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.
Showing posts with label Race in Everyday Situations. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Race in Everyday Situations. Show all posts
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.
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.
Being Conscious of Your Own Race and Fitting In
An original version posted on 10/11/2008 as "Unconsciousness, Consciousness, Popular Discourse, Race, and the Presidential Election" @ throwascrewinit.blogspot.com
When I think of the word "consciousness", I think of Mos Def's line in his Close to the Edge Freestyle on the Chappelle Show.
He was talking about "conscious", meaning a state of knowing what's going on. He says "being conscious" is not really a state worthy of praise or congratulated for; it's just him simply being awake. By implication, this means he's noticing things.
Consciousness, specifically human consciousness was the main topic in the book the User Illusion by Tor Norretander.
The main thing I got from the book was that 80% of what we do is done unconsciously. Breathing, heart rate, thoughts, especially during sleep. Unconscious. We can sense a billion things a minute, but only a few bits actually enter our stream of thought and movement called our "consciousness."
I'm inclined to say that consciousness is about maintaining and exacting control. Consciousness acts so you don't go crazy processing every bit of information. It acts as yet another filter of information for the world around you.
Consciousness simplifies your life, your thought, emotion, movement process --- the way that the User Interface on your computer simplifies your life as a computer user.
You don't have to enter code just to do anything. You can click on your My Computer icon, the start button, which is nice, but there's so much work involved in making it look that easy. The binary coding, the programming language, the time it took to develop all that. That's all hidden.
Consciousness is like that user interface that hides a lot of those details like the binary code and the programming language.
One thing I notice is that what you do become conscious of, you're probably insecure about. Which brings me to self-consciousness.
I'm conscious right now about my math abilities.
Kanye West says he's so self-conscious, but he's the only one to admit it.
It's a bad thing in this socio-cultural milieu to be "self-conscious" because it means you're too worried about what people think. You don't act the way you want to because you're trying to control what people think about you. Or at least limit the bad thoughts.
When you become conscious, it seems like you don't really do anything but observe. The "I" part of you becomes active, but you cannot envision that "I" part of you committing to an action.
Basketball players, soccer players are said to be unconscious when they're making quick decisions with their respective balls. In those contexts, where timing is of the essence, you're not supposed to think, you're supposed to act. There is no room for pondering. There is no room for the "I" to perceive, and then decide to act because the moment is already over. Hesitation usually doesn't mean anything good in sports. The solution is to act before you think. Acting unconsciously.
Essentially, the book by Norretrander is about how happiness tends to happen more when we are unconsciously acting. Unconsciousness means we act rather than let the consciousness creep in and instill doubt.
Lets think again about what Mos Def said about consciousness.
Even outside of Mos Def's context, we use "consciousness" within urban contexts here in the US of A to indicate someone who seems to be thoughtful and knows about harsh realities. As opposed to someone who isn't conscious. By implication, a person who isn't conscious isn't thoughtful and skips over harsh realities.
There is even a demarcation of "conscious" hip-hop and non-conscious hip-hop. "Conscious hip-hop" is hip-hop that invokes thoughtfulness and harsh realities.
There seems to be a parallel between consciousness and harsh realities. Consciousness seems to recognize "harsh realities" all the time. With its recognition of harsh realities, it notices limitations as well. Consciousness by proxy notices limitations.
Consciousness. Realities. Limitations. Consciousness knows realities and knows limitations.
Acting unconsciously. Happiness. When you act unconsciously, you're generally happier.
Notice that we don't really care whether or not Britney Spears, Lindsey Lohan, or Paris Hilton are "conscious." I rarely hear that word used in any Hollywood Infotainment show. "Conscious."
It's probably because there's a kind of happy and upbeat discourse always surrounding them, regardless of what they actually are feeling. They live in an unconscious world where each of their missteps are exposed and judged harshly, yet anything positive they do, including losing 0.5 lbs of weight, is celebrated as an achievement. With the worlds they live in, they can fuck up royally,
When explaining why people are addicted to gossip about Hollywood celebrities, Danielle Fishel, formerly of Boy Meets World and apparently now a gossip host, said something to the effect of: "it's fun to follow their stories because their worlds are limitless." Limitless. Boundless. Unconscious. By implication, they have choices and can act on any whim, which makes their story more intriguing.
They get to act as unconsciously as they want.
Now that's something I wish I could do as a middle-class Filipino kid in America. I'm happy, but it feels like I have to walk on eggshells still. I have to carefully be something. I mean I wish I could just act ridiculous and stupid and then somehow bullshit my way into popularity. Or even something like the US presidency ala George W.
Only it feels like I can't. It feels like I can't just walk into a job interview and chum it up with old whitey.
No matter the qualifications or knowledge I have, I have to match an employer's "comfortability, fit" factor (or maybe that was just me). The employer is usually somebody white. It feels like I can't just be an Eric Kandel from Vienna who studies literature and history as an undergrad, becomes a psychiatrist in training, and becomes a Noble Prize winning neuroscientists. My point is that it seems like everyone's doing something unconsciously, except me.
I'm just sitting here consciously, and observing.
Now this brings me to a question of whether or not I could act unconsciously on my way into something like the US Presidency?
Would I as a Filipino middle-class kid be able to George W. Bush/Sarah Palin my way through anything en route to the presidency?
It feels like I have to do everything by the book while other people, namely the white folks and asskissers of color get by on a steady diet of bullshit. I feel like I've had to do things at a higher and tighter level, so good just to get something that white people could get with just a minimum of effort.
The same I could say about Barack Obama.
Community organizer from the creme-de-la-creme, professor, organizer, awesome communicator matching up against an old guy who is respectable but is probably going to continue the Bush push, and some lady who came out of nowhere and prides herself on being a hockey mom.
It feels like this presidential "race" shouldn't even be a competition anymore. However, the polls are close. He still seems to be walking on eggshells and is perpetually in doubt over the Bubba votes and the Bradley effect.
He's still defending against so many things: Reverend Wright, the unfettered linking of his middle name to Saddam's last name, the claims against his links to Islam.
All of these things shouldn't be issues, but have been made so, and he's had to straddle the line delicately to appease voters.
I think it took a lot of consciousness to play his positions the way he has. I do believe in his commitment to ALL working class folks. I really doubt he actually likes to support Israel, that he's actually steadfastly Christian, or that he's all for some kind of border security. Those seems like things in his form, his identity, that he consciously changed to make him palatable to broader demographics.
Not saying that's wrong, but that's how you win in politics --- more form than function. The right form to carry out the function. With the right form, the collective feels that it can unconsciously carry on with their functions.
When I think of the word "consciousness", I think of Mos Def's line in his Close to the Edge Freestyle on the Chappelle Show.
So, stop with the nonsense, like he conscious
I'm just awake dawg, I'm doin' great dawg
He was talking about "conscious", meaning a state of knowing what's going on. He says "being conscious" is not really a state worthy of praise or congratulated for; it's just him simply being awake. By implication, this means he's noticing things.
Consciousness, specifically human consciousness was the main topic in the book the User Illusion by Tor Norretander.
The main thing I got from the book was that 80% of what we do is done unconsciously. Breathing, heart rate, thoughts, especially during sleep. Unconscious. We can sense a billion things a minute, but only a few bits actually enter our stream of thought and movement called our "consciousness."
I'm inclined to say that consciousness is about maintaining and exacting control. Consciousness acts so you don't go crazy processing every bit of information. It acts as yet another filter of information for the world around you.
Consciousness simplifies your life, your thought, emotion, movement process --- the way that the User Interface on your computer simplifies your life as a computer user.
You don't have to enter code just to do anything. You can click on your My Computer icon, the start button, which is nice, but there's so much work involved in making it look that easy. The binary coding, the programming language, the time it took to develop all that. That's all hidden.
Consciousness is like that user interface that hides a lot of those details like the binary code and the programming language.
One thing I notice is that what you do become conscious of, you're probably insecure about. Which brings me to self-consciousness.
I'm conscious right now about my math abilities.
Kanye West says he's so self-conscious, but he's the only one to admit it.
It's a bad thing in this socio-cultural milieu to be "self-conscious" because it means you're too worried about what people think. You don't act the way you want to because you're trying to control what people think about you. Or at least limit the bad thoughts.
When you become conscious, it seems like you don't really do anything but observe. The "I" part of you becomes active, but you cannot envision that "I" part of you committing to an action.
Basketball players, soccer players are said to be unconscious when they're making quick decisions with their respective balls. In those contexts, where timing is of the essence, you're not supposed to think, you're supposed to act. There is no room for pondering. There is no room for the "I" to perceive, and then decide to act because the moment is already over. Hesitation usually doesn't mean anything good in sports. The solution is to act before you think. Acting unconsciously.
Essentially, the book by Norretrander is about how happiness tends to happen more when we are unconsciously acting. Unconsciousness means we act rather than let the consciousness creep in and instill doubt.
Lets think again about what Mos Def said about consciousness.
So, stop with the nonsense, like he conscious
I'm just awake dawg, I'm doin' great dawg
Even outside of Mos Def's context, we use "consciousness" within urban contexts here in the US of A to indicate someone who seems to be thoughtful and knows about harsh realities. As opposed to someone who isn't conscious. By implication, a person who isn't conscious isn't thoughtful and skips over harsh realities.
There is even a demarcation of "conscious" hip-hop and non-conscious hip-hop. "Conscious hip-hop" is hip-hop that invokes thoughtfulness and harsh realities.
There seems to be a parallel between consciousness and harsh realities. Consciousness seems to recognize "harsh realities" all the time. With its recognition of harsh realities, it notices limitations as well. Consciousness by proxy notices limitations.
Consciousness. Realities. Limitations. Consciousness knows realities and knows limitations.
Acting unconsciously. Happiness. When you act unconsciously, you're generally happier.
Notice that we don't really care whether or not Britney Spears, Lindsey Lohan, or Paris Hilton are "conscious." I rarely hear that word used in any Hollywood Infotainment show. "Conscious."
It's probably because there's a kind of happy and upbeat discourse always surrounding them, regardless of what they actually are feeling. They live in an unconscious world where each of their missteps are exposed and judged harshly, yet anything positive they do, including losing 0.5 lbs of weight, is celebrated as an achievement. With the worlds they live in, they can fuck up royally,
When explaining why people are addicted to gossip about Hollywood celebrities, Danielle Fishel, formerly of Boy Meets World and apparently now a gossip host, said something to the effect of: "it's fun to follow their stories because their worlds are limitless." Limitless. Boundless. Unconscious. By implication, they have choices and can act on any whim, which makes their story more intriguing.
They get to act as unconsciously as they want.
Now that's something I wish I could do as a middle-class Filipino kid in America. I'm happy, but it feels like I have to walk on eggshells still. I have to carefully be something. I mean I wish I could just act ridiculous and stupid and then somehow bullshit my way into popularity. Or even something like the US presidency ala George W.
Only it feels like I can't. It feels like I can't just walk into a job interview and chum it up with old whitey.
No matter the qualifications or knowledge I have, I have to match an employer's "comfortability, fit" factor (or maybe that was just me). The employer is usually somebody white. It feels like I can't just be an Eric Kandel from Vienna who studies literature and history as an undergrad, becomes a psychiatrist in training, and becomes a Noble Prize winning neuroscientists. My point is that it seems like everyone's doing something unconsciously, except me.
I'm just sitting here consciously, and observing.
Now this brings me to a question of whether or not I could act unconsciously on my way into something like the US Presidency?
Would I as a Filipino middle-class kid be able to George W. Bush/Sarah Palin my way through anything en route to the presidency?
It feels like I have to do everything by the book while other people, namely the white folks and asskissers of color get by on a steady diet of bullshit. I feel like I've had to do things at a higher and tighter level, so good just to get something that white people could get with just a minimum of effort.
The same I could say about Barack Obama.
Community organizer from the creme-de-la-creme, professor, organizer, awesome communicator matching up against an old guy who is respectable but is probably going to continue the Bush push, and some lady who came out of nowhere and prides herself on being a hockey mom.
It feels like this presidential "race" shouldn't even be a competition anymore. However, the polls are close. He still seems to be walking on eggshells and is perpetually in doubt over the Bubba votes and the Bradley effect.
He's still defending against so many things: Reverend Wright, the unfettered linking of his middle name to Saddam's last name, the claims against his links to Islam.
All of these things shouldn't be issues, but have been made so, and he's had to straddle the line delicately to appease voters.
I think it took a lot of consciousness to play his positions the way he has. I do believe in his commitment to ALL working class folks. I really doubt he actually likes to support Israel, that he's actually steadfastly Christian, or that he's all for some kind of border security. Those seems like things in his form, his identity, that he consciously changed to make him palatable to broader demographics.
Not saying that's wrong, but that's how you win in politics --- more form than function. The right form to carry out the function. With the right form, the collective feels that it can unconsciously carry on with their functions.
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.
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.
Solutions for Change After Compton Cookout
An original version posted on 3/1/2010 as "Recapping the aftermath of Compton Cookout and solutions for change" @ Examiner.com
The aftermath of the Compton Cookout organized by students at UCSD has seen a flurry of responses.
Responses have included: a student calling blacks ungrateful on campus television, a protest led by the Black Student Union, plans for a "Compton Cookout Part Deux" and the discovery of a noose at a UCSD library.
The events at UCSD may have touched off a wave of crimes at other college campuses.
Last week, Kris Gregorian, an editor of a controversial campus newspaper said on campus television after the Compton Cookout, "You should be thankful you ungrateful n****." Later after his segment was aired, a piece of cardboard was later found in the studio with the words "Compton lynching" written on it.
Later in the week, Mike Randazzo, organizer of the Compton Cookout, announced plans for a repeat of the Compton Cookout, "We pretty much want people to just choose a culture and harmlessly poke fun at it."
"On Cinco de Mayo, we have parties making fun of Mexicans; on Veterans Day, we make fun of veterans (yes, the same veterans who uphold our rights to free speech); on St. Patrick's Day we make fun of the Irish. Everyone gets made fun of out of jest now, not hate,” the invitation read."
The Black Student Union Protest responded to the week's events organizing a teach-in chanting "Real Pain, Real Action." The teach-in drew over 300 students and lead to a student walk-out.
The latest incident happening late Thursday night involves the discovery of a noose at a UCSD library at around 10:30 PM. An unnamed student has since confessed to the incident, claiming she did not think that "hanging the noose would be a big deal."
A wave of incidents has since been touched off at UC Davis and the University of Missouri.
At UC Davis there have been two instances of race and ethnicity related vandalization. A swastika was carved into a Jewish student's dorm room earlier last week. On Saturday, there was discovery of vandalism at the UC Davis Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transgender building.
At the University of Missouri, balls of cotton were found strewn together in front of the University's Black Cultural Center. The strewn cotton has significant association to associations of slavery.
Perspective: Why Compton Cookout was not that funny
The party organizers were not intending to harm groups of people, but intention doesn't need to be present to actually harm individuals or groups of people. That's the very definition of "negligent."
However, the fact that it was a party which was planned, ultimately garners little sympathy here. These kids throwing racial parties, products of the 7th-ranked public university in the US News College rankings anticipated such controversy.
People need to recognize that organizing racial theme parties such as the Compton Cookout were not simply mistakes made by simple slips of the tongue. These individuals made deliberate, poor decisions and need to be called out for it each and every time they do organize a similar gathering or event.
I love off-the-cuff jokes and humor as much as the next person, but I can't find Compton Cookout, south of the border, white trash, or Eurotrash parties that funny.
Maybe it's because I know the "ghetto culture" wasn't something fabricated by MTV and merely popularized by rap music. It is a culture of people bred in response to centuries of segregation from advancement and opportunity. It is a symbol of inequality, survival, and ongoing struggle that was created by centuries of logic and policy that excluded black people.
These "ghetto", racialized theme parties puts out to the public that it's acceptable to trivialize products of struggle from different communities.
I know that the theme party to be thrown by Randazzo encourages a mindset that we all need to laugh at ourselves. I agree, laughter is the shortest distance between two people.
But it's hard to see how a fraternity full of white guys taking elements of black culture they only know through TV and computer monitors, is actually laughing at "themselves."
Advice to Compton Cookout organizers: equal opportunity offending is a horrible solution
Party organizer Mike Randazzo has served up the argument that these racial theme parties are an attempt to treat every race equally. They would do this by offending every race or ethnicity --- when I was in college this was called "equal opportunity offending." Seems to draw a lot on the methods of Borat, a movie I absolutely abhored.
The problem however is that this type of offending tends to not to actually be an "equal offender."
The idea of equal opportunity offending is essentially a justification to fight for the right to be ignorant.
Yes, there are so-called "Euro-trash" and "white trash" parties, but they are very specific to certain sub-cultures dominated by white people. If a big percentage of people were white trash or Euro-trash, there would probably be more outrage of those parties by those populations.
Through television, newspapers, radio, and our schooling, we have learned that white Americans are so varied, so unique, and carry such a diversity of opinion. Because they and everyone else absorbing US media have learned that they are so unique, many including themselves perceive their racial and cultural identities are essentially meaningless to the outside world.
With meaningless racial and cultural identities, they get the idea that race and ethnicity is something that could easily be ignored and either turned on or off.
In contrast, people of color tend to be recognized in popular media and work mostly for their cultural differences, whether real or not.
In news reports you see the labels of ethnicity demarcating an individual. You always see the labels "African-American" or "Latino" used to demarcate individuals, and that's even when there is no missing person or suspect on the loose. However, you rarely see the labels "Caucasian-American", or "white American" to describe an individual's background.
As it is, people of color are often perceived by decisionmakers like job interviewers to be monolithic thinkers with no variance, no diversity of opinion, and no uniqueness other than the color of their skin and accompanying culture. It's as if their diversity is the full extent of the uniqueness and talent that they bring.
"Equal opportunity offending" in the form of parties and tropes tends to hit Americans of color harder than white Americans. No matter how much they try to escape their stereotypes, people of color are linked more tightly by the outside world to the stereotypes of their race and ethnicity. As a result of this closeness, they tend to feel the mocking of their ethnicities and races a lot more.
Equal opportunity offending communicates to the word that its still acceptable to look down upon people of color using old familiar tropes that have denied people of color opportunities.
In the meanwhile, this equal opportunity offending offers less relevant tropes for the vastly varied white cultures and ethnicities. This ends up stinging no white person and confirms belief for them that making fun of race and ethnicity is essentially harmless.
Solution: We would build better racial understanding if we assume the best in people
While the idea of "racial and cultural sensitivity" means well, it is a somewhat ineffective idea to describe what is needed in working towards racial understanding.
"Racial sensitivity" for many young white Americans has meant a feeling to need to walk on eggshells when speaking with people of color, careful never to offend. The uncertainty many white Americans feel when dealing with people of color and race and ethnicity leads to this pointlessly rebellious "equal opportunity offending", first-ammendment-asserting Compton Cookout-type backlash.
"Racial sensitivity" is antithetical to "making fun" of something.
People of color suggesting "racial and cultural sensitivity" as opposed to "making fun" makes it seem like people of color have no sense of humor and that we absolutely allow no room for any mistake around them.
One solution to addressing these racially-themed parties and incidents is simple: tell people why exactly it isn't funny. Emphasis on "why exactly" as a way towards rational explanation.
It isn't funny because I understand that many black Americans are struggling still. These stereotypes floating in people's thoughts aren't bound to help anyone in job interviews and decisionmaking, and frankly it isn't my place to judge or make light of what I see people struggle through. Even amongst the best intentioned, bias does play a role when evaluating people of color.
I feel like there would have been no "Compton Cookout" or at least, less justifications of the event, had these kids been familiar with understanding the connections between events, policies, attitudes in the past with today's events, behaviors, and attitudes.
The public needs to understand that there are reasons why people live the way they live, and do the things they do. As James Loewen argued in his classic Lies My Teacher Told Me, people need to understand that the "effects" we observe in the world today all have "causes."
Studying history's many perspectives and establishing connections to today allows people to build on the assumption that there is logic, rationality, intelligence in individuals caught up in so-called "ghetto-cultures" and basically all cultures.
However, if you don't want to learn history and just want to build better racial and cultural understanding, here's something simple: Assume that people of color or white people or anyone with a different background is just like you and have done the best they could, given their circumstances.
Forget education levels, current employment status, assume that all people regardless of background are trying their best at something.
Assumptions we hold of groups of people direct how we see and ultimately understand people.
For example, if you assume that white Americans are evil, then you're likely to keep looking for examples of white people being evil. But if you run on the assumption that white Americans are trying their best, then you'll be more likely to accept and understand that they are essentially just individuals who are not intentionally keeping people down.
Inversely, if you assume that black Americans are lazy, then you're likely to keep looking for examples of black people being lazy. But if you run on the assumption that black Americans are trying their best, then you'll be more likely to accept and understand how hard it is to move up in America.
If these UCSD kids assumed the best of "ghetto people" meaning they assumed that black people were doing the best they could with what they had,they would instead simply see another group of people trying to get by in this even funnier thing called life.
They would not even see such superficialities such as "limited vocabulary" or "speaking loud" as anything particularly noteworthy, interesting, shocking, or attributable to "ghetto chicks."
Everyone has moments when they have "limited vocabulary" or "speak loud."
With nothing noteworthy, interesting, shocking about another culture, there would be less of a pressing "need" or a burning desire to throw parties as if those superficialities were something unique or interesting.
One tangible step people can take towards assuming the best in people is understanding that no matter what Bill Cosby thinks, "ghetto" language or what is referred to as black English is not broken English with mistakes.
It has its own pronunciation rules and logic. Perhaps a speaker of the language displays a lack of college education, but it does not necessarily mean a lack of knowledge or competency.
However because people conflate "education" with "knowledge", Black English speakers are perceived to be lacking knowledge, therefore competency, and subsequently, are looked down upon as speaking "broken" English.
As was stated by Texas A&M Sociologist Joe R. Feagin, "Language mocking and subordination are not about standards for speaking as much as about determining that some people are not worth listening to and treating as equals." Language is simply a tool that people use to understand each other, nothing more nothing less.
If we assumed that people were trying their best given their circumstances, we'd be past feeling suspicious of other people.
If more people assumed the best of different people, the question we'd attempt to answer would be past the warring stage, where people are battling every day trying to scream the existence of racism.
If we assumed the best of people, we'd already know that it happens, and we'd focus on addressing how and why racial division happens, and negotiating how we can all come to some kind of agreement that permits even exchanges across racial, ethnic, and cultural divides.
Masculinity and Being a Young Ethnic Male at Los Angeles Academic Conferences, Public Lectures, and Public Basketball Courts
An original version posted on 5/28/2010 as "Masculinity and Being a Young Ethnic Male in Los Angeles Academic Conferences, Public Lectures, and Public Basketball Courts" @ AMMMO
In my quest to pinpoint my real, definitive academic interests to determine my career path, I've observed around 60-70 lectures, conferences, symposiums in the past 4 years all across LA and across many topics of interests.
Topics of these lectures, conferences, and symposia have ranged from the possibility of opening a street car on Broadway in Los Angeles to 3-day conferences on transcultural psychiatry. There were random interest talks I attended just for the fuck of it, like the one about freeing the mustang, or a conference on the History of the Pacific. I went to a bunch of public policy panels dealing with health care, higher education access, local government. I was very interested in the histories of everything from sciences to Los Angeles. I went to Caltech for random neuroscience-related discussions. All of this was basically just food to feed my thinking, which I'd hope to use later in my career.
Who goes to these things?
As far as conferences and symposia go, it's professors and graduate school students. Middle-aged and older people blended in with young people.
As far as public lectures, it's also mostly middle-aged - older white people and perhaps a contingent of younger people, depending on the topic or school project.
When you take race and ethnicity into consideration, however, there aren't too many people who fit my demographic in these spaces: the young ethnic male, AKA the people who are more likely to be in prison than in school and get accused all the time of being gang members, particularly the blacks and Latinos. Being a Chino, I'm not harassed to the extent that they usually are, but on a handful of occasions, police have wanted to know what I, a 20-something year old college grad (completely unbeknownst to them), was doing in the middle of the day out of [high] school and instead on sidewalks or Metro stations. Sadly, neither academics nor long-term employers have not matched the level of police curiosity in me when out and about.
My demographic's absence was most glaringly apparent at a very small conference at USC on the history of the Pacific and when I was attempting to sit-in on an Albert Einstein symposia at Caltech.
I stuck out like a sore thumb --- a young, hip-hop habitus-ed (i.e. wearing baggy clothes), teenage-looking, no-monied kid walking amongst accomplished, middle-aged or hipper, on-the-ball younger white people with an occasional dropping of smarter, smugger ethnic females. It's not like I'm trying to antagonize people by wearing baggy clothes, it's just kind of how my clothes are and have been.
In settings like this with the exception of ethnic studies' events, it was a constant mental battle of questioning whether I belonged. Without that feeling of "belonging" or "ownership/expertise in a field", I felt a social anxiety about talking about anything and so I just kinda sat through a lot of these events indulging in my note-taking. I only asked questions if I was really really really compelled to, and even then I was quite scared doing it.
Questions of "belonging" or "ownership/expertise" are not as glaring however when I take off the academic thinking cap and go play basketball in Eagle Rock on Fridays or Sundays. Playing basketball at a public park, I'm exchanging elbows with the very young ethnic males absent from these aforementioned lectures, conferences, symposia.
This is pretty much the only demographic at many public parks and basketball courts around LA. That's our domain.
I remember an idea from The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down about how gender and power dynamics for Hmong immigrant families change once they migrated to the US. Generally, in the old country, the eldest man in the family would be the highest status individual while the youngest female would be at the bottom.
However, in the US, the dynamic of eldest being the most respected would be flipped on its head. The youngest female Hmong would likely be the highest status individual. Meanwhile, poor grandpa would be lowest because he's not likely to speak English and can't really participate in the workforce.
What this example shows seems reflective of a larger trend I've noticed: ethnic males are having a hard time breaking into positions of upward mobility.
At non-ethnic studies academic and public lecture functions, I am and have always been looking for other males of color to be like "aye, what's happening cuz" with. Latinos are somewhat hard to tell, but the ones that I kick it with don't seem to match the social habits of the ones I might see at the conferences. I've only seen like 2 black dudes at all the academicky non-ethnic-studies-related conferences. I was damn near shocked and mentally celebrating to see a dreadlocked black guy attend the transcultural psychiatry conference, but understood his plight when he interacted with almost no one. At that same conference, I also saw my very first Filipino who wasn't me, but actually ended up not being affilated with the conference and all and was some kind of CSUN Business douchebag.
In contrast to this absence, ethnic women are a pretty fast emerging group of academics. Maybe it's because they tend to be more flexible in the US as far as broadening their careers to different things. Maybe males have a more rigid way of doing things which is harder to jibe with the cultural norms in America.
Sometimes on the court I'm thinking, what we as ethnic males are all doing, besides playing basketball. In my basketball group, I know one engineer, one freshly-minted nurse, a tutor, a few bank employees, and the self-employed alpha player taking accounting classes. Not the worst, but still not in positions of power (i.e. policy-making --- politics and knowledge-making --- academia). It feels like we have a glass ceiling.
Why is this all important?
Well, I think that human beings in general tend to make life decisions based on their social groups and networks of influence. Whatever is "normal" around you becomes almost a glass ceiling, difficult to break out of for groups of people and possibilities limited. With limited possibilities means less representation in important legislation, and decisions about what gets counted as knowledge.
I wonder what keeps us from getting into these positions of upward mobility. Are we either one of or either too practical, too egotistical, too impatient? If we are, what makes our groups like that, especially in academia?
In my quest to pinpoint my real, definitive academic interests to determine my career path, I've observed around 60-70 lectures, conferences, symposiums in the past 4 years all across LA and across many topics of interests.
Topics of these lectures, conferences, and symposia have ranged from the possibility of opening a street car on Broadway in Los Angeles to 3-day conferences on transcultural psychiatry. There were random interest talks I attended just for the fuck of it, like the one about freeing the mustang, or a conference on the History of the Pacific. I went to a bunch of public policy panels dealing with health care, higher education access, local government. I was very interested in the histories of everything from sciences to Los Angeles. I went to Caltech for random neuroscience-related discussions. All of this was basically just food to feed my thinking, which I'd hope to use later in my career.
Who goes to these things?
As far as conferences and symposia go, it's professors and graduate school students. Middle-aged and older people blended in with young people.
As far as public lectures, it's also mostly middle-aged - older white people and perhaps a contingent of younger people, depending on the topic or school project.
When you take race and ethnicity into consideration, however, there aren't too many people who fit my demographic in these spaces: the young ethnic male, AKA the people who are more likely to be in prison than in school and get accused all the time of being gang members, particularly the blacks and Latinos. Being a Chino, I'm not harassed to the extent that they usually are, but on a handful of occasions, police have wanted to know what I, a 20-something year old college grad (completely unbeknownst to them), was doing in the middle of the day out of [high] school and instead on sidewalks or Metro stations. Sadly, neither academics nor long-term employers have not matched the level of police curiosity in me when out and about.
My demographic's absence was most glaringly apparent at a very small conference at USC on the history of the Pacific and when I was attempting to sit-in on an Albert Einstein symposia at Caltech.
I stuck out like a sore thumb --- a young, hip-hop habitus-ed (i.e. wearing baggy clothes), teenage-looking, no-monied kid walking amongst accomplished, middle-aged or hipper, on-the-ball younger white people with an occasional dropping of smarter, smugger ethnic females. It's not like I'm trying to antagonize people by wearing baggy clothes, it's just kind of how my clothes are and have been.
In settings like this with the exception of ethnic studies' events, it was a constant mental battle of questioning whether I belonged. Without that feeling of "belonging" or "ownership/expertise in a field", I felt a social anxiety about talking about anything and so I just kinda sat through a lot of these events indulging in my note-taking. I only asked questions if I was really really really compelled to, and even then I was quite scared doing it.
Questions of "belonging" or "ownership/expertise" are not as glaring however when I take off the academic thinking cap and go play basketball in Eagle Rock on Fridays or Sundays. Playing basketball at a public park, I'm exchanging elbows with the very young ethnic males absent from these aforementioned lectures, conferences, symposia.
This is pretty much the only demographic at many public parks and basketball courts around LA. That's our domain.
I remember an idea from The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down about how gender and power dynamics for Hmong immigrant families change once they migrated to the US. Generally, in the old country, the eldest man in the family would be the highest status individual while the youngest female would be at the bottom.
However, in the US, the dynamic of eldest being the most respected would be flipped on its head. The youngest female Hmong would likely be the highest status individual. Meanwhile, poor grandpa would be lowest because he's not likely to speak English and can't really participate in the workforce.
What this example shows seems reflective of a larger trend I've noticed: ethnic males are having a hard time breaking into positions of upward mobility.
At non-ethnic studies academic and public lecture functions, I am and have always been looking for other males of color to be like "aye, what's happening cuz" with. Latinos are somewhat hard to tell, but the ones that I kick it with don't seem to match the social habits of the ones I might see at the conferences. I've only seen like 2 black dudes at all the academicky non-ethnic-studies-related conferences. I was damn near shocked and mentally celebrating to see a dreadlocked black guy attend the transcultural psychiatry conference, but understood his plight when he interacted with almost no one. At that same conference, I also saw my very first Filipino who wasn't me, but actually ended up not being affilated with the conference and all and was some kind of CSUN Business douchebag.
In contrast to this absence, ethnic women are a pretty fast emerging group of academics. Maybe it's because they tend to be more flexible in the US as far as broadening their careers to different things. Maybe males have a more rigid way of doing things which is harder to jibe with the cultural norms in America.
Sometimes on the court I'm thinking, what we as ethnic males are all doing, besides playing basketball. In my basketball group, I know one engineer, one freshly-minted nurse, a tutor, a few bank employees, and the self-employed alpha player taking accounting classes. Not the worst, but still not in positions of power (i.e. policy-making --- politics and knowledge-making --- academia). It feels like we have a glass ceiling.
Why is this all important?
Well, I think that human beings in general tend to make life decisions based on their social groups and networks of influence. Whatever is "normal" around you becomes almost a glass ceiling, difficult to break out of for groups of people and possibilities limited. With limited possibilities means less representation in important legislation, and decisions about what gets counted as knowledge.
I wonder what keeps us from getting into these positions of upward mobility. Are we either one of or either too practical, too egotistical, too impatient? If we are, what makes our groups like that, especially in academia?
Seeing Hints of Racism on Message Boards in Characterizations of USA Basketball
An original version posted on 8/20/2004 as "Racist Agenda Towards USA Basketball" @throwascrewinit.blogspot.com
It's always interesting to see how racist people really are when people from different countries come together. But that's to be expected.
What isn't really expected is when your own country is racist towards you.
One act of racism is committed when one or more individuals think that there is something inherently wrong with a group of people based on physical characteristics, namely color of skin.
Whether intentional or not, message boarders People seem to be (whether intentional or not) blaming the urban culture of hip-hop, dominated by minority races in these Team USA basketball losses. And since the USA team is composed of all black people, some people see it fitting to associate them with hip-hop. Most people do. I mean, when one thinks of hip-hop, one will most likely think of a black person's face.
People bashing Team USA start out blaming things strongly associated with hip-hop like street basketball, the And 1 Tour (sometimes even mockingly using hip-hop terms). They imply that these aspects associated with hip-hop are what is causing the US team to be selfish and lose. They claim that these players are being selfish as a result of liking hip-hop/urban.
For example, they'll say things like "it's all about And 1 basketball with these guys. They don't know anything about team basketball or fundamentals."
Yeah, I completely missed the off-the-backboard 360 dunk by Tim Duncan followed by the Emeka Okafor off BOTH Carlos Arroyo's and Carlos Boozer's head dribble all with 4 fingers while keeping his middle finger up at the US flag in the loss to Puerto Rico.
Oh wrong game?
I guess I was watching the game where Allen Iverson was actually passing the ball. The rest of the team thought that was such a great idea that they decided to do just the exact same. The team was playing defense. They may have these reputations as selfish players (which is an issue in itself), but that's not what they have shown in the games.
In other words, I've observed the exact opposite of what they have been accused of doing by message board posters.
Racist ? Check with a big fat red, white, and blue mark !
People seemed to immediately placed labels on the team based namely on Allen Iverson. They have romanticized FIBA style basketball. They call the whole team selfish, some have even said that they lacked pride.
I definitely saw that they lacked pride because they're all too black for us to see their hearts.
Team USA's just one example of how hip-hop and everything associated with it has become such a great goat for these mostly American message boarders to put all their own bad traits of Americana into and kick repeatedly.
I'm not sure that people actually watched the game. "Hip-hop" style of basketball doesn't really affect how they play the game. Hip-hop, blackness is not to blame because it had absolutely nothing to do with the team USA loss.
If there's anything to blame it's probably how the NBA Rules are structured.
Let's just all ignore the facts that this team was poorly conceived and sorely unadapted to the competition. Sure, they're top players, but all of them have the same skills and lack the same ones. It also doesn't help that none of them are great shooters.
How is that possible in basketball you ask ?
In the NBA game, these guys are taught to be aggressive and attack the hoop. What faciliates going to the hoop is that there is this 3 second rule in the NBA which prohibits players from staying in the painted area for more than 3 seconds. It was a rule conceived to add more action to the NBA game. International basketball has no such rule and so the strategy for these international teams has been to clog these lanes.
Another reason USA basketball has slipped is that these international teams don't select players from a big pool. There's a tryout process for them. The USA team basically threw together a team composed of young, inexperienced, good players. They're still the most talented team, but unlike the previous Dream Teams in 1992 and 1996, they're not good enough to plow through other teams on just talent alone. They actually need team chemistry. Not fundamentals.
More reactions of hidden racism here.
It's always interesting to see how racist people really are when people from different countries come together. But that's to be expected.
What isn't really expected is when your own country is racist towards you.
One act of racism is committed when one or more individuals think that there is something inherently wrong with a group of people based on physical characteristics, namely color of skin.
Whether intentional or not, message boarders People seem to be (whether intentional or not) blaming the urban culture of hip-hop, dominated by minority races in these Team USA basketball losses. And since the USA team is composed of all black people, some people see it fitting to associate them with hip-hop. Most people do. I mean, when one thinks of hip-hop, one will most likely think of a black person's face.
People bashing Team USA start out blaming things strongly associated with hip-hop like street basketball, the And 1 Tour (sometimes even mockingly using hip-hop terms). They imply that these aspects associated with hip-hop are what is causing the US team to be selfish and lose. They claim that these players are being selfish as a result of liking hip-hop/urban.
For example, they'll say things like "it's all about And 1 basketball with these guys. They don't know anything about team basketball or fundamentals."
Yeah, I completely missed the off-the-backboard 360 dunk by Tim Duncan followed by the Emeka Okafor off BOTH Carlos Arroyo's and Carlos Boozer's head dribble all with 4 fingers while keeping his middle finger up at the US flag in the loss to Puerto Rico.
Oh wrong game?
I guess I was watching the game where Allen Iverson was actually passing the ball. The rest of the team thought that was such a great idea that they decided to do just the exact same. The team was playing defense. They may have these reputations as selfish players (which is an issue in itself), but that's not what they have shown in the games.
In other words, I've observed the exact opposite of what they have been accused of doing by message board posters.
Racist ? Check with a big fat red, white, and blue mark !
People seemed to immediately placed labels on the team based namely on Allen Iverson. They have romanticized FIBA style basketball. They call the whole team selfish, some have even said that they lacked pride.
I definitely saw that they lacked pride because they're all too black for us to see their hearts.
Team USA's just one example of how hip-hop and everything associated with it has become such a great goat for these mostly American message boarders to put all their own bad traits of Americana into and kick repeatedly.
I'm not sure that people actually watched the game. "Hip-hop" style of basketball doesn't really affect how they play the game. Hip-hop, blackness is not to blame because it had absolutely nothing to do with the team USA loss.
If there's anything to blame it's probably how the NBA Rules are structured.
Let's just all ignore the facts that this team was poorly conceived and sorely unadapted to the competition. Sure, they're top players, but all of them have the same skills and lack the same ones. It also doesn't help that none of them are great shooters.
How is that possible in basketball you ask ?
In the NBA game, these guys are taught to be aggressive and attack the hoop. What faciliates going to the hoop is that there is this 3 second rule in the NBA which prohibits players from staying in the painted area for more than 3 seconds. It was a rule conceived to add more action to the NBA game. International basketball has no such rule and so the strategy for these international teams has been to clog these lanes.
Another reason USA basketball has slipped is that these international teams don't select players from a big pool. There's a tryout process for them. The USA team basically threw together a team composed of young, inexperienced, good players. They're still the most talented team, but unlike the previous Dream Teams in 1992 and 1996, they're not good enough to plow through other teams on just talent alone. They actually need team chemistry. Not fundamentals.
More reactions of hidden racism here.
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.
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.
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