Racialicious is on break from December 24 - December 25. We will resume posting on Friday, December 26.

Happy Holidays, everyone!

by Special Correspondent Fatemah Fakhraie

My brother likes to push my buttons. When I bring up women’s issues, he tells me to get back to the kitchen. When I bring up Iranian culture, he cracks jokes in a fakey Middle Eastern accent.

I love him anyway.

We’re pretty close. We look alike, family members often confuse our voices on the phone, and we crack jokes to keep each other entertained when things get tense or boring. I feel very blessed to have him, and to have the relationship that we do.

Since high school, I have been striving to reconnect with my Iranian and Muslim identities; he hasn’t shown the same inclination. This isn’t to say that he’s remained the same person since high school: he and his interests have developed and evolved, but they have not done so in a direction that seeks to connect with this half of his ethnic identity. He is just as Iranian as I am in his biological makeup, but his identification doesn’t mirror mine.

Continue Reading »

by Guest Contributor Neesha Meminger, originally published at Neesha Meminger

This weekend, I was interviewed for a magazine article. Nothing to do with my book, or even writing, for that matter. The topic of the hour was body image. This is a topic I could go on and on and ON about (and have, on several occasions), but I’ll refrain just this once.

Before the interview, all sorts of thoughts went through my head about what I might talk about — will I do the usual issue of weight and body size/shape? Would I go to the more familiar topic of areas of my body I’ve waged war with? Or would I go into the skin shade territory? So many areas to cover (no pun intended), not enough interview time . . .

So, when the lovely interviewer called me, we had a fantastic, lively, friendly discussion. It was fun and hilarious. We were about forty-five minutes through when I realized all I’d talked about was my hair. My hair. Not the usual trilogy: butt, boobs, belly. Not flab, sag, and lumps. Hair. And not body hair, either.

I had no idea what a huge issue hair has been all through my life. But as I talked to Ms. Lovely Interviewer, I realized that as a Sikh girl-child, then young woman, so many battles over control and power in my house were fought around the territory of my hair. I was not allowed to cut it, there were certain hairstyles I could not wear, and there was just so much IMPORTANCE placed on what I did or did not do with my hair. Continue Reading »

by Carmen Van Kerckhove

Addicted to Race Premium is the premium version of New Demographic’s podcast about America’s obsession with race.

Since this is the public RSS feed, you will receive just a 15-minute preview of the interview.

Why are Asian-Americans seen as a model minority, and why is it problematic to be associated with a so-called “positive” stereotype? How does the type of racial discrimination and prejudice faced by Asian-Americans compare or contrast with that of other people of color? What are the real-world impacts of racism on Asian-Americans, ranging from mental health to romantic relationships? Rosalind S. Chou is co-author of The Myth of the Model Minority: Asian Americans Facing Racism.

Got feedback for us? Call 917-720-6348 or email info@addictedtorace.com.

Rosalind S. Chou is co-author of The Myth of the Model Minority: Asian Americans Facing Racism. She spent six years working at a nonprofit camp for at-risk girls before moving to Texas in 2005 for graduate studies in sociology at Texas A&M University and to play rugby for the Austin Valkyries.

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by Guest Contributor Joanna Eng

In Gran Torino, Clint Eastwood plays a bitter old man who’s basically the only white person left in a run-down neighborhood somewhere in the Midwest. He (reluctantly, at first) gets to know his Hmong neighbors, and ends up getting intricately involved in their lives, as they deal with issues caused by a local Hmong gang that some of their relatives are a part of.

There are plenty of things about the movie that might make for great posts on Racialicious:

1. Like most Hollywood movies that are about a community of people of color, Gran Torino features a white protagonist who not only saves the day, but also has the most layers of complexity to his personality.

2. As the first major Hollywood film about Hmong Americans, how did it do at depicting this community? Does the exposure of Hmong culture and the opportunity for Hmong actors outweigh the possible inaccuracies and negative representations? (See some of the commentary about this on AsianWeek.)

3. Clint Eastwood’s character’s constant racist remarks serve as a running joke in the movie. Just because he uses outdated and blatantly un-P.C. language with an “equal-opportunity discrimination” approach, is it OK to use this deeply offensive language as comic relief?

But I don’t really want to write about those things. I want to write about another reaction I had. Continue Reading »

by Guest Contributor Lisa Leong, originally published on the AZN Television blog

“That’s colonialism all over your face!”

The quote is from one of my favorite Asian American Studies professors on eyelid surgery, nose bridge implants, and any other kind of cosmetic surgery that transforms Asians physical features into more Caucasian ones. She meant that there is one standard of beauty—the Western one—that gets imprinted on our faces, our bodies, and our senses of self.

It’s easy to see that the Western ideal of blond-haired, blue-eyed, All-American (or Ayran, if you’re more sinister) beauty is the dominant standard. Look no further than the all-present world of popular media. Advertisements, TV, and movies glorify beautiful faces, but these beautiful faces don’t look anything like me—or you, probably. Every billboard says, “This is Beauty, and you are not quite it. Envy my bag, my hair, my look and my, uh, eyelids.”

Racialized plastic surgery is a popular topic on talk shows like Tyra and Montel. They raise the question: does eyelid surgery erase or enhance race? The audience nods along in agreement that eyelid surgery is a way for Asians to conform to white prettiness. The plastic surgeon and his patients say that they are just enhancing Asian looks. I may not have big, round eyes, but I can see perfectly well what’s going on here. Continue Reading »

*Trigger Warning*

Latoya’s Note: So, as promised, here’s the original version of the essay that appears in Yes Means Yes. If you see this popping up in your reader, I do not recommend you read it at work.

Continue Reading »

by Guest Contributor Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez, originally published at Write.Live.Repeat

This photo shows my mother on her wedding day. That’s her, in the middle. Her sister “Sis” is on the left, her sister Janis on the right.

Notice how the sisters exchange a strange look across my nervous, uncertain mom (who was 24 at the time). Knowing my aunts, and the family narrative, I have a feeling I know what that smirk was about. It was a smirk of superiority, for my mother had chosen to marry a short Cuban man who spoke little English - while the sisters themselves had both already married conservative white men.

At holiday gatherings, my mother’s family - which self-identified as “anglo” - often made derogatory comments about “Mexicans,” that being the only group they could readily find to lump my father (and his children) into.

When I was in my teens, my mother’s paternal aunt Gladys researched the Conant family tree (my mother’s maiden name is Conant) and discovered, among other things, that my mom’s father’s grandmother’s maiden name was Marquez, and that she hailed from Anton Chico, New Mexico. Her family, Gladys assured us all, could trace its roots directly to Spain in the 1500s, with a land-grant from the King. She was, in other words, royalty. “She was from the Northern part of Spain,” I often heard my grandmother (who married into the Conant family) say, following up with “they’re blonde-headed up that way.”

Well, this week I began researching our family tree myself, for a memoir I’m working on. Imagine my surprise when I discovered that Barbarita Marquez (listed as “Marcus” on her death certificate in California, ha!) was not exactly as Spanish as the Conants have wanted us all to believe. Continue Reading »

Shameless Promotion

This is a big month, readers.

First off, Nadra Kareem and I are in this month’s issue of Bitch Magazine (the Noir Issue #42).

Nadra wrote “Am I [Para]normal?” about the heroines in Lois Duncan’s novels and the relationship between teen coming of age stories and the supernatural. It’s an excellent piece, particularly in light of this conversation we had about Twilight and Harry Potter.

And my interview with Tricia Rose is there, titled “Turning the Tables.” Now that it’s finally out, I can start posting the overflow, so you’ll see some starting tomorrow. And once again, I would like to thank LM, fireeyedgirl, exhausted, cat m., PureGracefulTree, Jane, Jen*, Dolly, T.M.A., and everyone else who helped to spread the word and donate. Thank you so much for supporting indie media, and thank you all so much for indirectly supporting me, Nadra, Fatemeh, and other names you may know like Deesha Philyaw and Jessica Hoffman - we have to eat too!

Also hitting a bookstore near you is Yes Means Yes: Visions of Female Sexual Power and a World Without Rape. Now, some intrepid readers might remember all the drama swirling around this book from inception to printing. And I have to admit, I was less than pleased at the circumstances surrounding a project I committed to. But I got my contributor copy in the mail yesterday, and after reading the book, I have to say I am proud of this project. There are so many amazing women on these pages speaking the truth about our lives and our sexuality that I was just sitting there astounded. My essay is titled “The Not Rape Epidemic” and it was tough to write that down and put that out there on the page. But I am glad I did it. I am donating one of my copies to my local Planned Parenthood there - I may buy a few more for them to stick in the waiting room for the teens that are there for counseling.

There are DC, NY, and Boston promotional dates scheduled. I’ll post more on that in a few days. If you can, please consider buying the book. If you don’t have the money, please help by requesting that your local library or youth center purchase a copy. I worked in the library system for three years, and highly requested books do get purchased.

Also, as a side note, I should mention the version in YMY is not the original piece I submitted. Jacyln and I worked on a broader ranging piece for the book which weaves parts of my personal story in with some other events that happened and recommendations on how to help. We agreed that I would eventually post the full version of the original here. I think I will also post that over the weekend - however, the subject matter is extremely heavy. That’s why I’m posting it off hours.

More info and links after the jump. Continue Reading »

By Special Correspondent Arturo R. García, also posted to The Instant Callback

*Warning: Spoilers Ahead*

… Well, at least Volume IV looks promising. Sort of.

You could almost see the hands of writer Jeph Loeb moving everyone around in “Dual,” frantically tying up the loose plot threads of this latest arc, as the decks get cleared for a new status quo when “Fugitives” kicks off in a couple of months.

But the road to get there, creatively and critically, has decidedly been full of lows. And this episode was barely an exception. At the end of the day, Tim Kring’s precious Benetrellis are still standing, though in houses divided, although their respective houses of science, Primatech and Pinehearst are not. And the false family member, Sylar, once again falls hard.

Taking his place, for now, as the Big Bad black sheep is Nathan, who completes the shift from conflicted good guy to conniving bad guy even as his plan to create a meta-human army is foiled by not only his brother, but former employees Knox and Flint. As Pinehearst is about to explode, Peter shoots himself up with Mohinder’s formula in order to save Nathan, a favor Nate rejects, telling Pete, “I wouldn’t have done the same” before zooming back to Washington. Well, okay then.

Over at Primatech, Sylar further re-establishes his dark side, playing an unconvincing game of Saw cat-and-mouse with Noah, Claire, Angela and Meredith. Unfortunately for him (and us as viewers), Sy gives in to his inner Bond villain and threatens to monologue everybody to death before Claire puts him down with a well-timed shank. Continue Reading »

by Latoya Peterson

*Warning: Strong Language*

Regular readers might remember a piece I wrote a year or so ago, called Hair, Apparently. In the piece I wrote about an incident where I felt like someone had insinuated I was a “house nigga” because my hair was straightened with a chemical relaxer.

The piece sparked an interesting conversation in the comments and I was comforted by the reactions by most of the readers - do you and let it be done. The overwhelming consensus was your hair is your hair and you should be able to do with it what you please. (Should is the operative word, but more on that later.)

However, a lot of time has passed since then. In the interim, I read Tami’s piece (the original version of the piece posted here), started reading Afrobella’s blog regularly, and watched as my friend Spiffany transitioned from chemical relaxers to a beautiful and natural do. I admired what people could do with their naturals, but never felt motivated to do it myself.

Yet, Tami posed a little question in her original piece that always stuck in my mind.

Earlier this year, a fellow blogger very smartly observed that black women may be the only race of women who live their whole lives never knowing what their real hair looks and feels like. Think about that.

I was one of those women. Aside from a happy little puffball photo from the fifth grade* and a couple of shots of me with pressed hair, I had a relaxer for as long as I could remember. And that question stayed with me, for the next six or so months until I had my third Catastrophic Relaxer Disaster^TM and found myself bald at my temples and missing a big chunk of hair from the back of my head.

From that day on, I was like “Fuck it - I’m letting it grow.”

And so it has. Today, I’ve been relaxer free for more than a year. My hair is fully natural - I cut out the last of the chemically straightened hair six months ago and haven’t really looked back. I love my hair now, love everything it does, how it looks, all that.

But it occurs to me that this was strange journey for me. Navigating transitioning my hair out was never really about my hair - it was about notions of societal influence, beauty, intra-group standards, cultural conditioning, and asserting my own personality. It was about my hair as a political battleground - where people read the pattern of my stands like tea leaves, trying to divine my personality and political views. It was about everything except what I actually wanted to do - which was stop relaxing my hair and wear a new style.

While I scoured all the pro-natural sites on the net for advice, all I learned were new styles. No one told me how to cope with the transition itself. Everyone cuts to the happy - “You’ll love yourself! You’re free from chemicals!” speech, but no one really talks about how tough that road is to walk. So, let’s look at a few of the things we tend to gloss over when we talk about natural hair.

The Influence of Men and the Perception of Attractiveness
Let’s start with the outside influence aspect of things. About two weeks out from the Catastrophic Relaxer Disaster,^TM I was hanging out with my friend KJ, the natural haired friend I referred to in the first piece. Artfully rocking a cap and a long bang to cover my bald spot, I excitedly told her my decision - I was switching to natural hair.

She stopped fumbling through earrings and looked up at me, face locked in a hesitant expression.

“What did your boyfriend say?” she asked carefully. Continue Reading »

by Carmen Van Kerckhove

Addicted to Race is New Demographic’s podcast about America’s obsession with race. Here’s a rundown of what you’ll find in this episode:

Tami Winfrey Harris and Carmen Van Kerckhove discuss Obama’s connection (or lack thereof?) to the Rod Blagojevich scandal. Unfortunately the rest of this episode’s recording got lost and we didn’t have time to re-do it, so this is a super-short episode. Apologies to our listeners.

Got feedback for us? Call 917-720-6348 or email info@addictedtorace.com.

Tami is a writer, and communications and marketing professional living in the Midwest with her husband and stepson. She edits the New Demographic blog Anti-Racist Parent, blogs at What Tami Said and is a contributor to the anthology What We Think:Gender Roles, Women’s Issues and Feminism in the 21st Century.

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by Guest Contributor Tagland, originally published at Tanglad

I am an immigrant woman of the Two-Thirds World, who is living with the One-Third World.

I first came across Esteva and Prakash’s concept of the One Third/Two Thirds World via Chandra Mohanty’s Feminism Without Borders. The concepts recognize the transnational nature of capital, and how policies instituted by people in the One-Third World (middle and upper classes in the North and elites in the South) destabilize the lives of those in the Two-Thirds World, comprised by majority of the world’s population.

And most of the time, those of us in the One-Third World remain unaware of how our actions, well-meaning or otherwise, generate and perpetuate poverty and hardship.

For example, many of us in the One-Third World rarely reflect on our patterns of consumption, on how overconsumption contributes to substandard working conditions in Export Processing Zones around the world. If you’ve ever bought clothes from Nike, the Gap, or purchased products from Walmart and Target, for example, please take a minute to consider why your purchases seem so “affordable.” Ditto with that $2 bottle of wine from Trader Joe’s.

If you want to help those in poverty, take some more time to consider the consequences of top-down assistance programs that are instituted without any input or consultation from the communities themselves. This includes turning a critical eye on programs that present capacity-building and microcredit as solutions to poverty, rather than stopgap measures to systemic problems that are exacerbated by globalization. This means actually listening to the people in communities when they say that they need healthcare and education programs instead of yet another start-up handicraft business. Continue Reading »

by Guest Contributor Tami, originally published on What Tami Said*

My hair is nappy. It is coarse and thick. It grows in pencil-sized spirals and tiny crinkles. My hair grows out, not down. It springs from my head like a corona. My hair is like wool. You can’t run your fingers through it, nor a comb. It is impenetrable. My hair is rebellious. It resists being smoothed into a neat bun or pony tail. It puffs. Strands escape; they won’t be tamed. My hair is nappy. And I love it.

Growing up, I learned to covet silky, straight hair; “bouncing and behaving” hair; Cheryl Tiegs and Christie Brinkley hair. But as a young black girl, my appearance was far from the American ideal. Making my hair behave meant hours wriggling between my grandmother’s knees as she manipulated a hot comb through my thick, kinky mane. The process stretched my tight curls into hair I could toss and run my fingers through, something closer to the “white girl hair” that so many black girls admired and longed to possess.

My beautiful, straightened hair came at a price. It meant ears burned by slipped hot combs and scars from harsh chemicals. It meant avoiding active play and swimming pools, lest dreaded moisture make my hair “go back.” It meant having a relaxer eat away at the back of my long hair until barely an inch was left. It meant subtly learning that my natural physical attributes were unacceptable.

I was not alone in my pathology. Pressing combs, relaxers, weaves and the quest to hide the naps are part of the fabric of black beauty culture. It is estimated that more than 75 percent of black women straighten their hair. In the book “Hair Story: Untangling the Roots of Black Hair in America,” Ayanna Byrd and Lori Tharps write: “Before a black child is even born, relatives speculate over the texture of hair that will cover the baby’s head, and the loaded adjectives “good” and “bad” are already in the air.” In the same book, a New York City dancer named Joicelyn explains: “Good hair is that silky black shit that them Indian girls be havin’…Good hair is anything that’s not crazy-ass woolly, lookin’ like some pickaninny out the bush.” Too often, black women find their hair hatred supported by media, men and the rest of the mainstream. Continue Reading »

by Guest Contributor (and regular commenter) Atlasien

*Warning: Strong Language*

From Protecting children from racism and racial abuse: a research review: Summary of research and findings

- Although the family structure is an important site of resistance to racism, research highlights that many minority ethnic children do not discuss their experiences of racial abuse with parents or other family members.
- Ethnic minority young people are not passive recipients of racism - they employ a range of strategies when confronted with racial abuse.
- It is important to produce integrated strategies, involving a number of agencies, to combat racist abuse both in the school setting and in the local community.
- To date, the majority of responses have focused on the victims of racial harassment, but the effectiveness of these programmes is debatable. Agencies also need to undertake both preventive and interventive programmes focusing on perpetrators.
- There is a need for approaches which are based on children’s actual experiences and perceptions rather than adult constructions of the problem.

Did they ever tell the black girls to go back to Africa?

Back then, I didn’t know. And I had no idea how to ask.

There were a few of them at my middle school, maybe around ten. For some reason, I don’t remember ever seeing any black boys. The middle school must have been between 95-99% white. It was about .001% Asian (me).

The black girls stuck close together. I had no interaction with them, with one exception. One girl was in my Honors class for a year. She didn’t fit in well. She seemed very loud and very insecure (I was quiet and insecure). One day for show and tell, she brought her little sister to school. She was obviously proud of her little sister, who was extremely cute. But the girl’s first name was the same as a certain household product and the rest of the class couldn’t stop saying how crazy that name was. Why would any parent name their kid something so crazy? They must be stupid. I watched the big sister get frustrated, almost to the point of tears. Either her family moved after that year, or she transferred to another school.

I always looked at the black girls and wondered: what did I have in common with them? I took this question very, very seriously. If I found something in common with them, maybe I wouldn’t have to feel so horribly alone. As it was, junior high school race relations felt sort of like The Omega Man/I am Legend, with me being Charlton Heston/Will Smith.

When I was five and six, we lived in Japan with my father. Then my mother moved back to America to be close to my grandparents. We started off living with them, then moved to a house in the suburbs. I quickly forgot all my Japanese, but I kept ties in other ways. I refused to eat sandwiches for lunch; I had to have my bento with noodles or rice.

I was as close to my father as is possible with a non-custodial parent in another country. We talked on the phone, I flew out to Japan in the summer, he got copies of my grades in school. My grades were always good. I really liked school. I played soccer and swam and rode my dirt bike. I liked living in America. I was American because my mom and my grandparents were American and I was born in America and I lived in America.

Then, starting about second grade, I noticed that other kids started calling me names and singing funny songs at me. The other kids started telling me I didn’t belong. I looked weird and I talked funny. I wasn’t a real American. I should go back to China. My mother had always stressed the importance of logic, reason and peaceful conflict management. I tried logic. I told them I’d never even been to China. I didn’t even know anyone from China. Nobody paid attention. I started getting frustrated and depressed in school. Continue Reading »