The Cabbage Path

Anansi sure knows how to make an entrance.

The second of American Gods, “The Secret of Spoons,” kicks off with one of the most memorable character introductions in ages. It’s one of the show’s “coming to America” vignettes, set aboard a Dutch slave ship on the Atlantic Ocean in 1697, and it highlights that not everyone who arrived in America with their gods came of their own free will. A man named Okoye, shackled and scared, called out to Anansi for help and offered gifts if his prayers were answered.

“Let me tell you a story,” Anansi started softly. “Once upon a time, a man got fucked. Now how’s that for a story? ‘Cause that’s the story of black people in America!”

For the next few minutes, the men on the ship (and some of the audience at home) are given a rude awakening. It’s a blunt and candid summation of what black people in America have waiting for them after reaching those shores for the next few hundred years. Although the men on that ship might have no idea what Anansi means when he tells them what will happen, the audience knows exactly what he’s talking about.

Anansi is an expert storyteller, and in the hands of Orlando Jones—who grew up hearing stories of Anansi long before he read American Gods—he’s absolutely captivating. He can enthrall and spin webs, rile up those who listen, or calm them down if he needed to. (In this case, he pulls absolutely zero punches.)

“I was blown away,” Jones told reporters last month during an American Gods press junket. “I joked when I first read it, I was like, ‘Man I didn’t know these guys [showrunners Bryan Fuller and Michael Green] were Black Panthers.’”

“It’s a brutally honest accounting of obviously the historical elements that come to play,” Jones continued. “It’s in the same way that I think we’re responding to all of our dialogue as the characters in that way that there’s a core resonating through it that we recognize as completely truthful, and you’re almost like, ‘Are they gonna let us say this?’”

They do that and more as Anansi convinces the men on the ship to kill all of the “Dutch motherfuckers” and burn down the ship, which will certainly kill them in the process. And Anansi has a message for them, one that might end up resonating with audiences after the show.

“Angry is good,” he said. “Angry gets. Shit. Done.” [x]

Sorry, that DNA test doesn’t make you Indigenous

[IMAGE: Kim TallBear, author of ‘Native American DNA’, is an associate professor at the University of Alberta.]

So you send your DNA off to an ancestry company, and get a report back that says you’re ‘part Native’. So what?

Maybe you’re excited to learn about your ancestry, but can you really consider yourself part of that culture?

Not really, says Kim TallBear.

“We construct belonging and citizenship in ways that do not consider these genetic ancestry tests. So it’s not just a matter of what you claim, but it’s a matter of who claims you.”

TallBear is an Indigenous scholar based at the University of Alberta. She’s reacting to a particular advertisement for DNA ancestry tests, that shows a woman who learns she is “26% Native, and can’t wait to learn more about ‘her’ heritage”. It got regular play in Canada during Major League Baseball playoffs this year.

But learning about one’s “Native ancestry” is not simple. For one thing, “Native” is a pretty broad term: whose culture does she learn? Inuit? Maya? Coast Salish? The tests don’t give you that much detail.

And, TallBear says, even if you ‘chose’ a specific Nation, having some matching genetic markers from ages ago doesn’t mean you have the lived experience to become part of that community.

“People who are not actually members of Indigenous communities, tend to define Indigeneity as a racial category. Now for us, those are umbrella categories which help us talk to one another, relate to one another, but our primary sense of belonging, and identity, is our particular Indigenous or tribal community. They don’t use the word tribe up here, but in the U.S. we do, so somebody might say ‘I’m a member of the Métis Nation,’ or ‘I’m a member of this particular Cree band,’ I would say I’m Dakota.”

It’s no surprise that in the U.S. landscape, Latinas are still seen as hot, hypersexual women with copious fertility and uncontrolled reproduction. But these sexuality and reproduction myths and stereotypes mixed with real cultural pressures to be a mother can be harmful to asexual Latinas — individuals who experience very little sexual attraction to others, sometimes none at all.

The Black is Back Coalition will hold the National Black Political Agenda for Self-Determination Convention in Washington D.C., Nov. 5 and 6. Poor and working class Black people in Florida are struggling to go to the convention – people who work tirelessly and still struggle to feed their families. While the convention itself is free, the costs to travel, house and feed these people (and in some cases their families) prevents them from attending the conference.

These are people who genuinely want to attend and cannot because of financial inability. In an effort to cover the costs for people who want to attend, they created a gofundme page.

If you can, please help by donating money to support these costs. If you can’t donate, please boost this and share the link. 

https://www.gofundme.com/2v6kgis

For more information about the Black is Back Coalition, please follow the link below:

Where do I begin?

- Criticized the Jews for defending themselves against the Holocaust because he insisted that they should have committed public mass suicide in order to “shame” the Germans instead of fighting back. His exact words were, “But the Jews should have offered themselves to the butcher’s knife. They should have thrown themselves into the sea from the cliffs. As it is, they succumbed anyway in their millions.”

- Wrote an open letter to the British people in 1940 telling them to surrender to the Axis even if it mean accepting genocide.

- Was very anti-black. I hope you can stomach reading how he treated black people in South Africa. It’s fucking disgusting.

- Refused his wife life-saving medication (for religious reasons), but those religious reasons all of a sudden no longer applied to him when he was in a similar position.

- Refused to have sex with his wife for the last 38 years of their marriage. He felt that in order to test his commitment to celibacy, he would have beautiful young women (including his own great niece) lie next to him naked through the night. His wife, whom he described as looking like a “meek cow” was no longer desirable enough to be a solid test.

- Believed that Indian women who were raped lost their value as a human.

- During his time as a dissident in South Africa, he discovered that a young male was harassing two of his female followers. He responded by cutting the girls’ hair off to ensure the “sinner’s eye” was “sterilized.” He later boasted about the incident in his writings, pushing the message to all Indians that women should carry responsibility for sexual attacks upon them.

- Argued that fathers could be justified in killing daughters who had been sexually assaulted for the sake of family and community honor.

- Believed that menstruation was a manifestation of the distortion of a woman’s soul by her sexuality.

- Waged a war against contraceptives, labeling Indian women who used them as whores.

- Held the attitude that women were simply creatures that could bring either pride or shame to the men who own them.

Sources:

Websites:  Women Suffer From Gandhi’s Legacy,  People who most likely chose Gandhi as a historical figure to do a report on and immediately regretted it, On Mahatma Gandhi, his pathetic racism and advancement of segregation of black people by Sentletse Diakanyo, Not All Peaceful: 13 Racist Quotes Gandhi Said About Black People by Nick  Chiles

Stop forcing your daughters to hug the family molester. The molester that every adult in the family knows about but swept it under the rug years ago, because we as Black people already have enough issues to deal with, so we HAVE to keep the family together, right? Wrong.  

This idea that we are protecting the family structure is something I like to call “Politics of the Black Family”

So let’s talk about it. I mean really really talk about it. Let’s talk about how 60% of Black women experience sexual abuse from the hands of a Black man by the age of 18. Talk about what messages we are sending.. one that doesn’t uplift the entire family structure, it instead fucks up the minds of black people and the main victim is the black woman. It sends a message to not to break up the family with these “allegations”. It sends a message that her pain is the lesser of the issues. It sends a message that we as Black women have to be more black than we are woman.

This past weekend I attended the Young People For National Summit. As always it poured into my life, and I got a chance to listen to perspectives that I hadn’t heard before. One that stuck with me is the idea that we as americans don’t value personal space, and we actually devalue it  so much that we take it upon ourselves to hug as we see fit and if someone doesn’t embrace us back they are considered rude.

Taking this a step deeper we send that same message to children. I know this is true for the Black family where we grow up hearing “Go give your grandpa a kiss or give your uncle a hug” and if we as a child don’t want to do those things that is followed up with stop acting like that, and we are then forced to do it anyway. Taking the power away from the child who could then internalize a message that they don’t have control of their own body.

So then, if that same uncle, grandpa, family friend, or step dad becomes the perpetrator…if they become this monster what does this child know to do when she has been told she doesn’t have control of her body anyway. She has been told to “Be nice” as if it is mean to not want to give someone access to your body whether it is an innocent hug or not.

Then abuse occurs, pain occurs, silencing occurs and a cycle repeats. So question what we have all grown up in. Question what messages you send, no matter how innocent the intentions. Think deeply about the structures we fall victim to, even within the Black community. & Don’t ever be so black that you forget to be woman. Protect your woman, it is as much you as your melanin.

-Polish&Politics, Regennia Johnson

Recently, a friend and I were talking about growing up Asian American in predominantly white neighborhoods and schools, and she told me that when she was in fifth grade, boys teased her on the playground by saying that she had a “sideways vagina.”

This has happened to me, too – and I’m sure to so many other Asian girls.

From racist humor in mid-1800s brothels to today’s playground jokes, the race and gender identity of Asian women is seen as so foreign, so “alien,” that our vaginas magically defy biology.

Throughout my life, I’ve received unwanted comments and questions about my body, specifically my anatomy, including being harassed on the street with calls like, “Ni hao,” “Konichiwa,” “Are you Chinese, Japanese, or Korean,” and recently, “Hi Ling Ling.”

On top of that, in my dating history, I was expected to be more quiet and less assertive.

The hyper-sexualization and fetishization of East Asian women is problematic – I am not “lucky” that my race and gender is imagined as sexy and exotic, that Asian women “all so beautiful.”

Or that, an image search of “Asian women” pulls up excessive pictures of women posing in lingerie.

Racial fetishes are about objectification, fetishizing an entire group of people – in this case Asian women, means reducing them down to stereotypes instead of recognizing their full personhood.

Beyond just personal preferences or “having a type,” racial fetishes project desired personality and behavior onto an entire racial or ethnic group.

The fetishization of Asian women even has a name, “yellow fever” – as if the obsession with Asian women were also a disease.

When my identity as an “Asian woman” becomes the only thing that’s important to someone in an interaction, that’s a problem.

This is different from an interracial partnership where all partners are equally respected. Fetishizing someone’s race and gender means not caring about someone as an individual.

So, where did the fetishization and objectification come from? How did Asian women get the hypersexualized stereotypes of being docile and submissive or being dangerous and seductive?

While today, some people might think of fetishes and sexual stereotypes as “not a big deal,” the history behind these tropes is rooted in violence and war, which get oppressively reimagined by mainstream media and entertainment.

Below are five ways East Asian women became fetishized and how that fetishization horribly impacts our lives.

1. Mainstream Media Creates the Submissive ‘Lotus Blossom’ and Evil ‘Dragon Lady’ Stereotypes

“[S]mall, weak, submissive and erotically alluring…She’s fun, you see, and so uncomplicated. She doesn’t go to assertiveness-training classes, insist on being treated like a person, fret about career moves…” —Tony Rivers, “Oriental Girls”, Gentleman’s Quarterly, 1990

Growing up, Lucy Liu was one of the only East Asian women I saw on TV and in movies. It was her, the Yellow Power Ranger (Thuy Trang), and Mulan.

For me, Liu is badass – both for being one of the only Asian American actresses in mainstream Hollywood and also for playing roles that literally kick ass.

However, many of her roles throughout the 90s and early 2000s, such as Ling Woo on Ally McBeal or as O-Ren Ishii in Kill Bill, were also ones that showed Asian women as beautifullyevil, aggressive, and also mysterious.

Asian women are often stereotyped as either the dangerously cunning “Dragon Lady” that seduces White men, leading to their inevitable downfall, or as the submissive “Lotus Blossom.”

Both are meant to be demeaning and demonizing.

While there are exceptions, for the most part, mainstream media has created one dimensional, sexualized representations of Asian women that have affected the way they’re perceived by others.

Chinese actress Anna May Wong, the first Asian American actress to be internationally famous in the 1920s, was often cast in stereotypical supporting roles – and passed over for leading roles of Asian characters, which were given to white actresses in yellowface.

One of her most recognized characters was the demure, respectful Lotus Flower in The Toll of the Sea. The demure, subservient, and delicate “Lotus Blossom” stereotype is intended to cast Asian women as “less than,” both in terms of race and gender.

These stereotypes are seriously harmful. In the US, up to 61% of Asian women experience physical and/or sexual violence by an intimate partner during her lifetime.

Being docile is specifically about being deferent and obedient, especially to the authority of men.

As our race, gender, and sexuality become ruled by Western and male fantasy, in order to serve men sexually, Asian women must both be “feminine” and “heterosexual” and also either submissive and/or hypersexual.

These double stereotypes of “Lotus Blossom” and “Dragon Lady” reflect the ways that Asian women become transformed into either a sexual servant or embodied as a sexual adventure.

2. Labeling Products ‘Oriental’ Leads to the Objectification of East Asian Women as Exotic Commodities

Have you heard of Oriental rugs or Oriental lamps? What do those have in common? They’re objects.

“Oriental” was used as an adjective by “the West” to describe “the East.” And now, it’s often represented as anything with dragons, lotus blossoms, red lanterns, and other “mystical” symbols from the “Far East.”

The historical and media image and idea of “Oriental” also ends up lumping together all “Asian women” as East Asian and also conflates Chinese, Japanese, and Korean identities.

The “Orientalizing” of Asian women is a historical process where race, gender, class, immigration status, and also empire all play a role.

Since trade routes that opened up in the 1200s, notably the Silk Road, White adventurers sought to find exotic goods in the “Far East” – not only spices and fabrics, but women as well. (Netflix’s recent series Marco Polo retells this “White-guy-in-Asia” story.)

As seemingly faraway cultures and places begin being defined by objects and artifacts, these so-called exotic aesthetics end up getting imposed onto people and their physical appearance.

Similarly, Asian women become defined by their “jet black hair,” “dark almond eyes,” or “petite figure,” and that’s part of that objectification.

Like a porcelain vase, Asian women are often seen as decorative and fragile. Transformed intopassive commodities of sex, our bodies must also be seen as weak and submissive – dainty, delicate, and small.

This shows up in everyday ways that men perceive sex with Asian women as something to collect. There’s a scene in Wedding Crashers where Vince Vaughn screams, “That was my first Asian!” Sadly, that line is used often in real life.

Like many other Asian women who have tried online dating, when I was on OKCupid, I received messages such as, “I’ve never been with an Asian before. Are you as exotic in bed as you look?” or “You’re a beautiful, delicate flower. Do you need someone to protect you?”

These expectations and demands on our external bodies also end up getting internalized – my identity as both Asian and a woman is constantly under scrutiny.

3. Exclusive Immigration Policies Create Perception of Asian Women as ‘Immoral’

Immigration policies affected the ways Asian women were perceived by White Americans.

Specific to the US, one example comes from Chinese American history. During the 1800s, most of Chinese people in the US were immigrant men working as low-cost laborers. The sexual interactions of Chinese immigrants were controlled by immigration laws and laws that prohibited interracial sexual relationships.

Many Chinese women who immigrated to the US around that time were women that were deceived and kidnapped or trafficked into serving this group of Chinese men.

Eventually, they also established White clientele, and racial stereotypes began to emerge that Chinese women were luring White men towards sin and expanded the trope of people in the sex industry as irresponsible and dangerous.

“Yellow Peril” anti-Chinese immigration sentiments also created the threatening perception of Asian women as “greedy, devious, and immoral.” The Page Act of 1875 prohibited “undesirable” immigrants from entering the US.

Other acts, like the “Gentlemen’s Agreement” discontinued passports for Japanese laborers to the US and Hawaii. However, it allowed women and children to join husbands, leading to over 10,000 Japanese and Korean women came to the US as arranged “picture brides.”

This practice was looked down upon by White Americans, adding to anti-Japanese sentiment at that time.

After World War II, Congress also passed the War Bride Act, where those serving abroad were allowed to bring Japanese and European wives home and Americans saw Japanese wives as virtuous homemakers.

Yet, while Asian men with picture brides were decidedly immoral, it was acceptable for White American soldiers to have war brides.

Today, the fantasy of having an overseas Asian wife continues through the “mail order bride” industry, which continues to both commercialize women and put them in vulnerable positions. In this industry, women can literally be “returned and exchanged.”

4. US Military Representations in Pop Culture Construct Asian Women as Subservient to White Men

“ The Problem of Miss Saigon makes us believe that we are worth less, that it is only through the white lover’s touch that we may be conferred a fuller humanity.” —Kai Cheng Thom

While the “East meets West” narrative is centuries overdone, literary and film history plays a role in the construction of Asian women as subservient.

In 1887, Pierre Loti wrote the novel Madame Chrysantheme about a French officer going to Japan to find a “dainty” and “delicate” woman “not much bigger than a doll.”

This becomes the main basis for Puccini’s 1904 opera Madame Butterfly. The gist is that an American soldier travels to Japan and takes on a Japanese wife.

He leaves her to return to legitimately marry a White American woman, and she ends up killing herself.

This storyline repeats itself in various films with settings across locations throughout Asia. Later, the 1989 musical Miss Saigon resets the narrative in Vietnam.

The problem with the Miss Saigon and Madame Butterfly storyline is that in these novels, plays, and films, Asian women from different places end up homogenized and literally depicted as ornamental objects created for the sole purpose of White men’s pleasure.

Later films and novels like The World of Suzie Wong embellished the Western soldier seeks Asian bride narrative by adding a savior element –Asian women needed to be rescued and protected by White men.

This narrative is something that I’ve internalized. I’ve found myself wondering in previous relationships and never truly being able to articulate out loud: Are you just trying to experience what it’s like being with an Asian woman? Are you just with me because I’m Asian?

As it turns out, these fictional tales and stories are also a big part of history.

5. War and Military Presence Produce Even More Sexual Violence

Throughout history, the sexual violence against women is used as a wartime weapon and women are seen as part of the “spoils of war.”

In World War II, Japan enslaved approximately 200,000 women across Asia, including Korea, China, Taiwan, Indonesia, and the Philippines to provide sex for its troops. Women were raped by multiple men every day.

After Japan surrendered to the United States, US occupation authorities approved of continuing the system for US troops, setting up a network of brothels under a “Recreation and Amusement Association.”

Military presence impacts local economies – for women who are poor, the sex industry offers an opportunity to make a living.

US military presence in Asia led to the creation of local sex industries and sex trafficking rings that would serve soldiers. Some of the first encounters soldiers ever had with Asian women were around the idea that these women were there to serve them sexually.

By the end of the Vietnam War, around 300,000 South Vietnamese women were working within the sex industry.

Although many women suffer horrible working conditions including assault and violence, institutions are more interested in turning women into commodities to serve military clientele then in the wellbeing of the women.

Also, thanks to Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket, the experiences of these woman have been reduced down to one line: “Me so horny. Me love you long time.” Strangers will ask me on the street or in bars, “Will you love me long time?”

This historical violence carries on its legacy today in large scale ways. Human trafficking of domestic and sex workers continues to exploit women as commodities.

Over 30,000 Asian women are trafficked into the US each year.

Wars against Japan, Korea, the Philippines, and Vietnam have also created national imagery that gets represented in pop culture and then get internalized by any Americans who may not know any Asians or Asian Americans.

Asian nations and the people from them are perceived as both dangerous as well as desired objects of conquest.

***

The objectification and fetishization of Asian women comes out of devastating wars and exclusionary immigration practices that get re-transcribed by books, movies, and other mass-consumed media.

While some folks might think that these sexual stereotypes are a “compliment” or “positive,” the ongoing violence perpetrated against Asian women as a direct result of these stereotypes get overlooked.

Objectification is about being seen as less than human. As unworthy of anything else but a singular use and function.

I fully expect this to be the one and only post I ever do about Amber Rose.

Occasionally, Amber Rose surfaces in pop-culture as a trending topic. I don’t look into her often, but when I do usually I understand where she’s coming from, if not agree with the point she’s trying to make.

Recently, Kanye West called her into a twitter-fight between himself and Wiz Khalifa–and she shut it down entirely. And as amusing as that is and no matter how much I identify with the things she said and does – there’s one thing about her that bothers me.

Amber Rose has repeatedly denied being a black woman. “Portuguese, Scottish, Italian and Irish“ or more often, “Cape Verdean.”

Yet she clearly appears to have features heavily associated with blackness: full lips, an olive complexion (relatively common in black people), a thick, very curvy body, and a large round butt. The icing on the cake: she has an African mom. She still says, “I’m not black.”

Many of the descriptors she uses for herself are nationalities that do not define her race. It’s as if stating countries which a possess white populations and/or have substantial European influence is a free pass on blackness – As if black people didn’t live in Portugal, Scotland, Ireland or Cape Verde. As if her mom didn’t wasn’t African.

But rest assured: her mother is African and she is brown-skinned.

Cape Verde, where Amber Rose’s mother is from, is an island off the coast of Western Africa. It’s an African Country. Africans have been there since the Portuguese trafficked African (black) slaves from the African continent in 1456.

And because of the heavy European influence and racial mixing in Cape Verde, they’re considered a mixed people – And According to Amber Rose, she views herself as Creole:

“With my family, they feel like they’re more superior or better than an African American because we’re Creole and we have culture and that’s something I battle with most of my life.” (source)

Amber Rose was born and raised in America. Her mother is a brown-skinned (black) African woman, she has a white father (Irish and Italian descent), and because she has light skin, she has people defending her as non-black.

“I do not consider myself a black women, absolutely not. [I consider myself] biracial.”

In the United States (and many other places), any black ancestry easily qualifies a person as black – especially if that person is not white passing and especially if that person has an African mother. Amber Rose is not white passing. Her mother is African. She openly participates in black culture. And still, she hesitates to even use the descriptor “black” in reference to herself. In every interview I’ve found and every quote, she is quick to claim her white ancestry but does not even utter “black” or “African.”

I’ve always thought of Amber Rose to be a light skinned black woman--long before I knew or investigated her heritage. Her being Scottish, Italian and Irish in addition to African doesn’t override that.

I’m am a mono-racial, light-skinned, black woman. I understand how explaining or justifying your heritage to some stranger is exhausting and certainly leads a person to question themselves and their heritage -- however, it’s still a fact that you are also included in the African Diaspora. The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade stole Africans and placed them all over the world, not all of us are going to fit the stereotype of having “black” or African features. In this regard, it’s useful to know that the Continent of Africa has the greatest amount of biodiversity on the planet. Not all Africans fit the stereotype. They never have.