[ White race riots against integrated public school busing in Boston, 1976 ]
[ Originally posted at Feministe at the end of my guest-blogging stint there. I'm reposting it here now, just cuz. ]
Well it's been good chillin in these parts for a bit and catching the action these past couple weeks, but the time has come to respectfully bow out with a bittersweet smile, with a warm embrace to our hosts and the new friends I've made. And maybe one more tequila shot before hitting the after-party. Tequila distilled from the blue agave pulp of the soul. Perhaps a few parting sentiments, befitting a return to the road.
What I'm feeling, at this particular time, at this point in my life, is the familiar recognition that there's no real home for me in this earthly sphere, only criss-crossed paths across the surface of this spinning planet. It's often said that life is a journey; all of us are in transition, marching side-by-side from unknown into unknown. I do understand that folks sometimes experience a different feeling of home, of bodily belonging, of sitting still and satiated atop ancestral roots pushed deep into the earth. I've had moments, now and then, here and there, where the hunger and the restlessness and the winding road melt from my being and all that's left is wholeness. Maybe that's what we're all after.
But I think many of us who are children of diaspora, children of the displaced and the unwelcome, tend not to expect so much. We grow up with constant reminders that we're a long way from home, surrounded by hostile strangers, barred from the center of the public square, shoved into the shadows. They don't much like our kind round here, we are told in a million large and small ways, we are the ugly ones, the inadequate and intrusive ones, the spoilers of the pristine landscape. For such children of diaspora, there can be no homecoming. Locals in our adopted homes yell at us to "go home". And our ancestral homes have been taken from us -- by invaders and colonizers, by wars and circumstances and decisions, by distance, by time.
~ ~ ~
Every diasporic community is, of course, unique. Every people, indeed every family and every individual, has a unique story. I enjoy learning about all those stories. I like contemplating both the differences and similarities between the experiences of all the variegated groups that have ended up bouncing off each other like billiard balls here in the so-called New World. Understanding how we got here helps me understand where we are.
Understanding where we are, for me, began as a teenager, with a headlong plunge into my mom's bookshelf of African American literature. My mother had been an anti-war and civil rights activist in the 1960s, when she first arrived in this country, literally fresh off a cargo boat from China after 3 months of lashing waves, tumultuous weather, and unwanted advances by seamen. Arriving on these golden shores, my mother had been troubled by the racism she discovered and had hit the books to try to understand the forces that were tearing her new country apart. She accumulated writings by James Baldwin, Richard Wright, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, among others. She marched with progressive activists. In the 1980s, in my teens, I followed those footsteps. Her dusty dog-eared collection of Black literature opened the doors. It was my formal entry into anti-racism. I never turned back.
It's been crucial for my journey as an Asian American citizen and activist to seriously, studiously, steadily explore and contemplate African American and Native American history and experience. I believe that it's impossible for Americans of any stripe to grasp our own existence on this continent without first grasping those foundations. Obviously I'm steeped in Asian American history and culture, but the unique centrality of Native American and African American stories are not lost on me. To me, those are stories which bring us to both the vital spiritual source and the bleeding soul wound at the heart of US society. That's how we got here. That's who we are. That's the electrical signal within our own heartbeat. Whiteness may attempt to negate this reality, or twist it into metallic square-brained convolutions devoid of visceral meaning, or set communities of color against each other by overplaying the gulfs between us and underplaying what we share; but the truths of our genocidal past, the Door of No Return, the Trail of Broken Treaties, as well as the bounty of gifts we've been given by all the forgotten, burn in my chest and in my eyes every day that I look upon the world.
~ ~ ~
In 1963, my father made the journey from Taiwan to the United States by way of East Africa. You could say that he took the long way here. My father's family had ended up on the Kuomingtang-controlled island of Taiwan in the 1940s, after having been displaced from the mainland by the traumatic convulsions of the Japanese invasion in World War II and the Chinese civil war.
Both of my paternal grandparents were doctors, and in the early 1960s they took jobs working for the World Health Organization in Ethiopia. They gradually maneuvered their family toward a new life in the US, like moving chess pieces, one slip of paper at a time, one family member at a time. Being the eldest son, my father stayed behind in Taiwan the longest and took care of family business. All three of his younger siblings were already in the US by the time it was his turn to make a move. It was a big move. He made his way through Hong Kong, Bangkok, Bombay, Beirut, and Cairo, before arriving in the Ethiopian capital of Addis Ababa. From there, he traveled northwest to the ancient city of Gonder, where he met up with his parents.
Reflecting on it now, I realize what a profound impact this voyage must have had on my father, and consequently on me. It was an experience which shattered the horizons of his 22-year-old mind and opened his eyes to the grand scale and spectacular diversity of humanity -- a vision which he passed on to me. In his memoir, my father writes:
Ethiopia is an ancient country with three thousand years of history. It looks over the Red Sea to the Arabian Peninsula, and is connected to Egypt by the Nile. The kings of this country had always claimed that they were descendants of Queen Sheba and King Solomon. Legend has it that the beautiful Queen Sheba went to visit King Solomon in Jerusalem, and later bore him a son, who became the founder of Ethiopia. Gonder is not far from the source of the Blue Nile, one of two major tributaries of the Nile. I once took a car to the hilly country nearby and looked down at the source of this world-famous river. You could say that I revered or even worshipped the Nile, but I had actually learned only isolated facts and lacked a historical sense to comprehend what I was seeing; it was as if I was able to mumble a few lines of poetry but knew not what they signified. I can only recall that when I looked at the source of the Nile, I murmured lines of Confucius, "It passes on just like this, not ceasing day or night," and the poem, "I live by one end of the Long River, and you by the other end. I think of you day by day. I long to see you, but in vain. We drink by the same river."
During his time in Gonder, my father met Ethiopian Christians and Ethiopian Jews, Israelis, Russians, Iranians. They were doctors, students, and patients at the medical center where my grandparents worked. He eventually managed to obtain a student visa from the US consulate, as the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 finally got rid of racist quotas imposed during the Chinese Exclusion era, which had essentially barred Chinese folks from US citizenship and public life since they began arriving in the 1850s. So my father said goodbye to his parents in Ethiopia and set off on the second leg of his journey, through Asmara (which was then part of Ethiopia but is now the capital of Eritrea) and on to Khartoum in the Sudan, where he boarded a flight to Athens. He passed through Zurich, Rome, and Paris, before flying to New York and setting foot on the continent where he would meet up with my mother and raise children, my sister and me. That's how I got here.
~ ~ ~
In 2001 I made a pilgrimmage back to ancestral lands. My great-grandfather's house, where he made burlap sacks for a living, is still standing in a small village with mud roads where literally everyone shares the same surname. I visited the Japanese prison camps where the Chinese had been subjected to human experimentation for the development of biological and chemical weapons, as well as slave labor for industrial development of the Japanese imperial army which the US faced in the Pacific theater. Approximately 10 million Chinese people died during World War II, yet this isn't even worth a footnote in the US. Most US Americans have no idea that the Chinese land war against Japan had at least as much to do with their defeat as the US naval war.
That's how these journeys oftentimes go: we unearth geologies of bloodshed, tectonic plates of pain. We can't imagine the cruelty and horror which our forebearers endured. Yet somehow we made it, and here we stand, upon the blood-soaked earth, under the aura of our ancestors.
My pilgrimmage ended at a remote mountain lake known as Tian Chi, which is usually translated as "Lake of Heaven" but which I prefer to call simply The Sky Pool. It's a sacred spot draped in legend and mist and shimmering light. I sat on the shore meditating and gazing into the dark waters. That's where I saw with definitive clarity that I could never go home, neither in China where my grandparents fled invading armies, nor in the US where my mind and body were formed. I would always be a child of diaspora. Gazing into those misty depths, I saw that ultimately we are all children of diaspora, scattered across the planet over eons of exodus like stars strewn across the sky. We are all migrants. We are all members of the Human Diaspora. Our only home is a bottomless Sky Pool where endless visions of countless tragi-comedies gather and dissolve. "I live by one end of the Long River, and you by the other end. I think of you day by day. I long to see you, but in vain. We drink by the same river."
[ White race riots against integrated public school busing in Boston, 1976 ]
[ Cross-posted at Feministe ]
The ugly history of enforcement rhetoric in modern US politics winds its way from Richard Nixon to Barack Obama, by way of Bill Clinton. It's a history of cynical deception and manipulation based on racist fear and violent lust for domination and subjugation, conceived and championed by Republicans but all too often embraced by the slide-rule triangulations of Beltway Democrats preoccupied more with the engineerings of government power than the lives and struggles of the governed.
Richard Nixon knew exactly what he was doing when he ran his 1968 presidential campaign on the two philosophically inconsistent promises of enforcing law and order and stopping big government. Those tenets were never meant to be substantive or even rational. In fact, it was better for them to be jarringly irrational, because that was part of their acid-gut appeal, a Colbertian anti-intellectual assertion of primal fear over reason. In the midst of the 60s urban uprisings and race riots, these were smashface calls for white identity politics, explicitly designed to mobilize an emotionally volatile backlash against the Civil Rights movement and the imagined derailing of the 1950s White American Dream.
Nixon's enforcement rhetoric ("tough on crime", "law and order") implicitly promised to crack down on brown people and put them back in their place at the bottom of society; while the attacks on "big government" generated false narratives that white magnanimity had gone too far and had resulted in dangerous hoardes of ungrateful welfare leeches who soaked up tax dollars, benefited from racial quotas, and gave nothing back to society. These constructs were, of course, not grounded in any sort of measurable reality. They were strictly drawn from the deep well of racism, built into the very foundation of this nation, seared into the psyche of every US American as solidly as the opening words of the Constitution.
As the renowned Republican strategist Lee Atwater put it in a 1981 interview with Bob Herbert on the so-called "Southern Strategy":
By 1968 you can't say "n----r". That hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states' rights, and all that stuff. You're getting so abstract now [...] because obviously sitting around saying "We want to cut this" is much more abstract than even the busing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract than "N----r, n----r!"
Not a particulary refined or elevated political strategy. But Nixon rode it to victory in 1968, as did Ronald Reagan in 1980 ("welfare queens") and George H. W. Bush in 1988 (Willie Horton). The lesson that Washington DC's professional class of electoral manipulators drew from these outcomes was that national politicians could always count on the racism of white America.
Thus the rise of Bill Clinton and the Democratic Leadership Council in the 1980s and 90s. Rather than confront and expose the GOP's debased demagoguery; rather than elevate national discourse by aggressively defending the strides of the Civil Rights movement and attacking racist fearmongering using a principled grown-up language based on human rights; rather than expand the dwindling electorate by reaching into disenfranchised communities who would respond well to a message of progressive populism, the Democratic Party ceded the debate to the most reactionary forces in US politics and adopted the discourse of coded racist narratives.
Bill Clinton won the presidency, ended "welfare as we know it", ended "the era of big government", doubled the prison population with mandatory minimums and an explosion of privatized prison construction, slapped NAFTA onto the continent unleashing new levels of unemployment, homelessness, and cross-border migration, and generally devastated countless communities of color.
~ ~ ~
Today, the Obama administration and the Democratic Party are apparently on the verge of tackling "comprehensive immigration reform" (CIR) once and for all. How will the debate play out? Exactly which policies will and will not constitute CIR? What political ploys and marketing schemes are DC consultants, motivated primarily by the desire to notch a "win" on their resumes, whispering into the ears of Democratic politicians and mass media lackeys? What legislative package will eventually be passed into law? And what tangible effects will that law have on the lives and struggles of both worthy and "unworthy" members of our communities?
Those questions remain up in the air, and the answers that eventually fall into place will depend in part on the strength and adamancy with which people of conscience assert the voice and power of a mobilized and progressive civic society on the public debate as it unfolds.
As I see it, a fundamental starting point for embarking upon the path to CIR is rejecting the racially-coded enforcement rhetoric which has characterized a great deal of the xenophobic hysteria and racial hatred of our country's reactionary anti-immigrant forces. I describe this rhetoric as the language of the Leviathan, in reference to Hobbesian political theory, because it reduces the rule of law to the most base human impulses of domination and subjugation, promulgating the submission of individual liberty to the draconian sovereignty of ruler and state by means of a unilateral monopoly on coercive violence.
Obviously every society requires laws, ethical norms, rules of social conduct. But law should elevate society rather than debase it, and the sleight of hand inherent in Nixonian enforcement rhetoric is the manner in which it truncates democratic dialogue and social progress by falsely representing a corrupt and outdated legal, intellectual, and moral framework as a legitimate foundation for reform, when in fact reform must begin with a new, revitalized framework. As the Clinton years demonstrated, liberals cannot adopt reactionary rhetoric as a political tactic and then expect anything other than reactionary social results.
Unfortunately, DC Dems are showing seedy signs of supineness, with "leading" liberal figures such as Senator Charles Schumer resorting to cartoonishly-cynical "get tough" posturing and even President Obama blurting loaded exhortations to "get to the back of the line". What line? There's no line, there's never been one; it's always been a rigged game. The first folks to be singled out to "get in line" were the Chinese. The vast majority of European folks who came to this country, whether in pursuit of genocidal land grabs or as penniless workers or both, faced no line. Only certain groups are berated with that barked order. Now descendants of those Europeans actually think they have a stronger claim to this continent than the indigenous people themselves.
~ ~ ~
As Nezua wrote in an op-ed for The Commonweal Institute entitled "The Power of Truth and The Weakness of Tough Talk":
When Democrats concede that the proper starting point is fear and revulsion of the Alien Other, they adopt the lens of xenophobia and feed the toxic environment in which race-based violence is bred. This stance is not productive nor is it rooted in truth. [...]
“Go to the back of the line” is an intentionally punitive and domineering phrase. But instead of stroking our desire to dominate the new outsiders, we would benefit from a discussion on the many ways in which “the line” has broken down. From human trafficking rings in which foreign nationals are lured into exploitative US jobs, to foreign-born soldiers denied earned citizenship, the system is overwhelmed with a backlog of over 200,000 cases.
Even if rationalized as standard political posturing, any validation of language and ideas promoted by fringe elements that act violently to defend a “disappearing culture” from “illegals” cannot be excused. [...] Who will give the Democrats a tough talk? Who will tell them that in order to rise above the well-entrenched practices of the Right, they will need to be daring, intelligent, and original? Who will assure them they possess the ability to be both honest and victorious?
Indeed those who spout the language of the Leviathan can never serve the cause of social progress, because their tongues are tied to the rigid despotism of the state rather than the rising aspirations of downtrodden communities.
When Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. led a march from Selma to Montgomery in 1965, he was disobeying a federal court injunction; his mainstream critics decried this "illegal" march and a majority of US public opinion disapproved of the action. But something strange happened after that march. The winds shifted. Hardened positions became more fluid. Even in white America, a flicker of self-doubt flashed across social consciousness. Openings appeared in the fabric of society and the impossible suddenly became possible. Addressing a nationally televised joint session of Congress two days after the first Selma march, President Lyndon Johnson famously declared:
What happened in Selma is part of a far larger movement which reaches into every section and state of America. It is the effort of American Negroes to secure for themselves the full blessings of American life. Their cause must be our cause, too, because it is not just Negroes but really it is all of us who must overcome the crippling legacy of bigotry and injustice. And we shall overcome.
It is said that a single tear rolled down Dr. King's cheek when he heard that line on TV.
The Voting Rights Act passed 5 months later, not because Washington insiders hatched the right marketing scheme with the correct compromises, but because people grounded in a moral vision of social justice stood up, walked forward with heads held high, and didn't back down in the face of the Leviathan.
[ Cross-posted at Feministe ]
In recent weeks, the startling story of Cirila Baltazar Cruz has been stirring outrage and splitting spleens in certain corners of blogland, though it has yet to receive mainstream attention. Some details remain fuzzy, and we have yet to hear directly from the person at the center of the story, Ms. Cruz herself; and indeed we aren't likely to hear from her anytime soon because her case is currently under a court gag order.
Here's what we have so far: Cirila Baltazar Cruz gave birth to a baby girl, Rubi Juana, on November 16, 2008, at the Singing River Hospital in Pascagoula, Mississippi. It is, as you might imagine, a predominantly white area. The hospital provided Cruz with a Spanish interpreter. However, Cruz doesn't speak Spanish; she speaks Chatino, an indigenous language from the Oaxaca region of Mexico. Two days after the birth, the hospital reported the baby as a neglected child to the Department of Human Services, after which Rubi Juana Cruz was promptly taken from her mother and placed in the custody of an affluent couple in Ocean Springs.
According to court records obtained by The Mississippi Clarion-Ledger, the child was deemed neglected in part because Cruz "has failed to learn the English language" which "placed her unborn child in danger and will place the baby in danger in the future". In addition, the hospital report noted that Cruz "was an illegal immigrant" who was "exchanging living arrangements for sex".
Of course, it's a bit of a mystery how they were able to establish these facts when there were apparently no Chatino-speakers on hand. More to the point: it's irrelevant. I'm no legal expert, but in my understanding, immigration status, language skills, and highly-questionable allegations of sex work are not grounds for snatching a baby from her mother and initiating adoption proceedings. But that's exactly what's happening. The case is currently in the Jackson County Youth Court, where Cruz is being represented by the Southern Poverty Law Center. As mentioned, the case is under gag order so it's been difficult to get updates on the situation and the fate of Rubi Juana remains unknown.
Unfortunately, the National Coalition for Child Protection Reform's Child Welfare Blog notes:
The case is not unique. In 2005, the Lebanon (Tenn.) Democrat, revealed that, at least twice, a local judge ordered Mexican mothers to learn English -- or lose their children forever. [...] In one case the child still lived with the mother, in the other the child was in foster care. In both cases, the mothers spoke an indigenous language rather than Spanish.
Over at Vivir Latino, Maegan La Mamita Mala places the story in the larger context of the "good immigrant vs. bad immigrant" narrative which has come to dominate mainstream liberal discourse in the immigration debate:
Quick. Choose. The house is burning and you have to choose. Your mother or your child? Who do you save?
Your mother, Maegan writes, "didn’t make it like Sonia Sotomayor. Didn’t graduate from college and in fact can’t even speak English". On the other hand, your child has assimilated, can speak English, has received a formal education, and "won’t be a burden on the system".
Is it the correct choice to abandon your unassimilated mother?
This is the morally untenable dead-end into which liberals propel themselves when they adopt tactical discourse which appeases the xenophobic forces of the right-wing for the sake of electoral expediency, rather than a discourse fundamentally grounded in universal human rights.
Now I'm not suggesting any less respect for the remarkable achievements of someone like Sonia Sotomayor. But when liberals hold her up as the shining example of The American Story -- a model minority, a false compliment with which Asian Americans are all too familiar -- they are actually Othering the majority of immigrants, ordinary hard-working people who have never had the opportunities or life situations or sheer good fortune to rise to such societal heights. The implication is that those less-accomplished immigrant stories are somehow less American, and therefore those other immigrants are unworthy of the magnanimous acceptance extended by the mainstream to a select few.
What is the plight of the unworthy? Ask Cirila Baltazar Cruz.
Please consider writing, faxing, or calling the presiding judge in this case and asking that (1) Rubi Juana be re-united with her mother, and (2) all adoption proceedings against the will of the mother be stopped. Here's the contact info:
Honorable Judge Sharon Sigalas
Youth Justice Court of Jackson County
4903 Telephone Rd.
Pascagoula, MS 39567
Call (228) 762-7370
Fax (228) 762-7385
ETA: Thanks to Maegan for sending me this radio interview, recorded on June 1, in which we hear from Cirila Baltazar Cruz herself (in Spanish and Chatino).
Cruz says she doesn’t know why they took her daughter, though she calls herself “ignorant” for not being able to speak Spanish or English (though she does speak some Spanish, as you can hear in the interview). She’s a homeowner in Oaxaca with two other children being cared for by her family there. She works at a Chinese restaurant in Biloxi and lives in an apartment owned by her employer — an arrangement which the hospital interpreter either misunderstood or misrepresented. Cirila says that the interpreter told her that she must leave her Chinese employer or lose her baby; furthermore, the interpreter offered her a job with a wealthy family who would take care of the child. When she refused the offer, the interpreter became irritated with her, and we know the rest.
Cruz says she wants her daughter back. All the information she receives from the court is in English. It was her cousin Esteban who implored the Mississippi Immigrants’ Rights Alliance (MIRA) to get involved, which is how we now know about this case. Vicky Cintra of MIRA (also interviewed) says red flags went up at the organization when they learned that Esteban had been barred from serving as an interpreter for Cirila at the hospital, even though he repeatedly offered; he was told he would be arrested if he didn’t leave. MIRA claims that the family that took custody of Rubi Juana are lawyers with connections to the judge; they threw a baby shower to greet Rubi’s arrival.
November 18 is the next court date. We’ll be keeping a close eye on this story.
Over at A Book Without A Cover, Adele has put up a post announcing the upcoming celebration of Grace Lee Boggs' 94th birthday. In honor of this prodigious Detroit icon and her ongoing legacy of tireless social activism, I'm reposting a Zuky piece I wrote upon reading her autobiography a couple of years ago. Happy Birthday, Grace!
~ ~ ~
[ Originally posted on March 6, 2007 ]
In the landscape of Asian American activism, Grace Lee Boggs is a giant, a legend, an icon.
Recently I've been re-reading her 1998 autobiography, Living for Change. As I see it, this is must-read anti-racist history.
Born in 1915 in Providence, Rhode Island, Grace Lee Chin was the Chinese American daughter of middle-class restaurant owners. Grace spent the Great Depression studying philosophy, undergrad at Barnard College and doctoral at Bwyn Mawr College. After which, she dove into radical politics with a full head of steam, joining the Socialist Workers Party, where she took on the pen name of Ria Stone.
In 1939, the Socialist Workers Party split in half over the question of whether or not to continue to be loyal to the Soviet Union (following the invasion of Finland and the Stalin-Hitler pact). A majority followed Trotsky in maintaining the need to support the Soviet Union despite its degenerate state ("bureaucratic collectivism"). A minority broke away and formed the Workers Party, led by Max Schachtman, Marty Abern, and C.L.R. James. Grace fell in with this latter crowd. She writes of this period:
Despite my growing suspicions that my new comrades represented the past rather than the future, the Workers Party's decision to oppose World War II reassured me that I was in the right organization. My main reason for remaining in the party, however, was that I had met C.L.R. James when he stopped in Chicago to talk to the comrades on his way back from organizing sharecroppers in southeast Missouri. Tall, black, and strikingly handsome, C.L.R. was everything that the Chicago branch was not. He was bursting with enthusiasm about the potential for an American revolution inherent in the emergence of the labor movement and the escalating militancy of blacks. When together with another comrade I met him at the train station, he was carrying two thick books, volume 1 of Marx's Capital and Hegel's Science of Logic, both heavily underlined. When he discovered that I had studied Hegel and knew German, we withdrew to my basement room where we spent hours sitting on my old red couch comparing passages in Marx and Hegel, checking the English against the original German. It was the beginning of a theoretical and practical collaberation that lasted twenty years, until we went our separate ways in 1962. [...]
To study Marx and Lenin and to work with C.L.R. I moved back to New York after the Workers Party convention. For a while I lived in my mother's house in Jackson Heights. Later, when she began renting out rooms, I rented apartments in different parts of the city. In the 1940s you could live in New York for very little money. [ Pictured, from left: Raya Dunayevskaya, C.L.R. James, and Grace, in the 1940s.]
Living in New York and working with the Johnson-Forest Tendency inside the Workers Party opened me up to a whole new world of people, ideas, and activity. I visited the Schomburg Collection in Harlem and read Amy Garvey's compilation of her husband's philosophy and opinions. It was exciting to discover that Marcus Garvey's Back to Africa movement had been inspired in part by the Russian Revolution. Lenin, said Garvey, had seized the opportunity of the crisis of the Western powers caused by World War I to make the October Revolution. People of African descent scattered all over the world, he thought, should follow Lenin's example and exploit the postwar crisis to recover Africa for themselves. The Workers Party had organized Interracial Club with an office on 125th Street in Harlem where we held regular forums. They were chaired by Lyman Paine, who took the name of Tom Brown. After meetings we would go to the Apollo Theater, the Savoy (where I heard Count Basie one night), or Small's Paradise. Connie Williams, a West Indian friend of CLR's, owned a calypso restaurant in the Village where James Baldwin and Richard Wright hung out. [...] Katharine Dunham, one of the founders of the ethnic dance movement, invited me to give a class in philosophy to her dance company. But my own ideas where changing so rapidly in my new milieu that I couldn't imagine myself teaching anybody anything.
Grace's work with C.L.R. brought her many interesting opportunities. In 1954 she collaborated with Mbiyu Koinange on a booklet entitled The People of Kenya Speak for Themselves. She worked with Kwame Nkrumah, author of Towards Colonial Freedom, who eventually made a triumphant return to the Gold Coast. Through her activism, she also met Jimmy Boggs, a factory worker from Detroit whom she eventually married and worked alongside until his death in 1992.
As should be obvious by now, Living for Change captures a series of personal and political snapshots of leftist political development from a unique front-row perspective. From World War II on the home front, through the Civil Rights era and the Black Power movement, through the 80s and her "return" to China to come to terms with her own roots, all the way up to her latest philosophical reflections as she looks back on all her years in politics, Grace Lee Boggs has given us something invaluable: a genuine piece of herself, a piece of her beating heart and soul, a high-minded clear-eyed telling of a revolutionary tale.
Grace is still at it, too. As recently as 2003, Grace was the keynote speaker for the MLK Day Symposium at the University of Michigan. See also this excellent 2005 interview.
I'll leave you with this passage from the introduction of Living for Change:
I consider myself blessed to have been born a Chinese American female with two first names: Grace and Jade Peace. [...] Had I not been born female and Chinese American, I would not have realized from early on that fundamental changes were necessary in our society. Had I not been born female and Chinese American, I might have ended up teaching philosophy at a university, an observer rather than an active participant in the humanity-stretching movements that have defined the last half of the twentieth century. [ Pictured: Grace at 18.]
I never thought I'd be writing my autobiography. As late as the spring of 1994, when Shirley Cloyes of Lawrence Hill Books suggested it, my response was that I would rather continue my movement-building activities.
At that time Jimmy had been dead for less than a year and I was still trying to figure out what I was going to do on my own or, indeed, whether there was any "my own." That is what often happens when you lose the person with whom you have lived and worked closely for decades. Especially if you are a woman, you need time to re-create yourself, to discover who you are. In my case this need was even more acute because for the most of the forty years that I was married to Jimmy, the black movement was the most important movement in the country. So I borrowed a lot of my identity from him—to such a degree that some FBI records describe me as probably Afro-Chinese. [...]
When we first met in 1952, I was a city girl from a middle-class Chinese American family. Despite the fact that I had already been involved in the radical movement for more than a decade and had even worked in a defense plant during World War II, I was still essentially a product of Ivy League women's colleges, a New York intellectual whose understanding of revolutionary struggle came mainly from books. Jimmy had been born and raised in a small town in Alabama where there were only a couple of stores on the main street. [...] I was a Chinese American, an ethnic minority so small as to be almost invisible. He was an African American who was very conscious that the blood and sweat of his ancestors had made possible the rapid economic development of this country and who had already embarked on the struggle to ensure that his people would be among those deciding its economic and political future.
Ten years after our marriage Jimmy's first book, The American Revolution: Pages from a Negro Worker's Notebook, was published. [ Pictured, from left: Jimmy Boggs, Grace Lee Boggs, Ted Griffin, in 1957. ] To our amazement it brought a letter of congratulations from the British philosopher Bertrand Russell, initiating a correspondence during which Jimmy did not hesitate to lecture Russell, who was at the time probably the West's best-known philosopher, respectfully but firmly pointing out his ignorance of the ongoing struggle in the United States. As he wrote in the introduction to The American Revolution, "I am a factory worker but I know more than just factory work. I know the difference between what would sound right if one lived in a society of logical people and what is right when you live in a society of real people with real differences."
I believe that the story of how Jimmy and I, coming from such different backgrounds, were able to enjoy such a productive life together can be instructive to other Americans, especially in light of the rapidly changing ethnic composition of this country. [...] With this situation will inevitably come new stresses and strains. If the new immigrants are viewed as a threat, these tensions can explode as they did in South Central Los Angeles in 1992. On the other hand, if older migrants — and except for Native Americans, we have all migrated to this country, by choice or in chains — can see the new arrivals as people on whose backs we have prospered and whom we now need to make ourselves whole, we can embark together on the struggles necessary to make the United States of America what it was meant to be — a country that all of us, regardless of national or ethnic origin, will be proud to call our own.
Unfortunately I've been forced to concede defeat to my squirrel-nemesis in my attempts to grow corn. Every corn stalk I've grown has gotten dug up. It's been a slaughter. So today I switched gears and planted spinach and peppers where the corn used to be. We'll see if my nemesis continues to taunt me. In the meantime, the two remaining sisters are doing quite well. Below you see a juicy-looking bean pod and a couple of zucchini flowers.
On this day in 1982, Chinese American immigrant Vincent Chin was beaten to death with a baseball bat, at his own bachelor party, by racist white auto workers in Detroit who blamed Japan for layoffs in the US auto industry. The murderers, Ronald Ebens and Michael Nitz, were convicted of manslaughter. They served no jail time, were given three years probation, fined $3,000 and ordered to pay $780 in court costs. Wayne County Circuit Judge Charles Kaufman said, "These weren't the kind of men you send to jail."
On July 14, 2008, Mexican immigrant Luis Ramirez was beaten to death by racist white teens shouting anti-Mexican epithets, in Shenandoah, Pennsylvania. The murderers, Brandon Piekarsky and Derrick Donchak, were convicted of simple assault. Two days ago, they were respectively sentenced to 6 and 7 months in county jail. Piekarsky's lawyer Frederick Fanelli said, "You would be proud to have any of these kids in your classroom, and any of them as your children."
