On Lords and Ladies

In the NY Times, I read this:

The Baylor University Lady Bears, who took home their third national title with an 82-81 victory over Notre Dame in this year’s N.C.A.A. final, were welcomed to the Oval Office by Mr. Trump.

Once again, I am pissed off.  No, not about #tRump, but about the usage "Lady."

Why?

Think about why there is a reference to "Lady Bears."  Are there Lord Bears?  Nope.  There are Bears, and then there are Lady Bears.

What's happening?  The nickname for the Baylor University is Bears.  By default, that nickname refers only to the men's teams.  Women's teams are therefore referenced with respect to the male Bears; hence, Lady Bears!

In my early op-ed writing years, I wrote about this too.  I thought--and I continue to think--that it was bizarre that a common nickname does not refer to males and females.  In that essay, I wrote about how the reports were then equating the name only to men, and therefore specially calling women out.  Of course, that essay was not published.

Imagine if "Americans" referred only to men, and we then said "female-Americans."

Well, we kind of sort of do that.

During my early years in the US, I was always surprised that only the non-white groups were referred to by their prefixes, as if the word "American" meant only white.  In my commentary-writing days in California, I once submitted an essay in which I argued that white criminals should be referred to as being white, just as reports call out the racial ID when the perps are "others."  Of course, the commentary was not published.

Maybe those essays were not published because they were crappy writing.  Or, maybe because I was calling out the obvious, and people are usually uncomfortable with dealing with such truths.

The "other" is based on such definitions of default conditions.  Whether it is about gender or race, or even food habits.

Recall my observations on the Indian usage "non-vegetarian" that is often referred to as "non-veg"?  What?  No?  How could you forget?

Ok, lemme quickly recap for you.

Meat eating is the default food habit in England.  The ones who do not eat meat, have to identify themselves as vegetarians or vegans or whatever else.  When the Subcontinent absorbed the English language, a new usage was created for the food habits there: non-veg.  As in not-vegetarian.

Such a special coinage to refer to the meat-eaters makes the rest of the world also think that Indians are vegetarians.  The reality is far from that.  It is a minority of Indians who are vegetarians.

Estimates of vegetarians in India are as low as 20 percent of the population to about 30 percent of the Indians.  Even if one takes the average, only about a quarter of India's population restricts itself to vegetarian food.  An overwhelming three-quarters of the population is non-veg.  This is not new.  It has always been that way. Consumers of animal protein have always exceeded the population of vegetarians.

Then, one would think that in India, too, there will not be any need for the "non-veg" usage, right?

I suspect that, as in many instances, this is a result of identifications being shaped by the rich and the powerful.  I think that given the high profile role of brahmins in the British Raj, well, both the British and the Brahmins made vegetarian as the default word to describe Indians in the new language.  And, therefore, a new word for the others.

Language is about power.  The dominance of "vegetarian" is a reflection of the power that a minority had over an overwhelming majority of "others."  The phrase "non-veg" is not any accidental creation.

"Lady Bears" says a lot about the power, privilege, and primacy of the "Lord" Bears.  It is not a phrase that was accidentally created.

Breaking bread

Decades ago in Neyveli, I ended up at lunch time at my friend's home.  His mother suggested that I eat there, and I did.

"My cooking will taste different from your mother's," she said.

It did.

Especially to me, who has been a taste-tester for my mother from since I can remember, of course I could tell the difference.  The rasam was different with the overpowering garlic.   Even the plain rice tasted differently. The thuvaran was the only one that was almost like my mother's preparation.

A few years ago, I was excited when two high school classmates invited me to dinner at their homes. They had both carefully prepared dishes with very little spices to suit this visiting American's tastes. 

A couple of years ago, another classmate invited me and my parents for a meal at his home.  "Your parents will eat at our home, right?" he asked me.  I had to remind him that my father and mother had even visited with him and his wife when they lived in Singapore.

In the "normal" course of events in the old country, all those meals are uncommon for a single reason--those friends and I come from different religious and caste backgrounds.

As Bezwada Wilson noted:

India is a fraternal society. There is a Brahmin society, a Reddy society and a Dalit society. Within each society, there is a sense of fraternity, but they don’t want to come out of that circle.

Sharing food at home with another is a calculated decision for almost all the folks back in the old country.  It is rare, therefore, that a brahmin invites a reddy over for dinner.  Or even for coffee.

My own life in America has been a wonderful contrast.  Right from the first day of graduate school, it has been a pleasure to share meals with people from all over.  The first ever "others" I invited to taste my cooking were a Pakistani and a Taiwanese.  And that was how it all began.

But, the past couple of years have made it clear that the "castes" here don't always mix.  Which is why, in the context of the upcoming holiday, this essay asks:

“Have you or your family ever invited a person or a family of another race to your home for dinner?” ... When is the last time you or your family had dinner in your home with a person or family of another race?

The fact that we have to even ask that question says a lot, right?

We are convinced that we will never get all the issues about race on the table, until we get our feet under the same table and talk like friends. At its core, racial divisions are a heart issue, not a skin-color issue. Our children need to see their parents developing friendships around the dinner table with people who look different, so that the next generation can be different.

Of course, the subscribers and regular readers of this blog are not the ones that we worry about.  But, how do we get this message across to the overwhelming numbers in whose lives the different circles never ever overlap?

Everybody else was paying their dues ... for the American Dream

It was heart-breaking for me to watch the archival footage of James Balwdin's comments, and to listen to his words, in the documentary "I am not your Negro," and think that many of those very words are applicable even now.  Word for word.  What a tragedy!

I wonder how many of the 63 million trump voters have watched that documentary.  Perhaps they think, believe, that there is nothing more to talk about race issues.  Perhaps they continue to believe that whites are the superior ones who deserve everything and more.  Or, perhaps the 63 million voters even believe that they are now the real victims of racism!

Baldwin talks about the urgency that he felt to leave Paris and return to America.

On every newspaper kiosk on that wide, tree-shaped boulevard in Paris were photographs of 15-year-old Dorothy Counts being reviled and spat upon by the mob as she was making her way to school in Charlotte, N.C. There was unutterable pride, tension and anguish in that girl's face as she approached the halls of learning with history jeering at her back. It made me furious. It filled me with both hatred and pity, and it made me ashamed. Some one of us should have been there with her.
But it was on that bright afternoon that I knew I was leaving France. I could simply no longer sit around Paris discussing the Algerian and the black American problem. Everybody else was paying their dues. And it was time I went home and paid mine.

I thought about the BB King lyrics when he sings:
Everybody wants to know 
Why I sing the blues 
Yes, I say everybody wanna know 
Why I sing the blues 
Well, I've been around a long time 
I really have paid my dues 

When I first got the blues 
They brought me over on a ship 
Men were standing over me 
And a lot more with a whip 
And everybody wanna know 
Why I sing the blues 
Well, I've been around a long time 
Mm, I've really paid my dues

With trump's election, the social dynamics certainly have shifted, yet again.  Once again, it is all about the whites.  The GOP has become, for all purposes, the party of the whites.  It is a tragedy that completely depresses me.  Overwhelms me.  Drains me of emotions.  And then I wonder how Baldwin and others plodded on, even when people around them we being killed--all because they were fighting for human rights and equality.

Baldwin says:

You know, the question is really a kind of apathy and ignorance which is a price we pay for segregation. That's what segregation means. It - you don't know what's happening on the other side of the wall because you don't want to know.

The racist whites do not even want to know.   Baldwin wrote back in 1965:

Until the moment comes when we, the Americans, are able to accept the fact that my ancestors are both black and white, that on that continent we are trying to forge a new identity, that we need each other, that I am not a ward of America, I am not an object of missionary charity, I am one of the people who built the country--until this moment comes there is scarcely any hope for the American dream. If the people are denied participation in it, by their very presence they will wreck it. And if that happens it is a very grave moment for the West.

A grave moment this is--fifty years later.  After all these years of merely intellectualizing,  I fully realize how indebted I am.  I need to pay my dues.  Big time dues!

On the creepy confederate flag

Way back when I was in graduate school, I was once talking about the road trip I wanted to go on in the Deep South, thanks to having read Gone with the Wind when I was in high school.  The three guys listened to my plan.  One of them--btw, all the three were Whites, born and raised in the US--said something like "even I would not want to get off the freeways there" which puzzled me.  He saw my puzzled expression and clarified--he was Jewish.

There is heritage and then there is heritage that comes with a mile-long freight train full of baggage.  The worry is that not only the baggage of the confederacy has not been completely thrown out but that it is even cherished!  As the NY Times noted in its editorial, "the Civil War is winding down":

to put away old business — the Civil War, Reconstruction, jut-jawed defiance to equality for black citizens — so their state could finally take up the ever-pressing, unfinished job of reconciliation.

Earlier this spring, the friend and I went to the coast.  On our way back, we decided to detour via a road that we normally do not take.  It was pretty, of course.  Not much of a traffic, other than a pickup truck that was behind me and was in a hurry.  No surprise for me when the vehicles behind want to pass me, because I am always the slow guy on the road!  When I got a break, I moved over to the sandy shoulder space to let the pickup overtake me and it did.

A couple more miles in, and the friend and I decided to pull over, figure out where exactly we were and to then proceed.  As I reached a clearing, where I thought I would stop, I passed the same pickup truck that was parked there.  Strange it seemed that the driver was in a hurry and yet was parked there.

We checked the map and figured that we had taken a wrong turn, which meant that I had to make a u-turn at that point.  I started the engine and crawled forward to find a sweet spot to make the u-turn.  The pickup truck also headed out slowly.  We thought it was creepy.  I made the u-turn and passed the pickup, and we never saw that truck again.

A few miles later, we passed a relatively rundown house with a huge confederate flag that was fluttering with the breeze.  After that pickup truck experience, the sight of the confederate flag worried me.  A dark-skinned me, and with a white woman too!  I visibly shifted into a worried mode.

If a dark-skinned me feels this way here in Oregon, far away from the Confederate states, then I cannot even begin to imagine how African-Americans feel about that flag and the "heritage" it represents.

I will leave it to my favorite go-to intellectual on race issues in the US; Ta-Nehisi Coates writes about the confederate flag:

Put it in a museum. Inscribe beneath it the years 1861-2015. Move forward. Abandon this charlatanism. Drive out this cult of death and chains. Save your lovely souls. Move forward. Do it now.

Will race disappear once we ID our genetic formula?

Turns out that the Boston bombers were of Chechen origin.   The younger brother, the one who is alive, was a naturalized citizen as well.  The Islamophobes who now will consider any Muslim with ultra-suspicion might be shocked to know that the brothers are Caucasians.

We are a strange people ready to classify fellow humans into various categories simply based on how we look.  White and brown and black and yellow and red.  Whites aren't really white, and there was never any "red" Indian either.  It is all in our imaginations.  Here on the web, nobody knows what color your skin is, and everybody is just a dog.

Source

Even the government systematically collects information on our "race."  I have almost always picked "other" or "white" when responding to those questions.  "Other" because I am usually pissed at the data collection, and "white" because I want to make a point that I, too, am a Caucasian if that is how they define a white.

However, I had no idea, until reading this essay by Amitai Etzioni, that whenever I chose "other" the Census folks were imputing a race for me anyway:

[Never] underestimate our government. The Census Bureau has used a statistical procedure to assign racial categories to those millions of us who sought to butt out of this divisive classification scheme. Federal regulations outlined by the Office of Management and Budget, a White House agency, ruled that the Census must “impute” a specific race to those who do not choose one. For several key public policy purposes, a good deal of social and economic data must be aggregated into five racial groups: white, black, Asian, American Indian or Alaska Native, and native Hawaiian or other Pacific Islander. How does the government pick a race for a person who checked the “Other” box? They turn to the answers for other Census questions: for example, income, neighborhood, education level, or last name. The resulting profiles of the U.S. population (referred to as the “age-race modified profile”) are then used by government agencies in allotting public funds and for other official and public purposes.

I wonder what race I was assigned to when I bubbled in "other."  Do I exist as a white, or a black?  How bizarre!

I agree with Etzioni's simple request:

Let us begin with a fairly modest request of the powers that be: Give us a chance. Don’t make me define my children and myself in racial terms; don’t “impute” a race to me or to any of the millions of Americans who feel as I do. Allow us to describe ourselves simply as Americans. I bet my 50 years as a sociologist that we will all be better for it.

Yes.

Simply as "Americans" will be wonderful especially when we are all nothing but a collection of genes underneath.  With an origin in Africa.

Our ancient mother, the mother of us all, lived in Africa some 150,000 years ago. She was one individual in a world population of Homo sapiens—recently evolved out of Homo erectus—amounting to 2,000 individuals at most. There were other females of course, but their lines died out long before historical times. Everyone alive today descends from this one woman, from one of her two daughters. This is the astonishing news revealed by the book of the human genome, the book whose pages we are just beginning to turn.

I noted nearly a year ago, based on the results of my DNA analysis, about my forefather:

The man who gave rise to the first genetic marker in your lineage probably lived in northeast Africa in the region of the Rift Valley, perhaps in present-day Ethiopia, Kenya, or Tanzania, some 31,000 to 79,000 years ago. Scientists put the most likely date for when he lived at around 50,000 years ago. His descendants became the only lineage to survive outside of Africa, making him the common ancestor of every non-African man living today.

We then invented the languages that separate us.  We invented the religions that separate us. Our adaptation to the natural settings helped us develop the color of skin and hair and everything else that separate us.  If we are all given our respective genomes, will we begin to understand that we are not any different at all?

One way to show how contrived racial divisions actually are is to recall that practically all of the DNA in all human beings is the same. Our differences are truly skin deep. Moreover, the notion that most of us are of one race or another has little basis in science. The Human Genome Project informs us not only that 99.9 percent of genetic material is shared by all humans, but also that variation in the remaining 0.1 percent is greater within racial groups than across them. That is, not only are 99.9 percent of the genes of a black person the same as those of a white person, but the genes of a particular black person may be more similar to the genes of a white person than they are to another black person.

We humans are so awful that we will want to focus on the 0.1 percent.  We will then finely dice that into components that will reveal the 0.00000001 percent that makes us different from some group and that 0.00000001 percent will be the basis for discrimination. For stereotyping. "Those people, you know."  Crappy apes we are!

We’re old, we’re white and we want our country back

Am following up on yesterday's post, with this Washington Post opinion piece that highlights the troubling facts about the GOP:

[Today's GOP] is almost entirely white — 92 percent, compared with just 58 percent of Democrats. It is disproportionately Southern — 49 percent of Republicans live in the South vs. 39 percent of Democrats.

It is a big tent all right--a big white tent in the South!

[How] is it that the South has come North in today’s GOP? The fact that Barack Obama is our first black president coincides with the United States’ transformation from a majority-white nation to a multiracial country no longer destined to remain the world’s hegemon. Augmented by an intractable recession rooted in a crisis of capitalism, this epochal shift has summoned the shades of racial resentment. To the extent that Republicans can depict government as the servant of this rising non-white America (precisely the purpose of Romney’s ads), the South’s antipathy toward government can find a receptive audience in other regions.
This transformation of the GOP has also been spurred by the Southernization of the economy. The U.S. economy’s dominant sector is no longer the unionized manufacturing of the Northeast and Midwest, whose leaders included such Republican moderates as George Romney, and whose white working-class employees were persuaded by their unions to back Democratic candidates. Instead, the economy is dominated by a mix of the low-wage, nonunion retail and service sectors, and by high finance, which has shown itself fiercely opposed to regulation and taxation, happy to reap and shield its profits abroad at the expense of U.S. workers, and willing to invest plenty in a party that does its bidding.
That party is meeting in Tampa this week. Cut through its self-justifying rhetoric and we’re left with a GOP whose existential credo is, “We’re old, we’re white and we want our country back.” The rest, as the sages say, is commentary.

As if to provide real and tangible evidence to all this, Andrew Sullivan draws attention to this utterance from Senator Lindsey Graham:

The demographics race we’re losing badly. We’re not generating enough angry white guys to stay in business for the long term

WTF!

Looks like the right wing extremists have now become the GOP. 

Two depressing articles on Obama's "race" for a second term

I wonder what the reason was for me, even as a kid, to have gotten so interested in the news and events around me.  I remember even keenly following changes in the price of gold, and the exchange rates for the Indian rupee. Local and international politics--especially the Cold War issues--fascinated me.

Now, if only I hadn't that infection in my early years!  Because, then I would have never stuck my nose so seriously into attempting to understand this complex world.  I could have chosen a professional life where I could simply have punched-in and punched-out, and not worried about a damn thing.

Nah, that is an alternative that I would never have chosen! 

Thus, I end up reading and thinking and driving myself crazy.

A horrible feeling it was to read two articles, in two different publications, and feel that there is nothing I, or even millions of us, could ever do to change the way things are.

In the Atlantic, Ta-Nehisi Coates writes about the worrisome fear of a black President, and he notes:

After Obama won, the longed-for post-­racial moment did not arrive; on the contrary, racism intensified.

Yes, it is awful how much race has become a divisive issue.  Coates' essay is intense, and I hope that it will gain a much, much wider audience.  Towards the end, he writes:

In a democracy, so the saying goes, the people get the government they deserve. Part of Obama’s genius is a remarkable ability to soothe race consciousness among whites. Any black person who’s worked in the professional world is well acquainted with this trick. But never has it been practiced at such a high level, and never have its limits been so obviously exposed. This need to talk in dulcet tones, to never be angry regardless of the offense, bespeaks a strange and compromised integration indeed, revealing a country so infantile that it can countenance white acceptance of blacks only when they meet an Al Roker standard.

Reading that essay while getting ready to sleep was a bad idea.  Instead of calmly drifting off into sleep, there I was wide awake, thinking about all the subtle and explicit racist jokes I have heard or read about Obama.  I wanted to yell out a big FUCK YOU in the middle of the night.

Sleep I did, eventually, and back to the routines of reading.  After laughing through the cartoons in the New Yorker, I settled down to read Jane Mayer's piece on the other race in this election--the race for money.  The more Obama falls behind in this race, Mayer thinks that he could even lose this election!  The idea(l) of one-person-one-vote is threatened ever more than before:

the top .07 per cent of donors are exerting greater influence on the 2012 race than the bottom eighty-six per cent. And this accounts only for publicly disclosed donations: much of the money raised during this election cycle consists of secret gifts to “nonprofit public-welfare” groups that claim to have no overt political agenda.

Rare are billionaires who donate gazillions to the Democratic Party and not to the GOP.  In the age of SuperPACs, that means disaster for Obama, or any candidate anywhere who is not aligned with the billionaire Republicans.

looking ahead, many Democrats grow more concerned. Bill Burton, the former White House aide who is now running Priorities USA, says, “My worry is that the numbers will just get even more astronomical. It could easily be doubled, or quadrupled, by 2016. Once big business realizes it can purchase the White House, you have to wonder what the limit is.”

Tell me why I should not be worried, and why I should not yell a big FUCK YOU in the day time as well.  You can now understand why sometimes I wish that I didn't have this intellectual curiosity when I was young!

Race and caste in the two largest democracies

Matt Yglesias, who inherited the last name from his Cuban grandfather while the other three grandparents were Jewish, questions this bizarre ritual of race and majority and minority, and notes:

America has never operated with a stable conception of race. The factoid that 50 percent of our latest baby crop is other than non-Hispanic white is true only relative to the 2000 census scheme. There’s no reason to believe that this particular categorization will continue as bureaucratic practice or social reality.

Crazy stuff.

Whenever I am asked for race/ethnicity information, I choose whatever I want to be that very minute.  As I have blogged about earlier, sometimes I have been an Asian Indian, sometimes a white, and sometimes an African-American.  I believe I am correct in all the three choices: born in India. But, then born as a brahmin in India means that there is the perennial question of whether brahmins were at least part of the group that wandered into the Subcontinent from the Caucasus, which then means I am a Caucasian!  And, hey, ultimately we are all descendants of ancestors who decided to look what might be there outside the African continent and, thus, I am an African-American, too.

On the other side of the planet, India's effort to count people by caste is well underway. Unfortunately!  The purpose?

As with the British census it is seen as a means of classifying and categorising the social universe into groups entitled to or not entitled to certain benefits.

I tell ya, we humans are crazy anywhere on this planet!

White. Whiter. Whitest. ... Portland, Oregon!

Click here for the text-analysis of the following graphics from the Oregonian:

Dr. Condi Rice's Jim Crow childhood

This past summer I read Invisible Man and To Kill a Mocking Bird ... it is shocking to realize at every instance that the atrocious treatment of blacks was not that long ago.  It is the same way I feel about the caste-contexts in India.  The whole idea of "untouchables" being so less than human that an accidental brushing against the skin of one would send a brahmin to bathe ... while we are thankfully far removed from those bad days, we still have a long way to go.

Conoleeza Rice speaks of that atrocious past.  I watched her on The Daily Show the other day, and appreciated Jon Stewart for not (mis)using the opportunity to question Rice about her involvement in the decision-making on the wars that are dragging on and on.  Rice's factual and relaxed recollections of her childhood and her parents in the most segregated city were inspiring.  It is incredible that Rice--a global personality now--didn't have a white classmate until she was twelve, and after they moved to Denver ... All political differences aside, her life story is simply marvelous.

In the review of her book by Professor Stephen Carter, over at the Daily Beast, I came across this comment about the usage "African-American":

Rice, by the way, rejects this term, which she thinks too easily lets white Americans off the hook for slavery and Jim Crow, by making the black community seem like any other group of immigrants.

I am with Rice on this one, too.

Will be neat to have Dr. Rice over for dinner with just about four or five people and listen to stories about her childhood, parents, grandparents, the obstacles that she faced as a young black woman ...  ask her about her take on Invisible Man--what her reactions were when she first read it ... I wonder if she likes Indian food :)

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
Condoleezza Rice Pt. 1
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"The White Messiah" in Hollywood movies

Who knew that David Brooks is a good movie reviewer too! :)
I have not seen Avatar, nor do I have any plans to.  I remember reading the lengthy feature about the movie and the director in the New Yorker, and that was enough for me.  Anyway, Brooks has a great column in which he writes that Avatar:

rests on the stereotype that white people are rationalist and technocratic while colonial victims are spiritual and athletic. It rests on the assumption that nonwhites need the White Messiah to lead their crusades. It rests on the assumption that illiteracy is the path to grace. It also creates a sort of two-edged cultural imperialism. Natives can either have their history shaped by cruel imperialists or benevolent ones, but either way, they are going to be supporting actors in our journey to self-admiration.
It’s just escapism, obviously, but benevolent romanticism can be just as condescending as the malevolent kind — even when you surround it with pop-up ferns and floating mountains.

 Yep.  It makes for romantic escapism, as much as "Dances with Wolves" or "The Last Samurai" were .... Oh, wait, I did go to see those movies!  I suppose I am older and wiser now. At least, I think so :D

American History X on FX: bad timing

So, here I am flicking TV on a Friday evening, and FX has American History X. It is a fantastic movie, but the worst time to feature it on television, with race being a huge factor in the elections, which is only 25 days away.
Bad, bad, scheduling.
I don't mean that they intentionally scheduled it this way, but the TV folks have a responsibility that they have conveniently overlooked.

If the missing Caylee was a black kid ....

From Salon:
[You] probably haven't heard of Tomisha Ross, Camille Johnson, Jasmine Kasner, Jasmine Hosbon or Callie Munn -- all of whom have gone missing this summer. And all of whom are black.

I hadn't heard of them until I read a recent post by Renee of Womanist Musings, who writes, "By pointing out the invisibility of these young black women I am not stating that Caylee [Anthony] does not deserve attention, I am only seeking the same kind of attention for [people of color]. We do not love our children any less than white families. Yet when one of our children disappears resources are not devoted to finding them and this often leads to tragic results." Those tragic results include the torture and murder of Romona Moore, a 21-year-old black woman from New York whose mother, Elle Carmichael, reported her missing a few hours after Romona said she'd "be right back." According to the Village Voice, police told Carmichael that since Romona was an adult, they were "not supposed to take the report," even after 24 hours had gone by. Carmichael called local media outlets and got the brushoff. Only after Romona's family contacted politicians, who put pressure on the NYPD, did the official search for Romona begin, 93 hours after her disappearance. That was the same day she was murdered.

The lack of media and police response to cases of missing people of color has prompted former ad writer and blogger Black Canseco to launch a viral Web campaign called We Want Our Kids Back Too. It's a series of posters featuring the faces of missing children with tag lines like: "He had his whole life ahead of him, too," "Her mother hasn't slept since she disappeared, either," and "Her close-knit community was shaken, too." Writes Black Canseco, "Each ad highlights a different child/teen and reminds us that they are just as human, just as 'all-american' as Jesse Davis, Natalee Holloway, Elizabeth Smart and all the rest who receive so much focus.