Monday, May 19th, 2008

The Candidates Have An Asian American Problem

One of the main reasons this presidential election has been historic is that every imaginable demographic has been in play. Long ignored constituencies seem to have suddenly appeared on the screens of political operatives.

Speculation abounds. Will African American vote break the Republican stranglehold on the south? Can Republican nominee McCain split the Latino vote? Will young voters make the Dem candidate invulnerable? None of these questions seemed remotely imaginable before January.

But Asian Americans still get no love.

A presidential forum this past weekend in Irvine, California, organized by APIA Vote confirmed this. Before a reported crowd of 1,000, none of the candidates even bothered to show.

Clinton did a canned speech and took no questions, despite her heavy reliance on Asian Americans for the plum Super Tuesday primary victory in California. McCain’s supporters claimed he couldn’t access the satellite tech to make the appearance, even though he was in New York City to tape Saturday Night Live, a show that happens to be broadcast, uh, live via satellite.

(Hmmm, what genius thought that excuse would get over with Asians?)

Obama literally phoned it in from Oregon. But he spoke about his family–which is as Asian as it is African and white–and took questions–including a thorny one about Native Hawaiian sovereignty in his state of birth. If Clinton took the Asian American vote in key states earlier this spring, credit Obama for not taking it for granted looking toward the fall.

Obama has been accused of having an “Asian American” problem. He did. Last year, Obama’s campaign staff issued a memo criticizing Clinton’s support for outsourcing by mocking her as the Democratic Senator from Punjab. Obama quickly distanced himself from the comments but no heads rolled over the foulup.

Truth be told, the other campaigns look like they have it worse.

Last month, Hillary Clinton’s campaign rallied white voters in Pennsylvania with what Emil Guillermo calls “yellow peril” ads. No one on her lengthy list of Asian American endorsers jeopardized their delegate seats by making any noise about it.

Worse, McCain has never apologized for his “I hate the gooks” comment. (Add that to his ongoing denial of his own pastor problem–even the pastor apologized, kinda–and you’ve got a pattern.)

So leave it to Def Slammer Beau Sia to rock the event with this rant. Too bad that by the time he got onstage most of the political operatives had left.

posted by @ 2:06 pm | 2 Comments

Monday, May 19th, 2008

Byron Hurt On Sean Bell

A day after Sean Bell’s birthday, on Malcolm X’s birthday…

posted by @ 7:47 am | 0 Comments

Wednesday, May 14th, 2008

Hillary And The Racist Gap

Hillary’s argument that Obama can’t reach white working-class voters makes perfect sense. It represents her true politics–based in buzzkill pragmatism of the most cynical kind. Will we cater to the worst in our voters all the time? Yes we will!

Or…to paraphrase Amy Poehler-in-her-Hillary-banana-suit on SNL: “My voters will never vote for Senator Obama because they’re racist.” It was hilarious because it called out the Clinton campaign on its not-so-subtle identity politics. Last night, Clinton all but made West Virginia ’08 into Alabama ’64.

But what if Hillary’s line is right?

Last month after the Pennsylvania caucus, I mentioned a Republican calculation that 15% of white voters would never vote for a Black man. Exit polls gave circumstantial confirmation.

Then came reports earlier this week of Obama canvassers confronting racists in the streets and on the phone.

Last night, more than half of West Virginia’s 95% white voters said that they wouldn’t be happy if Obama got the nomination. A shockingly large number say they would vote for McCain if he got the nomination.

Democrats for both Obama and Hillary insist that this is a temporary condition, that once the rancor of the primaries is over, all hatchets will be buried. Obama, for his part, has ignored the white-baiting and did almost no campaigning in West Virginia.

But Earl Ofari Hutchinson notes that where Obama picked up white voters, the states aren’t even in play. He calls an Obama candidacy “the Democrat’s gamble”.

Is there a racist gap? And if so, can Obama overcome it?

posted by @ 6:22 am | 7 Comments

Monday, May 12th, 2008

Roberto Lovato on the ICE Raids Nationwide + Sean Bell II In Inglewood

Roberto Lovato’s new piece on ICE’s crackdowns speaks specifically to Georgia, but also contextualizes what’s been happening around the country, including here in the Bay Area (see below)::

Mancha and the younger children of the mostly immigrant Latinos in Georgia are learning and internalizing that they are different from white–and black–children not just because they have the wrong skin color but also because many of their parents lack the right papers. They are growing up in a racial and political climate in which Latinos’ subordinate status in Georgia and in the Deep South bears more than a passing resemblance to that of African-Americans who were living under Jim Crow. Call it Juan Crow: the matrix of laws, social customs, economic institutions and symbolic systems enabling the physical and psychic isolation needed to control and exploit undocumented immigrants.

…

In fact, the surge in Latino migration (the Southeast is home to the fastest-growing Latino population in the United States) is moving many of the institutions and actors responsible for enforcing Jim Crow to resurrect and reconfigure themselves in line with new demographics. Along with the almost daily arrests, raids and home invasions by federal, state and other authorities, newly resurgent civilian groups like the Ku Klux Klan, in addition to more than 144 new “nativist extremist” groups and 300 anti-immigrant organizations born in the past three years, mostly based in the South, are harassing immigrants as a way to grow their ranks.

The whole piece is here.

Davey D pointed out this incident on Sunday in Los Angeles with eerie parallels to the Sean Bell’s murder. (Update here.)

The long hot summer hasn’t even begun…

posted by @ 2:35 pm | 2 Comments

Monday, May 12th, 2008

ICE Raids On Berkeley And Oakland Schools


OAKLAND, CA – May 6, 2008 – Oakland Mayor Ron Dellums joined unions and community groups at Stonehurst Elementary School after agents from the Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement showed up earlier in the morning. Dellums and others protested the ICE activity in Oakland, which is a sanctuary city, just days after marches took place across the country for immigrants’ rights. Dellums talked with concerned parents, as worried children left school at the end of the day. Photos and Caption By David Bacon.

The political campaigns may have become a cartoon, but real issues are still exploding in the streets.

This past week, ICE sent agents to elementary schools in Oakland, shocking and scaring students, parents, teachers, and city officials. Parents reported that the agents intimidated students by patrolling outside the school after being denied entry at Stonehurst Elementary. ICE followed up with arrests of parents at their homes in Oakland and Berkeley.

Oakland Mayor Ron Dellums and Berkeley schools superintendent Bill Huyet quickly promised to protect students from such raids. Berkeley schools also offered escorts for worried parents and students.

Both cities–and San Francisco–are sanctuary cities for immigrants.

Parents, students, and immigrant advocates launched protests last week against the raids. In the past, ICE raids have often targeted workplaces. For many documented and undocumented immigrants, these ICE school raids introduce another level of fear and provocation.

ICE raids have often ripped young children from their parents and last week’s were no exception. One lawyer advocate reported being denied access to counsel a couple who had been arrested and detained. She ended up caring for that couple’s young child.

With the immigration debate sidelined for the duration of this presidential term, how will the presidential candidates address the issue in January? Are these kinds of raids throughout the summer the ICE bureaucrats’ way of forcing the issue sooner?

posted by @ 7:11 am | 0 Comments

Friday, May 9th, 2008

When The Campaign Becomes A Cartoon…

…the cartoons are becoming of the campaign. Certainly beats 99% of the coverage…

posted by @ 7:02 am | 0 Comments

Thursday, May 8th, 2008

Zirin on Bissinger v. Leitch, Blogs & The Future of Sportswriting

Costas’s HBO show on sportswriting the other week continues to generate waves of discussion, particularly the segment on new media in which old-school journalista Buzz Bissinger went after sports-blogger Will Leitch like it was a Tapout match and not a, you know, civil discussion.

Yo, great frickin TV, especially for reporter geeks of color like me. (Video is here. Watch the replays on HBO to catch the closing segment on race and sportswriting.)

Bissinger’s vampire weekend attack on Leitch reminded me a lot of the issues Oliver Wang raises in Total Chaos around the future of hip-hop journalism, especially the role of bloggers.

It should be noted that Bissinger is a highly accomplished reporter and journalist–he wrote Friday Night Lights and has scooped mad awards. Leitch is, in fact, an acclaimed author as well, but…well, let’s just say Deadspin–while fun, sometimes, willing to go where it needs going in others, but normally pretty trashy–is not necessarily Exhibit A of his own talents as a writer and editor.

I had a discussion with my editor at Vibe.com about it all. Blogging ain’t going away–Bissinger admitted as much at the end that that was the source of his vitriol. But how is it useful for bloggers to trumpet, as Deadspin’s Leitch does, a lack of “access, favor or discretion”? I was on the fence.

Along comes the brilliant Dave Zirin in this fantastic column that has me thinking, if not yet fully convinced.

I think it’s worth a conversation: Is this the future of hip-hop journalism too? (Or maybe asked another way, can hip-hop journalism really actually get worse?!) Are skilled journalists–and by extension, journalistic skills–an endangered species? Have they become media’s undead? Are outbursts like Bissinger’s a sign of a developing cold war between journalists and bloggers, a just a passing thing on the way to a new opinionscape, or just a sad example of what happens when you forget to take your meds?

Anyway, here’s a teaser from Zirin. Weigh in if you like…

Bissinger’s beef appears to be less with Leitch than with the changing media landscape. Sports blogs have brought younger, more diverse and more creative voices into the discussion of sports. While much mainstream sportswriting obsesses about personalities, scandal and statistics, the blogosphere offers other options. Pining for the past makes Bissinger sound like some 1950s preacher railing against rock ‘n’ roll. In some ways, Internet sports coverage is like rock–there’s bad and there’s good–but overall, it has expanded the confines of the form and content of sports journalism.

Costas fueled the controversy, likening blog commentary to what “a cabdriver” thinks about sports. In the past, he has called bloggers “pathetic, get-a-life losers.” It’s an attitude that’s shared by many A-list columnists and sports personalities, some of whom seethe over the fact that “some guy in his basement” gets to have equal voice–or, in Leitch’s case, even exceed the popularity of those whose once dominated the coverage.

There are sports blogs in every style, for every team, and they have entirely changed the game. Of course, some are repellent, but to swear off all blogs would be like refusing to read the New York Times because you don’t like the National Enquirer.

…

If anything, legacy sportswriters deserve far more scrutiny than the upstarts on the web. Washington Post and ESPN scribe Tony Kornheiser has said that this not a golden age of sportswriting, but it is a golden age for sportswriters. There is more money and fame for those willing to “play ball.”

Consider what Big Daddy Drew wrote on Deadspin about ESPN’s Rick Reilly. “Reilly is what I like to call a privileged sportswriter. I’m not saying he’s rich, or snooty, or anything like that. What I mean is that, in his position, Reilly has access to privileges that you or I, as normal sports fans, don’t have. He gets to go to the Masters, VIP-style. He gets to go golfing with Bill Clinton. He gets to ride in an Indy 500 race car. He gets to walk up to Sammy Sosa’s locker and dare him to pee in a cup for him. He gets to do all that. And that’s why he sucks…. If you’re a privileged sportswriter, you’re experiencing sports in a completely different way from normal, everyday fans. It’s no coincidence the bulk of ESPN’s programming now involves sportswriters talking to one another. They’re the only people they can identify with. You certainly aren’t part of the conversation.”

What infuriates old-school sportswriters is that people on the web are calling them on their privilege, isolation and celebrity. In sharp contrast, bloggers, with their messy passion and sharp interaction with readers, sometimes sound far more authentic.

Read it all here.

posted by @ 8:46 am | 1 Comment

Wednesday, May 7th, 2008

It’s Not Over… + Darrin Bell on America-Hating Black Preachers

It’s not over.

We’re all still puzzling over Hillary’s spin that Indiana was somehow a tie-breaker. She barely escaped out of there with a virtual tie. The wrath of the math is upon the Clintons. But let no election results put asunder…

In any case less than half of voters in Indiana and North Carolina were distracted by the Reverend Wright scandals. Maybe we’re smarter than the media gives us credit for?

The last word should belong to Darrin Bell, whose Candorville has been straight killing it this week. These 6 panels–asking the question “If 2008 were 1968…”–are worth more than the hundreds of thousands of words that have poured out this past month.

Click through to see the strips full-size.

UPDATE :: Here’s the links to the rest of Candorville’s week…

+ Thursday

+ Friday

posted by @ 8:26 am | 1 Comment

Tuesday, May 6th, 2008

Breakin The Law :: B-Girls + B-Boys In Madison


Photo By Robin Davies (under Creative Commons license)

Big shout out to Jarius King, Rock Lee of Rhythm Attack, and all of the b-boys and b-girls–from as far away as Hong Kong, Japan, South Africa, and Wausau–who represented a couple weekends back at the Breakin’ The Law competition. (Video is here and here.) T-dot’s Supernaturalz took it in a close final against Milwaukee’s Motion Disorderz.

Robin Davies’s photos capture the vibe completely. Check them all out here!

posted by @ 9:25 am | 1 Comment

Tuesday, May 6th, 2008

How About Some Music? :: Dubwise Santogold + Invincible The Sound Of Young Detroit

Out of the shed for a minute–where I’ve got things cooking at a good boil–to share some tasters.

Invincible :: Shape Shifters

After keeping it hot for Dilla, Sa-Ra, Platinum Pied Pipers, Slum Village, Black Milk and the cream of Detroit for years, Invincible finally gets her own shine. Quiet as it’s kept, she’s also one of the city’s most important young hip-hop activists–and you’ll hear that in her music–but her skills seal the deal.

Get her 3-song single here.

Santogold :: “Your Voice”

If you haven’t heard her yet, she’s worth the hype. I mean, this one’s free, so you can imagine how good the ones she’s charging you for.

Get her album here.

posted by @ 6:19 am | 0 Comments



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