A Way to Understand American History

An original version posted on 3/10/2010 as "Time Is Right For New Social Studies Education after LAUSD Incident" @ Examiner.com

Three teachers at Wadsworth Elementary school in South Los Angeles were suspended for allegedly having students carry pictures of troubled former football player OJ Simpson, basketball player Dennis Rodman, and female impersonator RuPaul during a Black history month parade.

The Black history month parade is an annual event. Each class chose figures from the school-approved list, which dates back to 1985. While OJ Simpson was already on the list, Dennis Rodman, and Rupaul were allegedly written in via pencil.

First, second, and fourth grade students carried pictures of these controversial figures during the parade.

Despite having a remarkable college and professional football career, OJ Simpson has had numerous brushes with the law. He is currently serving time after being convicted of armed robbery and kidnapping in 2008.

Dennis Rodman, a former professional basketball player had been a public icon in the 1990s. Since his career officially ended in 2005, he has made appearances on celebrity shows and has had minor skirmishes with the law.

RuPaul has been a big hit within the entertainment industry as an actor, musician, and filmmaker. He has made numerous guest appearances on television, movies, and print media, and currently hosts the reality television show RuPaul's Drag Race. While he himself has had little public controversy, his entertainment personality is associated with lesbian, gay, and transgendered issues, which in the context of marriage has drawn national controversy.

The suspended teachers, who are white, have not been identified.

The controversy came in a Black History month that saw furious public debates over racism at UCSD and many other college campuses. Click here to read "Public debate over racism erupts after student theme party". Also, click here to read "Recapping the aftermath of Compton Cookout and sugggestions for change"

Perspective: Little sympathy for the teachers

The fact that someone, likely the three adult teachers would write in RuPaul and Dennis Rodman shows more than a conscious effort to make some sort of statement.

Making such a statement by using such an impressionable population as a vehicle to this message in an already tense climate where 5,200 LAUSD jobs are on the line, they should have fully anticipated the consequences. Click here to read "California's Public Education in Peril"

Sorry, no sympathy for those teachers here.

"Teaching is the art of changing the brain" says Biologist James Zull.

If these were true educators as opposed to the currently-employed hacks they appear to be, the focus would have been built on getting children to understand why or why not a Black history month is needed.

Based on the boldness of the statement they made, it doesn't appear that they have had that dialogue. They instead taught disrespect for peoples' cultures and traditions.

Their actions make you wonder what they've been telling these children all along and what other political views have bled over into their work.

We need to perceive of American history as a "family album"

I think if those teachers were grounded in a more critical understanding of history, I would be comfortable with them teaching again. If the Compton Cookout invitation writer was grounded in a more critical understanding of history, he wouldn't have so ignorantly tied Black history month with the ghetto culture.

History is not one big cluster of rote indisputable facts, names, and dates.

If I can make a metaphor about history in general, it is this: history is a series of pictures and albums strung together to make a coherent storyline to determine present and future courses of action.

Pictures and albums aren't meant to capture every angle. Sometimes they're blurry, sometimes they're clear. Sometimes the pictures are very representative of a person, sometimes they aren't.

Pictures capture points in history and are endlessly interpreted and judged, regardless of the original intent or focus of the photographer.

We say that in this age of Obama we want to look past race and have it be of minimal consequence. If we want to minimize that difference, the histories we tell students need to integrate people of color.

If we are to minimize the importance of ethnic or racial history months, like Black History month or Asian Pacific History month, we need to look at American history the same way we look at a family album.

Family members who are missing or are otherwise given scant attention in the album feel excluded and less likely to participate in family activities.

The "family album" works best if we equally represent all members of the American family.

Black Americans, many whose ancestors have been in the United States longer than many other Americans only have representatives in the metaphorical album involved in rebuffing slavery and asserting civil rights. It is as if civil rights was the only issue they were interested in.

In the American family album, we already have many landscape photos of people of color, not just black people, as if they are one monolithic entity.

For example, the average 4th grade social studies textbook about California will talk about the great Indian tribes. We only get a landscape picture of them.

We learn that the Chumash were expert canoe builders and had their own system of government. We do not get any sense however that there were any great Chumash individuals who initiated anything of significance. We do not learn of individuals with strong characteristics and traits.

These metaphorical landscape photos contrast sharply to the detailed protraits of white American individuals. In schools, museums, popular culture, we will get plenty of metaphorical and figurative photos of Thomas Jefferson, George Washington --- their mythical characteristics and traits, and most importantly achievements illustrated through popular fables.

With a focus on individual characteristics, we perceive of these individuals having made a difference for everyone. Because they made such a widespread difference, they can rightfully occupy the same place in history as entire groups of people. This feeds the social perception that white Americans do things that make a difference for everyone and are still the driving force behind any kind of decisionmaking.

Yes, school teachers will say a little something about Fredrick Douglass, W.E.B. DuBois, Marcus Garvey, Harriet Tubman, but they get painted as people merely responding to their own social problems. They are not perceived to have these mythic personalities, lacking illustrative stories and fables that could relate to people outside of the black community.

Not learning that individuals of color can take on mythic personalities as well fosters a widespread social perception that people of color act only in accordance with their racial or ethnic groups. As a result, many white Americans assume that people of color have allegiance first and foremost to their racial or ethnic group. From this point, everything they do can be perceived as responding to problems within their own little groups.

Black history month, like other ethnic history and heritage months are an attempt to show that black Americans have interests other than civil rights, and innovations. They should be celbrated because they are likely not going to be any other time.

The idea of Black history month comes from a history of segregation and discrimination which omitted the role of blacks in influencing American culture. Celebrating the month and people in it is celebrating of people overcoming a struggle.

To place less importance on Black history month or other ethnic history months, we need to make a firm commitment towards a "family album history."

The family album history should attempt to reveal a sense of interaction or trading of influence within the different demographics of American history. It isn't a story of extraordinary individuals, presidents, political figures, but a story of networks of individuals, mere human beings wielding their power through their connections with other people as they saw fit.

Breaking Down the Falsities of Texas Public School Social Studies' Curriculum

An original version posted on 5/18/2010 as "Deconstructing the Texas Calls for Social Studies Overhauls" @ Examiner.com

The past few months have seen an uptick in proposals across two states to radically reform public State education in Social Studies and US History.

Officially signed into law by Governor Jan Brewer on May 11th, Arizona banned ethnic studies classes in public education because of what supporters say are displays of "ethnic chauvanism."

Most controversial in the law are provisions which ban courses "designed primarily for students of a particular ethnic group" and "advocate ethnic solidarity instead of the treatment of pupils as individuals." The courses affected include Mexican-American/Chicano Studies, African-American Studies, and Asian Studies, which according to Tom Horne, Superintendent of Schools in Arizona, "divides students up, just like the old South."

If public schools do not adhere to law, they stand to lose state funding. The LA Times reported that the Tucson Unified School District's 14-year old Chicano studies program was a main target of the state law.

The latest call for reform for social studies reform will be decided in Texas tomorrow on May 19th when the State Board of Education will vote on whether to pass a list of proposed changes.

The Texas Board of Education released its 5th and Final draft of required Social Studies curriculum for public schools in April. Much contention has arisen over highlighting the influence of religion on the founding fathers with a notable de-emphasis on Thomas Jefferson's influence and the "unintended consequences" of big government programs such as the New Deal or the War on Poverty. Read the document here.

Also included is a call for a "Celebrate Freedom" week.

Perspective: Texas Proposal aims at selective truth

I grew up learning that the truth was the most important thing to aim for in history.

As I've come up in my education, I've learned that history isn't necessarily about telling one objective truth, but about rounding up primary sources and having subjects share their stories about events.

They used parts of American history to invoke a sense that America is rooted in exceptionality, or in other words "being better" than other people. I am quite sure that this type of thinking hints at a truth, but I am not sure that it represents the entire truth.

History is dynamic, always being made, and contains an infinitude of stories to be understood in one neat way.

If American history can be understood as a big collection of snapshot pictures, Texas is taking only the most flattering portraits of American policy and its conservative bases, but catching only invasive paparazzi voyeuristic ones of liberal and international views.

The view presents US history as every event in naturally and eventually agreeing upon or evolving into whatever happens to be the status quo.

The Texas brand of social studies is bent on suggesting that the origins of equality were already implemented in the document. They had been trying to say that the Declaration of Independence which was declared in 1776 was really the stimulus behind undoing slavery in 1865, how it allowed for women's rights movements in the 1920s, and the driver behind diversity we came to accept in law by 1965.

Saying that origins of equality were already in the Declaration of Independence gives off the impression that equal opportunity was all only a matter of rationalized legislation, like changes were all going to happen anyway, minimizing the struggles of different peoples.

The document is based on minimization of the negative impacts of US Foreign policy and conservative domestic policy.

They really want to call capitalism, "free enterprise" in attempt to negate its negative connotations. If were going to play this game of calling everything by a more positive name, let's call communism, socialism or Marxism by their intention-based positive phrase too: "people's needs-based system."

The way they plan to represent other countries is particularly troubling in their selective application of certain loaded and controversial terminology. Bothersome is their selective employment of the word "imperialism."

Traditionally, "imperialism" has been used to describe US foreign policy in the turn of the 19th century into the 20th century. However, notice how imperialism is something only the Japanese do.

• "...explain the major causes and events of World War II, including the German invasions of Poland and the Soviet Union, the Holocaust, Japanese imperialism, the attack on Pearl Harbor, the Normandy landings, and the dropping of the atomic bombs."

This clause is buried deep in the document and very specific. I only read about Japanese imperialism and a broad "European" imperialism. I didn't read anything about American, France, German, Italian, Belgian, Portugese or Spanish imperialism. It is merely German "invasion" of Poland and Soviet Union, no mention of the driving ideology of Nazism, while the Japanese take on a label of "imperialism" as if Japanese people were inherently imperialistic.

Equally troubling is the framing of the Palestine and Israel conflict. They use loaded terminology to circle Palestinians and Arabs, nonchalantly labeling them "terrorists" and pretending that State of Israel wasn't established under much controversy. By framing it as the Arabs rejecting the state of Israel, it makes it seem as if the Arabs were the problem.

The only things the Texas State Board of Education wants students to openly analyze and question are the people and movements that they decidedly don't like. For example, the document calls for "analyzing the unintended consequences of affirmative action and Lyndon B. Johnson's Great Society." There is also a call to "Analyzing the effectiveness of the approach" taken by the Black Panthers versus the "philosophically persuasive" tone of Martin Luther King Jr."

It's peculiar how "consequences" and "effectiveness" are a cause for concern with equal opportunity and civil rights programs.

While given the freedom to analyze the tactics used in civil rights era movements, there doesn't appear to be any similar mandate to analyze the "unintended consequences" of the "conservative resurgeance" of the 1980s or the mandated "Celebrate Freedom Week" itself.

The "conservative resurgeance" was a period that saw Ronald Reagan triple the national debt by cutting taxes while cutting social programs. His great work was being able to firmly instill into the American consciousness the image of the black, undeserving "welfare queen", a distasteful and ultimately divisive image upon which a generation of conservative and tea partiers have used to drum up distaste towards social programs.

Texas: Giving a blueprint for Eugenicist thought

The image of the welfare queen is still alive and well. It's an image of dependency, laziness, and all-around incompetence that continually informs popular perception and legislative decision-making.

The image pervades the way Texas plans to do social studies and teach people about America in the 21st century. They do not give people of color or perceived predecessors any credit for their own advances. It's as if any advancement they have made was a result of "other people's" actions, which by default tends to mean "white people."

For example, when talking about the cultures whose people appear to descend from what is now known as Mexico, the only way to understand them is as outgrowths of people prior to them. The people prior to them are Greece and Rome.

• "...compare the major political, economic, social, and cultural developments of the Maya, Inca, and Aztec civilizations and explain how prior civilizations influenced their development"

Why is there no need to study how prior civilizations influenced the development of Greece or Rome?

Its as if Greece or Rome were people who self-generated themselves and fathered all our ideas, hence fitting this narrative of self-sufficiency coming from one race, the White one.

While the white people were thinking up great ideas in the West, the sparsely populated brown-skinned peoples were just waiting around to be inspired by them.

If white people were the originators of ideas and it is presented that way, it follows that rationally and naturally they would be entitled to ownership over the land; everything in their view was earned fairly. This mentality follows that minimal benefit can be gained from immigration or the infusion of different cultures, which has actually shown to be the opposite in some studies.

They want students to learn that everything of consequence emerged from Europe without any influence or contact from any other group of people whatsoever.

Never mind that Islam and Arabics, some heavy targets in popular American media today for their way of thinking, were responsible for innovations in the medieval era, making contributions to what we label now as "Western medicine." Never mind that the very number system we use today would not have been possible with Roman numerals, but also took Eastern thought to come up with the idea of zero to make the number system work.

The idea of dependency where people from minority cultures need to wait around for white males to come to the rescue is reflected in the way they represent contemporary battles for equal opportunity.

• "Explain actions taken by people to expand economic opportunities and political rights, including those for racial, ethnic, and religious minorities as well as women, in American society"

This provision reads as if women, racial, ethnic, or religious minorities took little or action on their own behalf. They needed "people" to swoop in save the day and are ultimately dependent on majority action.

The study of US geography also carries a Eugenicist bent.

Specifically, they want students to identify "the effects of population growth and the impacts on physical environment." For over 100 years, this has been a pseudo-scientific way to criticize immigrant populations.

If they were really concerned about the physical environment, children should learn that resources tend to be concentrated in the hands of very few people, and continued hyper-consumption combined with a culture of disposal and landfills, those kind of human activities are the real harm to the physical environment, not necessarily certain demographic groups.

For more analysis of the Texas curriculum proposal:

NY Times deconstructing Texas

The Nation deconstructing Texas

The Nation deconstructing Conservatives who use history

The Social Memory of a Sports Message Board Community on a Divisive Figure

An original version posted on 7/23/2009 as "Message Board Posting: Perception, Language, Memory" @ AMMMO

I think the ripe topic for this is the Chicago Bulls message boards online.

At least for me.

Even if I detest the Chicago Bulls management at this very moment (see Ben Gordon post below), I'm quite addicted to at least following their progress, and after 8 years of recreational posting, I've come to the conclusion that I can't quite get the Bulls nor the message board communities out of my system.

Everything I've learned about arguing and everyday reasoning way back to my SAT test-taking days to my first days studying linguistic anthro, I've learned from recreational message board posting. I figured that much after picking verbal arguments in AOL chatrooms and later sports message boards. As an enthused student of AP US history in 11th grade I aimed to pick apart Republican/Conservative message board responses by referring to moments in history analagous to current conditions. It was a spitting image reflection of what my teacher did to white Republican kids during class, manifested and reinacted in the message board space, race-less, status-less, where I felt comfortable.

I used to go out there thinking that if I could show the facts and nothing but facts, that people would automatically click and "get it." They would understand my point of view and perhaps change their minds.

But I dare say that that has almost never been the case. It takes much more than facts to move anyone. I think it takes almost a religious conversion, meaning a conversion that involves a shift of the body, mind, and soul. In psychological terms, that means moving an entire schema of relations. There are no power tactics available other than cyber-bullying or some kind of fixed groupthink within a message board community.

From my experience, no one really ever admits that they're wrong. And if they do admit a mistake, it's probably because they made an explicit prediction (i.e. predicted 50 wins, player X to suck), and/or they can distance their current thoughts from past transgressions, that is, they can explain away how they were wrong before, but not likely to be this time around.

On Perception and Memory of these Message Boarders:

I was and still continue to be amazed at how fans can watch one basketball game and yet still make different observations.

These aren't flash-in-the-pan comments made, but there is a long-standing community of posters. While there is a steady stream of newcomers, there's also posters who I've come to "know." They will occasionally make reference to their jobs, occasionally talk about their personal experiences, share photos of their newborn children, and even share how they've lost their jobs, or ask for prayers.

So I feel like I've grown emotionally with this online "community", even though I only "know" them through what I've read, but have managed to do so consistently for about 8 years.

But there was and remains a lot of fighting between fans. Fans of the SAME team, usually about the transactions made.

My favorite player, Ben Gordon, was the topic of plenty of message board fighting within the Chicago Bulls message board community, and will probably continue to be a center of controversy now that he's not with the Bulls anymore and moved to a division rival.

I was amazed that no matter how many memorable moments I brought up, no matter how many wins I thought he brought us because of his momentum-swinging style, the same cadre of posters would continue to criticize him. There were very different degrees and reasons for dislike, but for sake of my cognitive sanity, I will simply label them the "haters." Not because I really believed these guys "hated" him as a person, but simply didn't like him on the team.

The same old criticisms by people I perceived as "haters" would be front and center: "he's selfish, he's playing for a contract and not for the team, he doesn't play defense, it won't matter much if we lose him."

I was always curious of what episodic memories anchored their perceptions of his playing ability. Based on what some haters" wrote in the official appreciation thread for him, they could only talk about general semanticized memories about him. The general semanticized memories were memories of habits they weren't fond of:

They cited only general habits ala

"gets posted up by bigger guards"

"dribbling the ball of his foot"

"shooting over 3 defenders"

In the discussion of habits, they could only abstract their memories about him. "Abstracting" means that you forget a few moments and extract the relevant moments to fit with an abstract and general statement. For example, if you have it burned into your cortex that he's "selfish", and make the statement "Ben Gordon is selfish", you'll predispose yourself to remembering only when he was selfish, and filter out any moments when he was "not selfish."

From these general statements, I suspected that these posters seemed to listen more to commentary, hearsay, and analysis about him from reporters and talk radio rather than actually watching the game for themselves. I suspect they remember more verbal commentaries and merely parroted their bullshit on the message boards. As was shown by Jonathan Schooler, verbal memories have been shown to interfere with the expression of episodic memories.

Other than the very last game he played as a Chicago Bull, which was Game 7 against the Boston Celtics in a very memorable series, I was particularly struck by the inability to cite specific moments compared to his advocates and supporters.

So the interesting finding was that advocates and supporters present more episodic memories, while haters present more semanticized abstract memories. The haters seem to have more memory of general descriptions and characteristics as opposed to concrete occurrences.

Episodic memories are rooted in concrete occurrences, while the semanticized abstract memories are mental shortcuts.

The Treatment of White Youth Vandals vs. Black Youth Vandals

An original version posted on 4/13/2009 as "White Guy Tough Talk: White Vandalism, Black Vandalism, 'Other Vandalism'" @ AMMMO

Highly fascinating candid camera via the Everyday Sociology Blog via ABC's 20-20. "Fascinating" meaning I'm extremely surprised that network TV actually does this kind of thing anymore.

In the first video, three white kids are smashing a car in a park. People's reactions? Numerous confrontations and suspicious eyes, but only one phone call to the police.

Incidentally, there was one phone call to the police from that same park, but it was about black kids sleeping in a Lexus. Apparently, they were planning to rob somebody.

In the second video, three black kids are smashing a car in the same park. People's reactions? Healthy distances and 10 calls to the police.





Ain't nothing we don't already know, except it was produced for a mass audience.

Observations on the experiment and one note about how the media handled the story:

1. Look out how far they were: When passersby went by the black vandals, seems like they were more likely to keep their distance, but take more action. Taking from Ruth Benedict, if I were to ascribe a personality to that context and pervading culture in that park in Ridgewood, NJ it seems to be that of passive-aggression.

Black kids weren't people to talk with. They were objects to be thrown at to the police system.

The passersby don't want to deal with it, but they "know" its wrong and want to outsource the engagements and handling to the police. Seems like the popular way in a highly outsourced, specialized society to deal with cultural, ethnic, and racial difference. Let somebody else handle it.

2. The Demographics of the people who did the confronting: There seemed to be a gender and racial divide within the people who actually chose to confront the kids. It's interesting how in the first video with the white kids, it was a bunch of white males that did the calling out, barking out tough guy police talk back at them. They didn't appear to be afraid to walk right up at them.

Meanwhile, in the second video with the black kids, its one white woman, a Latina woman, and an Asian lady jogger who actually confront the boys.

3. The newscast gave no credit to the Asian Lady. Also interesting within the broadcast itself is how the resident sociologist highlights the extreme courage of one of the white guys who confronted the white vandals with the assistance of his wife, but doesn't care to talk about the Asian lady who right went up to the black kids by herself and actually struck up a 4-minute conversation with them. Both pretty dangerous situations, but I guess the white guy tough talk is the only stuff worth showing on television and commenting on TV. Maybe if that Asian lady did it in a Geisha costume, she'd a gotten more air time.

No doubt that this is a pretty good popular revelation, but I wonder what the reaction is to Latino, Arab/Indian, and Asian kids doing the same.

First Memories and Episodes with Race in 1990s Los Angeles

An original version posted on 6/7/2010 as "Graff Board: Share Your First Experience(s) with Race @ AMMMO

I really really really like reading more of what people think and have experienced. It's why I spend hours reading message boards from sports to politics to science. It's why I'm going to study how people think.

Whenever I read what people think, I'm not really judging the intelligence or the quality of what people have to say, I'm just wondering about the worlds they've went to and through to arrive at their viewpoints.

When I was in college and organizing kids, my favorite activity was taking a piece of butcher paper and having kids write about a topic. I saw it as getting people to give their 2 cents and helping them get engaged in a way that couldn't be explained primarily through lecture or verbal conversation.

When I wasn't in college and organizing kids, my other favorite activity during that time was mural and graff touring friends through LA even though I knew absolutely nothing and pretended like I was doing something innovative when it was little more than walking through Boyle and Lincoln Heights.

When I ran the LA Marathon in 2007 and 2008, I ran with T-shirts signed by people who just wrote whatever responding to the prompts of "struggle is..." and "what do you hope for".

So between getting people to write on butcher paper, (loosely) following murals and graffiti, and getting people to write on my marathon shirts, I was just really interested in what people expressed or were willing to express in public.

And being in cyberspace, the interest remains the same. The online message board or comments section on a piece of news or item of interest serves as that metaphorical piece of butcher paper.

However, the impersonal nature of that kind of communication doesn't leave much room for people you actually know to talk about their first-hand experiences on big topics. On message boards and comments, unless there's a developed community, there aren't too many people sharing focused first-hand experiences on big topics like racism, politics, religion.

I want to change that!

I want to know more about those first-hand experiences and memories. I think people form a lot of their world views early on in childhood and adolescence and it would be interesting to unpack some of our early childhood memories.

So now I'm using part of this website's real estate to do something collaborative with the very few people who read my blog: A collaborative Graffiti Board, full of original thought, first-hand experiences and early childhood memories.

Here's how it will work:

I'll start with a post about a topic.

Then, whoever else reads can join in. In the comments section of my blog or this facebook note, you can either theorize about my experience or share your own experience and memories (most important) or linking their answer in my comments to their own blog.

So for the first "Graff Board", I'm asking people to share their first ever experiences with race as many important points as you could remember.

So here are my first ever experience(s) with race straight from childhood and adolescence. These aren't in any particular order, feel free to point out stuff.

1) Singing U.N.I.T.Y's hook ("who you callin' a bitch") at the Lucky's supermarket at random as a 9-year old. A middle-aged black dude was staring at me like "WTF are you doing", either because he was shocked that a young kid was using profane language in public or because I was a whitish type kid.

Whatever it was, that disapproving stare was the first time I remember I felt like I didn't belong doing a certain activity. That was the first time I felt that hip-hop or rap, which I felt "belonged" to black people, wasn't an activity I felt I could "belong" to.

2) I remember thinking while in Daycare in the 2nd grade, there was no such thing as ugly black women. I was like "wow, they're all so beautiful." This was at a Catholic school where the population was a mix of Filipino, Latino, white, but not so many black people. I don't know why or how, it was just something I thought.

3) The dude I considered my best friend in my early elementary school years was the one black kid in our class, Erik Wade and this other kid named Christian who had the coolest Ninja Turtles kick ball.

Erik invited me to his house for his 7th or 8th birthday. Our elementary school was located in Los Feliz, but for some reason Erik lived really far away, which I didn't "understand" was South LA.

I was wondering why no one else from school was there at his party.

I remember accidentally running into some other family's house by mistake and thinking "oh, they're black too...OK!"

In retrospect, knowing my dad as he is now, the political views he apparently holds steadfast too, and the racism that some Filipinos do hold, I am really surprised that he would go out of his way to take me to South LA like it was anyone else's birthday and how he and my mom would both welcome Erik and his mom to my birthday parties.

4) In Kindergarten at Commonwealth Elementary where initially I was bused to Pico Elementary because I wasn't prone to speaking and had a Spanish last name, I was taken to an ESL class.

5) In high school, the prestigious Loyola High School, I felt almost obligated to hang out primarily with the other Filipinos. I knew coming into the school that it was the "white school", pretty much the only school I knew in LA (which in my personal childhood geography didn't include West or East LA).

That said, I also became privy to the racially-segregated geographic differences. All the Filipinos were from Eagle Rock or Glendale. Some Latinos came from the actual neighborhood. The white kids came from either the Palisades or Pasadena, neither of which were part of my personal childhood geography. Far as I was concerned as a non-driving 9th, 10th, 11th grader those places were each at least an hour away.

6) When I was about 11 years old, I had just decided that I was going to be like my godsister, Cheryl and become part of the "cool teenager" category. I was going to like rap and hip-hop. My official entrance into rap and hip-hop started with Coolio's Gangsta's Paradise, and I started listening to Power 106 and 92.3 the Beat.

When I went to Disneyland for my little sister's birthday and I was standing in line waiting for a ride, somehow I got into conversation with a white person named "Doug." Him being a white guy, I assumed he was into rock and roll.

For the next 10 minutes, I went on to bash KROQ.

I sincerely thought I was "educating" him.

/First time I was really discriminating against someone.

7) After I had officially declared myself "into" rap and hip-hop, I decided I liked all kinds of TV shows with black people too, whether it was In the House with LL Cool J, Wayans Bros, Fresh Prince, to Malcolm and Eddie, to Sparks, to Homeboys in Outer Space.

I remember someone actually brought up those shows in class.

The teacher said she wasn't familiar with any of those shows.

8) "Goody two shoes" was a marker of "whiteness" for me.

I marked the few white kids in elementary school as "goody two shoes." I wasn't that, least in elementary school, but I had a strange affinity for drawing people with collared shirts and imagining what it was like to live in the suburbs.

So there you have it, my first experiences with race as a kid and as an adult.

Now either say something back about my experiences, your first memories, episodes on race.

The Answer to the Weight of Stereotypes on Test Performance: Get Amnesia!

An original version posted on 4/4/2009 as "Stereotype Threat, Obama Effect, and Social Memory" @ AMMMO

It's a question I've been interested in since I read Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel when he compared his academic knowledge of biology with the knowledge of "uneducated" healers. It's a question that evolution, Darwinism explained away by saying that colored people were closer to apes than "normal", "regular" white humans.

So...

The question: Why aren't brown, black, yellow people the ones coming up with scientific and technological innovation?

Why do disparities in educational attainment, test scores, income persist between racial and ethnic demographics persist? Why aren't people seeing that this is their opportunity to pull themselves up by the bootstraps?

Most saliently, most importantly, and straight to the point, are people of color inherently retarded or something that they can't do simple stuff like go to college and earn middle-class income jobs?

Those questions act as reinforcements of a documented social psychological phenomena called the Stereotype Threat.

Countering the stereotype threat, in comes research on a phenomena called the Obama Effect, described here by the Situationist, reported first via the NY Times:

[R]esearchers have documented what they call an Obama effect, showing that a performance gap between African-Americans and whites on a 20-question test administered before Mr. Obama’s nomination all but disappeared when the exam was administered after his acceptance speech and again after the presidential election.

...In the study made public on Thursday, Dr. Friedman and his colleagues compiled a brief test, drawing 20 questions from the verbal sections of the Graduate Record Exam, and administering it four times to about 120 white and black test-takers during last year’s presidential campaign.

...On the initial test last summer, whites on average correctly answered about 12 of 20 questions, compared with about 8.5 correct answers for blacks, Dr. Friedman said. But on the tests administered immediately after Mr. Obama’s nomination acceptance speech, and just after his election victory, black performance improved, rendering the white-black gap “statistically nonsignificant,” he said.

Even though it's a very small sample and over a small time period on one test, it's something to be looked at and hopefully taken into account with our mega-informocracy and online social networking.

The claim is that Obama's position as the most powerful man of one of the most powerful nations on the planet and his identity as the product of a multi-racial demographic primed the African-American testtakers for confidence. The idea is that those clips of Obama, a positive achievement by an individual who is categorized within "African-American" seem to work subconsciously on its viewers' confidence and is directly correlated to their improvements in their scores.

With priming figuring prominently in this study, this should bring up the question of what everyday media from the school to the public and popular discourse primes students from historically disadvantaged demographics to think the way they do.

This brings up questions of social memory: what do demographics internalize and take with them as somewhat important when they take the test? What kind of baggage do they carry with them? How does that baggage manifest itself in the unconscious and implicit memories?

Trailing off my posting on identity and amnesia, I'm thinking that if members of the African-American demographic did not carry with them the socially-constructed and reinforced, yet unconscious meme that they were inherently intellectually inferior in the first place, there wouldn't be as many gaps.

It seems like there would need to be a mass social amnesia about that meme.

Speedy Gonzales and How He Influenced My Childhood Views of Latinos

An original version posted on 5/12/2010 as "Influence of Speedy Gonzales on my Perception of Latinos as a Kid" @ AMMMO

Looney Tunes was a fixture of 1990s Nickelodeon and my TV-watching experience as a kid.

I didn't particularly aim to watch Looney Tunes, but when it was on, I guess it was alright, it was something to keep me occupied.

Speedy Gonzales was a pretty prominent recurring character whose sole purpose was to make Sylvester the cat look stupid. I hated that, I really wanted the cat to finally catch that little mouse.

Speedy was just one in a line of physically little, quick-moving, thinking characters that included Jerry from Tom and Jerry, Tweety bird, the Roadrunner, and the kids who actually got the Trix in those commercials. These little, quick-moving characters were always elusive, and I couldn't help but be annoyed at each one of them.

I wonder if the 1950s narrative for these cartoon characters was structured so that we would dislike these nimble little characters. The storylines were constructed in a way in which you wondered if those physically little, quick-moving and thinking characters would get caught.

It was always a narrative of evasion (which probably fit in with the time). So while the characters looked physically defenseless, you knew they would always get away with something, almost like criminals.

The narratives never centered around the Speedy's, Tweety's, Roadrunners and a question of when they would overcome these big predatorial characters. It was about when the big predatory characters, the Sylvesters, the Trix Bunny, the Coyote, devising all kinds of plans, would finally win.

Speedy arguably had the most personality of all those little evasive characters. His personality was marked by his ethnicity, which was emphasized way beyond belief: he was undeniably, thoroughly Mexican, from the sombrero to the accent to the use of Spanish.

Arriba, arriba, andale, andale.

I remember going to Spanish class the first day of my freshman year in high school thinking, "I'm finally going to learn what those words mean!"



The video above of Speedy Gonzales is quite relevant to today's debate over immigration.

You've got the immigration boundary, the all-male "border crossers" trying to get cheese (i.e. "stealing our jobs"), and this ineffective "border defense", the cruder older stereotypes of the Latino lover, and immigrants as these opportunistic rats.

Based on current socially accepted rhetoric of "catching illegal immigrants", "breeders", and border patrol video games, I wonder how people might've been influenced in their thinking by mere "entertainment."

People say Looney Tunes was "just" a cartoon, entertainment, as if thoughts can be neatly packaged away into separate compartments of our brains, not ever influencing things like our political beliefs or views on race.

I think things in general would be much easier if our brains actually were structured that way. But our brains are not computers and as was pointed out by Gary Marcus in his book Kluge, our brains are imperfect. This means we are not always rational, controlled, and we don't always act the way we intend to. So we may not always have the most perfectly formed opinions.

Our opinions on politics and race today might've originated from something we don't remember or don't really like to admit. We often don't remember the sources of these beliefs, but we cling to them because they are convenient and our lifestyles have been built around them. I think very few people if any are convinced to change beliefs based on hard, cold factual or statistical arguments. If anything, for both sides of any argument, tools like statistics are just rhetorical weapons wielded from high-minded individuals to convince everyone of their personal extreme rationality.

I tend to think that most opinions on politics, race, even sports originate in early motivations developed from emotional reactions. Our emotional reactions develop from social environments and communities.

I don't think people in general realize how irrationally formed some of their beliefs and perceptions are, particularly those involving race, ethnicity, and politics. I think most people, particularly those who aren't made conscious of their race and ethnicity, latch on to certain beliefs and stereotypes of other races and ethnicities early on in their lives.

As a kid, Speedy stirred up a sentiment of annoyance in me. He was so annoyingly evasive. So I disliked him. By association, I ended up not liking some of his traits, like the fact that he was dirty brown or spoke "broken" English.

I knew that not every Mexican actually talked or acted like Speedy or his friends, but I felt like some of the way they speak was what I observed the way some Latinos in real life spoke and were generally dirty-looking, especially the jornalero types. The stereotype had a grain of truth, I thought.

And so in grade school, when I went to a neighborhood friend's house who was Guatemalan, I saw that he was brown and lived pretty dirtily, unconsciously confirming a stereotype. The friends he brought over from public school were also dirty, especially when one time they played on my makeshift kiddy basketball court, and my finger accidentally touched on dude's tongue. I sniffed my finger and it smelled foul.

Later in grade school for a school project, I had to go to a Mexican's house. I was almost pleasantly surprised to find out how clean he was because he was sort of a big dude and always kinda smelled foul.

I wasn't out there pointing this out to either one of my friends; these were just things running in my head --- caricatures of little dirty brown Speedy Gonzales juxtaposed with confirmed stereotypes of real life people.

It's not like I had anything else in my streaming experience of television, school, or real life experience (in LA no less) to dispel these wholly irrational caricatures of Mexicans/Latinos.

All I knew is that it was wrong to discriminate against any of them or any people or say bad things about them (or any other people of color, much like myself).

All I learned was not to intentionally do bad things around them or anyone else, and everything would be alright.

I didn't learn exactly how to be cool with them, what good food they had, how clean most of them were, you know stuff that we could actually connect on. All I learned was how to joke about their different stereotypes and not take those too seriously.

The problem with the widespread public idea that Speedy Gonzales is "just entertainment" or was about "jokes" is that I'm not sure there is much out there to make a better attempt at representing Mexicans for other people. It's as if their non-White racial and ethnic categories are only out there to be punchlines and caricatures. I could probably tell you more about how annoying Speedy G. than how great Cesar A was.

The Racial Identity of Your Favorite Sports Protagonist Does Matter

An original version posted on 2/3/2008 as "Your Leader's Identity" @throwascrewinit.blogspot.com

In the American team sports that I follow both on TV and online be it the NBA, NCAA football, or the NFL, I see black, white, pacific Island, Spanish-speaking players and coaches emerging all the time. It’s nice because I definitely didn’t see much of that growing up, if at all.

Growing up and not seeing my culture, my people represented was the kind of thing that made me question why the hell I had to be Filipino.

Why did I have to be a culture that no one’s heard or talked about? Nowhere to be seen on ESPN. How the heck would I ever become famous or even get on a newspaper (where I wasn’t being described as a murder suspect or an FBI wish list) with a name like I had? Delas Armas anyone? Could they even fit that in the back of a jersey? We used to joke that the last name Delespiritusanto on the back of a jersey would have to come full circle.

However, At least nowadays in sports, I’m seeing little trinklets of multiculturalism. More folks from different races and ethnicities in sports representing.

While that counts as a few steps forward, I ask myself what power do these people of yellow, black, brown-skinned identities hold?

When observing fans of all sports on message boards, forums, comments after articles, I noticed one thing: people really really love the idea of the white guy as the head honcho, top dog, the leader. People will fight hard to have the white guy be the guy on top.

It’s why a white guy like Kirk Hinrich, the Chicago Bulls’ point guard automatically gets compared to players like Steve Nash, the NBA MVP and hall-of-famer John Stockton, despite not having any of their abilities AT ALL.

Those guys were actually known for passing the ball, and making good decisions with the ball.

From my own observation, Hinrich did/does little of the described activities above. Instead, Hinrich dribbles the basketball aimlessly around the court, and panics when time is running out. The man is nowhere near their class and basically has earned his prestige because he shares their pigmentation in a league where the pigmentation is generally much darker.

The guy is not even that good on this team. He’s had his starting spot on the team saved for him ever since he’s been a rookie — he’s the only guy in the Bulls backcourt who hasn’t had to fight for playing time despite his lack of actual impact.

Since he’s not really that talented, people make stupid unquantifiable, highly subjective statements: “he’s a 2-way player, he plays really great defense.” Even more outrageous is that this guy has had one of the worst fall-offs, yet he’s never involved in trade rumors or criticized nearly as much as his more impactful, higher-scoring, clutch counterpart Ben Gordon.

Ben Gordon is currently the team’s leading scorer, despite being relegated to the bench, receiving a lowball contract offer, and being ignored on offense by Hinrich. However, when compared to Hinrich, it’s his negative traits that are emphasized: he’s undersized and one-dimensional.

The naturalness of a white leader also applies to another sport I follow. The societal expectation that the best leaders would be white is probably why people at Bruinsnation couldn’t stomach the idea of a Norm Chow (Asian) and Dewayne Walker (black)-led team.

I think their distaste for those two as coaching candidates was not necessarily rooted in their race, but it seems that the fans at that site had a tendency to assume the worst with anyone outside of their fellow white folks.

Norm Chow, Chinaman, apparently had no "personality" to get the job done. They cited his lack of experience, intensely putting out the question why a 61-year old (Asian) guy (in a white and black league) hadn’t had a head coaching job. This ire drawn despite the years of coaching experience, coaching some of the most elite quarterbacks in college football history, and having won a national championship.

There "must" have been something wrong with Norm. There had to be.

Dewayne Walker was characterized by the Bruinsnation writers as a self-promoting Karl Dorrell-holdover. This despite being respected as the incumbent UCLA Bruin defensive coordinator.

Together, Norm Chow and Dewayne Walker as the leading coach candidates, earned the derisive name “Choker.”

I looked for nicknames attributed to other (white) coaching candidates.

Needless to say, no other coaching candidates (most of whom were even LESS qualified than these two) received such names.

There was “Slick Rick” for Rick Neuihesel, but that disappared once it was clear that Walker and Chow were being considered as coaching candidates.

Nothing personal against the new white guy at UCLA, Rick Neuheisel, I admit I like what Rick’s been able to do so far as far as the working-togetherness of his hired guns and recruiting, but the same people who were pulling strongly for him initially balked at the idea of him becoming coach.

The Bruinsnation people thought we had run a lackluster coaching search campaign.

It seems like they only really rallied around Rick Neuheisel NOT because he was a effusively qualified and overly strong candidate (he definitely brings that baggage of cheating with him) but only because he was NOT Norm Chow or Dewayne Walker. He was decidedly not the "timid, stoic, cold" white guy nor was he the "self-promoting" black dude who since he was black obviously was still attached to everything from the fired black coach.

In a twist of irony, when it was announced that Norm Chow and Dewayne Walker would be retained on staff, these same fans calling Chow and Walker, Choker were going apeshit over their hirings.

They were most happy when it happened because in their own words,”it was Rick Neuheisel’s choice” as if white people’s choices are the only good decisions made. It was Rick Neuheisel’s choice, so naturally, it had to be good and trustworthy.

I wonder what it would be like had it been the inverse in any way, with Neuheisel as a coordinator, and Chow and Walker as the guys running things.

When we jump back to professional basketball, with Kirk Hinrich/Ben Gordon, fans like to do much of the same. They will characterize and put the players of color as successful in one-dimensional, specialized roles, but not broad, leadership ones.

Leadership, colored people, never that. One dimensional scoring guard, offensive coordinator, defensive coordinator, as opposed to 2-dimensional player, quarterback, and head coach.

For years, people have talked about the issue of the leadership roles being assumed by people of color, but it’s probably been a “minor” issue or something just not talked about.

The paucity of black owners, black coaches, black quarterbacks in sports where the number of players who are black are high is not really a social justice issue, but I think it reflects some lessons about the way our society in the US of A works.

In general in this context, it’s become “natural” for white people to be “our” leaders. They need to be the decisionmakers because they’re usually defaulted and perceived as the ones with the experience, the education, etc, especially when running against a person of color.

What bothers me is that we as a society don’t question what exactly makes their decisions better or how they end up with all the experience and education in the first place.

We've relied on white leaders for so long that its weird and unexpected by the society to not have any. Without a white guy as leader, it’s unnatural and odd, or so my dad implies when discussing how weird it is to have a president by the name of Obama.

Quotes: On Why Asian-American Legendary Coordinator Norm Chow Did Not Get a Job as a Head Football Coach

"You know, it's possible that Chow's not been getting these jobs because, you know, he's Asian. If you believe that racism plays a part in the lack of minority hiring in the college ranks (not necessarily on behalf of the ADs themselves, but from boosters who aren't excited about hiring, say, a black coach), then obviously racial prejudices would also pertain to an Asian candidate as well.

There are plenty of people out there who are upset at how "Asians" have ruined UCLA. Stereotypes about Asians are out there. Or maybe people just think an Asian couldn't connect with black and/or inner-city recruits. I don't know.

Think about Ralph Freidgen -- the guy never got a shot at being a head coach until his alma mater called. Why? The common explanation was that he was too fat. Charlie Weis had the same knock on him. If people can be as so narrow-minded as to by pass a worthy candidate because he's fat, what would they think of someone who's Asian?

I'm curious about how Chow has supposedly "bombed" these interviews. He never seems to bomb them when it comes to being hired as an OC. What happens when he interviews for a head coaching job?

(Looking at resume)
AD: So, you've been title winning assistant coach for over thirty years. Your offenses have always been productive and innovative. Why do you think you can be as a head coach?

Chow: Well, I'm... oh wait, it's 2:00. It's time for my daily meal of eating a live puppy and raping a school boy. Can you give me 10 minutes?" - Bruinsnation user haoledave

Dynamics of the Perception of People of Color Sticking Together

An original version posted on 8/19/2003 as "Friendster: The Asian Thing to Do! :karate chop:" @throwascrewinit.blogspot.com

People of the same race, whether white, Asian, black, Latino generally stick together.

This tending of people within their racial groups whether white people or people of color towards each other is about developing a trust. People generally trust whoever looks like them, grows up around them. That trust and rapport is important in such a society as the urban United States because it helps connect strangers in an otherwise polarized, individualized, impersonalized society.

For example, when buying a car, my dad will automatically go towards the car salesman who happens to be Filipino. Not that he’s racist, but he can automatically and instantly build a connection with the salesman who happens to be Filipino by just speaking the native Tagalog.

The best way to eliminate dependency on race?

Connect with strangers. But that takes time. These stereotypes are something only gradual assimilation into society via more media exposure, and people of color acquiring powerful positions in society and bringing more visibility and confidence for youth of color to align themselves with.

Hopefully continued media exposure, and thus varied opinion and positions of authority can help dissipate the stereotypes that are associated with people of color.