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Richard Aoki





Trailer for independent documentary film on Japanese American Richard Aoki, who was a Field Marshall in the Black Panther Party in Oakland, CA.


untold civil rights stories: asian americans speak out for justice

If you’re like me, growing up as a student, you heard a lot about civil rights history, but not much about the role of Asian Americans in those struggles. But wait! There’s a new book for you.Untold Civil Rights Stories: Asian Americans Speak Out for Justiceis the first educational textbook describing the role of Asian Americans in United States civil rights history. Recently published by the Asian Pacific American Legal Center and the UCLA Asian American Studies Center, it’s the first book created for students to learn and discuss the social struggles Asian Americans have faced for over a century in this country.
The book tells the stories of Amric Singh Rathour, Beulah Ong Kwoh, Fred Korematsu, Joseph Ileto, K.W. Lee, Lily Chin, Peping Baclig, Philip Vera Cruz, and the enslaved Thai garment workers — real stories that are often forgotten in history texts. The goal is to fill an educational void and correct the “invisibility” of Asian Americans in United States history.MORE

Has anyone read Yellow: Race in America Beyond Black and White. Is it good?

The Massacre For Which Thanksgiving Is Named

Pometacom

By Douglas Watts

I was born on soil soaked with blood

Where the head of King Philip was ground in the mud

By the Pilgrims of Plymouth, and their first born sons.

They put his head on a spike and let it rot in the sun.

Shackled his children and family.

Shipped them to Barbados and sold them into slavery.

Now they taught me in grade school

About the first Thanksgiving

How Massasoit and Squanto kept the Pilgrims living.

But the teachers never told us what happened next.

How the head of King Philip was chopped off at the neck.

The teachers never told us what happened next.

How the head of Pometacom was sawed off at the neck.

The teachers never told us what the Pilgrims did

To Massasoit’s second son.

They put his head on a spike and let it rot in the sun.

The teachers never told us what they did

To kids who swam in the same brooks as me.

They put their legs in iron chains and sold them into slavery. Yeah, there is rather more to the stupid legend than you were told


The Massacre for which Thankstaking is Named Part 2

sanguinity made compelling objection to the videohere So I now take it down. I do apologise for my thoughtlessness.


Talk about taking bad things and making joke! here have some MORE smallpox!


from delux_vivens deconstructing the thankstaking myth:

short version

long version

which is bloody HILARIOUS, considering the typical state of affairs, and to make matters worse:

via: racebending

Black belt jonesing: American martial arts culture's roots in the black community

Rumble in the Bronx
The fact is, African Americans were the first community to embrace martial arts in the U.S., and without that community's active support, Asian fighting disciplines would never have gained the foothold they now have in the American consciousness, as both a practice and a pop-culture influence.

"The story of martial arts in black communities is part of a much bigger narrative of African American interest in Asian culture," says Amy Obugo Ongiri, assistant professor of English at the University of Florida and author of the forthcoming book "Spectacular Blackness." "People want to read African Americans and Asians as being in conflict rather than engaged in creative exchange. But black interest in Asian culture has a long history, and what you see is that by the '60s and '70s, a bunch of factors led to the consolidation of that interest."
The return of soldiers from Korea and Vietnam; the growth of Asia as an export power; white flight from the inner cities, and the rise of black nationalism -- all of these phenomena set the stage for the unique cultural intersection that was the rise of martial arts cinema.
"As white people abandoned the cities, all these downtown theaters became spaces for people of color," says Ongiri. "Theater owners started screening stuff that was less marketable, mostly cheap imports -- and that meant martial arts movies."
And for generations of urban black youth who grew up in the 1960s and 1970s, grindhouse theaters screening kung fu double features had an irresistible gravitational pull.


"We'd go and watch films all day," remembers Warrington Hudlin, best known as the producer behind films such as "House Party" and "Boomerang" and the children's television series "Bebe's Kids." "The whole time we'd be going, 'Oh man, how'd they do that?' Because it happened so fast, you'd have to screen a film three or four times to get the technique. So we'd be like, 'Okay, man, you watch his feet, I'll watch his hands, and we'll compare notes in the lobby.' Me and my friends, we used to live in those theaters."

...


"We were the early adopters of martial arts in this country," says Hudlin. "That's why it was so irritating to me that a movie like 'The Forbidden Kingdom' was made, in which Jet Li and Jackie Chan teach their skills to a white kid from Boston."

Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/g/a/2009/10/28/apop102809.DTL#ixzz0VLlokvNh

 

The Black Heroes of the Martial Arts

Cue heads exploding all over the place.




of course, Africans had their own martial arts, as yeloson recced me this Fighting for Honor: The History of African Martial Arts in the Atlantic World

this looks interesting too The Hidden History of Capoeira: A Collision of Cultures in the Brazilian Battle Dance

One Nation, Under Illusion

There is nothing wrong with self-satisfaction or national pride. But the incessant trumpeting of our national superiority to every other country in the world is more than just off-putting and insulting. It is infantile, like the vaunting of a schoolyard bully that his Dad is better than your Dad. It is wrong. And it might be dangerous both to ourselves and to the rest of the world.

Consider what it means. By what standard is one nation any greater than any other nation? Yes, the United States has vast material resources - we rank eighth in gross domestic product per capita - but we also have, according to the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, the "highest inequality and poverty rate'' in the world, outside of Mexico and Turkey, and things are getting worse. Nothing to boast of there.

Yes, we have a relatively high median income, but our standard of living as measured by the Human Development Index of the United Nations ranks us only 15th in the world, behind, among others, Norway, France, Canada, and Australia. Are they better than we are? Even our home ownership rate trails that of the citizens of Canada, Belgium, Spain, Norway, and even Portugal.

Yes, the United States has the best system of higher education in the world, but, according to an Educational Policy Institute report, we rank 13th in the affordability of that education, and we are much less successful with lower education - 11th in the percentage of the 25 to 34 population with a high school diploma and 22d in science education.

...

The point of all this isn't that America doesn't have a lot to be proud of. It does. The point is that just about every country has a lot to be proud of, and America has no more right to assume it is the greatest nation in the world than does France, Switzerland, China, or Russia.MORE

So much for human rights, for instance:
Flowers, Candies and Tumors from An Arab Woman Blues, Reflection in a bottle...

That was the deal. You greet us with flowers and candies and we will greet you with D.U, napalm and neutron bombs...

This may be news to you, but all kinds of weapons were tested in Iraq by the demoniacal terrorists called the Americans. Depleted Uranium is the most "famous" one.

D.U was used during "Desert Storm", may wrathful storms engulf you. And it was used during "Operation Freedom".

Napalm was used in Falluja and Mosul.

According to fellow MDs, they are convinced that neutron bombs were also used (for those of you who don't know, neutron bombs are a limited range nuclear mini explosions that carbonize people and leave buildings intact). According to them, those were used in 2003, in the battle for Baghdad, namely around Baghdad's airport. Fellow MDs said that the corpses they saw in ER on one particular day, were no longer corpses, they were not even burnt, like in napalm, they were simply disintegrated like and I quote "a handful of sand".

While, the sectarian Shiite puppet government is busy plundering and pimping for Iran,

While the numbed out, dumb assholes called American "people ?" are busy checking out the latest released single from Michael Jackson and Paris Hilton new hairdo,

While the filthy English are busy getting plastered on beers and cheers,

While the U.N and its "specialized" agencies are busy snoring in the corridors of silence

While environmental NGOs are busy saving another penguin in Antarctica...

While ...

Tumors are multiplying in Iraq, at a vertiginous rate...sparing none.
Click through for the Al Jazeera English video

As a note on the above blog post. No tone arguments, please. I am almost sure that testing weapons on people war crime behaviour, and its not as if the US has not done this before. I do love this country, but Lawd if karma should ever catch up with us? Even unto the 20th generation we would STILL be crying out.

That people were living there before the good Lord told Israel to kill em all and take the land for a inheritance. It says so right there in the Bible. Now, they sure as hell weren't the only ones pulling those shenanigans. That whole "my god says your shit is mine!" attitude was pretty common back in the day. But it does render the whole "but tradition and religion!" argument...invalid.

Dsteffen at Daily Kos has a very informative and horrifying series of how regulation came to be in some cases. Here it be: How Regulation came to be: 1938 Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act

According to an AP article that appeared in our local daily this morning, one of the tools the federal government may use in going after Stewart Parnell and other management of the Peanut Corporation of America is the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act of 1938. Ironically, the 1938 law has its roots in an incident of corporate hubris and disregard for public safety not unlike the present salmonella-tainted peanut butter case.
"A spoonful of sugar," Julie Andrews sang in her role as Mary Poppins, "Helps the medicine go down." In the middle of the Great Depression, the S. E. Massengill Company found something much better than sugar. Or so they thought. The disaster unfolds on the flip.MORE

How Regulation came to be: The Iroquois Theater Fire

Here's a little mental exercise for you. Picture yourself standing at the front door of your house or apartment preparing to go outside. How do you open the door? Chances are you reach out, grasp the door knob or handle, turn it, and pull the door in towards you. Now picture yourself standing at the door of a business, school, or other public building. What's different? If you answered that the door swings out, give yourself a gold star.

If you know what the Iroquois Theater had to do with this difference, give yourself a big gold star.

...And if you don't, you know where to find out. To the flip.MORE

How Regulation came to be: Radium Girls - Part I

The Radium Dial Company employed about one thousand local women to paint dials primarily for their largest customer, the Westclox clock factory in Peru, Illinois that made the ubiquitous "Big Ben" alarm clock. In an era with few occupations open to women, the pay at the dialpainting factories was significantly better that most alternatives -- as much as three times more -- and the factories had little trouble filling positions. The women, many of them girls fresh out of high school, became part of a phenomenon that would become known collectively as the "Radium Girls".

The women working in Ottawa were assured that the luminous material was safe. Their instructor, wife of the plant manager and teacher of the lip-pointing technique, once ate the radium-laced paint from a spatula to demonstrate its innocuousness. The workers were told by their supervisor that the radium would "put a glow in our cheeks," that "the paint would make us goodlooking,"
Claudia Clark, Radium Girls: Women and Industrial Health Reform: 1910-1935

And then, the workers bones and teeth started to rot, and some began to die

( Read more... )

Article from 1999 "Educate to Liberate!": Multiculturalism and the Struggle for Ethnic Studies

Thirty years ago, students of color at San Francisco State College called a strike demanding a Third World College. The authorities deployed up to ten thousand armed men almost every day for more than two months to crush the Third World strike, but the students prevailed—and Ethnic Studies was born. Similar battles erupted at Berkeley, Columbia, Cornell, and other white universities throughout the country.

Despite almost constant attacks by hostile politicians, administrators, and academics over the last three decades, Ethnic Studies has endured. As one of the few spoils of student wars that has been institutionalized, Ethnic Studies today probably occupies a more prominent place in U.S. academic and intellectual life than at any time in history.

But the years of struggle have also taken their toll. Lodged within white universities and bereft of powerful social movements, Ethnic Studies has increasingly submitted to academia’s elitist rules, rewards, and punishments.

How has Ethnic Studies survived? What remains of its original mission? What struggles shape Ethnic Studies today?MORE

Having their say

UNESCO lists almost 2,500 languages worldwide as “endangered,” meaning they are at risk of falling out of use and even disappearing as fluent native speakers die and younger generations fail to take up the language. A bulk of endangered languages are the tongues of indigenous groups who have been colonized or encroached upon by a dominant culture and forced or coerced to give up their native language. In the past, students were beaten for speaking their language in strict boarding schools in the United States and Australia. More recently in parts of the U.S. and countless other regions worldwide, people feel cultural and economic pressure to switch to the dominant language, seeing it as a means of opportunity and feeling a sense of shame in their indigenous identity.

But recent years have also seen a resurgence in the interest to preserve indigenous languages among academics, nongovernmental organizations and indigenous communities. In many cases, young people, who did not grow up speaking their native language, are now studying and embracing it as a way to understand and celebrate their heritage and connect with their elders.

Benjamin Young is a perfect example.MORE

There's something about Monotheism

Via Dave Bath, I’ve learnt that leading Spanish director (he won Best Foreign Language Oscar in 2005 for Mar adentro) Alejandro Amenábar has made a film about classical scientist Hypatia. It’s to be called Agora and stars Rachel Weisz. For those unfamiliar with the background, Hypatia (an astronomer) was killed in appalling circumstances by a Christian mob shortly after Christian Roman Emperor Theodosius’ ‘Edict of Intolerance’ in 391AD.
That’s my moniker, of course, but it sums up pretty accurately what Theodosius did: made all non-Christian religions (bar the very limited exception of Judaism, although the stinging slur ‘Christ Killer’ was beginning to make its presence felt) illegal, confiscating their property and giving it over to Christian churches, breaking up community associations and desecrating public structures associated with paganism. The most dramatic of these acts was the destruction of the Library of Alexandria, which although a public building for the citizens of the city, was maintained and paid for by worshippers of the Hellenized Egyptian God Serapis. Theodosius did other nasty things at the same time, like banning same-sex marriage and generally taking what had always been a matter of private contract in the Roman world into the hands of the State. He’s the reason why churches in Italy with names like ‘Maria Maggiore’ will have a Temple of Cybele underneath, or why the crypt is so often a mithraeum.
Here’s a rather bitty outtake from the film; the panicked reaction of library staff once they realise what’s coming is well done.

MORE

This viajsl32 is the actual history...

The Hypatia of History

The real Hypatia was the daughter of Theon, who was famous for his edition of Euclid's Elements and his commentaries on Ptolemy, Euclid and Aratus. Her birth year is often given as AD 370, but Maria Dzielska argues this is 15-20 years too late and suggests AD 350 to be more accurate. That would make her 65 when she was killed and therefore someone who should perhaps be played by Helen Mirren rather than Rachel Weisz. But that would make the movie much harder to sell at the box office.

She grew up to become a renowned scholar in her own right. She seems to have assisted her father in his edition of Euclid and an edition of Ptolemy's Almagest, as well writing commentaries on the Arithmetica of Diophantus and the Conics of Apollonius. Like most natural philosophers of her time, she embraced the neo-Platonic ideas of Plotinus and so her teaching and ideas appealed to a broad range of people - pagans, Christians and Jews. There is some suggestion that Amenabar's film depicts her as an atheist, or at least as wholly irreligious, which is highly unlikely. Neo-Platonism embraced the idea of a perfect, ultimate source called "the One" or "the Good", which was, by Hypatia's time, fully identified with a monotheistic God in most respects.Fanatical Christians still killed her, but the reason was... Also, the Great Library of Alexandria was not burned down by a Christian mob. It was probably done in by a fire started by Julius Cesar's soldiers...Oh. lesbiassparrow comments that thats not accurate either. The library went to its doom in a different manner And the director of the film is Chilean, not Spanish.helenadaxclarifies the identity issue re: the director This entire post is amusing me no end...

Hullabaloo points out:

Following up on my post last week about the shall we say, friendliness between the business and national security elites, here's a story from 2006 for the wtf files:

President George W. Bush has bestowed on his intelligence czar, John Negroponte, broad authority, in the name of national security, to excuse publicly traded companies from their usual accounting and securities-disclosure obligations. Notice of the development came in a brief entry in the Federal Register, dated May 5, 2006, that was opaque to the untrained eye.

Unbeknownst to almost all of Washington and the financial world, Bush and every other President since Jimmy Carter have had the authority to exempt companies working on certain top-secret defense projects from portions of the 1934 Securities Exchange Act. Administration officials told BusinessWeek that they believe this is the first time a President has ever delegated the authority to someone outside the Oval Office. It couldn't be immediately determined whether any company has received a waiver under this provision.

...



A trip to the statute books showed that the amended version of the 1934 act states that "with respect to matters concerning the national security of the United States," the President or the head of an Executive Branch agency may exempt companies from certain critical legal obligations. These obligations include keeping accurate "books, records, and accounts" and maintaining "a system of internal accounting controls sufficient" to ensure the propriety of financial transactions and the preparation of financial statements in compliance with "generally accepted accounting principles."MORE

Think of the possibilities...


Pam'ss House Blend:

Meantime, our Obama's response to 77 members of Congress sending him a letter to ask him to help repeal DADT?Pass the hot potato

ENDA has been been introduced into the house and it includes the transgender population this time


Our heterosexual privilege knapsack


NC:Anti-bullying bill passes -- awaits Gov. Perdue's signature


In the meantime:

Obama: No apology for CIA fucking up Chile Let us look forward! Ignore history!

Q The point being that almost no Latin American nation has been free from CIA -- bloody CIA intervention, Chile being a prime example, President Bachelet being one of its victims. Is it time for a historical apology?

PRESIDENT OBAMA: Well, look, I think you answered your own question right at the beginning, which is I’m interested in going forward, not looking backward. I think that the United States has been an enormous force for good in the world. I think there have been times where we’ve made mistakes. But I think that what is important is looking at what our policies are today, and what my administration intends to do in cooperating with the region.MORE

It's a good thing we don't have rationing like all those horrible European countries or people wouldn't be able to get health care when they need it...



Glenn Greenwald:

The "Neda video," torture, and the truth-revealing power of images


Obama, the Right, an defendants Rights Remember that Supreme Court ruling that defendants have no constutional right to access states evidence and request a DNA to prove their innocence? Guess who supported this? Obama's DOJ.

Found: a cause of [Bee] Colony Collapse Disorder

Breaking:Spanish Indictments are back on teh table


interestingly great: Brown University Rejects Columbus Day