Wendy Cheng previews my upcoming book: Dream of the Water Children

A Black-Japanese Amerasian reflects on life in the present, with the traces of wars and their aftermaths. 2Leaf Press is pleased to announce the publication of Fredrick D. Kakinami Cloyd’s first book, DREAM OF THE WATER CHILDREN, MEMORY AND MOURNING IN THE BLACK PACIFIC, in June 2016. In Dream of the Water Children, Fredrick Kakinami Cloyd delineates the ways imperialism and war are experienced across and between generations and leave lasting and often excruciating legacies in the mind, body, and relationships.

READ The Preview Here:   http://2leafpress.org/online/preview-dream-of-the-water-children-wendy-cheng/

MY BOOK – Coming Fall 2014

My Book will be released this Fall 2014, by 2Leaf Press!!

Introduction by Gerald Horne

Foreword by Velina Hasu Houston

Cover Art by Kenji Chienshu Liu

Here are just a few preview comments about the book:

Fredrick Douglas Kakinami Cloyd has written a profoundly moving and thought-provoking book. He courageously challenges our neat categories of identity, going beyond broadening our understanding of mixed race to touch what is human in all of us. This book will shift readers’ perceptions and assumptions and may change many lives. Above all, Cloyd is a master story-teller who honors and respects memory.

–Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, historian and writer

This is a mature book that moves fluidly, as the mind moves, untroubled by traditional distinctions between writing considered to be academic vs. creative, memoir vs. personal essay, sure-footed in unexpected ways. This genre-bending book is not “experimental writing.” The author knows what he wants to say and he knows how he wants to say it, seeking, in his own words, “restoration and reclamation” for silenced voices and histories never erased because they have not yet been written. Dream of the Water Children demands that its reader rigorously consider the constructed nature of memory, identities, and historical narrative. And it is also an enormously kind and passionate chronicle of a son’’s long journey with his mother. To read it is to marvel, to learn, and to discover anew what surrealist poet Paul Éluard said: “There is another world, but it is in this one.”

–Patricia Mushim Ikeda
    Buddhist teacher / activist
    Oakland, California

Can be read as a ghost story, a meditation on how to disassemble the heartbreak machines; a catalog of copious tears and small comforts. This is a challenging example of personal bravery and filial love. It puts the “more” in memory.

–Leonard Rifas, Ph.D
   Communications, University of Washington

2Leaf Press Book LINK: http://2leafpress.org/online/dream-water-children/

Race-Nation-Gender-Class-Nation: Forget it. Never Forget it

Pat Parker (1944-1989), poet, teacher and activist, wrote this poem: For the White Person Who Wants to Know How to Be My Friend  and had this wonderful line:

The first thing you do is to forget that i’m Black.
Second, you must never forget that i’m Black.

For any social difference that exists in any society, we can place it there, in the space of “Black.”   In any case, color-blindness, gender-blindness, mixed-space blindness, sexual orientation blindness, socio-economic class blindness, neighborhood blindness, body-size blindness, nationality blindness etc. etc. —  we have to pay attention to how quickly we may subsume, make invisible, refuse (ignore), make trivial, something that makes a difference.  Sameness is too valorized in the globalizing society.  It’s not about any particular choices we have in holding on and letting go—-because even this is an action and a series of action (holding or letting go, that is), that come from political positionings that rely on privilege, luck, ability, amount of trauma, fear, violence, and a host of other things that come from oppression and social constructions of society.

Let us not forget how completely and utterly different we are from each other.  This way, we truly understand diversity.  If we “understand,” then perhaps we do not understand difference at all.  We just consume, co-opt, and bring into our own history and culture and language and values, that OTHER.  This is a violence to that Other.

But in saying they are different, do we automatically become AFRAID?   Or do we automatically become ANGRY?  Do we automatically IGNORE?  Do we assume we can translate, communicate?   Yes we can communicate, but understanding its partiality is important.

Honor you.  Honor me.

In our difference.  Utterly different.  Utterly ourselves.  Yet somehow, we are related as humans, as that who has experienced pain.

Perhaps other things.  But do not assume equality.

Be human.

There . . . . . .  Can we allow difficulty, struggle, powerful connection and dissonance?

First International Critical Mixed Race Studies Conference! A Success!!

The First International Critical Mixed Race Studies Conference was held at DePaul University in Chicago, Illinois in the USA on November 5-6, 2010.  According to reports (sadly I could not make it because I’m too poor!) — all programs were packed and/or standing room only and provided a vibrant atmosphere for community-building, alliance-building, critical discussion and thought, and efforts to think and re-think racialization in the context of issues of identities, gender(s), sexualities, class, nationalities, allegiences, fissures, parallels, disjunctures, and their relation to geopolitics, dominant narratives and the trope of the self.

From a privileged standpoint, and especially in the United States and the global north, issues of race, racism and racialization are couched only in the realm of identity and access to higher privilege, a sort of normalization of the current world system.  The question of social justice was raised by certain keynote speakers and others within various presentations and discussions, asking people to think about how the creation and process of racialization may repeat and maintain the current systems of domination, in the world.  How can a ‘mixed race pedagogy’ begin to address and actually begin and thoroughly intervene into the maintance of current traumas, violations, genocide, and invisiblization that passes for security, comfort, safety, and nation along with a privileging of being ‘mixed race’ and or monoracial?  How does ‘race’ and the process of creating racial categories and re-ifying ‘race,’ carry the impetus through which racisms could be practiced in our lives and between communities and nations?  How does NOT speaking about race also create further demarcations that make racism ‘normal’ and ‘tragic’ and ‘sad’ and ‘natural,’ thus portraying it as an aspect of life that has nothing to do with our own realities and/or ignorance and refusal?  How can these dynamics be shifted?

Congratulations to the conference organizers: Camilla Fojas, Wei-Ming Dariotis and Laura Kina, for pulling off what I gather, was a highly successful and promising event that we hope will become an annual event!!!!

More information can be seen here:

http://www.mixedracestudies.org/wordpress/?cat=13

Excellent reflection on the conference by Laura Kina, one of the organizers of this conference:

http://laurakina.blogspot.com/2010/11/watershed-moment-for-critical-mixed.html

Comments on Joss Whedon’s blogpost regarding Women in society

This post is dedicated especially to those who struggle to live in a world dominated by heterosexism, patriarchy and its various violences (i.e. everybody).

Link to Joss Whedon’s excellent post follows my commentary.

Joss Whedon is perhaps most famous for his show-runner/creator role in the US for television shows such as ‘Angel’ and ‘Buffy the Vampire-Slayer.’ He enjoys a large cult following globally. I feel he is an excellent producer/writer. In a blog post he wrote May 20, 2007, entitled: “Let’s Watch a Girl Get Beaten To Death,” he speaks strongly about heterosexism and the control of women in the world. His words are sparked by the broadcasting of the stoning-death of a 17-year old Yezidi Kurdish girl from Iraq.

Dua Khalil Aswad, a 17-year old Yezidi Kurdish girl from Bashka Ninawa in Iraq, was stoned to death on April 7, 2007. Her death was broadcast on the internet via recordings from a mobile phone. Her stoning has been said to have sparked several ‘reprisal’ attacks and massacres by Sunni Muslim fundamentalist extremists against certain Yezidi villages. Dua Khalil was a girl from the Yezidi culture/worldview, which pre-dates Islam. Much like Alevism, Yezidism has also been a persecuted religion by certain more fundamentalist Sunni and Shi’a groups. The division between Sunni and Shi’a has also sparked some violent antagonisms through history. Let us not forget that fundamentalism and extremism create these licenses to torture and kill. For women and children, this is even more pronounced.

Fundamentalism and extremism exist everywhere and in many forms. In the US and Europe, most of it is hidden behind closed doors and plays out violently in domestic spheres hidden from the public or inter-personally, and in the more poverty-stricken neighborhoods where most news programs and citizens of wealthy countries do not spend much energy or time. Much of it plays out unseen to the public in policy-making wars in government. Exclusions and dominations are everyday aspects of our lives.

When I was doing research on Kurdish groups in Europe, the United States, and in their traditional homelands in the Middle East, I often questioned my Kurdish friends on ‘honor killings.’ I was always mindful to not blame or speak from a feeling of being ‘better’ as an American or Japanese, which is always the risk in bringing these things up when one is ‘a westerner.’ In most cases, most Kurds think of honor-killings as horrendous and needing to stop. In many cases, Muslims who did not agree with honor killings, were correct in understanding that certain tribes, pre-dating Islam, practiced these killings, much like certain tribes in Christian areas. Those traditions have been carried on in certain families and Islam cannot be the blame. In a few cases, there were those who were quite open with their anti-female attitudes and told me that if they are dishonorable, they should be punished. They sounded the same as some of my American friends who felt that all gays should die or that the ruin of the world was when women were allowed to vote and work alongside men. One can imagine the non-heterosexual boys and the girls who are being raised by these men. We, the other people, know what goes on.

Intensifying the questions and investigative energy that I acquired when asking my Kurdish friends about honor killings, various kinds of anger and blame had to be side-stepped in the name of academic research and my own willingness and desire to get through to depths beyond the superficial and the spectacular of such horrific actions as honor killings in society. In the west, sudden gun-shooting rampages, Columbine, and daily rapes and tortures unseen and unreported, are also questions I have spent the last decades on deciphering. I do not believe in original sin, so the sickness of humanity, as far as I know, is not because we are born sick and twisted and violent. Things develop. But things also have pre-texts, histories, traditions, legacies. We are born into these. My thinking/feeling is that as long as they have been developed in history, they can also be undeveloped, shifted, constructed differently, albeit most of the time, in slow trajectories through our small, urgent, and sophisticated actions.

When asking leaders of certain Kurdish, Islamic, or Persian organizations regarding the traditions of honor killings, they were quick to blame ‘poor’ and ‘uneducated’ people on this. It was interesting, then, to discuss how, in certain cases, their own family members practiced this on a sister, or a niece, or another female member. In some of my friends’ cases, they may have grown into certain middle-class wealth but originally came from poor villages. Others, had come from wealthy families where perhaps one or two of the boys participated in honor killings. In some cases, I have also heard of honor killings against men, most for being homosexual. This points to another aspect of the violence of our societies. Our heterosexism also plays into the ignoring of male-targeted violence and publicizing anti-woman, anti-girl violence. The invisible killings of gays in culture, whether spiritually or physically) and male-to-male violence are normalized and therefore unattended to, while in the western nations there is a certain glorification of our horror at violence against girls and women. This system keeps everything in tact.

When speaking of these intense issues of violence, what we hear cannot always be assumed to be ‘truth’ or ‘lies.’ It is difficult, at this juncture, to get a feel for when things were down-played or made to ‘sound’ democratic and caring, when in fact, they did not believe their own words in wanting to dispel honor killings; or whether they truly wanted it to end. After all, I was an American and they wanted to be seen in the best light. I have questioned US Americans on their gay-bashing weekends where they tortured a gay boy behind a bar, and they were sometimes apologetic but I did not believe them. I am sure in some cases, they did change their thinking on this, but one can never be sure in the reality of face-to-face politics. However, in knowing most of my Kurdish friends and being with their families, I am certain that they held nothing back in their belief in the respect of women, simply by watching the consistency between their actions and beliefs while I spent time with them and to watch how Kurdish girls and women responded to them.

One Kurdish political figure I interviewed, became angry with me for questioning her (yes she was a woman) on honor-killings among the Kurds. She accused me of being an American who always wanted to present Middle Easterners in a bad light. She said she was tired of it, and began to name events and attitudes of the Americans that would qualify as the same–the denigration of women and its structural elements in the present world society. She was a strong woman who worked among the Kurdish and Middle Eastern elite and worked for human rights, gay rights, women’s rights, and Kurdish rights in the diaspora and in the Middle East. She was right in the sense of the ‘honor killing’ concept to be barbaric, yet propped up differently in the West and often ignored. Women in the US are often killed ‘spiritually.’ Internalized oppression also plays into how women play these dynamics out themselves.

This brilliant political woman, also told me that honor killings was a general Islamic problem in certain areas and was not a ‘Kurdish problem.’ I found this comment to be half-true. Yes, it is not a Kurdish problem. I responded back: “But Kurdish girls, women (and some boys and men) are dying from this. So don’t you think Kurdish leadership should work on it within the Kurdish community?” She agreed but she said that it is at the risk of being accepted by the West. In her logic, she said that if they began to work on it as a Kurdish issue, the four countries that rule the Kurds at the moment, as well as Europe and the US, would use this as a way to demonize the Kurds in world politics, just as they were trying to form more Kurdish empowerment in the community. The West, she believed, would quickly allow the Arab countries to continue what they do, while they could get more oil from them, while blaming the Kurds for honor killings and strengthening Turkey and the other Middle Eastern countries in their efforts to annihilate the Kurdish culture. I would also add here that for Yezidis, Alevis, Dersimians, Christians etc. who are also Kurdish, there are even worse pressures to consider. Mainstream Sunni and Shi’a Kurds would also join with Turkish, Syrian, Iraqi and Iranian mainstream Muslims in the denigration of them as ‘other.’ There is, in many cases, violences visiting them from other Kurds because of mainstream Islamic domination. In my experience, this was intense, as well as meeting many Muslim Kurds and Turks who felt that religion should be about peace and that those forcing violence on non-Muslims were wrong. In working on sexism and violence against women, as well as against gays and lesbians and non-heterosexually identified peoples in conflict zones, how do we respond?

She is right about the political strategy, I feel. But also, she was side-stepping the honor-killing issue. In the middle-class oriented culture of state-making, and elitisms, the honor-killings continue to work in many societies. It is not just a moral sexism issue. It becomes geopolitical, which holds racism and nationalism to be at play in this.

It is indeed easier for a westerner to criticize quickly and to not think of history and relations when intervening. Certainly we must criticize honor-killings and violence against women. But as a westerner, we must be respectful of painful family histories and politics. We can easily get someone killed even for speaking with us about these issues. We are easily racist and nationalist in having condescending attitudes toward those who practice honor killings. It has been a long road of violence. When a culture or community faces annihilation by western nations, dominant local nations (n this Yezidi case we can speak of the Middle East and Central Asia, as well as diasporic communities around the world) how can we intervene without the communities feeling encroached upon (western racism and moral high-grounds)? Do traditions easily change by our wishes in other communities? If not, do we just let things be? How do we work together? How can we empower stateless communities such as the various Kurdish cultures including the Yezidi, who are also oppressed by local communities? These are not easy answers. We must work urgently yet compassionately. Understanding histories and power-relations and thinking creatively would be a good start.

Photo of Du’a Khalil Aswad

In the West, women are, on the most part and often, still acting as objects of patriarchy and violence. This also allows male-to-male violence to be seen as ‘normal’ and ‘boys-will-be-boys’ continues unspoken and rarely paid attention to. At the point when the gun shoots, or the knife is wielded or the fist is thrown, it is too late. Hundreds and thousands of hours have constructed that moment. What I mean to say is that what people consider ‘violent’ is just the final act. Violence is in words, thoughts, motions, worldviews. Women also play into their own subservience through internalized oppression. Just today, I heard the ‘I’m sorry’ by women twenty times!!! For just stepping past me in the elevator or some other act I consider everyday. I consider this to also be a form of internalized oppression, internalized violence.

I remember a woman-friend in college who was always speaking of men being violent and macho and that just once, she would like sensitive caring men in her life. However, one day when she saw a man crying because his dog died, she called him a ‘fag’ for crying. I pointed out to her that a sensitive man was perhaps the last thing she could take. What would happen to ‘womanhood?’ When women take the place of the man in an already-patriarchal and violent system, do they become like men? What would be the requirements for de-violentizing our society? What would be required to live differently in a world not propped up by our own internalized oppressions and legacies? Our fears? And as we, perhaps, back-down from dreams and actions toward change and hope, we re-create the violences and oppressions. What are our choices? Can we respect women while disrespecting men and boys? How does this need to be shifted?

Joss Whedon’s excellent post from 2007, is an excellent example of admonishing ourselves to step-up, step-forward; not succumbing to brutalizations that happen through us in the largely heterosexist-dominant world systems into which we have been born. We have the power to change things. We must.

Read JOSS WHEDON’s excellent blog here:

http://whedonesque.com/comments/1327

For more information on Du’a Khalil Aswad: wikipedia – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stoning_of_Du%27a_Khalil_Aswad

Yezidi / Yazidi people/culture: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yazidi

Joss Whedon blog: http://whedonesque.com/

Slavoj Zizek on Charity & its collusions with oppressive results: A commentary

Slavoj Zizek (1949 –)  is a very popular Slovenian-born political philosopher, change-agent, and cultural critic.  Like most of the better cultural critics and revolutionaries, he cannot be locked into, or defined as representing any one branch, sect, ideological framework of any discipline, yet he is most definitely political/cultural in orientation.  He also invokes psychoanalysis as a gate through which he can link dominant cultural actions with psycho-social factors as well, although his psychological analysis seems to be closely linked with his understanding of Jacques Lacan (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacques_Lacan).  I, as you know, do not think of one philosopher or idea as all-encompassing and ‘good’ or ‘evil.’  I think of everything as multiple (remember Chimamanda Adichie‘s talk on multiple stories?) including our ideas and trajectories of action, which come from our world histories and our relations with each other’s histories, thoughts, cultures, and power relations.  I enjoy listening to, and reading Slavoj Zizek.  Many of his best works are within panel discussions or partnerships where he can discuss with others.

In this video, he presents his ideas on the idea of ‘charity,’ being a prioritized ‘good’ action on the part of a globalized dominant Christian narrative and now moral value, that has spread as a tactic of giving and compassion in the eyes of the media and political interest.  If you recall, I have mentioned that I feel and think that things are contradictory.  Within a contradictory reality, we must think of how our actions will have effects and choose accordingly, understanding the complex arrangements and further contradictions that arise from our actions.  Instead of being paralyzed because we are NOT doing ‘good’ or that we may do ‘bad,’ our analysis and knowledge and discussions can lead to better actions that take into account, the multiple stories that arise from our actions.  This, may then, lead to more ethical choices and diverse contexts through which we may analyze what road to take, what decisions we must make, and what processes we use to reach those determinants.

Charity has been viewed as an action that a benevolent and privileged group, family, or person—and now in the case of nations, the ‘good and benevolent nation’ would do in order to be seen as positive for the world to become better, or perhaps enjoy rewards in shape of arriving at a ‘kingdom of heaven.’   In any case, Slavoj Zizek presents a wonderful case for the collapsing of the idea of a ‘charity’ into our nation-state system, whereby charity is not totally what it seems.

Feminist and postcolonial and post-structural analyzers of economic development concepts, have long understood the uses of charity and ‘giving’ as a tactic of powerful nations to control the weaker nations (see the book: The Development Dictionary: The Guide to Knowledge as Power. Edited by Wolfgang Sachs. Published by Zed Books 1991).

With this in mind, Slavoj presents the idea of how our middle-class, comfort and ease-seeking mainstream societies of dominant nations, globally, would want to be charitable without lifting anything but a finger with a checkbook or a vote.  In other words, by being able to be charitable in a very immediate sense, without any contact with those we give to, or without any thought of how those recipients may be affected, we collapse buying as a consumer with the knowledge of our charity.  In buying a certain product, and having that product have a percentage go to some poor family, we feel good about ourselves.  Slavoj also questions if we actually do feel good, or that we are just doing it because it is available for us to do it but do not wholeheartedly believe that this is actually happening.

Slavoj does not mean, as he states, that we should NOT give and be charitable.  He asks us to see this as a contradictory affair, where the charity has oppression attached to it and that while we give, we must think of new and more just and ethical ways of caring for each other, beyond the consumerist and very alienated way of so-called ‘giving’ that we have inherited and reproduce.  It is attractive to our lazy middle-class ways, and also being satisfied with what we ourselves want (a cup of coffee, etc.), and we can ignore whatever else is happening in this case.

How can giving be bad?  Well, there are may ways to ‘give.’  I would say that Christian charity is born of privilege.  First, it may have started out as a moral act, but soon it became much more political.  In a sense, as I have mentioned before, the giving is actually quite condescending.  It is very self-centered and really not about ‘the other.’  It is about ourselves getting to heaven, doing ‘good.’  SEE GOD, I AM GIVING…….I AM A GOOD PERSON……..I’m trying to get to heaven…..See me.    I feel sorry for the person I give to, and may even get a sad look on my face, showing concern.  This may also be quite enraging for the receiver.  In the case of economic charity and the giving machine, the giving is never just giving.  The news that we watch about how the US gives to New Orleans after the Katrina hurricane, or how we give to the Iraqi children during war, or how we set up Offices in Japan after the Atomic bomb for victim relief……are all also fronts for more cruel and cold acts of crime, in some cases, by the American government.  These are no longer secrets.

There has been much lost in this charity game.   We must become more courageous and take our lives back, and in so doing, we take the ways we care for each other back.  First, I think, we must get through a century of fear and isolation that has guided and stunted our identities so that we no longer approach things as mysteries and different.  We must ‘know’ and recognize and be able to define so we can control.  So, I think Slavoj is correct in saying that charity is, in many ways, damaged.   Let us examine how we participate, but we must also not withhold giving where we need to, as we have no other system to give to those far away and the necessities of our privilege in the US or the UK or in Japan, or other first-world nations, can be used to give in whatever way we can.  And as Slavoj suggests, we must , at the same time, be discussing and implementing new ways that may disturb the current mainstream system of oppressions and perhaps pave the way for new systems not born of reactionary patterns born from our current situation, breathing life anew.

Slavoj Zizek overview: http://www.iep.utm.edu/zizek/

Chimamanda Adichie – Single Story Perception & Understanding

Nigerian novelist/writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie‘s writings are among the many good works that present stories of difference.  In the video here, she gives a fantastic talk about how multiple stories of one subject, are important in how we may interact/not interact with that subject; perhaps in a more thoughtful or just way, ideally, than approaching a subject with a single story in conscious/unconscious mind.

This is an important point which I, in its basic way, agree with.  We are multiple, we are not singular.  Our stories have multiple points and trajectories, multiple positions from which we come to life and how our stories are told to self and other, can determine many attitudes and opinions and processes.  If our multiple-ness, is taken into account, then perhaps there is more patience, more reflection and pause, more of a place from which to engage other, perhaps understand positions in relation to culture and oppression, resistance and heritage, privilege and sorrows, joys and questions.  Single stories do cut-off history, cut-off political positions brought on through histories, cut-off the circulation of the realities of life and its movements in time and change.  Multiple stories may open avenues in taking these into account.

This being said, I have a critique of one aspect that may come up in listening to, seeing, and engaging this talk which is so eloquently spoken.  It is what I have mentioned before in my blog posts, and through which I speak on practically every post.  It is this question of how to accept/not accept: Difference.  I do not say that Chimamanda Adichie means one thing or another, but I am certainly opening up a discussion about how she approaches the topic of difference.  She says that people often have single stories and this closes a ‘fuller’ understanding or the realization of the similarities between people, communities and cultures.  She then goes on to say that people have more similarities than differences and there is an assumption that this is ‘better’ or that it is a fact of life that there are more similarities, which means this is more positive.  I am not sure that she means this exactly, but this is certainly one way in which Chimamanda Adichie speaks to the difference/similarities dynamic.  I say that this ‘similarities and differences’ polarity is not eternal, or a set of natural ‘facts’ and that this similarity that is so often prioritized in the world, is not positive necessarily.  To put it another way, I think that valorizing similarities is an act that can legitimize violence based on difference, with the matter of sameness and similarity being measured and applied as criteria for treating someone or a group or thing, with respect or dignity.  This is a problem with liberal thinking as well as conservative in the United States.

The measure of similarity and sameness should NOT be a criteria for measuring respect or how we treat someone or culture or community or history, or how we approach avenues for engagement and/or understanding.  Not understanding should be just as much of a pleasure and accepted space.  In fact, the reason there are more similarities today than ever before, is that there is less diversity.  One can go to any scientific journal and there, it is no secret.  There are extinctions in progress, as well as less species of most of the beings on this earth, as human beings increase their numbers.  There is less diversity not just because of over-population.  I say there is less diversity because of neo-colonization– i.e. globalization, which is an extension of colonial expansionism and what goes along with it in the nation-state system:  homogenization.  Everything is become more of the same.  This sameness has been constructed through history through the colonization of minds and lands, cultures and ideas, killing, torture, coercion and manipulation and exclusion through laws, textbooks, military weapons, covert agents amidst cultures, educational policies, judicial systems, and everything else we know to be our reality.  Assimilation and exclusion have worked hand-in-hand in order to create national cultures in the global system.  This is a continuation of the colonization process.  Difference can only be understood.  It cannot be different and not understandable.  This is the reason we must experiment on people and animals, develop stories around them that make scientists and counselors wealthy and create medicines and psychologies that deem certain things abnormal, inexcusable, sad and assimilatable, or wrong.  Learning to question ourselves and others become wrong.  It is now normal to think of everything as right and wrong, good and bad.  We either know, or are embarassed to say we don’t know.  Or we just repeat what our elders and teachers have taught us, or our parents, or our own reactions to what they’ve said because we have hated them.  In any case, our perceptions of reality do not accept difference as well as we would like.  So if we are to follow Chimamanda Adichie’s path, we come to the same tactic of exclusion and marginalization.  There is not acceptance of difference if we only look for and fetishize ‘similarity.’  Looking for a mirror in others is a sure way to the death or invisibility of both yourself and other.

You can do your own experiment. For instance, go through the history books of practically any culture group through history and pick out pictures of soldiers and their uniforms over time.  So start with pictures and drawings of how soldiers in Turkey or in Guatemala or in China or England looked in the 12th century, the 14th century, then the 17th century, the 19th century, the 20th century early and late and in the present.  See what the uniforms look like for each country.  You can do this with several other aspects of life as well, such as clothing, in general, or food, etc.  The affluent people from various cultures around the world starting in the 12th century to the present should confirm what I get at.   It will not be the ‘same’ in every case.  But there is certainly a pattern.  And do we excuse this as ‘evolution’ and ‘progress?’  Shall we now have to look at who used these terms ‘evolution’ and ‘progress’ and address and analyze for ‘what purpose’ these terms were used and how they were used to subjugate and annihilate?

So I disagree with the tone and assumption that Chimamanda Adichie brings in speaking to the issue of single versus multiple stories.  I like how she approaches the subject and explains it.  I do not agree with her notions of making sameness and similarity a criteria for harmony or a reason to let alone and not molest or control.  Isn’t that the reason colonization was justified in the first place?  Why genocide is justified from its beginnings in massacres and to the present day?  Is our understanding a criteria for killing and maiming, manipulating and giving permission to change the other?  However, I do not condone unethical behaviors and traditions so do not say I condone things like female circumcision and other such things.  However, I do not believe that not understanding someone or some culture group or tradition or history, means that we must.   In order to do this, we must co-opt ‘the other’ into our own understanding.  There are differences.  Why are we so afraid of non-difference (irreconcilable differences that is further than what we think about as ‘different’)?  It speaks more about us than of the other.

So this wonderful talk with fantastic, lucid points about history, education, power, and relations, is as is everything, multiple.  I only take issue with the will to incorporate other into an understanding that allows us to be at peace with difference.  In that instant, we are even further apart and alienated.  And in our present climate, this would give a legitimate go-ahead for a take-over and a make-over; violence as some normal activity.  It is a something we need to de-colonize in our thinking.

In relation to the subject matter and analyzing content while appreciating, we must also look at where this video rests.  It rests in the TED site.  If one has so much money behind it, so much corporate connection, then we must also think of it as towing mainstream thoughts in some ways, perhaps in subtle ways in more of the radical thinking.  Let us not be mistaken, this is not a radical change site.  It gives comfortable, informative, interesting, and safe thoughts.  For instance, for as much great things Al Gore has done in warning the public about Global warming, he does not touch his constituency, his ‘group’ and friends, who have been the ones to engineer the human quotient and engines to the destruction of our ecology.  Until he himself becomes radicalized, he keeps himself and our elites and our patriotisms comfortable, continuing the invisible domination by elitism and privilege without a shift in thinking.

And with all this, I highly recommend this wonderful talk that pushes mainstream thought to the edges of history, colonization of the mind, forgetting, education, nation-state and cultural/historical difference.  Critique is not about excluding and putting down, it is about analyzing its various positions, approaches, assumptions, possibilities reached for freedom and creativity, aspects that need further investigation, etc.  Enjoy, think, appreciate, change!

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie website:  http://www.l3.ulg.ac.be/adichie/

TED (technology-education-design): Remarkable Talks site: http://www.ted.com/

Nation & Person – Bullying & Difference: The Bully Project

I am a person who has been bullied.  As a child in both Japan and the United States, I was the target of bullying.  Both of my parents were also targeted.  The imagined ideal, given to us by our cultures and societies, in the context of certain times, when certain things are happening, allow bullying as a fabric of  legitimizing ‘survival of the fittest’ memes that circulate as universal natural sciences, masquerading as social science as well.

We handle being targeted differently, according to severity, our personalities, the communities we live in or transition into, the time period and circumstances, as well as an effect that anyone hardly mentions:  accumulation.  Bullying is not just about a person or group targeting someone for their looks and/or behavior or race and other factors perceived as ‘go’ lights to offend and abuse, maim and kill spirits.  It is mixed with national and cultural histories as well.  It is usually repetitive because it is the relationship between dominant and subordinate.

As an example; in my mother’s case, she was born in China, then her family fled to Japan when she was little.  Her mother was assassinated by national Japanese soldiers.  My mother’s mother was Chinese and Austrian.  All non-Japanese in Japan in the late 1930s and early 1940s, were suspect and were mostly accused of being spies.  In Japanese schools and neighborhoods, under the fascist dictatorship of Tojo, the police were basically terrorists.  In addition, some people in every neighborhood would be branded ‘good citizens’ by being the neighborhood watch, reporting to authorities and being free to hold people and situations they deemed ‘un-national’ and unpatriotic.  Of course.  As one can guess from this scenario, the racism intensifies, legitimizing very harsh penalties for Japanese who even socialize with or are seen with a non-Japanese, much less being free to marry or whose parents and relations were from different nations and cultures.  This scenario also legitimates all sorts of lies and stories that could be made as a tool of power if one simply doesn’t like someone.  Someone may invent a sordid story which suddenly becomes more true and believable at this point, legitimizing violence.  This scenario, is not too different from other areas and times around the world, when the building of a nation rests on certain intensifications of racism and other forms of marginalizations including local stigmas, legitimating superiorities and punishments.

In addition, my mother experienced being bombed by the Americans and having an older sister killed in Hiroshima.  Another older sister of my mother’s committed suicide after social stigmatization.  She had been kidnapped and made a comfort woman for the Japanese imperial army.  My mother was bullied in elementary and junior high school in Japan, for being non-pure Japanese.  In high school, my mother became a bully, belonging to a band of girls feared at her school.  It is not that one decides, necessarily.  The circumstances warrant some response.  In any case, violence does not just go away.  It always has effects.

One can imagine this tender beautiful, funny woman who is my mother, at certain times, would become an ugly and scary, violent woman.  I would sometimes fear her as much as love her as a mother and confidant.  The fabric of all of our lives are made of this.  Those people who experience non-violence in the home, have most likely been shielded from the exploitative violences that have shaped privilege.  Privilege is sometimes un-thought, unspoken.  For instance, a Japanese woman who has experienced fascist governments, suicides, daily humiliations by classmates, abuse and being ordered around by a stepmother and older brother and is bombed by the Americans everyday and a host of other things, cannot be told to be peaceful and quiet and good.  While that is true, many Americans think that they should, while their families were the ones building the bombs and making the American war effort succeed without bombs to run from or fascist government dictates.  They have been told that the Japanese were bugs that should be smashed off of the face of the earth and that Japanese knew nothing of democracy.  It was a sham, a propaganda, a way to be superior.  The Japanese would also make stories of the Americans and this would keep the violence at a high level in both countries.  Whether one was a soldier or not, it doesn’t matter.  The racist hate-mails I receive in the present day, are not from former US soldiers in the World War fighting the Japanese.  People calling me ‘Jap’ and slant-eye that should die, often come from young people.  Their grandparents have passed it down.  There is a certain worldview.  It is politically incorrect so it is not around on postcards and bugs bunny cartoon shows, or in magazines as they were regularlyduring  the war.  The hatred is kept private, and comes out towards people like myself, unseen to others.  It is often a surprise to classmates and friends and sometimes those racist-carrying people would be defended and I would be labeled a paranoid lunatic who is making it up.  This scenario is one such generalized example of the legacy of racism and legitimate bullying and how it is carried forward.  It looks differently according to climate and circumstance, etc. but it is still there.  Other people have gone through changes about this.  In my mother’s case, being told to be ‘good’  by people who are in a privileged position in relation to the history between the Japanese and the Americans, the being told is a furthering of the bullying.  It already establishes a positioning in relation to violence.  The privileged who carry out the violence, then continues to tell people how they should act in relation to the violence?  This is violence as well.  My mother did not invent fascism.  She was a little girl in a country that was ruled by fascist leaders.  It was not pretty.  But neither was what Woodrow Wilson and the other bankers and corporatists and the military leaders of the US and England did, continuing to fabricate reasons to amass finances and resource-power through militarization and superiority over the Asian nations, attempting to colonize before the World War.

Bullying has many faces.  The inter-personal bullying is a part of how nation-states can become strong.  Bullying is a way in which we may choose ‘the strong’ over the weak.  The CIA recruits people who do not have feelings and who can carry out orders with a smile.  They know how to smile and be charming.  Being detached from compassion is a part of smiling and being charming.  They don’t have to be mutually exclusive.  Some of the coldest and calculating people are the most charming.  Yet they are the quiet bullies.  Some are more overtly aggressive while others do it covertly.  Torturing is a learned thing.

In the movie ‘ The Bully Project‘ ( http://www.thebullyproject.com/_/Bully_Project_home.html) one notes in one of the stories that even after a youth kills himself, the bullies come to school wearing fake nooses around their necks as a furthering torment.  It is continuing fun.  It is not thought of as something bad or wrong.  There are smiles and laughter and joinings in. The school board continued to ignore it, because it was embarrassing to them.  They wanted it quiet.  The parents had fought long and hard and yet the school officials kept it hushed.  These parents, however, did not give up.  It is sad that so many of the parents of the other children (the majority), did nothing but listen to the speeches like it was entertainment, telling their children to stay away from the families of the bullied.  In this way, the institution, the school, condones the bullies.  It knew it was.

In doing anthropological/sociological research on prison systems, and the spread of US systems into Turkey and Japan, for instance, which I have done, it became clear how prison systems are related to bullying and the spread of military superiority.  Time and again, when interviewing prisoners and former prisoners as well as prison guards and interrogators, whether reading their accounts or interviewing them myself, that it was important that the military had those who are expert bullies who felt nothing in relation to perpetrating interrogations and torture.

Nowadays, in the television programs and the most popular movies, violent and malevolent speech and physical brutality as a way of communicating distaste and devaluing the other is commonplace.  Smartass comments are funny, even though it is often violent.  Often, nothing different can enter.  As much as we think that every individual makes their own decisions, every individual is in a different position in relation to violence, and depends on class, race, and behavior in relation to masculinity and femininity continuums, body motion techniques (do I walk right? eat right? talk right? etc.).  So the connection between violence, heterosexism and homophobia, patriarchy and militarism are very close in American society and most of the wealthier nations.  Most likely this is becoming more true as we speak, in a globalizing world, in the wannabe countries.  There is less diversity than ever before.  More violence in the world than ever before.  Why?

I want to applaud and support The Bully Project for being one of the strongest voices to speak to bullying and its connection to nation-state, masculinity and manhood, and the non-acceptance of difference.  If we cannot co-opt and/or recruit into our own fold, then we antagonize and destroy.  These are the only options increasingly in the globalizing system.  And we know there are most of us living, who fake it.  Then we wonder why we are depressed, seeing therapists, destroying our families, getting drunk and doing drugs all the time, having addictions, etc. etc.  I do not believe we need more drugs and therapists to cure.  These are social problems related to the violence that is our modern and postmodern cultures, constantly being created by either our actions or our inactions.

My mother turned to bullying for awhile, to combat being swallowed by bullies.  that aspect of her has not changed, even though she is no longer throwing her weight around in school hallways.  Others like myself, chose more silence.  However, later it caught up with me and I tried to take leave of this world.  It didn’t work. Suicide is an ultimate harm to oneself.  I chose other routes afterwards.  My father took the route of trying to assimilate.  As a Black man in the US, he wanted to be the fairest, well-spoken and educated, open-minded man and was truly a humanist.  But he gave up so much in order to be this.  And humanism has so many problems insofar as diversity is concerned.  And there are some things he does not understand because of it.  Short of accusing my father of being ‘white,’ how can we communicate through difference?  My father feels (at least the last few times we spoke) that all humans are alike with trivial differences.  His actions also speak to this philosophy.  My mother is the opposite.  She feels that people are very different and this cannot be reconciled and we have to live with it.

The Bully Project, which is a movie that shows the crisis in which US society shows itself in young people, yet is mostly ignored.  This Project addresses questions about what is legitimated socially and about community and nation.  How can a nation have nice and compassionate kids while everyday we know that bombs fall representing us, onto families who are not running governments, being killed as pawns of difference-equals-expendable?  All the moral preaching won’t work.  It is a lesson in hypocrisy and illegitimacy.  It is a lesson in the violent underpinning of Empire and nation-building.

The Bully Project is about all of us, whether we believe so or not.  Where do you stand? What do we do?

The Bully Project website:  http://www.thebullyproject.com/_/Bully_Project_home.html

No Bully website:  http://www.nobully.com/

Impunity and the Fabric of Society: commentary

This is a commentary for the previous post – on the 108 Judo class deaths in Japan.

Kobayashi Yasuhiko skipped his judo class at a junior high school in Yokohama Japan.  Later that day, he was pronounced dead.  According to the way this plays out in the courts, as well as in Japanese popular society, it is ‘an accident.’   What happens to people when they are not persons with lives and histories, but are a part of a large society, culture, nation and are nothing but statistics?  It favors refusing to take care.  It favors ignoring.  It favors ‘life as usual’ for most of us.  In this way, as our so-called ‘free’ societies such as the US, Japan, most Western European countries, Turkey, South Korea, and all those so-called ‘democratic’ and almosts, create an illusion of freedom as bestowed upon us by a kind and benevolent, well-intentioned society.

What happened to Kobayashi Yasukhiko was that the judo teacher had to punish him for being undisciplined, for missing a practice.  So when the student arrived at the school, the judo teacher demanded a match with his ranking judo superior and champion in a punishing and grueling match.  He was choked by that champion to the floor, then choked again by the teacher while they grappled him and threw him violently onto the floor.  The boy experienced severe internal bleeding (subdural hematoma) and died.  This is an ‘accident’ in Japanese society.

Now there is an association in Japan called ‘Japan Judo Accident Victims Association.’ http://judojiko.net/eng/

Do we not find this perverse? I am not questioning the group itself, it is needed.  What I question is the violence of a dominant society that makes the forming of this group necessary.  In all countries, this is a problem: the state’s refusal to take care of its subjects.  In this sense, the violence is a monopoly of the state and it can ignore citizens if it needs to protect itself.  The state, being an imaginative outline on a map with its police, prisons, military, and industries and institutions, imagines itself as having to protect itself.  The people who work for the state, imagine themselves to BE the state! Imagine this!  So victims of legitimized violence must suffer enough to found an association so that their voice can be taken seriously by the state.  What harm does the state see it taking in when a group of parents say that there is a strange legitimizing of violent and abusive behaviors that pass for normal and okay in society?

The problem starts with the silencing of ‘being killed’ and the replacement with the term ‘dying’ (assumes non-intention by a person or group and blame is placed on a disease or accident)  or ‘death ( just a statistic somewhere).  People are being killed by active agents that are most often a complex nexus of legitimate events, things, spaces and cultural systems (such as ‘boys will be boys’ and ‘survival of the fittest’).

Silence is a weapon of the rulers.  Silence must be counted upon as a major factor in maintaining a society.  Making something as an individual anomaly, an individual issue, is counted upon and is effective in most of the first world nations today, and others as well.  On the other spectrum in these societies, there is also the parallel motivation to blame everything on the state and the government.  So on the one hand, it is individualized, made an individual case.  On the other hand, it is something that the government and the state must take care of, it’s not our individual fault.  Both of these trajectories, dualistic poles of behavior, are from the issue of individuals in increasingly individualizing societies, that disempower by disengaging.  The self has tremendous pressure and the only thing it knows is that it is under a system, but at other times it is never that system (ignoring).

In another instance, Japan was at the center of an international controversy surrounding increasing numbers of people dieing while at work.  This phenomena, called:  karōshi 過労死  ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karōshi ) became almost an embarassment for the Japanese, once internationalized.  At the beginning, when the first few had died, the Japanese government used the excuse that if this were a workplace problem, then all people who are over-worked while working, should be dying.  But since they are not, it is not the workplace or the government who is responsible, but this is specific to those individuals.  On these grounds, there was no compensation.  What the hell??  But doesn’t this sound familiar?  As the state and corporations run most of our lives anyway, when convenient, they have the lawyers and thinkers to have logical defenses such as those, to make individual lives suddenly not their responsibility.  Individual differences in increasingly individualizing societies, are individually more free to roam around and make personal choices and have personal opinions, but the body, the health, the worldviews and the movement of the body in certain ways here and there, and in this way (think of brushing teeth every morning, then jogging, then eating breakfast, then going to work, then stopping for a drink after work, then going home and seeing family, then watching television, then waiting for the weekend–over and over again and over again)  seals our bodies in certain ways and repetitions.  Mechanized lives that we don’t recognize as mechanized, routine-ized.   For the wealthy, they rarely follow these routines so they are totally unconcerned about the bulk of the people in their own societies.  There is NO RECIPROCAL relationship in individual societies.  Each of us do what we do.  So in BEING KILLED, we just call it one person’s death in this way, or he or she or that dies in this way.  Oh how unfortunate.

Well, unfortunately for Japan, at least, more and more people are questioning this disconnect between the people working for and caring for certain things but this care NOT BEING RETURNED, not being reciprocated.  I can almost hear some people now reading this—–‘who says it has to be reciprocal?  We are FREE TO LEAVE.’   Such is how individual freedom goes.  Leaving something we need, or leaving something we love, or feel connected to is Painful, and perhaps life-killing.  But we rarely acknowledge this.  Increasingly, especially in the world’s wealthiest nations, all that we are is in our heads and our bodies are just there to carry our heads around.  We stomp on the earth, we pollute, we say whatever, think whatever, other people have their realities, I have my own, what else is there…… etc. etc.   To me, this is what the Buddhists call the ‘Age of degeneration.’   The Bible calls ‘The End times”.   Self-hatred is there.  It is not natural but certainly foretold and followed.

Yasuhiko’s story, being killed by his judo teacher; and the Japanese salary-men’s deaths at work, seem to be ‘the way things are.’  They supposedly are not killed by the silent and abusive modern society we live in, by our ignorance.  Even if we understand it, we don’t seem to have any creativity enough to fight it so we may succumb to silently going about our business.  Others find ways to begin subverting, and then changing things for the better.

Corporate and government leaders, and all leaders of anything in society, must be held accountable for how things are.  At the same time, we ourselves, whether leaders or not, must be held accountable for whatever we do to disempower ourselves, or become arrogant in thinking that we do not need guides and teachers in our lives.  We must continue to think and perhaps think better than we do now, in our complex world, to navigate the various mental and emotional games we have all learned to play in the modern world to get by.  That, I feel, is the most challenging aspect of social change.

I pray and work hard for people to begin thinking about what kind of societies we live in and therefore participate in the killing of ourselves and others and the ecology willingly.   And I pray that we become empowered instead of paralyzed by our sadness and rage, to empower ourselves to work differently.  First, we must recognize the difference between ‘being killed’ and ‘dieing.’  Silence by a nexus of gendered notions of toughness and legitimate forms of disciplining, which can allow abuse and hatred and condones it, and how this spreads to all aspects of society in the family , the workplace and leisure and to human relations and nations–must mean that these are not natural but made-up and that these can be changed through equal amounts of work in new directions.

In what various ways and methods does your society, culture, nation, neighborhood, family, participate in the collusion of violence that passes for silence and manhood, ‘bad’ personalities and nature?  In what ways can we begin to seriously look at this issue, bring discussions and come to formulate ways to stop maintaining the fiction of these things as ‘nature’ and inevitable?  In what ways do masculinities become linked with violence as natural?  In what ways does this masculinity, then, become beneficial to strong societies that want to maintain themselves (military strength and the militarization of society)?  In what ways are women and non-males inscribed in an empowerment that is falsely viewed as such but in reality is a patriarchal form of power, a violent-ization of power; and is an intensification of sexism?  How do women internalize patriarchal violence in order to be ‘equal,’ and perpetrating violences? In what ways can all of these things be changed?  How could Yasuhiko still be in judo classes, perhaps performing the sport that he loves, without being killed, then labelled an accident?

TASHA – The Best Female Blasian Rapper II: Yoon MiRae “T” (티) 윤미래 : Biracial expressions II

Photo courtesy of SookYeong at wordpress

More  “T” music – as she is also known in the global R&B world, and her former name “TASHA.”

Her name is YOON MI RAE.

She’s not just a rapper.  She encompasses R&B and balladry.  She’s one of the best anywhere. She is the undisputed queen of Korean Black music.

There have been others like her in the past, in East Asia and Southeast Asia, who have been shunned and their lights never shone to the world.  Now that the world seems readier, in many ways, while in some nations, including in Japan and other countries it is still slow and the repressed expressions of life and creativity live side-by-side.  The empowering of “T” into the limelight is a path of empowerment.  At the same time, it continues the sequestering of difference into entertainment and sports, which seems to now be the globally accepted places/spaces where multi-racial and bi-racial persons of Asian and/or black descent, can shine more.  Even as there is a ‘shining,’ I have found in my own life and in talking to other blasians, the road is still steep.  Endurance and commitment have to be nurtured, as many of the sub-cultures of identity and color and difference, do not completely accept, if at all.  The glittering lights should not be seen a totally happy place, a place where we can say “oh now they’re fine, those poor people who have endured so much–now they can be somebody…”  We can think that people have ‘found their paths’ but how much of that ‘path’ is a cornering, an act of survival?  It is most certainly a freedom.  But is freedom only freedom?  What I point to is that freedom is small in relation to the spaces that are closed and which that ‘path’ is really a space that the oppressions don’t cover.  It is a small escape hatch, if you will, while most of the dominant spaces still remain closed.  It LETS DOMINANT SOCIETY off, disguising itself as:  ‘see….we’re a ‘free and democratic society–we let EVERYONE find their path.”   Is it THAT INDIVIDUAL’s path?  In some ways, it was chosen by the structure of society FOR THEM/ for US.  Freedom is most often, and increasingly and globally, an un-freedom created by dominant society.

How?  What restrictions do the open spaces cover?  How does this, then, assuage those who feel powerless or ignorant, to do much to intervene into the racist structures of our society.  Music is an outlet and a place for survival, for many.  But other spaces may close.  And perhaps others may open.

At the same time…….as I have hinted at in my earlier post on ‘MULTI-RACIAL….Transnational Elitisms??” — it can also become a cover for assimilation into the middle class and the globalization of sameness and comfort and safety.  It is a razor’s edge.  Difference will then be subsumed under ‘YOU need to make it into the middle class–LOOK! I’ve done it.  You have NOT arrived until you do it like I do….”

This is so often what it looks like.  It’s painful.  It is still a way of condescending against different lives and also classism.  We must alleviate the fissures of class and domination, yet at the same time, not wish other communities and cultures to assimilate.

As one may become more visible, perhaps through openings in entertainment or sports, one then enters a whole other set of multiple oppressions to work on.  It can become a choice.  It is — SAD, enRAGING, and also a space for us to become privileged in our knowledge and resource-amassing– to struggle for empowerment and justice in the world.  Having ARRIVED into middle-class positions, who want and have some access to higher elite resources and comforts, what do we do with it?  Do we then, point to the lower again and become that which assimilates, condescends, wanting everything to be homogenized, the same, constricted, small, superior?

“T” or Tasha, invites us to enter into the boardroom of a mass society of marginalized and brutalized underclasses who are formed by those who have been born into their ‘natural’ class and use it to wield the power of assimilation and superiority –mostly through being unaware. It is not entirely only about RACE.  It is also about gender.  As a female and as bi-racial, and as dark-skinned, she has endured the lines through which dominance is activated in mainstream lives across the world.   “T” invites us, first, to be conscious of that life.

If we hear the words, we can hear YOUR voice, no matter how wealthy or privileged.  The whole world has internalized oppression.  Even as we move up in socio-economic class, we can perhaps remember that there is so much within our lives and selves we GIVE UP and destroy in ORDER TO ARRIVE at that position.   YES, we are all under the system.  Those, like myself and T, have struggled in the racially-constructed oppressions.  Perhaps even as socio-economically determined, adding another slew of intensities.   Being sensitive in listening……we hope that this music does what it wants to do—–to NOT JUST understand an individual’s pain, but that individual pain most often comes from SOCIALLY-CONSTRUCTED and AGREED UPON and often INVISIBLE forms of oppression.  And often not so invisible but invisible when we are too busy with our own individual concerns and not with policies, institutions and perceptions that hold it in place, even as individuals may become aware of how their own lives have been affected.  How about an understanding of how most of us need to fight against, and transform all the myriad oppressions that make us slaves to them while we try to gain access to privileges.

Racism and sexism, heterosexism and classism, anti-semitism, able-ism and other isms are alive everywhere.  “T” is asking for us to listen and FEEL something that we must fight together.

Blorean, Blasian, Korean, Black-American, African-American– sings of the vicissitudes of being biracial/multiracial in societies that shun and legitimate the shunning, through the silence of the majority–thus legitimizing and upholding the racist violence–including exclusion and physical and emotional abuse and brutality of the direct perpetrators.  The loneliness and the will to survive go hand-in-hand– tremendous obstacles not understood by most.  This torture applies to the various exclusions and the brutality of majorities and minorities within our own and against the ‘other’ in our world.  The effects come to song.

I absolutely love this song “Memories” with lyrics below the video.  It is mixed English and Korean.   You can get an idea of her vocal abilities and style.  T’s got it going on!

I also include more video songs and an INTERVIEW in ENGLISH below.

WONDER WOMAN –  Here ‘T’ sings/raps about female empowerment !!   She says:  “Dem wonder, Dem wonderin’ but I’m nappy-headed illegal Rasta.  YEAH!!

AS TIME GOES BY –  a love-song ballad sung in English

TO MY LOVE – R&B ballad sung in Korean

INTERVIEW IN ENGLISH from 2002

EXCERPT from ‘MONSTER’ in English: