"Mixed Messenger" reprint from NYTimes

The New York Times
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March 23, 2008
The Way We Live Now
Mixed Messenger
By PEGGY ORENSTEIN

A few weeks ago, while stuck at the Chicago airport with my 4-year-old daughter, I struck up a conversation with a woman sitting in the gate area. After a time, she looked at my girl — who resembles my Japanese-American husband — commented on her height and asked, “Do you know if her birth parents were tall?”

Most Americans watching Barack Obama’s campaign, even those who don’t support him, appreciate the historic significance of an African-American president. But for parents like me, Obama, as the first biracial candidate, symbolizes something else too: the future of race in this country, the paradigm and paradox of its simultaneous intransigence and disappearance.

It’s true that, over the past months, Obama has increasingly positioned himself as a black man. That’s understandable: insisting on being seen as biracial might alienate African-American leaders and voters who have questioned his authenticity. White America, too, has a vested interest in seeing him as black it’s certainly a more exciting, more romantic and more concrete prospect than the “first biracial president.” Yet, even as he proves his black cred, it may be the senator’s dual identity, and his struggles to come to terms with it, that explain his crossover appeal and that have helped him to both embrace and transcend race, winning over voters in Birmingham, Iowa, as well as Birmingham, Ala.

Mixed-race marriages were illegal in at least 16 states when Obama was born, though the taboo was historically inconsistent — white men could marry Asian women in some places, for instance, while marriages like mine, which go the other way, were forbidden. Since 1967, when those laws were declared unconstitutional, the rate of interracial marriage among all groups has skyrocketed. And those couples have children. Of the seven million Americans who identified themselves as mixed-race in the 2000 census (the first in which it was possible to do so), nearly half were under the age of 18. Almost 5 percent of Californians now identify themselves as mixed-race; by comparison, fewer than 7 percent are African-American. Hawaii, Obama’s childhood home, is the most diverse state in the Union: 21 percent of residents identified as “Hapa,” a Hawaiian word meaning “half” that has gone from being a slur against mixed-race Asians to a point of pride — and has increasingly been adopted by multiracials of all kinds on the Mainland.

But the rise of multiracialism is not all Kumbaya choruses and “postracial” identity. The N.A.A.C.P. criticized the census change, fearing that since so few in the black community are of fully African descent, mass attrition to a mixed-race option could threaten political clout and Federal financing. Mexican-Americans, a largely mixed-race group, fought to be classified as white during the first half of the 20th century; during the second half, they fought against it.

Among Asians, Japanese-Americans in Northern California have argued over “how Japanese” the contestants for the Cherry Blossom Queen must be (the answer so far: 50 percent, which is less rigid than San Francisco’s Miss Chinatown U.S.A., whose father must be Chinese, but more strict than the 25 percent Chinese required to be Miss Los Angeles Chinatown).

Hapas muddy discussions of affirmative action and the gathering of health-care statistics. When a Centers for Disease Control researcher who called to survey me about my daughter’s vaccinations asked about her race, I answered, Caucasian and Asian. There was a pause, then she asked, “Which would you mainly identify her as?”

More than anything, though, Hapas remind us that, while racism is real, “race” is a shifting construct. Consider: Would Obama still be seen as “black enough” if the wife by his side were white? And don’t get my husband started on why Tiger Woods — whose mother is three-quarters Asian and whose father was one-quarter Chinese and half African-American — is rarely hailed as the first Asian-American golf superstar.

Race is thrust on Hapas based on the shades of their skin, the shapes of their eyes, their last names. (Quick: What race is Apolo Ohno? How about Meg Tilly? Both are half-Asian.) But ethnicity, an internal sense of culture, place and heritage — that’s more of a choice. Cultivating it in our children could be the difference between a Hapa Nation that’s a rich, variegated brown and one that fades to beige. I know that challenge firsthand. Because we are trying to raise our daughter as bicultural, much in our family is up for grabs, from the food we eat — and what we say before and after eating it — to the holidays we celebrate to whether we call her rear end a tushie or an oshiri.

For the moment, she attends a Jewish preschool (where, as it happens, a quarter of her class, not to mention an assistant rabbi, is Hapa) and identifies so strongly with my heritage that my husband has begun to feel uneasy. He recently suggested that, for balance, we enroll her in Dharma school at the Japanese Buddhist church. Let me be clear: he is an atheist who grew up Methodist; I hew to a kind of social-relativist concept of “oneness.” And our daughter is going to spend her days shuttling between two temples?

I sometimes wonder what will happen in another 50 years. Will my grandchildren “feel” Jewish? Japanese? Latino? African-American? Will they be pluralists? “Pass” as Anglo? Refuse categorization? Will Hapa Nation eventually make tracking “race” impossible? Will it unite us? Or will it, as some suggest, further segregate African-Americans from everyone else? The answer to all these questions may be yes. Regardless, watching Senator Obama campaigning with his black wife, his Indonesian-Caucasian half-sister, his Chinese-Canadian brother-in-law and all of their multiculti kids, it seems clear that the binary, black-and-white — not to mention black-or-white — days are already behind us.

Peggy Orenstein is a contributing writer for the magazine and the author of a memoir, “Waiting for Daisy.”

Clinton/Wright Photo and FOX news

Infamous pre-Lewinsky prayer breakfast
Read the Times article here






Chris Wallace defends Obama

A More Perfect Union

Brown Brown Grass of Home

A 'Must-Read' for the Obama Campaign

Op-Ed Columnist
Playing by Clinton Rules
By DAVID BROOKS
Published: March 7, 2008
Senator Barack Obama doesn’t have an impressive record of experience or a unique policy profile. New politics is all he’s got. He loses that, and he loses everything.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/07/opinion/07brooks.html?ex=1362632400&en=234258a14613c36e&ei=5124&partner=permalink&exprod=permalink

Censored SNL Video

http://www.megavideo.com/?v=Q3SR41UY

Manic Monday

Thanks to Swati's gtalk message, I recall The Bangles hit...



Thanks to YouTube I get to watch it in an updated acoustic version!

What a cutie!

*Thanks to CultureCat where this originally appeared!

Multiply the Obama effect !

Please embed this video or send it in emails to get the word out about multiplying the Obama-effect in US government for all 50 states!



Thanks to pt, who previously posted this blog.

Investigation that Lead to Recall of 143million pounds of Beef

Humane Society of the US Investigation

*warning:the video located on this page is disturbing

Seems fishy...

"Debate" Sponsored by the American Association for the Advancement of Science
1. Only Dems show up; all GOP no reply or cancelled.
2. Oddly keen attention to attire.
3. Stereotyping of Obama as transcendental (Thoreau, Emerson--not Kant) and Clinton as hyper-detailed.
4. Wholesale labelling of Dems as overspending on science.
5. Repeated underscoring Dems' reversal of Bush stem-cell research policy.

Read it for yourself here.

Too much politics : Not enough music

Avri Levitan plays Ernst Bloch "Suite Hebraique," movt 3, "Affirmation"


David Garrett plays Vittorino Monti "Czardas"

(Yes, this is the guy who shattered his Guadagnini.)

Kairos: the "Fierce Urgency of Now"

Maya Angelou's Poem in Praise of Hillary Clinton

Complete article here: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/jan/20/usa.poetry

State Package for Hillary Clinton

You may write me down in history

With your bitter, twisted lies,

You may tread me in the very dirt

But still, like dust, I'll rise.

This is not the first time you have seen Hillary Clinton seemingly at her wits' end, but she has always risen, always risen, don't forget she has always risen, much to the dismay of her adversaries and the delight of her friends.

Hillary Clinton will not give up on you and all she asks of you is that you do not give up on her.

There is a world of difference between being a woman and being an old female. If you're born a girl, grow up, and live long enough, you can become an old female. But to become a woman is a serious matter. A woman takes responsibility for the time she takes up and the space she occupies. Hillary Clinton is a woman. She has been there and done that and has still risen. She is in this race for the long haul. She intends to make a difference in our country. Hillary Clinton intends to help our country to be what it can become.

She declares she wants to see more smiles in the family, more courtesies between men and women, more honesty in the marketplace. She is the prayer of every woman and man who longs for fair play, healthy families, good schools, and a balanced economy.

She means to rise.

Don't give up on Hillary. In fact, if you help her to rise, you will rise with her and help her make this country the wonderful, wonderful place where every man and every woman can live freely without sanctimonious piety and without crippling fear.

Rise, Hillary.

Rise.

--Maya Angelou

Behold, Barack O'Bollywood:

Fear of writing

Sabbatical Affective Disorder
http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2008/02/01/brunsman


Happiness: Enough Already
http://www.newsweek.com/id/107569http://www.newsweek.com/id/107569

How I Wrote My Dissertation
http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2007/03/19/caesar

dans ma tête au moment

IQ vs. Self-confidence?

"Are men smarter than women? No. But they sure think they are. An analysis of some 30 studies by British researcher Adrian Furnham, a professor of psychology at University College London, shows that men and women are fairly equal overall in terms of IQ. But women, it seems, underestimate their own candlepower (and that of women in general), while men overestimate theirs. Furnham talks to NEWSWEEK's Joan Raymond about his findings and why perceived IQ matters."

Read the rest here: http://www.newsweek.com/id/101079?g=1