Blowflies on the Pawpaw blossoms

I planted two pawpaw trees in my backyard last year. They're about 5 feet tall. One of them is blooming, but the other one is being lazy. I need to get a couple more this year. They're not easy to find.

Pawpaw trees have beautiful foliage and produce a large, white-fleshed, sweet pulpy fruit that's supposed to be delicious. All pawpaw sites mention the fact that pawpaw was George Washington's favorite dessert.

The pawpaw used to grow all over the Eastern US, especially the Southeast. But as our old growth forests were cut down, the pawpaw also went. Pawpaw seedlings need filtered shade to grow, and when the old forests were gone, the sunlight destroyed them!

The pawpaw is pollinated by blowflies. They flowers emit the odor of rotting meat, and the flies crawl over the flowers, picking up pollen that they then bring on to the next tree. Some growers say this method isn't reliable enough, so they hang small bags of rotten chicken parts on the branches in order to increase the number of blowflies.

When our pawpaw blossomed, the flowers didn't smell like anything at all. But they must be putting out something. There was such an impressive swarm of blowflies the other day, I took some pictures.









Here's a very extensive site about pawpaws.

Picking up paw-paws; put 'em in a basket.
Picking up paw-paws; put 'em in a basket.
Picking up paw-paws;put 'em in a basket.
Way down yonder in the paw-paw patch.

Pre-Vacation Update and Moderate Rant

I had an extremely busy weekend. My cousin was in town, an old friend is also here, plus we created a new bed in the backyard garden. I'll have some interesting garden pictures later.

I've also been kind of down about racial issues lately.

The first thing my cousin said when she saw my mother and me was how glad she was now that she wasn't around racists anymore. She's a salesperson in a very male-dominated industry and has been traveling around the Southeast dealing with clients. For the last several days, she was in intense negotiations with an important customer who also happened to be a particularly nasty racist. He's from the North, but as soon as he heard her Southern accent, he just unloaded. He used the n-word. At dinner, he harassed their waiter for being Cuban. She kept looking away and/or deflecting. Then on the last day, as they were walking down the street, he saw a black man walking hand-in-hand with a white woman. He said "I don't understand that. I have a 15-year-old daughter, and I told her if she ever brought a ***** home I'd take my shotgun and shoot both of them. I'm sure you were raised the same way." My cousin said "As a matter of fact I was NOT and I really disagree with that."

I was listening to the story with a lot of unease. I didn't even want to hear it, actually. But my cousin obviously wanted to get it off her chest. It made me feel horrible. First of all, I felt mad at her for not saying more, for not challenging it more strongly for those three entire days. But it also made me think about my own work experiences as a waitress. I put up with a lot of racist crap. Some of it was directed against me and some against other races. Sometimes I could challenge it and sometimes I just had to eat it up so I could get that cash at the end of the night.

I'm so glad I don't have to deal with it anymore. I've built a life where I'm very sheltered against it. But that story, and other episodes I've also blogged about here, reminds me that I probably come into contact with a lot of people that hold racist beliefs. They don't say anything to me both because a) I'm not white and b) I'm not in an economically subservient position. But they use that racist stuff to socialize with other white people and do that good ol' boy networking. So I guess I'm luckier than both non-racist white people and black people. Somehow I don't feel lucky.

Plus, I remember back in the 1980s when East Asians were hated like crazy; right now the general public is too busy hating Arab- and Mexican-Americans to think about East Asians, but it could flip right back again quite easily.

Hearing media accounts of racism has been getting me down more than usual lately. Black kids beating up an Asian girl. Latino gangs killing black people. A Native American army recruiter viciously insulting a black person who fights back with yet another stereotype. I'll stop while I'm ahead, but you get the point. I'm irritated not just with white people but pretty much every other group in America, including other Asian-Americans who think if they're nice and quiet and don't rock the boat everything will get better, except it never does.

Damn, I sure need this vacation! I'll force myself to have zero computer access.

If I get any more misanthropic, I'll turn into my dad. By the way, he's still doing very well, and is now back to taking the subway all over Tokyo.

Personal Update

I'm happy to report that everything has gone swimmingly with my dad's ankle fusion! The clinic took his cast off, and he now walks (a slow shuffle for now) with a cane and a special boot. After he sent back the roller, he had to deal with the fact that his mobility actually got worse even as his ankle got better.

He flew back to Japan yesterday and arrived safely. He's in a good mood and everything is on track. In a few months he should be able to return to a very active lifestyle.

On the adoption front, our worker has finished our homestudy and submitted it for state filing. We need to get cracking on that 10 additional hours of foster care training for 2007. We missed some excellent training opportunities for various business and personal reasons, but it shouldn't be too difficult to catch up.

Lastly, I've been doing some work promoting a highly targeted anti-racism blog. It's called CKY=KKK. If you have a Youtube account and an interest in anti-racism, especially racism directed against Chinese and Asians, I suggest you visit it and do some of the Youtube actions. On the other hand, the videos that the blog links to are really filthy and disgusting, and you have to watch at least part of them to figure out what this is all about, so don't go there unless you are ready. Seriously!

Here's a Youtube video, safe for everyone, with awesome energy that will probably increase the healthiness of your blood circulation.

Slavery Apology and Confederate History Georgia Bills

I love living in Atlanta, but our state government peckerhead overlords often get me down.

There's been a lot of recent media attention over a proposed bill that would apologize for the state's role in slavery and segregation. Certain people got all outraged and started yelling that they weren't responsible for the actions of their ancestors. Slavery and segregation are so old news. Why get so hung up on the past? Whine, whine, whine.

Now, we have another bill proposing April as official Confederate History Month.

The same people then start muttering about the proud heritage of our glorious past. So what if it all happened 150 years ago?

ARRGH! The hypocrisy!

It looks like black and white lawmakers are going to come together and pass both of the bills. Personally, I disagree with that solution. It's not that I mind apologizing for slavery. Although I'm not white, I'm reasonably sure that some of my white ancestors were slaveowners. For some reason, I have zero guilt about that fact, and also zero resentment at being asked to apologize. I just think an apology would be rather hollow.

Instead, I would prefer to see more real recognition of history. Some of those scenic courthouses surrounding Atlanta should have large plaques on the side dedicated to the slaves who built them. It's sad that all those slaves, with names both known and unknown, are treated as if they're an invisible shame. They existed and have a right to be remembered for the many things they did. But the state government obviously prefers to spend money on memorials to white people, and I suppose this won't change until Georgia demographics reach a tipping point on their current trend.

For a white Southerner perspective on this issue check out Drifting through the Grift.

Blogging Slow Patch

I don't have the energy for a long adoption-related post until I get some progress on the adoption front. We turned in our lifebook and Profile, and all we're waiting for is homestudy completion. Our worker has not been in a great hurry to finish ours, since she knows we're not ready to start until dad recuperates fully and leaves. The time is approaching fast though.

I always try to post at least every other day. This month may get lighter. I'm still going to be reading other people's blogs and will also try to comment more on them. By the way, if you're a regular or semi-regular reader of this blog and feel like you have any questions you want to ask me, please jump in and do so in the comments.

Weekend Update

The weather was amazing today, and I skipped church and put in a full seven hours working in the yard. I ripped out the sad, boring front-yard foundation shrubs that came with the house (English laurel is just no good in Atlanta) and replaced them with Frost Proof gardenias. I also planted clematis, lily turf and primroses and remulched a huge area.

I saw "The Host", a Korean horror movie, on Friday night. It was awesome! I might do a fuller review later, because it featured adoption as a brief plot tangent.

Vacation

My husband and I are taking a much needed vacation at the end of this month. We're using frequent flyer miles and going to Puerto Rico for a week. There are two smaller islands off the main one - Culebra and Vieques - that are supposed to have wonderful beaches and snorkeling and NO JET SKIS (I hate them so much).

I've never been to Puerto Rico before and am really looking forward to it.

Handling Racism as a Child

This is a long post I've been working up to for a while. I want to take a very close look at the statement that "parents of color are better equipped to teach their children how to handle racism". It's a statement that's very important for transracial and intraracial adoption. It often gets dropped into a debate or a conversation and just left there.

I'm going to relate a lot of my personal experiences growing up with racism and ultimately agree with that statement. But in the process, I want to point out some things that make it a bit more complicated. What bothers me most is the subtle way the statement shifts "handling racism" as a burden onto the child or the parent. I understand that this is totally not the intention, and it might just be my own paranoia. But I just have to stress, dealing with racism is not something that any child or any parent should have to do. And it's not something any child or parent can truly accomplish to perfection. At best, they can fail less than others fail.

To clear up my own intentions: talking about my own experiences, I don't want to compare myself in a harmful way to a transracial adoptee. I remember sharing a little bit about my experiences in my adoption class, and noticed other parents reacting in two different ways:

1. "Her experience of racism shows that growing up as a person of color with a white mother is very difficult. Adding adoption on top of that would have made things even more difficult."
2. "Her experience shows that biological families can have racial identity issues as well as adoptive ones."

The second reaction is just as valid as the first, but it's also more dangerous. I don't want people to think that my issues made other peoples' issues any less serious by comparison.

Here goes.

We moved to America when I was 6. I saw my father a few times a year, a few weeks at a time. Almost every summer he flew me out to Japan.

We moved in with my grandparents. My mother rented her own house after a while, then started up a home business with my grandfather. It turned out to be successful. The business moved to a separate office and she was soon comfortably supporting us as a single mother. In the recession of the late 80s/early 90s she was fired from her own business and had to start all over again, but that's another story.

Our neighborhood was suburban and rootless. I feel zero nostalgia for that place, and when I tell people where I grew up I usually follow it with the term "armpit of America". In the schools I went to, I was the only Asian. There were exactly two exceptions: one Korean-American boy who was in my 1st-grade class and a Chinese-American girl who was in my 9th-grade art class. I never spoke with the Korean boy and exchanged maybe one sentence with the Chinese girl. We were terrified of each other. To explain why is difficult. I'd have to use the analogy of a school of fish. I was a fish with a stripe that the other fishes didn't have. If I swam carefully the other fish wouldn't notice. But if I swam close to another fish that had the same stripe, the other fish would see it, and they'd go into a feeding frenzy and turn us into sushi.

Things started getting bad for me, socially, around 2nd or 3rd grade. When I was 10, I thought they couldn't get any worse, but they did. I hit a low point when I was 13, in my last year of middle school. I remember every night hoping aliens would abduct me in my sleep so I wouldn't have to go to school the next morning. The abuse would wax and wane in intensity, but it never went away. Sometimes it would be a note on my locker saying "GO BACK TO CHINA". Throwing things at me on the bus. Pulling their eyes. Other times it would be a group of kids following me down the hall, breathing down my neck, singing "ching chong, ching chong, chinky chinky ching chong". It seemed wrapped up in a lot of other things: being nerdy, being a girl. I kept thinking that if I could just improve myself, wear the right clothes, say the right things, then I could make it stop.

My life, in every other respect, was pretty good. I loved most of my classes at school; I did very well and competed in a lot of academic tournaments. I played soccer and climbed trees and went on trips to the beach and awesome family vacations and summer camp, where there were international students.

Here's how several adults in my life reacted to my problems. I didn't tell them the worst of it, because I didn't have the language. Rather, I carefully selected episodes.

• Guidance counselor, middle school: "Toughen up and come back when you have a real problem."
• Dad: "When I was your age, we had to walk over a mountain pass covered in snow to get to school every day. There were bears in the mountain. We rang bells to scare off the bears so they wouldn't eat us. Life is hard. Shut up. Study harder."
• Mom: "The people who say things like that to you are damaged. You should feel sorry for them. You are better and smarter than them and should never believe the ignorant things they say."
• Grandmother: "Give them a sharp backhand slap to the face". She then proceeded to show me exactly how I should slap them, guiding my arm into the proper position. It was like a tennis move. I loved my grandmother but I was always a bit scared of her. She could get very mean, although never towards me, when she had too much Dewar's.
• Grandfather: I never told my grandfather because I wanted to protect him. He was very sensitive. I thought he might start crying if he knew how much I was hurt.

Guess which approach to "handling racism" was most effective? If you're guessing my grandmother's approach (backhandling racism) you'd be right. The day I turned around and faced the kids who were breathing down my neck and hit one in the face and knocked her to the ground, they stopped. I still got insults at a distance, and notes, but they were much more careful from then on.

At the time, I felt a lot of guilt because I couldn't deal with the situation nonviolently. From my mother I'd absorbed a philosophical belief in nonviolence and developed it and made it my own, and the incredible efficacy of violence was a huge shock to that belief system.

A lot later on, I realized I couldn't have really dealt with it. It was beyond me. It was too much to ask. It wasn't my responsibility that I broke or failed; it was the failure of the kids who abused me and the parents who didn't teach them not to abuse other kids and the whole system of unchallenged racism in America.

The guidance counselor was a complete dickhead. Other than that, I can’t blame any of the adults I listed. They did their best. My father had a lot of other problems in his childhood, but he never experienced racism.

He helped me in other ways, which he was oblivious to.

When I was growing up in the 80s there was a very limited range of Asians in the media. A limited and horrible range. Keep in mind that I knew no other Asian-Americans at all, my entire childhood, but I remember watching my first and only episode of that TV show Kung Fu with David Carradine and feeling nothing but sheer blinding rage. This guy was supposed to be Asian? They were cheating me. And then there was the cringing Hop Sing on Bonanza reruns.

I remember a few times staring at my face in the mirror and trying to make eyes look bigger, but I just ended up looking surprised. I've read accounts of this mirror moment in other literature about Asian-Americans, and it also features in an even more terrifying form in accounts from transracial adoptees.

At the moment I was doing it, I felt very divided. I felt a strong urge to do it, and to examine my non-whiteness as if it were something I could cast out; at the same time, I knew it was wrong and deeply harmful. And I was angry at myself for wanting to do it. Looking back at those moments, I think I was wrestling with a demon.

It was because of my father that I won. I knew that the images they showed of Asians were vicious lies. My father was a physically powerful and completely fearless Asian man. He had nothing, absolutely nothing, in common with those lies.

The other adults in my family helped me in some way: even my grandfather, being so sensitive and compassionate. My mother helped by giving me the skeleton of an intellectual framework so that I could step back and analyze what was really going on.

When I was 13 I gave up my horribly unsuccessful project of fitting in. The next year, the first year of high school, for my one elective I signed on to be a teacher's aide for the TMH class (Trainably Mentally Handicapped, the clinical/educational term in use back then). I did it for selfish reasons. Since I didn't care about my reputation anymore, I thought I might as well spend my elective time with people who were guaranteed not to call me racial insults. In the beginning I wasn't a very good aide, but I learned how to be a better one. I flipped the social value system and only tried talking to D&D geeks, goths and punks. The decision I made ended up giving me a strong, positive identity, but I sacrificed a lot to get there; I have no natural ease in social situations. I had to train myself not to care what people think about me, so I come off as not being very empathetic, even when I really do care.

I can't imagine my personality without going through what I went through! I think I've done a good job turning the negatives into positive learning experiences for myself and others. Still, as I touched on in my very first post, sometimes I think about how it could have been so less painful, so much better.

Spot the Hapa

We found this photo while digging around in some old family albums. It's my Japanese kindergarten class. The photo is very unflattering... my cheeks look weird! Actually, it's unflattering to everyone. We all look like someone just took our lollipops away.

I remember kindergarten as being a mostly fun, happy, playful time. I loved my teacher (the woman in the purple sweater).

After kindergarten, we moved away from Japan.

Weekend Update

This week has been kind of blah. Not much progress on any front. I think our lifebook will be done this week; I've gathered almost all the pictures together. Dad has a ticket back to Japan in the third week of March. He's spending a lot of time in his room practicing an obscure Central Asian language. I was distracted in church this morning and didn't really follow the sermon.

There are a lot of big, substantive posts I want to write, but it's hard to get a block of time in place to write them. I'm going to make a note right here so I don't forget any of the topics:

1) Religion -- specifically, the Charismatic Pentecostalism practiced by a few branches of my family.
2) Intraracial adoption and me (follow up on Intraracial (Same-Race) Adoption)
3) Follow up on Race, Demographics and Decatur: Part II discussing racial diversity and the school system, both public and private.
4) An argument that as a general concept, adoption is paradoxically both very selfish and very selfless, and attempts to view it as either/or lead to circular debate.
5) An examination of the idea that parents of color are better prepared to teach their children how to resist racism (agree, but with some major qualifications)

I'm really looking forward to Rome tonight. Last Sunday they skipped an episode, which was excruciating.

P.S. If you like really surreal political humor check out this campaign ad.

The AJC is awful beyond belief

This is why I never read the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

There are no black people in Argentina

On this last day of Black History Month, I really couldn't think of a good U.S. topic I could write on that hasn't already been covered extensively. Instead, I'm going to point out a little-known international black history topic: what happened to black people in Argentina.

The title of my post is intentionally misleading, because there are definitely black people in Argentina! There just aren't that many of them. The Argentinian national identity is very European, and much more defined and crisp around the edges than is usual for an American country.

Like the U.S., the modern nation of Argentina established living room through ethnic cleansing and genocide of indigenous inhabitants, then combined different streams of immigrants to form a conglomerate identity. The difference is that there was a second wave of ethnic cleansing in the late 19th century that got rid of the large black population in the north of the country. Formerly, black people in Argentina had played a major economic and cultural role. The tango, for example, has roots in Africa.

From a review of the documentary "Afroargentinos"
Carlos Menem, whose ten-year tenure as Argentina's president ended in 1999 just before his macroeconomic policies led to the collapse of the economy, was asked, during a tour of the United States, about whether Argentina had any citizens of African descent. He responded, "No, we have no blacks. Brazil has that problem."

Something happened. No one is quite sure exactly what. The official version is that the black people just drifted off during a long war. This is wrong: there was a concerted effort to remove them, sponsored in large part by statesman Domingo Sarmiento. But exactly how they were removed is in doubt. Were they concentrated in quarantine areas without medicine and left to die during epidemics? Or simply taken from their homes, pushed over the border into Brazil and Uruguay and told never to come back?

Some of them remained. Here's part of an interview with Fidel Nadal, former frontman of the Argentinian rock band Todos Tus Muertos. I'm sure not all Afroargentinos have taken his path: the complete rejection of national identity in favor of a transnational one. But these are the very raw words of someone who refuses to accept the official story.

From a 1998 interview (my typical clunky translation)

It happened I was born in Argentina, but I'm black and my nationality is African. My ancestors came from Africa in an illegal way, kidnapped, robbed, into slavery. If I said that I am Argentinian I would be accepting that illegal fact. And I don't accept it. They kidnapped us, they mistreated us, and we still built their cities and gave them love in exchange for mistreatment. Also, when any person of the world sees me, they don't believe me when I say I'm Argentinian. Once, in Peru, someone wanted to beat me up. "You're Argentinean. I was in Argentina and there are no black people. Why are you lying to me?". There, you realize that no matter that I've been born in Argentina, my nationality always is going to be Africa, because any person that sees me on the street says: "That black man, where is he from?". In Africa, when they see a black man they don't ask where he's from, because that's his house. But if you went to Africa, they would ask you, "Where are you from, white man?" Black people aren't born from here, we come from Africa. It's natural. And it's natural for Europeans that a rasta speaks of rastafarianism. They're surprised when I tell them that I was born in Argentina. They ask me: "Where are you from?" And I say: "I'm of Africa, but I was born in Argentina. How?" And I explain this same thing that I'm saying to you now. And they have to accept it. I don't come from the family of the ambassador of the Congo in Argentina. No. My family went through five generations in slavery, making the streets, nursing children, fighting in the English invasions, forming what now is known as Argentina. If you don't know where you come from, how do you know who you are and where you're going? One thing is your original culture, and another one is imposed culture. You'll say: if you're of Africa and you think that it's that way, why don't you go there? I'll tell you something: I go to Africa, but who pays me for all of that? Imagine it, I go over there and they start off: "Ahg, ug" and I say "Hey, what's up". "But what: you don't know how to speak? What did you come here to do? What's your family, what's your last name? And me: "I don't know. Nadal". "But that's not an African name." "No, because it's the last name of the family that enslaved me and made me take their name." "But that makes you like a dog, not a human being, they’ll say to me... You don't know your name, your last name, your language. You have nothing, neither home, nor family. The richest part of a man is his culture. But you're a stranger in your own land. And neither are you from here. You're seen as different because you are different. You're black. Although you dye your hair blonde and put on contact lenses, they're always going to shout at you from a truck: "Hey, black man, what are you doing." I always knew that I was black; let's say, since I was a little boy. When you went to school, you didn't say: "Eh, I came there as white." But they say to you all of a sudden: "Black!" and, above all, it's to insult you. It's crazy. Just like when I was a boy my father spoke to me of Malcolm X, Lumumba, leaders of Africa. And I hooked up with reggae because I looked at the album covers and said: "How I look like this type; my hair grows like that." Sure, I lived in Almagro, but we were links on the same chain. And there was something familiar in that, as if I'd heard it before...

More links:

• OFFOFFOFF review of the documentary "Afroargentinos" (English)
  
• Argenpress: EL GENOCIDIO NEGRO EN LA ARGENTINA (Spanish) Article about socialist and democratic afroargentinians.
  
• AfroamericaXXI page on Argentina (Spanish)
  
• Clarín.com: Los afroargentinos: una historia de negación (Spanish)
  
• Todos Tus Muertos (English)
  
• Todos Tus Muertos (Spanish)
  
  
  
  

Transracial Adoption Article and Video

Time for something a bit more on topic. I read about this last week at the Harlow's Monkey blog. I thought it was fantastic coverage of the issue. It's a short 10-minute video with some very moving interviews: two transracial adoptees and one adoptive parent.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ekMZw_mP-Xc

Here's the linked magazine article:

http://www.colorsnw.com/index.html

White Rapper Show

Another disclaimer/excuse... I hardly ever watch reality TV, but I've been following the VH1 White Rapper competition show semi-religiously. I just saw the finale and local boy $hamrock won it! I just have one word:

DUUUUUUUUUUUURRRRRRTEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!!!!

Letters from Iwo Jima

We went to a Sunday matinee. Dad and I missed the first few minutes of the movie. I left after an hour, before characters started dying en masse, and ran some errands and came back just after it ended to pick up Dad. I really wanted to see the movie, but I didn't want a repeat performance of several weeks ago, when I cried through the last half hour of Pan's Labyrinth. People who know me never peg me as sentimental and are amazed when I tell them I often cry at movies.

Dad liked the movie. His only complaint was that anachronistic language was sometimes used to describe the military equipment. He blamed this on both "Japanese-Americans" and "Japanese who are too young and don't know anything".

I'll see the movie later when it comes out on DVD. The first hour looked very good.

Mexico's Migrant Mountain

I just read this article from the BBC.

My only reaction: one of the distinctive hallmarks of Mexican culture is the sophistication, sheer biting force and prevalence of black humor. Irish and Russian are other cultures known for black humor, but as far as I know, Mexicans take the prize.

From the BBC

Millions of migrants have crossed illegally from Mexico into the United States. Their experience could hardly be more real. But now at a controversial theme park in Mexico, tourists can pretend to be an illegal migrant.

Weekend Update

We've been going over to my mother and stepfather's house every few days to have dinner. They have a much bigger house to the east of Atlanta that they bought just last year. They moved out to Atlanta from the Seattle area to be closer to us, which is awesome.

The problem with their house is that it's not very handicapped-friendly. To get to the living area, you have to climb some fairly steep wooden stairs. In back, there's enough of a grade to the ground that there are only a few feet of stairs to climb. We've been helping my dad to use crutches to walk around back and then up the short stairs, then transfering to his knee roller.

On Thursday night, we were leaving from a dinner. My dad made it almost all the way to the car on his crutches, but a two-inch rise to the concrete driveway caught him. His face had a short and unhappy encounter with the driveway. It was horrible and I felt bad for not walking closer and catching him in time. He got overconfident and was just moving too fast. Thankfully there's no major damage at all. He has a black eye, a fat lip and a few scrapes on his knuckles. This is our first accident and I hope the last one. He has started referring to my mom's house as "the death trap". Crutches are just no damn good.

Today I spent most of the day with my husband, my mom, my stepdad and a Mexican family doing massive topsoil stuff in mom's garden. The house they bought has awful plastic landscaping sheets in the front yard that need to be removed.

Tomorrow I'll be going to church with my mom, then we'll all go see Letters From Iwo Jima, which my dad expressed an interest in.

Yes, my life does revolve totally around my family. It can be a little bit oppressive at times, but they're all interesting people, on the whole their support is great and I think I'm incredibly lucky for having them. I'm also looking forward to having children so I can leave them with the relatives and run off every once in a while!

My Reaction to the Anna Mae He Case

I'm not going to sum up this case here, because readers will probably be familiar with it already. Here's a link to the Wikipedia entry for Anna Mae He just in case. Here's another recent link that goes more into legal detail.

I've resisted commenting on it because I don't really have anything new to say, plus the more I learn about it, the more depressed I get. It was so obvious that Anna Mae should have been returned to her parents. I'm glad it's finally happened; sad it took eight years because of a racist judge in the beginning stages. The Bakers are no better than baby thieves. There are many children out there that truly need homes; instead, the Bakers decided to trick some desperate people out of their child. They tried to wash the Chinese out of her. Eight years later, and they're still acting like bandits. Here are some quotes from news stories that illustrate their disgusting nature:

laborlawtalk.com:
Mrs. He said her daughter had shown her the picture during a court-ordered visit last fall, and that she had later found it in her purse and shown it to a television reporter. She was concerned that while in the Bakers' home, her daughter's hair had been dyed and her ears pierced, contrary to Chinese custom.

Why on earth would you dye a toddler's hair? Especially Asian hair, which is very hard to dye and always has to be bleached first? Because they wanted her to look more white, I presume.

commercialappeal.com:
Anna's seen the Hes twice that she can remember, once at Wal-Mart and most recently at the park. Anna didn't want to talk to them, didn't want to know them.

She doesn't want to learn to speak Chinese. She wants to learn Spanish.

Louise had a piece of art made with Anna's name in Chinese letters.

Anna told her to take it down.

"She doesn't want any part of it," said Jerry. "We haven't made her listen. Now we have to."

commercialappeal.com :
Person expressed his displeasure with stories, photos and video of Anna Mae at the Bakers' home published and aired Wednesday by USA Today and ABC-TV's "Good Morning America."

In the newspaper article, Jerry Baker asks her where she wants to grow up, the United States or China. Anna replies, "United States." In the "Good Morning America" video report, Anna Mae is shown wearing a sombrero and declaring she is Mexican, not Chinese.

Person did not ban attorneys and their clients from talking with the media, but the judge did not rule out issuing a gag order if such reports continue, said Larry Scroggs, chief counsel for Juvenile Court.

The Bakers lost their case. They should be working together with the Hes to make Anna Mae's transition to her parents as smooth as possible. Instead, they're putting her on the media stage like a trained monkey. The Bakers really think videos where she denies being Chinese is really going to help their cause? Imagine the shame when she sees those later when she's older. This is what really tipped me over the edge, because I hate to take emotional sides on high-profile custody cases. I resist because I know I probably don't know the full story. But this one is so easy to call.

The Bakers were given Anna Mae to be temporary guardians to her, by a desperate couple that trusted them as fellow Christians. They abused that trust. They harmed a few people very intensely, but have also caused harmful embarassment to other large groups: white people, Christians, foster parents, adoptive parents. I hope someday they'll realize how badly they acted, and start trying to make up for it. I have at least that much faith in their humanity.

Race, Demographics and Decatur: Part I

Since most of my blog readers are not from the ATL, in this post I'll try to outline some of the demographic and racial factors of my surrounding neighborhood. This is such a huge topic I'm going to focus very narrowly on Decatur, and not even on all of Decatur.

Think of Atlanta as a circle divided into four quadrants. Decatur is in the lower part of the northeast quadrant. It's a confusing area, because it's officially an incorporated city but unoffically extends much further south into unincorporated Dekalb County.

Here's the racial breakdown on the city of Decatur from city-data.com:

• White Non-Hispanic (64.7%)
• Black (30.5%)
• Hispanic (1.7%)
• Two or more races (1.4%)
• American Indian (0.7%)
• Other race (0.6%)
  

The city of Decatur is within the Atlanta perimeter, so it counts as intown Atlanta. It's not really a "city" except in an administrative sense: it's a small downtown area with a couple square miles of shops, restaurants and apartment buildings, surrounded by a mostly residential area of small houses with yards. The downtown area is quite expensive. In the southernmost part there's a few blocks of low-income apartment housing which is almost all African-American. Otherwise, the area is sort of diverse but mostly white. There's a lot of diversity in other dimensions. Decatur is known as a lesbian hotspot. Property values are very high, and the Decatur city school district has some of the best schools in Atlanta.

South of downtown Decatur, property values start going down. Below the major thoroughfare of Memorial Drive, the neighborhoods are almost entirely African-American. For reference, see the corresponding data for Belvedere Park:

• Black (82.4%)
• White Non-Hispanic (12.1%)
• Hispanic (3.5%)
• Other race (1.7%)
• Two or more races (1.6%)
• American Indian (0.6%)

And then a little further south, Candler-McAfee:

• Black (95.2%)
• White Non-Hispanic (3.1%)
• Hispanic (0.9%)
• Two or more races (0.8%)
• American Indian (0.5%)

This is a low-income neighborhood and on the whole it's not very attractive. It's got the typical urban blight look: lots of cheap, shoddy buildings, mouldering strip malls, liquor stores and check cashing places everywhere on the main streets. This is the area that gets name-dropped in rap songs like this 2001 Ludacris hit:

With a mac, with a glock I'm a make 'em say please
In the back, on block so the cops they freeze
And I'm so high, I think I got a nose bleed, you gotta nose bleed?
Don't it smell so sweet?
In DECATUR, where they pack that heat
And ROB neighbors in the night creep, creep
I'll see you LATER we'll be in them streets...

Rappers tend to exaggerate, of course! The Candler-McAfee neighborhood is not inhabited solely by glock-flourishing, nose-bleeding home invaders. It's mostly working-class black families. It's not a nice neighborhood, or a pretty one, but the really, really bad neighborhoods are something else. For example, Vine City, to the west of the Atlanta center, and its legendary open-air drug market known as the Bluff. If you happen to be in that area without a good reason (which means either buying or selling drugs) you will get severely beaten or shot. That's where the police broke into the 88-year-old grandmother's house and she winged a few with her pistol but they shot her dead and then tried to plant drugs on her to cover up their mistake. That story made national news last year.

Leaving the larger Decatur area and moving to the east, outside the Atlanta perimeter, the middle- and upper-class black neighborhoods are found. Higher-income families moved there from the inner city, joined by massive numbers of African-Americans who sold their houses back in California and the North to buy ones twice as big for half the price in Atlanta. Atlanta is often called a "black mecca" and attracts many black artists of all mediums. Right now I doubt its overall national cultural influence approaches New York, but it's definitely climbing higher.

So Decatur as whole is very diverse, but also fairly segregated. In this respect it's kind of a microcosm of diverse, segregated Atlanta. New York, another city I've lived in, was much more integrated. On the other hand, I think Miami is even more diverse and more segregated than Atlanta.

The Decatur neighborhood where I live is majority white. The family to our left is a working-class black family renting their house, which is really too small for them. They had more space at their old apartment building about five blocks away, but said they didn't like the atmosphere: there were too many knuckleheads who did drugs in front of their kids. They are extremely moral people who belong to a confusing syncretic religion. The family to the right is an elderly white couple who have owned their house since time immemorial and have probably been through a ton of demographic shifts.

It's amazing how much repressed fear and guilt is involved in real estate decisions. A lot of times I hear people say things like "I could never live anywhere except the north of Atlanta" in a way that I know for sure is racially motivated. And not being white, I don't hear the worst of it.

Some white people, who are very racist and used to a binary race system, don't socially process me that well. I don't hang around these kinds of people, but I do come into contact with them a couple times a year when I leave the Atlanta perimeter. On several occasions I have heard words used like "nihcolored person" and "nihblack dude". I can see a switch go off in their head. She's not black? Switch turns on. Use N-word. Uh-oh. Not white either. Switch turns back off. Change word! Then cough, break eye contact, look towards the corner. Ugh, I hate being in those conversations, wondering whether to start the confrontation over only one syllable that I definitely would have started over the full two.

My mother, who is white and recently moved into an upper-middle class, majority (60-70%) African-American neighborhood to the east of Atlanta, gets some weird demographic questions from racist older white people in the neighborhood. One of them asked her if she'd noticed the neighborhood was getting "cloudy". It took her a while to figure that one out, because who associates black people with clouds? There are other white people who are just fine the way things are, and are staying around or even buying into the neighborhood, but the majority of new incomers are African-Americans from California, semi-retired (especially military) and professional.

The situation of schools in this area is another important topic. I'm calling this post Part I because I'm going to write a little bit about racial diversity and schools in Decatur when I get more time.

It seems like half the U.S. is moving to Atlanta! Readers, let me know if you have any more specific questions. This is not the absolute most wonderful place in the world or anything like that, but I have a lot of pride in it just because it's more tolerable than some other places I've lived. People are friendly and the weather is usually nice. I'll close with some words of wisdom from the Korea Times:

I might add that Atlanta is not an attractive town in terms of natural beauty or cultural quality. Atlanta, however, is one of the most important transportation hubs in the nation. There is a saying that even the dead will have to go through Atlanta before they reach heaven.

Doraemon and Keyword Searches

I have a free statcounter.com account and occasionally check what kind of keywords people use to find or stumble across my blog.

This isn't going to be one of those posts where I list all the weirdest and grossest keywords and phrases. I see these kinds of posts pop up regularly on the some of the more political blogs I like to read. Yes, there are definitely some really sick people on the internet. On the other hand, I have a feeling that the most disgusting keyword searches are often done by young kids. When kids are four years old, they think "what's going to happen if I yell PEEPEE POOPOO CACA?" But when they're 14, they wonder, "what's going to happen if I type *&^%THE %#!& IN THE *$*% AND @#^$ into Google and hit enter?"

I don't use any curse words or full forms of racial slurs on this blog, not because I'm totally against them in any context... I'd just rather not end up getting some unwelcome visitors. Otherwise I enjoy reading a lot of antiracist and feminist blogs where the language goes all over the place.

So my keyword searches aren't very shocking to me. Most of them are fairly predictable. I'm amazed that my pressure cooker collard green recipe still gets a fair amount of hits.

The only one that really freaked me out was a search for "racist Doraemon". It must have pulled up a page that had my one Doraemon post together with a different post about racism.

Doraemon is a wise, helpful and very sensitive cat. A friend to all.

How could he be a racist?!?!

Don't make Doraemon cry.