Ong and De Genova

This week's readings are revealing on multiple levels; they at once unveil the power dynamics of transnational cultural capital and simultaneously, at times, fall into the traps they are seeking to avoid. For example, Ong tries to dispel the notion of a static "Chineseness" (111) that is employed even in academic discourses that try to dismantle orientalist rhetoric. However, earlier in her piece, she refers to the way that "Americans" react to the Chinese influx in Northern California. She says that the Chinese quest for social capital "destablizes the sense of political security for American residents" (Ong 97). Is it possible to talk about these issues without falling into the traps of the issues? Is she not, unconsciously, and most likely unwillingly, conflating whiteness with Americanness here? Even while she seeks to explore a new, transnational, globalized American identity, to uncover the layers of power hierarchy that are embedded within racial and place-based identities in America, she is pointing to a normalized, static "Americanness" that is interchangable with whiteness.

The article, for the most part, however, is very illuminating. Ong discusses multiple strategies of accumulation of cultural capital, offering insights into the ways that actions such as philanthropic donations convert into "social distinction" (93). On page 112, she defines flexible citizenship, pointing to specific tiers of the job industry that Chinese immigrants occupy and employ as a means to work their way up the (mythical?) cultural ladder in America. Similarly, De Genova talks about how "Mexican Chicago" refers to the way that Mexican-Americans interact with their own sense of "Mexican-ness" in relationship to the way that "Mexican-ness" is placed on them by the state and mainstream America's racialization of them (96). He, like Ong, addresses what "Americanness" has come to mean, and includes the concept that "Americanness" involves linguistic homogeneity, which immediately excludes many people from embodying America. While he specifically is referring to Chicano folks who speak two (or more) languages, his argument can be applied to Ong's assessment of the "Hong Kong money elite" as well.

Golden Gulag/Prison Town USA

Ruth Wilson Gilmore's book Golden Gulag and the documentary "Prison Town, USA" compliment each other well. Both serve to expose the reality of the Prison Industrial Complex and its impacts on the American people. Although Gilmore opens up with an anecdote about people riding on a bus to Sacramento to petition the government, the rest of the book gets into more of the technicalities of how the PIC operates, specifically in California. What I appreciated about the documentary is the human face it puts with both the experience of being incarcerated in America, and being forced to buy into the system on the other end--by becoming a prison guard.

It is always painful for me, a California-born, to read about the prison system in California, when we spend so much money per year on prisons and so little on education. People are literally fast-tracked into prison. When my friends and I would cut school, if we were caught, we would be taken by the truancy police to a truancy depot, rather than returned to school. This shows how young people are very actively being sent the message that one step out of line (or three strikes) will get you locked up, rather than cared for or looked after by the state system. As Gilmore focuses on the capitalistic benefits for certain people of the expansion and privatization of prisons, she also points to the ways that labor and welfare become inextricably linked to warfare. She says that the new state renovated "its welfare-warfare capacities into something different by molding surplus finance capital, land, and labor into the workfare-warfare state" (85). One main theme that comes out in this statement, and also throughout her masterpiece, is the idea of dependency. This connects back to the film because we see the ways that the people living in these prison towns become utterly dependent on the prisons, and how that fuels and feeds this growth of monstrous prisons. The ways that the larger powers, i.e. the state and private companies, benefit from the expansion of prisons is masked by the ways that working class white folks are pitted against working class people of color, when the former are exploited as prison workers and the latter are criminalized and locked up as prison inmates.

Guantanamo and U.S. Imperialism

This week's readings, Amy Kaplan's "Where is Guantanamo?" and Giorgio Agamben's "What Is a Camp?" both point to questions of nationhood, exceptionalism, sovereignty, and imperialism. I did not know the full history of Guantanamo, so reading about how the Platt Amendment set the groundwork for the United States to maintain authority over this land, without applying American constitutional limits to the practices that the U.S. employs there. That the U.S. was still sending checks of about 4 thousand dollars (which the Cuban government refused to cash) is so telling of the formalities that the American government recognizes as proof of our right to the globe. As Kaplan so wonderfully puts it, there is an intense "hierarchy between recognition and consent, rendering Cuban sovereignty over Guantanamo Bay contingent on the acknowledgment of the United States, in exchange for which Cuba agrees to cede sovereignty over part of the territory it never controlled" (Kaplan 863). The idea of Guantanamo as a "launching pad" for military interventionism signals the ways that Cuba and other Latin American countries have been subjugated by treaties couched in international diplomacy, when in actuality they are codifying American global imperialism.

Agamben's essay "What Is a Camp?" references his work on the State of Exception. We can read Guantanamo exactly in the context of the camp that Agamben describes: "the hidden matrix and nomos of the political space in which we still live" (Agamben 38.8). He says, "The camp is the space that opens up whe nthe state of exception starts to become the rule" (38.9). We see this in Kaplan's article, when the courts rule repeatedly that the territory of Guantanamo is exempt from constitutional boundaries, or when the courts refuse to officially name where in the world Guantanamo lies. In addition, the racializing of bodies and the racializing of non-citizens that takes place in Guantanamo only serve to further establish the permanence of the camp that Agamben names. I came out of this wonder, are we in "a period of permanent crisis," as Agamben might suggest (42.3)?


I did some research because I wanted to know what happened to the detainees from Guantanamo who, according to Obama, are supposed to be released by now.
I stumbled upon this article, written today, that concludes with a statement from the Obama administration recognizing that their projected deadline for shutting down the camp will most likely not be met. Though Obama made it clear that one of his first intentions in office was to shut down this camp and end these unlawful, undefined, unregulated, and unsituated practices, the "camp" at Guantanamo Bay remains today:

http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2009-11/15/content_12458768.htm

Native Americans and EJ

This week's readings directly connect to many of the issues that Julie Sze discusses in "Noxious New York," but in the specific context of Native American experiences with the state apparatus and the environment's wellbeing.

Thomas Biolsi spends a significant amount of his article "The Birth of the Reservation" talking about the modes in which dominant and colonial gazes function to undermine Native American autonomy and agency. Through an examination of the state policies regarding the Lakota Nation, he analyzes the ways that the individual and individual property ownership was cultivated by the government, how the nuclear family and institutional marriages/unions were forced upon the Lakota people, and how the idea of progress became associated with marrying with white people and diluting native bloodlines. He says, "Lakota people internalized blood quantum as part of the way they saw themselves in the world or that they perceived full-bloods and mixed-bloods as being different, even mutually antagonistic, social groups" (Biolsi 42). The internalization of the ideas of incompotence and blood quantum that was produced by the American government, he concludes, is ultimately the most powerful weapon in furthering the subjugation of native peoples in this country.

Andrea Smith takes on the issue of Native people in America and land largely in terms of ecofeminism. She discusses the "greening of hate" as the pointing of blame towards people in the global south (especially women) for overpopulation that leads to environmental ills. This is problematic because it does not address--in fact it completely obliterates--the ways that women of color suffer through environmental injustice that often hurts their reproductive health. She talks about depleted uranium as an extreme example of the detrimental conditions that some people are living in and she explores the idea that is put out by some people that there are certain populations and groups of people in the world who are inherently "dirty."

The most interesting part of both articules to me was the discussion of mainstream environmental activism and its disconnect/hurtful stance towards Native American EJ issues. I would like to discuss this further and see if there are any mainstream organizations that are doing a good job of effectively showing solidarity with the struggles of Native Americans.

Noxious New York

In a time of ever-increasing awareness about the ways that the earth is in trouble (and man/woman's responsibility to attend to this problem), it boggles my mind how blind the dominant discourse is to the ways that different groups are impacted differently. "Environmental (in)justice" is not a word that everyone in America understands, sad as that may be. Julie Sze's book Noxious New York is an attempt to expose and discuss how lower-income communities of color are disproportionately impacted by bad environmental conditions. From Sunset Park to Williamsburg to West Harlem to the South Bronx, her book is a journal through the environmental justice struggles of New York City.

The chapter on Garbage really held my attention, since I grew up thinking about garbage. My dad is the recycling director for the county I was raised in, and every time we would pass a landfill or a dump he would slow down and look--he was always talking about the ways that different regions handled their trash. The dangers of the privatization of garbage and globalizing garbage are very real and Sze's discussion of them, as funny as it may initially sound to write a chapter on Garbage, is so important. As she points out, "the changing nature of urban garbage, and the fate of marginalized communities in the cities, is intimately linked to rural impoverished populations through class and race" (122).

This book is so important for all Americans to read,not just those interested in EJ work. I am very interested in what Sze's book would look like if she spent a whole book exploring how the EJ conditions have (or have not) shifted in Williamsburg since the influx of gentrifiers and developments.

Barrio Dreams

The rapidly increasing situation of gentrification in East Harlem (and Harlem in general) is something that I have recently become very exposed to. Interning uptown in East Harlem with an organization that tackles this issue (among many others), reading Davila's book was something like an intellectualized version of a Monday afternoon at my job. (One of her picture inserts even includes a photo of my coworker's mom!) The issues that she talks about, from naming to self-naming to "marketable ethnicity"to the production of belief and adherence to certain ideals of capitalism are all, in my mind, on-point with what is occurring today. Her analysis of "slumlords" and the problems they produce for residents in the Barrio is also very accurate. I think that the idea of "slumlords" has become romanticized and fictionalized in the white spatial imaginary, so it's important that an intellectual piece like this, clearly intended for higher-educated people, speaks to the presentness of this reality.

The notion of "upward mobility" was one that I found especially interesting. Davila explains in her intro the ways that upward mobility is consumed as an ideology by people in the Barrio, and how that internalization of this ideal actually helps to destroy their neighborhood. She claims that oftentimes it is because the people are afforded a false sense of autonomy and mobility within larger structures that are designed to prevent such movement, and while I do think her point is very valid, I can't help but feel that this rhetoric strips the people in East Harlem of their agency, to a certain degree. It is important to point out the ways that people become duped by "the system," but I have found increasingly in my studies that it seems to be a challenge for most scholars to talk about victimization without making the victims sound completely powerless. She later remedies this by including testimonials and channeling the voices of multiple Puerto Rican activists in the community.

I found her analysis of culture and space especially powerful. Chapter 2, linked with some comments in the introduction, talk about how "ethnic" cultures are often detached from their histories in order to be prepared for and consumed by the mainstream. She says, "simply put, cultural enthusiasts were asking themselves about the price of recognition from general audiences, fully aware that it could potentially transform and 'mainstream' them along with the audiences they serve," (89), and references "cultural gentrification" (90). It is a fetishization, then, of Puerto Rican/Nuyorican culture that plays such a strong role in the cultural sale of El Barrio. Bringing it back home, I can clearly see the ways that this neighborhood is changing through the lens of her book. On my three block walk up Lexington from the 103rd St. station to 106th St, for example, there is a coffeeshop that is new, beautiful, funky, frequented by young white folks, but whose name promises authenticity: "El Barrio Cafe" is the name, I believe. On the other hand, I hear an acquaintance, born and raised in East Harlem, say that he enjoys the new, nice lounges in the neighborhood, because young adults from the community never really had a nightlife infrastructure before now. Does this make him complicit in gentrification, in the mainstream consumption and cultural selling of El Barrio? I think not, but perhaps Davila would think otherwise?

Japanese and Black in America

The two articles for this week through into tension the realities of Japanese Americans and African Americans, exploring the points of similarity, difference, and potentials for solidarity work. Yamamoto's piece, "A Fire in Fontana," mentions her process of politicization and how she came to understand the black American struggle as implicated in her own struggle. She says, "sometimes I see it as my inward self being burnt black in a certain fire" (Yamamoto 150). What makes this statement so interesting, powerful, and controversial is the ways that she proceeds to explain how she basically passes as white in many cases in her life. She uses the "white" bathroom at rest stops in the South, she lives in a white neighborhood, she bears the responsibility of being assumed to be a "white" thinker and receiving racist comments that are believed to be shared by her. Sometimes she mentions challenging these people, but other times she talks about her inner frustration, while she sits and does not do much. Ultimately, her conlcusion that the Watts riots symbolized the fire in Fontana and the fire in her leaves me wondering how exactly racial solidarity work plays out in her life. I understand how her emotions around African Americans and Japanese Americans inform this link, but I do not see a clear, tangible action coming out of this.

Grace Hong calls Yamamoto out on exactly this point. Much of Hong's article explores Harris' idea of whiteness as property, then talks about how Japanese Americans, through measures like the Alien Land Act, have been denied property rights, and thus excluded from white America (like blacks in America). If we use this framework, we begin to see how black and Japanese people in America do not have a same history, but do have a shared denial of access to whiteness and property in America. However, this still does not change the fact that Yamamoto describes access that seems to include "passing" as a white person. Hong speaks about the lack of resolution in Yamamoto's work, which is exactly what frustrated me. I wonder if Yamamoto and Hong ever engaged in a dialogue about this work? I would love to hear/read a conversation between the two of them discussing the issue of cross-racial solidarity work.

Cultural Citizenship and Assimilation

The keywords and grander concepts of "cultural citizenship" and "assimilation" (and the relationship between the two) carried me through my readings this week on Chinese Americans, Chinese immigrants, and the structuring of the Chinatown in America. The tangible production of the nuclear family as national pride and survival, as Cindy I-Fen Cheng points out in her essay "Out of Chinatown and into the Suburbs," is central to understanding her concept of "cultural citizenship." As she highlights the politics of oversexualization of Chinese people in the white American imagination, she also points to the ways that motherhood and marital status secured a place for Chinese women in the realm of American cultural citizenship.

Still, it seems that a thread that pulls the articles together is the idea of the "othering" of Chinese in America, and a lack of full social equality, despite assimilation and access to "cultural citizenship." It is clear that cultural citizenship does not necessarily mean cultural sameness. From Chinese suburbanization to Chinatownization, the white power structure does not appear disrupted by any geographic placement of Chinese Americans. Kay Anderson asserts that "Chinatown has been a victimized colony of the East in the West," exploring the ways in which Chinatown was created and maintained by both a white expectation of "orientalism" and white geographic dominance; "indeed, it requires a more fundamental epistemological critique of the twin ideas of 'Chinese' and 'Chinatown,' of race and place" (Anderson 581).

One thing that did bother me was the use of the term "ethnic banks" in the Li et al. article "Chinese-American banking and Community Development in Los Angeles county (Li et al. 780). I understand the importance of distinguishing the "ethnic" bank from the "white" bank, but the blatant labeling of non-white-owned banks as "ethnic" clearly speaks to the markedness of non-white identities, both naming a problem and further perpetuating it. It's hard to mediate when the terms necessary to expose a social ill are terms that in themselves contribute to said ill.

American Apartheid and Wealth in America

The three texts from this week deal with the intersections of race, class, wealth, and housing in America, particularly in the context of the discriminatory attitudes and institutionalized practices that maintain inequalities. Douglas Massey and Nancy Denton point out the ways that the ghetto has been constructed and the ways that it is perpetuated today. They specifically focus on the black (non-Latino) community/ies in the U.S., stating that this is because "no other group in the contemporary United States comes close to this level of isolation within urban society" (77). While I strongly agree with and am impressed by their analysis of this situation of urban isolation in general, I kept expecting them to mention Native Americans. The fact that Native Americans are completely marginalized from their discourse performs a work very similar to what they are trying to counter. Their omitance erases a history that is not dead, but continues today. Their argument about hypersegregation as a combination of at least four of the five dimensions of segregation undoubtedly could be applied as a lens for reading the reservations in America.

Back on the note of economic inequality between black and white people in America, Thomas Shapiro's article "Race, Homeownership and Wealth" supplements the point of American Apartheid by pointing out ways that wealth inequalities are maintained in the United States. His idea that homeownership should be viewed as a continuum with homeownership as the goal is a great new perspective to understand homeownership and sustainable wealth. The second article that he co-wrote with Melvin Oliver zooms in on how the sub-prime crisis was a crisis for Black Americans. This article highlights the specific ways that structural discrimination comes to fruition and maintains what Massey and Denton call "American Apartheid." I especially think that this idea of homeownership as a continuum is useful, because homeownership in itself does not signal wealth, as we see in the article by Oliver and Shapiro. Homeownership is a tenuous, not necessarily stable thing, especially when you factor in appreciation rates (or lack thereof). Thus, it is essentially addressing a fruit and not a root of the problem of wealth distribution if we pay attention to homeownership rates independently of these other ongoing societal issues.

Whiteness as Property and Environmental Health

One of the concepts that Harris opens up her piece with is "passing." She then drops the strand of thought, to return to it later, when her conversation turns to affirmative action. She says that, "like 'passing,' affirmative action undermines the property interest in whiteness," (1779), but that "what passing attempts to circumvent, affirmative action moves to challenge" (1779). This is a very intriguing argument. Affirmative action is about challenging the white status quo, but in an in-your-face way, rather than working "within" the institution of whiteness, as she defines passing. Although what she talks about is a move away from the ideals of "passing" towards something structurally different, I have to wonder: what is/would modern-day "passing" mean? What would it look like? Does "passing" exist anymore in our society? It seems that more and more we are moving towards a push to reevaluate our essentialist ideas about race or origin-based identity, so that even the word "passing" might have become a slur. In the context of our past class discussion, we talked about ways that Obama might have transcended certain identity boundaries. Does this transcendence constitute a form of "passing," or is that a term that is no longer useful to our understandings of society? (The concept of colorblindness, on the other hand, that we talked extensively about, shows up blaringly in her article. She believes, as we generally concluded as a class, that the claim of "colorblindness" actually upholds and produces racism.)

A point that I thought was crucial was Harris' definition of white identity as not necessarily guaranteeing that one will win in life, but definitely guaranteeing that one will not lose (1758). A problem that has been forming in my mind the past couple of weeks regards this idea of structural racism that both Harris and Pulido define. Pulido, in her article "Rethinking Environmental Racism," reprimands studies on environmental racism that do not question racism as a structural institution. I am becoming increasingly concerned that this growing understanding of structural racism potentially removes the responsibility from the individual in dealing with racism. If racism can be removed from the individual and attributed to the structure, it becomes much easier for the individual (especially the white individual) to claim exemption from participation in both perpetrating and, conversely, solving the problem of racism. Of course acknowledging structural racism, as well as environmental racism and white privilege and whiteness as property is essential, but what is next? Where does a white person go after acknowledging and understanding the ways that she is implicated in all of these structures? Pulido says, "because most white people do not see themselves as having malicious intentions, and because racism is associated with malicious intent, whites can exonerate themselves of all racist tendencies, all teh white ignoring their investment in white privilege" (15). But once white privilege is acknowledged, then what? If a middle-class white person were to reject her privilege by moving out of the suburbs and into the "inner city," she would most likely be gentrifying. I suppose my question is this: Although this is highly improbable, if all white people in the country were to actively recognize and grapple with their white privilege, what would that struggle look like in terms of dismantling racist structures?

Concrete Whiteness and Impossible Subjects

As I read this week's readings (Mae Ngai's Impossible Subjects, Claire Jean Kim's "The Racial Triangulation of Asian Americans," and Nicholas De Genova's "Latino and Asian Formations at the Frontiers of U.S. Nationalism"), my mind kept running back to a concept of Paolo Freire's. Freire, a Brazilian educational/social-justice theorist, presents the concept of the "suboppressor" in his book Pedagogy of the Oppressed. This framework offered me great insight into the works covered in our course this week. Kim's definition of triangulation as "relative valorization" is an example of White people attempting to create a system of suboppressorship. A suboppressor class arises when a subjugated group adheres to the social roles and behaviors of the dominant oppressor class and perpetuates a cycle of oppression against another subjugated group. Kim talks about a dominant group (which she names as White) placing/naming one subordinate group as culturally and/or racially better than another in order to dominate both. She continues to describe the way that Black people were villainzed and Asian people sanctified in the process of maintenance of white dominance in America. Along with her analysis of the model minority myth, it becomes clear that White America (I am referring to the dominant whiteness here, not to all White folks) draws and rests its power on the insolidarity of other racial and ethnic groups.

All of this week's readings brought up and questioned both the insider/foreigner dynamic and the Black/White racial binary system in America. Ngai talks about impossible subjects who, despite being viewed as foreigners, exist within the American landscape. The idea of existence becomes crucial in linking this week's readings. De Genova talks about the genocide of Native Americans as a decimation but not an extermination; he says, "as if mass slaughter ever accomplished the end of absolute extermination and extinction" (2). Once an identity group is labeled as foreign, as decisively external to the American identity, the hegemonic nature of American whiteness as "American"-ness, as De Genova names it, is reaffirmed. In the process of trying to gain access to and inclusion within the American identity, groups have engaged in a process of adhesion to the oppressors'/White people's ideals, exhibiting sub-oppressive mentalities. The multiple court cases where non-White people argued for racial classification as White reflect this dynamic. These articles open the door to many questions. What constitutes assimilation? Has America ever been a melting pot, or is it a white dish surrounded by colorful garnishes on the margins? How does one have to represent herself in order to be associated with her racial group (this question is drawn from the Kim article--I'm curious as to why she says White people disassociate Asian people from carrying identity politics)?

Lastly, I was intrigued by the minimal attention paid to multiracial people in these authors' reflections on dismantling the black-white binary in the United States. While I recognize the importance of understanding the histories and legacies of the creation of racial labels and parameters ("Asian," "Latino," etc.), I was surprised at the lack of attention paid to people of mixed lineage in the United States. Granted, De Genova mentioned the Latino identity as one associated with miscegenation, but I would have liked something more. A key part of dismantling the racial binary system in the United States, in my opinion, is recognizing the legacy of extensive racial mixing in our country.

Race, Space, and "Common Sense" in America

The main thread that held my attention throughout this week's readings was the concept of "common sense." Omi and Winant state that "race becomes 'common sense'--a way of comprehending, explaining, and acting in the world" (60). Race is definitely a lens through which we understand and interact with the world, but if spatial imaginaries differ based on racial identity and experience(s), then does a "common sense" ever exist? Is the only constant in common sense that it is relative to and dependent upon one's racialized spatial imaginary?
Schein points to "normative dimensions of any landscape" as common sense (217). Rojas further complicates the idea of common sense by pointing out the ways in which different communities clash with one another. The Mexican and Chicano community/ies in East LA make new use of and redefine the physical and cultural landscape, ultimately producing a new register of "common sense." It is when multiple "common senses" exist without mutual recognition that real social strife exists and structural inequality is ignored and/or untouched.

The notion of emotional ecosystems that is mentioned in Lipsitz's article ties into the concept of multiple common senses. We can understand a community's "common sense" in relationship with its "emotional ecosystem." Mindy Fullilove describes the destruction of black emotional ecosystems at the hands of urban renewal projects. If we stick with Omi and Winant's definition of race as common sense, then it becomes clear that an emotional ecosystem can be demolished while common sense remains intact. Both might become confused by the "common sense" the destructors hold to be true, but ultimately "common sense" has never become a universal truth in America. American hegemony, powerful as it might be, does not destroy or negate the multiplicity of racial lenses and experiences--aka the array of "common senses"-- in this country.