ACONE

ACONE

Yesterday I participated on a panel at the Annual Adoption Conference of New England held in Milford, MA. The first thing I noticed when I walked into the conference were the large number of adoption agencies and prospective (predominantly white) parents racing back and forth looking at posterboards of children from all over the world taking notes in their ACONE supllied folders.

It was like a marketplace. This wasn’t the first time I had encountered something like this before, but I couldn’t but feel powerless. I was the product, or an investment. Like a CD I had finally matured to my fullest capicity and here I was on display for all to see the potential investment that could be had. If felt surreal walking up a hallway seeing endless walls of adoption “counsellers” (also predominantly white) dotting the floorplan of what had become a worldwide adoption menu. I approached the check-in table and inquired about where my presentation room would be. The lady behind the table pulled out a floor diagram pointing to the room I would be in. “Just follow the walls of vendors-ahem I mean adoption advocates, and you’ll see your room right before the court yard.” At least someone else noticed the consumeristic through-line here.

The panel went well-productively I thought. Most of the parents in the room asked intelligent questions and seemed to genuinely want our opinions to help raise their children. Others seemed indifferent and forced by their partner to come and “hear us out.” One woman towards the end of the program put me on the spot with a question that I wasn’t quite ready for.

“I was wondering, as an adoptee with adopted siblings of different ethnicities, do you think it would be more important to construct my family with all Korean adoptees, or with a multiracial family?”

I’m still sort of plowing through what I should have said without much luck. It was an interesting experience, and with each experience I’m able to compile new insights that hopefully can help a-parents grapple with adoption. Hopefully next time I’ll be more prepared.

“Adopting Is The New Black”

Thanks to Carmen from racialicious for pointing out this Urban Outfitters t-shirt abomination…

Not much else to say here, I’ll leave it to you all to comment on this piece of work. Well Urban Outfitters has been known for this sort of bull so I am not surprised that they came out with a t-shirt like this. I remember a year ago or so seeing a board game that they were selling there called “Ghettopoly.” It’s essentially an extremely offensive stereotypical portrayal of all people of color with token characters. Check out the link if you want to see more. And I hate to say this, but the board game was originally developed by…an Asian American man. On the original site (which was ghettopoly.com) the owner of the game defends himself. There was a whole controversy about this before, and some might remember it. I had already banned Urban Outfitters for selling that, but looks like I renew my ban with the latest t-shirt.

Looking for Unnaturalized Korean Adoptees

Ok well, I’m going to leave this next post up for a little while.

I left a post a few weeks ago about a radio program called ‘US Asians’ that I am currently helping develop with the Institute for Asian American Studies at the University of Massachusetts, Boston. The program aspires to be the first National Asian American Radio program in history. As part of a large grant that we are submitting to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, we are putting together a number of radio module submissions.

After much coercion, I have convinced my colleagues that a piece on transracially adopted Asian and more specifically Korean adoptees will make a good piece for the grant. Within this group of adoptees we are explicitly looking for those adoptees who were NOT naturalized upon their arrival to the U.S. by their a-parents. This subpopulation is relatively uncharted territory and does not have a good deal of information available, but in light of the recent deportation cases of transracial adoptees it is quite obvious that there are those who were not naturalized and remain non-citizens.

If you are interested in potentially sharing your story via email, or by interview, or if you know a particular expert or lawyer that specifically deals with these sort of immigration issues for adoptees please contact me at gangshik.kadnexus@gmail.com.

Poetry is Dangerous – By Kazim Ali

(Thanks to the Asian Americans for Political Awareness Listserv for this article)

Poetry is Dangerous
by Kazim Ali

On April 19, after a day of teaching classes at
Shippensburg University, I went out to my car and
grabbed a box of old poetry manuscripts from the front
seat of my little white beetle and carried it across
the street and put it next to the trashcan outside
Wright Hall. The poems were from poetry contests I had
been judging and the box was heavy. I had previously
left my recycling boxes there and they were always
picked up and taken away by the trash department.

A young man from ROTC was watching me as I got into my
car and drove away. I thought he was looking at my car
which has black flower decals and sometimes inspires
strange looks. I later discovered that I, in my dark
skin, am sometimes not even a person to the people who
look at me. Instead, in spite of my peacefulness, my
committed opposition to all aggression and war, I am a
threat by my very existence, a threat just living in
the world as a Muslim body.

Upon my departure, he called the local police
department and told them a man of Middle Eastern
descent driving a heavily decaled white beetle with
out of state plates and no campus parking sticker had
just placed a box next to the trash can. My car has
NY plates, but he got the rest of it wrong. I have two
stickers on my car. One is my highly visible faculty
parking sticker and the other, which I just don’t have
the heart to take off these days, says “Kerry/Edwards:
For a Stronger America.”

Because of my recycling the bomb squad came, the state
police came. Because of my recycling buildings were
evacuated, classes were canceled, campus was closed.
No. Not because of my recycling. Because of my dark
body. No. Not because of my dark body. Because of his
fear. Because of the way he saw me. Because of the
culture of fear, mistrust, hatred, and suspicion that
is carefully cultivated in the media, by the
government, by people who claim to want to keep us
‘safe.’

These are the days of orange alert, school lock-downs,
and endless war. We are preparing for it, training for
it, looking for it, and so of course, in the most
innocuous of places-a professor wanting to hurry home,
hefting his box of discarded poetry-we find it.

That man in the parking lot didn’t even see me. He saw
my darkness. He saw my Middle Eastern descent. Ironic
because though my grandfathers came from Egypt, I am
Indian, a South Asian, and could never be mistaken for
a Middle Eastern man by anyone who’d ever met one.

One of my colleagues was in the gathering crowd,
trying to figure out what had happened. She heard my
description-a Middle Eastern man driving a white
beetle with out of state plates-and knew immediately
they were talking about me and realized that the box
must have been manuscripts I was discarding. She
approached them and told them I was a professor on the
faculty there. Immediately the campus police officer
said, “What country is he from?”

“What country is he from?!” she yelled, indignant.

“Ma’am, you are associated with the suspect. You need
to step away and lower your voice,” he told her.

At some length several of my faculty colleagues were
able to get through to the police and get me on a cell
phone where I explained to the university president
and then to the state police that the box contained
old poetry manuscripts that needed to be recycled. The
police officer told me that in the current climate I
needed to be more careful about how I behaved. “When I
recycle?” I asked.

The university president appreciated my distress about
the situation but denied that the call had anything to
do with my race or ethnic background. The spokesperson
of the university called it an “honest mistake,” not
referring to the young man from ROTC giving in to his
worst instincts and calling the police but referring
to me who made the mistake of being dark-skinned and
putting my recycling next to the trashcan.

The university’s bizarrely minimal statement lets
everyone know that the “suspicious package” beside the
trashcan ended up being, indeed, trash. It goes on to
say, “We appreciate your cooperation during the
incident and remind everyone that safety is a joint
effort by all members of the campus community.”

What does that community mean to me, a person who has
to walk by the ROTC offices every day on my way to my
own office just down the hall-who was watched, noted,
and reported, all in a day’s work? Today we gave in
willingly and whole-heartedly to a culture of fear and
blaming and profiling. It is deemed perfectly
appropriate behavior to spy on one another and police
one another and report on one another. Such behaviors
exist most strongly in closed and undemocratic and
fascist societies.

The university report does not mention the root cause
of the alarm. That package became “suspicious” because
of who was holding it, who put it down, who drove
away. Me.

It was poetry, I kept insisting to the state policeman
who was questioning me on the phone. It was poetry I
was putting out to be recycled.

My body exists politically in a way I can not prevent.
For a moment today, without even knowing it, driving
away from campus in my little beetle, exhausted after
a day of teaching, listening to Justin Timberlake on
the radio, I ceased to be a person when a man I had
never met looked straight through me and saw the
violence in his own heart.

====

JAI Turiya Sangeetananda Alice Coltrane– Hari OM Tat Sat

====

www.kazimali.com

www.alicejamesbooks.org/far_mosque.html

Starting the Weekend

Cheers to weekends…

I had lunch with my dad yesterday. We went to a Vietnamese Pho Restaurant where I attempted the heroic feat of finishing an extra large bowl if chicken Pho. I always come close, but never manage to scarf an entire bowl in its entirety. Well in any event, I’ve been talking about this whole cultural competency issue, and it has been discussed at length on the K@W Listserv. It hit me again, (and it always does for that matter), growing up with my family and how we would often go out to eat at restaurants. From an early age I recall going and being completely paranoid about what others thought of us. And it wasn’t a completely unbased fear, because more often than not I would look around and see other tables looking our direction with puzzled expressions on their faces. Sometimes I feel oversensitive to these issues, but from seeing others on the listserv discuss this sort of topic at more length I have given it more thought. When my dad and I were out at lunch I could see just about every table looking at us. Throughout the meal I couldn’t completely concentrate because I could feel piercing stares from all directions of the restaurant.

It’s never been something I’ve felt completely comfortable about, and sometimes what makes it worse is when servers or waiters ask about our family. I mean I can understand, two older white people with Vietnamese, Taiwanese, and Korean kids at a table makes for excellent tip conversation fodder. And while this sort of conversation very rarely is brought up and (furthermore seems to only rear its nasty head at Asian restaurants), it’s aways in the back of my mind. My entire life (correction: my entire childhood) I’ve had to explain our family and how we came to be. Sometimes when I was young I could get away with having one of my parents pick me up from school and in my mind rationalize that others would understand that if I had a white parent, I must be biracial (Even though I’m probably as fully Korean looking as it gets).

For the past 5 years or so living on my own I’ve come to take this sort of thing for granted-that is, being able to go to restaurants with my friends, or my partner without ever having to think twice about others starring. But every so often I’ll meet up with my family or parents at a restaurant to catch up on what I’ve been up to, and like clock-work, the feelings flood back. I try to block them out because I almost feel sort of guilty for feeling embarrassed by the situation sometimes, but they always surface no matter how much I try. The feelings are fleeting as one meeting with my parents comes and goes and I’m thrown back into the normalcy of my daily routine. Thought I’d share that today in the hopes that other KADs and TRAs can identify with even just a piece of how I feel. I’m not completely proud of how I feel, but I know it can’t be helped at this point. Anyone else have similar experiences or feelings?

Tibetan Monk

Just thought this was an interesting article in the Boston Globe. Thanks to Useless Thoughts‘ Blog post.

“The simple life”

Raised to be a Tibetan monk, he had to find his own path to enlightenment

By David Mehegan, Globe Staff | April 17, 2007

NEWTON — With his bright smile, wire-rimmed glasses, and shock of thick hair, Daja Wangchuk Meston of Newton looks like an ordinary guy in his mid-30s, with a faint south-Asian accent. But his amazing story shows what a precious and hard-won thing an ordinary life can be.

 

When he was 6 years old, Meston’s American mother arranged for him to be ordained as a monk in a Tibetan Buddhist monastery monk in Nepal. Confused and unhappy, he left the monastery at age 16, knowing rudimentary English, and eventually made his way alone to the United States. He ended up in Boston, and only gradually unraveled the mystery of his origins.

Today, Meston and his Tibetan-born wife, Phuni, own a small import shop, called Karma, in Newton Centre. Now he has told his story, without any bitterness, in a new book “Comes the Peace: My Journey to Forgiveness.”

Meston, 36, was born in Switzerland in 1970 to Feather Meston and Larry Greeneye, a pair of American flower children from Los Angeles, wandering across Europe in a green Volkswagen Bus, smoking dope , and dreaming of enlightenment. They ended up in Nepal, where his father had a schizophrenic breakdown, and his mother became a Tibetan Buddhist nun.

His father eventually was brought back to the United States, to be cared for by family. His mother left her boy at age 3 with a Tibetan family in Kathmandu. Three years later, she committed him to a life as a monk in nearby Kopan monastery, while she went off to study the Buddhist ideals of compassion and renunciation.

As an odd white boy among Asians in the monastery, Daja was harassed by other monk-boys and beaten for making mistakes in memorization. He was often hungry, and increasingly baffled at his own identity. “Six to 16,” he said, “my formative years, were a constant struggle to fend off attacks, taunts, name-calling. I developed a sense of unworthiness and discomfort with my own color, a sense that there was something fundamentally wrong with me.”

At 16, increasingly restive and angry, Meston got himself kicked out of the monastery by faking a visit to a prostitute. He spoke Tibetan and Hindi, but his English was poor. “There was nothing for me to do in Nepal as a lay person,” he said. His mother, still in the region, reluctantly helped him go to Italy for a year, then to Los Angeles, where she had relatives. “She was furious,” he said. “She did not want me to leave being a monk.”

Arriving in Los Angeles in 1987, he was placed in a public high school. He took his mother’s family name because he thought Greeneye (his father had changed his name from Greenberg) was too weird. Though he spoke four languages — he had added Italian — his reading skills were weak and he knew little math and less science or history. He refused to eat a hot dog because he thought it was dog meat. When a history class took up the Civil War, he assumed that the Battle of Gettysburg had happened recently. Gradually he learned. He found his father’s older brother, Albert Greenberg, who became a surrogate father to him. Albert took him for the first time to meet the boy’s father, Larry, in a Los Angeles home for the mentally ill.

In 1989, at his mother’s suggestion, Meston came to Boston, where he met Phuni Sonam, a Tibetan immigrant. They were soon married. He was 19; she was 20. He had not finished high school but in 1993 was accepted at Brandeis University, graduating with a degree in sociology.

“You don’t meet many Jewish Tibetan Buddhists, at least not from the age of 3,” said Gordie Fellman, a professor of sociology at Brandeis who remains close to the couple (Phuni also went to Brandeis). “When I learned that the Dalai Lama says the heart of Tibetan Buddhism is compassion for other people and the self, I saw that that is the way he has lived his life.”

Yet he remained depressed and confused. He traveled several times to Tibet and India as guide and interpreter. In 1999, China had applied to the World Bank for funds to build a massive land-reclamation project which a Tibetan human rights group suspected would displace Tibetans. Meston was asked to visit the area and investigate. Caught taking photographs, he was arrested. During a break in intense interrogation, he jumped out a third-floor window and shattered his heels, in addition to internal injuries.

Eventually, he was released and returned to Boston, where he spent several years convalescing, while Phuni worked in retail jobs to bring in money. Emotionally, he had hit bottom.

“I was physically broken,” he said. “I thought I was finished. I couldn’t think or function.” Then he attended a 2001 conference at Boston University on the writing of autobiography and memoir, which suggested to him “how I could transcend and transform the difficult experiences I had had by writing about them.” But first he had to find the truth. “I had no information at all, zero,” he said, and since he could not learn much from his father, he asked his mother, who had moved back to the United States.

“I tried to press her,” said Meston, “but she would say, ‘Why do you care? It’s finished, it’s past — move on.’ I was so confused because she was the only person I could go to, and she wasn’t giving me anything.” But gradually she softened. He said, “She began to trust that I would not attack her, and she told me things she had never told me.”

What Wongmo (her nun’s name) told him, she repeated in a telephone interview from Washington state, where she now lives. She was from an artistic, high-strung family. Her father, John Meston, was cocreator and scriptwriter for the “Gunsmoke” radio and television show. He and his wife were alcoholics and neglectful parents. Wongmo said that as a young person in California and Europe, she was deeply sunk in “sex, drugs, and rock and roll.”

“Then all of a sudden to find your spiritual life and purpose, you can’t say no,” she said. “When you are so young, you need support. I asked [Daja], ‘What did you expect me to do? Did you think I could have come back to the US?’ I would have gone back to my old habits in a week. I had to stay.”

But there was the small matter of the child. After leaving him for three years with the Tibetan family, she decided to have him ordained a monk. “Every mother wants the best for her child,” she said. “I thought with my whole heart that being brought up by wise Tibetan spiritual masters would be the best thing for anyone on earth.”

The one thing she regrets is not realizing how unhappy her son was in Kopan. “If I were to do it again, I would check more carefully on how he was doing,” she said. Yet she still speaks as though, in abandoning the monastery for America, he had traded his birthright for a mess of pottage.

“He spoke perfect Llasa Tibetan, which is like the king’s English,” she said. “He could have been a translator for His Holiness [the Dalai Lama] or ancient texts. It wasn’t his karma, and I have accepted that, but such a life would be extraordinary, to be in the presence of great masters, as opposed to living a normal, everyday, ordinary life.”

Albert Greenberg, 81, of Los Angeles, is devoted to his nephew but speaks with outrage at his sister-in-law’s family.

“I can’t look at the bright side of that family,” he said by telephone. “My family was poor and dysfunctional, but they loved their kids. Her family was wealthy and talented, but more screwed up than we were. They had no love in that family. What Daja and Phuni have done for themselves, all that is in spite of what happened to him.”

In 2003, through a friend, Meston made contact with Clare Ansberry, the Pittsburgh bureau chief of The Wall Street Journal. She wrote a story about him in 2005, and acted as coauthor of the book.

Now that he knows his life story, Daja Meston makes no harsh judgments. The nearest he comes to criticizing his mother is to say, “To be compassionate, you also have to be wise. You can be compassionate and still make a lot of mistakes.” He is close to her, and also visits his father several times a year. His and Phuni’s home is filled with his father’s strange and beautiful artwork.

“The gift of all this,” he said, “is the piecing together for myself, and getting to a place where I am comfortable, whether it’s understanding my fears, or understanding my parents and all the contradictions, and saying, ‘That is life.’ Life is a messy business.”

David Mehegan can be reached at mehegan@globe.com.

Moving Forward

I know that there has been a lot of media/blog coverage of the VT incident. I know there are a lot of people and families grieving and in a lot of pain. And for them I also grieve. This tragedy, unfortunately has unleashed quite a bit of anger and anguish that has been channelled through hurtful racialization and racist commentary. I do not mean to in any way minimize the atrocities that took place this past week. I just wish to look to how the media and mainstream America are channeling their anger and anguish onto many within the Korean and Asian American communities. There are many who feel this same sadness over the tragedy, yet on top of it they feel scared and intimidated. I’ve heard countless stories of how Korean and Asian American adults, children and families are scared of what this may mean for how they are viewed by the rest of America. There is absolutely no reason for the atrocities of Cho to polarize relations with the Korean and Asian American Communities. He acted upon his own volition, and this does not mean that all other Asians or Koreans are killers. I thought this much would be glaringly clear, yet articles like these, and testaments from many Asian Americans continue to flare up and are largely unaddressed on an institutional level.

We live within a society that is racially charged. While most of the country relegates race and racism issues to those residing within the restrictive White vs Black binary, there are obviously many other people of color who are also marginalized and suffer racism as well. Just this past week, Don Imus was batted around by the media for his careless remarks, and was taken off the air. What sort of consequences were there for those such as Rosie O’Donnell’s racist remarks? an apology, and a weak one at that.

People of color are continuously cast as the “racial other” in many current events and are even more so dehumanized in this sense. VT is no exception. Initial police encounters with those trapped inside the engineering building resulted in a Chinese American male being arrested, cuffed, and shown on the cover of the NY Times. It’s not as if any White male was arrested and cuffed during Columbine…

In a more recent article Koreans in Korea who share the name “Cho” are receiving so many hateful and racist comments from many Americans that their sites have been forced to shut down due to too many visits. Many in the U.S. with similar names are also being targeted for racist and xenophobic remarks. http://joongangdaily.joins.com/article/view.asp?aid=2874616

Many are scared. Parents are scared for the safety of their children on campuses, especially Asian American students at VT. If this sort of racist backlash is happening on the internet and in the blogosphere, what does this mean for physical encounters? Many Korean and Asian American organizations have received racist hate mail, and are having to publicly denounce the activity of Cho as if they bare some sort of obligation or involvement for being simply Asian American. I liken this sort of behavior to that of World War II when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. I’ve seen many bloggers make this connection as well. As if there is a need to place blame on others of the same ethnicity…Are all Koreans somehow hot-wired to mother Korea and share the same thoughts including those of Cho’s?

Of course not, yet we saw this exact sort of sentiment during World War II as the justification for interning Japanese Americans on the basis of their alleged blood ties and loyalty to Japan. There is this perverse need to categorize and homogenize the acts of Asians, to be some sort of shared cultural experience. This same sort of “ownership” and racialized loyalty was also seen during the LA Riots when Korean stores and businesses were targeted and destroyed as a result of skewed media coverage and the fallacy that all Koreans were the same. What about Vincent Chin who was killed by several white automobile workers who assumed he was Japanese and that all Japanese were responsible for the deteriorating American car market and rising Japanese care market?

Much of America racializes events into blaming or creating some sort of ethnic responsibility for Asian Americans and people of color in general. I think it’s preposterous for those to think that racism has and will not result after the VT incident. It has, and will continue to occur so long as Americans rely upon homogenizingly limiting typecasting of Asian Americans, that result in placing collective blame.

What happened at VT is a tragedy and as we all grieve I urge you all to not vent your anger and anguish through racist and xenophobic epithets. How are we truly grieving and renouncing the acts of Cho, if we are in turn violently pointing a racist finger back at the many Korean and Asian Americans in this country?

I know there are many of you with quite a bit of anger and feel quite stirred by the number of blog postings and articles all over discussing this issue at length. If you would like to comment to this post please do so in a respectful manner. We need to continue to have ongoing discourse on these issues community to community without hate or generalized blaming or shaming.

-Gang Shik
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(THE FOLLOWING ARE REMARKS WRITTEN BY NEWSWEEK WRITERS AND NOT BY THE AUTHOR OF THIS BLOG)

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/18178194/site/newsweek/

Korean-Americans Brace for Backlash

Korean-Americans fear that hatred toward the Virginia Tech killer will spill over into their community—and fuel negative typecasting.

WEB EXCLUSIVE

By Jessica Bennett and Noelle Chun

Newsweek

 

Updated: 1:44 p.m. ET April 18, 2007

April 18, 2007 – The bodies had barely been removed when the racial epithets started pouring in. Cho Seung-Hui, the 23-year-old identified as the killer of 32 on the Virginia Tech campus, may have lived in the state since his elementary school days, but to the bigots in the blogosphere it was his origins in Korea that mattered most. “Koreans are the most hotheaded and macho of East Asians,” wrote one unnamed commentator on the Sepia Mutiny blog. “They are also sick and tired of losing their Korean girlfriends to white men with an Asian fetish.”

The vitriol of comments like these has shocked America’s Korean community, leaving it braced for a backlash and scrambling to control the damage caused by distorted stereotypes. In South Korea—where government officials feared that the incident could further sour relations with Washington—the foreign ministry issued a statement saying that it hoped the tragedy would not provoke “racial prejudice or confrontation.” Inside the United States, social-network users set up online forums with names like “Don’t Hate Koreans Because of Cho Seung-Hui” and “Cho Seung-Hui Does NOT Represent Asians.” Some spoke of launching a fund-raising drive for the families of those who died in the most deadly school shooting in U.S. history. But many fear these measures won’t be enough to blunt the hatred. “In the wake of 9/11, we saw so many racially charged incidents that I don’t think it’s out of the question to suspect this [prejudice] will happen,” says Aimee Baldillo, a spokeswoman for the Asian American Justice Center, a Washington-based civil-rights group. “The lesson we learned then was that individuals are going to get targeted on the basis of a perceived race or ethnicity with connection to a suspect.”

An estimated 1.4 million people of Korean descent live in the United States. Badillo says her organization has already received reports—still unconfirmed—of several crimes of retribution against the community. Online, chat rooms throbbed with hate. “Take that s–t back to your own nation,” declared one participant on the social networking site Facebook. Not all the comments were negative: 23-year-old student and tech consultant Eugene Kim told NEWSWEEK that about half of the online commentators on Faceook “are saying how an individual shouldn’t be generalized to the entire Asian community.” Others, however, were making remarks like “This guy [Cho] comes to our country on a visa; he’s not even a citizen.” Kim, himself an ethnic Korean, says he has already been the butt of several jokes: “One guy at work said, ‘You guys better be real nice to Kim. Make sure he doesn’t get stressed out so he doesn’t come in and shoot everyone.’”

Other Asians in the United States also experienced mixed emotions when it was confirmed that Cho was indeed Korean. Vietnamese-American writer Andrew Lam says he had held his breath waiting to learn the killer’s identity, hoping his community wouldn’t shoulder collective blame for the acts of an individual. “Let it be some other Asian!” was the prayer among many Asian-American communities, Lam says. Other Asians meanwhile, said they fear a spillover effect would extend beyond Koreans. “The things that some of you are saying scare the s—t out of me,” wrote one Facebook contributor. “I know you all remember the stories of [turbaned] Sikhs getting beaten up after 9/11. Can we show some sense for once?”

Korean-related Web sites, meanwhile, came under intense scrutiny. The site for the national Korean American Student Association, which carried forum postings from alumni expressing support for Virginia Tech, on Tuesday morning went offline with no explanation by the afternoon. At Virginia Tech itself, the Korean Student Association site was shut down; a message in Korean said it had been closed temporarily because of too much server activity. Seung-Woo Lee, the head of the Virginia Tech association, told NEWSWEEK he had received calls from many of the several hundred ethnic Korean students on campus telling him they felt “horrified and scared.” Several parents had already come to their campus to take their children home, he said.

Cho was clearly a troubled young man, whose motives for the rampage may never be known. But scholars like Hugo Schwyzer, a history and gender studies professor at Pasadena City College in Los Angeles-where 35 percent of the college population is of Asian descent—says he expects to see some “classically damaging” typecasts of Asian males as socially awkward and introverted, as more information about Cho emerges. Fears are running particularly high in Los Angeles, home to one of the nation’s largest Korean-American communities. Many residents there remember the violence during the Rodney King race riots that ravaged the city 15 years ago, and fear the possibility of becoming targets again. “We were once the hatred target of black Americans,” says L.A. businessman Kim Yong Gi. “I hope we don’t become the target of all Americans this time.”

“The Korean community as a whole is in shock,” says John Cho, the Los Angeles-based assistant editor of the Korean Times (and no relation to the gunman). “Something like this has never happened to us.” Cho is especially sensitive to concerns about stereotyping—and the pressures facing young men like Cho. “When you first move here, it is a challenge to learn English, to make friends. In Korea, we are all taught to act as part of a group, to be part of bigger group. But here, people are taught to be individuals and to shine on an individual basis. That’s culturally hard for us.” One of the additional pressures facing Koreans, Cho notes, is the belief that members of the group achieve disproportionately high success rates. “The Korean community is known for overachieving,” says Cho. Maybe [the killer] had pressures on him that he couldn’t settle because he wasn’t in [his home] community.” Cho’s newspaper is among the institutions trying to counter negative perceptions of the community. But even as Cho tries to explain the typecasting, he is aware of the irony. “What’s worrying is that if a white person had done this,” he muses, “no one would call up the white community and ask if they were going to be stereotyped.”

With BJ Lee in Seoul, Tara Weingarten in Los Angeles and Lynn Waddell in Blacksburg, Va.

 http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/18178194/site/newsweek/

Newsweek Article on VT Shooting

Thanks for the heads up on this one from the Asian Americans for Political Awareness Listserver

URL: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/18178194/site/newsweek/

By Jessica Bennett and Noelle Chun
Newsweek
Updated: 12:44 p.m. CT April 18, 2007

April 18, 2007 – The bodies had barely been removed when the racial
epithets started pouring in. Cho Seung-Hui, the 23-year-old
identified as the killer of 32 on the Virginia Tech campus, may have
lived in the state since his elementary school days, but to the
bigots in the blogosphere it was his origins in Korea that mattered
most. “Koreans are the most hotheaded and macho of East Asians,”
wrote one unnamed commentator on the Sepia Mutiny blog. “They are
also sick and tired of losing their Korean girlfriends to white men
with an Asian fetish.”

The vitriol of comments like these has shocked America’s Korean
community, leaving it braced for a backlash and scrambling to
control the damage caused by distorted stereotypes. In South Korea—
where government officials feared that the incident could further
sour relations with Washington—the foreign ministry issued a
statement saying that it hoped the tragedy would not provoke “racial
prejudice or confrontation.” Inside the United States, social-
network users set up online forums with names like “Don’t Hate
Koreans Because of Cho Seung-Hui” and “Cho Seung-Hui Does NOT
Represent Asians.” Some spoke of launching a fund-raising drive for
the families of those who died in the most deadly school shooting in
U.S. history. But many fear these measures won’t be enough to blunt
the hatred. “In the wake of 9/11, we saw so many racially charged
incidents that I don’t think it’s out of the question to suspect
this [prejudice] will happen,” says Aimee Baldillo, a spokeswoman
for the Asian American Justice Center, a Washington-based civil-
rights group. “The lesson we learned then was that individuals are
going to get targeted on the basis of a perceived race or ethnicity
with connection to a suspect.”

An estimated 1.4 million people of Korean descent live in the United
States. Badillo says her organization has already received reports—
still unconfirmed—of several crimes of retribution against the
community. Online, chat rooms throbbed with hate. “Take that s–t
back to your own nation,” declared one participant on the social
networking site Facebook. Not all the comments were negative: 23-
year-old student and tech consultant Eugene Kim told NEWSWEEK that
about half of the online commentators on Faceook “are saying how an
individual shouldn’t be generalized to the entire Asian community.”
Others, however, were making remarks like “This guy [Cho] comes to
our country on a visa; he’s not even a citizen.” Kim, himself an
ethnic Korean, says he has already been the butt of several
jokes: “One guy at work said, ‘You guys better be real nice to Kim.
Make sure he doesn’t get stressed out so he doesn’t come in and
shoot everyone.’”

Other Asians in the United States also experienced mixed emotions
when it was confirmed that Cho was indeed Korean. Vietnamese-
American writer Andrew Lam says he had held his breath waiting to
learn the killer’s identity, hoping his community wouldn’t shoulder
collective blame for the acts of an individual. “Let it be some
other Asian!” was the prayer among many Asian-American communities,
Lam says. Other Asians meanwhile, said they fear a spillover effect
would extend beyond Koreans. “The things that some of you are saying
scare the s—t out of me,” wrote one Facebook contributor. “I know
you all remember the stories of [turbaned] Sikhs getting beaten up
after 9/11. Can we show some sense for once?”

Korean-related Web sites, meanwhile, came under intense scrutiny.
The site for the national Korean American Student Association, which
carried forum postings from alumni expressing support for Virginia
Tech, on Tuesday morning went offline with no explanation by the
afternoon. At Virginia Tech itself, the Korean Student Association
site was shut down; a message in Korean said it had been closed
temporarily because of too much server activity. Seung-Woo Lee, the
head of the Virginia Tech association, told NEWSWEEK he had received
calls from many of the several hundred ethnic Korean students on
campus telling him they felt “horrified and scared.” Several parents
had already come to their campus to take their children home, he
said.

Cho was clearly a troubled young man, whose motives for the rampage
may never be known. But scholars like Hugo Schwyzer, a history and
gender studies professor at Pasadena City College in Los Angeles-
where 35 percent of the college population is of Asian descent—says
he expects to see some “classically damaging” typecasts of Asian
males as socially awkward and introverted, as more information about
Cho emerges. Fears are running particularly high in Los Angeles,
home to one of the nation’s largest Korean-American communities.
Many residents there remember the violence during the Rodney King
race riots that ravaged the city 15 years ago, and fear the
possibility of becoming targets again. “We were once the hatred
target of black Americans,” says L.A. businessman Kim Yong Gi. “I
hope we don’t become the target of all Americans this time.”

“The Korean community as a whole is in shock,” says John Cho, the
Los Angeles-based assistant editor of the Korean Times (and no
relation to the gunman). “Something like this has never happened to
us.” Cho is especially sensitive to concerns about stereotyping—and
the pressures facing young men like Cho. “When you first move here,
it is a challenge to learn English, to make friends. In Korea, we
are all taught to act as part of a group, to be part of bigger
group. But here, people are taught to be individuals and to shine on
an individual basis. That’s culturally hard for us.” One of the
additional pressures facing Koreans, Cho notes, is the belief that
members of the group achieve disproportionately high success
rates. “The Korean community is known for overachieving,” says Cho.
Maybe [the killer] had pressures on him that he couldn’t settle
because he wasn’t in [his home] community.” Cho’s newspaper is among
the institutions trying to counter negative perceptions of the
community. But even as Cho tries to explain the typecasting, he is
aware of the irony. “What’s worrying is that if a white person had
done this,” he muses, “no one would call up the white community and
ask if they were going to be stereotyped.”

With BJ Lee in Seoul, Tara Weingarten in Los Angeles and Lynn
Waddell in Blacksburg, Va.

URL: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/18178194/site/newsweek/

Seung Hui Cho

Well I thought about publishing a post, but then I read this post and realized that I could never have written something as succinctly or as glaringly true as what you’re about to read. She covers just about all the points that I had wanted to hit, and much better than anything I could have written. Thanks to the Women of Color Blog for publishing this post, I couldn’t have said it any better.
—————

http://brownfemipower.com/?p=1256

What May Come: Asian Americans and the Virginia Tech Shootings

Tamara K. Nopper
April 17, 2007

Like many, I was glued to the television news yesterday, keeping updated about the horrific shootings at Virginia Tech University. I was trying to deal with my own disgust and sadness, especially since my professional life as a graduate student and college instructor is tied to universities. And then the other shoe dropped. I found out from a friend that the news channel she was watching had reported the shooter as Asian. It has now been reported, after much confusion, that the shooter is Cho Seung-Hui, a South Korean immigrant and Virginia Tech student.

As an Asian American woman, I am keenly aware that Asians are about to become a popular media topic if not the victims of physical backlash. Rarely have we gotten as much attention in the past ten years, except, perhaps, during the 1992 Los Angeles Riots. Since then Asians are seldom seen in the media except when one of us wins a golfing match, Woody Allen has sex, or Angelina Jolie adopts a kid.

I am not looking forward to the onslaught of media attention. If history truly does have clues about what will come, there may be several different ways we as Asian Americans will be talked about.

One, we will watch white media pundits and perhaps even sociologists explain what they understand as an “Asian” way of being. They will talk about how Asian males presumably have fragile “egos” and therefore are culturally prone to engage in kamikaze style violence. These statements will be embedded with racist tropes about Japanese military fighters during WWII or the Viet Cong—the crazy, calculating, and hidden Asian man who will fight to the death over presumably nothing.

In the process, the white media might actually ask Asian Americans our perspectives for a change. We will probably be expected to apologize in some way for the behavior of another Asian—something whites never have to collectively do when one of theirs engages in (mass) violence, which is often. And then some of us might succumb to the Orientalist logic of the media by eagerly promoting Asian Americans as real Americans and therefore unlike Asians overseas who presumably engage in culturally reprehensible behavior. In other words, if we get to talk at all, Asian Americans will be expected to interpret, explain, and distance themselves from other Asians just to get airtime.

Or perhaps the media will take the color-blind approach instead of a strictly eugenic one. The media might try to whitewash the situation and treat Cho as just another alienated middle-class suburban kid. In some ways this is already happening—hence the constant referrals to the proximity of the shootings to the 8th anniversary of the Columbine killings. The media will repeat over and over words from a letter that Cho left behind speaking of “rich kids,” and “deceitful charlatans.” They will ask what’s going on in middle-class communities that encourage this type of violence. In the process they may never talk about the dirty little secret about middle-class assimilation: for non-whites, it does not always prevent racial alienation, rage, or depression. This may be surprising given that we are bombarded with constant images suggesting that racial harmony will exist once we are all middle-class. But for many of us who have achieved middle-class life, even if we may not openly admit it, alienation does not stop if you are not white.

But the white media, being as tricky as it is, may probably talk about Cho in ways that reflect a combination of both traditional eugenic and colorblind approaches. They will emphasize Cho’s ethnicity and economic background by wondering what would set off a hard-working, quiet, South Korean immigrant from a middle-class dry-cleaner-owning family. They will wonder why Cho would commit such acts of violence, which we expect from Middle Easterners and Muslims and those crazy Asians from overseas, but not from hard-working South Korean immigrants. They will promote Cho as “the model minority” who suddenly, for no reason, went crazy. Whereas eugenic approaches depicting Asians as crazy kamikazes or Viet Cong mercenaries emphasize Asian violence, the eugenic aspect of the model minority myth suggests that there is something about Asian Americans that makes them less prone to expressions of anger, rage, violence, or criminality. Indeed, we are not even seen as having legitimate reasons to have anger, let alone rage, hence the need to figure out what made this “quiet” student “snap.”

Given that the model minority myth is a white racist invention that elevates Asians over minority groups, Cho will be dissected as an anomaly among South Koreans who “are not prone” to violence—unlike Blacks who are racistly viewed as inherently violent or South Asians, Middle Easterners and Muslims who are viewed as potential terrorists. He will be talked about as acting “out of character” from the other “good South Koreans” who come here and quietly and dutifully work towards the American dream. Operating behind the scenes of course is a diplomatic relationship between the US and South Korea forged through bombs and military zones during the Korean War and expressed through the new free trade agreement negotiations between the countries. Indeed, even as South Korean diplomats express concern about racial backlash against Asians, they are quick to disown Cho in order to maintain the image of the respectable South Korean.

Whatever happens, Cho will become whoever the white media wants him to be and for whatever political platform it and legislators want to push. In the process, Asian Americans will, like other non-whites, be picked apart, dissected, and theorized by whites. As such, this is no different than any other day for Asian Americans. Only this time an Asian face will be on every television screen, internet search engine, and newspaper.

Tamara K. Nopper is an educator, writer, and activist living in Philadelphia. She can be reached at tnopper@yahoo.com

Interracial Marriages Surge in U.S.

Just wanted to ping an article I just recently saw on Interracial Marriages in the U.S.

CN Le, was one of my Asian American Studies professors I had in my undergrad studies.  His site is Asian Nation.

And yes I will probably get to posting something on Cho Seung Hui…

http://www.onelocalnews.com/chandlernews-dispatch/ViewArticle.aspx?id=13781&source=2 

Interracial marriages surge across U.S.
04/12/2007 16:58:46

By DAVID CRARY, AP National Writer 18 minutes ago

NEW YORK – The ch, , ), Tiger Woods and Derek Jeter have another common bond: Each is the child of an interracial marriage.

It was only 40 years ago — on June 12, 1967 — that the U.S. Supreme Court U.S. Supreme Court knocked down a Virginia statute barring whites from marrying nonwhites. The decision also overturned similar bans in 15 other states.

Since that landmark Loving v. Virginia ruling, the number of interracial marriages has soared; for example, black-white marriages increased from 65,000 in 1970 to 422,000 in 2005, according to Census Bureau figures. Factoring in all racial combinations, Stanford University sociologist Michael Rosenfeld calculates that more than 7 percent of America‘s 59 million married couples in 2005 were interracial, compared to less than 2 percent in 1970.

“The racial divide in the U.S. is a fundamental divide. … but when you have the ‘other‘ in your own family, it‘s hard to think of them as ‘other‘ anymore,” Rosenfeld said. “We see a blurring of the old lines, and that has to be a good thing, because the lines were artificial in the first place.”

But what once seemed so radical to many Americans is now commonplace.

Many prominent blacks — including Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas , civil rights leader Julian Bond and former U.S. Sen. Carol Moseley Braun — have married whites. Well-known whites who have married blacks include former Defense Secretary William Cohen and actor Robert DeNiro.

Last year, the Salvation Army installed Israel Gaither as the first black leader of its U.S. operations. He and his wife, Eva, who is white, wed in 1967 — the first interracial marriage between Salvation Army officers in the United States.

That‘s not to say acceptance has been universal. Interviews with interracial couples from around the country reveal varied challenges, and opposition has lingered in some quarters.

Taunts and threats, including cross burnings, still occur sporadically. In Cleveland, two white men were sentenced to prison earlier this year for harassment of an interracial couple that included spreading liquid mercury around their house.

Kim, a white woman raised on Cape Cod, met Al, who is black, in 1993 after she came to Jackson‘s Tougaloo College to study history. Together, they run Cool Al‘s — a popular hamburger restaurant — while raising a 12-year-old son and 10-year-old daughter in the state with the nation‘s lowest percentage (0.7) of multiracial residents.

“Making friends here has been really, really tough,” Kim said. “I‘ll go five years at a time with no white friends at all.”

Yet some of the worst friction has been with her black in-laws. Kim said they accused her of scheming to take over the family business, and there‘s been virtually no contact for more than a year.

“Everything was race,” Kim said. “I was called ‘the white devil.‘”

Her own parents in Massachusetts have been supportive, Kim said, but she credited her mother with foresight.

“She told me, ‘Your life is going to be harder because of this road you‘ve chosen — it‘s going to be harder for your kids,‘” Kim said. “She was absolutely right.”

Al Stamps said he is less sensitive to disapproval than his wife, and tries to be philosophical.

“I‘m always cordial,” he said. “I‘ll wait to see how people react to us. If I‘m not wanted, I‘ll move on.”

It‘s been easier, if not always smooth, for other couples.

Major Cox, a black Alabamian, and his white wife, Cincinnati-born Margaret Meier, have lived on the Cox family homestead in Smut Eye, Ala., for more than 20 years, building a large circle of black and white friends while encountering relatively few hassles.

“I don‘t feel it, I don‘t see it,” said Cox, 66, when asked about racist hostility. “I live a wonderful life as a nonracial person.”

Meier says she occasionally detects some expressions of disapproval of their marriage, “but flagrant, in-your-face racism is pretty rare now.”

Cox — an Army veteran and former private detective who now joins his wife in raising quarter horses — longs for a day when racial lines in America break down.

“We are sitting on a powder keg of racism that‘s institutionalized in our attitudes, our churches and our culture,” he said, “that‘s going to destroy us if we don‘t undo it.”

In many cases, interracial families embody a mix of nationalities as well as races. Michelle Cadeau, born in Sweden, and her husband, James, born in Haiti, are raising their two sons as Americans in racially diverse West Orange, N.J., while teaching them about all three cultures.

“I think the children of families like ours will be able to make a difference in the world, and do things we weren‘t able to do,” Michelle Cadeau said. “It‘s really important to put all their cultures together, to be aware of their roots, so they grow up not just as Swedish or Haitian or American, but as global citizens.”

Meanwhile, though, there are frustrations — such as school forms for 5-year-old Justin that provide no option for him to be identified as multiracial.

“I‘m aware there are going to be challenges,” Michelle said. “There‘s stuff that‘s been working for a very long time in this country that is not going to work anymore.”

The boom in interracial marriages forced the federal government to change its procedures for the 2000 census, allowing Americans for the first time to identify themselves by more than one racial category.

About 6.8 million described themselves as multiracial — 2.4 percent of the population — adding statistical fuel to the ongoing debate over what race really means.

Kerry Ann Rockquemore, professor of African-American studies at the University of Illinois-Chicago, is the daughter of a black father and white mother, and says she is asked almost daily how she identifies herself.

The surge in interracial marriage comes at “a very awkward moment” in America‘s long struggle with racism, she says.

“We all want deeply and sincerely to be beyond race, to live in a world where race doesn‘t matter, but we continue to see deep racial disparities,” Rockquemore said. “For interracial families, the great challenge is when the kids are going to leave home and face a world that is still very racialized.”

The stresses on interracial couples can take a toll. The National Center for Health Statistics says their chances of a breakup within 10 years are 41 percent, compared to 31 percent for a couple of the same race.

In some categories of interracial marriage, there are distinct gender-related trends. More than twice as many black men marry white women as vice versa, and about three-fourths of white-Asian marriages involve white men and Asian women.

C.N. Le, a Vietnamese-American who teaches sociology at the University of Massachusetts, says the pattern has created some friction in Asian-American communities.

“Some of the men view the women marrying whites as sellouts, and a lot of Asian women say, ‘Well, we would want to date you more, but a lot of you are sexist or patriarchal,‘” said Le, who attributes the friction in part to gender stereotypes of Asians that have been perpetuated by American films and TV shows.

Kelley Kenney, a professor at Kutztown University in Pennsylvania, is among those who have bucked the black-white gender trend. A black woman, she has been married since 1988 to a fellow academic of Irish-Italian descent, and they have jointly offered programs for the American Counseling Association about interracial couples.

Kenney recalled some tense moments in 1993 when, soon after they moved to Kutztown, a harasser shattered their car window and placed chocolate milk cartons on their lawn. “It was very powerful to see how the community rallied around us,” she said.

Kenney is well aware that some blacks view interracial marriage as a potential threat to black identity, and she knows her two daughters, now 15 and 11, will face questions on how they identify themselves.

“For older folks in the black community,” she said “it‘s a feeling of not wanting people to forget where they came from.”

Yet some black intellectuals embrace the surge in interracial marriages and multiracial families; among them is Harvard law professor Randall Kennedy, who addressed the topic in his latest book, “Interracial Intimacies: Sex, Marriage, Identity, and Adoption.”

“Malignant racial biases can and do reside in interracial liaisons,” Kennedy wrote. “But against the tragic backdrop of American history, the flowering of multiracial intimacy is a profoundly moving and encouraging development.”