So I went to a community event the other day. Waited patiently at the refreshment table for a drink. There was only one person in front of me, but she was taking a very long time. Then right when she finished, a white woman stepped right up in front of me and helped herself.

(Yes, I do attribute this to her race.)

Anyway, so later I apparently was pointed out to this same woman as a person to know, and she came over and made some politeness noises. I was talking with a Latina woman at the time and I noted with some interest that the white woman didn’t acknowledge her. She just butted into the conversation.

Anyway, because I am so f*cking polite, I introduced them.

(Wait, it’s coming!)

So what happens? The white woman glances over and says, “Oh, I already KNOW Mary!”

One problem.

I wasn’t talking with Mary. Mary is Asian Indian. I was talking with Christina. And I introduced her as Christina. There’s maybe five inches difference between them in height. One of them has short hair and one has long hair. One’s hair is black and the other’s is reddish brown. I’d guess there’s also a thirty pound weight difference, and one of the women tends to dress very stylishly.

Later I find out that Mary’s children play with the white woman’s children, and they have kids in the same classroom, even.

On another note, somebody came up to me recently and made a lot of complimentary comments about the community service video I’m in. Except I’m not in it. She even asked me, “Are ya SURE?”

More and more children are being adopted from Africa. A Canadian news report asks if Africa is “The Next China?” One adoption agency representative in Ethiopia complained:

“I’ve had people call me and say, ‘Oh, I want a child just like Angelina Jolie.’ It’s very frustrating because we work for the children. I’m trying to place two brothers right now from Liberia. Nobody wants two boys. Everyone wants a girl,” she said. “I feel like sometimes we have families who want to go shopping.”

African adoptions have the potential for disaster with the differing mindsets of African and North American parents. It’s the consumerist “invisible hand” vs. the tradition-bound lending hand. There is no word for adoption in Swahili, for example, and parents who relinquish their children may not realize they are doing so permanently. Full story here.

It is common for Africans to send orphaned or impoverished children to live with richer relatives, says Nairobi-based UNICEF expert Margie de Monchy, who has spent decades working on child protection cases. Unlike in adoptions, the child remains in regular contact with the parents.

Monchy says networks of traffickers are exploiting this confusion between African custom and Western concepts of adoption. With some families willing to pay up to $30,000 for a Kenyan child, “It’s calculated, it’s organized, and anecdotal evidence suggests it’s increasing … throughout the region. It’s getting worse and it’s organized crime,” Monchy said.

Monchy says celebrities such as Madonna might have unwittingly contributed to the problem by raising interest in African adoptions.

The Ontario Human Rights Commission has concluded that racial profiling played a major role in the harassment of Asian Canadian fishermen. This inquiry was launched in November 2007 after numerous reports, including one in which a 73-year-old man was beaten unconscious and his son-in-law was thrown off a bridge.

In the United States, Du Doan’s murderer, John Haley, was charged with first degree murder in September 2007. I haven’t gotten any updates on this case, but ten bucks says he pleads to manslaughter or less.  As far as I can tell, he must be out on bond.

More stuff from the floppy disks. From a much longer essay I wrote a long time ago. I noted with some interest that I use the terms “non-white” and “minority” here–which I rarely use now.
—

… Although Nancy and I … are both as culturally American as Campbell’s Chicken Noodle Soup and Wonder Bread, and share a common upbringing and lifestyle that is the foundation of our friendship, one crucial difference separates us: Every day of her life, she walks around as a white person. Every day of my life, I am reminded I am not white, and sometimes I am treated differently for one reason alone.

That day, as we talked, it suddenly occurred to me that Nancy saw racist incidents like these as isolated acts committed by a few bad individuals. Racism did not touch her life. She was occasionally forced to look at it, but she would never feel it. I saw racism as ingrained within our society; I see and feel its evidence every day of my life.

When I heard a black couple was firebombed in Cicero, a predominantly all-white suburb of Chicago, I remembered the time someone tried to set fire in the foyer of my apartment after sending me anonymous threatening letters. I remembered visiting friends who lived in Cicero, only to have strangers tell me threateningly, “Your kind does not come to this side of Roosevelt Avenue,” when I got out of my car.

When I heard [redacted].

The racist incidents that I read about in the newspapers and that I hear in the news are not disjointed, disconnected events to me. They do not exist in a vacuum; they are not things that happen only to other people. They shock and frighten me, not just because they have happened in my own country, in my own state, in my own hometown, but because they embody a reality that I know to be true.

My fear is that racism is not acknowledged, that it is not taken seriously, that it is routinely denied. Even though evidence of racism permeates American society, lack of personal experience has led white people to discount evidence they have witnessed with their own eyes. Their whiteness is a shield that protects them; by the same token, they are unable to see past it.

When I speak of racism to white people, invariably the response is either a complete denial or dismissal, or I am told I am “oversensitive,” I am “injecting a racist slant” into a situation, I am “overreacting.” But I trust my own senses; I am confident in my own ability to interpret events as I see them. Overtly racist acts against non-whites are too numerous in American society to be easily dismissed as hypersensitivity on the part of the victims. More than 25% of the American people wear faces that are not white. Can the collective reality of our 25.9% be so severely distorted as to always imagine slight? Or do we simply see a reality that whites have never experienced and are therefore unable to acknowledge?

I do not believe in “white guilt”; I do not subscribe to the notion that white people must answer to the oppression of minorities because of the whiteness of their skin. Yet I believe that every white person walks around as an individual unencumbered by the preconceptions of others that are based solely on race, and is born with a sense of selfhood that no minority will never achieve. And in the presence of this selfhood, there is no under­standing of what it means to wear a face that marks every non-white person as foreign in the country of his or her birth.

Rest in peace, Irena Sendler.

A true hero, Sendler joined the Polish Underground. She started her work by transporting food and supplies to the Jewish ghetto. Later she began smuggling children out and hiding them with sympathetic families.

Sendler was arrested in 1943, was tortured (her legs and feet were broken), but she refused to disclose any information.

“Every child saved with my help and the help of all the wonderful secret messengers, who today are no longer living, is the justification of my existence on the Earth and not a title to glory.

“Over a half-century has passed since the hell of the Holocaust, but its specter still hangs over the world and doesn’t allow us to forget the tragedy.”

We previously wrote about Sendler here.

Omowale Akintunde, Multicultural Education v. 7 no. 2 (Winter 1999)

Racism is a systemic, societal, institutional, omnipresent, and epistemologically embedded phenomenon that pervades every vestige of our reality. For most whites, however, racism is like murder: the concept exists but someone has to commit it in order for it to happen. This limited view of such a multilayered syndrome cultivates the sinister nature of racism and, in fact, perpetuates racist phenomena rather than eradicates them. Further, this view of racism disguises its true essence, thus allowing its tenets to proliferate.

Racism conceived of in this way ignores the societal, systemic, institutional, and political institutions which both overtly and inherently ensure minority subjugation and protect white privilege. When racism is regarded in this way, it also helps white society to erect defense mechanisms to ignore its direct implication and involvement in the maintenance of white racism, white privilege, and the construction of “other.” After all, if racism is conceived of as the conscious employment of certain acts, using certain taboo terms (i.e., nigger, spic) and one does not consciously perform “racist” acts or utter certain taboo terms, then one can reasonably assert that one is not a racist.

This notion suggests that racism is an abstract hypothetical that functions outside of our human and social systems and that without conscious human choice cannot occur. This notion of racism and American society is illustrated in Conceptual Model 1 (see below).

Another view of racism in America, however, is that it is a phenomenon constructed by Americans socially defined as “White,” and that its primary role is to ensure that group’s primacy to the exclusion of all others at whatever cost. This view of racism refutes the notion that racism is an abstract hypothetical that exists outside of the social milieu that requires conscious and deliberate acts to manifest. Further, this view asserts that racism is integrally and inextricably bound to all of our “human” and social processes and that, in fact, American society itself is a function of racism and lies imbedded in racist ideology. This notion of racism and American society is illustrated in a Conceptual Model 2 (see below).

Racism is thus perceived of as abstract hypothetical cause for the emergence of other fallacious syndromes. If racism is perceived as functioning outside of societal processes and as having to be consciously chosen and enacted to become concrete reality then racism in theory can be practiced by anyone. That is, “non-Whites,” too, may engage in practicing racism and thus Whites themselves may be victims of racism.

Such a notion is exactly how racism is mostly perceived in American society, so that the possibility of deconstructing White supremacy, the progenitor and true underlying problem of racism and racist ideology, does not become the focus of racial investigation. That the entire infrastructure of American society is based upon and emanates from the Western canon; that European Americans raped the continent and decimated its indigenous peoples, instituted a system of society- and government-sanctioned chattel slavery for over three centuries; that the present population that is deemed “White” is still benefiting from these systems and institutions; these, it appears, are all points to be ignored.

By ignoring the historical specificity of the construction of race by “Whites,” as a tool to ensure that group’s supremacy and subsequent degradation of “others,” and by promoting the concept of racism as abstract hypothetical, White society not only can ensure that the system of White supremacy remains intact but can, in fact, successfully create smoke screens that actually implicate “others” in the maintenance of such a system.

The No Child Left Behind Act is not meeting the needs of Asian American students:

As Congress considers the reauthorization of NCLB
and other education reforms, legislators, policy makers,
and policy advocates must take into account the
needs of Asian American students, an often neglected
group. Contrary to stereotypes that cast Asian
Americans as model students of academic achievement,
many Asian American students are struggling,
failing, and dropping out of schools that ignore
their needs. Many immigrant youth are from working
class families who find themselves without adequate
resources necessary to succeed. Most school
districts do not provide sufficient services for
English Language Learners (ELL), especially those
who speak a language other than Spanish. Asian
language interpretation and translation services,
bilingual programs, or translated assessments are
hardly ever available even though they are essential.

From the Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund report (pdf document).

… that the officiant at Jenna Bush’s wedding was Kirbyjon Caldwell?

From a search that brought someone to this site: “Why are white people so racist?”

Answer: White people’s racism is a classic example of how rewards for bad behavior perpetuate that same problematic behavior. So let them have a couple of slaves or two, and next thing you know the idea that brown people are born to serve has become entrenched in the white mind. Because of course it’s great to have people to order around! Who wouldn’t want a slave, given the chance?

Of course, white people will all yelp, “But slavery was so long ago and I didn’t have anything to do with it!” (A friend related that on a first date, the other party turned to her and said, “What are black people complaining about? Slavery has been over for seventy years!”) But that assumes that history is meaningless.

Tell a racist joke at a party?  Wear an offensive Fukudome tee-shirt?  Mistake a black executive for a waiter at a party?  Ask an Asian American “Where do you come from?  No I mean, REALLY?”  Touch some hair?

There will always be tons of white people (and maybe even a few folks of color) who will laugh at the jokes and support ill-considered opinions.  And if one of those uppity brown folk just happens to voice an objection, there will be tons of white people (and maybe even a few folks of color) ready to leap to the defense.

Because, you see, it’s not about “real” racism.  It’s about who gets to define reality.

Oops, guess this isn’t so quick and dirty. One out of two ain’t bad.

“What kinda name is THAT?”

“Oh, it’s an American name,” I say.

“An American name? No, you know what I mean. That’s not an American name.”

“Sure it is,” I reply. “I’m an American, and that’s my name.”

“You know what I mean.”

“No, I’m sure I don’t. What exactly is an ‘American’ name?”

Heh, this is a lot of fun.