“
But I think the first real change in women’s body image came when JLo turned it butt-style. That was the first time that having a large-scale situation in the back was part of mainstream American beauty. Girls wanted butts now. Men were free to admit that they had always enjoyed them. And then, what felt like moments later, boom—Beyoncé brought the leg meat. A back porch and thick muscular legs were now widely admired. And from that day forward, women embraced their diversity and realized that all shapes and sizes are beautiful. Ah ha ha. No. I’m totally messing with you. All Beyonce and JLo have done is add to the laundry list of attributes women must have to qualify as beautiful. Now every girl is expected to have Caucasian blue eyes, full Spanish lips, a classic button nose, hairless Asian skin with a California tan, a Jamaican dance hall ass, long Swedish legs, small Japanese feet, the abs of a lesbian gym owner, the hips of a nine-year-old boy, the arms of Michelle Obama, and doll tits. The person closest to actually achieving this look is Kim Kardashian, who, as we know, was made by Russian scientists to sabotage our athletes.
”
”
Tina Fey (Bossypants)
“
Do not diminish who you are. Your gender, your heritage, your identity. That's what makes you unique. - Strong by Kailin Gow
”
”
Kailin Gow
“
Try being an indie author, a minority author, a woman, and a person with health issues in the world of traditional - that's where you are clearly 'different' and marginalized. I am all of that, yet I am still here and smiling. Life is good!
”
”
Kailin Gow
“
Men need to whisper secrets, Lady. That’s what makes them different from us – they need to share secrets, but we women only reveal them to gain an advantage.
”
”
James Clavell (Shogun (Asian Saga, #1))
“
Torn was betwixt and between, but eventually realized the arrangement suited him quite well. He had the security of his long-term relationship with Yukie and the romance with Mayumi. Unfortunately, it took two women for him to get what he wanted from one.
”
”
L.M. Weeks (Bottled Lightning)
“
One time you mentioned the loneliness inside of marriage and I did not understand what you were saying. Two people are together; they have come from the same place; they share the same values, the same language. Practically speaking, they are the two halves of one consciousness. They eat the same food; they have a child; they sleep in the same bed, how can they be lonely.
”
”
Bharati Mukherjee (Desirable Daughters)
“
What about other women of color? For Hispanic and Latina women, Indian women, Middle Eastern women, Asian women, their absence in popular culture is even more pronounced, their need for relief just as palpable and desperate.
”
”
Roxane Gay (Bad Feminist: Essays)
“
Only a bitch of color comes to Harvard to get pregnant. White women don't do that. Asian women don't do that. Only fucking black and Latina women. Why go to all the trouble to get into Harvard just to get knocked up? You could have stayed on the block and done that shit.
”
”
Junot Díaz (This Is How You Lose Her)
“
If indeed all lives mattered, we would not need to emphatically proclaim that "Black Lives Matter." Or, as we discover on the BLM website: Black Women Matter, Black Girls Matter, Black Gay Lives Matter, Black Bi Lives Matter, Black Boys Matter, Black Queer Lives Matter, Black Men Matter, Black Lesbians Matter, Black Trans Lives Matter, Black Immigrants Matter, Black Incarcerated Lives Matter. Black Differently Abled Lives Matter. Yes, Black Lives Matter, Latino/Asian American/Native American/Muslim/Poor and Working-Class White Peoples Lives matter. There are many more specific instances we would have to nane before we can ethically and comfortably claim that All Lives Matter.
”
”
Angela Y. Davis (Freedom Is a Constant Struggle)
“
now you have the body shape considered ideal to the women you seek to cultivate—delicately emaciated, with just a hint of a well-managed eating disorder.
”
”
Kevin Kwan (China Rich Girlfriend (Crazy Rich Asians, #2))
“
As a child of immigrant parents, as a woman of color in a white society and as a woman in a patriarchal society, what is personal to me IS political.
”
”
Mitsuye Yamada
“
MRS. LIU IS GORGEOUS. IT’S TRUE WHAT THEY SAY—ASIAN WOMEN don’t age. She must be in her midfifties by now, but she doesn’t look a day over thirty.
”
”
R.F. Kuang (Yellowface)
“
Thing is, anyone who thinks Asian women are submissive and silent has never truly known one. Asian women are matriarchs of the earth.
”
”
Joanna Ho (The Silence That Binds Us)
“
[Two respondents] minimized the assimilationist implications of the dominant account; Russ Silver rejects the idea entirely.
'I have no interest in being accepted. I consider this system corrupt, and I don't want to be accepted by it. We're in this together. Faggots, junkies, women, blacks, Hispanics, Native Americans, Asians, don't you see it? Don't you see that our white male government doesn't care about us? When I say this it shocks coat-and-tie lesbians and gay men everywhere. Well, I'm sorry, folks; if you had AIDS you would know what I know: The government doesn't give a goddamn cent for a faggot's life.
”
”
Vera Whisman (Queer By Choice)
“
Black women are always the loudest when they have babies. Screaming to Jesus, usually. White women are much quieter, right up until the baby starts to crown. Then you can't tell a white woman from a black woman. Asian women make no sound at all. Quiet as church mice. We have to keep an extra-careful eye on them, because if we don't keep checking their hootchies they'll give birth without even letting us know.
”
”
Jenny Lawson (Let's Pretend This Never Happened: A Mostly True Memoir)
“
The divorced Indian lady combines every fantasy about the liberated, wicked Western woman with the safety net of basic submissive familiarity.
”
”
Bharati Mukherjee (Desirable Daughters)
“
Suddenly Americans feel self-conscious of their white identity and this self-consciousness misleads them into thinking their identity is under threat. In feeling wrong, they feel wronged. In being asked to be made aware of racial oppression, they feel oppressed. While we laugh at white tears, white tears can turn dangerous. White tears, as Damon Young explains in The Root, are why defeated Southerners refused to accept the freedom of black slaves and formed the Ku Klux Klan. And white tears are why 63 percent of white men and 53 percent of white women elected a malignant man-child as their leader.
”
”
Cathy Park Hong (Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning)
“
There are thousands of other women to choose from. You understand me? And this court runs on ambition alone.
”
”
Cindy Pon (Fury of the Phoenix (Kingdom of Xia, #2))
“
But she looked powerful. She wore the sun like a shiny pin on the side of her hair.
”
”
Lilian Li (House of Koi)
“
Curious, Toranaga thought, how women can change like chameleons—one moment ugly, the next attractive, sometimes even beautiful, though in reality they’re not.
”
”
James Clavell (Shōgun: Part Two (Asian Saga, #2))
“
I do not need to understand words to know he is disappointed I am not a boy. Some things need no translation. And I know, because my body remembers without benefit of words, that men who do not welcome girl-babies will not treasure me as I grow to woman - though he call me princess just because the Guru told him to.
I have come so far, I have borne so much pain and emptiness!
But men have not yet changed.
”
”
Shauna Singh Baldwin (What the Body Remembers)
“
She's a slinky sort of person, no angles at all; and magnetic - you can't take your eyes off her. She's dressed like a Westerner, but her eyes have a slant to them. They are the eyes of an Easterner. She doesn't walk like our women do, she seems to writhe all in one piece - undulates is the word. ("Kiss Of The Cobra")
”
”
Cornell Woolrich (The Fantastic Stories of Cornell Woolrich (Alternatives SF Series))
“
And while it is okay to acknowledge that all kinds of women, whether white, Black, Indigenous, Latina, Asian, cis, gender nonconforming, trans, queer, bi, or straight might have different experiences, it's not cool to act as though transwomen are in some entirely separate category from the more general category of woman. That is something that feminism needs to be clear on - that it isn't feminism if all women's concerns, particularly the most marginalized women's concerns, aren't taken seriously.
”
”
Brittney Cooper (Eloquent Rage: A Black Feminist Discovers Her Superpower)
“
The reason why so many white men date Asian women is that they can get better-looking Asian women than they can get white women because we are easier to get and have lower self-esteem.
”
”
Cathy Park Hong (Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning)
“
From invisible girlhood, the Asian American woman will blossom into a fetish object. When she is at last visible—at last desired—she realizes much to her chagrin that this desire for her is treated like a perversion. This is most obvious in porn, where our murky desires are coldly isolated into categories in which white is the default and every other race is a sexual aberration. But the Asian woman is reminded every day that her attractiveness is a perversion, in instances ranging from skin-crawling Tinder messages (“I’d like to try my first Asian woman”) to microaggressions from white friends. I recall a white friend pointing out to me that Jewish men only dated Asian women because they wanted to find women who were the opposite of their pushy mothers. Implied in this tone-deaf complaint was her assumption that Asian women are docile and compliant. Well-meaning friends never failed to warn me, if a white guy was attracted to me, that he probably had an Asian fetish. The result: I distrusted my desirousness. My sexuality was a pathology. If anyone non-Asian liked me, there was something wrong with him.
”
”
Cathy Park Hong (Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning)
“
A Rock, A River, A Tree
Hosts to species long since departed,
Mark the mastodon.
The dinosaur, who left dry tokens
Of their sojourn here
On our planet floor,
Any broad alarm of their of their hastening doom
Is lost in the gloom of dust and ages.
But today, the Rock cries out to us, clearly, forcefully,
Come, you may stand upon my
Back and face your distant destiny,
But seek no haven in my shadow.
I will give you no hiding place down here.
You, created only a little lower than
The angels, have crouched too long in
The bruising darkness,
Have lain too long
Face down in ignorance.
Your mouths spelling words
Armed for slaughter.
The rock cries out today, you may stand on me,
But do not hide your face.
Across the wall of the world,
A river sings a beautiful song,
Come rest here by my side.
Each of you a bordered country,
Delicate and strangely made proud,
Yet thrusting perpetually under siege.
Your armed struggles for profit
Have left collars of waste upon
My shore, currents of debris upon my breast.
Yet, today I call you to my riverside,
If you will study war no more.
Come, clad in peace and I will sing the songs
The Creator gave to me when I
And the tree and stone were one.
Before cynicism was a bloody sear across your brow
And when you yet knew you still knew nothing.
The river sings and sings on.
There is a true yearning to respond to
The singing river and the wise rock.
So say the Asian, the Hispanic, the Jew,
The African and Native American, the Sioux,
The Catholic, the Muslim, the French, the Greek,
The Irish, the Rabbi, the Priest, the Sheikh,
The Gay, the Straight, the Preacher,
The privileged, the homeless, the teacher.
They hear. They all hear
The speaking of the tree.
Today, the first and last of every tree
Speaks to humankind. Come to me, here beside the river.
Plant yourself beside me, here beside the river.
Each of you, descendant of some passed on
Traveller, has been paid for.
You, who gave me my first name,
You Pawnee, Apache and Seneca,
You Cherokee Nation, who rested with me,
Then forced on bloody feet,
Left me to the employment of other seekers--
Desperate for gain, starving for gold.
You, the Turk, the Swede, the German, the Scot...
You the Ashanti, the Yoruba, the Kru,
Bought, sold, stolen, arriving on a nightmare
Praying for a dream.
Here, root yourselves beside me.
I am the tree planted by the river,
Which will not be moved.
I, the rock, I the river, I the tree
I am yours--your passages have been paid.
Lift up your faces, you have a piercing need
For this bright morning dawning for you.
History, despite its wrenching pain,
Cannot be unlived, and if faced with courage,
Need not be lived again.
Lift up your eyes upon
The day breaking for you.
Give birth again
To the dream.
Women, children, men,
Take it into the palms of your hands.
Mold it into the shape of your most
Private need. Sculpt it into
The image of your most public self.
Lift up your hearts.
Each new hour holds new chances
For new beginnings.
Do not be wedded forever
To fear, yoked eternally
To brutishness.
The horizon leans forward,
Offering you space to place new steps of change.
Here, on the pulse of this fine day
You may have the courage
To look up and out upon me,
The rock, the river, the tree, your country.
No less to Midas than the mendicant.
No less to you now than the mastodon then.
Here on the pulse of this new day
You may have the grace to look up and out
And into your sister's eyes,
Into your brother's face, your country
And say simply
Very simply
With hope
Good morning.
”
”
Maya Angelou
“
they would be a voice in theatre where there was silence black and Asian women’s stories would get out there they would create theatre on their own terms it became the company’s motto On Our Own Terms or Not At All.
”
”
Bernardine Evaristo (Girl, Woman, Other)
“
I tried to stay away from the classic Disney princess movies. In addition to featuring a lot of unempowered women, those movies are just so white. White people and stories about white people are not bad, it’s just that when you live in America, everything is so inherently white. I don’t want you to grow up wishing you were white and having that inform all of your decisions later on in life. I want you to be proud of having black hair and Asian features.
”
”
Ali Wong (Dear Girls: Intimate Tales, Untold Secrets, and Advice for Living Your Best Life)
“
We ate, did our homework, got good grades, kissed our parents goodnight and always had the secret door and shared experiences to go to. It was truly remarkable, and doing it as a group made us feel invulnerable. As soon as the drums and amps were set up and Jean and Kathie hit it, I tell you there was nothing more to say. Conversation stopped, and the magic carpet ride took off. I’ve never felt anything more powerful in my life.
”
”
June Millington (Land of a Thousand Bridges: Island Girl in a Rock & Roll World)
“
This image has so dominated Western views of Southeast Asian women that it became a key driver of Thailand’s sex industry. Sex tours of Southeast Asia remain hugely popular among white men, which ensures that the distorted image of Asian women persists.
”
”
Ruby Hamad (White Tears/Brown Scars: How White Feminism Betrays Women of Color)
“
Your own politicians make our Dr. Goebbels look like a child playing with picture books in a kindergarten. They speak of morality while they douse screaming children and old women in burning napalm. Your draft-resisters are called cowards and ‘peaceniks.’ For refusing to follow orders they are either put in jails or scourged from the country. Those who demonstrate against this country's unfortunate Asian adventure are clubbed down in the streets. The GI soldiers who kill the innocent are decorated by Presidents, welcomed home from the bayoneting of children and the burning of hospitals with parades and bunting. They are given dinners, Keys to the City, free tickets to pro football games.” He toasted his glass in Todd's direction. “Only those who lose are tried as war criminals for following orders and directives.
”
”
Stephen King (Apt Pupil)
“
Let us by all means teach black history, African history, women's history, Hispanic history, Asian history. But let us teach them as history, not as filiopietistic commemoration. The purpose of history is to promote not group self-esteem, but understanding of the world and the past, dispassionate analysis, judgment, and perspective, respect for divergent cultures and traditions, and unflinching protection for those unifying ideas of tolerance, democracy, and human rights that make free historical inquiry possible.
”
”
Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. (The Disuniting of America: Reflections on a Multicultural Society)
“
The myths of the Strong Black Woman from chapter one, the Wise Indian, the Submissive Asian, and the Sassy Latina do more than show up in bad TV shows. They influence the perception that women who are not white do not experience a full range of emotions, much less suffer from the same mental health issues.
”
”
Mikki Kendall (Hood Feminism: Notes from the Women That a Movement Forgot)
“
As an associate at McKinsey & Company, my first assignment was on a team that consisted of a male senior engagement manager (SEM) and two other male associates, Abe Wu and Derek Holley. When the SEM wanted to talk to Abe or Derek, he would walk over to their desks. When he wanted to talk to me, he would sit at his desk and shout, "Sandberg, get over here!" with the tone one might use to call a child or, even worse, a dog. It made me cringe every time. I never said anything, but one day Abe and Derek started calling each other "Sandberg" in that same loud voice. The self-absorbed SEM never seemed to notice. They kept it up. When having too many Sandbergs got confusing, they decided we needed to differentiate. Abe started calling himself "Asian Sandberg," Derek dubbed himself "good-looking Sandberg," and I became "Sandberg Sandberg." My colleagues turned an awful situation into one where I felt protected. They stood up for me and made me laugh. They were the best mentors I could have had.
”
”
Sheryl Sandberg (Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead)
“
Success in life is not just about professional success. It is personal success too. There is a trend in Asia and Asian American society for young women to not get married or not have children to get ahead professionally. That was the trend 10 years ago in the US. This is bad for society and a country's population growth. Women need to encouraged and supported for being able to have both a successful career and a successful personal and family life. That is why we need to see Asian American women who are both successful professionally and personally in the media and on screen. That is why I am out there in public as a wife and mother who is a self-made million-selling author and director who is in touch with my Asian heritage. Not because I crave the limelight, but because I want my daughter and nieces to see they can do it too. - Strong by Kailin Gow
”
”
Kailin Gow
“
As immigrants fly across oceans they shed their old clothing because clothes maketh the man and new ones help ease the transition. Men's clothing has less international variations; the change is not so drastic. But those women who are not used to wearing western clothes find themselves in a dilemma. If they focus on integration, convenience and conformity they have to sacrifice habit, style and self-perception.
”
”
Manju Kapur
“
In 2013, 2.4 million heterosexual interactions on the Facebook dating app ‘Are You Interested?’ were analysed and showed that ‘all men except Asians9 preferred Asian women’. 10 ALL. The fetishisation of the Asian female body is highly problematic. Sexual submissiveness, sexual voracity, and voicelessness is a particularly tricky and damning combination.
”
”
Nikesh Shukla (The Good Immigrant)
“
Of course, some women are more war-like than others and enjoy going into battle with their husbands or fathers.
”
”
James Clavell (Shogun (Asian Saga, #1))
“
The other question young people always ask me is: "What advice do you have for a person like me, an Asian American woman wanting to get into Hollywood?" Here it is: Let go of seeing yourself as nothing more than an Asian American woman. Ask yourself who you are outside of that.
”
”
Ali Wong (Dear Girls: Intimate Tales, Untold Secrets, & Advice for Living Your Best Life)
“
Then there are families for whom education was not the focus at all. Instead children were expected to go into the family business, join the military, marry and have children, enter the clergy, or grow up to be a contributing member of one’s racial, religious, or cultural group—something some African, Latino, Native, and Asian Americans refer to as “collective success.
”
”
Valerie Young (The Secret Thoughts of Successful Women: And Men: Why Capable People Suffer from Impostor Syndrome and How to Thrive In Spite of It)
“
Asian professionals are frequently held back from senior positions by the perception that they don’t have “executive presence,” a factor that similarly operates against other minority groups in the workplace, including women.39 And what constitutes executive presence? Certainly not modesty:
”
”
Jeffrey Pfeffer (Leadership BS: Fixing Workplaces and Careers One Truth at a Time)
“
I refused to be stuck. In Pasaje, California. In the smallness of my mother's life. In a fixed notion of my cooking, my abilities, my worth as ascribed to my Chineseness my Asianness my smallness my womanness my perpetual foreignness--myself.
”
”
C Pam Zhang (Land of Milk and Honey)
“
We could see in our own country as late as the 1960's and 1970's how good Christian and Jewish men, the pillars of our society, when they acceded to political and military power, could sit calmly and cooly in their air-conditioned offices in Washington and cold-bloodedly, without a qualm or a moral quiver, plan and order the massacre of hundred of thousands of men, women and children and the destruction of their homes, farms, churches, schools and hospitals in a faraway Asian land of poor peasants who had never threatened us in the slightest, who were incapable of it. Almost as savage was the acceptance by most of us citizens of such barbarism, until, toward the end, our slumbering - or should one say, cowardly? - consciences were aroused.
”
”
William L. Shirer
“
The only difference between having an affair here and having an affair there was that the American men would always ended up losing half of his estates over a woman he was infatuated just as much as the next tramp who would come his way, while Japanese men would only earn more respect from their subordinates through the possession of much younger women, as a sign of prowess and affluence, while their wives at home, as if there were rule books distributed nationally on the “proper” marriage etiquette for all young Japanese women to read before they enter into the matrimony, would turn a blind eye on their disloyalty quietly.
”
”
Vann Chow (The White Man and the Pachinko Girl)
“
You’ve been a hard worker—white, black, Asian, and Latino women ship out of the San Francisco port because of you. You have been a shipfitter, a nurse, a real estate broker, and a barber. Many men and—if my memory serves me right—a few women risked their lives to love you. You were a terrible mother of small children, but there has never been anyone greater than you as a mother of a young adult.
”
”
Maya Angelou (Mom & Me & Mom)
“
She had stepped into the thin strip of earth that they claimed as their own. Bound by the last building on Brewster and a brick wall, they reigned in that unlit alley like dwarfed warrior kings. Born with the appendages of power, circumcised by the guillotine, and baptized with the steam from a million non reflective mirrors, these young men wouldn't be called upon to thrust a bayonet into an Asian farmer, target a torpedo, scatter their iron seed from a B-52 into the wound of the earth, point a finger to move a nation, or stick a pole into the moon--and they knew it. They only had that three-hundred-foot alley to serve them as stateroom, armored tank, and executioner's chamber.
”
”
Gloria Naylor (The Women of Brewster Place)
“
We are called Sad Asian Girls, Hot-tempered Latinas, Crazy White Women, and Angry Black Women. It goes without saying that “angry women” are “ugly women,” the cardinal sin in a world where women’s worth, safety, and glory are reliant on their sexual and reproductive value to men around them.
”
”
Soraya Chemaly (Rage Becomes Her: The Power of Women's Anger)
“
home, alone in my room, with the sounds of #2 and #5 trains rumbling in the distance, I started with a letter to myself. Dear Juliet, Repeat after me: You are a bruja. You are a warrior. You are a feminist. You are a beautiful brown babe. Surround yourself with other beautiful brown and black and indigenous and morena and Chicana, native, Indian, mixed race, Asian, gringa, boriqua babes. Let them uplift you. Rage against the motherfucking machine. Question everything anyone ever says to you or forces down your throat or makes you write a hundred times on the blackboard. Question every man that opens his mouth and spews out a law over your body and spirit. Question every single thing until you find the answer in a daydream. Don’t question yourself unless you hurt someone else. When you hurt someone else, sit down, and think, and think, and think, and then make it right. Apologize when you fuck up. Live forever. Consult the ancestors while counting stars in the galaxy. Hold wisdom under tongue until it’s absorbed into the bloodstream. Do not be afraid. Do not doubt yourself. Do not hide Be proud of your inhaler, your cane, your back brace, your acne. Be proud of the things that the world uses to make you feel different. Love your fat fucking glorious body. Love your breasts, hips, and wide-ass if you have them and if you don’t, love the body you do have or the one you create for yourself. Love the fact that you have ingrown hairs on the back of your thighs and your grandma’s mustache on your lips. Read all the books that make you whole. Read all the books that pull you out of the present and into the future. Read all the books about women who get tattoos, and break hearts, and rob banks, and start heavy metal bands. Read every single one of them. Kiss everyone. Ask first. Always ask first and then kiss the way stars burn in the sky. Trust your lungs. Trust the Universe. Trust your damn self. Love hard, deep, without restraint or doubt Love everything that brushes past your skin and lives inside your soul. Love yourself. In La Virgen’s name and in the name of Selena, Adiosa.
”
”
Gabby Rivera (Juliet Takes a Breath)
“
In western societies, Asian men are considered the least attractive race of men, uniformly passed off as inadequate, unattractive sexual partners by women of all races. Scientific studies have been conducted in which women of every race identify Asian men as the least desirable, and not only that, on average Asian men need to make more than 75% than men of other races to attract white women which are the pickiest women of all races. Not only that, whereas all women of all races prefer men of their own race, that is, the vast majority of black women prefer black men, white women prefer white men, Mexican women prefer Mexican men, etc, this trend is only reversed in the case of Asian men. The vast majority of Asian women prefer non-Asian men as sexual partners; about 50% of Asian women marry non-Asian men and a whopping 80% of Asian women have had sexual intercourse or are currently cohabiting with non-Asian men, the vast majority of which are white men. Not only that, in many cases, Asian women tend to make more money than their non-Asian sexual partners, which is unheard of for women of other races, since in all other races women prefer to date men who make more money than themselves. Asian men are so inferior not only are non-Asian women rejecting them, even Asian women reject Asian men.
”
”
Ling Anderson (My Miserable Life as an Asian Boy Growing up in America: Humiliation, forced feminization, forced homosexuality, castration, brainwashing, slavery, solitary confinement, despair)
“
I can hear people in American society saying, "Oh, you just like that subservient kind of woman in Asia who waits on her man hand and foot." Nothing could be more of a misconception. Many Asian women I've met, surely the most interesting ones. . . have strengths of character that most of us in America - male or female-simply lack.
”
”
Richard Terrill (Saturday Night in Baoding: A China Memoir)
“
Without women, Peter Marlowe thought helplessly, men are only a cruel joke.
”
”
James Clavell (King Rat (Asian Saga, #4))
“
I am an Asian goddess! I love myself and show others they can love themselves as well.
”
”
The Thoughtful Beast
“
The more obsessed with personal identity campus liberals become, the less willing they become to engage in reasoned political debate. Over the past decade a new, and very revealing, locution has drifted from our universities into the media mainstream: 'Speaking as an X' . . . This is not an anodyne phrase. It tells the listener that I am speaking from a privileged position on this matter. (One never says, 'Speaking as an gay Asian, I fell incompetent to judge on this matter'). It sets up a wall against questions, which by definition come from a non-X perspective. And it turns the encounter into a power relation: the winner of the argument will be whoever has invoked the morally superior identity and expressed the most outrage at being questioned. So classroom conversations that once might have begun, 'I think A, and here is my argument', now take the form, 'Speaking as an X, I am offended that you claim B'. This makes perfect sense if you believe that identity determines everything. It means that there is no impartial space for dialogue. White men have one "epistemology", black women have another. So what remains to be said?
What replaces argument, then, is taboo. At times our more privileged campuses can seem stuck in the world of archaic religion. Only those with an approved identity status are, like shamans, allowed to speak on certain matters. Particular groups -- today the transgendered -- are given temporary totemic significance. Scapegoats -- today conservative political speakers -- are duly designated and run off campus in a purging ritual. Propositions become pure or impure, not true or false. And not only propositions but simple words. Left identitarians who think of themselves as radical creatures, contesting this and transgressing that, have become like buttoned-up Protestant schoolmarms when it comes to the English language, parsing every conversation for immodest locutions and rapping the knuckles of those who inadvertently use them.
”
”
Mark Lilla (The Once and Future Liberal: After Identity Politics)
“
How easily the Chinese vacillated between ally and enemy every hundred years depending on who America was mad at or what America wanted. When needed, they could stand in as white, or at least, white enough to slaughter other Asian men and women in America’s wars, but with the snap of a finger, they were yellow again—the color of a disease, the color of a warning. Indistinguishable from the yellow men and women they’d slaughtered. Any temporary acceptance into whiteness revoked as quickly as it’d been granted.
Because that was the thing: they were never white to begin with.
”
”
Elaine Hsieh Chou (Disorientation)
“
but men who feign helplessness—which Oberlin specialized in—can be just as manipulative as alpha males because they use their incompetence to free themselves of menial tasks that are then saddled onto women.
”
”
Cathy Park Hong (Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning)
“
EXPECTATIONS ALSO SHAPE stereotypes. A stereotype, after all, is a way of categorizing information, in the hope of predicting experiences. The brain cannot start from scratch at every new situation. It must build on what it has seen before. For that reason, stereotypes are not intrinsically malevolent. They provide shortcuts in our never-ending attempt to make sense of complicated surroundings. This is why we have the expectation that an elderly person will need help using a computer or that a student at Harvard will be intelligent.* But because a stereotype provides us with specific expectations about members of a group, it can also unfavorably influence both our perceptions and our behavior. Research on stereotypes shows not only that we react differently when we have a stereotype of a certain group of people, but also that stereotyped people themselves react differently when they are aware of the label that they are forced to wear (in psychological parlance, they are “primed” with this label). One stereotype of Asian-Americans, for instance, is that they are especially gifted in mathematics and science. A common stereotype of females is that they are weak in mathematics. This means that Asian-American women could be influenced by both notions.
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Dan Ariely (Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions)
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When groups feel threatened, they retreat into tribalism. They close ranks and become more insular, more defensive, more punitive, more us-versus-them. In America today, every group feels this way to some extent. Whites and blacks, Latinos and Asians, men and women, Christians, Jews, and Muslims, straight people and gay people, liberals and conservatives—all feel their groups are being attacked, bullied, persecuted, discriminated against. Of course, one group’s claims to feeling threatened and voiceless are often met by another group’s derision because it discounts their own feelings of persecution—but such is political tribalism.
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Amy Chua (Political Tribes: Group Instinct and the Fate of Nations)
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Educated black women are too high maintenance, high strung, and independent—they don’t need men. There is a widening gap between the education of black women and men, which doesn’t leave very many “suitable” suitors. Unfortunately, the higher one’s degree, as a black woman, the lower your chances are of getting married. Add to the con pile the stereotypes of being loud, complicated, and difficult. Black women, your reputation sucks. Asian
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Issa Rae (The Misadventures of Awkward Black Girl)
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His day is done.
Is done.
The news came on the wings of a wind, reluctant to carry its burden.
Nelson Mandela’s day is done.
The news, expected and still unwelcome, reached us in the United States, and suddenly our world became somber.
Our skies were leadened.
His day is done.
We see you, South African people standing speechless at the slamming of that final door through which no traveller returns.
Our spirits reach out to you Bantu, Zulu, Xhosa, Boer.
We think of you and your son of Africa, your father, your one more wonder of the world.
We send our souls to you as you reflect upon your David armed with a mere stone, facing down the mighty Goliath.
Your man of strength, Gideon, emerging triumphant.
Although born into the brutal embrace of Apartheid, scarred by the savage atmosphere of racism, unjustly imprisoned in the bloody maws of South African dungeons.
Would the man survive? Could the man survive?
His answer strengthened men and women around the world.
In the Alamo, in San Antonio, Texas, on the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco, in Chicago’s Loop, in New Orleans Mardi Gras, in New York City’s Times Square, we watched as the hope of Africa sprang through the prison’s doors.
His stupendous heart intact, his gargantuan will hale and hearty.
He had not been crippled by brutes, nor was his passion for the rights of human beings diminished by twenty-seven years of imprisonment.
Even here in America, we felt the cool, refreshing breeze of freedom.
When Nelson Mandela took the seat of Presidency in his country where formerly he was not even allowed to vote we were enlarged by tears of pride, as we saw Nelson Mandela’s former prison guards invited, courteously, by him to watch from the front rows his inauguration.
We saw him accept the world’s award in Norway with the grace and gratitude of the Solon in Ancient Roman Courts, and the confidence of African Chiefs from ancient royal stools.
No sun outlasts its sunset, but it will rise again and bring the dawn.
Yes, Mandela’s day is done, yet we, his inheritors, will open the gates wider for reconciliation, and we will respond generously to the cries of Blacks and Whites, Asians, Hispanics, the poor who live piteously on the floor of our planet.
He has offered us understanding.
We will not withhold forgiveness even from those who do not ask.
Nelson Mandela’s day is done, we confess it in tearful voices, yet we lift our own to say thank you.
Thank you our Gideon, thank you our David, our great courageous man.
We will not forget you, we will not dishonor you, we will remember and be glad that you lived among us, that you taught us, and that you loved us all.
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Maya Angelou (His Day Is Done: A Nelson Mandela Tribute)
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Feng thought that her mother's education would give her confidence to speak up for what is right, but no amount of learning could unshackle her from society's attitude towards women, and she chose to remain an apathetic bystander.
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Shirley Fung (Second Chinese Daughter)
“
Scholars in South Asian Studies departments and liberal think-tanks see India through a secular lens based on Western ideas of human rights. They deploy subaltern studies and postmodern theories to deconstruct the Indian state as a catastrophe constructed artificially by colonialism, and to show its very nature as oppressive, undemocratic, inherently anti-minority, anti-women and anti-Dalit. They export these models to their Indian counterparts, forming a self-sustaining system. They also feed these visions into media and government hearings. Thus, these two supposedly opposing intellectual streams converge to provide an image of India as a frontier necessitating Western intervention.
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Rajiv Malhotra (Breaking India: Western Interventions in Dravidian and Dalit Faultlines)
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From Indonesian and Malay mythology, pontianaks are said to be spirits of women who died while giving birth. A pontianak kills her victims by digging into their stomachs with her sharp dirty fingernails and devouring their organs. Yum.
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Kevin Kwan (China Rich Girlfriend (Crazy Rich Asians, #2))
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Stereotypes are the most reductive kind of story: They reduce others to single, crude images. In the United States, the stereotypes are persistent: black as criminal, brown as illegal, indigenous as savage, Muslims and Sikhs as terrorists, Jews as controlling, Hindus as primitive, Asians of all kinds as perpetually foreign, queer and trans people as sinful, disabled people as pitiable, and women and girls as property. Such stereotypes are in the air, on television and film, in the news, permeating our communities, and ordering our institutions. We breathe them in, whether or now we consciously endorse them. Even if we are part of a marginalized community, we internalize these stereotypes about others an ourselves.
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Valarie Kaur (See No Stranger: A Memoir and Manifesto of Revolutionary Love)
“
Together and separately, we as speakers disproved another description used to disqualify feminists: that we were all “whitemiddleclass,” a phrase used by the media then (and academics who believe those media clippings now) as if it were a single adjective to describe the women’s movement. In fact, the first-ever nationwide poll of women’s opinions on issues of gender equality showed that African American women were twice as likely as white women to support them.8 If the poll had included Latinas, Asian Americans, Native Americans,
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Gloria Steinem (My Life on the Road)
“
If a guy has a thing for black women - jungle fever.
If a guy has a thing for asian women - yellow fever.
If a guy has a thing for indian women - curry craving.
Is there a term for having a thing for white women? What about latina woman?
For white women: Calcium deficiency? White delight? Snowburn? Mayo madness? Reverse-colonialism? Racism? The other white meat?
Empanada ecstacy? Guacamole grip? Tostones temptation? Arepa amor? Cafe con leche? A taste for churros? Sofrito satisfaction? Cortez' revenge? Catholocism? Arroz con pussy? Chile con culo?
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stained hanes (94,000 Wasps in a Trench Coat)
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She knew that the universe of women who had been raped looked identical to the universe of women. They could be mothers, teens, sex workers. They could live in mansions or in flophouses. They could be homeless or suffer from schizophrenia. They could be black or white or Asian. They could be passed out drunk or completely sober. And they could react to the crime in all kinds of ways. They could be hysterical. Or withdrawn. They could tell a friend, or they could tell no one. They might call the cops right away, or they might wait a week, a month, even years.
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T. Christian Miller (A False Report: A True Story of Rape in America)
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You see, in American pop culture, beautiful dark women are invisible. (The other group just as invisible is Asian men. But at least they get to be super smart.) In movies, dark black women get to be the fat nice mommy or the strong, sassy, sometimes scary sidekick standing by supportively.
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Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (Americanah)
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The maximum life potential (the age at death of the longest-lived member of the species) has not changed and remains at 120 years. Life span (the age at which the average person would die if there were no premature deaths from accidents or disease) has also not changed and remains at about 85 to 95 years. But life expectancy (the age at which the average individual would die when accidents and disease have been taken into consideration) has skyrocketed upward from 47 years in 1900 in the United States to 78.9 for all Americans born in 2010, and 85.8 for Asian American women.
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Michael Shermer (The Moral Arc: How Science and Reason Lead Humanity Toward Truth, Justice, and Freedom)
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If you hate children,
remember, God gave them innocence.
If you hate youth,
remember, God gave them potential.
If you hate men,
remember, God gave them strength.
If you hate women,
remember, God gave them grace.
If you hate Hindus,
remember, God gave them knowledge.
If you hate Muslims,
remember, God gave them understanding.
If you hate Jews,
remember, God gave them insight.
If you hate Christians,
remember, God gave them wisdom.
If you hate black people,
remember, God gave them skill.
If you hate white people,
remember, God gave them talent.
If you hate Asian people,
remember, God gave them brilliance.
If you hate any people,
remember, God gave them genius.
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Matshona Dhliwayo
“
His eyes were staring at the lonely sun that was now beginning its descent behind some far off hills. How lonely its existence was, Ranjan mused. Traveling every single day from East to West, with no break, no company; nothing to wait for, nothing to look forward to, just going on and on, in a cycle of existence that did not have a beginning or end.
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Yamini Vijendran (Full Circle)
“
Office Peone looked at John and wondered what mental illness he had. The Seattle streets were filled with the mostly-crazy, half-crazy, nearly crazy, and soon-to-be crazy. Indian, white, Chicano, Asian, men, women, children. The social workers did not have anywhere near enough money, training, or time to help them. The city government hated the crazies because they were a threat to the public image of the urban core. Private citizens ignored them at all times of the year except the few charitable days leading up to and following Christmas. In the end, the police had to do most of the work. Police did crisis counseling, transporting them howling to detox, the dangerous to jail, racing the sick to the hospitals, to a safer place. At the academy, Officer Peone figured he would be fighting bad guys. He did not imagine he would spend most of his time taking care of the refuse of the world. Peone found it easier when the refuse were all nuts or dumb-ass drunks, harder when they were just regular folks struggling to find their way off the streets.
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Sherman Alexie (Indian Killer)
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math performance in Asian American women, built around the stereotypes of Asians being good at math, and women not. Half the subjects were primed to think of themselves as Asian before a math test; their scores improved. Half were primed about gender; scores declined. Moreover, levels of activity in cortical regions involved in math skills changed in parallel.
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Robert M. Sapolsky (Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst)
“
Some series teach us that ethnic features must be "fixed," by drastic means if necessary. Plastic surgeons with questionable ethics give insecure women of all ethnicities boob jobs, liposuction, and face-lifts on shows such as Extreme Makeover, The Swan, and Dr. 90210, ignoring medical risks and reinforcing problematic ideas about women's worth. Yet they don't make white surgical candidates feel like their cultural identity should also be on the chopping blocking - or that they'd be so much more attractive and fulfilled if only they didn't look so... Caucasian.
In contrast, TV docs' scalpels reduce or remove racial markers on patients of colour. Black women's noses and lips are made smaller. In an increasingly common procedure targeting Asian women, creases are added to Asian women's eyelids.
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Jennifer L. Pozner (Reality Bites Back: The Troubling Truth About Guilty Pleasure TV)
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In most Asian cultures, I learned, there is no reverence for the vampiric monster as there is in the West; most bloodsucking things are women, and their actions - be it sin in a past life, a pact with a demon, a jealous or unstable personality - are all blamed for their monstrous states. Maybe my mum hated herself for not being able to hold on to her humanity; maybe she hated me for being the cause of her losing it.
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Claire Kohda (Woman, Eating)
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Many blacks, Hispanics, Asians and Native Americans are socialized and educated in institutions which devalue the presence of people of color and celebrate only the contributions of whites....Thus, people of color can come to see themselves...primarily through the eyes of that dominant culture....Seeing few men and women from their own culture or class in leadership roles, they begin to apply to themselves the negative stereotypes about their group that the dominant culture chooses to believe.
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Francis E. George
“
We have a lot more opportunities in Singapore now compared to the 1960s and 1970s. We have access to the same careers, receive the same education and compensation. Many also venture into industries that were formerly “men’s fields”. The last I checked we were ranked #55 out of 150 odd countries in terms of gender equality, according to World Economic Forum. We are still lagging behind Scandinavia and some European countries, but we are way above all the Asian countries. We are quite fortunate to be women in Singapore.
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Fanny Lai
“
Once there was and once there was not a devout, God-fearing man who lived his entire life according to stoic principles. He died on his fortieth birthday and woke up floating in nothing. Now, mind you, floating in nothing was comforting, light-less, airless, like a mother’s womb. This man was grateful.
But then he decided he would love to have sturdy ground beneath his feet, so he would feel more solid himself. Lo and behold, he was standing on earth. He knew it to be earth, for he knew the feel of it.
Yet he wanted to see. I desire light, he thought, and light appeared. I want sunlight, not any light, and at night it shall be moonlight. His desires were granted. Let there be grass. I love the feel of grass beneath my feet. And so it was. I no longer wish to be naked. Only robes of the finest silk must touch my skin. And shelter, I need a grand palace whose entrance has double-sided stairs, and the floors must be marble and the carpets Persian. And food, the finest of food. His breakfast was English; his midmorning snack French. His lunch was Chinese. His afternoon tea was Indian. His supper was Italian, and his late-night snack was Lebanese. Libation? He had the best of wines, of course, and champagne. And company, the finest of company. He demanded poets and writers, thinkers and philosophers, hakawatis and musicians, fools and clowns.
And then he desired sex.
He asked for light-skinned women and dark-skinned, blondes and brunettes, Chinese, South Asian, African, Scandinavian. He asked for them singly and two at a time, and in the evenings he had orgies. He asked for younger girls, after which he asked for older women, just to try. The he tried men, muscular men, skinny men. Then boys. Then boys and girls together.
Then he got bored. He tried sex with food. Boys with Chinese, girls with Indian. Redheads with ice cream. Then he tried sex with company. He fucked the poet. Everybody fucked the poet.
But again he got bored. The days were endless. Coming up with new ideas became tiring and tiresome. Every desire he could ever think of was satisfied.
He had had enough. He walked out of his house, looked up at the glorious sky, and said, “Dear God. I thank You for Your abundance, but I cannot stand it here anymore. I would rather be anywhere else. I would rather be in hell.”
And the booming voice from above replied, “And where do you think you are?
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Rabih Alameddine
“
Black women first recognized their own intersectional identity. Black feminists first theorized the intersection of two forms of bigotry: sexism and racism. Intersectional theory now gives all of humanity the ability to understand the intersectional oppression of their identities, from poor Latinx to Black men to White women to Native lesbians to transgender Asians. A theory for Black women is a theory for humanity. No wonder Black feminists have been saying from the beginning that when humanity becomes serious about the freedom of Black women, humanity becomes serious about the freedom of humanity.
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Ibram X. Kendi (How to Be an Antiracist)
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The girls you loved as a boy, the women you loved as a man, each one different from the others, some round and some lean, some short and some tall, some bookish and some athletic, some moody and some outgoing, some white and some black and some Asian, nothing on the surface ever mattered to you, it was all about the inner light you would detect in her, the spark of singularity, the blaze of revealed selfhood, and that light would make her beautiful to you, even if others were blind to the beauty you saw, and then you would burn to be with her, to be near her, for feminine beauty is something you have never been able to resist.
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Paul Auster (Winter Journal)
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I am here because you vivisected my ancestral country in two. In 1945, two fumbling mid-ranking American officers who knew nothing about the country used a National Geographic map as reference to arbitrarily cut a border to make North and South Korea, a division that eventually separated millions of families, including my own grandmother from her family. Later, under the flag of liberation, the United States dropped more bombs and napalm in our tiny country than during the entire Pacific campaign against Japan during World War II. A fascinating little-known fact about the Korean War is that an American surgeon, David Ralph Millard, stationed there to treat burn victims, invented a double-eyelid surgical procedure to make Asian eyes look Western, which he ended up testing on Korean sex workers so they could be more attractive to GIs. Now, it’s the most popular surgical procedure for women in South Korea. My ancestral country is just one small example of the millions of lives and resources you have sucked from the Philippines, Cambodia, Honduras, Mexico, Iraq, Afghanistan, Nigeria, El Salvador, and many, many other nations through your forever wars and transnational capitalism that have mostly enriched shareholders in the States. Don’t talk to me about gratitude.
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Cathy Park Hong (Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning)
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CONFESSIONS OF A GANGSTER A former gang member talks about racial violence from way back in the eighties. “It started out innocently,” Jones, 39, tells me at a Starbucks on Chestnut Street near the group’s old stomping grounds. The posse walked to South Street seeking action. “They had a term, ‘clocking wigs,’ that meant hitting someone in the head,” he recalls with shame and disgust. “They preyed on women, whites, and Asians.” “They were selective,” driven less by hating whites than wanting to feel superior to weaker, vulnerable strangers, he explains. “If they saw anyone who could defend themselves or pose a threat, they wouldn’t do anything.”1 Any questions?
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Colin Flaherty ('White Girl Bleed A Lot': The Return of Racial Violence to America and How the Media Ignore It)
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Prostitution arrests are racist. They have always been racist. In 1866, San Francisco police arrested 137 women, 'virtually all Chinese'; the police boasted that they had 'expelled three hundred Chinese women.' In the 1970s, the American Civil Liberties Union found that black women were seven times more likely to be arrested for prostitution-related offenses than white women. This disparity is no relic of the past: between 2012 and 2015, 85 percent of people charged with 'loitering for the purpose of prostitution' in New York City were Black or Latinx- groups that only make up 54 percent of the city's population. Increases in prostitution enforcement mean increases in the arrests of women of color. Between 2012 and 2016, the New York Police Department stepped up enforcement mean increases in the arrest of women of color. Between 2012 and 2016, the New York Police Department stepped up enforcement targeting massage parlors. As journalist Melissa Gira Grant details, during this period the arrests of Asian people in New York charged either with 'unlicensed massage' or prostitution went up by 2,700 percent. Arrests on the street target Black and Latina women - who may not even be selling sex - simply for wearing 'tight jeans' or a crop top. The NYPD do not arrest white women in affluent areas of the city for wearing jeans.
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Juno Mac & Molly Smith
“
And then I saw her, who I could have only assumed with Aura Tsang, a very petite women, with the exotic features of those you associate with an Asian background complete with slick dark hair but the most amazing piercing blue eyes, the type that any Aryan would have be proud of. She seemed to have the persona that made her a person of the world,Yet, there was the energy that she was giving off, a energy of a powerful and brave woman who could and would take on the world and yet she had the gentlest smile complete with dimples. I was transfixed by her and I felt that my heart would burst into a thousand of pieces if she spoke to me, which of course she would and it did.
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Beverley Price (Blood Bound)
“
Suddenly Americans feel self-conscious of their white identity and this self-consciousness misleads them into thinking their identity is under threat. In feeling wrong, they feel wronged. In being asked to be made aware of racial oppression, they feel oppressed. While we laugh at white tears, white tears can turn dangerous. White tears, as Damon Young explains in The Root, are why defeated Southerners refused to accept the freedom of black slaves and formed the Ku Klux Klan. And white tears are why 63 percent of white men and 53 percent of white women elected a malignant man-child as their leader. For to be aware of history, they would be forced to be held accountable,
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Cathy Park Hong (Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning)
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When I say I am Black, I mean I am of African descent. When I say I am a woman of Color, I mean I recognize common cause with American Indian, Chicana, Latina, and Asian-American sisters of North America. I also mean I share common cause with women of Eritrea who spend most of each day searching for enough water for their children, as well as with Black South African women who bury 50 percent of their children before they reach the age of five. And I also share cause with my Black sisters of Australia, the Aboriginal women of this land who were raped of their history and their children and their culture by a genocidal conquest in whose recognition we are gathered here today.
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Audre Lorde (A Burst of Light)
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A further embarrassing problem for Japan with regard to its wartime behavior was the prominent surfacing during the 90's of the "comfort women" (ianfu) issue. These women - mostly Korean, but including many from other Asian nations as well as some Dutch - were forced into the sexual servicing of Japanese troops. First of all the Japanese government denied any knowledge of this, but when confronted with documentation to the contrary (uncovered by a Japanese researcher) they conceded that they knew about it but were not involved. Then when confronted with further documentation categorically indicating the government's involvement, they had no alternative but to acknowledge the truth.
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Kenneth Henshall (Storia del Giappone (Italian Edition))
“
What the most advanced researchers and theoreticians in all of science now comprehend is that the Newtonian concept of a universe driven by mass force is out of touch with reality, for it fails to account for both observable phenomena and theoretical conundrums that can be explained only by quantum physics: A quantum view explains the success of small efforts quite differently. Acting locally allows us to be inside the movement and flow of the system, participating in all those complex events occurring simultaneously. We are more likely to be sensitive to the dynamics of this system, and thus more effective. However, changes in small places also affect the global system, not through incrementalism, but because every small system participates in an unbroken wholeness. Activities in one part of the whole create effects that appear in distant places. Because of these unseen connections, there is potential value in working anywhere in the system. We never know how our small activities will affect others through the invisible fabric of our connectedness. In what Wheatley calls “this exquisitely connected world,” the real engine of change is never “critical mass”; dramatic and systemic change always begins with “critical connections.”14 So by now the crux of our preliminary needs should be apparent. We must open our hearts to new beacons of Hope. We must expand our minds to new modes of thought. We must equip our hands with new methods of organizing. And we must build on all of the humanity-stretching movements of the past half century: the Montgomery Bus Boycott; the civil rights movement; the Free Speech movement; the anti–Vietnam War movement; the Asian American, Native American, and Chicano movements; the women’s movement; the gay and lesbian movement; the disability rights/pride movement; and the ecological and environmental justice movements. We must find ourselves amid the fifty million people who as activists or as supporters have engaged in the many-sided struggles to create the new democratic and life-affirming values that are needed to civilize U.S. society.
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Grace Lee Boggs (The Next American Revolution: Sustainable Activism for the Twenty-First Century)
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The Council Wars era from 1983 to 1986 and the brief months from 1986 to 1987 when Mayor Washington gained control over the council were among the most dramatic periods in Chicago's history. Blacks, Hispanics, Asians, women, and homosexuals gained real power at City Hall for the first time. Opposition to Reaganomics and support for the city as a nuclear weapons-free zone were led by the mayor and his department heads, not just opposition groups. The growth machine of the old Chicago regime, which favored urban growth focused on major public works projects and development in the downtown Loop area, was replaced by a balanced program of neighborhood, as well as downtown, economic development.33
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Dick Simpson (Rogues, Rebels, And Rubber Stamps: The Politics Of The Chicago City Council, 1863 To The Present (Urban Policy Challenges))
“
the Human Genome Project revealed that the human species cannot be divided into biological races. President Clinton famously announced, “I believe one of the great truths to emerge from this triumphant expedition inside the human genome is that in genetic terms, all human beings, regardless of race, are more than 99.9 percent the same.”75 Collins ended his remarks by saying, “I’m happy that today the only race that we are talking about is the human race.” Venter reported that Celera Genomics had sequenced the genomes of three women and two men who identified as Hispanic, Asian, Caucasian, and African American and found that “there’s no way to tell one ethnicity from another.” He bluntly declared, “Race has no genetic or scientific basis.
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Dorothy Roberts (Fatal Invention: How Science, Politics, and Big Business Re-create Race in the Twenty-First Century)
“
In his book, Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War, Viet Thanh Nguyen writes that immigrant communities like San Jose or Little Saigon in Orange County are examples of purposeful forgetting through the promise of capitalism: “The more wealth minorities amass, the more property they buy, the more clout they accumulate, and the more visible they become, the more other Americans will positively recognize and remember them. Belonging would substitute for longing; membership would make up for disremembering.” One literal example of this lies in the very existence of San Francisco’s Chinatown. Chinese immigrants in California had battled severe anti-Chinese sentiment in the late 1800s. In 1871, eighteen Chinese immigrants were murdered and lynched in Los Angeles. In 1877, an “anti-Coolie” mob burned and ransacked San Francisco’s Chinatown, and murdered four Chinese men. SF’s Chinatown was dealt its final blow during the 1906 earthquake, when San Francisco fire departments dedicated their resources to wealthier areas and dynamited Chinatown in order to stop the fire’s spread. When it came time to rebuild, a local businessman named Look Tin Eli hired T. Paterson Ross, a Scottish architect who had never been to China, to rebuild the neighborhood. Ross drew inspiration from centuries-old photographs of China and ancient religious motifs. Fancy restaurants were built with elaborate teak furniture and ivory carvings, complete with burlesque shows with beautiful Asian women that were later depicted in the musical Flower Drum Song. The idea was to create an exoticized “Oriental Disneyland” which would draw in tourists, elevating the image of Chinese people in America. It worked. Celebrities like Humphrey Bogart, Lauren Bacall, Ronald Reagan and Bing Crosby started frequenting Chinatown’s restaurants and nightclubs. People went from seeing Chinese people as coolies who stole jobs to fetishizing them as alluring, mysterious foreigners. We paid a price for this safety, though—somewhere along the way, Chinese Americans’ self-identity was colored by this fetishized view. San Francisco’s Chinatown was the only image of China I had growing up. I was surprised to learn, in my early twenties, that roofs in China were not, in fact, covered with thick green tiles and dragons. I felt betrayed—as if I was tricked into forgetting myself. Which is why Do asks his students to collect family histories from their parents, in an effort to remember. His methodology is a clever one. “I encourage them and say, look, if you tell your parents that this is an academic project, you have to do it or you’re going to fail my class—then they’re more likely to cooperate. But simultaneously, also know that there are certain things they won’t talk about. But nevertheless, you can fill in the gaps.” He’ll even teach his students to ask distanced questions such as “How many people were on your boat when you left Vietnam? How many made it?” If there were one hundred and fifty at the beginning of the journey and fifty at the end, students may never fully know the specifics of their parents’ trauma but they can infer shadows of the grief they must hold.
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Stephanie Foo (What My Bones Know: A Memoir of Healing from Complex Trauma)
“
On August 10, 1984, my plane landed in Kabul, the capital of Afghanistan. There were no skyscrapers here. The blue domes of the mosques and the faded mountains were the only things rising above the adobe duvals (the houses). The mosques came alive in the evening with multivoiced wailing: the mullahs were calling the faithful to evening prayer. It was such an unusual spectacle that, in the beginning, I used to leave the barracks to listen – the same way that, in Russia, on spring nights, people go outside to listen to the nightingales sing. For me, a nineteen-year-old boy who had lived his whole life in Leningrad, everything about Kabul was exotic: enormous skies – uncommonly starry – occasionally punctured by the blazing lines of tracers. And spread out before you, the mysterious Asian capital where strange people were bustling about like ants on an anthill: bearded men, faces darkend by the sun, in solid-colored wide cotton trousers and long shirts. Their modern jackets, worn over those outfits, looked completely unnatural. And women, hidden under plain dull garments that covered them from head to toe: only their hands visible, holding bulging shopping bags, and their feet, in worn-out shoes or sneakers, sticking out from under the hems.
And somewhere between this odd city and the deep black southern sky, the wailing, beautifully incomprehensible songs of the mullahs. The sounds didn't contradict each other, but rather, in a polyphonic echo, melted away among the narrow streets. The only thing missing was Scheherazade with her tales of A Thousand and One Arabian Nights ... A few days later I saw my first missile attack on Kabul. This country was at war.
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Vladislav Tamarov (Afghanistan: A Russian Soldier's Story)
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Roth blinked, then nodded slowly. “I hate making them. I haven’t gotten where I am on the job by indulging my temper or apologizing for it. Neither, I imagine, have you. Women are still more closely scrutinized in the department and more strictly judged.” “That may be true, Captain. I don’t let it concern me.” “Then you’re a better woman than I, Dallas, or a great deal less ambitious. Because it burns the living hell out of me.” She inhaled, hissed the breath out through her teeth. “My coming at you as I have has been an emotional reaction, an indulgence again, that was both inappropriate and ill-advised. I’m going to tell you that I overreacted to Kohli’s death because I liked him, very much. I believe I overreacted to Mills because I disliked him. Very much.” She glanced back at the car. “He was a son of a bitch, a mean-spirited man who made no secret that, in his opinion, women should be having babies, cooking pies, and not wearing a badge. He disliked blacks, Jews, Asians . . . hell, he disliked everyone who wasn’t just what he was: an overfed white male. But he was my cop, and I want whoever opened him up that way.
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J.D. Robb (Judgment in Death (In Death, #11))
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There is surely no reason for Western civilization to have guilt trips laid on it by champions of cultures based on despotism, superstition, tribalism, and fanaticism. In this regard the Afrocentrists are especially absurd. The West needs no lectures on the superior virtue of those "sun people" who sustained slavery until Western imperialism abolished it (and sustain it to this day in Mauritania and the Sudan), who keep women in subjection, marry several at once, and mutilate their genitals, who carry out racial persecutions not only against Indians and other Asians but against fellow Africans from the wrong tribes, who show themselves either incapable of operating a democracy or ideologically hostile to the democratic idea, and who in their tyrannies and massacres, their Idi Amins and Boukassas, have stamped with utmost brutality on human rights. Keith B. Richburg, a black newspaperman who served for three years as the Washington Post's bureau chief in Africa, saw bloated bodies floating down a river in Tanzania from the insanity that was Rwanda and thought: "There but for the grace of God go I . . . Thank God my nameless ancestor, brought across the ocean in chains and leg irons, made it out alive . . . Thank God I am an American".
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Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. (The Disuniting of America: Reflections on a Multicultural Society)
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Something sharpens in my chest then. The same feeling I’d always had watching Athena succeed; the vinegar-sour conviction that this wasn’t fair. Now Candice is sauntering in front of me, flaunting her spoils, and I can already see how the industry will receive her manuscript. They’ll fucking go wild for her, because the narrative is simply so perfect: brilliant Asian artist exposes white fraud, wins big for social justice, sticks it to the man. Ever since The Last Front came out, I have been victim to people like Candice and Diana and Adele: people who think that, just because they’re “oppressed” and “marginalized,” they can do or say whatever they want. That the world should put them on a pedestal and shower them with opportunities. That reverse racism is okay. That they can bully, harass, and humiliate people like me, just because I’m white, just because that counts as punching up, because in this day and age, women like me are the last acceptable target. Racism is bad, but you can still send death threats to Karens. And I know one thing. I will not let Candice walk away with my fate in her hands. Years of suppressed rage—rage at being treated like a stereotype, like my voice doesn’t matter, like the entirety of my being is constituted in those two words, “white woman”—bubble up inside me and burst.
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R.F. Kuang (Yellowface)
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In addition to all the information about income, education, and looks, men and women on the dating site listed their race. They were also asked to indicate a preference regarding the race of their potential dates. The two preferences were “the same as mine” or “it doesn’t matter.” Like the Weakest Link contestants, the website users were now publicly declaring how they felt about people who didn’t look like them. They would reveal their actual preferences later, in confidential e-mails to the people they wanted to date.
Roughly half of the white women on the site and 80 percent of the white men declared that race didn’t matter to them. But the response data tell a different story. The white men who said that race didn’t matter sent 90 percent of their e-mail queries to white women. The white women who said race didn’t matter sent about 97 percent of their e-mail queries to white men. This means that an Asian man who is good-looking, rich, and well educated will receive fewer than 25 percent as many e-mails from white women as a white man with the same qualifications would receive; similarly, black and Latino men receive about half as many e-mails from white women as they would if they were white.
Is it possible that race really didn’t matter for these white women and men and that they simply never happened to browse a nonwhite date that interested them? Or, more likely, did they say that race didn’t matter because they wanted to come across — especially to potential mates of their own race — as open-minded?
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Steven D. Levitt (Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything)
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Jews and Asians are only 7 percent of the total population, and between them they dominate in fields like medicine and engineering, not to mention entrepreneurship and academics. They rarely end up in prison or gangs (this is especially true of Jews). And while they are historically poor and persecuted, they have not allowed themselves to stay in that position. Take their story and compare it to black Americans and how can we explain the canyon that separates them? I’m sure the Jesse Jacksons of the world would sooner become Holocaust deniers than admit to the real answer: Family. Education. Ambition.
Family.
Education.
Ambition.
Whenever the plight of the minority in America is discussed, you’ll notice that Jews and Asians are left out of the conversation. In fact, many school systems are now trying to figure out how to get LESS of them in advanced placement courses and prestigious colleges. They’ve become too successful, apparently. But it’s not just their success that the race mongers hate, it’s HOW they accomplished it. Their men don’t father dozens of out-of-wedlock babies with dozens of women. Their households insist on discipline and academic success. They work hard, they are driven. Asians may now be at the point where they actually enjoy preferential bias. If I’m an employer and an Asian walks in to apply for a job, I’m going to assume he’s an achiever. That’s not a stereotype, that’s called a reputation. And they’ve freaking earned it.
Family. Education. Ambition. These three things really are a recipe for success. If you don’t believe me, ask the next Asian or Jew you meet. And then make sure to take care of your co-pay on the way out.
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Matt Walsh
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Kung Fu's process of individualization similarly takes part in this backlash as the representation of the social ills experienced by racial minorities is routinely disciplined and rechanneled to make the show palatable for mass consumption. Under this rubric, it is assumed that changing the hearts of individuals will automatically lead to changing society. To a post-1960s liberal audience who obviously felt sympathy toward the plight of racial minorities but who nevertheless were wary of certain measures taken by these groups toward self-determination and weary from extended conflict, this simple adage proved seductive. Indeed, for a great many Americans, post-Civil Rights race relations has transformed the United States into an unruly site with different groups vying for cultural, economic, and political resources. In this way, Kung Fu's Wild West setting—the uneven hand of justice, the social free-for-all, the generally inhospitable natural landscape—seemed to reflect the audience's view of their contemporary social environment. It also mirrored the overall impotence that Americans felt toward ameliorating the situation. Given such a scenario, individualizing racial oppression and other social inequities may have seemed like a final alternative.
While this process of individualization is key in deciphering the show's political stance, the types of identifications the series forged between character and audience more substantively reveal its ideological commitments. Although Kung Fu's psychospiritualized vision was available to all of its audience members, one could argue that it was primarily framed as a commentary toward racial minorities and women who sought social change through means other than or in addition to inner transformation. It achieved this through a formulaic pattern of identifications.
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Jane Naomi Iwamura (Virtual Orientalism: Asian Religions and American Popular Culture)
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Myself and my colleague Guy Madison (Dutton & Madison, 2017) inadvertently provided evidence for the Finnish inferiority complex in a study we did of every marriage between a Finn and a foreigner that took place in Finland in the year 2013. On average, males and females operate different sexual selection strategies. Males have nothing to lose from the sexual encounter, so it makes sense for them, if they can get away with it, to have as much sex as possible with as many different women as possible in order to maximise the probability that their genes will be passed on. Accordingly, they select for youth and beauty, as these are markers of fertility and health. The essence of beauty is a symmetrical face and a such face implies a low level of mutant genes and thus sound genetic health. Females operate differently. As we discussed briefly earlier, they have a great deal to lose from the sexual encounter, because they can become pregnant, which carries with it a range of social and physical costs. This makes them more selective. Specifically, they are sexually attracted to high status men as these men will have the resources to provide for them and their child, meaning that both of them are more likely to survive (Buss, 1989). So, socioeconomically, women ‘marry up’ (hypergamously) and men ‘marry down’ (hypogamously). We would expect that nationality would be an aspect of status. We tested this by ranking different nationalities based on various criteria and especially how wealthy a country was. We predicted that, among marriages between a Finn and a foreigner, Finnish women would to a greater extent marry men that were from countries ranked as higher status than Finland while Finnish men would disproportionately marry women from lower status countries. This is, overall, what we found. However, we specifically found that, whatever the objective national status differences, Finnish women married Western European and Anglophone (USA, Canada and so on) men while Finnish men married Eastern European and East Asian (including Japanese) women. This would imply, whatever the economic reality, that Finns regard themselves as inferior to pretty much all Western Europeans. It also indicates that the Japanese – who are far wealthier than the Finns – regard themselves as inferior to the Finns, presumably because there is some idolization of whiteness or, possibly, as has been argued by a Japanese anthropologist, the Japanese specifically adore Finnish culture (Mitsui, 2012).
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Edward Dutton (The Silent Rape Epidemic: How the Finns Were Groomed to Love Their Abusers)
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Thirty-Nine Ways to Lower Your Cortisol 1 Meditate. 2 Do yoga. 3 Stretch. 4 Practice tai chi. 5 Take a Pilates class. 6 Go for a labyrinth walk. 7 Get a massage. 8 Garden (lightly). 9 Dance to soothing, positive music. 10 Take up a hobby that is quiet and rewarding. 11 Color for pleasure. 12 Spend five minutes focusing on your breathing. 13 Follow a consistent sleep schedule. 14 Listen to relaxing music. 15 Spend time laughing and having fun with someone. (No food or drink involved.) 16 Interact with a pet. (It also lowers their cortisol level.) 17 Learn to recognize stressful thinking and begin to: Train yourself to be aware of your thoughts, breathing, heart rate, and other signs of tension to recognize stress when it begins. Focus on being aware of your mental and physical states, so that you can become an objective observer of your stressful thoughts instead of a victim of them. Recognize stressful thoughts so that you can formulate a conscious and deliberate reaction to them. A study of forty-three women in a mindfulness-based program showed that the ability to describe and articulate stress was linked to a lower cortisol response.28 18 Develop faith and participate in prayer. 19 Perform acts of kindness. 20 Forgive someone. Even (or especially?) yourself. 21 Practice mindfulness, especially when you eat. 22 Drink black and green tea. 23 Eat probiotic and prebiotic foods. Probiotics are friendly, symbiotic bacteria in foods such as yogurt, sauerkraut, and kimchi. Prebiotics, such as soluble fiber, provide food for these bacteria. (Be sure they are sugar-free!) 24 Take fish or krill oil. 25 Make a gratitude list. 26 Take magnesium. 27 Try ashwagandha, an Asian herbal supplement used in traditional medicine to treat anxiety and help people adapt to stress. 28 Get bright sunlight or exposure to a lightbox within an hour of waking up (great for fighting seasonal affective disorder as well). 29 Avoid blue light at night by wearing orange or amber glasses if using electronics after dark. (Some sunglasses work.) Use lamps with orange bulbs (such as salt lamps) in each room, instead of turning on bright overhead lights, after dark. 30 Maintain healthy relationships. 31 Let go of guilt. 32 Drink water! Stay hydrated! Dehydration increases cortisol. 33 Try emotional freedom technique, a tapping strategy meant to reduce stress and activate the parasympathetic nervous system (our rest-and-digest system). 34 Have an acupuncture treatment. 35 Go forest bathing (shinrin-yoku): visit a forest and breathe its air. 36 Listen to binaural beats. 37 Use a grounding mat, or go out into the garden barefoot. 38 Sit in a rocking chair; the soothing motion is similar to the movement in utero. 39 To make your cortisol fluctuate (which is what you want it to do), end your shower or bath with a minute (or three) under cold water.
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Megan Ramos (The Essential Guide to Intermittent Fasting for Women: Balance Your Hormones to Lose Weight, Lower Stress, and Optimize Health)
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To decide how great the danger was that this oldest civilized continent in the world would be overrun this winter will be left to later historical research.
The unfading credit that this danger is over now goes to those soldiers whom we are commemorating today.
Only a glance at Bolshevism’s gigantic preparations for the destruction of our world is sufficient to let us realize with horror what might have become of Germany and the rest of the Continent, had not the National Socialist movement taken power in this state ten years ago, and had it not begun the rebuilding of the German Wehrmacht with the determination that is so peculiar to it, following many fruitless efforts for disarmament. After all, the Germany of Weimar with its Centrist-Marxist democratic party politics would have been swept away by this Central Asian invasion as a straw would be by a hurricane.
We realize with increasing clarity that the confrontation that has taken place in Europe since the First World War is slowly beginning to look like a struggle which can only be compared with the greatest historic events of the past. Eternal Jewry forced on us a pitiless and merciless war. Should we not be able to stop the elements of destruction at Europe’s borders, then this continent will be transformed into a single field of ruins.
The gravest consequences of this war would then be not only the burned cities and destroyed cultural monuments, but also the bestially murdered multitudes, which would become the victim of this Central Asian flood, just as with the invasions by the Huns and Mongols.
What the German and allied soldiers today protect in the east is not the stony face of this continent or its social and intellectual character, but its eternal human substance, whence all values originated ages and ages ago and which gave expression to all human civilizations today, not only to those in Europe and America.
In addition to this world of barbarity threatening from the east, we are witnessing the satanic destructive frenzy of its ally, the so-called West. We know about our enemies’ war objectives from countless publications, speeches, and open demands. The babble of the Atlantic Charter is worth as much as Wilson’s Fourteen Points in contrast with the implemented actual design of the Diktat of Versailles.
Just as in the English parliamentary democracy the warmonger Churchill pointed the way for later developments with his claim in 1936, when he was not yet the responsible leader of Great Britain, that Germany had to be destroyed again, so the elements behind the present demands for peace in the same democracies today are already planning the state to which they seek to reduce Europe after the war.
And their objectives totally correspond with the manifestations of their Bolshevik allies, which we have not only known about but also witnessed: the extermination of all continental people proudly conscious of their nationality and, at their head, the extermination of our own German people.
It makes no difference whether English or American papers, parliamentarians, stump orators, or men of letters demand the destruction of the Reich, the abduction of the children of our Volk, the sterilization of our male youth, and so on, as the primary war objective, or whether Bolshevism implements the slaughter of whole groups of people, men, women, and children, in practice.
After all, the driving force behind this remains the eternal hatred of that cursed race which, as a true scourge of God, chastised the nations for many thousands of years, until they began to defend themselves against their tormentors in times of reflection.
Speech in Lichthof of the Zeughaus for the Heroes’ Memorial Day Berlin, March 21, 1943
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Adolf Hitler (Collection of Speeches: 1922-1945)