Category Archives: race

blog, diversity, news, politics, race

Asian Americans won’t soon forget how the GOP shot down Goodwin Liu

Goodwin Liu’s withdrawal as a nominee to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals was maybe a “good win” for GOP partisans.

But it’s  a bad loss for Asian Americans, and all Americans who believe in diversity, justice and merit.

There is no doubt that such a gifted legal mind as Liu would have served the country with distinction. 

Too bad the nomination was poisoned by those on the right  intent on designing the face of the federal judiciary instead of leaving it to what has been routinely a sitting president’s prerogative. 

(For more on why Liu would have been a great choice, see my blog posts at www.aaldef.org/blog)

Liu’s letter to President Obama on Wednesday was to the point. As quoted in Politico:  “In light of last week’s unsuccessful cloture vote … I respectfully ask that you withdraw my nomination from further consideration by the United States Senate…With no possibility of an up-or-down vote on the horizon, my family and I have decided that it is time for us to regain the ability to make plans for the future.”

“In addition, the Judicial Council of the Ninth Circuit has noted the ‘desperate need for judges’ to fill current vacancies, and it is now clear that continuing my nomination will not address that need any time soon.”

The Ninth Circuit’s need for judges is great. But Liu underplayed the need for Asian American judges in the most Asian American region in the U.S.  The under-representation of the group on the federal bench  is practically a crime.

When someone as qualified as Liu doesn’t get past go in the nomination process, it’s  a sad message to Asian Americans, and anyone who believes in the values of diversity and merit.

Were it  not for the nastiness of modern politics, Liu could have been a contender. He is probably the best Asian American Supreme Court Justice who never was. 

Liu never got the chance he deserved. 

How he was shot down by the GOP is something Asian Americans will not soon forget.

I had hoped that Liu would fight on for his right to serve. Certainly, the president could have pressed on and continued the fight through October.   We won’t know if Liu’s letter pre-empted that.  It certainly lifted the pressure on Obama to do anything further.

But we do know that the GOP will come courting in 2012 and beyond.

The memory of Goodwin Liu should still be very fresh. 

blog, news, race

Happy Asian Heritage Street Fair Day! Get the perfect rapture appetizer before the world ends…

I’m out on the streets of San Francisco for the big Asian Heritage Street Day.

As a San Francisco native is great to see everyone out there in Civic Center and Little Saigon checking out the food, the booths, and the music that make the street fair a fun party. 

The Street Fair ends at about the same time the world is supposed to end at 6pm.

I’ll be doing a uniquely Filipino contest at 5pm on the Jazz and Cultural stage at Golden Gate and Larkin.  

Come on by and say hello. Before you get raptured, you’ll want an appetizer.

If you haven’t seen me in AsianWeek since it stopped publishing the print edition,  you can still see NEW Amok columns. 

Read my amok utterances here at www.amok.com.

And there’s the blog at the Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund: www.aaldef.org/blog

You can also follow me at www.twitter.com/emilamok

Go read up.  If the world ends at 6pm, you’ll be sorry.

blog, diversity, news, politics, race

Schwarzenegger and Strauss-Kahn: It’s not about sex, but power, greed, and ego

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Better than your average car wreck on the interstate, it’s hard not to be fascinated by the public spectacle of powerful white men getting their penises caught in a shredder.

That’s what happening to Arnold Schwarzenegger and Dominique Strauss-Kahn, who both thought their sexual exploits could be as easily dismissed and forgotten like some unwanted document.

Strauss-Kahn, the head of the International Monetary Fund, would have gotten away, at least from New York, were it not for the cell phone left at the scene of the crime.

And Schwarzenegger, well, you can’t undo a love child.  A pro-choice Republican while in office, Schwarzenegger made a bad choice.

And now we see how badly he misunderstood the notion of “courting the Latino” vote.

I would have thought that we all have settled in our minds how we felt about philandering politicians after the Clinton/Lewinsky affair.

But I guess it depends on how much you like the philandering pol.

Then you can “compartmentalize” private and public, just like the pol, and allow your guy to get away with the nasty.

Bill Clinton seems to done just splendidly after the affair. But that didn’t happen to John Edwards, who not only cheated on the poor cancer-stricken Elizabeth, but then…. she died on him. 

I’d say serial cheaters like Newt Gingrich, a presidential candidate, need to worry.

The public still expects fidelity and honesty. More leeway is given if they like you. And Gingrich is hardly warm and cuddly.

In Schwarzenegger’s case, everyone loves Maria Shriver, so it’s really no contest for the body builder. He’s done in public life. And in his private life, maybe he’ll find solace among the ethically challenged in show business.

Strauss-Kahn? In America, he’s just known as a man of power.  But he’s also a man of contradictions. The guy heads the IMF and he’s a socialist?  He certainly was a socialist when it comes to sex.

He apparently did it with everybody, many of them journalists and now they’re speaking out.

Curiously, Strauss-Kahn’s victim was a hotel maid from Africa.

Schwarzenegger’s was his household help from Guatemala.

And this is basically why these two sexual exploits are vastly different from some other sexual shenanigans in politics.

You can’t compartmentalize the actions so easy in the realm of  personal vs. public.

Schwarzenegger and Strauss-Kahn’s dalliances become crimes when they cease to be about sex, and turn into imperialistic acts of power and class.

Their actions are all about powerful men taking advantage of the weak, getting what they want, when they want, and thinking they can get away with it.

They can’t.

blog, diversity, humor, news, race

Alexandra Wallace for Asian Pacific American Heritage Month Queen?

In the nearly 15 years of  writing my “Amok” column in that historic ethnic media publication known as Asian Week, I can’t recall ever seeing a force unite such a disparate group as Asian Americans so totally. And just in time for heritage month.

Given our ethnic variety, never mind our generational differences, it would take a phenomenon of sorts to bring us all together. But then, there she was, like no one else in history, unifying us in these digital times, simply by appearing on the screen and saying the magic words: “Ching, chong, ting, tong, ling long.”

You mean Alexandra Wallace, that ex-UCLA chick who went viral on YouTube?

Wallace, the fresh face of unconscious racism,  gets my vote for San Francisco’s Asian Heritage Street Fair Queen. You might say, we don’t have a queen, at least not that kind. Or that in these modern times a queen is so passé.  But in 2011, Wallace, that ditzy blonde with a webcam and pushup bra, deserves something for waking up a community that normally stays silent.

Quiet Asians?  Not after Wallace did her thing.

If you’ve been living under a large ramen bowl the last six months, google Wallace and you’ll see how she castigated Asians at UCLA for being loud in the library, talking on their cell phones to call people about the Japanese earthquake and practically turning the dorms into Asian ghettoes.

Boorish and graceless, sure.  But then Wallace added a racist touch with her “ching-chong” talk.

It’s just so natural when you want to mock an Asian to get your “ching-chong” on.
 
The “ching-chong” joke has been with us for ages, just as fried chicken and watermelon jokes have hounded blacks since slavery. Today, only a truly racist and ignorant lout would be so unoriginal.

But sensitivity to Asians and Asian Americans just isn’t that far along. So we must endure the Wallaces of the world (and there are millions of them out there) and witness as they discover for the first time their inner “ching-chong” and think they’re being hysterically funny.

Blame it on the media. Trickle down doesn’t work in economic, but it does in pop culture.

Rosie O’Donnell, Rush Limbaugh, Adam Carolla et al. have all fed at the “ching-chong” trough. Morning DJs are notorious. Despite community protests, there’s still a green light that says mock away.

It’s about time the green light turns red.

As a private person, Wallace may deserve an ounce of sympathy. But in this case, she did it for world to see, on the internet, where revolutions are spawned.
 
Inadvertantly,she ushered in the anti-“ching-chong” revolution.

Web-savvy Asian Americans irate at Wallace’s insensitivity responded with videos of their own, some  showing real style..

Wallace ultimately took down her video and apologized. I’m sure she got some menacing taunts, but many more responses I saw seemed to be creative reactions from young Asian Americans.

Historically, Asian Americans have always been slow to meet the challenge of negative speech. A Wallace rant? It’s an invitation to debate. As a first amendment absolutist, I always believe in more speech not less. This time, the internet allowed Asian Americans to speak out.

Her political science professor, Phil Gussin thought some of it was too harsh..

“What Wallace did was hurtful and inexcusable, but the response has been far more egregious,” Gussin reportedly told the UCLA campus paper, the Daily Bruin. “ [Asian Americans] responded with greater levels of intolerance.”

No, I’d say Asian Americans woke up and decided it was time to stand up and be heard.

Besides, if there’s no hate behind her statements, just ignorance, then Wallace has nothing to fear.

She should have stayed in school. Maybe started dating Asian guys.

Remember, any negatives Wallace experienced are just a fraction of what Asian Americans have experienced since coming to America. From Exclusion Acts, to anti-miscegenation laws, to internment camps, Asian Americans have endured it all. We didn’t go away. If we had, there’d be no community worth being part of.

So, yo, Alexandra, thanks for bringing us all together.  Here’s an olive branch—to stand on—my unofficial  street fair queen. See you at the balut-eating contest?

I’m emceeing the event at the Street Fair in San Francisco. Wouldn’t it bee neat to see Alexandra suck a fertilized duck egg? I have one with her name on it!