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a penguin of very little brain
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| not for the sake of fighting |
[Jul. 21st, 2008|06:20 pm] |
This post was crossposted here.
"But that's the good thing about you," K said recently. "You can choose your Chinese side or your Australian side."
And I didn't say, "are you using 'Australian' to mean 'Anglo'?" I can't remember what I said, but I didn't say that, and things that I hate include but are not limited to: that I have become so complicit in this game of privilege and institutionalisation.
Since the debacle of last week (leading to the bannination of someone for being a dickhead and a racist apologist), I have been so fired up and angry, but also more aware than usual of my own privilege and the privilege of others. I am almost always aware of white privilege and, as someone who has been known to pass (as many things that I am not), sometimes it's painfully clear to me how I play that to my own advantage.
I tend not to talk about this stuff because I find it really difficult to articulate, for all that I like talking and I enjoy writing. But not talking means silence, and silence is often a tool of acceptance, and I can't let myself be like that anymore, that's not really who I am. And I'm not just talking about racism, either.
So if I get angry at you, I'm not sorry. I don't want to be complicit in playground equipment that you can't get to if you're on wheels, preventing parents in wheelchairs from reaching their kids. I don't want to just accept when people tell stories that start, this Asian girl or that Aboriginal boy, but begin a boy when they're talking about someone who is Anglo, singling out the difference and othering us through language. I don't want to sit silently by as people talk in stereotypes because they're funny, gay people are promiscuous and fat people are lazy and when you say these things somebody believes you, and when you say these things you draw a line between you and the people you're picking out, and we have different backgrounds and histories but we're people and it's terrible, regardless of your intentions.
My anger is real. And so is the bigotry and discrimination in this country, overt or not, and talking about it doesn't create it, talking about it makes the problem visible, and we do not have to give the benefit of the doubt that everyone is actually totally nice. It's easy to point at someone who thinks all Chinese are stealing the jobs or whatever and say, "that person is racist!" but it's harder to point to someone who is being nice, because it's often the nicest people who are so well meaning and don't notice that their own prejudices are totally messing us up.
A STORY:
Friday, on the bus:
*man visually of African descent stands and gives his seat to a middle-aged lady*
Anglo lady next to me: Oh, isn't that lovely. (in an approving tone)
Anglo lady opposite her: Well, he's not Australian.
Anglo lady next to me: Give him twelve months.
This is a well-meaning conversation: isn't he lovely? He's giving up his seat!
But it IS STILL RACIST, this assumption that different ethnicity = different nationality, and it does us all a disservice, and it still makes me angry. And I bet they thought they were being nice, too. And how did that guy feel, hearing that? All he did was stand up whilst black, and to those women that means he's not Australian.
Further reading:
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| things that are racist |
[Jul. 9th, 2008|06:44 pm] |
the Western Suburbs Weekly, July 7, page 8
I don't care how trashy a local rag is, this sort of racist, offensive shit masquerading as 'hilarious social commentary' is completely unacceptable.
Worse is that of the four people I was with, only one of them understood why I got so angry.
(I wrote my very first angry letter to the paper) |
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| a survey of terms |
[Mar. 2nd, 2008|08:34 am] |
Please only answer this survey if you are Australian/live in Australia. It is for the purposes of defining my panel, and as such does need to be locally specific. Though suggestions could still be taken for question three, hmmm.
1. Have you previously heard the term 'POC' or 'Person of Colour'?
2. If no, do you understand what it means?
3. What would you suggest to be a more accurate/widely understood term to use in an Australian context? ETA: and was more inclusive of all non-White people, ie Indigenous, African, Asian etc.
4. Please also comment on anything you might think relevant.
The point of this survey is that I want to finish titling and summarising my panel for Swancon (working title: Characters of Colour in Speculative Fiction, about the presence or lack there of of non-White characters in speculative fiction texts), so I can email it to Dave and actually end up on the programme for this year. It is the one thing I officially want to do this year - all the rest of Swancon is going to be spent loitering, heckling, and folding origami (more on that last later). |
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| 长大后世界就没有花 |
[Oct. 26th, 2007|07:27 pm] |
Last week, Angry Asian Man blogged about how you too can be Asian for Halloween.
A few days later, ![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) naissa blogged about cosplaying/dressing up cross-ethnic groups here and here, and whilst she raises some very thought-provoking and interesting things, the thing I most want to highlight is something that bossymarmalade said in the comments to the former post:
The thing is, *especially* where costumes/acting is concerned, it's always been okay for white people to "play" a different ethnicity as well as white. Whereas if you're dark-skinned, you can play ... other dark-skinned people.
I have been thinking about this, and I'd love to elaborate but I'm not sure that I have anything further to say, mostly because I'm not sure how I feel about it.
Relatedly: People of Colour SF Carnival
I still find Halloween a bit confusing, but not as confusing as the fact that the Christmas decorations are already adorning the sky down King St in Perth. |
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| all because you are |
[May. 14th, 2006|08:34 am] |
Today is the fourteenth of May. I am sure that there is something special about this date, although I do not know what it is. A minute or two with wikipedia would tell us, I have no doubt.
The special thing about yesterday's date is that it is the anniversary of the 1969 race riots in KL.
I completely forgot, until a post made by eeb_bee reminded me. She made a post filled with links, and I read them and read them and was sort of disbelieving that I had forgotten the date. But the more I thought about it, the more I realised it made sense, in its own way.
I very rarely talk about what I suppose would be called my Malaysian identity. This is mostly because I don't really have one. There are things that I do because my mother taught me to do them, and sometimes these things are a direct result of her having been born in Malaysia. They are little things, the tiny things that create your habits and your lifestyle. The compulsion I feel to boil the water, then let it cool before I drink it, would be an excellent example.
I speak Malay very poorly (my Chinese is much better), and more important than anything else is the fact that I am not Malaysian in any way that counts. I consider myself Australian above all, and most of the time I consider myself Chinese, and I rarely think about Malaysia. But who am I to deny my composite parts? I love the idea of Malaysia, this country that, much like the one in which I live, was supposed to be this ideal of multicultural identity that all went terribly, horribly wrong somewhere along the way. I love its tall hills and its dirty water and its tacky tourism. I love the way I can buy all my favourite Chinese musicians and all my favourite books translated hilariously into Chinese. I love its monsoon drains and its fruits and its killer monkeys, and the correct pronunciation of orang-utan.
My mother; my extended family; my mother's friends, they are all Chinese. In a country that is only thirty percent ethnic Chinese, every Malaysian national that my mother loves is ethnically Chinese. She is from Pulau Pinang, which is still made up predominantly of ethnic Chinese, so perhaps this is not a surprise. But when last I was there, an aunt told us of a mosque; the tsunami swept over and through it, destroying the Chinese kampung just beyond, but when the waters receeded the mosque was unharmed. The conspiracy theories, and the whispered warnings that I remember from my youth. And when I used to get in trouble as a child, it was sometimes with a glare and a, "don't do that, only Malays eat with their hands," or whatever, and these are the words that I cannot shake from my head, even as an adult. I don't eat with my hands, for whatever reason. And I am not Malaysian, I am Chinese, and that is the way that things are.
I think about those things, sometimes, and then I put them aside, and long briefly for a country that does not want me. But only briefly, because this is my life and I have chosen this life, and I am Australian above all else.
This link, I stole from the above-mentioned post by E, and I place it here because it made me stop, and sit, and I couldn't move on until I had put these words down. Creating identity at the fringe. E's post is locked - if it wasn't, I would just link you to that. Instead I leave you with this: if it were possible, I would take dual citizenship with Malaysia (remaining Australian, of course). Because I am ethnically Chinese, but I would chose Malaysia over China.
PS. Have a non-traumatic familial experience today.
ETA: The post by eeb_bee of which I spoke above is here: Today In History: Chinese-Malay Race Riots |
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[Apr. 19th, 2006|08:26 pm] |
Sometimes I worry that I am a failure as a feminist because I never became a scientist; instead I will spend my days reading and researching and (hopefully) talking to sex workers, and how is that anything but perpetuating the myth that women cannot work in the sciences? |
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| book |
[Oct. 11th, 2002|09:25 pm] |
a book that i am currently reading: am i blue, an anthology of short stories about teenagers sort of...discovering (where discovering can mean realising, acknowledging, admitting, believing, coming out) they like their own gender. and it's...sometimes it's cliche, and sometimes it's beautiful, and it's like places i never thought i'd be, in that it's not anything, artistically, that is fabulous, but i'm glad that i read it.
and reading it made me sad, sometimes, that people can be so prejudiced, and so horrible, and sometimes, so blind and unwilling. it was like...there is this episode of angel from last season, and gunn's old posse or whatever were killing all these monsters, and one was taking joy in it, and they targetted lorne's karaoke bar as a demon nest, and refused to listen and made gunn out to be some evil treason-y bitch, and i cried when i watched that. i knew, of course, that it was just a show, but everything has this kernel of truth, and the kernel of truth was this: people can be bigoted and blinkered and sometimes, they can be mean. |
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| boys in the girl's room, girls in the men's room |
[Oct. 3rd, 2002|08:58 pm] |
| [ | Tags | | | isms | ] |
| [ | Current Mood |
| |  tired | ] |
| [ | Current Music |
| | 'androgeny' garbage | ] |
am currently reading a book about men, women, and sex in the early nineties. basically, thus far, it is a lot of men and a lot of women whining about how feminism ruined sex and relationships.
their arguments are two: the first is that women are now all "yay us!" and secure in who they are and strong and know what they want, and so men are scared to speak out and be who they are, and so relationships fester and go bad (also linked to this one is men who fantasise about women who just want casual sex but flee when they come across a woman who is sexually agressive); the second is that women want men to be understanding and sensitive (the snag argument, if we all cast our minds back to that), but when they find one who is, they leave claiming "wimpiness". one woman claimed to be really interested in this nice, understanding guy, until she went to the toilet and found a 'ms' magazine in there, and so left him, even though she then said to the interviewer that while she "chastised herself for this instinctive reaction, she felt bewildered and powerless about how to alter it...you don't want to see ms in a guy's bathroom...you want to see road & track or esquire or - i can't believe i'm saying this - even playboy. somehow that would be more normal, more what you expect a guy to be about."
and it's just...i have to remember that this book was written ten years ago, and that i'm not finished reading it yet but i do have to note that perusing the chapters it says nothing about same-sex-sex, and also that these people...
you are who you are. if you're a teenager, or someone in their twenties, you can't really blame feminism and the fact that 'strong women' is a difficult concept for you to get around, because it's been that way your whole life. and if, like that woman, you chastise yourself for your instinctive reaction, then change it, for fuck's sake.
do you have a problem with who you are? |
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