Scary, sad stuff

I'm trying not to be political on this blog, but I wanted to share these two videos that almost made me cry. If you're a McCain/Palin supporter, you may not want to watch. Then again, maybe you should... I know (I hope!!) that people like this are in the minority, and I'm sure there are equally horrible people on the other side, but regardless, this election is really bringing out the ugly in people. For those people who say racism isn't alive and well, I think this is proof enough.

Really sad:


Really frightening:



If those didn't work, you can view them here and here.

Olympic obsession

I've been somewhat obsessed with the Olympics--I didn't think I would be, but I've been watching it almost every night. I've been fascinated by some of the side stories, too: the lip syncing little girl at the Opening Ceremony who wasn't pretty enough (I think she's adorable!), the dancer who was paralyzed in an accident during rehearsals, the controversy over the Chinese gymnasts' ages, Michael Phelps's quest and the fingernail finishes, etc. etc. But one of the controversies that has most fascinated me is that of the Spanish basketball team's advertisement featuring the teams all posing doing the somewhat Universal "slanty eye" imitation that all Asian-Americans will cringe at and recognize from their childhoods. 

I first became aware of this from this gawker post, and consequent follow-up posts, and then also some coverage in the NY Times. What most fascinated me were the incredible amount of comments--the NY Times article's comment count is up to 1,098! The commenters are from all over the world, and obviously many of them from both "sides" were quite upset and angry. Many Spanish people were in an uproar about being called racist, and most of the comments I've read from Spain are by people insisting that the ad was simply a joke, a "wink" at the host country of the Olympics, done "in love" and how is it even possible that people interpret the ad as being racist?

My personal first reaction to the ad was to cringe in disbelief. Honestly, I don't think anyone who has ever had this gesture done to them has misinterpreted the intention of the perpetrator as intending anything but ridicule. But of course, it crossed my mind briefly--maybe all those kids were actually just "winking" at me, and expressing their affection for me! Ha.

But in this case, I personally don't feel that there was any real malicious intent on the participants, although it's hard for me to believe that the ad was done with love and respect to the Chinese people. However, I do object to the Spanish reactions in the comments--even if they did not intend the ad to offend, people were offended. I wish they would simply try to understand why some people reacted that way, and apologize. 

I do feel there was ignorance involved. And it made me realize that I love living in a politically correct culture. Many people condemn political correctedness, but it allows me to live in the world without feeling that people are constantly seeing me as an "other," and knowing that without overt racism, perhaps future generations will change their thinking from previous generations. Then again, I did go to UC Berkeley, the PC capital of the world, so I may have a skewed view of this.

The controversy also made me wonder if the people of China have ever encountered this gesture--it seems unlikely to me, because they are the majority. So it's likely that they wouldn't be offended by the ad at all.

Anyway, I'm over my obsession with this controversy now. I'll leave you with this hilarious segment from the Jon Stewart show concerning many of the controversies I've mentioned above.

Asian women and gay men. What would you have done?

Last week after playing darts with coworkers, some of my group started hankering for Karaoke. We decided to go to Lucky Cheng's, which is dubbed "The Drag Queen Capital of the World." I had never been there before, but had heard good things about it. We walk in, and they haven't started Karaoke yet, and as we're waiting in the lobby area, one of the "ladyboy" hostesses looks at my coworker J and says, "You look familiar--don't I know you from somewhere?" which embarrasses him because this is the second time he's been out with coworkers where he's been mistaken as being gay. Then "she" looks at me and says, "Is this your boyfriend?" and we both say NO but she continues and says, "Because you know what they say about men who date Asian women..." and I sigh and nod and say, "Yes, I know what they say, but I find it insulting."

What I know she's getting at is that some people say that many gay men who are perhaps still in the closet date Asian women to cover up for the fact that they're gay. I know this because I had an incident with a gay friend of mine a few years ago--he made an offhand remark to another friend about how he thought my boyfriend at the time was gay because he was dating me. Needless to say, I had a talk with that friend. And then recently other friends have brought up the book Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides which I own but have not yet read. Apparently, there's as passage in the book where he talks about this "phenomenon" as well. I have no idea if it is based at all in reality. And I'm not quite sure what the reasoning would be for this, perhaps that Asian women are seen as being "exotic" and desirable, so that if a man is seen with an Asian woman, then people will assume that they must be having sex with them. But this is just my guess.

So, as I said, I said to "her" that I found that generalization offensive, but she is oblivious to my protests and is putting on a show, has her whole routine going, and starts strutting around saying, "They walk around in Chelsea with an Asian woman on their arm, saying 'Look at me...I'm not gay! I have an Asian girlfriend!'" and she goes on and on, and I keep saying, "I find that offensive" but it falls on deaf ears and at one point she says, "And the Asian woman is okay with it, because she passive." And finally, what for me was the final straw, she says, "And the Asian girl is happy with it because she gets to say, 'Look at me, I'm with a white guy!'"

Argh. It's at this point I turn to my friends and say loudly, "Let's go somewhere else" and so we all leave. I don't look back.

Anyway, I managed to completely put the incident behind me that night, but the next morning I woke up for no reason at 5 am, remembered what happened, and got extremely angry.

The hostess happened to be black, which doesn't play a role in the incident at all, except for the fact that it frustrates me even more when one minority group is racist towards another. The fact that "she" belonged to two disenfranchised groups made the whole incident even more frustrating.

I keep wondering if I should have done more than just walk out, if in fact I was being passive in my reaction and actions. What do you think? What would you have done in my situation?

Do you know your own mind?

In a previous post, I talked about racism, and mentioned the book Blink by Malcolm Gladwell. This book explores how we think without thinking--in the blink of an eye. How our instinct oftentimes take into account our lifetime of experience. He talks about a psychologist who can predict with 95% accuracy if a couple is going to end up together 15 years from now after watching a tape of them interacting for an hour, and 90% accuracy after just 15 minutes. He describes the tennis coach who knows when a player will double fault before the racket hits the ball. And part of the reason why they can do this (they weren't born with this skill) is that they have become experts, with experience and training, their minds have been honed to do this. Although I'm not sure if I can really call myself a children's book expert, I think if I'm an expert in anything, that's it. And in my job, I often know if I'm going to turn down a manuscript after reading one sentence, (Of course I read more than that just in case!), and it comes from reading so many books and manuscripts and knowing what I like and what I don't.

Well, Gladwell also explores when perhaps we shouldn't trust our instincts, and one situation is when racism or preconceptions come into play. He talks about this test, which I had coincidentally taken before reading the book, because a friend had forwarded it to me. It's completely fascinating, so I highly recommend checking this website out and taking a few tests: https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/

This is how the tests are described on the site:
It is well known that people don't always 'speak their minds', and it is suspected that people don't always 'know their minds'. Understanding such divergences is important to scientific psychology.

This web site presents a method that demonstrates the conscious-unconscious divergences much more convincingly than has been possible with previous methods. This new method is called the Implicit Association Test, or IAT for short.

According to Gladwell, over 80% of people taking the Race IAT end up having pro-white associations. Even Gladwell himself showed a "moderate automatic preference for whites"--and he himself is half black! I showed a preference for whites as well after taking the test, and considering I'm a minority myself, I don't consider myself racist (although since I've taken these tests before, I know that everyone is, a little bit...).

Gladwell says, "The disturbing thing about the test is that it shows that our unconscious attitudes may be utterly incompatible with our stated conscious values...of the fifty thousand African Americans who have taken the Race IAT so far, about half of them, like me, have stronger associations with whites than with blacks. How could we not? We live in North America, where we are surrounded every day by cultural messages linking white with good." (p. 85)

But what I found MOST amazing (and please bear with me, I know this is long, but thanks for reading this far!), what I found most affirming and hopeful was this section of one paragraph:

"...believe it or not, if, before you take the IAT, I were to ask you to look over a series of pictures of articles about people like Martin Luther King or Nelson Mandela or Colin Powell, your reaction time would change. Suddenly it won't seem so hard to associate positive things with black people. 'I had a student who used to take the IAT every day' Banaji says, 'It was the first thing he did, and his idea was just to let the data gather as he went. Then this one day, he got a positive association with blacks. And he said, 'That's odd. I've never gotten that before,' because we've all tried to change our IAT score and couldn't. But he's a track-and-field guy, and what he realized is that he'd spent the morning watching the Olympics.'"

I found this hopeful and affirming because one of my goals of being in publishing is to make sure that minorities and other unrepresented groups are featured more in children's books, because I know from personal experience that it really troubled me as a child to not see characters that looked like me in the books I was reading (let alone magazines, television, and movies). I was so thirsty for characters that were like me that whenever a character had black hair, I would think hopefully, "Maybe she's Asian!"--I even wanted Snow White to be Asian. And I think this is also partially why I loved the Emily books by L.M. Montgomery more than the Anne books (although of course I loved those, too!)--because Emily had black hair. This is normal--we all know that kids want to see themselves in the books their reading. That's why we buy books like Eloise for little girls named Eloise, and Fancy Nancy for girls named Nancy (alas, not Alvinas in any of the books I was reading, either! Although as an adult I did find a D.H. Lawrence book The Lost Girl with an Alvina in it and of course read it even though it was not very good).

And especially for minority kids growing up in mostly white communities, the positive "examples" of people who look like them are even less. And when white children aren't seeing any kinds of depictions of kids of other ethnicities either, that's problematic as well. I often realized that I was oftentimes the only example of an Asian person that some people ever met, and I certainly don't think I'm a great representative of my ethnicity!

So, to have this confirmation that seeing positive, diverse images in children's books can make a psychological difference, a subconscious difference, to lessen the bias against people of color, well, this was so affirming for me. It is important. It does make a difference.

Take the tests here, see how you do.

rumination on racism

On Tuesday night Sachin and I went out with his friends--played some ping pong, and then went to Art Bar for dinner. And eventually the conversation came around to racism, which was fascinating to talk about in a group of "mixed company"--one was black, one Indian, one Taiwanese, and one half Pakistani, half white. We talked about everything from the difference between Nationality and ethnicity and race, how we hate being asked "Where are you from?" because we hate not knowing whether they're trying to determine our parents' ancestry, or just making small talk about where we grew up. And when it's the former, why do they want to know? And why do they think it odd when we answer "New Jersey" or "California"? And if you're multiracial or biracial, what to you check off when it comes to the census if you're only allowed to check one option? And if you're a quarter or a half black, should you consider yourself just black? I love conversations like this because there's a lot of gray area, and that's fascinating.

And then later that night...Sachin and I went down to catch the L train at Union Square around 11:40, and there were all of these people waiting on the platform, but also a lot of people who were streaming back upstairs. One guy mouthed to me, "There's no train" so we went around the stairwell where these MTA workers were explaining the situation to irate passengers. There was a sign posted that said no L train service after 12:01, and apparently this meant that the last train would arrive at the final station at 12:01, which certainly wasn't clear--the sign should tell you when the last train leaves, not finishes. And why were there no announcements for all the people just sitting on the platform waiting?

So we went upstairs to wait for the yellow line to get to the J train, and as we were waiting a hipster guy around our age and an older women maybe in her 40s with an accent of some kind asked us if the J was running and if this was the right train to take to it. Sachin answered the question, and then the hipster guy went back to reading a book, and the woman started asking all of these additional questions. Where are we going, where do we live, Oh, I live there too and am going to the same place, etc etc. I step a bit away so am not listening to most of their conversation because I'm tired and am also suddenly wary of this woman. I don't know why. I'm generally a pretty trusting person, and she's probably innocuous, but something about her seems off. She seems too eager to latch onto us, and I wonder if we'll have to commute the whole way to Williamsburg with her. All of a sudden, Sachin says, "Hey, there's Sarah" and sure enough we see Sarah on the other side of the platform going up the stairs and I call out to her. "Where are you going?" Sarah lives a block and a half from Sachin. "I'm going to take a cab. My company will pay for it." she says. "Want to come?" so we say sure and head up the stairs, and the woman practically runs after us, "Where are you going?" "We're taking a cab." "Can I come with you? I'll pay!" and then I think, if she's offering to pay for a cab, what does she need us for? Does she just want to be friends with us or something? "Sorry, we're going with a friend of ours." and we leave her behind. We both feel guilty about it later, but I try to justify it--"my gut just told me that she was sketchy." "Was it really that? Or do you think the fact that she was 'foreign' and older had something to do with it? What if she had been a young hipster girl or guy? Would we have let them share a cab with us then?"

I don't know. A while back, right before I started in publishing and while I worked at B&N, I read a book called Why Are all the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria? And Other Conversations About Race by Beverly Daniel Tatum, PhD. I found it completely fascinating. One of the things it talked about it how racism is more subtle in today's PC climate than in the past. It talked about subtle racism, and specifically how it came to play in terms of interviewing and hiring. People tend to feel more comfortable with people of their own race, so when you're making hiring decisions, subconsciously you oftentimes tend to gravitate towards people who are like yourself (hence why all the black/Asian/Latino/etc kids sit together in the cafeteria). In industries that are male dominated, or white dominated, or middle class dominated, this comes into play. Sometimes excuses are used. "The person was over qualified" or "there was just something I wasn't sure about him/her, I just can't articulate it."

Anyway, this can be a long and complicated discussion that will go around in circles forever, but going back to why I didn't trust the woman in the subway: "My gut told me something wasn't right about her. She was too clingy, too eager. She must have had an ulterior motive." I don't know now. I know that in NYC, we're required to be extra-careful, vigilant. I've had many friends who have been robbed because they were too trusting, so I'm going to excuse my behavior somewhat. But I also want to be honest with myself. Would I have let her share a cab with me if she had been Asian and young? Probably. It reminds me of that Avenue Q song. Everyone is a little bit racist. Maybe in this case I was being ageist, I don't know. We all have our prejudices. We all still have far to go.