"What is the value of a life of a black man in America?"- No justice for Oscar Grant

Oscar Grant mural in downtown Oakland

"What is the value of a life of a black man in America?"

It's clear-- NOT MUCH. Not fucking much at all. Rev. Keith Mohammed said these words this evening during the press conference after the verdict was released in the Oscar Grant trial.

Mehserle got involuntary manslaughter, y'all. INVOLUNTARY MANSLAUGHTER. That's what you get when you get into a car accident. According to ABC News, "Regarding the upcoming sentencing, Burris [Grant's family attorney] said, 'He should be going to jail for the rest of his life, but yet he very well may get a sentence that does not even require him to go to jail, which would be the ultimate insult and travesty that I can imagine.'"

A cop fatally shot an unarmed man and is basically getting away with it. That's not news. What's news at least for some of those who held a little bit of hope is that this completely racialized violence and police brutality is condoned by our justice system. As Rev. Mohammed asked, "what is the value of a life of a black man in America?" Depressingly, the message is clear. This ruling would be completely different if Mehserle or Grant was a different race. This is ALL about race, people. As Adam Serwer writes at the Prospect,

"Times change, but the radioactive fear of black people, black men in particular, has proven to have a longer half-life than any science could have discerned. This is not a fear white people possess of black people--it is a fear all Americans possess. It makes white cops kill black cops, it makes black cops kill black men, and it whispers in the ears of white and nonwhite jurors alike that fear of an unarmed black man lying face down in the ground is not 'unreasonable.' All of which is to say, while it infects all of us, a few of us bear the brunt of the suffering it causes."

He goes on to quote a 2007 ColorLines study demonstrating the little progress we've made since the Civil Rights era. The study found that "New York City consistently has the highest number of shooting deaths by police in the country, an average of 12 every year. The city also has substantially disproportionate killing of Black people, who make up 26 percent of the population but represented 66 percent of those killed by police." This verdict confirms this study: cops shoot and kill unarmed victims and get away with it, especially when the victim is black.

If I hear another mention of "post-racial" unless its a damnation of the phrase, I will explode.

At this moment in time we need to take care of ourselves. Not only are we healing from the pain that is the loss of innocent life, but now we have to deal with this twisting knife in our back. From someone we thought we could trust-- the justice system. But I guess Rev. Mohammed said it best. If we thought there would be justice served in this verdict, maybe we hoped for too much.

I am writing this from my home in the Bay and trying to hold back tears. What kind of world are we living in?

Links here:
Justice or Just Us? Beyond the Hype of the Mehserle Trial
Justice for Oscar Grant- Please spread widely!
Justice for Oscar Grant: Update on Fruitvale BART Protest
Understanding the Dialogue around Lovelle Mixon.
There is no justice for Aiyana

If you need some good resistance music, listen to Native Guns new single "Handcuffs." It's all about police brutality, particularly about Grant and others. Very touching song and appropriate for these times. And Bambu's (of Native Guns) video called "Bambu: Before The Verdict". More background on this case and support for people's right to be angry. Not hurt people.

Cross-posted at Feministing here.

Dark Skinned White Girls?

"Now half and half mixed girls
I know what the battle be
Everytime you go out it's... whats your nationality?"
Everybody always wanna dig up in ya background
You don't look... now how does that sound?
I couldn't tell you were... oh is that right?
Do you take it as a compliment or start up a fight?
Venezuelan and Indian, Rican and Dominican
Japanese or Portuguese, Quarter of Brazilian
White and Korean, Black and Pinay
I can find out later
It don't matter, ya fly" - Murs

What does it mean to be a dark skinned white girl? And what is a dark skinned white girl?

I attended Families on the Fault Lines at UC Berkeley's Center for Race and Gender this past week and aside from opening up a million new lines of questioning surrounding issues of race, kinship and care, I was particularly moved by a talk called "Mongels vs. Hybrids: Colorful Families in Post-racial Space" by Mitzi Carter who blogs over at what she calls "a blog for progressive mamas of color in the SF Bay Area": Colorful Mamas. The idea of a "dark skinned white girl" has always been a really interesting topic for me and something that hits really close to home. I think it can be interpreted as specifically as bi-racial and as broadly as the confusion and ridicule a person of color might face when accused of being "white-washed" (as in, you don't fit into narrow prescriptions of what someone of your race should act or talk like). I think "dark skinned white girls" (or "light skinned black girls" or guys for that matter!) generally aims to bring light to the issue of someone of mixed heritage.

Mitzi Carter spoke about mixed race families and her experience as a bi-racial Okinawan/black woman and as raising what she calls her "Cublinawan" or "Cubanese" children (Adorable pics after the jump!). Oftentimes she is confused as her daughter's nanny. She was even questioned one time in a post office by a white woman (in a bougie part of Berkeley) about whether she should be "taking time off from work to do personal errands"!

This truly got me thinking about my own experience as a mixed race person and mixed race families in general. There is oftentimes much exoticism associated with (and, to be frank, fawning over) those whose phenotypes don't allow easy categorization into distinct racial categories. For Mitzi Carter, while she was pregnant with her first child she faced people who literally obsessed over the potentially exotic and hybrid characteristics of her baby ("ooh Asian eyes and an afro!"). To be mixed race has definitely been a source of strife and confusion for many-- even prompting hip-hop artist Murs' to write the above quoted song "Dark Skinned White Girls." (Love that he shouts out the pinays! Haaaay!)

It's something I've faced growing up too but have had a hard time articulating. It seems we don't talk a lot about it, but to be sure, there are distinct pains, complexities and privileges associated with mixed heritage people. And I'm realizing that these distinctions can be quite fruitful to discussions of race and gender. For I realized that mixed heritage families are a perfect example of "families on the fault lines." In other words, mixed families undergo a unique experience that may reflect and reify notions of privilege and hierarchy. At the same time, they hold vast potential to resist narratives of the normalized body.

Continue reading at here @ Feministing.

Immigration is MOST DEFINITELY a feminist issue

Cross-posted at Feministing

Feministing and others have been covering the news this past week of Arizona officially putting racism on the books. If you haven't heard, new legislation was passed that allows racial profiling of what authorities consider "illegal immigrants" (aka brown folks). It is not a good time for immigrants and their families right now. (Seems like Saturday's May Day rallies comes at just the right time - Action Alert after the jump!)

What surprised me the most, however, was people's response to this. Many commenters on Feministing asked (and have asked before) why immigration is a feminist issue. Feminism is strictly gender, right? Equal pay, glass ceiling, abortion and all that?

Well, no, actually.

Feminism is a lot more than that. And for me, an Asian-American woman of color, feminism is centrally the intersection of gender and race. So when news of immigration "reform" is blasted all over the media, I'm instantly alerted.

You see, immigration is about my family. It's about my entire community and all other communities of color that are viewed by society as Other and as not rightfully belonging. "All-American" is a term I shudder at because it is almost always referenced as a Ralph Lauren, blonde cheerleaders and jocks type image. A picture as distant and unrelatable to me as the planet Mars.

Continue reading here.

Filipino Unity Statement on the May Day Rallies this Saturday!

In light of Arizona's recent legislation of enforced racial profiling, I'd say this rally comes at just the right time!

Read the Filipino community's statement and demands here.

And check out your local May Day action alert here.

babae SF will be out in full force supporting this march in San Francisco. If you're free, hope you can make it out!

Adam Carolla hates Filipinos

Don't think I wasn't gonna comment on this one. Adam Carolla, that 2-bit C-list "comedian" that I can't quite remember where I know him from, has just made his place in my blacklist of people who should just crawl in a cave and die.

On his recent radio show, he goes off on Manny Pacquiao and Filipinos. He basically calls us disgusting for being poor and Third World. If anything should have a big, fat IGNORANT stamp on its forehead, it's this guy. Read more and subject yourself to it here. It's really disgusting. Perez just commented on it today too.

I would write in length of how I felt about these remarks and what it means for the Filipino community, but BAYAN-USA already did that! Peep this brilliantly written statement. Seriously, peep it. It hits the nail on the head in every point. Now this is the real shit:

Perhaps the even bigger offense beyond Carolla’s words that should not go unchecked is the mainstream corporate media’s tolerance and allowance of such derogatory and racist comments to even air. That a white radio personality such as Adam Corolla can boldly make those remarks against a racial minority with seemingly no air of reservation for the social ramifications ultimately reveals that corporate media here in the US has barely progressed from the turn of the 20th century when, during the long-forgotten Philippine-American War, mainstream US newspapers blatantly depicted caricatures of Filipinos as “niggers”, monkeys, and dog-eating savages, all in the efforts to justify what was to be the US’s first colonial project abroad.

LOVE ME SOME BAYAN! (Hate me some A. Carolla.)

Performing Masculinity in Rihanna's "Rude Boy"

Cross-posted at Feministing.

I've been holding out on writing a post about this song, but it's been playing like 5x a day on the radio lately (almost an incessant reminder "get to your computer, get to your computer")... So here I am.

Let me be blunt. I am horrified by the lyrics in Rihanna's newest song "Rude Boy." EVERYTHING about it seems to uphold very narrow and traditional standards of masculinity. According to this song, a desirable man is one who is "big enough" and can basically get it up on command. Almost every single hip-hop and R&B song on the radio alludes to this type of performance, particularly of this sexual nature. In this song, however, it's the main premise. My boyfriend, a hip-hop guru, always shares his thoughts with me on how this constructed sexuality is damaging for men. (If only he would do a guest-post!) First, if your shit isn't 9 inches long, then just don't even have sex. You're a disgrace. If you ARE packing, then you better make sure you last ALL night and give the woman 10 orgasms because you need to prove how much more manly you are then all the other men she's ever been with (Ew, this just gave me a flashback to John Mayer's disgusting Playboy interview *trigger warning on that link!*). Forget that these are oppressively unrealistic standards. Forget that sex is something intimate, a sacred act between two individuals. Forget all that. It's a performance! (At least, this is what these songs would have us believe.)

The part that makes me cringe the most though in Rihanna's song? The repetitive demand to "TAKE IT TAKE IT TAKE IT TAKE IT!"

Arggghhhhhh!! Honestly, what kind of world do we live in where we demand 1/2 of our population to "TAKE IT"?! The mere virtue of having a penis should NOT require you to endure violence and pain, should NOT require you to block and diminish any emotion you have-- the very essence of what makes us human. I've said it before and I'll say it again: I'd put GOOD money on the idea that a world which fosters our humanity equally among the sexes is a world in which much less violence would occur. What makes me even more mad about this song is how she's basically saying "Fuck you" to all the men who have endured domestic violence, rape and sexual abuse. And this DOES happen. (The fact that I even have to qualify that says it all. People just assume that since a man is a man, he can't face abuse or violence from his partner. Bullshit.)

The one redeeming quality of this song? The sex-positivity in the last verse. I absolutely love these lyrics: "I like the way you touch me there/ I like the way you pull my hair/ Baby, if I don't feel it, I ain't faking no, no/ I like when you tell me kiss it here/ I like when you tell me move it there."

Now that's something we should be teaching our kids-- that to communicate our wants and desires is both healthy and sexy. That our bodies are sacred and deserve pleasure. And that means figuring out what feels good to you and feeling comfortable enough to directly tell your partner.

Too bad right after that she says: "So giddy up, time to get it up/ You say you a rude boy/ Show me what you got now."

Let the performance begin!

Sigh. Why oh why does sex-positivity for women have to come at the expense of liberating our men?!

It doesn't.

Rihanna, you just suck.

(Sidenote: Lyrics aside.... the video is OFF THE HOOK!!!! I'm totally loving the 80's, reggae island feel of it all! I mean, LOVE. The amazingness of the video is actually what made me notice the song-- too bad!)

Happy St. Patty's Day

I realize I'm usually railing against pop culture and telling everybody how much I hate everything on this blog... so for funsies, and to put a smile on your face, I'ma share two favorite songs of mine right now: Usher's "Hey Daddy" and Mario's "Stuttering."

FOREAL y'all... these beats are sick. Whenever one of these songs come on, it's like my body disconnects from my mind and suddenly I am dancing like it's my last night on Earth.

Yeah, it's that serious.






And believe it or not, I'm part Irish. Haaaaaaay! ;)