Happy Halloween!

Now here's some food for thought around why dressing up as an Indian or Geisha or Mexican, etc. for Halloween is offensive:

Take Back the Halloween

Here's something to draw your attention:
"The reason why “ethnic costumes” are so problematic is because they posit a cultural identity as a costume - they compress the complexity and intricacy of an entire culture into dress-up; into something that anyone (or really, usually someone with class and race privilege) has the right to use for the most superficial purposes."

Now go read!

Support UAAO at UMich!

Hey y'all,

Thought it'd be important to pass this along:

"Hey all,

Sorry to spam your facebook inboxes but this is really important.

First off, I'm so glad to have met you all at NAASCon, and heard all of your suggestions regarding getting our student orgs more support from the community. With that in mind, at the University of Michigan, the Housing Administration has been enforcing a policy on room reservations and how many times student groups can reserve rooms. Such that we haven't been able to use the Yuri Kochiyama Lounge every week, or have had our time cut short. (the Yuri Kochiyama Lounge is a lounge in a residence hall that is dedicated to the Civil Rights activist Yuri Kochiyama. It was dedicated in 1999 and since then has been the main meeting space of United Asian American Organizations which serves as the umbrella group for the A/PIA student orgs on our campus)

We believe that this policy disproportionately affects student groups of color, as all of the Multicultural and Minority-Cultural Lounges that are meant to be especially for student groups of color, are located in the Residence Halls.

As one of the only A/PIA spaces located centrally on campus, we feel that to not have unrestricted access marginalizes and limits our space, voice, and community on campus.

We hope that you will stand with us and sign our petition:

http://www.facebook.com/l.php?u=http://www.ipetitions.com%2Fpetition%2Fyklounge%2Findex.html

If you go to the University of Michigan, please attend our general meeting this Wednesday to receive a copy of the resolution we have come up with on this issue, and again the following Wednesday (Nov. 5th) so you and your orgs can vote and be represented on this resolution.


If not, please read/sign/pass on this link and the petition to your A/PIA student orgs on your respective campuses!

http://www.facebook.com/l.php?u=http://www.ipetitions.com%2Fpetition%2Fyklounge%2Findex.html

Thanks again,
Laura Misumi
Co-Chair '08-'09
United Asian American Organizations
University of Michigan"

As a student organization ourselves, I don't want to speak for everyone, buuuut I think we can all agree that having a space for meetings/events is crucial! And that this policy UMich is trying to implement is totally unfair for people of color student orgs.

So please sign the petition and pass it on!

Thanksss.

Dao Strom

With the exception of the incredible Alejandro Escovedo, you would be hard-pressed to find very many people of color making music the realm of Americana/alt-country/insurgent country genres/sub-genres. Of course, it's hard to define what exactly those terms mean, or what music/artists they encompass, but regardless of how you choose to define the terms, it's difficult to find people of color who make music that could tangentially be considered to fall under those categories.

Speaking as someone who enjoys this type of music, I find it a bit disheartening. Alejandro Escovedo is amazing, but these genres consist, mostly, of white people, both in terms of the people making the music, and the people consuming it.

That brings us to Dao Strom.

She is a Vietnamese American, born in Vietnam, grew up in Northern California, and currently operates out of Juneau, Alaska. She makes some pretty awesome alt-country/Americana/[whatever you want to call it] music. She self-released an album this year, as well as one a couple of years ago. I first came across her on the blog Songs:Illinois a few months ago [link below], and thought "oh my god, a person of color on this blog!"

There are some tracks for preview from her new album, Everything that Blooms Wrecks Me on her website [link below]. She has also written a couple of books, into which I have yet to look.

Rec'd if you like: Lucinda Williams kinda, Neko Case sometimes, Marissa Nadler minus feedback plus twang. Songs:Illinois says "Devandra, Alela Diane and Marie Sioux...hybrid of Loretta Lynn and Gillian Welch"

Anyway, here are some links. Check her out.
Dao Strom homepage
HerSpace
Songs:Illinois writeup

A small history lesson

*This isn’t much of like an identity sort of thing, more like a history lesson.

So for ENGL 160, my newest assignment concerns memorials and what not (design, significance) and we were discussing the Viet Nam (correct spelling and spacing by the way) War Memorial. I realized that there are no names of Vietnamese soldiers who fought alongside the United States on the wall. This might be of little concern to readers but for all the Vietnamese children who had family involved in the war, this is pretty insulting. To Vietnamese people, this was a CIVIL war, this battle was more important to us than the American explanation for them going to war. But then again, you might say “hey, we invested hundreds and thousands of our sons and fathers to fight Communism, so we had as much contribution to the war as the Vietnamese people.” Not exactly true. The Americans only cared about Viet Nam when Ho Chi Minh managed to route the French soldiers out of the country. They didn’t care about the Soviet Union (Communist at the time) influence of giving military arms to the Viet Cong or giving political support to force the French (Allied) out of Viet Nam.

In the early to mid 1960s, Viet Nam underwent a nationwide recruitment of children to send to the military (child soldiers). My dad and uncles can attest to this, as they were recruited at the ages of 10 and 11. So way before the American arrival in 1965, the Vietnamese were already preparing for a civil war that would last for many years.

Now take a look at the names on the wall, there are names of soldiers who didn’t last a day, month, or let alone a year in Viet Nam. Vietnamese soldiers have been fighting years against the Khmer Rouge and the Viet Cong themselves, they had to see their country fall after the battle in Saigon, and they had to live to see their nation regarded as a third world country. Yes these soldiers have fought, but little was said on what the military actually did in Viet Nam. Is there any memorial for the My Lai Massacre in which hundreds of people were innocently killed by the U.S. military? Is there any wall for the people that were killed when Nixon ordered a large scale bombing of Hanoi/Ho Chi Minh trail? (Estimated firepower of almost six or more times the nuclear explosion of Hiroshima and Nagasaki) Is there any way I can get the name of my grandfather who died when his platoon was trying to defend my dad’s village. It sickens me that there are probably names of soldiers who just slept with prostitutes, killed innocent civilians, and did drugs during there tours.

Is it that hard to get a name engraved on a wall? Don’t Vietnamese soldiers who died have the right to have their names on there also? Or were the Vietnamese people just clueless idiots who begged for U.S. assistance. After the atrocity of electing Ngo Ding Diem (U.S. hired him), My Lai Massacre, the bombings that destroyed the land (still destroyed to this day), and abandonment. All I want for my family and other Vietnamese soldiers is to have their name engraved on the Viet Nam War Memorial, to show the United States that although this was a radical unsupported war, the Vietnamese were willing to give democracy a chance and work side by side to defend a country against Communism (at the time).

Cultural Appropriation.

So yesterday during our discussion of "Shortcomings" [are books underlined or italicized or in quotation marks? i never could remember] by Adrian Tomine, we eventually ended up around the topic of appropriation. Given that I've been running on very little sleep and am currently not very capable of making coherent statements, I tried to describe cultural appropriation the best I could but I don't think I did a very good job.

Sooooo, I vowed that when I got home, I'd find a more dependable source to give a better description for y'all. And lo and behold, I remembered that I'd posted something on my facebook [friend me!] from Racialicious [this website is amazinggggg. the link to the site is on the sidebar. check it out!] that was a piece on cultural appropriation they'd done a while back.

Go check it out:
cultural appropriation

It's fairly easy to read and digest. So go!

FACT Conference

Hey everyone.

So this weekend I'm attending the FACT conference down at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign. FACT stands for Filipino Americans Coming Together. At FACT, there are a lot of workshops that educate about Filipino Culture and Fil-Am Culture as well. Some of the workshops included are a Modern (Hip-Hop) Dance workshop, Filipinos and Martial Arts, Pinay Empowerment, Filipinos in Non-Tradtional Fields among many more. This years theme is "I Am" | The world around us. The culture among us. The power within ME. Filipinos from so many midwest schools are going to be there this weekend, celebrating our culture within the US and within our roots back in the Philippines. I'm hella excited and also grateful for this weekend cause I've been really stressed with school. I heard the Variety show is sick on Saturday night and I heard the afterset at Canopy is just as crazy. I'll be filling you guys in Sunday on the workshops I attended and also all the other fun stuff. Hope you all have safe and good weekends.

-Jeff

Whaaassupp?!

Hey everyone!

Hope all is going well, it's Jeff here! Your treasurer! HOLLA! haha just kidding.

Just want to remind everyone on here that tomorrow we have another AACC meeting! at 4pm. Location is still kinda iffy! haha, but just contact one of us on here and we'll get back to you guys.

I just felt like I should contribute to his blog, since I think everyone has already. I'll probably be one here updating you guys on new Artists and movies, and probably just some cool articles from different AA blogs! Alrite guys, take it easy!

Peace and Love,

Jeff

a sustainable lifestyle?

My first blog post! Yay.

So as you all know by now, NAASCon was this past weekend at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia. Your very own AACC Chair sits on the national board as one of the communications chairs [y'all should think about applying to be on the '09-'11 board!!]. Anyway, this whole weekend was kind of a reminder of what's been on my mind lately: is community organizing something I really want to be doing ten-twenty years down the line?

Yes. Of course. But to what extent? The reason why I've been thinking about this is because the last few years I've been doing this, since the start of my freshman year of college, I haven't been able to find a healthy balance between doing this work and working and going to school and then still trying to find some semblance of time for myself and a social life. Last night, I had what felt like the millionth breakdown in the span of about two weeks. Granted there were other things at work that more or less exacerbated the feelings I was already experiencing, but it really made me reconsider everything.

As activists, where do we draw the line between pushing the 'movement(s)' foward and taking care of ourselves? I feel like being an activist means that you really do have to sacrifice a piece of yourself in order to make things happen.

Maybe that's true. Maybe it's not. I don't know. I think my problem is that I keep taking on all these new tasks, thinking that I can do it all, but it's become increasingly apparent that I can't. I keep forgetting that different people have different limits and that I can't keep pushing mine too far.

Anyway, life stops for no one so I've just gotta keep on chugging and hope things will get better. I mean, all this work, all this stress, all this insanity, it's all for the movement....right?



p.s. i apologize if this made no sense whatsoever. i'm still in the process of trying to recover and i don't think my brain's ability to make coherent thoughts has caught up yet.

"Whiteness"

One of the workshops on Saturday morning at NAASCon talked about groups [specifically Asian American student organizations] moving beyond their own personal "silos" and working with other groups that are not "Asian American" [or something] in nature in order to achieve liberation for all groups. The workshop description talked about building a "stronger[,] more cohesive movement community to work towards collective liberation and greater access for our people."

I do agree with this sentiment. We absolutely do need to move out beyond the scope of just being Asian American student organizations. The coordinators asked us to look at oppression like a tree. At the top, the branches, you have different communities, and the different ways in which oppression affects us. Though we may be of different communities, the truth is that we are all connected through the trunk and roots of this tree, and the oppression that we feel comes from, ultimately, an institutionalized form of oppression.

We were urged to form an "intersectional social justice movement." I certainly agree with this sentiment. One of the subsequent workshops talked about how this thought might be problematic. To say that oppressed groups only come together at certain intersections doesn't speak loudly enough to the issues and problems. We can't only work together on certain situations when our paths happen to cross.

So that's something to think about. Let's branch out beyond this "Asian American" group, or "Asian American" student movement, and try to form a larger group by incorporating other oppressed peoples. Of course, something such as this is much easier said than done. We have at least some group overlap amongst our individual members [with feminist groups, other groups of people of color, and LGBTQA groups], but it's more of a matter of getting the whole group to back a movement, not individual people with some group overlap supporting different movements. Again, easier said than done, but it is important to look at this in the bigger picture with, ultimately, the same root cause: "Whiteness"

It's not "white people" as a whole who we want to pick on here, that's certainly not the case. It's more about tackling the interpretation of an "American" [one from the United States] as an able-bodied, white, Protestant, heterosexual, English speaking male. "White supremacy" in this context is not about a bunch of guys running around on horses with white pillowcases on their heads, it's more about "whiteness supremacy" at least in the "mainstream" [whatever that is] view of what an "American" is or should be. Another word to use here is "hetero-normative," but I'm not quite sure how to use that properly in a sentence. It's this view of "whiteness" that comes out through legislation, and through the media, and it's this view that needs to be challenged because, let's face it: we're not all male, some of us are individuals with disabilities, some of us are not white, some of us are not heterosexual, some of us are not Protestant, some of us do not speak English, and some of us are a few of these things. [of course, we can take this further, within individual movements where certain aspects of the "normative" thought still prevail, but we won't, at least not right now]

Sorry if this seemed like a little bit of a rambling entry, but hopefully it makes a little sense.

I will be waaaaaitiiiiiiing

Cynthia Lin just performed a few songs to close out NAASCON including but not limited to a cover of Cyndi Lauper's "Time After Time." It was fun.

Anyway, conference is over, with the exception of the After Party. My presence at said party is currently up in the air, but hey, how often does one get to party in Atlanta, right?

I never thought I would mention Robert Schneider on this blog

We mentioned Robert Schneider at the meeting on Thursday. Turns out he's Filipino, which kinda blew my mind. He just made his way into the poetry of one of the spoken word artists wrapping up the formal part of NAASCON in the context of being Jewish and Filipino. I never thought he would make his way into things in which I was involved twice in sixty hours.

Although, truth be told, I did read this twice in a week one time 'cause I thought it was really cool.

We run on Asian time

Recurring theme of the National Asian American Students Conference 2008: Running on Asian Time.

We're waiting for the final program, which was supposed to start 35 minutes ago.

Anyway, here's the Midwest Caucus [picture is a little big for Blogger, so you can't see the whole thing unless you open it in a new window; you can still see me and Elisa...Joyce is TRUANT]:



You can see the other pictures [all two of them!] on Facebook. There may be more, but honestly I doubt it. Joyce and Elisa may post some.

Live from NAASCon

I went to a "workshop" this morning [I use the term "workshop" loosely; it was more like a lecture], and the first words out of the presenter's mouth were "Asian America is dead." The lecture itself still proved very informative and, on some level, inspiring, but I'll get to more of that a bit later.

I do have a couple of brief things:

- We're moving between workshops right now, and I finally had a little bit of time to get on to the Emory Guest wifi network. The Mixed Race caucus just finished, and now the third workshop session is about to begin. I'll be attending the one on police brutality, and I'll be sure to relay some information via the blog.

- The Matiott doesn't have free wifi for its guests, which is why I wasn't able to update last night.

- I'll have a bigger update tomorrow night that discusses more of the meaty, substantive points of the workshops.

See y'all soon; who knows, maybe later tonight.

NAASCON Weekend

This weekend is the National Asian American Students Conference. Joyce and I are headed down there with Elisa and Ramona, and we'll have updates throughout, provided we can get internet service. If not, then there'll be a big post Sunday night or Monday morning. We'll try to keep everyone as updated as possible.

Right now we're about to embark on an 11 hour and 6 minute car ride, and that's without stops. So, basically, we'll hit Hotlanta some time tomorrow.

I'm trying to get the number of CDs I'm bringing down to a reasonable number. Needless to say, I don't want to bring a bag just for CDs, but it might come to that...

Obligatory Introduction Post

Hello, fair peruser of the internets.

You have stumbled upon the blog of the Asian American Coalition Committee (AACC), a student organization at the University of Illinois at Chicago. AACC is a pan-Asian American advocacy organization, whose main causes have, historically, been the establishment of an Asian American Studies curriculum at UIC, the establishment of an Asian American resource center (accomplished! See links), and, in a more general sense, strive to provide a voice, push for social justice, and demand educational equity for not only Asian Americans, but also for other people of color and historically marginalized groups.

This is the AACC blog. This is a medium through which AACC members can post their own opinions, or spread news that they encounter via the internets. The views posted reflect those of the individual members that post them, not those of the organization (though they could, and in fact, they might). Any AACC member who wishes to post may do so [just let me know if you would like to post], and even non-AACC members may post [again, just let me know].

Personally, I am Brandon Lee, vice-chair for the Asian American Coalition Committee for the 2008-2009 academic year. You can contact me at blee21@uic.edu. The president this year is Joyce Yin, and the treasurer is Jeff DeGuia. I suspect they will both get around to posting very soon.

Please take some time to peruse the blog, check out our friends on the side, and, if you're so inclined, help support the cause!