There is no intimacy like that between two women who have chosen to be sisters.
— Warsan Shire (via themindislimitless)
#warsan shire #quote
I admit, I don’t know Cho that well, so I am glad there are other readings to be had!And if he is just calling it out simply because he’s tired of it and he feels comfortable doing so even on his own films now, I think that’s fantastic. There’s certainly plenty for him to be calling out.
Heh. Well, I don’t know John Cho either. But he has talked about race & representation before* (and not in a ‘we’re all human, it doesn’t matter’ way), so it’s not completely ‘out of character’ for him to bring it up. I think it probably would be easier on him if he didn’t say anything, but I’m glad he does.
*Re Harold & Kumar (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NHEkLBZI1IM 4:07 mark): If you have a Korean and an Indian guy as your leads, you must address race at some point in the movie. You must, because the audience is noting it, really. The other thing is, I think, comedy at its best, treads in taboo waters a little bit. It has to have that transgressive quality to it, and race is the biggest taboo in America. I mean, people are very reluctant to talk about race and yet when you do jokes about race, uh, that work, people are very happy to release tension and laugh about it. But it has been interesting. I’ll make an observation. During the first tour for the first movie, we were talking about race all the time with journalists. It was almost like a process— looking back, the first movie was more concerned with race, but we talked about it so much, I felt that it was in a way…a way of justifying our presence in a motion picture.
And from an interview in 2009 http://www.asiaarts.ucla.edu/090703/article.asp?parentID=110145>:
JC: I recall from the Harold and Kumar movies is my struggle with the advertisers.
APA: What happened there?
JC: There was all this racial humor in the movie, and the advertising department wanted to say “Starring the Asian guy in American Pie, and the Indian guy from Van Wilder…” and they did go with that, and they submitted that to me for approval, and I said, “I don’t like it.” They asked me why, and I explain it to them, and that was tricky because it’s difficult explaining to my own representatives, why that didn’t jibe with me, because everyone kind of felt like it was keeping in tone with the movie. And I said, “I don’t like it. We’re poking fun at racism in the movie all the time, but it puts the audience on the wrong side of the racism joke.” So they were playing with the wording a little bit in the edits, and they kept coming up with versions to make me happy, but they were essentially the same thing, and I finally said, “you are not going to make me happy. You’re dancing around it, and you’re clearly attached to this idea, and I want you to know that no version of this idea will make me happy. And if you’re afraid that I won’t show up to do promotion because of this bitterness, you can rest assured that that’s not true. I consider promoting a movie part of my duties, and I will show up nevertheless. But you can either use this campaign and know that I’m unhappy, or you can change it and know that I’m happy. That’s it. Stop trying.” And eventually they went with it, and it’s one of those things where I look back and I’ve very proud of the movie, but that’s the thing I remember.
APA: Last question…for Harold and Kumar Escape From Guantanamo Bay, Viva La Union recorded a song for the soundtrack with the line, “I want my own Chinese baby” — what’s that about?
JC: When I was thinking about it, I thought of a literal baby. There’s a kind of lack that children fill, that’s just the dark side of being a parent, I think. And there’s an accessory quality to Chinese babies in America, and I just think it’s funny. I just liked it. And you know, I would know people who would fawn over Asian babies more, and it got me to thinking, there’s this belief that Asian babies are really cute, and it got me thinking that our whole race is infantilized to some degree, and it manifests itself in different ways. You infantilize a woman, and she becomes eroticized. You infantilize a man, and he becomes emasculated. You infantilize a baby [laughs] — and it’s possible, it appears that you can infantilize a baby even more. [laughs] The babies need to be cuter than white babies. And it’s just a weird thing that I felt like said something about mainstream America’s relationship to Asians in general. So that’s where it came from.Also this interview: http://blog.angryasianman.com/2008/04/q-with-john-cho.html
“And yes, I do feel a responsibility, and always have, and it’s been an odd burden for me. Even when I started and no one gave a shit, I was trying to avoid doing roles—and it’s no accident that I’ve never done something with a chop suey accent. It’s no accident that I’ve never played those parts. I strongly believe there are a lot of Asian American actors who think that that’s the price to pay before you get to wherever you’re going. And I take real issue with that. Because you have to maintain integrity from the start, and on a personal level, you have to not do something that’s going to make you sick to your stomach.
But on a political level, how are things supposed to ever change if there’s someone willing to do it? I can tell you now, having worked in the business, that you can gather an army of people to hold picket signs and stand outside the studio, and say, “we destest this portrayal”… but it doesn’t matter if there’s a guy—who they know, a peer—who’s willing to do it, who stands in front of the crew and does the buck-tooth accent. If he or she is willing to do it, it makes the protestors look like extremists. It makes this guy look like the normal guy. Because we all work in the same industry. So the willingness of one actor negates a thousand protestors and a thousand angry letters.”(So I can see why Butawhiteman Cantbekhan playing Khan would be deeply upsetting to him, even if Cho wasn’t in this movie.)
I love him 1000 times just for flawlessly articulating this racist absurdity in the most succinct and accurate way I’ve ever encountered.
(Source: whitelaws, via lostintrafficlights)
horrible dream i had: he texts me something like “i had a really great time tonight” when we haven’t even been out, and i look and see that it’s addressed to somebody else by name… wake up feeling bad/sad.
see? i’m not trying. it’s my subconscious panicking and the rest of me just catches on. i told E (bestie) this, and she just laughed at me. so good.
#personali-D Covers by Chen Man Pre-Fall 2012
(via yiheyuans)
These links work as of 5/7/13.
None of the links require downloads, plug in installs, or signing up for anything of ANY KIND. Those are just ads, click out of them and press play. If you’re struggling, this chrome plug in will make your life easier.
Subbed = speaking in japanese with english subtitles
Dubbed = speaking in english (usually with no subtitles)
- The Cat Returns: subbed | dubbed
- Grave of the Fireflies: subbed | dubbed
- Horus: Prince of the Sun: subbed | x
- Howl’s Moving Castle: subbed | dubbed
- Kiki’s Delivery Service: subbed | dubbed
- Laputa: Castle in the Sky: subbed | dubbed
- My Neighbor Totoro: subbed | dubbed
- My Neighbors the Yamadas: subbed | dubbed
- Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind: subbed | dubbed
- Only Yesterday: subbed | x
- Panda! Go Panda!: subbed | x
- Pom Poko: subbed | dubbed
- Ponyo on the Cliff by the Sea: subbed | dubbed
- Porco Rosso: subbed | dubbed
- Princess Mononoke: subbed | dubbed
- The Secret World of Arrietty: subbed | dubbed
- Spirited Away: subbed | dubbed
- Tales from Earthsea: subbed | dubbed
- Whisper of the Heart: subbed | dubbed
(via backlash-blues)
CeCe McDonald
TW: Racism, Violence, Transphobia, Murder
Around 12:30 am on June 5, 2011, CeCe was walking to the grocery store with some friends, all of them young, African American, and LGBTIQ or allied. As they passed a local bar, the Schooner Tavern, a group of older, white people who were standing outside the bar’s side door began hurling racist and transphobic slurs at them, without provocation. They called CeCe and her friends ‘faggots,’ ‘niggers,’ and ‘chicks with dicks,’ and suggested that CeCe was ‘dressed as a woman’ in order to ‘rape’ Dean Schmitz, one of the attackers. When CeCe approached the group and told them that her crew would not tolerate hate speech, one of the women said, “I’ll take you bitches on,” and then smashed her glass into CeCe’s face. She punctured CeCe’s cheek all the way through, lacerating her salivary gland. A fight ensued, during which one of the attackers, Dean Schmitz, was fatally stabbed.
The only person arrested that night was CeCe. She was briefly taken to the hospital where she received 11 stitches in her cheek. While she was still suffering both physically and mentally from this traumatic incident, she was left alone in a room for three hours and then interrogated, and then placed in solitary confinement at the Hennepin County men’s jail. She spent the next several months in jail and had to wait almost two months between her initial doctors’ visit and a much-needed follow-up appointment.
After her arrest, CeCe was quickly charged with second-degree murder. In short, she was prosecuted for surviving a violent, racist, transphobic attack.
(via ikenbot)
Elizabeth Martínez, a legendary civil rights and Chicano movement activist, has pointed out, along with her collaborator Arnoldo García of the National Network of Immigrant and Refugee Rights, that the new conditions that constitute neoliberalism and characterize economic development since the 1980s involve an almost total freedom of movement for capital, goods, and services—in other words, the absolute rule of the market. Public expenditures for social services have been drastically cut. There has been constant pressure for the elimination of government intervention and regulation of the market. Thus the privatization of gas and electricity, of health care, education and many other human services has emerged as the mode of increased profits for global corporations. Finally, Martínez and García point out, the concept of the public good and the very concept of “community” are being eliminated to make way for the notion of “individual responsibility.” This results in “pressuring the poorest people in a society to find solutions to their lack of health care, education, and social security all by themselves—then blaming them if they fail, as ‘lazy.’”
I would add yet another point to this definition of neo-liberalism: the flawed assumption that history does not matter. This idea, formulated by Francis Fukuyama as “The End of History,” also involves, as Dinesh D’Souza put it, “The End of Racism.” Both race and racism are profoundly historical. Thus if we discard biological and thus essentialist notions of “race” as fallacious, it would be erroneous to assume that we can also willfully extricate ourselves from histories of race and racism. Whether we acknowledge it or not, we continue to inhabit these histories, which help to constitute our social and psychic worlds.
Neoliberalism sees the market as the very paradigm of freedom, and democracy emerges as a synonym for capitalism, which has reemerged as the telos of history. In the official narratives of U.S. history, the historical victories of civil rights are dealt with as the final consolidation of democracy in the United States, having relegated racism to the dustbin of history. The path toward the complete elimination of racism is represented in the neoliberalist discourse of “color-blindness” and the assertion that equality can only be achieved when the law, as well as individual subjects, become blind to race. This approach, however, fails to apprehend the material and ideological work that race continues to do.
When obvious examples of racism appear to the public, they are considered to be isolated aberrations, to be addressed as anachronistic attributes of individual behavior. There have been a number of such cases in recent months in the United States. I mention the noose that was hung on a tree branch by white students at a school in Jena, Louisiana, as a sign that black students were prohibited from gathering under that tree. I can also allude to the public use of racist expletives by a well-known white comedian, the racist and misogynist language employed by a well-known radio host in referring to black women on a college basketball team, and finally, recent comments regarding the golfer Tiger Woods…
These comments were, of course, readily identified as familiar—exceedingly familiar—expressions of attitudinal racism that are now treated as anachronistic expressions that were once articulated with state-sponsored racisms. Such occurrences are now relegated to the private sphere and only become public when they are literally publicized. Whereas, during an earlier period in our history, such comments would have been clearly understood as linked to state policy and to the material practices of social institutions, they are now treated as individual and private irregularities, to be solved by punishing and reeducating the individual by teaching them color-blindness, by teaching them not to notice the phenomenon of race.
But if we see these individual eruptions of racism as connected to the persistence and further entrenchment of institutional and structural racism that hides behind the curtain of neoliberalism, their meanings cannot be understood as individual aberrations. In the cases we have discussed, the racism is explicit and blatant. There is no denying that these are racist utterances. What happens, however, when racism is expressed not through the words of individuals, but rather through institutional practices that are “mute,” to borrow the term Dana-Ain Davis uses, with respect to racism?
— This is an excerpt from Chapter 10 of Angela Davis’ 2008 book: “The Meaning of Freedom and Other Difficult Dialogues”. You can read the full chapter here. The chapter is called: ‘Recognizing Racism in the Era of Neoliberalism’ (via thepeoplesrecord)
#angela davis #neoliberalism #quote #racism #US
(via themindislimitless)
catching up with bestie was really, really great. i’m planning on eventually meeting up with some old high school acquaintances (i can’t really call them friends now). apparently, these people i haven’t seen in at least four years still think about me, think i’m “intimidating” and seek out my approval. i guess that’s my Presence, that gift of personality that i have. :/ not really, i mean. it’s all very weird to me. i’m very glad i had a chance to get away, grow outside of this area and see a bit of the world out there. some people just continue with the same people from high school, and the gossip’s all the same, the drama. i can’t fucking imagine…
#personalGlobalization is not a natural, evolutionary, or inevitable phenomenon, as is often argued. Globalization is a political process that has been forced on the weak by the powerful. Globalization in not the cross-cultural interaction of diverse societies. It is the imposition of a particular culture on all others. Nor is globalization the search for ecological balance on a planetary scale. It is the predation of one class, one race, and often one gender of a single specie on all others. ‘Global’ in the dominant discourse is the political space in which the dominant local seeks control, freeing itself from local, regional, and global sources of accountability arising from the imperatives of ecological sustainability and social justice. ‘Global’ in this sense does not represent the universal human interest; it represents a particular local and parochial interest and culture that has been globalized through its reach and control, irresponsibility, and lack of reciprocity.
Globalization has come in three waves. The first wave was the colonization of the Americas, Africa, Asia and Australia by European powers over the course of 1, 500 years. The second wave was the imposition of the West’s idea of ‘development’ on non-Western cultures in the postcolonial era of the past five decades. The third wave of globalization was unleashed approximately five years ago as the era of ‘free trade,’ which for some commentators implies an end to history, but for us in the Third World is a repeat of history through recolonization. Each wave of globalization has served Western interests, and each wave has created deeper colonization of other cultures and of the planet’s life.
— Vandana Shiva. “Ecological Balance in an Era of Globalization.” (2000). The Globalization Reader, Fourth Edition. 2012.(via thedarksideoflight89)
#vandana shiva #imperialism #quote #globalization #colonialism #capitalism #ism
(via themindislimitless)
When I was a kid, you know I immigrated to the States in 1978, and I’m six years old and watching TV and I didn’t see any Asians on television. And you turn on Star Trek and there’s this Asian guy not chopping anybody up. He’s honorable, a helmsman of a spaceship, and it was a big, big deal for me to see that and have a role model.
—
#asian american #media representation #quote #john cho
John Cho (x)
The only Asians I remember seeing on mainstream TV when I was a kid were Sulu on Star Trek, nameless Asians loading trucks in the background or dying on MASH (which was all about funny lovable white US Americans waging war on Asians), and the “ancient Chinese secret” Calgon laundry detergent commercial.
(via zuky)
Was the same when I was a kid. That moment of seeing George Takei not being overly-stereotyped when I was a kid was a powerful one. I think the only place I had really seen other Asians on the screen was finding the rare (because I was a kid in mountains, far from the rest of the community) movie that had Asians in it. Unfortunately, a lot of those were the “white guy learns martial arts, beats up Asians because ‘Merika” type movies. Which, of course was not TV. They were still the “Asian other” just as in MASH backdrops. Anyway, what I’m trying to say is that Sulu always has a special place in my heart. Star Trek helped me get through some bad emotional spaces as a kid, and I think part of what made it welcoming was having POC, especially George Takei ( since I’m JA too, and the other Asian American actors who came later), represented on screen in positive and whole characters, with names instead of “Solider #1, Henchman #4, Ninja #18”.
(via reallifedocumentarian)
(Source: divorcedreality, via fascinasians)
Today solidified why despite being unabashededly pro-choice, I will never bring myself to join hands with western feminism’s version of “abortion freedom”.
I went to a feminist meeting with a friend on her campus (she invited me) and the issue of “overpopulation” comes up and displays women from various nations (particularly Somalia, Ethiopia and India) in which they seem to be struggling to take care of their children and the slideshow insinuated, “if these women had an opportunity to get an abortion, they would”. That message is not only patently false, but it’s also incredibly offense and disingenuous.
Misogyny is a huge issue in many of these nations, no doubt and reproductive rights are deeply stifled and neglected, as well as prenatal care. It’d be foolish to deny such a reality. But, to showcase women with five, six, up to ten children, as somehow being oppressed by their circumstances and painting huge families as leeches and parasites to the well-being and livelihood of women in the third world is dishonest, hyperbolized and frankly, bullshit propaganda. It suggests that women of the third world have absolutely no agency and are somehow forced to have these children (which thereby means that every large family is the cause of rape, essentially), which is demeaning to every woman’s advocacy movement that have taken place in the aforementioned regions. In addition, it portrays brown and black children as a nuisance, something that the world needs less of, which is disgusting, racist and directly aligns with neoimperialist initiatives.
Also, as someone who comes from an African country where the average family bears 4-5 children, I know firsthand that children are assets to their family, above anything. From my experience, women tend to have more children as sort of a safety net; arguably husbands are more likely to die first, so the more children a woman has, the chances of her being taken care of and accounted for are higher. In face the of heightened risks of early death, disease, poverty, war, etc. this is a premeditated move, an action of resistance to ensure one’s survival. In Eritrea, there are children (up to eight years old) who sell gum, tissues and other small merchandise after school to help provide for their families and continue to do so into their teenage years. This, as unpleasant as it may seem, is the reality. Children serve a purpose. They’re an ecomonic resource to their families.
To assert with pictures which provide no nuance, that mothers with their children are helpless, needy and their families repress them is a gross misconstruction of the realities that these women face and it does nothing but assert that western feminism, in all of its narcissism, will ignore and distort context to appeal to its own agenda.
^ so fucking important
this “ABORTIONS FOR ALL” rhetoric is reckless, ethnocentric nonsense
let’s talk about EUGENICS
let’s talk about the United States’ legacy of EUGENICS
let’s talk about the exploitation of working-class communities of color
let’s talk about the Nixon administration’s 1970 establishment of “family planning services” which target inner-city populations
let’s talk about Madrigal v. Quilligan, the policing of fertile bodies of color by fascist white professionals, and the naturalization of non-consensual, coercive sterilization practices
let’s talk about the acute colonization of Puerto Rico and the ways in which Puerto Rican women have been corporeally subjugated, not only becoming receptacles for American contraceptive experiments yet also being rendered completely infertile via tubal ligation (reproductive justice activist and professor Elena R. Gutiérrez notes that “By 1965 about 35 percent of the women in Puerto Rico had been sterilized, two-thirds of them in their 20s.”)
let’s talk about the year 1973
let’s talk about how, while affluent, white, second-wave feminists were still celebrating Roe v. Wade, Relf v. Weinberger was happening
let’s talk about the Relf sisters and the intersection of race, class, gender, and ability
we can no longer afford to ignore these histories
we can no longer afford to let people, however unwittingly, promote the co-optation of “choice”
feminisms cannot survive and evolve and grow richer and stronger without a deep recognition of the myriad fictions of liberation
“The progressive potential of birth control remains indisputable. But in actuality, the historical record of this movement leaves much to be desired in the realm of challenges to racism and class exploitation.” -Angela Davis
reblogging to add that an acquaintance of mine is working on a dissertation for her Ph.D in Hawaiian Studies that details early eugenics programs forced on Hawaiian women when white missionaries showed up
also the Hyde Amendment, how “the movement” didn’t give a shit enough about poor women and women of color to fight that shit. which is one of the most damaging things in contemporary abortion/women’s health access and a big reason women can’t afford terminations and clinics have a hard time staying open.
(Source: maarnayeri, via svartskalleroy)
#feminism #abortion #imperialism #birth control #racismGovernment assistance in America is invisible until black people receive it. Then it becomes racialized, demonized and stigmatized.
—
#melissa harris-perry #karen finney #quote #racism #US #capitalism
Melissa Harris-Perry and Karen Finney (paraphrased), commenting on a recent New York Times editorial wherein black farmers were all but vilified as ‘lazy takers’ who gamed the system —for winning an historic discrimination lawsuit against the USDA: Pigford v. Glickman (via odinsblog)
So true. In fact, the entire capitalist system — all banking, all corporate operations, all military industry — is built on and based upon government assistance; or rather, much more than “assistance”, more like extreme government largesse by granting public funds from taxes and public resources to private interests.
Private banking relies entirely on credit, loans, underwriting, insurance, and political-military protection from the government. All corporate merchandise in the USA is moved and distributed on highways and roads built and maintained using public money. The telecom companies sell you mobile phone service using radio spectrum which belongs to the public and is granted to them by the government. Agribusiness is well-known to be subsidized. Big pharma relies on publicly funded research to isolate its private profit makers. There are no major areas of corporate America which are not entirely reliant on government assistance. And that’s not even getting into corporate tax breaks.
Yet god forbid Black people get any benefit from the government whatsoever, amounting in total to the tiniest trickle in relation to the government largesse extended to corporate America. Suddenly that is seen, within the prevailing racist US political discourse, as a burden upon society and sign of an imaginary racial pathology of laziness and dependency. Good one, white America.
(via zuky)
(Source: nbcnews.com, via nezua)
