Monthly Archives: April 2011
Dear Bruce Caswell
I’m sure foster kids would be happy to wear second-hand clothing if they had dads:
State Sen. Bruce Caswell wants to see the state’s clothing allowance for foster children to be spent only at thrift stores. The Department of Human Services gives families an $80 annual stipend for clothing. … “I never had anything new,” Caswell told Michigan Radio. “I got all the hand-me-downs. And my dad, he did a lot of shopping at the Salvation Army, and his comment was — and quite frankly it’s true — once you’re out of the store and you walk down the street, nobody knows where you bought your clothes.”
Eighty bucks! Woohoo! Undoubtedly those foster parents are running over to Macy’s and blowing the whole wad irresponsibly on one pair of designer socks.
The reality is that most foster parents are hard pressed to dress kids on $80 a year. And that most of them spend out of their own pocket because the stipend just isn’t enough.
Anyway, Bruce, did you buy your own kids stuff from the thrift store? Was your annual budget just $80? How about taking your grandkids out to the Salvation Army for their yearly shopping spree? Because we can see how well you turned out. Fiscal responsibility and all that. No time like the present to teach them.
Korean American wins Pulitzer
John J. Kim of The Chicago Sun-Times received the award in the local reporting category for their documentation of crime-ridden Chicago neighborhoods. He shared the prize with staff writers Mark Konkol and Frank Main.
Story here.
Bach.
Played on some kind of 44 meter long xylophone-thingy (that’s the technical name, “xylophone-thingy”) designed by Morihiro Harano. You can see a video about the making of this amazing object here.
Our history
Corporal Joseph Pierce, who served with the Connecticut Volunteer Infantry during the Civil War
Although only about 200 people of Chinese descent lived in the eastern United States, there were at least 58 who fought in the Civil War. (Note that I don’t say “Chinese Americans” because at the time Chinese people could not become U.S. citizens.)
Article here. You can also listen to an interview with writer Ruthanne Lum McCunn.
Jennifer Haynes – update
Remember Jennifer Haynes? Adopted as an eight-year-old from India in 1989 by U.S. citizens, her adoption was later disrupted. She was bounced around from foster home to foster home and her U.S. citizenship was never acquired. In 2008, Haynes was deported.
After almost three years, Haynes has received a passport. From India.
Go. Read.
The notion that Asian Americans are model minorities originated in the 1960s, mainly in reference to the socioeconomic gains of Japanese and Chinese Americans in particular. It did not take long, however, for that very idea to be applied to Asian Americans as a whole, especially as it continues to be perpetuated by the mainstream media. The claim is that Asian Americans (like Cubans and Jews), because of the wealth they’ve attained in America, have transcended racism and the social obstacles they have historically encountered and thus can serve as exemplars of progress for other minorities.
It goes without saying that this narrative easily obscures the willful, systemic and intricate nature of American racism: it’s a quick and false reference for those who want to argue that the social decline and regress of other minority groups are self-incurred and that opportunities for socio-economic progress is guaranteed for, if not awaits, all communities that play by the rules. According to this logic, if America is to be multicultural, it is to be multicultural without subverting the dominant socio-economic logic and realities of American culture.
Chinese American wins Pulitzer
Photo by Jonathan Wiggs/Globe
Composer Zhou Long won the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for Music yesterday for “Madame White Snake,’’ the first opera commissioned by Opera Boston — and the first one he has written.
The prize is “really something heavyweight to me . . . I feel I have been recognized,’’ Zhou said by phone from his home in Kansas City, Mo. “I have been working very hard to blend the East and the West for years.’’
Story here.
What will $50,000 buy?
Why, an ad in the New York Times* talking about how sexual abuse by priests really isn’t so bad, after all.
*I will note I don’t know how much a full-page ad in the Sunday New York Times would run. But I’d guess it’s up there. Plus add on some more cash to print the ad in other major dailies, since I saw it in another paper as well.
Read on if you have the stomach for it. Here’s the short version: It wasn’t really so bad. Most of it was a long time ago. It was during the sexual revolution. Probably there are lots of liars unfairly accusing priests. Most priests didn’t do it. Blame the homosexuals. Other people are more guilty of it (hey, everybody does it!). The psychiatrists told us to do the wrong thing. Gitmo detainees have more rights than accused priests. Complainants are just “professional victims.” Think I’m exaggerating? Read the whole thing.
But here’s the kicker:
The refrain that child rape is a reality in the Church is twice wrong: let’s get it straight–they weren’t children and they weren’t raped. We know from the John Jay study that most of the victims have been adolescents, and that the most common abuse has been inappropriate touching (inexcusable though this is, it is not rape). The Boston Globe correctly said of the John Jay report that “more than three-quarters of the victims were post pubescent, meaning the abuse did not meet the clinical definition of pedophilia.” In other words, the issue is homosexuality, not pedophilia.
(Emphasis mine.)
Got that? They weren’t children and it was just “inappropriate touching.” Of course, 30 percent of those non-children were girls abused by men. And 100 percent of them were an abuse of power within a corrupt system that protected the abusers. So get this straight: It is outrageous that this happened. “Everybody does it” is not an excuse. But it is doubly outrageous that the church attempted to cover this abuse and left abusers in positions to abuse.
Full text of advertisement after the cut. Yes, I do know who Donohue is. And the church lauds him, so I guess it must feel comfortable having him as its spokesperson. Read the rest of this entry
