An eloquent, to the point piece from Aziz Ansari from last night’s Saturday Night Live. He names the racist insurgency emerging today with seriousness and humor. Nicely done, Mr. Ansari.
NYTimes: Aziz Ansari’s Monologue on ‘Saturday Night Live’: Transcript
From Eddie Huang, a spot-on commentary on the predicament of Asian Asian American life in White (and sometimes Black) America.
Maybe I shouldn’t be surprised by anything that happens in American politics anymore especially since presidential politics in the U.S. has entered a new level of silliness, but I was taken aback by Jeb Bush’s use of the derogatory and inflammatory anchor babies label against Asians. I get his desire to out-Trump Donald Trump these days, since he is lagging in the Republican primary polls under the scorching heat of Trump-Ra. But let’s call it as it is: he probably didn’t want to offend (perhaps even further) Latinos/as who he will need to have a chance in hell to be elected president, so he picks on Asians and Asian Americans thinking (in a not so well-thought out way) that maybe no one will care–after all, Asians are pretty quiet and compliant, aren’t we?#MyAsianAmericanStory is one small way of expressing that Asian Americans are no longer willing to let such slights go by unanswered. Asian Americans: Invisible no longer– let’s hope so.
For more on the #MyAsianAmericanStory, take a look at this L.A. Times piece.
And today’s New York Times editorial is one of the better ones I’ve read in a long while. The editorial board provides an insightful critique of the Asian anchor babies comment. Good for them.
A Los Angeles Times reporter recently asked me and a couple of others which two books or essays students should read regarding race and racism in the Ferguson era. Whittling it down to only two was almost impossible, but I managed–it was an interesting exercise. I pared it down to James Cone’s A Black Theology of Liberation and a Harper’s Magazine interview between Cornel West and Jorge Klor de Alva. You can read more about these two texts in the L.A. Times article that came out yesterday.
A spot-on comment from Hua Hsu in The New Yorker:
“The scenes of American injustice that we see on a regular basis are not failures of people being insufficiently nice to one another. They are about the legacies and structures that hem in our choices, that define the circumference of our imaginations, that trigger our personal gut reaction to the very word ‘dream.’ They are about those whom the truth cannot set free. We can control and harness our feelings. I have no idea how to destroy and rebuild our institutions.”
Read the full commentary here.
My So-Called Race 