Belated Katrina Anniversary Post

I forgot to do a Katrina anniversary post yesterday.

There's an interesting post and discussion over at poplicks.com. In short, everyone is still screwed.

Two years ago I was absolutely horrified and shaken to the core while watching scenes of the aftermath. I could not believe how badly America was failing.

I was able to help some evacuees in a small way. Many of them poured into Atlanta. Some had friends or relatives in Georgia, others just kept driving until their gas and money ran out. We held a donation drive at work. I volunteered with the Red Cross over the weekend to "process" evacuees and get them food, shelter and $300 debit cards. I vividly remember the faces as I sat across the table interviewing them and filling in their applications. They had to wait for a long time, but we didn't deny anyone. A couple scam artists must have made off with a card, but so what... the elderly, gaunt-looking people with nothing in their pockets except change and a few scraps of paper got the immediate help they needed with the minimum of humiliation and heartache.

The levees still aren't fixed. The whole thing could happen all over again next month.

White Guilt, White Resentment

Here's a post for the "Turning over a rock" series. These are longer posts where I try to look at difficult and highly emotional topics in a rational but creative way. I've been thinking about this particular racial topic for a while, and a recent discussion over at Racialicious gave me the impetus to set it all down.

------

My mother is white. My husband is white. About 80% of my life and 95% of my adult life has been spent in predominantly white environments. I'm a former student of the topic of racial hybridity, but recently I'm most interested in the study of whiteness and white people.

This is an absolutely fantastic book on the topic: White Like Me by Tim Wise. He's also a southerner and the book has a lot to say about white male identity in the south, and since I've lived most of my life down here I found it very relevant and accurate.

How do white people think about race? How do they think about their own whiteness? White people often give very confusing and contradictory answers to these questions.

I can try and answer the questions myself. Doing so means trying to think like a white person. This should be easy, given my long and intimate experience with whiteness, but it's not. In fact it's sort of weird and painful.

I came up with this idea of white guilt and white resentment earlier this year. I've been thinking about it and applying it to people's actions and arguments and seeing if it fits. So far it has.

I started off by thinking about a difference I've noticed between several different types of white people and their psychological development. I don't want to generalize. Some white people grow up in an environment where they're a minority; for example, a white girl I knew who grew up in a predominantly black neighborhood in Brooklyn. They tend to develop a refreshingly pragmatic attitude about race. Others from that kind of environment react in the opposite way by closing ranks with other white people and establishing firm prejudices. On a different path, white people who grow up in monocultural white environments tend to exist in blissful racial ignorance until they go off to college, then go through a racial identity shakeout period.

When white people first seriously start thinking about race they're in danger of falling into the guilt/resentment trap.

A white person starts feeling guilty. "My ancestors may have caused the suffering of this other (almost always black) person," they think. The non-white person is a victim! The next step: being a victim means being a loser or a saint. This has nothing to do with race, it's actually a much deeper cultural tendency and runs deep through various religions.

The ancient Greeks and Romans believed in the rule of Fortune. Many thought that those who were lowest on Fortune's wheel, such as slaves or the chronically unlucky, should be socially avoided. Their suffering was contagious and could drag down those higher on the wheel. But Christianity stresses the redemptive value of suffering: the meek shall inherit the earth.

The guilty white person believes that suffering has ennobled the black person to a near mystical degree. This is the origin of all those silly Magic Negro fictional characters. The glorification of the proud-in-the-face-of-certain-defeat and conveniently-located-in-the-far-past Native American warrior is another example of the nobility of suffering theme.

But suffering doesn't really make people any more noble in their real-life actions. In fact, it often makes them stressed, depressed, apathetic and mean. Overcoming suffering builds character, but suffering on its own tends to limit people horribly.

The guilty white person puts the non-white person on a pedestal and expects them to act nobly. Disappointment always results! In fact, non-white people are stupid, lazy, materialistic, weak-minded, petty, cowardly and vicious in about the same proportion as white people are stupid, lazy, materialistic, weak-minded, petty, cowardly and vicious. Cultural differences exist, but the basic flawed nature of humanity cannot be denied.

The guilty white person now begins to feel not so guilty. They get mad. After all, they went out of their way to form a positive impression of the non-white person. They raised up the non-white and in turn lowered the estimation of their own self. But instead of being congratulated or thanked, the other people didn't really care! The pedestal crumbles. Resentment begins. "I gave those people a chance. They didn't take it." The pendulum swings into full-blown resentment.

Now, any further criticism of whiteness or racism can potentially trigger the guilt/resentment dynamic. For example, a simple criticism of institutionalized racism.

"Those people say I am benefiting from a system. This system was established by white people. I am supposed to feel GUILTY because of the actions of white people in the past. Well I RESENT their attempt to make me feel GUILTY. White people aren't the only oppressors after all..." They begin a rambling unnecessary series of defensive maneuvers.

(The most regressive white people don't even go through a guilt phase, because they see non-white people as victims totally deserving of their victimhood due to innate, biological flaws).

The healthy and pragmatic approach is to not feel guilty in the first place, or else work through and move past the guilt/resentment dynamic.

I'm not holding myself out as some kind of squeaky clean saint but I can honestly say I have never experienced this dynamic, and I'm thankful for that. I have two great-grandfathers who were almost certainly members of the Ku Klux Klan. Their ancestors fought on the wrong side in the Civil War. And then I have Japanese ancestors who fought on the wrong side in WWII. I don't feel guilty about any of it. What's the point? I feel a sense of responsibility as a citizen and human being to fix the mistakes of the past, but no sense that I have blood on my hands.

I feel sorry for white people who feel guilty, and I also worry about them. The white people who loudly proclaim that they don't feel guilty I worry about even more. They're generally the angriest, most resentful and claim that anyone who talks about race is trying to personally attack them.

Guilt is not a useless emotion. If you wrong another person, and you feel guilty, you're motivated to change your actions, to apologize and make things right again. But feeling guilty about something someone else did in the past is a completely useless emotion, unless you have a time machine of course. Consider the repercussions of the past on the present, but we all need to move forward together. In America this advice is especially relevant for white people, but I think everyone, everywhere, should try to live by it.

Response to a Response to a Rejection (sort of)

Our worker got back to us fairly quickly after I sent the response email. I had cc:ed her on it. The reason she gave was simple: geography.

I thanked her, and that's about it. I have some doubts as to whether they actually told her that or she just made it up as a nice, plausible neutral answer. There's no point in pushing on it. I don't have high expectations for her at this point. I just want her to send inquiries when I ask, and she's been sending them.

I don't think they're really going to bat for us right now. We don't have enough seniority. We're five months in, and I think once we get nine months in they'll really start shopping us around. Mr. Perfect Single Guy was an exception, partly because I know he actively sent out a lot of inquiries. I want to do the same thing... push on the inquiries, but not obnoxiously.

I'll be doing some respite care this weekend on a referral from the agency. This is awesome. An adoptive mother needs a bit of time in the afternoon to go to a special event, so it's really more babysitting than respite. I'm excited about meeting the little kiddie and also getting the respite brownie points.

Thanks to everyone who shared their comments on the earlier post. This is one of the great things about blogging, sharing knowledge and experience. I'm always glad to hear stories from people who've done it before.

Response to a Rejection

Here's my response to a rare rejection for a sibling group application. The rejection email was short and very polite.

I'm thankful for being told we were not selected; only a few states bother to communicate this. The children were very young with almost no special needs and I doubted we would be selected. I still felt terrible for a few seconds but I'm resolved to try and turn this into a positive. I'm on my virtual knees begging for feedback.

Hello,

I appreciate your notifying us of this decision and hope that __ and __ will soon have a great permanent family.

If you would be so kind, could you please let me know what factors took us out of the running, or where you felt other homestudies were more fitting? For example, the fact that we are not experienced parents? If you could possibly spare a few minutes for a reply, I would be extremely grateful. It would really help us in determining what other children in the photolistings to apply for.

Thank you,
___

Sick of Vick

The Michael Vick story has so much local and national attention right now. The coverage is inescapable. I have to say, I don't have a feel for sports culture at all, although I do vaguely feel it's important because so many other Americans are involved in it.

His supporters get on my nerves. "Dogfighting isn't as bad as killing humans" is their refrain. It's a point that is true, but stupid. Celebrities lose (and make) their careers for all kinds of reasons that aren't as bad as killing humans.

Let's say a video surfaced on Youtube of Michael Vick pooping on the American flag while swearing allegiance to Osama Bin Laden. I don't think that's illegal. Nevertheless, it would instantly destroy his career. Even if his PR team vigorously argued that it wasn't really him, it was his twin brother that looked just like him, he would still be judged guilty in the court of public opinion.

Some of his detractors are irritating, too. I can't put my finger on it exactly, but they seem to have unrealistic standards for sports stars. Agents and owners and fans have been throwing money at these stars for their whole adult lives. When they go to college they have teams of people doing their schoolwork for them. Their ethics are naturally going to be screwed-up. And the commenters saying "well race is not a factor in this"... another half-true-but-half-stupid statement. If he was white he would be in trouble too, perhaps not as much trouble, although I can't really analyze sports racism as I would miss all the subtleties. The stupid part of the statement is that if you're not white, race is always a factor in how you're perceived.

As far as I can tell, where you are on the Vick scale -- "skin him alive" at 0 to "he deserves a second chance" at 100 -- seems to align pretty closely with these factors:

Love dogs: -80
African-American: +20
Love the Falcons: +60

And to me that last factor is the weirdest. I can't remember where I read this, but I heard about a study that asked a pool of ardent sports fans whether they would do something to sabotage a player on the opposing team if they could get away with it. There was a detailed scenario involved. What they would do would mess up the opposing player just enough so that their home team was guaranteed to win, but they would never be caught for it or face any kind of risk. A scary percentage of them said they would do it.

Full disclosure: I'm not a vegetarian, I love my little dog very much, I hate dogfighting and I'm obviously not very respectful of sports. Oddly enough, all the men in my family are the same way. If we have a sports-loving kid I'm just going to have to grin and bear it!

Personal Update - Lazy Coconut No More!

This weekend has been eventful and decisive! First of all, my mother hurt her foot. It appears to have been just a muscle spasm, and she's fine now. Thank goodness, because she doesn't have health insurance. She's waiting it out for Medicare, because the last private insurance quote she got was just ridiculous, as in $1000 a month.

I spent much of Saturday hanging around with my mother and a friend of hers. My father was also in town (he flew out yesterday). It was quite a change to have him visiting in a fully mobile state. We were used to the noise of his knee walker, a steady "whirrr ka-THUNK ka-THUNK whirrr" on the hardwood floor of our house. Now we can't hear him coming.

He's healed well from the ankle fusion and is still extremely active, although he made one concession: he's given up motorcycle riding. Your mid-sixties is probably a good age to give up motorcycle riding.

I bought a camcorder this weekend and I'm going to use it to make home movies and document our family history. I have a little background in film production... enough to know I'm a terrible director, worse actor but passable editor. We'll see how it goes.

The camcorder is going to be the last large purchase for a long time. My husband and I made a major financial decision: we're going to buy a house. The neighborhood around the corner from us is sort of depressed, but the houses are fantastic brick bungalows, much like ours, and we're located close enough to the center of the city that I'm not worried about a real estate crash. Prices there may drop in the short-term, but they won't get much lower.

I want to get a cheap house in that neighborhood, do basic renovations, rent it out and hold on to it as a long-term investment.

Where I think many landlords go wrong is in renting too much out of desperation and greed. Trying to squeeze the highest price in the shortest amount of time, they rent to sketchy people.

I remember a particularly nasty situation back in Miami. My friend and I were living together in a three-bedroom rental and needed another roommate ASAP. Our landlady recommended a guy. The guy moved in with us. It turned the guy was our landlady's ex-boyfriend. She had decided to get back together with her ex-husband, and couldn't kick out her ex-boyfriend until she found another place for him to stay, so she unloaded him on us! He turned out to be a thieving massive cokehead and there was a lot of stress getting him to leave after we figured that out.

My plan is to rent at a low price, and really look very carefully at rental applications, do credit checks and take time to choose the absolute most responsible and stable people. We will probably not make a profit off the rental for a while.

To get the down payment I've established a very ambitious six-month savings goal. I may need to get a part-time job. I'm looking into adjunct teaching in business or English. I hate the stress of teaching for money. I'd rather do some sort of food prep job, but although those jobs in themselves are less stressful, the social environment is risky... two out of three times you end up with Mussolini bosses and I can't deal with that anymore. Mini-anecdote: the last time I had a Mussolini boss I was working in an Atlanta cafe bussing tables. The manager picked up a crumb from the floor and flourished it in my face with an angry look. Later she apologized, but said her reaction to the crumb was unpreventable because she "came from fine dining".

Soon is the best time to buy real estate. It's turning into a buyer's market.

I need to plan for our future. I've been to a lot of interesting places already; I don't plan on sacrificing myself to the grind for the rest of my life, but at this stage I really need to create a secure base for my family, which includes my parents as well as my future children. The good job I have now has gotten us part of the way there and is as secure as corporate jobs get... which isn't all that secure. If I worked for the government or in a union job I wouldn't feel as apprehensive.

I'm also reducing the percentage of my charitable contributions. I'm going to make up for it by volunteering more. I'm excited about this plan and feel positive about making the savings goal by the end of February.

Joe is Japanese

I just read about this at Racialicious. It's an upcoming web animation called "Joe is Japanese", based on life stories from a hapa in Japan.



I've sometimes wondered what my life would be like had I stayed in Japan instead of going to America after kindergarten. I also have a very un-Japanese name! I don't think my life would have been impossible, but it would have been very, very hard.

Here's what Joe says:

The show is based on (mostly) true events from my life. It wasn’t easy growing up a half-breed. No one culture will ever be yours to embrace. No matter how hard I tried, I could never really be Japanese, and as I got older I realized that I might have overcompensated and became too Japanese. You’d have to be Japanese to understand what I mean by that one... :-P

... I get to tell random stories like that. Stories that made up my life… they made me into what I am today, (mostly) Japanese.

Food and Racism: The Snapping Point

It's been a while since I made a substantive post. Here's a draft I've had kicking around for a while. Unlike my other food and racism anecdote post, it doesn't reflect so well on me.

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This is an anecdote from my experiences waitressing in Miami during college in the early 90s. Since I'm Asian and there are so few Asians in Miami, I had an uncommon perspective on Miami's race and class hierarchy; as a US citizen and college student, albeit non-"Anglo", I was a relatively privileged outsider with an average amount of social mobility.

For about six months I worked at a trendy café in a tourist district. The cooks were Cuban-American. Cooks are a fairly high status position in restaurants. The other servers were a tightly-knit bunch of young illegal Swedish immigrants. Other part-time Anglo servers floated in and out, but the Swedes were willing to put up with more abuse because of their immigration status.

Everywhere I worked, cleaning positions in Miami were held by immigrants with the lowest economic and social capital. This generally meant non-Cuban Caribbeans and Hispanics. The full-time busser responsible for all major cleaning duties at the small café space was a recently arrived Jamaican. She was a very short and powerfully built woman, looking to be in her 50s, who always kept her eyes downcast and rarely spoke. We were both smokers, and I sometimes chatted with her during smoke breaks. She told me she had several children and grandchildren, not all of them in America. Our most memorable conversation was when something unknown triggered a quiet rant about African-Americans; in her opinion they were all violent drug-addicted thieves and could not be trusted.

The owner was an abrasive and dictatorial Italian. He once called a special staff meeting only to alternately glare and scream at us for 15 minutes straight. I remember him yelling "WORKING WITH YOU PEOPLE IS A NIGHTMARE, I TELL YOU, IT'S A NIGHTMARE". A few months into my tenure he stopped spending time at the restaurant and hired a French assistant manager to take over duties. The Frenchman's name was Philippe, and he was a truly miserable specimen of humanity. Because we were short-staffed, 90% of his job duties consisted of serving and cleaning and cashiering, so he didn't have nearly as much time to boss people around as he obviously wanted.

Philippe believed he was at the very top of the caste system. He wanted everyone else to believe it too. He was short and pudgy and had a complex about it. The Swedes were fellow white Europeans, so they were perhaps his closest threat, and he always reinforced their subordinate status by making nasty little jokes at them. His behavior towards everyone else was less subtle. We were scum.

The Cubans were skilled workers who probably had better job security than Philippe, so they didn't bother taking him too seriously. One cook pretended he couldn't pronounce the French "Fee-LEEP" and kept saying the Spanish "Felipe" or "Feh-LEE-Peh" instead. This would send Philippe into paroxysms. Of course, the Swedes and I all began to copy this passive resistance.

Me: "Felipe, we're out of napkins."
"My name is Philippe. Philippe! Why can't you pronounce my name correctly? Are you an idiot? It's not hard. My name is FRENCH. Not Spanish. Philippe! Not Felipe. Philippe!"
Me: "Sorry, Felipe."

His worst abuse was reserved for the Jamaican woman, and for reasons of his own he reserved it for when I wasn't around. Of course, as a normal day to day routine, he would tell her she was wrong and slow, as he did to the other workers... but the Swedes told me that they were starting to hear him say flat-out racist insults, introduced with "you people" statements.

At this point readers may be wondering what the hell I was doing staying at this job. I'd simply developed a high tolerance for racist and sexist digs... some of it directly towards myself, some of it towards others. I was very young and I figured it was just the price you had to pay to work in the restaurant industry. I knew it was wrong, and I spoke up sometimes, but not when it would endanger my jobs. Back then, I didn't think I had a choice. Looking back, I had more choice than others did. I'm also incredibly thankful I have a lot more choice now than I did back then.

One day I walked into a hushed café. The Swedes and Cubans dished the dirt. Last night, as the Jamaican woman was mopping along the length of floor, Philippe had followed right behind her, leaning over her shoulder, keeping up a steady stream of monotonous invective. "You people are so stupid. So slow. The black people. Why are you so stupid."

She snapped! Drawing on the strength of rage, she turned around, picked him up off his feet and hurled him over the counter. He skidded over the counter, landed on top of the glass cake display stand and threw out his back. She was gone, he was in the hospital. No charges were pressed. We were awestruck and wished we could have given her a medal.

Philippe returned to work a much more subdued assistant manager.

I was fired shortly thereafter because the Italian owner's wife saw me one day and didn't like the way I was wiping off the tables, or something like that.

Holy Hell It's Hot!

About now, like all other Georgia bloggers, I simply must remark on the weather.

Triple digits today, tomorrow and Thursday. And it's not a dry heat. My poor plants!

Creflo Dollar's Transracial Adoption

I checked my stats recently, and noticed a search for "creflo dollar adopt white boy" resulting in a click-through to my my short post about the prosperity gospel. It confused me as much as the "racist Doraemon" search earlier this year. So I went ahead and ran the search in Google to see if Creflo Dollar has, in fact, adopted a white boy. Yep!

Which Master Do You Follow? The Father of the 'Prosperity Gospel' Talks About Fatherhood
By Angela Bronner, AOL Black Voices,Posted: 2006-06-27 17:04:40

Why did you choose to have a family before marriage and why adopt white children when there are so many black children languishing in foster care?

I asked the same question -- it was God's solution for my racist attitude (laughs). I grew up in a household where we had a problem with white folks. And when the spirit of God told me to [adopt], he said I'm going to resolve some of your past issues and at the same time, use it as an example to really break the spirit of racism; not only in your life, but in the lives of other people. I've had an opportunity since then to be able to teach a lot of people for how to overcome a spirit of racism, which is really a spirit of division. But then later on, we went ahead and adopted a black kid too. Now the boys that I've adopted are planning to adopt one kid themselves, because of what happened to them.

That was a piece of Creflo Dollar trivia I did not know. I did know that his given name is actually Creflo Dollar, and his father was also named Creflo Dollar, although the father held a much more honest profession than his televangelist son.

I don't want to analyze his stated reasons for adoption, although they're open to criticism on several fronts. I'll just note that for non-white adoptive parents, intraracial adoption can be as politically charged as transracial adoption.

A Good Week for my Congressman, Hank Johnson

Hank Johnson is shaping up to be a legislator with some backbone.

I liked Cynthia McKinney's uncompromising positions and wasn't sure what to think about her opponent. McKinney had lost her effectiveness, though, and wasn't doing us much good.

Last week, according to his blog, Hank Johnson worked on or helped pass:

• the Ensuring Military Readiness through Stability and Predictability Deployment Policy Act of 2007. This bipartisan bill strengthens our military by mandating minimum periods of rest and recuperation for military service personnel between deployments. [...]
  
• the Children’s Health and Medicare Protection Act (CHAMP Act), which reauthorizes and expands the S-CHIP children’s health insurance program, including Georgia’s PeachCare. [...]
• The National Commission on Detainee Treatment Act of 2007 [...] This bill would commission a thorough review of our detainee treatment practices so Congress can craft an ethical and effective policy.
• the Ethics Reform bill [...]
  
• a bill I introduced in July with Sen. Russ Feingold, the Arbitration Fairness Act of 2007, which would protect consumers and employees against being forced into arbitration when their disputes deserve a jury trial. This week I attracted an additional four cosponsors for a total of twelve.

Here's Hank Johnson defending healthcare for Georgia's uninsured children. Go Hank!

An Outline of the Prosperity Gospel

I usually don't post on religious topics, but a local news item got me irritated about the prosperity gospel con artists who happen to infest our region.

There many good churches in Atlanta that are doing effective charity work with their money while fulfilling spiritual needs. And there are some other really bad ones. I feel so sorry for the people who get sucked into the prosperity gospel game. They will get bled dry. If you have a friend or relative who is associated, warn them to get out!

If you don't know anything about the prosperity gospel, here's an outline of how to follow it. It's not very complicated.

A. Use selective vision to ignore everything the Bible really says about wealth and poverty
B. Follow three-step plan:
     1. Give prosperity gospel preacher at least 10% of your income
     2. ??
     3. Achieve prosperity!
C. Use selective vision to ignore prosperity gospel preacher's luxury car and lavish lifestyle
D. (bonus step) Blame gays.

Here's the news item:

Eddie Long angling for MLK mantle?
August 8th, 2007 by Scott Henry in Hot Off The Press

Eddie Long, the self-proclaimed “bishop” of the 25,000-member New Birth Missionary Baptist megachurch in Lithonia, has the largest congregation in Georgia. He’s also got a $350,000 Bentley; a 20-acre, $1.4-million estate; and a heavenly bank balance.

But it appears he also wants to be the spiritual kingpin of metro Atlanta. Last year, he officiated at the funeral of Coretta Scott King and, just this week, the DeKalb County School System used his church as its official meeting hall for teachers — a controversial choice given Long’s long history of anti-gay sermonizing.

Now, Long, a proponent of the gospel of prosperity who puts his followers’ money where his mouth is, is gearing up for a blowout gala Aug. 17 to celebrate his 20 years at the helm of New Birth. We’re guessing the guest list of 1,200 for the black-tie affair at the Georgia World Congress Center doesn’t include many of the poor and needy types mentioned in the New Testament.

It does, however, include a roster of movers and shakers, most prominently Mayor Shirley Franklin and former U.N. Ambassador Andrew Young. A highlight of the event will be a “special presentation” by MLK’s youngest daughter, Bernice King, purportedly on behalf of her late mother. It seems to us that Long is hoping to claim the spiritual mantle of the slain Civil Rights leader. Will Atlanta let him succeed?

Here's Bishop Bentley, looking rich and smug.


Here's the even more corrupt Creflo Dollar, who has TWO Rolls Royces plus a private jet.

Frustrations of State Pre-Adoption: Timeline of an Inquiry

Some inquiries have been straightforward and organized, and all I have to do is call up and ask our previously filed homestudy to be associated with the file. Others are vague and confusing, and it feels like our caseworker might as well attach our homestudy to a balloon and release it, because we'll never get any kind of receipt confirmation. And some are an awful slog, slog, slog, like the one I'm describing below.

I am used to this sort of thing by now, so it doesn't bother me. I thought I'd remark on it so others in the process know what they're getting into!

Timeline of an Inquiry

• mid May: find state photolisting of sibling group. Call contact number to find out caseworker contact info. Referred to wrong number. Keep calling to try to find right number.
• early June: finally reach someone on phone. They give me a detailed description of the siblings and their needs and even why they are in care! This surprises me because usually such information is kept very private. I am given a fax number to send in our homestudy. I ask our caseworker to fax it in.
• July: nothing. Leave a few messages to try and get a receipt confirmation, but no one calls back.
  
• early August: receive a phone call asking us if we would like to a submit homestudy on a sibling group. "Due to privacy reasons nothing further can be communicated, even names" until homestudy receipt. Ha, of course I immediately remember the names from the mention of the two ages. Person confirms the names are correct. They must have lost our homestudy but remembered my phone number. I ask our worker to fax the homestudy again, this time to a different person at a different fax number. Next stage: confirming receipt.
  

Anniversary of Hiroshima Bombing

Well, I'd thought today would be a day free of complaining about racism. Sadly, this is not to be.

I was reading this short post about the Hiroshima anniversary. I clicked through to one of the video clips, but I couldn't watch it because I got too distracted by some of the nasty comments. Why are Youtube video comments such disgusting cesspools? That's a rhetorical question... it seems like any audiovisual type of communication with semi-anonymous comments always ends up that way. As a side note, I'm very interested, from an internet anthropology perspective, as to why that happens.

I am not going to reproduce any of the comments but it's quite typical stuff as to how "the japs" deserved it.

For what it's worth, I feel very ambiguous about the historical necessity of the bombing of Hiroshima. My father suffered from a terrible infection around that time, and he told us that the only thing that saved him was antibiotics his parents bought on the black market, and the antibiotics originated from American troops. Given the dire wartime circumstances, if Japan had not been defeated so rapidly, he would almost certainly have died. So by a certain twist of fate I would not be alive today if it weren't for the bomb.

What I am not ambiguous about... the bombing was a terrible atrocity. It should never happen again, anywhere, to any country. It makes me so sad to know there are people out there like those commenters -- many people -- who would deny humanity to the bombing victims, both the ones that died that day and the ones who slowly withered away from the aftereffects over decades.

Racism encourages the belief that something inherent in Japanese blood and culture that caused their ferocity in World War II. In reality, it's something that could have happened to any group of people infected by fascism. Japan is a complicated country with a complicated history. A hundred years ago it was very different, and a hundred years from now it will be very different. It is not some unchanging ahistorical bizarro-world created to evoke alternating awe and revulsion by credulous Americans.

There's a great interview between two master novelists - Kazuo Ishiguro, British nikkei, and Kenzaburo Oe, the Japanese Nobel Prize winner, that really encapsulates the complexity I'm trying to portray. Like my father, Oe grew up in a rural Japan that has almost vanished. Oe talks in great detail about what it means to be Japanese, not by claiming that his vision of Japan is superior, but by saying that he speaks from the margins, and still has as much right as those who claim to speak from the center. Ishiguro talks about how his Japanese identity slipped away, and how he became a "homeless writer", not Japanese and not fully English either.

Here's a passage from a different interview with Oe, about Hiroshima.

Finding a Voice in Tragedy

The birth of your son was the turning point in finding your voice as a writer. You have written that "Twenty-five years ago, my first son was born with brain damage. This was a blow, to say the least. Yet as a writer, I must acknowledge the fact that the central theme of my work throughout much of my career has been the way my family has managed to live with this handicapped child."

Yes, precisely. I wrote it.

When I was twenty-eight years old, my son was born. When I was twenty-eight years old I was a writer, a rather famous writer on the Japanese scene and I was a student of French literature. And I was talking in the voice of Jean-Paul Sartre or [Maurice] Merleau-Ponty. I was always speaking about everything of this work. But when my son was born with very big damage in his brain, I found out one night, I wanted to find encouragement, so I wanted to read my book -- that was the first time I read my book, [the only] book that [I'd] written up to that date -- and I found out a few days later that I cannot encourage myself through my book; [therefore] no one can be [encouraged] by my work. book cover So I thought, "I am nothing and my book is nothing." So I was depressed very strongly; then I was asked by a journalist who was editing a political magazine in Japan to go to Hiroshima, the place the atomic bomb [had been] dropped. There in Hiroshima, in that year the peace movement -- the anti-atomic bomb movement -- was meeting, and in those assemblies there was big fight between the Chinese group and the Russian group. And I was the only independent journalist there. So I criticized both of them.

I found the hospital of the Hiroshima survivors and there I found the very great Dr. [Fumio] Shigeto. In conversation with Shigeto and the patients in the hospital, I gradually found that there is something that encouraged me, so I wanted to follow this sense that there is something. So I returned to Tokyo and went to the hospital where my [newborn] son was, and talked to the doctors about rescuing my son. Then I began to write about Hiroshima, and this was the turning point of my life. A kind of rebirth of myself.

So there was an interplay between what you saw in the victims of Hiroshima and also very importantly what you saw in observing the doctors who were treating the victims. What you observed somehow moved you to another plane in dealing with your own personal tragedy?

Yes. Shigeto said to me, "We cannot do anything for the survivors. Even today we don't know anything about the nature of the illness of the survivors. Even today, so shortly after the bombing, we don't know anything, but we did what we could do. Every day a thousand people dead. But amidst the dead bodies, I continued. So, Kenzaburo, what can I do except that, when they need our aid? Now your son needs you. You must find out that no one on this planet needs you except your son." Then I understood. I returned to Tokyo and began to do something for my son, for myself, and for my wife.

Your novel about the birth of your handicapped son is called A Personal Matter, and your writings on Hiroshima are collected in Hiroshima Notes. You write in the latter: "When the Hiroshima doctors pursue the A-bomb calamity in their imaginations, they are trying to see more deeply and more clearly the depth of the hell into which they too are caught. There is a pathos in this dual concern for self and others; yet it only adds to the sincerity and the authenticity that we sense...." You are saying that in seeing this duality in the doctor, you were helped to see the complexity of the dilemma of Bird, the protagonist in your novel.

Yes. Until then, my little theme was a duality or ambiguity of human beings. [This concept] came from existentialism in France. I think I found out the true duality and how I can be so-called "authentic." But the word "authenticity" must not be so frozen in my case. I used the word from Jean-Paul Sartre. Today I would use another word. It is very simple. I wanted to be strictly an upright man. The Irish poet Yeats said in his poem, "The young man who stands straight." Straightforwardness. Erect. This kind of young man that I wanted to be, but then I used the word "authentic."

Lionel Trilling wrote that confessing to your feelings is one of the most courageous and valuable things a writer could do. That's what you did in A Personal Matter.

Yes. I wanted to do so. At the time I didn't think of the value of being an upright man. I [felt I] must write about myself. Why not? I cannot be reborn and my son cannot be reborn, I felt, [if I don't]. So when I was by the sea [I decided that] I must rescue myself and I must rescue my son. So I wrote that book, I think.

South Georgia Coast Visit

I've lived in Atlanta for ten years now, and I've never been to the Georgia coast. This weekend we finally made it out there. We left on Friday at 6pm, made it to Jekyll Island by 11pm, visited there and St. Simons and Fort Frederica and then spent a bit of time in downtown Savannah on the way back.

It's beautiful down there! My favorite part of the trip was our visit to a sea turtle rehabilitation center. My husband and I both love sea turtles so we always head straight for a sea turtle center anytime we go on vacation.

This was a much-needed mini-vacation.

Email to Universal Studios

Responding to a notice from Reappropriate and Angry Asian Man about yellowface in the new movie I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry. (Yes, I know Rob Schneider is a quarter Filipino, but that is no excuse whatsoever).

I may send this as a letter too, if I can find the right address.

Contact Form for Universal Studios
I have been notified that your new movie, "Chuck and Larry", contains multiple racist and insulting depictions of Asians.

Universal Studios obviously believes that depicting Asian men as clowns and Asian women as whores is supposed to be humorous.

Not only will I not see the movie, I will warn everyone I know not to see it, and also leave negative reviews warning others of these racist depictions on popular reviewing sites such as Netflix and IMDB.