living in hawaii has been really educational! i didn't know basically anything about native hawaiians, their culture, or their history before coming here. i still don't know very much (tho i have read two books about hawaiian history), but of what i do know, i feel like mainstream americans can learn a lot from.
one my most favorite podcasts recently replayed an old episode called Inheritance. i was specifically interested in the third section called: What If There Was No Destiny? it centers on barbara, a woman who adopted multiple children from another woman who was giving them up near annually, as soon as they were born. this woman was addicted to drugs and her children would all likely be affected, physically and mentally, because of it. she had three prior children to the four barbara had adopted also. all had given up for adoption.
after adopting the fourth child, barbara founded a non-profit called Project Prevention, which pays women with drug addictions to get IUDs or get sterilized.
obviously, this is a pretty controversial org! the money ($300-$400) is given without any drug prevention care. it's just given if the woman gets an IUD or sterilization. it's not given *for* the woman, you see. it's given to prevent more "drug addicted babies."
there are racial implications, of course, especially because barbara is white. altho she does say that the majority of the women who accept are white. (tho what's the breakdown of women they're approaching?) and you have to wonder if there's any coercion, especially when it comes to sterilization. but it's an interesting idea.
i don't have solid opinions about this org but i will say that i don't intend to donate to them. that may change, but barbara used some rather offensive (and umempathetic) language when describing some of these women and it seems like the org is very strongly driven by her vision alone, rather than by a board, which also makes me uncomfortable.
remember rachel dolezal? she was the white lady who represented herself as being black, was "caught", then lost her job as instructor in africana studies at eastern washington university and position of president of the NAACP spokane chapter. turns out there's a 2018 documentary about her on netflix.
I don't remember much about the controversy. pretty much just what's in the bit above. but the documentary talks about her younger life and how here parents were very religious and strict. they had two biological children and adopted a few more. all the adopted children were black. I'm not going to go into her history because I think the documentary is really worth watching, but in watching the film, her situation made a lot more sense to me.
some interesting things that come up during the film are reactions from black women. namely, that she doesn't get to call herself black, regardless of how she feels, because she doesn't live the struggles that black people have. but is that true? sure, when she was younger, she lived life as a woman person. but in the last number of years, she outwardly presented herself as black, her job had to do with the black experience and history, and her volunteer work as naacp head was also very much done "as a black woman." so how hadn't she been discriminated against in the last number of years as a black person? does it not count because she didn't always struggle?
also, what about black people in black majority places like africa or jamaica? sure they face discrimination, but certainly it's very different than what it's like as a black american. and like, probably less racial discrimination because they're in a place with majority black people and with black people in positions of power. but they also didn't struggle primarily because of their race.
so is it more so your outward appearance and how society perceives you that makes you black? cause i also watched "passing" lately, which was also very interesting and not just because of the casting choices, and would you say that clare is less black than irene because she lives as a white woman, where irene only occasionally does? is irene less black than her husband who couldn't pass at all?
obviously it's not just culture and knowledge of history. because a lot of black (hell most people of all backgrounds) don't know the history of their people but rachel knows africana studies well enough to teach it at a university. [I do wish they had interviewed some students] of course there's a big difference between personally living experiences vs learning about them, but she does seem pretty knowledgeable, at least academically.
a lot of people are mad that she culturally appropriated blackness, and while I guess she did, she also literally tried to walk a mile in their shoes. most people just want the benefits, the cool culture, the tasty dish, the street cred. she literally tried on the whole life.
I don't have an opinion about what she did, but I do wonder if she should have been treated so harshly.
couple reviews of the documentary:
Vulture - The Rachel Divide Is a Rorschach Blot for Its Viewers
Vice - The Rachel Dolezal Documentary Is a Hollow, Manipulative Spectacle
Conscious Style Guide - Drop the Hyphen in Asian American
when I was a kid, I played around with Asian American or American Asian, and for some time I classified myself as American Asian, because I felt American first. my parents, not having been born or raised here, were Asian American.
I don't remember thinking much about the hyphen tho. I think agree with Maxine Hong Kingston, that “I have been thinking that we ought to leave out the hyphen in ‘Chinese-American,’ because the hyphen gives the word on either side equal weight, as if linking two nouns. …Without the hyphen, ‘Chinese’ is an adjective and ‘American’ a noun; a Chinese American is a type of American." this runs parallel to the idea I had about Asian American vs American Asian.
in the comments where I found the above article linked, someone said that "Asian Americans are Asian migrants who now have American citizenship, and so, they're in the same category as African migrants who now have American citizenship, and therefore are African Americans. There's therefore a distinction between African Americans and Black Americans." which is true! white Charlize Theron was born in South African and is now American. she is fully African American, tho not Black. and Rhianna is part Black and was born in Barbados, not Africa (tho her mom is Afro-Guyanese), so she's not African American. but then, what are people like me? I guess the rather wordy: American of Asian descent, because I don't think we'll ever be referred to as yellow Americans (nor should we be!).
p.s.
we SHOULD start using white American a lot more, or at least until we stop using race as a common identifier. otherwise, American will always default to being a white person.
I remember from when I was kid, my dad told me a story of him and his Asian Hawaiian coworker. something about how the coworker called himself an American, but that my dad thought that was only half the story since white Americans will never see Asian Americans as truly American.
when I was much younger I disagreed with him. it was true for him, maybe, since he was a naturalized citizen who only came to the US in his 20s and still spoke in a heavy accent. but me, I'm American! I was born and raised here; I speak with a SoCal accent. white Americans will see me as one any other American.
I think it was only in high school that I realized he was right. by then I was at a school white a ton more people (2000 students) and more racial diversity.
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the last part of this article in the NYT:
...I told my parents they were wrong about who we were. We were Asian-American, not Asian, and we were definitely not Oriental.
“We’re not American,” they said. “We’re Asian." At least they didn’t laugh me out of the house for my arrogance.
“Asian-American,” I said. “Not Asian Asian.”
That was more than 20 years ago. On a recent visit to New Jersey, I asked my parents, former Reagan Republicans turned staunch Obama Democrats who voted for Bernie Sanders in the 2016 primary, if they felt American now that they’ve been in the United States for half a century.
“Of course,” my mother said. “What else would I be? Even though other Americans don’t see me as American.”
“Well, who cares how they see us,” my father said. “They can think what they want, but it doesn’t matter to me.”
I hope he’s right. Regardless of how we are seen by others, we are the ones who can best see ourselves.
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New American Economy - Combatting the AAPI Perpetual Foreigner Stereotype
I watched Joker last week, and a few days later I realized that there seemed to be speaking parts for only white or Black people. I don't remember any other races of people talking, which is nuts.
and this is why I kind of hate the term BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and People of Color)
Black people are the go to race when adding diversity. I'm glad that these days tv and movies include more than a single "token black person". but, just as including one black person in a group of a dozen or more white people doesn't make it a diverse cast, adding just one other race doesn't make it so either.
when Kamala Harris was announced as the democratic VP candidate, I saw SO MANY headlines saying "first Black woman" but only a handful that said "first Asian woman". she's half Indian, and was mostly raised by her Indian mom. (side note, did you know that Tiger Woods is only a quarter black but 1/2 asian [1/4 Chinese, 1/4 Thai]. he's also 1/8 native American and 1/8 white.)
Black people are already highlighted in our society today. yes, often because of horrible horrible things. but they're still assumed to be American. I don't think Black people are often asked "where are you from?" whereas I've been asked dozens of times, even though I speak perfect english with more than a hint of a so-cal accent. asians, and possibly latinx might always be considered "other" in America. we may always be assumed to have immigrated here recently. which is crazy, because a good portion of today's America used to be belong to Mexico. and Mexicans had settled in places like New Mexico before 1600 even!
I don't at all take issue with the I in BIPOC. I think they, more often than the rest of us, get forgotten about. their experience is very different than the rest of us in that this was their land and it was stolen from them. (Mexico lost the Mexican-American war so gave up land in the settlement)
