Trepidation

I am heading out this afternoon to interview for a part-time gig teaching history to children. I am incredibly nervous. I also am currently unemployed and see very little avenues for me to get a job in the future, which puts even more pressure on my to NOT EFF UP.

Goddam crippling self-doubt!

On a further note, the Egypt thing is pretty interesting: here is my man Zunguzungu's collection of information, and here is Texas in Africa

Back back y'all

Just got back from what can generously be called a... year-long hiatus. I was in China, and the efforts it took to get on blogspot were just not worth the crap that came out of my fingertips. But in America, all my half-formed ideas can be thrown out with no real effort, and like the proverbial stack of ninja stars rapidly being flicked away with little accuracy, hopefully one of my thoughts can stick. To something. I do not know, similes are not really my thing.

I hope to learn Mandarin (HSK 4), become a more solid bboy, and dunk, by the end of this year. Those are my unofficial New Year's resolutions. I am also going TRY and blog more, but I keep telling myself that and it never works out. Consider it a secondary resolution.

I also just realized that somebody who I gave a shout out to actually responded. Did NOT expect that to happen... I need to figure out the intricacies of blogging. And by intricacies of blogging, I mean when somebody comments on a post.

I wonder what Irrational Patriotism looks like?

This reminds me of this one time when this dude called for 'responsible White Supremacists' or some such.

What is wrong with me?

So TNC picked up on something that I saw posted on The American Prospect. Basically, a campaign to end anti-gay bullying in school has morphed into a softer attempt to point out the injustices of school bullies in general. Well-meaning leftists, step back! Or some such. I find this position of 'unique oppression' philosophically infuriating, but that is not what is being argued for here. Instead, as TNC so eloquently argues:

"I think sometimes, we should accept that we don't understand--at least not yet. There's nothing wrong with just being angered and appalled, but not quite getting the full depth of the experience.

The chasm is real. And bridges are built. not conjured."

All well and good, except that I could not disagree more (and once again partake in internecine leftist infighting). Still, I am not going to argue TNC now on a tactical level (though in the wake of the Obama administrations pretty weak record on gay rights, I do not think pushing for specific gay-friendly policies is a winner at this juncture). I am just a guy on the computer, and because I have contributed so little to the LGBT cause (there was a benefit march literally twenty minutes away that I did not go to, christ I'm useless), I have not earned the right to disagree with TNC and his peeps on his hometurf.

Instead, I am looking at myself. I have a vision of a universal society, of universal humanity. Of treating everyone with dignity and respect. I also have a much darker vision of everyone being the same (however defined), and rather than celebrating our differences I want us to have none. It is the only way I can function. The universal versus the provincial )if one would allow me the opportunity to call the suffering of the LGBT community as 'provincial') is the defining point of my liberal vision. And the more time I spend reading and thinking, I realize just how far away I am from... the acceptable Left? The current Left? Whatever it is, I am not (though I wish I were). It does come down to this idea of the Universal though, and without it, I see no reason to not just be a Republican. I realize that this gets into discussion of Privilege, or Derailing, et al., but if the defending the Provincial is what I am supposed to do, I cannot do it. The fact that TNC and his peeps passionately agree with this just make me... wonder: what is wrong with me?

Get it get it Ghana

Get it Ghana

Thanks to Africa is a Country for the jam

On Teaching Black Power in China

So I managed to convince my university to let me teach a course on American Popular Culture that explores the emergence of Hip Hop and how it becomes (arguably) the dominant expression of American Youth Culture. Keep in mind that I am teaching this in China, as an English teacher. What that means is that, because I look white, I am qualified to only teach English or things that are guaranteed to make money (like Accounting, or Biology). Social Science and/or the Humanities? Hell to the no.

Still, I persevered and managed to successfully press my admins for this class, and now that I am teaching it I had to completely redo my syllabus (which was expected, I have no idea what the class is going to be like and it takes a month to really get a decent flow going). Basically I wanted to talk about people in America that many students might not have heard of, or even cared that much about. I wanted to talk about how governments can inadvertently (or deliberately) screw over people, and what that means for culture. I wanted to inculcate a sense of critical analysis, that taking learning is much more than reading texts without question. Really subversive stuff, basically. So I got through two weeks of class and then I wanted to teach about Black Power and Puerto Rican Nationalism. Race and nationalism are kind of a different beast here than in the United States, but even so I had to expose the kids to some Malcolm and Stokely (I said expose, I do not have the time or the resources to devote more than 15 minutes to this, because I have a lot to get through). The kids could not quite figure out what institutional racism means, and how that is different from individual racism (the term I always get is 'discrimination). I knew I could not do it justice so I just went ahead and did the whole 'read it at home' copout. What was the most surprising, and something I would love to delve into, was their reaction to Malcolm.

I located Black Power as the opposite of Civil Rights (yeah, I know the whole ‘two sides of the same coin’ deal and the cross-pollination of both ‘movements’, if they can be judged discretely, this was for pedagogy dammit!). I took two early Malcolm quotes, stuff that was easy to understand (the most crucial perquisite when teaching anything to the students is level of vocabulary) and I wanted to see what the students would make of them. They understood the meaning (huzzah!), and I wanted to put these quotes into a context of radicalism and the rejection of the status quo. I asked for what this Black Nationalist language sounded like, and everyone said it sounded like MLK. That was the LAST person I wanted them to say. I busted out some Sun Yatsen and Pan-Asianism, and broke out a little Mao, but the kids were not convinced. I could not understand how they did not see the connections between racial nationalism in the United States and in China. After talking with my dad about it, he said of course they would not, because the idea of civil rights cannot be differentiated between racial nationalism in China. When I put on some James Brown ‘Say it Loud, I’m Black and I’m Proud’, some of the students were bustin out with the song and replaced ‘Yellow’ with ‘Black’, which to me is really interesting. I asked the students if they were proud of their race, and the majority of them agreed. And then I asked them what proud meant, and whether it exists in isolation or in relation to other things. Are you proud to be Yellow because it’s a good race, meaning other races are not as good? Are you proud to be Yellow because it’s a better race? Just some light probing. When I start getting into conscious Hip Hop this is going to get even more interesting.

And yeah, I know how generally race works here (Liu Xiang, the Olympic hurdler’s immortal lines from 2004: “My victory has proved that athletes with yellow skin can run as fast as those with black and white skins.“), but I do not know how people teach about race. This is something I am going to investigate.

Sweet Jebus I HATE Firewalls

Ok, I am in China, the government censors stuff, I have been trying to get over it with a vpn, it has not worked, so I am at my boi's place right now, reveling in the glories of unfettered internet access. I will try to post something once a week. Which was about my rate when I did not have the Great Firewall to contend with.

PS PASS HEALTHCARE CONGRESS! DO NOT EFF THIS UP!

Random Ish

Courtesy of these guys. Thats the second-best Thai-bboy-martial arts movie I have ever seen. And the joke is courtesy of Monkey Island.

This was an interesting discussion on Coates about art and colonialism. And I think Invisman52 is a twit, but that might just be me.

An interesting piece on the United States of Africa, though I have to do a full-write up on its implications. Long story short, I am not a fan. But I always enjoy reading Ngwane's stuff.

And I watched almost every episode of the Justice League and Batman Beyond thanks to Coate's thing on Bruce Timm. Christ, Justice League is AMAZING, Batman Beyond was not as good as I thought, though the latter handles race better than the former. A future post if there ever was one.

:(

Michael Jackson died today. I was going to write a long-ass post on the deaths of some Africanists, but MJ trumps them all. Michael influenced so much of my life, and I hope he found happiness in his later years. You will always be my dude MJ.

Don't call it a comeback, I've been here for years...

And howdy, sorry for never posting anything. Been busy. Some highlights before I begin some regular posting (I am aiming for one thing a day, I know I can do it!).

First, my dad got cerebral malaria, and so the past two weeks have been... hectic. He did not die, he should be straight, he has some other complications but nothing major. Yay! Of course, considering that malaria still kills about half a billion people in the world, his health and well-being must be balanced with the knowledge that a whole lotta people are going to die of something that is preventable.

Second, I have been playing through Baldur's Gate II. I dunno why, I got the itch, and I absolutely pulverized BG and its expansion but never got into BGII (I think the second chapter was too large and intimidating, a problem I had with, like, all of Morrowind). It is a ridiculously awesome game, but christ I cannot stop getting all grad-skooly when I play it: I look for the racial implications of having most of your potential party members as human, or whether I can court big, burly Minsc as a human monk myself (I admit it, I only play as humans!), or how come basically EVERYONE in authority is a man (and all the in-game books, which I read cover to cover because I am a dork, only reference kings and male heirs), or how are poor and rich are represented, or the way history functions in the game. I CANNOT turn it off, and I am trying desperately to do so. If you have any suggestions how to deprogram yourself from this stuff, please let me know!

Third, I am going to purchase all the books by my favorite professors AND read them. This is not to score brownie-points, because I am already a graduate, so I do not owe them anything, but that these people were straight intellectual pimps and I want to see the stuff they wrote. And not enough people read their books, so I gotta show them some love in the ol' Amazon list.

Fourth, I have been reading a lot of stuff I have meant to read/never heard about but found out I should read. So I got through the Bluest Eye, The Brief and Wonderous life of Oscar Wao, Shadow and Act (Ellison's badass collection of essays), etc, and I realize something: I am a horrid writer. These people can string words and sentences together like... well, its their job. Nothing makes me feel more inadequate than when I read some really good prose... which is also why I love academic history, because a lot of people are not that good at writing, so I look GREAT in comparison!

Meh, more random thoughts to come. Thanks for tuning in!

The Day the Earth Shook Like a Mutha$*&%@

Cross-Posted at Postbourgie

This is both a crass attempt to get you guys to check out my blog and also to make a larger point about life. Thanks to PB for letting me do this, and G.D. in particular.

And apologies for the quick shift in tone. Getting the title right is hard.

On May 12th, 2008, around 2:30 in the afternoon, a big-ass earthquake hit Sichuan province. In the resulting shock and aftershocks, tens of thousands of people died. My aunt-in-law was one of them. My then fiance, now wife, could have been a victim of the earthquake as well.

There is a 12 hour difference between China and the east coast of the United States. I was either working on my final papers at 2:30 or I was passed out from exhaustion. Sometime before 10 AM, my best friend Daniel sent me a text message informing me of the earthquake. It woke me up, and with eyes half-open, I picked up the phone, barely comprehending the message my eyes were so blurry. An earthquake? Probably a bitch-ass one, nothing more than a 4.0, nothing worth waking me up for. Still, I decided I might as well get up and call my fiance to see what was going on. So began my May 13th, 2008.

It was not a good day.

I stumbled to my computer in my boxers (the standard uniform for doing anything in my room) and turned it on. After it booted up, I opened Skype, put on my headset, and tried to call Shoe (a bastardized spelling of my mispronunciation of her family name, 舒 [shu]). I could not reach her, instead the machine on the other line told me that there were some technical difficulties, so I tried calling her again, with the same response. I kept trying, and still nothing. I was starting to grow worried, so I opened up CNN.com to see what had happened, and there was no mention of it. That did not make me feel any better, because no American news outlet was going to give me the coverage I wanted. Frustrated, I opened BBC.com and found the news that I had been dreading: the earthquake in Sichuan was by no means minor. It had caused major damage. Communications were down. People were missing.

I called Shoe again. The same response.

I started to refresh the BBC page every five minutes, and the death toll was rising. I looked at the map to see if the earthquake had actually struck Mianyang, where she lived, or if it had just perhaps damaged the phone lines in an obscure mountain town, far from any major cities. The website could not tell me the epicenter, just that the most damage had occurred in the cities, towns, and villages to the west of Chengdu. Cities like Mianyang.

At a loss for what to do, I tried calling my mother, but her phone line was busy. I called my father, and in as calm a tone as I could muster, I told him that there was an earthquake in Sichuan.

Silence.

“Oh God Winslow, is everything ok?”

Whatever semblance of a stiff-upper lip I had was washed away by my tears, as I began to sob and moan. All I could say with any coherence was

“I can't call Shoe... I can't call Shoe... I can't call Shoe...”

We discussed any and all possible courses of action, and he tried to comfort me. I managed to get in contact with mom, and she told me she would try to contact State Department people in Chengdu and ask them what they knew. She tried to comfort me. The phone lines to Sichuan were still down, but I tried sending her a text message (thanks to the miracle of modern telecommunications). I would spend the next three hours in a constant state of freak-out. I nearly had a nervous breakdown.

At precisely 2:11 PM, I received a text message that said the following

“Im ok but i cant call people and get any calling from people.”

Shoe was fine. I could breathe again. I saved the text message on my phone (inadvertently tying me to a lifetime of Verizon's mobile services, as I will forever keep the phone and the text message and I have to stay on contract to do so), and we began sorting out the situation through a flurry of texting. A few hours later the phone lines were up and I could call her directly from Skype. She had experienced the quake, her apartment rolled and rocked like the Ark during the flood, but she managed to evacuate quickly and nobody in her complex was hurt. She had yet to make contact with all members of her family, of our family, my family. We learned later that her aunt, our aunt, my aunt, had perished in Beichuan.

I felt utterly helpless, as there was nothing I could do to help her and our kin, but she told me everyone was sleeping in the streets and there was a shortage of tents. This was shortage was something I could help ameliorate. I told my family and they sent all the spare tents they could get their hands on (considering the amount of outdoorsmen/women in the clan, this was no small number). I bought a tent and mailed it. What was perhaps the most touching episode, though, was that after I posted my information on Extremeskins.com (A Washington Redskin fan site), a reader managed to drop everything and deliver a tent to my parents house for no compensation. It was swiftly shipped to Sichuan.

I wrote this to commemorate the anniversary of the Earthquake, which, while nice, is still somewhat selfish of me. Everyday around the world there are injustices and tragedies, and what makes the Sichuan Earthquake particularly noteworthy? What makes my pain on that day special? My answer is nothing, a cold and blunt assessment to be sure, but something I truly believe. What was worse on May 12th 2008? The Earthquake? Or the ongoing occupation of Iraq? Or massive global inequalities? Or the ongoing Congolese Civil War (actually I think this is the worst :) )? What made May 12th such a cathartic experience was the outpouring of support on behalf of the victims, from the stranger on Extremeskins to Lin Hao to the millions of Chinese people who rolled up their sleeves to help their countrymen (which is not a given considering just how tense some of the provincial identities can get) to the Chinese government doing its damnedest to assist in disaster relief (a government that, on occasion, helps its citizens? Sign me up!) to the international support and sympathy shown by the global community. In short, people like you and I made a difference in the lives of so many. People who should have been too busy, too unengaged, too poor, or too bureaucratic, put aside their interests in the name of common humanity. No matter how screwed up this world is, I have faith in the possibilities of the human spirit and the human community. And I know we all have stories of people who DIDN'T NEED TO but DID. I hope that one day I will hear yours.

Who's da master? (hint: it ain't Sho'nuff)

Yes, I got my MA today, which makes me officially a MASTER... of something. This weekend was kind of hectic, expect a glorious three-part post tomorrowish.

Finished!!!

I finally finished up my MA, now it is time for some impromptu choreographed dancing on the street!

Random Ish

My wife is ridiculously awesome.

Last night, as my professor came to pick up the papers I had graded (Which involves another story about the anguish I felt as to whether to give a female student a check mark or not on her creative paper for having their female protagonist get beaten by their husband...), I insisted that he come into my humble abode and chill a little.

Which he did.

The Wife Woman, who had been watching her current favorite TV show (which is some sort of Chinese CSI, as near as I can tell), left her fairly comfortable lounging position and bounced to the kitchen so she could chat along with me (and not appear rude to the guest). After some idle exchanges, she launched into a speech, telling my professor that I am really lazy and I need a severe beating to get me to do anything (which is completely false, a mild beating will suffice), and then both of them starting talking about the best way to handle me. Eventually they agreed that he needed to be more strict with me, if not violent, and after some more banter, the professor left. This story is not about how the Wife Woman emasculated me in front of my boss, because A) I have no masculinity to lose and B) I could care less if my professor thinks less of me(which I doubt cause he is my dude), but rather to show how absolutely unpredictable she can be, how absolutely salty she can be, and why I love her for it. Yes, I like my women how I like my coffee; unpredictable and salty.

Then, just today she tasked me with watching her 'bread' (more like a crepe) fry in a pan while she hurried to the toilet. "Watching" involved me standing motionless with my plate full of half-eaten snacks until she finished her business. When she came out and saw that I had done nothing, she flipped over her 'bread' and told me that I should have done the same while she was gone. I told her that I just thought I was supposed to watch it literally. After I realized how stupid my words were, her eyes grew wide, a smile spread across her face, and she gave me the ol' "ni zenme zenme ke ai! [you're so cute]" and hugged me (instead of wacking me over the head with said frying pan). Less salty, more unpredictable.

Always awesome.

老婆老婆我爱你