Category: Blog

Categories
Blog

Donald Sterling’s Love of Koreans Ain’t No Kind of Love at All

I was going to write a post about Clippers owner Donald Sterling’s apparent love of Koreans, even to the extent of renaming a housing development “Korean World Towers” in order to attract Korean tenants. Sterling’s preference for Koreans as tenants (and employees) came at the expense of African Americans who he has allegedly said are undesirable because they “smell and attract vermin.” And that makes his particular brand of racist jujitsu a near perfect example of how the model minority myth is so often used to justify racism against “problem minorities.”

But then a Race Files reader linked me to … Read more “Donald Sterling’s Love of Koreans Ain’t No Kind of Love at All”

Categories
Blog Guest Bloggers

We Are All Cyborgs: Being Asian American and Doing Organizing Online

The following originally appeared on Reappropriate (a great site you should check out!)

Guest-post by Cayden Mak (@Cayden), 18MillionRising.

I recently remarked to a longtime Twitter friend that I feel we live in a magical time, and I always wonder if young movement folks in the past felt that way, too. My friend suggested that not every generation gets to feel that way but there are definitely moments that people live through when they know they are in a magical time. I feel confident saying we live in one such time, but there’s still a question of … Read more “We Are All Cyborgs: Being Asian American and Doing Organizing Online”

Categories
Blog

Why I’ll Always Apologize for My Privilege

Twitter was abuzz with banter yesterday concerning Time magazine’s re-post of a Princeton Tory diatribe by student Tal Fortgang, entitled Why I’ll Never Apologize For My White Male Privilege.

I checked it out and quickly understood why. Tal begins,

There is a phrase that floats around college campuses, Princeton being no exception, that threatens to strike down opinions without regard for their merits, but rather solely on the basis of the person that voiced them. “Check your privilege,” the saying goes, and I have been reprimanded by it several times this year. The phrase, handed down by my moral … Read more “Why I’ll Always Apologize for My Privilege”

Categories
Blog

No Right Turn: The Surprising Truth About Asian Americans and Affirmative Action

In an April 15 Los Angeles Times editorial entitled “An Asian American Turn to the Right?” Lanhee J. Chen, the former policy director of Mitt Romney’s failed 2012 presidential campaign and Hoover Institution Research Fellow, claims that Asian Americans played a critical role in defeating SCA5, a proposal to allow race to be considered among many other factors in college admissions in California.

SCA5 was proposed in order to remedy the precipitous drop in minority college admissions following the passage of Proposition 209, a 1996 ballot measure that banned affirmative action in California. The defeat of SCA5 is … Read more “No Right Turn: The Surprising Truth About Asian Americans and Affirmative Action”

Categories
Blog

37 Sikh Men Are Now On A Hunger-Strike at El Paso To Protest Their Detention

The Vaisakhi harvest celebration is a festive occasion of dancing, singing, music, and religious praise for many Sikh men and women, and marks the beginning of the Sikh New Year.

However, 37 Sikh men in El Paso, Texas, celebrated Vaisakhi in a truly unique fashion this year by launching a hunger-strike.

The 37 Indian nationals are detained at an immigration processing center in El Paso, Texas. How did they get there? Many, if not all, of them suffered religious persecution in their home countries, and tried to seek the protection of the U.S. by journeying through Moscow, Havana, Ecuador, … Read more “37 Sikh Men Are Now On A Hunger-Strike at El Paso To Protest Their Detention”

Categories
Blog

Model Minority Suicide: Five Reasons, Five Ways

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

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

Categories
Blog

The Right to Discriminate in Arizona: Where Freedom Meets Subordination

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

 

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

Categories
Blog

The Many Lives of the “Culture of Poverty”

When Paul Ryan said,

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

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

Categories
Blog

Anatomy of a Racist Joke

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

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

Categories
Blog Guest Bloggers

Beyond the #Hashtag: Movement Building Lessons from #CancelColbert

BY ESTHER WANG

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

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