“Children of Invention” – by Tze Chun
Two young children living outside Boston are left to fend for themselves when their mother gets embroiled in a pyramid scheme and disappears.  ”Children of Invention” premiered at the 2009 Sundance Film Festival, screened at over 40 film festivals, and won 15 festival awards including: Grand Jury Prizes at the 2009 Newport International
Film Festival, Independent Film Festival Boston, Los Angeles Asian Pacific Film Festival, San Diego Asian Film Festival, and Ojai-Ventura Film Festival. Variety said the film is “Urgent, artful…austerely poetic,” and the Film Society of Lincoln Center said it is “As close to cinematic purity as one is likely to see this year.”

More info:

http://childrenofinvention.com
Buy tix (NYC): http://bit.ly/boBMIU
Buy tix (L.A.): http://bit.ly/b314K0

“White on Rice” – by Dave Boyle
40-year-old Jimmy is growing up, or at least he’s getting older. While mooching the upper bunk of his ten-year-old nephew’s bed, he enjoys the never-ending generosity of his sister Aiko, and dodges the wrath of his impatient brother-in-law Tak. He thinks that if only he could get married all his problems would be solved. But when he falls head over heels for Tak’s niece things only go from bad to worse. Featuring a standout cast including Japanese Academy Award winner Nae and Mio Takada, “White on Rice is a satisfying comedic feast” (Honolulu Advertiser) and “A Cinematic Milestone.”(San Francisco Chronicle).

More info:

http://whiteonricethemovie.com
Buy tix (NYC): http://bit.ly/boBMIU

——————-

Because so many women of color have such little wealth other than the value of a vehicle, the rest of the paper uses the definition of wealth that excludes vehicles in order to capture the economic vulnerability experienced by women of color.

Excluding vehicles, single black women have a median wealth of $100 and Hispanic women $120 respectively, while their same-race male counterparts have $7,900 and $9,730. The median wealth of single white women is $41,500. To put it another way, single black and Hispanic women have one penny of wealth for every dollar of wealth owned by their male counterparts and a tiny fraction of a penny for every dollar of wealth owned by white women. With so little in reserve, half of all single black and Hispanic women could not afford to take an unpaid sick day or to even have a major appliance repaired without going into debt. The precarious financial situation of women of color is also evident when looking at those with zero or negative wealth, (negative wealth occurs when the value of one’s assets is lower than the value of their debts). Nearly half of all single black and Hispanic women have zero or negative wealth (see Figure 2).

Pre-retirement wealth disparities for women of color affect them drastically in their retirement years. According to federal poverty standards, poverty rates for people age 65 and over are highest for women of color. In 2007 16.7% of white women living alone were poor, but 26% of Asian women living alone, 38.5% of black women living alone, and 41.1% of Hispanic women living alone were poor. 21

What does it mean when we talk about the difference between wealth and income?  These two terms are not to be conflated.  Someone can be a high earner, but still have no wealth at all – it is as simple as spending more than you earn.  It doesn’t matter what the money is spent on – it can go up your nose, on your feet, to your landlord or thrown in mass amounts on a stage.  However, if you manage to make a million dollars a year, and you spend $1.5 million, you are not wealthy.  Not even close.

This is why this median figure of $5 is so important to understand.  At various points in the course of the report, the data for women of color (again, defined as black and Latina, unless otherwise indicated) tends to fall around zero or five dollars, depending on the unit of measurement.

It is also important to understand the difference between a median number and an average number. I emailed report author Mariko Chang to clarify why the median number was generally used in the report:

In wealth research, it is conventional to use the median instead of the average for the following reason:  Because wealth is so unequally distributed, with a few people owning extremely large amounts of wealth and the rest owning much smaller amounts, the few very wealthy people pull the average higher.  The median, on the other hand is a better indicator of the wealth of the more “typical” case.  (If we rank people or households on a continuum from least wealth to most wealth, the median is the point at which half have more wealth and half have less.)  Because the median is a better indicator of the more typical case, people and organizations that study wealth report the median (although some report both).

Since today is Friday, we are going to ease up on the data and instead take a moment to reflect:  how did you learn your lessons about wealth, income, and money?

Monday: Differences in financial starting points and class mobility

(The whole thing is on YouTube, who knew?)

I don’t expect you to have ever heard of For Love of Ivy. I hadn’t heard of it until a couple of years ago, one night when I was hanging out with my dad and we were trolling On Demand for something to watch.

So, as we resurrect “Revisiting The Canon” here at PB, I realize this is an out-of-place choice. This movie isn’t actually in the black canon, like previous entries Boyz In The Hood, Eve’s Bayou, and Idlewild. But it is a black movie, in the sense that it features two black leads, and was cowritten by one of the greatest stars of the 60s, Sidney Poitier. Also, it’s old, and definitely worth revisiting.

Spoilers ahead.

Allow me to lay the scene. The story revolves around the Austin family that owns a department store and lives in a beautiful home out on Long Island. Father, mother, hippie son Tim, and popular daughter Gena. And their maid, the titular Ivy Moore, played by Abbey Lincoln.

The plot is a simple twist on The Taming of the Shrew. Ivy, an uneducated woman in her late twenties, has been with the Austins for nearly 10 years. She wants to move into New York City to attend secretarial school, which would force them to hire another maid. The Austin patriarch, a pre-Archie Bunker Carroll O’Connor, couldn’t care less (“Hire another maid!”), but the mother, and two adult children are devastated, and try to convince her to stay.

The children, Tim (a very young Beau Bridges) and Gena, who seem to live at home and work in the department store, decide that what Ivy really needs is a man. Tim comes to this conclusion after figuring out what the biggest difference between Gena and Ivy is (“What’s color got to do with it?” Gena wonders): male suitors. Gena has several boyfriends, and Ivy none. The implication here, of course, is that a woman like Ivy doesn’t need any education if she gets some attention from a man. (As an aside: at one point, when the attractive Gena enters the stockroom of the store, all the men look up in admiration. Tim says to the room: “Alright guys, you’ve all seen Gena naked before.” This is never explained, and Gena’s sexuality is played in an odd, but nonjudgmental, way later in the film, as well.)

Tim blackmails Jack Parks (played by Poitier), a trucking business owner who has an account with the Austins, into taking Ivy out. Parks runs the day operation — shipping goods — while his partner runs the night operation, a casino truck for illegal gambling. But Parks doesn’t want the night operation exposed, so he very reluctantly agrees to meet Ivy. He’s educated and sophisticated, and looks down on Ivy as just another ignorant colored girl who wants to get married. Tim selected Jack precisely because he knows Parks will never propose and take Ivy away from the family.

When Jack, strongarmed, comes to dinner, there’s this nutty bit of dialogue that I just had to transcribe. It’s about 10 times more awkward than it reads:

Gena: Tell me, Mr. Parks, what do you think of the Black Power Movement?
Jack: I think about it…a lot.
Gena [awkward smile]: Ah. And do you approve of it?
Jack: I don’t…talk…about it.
Gena [awkward smile]: Ah.

[Tim enters with coffee.]

Jack: Thank you.
Gena: Ivy goes to a lot of civil rights meetings, don’t you, Ivy?
Ivy: Once in a while. It’s a place sometimes to meet people.
Tim: I was in an elevator once with Ralph Bunche. He stepped on my foot.
Jack [disdainfully]: That can be a problem when you don’t wear shoes.
Tim: No, he said “excuse me.”
Gena [proudly]: I’ve been on a lot of picket lines and things. In fact, I was even in jail once overnight, because I refused bail.

[Awkward silence.]

Gena: Ivy belongs to the NAACP, don’t you, Ivy?

At this point, Ivy excuses herself, and Gena follows her out. Saying what we’ve all been thinking, Ivy snaps at Gena, “Just because he’s colored, do you have to talk about colored things?” She adds: “Why did you make me sit in the living room like that? You know I never do that!”

But Ivy warms to Jack, and ends up going out with him, on the grounds that a date with him will be an ‘interesting’ experience for her to remember. By their second date, the magical properties of her vagina have led him to fall in love with her.

Abbey Lincoln, a truly underrated jazz singer, is compelling as Ivy, the maid who doesn’t want to die “ignorant and alone.” The privileged Tim and Gena are both amusing in their seeming goodwill, and frustrating in their selfishness. The parents fall a bit flat, but the story isn’t really about them.

But, of course, the real star in this film is Poitier. He gets to stalk the sets while being scored by Quincy Jones. He gets to be hostile and superior — something he does very well — and he gets to say things like “I got news for you, Charlie: slavery’s been abolished, maaaan” and “When you’re not thinking of me as the uppity spade with the trucks!” *finger snap*. And he gets to be the best-dressed man in the film. Also, I freely admit, this is the first Poitier film where I cocked my head to the side and said to myself: “yeah, now I get his, um, appeal.”

It’s clear that For Love of Ivy is trying to be progressive. And for its time, it mostly succeeds. The freedom for Gena to date whomever she wants is contrasted with the idea that loneliness is Ivy’s problem. Tim’s acknowledgment that he’s not good enough for Ivy himself gets played against the fact that he calls Jack Parks a “spade.” Ivy’s desire for independence is eventually solved by Jack’s marriage proposal, in which she leaves the Austin’s home for Jack’s.

I don’t know that this film could’ve been any better. In many ways, it’s a strange little piece of celluloid, and it speaks to its time in a way that’s very similar to Poitier’s great race film Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner did. But it serves to remind me that little has changed in Hollywood in the last 40 years. And in fact, I’d argue that things have regressed a bit. For Love of Ivy is a romcom from 1968, when Poitier was one of the biggest drama stars in the world. Today, Will Smith is the arguably the biggest action/drama/romcom star in the world. But I doubt Smith would or could create anything so bizarre and forward-thinking as this.

I called up a fellow young black professional friend of mine and told her about the findings of the study.  “Is it messed up that I’m kind of glad in a way?” she asked, “I mean, all this time I’ve been wondering why I can’t get my shit together, but it turns out I’m normal.” We both laughed at her small attempt at gallows humor around a situation many of us know a little too intimately – when it comes to our white counterparts, women of color are light years behind in wealth.

The study is a new report from The Insight Center for Community Economic Development, titled “Lifting as We Climb: Women of Color, Wealth, and America’s Future.”  The report is an in-depth look at the issues in wealth accumulation particular to black women, Latinas, Asian and Native American women.  However, even as this report is one of the most comprehensive I have seen on the subject, the limited data for Asian American and Native American women means that their statistics are limited from entire sections of the report, and discussed in a subsequent section about the need for better stats.  The report’s title is should be a familiar refrain to many black women, but the author of the report, Mariko Chang, kindly includes an explanation of the origin of the phrase:

More than a century ago, the National Association for Colored Women was founded by African American women leaders in response to a vicious attack on the character of African-American women. A few decades distant from the abolition of slavery, the intensification of poverty, discrimination, and segregation impelled these women to action in defense of their race. Their motto was “Lifting as We Climb,” signaling their understanding that no individual woman of color could rise, nor did they want to rise, without the improvement of the whole race. At the top of their agenda were job training, wage equity, and child care: issues that, if addressed, would lift all women, and all people of color.

The lift as we climb refrain was implanted into some of us from birth and a lot of my earliest lessons about black empowerment focused on financial empowerment.  Yet, these adages about saving money, investing in the community, and being a conscious consumer was like propping a footstool against a fifty foot high sheer rock wall.  Insight’s report focuses on the wealth gap, not the well documented income gap, for a good reason:

The current economic crisis has revealed why wealth is so important to the stability of households. Wealth, or net worth, refers to the total value of one’s assets minus debts. Without savings or wealth of some form, economic stability is built on a house of cards that quickly crumbles when income is cut or disrupted through job loss, reduced hours or pay, or if the family suffers an unexpected health emergency.

As the current crisis continues to unfold, it has become all too clear that it is not just “poor” people who are losing their homes to foreclosure in record numbers; even households with some wealth found that they did not have enough to ride out the still unfolding economic downturn. Wealth impacts not just current economic security, but retirement security as well. With concerns over the solvency of Social Security and the shrinking number of jobs that provide pensions, it is of increasing importance that people have the means to save for their own retirement. Wealth is also tied to the well-being of the next generation, as it provides parents with the ability to help pay for their children’s college education, and can also be passed down from generation to generation. In fact, the intergenerational transfer of wealth is one of the reasons why racial wealth gaps from policies long ago have become entrenched. [...]

Wealth and income are related, but they are not the same. Income refers to the amount of money received by an individual or household during a specific period of time, such as a month or year. It usually comes in the form of earnings or wages from a job, but can take other forms as well such as interest on savings or investment accounts, Social Security, transitional assistance (welfare payments), pension benefits, or child support. Wealth, or net worth, refers to the total value of one’s assets minus debts. Typical types of assets include money in checking accounts, stocks or bonds, real estate, and businesses owned. Typical types of debts include home mortgages, credit card debt, and student loans.

So how did we get to the five dollar figure? Page seven of the report explains “While white women in the prime working years of ages 36-49 have a median wealth of $42,600 (still only 61% of their white male counterparts), the median wealth for women of color is only $5.” A more complete answer is revealed in Insight’s wealth of charts discussing the gaps:

Since there is so much data (the full report is well worth a read, but clocks in at 28 pages) we will discuss small sections of the report and related issues over the next week.

The topics covered will include: the wealth gap (with and without vehicles); how marriage* impacts wealth building (and how stereotypes and fear mongering about single black women ignore the larger issues at play); parenthood and wealth building; differences in financial starting points and class mobility; a discussion of types of assets acquired by women of color; the rising levels of debt; Asian American and Native American women’s wealth, and barriers to understanding the full scope of the problem; issues of data collection and minority participation in the census; prior institutional factors contributing to the wealth gap for women of color; the “wealth escalator”; government assistance and its impact on wealth building; retirement; subprime home loans and the mortgage crisis, particularly as it relates to Latinas; citizenship and immigration status and how that impacts wealth building; cultural expectations of women; policy recommendations to end the wealth gap; and non governmental/community based solutions.

Tomorrow: Looking at The Wealth Gap

*There is no data included about queer POC. We will discuss this a bit more when we discuss the limitations of data, but the discussions of marriage and wealth building for POC provides an interesting element to the discussions surrounding same sex marriage rights.

Your run on Deathlok seemed to be full of allusions to the black experience. The lead character’s trapped in a cyborg construct and has his body stolen from him. His fear and shame at how his family would see his new form keeps him from them. He’s literally separated from his own humanity. And the dialogues between the cyborg’s computer AI and Michael Collins riffs on the twoness that W.E.B. DuBois spoke about. How much of this was explicitly in your and Greg Wright’s pitch and how much did you slip under the radar?

None of it was in the pitch, but all of it was intentional. Invisible Man was, and still is, my favorite novel. I’d just read The Souls of Black Folk and was explicitly thinking about Skip Gates’ The Signifying Monkey. Godel, Esher, Bach and Derrick Bell’s dialogues about race and law sort of crashed in my head. Deathlok was a way of sharing some of my thoughts about all of this.

Foremost, though, Deathlok was supposed to be a modern-day take on Marvel’s The Thing (a man alienated by his surface appearance), as well as my own commentary on the “grim and gritty” trend in comic book heroes. Contrary to the fashion at the time, I wanted to do a superhero who was more moral than I, not less. [...]

You’ve talked about how the character of Buck Wild came about as a commentary on the complicated love/hate relationship you had with Luke Cage. Do you still feel the need to address that relationship today? Did doing those issues with Buck help work that stuff out?

I’d worked those issues out even before I started Milestone. I just wanted to share those ideas with the comic book readership in an entertaining matter. Interestingly, those stories are about to be reprinted this summer as Icon: Mothership Connection. The excesses of Blaxploitation comics characters like Cage is the past, though. I’m much more interested in dealing with the stuff that’s going on now: more green characters with their own monthlies than black characters, a criminal lack of people of color in writing and editorial positions on mainstream books, et cetera… The last time I tried to write about that stuff in a mainstream book, my story was bounced (by the same people who asked me to write about it, mind you), and my editors wanted to replace it with clichés from twenty years ago, clichés that not coincidentally shielded mainstream readers and comicbook creators from any responsibility for the current state of affairs. I passed on that. I’ll write about those issues again when I have more control over the content.

—“Race, Sci-Fi, and Comics: A Talk with Dwayne McDuffie,” Interview by Evan Narcisse for the Atlantic

Canada is an officially multicultural country, but multiculturalism does not address racism.

The Continuum on Becoming an Anti-Racist Multicultural Institution shows six stages from being a monocultural institution to becoming an anti-racist multicultural institution. Canada appears to be at Stage Three:

3. Symbolic Change: A Multicultural Institution

• Makes official policy pronouncements regarding Multicultural diversity
• Sees itself as “non-racist” institution with open doors to People of Color
• Carries out intentional inclusiveness efforts, recruiting “someone of color” on committees or office staff
• Expanding view of diversity includes other socially oppressed groups

But…

• “Not those who make waves”
• Little or no contextual change in culture, policies, and decision making
• Is still relatively unaware of continuing patterns of privilege, paternalism and control

Stage Four is “Identity Change: An Anti-Racist Institution”. As Canada has never thought of itself as an anti-racist country, it remains at Stage 3 of this model.

In Canada, there is the mistaken belief that racism is caused by cultural differences, and that if multiculturalism is embraced, then there would be no racism. However, when Canadians face discrimination when we travel while black, go fishing while East Asian, protest while brown, or seek medical care while indigenous, the problem is not “cultural differences” to be solved with “cultural sensitivity”. This “cultural” problem formulation still insists that people of colour must have done something differently from white people to provoke discrimination. It ignores the possibility that people of colour might do the same things as white people and still be treated differently due to our race.

A clear example of people of colour being discriminated against because of race—not culture—is the fact that children of colour adopted by white (American) parents and raised as white still experience racial discrimination. In the past, white adoptive parents adopted Chinese children and raised them as if they were white biological children, cutting their ties to Chinese culture, under the same false belief that racial discrimination is caused by cultural differences:

Americans have adopted an estimated half-million children from overseas in the last four decades. During the early period of international adoptions, most parents believed their children’s lives would be easier if they shed their native culture, said Adam Pertman, executive director of the Evan B. Donaldson Adoption Institute, a nonprofit that focuses on improving adoption practices.

Parents believed that their children were a “blank slate” that should be filled in exactly the same as biological children, Pertman said. This sort of evenhanded treatment would be a buffer from any possible discrimination — or so parents believed.

Of course, this turned out to be false and harmful. People of colour raised as white people and raised in their white parents’ culture still experienced and experience racial discrimination.

It is not culture—or cultural intolerance—that causes racial discrimination. It is racism. Race and culture are two different things. Multiculturalism is not the same as anti-racism.

Multiculturalism does not stop White Canadians from assuming that I am a foreigner to Canada. In fact, the multicultural narrative tends to confuse racial diversity with cultural diversity, encouraging White Canadians to assume that Canadians of colour are culturally different and culturally other, based only on our racial appearance.

Canada’s problem mirrors the problem of white adoptive parents, who are now celebrating “Chinese” culture with their adopted Chinese children, falsely believing that multicultural celebration will protect against racial discrimination:

“They are trying their best,” she said, “but the truth is, no one likes to talk about race or acknowledge race.

–

Photo courtesy of Mollena, who sells actual race cards.

I’ve been hooked on videogames since the days of the Atari 2600, though my family was too poor to have one.  When I was young, I am ashamed to say that any kid who had an Atari had a good chance of being my best friend, as long as I got to come over to play Atari during slumber parties or birthdays.  In grade school at Anderson, some of the ‘problem’ kids, if they were good, got to choose a friend to take 5 minutes and play Atari as a reward – I was always thrilled when I got that chance.

Through the years, if a system was able to play a video game, I’d play it.  I’d torture myself with text-based games on the Apple IIe, playing them over and over again even if I kept dying or failing in the same place.  I was obsessed with the Smurfs game on the Colecovision, got yelled at by my moms for playing too much Kid Icarus on the NES, and one of my proudest gaming moments was when a friend of mine brought over Zelda II: the Adventure of Link, telling me he just could not beat shadow link – and how he jumped into the air when I did it for him.  I lost my temper way too easily when I lost at Mortal Combat or Street Fighter 2 in the arcades. When Civilization came out, I mercilessly hung out at my friend’s apartment and played on his computer all night, like some shameless video game scrub.  When my dad needed quarters to take the bus to work, we’d go and use the change machines in Thompson’s Arcade, and my dad would give me exactly two quarters to play (it was also there where a white man once asked me my ethnicity, and when I told him I was Viet, he gave me a brochure translated into Vietnamese trying to convince me to convert to Christianity, and the irony is, I probably would have read more of that brochure if it was in English).  In college I saw a guy in my computer lab playing some 3-D game where he went around blasting demons, and he taught me how to type in the sentence on the computer that would allow me to play Doom.  After a strenuous test or big paper was due in college, I’d drive to Mall of America and blow $10 of quarters on this arcade game where you got to hold this big garish plastic machine gun and shoot things.  During my mid-20’s I was a terror to my roommates and their friends in Goldeneye.

You get the picture.  I’m still gaming today, just got my second red ring of death for my Xbox 360, and my partner has asked me to please stow my Master Chief helmet in a place where our guests can’t see it.  Not only do I game, but I’ve also written about racial representation, especially regarding Asians and Asian Americans, in video games, and also read a lot of online reviews and discussions regarding this hobby that I have grown up with.

Anyone who’s played games has heard of the Final Fantasy series of games.  I was a big fan of Final Fantasy on the SNES, particularly FF III, I think.  It gets a little confusing since Final Fantasy is a Japanese series, not all of which makes it overseas to American audiences, and thus get numbered differently.  So basically, Final Fantasy III in the U.S. might be Final Fantasy VI in Japan.

Recently, Final Fantasy XIII has come out, and following the previews, reviews, screenshots, and looking at the concept art, it reminds me of a question that is provocative but seems to be ignored – why do Japanese game companies create so many games where the protagonists all look European or white?  Sure, Final Fantasy XIII has one Black character, but then it makes it all the more compelling to ask, why aren’t there any Asian characters?

Final Fantasy fanboys, let me reiterate: THIS IS NOT A REVIEW. I’m sure that the in-game cinematics are fluid and gorgeous, the art design is innovative, and that the new battle system grows on you.  This is not a blog entry on game play.  If you want a review, there are dozens out there that don’t even bother to mention race – go take your pick.

In fact, that’s why I am using this space to ask this question, which I find slightly odd since there have been so many issues, from the mundane to the obscure, written about video games. I find it fascinating that Japanese companies, again and again, create games featuring predominantly white characters – or, to put it another way, games where there are no characters that look Asian.  This is particularly interesting considering the demographics of Japan, and also their reputation, earned or otherwise, for colonization and nationalism.  And as an American gamer who is Asian American, it’s also an issue since most American and European game makers also make games where the majority of the characters are white.

Sure, there are exceptions: the Yakuza series and Lost Planet, for example, or fighting games which tend to be more inclusive in their stereotypes of people the world over.  But those are, again, exceptions.  For the few that we can think of that have characters with Asian features, let’s create a list of games and characters that are white, and for the sake of argument, let’s limit it to ones created by the Japanese game industry: Link and the Zelda series, Mario, Snake from the Metal Gear series, almost all of the characters from the Resident Evil and Silent Hill series, as well as the vast majority of characters from the multitudes of Final Fantasy games.  And that’s just the tip of the iceberg.  These are not niche characters or games: these are well-known, well-loved franchises, commercially and critically acclaimed.

This is not an attempt to attack Japan or Japanese people, I’m simply asking a question about something very provocative that no one seems to be asking, which is surprising given that other socio-political discussions on gaming have at least popped up here and there.  I’m not saying that those discussions are complete – I’m saying given that there has been at least some discussion about race, gender, and homophobia in gaming, no one has pointed out that, you know, it’s kinda weird that these games made by Japanese people, rarely have any characters that look Asian?

I’ll admit that my placement as an Asian American informs my curiosity, as there is a history of internalized self-hatred for many Asian Americans and a push for us to desire to aspire to whiteness, in appearance and in terms of culture (I used to dream I was, literally, a White Knight) – combined with the history of this country claiming the erasure of Asian and Asian American bodies is motivated by economics and not by racism (see the production of 21, and Avatar: The Last Airbender).  There’s this idea that Asian culture is more important than Asian people, and that actual Asian people can be swapped out by people of other races and that it doesn’t matter.

I already hear the arguments.   Again, I welcome informed and reasonable debate.  But it has become obvious that some people have come to this blog not to read, think, and discuss, but to attack and try to bully me into silence from behind the safe anonymity that the internet gives them.  I’ll offer anticipated arguments and my counter-arguments so that, when haters attack me, I can just refer them to the numbered bullet points.  So, in no particular order:

• Game sites don’t report on things like this because they’re not political. I beg to differ.  Many game sites publish stories on workers and developers getting overworked, underpaid, and exploited by corporations.  That is absolutely political.  And I’m glad that they do – these stories need to be heard.  My point is, there are different political stories and discussions happening on game sites all the time – but people still shy away from race issues.

• It’s fantasy, it’s not real. Exactly – fantasy is only limited by our imagination.  If we are free to create entire worlds and characters, why do we only create ones that look white?

• Gamers don’t want to think about politics. I hear all the time that gamers bemoan the stereotypes placed on them – that we’re all a bunch of straight male losers living in our parent’s basement, living off of junk food and deathly scared of having a conversation with a woman.  I hear that gamers and game developers want to be taken seriously, and that games should be respected as a form of legitimate entertainment.  Well, one thing that adults do is consider seriously these issues of race, gender, and sexuality.  If gamers and game developers have indeed grown up as we keep demanding we have, then we can’t dismiss or deride any discussions on race, gender, and homophobia the way that they have been.

• You’re making something out of nothing. This is actually a part of racism: white people think that they’re the ones that get to tell us whether something is racist or not.  People think they can dismiss racism, sexism, and homophobia by blaming people of color, women, and GLBTTs for being ‘overly sensitive.’  That’s like me coming over to your crib after you haven’t eaten for a week, listening to you say “damn, I’m hungry,” and insisting, “no, you’re not hungry,” then preventing you from eating.  Which leads to the argument that usually follows:

• My best friend/girlfiend/wife/boyfriend/game designer is Asian and says it’s not racist, so you’re wrong. So by this logic, if I polled my white friends and got them to say it IS racist, I would win?  I don’t hide behind my white friends, why should you get to hide behind your Asian ones? Don’t hide behind your friends: argue the points.

• It’s not about race, it’s about money. This ignores the fact that some of these blockbuster Japanese franchises made tons of money in Japan, with Japanese audiences, before they were exported here.  And even if it were true, then can we have a discussion on how the exportation of culture, the massive wealth and power of U.S. western media makers, is gendered and racial as well as economic?

• It’s escapism – why do you want to play someone who looks like yourself? I don’t.  When I get the option to create someone, like in Mass Effect 2, I make someone who looks a hell of a lot better than I do.  In ME2, my character looks like what would happen if Daniel Dae Kim had a love child with Denizen Kane and was born with a lifetime gym membership.  Anyway, people who ask this question really show their privilege: white people don’t worry about this because they take for granted that the vast majority of games made out there gives them AT LEAST one option to play someone the same race, gender, and sexual orientation as them.  Put that into context: how many games out there, especially the ones with strong narratives and iconic characters, allow me to play an Asian male?  Or a Black, Native American, Latina, or Arab woman, if I so chose?

• Race is not important in video games . If this was true, then there would be a lot more diversity in terms of stories and characters.  Because if it doesn’t matter, then why not have more games where there’s an Asian protagonist?  Why wouldn’t games made by predominantly Asian men, feature at least one or two Asian men as characters? Look at the gaming climate today – maybe we should ask ourselves, why do game developers only seem to think that white characters make compelling characters?  Why are the vast majority of games being made ask us to relate to a white narrative and character?  And even if race or gender or sexual orientation doesn’t matter to you, can it matter to someone else?

• Games like Final Fantasy and Dragon Age are based in European folklore and there were no people of color in Medieval Europe. Actually there were people of color in Medieval Europe.  You know what?  There were more actual people of color in Medieval Europe than there were REAL FIREBREATHING DRAGONS OR PEOPLE WHO COULD SUMMON MOTORCYCLES OUT OF THIN AIR WITH THEIR MAGIC POWERS.

• Japanese people shouldn’t be limited to making games that only have Japanese people in them. I agree completely!  As artists and creators, empathy and creativity, including stepping out of your own shoes and exploring the lives of others, is important.  I’m not saying that all Japanese games should be required to have Japanese characters – I’m asking why so few of them do.  And also, why is it that those of us who are people of color are continually asked to relate to someone who is not from our own race?  Why can’t people see that we have far fewer opportunities to see representation of people who are from our own race in pop culture and media?

• If you don’t like it, don’t buy it. The problem with this is, it’s not like a movie where you can rent it or look at a trailer.  You buy a game and you’ve invested $60 and a chunk of your time and energy to play it.  And you can’t rely on reviews because, well, game reviews generally don’t talk about issues like racial representation.  It’s not like if you read that Mass Effect 2 stripped away a bunch of its RPG elements and so you decide not to buy the game.  If you’re a person who cares about this stuff, you’re on your own.   I didn’t hear about Dr. Suchong before I bought and played Bioshock.   I didn’t know that Ada Wong was a Dragon Lady stereotype until after I had bought Resident Evil 2. It’s not like you can take a game you bought back to Gamestop or Best Buy because you found some representations in it to be problematic.  Can you?

• Some of these games feature American stories and characters, even if they’re made by the Japanese. This ignores the existence of people of color in America, including Asian Americans.  American does not equal white, though this mindset says a lot about the idea that Asians are perpetual foreigners.  Where are you from?  Asians get this a lot.  Plus, even if we went with this idea that America is majority white and that’s why the characters are, that hasn’t stopped white Western game developers from making a multitude of games set in Asia starring a white male protagonist.

• The characters could be racially mixed and biracial. Sure – but what, in the game or story, would have us believe that, or come to that conclusion?  Where does this desire come from – to see these characters, who have blond hair and blue eyes, which are markers of whiteness around the world, as mixed?  Does it add to the conversation and narrative, or is it an excuse to avoid these issues?

• Japanese people do make games with people who look Asian, like (fill in blank). Of course there are some exceptions.  But that’s just what they are: exceptions.  Try this: list all the iconic Japanese games and characters out there that feature characters that are white.  Now, create another list – with ones that are Asian.  See?

• They’re not supposed to be white or Japanese, the characters are in a fantasy world where they’re just human. If this is the case, then isn’t it a little odd that we equate human with light hair, pale skin, and blue eyes?

• Is race all you care about? If so, I would have stopped playing a long time ago.  I care about all the other things that gamers obsess and flame about on the boards: I think Gordon Freeman is a vanilla character but thrill at Half Life 2’s stellar level design and pacing (special shout-out to Portal).  I think Bethesda’s open worlds are breath-taking and mind-blowing, and yet I’m seriously irritated by their weight-based inventory system in their games.  I’m one of those crazy people who prefer Saints Row 2 to Grand Theft Auto IV, because even though SR2 is more juvenile, messier, and offensive, it’s also more fun to me.  And when I read about developers who get exploited by publishers, I get sad for them and their families and feel grateful for all the nerd sweat that went into making that snowmobile escape scene so exciting (and pretty) in Modern Warfare 2.  I love games, for all their frustrations and myriad flaws.  These issues of representation are just an added level of consideration for me.

You may have noticed that I don’t really provide any answers to my main query.  That’s because  I honestly don’t have all the answers.  I’m asking a question and I am curious as to what people think.  I also find it perplexing that people haven’t really asked this question before, especially as issues of race and gender and sexuality in gaming have been touched upon by various media.  The above rebuttals are to counter the knee-jerk reactions which I anticipate getting, as I am quite familiar with haters who don’t even bother to read my entire entries before putting up some abusive comment, or those who think snarky apathy is a cool substitute for honest debate and discussion.  I am also familiar with people who will complain that any of us even bring up these issues, which is perplexing since there are literally hundreds of other sources, professional or otherwise, that cover gaming which wouldn’t touch this issue – is it really that threatening that we talk about these things?

All of this adds up to people trying to bully those of us who would bring up questions of race into silence, or worse, make us blame ourselves for the flaming that goes on whenever we try to ask a difficult question.

And again, I don’t want it to appear that I’m unfairly picking on Final Fantasy XIII, as it’s far from the only Japanese cultural product that features predominantly white characters.  I also don’t want to pick on Japanese people. I’m not coming at this from some self-righteous place – anyone who read my nerd blog entry will remember that I have a lot of personal experience in imagining fictional worlds where everyone (including me) was white, and back then, if you told me there were racial aspects of my imagination and dreams, I would have gotten defensive and insisted that it was not racial and then I would have asked you to get out of my dreams.

I ask at this point in time because, for years, there have been a lot of blockbuster games from Japan featuring majority white characters, and yet very little has been spoken about it.  B  I’m not interested in policing how many people of color and Asians appear in a game, I’m honestly wondering where all of this comes from, and also why we can’t talk about it.

I am curious about these issues as both a consumer and a creator.  If we have the tools of creation, of story telling and world building and character at our disposal, what we create ultimately says something about us.

Thanks in advance for any constructive conversation and insight.

In an effort to eradicate the myth of the “seductive/sexually-empowered slave mistress” (most recently perpetuated by Touré on Twitter, apparently), new novelist Dolen Perkins-Valdez has penned a work of historical fiction set in a real location: Tawawa House, a summer resort that catered to white slaveholders and their enslaved “lovers,” in the free state of Ohio.

Wench chronicles the lives of four slave women: Mawu, Sweet, Reenie, and Lizzie (the central protagonist) whose masters annually “whisk them away” from the hardship of their plantation lives and put them up in cottages for a few weeks in summer.

For the women, few things have changed, other than their location: they’re still monitored, chained on a whim, and systematically raped. Only now, they’re also given once-lovely ball gowns—years-old cast-offs left behind by the resort’s previous white patrons—and encouraged to doll themselves up for a semi-public dinner and dance.

They’re also allowed the occasional “free day,” an irony, of course, on two fronts: they still must cook and clean, while their masters are away from the resort fishing, and also, as they spend hours of spare time trekking through the woods, where they meet abolitionists and happen upon an adjacent resort for free Blacks, they are constantly reminded of the vicious slave-catchers who lie in wait, at the first sign of any escape attempts.

The four women featured are from plantations in different states, and the circumstances of their relationships with their masters drastically vary. Three of the four hold their masters in varying degrees of contempt, with Mawu being the most hateful and determined. Lizzie’s the holdout: she earnestly believes that she and her master are in love.

Lizzie’s is the central story; she’s the only one of the characters whose post-summer life we’re shown. She and her master have two children. Over the course of their decade-long “relationship” (which began when she was just thirteen), she experiences highs (she’s given the guest room across the hall from the master’s barren wife) and lows (toward the end of the novel, she’s tied to the cottage porch at Tawawa House, while recovering from a very significant illness). We watch her illusions about the ability for “love” to exist between master and slave dissolve, with each passing summer at the resort. And, despite the tragic losses all four women experience, Lizzie’s mental/emotional negotiations and denials are perhaps the saddest of all.

The novel is a fast-paced read, with each of the four main women fully rendered as sympathetic and alive. Most interesting of all: by the end, you begin to realize that the book isn’t as much an examination of the relationship of master to slavewoman as it is a loving meditation on the bonds between women forced into the “slave mistress role.” The central four are steadfast friends, willing to forgive even the most egregious betrayals, because the understand the complexity of this life: hated by house and field slaves alike, yet relied upon to post-coitally plead those slaves’ causes.

There’s an unspoken devotion between them that drives the plot and informs a seldom-examined facet of history. There’s no way you could walk away from it, believing an enslaved woman has any real agency in a “relationship” with her enslaver. Maybe Touré should give it a gander.

Taking a break from film/TV/web series today to talk about an issue dear to my heart: the urban coffee shop. Specifically, the dying Manhattan coffee shop (and how Philadelphia is better).

I originally wrote this for Splice Today, but decided to re-post here after hearing from a friend, Madison Moore, that Esperanto, a 24-hour shop in the West Village/NYU-area had closed. Esperanto was, terrible service aside, a wonderful anomaly in Manhattan coffee shops: you stay for hours, anytime, get a meal, free wi-fi and dessert all in a very central location. These stores are a dying breed.

ORIGINAL: In my view, a city is defined by its coffee shops. As Madison Moore explored last week, coffee shops are meeting places to ogle and be seen, work and eavesdrop. They make the city less lonely.

New York has always, in my mind, been associated with coffee shops. Growing up in Jersey, I would go to the city with friends and go out on the town, but also coffee shop around. On break from college in Michigan, I’d do the same. It’s not just me. A generation of people has grown up with television shows and films romanticizing this experience—for me Woody Allen films, Felicity, Sex and the City and even Friends all played a part in creating this New York imagery.

No more. New York coffee culture is dying, especially in Manhattan. I used to be able to venture down to the Village, East or West, and find a café to sit and do work. I had numerous options. But on a recent trip to the city, I found myself hobbled by obstacle after obstacle. Coffee shops serving food and free wi-fi stopped offering one or the other, wi-fi networks in general were either not working or closed down, and because of the relatively small number of cafés, any decent place was too crowded to find a seat.

So what, right? New York is hard; deal with it, one might say.

Sure, but my troubles reflect some fundamental problems with the way the city has been run over the past couple of decades, showing us how something has been lost to the city’s rise to riches—a public sphere, perhaps, to abbreviate and simplify philosopher Jürgen Habermas.

Let me first describe the perfect coffee shop: 1) good coffee, 2) free wireless, 3) outlets for computers and other electrical devices, 4) plenty of seating, and 5) diverse food options (warm and savory to cold and sweet). Everything else is gravy: good music, abundant light and soothing decor are all optional.

New York coffee culture has definitely cramped down on what I consider most valuable, next to the coffee itself: free wi-fi. Stories abound about business owners cutting back on the apparent luxury, much to the ire of its customers, especially students. I don’t blame them, really. The truth is wi-fi makes customers take up space without buying anything. Who wants that?

It isn’t business owners’ fault. New York’s refusal to regulate the rise in real estate prices has made it economically unsustainable to own and operate a successful coffee shop. The sacrifice of Manhattan real estate to developers and corporations at the expense of the middle class (in particular, those tied to the education systems like teachers, professors, and, indeed, students) reached a crescendo with the sale of Stuyvesant Town, an enormous lot of downtown real estate, for $5 billion in 2006, a deal which has now gone horribly awry, marking, in many ways, the climax of gentrification in Manhattan.

But despite the housing downtown, the consequences have already been felt. Coffee shops are one such casualty. Rents are simply too high to allow people to sit and relax. Instead, New York is now restaurant-focused. People sit down, eat, pay and go. The perfect consumer experience. It’s like running a bank. People give you money and get the hell out. None of that sitting around, talking, thinking and learning mess.

Despite the financial difficulties, there are models for success, showing shop owners that it isn’t impossible to make money in Manhattan. Think Coffee, originally from the NYU area, seems to have a new branch every year. The fair trade/organic café has a recipe for success: be everything to all people. They offer free wireless, dessert and entrees, lots of seating (at the flagship), wine and cheese, live entertainment and plenty of outlets for computers. By offering high-margin items like food and wine, they can accommodate those people who only want a coffee and a place to sit and write.

Think Coffee is in the minority, leaving New York with little to brag about. Meanwhile, other cities are one-upping the great cultural metropolis. In Philadelphia, the economics of opening a business has led to a flowering of cafés. Within Center City, Philadelphia’s downtown, I’ve counted at least two dozen coffee shops with free wireless; some have food (one sells crepes), great dessert (another focuses on cheesecakes), or offer everything under one roof (Chapterhouse takes the prize). All of this within an area roughly the size of the East and West Village, where I can count no more than ten similar offerings.

How did Philly one-up New York? The main reason is gentrification happened slowly and with less force in Philly. Large buildings downtown (brownstones mostly) were still selling for way under $1 million as recently as eight-10 years ago. Downtown has only recently become chic. This means young people and couples, looking for an affordable urban experience, have flooded the area, snapping up adorable, classic homes for as little as $300,000—where comparable properties, in size, quality and location, would fetch well over $1 million in New York.

How can New York change course? I’m not sure. Certainly maintaining rent control, which Mayor Michael Bloomberg has sort of done, helps. But New York will not be able to say no to pricey development—and such developments (luxury buildings, etc.) are at a standstill anyway. Guaranteeing “affordable housing” in these buildings has done little, especially since “affordable” in New York is obviously a joke. In truth, broader generational changes—boomers selling their apartments and moving out—and economic shifts—the scaling down of the banking sector—will need to happen in order to make Manhattan comfortable for small businesses again. Something is always lost and something gained in these situations. In truth, New York will likely have to get “worse” in some ways in order to get “better” in others. It all depends on what you value most.

“Gentrification is coming,” says Morgan, “and there’s nothing you can do to stop it.”

What’s the difference between East of the River and River East?  According to a March 3rd article in the Washington City Paper, it depends on who you are.

Anacostia is located in South East, DC, made notorious for high levels of crime in violence in the 1990s. The area, currently 92% black and one of the most impoverished areas in DC, is often referred to by its residents as “East of the River.” This stands in contrast to the area of North West referred to as “West of the Park,” which holds a high concentration of wealth. Longtime residents often use those two descriptors to explain the flow of class and politics around DC. Those East of the River tend to get the short end of the stick, with horrible support from the city government. Those West of the Park receive all the benefits privilege can afford.

So, when new residents began to flock to the promise of cheap housing and convenient access to downtown Washington, they decided that the old image of Anacostia was ultimately detrimental to the neighborhood:

[T]here’s a constituency of folks who don’t like what “east of the river” connotes, and they’ve created an organization in part to address the matter. Members of “River East Emerging Leaders”—note the lower-case, hipoisie-appeasing acronym “r.e.e.l.”—have a new name for the place they call home. For these people, it’s “River East.” The rationale for the appellation comes straight from r.e.e.l.’s Web site: “Many committee members recalled conversations with friends or news stories characterizing ‘East of the River’ as dirty, dangerous, crime-ridden and poor. ‘River East’ was a new way to rebrand the area and inspire a sense of pride.”

Older residents fear that being “rebranded” is a way to remove them from the neighborhood. And their fears are well founded – often, projects to improve older neighborhoods tend to displace the lifelong residents there, in favor of wealthier entrants. And those who have stood with the neighborhood throughout the tumultuous history of DC find themselves pushed out, often to the increasingly abandoned suburbs and exburbs, or forced to live with the few relatives who managed to maintain their housing. And one resident quoted in the City Paper explains that the name serves a very distinct purpose:

Barbara Dewey, who was born and raised in Ward 8’s Barry Farm, says, “By trying to change the name, everything that happened years and years ago will be forgotten, it will start anew. Why? We don’t want to lose the history of Anacostia.”

Using the terms “East of the River” and “West of the Park” have become a form of social commentary, with each utterance calling attention to the disparities present in the capitol city of the United States. These geographic boundaries are also demographic boundaries and they symbolize the long legacy of segregation and neglect in DC. However, those trying to lend a new type of cache to South East believe the renaming will attract more new residents and eventually turn into the neighborhood they desire.

“We need diversity,” says LaShaun Smith, author of the blog Southeast Socialite. She was born in Southeast, grew up in Prince George’s County, and moved back to the District in 2007. “It’s nothing wrong with it being a predominantly black neighborhood, but we need other people to come in.” If those people take root, she says, so will new businesses. “We could keep it the same, but the whole city is going through this change,” she says.

And for Smith, the change would optimally involve some ordnance detonated on iconic Martin Luther King Jr. Avenue. “I would love a bomb to come through and just blow the whole street up, because it looks terrible,” she says. “It looks awful. The whole street, and just rebuild anew. The whole street looks terrible.”

LaShaun Smith is African-American. While a lot of gentrification stories in Washington DC fall along color lines, the story of Wards 7 and 8 are ones of class and expectations. While Smith vocalizes many of the shared hopes of Anacostia residents about revitalizing the area, she is also a proponent of gentrification.

The property at 523-525 Mellon Street SE was the Wilson Courts Apartments until 2004. Now, it’s vacant, dingy, and drab. Last year, the building was bought by So Others Might Eat—a homeless service provider that plans to turn the building into transitional housing.

“I would rather the building be vacant than for So Others Might Eat to come in,” says LaShaun Smith. “We have a very high proportion of group homes, transitional housing. Our neighborhood should not be the dumping ground for all of D.C.”

“They want it to be condos,” says [Darrell Gaston, community organizer.] “What’s wrong with using your own money to build transitional housing for people who need help? We don’t need more condos for new people to push people out.”

The debate over SOME is about more than just one property.

“You can’t just concentrate low-income people in one area and expect that area to thrive,” says Susan Kennedy. “I think there needs to be more variety. I think I need to see a better mix, whether it’s single-family homes, or apartment rentals, or condos.”

Commissioner and organizer Tijwanna Phillips looks at these claims skeptically. As she tells the WCP:

“Each time someone talks about development,” says Phillips, “it’s only to let us know that affordable housing is going to continue to diminish in Ward 8 as well.” In a ward with a median household income of $34,651, the sprouting of $550,000 condos doesn’t spark universal excitement.

Affordable housing and rising property taxes are a major issue to DC residents, who find themselves more and more constrained each year.  In areas of heavy gentrification (like Columbia Heights) many residents who own their homes are struggling to keep up with tax payments to the city, and newly enforced ordinance codes.  Washington DC is changing, quickly and violently. And while the backdrop of the fight for Anacostia is a story of class, both class and race continue to loom prominently as the city transitions.

Earlier:
The Gentrification Shuffle
Gentrification has Nothing to Do with White Hipsters
More Notes on Gentrification
Another Perspective on Gentrification
I Colonize

Awl writer Cord Jefferson just penned an incredibly thoughtful piece on the phenomenon of “nu prep” or what passes for “classic Americana” in men’s style. In “White People Clothing and ‘Old Money Green,’” Jefferson wonders what to make of garments whose appeal is narrated through unsubtle references to histories of racial degradation and economic privilege — Ralph Lauren Polo’s “old money green” chinos, J. Crew’s “plantation madras” button-down, and J. Peterman’s “owner’s hat” (the copy for which reads, “Some of us work on the plantation. Some of us own the plantation”).* Jefferson ends his piece:

I like Barbour jackets a lot, and Tod’s driving moccasins. I even like “Nantucket red” pants with a crisp white shirt and a blue blazer. But, as a person of color with no family crest of which to speak, I wonder if I should. It would be one thing if the current fashion trends were merely sentimental for grandpa’s favorite pair of shoes. But here, amidst the money greens and plantation nostalgia, it seems as if they’re also rooted in grandpa’s stunted cultural outlooks as well. I now see a sick irony in myself and kids in East New York wearing bow ties and sweater vests. Not new money kids, not old money kids, but no money kids who, apart from the slacks, look nothing like the Take Ivy boys everyone’s heralding, copying, designing for and listening to. To paraphrase one of my favorite poets, “I would go out tonight, but my ancestors were crushed under racial oppression for centuries.”

The piece is hilariously tagged with: “PLANTATIONS?, SOLID EUROPEAN STOCK, THE NEW NICE RACISM, WHITE PEOPLE THINGS.”

Referentiality –or knowing what cluster of ideas we refer to when we say “old money,” for instance– is an unstable thing. Does aestheticization deracinate a plantation history, or merely insist that such a history does not matter? For what might an “owner’s hat” be nostalgic, if nostalgia is the modern phenomenon of borrowing a “lost” sentiment or sensibility from the past for present usage? What does it mean to apprehend or be attached to something understood as lost, when the spatial or temproal dimensions of that loss cannot help but include chattel slavery or colonial racial rule? The dead do not stay down while their clothes come forward.

That said, how do we track their ghostly traces across living bodies which may or may not match their original wearers? One commentator suggests that despite the advertising copy, the circuitous routes some blue-blood dress styles take interrupt their straightforward claims to colonial privilege: “Also: can’t we say that nu-prep–at least in part–is a possibly unconscious appropriation of a ‘black’ style, which itself was an appropriation of a ‘white’ style, which was sorta kinda a different kind of appropriation of a ‘white’ style, which was originally an appropriation of many many different styles from around the world?”

As black style becomes global style, does the appropriation and revision of fancy clothes produce another historical consciousness, another origin story, for these dress styles? Consider the sartorial performances of the immaculately attired Andre 3000, the calculated precision of the self-fashioning Fonzworth Bentley. We might also recall Monica Miller’s Slaves to Fashion, in which she argues black dandyism “makes both subtle and overt challenges and capitulations to authoritative aesthetics.” Miller suggests, “Dandies are not always the wealthiest, but they aspire to other things and show that existing hierarchies can be broken. It’s about making something out of nothing.”

So does the meaning of a garment emerge from consumers’ usage, or from its conditions of manufacture, both ideological and material? In response to a commentator’s smart observation that “I would pause before associating Japanese fandom of this look to a deep dream of giving off Landed Class vibes,” Jefferson clarifies:

Not to dive even deeper into the rabbit hole, but I suppose what I find problematic about the trad blogs is how whimsical they are about longing for the days of yore. It’s very easy for middle aged white guys to romanticize the 50s and 60s (http://www.acontinuouslean.com/2010/02/15/las-vegas/), because then they would have been even freer than they are now. For me to think of the ’50s is to consider times of terror, heartbreak and violence.

While these garments’ manufacture is new, some of the questions I asked earlier of vintage politics seem relevant here.

What are the vocabularies of vintage clothes and how do these vocabularies produce value for the vintage-clad self? What feelings do vintage clothes and their histories inspire, in whom? What do these feelings do — to our understanding of the past, other bodies? As I consider these and further possible queries, it would appear that vintage can be about the evaluation and preservation of an item or an ideal –a beautiful dress, a beautiful woman– against the ruin of time, or vintage can be marshaled to mark ruin as important, as a significant event in the social life of that thing or ideal.

As Jefferson points out, the evaluation and preservation of a beautiful item from another time and place might easily slide into the evaluation and preservation of an associated (terrible, no-good) ideal. Nostalgia for a particular era or its sensibility can become dangerous, especially when such a sensibility might include qualifiers such as “dignity” or “freedom,” “classiness” or “old-school glamour,” which are also shifting measures of human value. (Consider some of the nostalgic remarks about “respectability” here.) But the adaptation of these dress styles can also fashion defiance, marking the ruin of these eras in these styles’ unruly revisions by those once denied their wearing.

Perhaps we must distinguish between the meanings that self-fashioning persons assign their clothes, and the meanings that lend a bloody social life to things like an “owner’s hat.” They may overlap; they may not. I think that there’s no coming down on one side or the other here: it’s a “both”/”and more” situation.

* Okay, J. Peterman is crazy nuts. So many of the “men’s things” are accompanied by nostalgic remembrances of multiple imperial moments. The “19th-Century British Dhobi Kit” is described thusly: “The British called them ‘dhobi’ after the ‘wash boys’ that they hired by the hundreds in Burma, Madras and the Punjab. They became such a necessity that viceroys, governors-general and trade ministers had them handmade in London before heading off to postings in the far reaches of the British Empire…. The perfectly civilized way to start your day – no matter where you find yourself. Imported.”

Dude comedies have become a staple of the American media diet, though they probably always have been in some form or another. Slacker dudes are particularly popular—the successes of Judd Apatow and Seth MacFarlane’s most popular fare are evidence enough.

HBO, in its perpetual effort to not be television, has taken this formula and turned it on its head. First with Entourage, a series about making it and staying on top, and now with How to Make It in America, about what happens before you’ve made it. Our two heroes, Ben (Bryan Greenberg) and Cam (Victor Rasuk) are too guys who are tired of doing nothing, and propose to start a line of designer jeans.

I suspect Ben and Cam will eventually get rich. The series can’t sustain itself on poverty and hardship (it’s too earnest); still, there’s something intriguing about How to Make It in America’s emphasis on the less glamorous, or occasionally glamorous New York—as opposed to Sex and the City and its copycats’ perpetually glamorous city, or Entourage’s Los Angeles. Sure, there are hot girls and gallery openings, even a cameo from John Varvatos, but the tone of the show is a little dour, like New York after The Fall. It’s certainly about the increasingly distant American dream and the ridiculous lengths people go through to achieve it. Yet it’s also, I suspect, about how the dream is almost just a handshake and a cocktail away.

More than anything, How to Make It is about the dream of post-boom New York City (perhaps also post-Boom America, but it’s really NYC-focused). This became very clear in episode two when Ben describes the philosophy behind his denim line to his former fashion professor. He wants to get back to the grit and authenticity of old NYC. “It’s inspired by 1970s New York, so you’ve got the birth of hip hop and the birth of punk rock … just the spirit of the 70s,” Ben says. “Were you even alive in the 70s? This place was a dump. Central Park was a war zone. Times Square was full of hookers,” the prof retorts. Ben: “What’s not to love, right?”

The “real” New York runs through How to Make It, especially in its use of still photographs over various parts of the city, both in its intro and between scenes. Unfortunately, these photos give the show almost all its verve—so far, it’s otherwise uninteresting. The photographs give us a sense of place, a grittier, dirtier, darker New York City, like in Scorsese’s Taxi Driver or After Hours.

How to Make It in America seems to be saying: it’s great to be rich and successful in New York, so long as everyone else is suffering. It’s a bit strange, really. The New York of the 60s, 70s and early 80s, is fantasized and longed for, with its “realness,” cheap real estate, empty storefronts and dirty streets. In this fantasy, a poorer New York is a playground. Gone from the discussion are rampant crime and unemployment. This New York is a great place to live, if you’re one of the few people to have “made” it. You can buy an enormous apartment; bolt downtown and take in some underground art, stopping by Warhol’s Factory, Oldenberg’s Store, Haring’s Shop; see Madonna sing; and jet back to your loft before you get robbed.

But the truth is, if this magical New York reappears, it’ll probably be at the expense of our heroes Ben and Cam. Independent luxury brands do not fare well in tough times, ceding ground to more established labels. Recently, Phi and Maria Pinto, a Michelle Obama favorite, have both shuttered. Zac Posen apparently isn’t doing too well. Even celebrity fashion lines have suffered. There are always successes, of course, but I doubt any investor would give much money to our former slacker dudes in this economy.

The appeal of the old New York, especially to many unemployed men who now populate the rolls, is understandable. Who wouldn’t want to see their smug high school colleague turned hedge fund manager down and out and living in New Jersey? But the truth is, if he’s forced out of Manhattan, you’re living on Staten Island with mom and dad, and there isn’t anything less glamorous than that.

How To Make It in America is off to a rough start, lacking the tight plotting of HBO’s dramas or sharp dialogue of Entourage and Sex and the City. I suspect the show will improve as Ben and Cam succeed, even if their success is utterly—and disappointingly—a fantasy.

On Friday, I joined Alyssa Rosenberg on Bloggingheads.Tv, to chat about the Oscars, which is my least favorite subject. We covered stereotypes, the expectations of the academy, and how to determine what is “a best picture.” But last night had some interesting upsets.

Kathryn Bigelow took home the award for the Best Picture for The Hurt Locker. Thea points out “Much to the shock and delight of all my tweeps, Kathryn Bigelow was the first woman to win Best Director, the day before International Women’s Day no less. And for a movie that is actually pretty great; that among other things, provides an unadulterated shot at what it means to be the harbinger of Western, American imperialism against wholly humanised civilians (of colour).”

Sandra Bullock won for Best Actress in a Leading Role for The Blind Side. As was expected, Mo’Nique took home Best Supporting Actress for Precious.

Mo’nique’s backstage post-acceptance speech is also worth discussing. Explaining that her outfit is a tribute to Hattie McDaniel (the first African-American winner of an Oscar, for her supporting role in Gone with the Wind), she goes on to discuss her motivation in the role. She says: “This role was not about my acting career. This role has shaped my life. To allow me not to judge and to love unconditionally.”

And Avatar didn’t sweep the Oscars, but they still netted 3 awards.

Oh, and guess who else took home a statue?

Pixar’s Up floated away with Best Animated Picture and Best Original Score.

Your thoughts?

ETA: Deaf Indian Muslim Anarchist points out that missed another historic first: ‘Precious’ win: Geoffrey Fletcher first African American screenwriter to earn Academy Award

In this way, the off-campus party, dubbed the “Compton Cookout” and designed as a deliberate mockery of Black History Month at the University of California, San Diego, aptly demonstrates the terrible legacy of this politics of beauty. (If you’re not sure what this event and the resulting furor are about, please see here and here.) The Facebook invitation featured detailed instructions to party-goers on how to enact caricatures of black racial deviancy via “ghetto” dress and a performance of ugliness-as-subhumanity:

February marks a very important month in American society. No, i’m not referring to Valentines day or Presidents day. I’m talking about Black History month. As a time to celebrate and in hopes of showing respect, the Regents community cordially invites you to its very first Compton Cookout.For guys: I expect all males to be rockin Jersey’s, stuntin’ up in ya White T (XXXL smallest size acceptable), anything FUBU, Ecko, Rockawear, High/low top Jordans or Dunks, Chains, Jorts, stunner shades, 59 50 hats, Tats, etc.

For girls: For those of you who are unfamiliar with ghetto chicks-Ghetto chicks usually have gold teeth, start fights and drama, and wear cheap clothes – they consider Baby Phat to be high class and expensive couture. They also have short, nappy hair, and usually wear cheap weave, usually in bad colors, such as purple or bright red. They look and act similar to Shenaynay, and speak very loudly, while rolling their neck, and waving their finger in your face. Ghetto chicks have a very limited vocabulary, and attempt to make up for it, by forming new words, such as “constipulated”, or simply cursing persistently, or using other types of vulgarities, and making noises, such as “hmmg!”, or smacking their lips, and making other angry noises, grunts, and faces. The objective is for all you lovely ladies to look, act, and essentially take on these “respectable” qualities throughout the day.

The “Compton Cookout” continues in the American theater tradition of blackface minstrelsy. As nineteenth-century free blacks used dress and clothing to distinguish themselves as also human, blackface minstrel performances subjected this self-fashioning black person to ridicule and loathing. In this, and as evidenced by the above, the defamation of black style is absolutely crucial to the racist imagination. (And we can see in the above that particular revulsion is directed at black femininity as irrational, uncivilized and ugly.) The statement from UCSD’s Ethnic Studies Department explains this history:

This “monstrosity” (as some of the organizers called it) has a violent and racist history that began with blackface minstrel shows in the U.S., starting in the early 19th century, heightening with popularity during the Abolition Movement, and extending into 20th century theater and film. Both blackface minstrel performances and parties such as the “Compton Cookout” reinforce and magnify existing material and discursive structures of Black oppression, while denying Black people any sense of humanity, negating not only the actual lives that exist behind these caricatured performances but the structural conditions that shape Black life in the US. Far from celebrating Black history, events such as this one are marked celebrations of the play of power characteristic of whiteness in general and white minstrelsy in particular: the ability to move in and move out of a racially produced space at will; the capacity to embody a presumed deviance without actually ever becoming or being it; the privilege to revel in this raced and gendered alterity without ever having to question or encounter the systemic and epistemic violence that produces hierarchies of difference in the first place. Moreover, like their blackface minstrel predecessors, the organizers and attendees of the “Compton Cookout” demonstrate the inextricability of performances of white mastery over Black bodies from structures of patriarchy: by instructing their women ‘guests’ on how to dress (“wear cheap clothes”), behave (“start fights and drama”), and speak (“have a very limited vocabulary”), these young men not only paint a degrading and dehumanizing picture of African American women as so-called “ghetto chicks,” but offer a recipe for the objectification of all women—made permissible, once again, through the appropriation of blackness.

Because of this terrible history, the “Compton Cookout” cannot be viewed as an isolated incident. Every year there are more college campus parties that depend upon a dehumanizing politics of dress to enact racist caricatures for entertainment; for instance, the 2006 “Tacos and Tequila” Greek party at the University of Illinois saw sorority sisters in tank tops, hoop earrings,and fake pregnancies, and fraternity brothers dressed as gardeners and agricultural workers. (With regard to the ethics of performance, the statement from the Theater and Dance community is also well worth the read.)

Both dress and beauty bear the weight of much ideological management in its racial classifications of humanity, through which some persons are guaranteed the principle of human dignity and other persons are denied it. In which some are invited to “play” at blackness-as-savagery, blackness-as-degeneracy, and some Others are trapped by this image, this event and others like it foster and perform dehumanization through a frighteningly cruel, and terribly effective, politics of ugliness.

For more background and context, read or listen to this KPBS report about both institutional and “popular” racisms at UCSD, featuring our former classmate (Berkeley Ethnic Studies, represent!) and immensely fierce and formidable colleague Sara Clarke Kaplan, an assistant professor of Ethnic Studies and Critical Gender Studies at San Diego.

This post elaborates on the excerpt we ran last week about David Dow.

It is no secret that our country’s criminal justice system has consistently proven to be biased against minority communities of color. Statistics published by the NAACP show that even amongst those found guilty of crimes, African-Americans continue to be disproportionately sentenced to life in prison, face higher drug sentences, and are executed at higher rates when compared to people of other races. Michelle Alexander speaks of a “color-coded caste system” in The New Jim Crow that marginalized communities who encounter the criminal justice system.

Seasoned Texas attorney David R. Dow’s new book The Autobiography of an Execution provides an exploration of the death penalty, written through the eyes of a man who has spent 20 years defending over a hundred death-row inmates, most of whom died, and most of whom were guilty. As the head litigator for the Texas Defender Service, a non profit legal aid organization in the state that boasts the highest number of executions since 1976, Dow presents a powerful argument against the death penalty system. Candidly exploring how he balances such a trying job with being a good father and husband, Dow’s extremely personal book only works to strengthen the argument that the broken criminal justice system operates on a vicious cycle based on racial and economic disparity.

In his book, Dow opposes the unequal basis on which some criminals are sentenced to be executed while others aren’t, and deems the criminal justice system “racist, classist (and) unprincipled.” He opposes the death penalty as a flawed and unjust facet of the criminal justice system. Based on his experience, he notes that while he believes that a majority of the clients he represented were, in fact, guilty, there was very little separating those criminals from others who were guilty of the same crime, other than “the operation of what I consider to be insidious types of prejudice.” Most unsettling is his severe mistrust of members of the justice system – police officers, prosecutors and judges – whom he believes would “violate their oaths of office” and put men and women on death row who they think “deserve to be there”.

In Dow’s exploration of the politics behind the death penalty, perhaps the most tenacious argument against it is the blatant way that the intersections of race and class influence the outcome of a criminal case. Dow says,

…if you’re going to commit murder, you want to be white, and you want to be wealthy — so that you can hire a first-class lawyer — and you want to kill a black person. And if [you are], the odds of your being sentenced to death are basically zero…It’s one thing to say that rich people should be able to drive Ferraris and poor people should have to take the bus. It’s very different to say that rich people should get treated one way by the state’s criminal-justice system and poor people should get treated another way. But that is the system that we have.

Dow’s book reflects all that is wrong with a social system that perpetuates inequality based on race and income, and a criminal justice system that feeds off prejudice in its sentencing and prosecution methods. More than ever, a lot needs to be done to ensure that the criminal justice system functions on the principles of “fairness” that are implicit in its definition, and not those of difference and persecution.

Photo courtesy of chicagotribune.com

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