Ethnic Avenue – The Street That Crosses All the Others

Archive for the ‘Racism’ Category

In his latest installment, Sexist Latino Contributor Don Felix registers his beliefs on the practice of asking beauty pageant contestants heady political questions.

Felix Mengano’s views aren’t necessarily those of Ethnic Avenue, its affiliates, sponsors, or detractors.

Asking Dumb Beauty-Pageant Girls Important Questions

By: Felix Omar Mengano Jimenez, Sr. – Sexist Latino Contributor

I’ve always thought beauty pageants were pointless. Sure I watch them, but they just don’t make a whole lot of sense to a guy like me. If you want to showcase beautiful women, why not have them parade onto the stage in the nude? Or, if you must have some competitive element to the whole thing, why not have them wrestle in mud, guacamole, or another similarly viscous substance? If you want to show some intelligent women, put a few (fully dressed) female college professors out there and ask them nuanced questions about their areas of specialization. That’ll easily fill up a few hours (and few seats).

But don’t try to combine the two. It never works. One side always sufferers—and I bet you can guess which side. They’re not fooling anyone by trying to integrate other areas besides looks into pageants. These things aren’t about anything but looks. Miss America is never brilliant, but just okay-looking. But they do it anyway, so what you get is a bunch of girls that are dumb as rocks straining their brains (which they never really use except in other pageants) to come up with answers like this:

Of course, that’s just the most famous in a series of idiotic pageant answers in recent years, answers to important political and social questions that should never be posed to these type of girls—pageant or not. The interesting part is that these dumb girls seem to consistently espouse hard-right, conservative leanings. I wonder if that’s any coincidence. No where is the folly of asking important questions to pageant contestants more clear than with Sarah Palin—a factory of pageant-style verbal diarrhea.

The latest installment in this tired story is Miss Oklahoma, who over the weekend released this gem:

The best part is that she uses the classic passive-aggressive, I-don’t-actually-know-what-I’m-talking-about line “but I can see both sides” after having made a decisive, committed statement– about states’ rights, no less. Anyone that’s ever taken a sixth-grade history class or read a non-fiction book in his life knows that “states’ rights” is code for all sorts of shit—most of it segregationist or confederate. The slave states seceded from the Union over “states’ rights.” People that wanted to keep black kids out of white schools claimed states’ rights. It’s a loaded term. And everyone, especially in the South, knows what it means.

Don’t get me wrong: I’m all for asking questions of beauty-pageant contestants. But they ought to be the types of questions that are appropriate for them. You wouldn’t ask Stevie Wonder for directions. You wouldn’t ask Bill Gates how to rebuild a transmission. So instead of asking beauty pageant contestants what they think the role of hydrocarbons is in climate change, we need to be asking things like: “those were some impressive moves, Jeannie, have you wrestled in guacamole before?”

The big thing in the news these days is an Arizona state bill, signed into law by appointed hag-governor Jan Brewer (see below), that basically requires regular-ass police officers to go around asking people for proof of citizenship if “it looks like they could be illegal.” I’m not making this up. What’s more, if police don’t do their (new) job, they can be sued by regular people for not enforcing the law.

Frankly, I don’t like chiming in on things this mainstream because pretty much anything that can be said about a topic like this gets said in the first few minutes, and I tend to be slow. So that means, invariably, I’m left unintentionally repeating the same shit some other guy said. This is the reason I didn’t say much about the whole Tiger Woods harem thing (except about his disappointingly cheap taste in sandwiches), the “balloon boy” story, and the healthcare reform “debate.”

Forget, for a minute, the coincidence that the illegal-immigrant debate seems to always come up in election years, especially ones in which Republicans are in the minority (i.e., out of power) and are hoping to make some gains by lathering up the masses about issues they don’t ever intend to solve—simply recycle the next time they need something to work people up with. Also forget the fact that you could solve the problem pronto by simply enforcing the laws that already exist, and throwing the CEO of any company that hires an illegal immigrant in jail for a few years.  (Like when you also throw the John in jail, not just the prostitute.)

I assure you, a lot of people would be leaving if no one would hire them. But of course that would hurt millionaires and billionaires and corporations, who benefit from cheap illegal labor that undercuts unions and their ridiculous demands for fair pay and benefits and the occasional vacation day. Remember: it was the conservative messiah, Ronald Reagan, that passed the largest amnesty for illegal immigrants in American history (1986), making millions of “illegals” legal overnight. He hated unions.

I could go on. But this isn’t about that.

This is about the question of what an illegal immigrant looks like, since that’s now become an important part of the dialogue on this issue. You can’t profile people by their race, because that would illegal. So these guys are handling that sticky question in a couple of interesting ways.

On the one hand are the right-wingers that claim to not know what an illegal looks like at all, deferring to the “professionals” in this arena.

Exhibit A

Then there are the ones that say they can tell, but with all sorts of other indicators apart from race. Definitely not race.

Exhibit B

Look guys, I know spotting an illegal immigrant (or at least a potentially illegal immigrant) without resorting to racial profiling isn’t easy for the untrained eye. But years of living in the great City of Los Angeles–the mecca for Guatemalan, Vietnamese, El-Salvadorian, Mexican, Ethiopian, and every other variety of immigrant you could dream up–has giving me a keen sense of what else to look for.

I know I may be hurting my ethnic brothers and sisters, but here’s a simple guide for you guys. Pay me back with what you do best–some tax breaks and exotic pyramid-scheme-like investment vehicles.

Right-Wingers’ Quick Guide to Spotting Illegal Immigrants

General FOB-ness

This is what the idiot in the second video above (Rep. Brian Bilbray) was dancing around, but couldn’t—or wouldn’t–articulate. Everyone knows when they’re dealing with someone that just “ain’t right.” It’s like when you spot an unseasonably pale (but straight) white guy, wearing a mesh tank-top and John Stockton coochie shorts, exposing his wickedly hairy legs (and, in some unfortunate cases, some of his junk) in the middle of Los Angeles. European, right? You bet.

Or like when you see a white girl in Teva­ sandals, shorts, a fleece vest, and a Nalgene bottle hanging from her outdoorsy backpack in the middle of your city. Unless you’re in a certain region or two of the country, you know she’s an unassimilated transplant.

John Stockton and his now-infamous shorts.

Similarly, people that haven’t properly integrated into the American Way of Life are going to telegraph that shit from a mile away. Mixing up our treasured clichés. Calling dollar bills notes. Singularizing plurals (Starbuck Coffee). Wearing a cowboy hat and mustache.

Every race and ethnicity has its unique set of FOB dead-giveaways. Learn them.

Broke-Asses

Seriously, when was the last time you saw a rich illegal immigrant (that wasn’t a king-pin in a movie)? I’m sure they exist, but they’re not the ones mowing your neighbor’s lawn or standing outside the Home Depot. Being poor is definitely a sign.

Brown

Let’s face it guys: you’re going to have to use some tangential indicator of race to pluck out the illegal immigrants you want to actually get rid of (the south-of-the-border variety). The great thing is that using color isn’t necessarily using race. Brown is generally a good start, but combine that with broke-ass and FOB, and you have yourself a good candidate.

A good candidate.

A reader asks:

Hey Ethnic Will,

I need your help settling an on-going debate with my tight group of friends, which is a bit like the United Nations with all of the exotic races and weird nationalities represented in it. We often make jokes about each other’s race, but once in a great while, someone will “cross the line.” That usually starts a huge thing, that we all get involved in discussing, about what’s “okay” to say about another race.

I need your opinion. Does having a certain number of friends of a given race grant you license to say things about them that someone else might not be able to say?

-R.S. – San Diego, CA

I certainly hope so, because that’s precisely the license I’ve been using (and abusing) on this blog. Having had an ethnically diverse group of friends for most of life, this is an age-old question I’ve considered many times, drawing virtually the same conclusion every time–absolutely.

This is the way I see it: if you’ve succeeded in fostering several relationships with members of a given race, you must have sufficient understanding about those people to make them like you and actually want to be around you (without kicking your ass). Part of relating to anyone is understanding the things they like and dislike based on their individual tastes (like all of us) and general tastes, to which they are pre-disposed based on the groups to which they belong (race, class, regional). So, in other words, by making friends that are of, say, Latino origin, you’re demonstrating a certain base-level of understanding about the Latino race. Prolonged exposure to the group is only going to educate you more.

To use an analogy, think of initially getting the Latino friends as just being admitted into an advanced graduate-level program on Latino Race Studies. But then keeping those friends for years is like advancing toward your Ph.D. in that race. The great thing about this, versus going to a real school (like the prestigious University of Phoenix), is that you can simultaneously work on “degrees” in various races (like me).

You can also punctuate your already impressive credentials with other “certifications,” things like: being married to someone of a given race; having a distant relative of that race; knocking up a girl of that race; or belonging to a formal organization (like a gang) whose membership primarily constitutes of another race.

Now I'm a Ph.D. in White Guys.

So, there’s no questions that, depending on your level of “study,” you are often more-than-qualified to make pretty sweeping generalizations, serious or joking, about another race with the full faith and confidence that you can point to your virtual degrees on the wall if someone should have the temerity to question your training.

The one problem is that not everyone sees it the way I do. There’s a group of race fundamentalists that think the only people that can talk about a race are members of that specific race. And, like most fundamentalists, those guys can get pretty violent. So, like with all shit-talking, proceed with caution. Talking about another race has the standard set of built-in risks (getting beat up or fired). This is yet another time where it’s important to know how talk your way out of a situation and how to un-ball a fist.

That’s one side of the coin. On the other side are the ignorant dumb-asses that never even went to race “college,” never mind advanced studies, but still think they can make assertions without the requisite years of studying. These are your traditional racists that everyone pretty much can recognize.

I don’t get the sense that any of your friends are anywhere close to Race Fundamentalists (or Traditional Racists, for that matter). What you’re experiencing is a natural process: someone questioning whether someone else has the adequate credentials to be making certain assertions.

Prove your skills or keep studying.

The Backstory

A few years ago, I had this millionaire, born-again Christian, asshole boss that was so consistently racist (like actually so), that he distorted my uncanny ability to detect racism for several years. He looked like a torn-up version of Lou Dobbs—if you can believe that.

He would say things out of the blue like, “You know, I hired you despite your accent.” Now, I’ll tell you that in subsequent polling, about 80 percent of people say I have no discernable accent. Another, 15 percent or so tell me I have a medley of American city accents. The other 5 percent is this guy. So, when he told me he hired me despite my accent, I figured that was code for, “I hired you despite your being brown,” a semi-obvious fact I appreciated.

It’s nice when people can overlook your flaws.

Over time, I developed a type of Stockholm Syndrome for the guy and our unhealthy relationship blossomed. We’d go to fancy, tax-deducted lunches together to plot out ways to make him even more money. He’d pay every time, and I came to know what a cheap-lunch-whore, entertaining a middle-aged Republican in exchange for the most expensive thing on the menu, must feel like.

Somewhere along the way, the guy got deluded into thinking he was a genius. And to prove his brilliance, he would bait me into conversations about politics. He’d repeat everything he’d heard on Fox News the night before, and I–like the idiot I was at the time–would try disprove him with reason, punctuated with arcane political theory and historical evidence. Definitely not recommended.

In a conversation about racial injustice in our criminal justice system, I pointed out to him that the jails were disproportionately filled with ethnic people.

He came back with, “Well, you’re the ones committing all the crimes.”

He should have been offensive, but he seemed pretty harmless at the time. Besides, the lunches were good.

Why I Told You All of That

Now fast forward to yesterday. I’m reading the news and I run into this story, where a twelve-year-old girl from New York got arrested, and taken away in handcuffs, for doodling on her desk.

Twelve-year-old Alexa Gonzalez scribbled “Lex was here 2/1/10″ on her desk Monday at Junior High School 190 in Queens. She also wrote “I love my friends Abby and Faith.”

The girl says the doodles could have been erased.

I immediately remembered my old boss and thought, you know what, that asshole was right. Lock the little bitch up. We are the ones committing all the crimes.

Just when you started to believe the excuses for the Australian KFC “crowd pleaser” commercial (e.g., that “not one person [polled] in Australia had any idea of the American stereotype of black people and chicken”), I uncovered another Australian gem–from back in the day (1992):

Now, admittedly, I’ve never eaten at Chicken Treat, but it’s probably a safe bet that, at $2.75, their “Chick’n Ham’n Cheese Burger” is no better than, say, Wendy’s Bacon Swiss Crispy. (Though Wendy’s wins on style points, for placing their adjective at the end.) In other words, Chicken Treat isn’t putting out an exceptionally delicious sandwich that’s universally known as the best. It’s just a regular-ass, fast-food, factory-farm chicken sandwich. So the fact that the black guy can’t contain himself around it—hungrily licking his chops while visually fixating on it at the beginning—says more about the guy than the sandwich.

Wendy's Bacon Swiss Crispy

Then there’s contrast between the two characters, which couldn’t be more stark. On the one hand is the cool, collected White guy with his deep voice (and exceptionally bushy, expressive eyebrows). He’s a wearing a conservative button-down shirt, buttoned to the very top, and a deliciously Fantastic Sams hairdo, circa 1988. On the other hand is the out-of-control, screaming black dude carrying on about the sandwich in his shrill voice. He’s got on the loudest—and frankly, nicest—floral shirt I’ve seen in years, as well as a flattened-bill baseball cap rested on the rear three-quarter on his head. I swear, the only thing missing is the original tags hanging off of his hat and a spinning basketball on his finger. Oh, wait, he’s probably busy licking those fingers.

So, Australians, I call bullshit.

There’s a fine line between using race semi-constructively to understand the world, and bona-fide racism. I know this because Ethnic Avenue dead-ends right before that line—Racist Parkway. On the other hand, the Australians seem to have no problem taking a bloomin’ kangaroo leap over that line, as evidenced by a recent KFC commercial creating quite a stir around the Internets.

I have to admit there’s something remotely amusing and, at first glance, harmless about pacifying a group of rowdy black people with an enormous bucket of chicken—the so-called “KFC crowd pleaser” (though we all know they wanted to call it the “black-people silencer”). But the more I watch the commercial, the more I realize the racism is in the details: the Aussie rubbing his face in exasperation; the black people (reportedly from the West Indies) dancing around happily and inconsiderately; the loaded “awkward situation” euphemism.

An interesting variation on this theme comes courtesy of our foot-shuffling, pen-flicking Korean friends.

We all know there are different types of racism. There’s rednecks-dragging-you-from-a-pick-up-truck racism. There’s abruptly-lock-your-automatic-car-doors racism. There’s your-membership-application-has-mysteriously-been-rejected racism. And there’s everything below that. So as these things go, resurrecting an old, tired stereotype is relatively low on the racist (and, frankly, originality) scale. After all, black people do seem to have a special relationship with chicken because, as Dave Chappelle famously put it, “it’s fuckin’ delicious.”

The temptation, of course, is to compare these commercials and declare one of them the more racist of the two. The Korean version certainly has some nice touches that favor it to win that contest: an attempted Korean barbecue abduction, cannibalistic savages hungrily devouring fried chicken, a theatrical protagonist performing Eastern magic. But the Australian one benefits from the automatically more condescending accent, and an overall douchier ass-wipe delivering the lines. So it’s definitely a toss-up.

What do you think?

Nobody likes being stared at. But ethnic people seem to have a special aversion to it. The more ethnic, the more they don’t like it. I can’t count the number of times–in my younger years–I asked, was asked, or witnessed the asking of whether someone (or I) had a “staring problem.” The staring usually ended right there. If you ever wanted to intentionally provoke a beef with an ethnic person, all you had to do was mad dog them for a little while.¹

¹Mad Dog (verb) To stare fixedly at someone in a hostile manner. Generally used to convey anger or disdain, can be a signal that a fight is about to happen.

[from Urban Dictionary]

So when I heard the story of “racist” malfunctioning in the new HP Deluxe Webcam, I immediately knew what was going on.

Hewlett Packard’s new camera includes innovative face-tracking technology, which follows a user’s face – even if it moves out of frame, or zooms in when the user is farther away.

This technology wasn’t working for one African-American consumer – the webcam didn’t move at all for him. But for his white co-worker, who was right next to him at the time, the face-tracking feature worked perfectly.

And so the man…had a message for one of the largest technology companies in the world: “Hewlett Packard computers are racist,” he says.

[Excerpted from theGrio.com]

This, I’m afraid, is no glitch. But it’s also not clear-cut racism. The device is just making a calculated assessment of the circumstances at hand.

Put yourself in its shoes.

Here you are, a nice deluxe-webcam from Palo Alto, California and, all of a sudden, you got a black dude in your face. The guy may look and sound friendly, but you know that even the friendliest ethnic people are liable to get pissed if you look at them too long, never mind follow them around the room with your “tracking lens.”

So, you play it cool, disregard your programming, and look away–while keeping an eye on him from the corner of your lens.

That’s not racist.