Redirect: Racist Cartoon Edition

While catching up on my blogroll, I spotted two posts about the impact of racist cartoons.

the what if question …: BFP considers the implications of cartoons that show Native Americans doing “white thing” (like keeping immigrants out of the U.S.) and other such “through the looking glass” political cartoons, and how the message they send actually reinforces racist and imperialist thinking.

Tintin is F*cking Racist: Ridwan Laher discusses his first encounter with racism in Tintin comics, and how people still collect Tintin stuff, after the uncensored second issue of the comic, “Tintin in the Congo” (which portrays Africans as apes, among other things) was released.

These two posts so clearly outline why I’ve always found the tendency to write off comic books and cartoons as unimportant so infuriating. They aren’t “high-brow” enough, they aren’t “intellectual” enough (which screams of elitism as it is, because, just a couple of examples, Neil Gaiman’s “The Sandman,” Hiromu Arakawa’s “Fullmetal Alchemist” and “Avatar: The Last Airbender” all deftly weave mythical and Biblical themes and imagery, philosophical questions and complex stories and characterization with beautiful artwork and humor much better than many of the new literary novels being written nowadays … and I totally just let my geekitude show, didn’t I?), so anything in them should not be taken seriously. Well, sometimes what’s in them is serious. Sometimes they can introduce or reinforce some pretty nasty stereotypes, and if no one takes them seriously, that just makes it more insidious.

And even if they are just “kid stuff,” what are children being told to believe about themselves by seeing cartoons in the newspaper or in the library that makes a mockery of their identity?

Both posts are very worth reading.

Three unrelated news items

Back from my break and I come bearing news.

In the bad news corner, not only has Philippine President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo failed to properly investigate the extra-judicial killings her army is accused of, but they’ve started up again in recent months. Another leader of the poor has been killed, according to Bulatlat.

While the summit on Extra Judicial Killings and Enforced Disappearances sponsored by the Supreme Court is going on, death squads claimed the life of another activist, demonstrating the culture of impunity in the commission of human rights violations. Charlie Solayao, vice-chairman of the urban poor group KADAMAY-Tacloban chapter, was shot by assassins on board a motorcycle at 1:26 this morning. He was rushed to St. Pauls Hospital where he was treated. Unfortunately, he succumbed to his wounds a little past 11:00 this morning (July 17). [Full story]

The PR government said that the killings would be investigated back in February and they stopped temporarily. Once international pressure shifted elsewhere, the killings began again, with two in May, three in June, and one so far in July. [Source]

Keep the pressure on. More on how to help here.

And the Irish government is planning to deport a Roma family of 32 adults and 22 children.

Plans have been drawn up to allow the gardai to evict, forcibly if necessary, the 32 adults and 22 children from one extended family who have set up camps on the M50 between Dublin airport and Ballymun. The Rostas family will be put on a plane back to their native Romania within the next fortnight, said Irish government sources.

…

‘We cannot tolerate this situation,’ one highly placed government official said yesterday. ‘If the government was to give in to this group many, many more would come seeking social welfare. The message has to be sent out, and that is why there is a real determination to end this,’ he said.

Conditions at the two sites, one on a roundabout on the M50 within sight of Dublin airport’s runway, the other just before a slip road, have deteriorated over the past few days. The scene resembles the slums of an Asian city rather than 21st-century Ireland. [Full story]

An Asian slum? “Dirty Roma” stereotypes? Nice to see racism alive and well in Ireland. /sarcasm

You know, someday, when people are complaining about how “dirty” a group of undesirables are, they’re going to have an epiphany that maybe poverty and lack of access to clean water, laundry, and other hygeine necessities have some sort of part to play. I think that these signs of logical abilities and human compassion may even be one of the signs of the apocalypse, according to the Revelation.

Okay, I’m really gonna stop with the sarcasm now and get back to the useful information. Sorry.

Pavee Point, an organization working for Travellers and Roma rights, has more information on this case.

There is good news, though. Hazleton, Pa.’s anti-immigrant law, which critics (myself included) say encourages discrimination against the town’s Latino community, was struck down in federal court as unconstitutional.

“We cannot say clearly enough that persons who enter this country without legal authorization are not stripped immediately of all their rights because of this single illegal act,” (U.S. District Judge James M.)Munley wrote.

He noted that the Constitution says no person may be deprived of “due process of law.” The Supreme Court has said this protection extends to those who have entered the country illegally, he added.

Civil liberties lawyers who sued to void the Hazleton ordinance called the ruling a sweeping victory and said it dealt a “body blow” to other local efforts to regulate illegal immigrants. Hazleton has inspired similar measures nationally.

“Today’s decision sends an unmistakable message to local officials across the nation that these types of ordinances are a waste of taxpayers’ money, anathema to American values and a violation of the Constitution,” said Omar Jadwat of the ACLU Immigrants’ Rights Project.

The ruling was also welcomed by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. “State and local governments have no business setting national immigrant policy,” said the agency’s National Chamber Litigation Center. [Full story]

Let’s hope that this gets backed by the Supreme Court, because you know the town is going to push it to that point. Still, this is wonderful news and a good reminder that not having documents doesn’t mean a person has no human or Constitutional rights in the U.S.

Also, I’ve spent most of my time away avoiding the news and reworking the purpose of this blog. Updates will be sporadic over the next week or two while I prep some things; I’ll mainly just be posting good news and opportunities for action.

I just purged my spam folder. If you commented and it’s not showing up, please let me know.

Update on Satendar Singh

A quick update: Satendar.com is up and running, and includes links to all of the news stories and the sheriff’s report, as well as video from a vigil held on July 6.

My sister told me that his friends and family are holding fundraisers so they can send his body back to Fiji. She’s going to get me information for PayPal when she goes back to work; I’ll post that as soon as I receive it, in case anyone would like to donate anything. Or, if you want to send money by mail, I did find this on Google:

Donations may be made by cash or check. Make checks payable to Parkside Community Church with “Singh Fund” on the memo line. If you wish to mail a check, the address is 5700 S. Land Park Drive, Sacramento, CA 95822. [Source]

Pro-life and pro-family only when convenient

Many people in the U.S., particularly those in the GOP, claim to be “pro-life.” Since 1973, these people have fought long and hard to turn back Roe v. Wade and outlaw abortion, with the claims that abortion is murder and conception is life.

In a twist of irony, some of the most vocal anti-abortion protestors know absolutely nothing about the U.S. government’s history of sterilizing men and women of color, or of things like the Tuskegee Experiment that destroyed the sexual health of many black men. They don’t protest the radioactive waste on Navajo reservations that give children cancer. They don’t protest the conditions of poverty that lead children to die from abcessed teeth. They don’t protest the poisons in ground and well water in many poor communities of color, that cause children to be born with birth defects. They don’t protest that the U.S. government is blowing up small children in Iraq and Afghanistan, or that the government is not helping children starving to death in Darfur or Brazil or the U.S. itself. They don’t protest the death penalty.

They are simply pro-life when it comes to fetuses, specifically white fetuses. The deaths of poor children and children of color, the deaths of poor people and people of color and “the enemy” and U.S. soldiers … none of those are covered under “pro-life.”

These same people often also claim to be pro-family, when they mean “pro-straight nuclear/white middle-class family.” I specify “white” there because the nuclear family of one father, one mother and 2.5 kids is primarily a Western thing. They don’t mean single-mother families, which is why poor mothers lose their children on bogus charges. They don’t mean extended families, which is why the adult children of immigrants have to wait over a decade to get into the U.S. legally, even if their parents are veterans of this country. They aren’t protesting that local governments often move poor families into housing in neighborhoods ridden with crime and drug use.

Well, here’s another one for the pro-life, pro-family files. Men and women in China who face sterilization can be political refugees, but they can’t bring their spouse with them.

For a decade, the Justice Department’s immigration courts had considered the husbands of women forced to undergo abortions or sterilizations to be political refugees in their own right. The protection also extended to women whose husbands were sterilized.

A deeply divided 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals reversed the Justice Department’s interpretation of the immigration law yesterday, holding that only the person unwillingly subjected to the medical procedure counted as a political refugee. [Full story]

The reason is because, supposedly, Chinese men leave their wives in the U.S. in some sort of underhanded asylum scheme, while they go back to China to live all happy. Hooray, stereotyping.

So it’s not really that they’re concerned about the life of the children (otherwise, they’d allow the babies to have two caretakers, right?) or their quality of life. It’s not that they care about family, really, either, or this wouldn’t even be an issue.

It’s that gay people, people of color, and poor people need to know their place. The GOP will tell you when you can reproduce, when you can have your children, and when your family can stay together, and you’d better keep quiet, keep your knees together and follow orders like a good little citizen.

Overload

I am overloaded.

The AP ran a story a few weeks ago about how the U.S. is still dragging its heels on cleaning up Agent Orange in Viet Nam. I spent half an hour looking through photos of children with twisted limbs, missing limbs, and other horrible birth defects. I have not been able to get the photo of a little girl, born with no eyes, out of my head.

There are a lot of photos I’ve been unable to get out of my head lately. Most of them are dead or wounded children in many, many places. There’s one of Somalis burning the body of a soldier; one of his legs was still intact and looked alive, while the rest of him was charred and ruined. There’s one of a Palestinian street with blood standing like floodwater in the road. There’s the smiling school portrait of Genarlow Wilson. There are a lot of mothers weeping over flag-draped caskets and of homes destroyed by bombs and of refugee camps and children with dead, hopeless eyes.

The worst are the photos that look okay as thumbnails, but you open them up and they’re bloody and gory and graphic. The AP doesn’t put a graphic warning on thumbnails. If they did, I would probably look anyway. I can’t stop myself; if the people in the photos can live through their suffering, the least I can do is acknowledge it instead of looking away.

Yesterday I almost lost it over a photo of a 16-year-old Iraqi boy sobbing after his father, a driver for Reuters, was killed in a clash between militants and U.S. troops. The image of his face, twisted with grief, won’t go away.

I feel like I’m not doing enough and stretched too thin all at once, and those pictures haunt me the whole time. And all I want to do lately is watch cartoons, play with my cats, eat ice cream and avoid the Internet, and pretend the world isn’t falling apart all around us.

New blog alert

ExpatJane of Where the Hell Am I? and some others have founded a new blog called Missing Minorities, after the Stepha Henry case went mostly unnoticed by the mainstream media (they’ve finally picked up the story — America’s Most Wanted did a spot on her disappearance). The blog focuses on getting media attention for POC who are kidnapped or go missing.

Hate crime close to home

One of my sister’s co-workers, Satendar Singh, was killed in a hate crime attack last week at Lake Natomas. He was at a party with some friends and family when a group from a Russian church started calling him racist and homophobic names, harassing him and his whole party for most of the day.

As his party started to leave, a group of them cornered him and they got into a physical fight. One of them shoved Satendar and he fell and cracked his skull. He was declared braindead when he arrived at the hospital. A few days later, his aunt and uncle had to take him off of life support. His parents, who live in Fiji, were unable to get a visa in time to visit.

The police have no leads, although they have vehicle descriptions:

The Russian group apparently left the park in two vehicles: a dark green four-door sedan and a red Mitsubishi with a red DMV number “7″ sticker affixed to the rear window. [Full story]

The area around Sacramento has become sort of a haven for violent hate groups in the past decade or so. There are several white pride and anti-gay groups, and even some anti-Semitic groups (one fire-bombed five synagogues a few years ago), and they’re getting more violent lately, less secretive about their prejudices.

And now a young man my age, a nice guy who was trying to make a good life for himself, is dead because people have just ignored them, or worse, because they secretly agree. And the Russian community is hiding them, and the police will only charge them with involuntary manslaughter and resisting arrest if they are caught.

More information can be found via the Sacramento Bee, where I found the photo. His family and friends are currently working on a Web site in his memory.

Australian update: Howard reinventing the wheel

I usually focus more on U.S. issues, but the Australian “crack-down” on Aboriginal people is so full of sheer WTFery that I just can’t help myself.

For example, I have to wonder why the Australian government is pouring money into these new laws when there are Aboriginal groups that have been trying to curb alcoholism and violent crime for over a decade now.

A recent report found a “river of grog” or alcohol was destroying aboriginal communities in the outback Northern Territory and fuelling violence.

Prime Minister John Howard has declared a national emergency and sent police and troops to end the binge drinking, violence and sexual abuse against women and children.

He plans to take over 60 aboriginal communities, but many Aborigines fear that the government just wants their land and that there is no long-term plan to improve their lives.

They say many aboriginal communities are already working hard to stop the violence and abuse through programs such as the “Night Patrol”, restricting welfare payments, issuing food vouchers, running sexual awareness campaigns and abuse shelters.

“If you take all control away from people, and you also eliminate all opportunities for them to take responsibility for their own lives, then you will create the worst welfare,” said William Tilmouth, head of Tangentyere Council. [Full story]

The Night Patrol around Alice Springs and the Tangentyere Council, according to Reuters reporter Michael Perry, act in many ways to prevent violence and alcohol-related incidents.

In 2006, the “Night Patrol” helped 5,474 people — driving drunks home, finding mothers of abandoned children, and settling domestic disputes before they ended in violence.

…

The Australian government plans to quarantine aboriginal welfare payments so money is spent on food, not alcohol, as a way of reducing binge drinking and violence.

But hundreds of Aborigines in Alice Springs have been voluntarily doing this since 1994. In 2006, the Tangentyere Council’s bank exchanged welfare payments worth A$1.9 million (US$1.6 million) into food vouchers for 860 Aborigines.

On a busy Friday payday, the tiny one-room bank can issue up to A$17,000 in food vouchers, which are only redeemable at the Foodtown Supermarket which is 50 percent owned by the council.

The supermarket has a strict policy prohibiting the purchase of alcohol with food vouchers and will not give cash change, instead offering a hot pie for the bus ride home.

…

Aboriginal leaders admit there is a problem with child sexual abuse in their communities, with girls as young as 12 becoming mothers, but stress they are working hard to end the abuse.

Scattered around Alice Springs are street signs pointing to “Safe Houses” to use in the case of violence. Tangentyere Council runs a safe house which has helped 130 children since it opened three years ago, but not all children here have been abused.

Interesting. Kind of makes you wonder why they’re bringing in police and soldiers and making new laws when Howard could simply help fund programs such as the safe houses and night patrols. Kind of makes you wonder why Howard is making new unilateral policies punishing all of the Aboriginal people instead of consulting those who are already trying to solve the problem and finding out what assistance they need.

Well, if you don’t know about the plan to dump nuclear waste on Aboriginal land, that is.

Human kindness

On June 23, LaShanda Calloway lay bleeding to death of multiple stab wounds on the floor of a convenience store in Wichita, Kansas while at least five shoppers stepped over and around her and one woman stepped over her four times and then took pictures of the dying woman with a cell phone. She died at a hospital later that day.

This is far from the first case of bystander apathy. It’s not even the first this year. In March, Marie Stefanie Martinez was beaten and harassed by 12 teens on a bus for “looking Chinese” while the bus driver ignored her pleas for help.

On May 9, 2007, Edith Rodriguez writhed in pain for 45 minutes and then died on the floor of the emergency room at Los Angeles’ Martin Luther King Jr.-Harbor Hospital, while nurses and patients ignored her and a janitor cleaned around her. Police called to the scene by one of the witnesses attempted to arrest the dying woman.

These are part of a long history of bystander apathy cases in the U.S.

On March 13, 1964, Kitty Genovese was killed outside of her home. Her neighbors looked on as she was stabbed multiple times. One yelled at her attacker, who left, but when he returned 10 minutes later, she was still alone outside her building. He stabbed her several more times, then left her dead. At least 12 people, perhaps as many as 38, witnessed the attack, but only two called the police, one after the half-hour long attack was finished, her attacker gone, and Kitty near death.

On March 6, 1983, 21-year-old Cheryl Araujo was assaulted and raped for over an hour in a tavern in New Bedford, Massachusetts. Some of the dozen witnesses applauded while she was raped. No one stopped the attack.

On February 12, 1993, two boys kidnapped two-year-old Jamie Bulger. Thirty-eight witnesses saw the boys leading the toddler on a 2.5 mile walk; Jamie had injuries to his head and the boys were kicking and injuring him. Not one person reported the incident. The two boys killed Jamie at a set of train tracks after torturing him, and his body was found two days later. [Note: This was actually in England, not the U.S.]

On December 7, 2002, 19-year-old Breann Voth was raped and murdered. Several witnesses heard her cries for help, which lasted over 10 minutes, but not one called the police or stepped in to help.

Experiments conducted by sociologists and psychologists, such as the infamous Stanford Prison Experiment, show that U.S. citizens are likely to listen to a voice of authority and ignore the pain of others. A series of experiments conducted by Bibb Latane and John Darley showed that people on their own were likely to report criminal violence, help injured people, or report dangerous situations. However, the larger the group, the fewer people were likely to do anything. [Source]

There’s human kindness still in the world, but it’s hard to believe it when you read about things like this. The cliche that indifference is as bad as active evil? It’s true.

What you can do to help the Jena Six

Run, do not walk, to Dr. Elle’s and read her post on who to write/call and what else you can do to help the Jena Six.

And if you have not done so already, sign Tom’s petition.