Update: Military Board Says Lt. Dan Choi Should Be Discharged
Calling it a setback and "an opportunity to keep fighting," Lt. Dan Choi faces discharge from the Army National Guard for violating the "don't ask, don't tell policy" for gays and lesbians in the military.
A military administrative board recommended
Tuesday that Choi, who outed himself on national TV in March to protest
"don't ask, don't tell," be discharged for violating the policy against
homosexual conduct.
President Obama had promised to repeal "don't ask, don't tell" but hasn't done anything about it so far.
It could be a year before Choi is actually discharged, so stay tuned. In the meantime, support Choi by signing his petition.
Uh ... was anyone actually suggesting that Obama invade Iran? I mean, other than crazy mans on da streets?
Because (m)O('bettah)bama is the very opposite of a brutal regime dictator tyrant evil axis thingie. (m)O('bettah)bama is good. It is Ahmadinejad who is brutal 'n' evil. And Kim Il thingie. And, like, Angela Merkel, and Johnson & Johnson. And Metallica.
Actually, if you look around, the Brutal Regimes are everywhere. Everywhere. Wow. It's frightening.
Here's the speech Army Lt. Dan Choi gave on Saturday at the Pink Triangle unveiling ceremony in San Francisco as part of Pride weekend activities.
Choi is an Iraq war veteran, Arabic speaker and West Point graduate. Sounds great? But he is also openly gay, which the military has a problem with. Choi is fighting his dismissal from the Army National Guard for violating the military's "don't ask, don't tell" policy.
For news and conflict junkies, and those of you who are just wondering what the hell's going on with the post-election protests in Iran, the BBC offers this round up of places to go on the web to follow along.
The study, titled "Addressing Ethnic Profiling by Police: A Report
on the Strategies for Effective Police Stop and Search Project," is the
result of 18 months of research on police stops in Spain, Bulgaria and
Hungary.
In that study, the Justice Initiative worked with police
to collect data on ethnicity and criminality, comparing the ethnicity
of people stopped by police to those actually found to have committed a
crime or offense. "In every pilot site, police were profiling people
based on ethnicity or national origin," the study reports. "Minorities
were more likely to be stopped, often more likely to be searched, but,
almost without exception, were no more likely to be found to be
offending than the majority group."
... At pilot sites in Hungary, for example, police
were three times as likely to stop Roma as ethnic Hungarians, "yet the
rate at which each group is detected in the commission of an offense is
almost identical." In some areas, the data showed ethnic minorities
were even less likely to be offenders than the local majority.
I've always been opposed to racial and ethnic profiling on moral and ethical grounds. But this study seems to argue that racial and ethnic profiling should be opposed on efficacy grounds. I have to say, I think the two are inextricably linked. Racism is an extreme example of poor judgment and unsound thinking. Assuming that people of a particular race or ethnicity will all have exactly the same outlook, goals, and prejudices is ignorant and stupid. It's not the kind of thinking that holds up in real life, and it's not the kind of thinking that illuminates human nature in a way that will become useful in social life, working life, or the study of criminal psychology.
So, ethnic profiling doesn't work? Duh. If I continued to insist that babies DID come from cabbage patches, because my parents told me so, would somebody have to do a study of the natural cycle of cabbage to help me design a policy to raise the US birthrate? But now we're getting dangerously close to other immoral and ineffective policy myths.
We've seen the extreme of ethnic profiling in Japanese internment. And we all know that's bad (except for M!ch3ll% M@lk!n, who shall be eternally disemvowelled for her sins), not least because it was ineffective: not a single Japanese American was ever shown to have spied for the Japanese. But just because police harrassment is less extreme, doesn't mean it's any more right ... or any more effective. So score a win for soft science ... let's hope.
William Wong: Sonia Sotomayor's Heritage Enhances Her Supreme Court Qualifications
Judge Sonia Sotomayor's Puerto Rican cultural heritage is
an important part of who she is and why she might make a good Supreme
Court Justice, former Oakland Tribune columnist William Wong writes in a piece posted on Hyphen's homepage.
Hyphen Lynx: Sriracha Sauce Origins, Asian Americans Hit Silicon Valley Glass Ceiling
Every so often when I'm in Southern California, we take the drive out
from Los Angeles proper to the eastern suburbs, and when the exit signs
for Rosemead pop up, I always think of Sriracha hot sauce and wished I was the guy who came up with that gold mine.
The Rosemead-based company's stuff is in restaurants everywhere, and it was christened with an article in the New York Times this week that's being linked to all over Facebook and the Web.
Back in the San Francisco Bay Area, a study released this week shows that Asian Americans are few and far between in the corporate board rooms and executive offices of Silicon Valley companies.
Asian Americans make up more
than a third of the work force at some of Silicon Valley's biggest tech
companies but only about 6 percent of board members
and about 10 percent of corporate officers of the Bay Area's 25 largest
companies, the report says.
The New York Times commemorated President Obama's 100th day in office last week with some optimistic reportage of race relations in the United States. Citing a recent New York Times / CBS News poll, the article asserted that Obama is positively influencing public perception of race relations, stating that
"Two-thirds of Americans now say race relations
are generally good, and the percentage of blacks who say so has doubled
since last July..."
If only the public's perception of "progress" were motivated by actual progress. Even a cursory examination of the state of race relations in the US will reveal that we are still a very racially divided nation, in some ways even more so than before Obama's election. The Southern Poverty Law Center, for example, just released a report which found that the number of hate groups in the US has increased by more than 50 percent since 2000, and by 5 percent since last year. SPLC attributes the increase, in part, to growing anti-immigrant sentiment -- a key point to remember, as Obama's rise seems to have us thinking about race relations exclusively in black and white.
New UC Admissions Policy Is 'Affirmative Action for Whites'
The headlines say Asian Americans are angry over changes to the University of California's admissions policy. Why? Because the new standards may reduce the number of Asian Americans students, who currently make up 40 percent of the undergraduates at UC's nine campuses.
Earth Day is a day I particularly like being Chinese AMERICAN because, although we Americans are 1 percent of the world's pop and using 98 percent of its energy (does that statistic seem off to you? Whatever.), at least we're not as bad as the Chinese.
Dear Representative Betty Brown,
I know you've gotten a lot of flak over your suggestion that Asian Americans change their names to something "easier for Americans to deal with" in order to exercise their right to vote. You know what? I agree. I mean, shoot, names like Ko, Vu, Chang, Patel, Kim, Gupta, and Park are just hard to learn. And why should you spend a second of your life trying to learn something new? You're a busy woman, working hard at legislating and all. People should totally change for you!
The Perils of Internet Research, and More on "Reverse Racism"
Ben Hwang over at 8Asians recently took issue with my post "Reverse Racism at Princeton..." because, according to himself, the South, and the Urban Dictionary, "reverse racism" is a misnomer, or non-existent, or something along those lines:
"Hyphen's recent blog post about Princeton University's "Reverse Racism" was amusing to me, especially since the terminology was used incorrectly -- it's not reverse racism, it's just racism. (Especially ironic since I learned this after I moved to the South.)"
Far be it from me to contradict the teaching of "the South," but I get the feeling that Ben doesn't exactly get it. Then again, his sources included the third (not to be confused with the first or the second) definition of "racism" provided by dictionary.com, as well as some of the less articulate
definitions of "reverse racism" posted at the Urban Dictionary, which he describes as his "reference for all things slang this side of Wednesday."
While I do appreciate the obviously extensive research he conducted in an effort to understand the tricky concept of "reverse racism," I think his analysis would have benefited a tiny a bit had he scrolled down the Google search results page a little further to discover either of the following links:
Tim Wise's essay, "A Look at the Myth of Reverse Racism," tackles this topic in language accessible enough for even regular readers of the Urban Dictionary to comprehend. (FYI, Tim Wise is a leading anti-racism activist and educator in the U.S.)
If he had, he might see that these essays, like both his post and mine, question the validity of the notion of "reverse racism." Unlike Ben, however, we don't take issue with the concept because we find it equivalent to "racism" -- on the contrary.
Sam #1. In an interesting development, director Sam Raimi is going to be overseeing a remake of the Zhang Yimou movie House of Flying Daggers. Why are there so many Hollywood remakes of recent movies created by Asian people? Hollywood remade The Hulk only a few years after Ang Lee directed it, remade Infernal Affairs into The Departed, and there are more than a dozen other recent examples from this decade of Hollywood remakes of brand-new quality Asian films. What is wrong with simply showing the same story with the original Asian faces in them?
Sam #2. I'm excited to pass along that Sam Yoon recently announced
his candidacy for mayor of Boston, attempting to beat out two other
candidates to take over the post long held by Tom "mumbles" Menino. For
those unaware of his background, Sam Yoon is a Princeton and Harvard
educated activist who just a few years ago became the first-ever
elected Asian American Boston city councilman. He is also a co-founder
of the Asian Political Leadership Fund,
which supports and fosters Asian American political leaders around the
country. Interestingly, most of his funds have been raised from out-of-state. Learn more about Sam Yoon and his campaign by visiting his site.
The third most powerful woman in the world is Indian American? And she's part of an international conspiracy of the rich and powerful who select politicians and broker wars?
BusinessWeek and US News recently ran articles about how TARP and other bills passed by Congress, with their policies severely restricting the hiring of talented, educated foreigners, are forcing these workers back to their home nations. The United States is shooting itself in the foot by
preventing talented, educated foreign workers from contributing to America's
innovation and to its economy, and allowing these individuals to return to uplift the economies of their home nations instead. The bills by Congress accelerate the brain-drain that has been occurring ever since the United States passed restrictions making it more difficult for the world's best and brightest to study in American universities after 9/11.
Though she's not the most powerful Asian American woman in politics, her appointment last week to Obama's new White House Council for Women and Girls may make her the most effective women's advocate in the country.
I just heard the news that Richard Aoki passed away Sunday at age 70*. Richard Aoki was one of the first members of the Black Panther Party and a field marshal of the revolutionary group.
Aoki was born in San Leandro, CA. He and his family were interned during WWII, and afterwards, resettled in West Oakland. Aoki befriended Black Panther Party founders Huey Newton and Bobby Seale at Merritt College in Oakland, where they all went to school. Richard was also a student leader in the Third World Student Strike at UC Berkeley in 1968 and a member of the Asian American Political Alliance.
I'm sure Richard will be missed by many friends and people in the community. Feel free to post a message here. I am writing a full obituary on him for the local paper, which I will link to later.
Here's an article I wrote about him on the 40th* anniversary of the Black Panther Party. Here's an article that Neela Banerjee, also a Hyphen editor, wrote about him in AsianWeek in 2001.
Hyphen contributor Yumi Wilson says in her first-person essay that all her life she "had fought to be recognized as half-black and half-Japanese" and that her racial identity "was based on my experience as the daughter of a
Japanese-born mother and African American soldier. My love of Japanese
soba came from my mother's cooking. My choice of music came from my
father's taste for soul and R&B."
Calling it a setback and "an opportunity to keep fighting," Lt. Dan Choi faces discharge from the Army National Guard for violating the "don't ask, don't tell policy" for gays and lesbians in the military.
Dear Representative Betty Brown,
I know you've gotten a lot of flak over your suggestion that Asian Americans change their names to something "easier for Americans to deal with" in order to exercise their right to vote. You know what? I agree. I mean, shoot, names like Ko, Vu, Chang, Patel, Kim, Gupta, and Park are just hard to learn. And why should you spend a second of your life trying to learn something new? You're a busy woman, working hard at legislating and all. People should totally change for you! 
Last Saturday I heard a story on "All Things Considered" on NPR about how Ecuador's new open-border policy this year has seen a flood of Chinese coming through, in hopes of getting to the US:
Hyphen contributor Yumi Wilson says in her first-person essay that all her life she "had fought to be recognized as half-black and half-Japanese" and that her racial identity "was based on my experience as the daughter of a
Japanese-born mother and African American soldier. My love of Japanese
soba came from my mother's cooking. My choice of music came from my
father's taste for soul and R&B."
