Racist, Immoral Dehumanization of Immigrant Children

July 29, 2014 • Maria Chavez • Americans of color, anti-immigrant, Hispanic, immigration, Latinos, law, politics

There are two main challenges in addressing the border issue of increased numbers of undocumented children traveling alone from Central America to the US.
The first is that the dehumanization of Latinos in the US has been so tremendously successful that a basic call for decency and humanity is absent from the conversations surrounding this situation. For example, I recently highlighted the issue in an op-ed to a local newspaper and the comments reveal people hiding their racism behind arguments of “legal” and “illegal.”

An absence of decency and humanity can also be seen in the protesters who turned away buses of children or who are protesting detention centers across the country where children are housed because we’re a “nation of laws” or because the children “carry diseases,” “bring crime,” will grow up to “rape women.” This is all to familiar language that uses the same fear tactics, dehumanization, and racism once used towards African Americans during slavery and Jim Crow and towards the Chinese during the late 1800s—language used to justify atrocious acts of oppression of these groups then and language used to justify monstrous cruelty to these children today. One has to wonder if these protesters would have the same response to refugee children coming from Eastern Europe. Perhaps there would still be a backlash against thousands of Eastern European refugee children arriving alone to the US; however, I doubt it would rise to the shameless levels we’ve seen recently, or that it would use the kinds of language being used–language that has roots in removing people of color outside of our human and national family throughout American history. This underscores how effective the racialization of Latinos in the U.S. currently is.

The second hindrance with addressing this issue is the problem of politicians who either do not care or if they do care are acting first and foremost in their self-interests by being in lock step with xenophobic Americans’ preferences. This response by our nations leaders underscores Schneider and Ingram’s research revealing that politicians make laws that benefit certain groups and burden others. This explains why Congress refuses to act in a bipartisan fashion and pass laws addressing this situation. This explains why traumatized children are being put on planes and sent back as a deterrence to others. This is not just, rational, or wise public policy but this is what our political leaders are engaged in.

Instead, there must be another way. There must be collaboration and civility between the nations involved to come up with short-term and long-term policy solutions. For example, Héctor Perla Jr. recently provided examples of both short term and long term solutions in a recent article. Perla gives the example of granting the children refugee status rather than seeing them as undocumented immigrants in the short term, and in the long term he argues we must address economic policies in Central America that are creating the conditions pushing children and their parents to migrate.

Other short term ideas with the goal of preventing further harm to the children immediately by keeping more children from dying or being injured on the train include finding them earlier in the process of migration. This would require creating a coalition between the US and the countries from where the children depart to check the trains and help the kids at that point. Long term of course must address the roots of the problem. This requires taking into consideration why children are fleeing their countries and finding ways to address these issues as Perla suggests. This too, must be done in collaboration with leaders from Mexico and Central America. Of course, civility, compromise, and collaboration across national leaders seems impossible to accomplish when it doesn’t happen across political leaders in this country who follow the desires of many Americans who cannot see Latinos as human beings, not even the children.

Not Just Symbolic: The Harm of Indian Mascots

July 27, 2014 • Jim Fenelon • Native American, sports

When seeing the dancing “Redskin” Wahoo fan below, many Americans think it’s okay as it’s “just fun,” or it is some kind of twisted way to “honor” Indians, or it’s “only a symbol” not meant to hurt anyone. However, there are real, pernicious effects coming from the public display and theatrical racism of these symbols and “race” costumes and all the antics that are an integral part of their use and history.

(Image Source)

When I was participating with the Black Hills Cultural Institute held in Spearfish, South Dakota, primarily for school districts on the Rosebud and other Lakota / Dakota “Indian reservations” with large numbers of Indian students, news came that the mainstream academic and media had finally acknowledged that the bodies of some of the Dakota men hung at Mankato by the United States military government, had indeed been immediately exhumed and given to those requesting the body parts, especially a prominent doctor in Minnesota (Dr. Mayo who later founded the famous clinic under his name).

Dakota survivors had long said they had done this, and much worse, but were always mocked and discounted. As a great grandson of Mayo apologized and returned the skeletal and other remains, (including skins made into lampshades and bones with tattooed numbers on them) the newspapers duly reported the genocidal stories as being true. One Dakota woman teacher of our group started crying, and then weeping, as we discussed this during a break in our workshops on “historical grief” and “generational trauma” for Indian descendants of these and many other infamous massacres. Finally consoled by her Dakota relatives, when asked what was the matter, she said “He was my great-grandfather, they are talking about my grandfather! My grandmother cried every night, and told us what they had done, and no one believed us and called us “liars” and worse, but we always knew our relatives were telling the truth.”

The Hanging of the 38 on Dec. 26, 1862
(image source)

It is hard to imagine a more direct cause-and-effect of mass killings, or in this case of a mass execution, the largest government sanctioned hanging in our country’s history, than to see and hear from those who survived and yet were never allowed to tell their stories, much less be acknowledged how deep their grief may be. Symbols such as “Chief Wahoo” and team names and words such as “Redskins” racially categorize Native peoples as less than fully human, and harken back to terms such as “savages” (literally used in the Declaration of Independence) that depict “Indians” as uncivilized and war-like.

Actually, these terms have been used in genocidal attacks against both my bloodlines – the Dakota after the 1862 Mankato hangings as Minnesota offered “$200 for every Redskin sent to Purgatory” with proof from scalps or “dead bodies” for the bounty, and the Lakota as prelude to the killings of our families at Wounded Knee when newspapers stirred up racial hatred with headlines such as “Old Sitting Bull Stirring Up the Excited Redskins” and “Some Bad Redskins” with Big Foot in the winter of 1890.

Picture of mass burial site at Wounded Knee
(image source)

In the denial of massacres and genocide and destructive conquest across the land, we must understand that these histories are not taught in the schools and universities of our nation, and they are not often taught in the curriculum where Indian peoples attend. When I was giving my 1890 Ghost Dance on Standing Rock lectures as a Humanities Scholar at the High School in Fort Yates on the reservation, a few students came forward and would not leave, with one missing his bus ride to Bullhead because he wanted to talk after everyone left. It turns out his relatives had died at Wounded Knee, including headsman Big Foot, and this not only was never discussed in his classes, but was actually discouraged.

But with real relatives who experience the trauma of unresolved grief and unacknowledged wrongs, great psychological harm is transferred across generations.

It is amazing that a large portion of American society does not see this as racism, or even as hurtful, discounting both research and testimony of scholars and Native leaders and traditionals, and research, in how these images, names and antics cause psychological and cultural harm to Native children,

In their book Missing the Point: The Real Impact of Native Mascots and Team Names on American Indian and Alaska Native Youth, Erik Stegman and Victoria Phillips found that studies show such names contribute to a negative educational environment:

“Research shows that these team Indian-oriented names and mascots can establish an unwelcome and hostile learning environment for AI/AN students. It also reveals that the presence of AI/AN mascots directly results in lower self-esteem and mental health for AI/An adolescents and young adults. And just as importantly, studies show that these mascots undermine the educational experience of all students, particularly those with little or no contact with indigenous and AI/AN people. In other words, these stereotypical representations are too often understood as factual representations and thus “contribute to the development of cultural biases and prejudices.”

This kind of racism is repeated in the team fight songs for sports teams, for example in “Hail to the Redskins,” the lyrics that fans sing are:

“Hail to the Redskins, Hail Victory, Braves on the Warpath, Fight for Old D.C.!… Scalp ‘um, swamp ‘um, we will take’um big score….”

These lyrics were written by Corrine Marshall, wife of R*dskins owner George Marshall.
American Indians have been experiencing a Renaissance of cultural revitalization. Part of this revitalization has been through work done with the Harvard Project on American Indian Economic Development. This project has found the most productive efforts are those that emphasize “nation-building” where Native peoples utilize the skills that focus on Sovereignty, Institutions, Culture and Leadership Matters. Each of these critically important areas is in direct contrast with the images and words that mascots and racial team names represent. Native children are usually taught that eagle feathers are given in respect to those who earn them, whether for civic leadership, defending the people in war, or as living with the values the elders teach – so it’s insulting and confusing when they see these plastic and turkey feathers in mock behavior of sports fans. American Indian students are taught they are the descendants of Nations and societies worthy of recognition, respect, and even reverence – so when fans go “whup-whup-whup!” as they yell “Go Tribe” or “Kill Redskins” with Tomahawk chops and little fake scalps over painted faces, their heritage is called into question. Indigenous youth are instructed in ceremonies and traditions that are culturally valuable and sacred – even as be-feathered racist antics suggest that Americans mock and denigrate their cultures.

There is abundant evidence to support the negative impact of these racist stereotypes on children in indigenous cultures, such as Stephanie A. Fryberg, lead author of a 2008 study, Of Warrior Chiefs and Indian Princesses: The Psychological Consequences of American Indian Mascots. Most recently, Michael A. Friedman compiled a report on various studies in his The Harmful Psychological Effects of the Washington Football Mascot.

(Image source)

American Indian students are involved in consciousness-raising over these issues and becoming more outspoken on the harmful effects that these represent to them as individuals and as tribal members. Recent studies are documenting these statements. The following are quotes from Indians that Stegman and Phillips spoke with on their views about names and mascots.

Dahkota Kicking Bear Brown, Miwok student and football player:

“One of our school’s biggest rivals is the Calaveras Redskins. … Worst of all, the most offensive stuff doesn’t even come from the Redskins. It comes from their rival schools, mine included. I have heard my own friends yelling around me, ‘Kill the Redskins!’ or ‘Send them on the Trail of Tears!'”

Joaquin Gallegos, Jicarilla Apache Nation and Santa Ana Pueblo:

“The issue impacts me because as long as the Washington football team and others retain pejoratives as names, mascots, and are allowed to do so, it says that it is ok to marginalize me, my family, and Indian country—that it is ok for Native peoples to remain on the periphery of American consciousness.”

Sarah Schilling, Little Traverse Bay Bands of Odawa Indians:

“I distinctly remember listening to a radio talk show one morning discussing changing the mascot of a local northern Michigan school because it poorly depicted Native American people. Non-Native people defending the mascot seemed to populate the airtime. They all spoke about school and community pride, or fond high school memories. A Native American mascot seemed to have nothing to do with actual Native American people to them. A white person’s school pride was put above a Native American person’s sense of identity. A white person’s fond memories were more important than a Native American youth attending a school they felt still wore the mascot of oppression.”

Cierra Fields, Cherokee, member of the NCAI’s Youth Cabinet:

When I see people wearing headdresses and face paint or doing the tomahawk chop, it makes me feel demeaned. The current society does not bother to learn that our ways, customs, dress, symbols and images are sacred. They claim it’s for honor but I don’t see the honor in non-Natives wearing face paint or headdresses as they are not warriors and who have earned the right. My heritage and culture is not a joke. My heritage and culture is not a fashion statement. For me, it ultimately boils down to respect.

Even more surprising is that defenders of these sports mascots, particularly the Washington Redskins, deny any negative effects and even claim that Native Americans broadly support their use, up to 90% according to one poll quoted ad nauseam by team owners and fans. This is where bad social science intersects with institutional racism, and where my work on similar issues some 20 years ago in Cleveland needs to be redressed for Washington. In my earlier research, we ran our own survey with American Indian respondents, and the results are more in line with what we know Native peoples are feeling and talking about, finding the “large majority of American Indians, when properly identified and polled, find the team name offensive, disrespectful and racist.”

(image source)

That research found that American Indians were 67% in agreement, 12% were neutral and 20% disagreed with the statement: “The Redskins team name is a racial or racist word and symbol.” Whites were 33% in agreement, 26% neutral, and 41% disagreed the term was racial, generally the reverse of American Indian responses. The neutral category played a significant role for whites in allowing them to not be seen as “racist” – upon further analysis more than 60% of whites reject the term Redskins as racist, while more than 60% of Indians see the term Redskins as racist.

We released the results of this study in the spring of 2014, but got little attention from mainstream media outlets. The Washington Post interviewed me about methods, asking who did the collecting (“were they Indian?”) and so on, but have not, to date, reported on it. The dismissal and denial of Indian genocide and its lasting effects runs deep in most sectors of American society, especially those cities and universities still employing these racial mascots.

Some twenty years ago I took my first tenure line position at a Jesuit university just outside Cleveland, Ohio, where the most pernicious sports mascot icon exists, the “Chief Wahoo” of the Cleveland Indians baseball team. Just as in Washington, they claimed it was to “honor” Native peoples or it had nothing to do with race or Indians, sometimes in the same sentence response to our survey on such attitudes. Again, how can reasonable people make such claims to any of these racial sports mascots, much less the two most egregious examples, the Washington “Redskins” and the Cleveland Indians’ “Chief Wahoo”?

Some forty and more years since this issue was first charged to the Washington Redskins and Cleveland Indians, we still have “be-feathered, dancing Chiefs” in straight-out racist antics, with clear connections to the worst practices of genocidal racism in our nation’s history. We still have white elites, such as George Will and Dan Snyder supporting and defending these deeply racist images and names, citing popular support and bogus polls, and denying this is just the same-old racism of yesteryear. And we still have Native American children suffering from having been surrounded by these racist images and words, and Indigenous students in conflict with what they are taught in their schools and textbooks.

When will America wake up, and see that the perpetuation of these racist images and terms is an ongoing insult to Indigenous Peoples and Native Nation?

~ James Fenelon, Professor of Sociology & Director of Center for Indigenous Peoples Studies, California State University-San Bernardino

Danny Glover reads Frederick Douglass’ “The Meaning of July 4th”

July 4, 2014 • Jessie Daniels • African Americans, slavery, United States

This time of year, we commemorate the famous speech “The Meaning of July Fourth for the Negro,” written by Frederick Douglass and delivered in Rochester, NY on July 5, 1852.

In this famous speech, Douglass says:

“What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July? I answer; a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sound of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciation of tyrants brass fronted impudence; your shout of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanks-givings, with all your religious parade and solemnity, are to him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy—a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages. There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices more shocking and bloody than are the people of the United States, at this very hour.”

You can read the full text of Dougalss’ speech here. Danny Glover read Douglass’ famous speech in 2005 at the Japanese American Cultural and Community Center in Los Angeles, California, captured in this short video(6:06):

Glover’s reading was part of Howard Zinn and Anthony Arnove’s book Voices of a People’s History of the United States. More video clips can be found at the Voices of a People’s History website and in the film The People Speak.

George Will, White Elites, Justify Use of “Redskins”

July 4, 2014 • Jim Fenelon • "manifest destiny", Native American

White elites who first developed the terminology of Indians, Savages and Redskins, are now desperately trying to justify that racist language.

George Will has been the latest to weigh in on this defense of racial privilege and hegemony, while abusing the English language. In a column titled “The government decided ‘Redskins’ bothers you“, Will arrogantly dismisses the controversy as the result of “some people” who are “professionally indignant” and chides what he sees as the overreach of government into being coercive “about wedding cakes and team names.”

Cartoon by Marty Two Bulls, Indian Country Today

Will insults the lead plaintiff, Amanda Blackhorse, Navajo, in a long-fought suit on trademark protections from the Washington Redskins, that itself borders on direct racism, then he “discovers” an infamous school on the reservation that uses the moniker Red Mesa High School Redskins, and then states All Navajo support its use, when if he had done the most basic homework, would have found the Navajo Tribal Council has recently condemned its use for professional sports.

But Will is not satisfied insulting Amanda Blackhorse and the Navajo Tribal Council, but goes on to repeat the mantra-like falsehoods that “90% of Natives support” the Redskins team name usage, even as my own survey work underscores that a majority of 67% of Native Americans say “Redskins” is offensive and see it as racist, a point reinforced in work I did on the (chief) Wahoo racist icon nearly 20 years ago with similar findings. The dominant society and its white elite discourse masters simply ignore any evidence that doesn’t support what they say, and this is acceptable to a general public that wants to believe these icons and words don’t really matter.

In his racist rant, Will states “The federal agency acted in the absence of general or Native American revulsion about “Redskins,” and probably because of this absence.” Even without acknowledging recent work on this issue, the National Congress of American Indians (representing 30% of Native people in the U.S.) has been criticizing this and other mascots use for more than twenty years, along with most other Native organizations, especially those in higher education. Will and a host of others systematically ignore Native Americans, leading Indian organizations, and the voices of their supporters and then report false information that seems to support their position, created by a dominant elite to justify its position and use of racist icons and team names. They also just flat out lie about these issues, such as their claim it is only recently an issue, when the same newspaper the Washington Post has the article “The Great Redskins Name Debate of … 1972?” stating that “people have been complaining, very publicly, about it since at least 1972. At the Washington Post’s DC Sports Bog, Steinberg presents excerpts from eight articles published in 1971-72 that challenge the name, as well as an editorial cartoon from the same era.”

Cartoon from 1972

This is also found in Will’s support for genocidal discourse, using a Choctaw set of words for Oklahoma in justifying an English word of R*dskins, and forgetting or ignoring that the state was originally called “Indian Country” by the United States that forced the Cherokee, Choctaw, Creek and Chickasaw into those lands by what nearly all scholars call Genocide in what is known as the Trail of Tears.

Will makes reference to a study done by Ives Goddard from the Smithsonian Institution that finds Blackhawk as the first being recorded to use R*dskins, even as he leads a notable fight in resistance to U.S. invasion and conquest, and from there they decide that Native peoples invented the term as a benign description of themselves. This nonsense is underscored by reference to William Clark (of Lewis and Clark fame) as a great influence over many students and leaders who learned from him, when Clark’s most powerful racist statement is in calling the Tetonwan Sioux (Lakota) the most “miscreant, savage race of people in the world” underscoring the rationale for the upcoming conquest of the Great Plains.

(Image from The History Commons)

All of this matters precisely because George Will is an erudite, refined columnist with a great command of language and meaning, however conservative his politics may be. Not only is Will ignorantly wrong, but he is playing to language that arose from the vast genocides of the 16^th and 17^th centuries where bounties were indeed paid for “scalps” of “Indian” men, women and children, all across this great land, going through the origin of the R word around 1800 (if accurate) and actually in print in 1863 Minnesota where the R word was used interchangeably with Savage, Indian and on the list goes.

“State reward for dead Indians” news clipping from The Daily Republican, 1863

In our research, we find the same conditions from studies done on the Wahoo to more recent work on the Redskins, including that 1.) institutionalized “white racism” (Feagin, Joe and Vera, Hernan. 1995. White racism: The Basics, New York: Routledge) is evidenced in the display, distribution, and defense of the racial icon Chief Wahoo, and the team name Redskins; 2.) ethnic group orientation towards symbolic issues is influenced by perceptions of one’s own group interests, Gamson’s “framing” (Gamson, William. 1995. “Constructing Social Protest” in Social Movements and Culture edited by H. Johnston and B. Klandermans, Pp 85-106. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota Press) of the issue (such as what Will does above) ; 3.) the racialized content and target of iconic symbols is controlled by dominant groups and a white elite (Fenelon, J. “Indians Teaching About Indigenous Issues: How and Why the Academy Discriminates” American Indian Quarterly, Volume 27, number 1 & 2 (2004: pgs. 177-188) ; and 4.) collective ethnic group activism on racism is more likely to cause changes in perceptions of whites.

(Image source)

The George Wills of an educated elite join with the Snyders of an institutional sports elite, to reinforce racist team names and sports mascots, deny their historical roots in genocide, redefine their meanings as benign or as honor, distort social science to fit the rationales, and denigrate those who resist their “white racism” calling them as “in the business of being offended” and “professionally indignant” as if their Native roots are cut off from the rest of Indigenous America. Will even ends his column in discussing these “serious matters” as including “comity in a diverse nation, civil discourse,” and “not only how we make decisions, but how we decide what needs to be decided, and who will do the deciding.”

Inadvertently Will touches on the heart of the matter. Will, Snyder and many other white elites want to define what race means and what qualifies as racism, with the foundationally racist and genocidal term Redskins twisted to mean “honor” and with Native leaders dismissed as radical outliers, so that racist rationales, words, images and denigrating statements can continue to be used with flagrant arrogance, and deep supremacist ideologies. As Joe Feagin points out, “white elite men get to decide what is, and is not, offensive and get to go unnamed as the racist progenitors in the first place.”

~ Guest blogger James Fenelon, is Lakota/Dakota, and serves as the Director of Center for Indigenous Peoples Studies and Professor of Sociology, at California State University – San Bernardino.

Systemic Racism and the Grading of AP Exams

July 1, 2014 • Sharon Chang • "model minority", Asian Americans, education

Just weeks ago in Salt Lake City the national grading/reading of the Advanced Placement World History Exam became something of a playground for deeply rooted anti-Asian racism thinly veiled as “light-hearted” humor. Did you hear about this? Bet you didn’t. Because barely anybody did. A brave handful of graders who were there protested, but MANY more (graders and non-graders) pushed back with abusive online bullying and what’s-the-big-deal-this-isn’t-even-racist rhetoric. So far only Angry Asian Man and Hyphen Magazine picked up the story. No major networks found it interesting. ETS and the College Board eventually issued a half apology. And then, silence. Crickets chirp. The nation waves away yet another heinous incident of Asian oppression as irritating ambient noise while presumably the glowing promise of a “model minority symphony” continues to ring loud, clear, and deafeningly across the land.

Advanced Placement Program

Advanced Placement (AP) is a program in the U.S. and Canada, created by the College Board (which also owns and publishes the SAT), offering college-level curricula and exams to high school students. The rigorous curricula for a wide variety of AP subjects is designed by a College Board panel of experts and college-level educators in each field of study. Standardized tests on this material are offered every May. In 2013, over 2 million students took almost 4 million of these exams (pdf). Those who perform well can receive course credit and/or advanced standing at thousands of universities worldwide. Exams are also written by The College Board but the proctoring, administering, and grading is farmed out externally to Educational Testing Service (ETS). AP tests contain a multiple-choice section scored by computer and a free-response section evaluated by an ETS employed team of some college professors and grad students but mostly high school AP teachers. In June this lineup of educated folk gather for a week to score student essays at what are known as AP Readings. AP Exam Readers are led by a Chief Reader, a college professor who has the responsibility of ensuring that students receive scores that accurately reflect college-level achievement.

What HAPPENED?

The 2014 document-based AP World History question (pdf) using 9 related/given documents, was to “…analyze the relationship between Chinese peasants and the Chinese Communist Party between circa 1925 and circa 1950.” According to Phil Yu of Angry Asian Man who heard from several attendees at this year’s AP World History Reading, this essay question “…apparently became an excuse for organizers to run wild with a week filled with all sorts of culturally insensitive jokes and anti-Asian imagery.” Yu further describes the Chief Reader allegedly, “made jokes about the Tianamen Square Massacre “Tank Man” (“You don’t want to be that guy.”) while wearing a Red Guard cap of the Cultural Revolution” and was “reportedly one of many people wearing such a cap that week.” And of course every Asian/Am-identifying person is flinching right now because we know all too well what it means to be the punchline.

(Image source)

This is “Tank Man”; one of the iconic images from the Tianamen Square Protests of 1989 which just saw their 25^th anniversary mid-April through early-June (literally days before the AP World History Reading). Okay moving on. Unfortunately it doesn’t get better. The AP World History Reading also annually offers for purchase a commemorative T-shirt loosely based on the same document-based essay question. According to Hannah Kim over at Hyphen Magazine a preview of the back of this year’s T-shirt was shown the first day. It featured appropriated Chinese communist imagery captioned with a “chop suey” font. Some attendees were offended and complained immediately. But despite assurances from ETS that the design would be reworked, the shirts were distributed end of the week unchanged. And lo and behold, on the front was yet another fun surprise; yellowface cartoon caricatures of the Chinese Communist “Party”:

T-shirt sold to commemorate the grading/reading of the 2014 AP World History Exam
(Image Source)

Kim relays sadly many AP World History teachers and academics present “were not put off by this racist imagery,” that “hundreds of educators purchased this shirt and wore it on the last day” [emphasis mine], and confirms Yu’s report that this was “just one of many instances of cultural insensitivity directed at Asian Americans during the week-long grading.”

Pushback, Paralysis, & I Don’t Get It

What was originally a smaller protest became a little larger and louder. But substantial pushback rose to the occasion with stop-being-so-sensitive-can’t-you-take-a-joke (and of course now every Asian/Am-identifying person is shaking their head sadly because we know all too well the experience of being told to calm down). The pushback morphed into widespread sometimes aggressive invalidation by others who really didn’t see what the problem was accompanied by total paralysis on the part of ETS HR (and by association the College Board).

Let’s be very clear here because really, it’s not that difficult. As sociologist Joe Feagin, Ph.D., writes in his 2010 book The White Racial Frame:

“Whites view Asians and Asian Americans as available targets for racial stereotyping, imagining, and hostility. Over the last century and more, Chinese, Japanese and other Asian Americans have been imaged and labeled in many areas of society as ‘the pollutant, the coolie, the deviant, the yellow peril, the model minority, and the gook…” [emphasis added] (Feagin 2010, p.113).

When the Chief Reader used serious political references to Chinese people/events in a mocking way while simultaneously alluding to oppressive tropes that have been used to discriminate against Asians in America for decades/centuries (i.e. model vs deviant behaviors + marks of foreignness “you don’t want to be that guy”), whether intentional or not he racialized his joking. He leveraged his position of power to microaggressively marginalize nonwhite peoples. Racialized joking is extremely problematic because it is a particular way people of color in this nation continue to experience discrimination and be demeaned, and therefore a key perpetrator in keeping racism alive today.

Similar scenario for the T-shirt’s Asian cartoon parody, which many also are still struggling to understand as anything other than innocuous, silly, or even benign. Again, it’s not that difficult. “Stereotypes, omissions, and distortions,” writes Beverly Daniel Tatum, Ph.D., in her well-known book Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria? , “All contribute to the development of prejudice” (Tatum 1997, p.5).

(Image source)

Like all race stories, America has a long, long history of anti-Asian propaganda that has promulgated itself through the use of degrading caricatures. If you don’t believe me, Google anti-Asian propaganda. Perhaps no one has said it better than Asian American graphic novelist Gene Luen Yang in describing his choice to strategically employ offensive Asian stereotyping for character Chin-Kee in American Born Chinese:

Cousin Chin-Kee isn’t meant to be funny. He’s meant to come off the page and slap you in the face. If you’re laughing at him, I want you to do so with a knot in your stomach and a dry throat…You see, Cousin Chin-Kee is no more my creation than the Monkey King. I yanked him, every last detail about him, straight out of American pop culture…Cousin Chin-Kee just keeps coming back to visit. In the 80’s, he showed up as Long Duk Dong in Sixteen Candles. More recently, he reared his ugly head in movie critic Rex Reed’s review of the Korean film Old Boy. When the American public caught a glimps of him in William Hung’s American Idol performance, Hung was promptly made the most recognizable Asian-American male in the world. Every time Asian America thinks it’s finally time to breathe easy, the doorbell rings and we find Cousin Chin-Kee on the doorstep with a piece of take-out box luggage in each hand. America simply isn’t sensitive to modern slurs against Asian Americans.” —Gene Luen Yang

What’s Really Going On

What’s really going on here is something that has been going on for generations and which perseveres in adaptively replicating itself across time. ETS and the College Board have since published a statement and apology condemning the incidents. In it they come clean about what happened using powerful words to describe the events: “unacceptable,” “inappropriate,” “offensive” and “toxic.” I applaud this move. BUT if you read the statement a few more times, in, under, and over the lines, you might notice another thread: “Neither ETS nor the College Board has any involvement,” “College Board officials were notified of these incidents after the AP World History Reading was over,” “the College Board has asked ETS to discipline any responsible individuals” [emphasis mine], and then over on Twitter, “We didn’t sponsor, create, or distribute the offensive materials, which we find truly appalling.” This duck-and-cover-not-our-fault subtext deflects blame onto a pathologized individual (or few individuals) and completely avoids institutional accountability. “Equating racism with pathology,” writes Derald Wing Sue, Ph.D., in his also well-known work Microaggressions in Everyday Life, “Diminishes its widespread nature by fostering an illusion that good, normal, moral, and decent human beings do not harbor racist attitudes and beliefs” (Sue 2010, p.146).

This is what we mean when we talk about systemic racism. A historically-rooted pervasive set of beliefs, actions, and inactions by individuals and institutions that all together continue to keep the racial order in place. There were many people involved here either intentionally or unintentionally, through force of will or willful ignorance, denial and complicity. ETS and the College Board completely disassociate themselves from supposed guilty individual(s) but offer no discussion around how they were the ones who hired said person(s) into positions of power to begin with. What is their hiring and training process? Do they fold in anti-bias practices? How did the T-shirt (which ETS and the College Board claim “one person” made though that seems highly unlikely) ever make it out the gates? “There was ample opportunity to prevent this from happening,” wrote a Twitter user, “It should have never been sold in the first place.” Once out the gates, why did hundreds of high school teachers and college professors buy the T-shirt and wear it? Then when word of this entire debacle did finally get round — something affecting not only our nation’s educational system, but children and families, our FUTURE — why do so few seem to care? And how do we just know the fact that it was Asians who were targeted in an academic setting is significant when we consider the anemic aftermath and overall lack of visibility?

These are tough and deeply uncomfortable questions. They hurt. They suck. They make me tired, overwhelmed and completely exhausted. Given these feelings and the particular climate around this incident I suspect far more people are putting in earplugs, slipping on blinders and singing “LA LA LA” really loudly than anything else right now. Nevertheless. I know some of us are still engaged. I hope more of us can become so. If we keep asking, keep challenging, keep demanding accountability and creatively seeking solutions, I really do believe we can do better by ourselves and our children.