A better response to Suzy Lee Weiss

From the e-pages of Racialicious, a worthwhile blog to read, for those of you who don’t know it: “To (All) the White Girls Who Didn’t Get Into The College Of Their Dreams” by Kendra James (http://www.racialicious.com/2013/04/10/to-all-the-white-girls-who-didnt-get-into-the-college-of-their-dreams/).

Here’s just a snippet:

There’s an arrogance in high school students that manifests during the college-application process, but it’s an arrogance that correlates with already existing racial and class privilege… It’s hard to understand that despite working hard for four years, you may not get into your first choice of school. It’s easy to look for someone to blame, and it’s easier still to want to place that blame on groups of people who can so easily be scapegoats for your problems…and historically always have.

Snap. Thank you, Kendra.

(Btw, I knew there was a WSJ connection! Suzy’s sister used to work there.)

** Thanks to my colleague NS for the link.

What makes the news

As I’ve read about the deaths at the Boston Marathon and listened to my community play back what they’ve absorbed from the news, it has struck me that the first piece of information I gleaned, and the one I keep hearing, is that Martin Richard was only 8 years old.

Martin has been at the top of my internet searches and on the tips of my community’s tongues. Krystle Campbell and Lu Lingzi take a little more scrolling.

Let me be clear: by no means am I arguing that the senseless death of an 8 year old isn’t tragic. It is. And so are the senseless deaths of a 23 year old graduate student from China and a 29 year old local Massachusetts woman.

So I’ve been struck, not only by what makes someone’s death more noteworthy (or newsworthy), but how who they are shapes our responses to their loss.

Take for instance, the online comments on this Washington Post article “Boston University identifies third bombing victim as Lu Lingzi” (http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/3rd-victim-of-bombings-identified-as-lingzi-lu-graduate-student/2013/04/17/ce65e660-a776-11e2-b029-8fb7e977ef71_story.html):

I am so sad for this young woman and for her parents so far away in China. To think that they poured their life’s work and love into raising this daughter–their only child under Chinese government policy–that she was apparently so accomplished, and that they let her follow her academic dream half way around the world–to us, here in Boston–never to return. It’s just heartbreaking. Her poor mom and dad! (MaldenJen)

While this comment seems authentically sympathetic, the aside (“their only child under Chinese government policy”) takes an intentional detour. Within these dashes, MaldenJen leverages Lu’s death as an opportunity to critique policy. And unlike the invocation of gun control laws in the wake of the Newtown school shooting, I don’t see how Chinese population growth policy is relevant to the bombing of the Boston Marathon.

Yet that’s where MaldenJen  goes with Lu’s death. Notably and disturbingly, MaldenJen doesn’t mention the bomber(s) as the obvious and direct cause of the tragedy: it’s as if the Chinese government is really to blame for making this situation heartbreaking. (And if we’re to follow this logic, should Martin’s parents be less heartbroken over his death since they still have a daughter?)

Even more notable and disturbing to me are the comments that followed MaldenJen’s post:

The one-child policy doesn’t apply to government employees and the otherwise well-connected, so please save your energy on that score (spellmistress).

Government employees are indeed subject to the one child policy. They can lose their jobs by having a second one. The well connected is another matter of course, but they seem to have different rules in all societies. Malden made a very thoughtful comment, and jerks like you ought to get a life (luxembourg1).

Notice anything about these responses? Like the absence of any mention of Lu?

With one set of dashes, one woman who died at the marathon is obscured by our perspectives on, (mis)understandings of, and political slant on China.

Meanwhile, Martin’s death somehow remains more individual, more specific and more human, both in the press and in our responses. And thait’s not just because of a difference in age. It’s about everything we see when we read the names and see the pictures of those who have made the news, and the meaning and value we attach to what we see.

The humanity of the Boston bombing

I’m still processing the Boston bombing, and the fear, anger and suspicion that the bombing has stirred. As much as our outrage and terror is about Boston, it’s about humanity: I’ve heard one too many people say the world is going to heck in a handbasket. And the blame lies with “these days,” as in everything has gotten so bad “these days.”

As I struggle with my own fear and identification with this particular tragedy (I’ve run Boston, and I’ve had the joy of seeing my partner, sister and friends cheering me on along different race routes), I’m thankful that I found this statement from actor Patton Oswalt. I hope it’s helpful to you, too.

I would only add that after you look “violence, or bigotry, or intolerance or fear or just garden-variety misogyny, hatred or ignorance” in the eye, take action: name it, stand with others in the face of it, poke it in the eyes, tell other people not to give up. Do something. Because not doing anything is actually doing something, too.

Blogs you’re reading

Today, I just want to know: what other blogs, newsfeeds, tweets and other media about identity, diversity and equity are you reading actively?

 

Thanks!

Actually, that’s not sarcasm. It’s just hate

As news broke about the Boston Marathon yesterday, columnist Erik Rush tweeted:

Everybody do the National Security Ankle Grab! Let’s bring more Saudis in without screening them! C’mon! #bostonmarathon

I had never heard of Rush before, who writes for WND, which touts itself as “America’s Independent News Network.”

Of course, this started a tweet war, with someone posting back, “Are you ALREADY BLAMING MUSLIMS??” to which Rush responded, “Yes, they’re evil. Let’s kill them all” (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/04/15/erik-rush-boston-marathon-muslims_n_3087642.html?utm_hp_ref=mostpopular).

Writing his response off as “sarcasm, idiot,” Rush went on to defend his position, tweeting:

Hypothesis proven: Libs responding to “kill them all” sarcasm neglect fact that their precious Islamists say the same about us EVERY DAY.

Did you see that? Did you see what Rush did?

That’s a world-class bait and switch right there. The issue is whether he was blaming Muslims without evidence, and Rush deftly changed the subject to an attack on liberals for not having a sense of humor and for choosing Islam over “us” (and under that cover, he managed to take another gross and defamatory shot at Muslims). It’s a classic redirection to justify prejudice–if only by refusing to acknowledge the prejudice in the first place.

And scarily enough, it works. (Evidence: Rush can tweet accusations loudly and proudly.)

So say you were on Twitter reading this. How would you respond? What do you have to say, and how you could you say it effectively? Maybe you’re not going to convince Rush of anything, but remember, the Twitterverse is watching.

On “terrorists”

If you’ve been following the news about the bombs at today’s Boston Marathon, you’ve heard the “t” word: terrorist. Beyond the news, which is understandably scant right now in terms of answers, I’m hearing it all over casual conversations:

In an e-mail exchange, a friend wrote, “Someone told me that it was a terrorist incident.”

In an online chat, another friend asked, “Do we know if it’s terrorists?”

And my response has been, “What else would we call it?”

This bombing, like any bombing, is an act of terror, plain and simple. The feeling in my gut and heart tells me that.

My second response has been, “Do you mean: did ‘people outside the US’ do it?”

In both cases, the answer has been yes.

And as yet another friend argued that the movie theater shooting in Aurora, CO was “a very different type of act” than what he refers to as “terrorism,” all I could say was, “No, it’s different people. Still terror.”

So I’m writing today just to ask you to help stop the racism and nationalism that are triggered instantly, powerfully and (in some minds) justifiably when it comes to acts of terror. It’s in moments like this when we reflexively grab onto stereotypes and prejudice (that we “know better” than to express in our daily lives). And so it’s in moments like this when we have to practice and help each other to think, speak and be the people we want to be.

As we wait in the wake of this tragedy, let’s do what we can not to deepen hatred and fear.

The script on entitlement: flipped

On yesterday’s post (how to respond to an accusation that people who receive government assistance believe they’re entitled to it), a technique I often use is flipping the script.

What I mean: if you step back and consider the presumption underlying a statement like Romney’s, sometimes it’s helpful to reverse the roles and look at the issue from the other side.

As a professor from my graduate studies once asserted: how you frame the question determines the possible answers. And sometimes, as with Romney’s assertion, there’s a fundamental problem with the frame. It’s skewed and obscures the full canvas. So give it a flip.

I can best illustrate what flipping Romney’s script would look like with this:

So today, here’s an invitation. Find a popular cultural script about a group of people and try flipping it. See what happens. Would love to hear what you discover.

* Thanks to my colleague SK for the image.

Sometimes it helps to flip the script

In the spirit of my WPC workshop, for those of you who aren’t able to attend, remember this Romney moment from the 2012 presidential campaign?

There are 47 percent of the people who will vote for the president no matter what. All right, there are 47 percent who are with him, who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe that government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you name it. That that’s an entitlement. And the government should give it to them (http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2012/09/full-transcript-mitt-romney-secret-video#47percent).

The question for many of us then and now is: so what do you say back to that?

Go ahead. Take a moment. Address Mr. Romney.

If it helps, you might first:

• Notice your gut response. Not just what it is, but what kind of response it is: emotional, intellectual, moral, action-oriented? Also, where that response comes from–what experiences or identities does it activate for you?
• Reflect on why this comment wasn’t surprising. How it was, in fact, culturally and socially understandable. (I didn’t say correct, I said understandable.)
• Take a moment to consider what this comment could be about/where it’s coming from. Please entertain at least 3 possibilities.
• Discern what you have to say, and how it’s most effective to say it. (You may not know the latter until you try, or with practice. The point is simply to consider how to be effective, as opposed to just right.)
• Now give it a try. Imagine or have someone play the role of Romney, or someone else you know who believes that 47% of people feel entitled. And say what you have to say. Aloud. So you can hear yourself.

And keep practicing. Because when you least expect it, you’re going to have a chance to respond live and in person. And not responding (because you’re unprepared or unwilling–it doesn’t matter which) is also a response.

At the risk of sounding like a broken record (or MP3): we all have a responsibility to stay “fit” and practice our skills for responding to these everyday 911 moments when equity, inclusion and justice are on the line. Thanks for practicing with me.

Talking back to entitlement

Today I take off for the White Privilege Conference in Seattle, where I will be facilitating workshops about Talking Back to White Entitlement. There are other identities of entitlement, of course. What’s more, those different identities intersect, overlap and sometimes conflict.

What I mean when I talk about entitlement begins with privilege.

Privilege refers to unearned rights, advantages and freedoms that I enjoy simply because I happened to be born into the norm, majority or preferred group. I didn’t earn my privilege. I just have it. It’s like being born right handed: almost everything in my daily life (including the English language, power tools, cars and your average available pair of scissors) is conveniently set up for me. Beyond the physical and practical, I’m immune to jokes or stigma about my particular handedness, and I can justify my unearned advantage with simple logic: there are more of us. So there.

You can see how whiteness, Christianity (cultural, if not religious) heterosexuality and other majority identities are “right handed,” and how one can be right handed in one aspect of identity and left handed in another. Also interesting to consider: a right handed child can be born to a left handed parent, much like a heterosexual child can be born to a gay parent, or a gay child to a heterosexual parent. More than just loving the child, the parent in both of these situations is tasked with helping the child to navigate through a world in which access, opportunity and status is fundamentally different simply because of who the parent and child were born as. (While this is true of any child and parent, there are many biological traits shared within families that create parallel or consonant experiences of privilege.)

So privilege is unearned advantage, including immunity from struggle or stigma. Entitlement is thinking that privilege is your right. And that’s what I’m going to help people think about and respond to for the next couple of days.

* My source on the literal and metaphoric way to think about privilege is my colleague Steven Jones and his thought paper “The Right Hand of Privilege”: http://www.jonesandassociatesconsulting.com/The_Right_Hand_of_Privilege_ThoughtPaper.pdf.

Remembering Oikos

A little over a year ago, on April 2, 2012, six people were killed at Oikos University in Oakland. The shooter One Goh was an Oikos student.

If you’ve never heard of Oikos before or even since the shooting, that’s not surprising. Writer Jay Kang, observes “just… how unremarkable [the school] was and just how forgettable it was” when he visited the campus (http://www.npr.org/2013/04/02/176037649/an-overlooked-school-shooting-transforms-a-community).

The fact of Oikos’ unremarkability takes on greater significance when you acknowledge two other facts:

• the school’s main student demographic is immigrants seeking an affordable nursing education, who rely more on referrals within their community than glossy admissions marketing to choose where they will go to school, and
• the school has recently been “on probation by the state regulators for lackluster pass rates on California’s licensing exam.”

It’s as if education doesn’t really matter there because the students don’t.

Does that sound melodramatic?

If so, consider how little the shooting has mattered in the national dialogue about gun control. Do Sandy Hook Elementary; Aurora, Colorado and Virginia Tech ring any bells? The shootings in those places certainly rang louder in the national ear.

As Kang reflects in an interview with NPR, “[F]or the most part, [poor immigrants are] just almost invisible, and so it makes sense that their tragedies would also be invisible.”

Sensible or not, the invisibility is still damaging. In the NY Times article “That Other School Shooting,” Kang writes, “It rakes at your guts, to watch your tragedies turn invisible. You know why it’s happening, but admitting it to yourself — that it has to do in some indivisible way with the value of immigrants’ lives — is something you’d rather not confront”  (http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/31/magazine/should-it-matter-that-the-shooter-at-oikos-university-was-korean.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0).

Of course, “you” don’t always have a choice about confronting what’s happening. In his exploration of the Oikos shooting, Kang describes learning about the incident from a Korean friend who wrote four words in an e-mail:

“We did it again.” I knew what he was talking about the moment I read it. “We,” indeed, had done “it” again, and “it” required no further explanation.

Does that sound paranoid? Like, come on… “we” could be anyone: men, people who own computers, human beings…

Well, as Kang writes, leaping from “we” to Korean-Americans “may sound cynical and callous, but it speaks to a truth shared among immigrants whose people have done terrible things.” I would take it further and say that any minority group who experiences tenuous tolerance by the majority can relate to this reflexive dread when anyone who can be identified with the group does something socially, morally or legally wrong. The flip side of being invisible in a community is that any attention can feel like scrutiny. And certainly, it is when one of yours has committed a mass murder.

Notably, the url for Kang’s NY Times piece (which, like other urls, offers an alternate title for the article it links to) includes this segment “should-it-matter-that-the-shooter-at-oikos-university-was-korean.”

Kang and Chung, both Korean-American, would say yes.

Kang writes about Goh and Chung both referring to their fathers as “typically Korean,” using that shorthand “knowing that [Kang] would understand instantly what they meant.” And he did. So, as a matter of fact, do I. Saying that you have a “typically Korean” father explains a lot about the emotional landscape in which you were raised and the interior terrain that you continue to navigate as an adult. Here, I’ll rely on Kang’s eloquent framing to elaborate:

[H]an and hwabyung, two Korean cultural concepts that have no equivalent in the English language [provide a lens into the psyche of Korean immigrants]. By Western standards, the two words are remarkably similar. Both describe a state of hopeless, crippling sadness combined with anger at an unjust world. And both suggest entrapment by suppressed emotions. Both words have been a part of the Korean lexicon for as long as anyone can remember, their roots in the country’s history of occupation, war and poverty. Perhaps the best way to distinguish between the two words would be to say that han is the existential condition of immutable sadness, whereas hwabyung is its physical manifestation. Those afflicted with hwabyung describe a dense helplessness and despair that always feels on the verge of erupting into acts of self-destruction.

According to Chung, the social ramifications of han and hwabyung are “denial and avoidance… Under all that suppression, emotional turmoil festers. When it’s not addressed, it can turn explosive. There’s this dark side that needs to be dealt with, but the Korean community as a whole will not acknowledge that something is up. Nobody will say anything about anything.”

There’s a very real reason that Koreans and Korean-Americans may be silent about han and hwabyung, the latter of which is now recognized in Korea as a treatable clinical disease: the fear of being profiled as dangerous and bad people. This is no trivial or silly concern in a world that struggles with xenophobia.

Yet, the acknowledgment of han and hwabyung is not about finding a cultural scapegoat for the Oikos shooting. Rather, it’s about having another lens, in addition or as alternative to the one we impose by default on the world around us. Because we’re always looking at others and our experiences through cultural constructs that shape our perceptions. (And more often than not, the lens we use to see the world says a lot more about us than it does about the world.) And when we can consider more than one perspective, then we can truly discover and learn about what we are regarding, as well as ourselves.