalists perpetuate angles that are part of the problem. Appointment viewers are concerned about content, not about how many of their peers are watching which newscast.
What is – or what should be – the priority as Ms. Sawyer and Mr. Gibson make the transition?
No matter whether it’s Minneapolis or Chi-town, when I walk in the neighborhood, brothers’ll greet me with a nod or something – a signal that says, “Yeah, you’re one of us.”
After a few years of accepting that social reflex with bemused misgiving, I find myself asking “why?” Why accept that? It isn’t bad.
Still other people from other countries, or who are older and better-travelled, no matter their color or features, ask if I’m from the Middle East or from somewhere like Morocco, or India. They don’t assume anything. They make me smile even grin and then chuckle. They are cosmopolitan. They understand life outside of the United States’ typical prism of color obsession.
At the heart of this is that I do not look Black. What is it about these disparate and myopic worldviews? Of course, that begs another question that is simple and opaque at once: what does Black look like?
Will Wright
That may be the more important and illuminating question or concern; how Black must black be to be…Black vs simply straddling the colors, the boundaries by one’s own whim and wit? How typical or conventional must one look? How fully must one conform to Anglos’ (white people’s) image of Black in order to be either Black or to pass away from it?
It may be that each of those competing questions is as important as the other. I simply have yet to understand why North Americans of African descent do not question that someone as ethnically ambiguous as I do, may not call himself Black or half any of African in his heritage or experience.
I suspect that these questions may have sprouted while reading Henry Louis Gates, Jr’s The Passing of Anatole Broyard, a chapter and essay from his book Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Black Man.
Anatole Broyard
Many years ago, I decided to discard that “one-drop-rule” chip from my shoulder – I was going to ignore North America’s demands; I was going to be multicultural and colored or “of color.”
As with far too many phenomena, Anglo America appoints itself to define and encode that. As bizarre, hard, and contradictory as it might be, I chose to occupy that fluid multiethnic crevasse during the turn of the century. It coincided with the 2000 U.S. Census.
I am certain that it’s too soon for anyone to seek indications that President Barack Obama’s presence and example has persuaded those, who are against people of color to think better, to reconsider their fears and ignorance.
The University of Florida’s Ashby Plant found data that suggested that, not only had an Implicit Association Test, that gauges “real” bias against groups, indicated a big decline in anti-Black feeling among participants – it showed that the white participants were showing bias for Blacks. Plant was thrown.
President Barack Obama listens intently
While Obama’s presidency might spawn delightful changes in how North Americans of African descent are perceived, as with presidential history, it will probably be years, maybe several, before scholars or lay people will find concrete data.
The phenomenon of President Barack Obama may be like this generation’s Cosby Show; and as Henry Louis Gates, Jr said, in a PBS show which might have been Ethnic Notions, after the show’s end, it is unrealistic and too much to expect one TV program to correct generations of ingrained and indoctrinated home training. It’s too much to expect, or even suppose, that families would abruptly stop teaching subtle biases, prejudgments, and discimination. This, either after an African-American president is inaugurated or a groundbreaking TV show succeeds.
People can debate whether the electronic media are more effective or surer teachers of children, but parents, who can still interact in real-time and in-person, remain the first teachers.
The eagerness to test, to study President Barack Obama’s affect is understood. Heck, a whole other academic subfield began upon his inauguration.
But of course, the key question – that which is chronically omitted or ignored, is why people still connect vices, criminal traits & inclinations to darker-skinned people solely because of a preoccupation with people’s color and features.
Why do people, who descend from African slaves, call themselves African-Americans – what is the value and use of the adjective? We used to be called by a word that’s considered a fighting word; one that’ll get you fired. Then we were colored. Then Negro. Then Black. Then Afro-American.
North Americans of African descent either describe themselves as Black or African-American, the latter of which feels clunky and unwieldy, if one thinks about it – but neither is accurate or precise. This labeling question is more and more important as African immigrants, who come to North America and strive, are confused and frustrated by labels, as all immigrants of color are when they arrive.
He wrote, in-part, “in reality, Africans and African Americans are not brothers, we are distant cousins. We were once part of the same family, but so much time has passed by that those family ties are threadbare. The development of black American culture, which is a combination of parts of African and Western European culture, has created a new tribe.”
When people notice that descendants of African slaves have little in common with African immigrants to North America, we can ask ourselves why we still call ourselves African-Americans; why we ally or align our identities with the continent, or even with the west coast. African immigrants should be able to call themselves African Americans if they want to.
Manny Otiko
One might simply approach the question by asking which term accurately and precisely describes oneself. That is hard. The term is traditional and sacrosanct; I am convinced that those who would lobby to change term would catch hell.
I find the term clunky and unwieldy. Also I must agree, in some ways, with extreme conservative and Manhattan senior Fellow, John McWhorter, when he wrote Why I’m Black. Other than acknowledging the legacy connection to West Africa, where the bulk of North American slaves were taken from, North Americans of African descent have no real cultural connection to the continent or that region.
John McWhorter
Mr. McWhorter writes in-part, “Living descendants of slaves in America neither knew their African ancestors nor even have elder relatives who knew them. Most of us worship in Christian churches. …Starting with ragtime and jazz, we gave America intoxicating musical beats based on African conceptions of rhythm, but with melody and harmony based on Western traditions.”
I agree: the connection to Africa is meager and tenuous. There is a romanticism. It is occasionally pleasant as a way to commemorate and revere how the African holocaust is vital to our heritage, understanding part of an ancestral experience. Otherwise Africa is rarely and barely connected to our daily lives and contemporary identities.
Mr. McWhorter also wrote, “‘Black’ isn’t perfect, but no term is.” Surprisingly, in doing so, as intent as he is on strict accuracy, when he referred to Africa, he is silly. He must understand that when he looks in a mirror is appropriate light, his color is not black.
Mr. Otiko’s retort answers this. Though, it also makes us think that much more. “The problem with the using the word ‘black’ to describe people of African descent is that is not strictly accurate. African people, are brown skinned – although there are some ethnic groups, such as Ghanaians and Sudanese, who have extremely dark skin that could be described as black.”
It is hard to avoid inferring an anti-African bias on Mr. McWhorter’s part.
There’s an Anglo on You Tube, who makes a persuasive, if vulgar and profane argument.
This leaves me, perhaps even us, with a dilemma:
1. Stick with a term that is unwieldy to say and which carries a lot of emotional baggage of its own,
2. Revert to Black, which is inaccurate and also emphasizes color differences, which is part of the foundation of our absurd ways of discrimination, or
3. The Black communities can meander their way into choosing the next generation descriptor There are too many popular and scholarly reports that have reiterated Mr. McWhorter’s criticism about Black North Americans holding to tenusous ties to Africa.
This needs to be discussed. Few people deliberate about what they’re saying, or how and why they do it. It may be a chiefly intellectual exercise until a “celebrity” finally raises the question: “why do Americans descended from African slaves call themselves African-American?”
The United States are looking at taking the next Census, 2010; I cannot foresee us being bold and assertive enough to have an alternative to the term on this Census. Electing President Barack Obama was extraordinary unto itself.
Perhaps if enough people of African decent and their friends, or even foes, are passionate enough about how people and different groups describe themselves, this will change. I won’t wait though.
As long as it’s the woman’s choice and she hurts no one in wearing that which makes her feel both pious, moral, and beautiful, then men have no reason to admonish them. The hijab seems to have an independent mind when it comes to making news. Still North Americans’ confusion and discomfort over it also nudges that.
I don’t pretend to understand the Muslim compulsion to submit to Allah by wearing the Hijab. I’m very spiritual in my way, but subscribe to no religion and bow before no god. But many literal or fundamentalist Christians act just as “strangely” as they devote themselves and submit to Christ or Jesus.
Why do we North Americans, particularly the self-righteous ones, routinely graft our social values onto others’ actions?
Muslim women happy wearing the hijab
These women are pious and revere Allah.
They go about it in a way that clashes with the way that typical American women do. Also, I suspect that women look at it as a lunging throw back to the 19th-Century epoch when North American women sought suffrage. Middle-American women can not see how other women could possible find power in a path that, for themselves, would be the abdication or surrender of that.
I have spoken to enough articulate, well-informed, educated, and feminist Muslim women – North American-born and not. I have conceded that I would more wisely listen, ask, and reconsider my assumptions and misconceptions rather than sound off and espouse evangelically about the United States’ cultural virtues [i.e., superiority].
More than five-years-ago, The Seattle Times‘ Eli Sanders described some of the complexity, including the regional and global ambiguities of interpretation, very well.
Muslim women fight for the right to wear the hijab
One question that one needs to ask is whether we care more about Hijab-wearing Muslims in the U.S. or in Muslim countries; the customs, traditions, and expectations are just as disparate their geography. So the debates won’t be the same.
The United States’ behavior has given our friends and foes enough arguments for a retort for those who live in glass houses not to throw stones. If you’re curious, read and then ask questions. After reading Sanders’ 2003 piece, above, look at Cnn’s Generation Islam.
When North America looks upon their neighbors with the same cultural lenses as their foreign policy, problems arise. Our superior attitude prevents us from earning friends across borders. When one asks a question, one sheds any veil of superiority and swithes to that of humility, interest, and openness. When one asks, one often learns.
Of course, the Muslim women who come to the U.S., have various stories to tell and experiences from which to speak. Some live under a hyper-pious, and sometimes stifling, Islamic yoke. Others do not. Then there is often a middle ground, between the extremes that journalistic forms like to emphasize, that makes this topic even harder to simplify in bite-sized – or sound bite chunks.
Women mustn’t be forced to wear the hijab, but if they choose to, they mustn’t be jeered either. Whether the issue is the equal rights amendment, which the U.S. Congress has not yet passed since it proposed it around 40-years-ago, the question of having more than one female U.S. Supreme Court justice, or North American men’s comfort with women wearing hijabs or abayas, these are women’s bodies and realms – men have meager, if any, right to sound-off first or rule on them. These are another part of women’s rights.
Theresa M. Johnson is a Minnesota state employee, who left an abusive marriage after 25-years. Lyndal Khaw, a University of Illinois scholar at Urbana-Champaign, is researching domestic violence and “the process of leaving.” Her work is unique because it integrates boundary ambiguity (uncertainty about one’s role in the family dynamic) into a Stages of Change model. By placing a proverbial transparency page of the domestic violence phenomenon over another transparency of that five-steps of grieving, she found that victims/survivors go through stages of “denial, contemplation, preparation, action and maintenance.”
a woman in pain
Johnson was surprised to hear that the University of Illinois had proven what she and other activists knew: there’s a process to leaving violence. “I find it very, very interesting…,” Johnson said. “It’s kind of funny… Because that’s exactly what we’ve been talking about at the Domestic Abuse Project,” (DAP) an advocacy and support organization, in Minneapolis, MN, for those who want to leave behind the abuse. “Strange that it’s ground-breaking thinking.”
So while neither the knowledge, nor the tactic is new, having it codified in scholarship is; it may mean something for those organizations that need scholarly evidence to plead their case for continually shrinking and scrutinized money.
Khaw and I hope that this news can help the victims/survivors feel and act with more control, safety, and self-confidence in the face of those who ultimately might either hurt them or lose patience with the victims/survivors path through those five steps.
Johnson affirms that the five-step process for leaving does that. “Just knowing that there’s a reason for it. Because leaving…sometimes takes years. But understanding it on a bigger scale was extremely helpful.” Her story seems atypical… Or maybe it’s more typical than one might suspect.
Her husband, a pastor, was a community icon, a pillar. Her family was “extremely grounded in the community.” The fallout from her leaving? “I lost everything. Friendship. Work acquaintances,” Johnson said. “So it just made perfect sense – the amount of loss I was suffering on a daily basis,” after she saw an example of that five-step process.
“When you’re leaving a domestic violence situation, you are consumed by day-to-day activities of…just being safe. Just maintaining – cuz you gotta play that game (of complying) and it’s hard to step out of the world and think rationally.”
“…When you make the decisions to leave – that’s the absolute most violent time,” Johnson insists.
Another woman who felt that daily stress and physical & emotional pain, didn’t feel compelled to wait 25 years. Even though Peggy Schmitt had been raised amid abuse, and the relationship seesawed due to her husband’s confusing deceptions, she kicked him out of her apartment – that into which he had moved.
“I met him at Christmas. He moved in about April. And I got engaged in August. And then I kicked him out, but we kinda went back and forth. It escalated very quickly, got very violent. That was 13-years-ago,” Schmitt said.
At one of her marriage’s dire points, outside of her car,”he broke through my car window and ripped off my clothes.”
Three weeks ago, an event brought back her unnerving memories and her hunger for safety resurged – Her ex-husband tried to “friend” her via Facebook.com. Thirteen years had passed since she needed DAP’s support. Just as long as it had been since I had trained there to volunteer in crisis intervention. Now they’re there for her again.
Those many years ago, without the benefit of a five-step process to buoy or calm her ideas or fears, she had come to a proverbial line in the sand. “It was my birthday in October, that I looked in the mirror and I said, ‘I don’t want to live this way.’”
When asked if she knew that there was a five-step “process for leaving..?” “I had no clue.” The idea, she says, “…gives you something to hold on to. There has to be… It made me feel like I had a little power.
I hope that Ms. Khaw’s research findings will empirically clarify the realities, and ease the lives and burdens for women like Ms. Schmitt and Ms. Johnson. DAP already knows this “secret,” but I hope that it will serve those who hadn’t quite connected it.
Johnson may have phrased it best: “I’m fully educated and fully aware of the stages of grief… Just having someone hand me the map and put the pieces together. …Like you said, was a ‘lifeline.’”
I only hope that Lyndal Thaw’s research at the University of Illinois-Champaign Urbana will empirically gird that lifeline.
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