Climate justice and immigrant communities

So, today I spent some time interviewing Portland State Urban Planning Professor Vivek Shandas about his work on what he calls climate justice, a term that was new to me. It differs from environmental justice in that it’s not really focused on the factory belching pollution into people’s backyards. Rather, climate justice considers how climate change affects marginalized communities more than privileged communities. In our conversation, we focused on how heat waves (projected to increase in frequency and intensity as a result of climate change) hit poor communities with higher temperatures and fewer resources to handle the stress of intense, prolonged heat.

In November, we’ll air the interview with Dr. Shandas — he’s passionate about environmental activism and the responsibility urban planners and government decision-makers have to all urban communities (not just wealthy neighborhoods).

Later this month (9am, Friday, October 22) he’ll be giving a lecture on “Blue Planet, Green Neighborhoods” at Portland State’s Smith Memorial Student Union as part of the PSU Weekend events. You should definitely check it out.

Here’s some information about Dr. Shandas’ latest work: http://www.pdx.edu/profile/meet-associate-professor-vivek-shandas.

That’s not art. It’s just racist.

Taping one’s eyes back? I’m sorry, but that is SO Charlie Chan. If Vogue wanted an Asian-looking model, how about hiring (gasp) an Asian model??? Here’s a link to the video of Crystal Renn’s photoshoot. The blog Refinery 29 asks, is this the new blackface?

‘Til undeath us do part

 

The hubbub surrounding weddings and marriage is generally pretty tiresome, but I have to say that Julian Sunmi Park and Benjamin Jinsuk Lee hit it out of the park with these wedding pictures. I bet their reception was awesome.

Thanks to APA Compass listener Beth for sending this link!

“Sorry our reporters, producers and editors are racist.”

At least they’ve apologized.

A few days ago, Fox Sports aired a piece in which Asian students at USC were singled out and mocked by reporter Bob Oschack because of the students’ accents and apparent lack of knowledge about Colorado and Utah joining the Pac-10. This has popped up on quite a few blogs already, but just in case you missed it, we’re including the gem here. It’s ridiculous that Oschack produced this story in the first place, but even worse, how many editors and producers saw it before it aired and figured it was just fine? They’ve taken down the video, and Fox apologized “to the entire USC campus,” but it can be viewed here, via Media Matters.

The Politics of Grief

V.V. Ganeshananthan has written an incredible essay for Granta Magazine on grieving the tens of thousands Tamil civilians killed at the end of the Sri Lankan civil war in 2009. The loss of human life on such a scale can seem incomprehensible, but for Ganeshananthan, that loss resonates with visceral specificity: “My heart still seizes, becomes that calculator, in any sizable space designed to contain a certain number of people.”

The Sri Lankan government, of course, has denied that it knowingly shelled civilians who were pinned between army forces and the last of the rebel Tigers, who — as Ganeshananthan points out — also had a long, ugly history of violence against civilians and dissenters in their quest for a separate homeland.

Ganeshananthan notes that speaking her grief is a political act, a risk that opens her up to criticism from those who deny that these deaths occurred, or worse, deny that the deaths are worth grieving. She also discusses how she has viewed this conflict from afar, as an ethnic Tamil born and raised in the United States by her Tamil-Sri Lankan parents. I share some aspects of this identity: I, too, grew up with this far-away war, also born and raised in the U.S. I am ethnically Sinhalese, however, and this fact enabled me, for most of my life, to disassociate myself from the reality of Sri Lanka’s civil war. My family wouldn’t be considered extremely political — but seeing oneself as apolitical in a war like this one is a luxury — and delusion — of privilege.

In recent years, the brutality of the Rajapakse government in Sri Lanka has made it impossible for me to maintain this false neutrality, which I recognize now as complicity. As Ganeshananthan mentions, criticism of the Sri Lankan government has been, for too long and by too many, mislabeled as support for terrorism. And fear of being misidentified this way is no excuse for keeping silent about the horrors of the 2009 mass killings and the continued horrors of the IDP camps where hundreds of thousands of Tamil civilians are currently detained.

I hope you’ll read V.V. Ganeshananthan’s essay. Also, you can find out more about the situation in Sri Lanka at Groundviews.org, a citizen journalism site focusing on humanitarian issues in SL. Another useful site is Lanka Solidarity, a North American, multi-ethnic organization focused on democracy and pluralism in Sri Lanka.

That’s all for now,

Kushlani

Stretch marks are beautiful, like exotic foreign ladies.

It’s been a while since we’ve updated the site, but we figured we’d resume the blog with an appropriately angry post. On today’s show, Kushlani sounded off about a recent column in the (conservative) Washington Times newspaper. The columnist offered a totally reasonable message about harmful beauty standards in the media, but the choice of photos to accompany the column left Kushlani thinking, “That’s racist!” Here’s the link to her Angry APA Minute. You can listen online or download it: https://kboo.fm/node/30668/. The text of Kushlani’s rant is below the screenshot of the offending column (along with some commentary).

Here's a screenshot of the offending column, which inexplicably features photos of two women from the so-called developing world, rather than an image that actually relates to the column's main message about women of privilege rejecting expensive and offensive "beauty" products.

“Stretch Marks are beautiful, like exotic foreign ladies.”

So, I’m trolling Facebook the other day and I see that one of my high school English teachers has posted a link (yes, I’m FB friends with my high school teachers – I am that cool).  The column my teacher has suggested is headlined, “I am not embarrassed about my stretchmarks.” This is a message that I, as a women’s studies instructor, as a person with some stretch marks, can get on board with. So I click the link.

A feminist message…

In her August 13 column in the Washington Times Communities section, columnist Rebekah Kuschmider declares proudly, that she is NOT ashamed of her stretch marks. She goes on to say that women should love their aging skin, that we should reject the impossible Photoshop beauty standards that make us hate ourselves and reject the costly products that promise to erase all signs of our former lives. Ms. Kuschmider describes herself, not as a perfect, plastic Barbie Doll, but a “Velveteen Rabbit, so worn and loved that I’ve become real.” It’s a great message.

… Marked by racism

But, two curious images accompany this story about the stretch marks of a (presumably) wealthy white woman, the identity suggested by Ms. Kuschmider’s mugshot and some of her other columns.

The two women pictured with the story are actually a Thai woman from a village near Burma and an Indian laborer from the city of Diu (this according to the Flickr pages from which the photos were captured). The old Thai woman’s face is a shrunken apple;  tatoos cover the younger Indian woman’s neck, and the whites of her eyes are yellowed from exposure to the sun. Both women are beautiful. Neither photograph reveals any stretch marks.

The power of pictures

So why don’t we see, not to get too personal here, the stretch marks of which Ms. Kuschmider is justifiably proud? Why do we instead see portraits that seem to come straight off the pages of National Geographic? The underlying message from whoever chose these photos (the author? some online editor?) is that wrinkles are exotic on poor women whom privileged Americans love to gawk at. We don’t expect them to be attractive by our standards – they’re so lovely in their way, so tragic. We should all be so… natural.

Maybe the conservative readership of the Washington Times wouldn’t want to see white women looking old or aging, much less with stretch marks – perhaps that kind of woman, a woman of privilege, is too dignified to be seen looking like she’d “let herself go.” No matter what Rebekah Kuschmider has to say about it, the use of these photos tells a different story altogether. Another implication here is that women from other countries are not affected by Westernized, corporatized images of idealized, airbrushed beauty: The reality is that these harmful beauty standards affect women across the globe, regardless of their ethnicity, nationality, or social class.

White women and women of color – people in general, really – should be offended by the selection of these photographs. I certainly am.

My name is Kushlani de Soyza, and this is my Angry APA Minute.

Submit your Angry APA Minute: You know you’ve got one.

As always, if you have an idea for an Angry APA Minute, we’d love to hear about it and help you get your rant recorded and on the airwaves. Just post a message on our Facebook fan page, APA Compass Radio.

Best of…

This Friday, APA Compass is airing some of our best pieces from 2010. Here are a few other lists of interest and entertainment from around the interwebs…

Angry Asian Man: this year’s angriest posts

Asia Pacific Arts: Best of 2010 (via Angry Asian Man)

Bicoastal Bitchin: Dawen’s Favorite Asian American Songs of 2010 (again, via Angry Asian Man)

Huffington Post: Funniest People of 2010 (including several APAs)

Hyphen Magazine’s Blog: Ten Notable Asian American Books of 2010

New American Media: The Most Underreported Stories of the Decade

Paste Magazine Blog: The 25 Best TV Performances of 2010

You Offend Me You Offend My Family: 5 Asian American Inventions You Didn’t Know Were Asian American Inventions

“Miley Cyrus sports bindi during NYC shopping spree.”

How do I express my distaste over this latest example of cultural appropriation?  My immediate reaction is, “Boo!” I don’t think she’s wearing the bindi, the Native-Americanesque necklace and the All-American, eagle-emblazoned Harley “T” ironically. But it is, without a doubt, ironic.

– Kushlani

Here’s a link to my last anti-Miley rant:

http://kboo.fm/node/11992

Asian Americans and the fashion industry

A September 5 article in The New York Times offers an interesting take on the rise of Asian American fashion designers. Maybe it’s because I don’t have time to focus on what I’m wearing these days, or maybe it’s because I’m simply grateful that the sweater I am wearing is not stained with toddler snot or food. But when did Asian Americans suddenly become so prominent in the fashion industry? Obviously, I’m out of it. Besides Jason Wu, I haven’t heard of Richard Chai or Alexander Wang. And I never heard of Jay Nicolas Sario until recently, either.

But what is notable in this piece is that it situates the recent success of Asian American fashion designers within the labor history of Asian garment workers. It also highlights the parallels between early Jewish immigrants working in the garment industry and the subsequent rise of designers such as Calvin Klein, Donna Karan, Ralph Lauren, Marc Jacobs and Michael Kors. And if there ever was a model model minority, then it would be Jewish immigrants. The stereotypical narrative that describes putative Asian American success and assimilation often parallels the stereotypical narrative of Jewish immigration and assimilation.

I know it makes for a good story–children whose parents or grandparents once worked in sweatshops now designing high-end clothes. But in highlighting the success and gains of Asian Americans in the fashion industry, the story potentially rehearses the same upward-mobility-model-minority narrative we’ve heard many times over.

Moreover, there seems to be an undertone of anxiety regarding the large “waves” of fashion students coming from Asia to study at prestigious New York design schools.  As Gary Okihiro notes, the stereotype of the yellow peril and model minority are two sides of the same coin.  And in touting how some Asian Americans are “climbing the fashion industry ladder,” the implication is that there are even more from Asia who are poised to dominate the fashion industry. But in singling out the success of a select group of designers (and its example of Lam is hardly representative–his grandfather owned a bridal gown factory), the article also seems to suggest that sweatshop exploitation of Asians is a thing of the past.

Just once, I’d like to be surprised.

Jay Nicolas Sario coming to APA Compass (and PDX Fashion Week)!

Even though my budget is lamentably more Ross-Dress-For-Less than Rodarte when it comes to fashion, I could not be more excited that Jay Nicolas Sario — the fantastic Filipino-American designer of Project Runway Season 7 fame — is showing a collection at Portland Fashion Week next month. We’re hopeful we can snag him for an interview for an upcoming show (tune in at 9 am, Friday, October 1) to talk about his new collection, his post-PR projects, his one-time “bok-bok” aesthetic of textures and color, and his experiences getting into fashion in the Philippines, Hawaii, and California. Last month he was grand marshall at the Pistahan Parade, a huge celebration of Filipino culture in the Bay Area — he’s a proud APA man who represents!

Jay, email us. Seriously! We should talk!!

Here’s his website if, like me, you want to covet the unbelievably fabulous boots from his PR collection: http://www.jaynicolassario.com/

Cheers,

Kushlani

UPDATE (9/23): Listeners, rejoice! I talked with Jay this afternoon, and you’ll get to hear our conversation on our October show, 9 am, Friday 10/1. Of course, Jay is gracious and funny, and he was a good sport about answering at least one goofy question about Project Runway. Follow him on twitter — he’s prolific: @jaynicolassario. And while you’re at it, follow us: @apacompass!