on slut-shamers in my newsfeed

why do men feel entitled to tell women what behaviors are wrong, especially when those same behaviors are ones that they endlessly exploit? why does society criminalize the sexuality of women at the same time that it objectifies women for this purpose? why do men act like they really have any conservative standards for women's attire and sexuality at the same time that they watch porn like they drink water? why does this sexually repressed christian boy on my newsfeed feel he can police the actions of women in the most obnoxiously patronizing matter? does it make him feel powerful or in control? does he get himself off by being able to violate our wholly personal choices? does he think he's bettering this world by educating women about the dangers of wearing short shorts? WHY IS THIS EVEN AN OBJECT OF YOUR CONCERN? fuck slut-shaming. fuck your ignorance, your entitlement, your confused fears, and your misidentified sources of frustration and insecurity.

More on slut-shaming: http://finallyfeminism101.wordpress.com/2010/04/04/what-is-slut-shaming/

from "poetry is not a luxury" by audre lorde

"Sometimes we drug ourselves with dreams of new ideas. The head will save us. The brain alone will set us free. But there are no new ideas still waiting in the wings to save us as women, as human. There are only old and forgotten ones, new combinations, extrapolations and recognitions from within ourselves - along with the renewed courage to try them out. And we must constantly encourage ourselves and each other to attempt the heretical actions that our dreams imply, and so many of our old ideas disparage. In the forefront of our move toward change, there is only poetry to hint at the possibility made real. Our poems formulate the implications of ourselves, what we feel within and dare make real (or bring action into accordance with), our fears, our hopes, our most cherished terrors."

context

this past summer felt out of context
moved "back home" to a new place
new love in old settings.
old love in new ways
in juarez for a new life,
for every re/union, a goodbye.
new perspectives on old circumstances,
old wisdom informing new insights.

(back) to the place that was never home
but where part of me has always lived.
all the things that could not be carried,
if not recreated, remaining
a constant reference point for our ways of being
soon to become all that surrounds me.
with nothing planned but a date of departure,
home wherever i go, always returning.

i feel like i'm around the corner from one of those moments when all my random experiences and daily inklings and realizations and theories collide and unify into a clarified, life-altering discovery.

home

I wrote something cheesy on my flight back to California, 2 months ago, just to capture how I was feeling at the moment of leaving. Though extremely belated, I wanted to post it now, since, with my mom living in a new city, my current stay in Juarez, and my upcoming move to Korea, I'm feeling a bit discombobulated.

July 6, 2012 - While living in New York for the past 6 years, I clung to the idea of home as that place I was from to which I could always return. But I realize now how much my concept of home has been challenged and transformed. The home I found in New York was one where my community was based on choice, invention, and shared passion, rather than any idealized fantasy or circumstance of birth. My "immediate family members" were my amazing friends, by beautiful necessity, which opened up space for incredible new bonds. And my comfort zone was not something to be escaped as if it were bordered externally by fear, but celebrated as the capacity to find peace and strength in challenge, a capacity expanded from within through a deepening understanding and acceptance of myself.

the construction of Asian America: a personal history

On June 8, 2012, I delivered a 15-minute monologue on my Asian American identity as my final presentation for a 10-month program. Not exactly what I was supposed to do, but anyway, here it is - I hope it can speak to some people out there:

The number of times I have to say Asian/Pacific Islander American in the course of my day really makes me wish that we had a more concise name for our community. The name gives away the fact that we are not really one coherent community, but a synthesis of countless identities. While I cannot fully understand the breadth of this construct, it is deeply infused into all that I am. When I’m not working at Asian Americans for Equality, I’m often working on something else as a board member of OCA-NY or as co-director of the New York chapter of Asian Pacific Americans for Progress. Along with these three intersecting roles, I am always analyzing questions of race, power, and privilege in every day life, and though I sometimes wish I could choose to stop seeing these things, I can’t.

Before I left for college, however, the concept of an Asian American identity did not exist for me. I grew up in a largely Korean community of LA where we were bound together by the personal and extremely specific stories we held in common. We created an intimate community for ourselves and lived by one another’s needs and hands. We created our own culture and support systems that were neither typically Korean nor typically American. All my friends were second generation Korean Americans who understood much of my identity without me needing to explain it to them. I had never been to a doctor, dentist, optometrist or hair salon outside of Koreatown, a world and economy unto itself.

Despite being children of the LA riots and living in a place so clearly delineated by ethnic lines, my friends and I were not very politically aware. We did not have the vocabulary to talk about race relations, and our immigrant parents, who were often working tirelessly to give us possibilities they had never dreamed of, could not possibly prepare us for the racialized world they had brought us into. Nevertheless, we recognized the reality in which we existed. We could feel the backlash against our quickly growing immigrant community. We could see the racist smear campaigns on TV against Asian Americans running for local office. We could read in our local papers about how scared white people were getting about all those foreign language signs in the neighborhood.

When I switched coasts to start school at Columbia, it was like entering a new world. I began experiencing the clash between my Korean background and an elite institution that consciously pressured us to identify with upper-class, white privilege, starting with the posh garden parties for our pre-orientation to the very essence of our core curriculum, a blatant fetishization of the Western world. I heard many people, including professors and administrators, joke about how our core curriculum was really supposed to prepare us for “cocktail parties,” and though they seemed to state this ironically, they also seemed to enjoy it. While I was only able to be at Columbia because I received a full-ride in financial aid, I realized many people around me hadn’t even considered applying for it. In both subtle and overt ways, I was made to feel ashamed about all the ways in which I fell short of privilege.

Removed from my Korean American bubble, I realized that people used the word Asian a lot, even to refer to me. I had only ever heard this term used to mean harm, to mock the existence of Korean Americans in our community and brand us with stereotypes that didn’t even bastardize the right country. I also heard, for the first time, the identifier, “people of color,” which manifested itself on Columbia’s campus in very bizarre ways. Many people of color at Columbia seemed to wear their ethnic identities like a badge and talk about their identities in dogmatic jargon. And if you couldn’t talk the talk, it seemed you were not welcome in those spaces, despite the fact that the people most identified with those spaces were often the most privileged people of color.  It was jarring to me that spaces meant for inclusion and empowerment would do so little to include and empower those they claimed to represent, who may not have had the same privileges to arrive at that point in the first place. My Korean identity had never been an entity to be held apart from me in order to be evaluated and used at will. It was just who I was, an identity all-consuming, deeper than any jargon could capture.

As I began to learn more about this Asian American identity, however, I began to understand that it had to exist precisely because of perception. To most people, it didn’t really matter whether we were born here or somewhere else, whether we spoke English or something else, whether we were here as refugees or postgraduate students. All people needed to know in order to form their conclusions was that we were yellow.

I began to realize that the ignorance of others, and their complacence about their ignorance, had defined my existence in this country in very real and often institutionalized ways. It disturbed me that our experiences of the world should be so dramatically shaped by what others decided you were, regardless of what you actually were. This realization began to make sense of a lifetime of discrimination that I had not really had the vocabulary to confront before.

I realized my experiences of discrimination and racism were not isolated or imaginary but real, historical, and systemically experienced. I realized that these experiences had nothing to do with my identity, but the identity others had made for me.

During college, I only took a few Asian American and ethnic studies classes, but they had a significant impact on me—not just because of the content but the experience of being primary in an academic environment for the first time in my life. In those classes, my opinions and experiences, in their unadulterated form, were suddenly relevant to an academic discussion. I didn’t have to phrase all my comments and present my opinions in a way that I had learned from the white mainstream rather than from my own parents and community in order to be heard. I didn’t have to preface every comment with an explanation of why I might have a different perspective. And I was for once an expert about the world I inhabited.

As I began to tune into the world of not just Asian America but the movements and struggles of different communities of color, I realized the deep commonalities in the experiences of such a diverse range of people, who had all been impacted by where they fell in relation to whiteness or histories of colonization. In finding my place in history for the first time, central parts of my life finally began to make sense, and it hit me that I had never before felt entitled to a place in the only country that was my own.

After I graduated, I moved into the Lower East Side, and one day, I noticed a building with a sign that read, “Asian Americans for Equality.” It was a significant moment to come upon such a sign, in such an unexpected place, a sign that seemed to point directly to my experience and physically draw out a space intended for me. I wouldn’t be in this position today if I hadn’t seen that sign.

A few moments later, I walked into a bar where my sister was holding her engagement party. As I tried to make my way back to my sister’s group, a white woman looked at me and turned to tell her friends, “There’s a group of Asians back there. You really can’t get away from that these days.” It was a tired moment, a constant presence in the lives of people who are not white in this country, a moment in which someone expresses that your marked body does not have the right to simply occupy space. The collision of these two moments illustrated a constant struggle–-the struggle to establish and define myself against the constant attempts of people to define me as less than themselves. It is a mentality that has been ingrained into all of us, a story woven around histories of conquest and occupation, slavery, and the violent demarcation of borders, which has stealthily bled into the globalized capitalism of today.

The reason why I chose to reflect on my identity as a final overview of the past 10 months is that knowing myself and my past gives me the confidence to go on and create the reality I want to live.

It is a significant experience in and of itself to work with staff and community members who look like me, to no longer be constantly subject to the racial power dynamics that have been normalized in our society. To have a supervisor and coworkers who respect my beliefs and my identity and don’t trivialize my work. It has felt like shedding blinders, and the feeling of empowerment that I’ve gained by doing so has bled into other areas of my life as well.

This sort of empowerment often scares people. We are made to feel crazy or paranoid for feeling the way we do, despite the fact that these realizations are made independently across communities and borders. After we undergo a long process of unlearning and reclaiming ourselves, we are then told that the power structures we have finally recognized are nonexistent or unimportant. And when we challenge those structures or create communities for ourselves in order to forgo the need to submit to them, people call it reverse racism.

The Mexican American studies program in Tucson high schools was banned because people were scared that it was “promot[ing] the overthrow of the U.S. government”. It is pretty unbelievable to hear the statements made by education administrators and politicians on this issue, and it is telling that to teach the truth about history, and document the existence of other cultures and experiences, is considered an overthrow of our country. What these people can’t recognize is that the every day privileges they take for granted – to just be normal, relevant and acceptable in the country that is theirs – are not available for everyone.

Asian American identity is not based on ancient manuscripts or passed down traditions or really any inherent ties– it is an identity based on constant choice and invention, an identity with a purpose. It has only a few decades under its belt and is therefore very young and impressionable, and it is a movement that I have seen myself tangibly affect.

By asserting a collective Asian American identity, we use the power of our numbers to assert the equal standing of our diverse community and reject the notion that any one of us is subsidiary, or in need of assimilation.

By identifying with other ethnicities, nationalities, customs, cultures, colors, and religions within our shared community, we choose to not only accept, but identify with, difference.

On the flip side, I think we need to recognize the responsibilities we have when we identify ourselves and others under a shared umbrella. We cannot ignore the fragile identities at stake and the assumptions we create when we do so. We cannot name our organizations Asian American without being vigilant about whether or not we are working with and for a community that is meaningfully so, and admitting the extreme limitations we have to ever doing this perfectly.

In 2 weeks it will be the anniversary of the death of Vincent Chin. Vincent Chin was a Chinese American who was attacked and ultimately killed because 2 white autoworkers thought he was Japanese and forced him to bear the cross of the Japanese auto industry, during a time when American autoworkers were losing their jobs. This was a time when the people of Detroit were publicly bashing Japanese cars to express their insatiable, territorial rage. In Vincent Chin’s case, it was an entire community and our judicial system that worked in tandem with 2 murderers, allowing them off with no jail time, no recognition that to beat an Asian body to death with a baseball bat was wrong. When people are discriminated against, harmed, or even killed because they are identified as Asian, I think we need to recognize how our choice to define ourselves as a shared community may perpetuate the ignorance leading to those circumstances.

I think we must remain most accountable to the most disenfranchised among us, especially recent immigrant communities who might not be talking about politics in the same ways as our organizations, or people like my mother, who don’t identify as Asian Americans, or really even feel entitled to call themselves Americans.

I also think our Asian American identity is in desperate need of artistic inspiration. I don’t think we can have a movement that is meaningful and truly communal without nurturing our writers, our artists, our music, and our media. And I leave this experience with a greater investment in helping to support the art and culture around social change, believing that these are central to the success of our movements.

Lastly, I believe that we should only identify as Asian American as a strategic act of resistance against racism. In all other occasions, we should not settle for less than accurate identifications of ourselves. It gives me hope that one of the central aspects of Asian American identity is the deconstruction of the model minority stereotype, an act that denies the myth of meritocracy and gives a voice to the segments of our population struggling most, whose very existence is denied by this myth. It is also an act of coalition building because it undermines the white power structure and media, which use the apparent successes of one community to deny the institutionalized oppression and systemic poverty affecting others.

I believe it is one of the most important acts of resistance in this country to recognize the ways in which communities of color have been pitted against each other. By doing so, we dismantle some of the biggest lies on which inequality and injustice are founded.

I am only at the beginning of a long journey. But what I treasure most about the last 10 months is the greater confidence it has given me to assert my beliefs and innovate toward a visionary idea of change and a more rational reality. It has led me to a place where I, as someone who doesn’t really like to talk very much, would choose to give a 15-minute monologue as my final presentation.

I won’t stop questioning why people want to deny others the simple indication that they are worth physical, mental, and spiritual space in this country. I hope that in all I do, I can help others find their place, right where they are.

On Marion Barry's Dirty Asian Problem

In response to Marion Barry's racist statement and subsequent justifications: “We got to do something about these Asians coming in and opening up businesses and dirty shops,” Barry said. “They ought to go. I’m going to say that right now. But we need African-American businesspeople to be able to take their places, too.” (more here)

shorter version posted on 8asians

Dear Council Member Marion Barry,

Let me begin by telling you that I think you’re right… sort of. You are right to want healthy food for your community. You are right to have a problem with Plexiglass walls in stores. You are right to be concerned that there are not more businesses owned by African American residents in an African American community. However, your string of hateful remarks about Asian storeowners was based on nothing more than your own racism, and you have yet to identify the real problems affecting your community.

It is an uncomfortable thing to see Asian-owned stores in low-income African American communities. We easily picture this situation as one of exploitation, and start thinking that the problems in the area must be caused by the most visible “other.” Without some critical thinking, it’s easy to assume that this “other” must be the one siphoning all the wealth away from the community. The visibility of the Asian “other” in a poor community makes them easy targets and convenient explanations for all economic problems, and the visible disconnect between these "others" and the rest of the community makes them the clearest enemy.

These Asian storeowners are an especially easy target for you as a politician because you recognize they are immigrants without much of a political voice, and you understand what you can gain by igniting racial tensions between African American and Asian American communities. This is a tension that has been happily exploited by the white mainstream for decades, and has created a division that has damaged us both.

So let’s take a closer look at your proposed solution: if you go ahead and evict all these Asian businesses from your community, would life for your constituents actually get better? Would an organic fruit market rush in to fill the void left by the Chinese take-out joint? Would Whole Foods eagerly heed the call to come save your district? If these dirty Asian businesses left your ward, would this magically give the people from the community the resources to start their own businesses in their place? After all, the only thing in their way must have been that the prime real estate was being occupied by these dirty Asian stores. And if none of these things happened as you imagined they would, would you then be appeased if a McDonald’s came in to provide your community with other forms of cheap shit? Never mind the fact that McDonald’s makes billions of dollars of profit each year, special thanks to poor communities everywhere.

Now, let’s talk about the Plexiglass. You retweeted one person’s comment to the effect that Asian business owners put up Plexiglass because they’re scared that all these “animals” will rob and kill them. That’s really inflammatory, and I’m sure great politics. I would love to live in a world without Plexiglass, locks and gates. Plexiglass is a very obvious statement that the person behind it is trying not to get robbed, and I’m really sorry that the people in your community have to deal with that. But does that mean that the storeowners are fundamentally racist and scared of every person who comes through their doors? Or are they just aware that they are a place of business in a place where robberies happen, and if there’s just one person out there looking to rob them, they can lose everything, even their lives.

As an Asian American, I can’t help but feel deeply pained by all the stories of loss in my community, as I’m sure you feel for the losses in yours. And I become more frustrated and angry every time I see yet another story about an Asian storeowner or delivery man who was senselessly murdered on the job. These are just people with families working hard for a fair shot at life. There is a troubling pattern of violence against Asian Americans, and when the perpetrators are African American as they often are, many express their inability to see these Asian bodies as fully human. And it’s our youth who are suffering the most, stories like South Philadelphia high school come to mind.

I’ve stayed silent on this issue too often, and I see other Asian Americans doing the same. Our community is the last to make waves about the injustices we face. In our country’s black-white dichotomy, many Asian Americans don’t feel entitled enough to even enter the conversation, and racism against our community is never taken very seriously, even when it results in lost lives. Also, Asian Americans like myself often seek to be allies before all else in conversations about racial justice, so we hesitate to talk about the racism and violence against us by other people of color. But will we ever change anything by remaining silent? Or will the void of understanding between these two communities continue to be filled by simmering resentments that eventually explode?

It's interesting how you continue to refer to these wok and deli owners as “businessmen.” You are projecting onto them privilege and opportunity that they do not have. If they had more options in life, would they have chosen to work in these stores? How much money do you think these people actually make? They are doing the best they can to support themselves, with the cards that this world has dealt them. They are not cheating your community or brainwashing you to buy their products, they are working in Plexiglass boxes selling things like really cheap Chinese food to people who want to buy cheap Chinese food.

They are often immigrants, not by choice, but economic necessity. The causes of all the injustices in our world are wrapped up into many of the same root causes, from slavery and colonialism to the global capitalism of today. The fact that immigrants come to the United States, leaving behind their lives and all they know, to work in places where they are disrespected, unwanted, and targeted, should signal a much larger problem in this world that has hurt both your community and mine. As a self-proclaimed civil rights activist, you should understand that there is always so much more going on than what others, bent on hating you, will recognize.

As someone with options in life, I promise to you I will never come to your ward to make money off of your constituents. I’m privileged and educated and enfranchised enough to make my money elsewhere. I can choose a career that I love, in a great neighborhood to which I can also belong. I can choose a job in which I go around “helping” people, even though the reality is that my non-profit job is more complicit in the capitalist system, which continues to impoverish your community, than those Chinese takeout owners will ever be.

The real enforcers and beneficiaries of institutionalized racism and systemic poverty in this country will probably never step foot in your ward. They have created a world in which they never actually have to interact with poor people, or black people for that matter, and they can simply forget that you even exist. They can continue to exploit poor communities en masse and watch from above as the poor fight for crumbs. They never have to deal with the hard work and small change of running a takeout business. They sit in skyscrapers and in our government, enriching themselves off of poor communities of color by making our laws and our prisons, creating our debt, producing our music and movies, owning our big food corporations, and determining our fashions. Why don’t you take issue with them, and not the people who are struggling to eke out a living in this world?

I’m a Korean American and when I go to a Chinese-owned restaurant, I’m not shocked when the person behind the counter is curt with me, and I don’t expect much communication beyond placing my order because we don’t speak the same language. When I’m not given any fake smiles or small talk, I don’t take it as a sign of disrespect – I take it as the reality of living in a world of many different cultures and ways of being and people who are just trying to get by. And I even feel a little guilty for existing in a world in which these people have to sit in their “dirty” stores and make cheap food for me because the money in my pocket commands that they do so.

In your attempts to villainize these Asian storeowners, you contrast them against a picture of your community that appears to be a lot like Mister Roger’s neighborhood, where everyone loves each other and is working together to build the community, except for the Asian exploiters. What would you like these storeowners to do to participate in a way you find appropriate? Come to a block party? And since we live in a country in which English is not the official language, should this friendly engagement have to take place in a language that these immigrants do not speak?

I’m tired of Asian American communities constantly being scapegoated for problems that are so much larger than ourselves, problems from which our communities suffer as well. I’m tired of people wanting to heap our nation’s injustices onto my struggling immigrant parents and the hardworking, resilient, struggling community in which I was raised.

My parents came here with absolutely nothing. My dad worked at a gas station attendant and both my parents worked and saved until they were able to open their own auto repair shop in Koreatown, Los Angeles, home of the LA Riots. Now that my father has passed away, my mother works 60+ hours per week at a clothes store and doesn’t have health insurance, which is taking a harsh toll on her body. My parents were always largely unaware of our country’s toxic race relations (one thing about them that might be considered un-American). They were too focused on making sure that I had a chance to make it in this world, and too good of people to treat anyone with anything less than kindness and respect. I’m tired of having people project their own racist upbringing onto others and forcing us into a broken narrative that is not ours, though we do have a responsibility to make it better.

I’m tired of politicians like you who do not help marginalized communities to build and heal, but exploit your own people and gain reelection by stirring up hate and misunderstanding against other marginalized groups. This will only hurt the people you claim to be advocating for. The person who is truly exploiting these people is you.

And please don’t say one more word about your “track record” with the Asian American community if, at the end of the day, you will throw us all under a bus and resort to hateful, exploitative race-baiting to take care of yourself.

As an elected official who claims to be representing the best interests of his people, I ask that YOU “do better,” and actually do some critical thinking to come up with some solutions that will create real opportunities for your community, rather than resorting to hateful memes that will inevitably lead to more violence and misunderstanding and no solutions. And lastly, I ask that you extend your noble desire for the African American community to be understood and justly treated to other communities as well.

Sincerely,

Esther