Courtesy of Youtube and the Dirty South, here's a few highlights with my comments. Please keep in mind a lot of these songs don't have bad words bleeped out.
I moved to Atlanta 12 years ago, just when Outkast released ATLiens. Me and you, your mama and your cousin too... This song says it's about movement, but then refuses say where it's going. It's an aimless, winding, cruising song. It's like a sequence of incomplete impressionist paintings.
ATLiens was a huge landmark. Other Atlanta rappers started getting noticed. A friend of Outkast and the Goodie Mob, rapper Cool Breeze put out this massive local hit, packed with guest stars, in 1999. You may recognize Cee-Lo, now with Gnarls Barkley. I cannot stress enough how awesome this song is. It's frenzied and bursting with energy but in complete control at the same time. It's ridiculously ambitious and richly cinematic. You get an amazing sense of multiple stories all weaving back and forth, destinies colliding, a crisis upon us. Brotherman!
In 2002 Nappy Roots, a Kentucky/Georgia group, has a breakthrough summer hit. This is a beautiful, soulful, plaintive song. It's intellectual and earthy at the same time; deeply southern, anti-materialist, multiracial. It's not just all about fast life in the big city. Them country boys on the rise...
Here's the last flowering of truly good and innovative Atlanta hip-hop. The Dungeon Family album is full of incredible songs. This happens to be my favorite, mainly because of the monstrous beat with the scratching.
Here's another Dungeon Family offshoot, the Purple Ribbon All-Stars. The hook spirals into your brain, and from there the song goes straight to the lungs and the groin.
The Ying Yang twins are good at party anthems. Their music is rather brainless and clownish. I have a soft spot for this early song of theirs, however. I think it's because it's about being stupid and jerk-ish solely for the sake of being stupid and jerk-ish. Plus, the part in the video where Big Gipp is rapping on top of plastic-covered furniture is hilarious. If you're getting tired now, skip the video.
This is Bonecrusher (what a silly name), T.I. (recently jailed on a machine gun charge) and Killer Mike. It's one of those really violent songs where the whole point is bragging about big, big penis-guns. Nevertheless, I'm going to include it because it was a huge hit, and represents the newer kind of Atlanta song. I hated this song when it was on the radio, but sometimes I feel a bit nostalgic for it. Why? I guess it's the cinematic feel, and the bells. This song is about urban violence, but it could just as well be a gothic tale... the hero standing outside the ruined mansion under a full moon with a shotgun in one hand and a chainsaw in the other, screwing up his courage to kick down the door, yelling to himself, "I AIN'T NEVER SCARED"...
Here's an earlier Ludacris song. I don't think he's ever done a truly excellent or important song, although he gives it a good try here, but his delivery is always perfect and his stuff is really, really fun. This is his funnest and most Atlantaest song.
Here's T.I.'s newest song. I heard he's going to fulfill his 1000 hours of community service by going around telling kids not to make the same kind of mistakes he made. That's the kind of stupid decision we've come to expect from the Dekalb County criminal justice system. That's not punishment, that's a publicity tour! I'd like to see him in an orange vest by the side of the highway picking up trash. Then I'd roll down my window and bonk him on the head with a well-aimed apple core. That being said, I actually like his new song. It's the organ sample and the drumbeat that make it good.
I was recently contacted by a representative from Ethica who told me about a lot of good things the organization is doing. I was at first a bit wary of donating since I usually donate to bigger organizations that publish exactly how they spend their donated funds, or else very local charities. But all nonprofits have to start out small!
Although I'm not involved in international adoption, I have some strong opinions about it. I don't believe it's always wrong, and I've said several times on this blog I would have liked to adopt from Japan if certain conditions were better. But it's horribly unregulated and full of corruption. Ethica is trying to do something about that, and I support their approach. Please go to this link to find out more and donate to their efforts.
You're about to read some lazy blogging here. But I'm still mustering up my energy for that other "barriers" post. I've been slammed recently... we're moving into our new house in a few weeks, Sunny's placement date is coming very soon and I'm in the middle of an exciting political volunteering initiative.
A key recommendation in the new report calls for amending the law so race could be considered as a factor in selecting parents for children from foster care. The change also would allow race-oriented pre-adoption training,
"We tried to assess what was working and what wasn't, and came to the conclusion that preparing parents who adopt transracially benefits everyone, especially the children," said Adam Pertman, the Donaldson Institute's executive director.
"The view that we can be colorblind is a wonderful, idealistic perspective, but we don't live there," Pertman said. "If we want to do the best for the kids, we have to look at their realities."
Pertman's stance is sound. Counterbalancing him is the idiotic gibbering of this woman:
Professor Elizabeth Bartholet, who directs the Child Advocacy Program at Harvard Law School, believes the concept of striving for color blindness is sound. She foresees problems if race once again becomes a key determinant.
"Giving social workers the chance to do that produced very rigid race matching," she said, referring to pre-1994 policies. "That's one of the reasons to say race can't be used at all... there's no other way to be sure it doesn't become the overwhelming factor."
Current policy allows standardized pre-adoption training, but wisely prohibits specific screening for parents seeking to adopt transracially, Bartholet said.
"What cannot be done is have a pass/fail test that turns on whether you give the politically correct answers," she said. "If social workers are allowed to use training to determine who can adopt, there's lots of experience showing they abuse that power."
She also questioned whether attempts to boost minority recruitment would succeed.
"Black people are significantly poorer than white people and less likely to be in a position to come forward," Bartholet said. "Recruitment efforts bump up against that fact."
ARRGH! I'll tell you why this makes me so mad. First of all, she references the racist myth that black people don't adopt as much as white people (see here for the truth). Second, she uses the buzzword "politically correct", which I despise because it's completely meaningless in any real ethical or political sense. Third, she creates a bogeyman of social workers "abusing their power". This should be hilarious to any foster or adoptive parent with experience in the system. Social workers already abuse their power CONSTANTLY. The only way to fix the problem is to create institutional change so that bad social workers don't keep on clogging up the system while the good ones mostly burn out after a few years.
- I don't believe in any strict form of race-matching. I believe it's foolish and cruel to children, and also fails to account for the existence of interracial couples and multiracial people (like me). However, race and ethnicity need to be factored into placement decisions. In fact, they are already factored into placement decisions. This "color-blind" system that Bartholet refers to is a complete fantasy. It's just common sense to be able to have more consistent training and placement standards when it comes to transracial placements.
For example, let's say a black child is placed with a white family as an emergency short-term placement. They end up staying there for years. The child seems to be doing well. The opportunity comes up to move the child to a black family. Should the child be moved? If race is the only factor, then no, definitely not. Give the white family some extra transracial training, and as long as they're willing to take it, sign off on the placement and move on.
Let's say there's a Latino child and a choice of two placements. One is out in the country with a white family. The other is in the city, in a diverse neighborhood, with a Latino couple, but of a different national ethnicity. However, the child is used to living in the country, loves the outdoors and their greatest wish is to live on a farm. Who knows? That's a tough one... but just because race or ethnicity should be a factor doesn't mean it has to be the determining factor.
- Here are a couple reactions to the report from other foster/adoptive parents:
My problem with the situation is that from my experience with foster care adoption, MEPA/IEPA does almost nothing to address the prejudices of social workers. If the social worker really wants to do race-matching, they're going to do race-matching anyway.
I think if there were CONSISTENT standards for training, the situation would be a lot better. Right now, it's just all over the map. I've heard horror stories about social workers who have jumped in, in the middle of a case, and moved a child solely because of race. Or else the opposite... that a child is placed because of favoritism, when there was a much more culturally appropriate home waiting.
I have noticed (often bitterly) how the current situation works against me. I'm not complaining as an adoptive parent as much I'm complaining as an Asian. Who thinks about the needs of Asian kids to be placed in Asian homes? Neither white nor black social workers have much of an understanding of that.
If new standards are going to be truly child-centered, they need to be consistent but also flexible when it comes to the needs of the children. Teenagers looking for a home should be allowed to make their own decisions, of course. Kids are coming from all kinds of backgrounds and some are going to be very secure in their cultural identity, others are terribly fragile.
And in my opinion, demographic standards are even more important than training. Something like "at least one area within a 5-mile radius has a concentration of greater than 10% of child's race/ethnicity". I think a diverse area or school compensates for family background much more than vice versa. It hardly matters what positive message the child is getting at home if they're assaulted and abused every day at school.
I have little interest in placing blame on white adoptive parents. It's just pointless. The problem is a lot more widespread and complicated. If you want prospective parents to behave better, you have to make them better, via the use of carrots and sticks. Otherwise, it's like an Army recruiter complaining about the poor quality of their recruits. You've got to work with what you've got! I do, however, blame "experts" like Bartholet who should know better, but choose to use their platform in order to mystify the public.
I'm working up to a longer post about the relationship between international adoption, private adoption and foster care adoption.
In the meantime, here are two important links I came across.
Eos linked to Brenda McCreight's blog. I didn't know she had one, so I'm looking forward to reading through it. McCreight wrote Parenting Your Adopted Older Child, which is one of the books I first read when we started along our road. I recommend it to everyone. It'll scare the bejeezus out of you. It's an incredibly depressing book because it's organized as a series of fictional problems, or issues, and none of them really have clear-cut solutions. One of the most terrifying was a scenario in which a couple adopted a child with no special needs except for ADHD, and they kept saying "but it's only ADHD!" as they slowly lost their sanity and their marriage fell apart.
The release of the latest AFCARS data shows that even more foster children and youth—129,000 in FY 2006 up from 114,000 in 2005—are waiting for a permanent, loving family. Sadly, the data also shows that more than 26,000 youth aged out of care in FY 2006 without finding a family—higher numbers than we've seen before. Adoptions from foster care remained steady at 51,000, and the overall number of children in care dropped slightly.
Clearly, there is a need for increased federal and state attention to finding and supporting families for foster children who cannot return home. It's time for legislative action that provides federal support of subsidized guardianship, increases access to adoption assistance, and enhances post-adoption support. Changes such as these would all help ensure that every child finds the permanent, loving family he needs and deserves, and that eventually no child leaves care without a legal connection to a family.
My husband sent me a link to this video. At first, I was terrified that this preacher was from Atlanta because he claims to be from "ATLAH". Luckily, he's not. "Atlah" is his special code word for Harlem. So you can't blame this guy on us!
The video is actually jaw-droppingly funny. Just when you think it can't get any more surreal, it does. You would think this preacher would be isolated from any reasonable public discourse, but apparently, he's made numerous appearances on FOX News shows. Oh wait, that doesn't count as reasonable public discourse.
I'm going to lay off the political posts for a while after this, but I couldn't resist posting the link... it's just too bizarre.
Mulligan's selling shirts with 'Curious George' picture By CHRISTIAN BOONE - The Atlanta Journal-Constitution - 05/13/08 Marietta tavern owner Mike Norman says the T-shirts he's peddling, featuring cartoon chimp Curious George peeling a banana, with "Obama in '08" scrolled underneath, are "cute." But to a coalition of critics, the shirts are an insulting exploitation of racial stereotypes from generations past.
1) They show a human or animal engaged in some unique or extreme activity 2) They exhibit noteworthy artistic skill or cleverness 3) They greatly reinforce prior beliefs 4) They greatly challenge prior beliefs 5) Newsworthy: they show something that connects with our sense of the local and the current, the here and now. We can relate the narrative of our lives to what happens in the video.
These videos also generate mountains of racially-based commentaries wherever they're posted. Actually, it's often more a spittle-flecked monologue than it is a dialogue.
I'll talk about two other viral videos before I show the Soulja Girl one.
I remember a video from last year that showed a high school fight. Two young men take off their shirts and square off. It's a white kid and a smaller, shorter Asian kid. The crowd is yelling their support of the white kid; they're on his side. It begins. Whoever uploaded it has added a soundtrack: Rick Ross' "Everday I'm Hustlin" booms over the fight. The Asian kid moves like greased lightning and after a few punches, the white kid is down. He gets up and walks off. The Asian kid drops him again; this time he can barely stagger away, blood and bits of teeth spraying from his mouth. The video ends.
This video was popular among Asian-Americans, for obvious reasons. A narrative built up around it. The white kid was the bully. The Asian kid was the hero. The narrative had dubious authenticity, but it felt right, it fit with the video and it fit with many of our experiences. I've certainly had the experience, multiple times at school, of being surrounded by a circle of hostile white kids screaming at me. I watched the video several times. It created a strong surge of mixed emotion. I couldn't think straight while watching it. I loved it and hated it at the same time for making me romanticize the violence.
Another example is a popular video I saw last year that's much less violent but seemed to arouse equally strong emotions. A young, pretty, blond white girl sits in front of the camera and talks about her infatuation with Arab men. Nothing is pornographic or poetic; her tone is quite flat and even bland. Arab men are handsome. They're sexy. They're romantic. They know how to treat women well. They're fun to hang out with. She only goes out with Arab men now. Her current boyfriend is Arab. She's learning Arabic. She's converting to Islam. That's it, really.
You can imagine how the typical anti-Arab commenter reacts to this. Her positive stereotyping sends them into a frenzy. What she believes is the exact opposite of what any white, presumably Christian woman is supposed to believe about Arab men. It's a huge challenge to their own beliefs, and they have to deal with it by turning her into a non-representative freak, someone who's not deserving of the title of woman, even.
If it was a more common fetish – for example, a white man giving similarly bland reasons for liking Asian women --- there is no way the video would have gotten the same attention and reaction.
I first saw the Soulja Girl video at the Creative Loafing blog. It's a local Atlanta blog. There are other local sources for the video. It's viral because it's current, it involves something that almost all Atlantans are familiar with (the MARTA train), it shows an extreme of human behavior and it reinforces some prior beliefs for a lot of people. I have to warn viewers, the video is quite depressing and is going to arouse a lot of negative emotions. I'm going to talk much more about those reactions than about the video itself.
Here are some comments from the initial Creative Loafing post. There's a good dialogue in that the stupid comments do not go unchallenged.
# Jill Chambers Says: May 7th, 2008 at 12:30 pm It's just one more reason why MARTA needs to have their police actually riding on the trains. How sad that someone would so rudely disrespect the elderly woman and that all those other riders did not even try to come to her defense.
# Cricket Says: May 8th, 2008 at 6:46 am This is a perfect reason that people with concealed carry permits SHOULD be allowed on MARTA. If I had seen this, and it had escalated to actual physical violence, I would have no problem giving that ghetto wh*re two in the hat.
# Ken Edelstein Says: May 8th, 2008 at 8:06 am Cricket, you make the point of gun control advocates everywhere.
# DaleC Says: May 8th, 2008 at 9:47 am Cricket it DID escalate to physical violence when the guy finally stood up and stopped the aggressor. No weapons needed. That poor old woman. I can't believe it took that long for SOMEBODY to stand up to her being assaulted. Notice how rapidly Soulja Girl's attitude changed when she was confronted by someone who showed force in an appropriate manner. Bullies fold when someone calls them on their crap. It's a shame it took someone that long to stand up to her. As an aside, don't you just LOVE the beautiful world of Hard Core Hip Hop culture.
# Roxie Says: May 9th, 2008 at 11:16 am Dude, Dale, did you just call "superman" Hard Core HipHop? Please, appropriately hang your head in shame. The woman in the video was not a life threatening individual. Although, she is severely testing sanity and patience, being horrendously disrespectful, aggressive, and antagonizing..It was NOT dealt with appropriately by the young man, as you can see, it only escalated the situation. There are better ways to deal with something like this that do not involve HITTING. Of course, armchair quarterbacking is so easy. It took so long for ppl to respond b/c they couldn't believe what was happening and certainly didn't expect it to last as long as it did.
Hilarious. # nast Says: May 9th, 2008 at 12:17 pm Seeing as how this incident was defused by a simple act of wig pulling, perhaps Gov. Perdue should sign a bill that protects individual rights to pull others' wigs in restaurants, parks, churches and other public places. "A wig-pulling society is a polite society."
In the next update to the story, the spittle-flecked monologue begins.
# troy c Says: May 9th, 2008 at 6:06 pm Is she an Obama superdelegate?
# LMM66 Says: May 9th, 2008 at 9:03 pm Not one of those losers tried to help an elderly woman. Everyone there was dumb*** you-know-what. As people have mentioned here already, THIS is how stereotypes are formed. And whether folks like it or not, THIS is the norm for "them".
# Weary One Says: May 10th, 2008 at 9:52 pm M.A.R.T.A. Moving Africans Rapidly Through Atlanta
# Roxie Says: May 11th, 2008 at 1:02 am Wow. I didn't know so many racists liked CL.
MARTA actually stands for Metropolitan Atlanta Rapid Transit Authority (although everyone knows the other five words). It's a contentious intersection of race and politics in Atlanta.
Compared to better-known train systems, such as New York City, the trains are very limited in the ground they cover. The crime rate is low and the trains and stations are extraordinarily clean. Everyday users of the MARTA trains are predominantly working-class/middle-class African-Americans. All other Atlantans take the trains periodically, usually to go the airport or to attend special events held downtown.
Central Atlanta is a diverse mix, with the largest bloc being native (Atlanta-born) African-American. White people who live inside Atlanta are comparatively progressive in their politics, especially because of the huge GLBT community. They're not a choir of enlightened angels, by any means, but one thing is sure: if they were scared of seeing and talking to black people every day, they wouldn't be living where they do.
The suburbs to the east are where many richer, non-Atlanta-born African-Americans have settled. And to the far north, the suburbs trace the arc of white flight. The iron claws of the northern suburbs have had a pretty bad effect on the development of public transportation in Atlanta. Their politics, plus the road-construction lobby's dirty money, ensures that Atlanta's traffic congestion and air quality get worse and worse every year. MARTA's system is funded only by the two counties of metropolitan Atlanta, although people from the surrounding counties frequently use it for park-and-ride. The counties of the northern suburbs refuse to link their own systems to it, for fear of getting too many undesirable people in their neighborhoods. A well known fact: "MARTA is unique in that it is the largest United States transit agency not to receive state operational funding."
The comments to the video illustrate an intense fear and loathing of public transportation. This fear and loathing feeds from racism, then back into racism, in a vicious feedback loop. "If only I could never leave my car," they pray. But parking is limited at their sporting events and their centers of bureaucracy. Every once in a while, they have to bravely step onto a MARTA train. And they're not even allowed to carry their guns on board! They resent that.
Anyone who is passionate about Atlanta and knowledgeable about Atlanta and lives inside it, no matter what their race, knows about this dynamic. We're all hostages to it.
Getting back to a more personal level, what do viewers feel about the woman?
I didn't think that drugs were involved. It definitely wasn't crack. People on crack aren't that fluid and expressive and coordinated in their movements. I think a lot of people on the train had the same visceral reaction I did… the fear and awe of the mad. If you don't look at them, maybe they won't notice you.
In fact, that's what happened. I read it first at local videojournalist A.Man.I's blog: Soulja Girl Turns Herself In. The fuller story was reported here and on local radio stations.
She's only 25 years old, but the dark bags under Nafiza Z.'s eyes tell the story of a young life blighted by psychosis, delusions, hallucinations and mania that are the hallmarks of her mental disorder.
Yesterday afternoon, Nafiza, was in the DeKalb County jail receiving the psychiatric treatment she desperately needed. But on April 7th, Nafiza was spiraling out of control on a MARTA train traveling through Atlanta's east side.
The scenes captured on another passenger's cell phone of Nafiza aka "Soulja Girl" terrorizing an elderly passenger - caused a sensation on the Internet and embarrassed MARTA officials who quickly issued a warrant for her arrest.
People with bipolar disorder aren't usually that violent or aggressive even in their manic phase. They are usually more of a danger to themselves than they are to others.
Nafiza's boyfriend Dee, with whom she has a baby son, said it more eloquently when he called into the Ryan Cameron Show on Friday, "If she wasn't bipolar she would be the good a person on earth," said Dee.
"That girl got a good heart. The city don't help her, man! They just kick her back out on the streets. The city don't help [black mentally ill] folks like that. Once you get in that [manic] stage you can't help yourself. It mess with your mind, man. Once your mind gone it's a wrap!"
I don't know exactly what it's like to be in the grip of clinical mania, adrenaline coursing through your body, other strange chemicals surging through your brain. But I know what it feels like to be a witness to something like that. Perhaps the awe and fear of the bystander is partly because of our empathy with mania... as if we're seeing the dial turned up to 10 on an experience we've felt at level 3 or 4.
It reminds me of a bizarre experience I had when I was in college in Miami. I was at a donut shop late at night, studying with some friends. An older white man walked in and set down at the booth next to us. He started talking very loudly to the air in a sharp, agonized tone. It was a monologue about being a Vietnam vet and how he was betrayed and how it was all the fault of the gooks. That sentiment, those words, over and over again.
My friends were shrinking into their seats. They were all foreign students and terrified of getting into trouble and getting deported, especially the one from Iraq. I had the opposite reaction. My skin was on fire, there was a buzzing noise in my ears, my body started shivering and trembling as if someone had plugged me into an electric current, and everytime he said the word "gook" the current spiked. After a couple minutes of this, I couldn't take it anymore. I got up and faced him and started yelling back.
There was chaos after that point. Another older white man came over, said he was also a Vietnam vet and then took my side of the loud, disjointed argument. The staff of the donut shop got involved. There were numerous threats of ass-kicking. The police came. They tried to talk him down but eventually arrested him after he got into his car, because he was obviously in no condition to drive.
My friends, who hadn't moved during the whole time, told me I was crazy. Yes, my actions were pretty irrational, but I didn't feel like I had a choice. I'd waded up to my knees in something that the mentally ill man was drowning in. I suppose I won, but my victory was pretty hollow.
This was the first narrative that I connected to the video I watched today. But after that man went out into the parking lot, I have no idea how his story began or ended.
After I read a bit more of Nafiza Z.'s story, I feel almost guilty for writing this analysis. I still empathize with the bystanders and the poor elderly lady, but I also empathize with her terrible struggle. I hope these words will go to show how the hatred expressed toward her has more to do with a complicated web of politics, race and resentment than it does with her actual actions. I hope she can transcend the person shown in that video and become the person she wants to be.
I talked to Sunny today over the webcam. He gives me a kiss by kissing the computer screen. I can't see him doing it, of course, I just see the top of his head approaching the camera. It's still really sweet. Then we all make funny faces at each other, and he laughs.
I usually don't get so sentimental over holidays, but this is my first mother's day as a mother, even if I'm a currently a quasi-mother, or perhaps a virtual telepresent mother.
I wondered whether to send a card to Sunny's biological mom. I decided against it. I don't know if it's my place yet to do so, and I don't know whether she wants to remember this day or not. I did send something to Sunny's foster mom.
This is a great organization I support. They have been working on many initiatives, including aid to Burma.
This Mother's Day give the mothers in your life a gift with meaning, a Doctors Without Borders e-card. Sending a Mother's Day e-card is fast and simple. You can choose the photo to feature in the card, like the one displayed here, and customize your personal message.Your Mother's Day gift will help Doctors Without Borders deliver medical aid where it is needed most. Women and children are disproportionately affected by humanitarian crises like armed conflict, displacement, disease and malnutrition. Our teams reach out every day to help them and other vulnerable people in nearly 60 countries. Let them and the mothers in your life know that you care this Mother's Day.
Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) is an international independent medical humanitarian organization that delivers emergency aid to people affected by armed conflict, epidemics, natural and man-made disasters, and exclusion from health care in nearly 60 countries. New York Office: 333 Seventh Avenue, New York, NY 10001
Anyone who's bitter about media coverage of Obama will love this cartoon. I'm still chuckling about it. I love the "transitivity of blackness" definition, the church sign, and the depiction of "throwing his grandmother under the bus".
I have an exciting opportunity this weekend. I can't talk about it now, but maybe later I will.
We have a date for Sunny's placement! It's not as soon as we'd like, but at least we have it. I just hope they'll stick with it.
I feel exhausted recently. I need to get back on my vitamins and exercise.
Also, I'm terrible at posting the right things at the right time. But I should mention that May is Asian Pacific American Heritage Month, as well as National Foster Care Month.
At one point in my life, I needed to take my Spanish to fluency level in order to accomplish an important goal. I spent a year working to save money in order to go to a private immersion school in a Latin American country. I picked the capital of Costa Rica, San José. I wanted to stay in a relatively big city, and I was worried the smaller towns famous for language schools in Mexico and Guatemala would have so many other Americans that the immersion wouldn't be as effective.
The school lasted 9 weeks, 8 hours a day. I was placed with a Costa Rican family. My señora was an older woman living with her adult son. They had a beautiful house in the suburbs. My boarding price included a breakfast and dinner. Breakfast was often a fried pork chop accompanied by rice and beans and a vegetable, with a side of fresh tropical fruit, a glass of fresh-squeezed orange juice and a steaming thermos of world-famous Costa Rican coffee. The first time she presented me with this spread, it was pretty intimidating. But I ate every delicious bite, thanked the señora and staggered off to school.
Some of my American fellow students drove me crazy. There was a teenager who kept complaining about the breakfasts. She made her señora fix her a special breakfast: Captain Crunch cereal. Then she complained because her señora wasn't fixing it right. The cereal was too soggy. So she made the señora wait to put the cereal into the milk until the exact proper moment.
I didn't want to be an ugly American. I tried to understand the customs of daily life, and did some research before I went. I also knew from living in Miami that people would call me "chinita" or "Chinese girl" without regard for my real ethnicity, but that "chinita" didn't carry the same negative baggage as it would in the U.S. In my own country there's a thin but persistent layer of enmity towards Asians, based on a long history of immigration scares, economic competition, and wars. That history wasn't the same in Costa Rica, obviously. Asians were simply stereotyped as "exotic" and "foreign". It was actually a breath of fresh air. I had to deal with being "foreign", and I had to deal with explaining that yes, I really was an American even though I didn't look like one. Nothing especially difficult or painful.
I didn't think about other racial stereotypes, but I had a rude awakening.
In class, we were doing a unit based on cartoons and jokes. We were shown cartoons and asked to comment on them. It was going well. Then I turned the page of the photocopied course packet for the next cartoon. There was a black boy with exaggerated black features, crying, sitting by the side of the road next to huge watermelon slice. An older man (white/criollo) asks him, "why are you crying, negrito"? The boy says something like, "there's too much watermelon and not enough negrito".
It was horribly offensive. I went to the teacher right away. It was hard for me to articulate myself in Spanish, so I switched to English, which the teacher spoke very well. I told her, "this is a terrible cartoon, it's very offensive to black people. It really needs to be taken out of the course packet."
The teacher smiled and chuckled. She explained several things. In the U.S., we had lots of problems with race relations. Even riots! But things just weren't the same in Costa Rica. In her country, black and white people got along. In fact, she had an in-law who was part black. No black Costa Rican would see anything wrong with that cartoon. How would I know it was offensive, when I myself wasn't black? What's wrong with enjoying watermelon?
She was implying, very politely, that I shouldn't be an ugly American. I was imposing my own ideas about race relations in a realm where I was ignorant.
I'd lost some clarity, but I stayed on track. If I couldn't win the argument on moral grounds, I'd switch to practical.
"I'm sorry I can’t explain why it's so offensive. But if you have a black student from the United States, and they see the cartoon, I promise you they'll be very offended. In fact, they'd probably ask for their money back and say bad things about the school when they got back home."
That did the trick. The teacher promised to remove the cartoon from the next course packet.
I felt bad about going this route and, in essence, threatening their livelihood. The teachers were women with multiple degrees in the humanities, who worked harder, for much less pay, than their U.S. equivalents. Costa Rica has a high standard of living for the region, but America is a much more powerful country and casts a large shadow.
My guilt didn't last long. I found out that everything the teacher told me about black Costa Ricans was wrong. When I went to the black Caribbean coast (which every criollo Costa Rican warned me against doing) and actually met black Costa Ricans, I realized that Costa Rican society was extremely segregated. There was strong institutionalized racism against black people. The tourist dollars were diverted from their beaches; their language (English patois) was disparaged and dying out.
The most graphic illustration I had of this flavor of racism was in another part of Costa Rica, when I was watching television next to a friend of my señora.
They were showing a Richard Pryor movie on TV. She quickly changed the channel and said, in a normal conversational tone, "I don't like black people. I don't know why, I just don't. My mother was the same way!"
I maintained a stunned silence. I didn't say anything, because the woman was much older than me, and I felt physically incapable of confronting her. I just sat there, confused, frustrated, depressed, inadequate and culpable.
So my attempts at dealing with anti-black racism in Costa Rica were definitely a mixed bag: one partial success, one abject failure.
It's very difficult determining where to intervene or how to stand when it comes to unfamiliar forms of racism. People defending American racism (or denying that it exists) often point to other countries and say, triumphantly, "well, they're just as racist!" When done from an unquestioning perspective, condemning the practices of other countries has little effect other than asserting American moral superiority.
I still believe it has to be tried.
I learned a lot about racism in my own country from traveling and living in Latin America. In parallel, the most insightful accounts of racism in Korea and Japan have been the ones I've read from African-Americans. Different forms of racism are often not as separate and distinct as they first seem, and comparing them shows the weak spots where they can be challenged.
I'm the mother of two brothers who came to us through the foster care system. I'm also a Nikkei hapa. This is a blog about transracial adoption from an unusual point of view, combined with some politics and ATL living.
Foster Care System Perspectives
