Snowed In! And other stuff.

We got several inches of snow yesterday, which for Atlanta is quite extreme. My father flew in from Hawaii just in time, or else his flight probably would have been cancelled.

We're planning on spending a quiet weekend at home. I don't want to drive anywhere until this nasty snow melts.

I've been following the New Life missionary scandal mostly via Bastardette. It's getting more and more tangled. They're turning against each other. Their lawyer, Jorge Puello, isn't a real lawyer, and he's suspected of trafficking kids from El Salvador for prostitution. There's this matter of a supposed $60,000 bribe. The ringleader, Laura Silsby, was probably motivated by greed. I do feel sorry for the two teenagers in the group; their parents were criminally irresponsible to have involved them in this mess.

I'm sure there'll be more twists and turns, plus a few tell-all exclusives and books. Sadly, at least some of the New Lifers will make on the profit on this story when they're released from prison.

I'm waiting for the inevitable movie, which will probably be some kind of made-for-TV crap. I'd see it, if was of real cinematic quality. Perhaps the Coen brothers? Or González Iñárritu. Trailer voice: "A nation in peril. Fear of God. Love of money. Desire for children. Combined in one woman. Snaring others into her web and dragging them into the moral abyss." Laura Silsby played by Meryl Streep. Judge Bernard Saint-Vil played by Jimmy Jean-Louis. Jorge Puello played by Benicio del Toro.

On another topic, I remembered recently that I wanted to link to this post from last month at Restructure: "White people’s family roots are deeper than those of ethnic minorities."

I love this post. It absolutely eviscerates a common and irritating stereotype: that minorities have "deeper roots". I run into this all the time. Often, it's very well-meaning and put across in a self-deprecatory fashion. "Oh, I'm not very interesting, I'm just a plain vanilla kind of family, I'm a mutt, I don't have any special ties to another culture..." Even though it's often intended in a positive way, it has the potential to be really insulting and damaging.

I'm certainly insulted by it. I mean, I can trace my white ancestors back 500 years, to York and Hanover, with a few mouse clicks. I'm very connected to American culture, and I feel a strong connection to England as well. The fact that I'm not white shouldn't mean I'm an automatic foreigner to Anglo-American culture. On the other hand, I can't even read or write my father's name in Japanese, much less my Japanese grandparents' names. I don't speak Japanese. And this lack of knowledge isn't wholly by choice, it's because I grew up partly in a racist environment where being marked as non-white meant you were supposed to conform culturally or else face verbal and physical attacks.

Like Restructure says, the stereotype of "deeper roots" masks the responsibility for cutting off those very same roots.

I can think of another, more subtle effect.  White people often talk about being cut off from their roots in the context of feeling a kind of existential angst that propels them into a desperate search for meaning.  That's quite understandable.  Modern American life increasingly isolates people.  Extended families are scattered all over. Family and community ties break apart.  The problem is that people often don't realize that these isolating social forces affect minorities just as much and even more.  I think in a lot of movies and books and art, the angst of middle- and upper-class white people is cast in a really portentous, heroic, important light.  Take that George Clooney movie Up in the Air, which I didn't see, but I heard it was about an angsty white business traveler.  Nobody makes big budget movies about angsty Mexican landscapers or angsty black postal workers or angsty Korean convenience store owners.  When you get into more independent movies, you finally start to see portrayals of people of color addressing complicated psychological pain: Michael Kang's "The Motel" is a great example.  But usually, any minority in a lower-class job is stereotyped as hard-working but happy, or oppressed and sad and noble.  Often, they help the angsty white character discover what's really important in life.  Because they are simple people and they have roots.  Gah!

Anyway, I love Restructure's take on the topic.  I also recommend her post "Libertarianism is rational for rich white people only".  It's short, sweet and to the point.  My only quibble is that libertarianism is increasingly rational if you're a person of color who is very rich, but the core of the argument is awesome.  It's one of my favorite libertarian takedowns, although China Mieville's Floating Utopias article is always going to be #1 for me.  I love the fact that a bunch of libertarians swooped in on the comments and dropped a bunch of awful, awful arguments that were easily swatted aside.