Media Images: Persistence of Stereotypes in Political Discourse
http://youtube.com/watch?v=V2b64RSE26w
Here’s a clip of an ad Kerry Healey ran in her ultra-negative campaign for governor against Deval Patrick last year.
I remember watching TV with my dad when this came on and how flabbergasted we were that someone could get away with this. We literally sat there with our mouths open, blinking – as if to say “did we just see what we thought we saw?!!??!”
The ostensible purpose of the ad is to point out Deval’s support for Ben LaGuer – an African-American many (mainstream politicians, celebrities, and journalists) believe was wrongfully convicted of rape in 1983 with a double-whammy combo of a highly biased jury and evidence-mishandling by law enforcement. Also run to show that, unlike Healey (being tough on crime was a key part of her image) Deval and Democrats are soft on the most brutal of criminals.
Now, I’m not sure if LaGuer is innocent or not. Although it does sound like he has a good case, which deserves to at least be heard. But that’s not the point.
The ad makes direct use of and attempts to gain leverage from the old stereotype that black men are insatiable, lustful animals who can’t be trusted around and will surely, if given the slightest chance, make sexual conquest of the ultimate prize – innocent, demure, white women.
School teachers, mothers, neighbors – your wife! The very same myth constructed by slave-owners to conveniently justify and obscure their own rampant sexual exploitation of female slaves.
In the scene, a professional (smart but feminine suit), innocent/intelligent (glasses) everywoman (every white woman, that is) soccer mom walks to her minivan after a wholesome day of shopping , or putting extra hours in at the office (up to the viewer to impose themselves in there).
As she does so, a shaky (implies deviant, uncontrollable, lurking lust) handheld camera follows her through the ominously lit parking lot. The same parking lot, with the dark corners, you anxiously tell your wife to avoid walking through alone at night - or one which would make any person feel unsafe. The camera is behind the woman, watching her, stalking her...
It is the rapist. The same one the voice-over is desperately trying to warn you/her about before it is too late.
As the voiceover/message builds to a crescendo (it’s about to tell you what Patrick said about LaGuer, i.e. reveal what Patrick is really like) the camera swoops in against the woman’s back. She’s almost to her car but it’s too late. Startled, she barely has time to dart her had back to see who it is - suddenly aware of the rapist behind her about to pounce and then…..
CUT! The rapist is revealed! And it’s Deval Patrick!! The stereotypically sexually deviant black man nonchalantly revealing his true feelings of praise for yet another black “convicted brutal rapist” - via a carefully snipped sound bite, of course.
Observe also the carefully ordered sequence in which the sparse (for more powerful effect) words appear on the screen – panning over Deval’s face:
“Rapist... Deval Patrick should be ashamed… Not governor”.
Close the gaps between these words a little, which everyone’s mind does subconsciously, and the message is clear.
All black men, like Deval, are rapists by nature and woe betide us all if we’re foolish enough to vote for one. Especially one who's openly proud to advocate for letting even more of his fellow black rapists out of jail to run rampant in dark parking lots…
F*ckin’ racist Healey. To do that to someone who’s intelligent and determined enough to have worked his way through the most prestigious schools in this country. Only to have someone who’s had everything handed to her use the color of his skin to shit all over him. I’m so happy Deval won.
And I was proud to see how it was the furor over this ad that helped put the nail in the Healey coffin…
…that was until the “watchdog” media broke the whole Deval-upgraded-the-governor’s-Lincoln to a Cadillac “scandal”. I think everyone knows what that was really all about. Just Google Cadillac and the N word and watch the hundreds of racist joke pages that come scrolling up.
How perfect for the media – they could take the supposed moral high ground of "protecting the taxpayer" - while confirming everyone’s suspicions: just look at what happens when you finally put one of "them" in charge, tsk, tsk - they go and blow our cash on a toy...
Always remember the media is in it for money. No white politician would ever receive that kind of scrutinty for such a minuscule part of the bugdget. Their are dozens of huge, important and expensive real issues the media could actually make a difference by addressing it. But that's not what sells million dollar TV commercials.
Because people desperately need to see their stereotypes, and foregone conclusions about the way things are safely confirmed. And the media better deliver and pander to this impulse or else people will get mad and switch the channel. And then it is a real issue cause it's ad money on the line. Trust me – I’ve seen it in full effect.
If your friendly idealistic reporter or do-gooder editor isn’t like that then the managing editor is. Or, if not, the editor-in-chief. Or someone else up the ladder. I.e. at some point in the chain of command someone who calls the shots is taking cues from the marketing guys and making sure only the right message goes to print.
In fact, the marketing guys don’t even need to say anything – everyone knows what’s expected. What they can and can not do. My favorite is the “highlighting the plight of minorities” pieces whose true aim is to show us that exactly what we thought of minorities (lazy and stupid enough to get in the situation in the first place) is nice and true…
I was watching the Deval-Cadillac piece with my dad too and I asked him why he thought no one was challenging it (in a meaningful way). And my dad (who is fond of reminding me that “black people always get the short end of the stick and don’t you forget it, Andy”) told me about the first time he traveled to the South for business. It was in the seventies, after the Civil Rights movement, and he turned on his hotel TV. And there was a politician in a state-wide election debate railing against the other candidate who if elected, will “let those n*ggers run wild and do whatever they feel like to us...” or something to that effect.
The point was that extreme prejudice against black people was a totally acceptable part of political discourse – a main plank in a candidate’s campaign. My dad says nothing surprises him after that. And he’s right. We like to pride ourselves on our tolerance and "just" liberal attitudes in the enlightened NorthEast. But is a sucker punch that’s cleverly hidden so you don’t see it coming any better than getting drilled in the face?
Friday, July 6, 2007
Answer to Racquel RE: Red Lining Tactics
As having had a little experience in the field, I’d like to comment on an earlier post made by Racquel regarding home financing for African Americans.
She asks about the process of Red Lining, what the status of this practice is, and what can be done to prevent it.
Much has changed since the government secretly adopted this practice in the middle of the 20th century. But at the same time business is also, in a sense, carrying on as usual. It’s just a little more complicated and hard to detect now.
As an employee of a mortgage lending department it is mandatory (via a strictly enforced FDIC regulation) for me to receive annual training regarding discriminatory lending practices - along with my colleagues and anyone in the bank remotely connected to extending customers any type of credit.
Here’s info from the official speech our auditors give us during training: Red lining, as described in Rothenberg, was officially banned in 1968 by the Fair Housing Act (FHA)– part of a package of progressive "New Era" Civil Rights legislation pushed through Congress by the Johnson administration just days after Martin Luther King’s assassination. While legally banned, the practice of Red Lining continued unabated by many home financing institutions well into the 1980’s. To recap, Red Lining (at least the internal variety) is when you circle an undesirable minority neighborhood and make it your policy never to lend money or market your services there – you simply ignore it outright.
A lot of institutions considered it an unnecessary risk to lend in the predominantly minority neighborhoods they excluded because minorities were perceived as bad creditors. Plus a waste of time and effort cause lenders essentially make a percentage on the total dollar amount of any housing transaction - and a percentage of a low value property is a low value commission.
Other fair lending legislation followed to beef up the FHA including the Equal Credit Opportunity Act (bans discriminatory practices in all forms of lending – not just housing-related) and the Community Reinvestment Act – mandates and rewards institutions for serving the credit needs of all of their surrounding neighborhoods. These passed in the 1970’s, but it wasn’t until the late 1980’s with the passage of the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act (HMDA), that anti-discriminatory lending began to see strict enforcement. HMDA mandates that lenders collect sex, ethnicity, and race info regarding applicants for any major type of personal financing – including housing (but not, significantly, requests for business-related financing).
The government collects this info from all lenders across the country and makes it available in public (see here: http://www.ffiec.gov/hmda/) tables. They then analyze the data to verify compliance with anti-discrimination laws and can tell pretty quickly now (based on how high a percentage of minorities are turned down for credit – denials must be reported) if a lender is cheating.
It wasn’t until the Clinton administration required top of the line analysis and enforcement that HMDA was used to its full extent, though. When it was, a large number of very big industry players were found to be discriminating. Massive class action suits followed (remember this is more than 25 years after the FHA was passed in the first place!).
Most institutions now feel the risk of getting fined outweighs any benefits and comply as best they can. That doesn’t mean cheating doesn’t happen (there’s ways around everything) but it certainly has gone down. There’s still a big settlement from time to time, of course. See here for a basic timeline of fair credit laws and their enforcement: http://www.ffhsj.com/fairlend/timtest.htm
Personally, I can attest to HMDA and the other laws being carefully observed where I work. First of all, we spend a great deal of time (money) collecting and thinking about race/sex/ethnicity data, complying with, and submitting reports required of HMDA. And when a minority application does comes in it’s often treated like a hot potato. This means we’ll do everything in our power to grant credit. Most lending decisions are pretty bread and butter. Do some simple math (45% total debt to income is one big benchmark) and if the person qualifies, they’re good to go. If they don’t meet the mathematical criteria - tough luck.
But in cases where the numbers are shaky and on the fence, I’d have to say minorities get more benefit of the doubt. This is not for altruistic reasons, however. Banks are terrified of state and federal regulators who pay frequent checkup visits. These guys are absolute pros. All they have to do is take a 2 minute peek at your HMDA report (must be accurately maintained/subject to inspection at all times) and they can tell right away if your breaking the rules. I’ve seen them in action and it makes you sweat.
So that’s good but not the complete story.
First of all, any institution does a good bit of relationship-building reaching out/bending-the-rules for wealthy customers they’d like to attract or keep in hopes that they, in turn, will attract even more wealthy customers. Guess what color their skin is?
Secondly, a bank (very conservative) is only one of the many types of lending animals out there these days. The lending business has mushroomed lately for many underlying economic/market-driven reasons.
First off, with home prices far exceeding most salaries like never before, lenders have had to dream up all sorts of clever new products to let you have the house you can now barely afford. Including loans that have sky-high interest rates and other punishing features (rates that adjust on a periodic basis, or eat into your equity, or fancy lines of credit that operate like Master Cards secured by your house are the biggest examples) to offset any risks borrowers with not a lot of income power might present.
These risky products are referred to as sub-prime (literally “beneath the best deal”) and I’m sure you’ve heard the recent news stories. They are peddled by aggressive companies (a bank that’s in it for the long haul is too conservative to sell these) that make their money by doing a high volume of transactions and don’t hang on to the underlying debt equity. Instead, they wash their hands of the risk by packaging the debt up in bulk and selling it to an ever growing market of quick-return-hungry investors.
Bottom line is there are a lot of extremely pushy companies out there who make their money by selling risky loans to low income people (often minorities and blue collar workers) who don’t truly understand what they’re getting into. Most bankers don’t even appreciate the risks – I see it every day. Think of it this way: a lender sees a dozen transactions every day as a normal, routine part of going to the office. A typical consumer does one or two transactions in their lifetimes. Who do you think has the information advantage?
A good salesman knows a million ways to make a rotten deal sound fantastic too. And often people are willing to take them at their word cause they need the money bad. Always remember that the person on the other end of the phone is making a percentage of the total deal amount. The higher the amount, or the worse the terms, the bigger their commission (and vacation/boat/fancy SUV).
Remember also that the most unscrupulous companies make their money through high volume (calling/marketing to tons of people in media/telphone blitz campaigns) + ill-informed consumers. In fact, many deals are specifically designed so that the payment will balloon after a year or so of a low “teaser rate”. Meaning the customer will be forced to come back and pay to renegotiate another deal again and again and again. Fantastic! More commission for the lender! And with credit reports that can now measure how much debt you can take on to the penny, lenders know just how much to try and hit you up for.
Here’s a common tactic: they start by offering you a terrible deal (often that has uneccesarry insurance associated with it you don’t need but they make you feel is mandatory – they make money off this too), knowing in all likelihood you’ll say no at first. Then they keep “sweetening” the deal until you say yes. Often by lopping off unnecessary features bit by bit. In reality you wind up in the bad deal they’d intended to stick you in all along – but you think you’ve done some hard and successful bargaining.
The upshot is, now, the worst companies are preying on the minority and low income neighborhoods they once wouldn’t touch with a ten foot pole. They see these as big cash cows. Just look at the “lower your monthly payment today – we say yes!” commercials on TV. Often they’re aimed at and feature minorities and blue collar workers. These make me absolutely sick, by the way. If you understood the fine print you’d know that each and every one of these deals is financial suicide.
When the economy/rates are good, everything’s fine because people can usually keep up payment on even the worst of deals. But what happens when the job market or rates are shaky? Miss a couple payments on your crap deal or don’t have enough cash on hand to pay them for renegotiating and guess what happens? The lender’s got the house you’ve put your life savings into. It’s the biggest scam ever. I don’t know what’s worse – denying minorities credit or giving them false hope while luring them into a deal concocted to pocket everything they have. Just look at foreclosure stories or statistics and you’ll see minorities are “over represented” to an insane degree.
So what’s the best protection against scam artists? I’d say knowledge and closing that info gap. Never be afraid to ask lots of questions (salesmen prey on people’s reluctance to “appear educated” and not question), and put the lender to the test by comparison shopping.
The best resource I can recommend is the following Web site: http://www.mtgprofessor.com/. This guy is a Wharton professor and impartial consumer advocate dedicated to tipping the info scales and giving people the knowledge they need to make wise choices and protect themselves. Most of the stuff anyone would need to know (and lender’s don’t want you to know) is in his FAQ’s - written in a style easy for anyone to understand.
Finally, if you ever feel you’ve been ripped off or denied credit unfairly, there’s a phone book of laws you may not even know of, designed to protect you. There are many consumer advocacy groups dedicated to helping people out. Reach out to them!
The official government agency for this is the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). Their only job is to protect people and they’re very easy and understanding to work with. Get in touch with them (http://www.hud.gov/). They have excellent trial lawyers whose reason-for-being is to sue the pants off con artists. When HUD gets on your case a business will get scared and often settle. And that’s what your taxes pay for. So use ‘em!
She asks about the process of Red Lining, what the status of this practice is, and what can be done to prevent it.
Much has changed since the government secretly adopted this practice in the middle of the 20th century. But at the same time business is also, in a sense, carrying on as usual. It’s just a little more complicated and hard to detect now.
As an employee of a mortgage lending department it is mandatory (via a strictly enforced FDIC regulation) for me to receive annual training regarding discriminatory lending practices - along with my colleagues and anyone in the bank remotely connected to extending customers any type of credit.
Here’s info from the official speech our auditors give us during training: Red lining, as described in Rothenberg, was officially banned in 1968 by the Fair Housing Act (FHA)– part of a package of progressive "New Era" Civil Rights legislation pushed through Congress by the Johnson administration just days after Martin Luther King’s assassination. While legally banned, the practice of Red Lining continued unabated by many home financing institutions well into the 1980’s. To recap, Red Lining (at least the internal variety) is when you circle an undesirable minority neighborhood and make it your policy never to lend money or market your services there – you simply ignore it outright.
A lot of institutions considered it an unnecessary risk to lend in the predominantly minority neighborhoods they excluded because minorities were perceived as bad creditors. Plus a waste of time and effort cause lenders essentially make a percentage on the total dollar amount of any housing transaction - and a percentage of a low value property is a low value commission.
Other fair lending legislation followed to beef up the FHA including the Equal Credit Opportunity Act (bans discriminatory practices in all forms of lending – not just housing-related) and the Community Reinvestment Act – mandates and rewards institutions for serving the credit needs of all of their surrounding neighborhoods. These passed in the 1970’s, but it wasn’t until the late 1980’s with the passage of the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act (HMDA), that anti-discriminatory lending began to see strict enforcement. HMDA mandates that lenders collect sex, ethnicity, and race info regarding applicants for any major type of personal financing – including housing (but not, significantly, requests for business-related financing).
The government collects this info from all lenders across the country and makes it available in public (see here: http://www.ffiec.gov/hmda/) tables. They then analyze the data to verify compliance with anti-discrimination laws and can tell pretty quickly now (based on how high a percentage of minorities are turned down for credit – denials must be reported) if a lender is cheating.
It wasn’t until the Clinton administration required top of the line analysis and enforcement that HMDA was used to its full extent, though. When it was, a large number of very big industry players were found to be discriminating. Massive class action suits followed (remember this is more than 25 years after the FHA was passed in the first place!).
Most institutions now feel the risk of getting fined outweighs any benefits and comply as best they can. That doesn’t mean cheating doesn’t happen (there’s ways around everything) but it certainly has gone down. There’s still a big settlement from time to time, of course. See here for a basic timeline of fair credit laws and their enforcement: http://www.ffhsj.com/fairlend/timtest.htm
Personally, I can attest to HMDA and the other laws being carefully observed where I work. First of all, we spend a great deal of time (money) collecting and thinking about race/sex/ethnicity data, complying with, and submitting reports required of HMDA. And when a minority application does comes in it’s often treated like a hot potato. This means we’ll do everything in our power to grant credit. Most lending decisions are pretty bread and butter. Do some simple math (45% total debt to income is one big benchmark) and if the person qualifies, they’re good to go. If they don’t meet the mathematical criteria - tough luck.
But in cases where the numbers are shaky and on the fence, I’d have to say minorities get more benefit of the doubt. This is not for altruistic reasons, however. Banks are terrified of state and federal regulators who pay frequent checkup visits. These guys are absolute pros. All they have to do is take a 2 minute peek at your HMDA report (must be accurately maintained/subject to inspection at all times) and they can tell right away if your breaking the rules. I’ve seen them in action and it makes you sweat.
So that’s good but not the complete story.
First of all, any institution does a good bit of relationship-building reaching out/bending-the-rules for wealthy customers they’d like to attract or keep in hopes that they, in turn, will attract even more wealthy customers. Guess what color their skin is?
Secondly, a bank (very conservative) is only one of the many types of lending animals out there these days. The lending business has mushroomed lately for many underlying economic/market-driven reasons.
First off, with home prices far exceeding most salaries like never before, lenders have had to dream up all sorts of clever new products to let you have the house you can now barely afford. Including loans that have sky-high interest rates and other punishing features (rates that adjust on a periodic basis, or eat into your equity, or fancy lines of credit that operate like Master Cards secured by your house are the biggest examples) to offset any risks borrowers with not a lot of income power might present.
These risky products are referred to as sub-prime (literally “beneath the best deal”) and I’m sure you’ve heard the recent news stories. They are peddled by aggressive companies (a bank that’s in it for the long haul is too conservative to sell these) that make their money by doing a high volume of transactions and don’t hang on to the underlying debt equity. Instead, they wash their hands of the risk by packaging the debt up in bulk and selling it to an ever growing market of quick-return-hungry investors.
Bottom line is there are a lot of extremely pushy companies out there who make their money by selling risky loans to low income people (often minorities and blue collar workers) who don’t truly understand what they’re getting into. Most bankers don’t even appreciate the risks – I see it every day. Think of it this way: a lender sees a dozen transactions every day as a normal, routine part of going to the office. A typical consumer does one or two transactions in their lifetimes. Who do you think has the information advantage?
A good salesman knows a million ways to make a rotten deal sound fantastic too. And often people are willing to take them at their word cause they need the money bad. Always remember that the person on the other end of the phone is making a percentage of the total deal amount. The higher the amount, or the worse the terms, the bigger their commission (and vacation/boat/fancy SUV).
Remember also that the most unscrupulous companies make their money through high volume (calling/marketing to tons of people in media/telphone blitz campaigns) + ill-informed consumers. In fact, many deals are specifically designed so that the payment will balloon after a year or so of a low “teaser rate”. Meaning the customer will be forced to come back and pay to renegotiate another deal again and again and again. Fantastic! More commission for the lender! And with credit reports that can now measure how much debt you can take on to the penny, lenders know just how much to try and hit you up for.
Here’s a common tactic: they start by offering you a terrible deal (often that has uneccesarry insurance associated with it you don’t need but they make you feel is mandatory – they make money off this too), knowing in all likelihood you’ll say no at first. Then they keep “sweetening” the deal until you say yes. Often by lopping off unnecessary features bit by bit. In reality you wind up in the bad deal they’d intended to stick you in all along – but you think you’ve done some hard and successful bargaining.
The upshot is, now, the worst companies are preying on the minority and low income neighborhoods they once wouldn’t touch with a ten foot pole. They see these as big cash cows. Just look at the “lower your monthly payment today – we say yes!” commercials on TV. Often they’re aimed at and feature minorities and blue collar workers. These make me absolutely sick, by the way. If you understood the fine print you’d know that each and every one of these deals is financial suicide.
When the economy/rates are good, everything’s fine because people can usually keep up payment on even the worst of deals. But what happens when the job market or rates are shaky? Miss a couple payments on your crap deal or don’t have enough cash on hand to pay them for renegotiating and guess what happens? The lender’s got the house you’ve put your life savings into. It’s the biggest scam ever. I don’t know what’s worse – denying minorities credit or giving them false hope while luring them into a deal concocted to pocket everything they have. Just look at foreclosure stories or statistics and you’ll see minorities are “over represented” to an insane degree.
So what’s the best protection against scam artists? I’d say knowledge and closing that info gap. Never be afraid to ask lots of questions (salesmen prey on people’s reluctance to “appear educated” and not question), and put the lender to the test by comparison shopping.
The best resource I can recommend is the following Web site: http://www.mtgprofessor.com/. This guy is a Wharton professor and impartial consumer advocate dedicated to tipping the info scales and giving people the knowledge they need to make wise choices and protect themselves. Most of the stuff anyone would need to know (and lender’s don’t want you to know) is in his FAQ’s - written in a style easy for anyone to understand.
Finally, if you ever feel you’ve been ripped off or denied credit unfairly, there’s a phone book of laws you may not even know of, designed to protect you. There are many consumer advocacy groups dedicated to helping people out. Reach out to them!
The official government agency for this is the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). Their only job is to protect people and they’re very easy and understanding to work with. Get in touch with them (http://www.hud.gov/). They have excellent trial lawyers whose reason-for-being is to sue the pants off con artists. When HUD gets on your case a business will get scared and often settle. And that’s what your taxes pay for. So use ‘em!
Caucasia Notes
Certainly all of the main characters in 'Caucasia' struggle with the push and pull of embodying the stereotypes of the dominant group and aspiring to the oppressor's way of life. While the struggle isn't manifested within herself, even Sandy is traumatized as this dynamic pulls apart her family.
The "existential experience" of Deck is perhaps the most obvious place where Freire's concept is at work. Even as a young boy, we discover Deck is more alienated than most of his peers. "he was always a bit of a loner, you know. Preaching to us about how he was going to make it out", says his childhoof friend Tony (p. 90).
This intense "Alienation" is described by Freire as the pre-condition for this "aspiration" to take hold. And Deck, who at his worst can be an "overintellectualized creep" (p. 394) who doesn't care enough to undertake the "REAL project" of finding his daughter - is the most alienated character in the novel in that he never seems to succeed in his relationships with even those that are closest to him.
It becomes clear that as a young man, Deck did go through a long period of yearning to be "resemble the oppressor" - even at the "cost" of rejecting his own neighborhood and family. Sandy's memories of Deck at Harvard present him as someone who is desperately trying to fit and adopt the manners and attitudes of his privileged peers. This student-Deck is a "nervous" "ghost" in a Herringbone jacket (pp. 33-35) - intensely interested in great minds of the priveleged Canon. One is led to imagine this had something to do with sparking his interest in Sandy. She is rejected by and rejects her peers. And as he does the same they are able to connect in this lonely space and find comfort and love in one another.
By the time Birdie is born, Deck seems consumed with a guilty, belated reaction to his earlier attempt to "aspire". He has discovered Black Power several years too late, rails against "miscegenation", is careful to use black lingo with Ronnie and ultimately decides he must find himself a "decent" black woman. It is this counter-reaction that seems at the root of his rejection of Birdie.
It is important to note that Freire describes the desire to "aspire" as happening at a "certain point". No character seems locked into this mode of thinking. But most of the characters fall vicitim to at it at one point or another, to varying degrees.
The scene before Christmas (p. 269) in New Hampshire is one where this can be seen at work in Birdie/Jesse. She realizes she's finding a "Strange solace" in the white world. Denis's racial slurs (hierarchy; stereotypes of the other enforced) makes things "seem clearer" to her. Birdie is obviously guilty over her acquiesence and "tries to tell herself" it's (giving in to becoming/passing-for white) all "make-believe" a game she must maintain to protect her mother...
The "existential experience" of Deck is perhaps the most obvious place where Freire's concept is at work. Even as a young boy, we discover Deck is more alienated than most of his peers. "he was always a bit of a loner, you know. Preaching to us about how he was going to make it out", says his childhoof friend Tony (p. 90).
This intense "Alienation" is described by Freire as the pre-condition for this "aspiration" to take hold. And Deck, who at his worst can be an "overintellectualized creep" (p. 394) who doesn't care enough to undertake the "REAL project" of finding his daughter - is the most alienated character in the novel in that he never seems to succeed in his relationships with even those that are closest to him.
It becomes clear that as a young man, Deck did go through a long period of yearning to be "resemble the oppressor" - even at the "cost" of rejecting his own neighborhood and family. Sandy's memories of Deck at Harvard present him as someone who is desperately trying to fit and adopt the manners and attitudes of his privileged peers. This student-Deck is a "nervous" "ghost" in a Herringbone jacket (pp. 33-35) - intensely interested in great minds of the priveleged Canon. One is led to imagine this had something to do with sparking his interest in Sandy. She is rejected by and rejects her peers. And as he does the same they are able to connect in this lonely space and find comfort and love in one another.
By the time Birdie is born, Deck seems consumed with a guilty, belated reaction to his earlier attempt to "aspire". He has discovered Black Power several years too late, rails against "miscegenation", is careful to use black lingo with Ronnie and ultimately decides he must find himself a "decent" black woman. It is this counter-reaction that seems at the root of his rejection of Birdie.
It is important to note that Freire describes the desire to "aspire" as happening at a "certain point". No character seems locked into this mode of thinking. But most of the characters fall vicitim to at it at one point or another, to varying degrees.
The scene before Christmas (p. 269) in New Hampshire is one where this can be seen at work in Birdie/Jesse. She realizes she's finding a "Strange solace" in the white world. Denis's racial slurs (hierarchy; stereotypes of the other enforced) makes things "seem clearer" to her. Birdie is obviously guilty over her acquiesence and "tries to tell herself" it's (giving in to becoming/passing-for white) all "make-believe" a game she must maintain to protect her mother...
Final Project Part II - A Different Perspective on Race
One of the more fascinating aspects of visiting Latvia is observing how my relatives and people there, in general, view race. They have quite a different perspective than we do. The first thing my family and I notice – right when you get off the plane – is the degree to which everyone looks the same. There isn’t a black, Asian, or Latino face in sight except in the more touristy areas in the heart of the capital city, Riga. Everybody is lily white.
The same for the news media, television, and magazines – white people only. Moreover, white in the same way: fair-haired, blue-eyed, with dainty features and the little Latvian piggy nose (much like mine, my mum’s and my brother’s, and ALL of our Latvian friends). Even though my dad is of English/Scottish ancestry he’s rather dark and has an enormous bumpy triangular nose. He really sticks out (funny cause he would never stick out in the U.S.) and the one time he came with us people kept asking if he was Arab (most often Lebanese for some reason) – they just can’t place him.
This sameness leaves you with a very strange feeling – I’ve laughed about it with my brother and my mum more than once. And it actually starts to get to you after a while. It’s the same sort of feeling I get when I go skiing – which I took up recently. Everyone at a Vermont ski lodge is white – no exceptions – and seems very wealthy (except me and my girlfriend).
This bothers me a great deal when I go. I feel creepy, like I’m doing something exclusionary and I don’t like to eat or hang out in the base lodge for long because of it (also cause it’s expensive so I bring my own lunch). Something black people were banned from doing until recently. I justify my guilt by thinking African-Americans probably weren’t banned outright and there absence is likely due more to racism in general: ghetto-ization made it such that they didn’t live in ski-states and didn’t have the excess (lots of! – why I only go a few times a winter) income to buy equipment and lift tickets.
But to get back to Latvia – you really do feel like you’re in a weirdo Twilight Zone alternate universe. I’ve never thought about how diverse the place I live in really is. But being in a country where the opposite is true brings this home in a way I wouldn’t have the opportunity to experience otherwise.
I actually do live in an extremely diverse working class neighborhood – relatively speaking, anyway. I’m writing this on my front porch, for example, and I can currently hear Portugese being spoken down below me in the street (moms yelling at their kids on scooters), plus someone singing Spanish and playing the guitar. There’s also quite a few Chinese and Indian families – I’d say my neighborhood is about half or a little under 50% white (mainly holdovers from the Irish families who dominated the area until 30 or so years ago).
I feel most at home in a place like this, perhaps because the neighborhood where I grew up is more or less the same way. And so the sense of sameness in Latvia is quite palpable to me – oppressive even. I feel relieved when I come back to Logan and see the customs line full of people from every corner of the Globe – mainly Latino and Caribbean families. And I feel momentarily proud to live in a place that for all its problems is comparatively fair and just and has enough good opportunities that people are clamoring and risking their lives to get in. Of course, exploitative U.S. dominance of the economies of North and South America has created a situation in which America is the best place to live (in terms of material wealth).
One night last year, after leaving my aunt’s house, I was tooling around a little village (a”city” by their standards) called Jelgava in our rental car. When I’m not visiting family, which is pretty much from the moment I get up until (their) bedtime, or friends from the U.S. that have gone back permanently, I go out and talk to anyone I can get my hands on. This is quite easy because Latvians are extremely friendly and open in a charming naïve kind of way.
They would never assume a stranger would mean them any harm - as I would if randomly approached in the U.S. Plus they feel extremely proud to see that a young person from the States speaks their language and cares about them because they have a pretty big chip on their shoulders about having lived in a backwards prison-state for so long. They’re embarrassed by this and deathly afraid of being thought of as primitive, so they love to see someone take an interest. Often I’ll wind up staying in a bar or getting invited back to someone’s house where I’ll drink and talk (the national past time – the slang word for endless bull sessions is “tuseties”) well into the next morning. This drives my mother nuts, but what can you do? – I’m only there for so long.
Anyways, I was in Jelgava cause I’d never seen it, but also, in part, to dip my hand in the Lielupe River. I have a sentimental thing for wanting to have touched each of Latvia’s 6 main rivers, whose lengths, widths, and contributions to 1930’s trading were drilled into our heads during Geography class back in Latvian school. So I go do the river thing and I’m creeping through the empty, dark back streets of town looking at old buildings, when I see two drunk girls stumbling my way. I roll down my window and strike up a conversation and the next thing you know we’re in the local bar dinking it up.
But it’s closing so they convince me to take them to the capital city Riga about an hour a way. Even though the aunt we were staying with at the time is in the opposite direction, I agreed cause the girls were very funny and chatty and using a lot of slang. I figured the drive would give me some time to catch up on the latest idioms – which I love cause the Latvian we speak at home is pretty stagnant in this way.
In fact, sometimes people will tease me and say I talk like someone from the 1940’s. So I like to get current. Mainly this means learning the latest in Russian swear words – Latvian having practically none. One of the biggest Latvians insults is “ej bekot” or “go mushrooming” (an extremely popular activity – it’s perfectly acceptable to call out from work when it’s Senu laiks or “mushrooming season”. When you need to get angry most people will do it in Russian (my mom in English).
Anyways, the girls had actually hardly been to Riga (pretty typical for country folk) and were thrilled at the prospect of going. So to impress them, I arranged to meet up with some friends at an ultra-trendy underground nightclub. I’ve sort of been taken in by this group of avante-guard artist types in Riga (we met up one night the previous summer and found we shared the same tastes in Latvian literature – particularly this author who is sort of the Latvian Kerouac) and they’ve showed me all the cool-guy places to go.
We had quite a good little group going in Riga and we were getting rowdy drinking Absinthe (very popular) when the two country girls froze. Their eyes bugging out, they became fixated on something behind me. Curious, I turned to see a group of young black men walk through the bar and thinking nothing of it (it was high tourist season) I kept talking. But the girls were so antsy they couldn’t concentrate on the conversation anymore.
Finally, the braver, more talkative one of the pair says – “listen, we’re very sorry. And I’m sure you’ll think we’re being awfully silly. But you get to live in America where they have everything. We, on the other hand, have never seen a black person in our lives. You’ll have to excuse us…” And with that they jumped up and went to track down the black guys. I watched them out of the corner of my eye to see what they’d do and at first they kind of milled around behind the poor black men giggling and staring.
Finally they worked up the nerve to start a conversation. Which was very funny cause, while they talked, the girls would use every opportunity to get touchy-feely – punctuating a sentence or a laugh with a tap on the one the men’s elbows or shoulders. You could tell they just wanted desperately to see what black skin looked and felt like up close. My artiste friends, meanwhile, tried to play the whole thing off cool – like they were so cosmopolitan they had been there, done that. But their eyes told a different story – they kept staring at the group of black men when they thought I wasn’t looking.
Later on I talked to the black guys just to see what their story was (Jamaican students studying in England who’d come to celebrate finishing exams) and as we chatted, they were besieged by Latvian girls flirting and asking them to dance. The guys were pretty freaked out by the whole thing but also amused by their instant popularity.
After this incident, I became curious about Latvian’s take on black people and would try to work the subject in when I went out on my nightly rounds. Although I can’t say the people I met represent all Latvians’ take on race, by any means, I was refreshed to find that no one had any negative associations (or any associations for that matter) with black people whatsoever.
Not even the “good” stereotypes like black people are good dancers, or natural musicians and athletes. Most people were simply fascinated by them, wanted to know everything I could tell them, and seemed somewhat jealous that I lived in a place where it was common to see African-Americans everywhere.
Some Latvians are vaguely aware of American slavery, as it was one of the only things you’d learn about the greedy capitalist U.S. pigs in the old Soviet school system. But these people seemed to almost identify with the position of African-Americans as 2nd class citizens – viewing their own mistreatment by Soviet Russians as analogous – just another big empire beating up on the little guy.
When I was in the ultra-rural farm country where another aunt lives, I met a young Latvian soldier who said his unit in Iraq felt closer to black Americans than the white U.S. soldiers. Not only did the black soldiers understand proper cooking (Latvians, who have a hearty farm-food based diet are convinced American cuisine is loaded with dangerous chemicals and poisonous – which is why I gain 10 pounds through my aunts force-feeding when I visit), he said he and his men felt like they were in a similar position to the black soldiers and would discuss this with them frequently.
Similar in that they were both fighting someone else’s war which they didn’t agree with and would bring them no benefit. Latvia’s involvement in Iraq, as small as it is, is extremely unpopular with average person. No one can understand why the government’s decided to send their soldiers to a country no one knew existed before the U.S. invasion.
Another interesting take on African-Americans can be found among those Latvians who’ve recently immigrated to the U.S. Since the 1990’s there has been another wave, although they don’t interact with American-Latvians as much as you’d think.
Most live in the same neighborhoods as recent Russian immigrants to the States and tend to feel more at home there. For the first time their coming into contact and living with African-Americans as neighbors. While they’re view of black people is more biased than the neutral ignorance of their European cousins, it is still relatively benign.
For men, especially, black women are seen as eminently sexually desirable above all other peoples. The ultimate sign that you’ve “arrived” or made it in this country (learned the language and acquired some kind of job) is getting a black wife or girlfriend. I’ve seen quite a few mixed marriages lately. It works sort of along the same lines as white male’s “fetish” for the mysterious Asian woman who know how to “please her man” like no other – as seen in the video we watched in class last week.
Maybe he’s not the best example because he’s kind of a criminal (part of a little gang that travels the country returning discounted Banana Republic clothes to other locations at full price) but a friend of mine from New York has a recently arrived cousin who explained the whole thing to me. We were hanging out in his (the cousin’s) apartment in Brooklyn and he was drooling over some black girls in a music video.
I asked his about his take on black women and he said that he’d never forget his first night in America and how he couldn’t keep his eyes off the gorgeous black “keninienes” (“Queens”) as drove down Flatbush Avenue (he pronounces it Flyetbyush”). Black women he explained were the most beautiful to him because they were so different – he couldn’t have been more bored with the angular straight-haired blondes back at home. He’s currently trying to convince his girlfriend, who’s have black half Latino, to get married – but she won’t until he gets am honest job.
These experiences with observing non-Americans’ takes on race are especially fascinating to me because these particular Europeans have such a different historical position and background than we do. None of them had ever participated in a society where social identity was constructed on race. They come from a country cut off completely from the social upheavals (segregation, Civil Rights, the feminist movement, the rise of consumer media and pop culture) of the second half of the 20th century.
As such, they have not inherited many of the stereotypes that drive the social dynamic of much of the developed world. But that doesn’t mean they are not keenly aware of race. In the absence of our myths, they’ve developed their own. It is as impossible for them to not see skin color first, when encountering a stranger, as it is for me. How their attitudes on race will have shifted in the next twenties years will be a good measure of how equitable their newly developing free society has become. And as they come increasingly under the influence of U.S. culture, values, and business culture – their future attitudes may be a good measure of our own country’s social progress.
One of the more fascinating aspects of visiting Latvia is observing how my relatives and people there, in general, view race. They have quite a different perspective than we do. The first thing my family and I notice – right when you get off the plane – is the degree to which everyone looks the same. There isn’t a black, Asian, or Latino face in sight except in the more touristy areas in the heart of the capital city, Riga. Everybody is lily white.
The same for the news media, television, and magazines – white people only. Moreover, white in the same way: fair-haired, blue-eyed, with dainty features and the little Latvian piggy nose (much like mine, my mum’s and my brother’s, and ALL of our Latvian friends). Even though my dad is of English/Scottish ancestry he’s rather dark and has an enormous bumpy triangular nose. He really sticks out (funny cause he would never stick out in the U.S.) and the one time he came with us people kept asking if he was Arab (most often Lebanese for some reason) – they just can’t place him.
This sameness leaves you with a very strange feeling – I’ve laughed about it with my brother and my mum more than once. And it actually starts to get to you after a while. It’s the same sort of feeling I get when I go skiing – which I took up recently. Everyone at a Vermont ski lodge is white – no exceptions – and seems very wealthy (except me and my girlfriend).
This bothers me a great deal when I go. I feel creepy, like I’m doing something exclusionary and I don’t like to eat or hang out in the base lodge for long because of it (also cause it’s expensive so I bring my own lunch). Something black people were banned from doing until recently. I justify my guilt by thinking African-Americans probably weren’t banned outright and there absence is likely due more to racism in general: ghetto-ization made it such that they didn’t live in ski-states and didn’t have the excess (lots of! – why I only go a few times a winter) income to buy equipment and lift tickets.
But to get back to Latvia – you really do feel like you’re in a weirdo Twilight Zone alternate universe. I’ve never thought about how diverse the place I live in really is. But being in a country where the opposite is true brings this home in a way I wouldn’t have the opportunity to experience otherwise.
I actually do live in an extremely diverse working class neighborhood – relatively speaking, anyway. I’m writing this on my front porch, for example, and I can currently hear Portugese being spoken down below me in the street (moms yelling at their kids on scooters), plus someone singing Spanish and playing the guitar. There’s also quite a few Chinese and Indian families – I’d say my neighborhood is about half or a little under 50% white (mainly holdovers from the Irish families who dominated the area until 30 or so years ago).
I feel most at home in a place like this, perhaps because the neighborhood where I grew up is more or less the same way. And so the sense of sameness in Latvia is quite palpable to me – oppressive even. I feel relieved when I come back to Logan and see the customs line full of people from every corner of the Globe – mainly Latino and Caribbean families. And I feel momentarily proud to live in a place that for all its problems is comparatively fair and just and has enough good opportunities that people are clamoring and risking their lives to get in. Of course, exploitative U.S. dominance of the economies of North and South America has created a situation in which America is the best place to live (in terms of material wealth).
One night last year, after leaving my aunt’s house, I was tooling around a little village (a”city” by their standards) called Jelgava in our rental car. When I’m not visiting family, which is pretty much from the moment I get up until (their) bedtime, or friends from the U.S. that have gone back permanently, I go out and talk to anyone I can get my hands on. This is quite easy because Latvians are extremely friendly and open in a charming naïve kind of way.
They would never assume a stranger would mean them any harm - as I would if randomly approached in the U.S. Plus they feel extremely proud to see that a young person from the States speaks their language and cares about them because they have a pretty big chip on their shoulders about having lived in a backwards prison-state for so long. They’re embarrassed by this and deathly afraid of being thought of as primitive, so they love to see someone take an interest. Often I’ll wind up staying in a bar or getting invited back to someone’s house where I’ll drink and talk (the national past time – the slang word for endless bull sessions is “tuseties”) well into the next morning. This drives my mother nuts, but what can you do? – I’m only there for so long.
Anyways, I was in Jelgava cause I’d never seen it, but also, in part, to dip my hand in the Lielupe River. I have a sentimental thing for wanting to have touched each of Latvia’s 6 main rivers, whose lengths, widths, and contributions to 1930’s trading were drilled into our heads during Geography class back in Latvian school. So I go do the river thing and I’m creeping through the empty, dark back streets of town looking at old buildings, when I see two drunk girls stumbling my way. I roll down my window and strike up a conversation and the next thing you know we’re in the local bar dinking it up.
But it’s closing so they convince me to take them to the capital city Riga about an hour a way. Even though the aunt we were staying with at the time is in the opposite direction, I agreed cause the girls were very funny and chatty and using a lot of slang. I figured the drive would give me some time to catch up on the latest idioms – which I love cause the Latvian we speak at home is pretty stagnant in this way.
In fact, sometimes people will tease me and say I talk like someone from the 1940’s. So I like to get current. Mainly this means learning the latest in Russian swear words – Latvian having practically none. One of the biggest Latvians insults is “ej bekot” or “go mushrooming” (an extremely popular activity – it’s perfectly acceptable to call out from work when it’s Senu laiks or “mushrooming season”. When you need to get angry most people will do it in Russian (my mom in English).
Anyways, the girls had actually hardly been to Riga (pretty typical for country folk) and were thrilled at the prospect of going. So to impress them, I arranged to meet up with some friends at an ultra-trendy underground nightclub. I’ve sort of been taken in by this group of avante-guard artist types in Riga (we met up one night the previous summer and found we shared the same tastes in Latvian literature – particularly this author who is sort of the Latvian Kerouac) and they’ve showed me all the cool-guy places to go.
We had quite a good little group going in Riga and we were getting rowdy drinking Absinthe (very popular) when the two country girls froze. Their eyes bugging out, they became fixated on something behind me. Curious, I turned to see a group of young black men walk through the bar and thinking nothing of it (it was high tourist season) I kept talking. But the girls were so antsy they couldn’t concentrate on the conversation anymore.
Finally, the braver, more talkative one of the pair says – “listen, we’re very sorry. And I’m sure you’ll think we’re being awfully silly. But you get to live in America where they have everything. We, on the other hand, have never seen a black person in our lives. You’ll have to excuse us…” And with that they jumped up and went to track down the black guys. I watched them out of the corner of my eye to see what they’d do and at first they kind of milled around behind the poor black men giggling and staring.
Finally they worked up the nerve to start a conversation. Which was very funny cause, while they talked, the girls would use every opportunity to get touchy-feely – punctuating a sentence or a laugh with a tap on the one the men’s elbows or shoulders. You could tell they just wanted desperately to see what black skin looked and felt like up close. My artiste friends, meanwhile, tried to play the whole thing off cool – like they were so cosmopolitan they had been there, done that. But their eyes told a different story – they kept staring at the group of black men when they thought I wasn’t looking.
Later on I talked to the black guys just to see what their story was (Jamaican students studying in England who’d come to celebrate finishing exams) and as we chatted, they were besieged by Latvian girls flirting and asking them to dance. The guys were pretty freaked out by the whole thing but also amused by their instant popularity.
After this incident, I became curious about Latvian’s take on black people and would try to work the subject in when I went out on my nightly rounds. Although I can’t say the people I met represent all Latvians’ take on race, by any means, I was refreshed to find that no one had any negative associations (or any associations for that matter) with black people whatsoever.
Not even the “good” stereotypes like black people are good dancers, or natural musicians and athletes. Most people were simply fascinated by them, wanted to know everything I could tell them, and seemed somewhat jealous that I lived in a place where it was common to see African-Americans everywhere.
Some Latvians are vaguely aware of American slavery, as it was one of the only things you’d learn about the greedy capitalist U.S. pigs in the old Soviet school system. But these people seemed to almost identify with the position of African-Americans as 2nd class citizens – viewing their own mistreatment by Soviet Russians as analogous – just another big empire beating up on the little guy.
When I was in the ultra-rural farm country where another aunt lives, I met a young Latvian soldier who said his unit in Iraq felt closer to black Americans than the white U.S. soldiers. Not only did the black soldiers understand proper cooking (Latvians, who have a hearty farm-food based diet are convinced American cuisine is loaded with dangerous chemicals and poisonous – which is why I gain 10 pounds through my aunts force-feeding when I visit), he said he and his men felt like they were in a similar position to the black soldiers and would discuss this with them frequently.
Similar in that they were both fighting someone else’s war which they didn’t agree with and would bring them no benefit. Latvia’s involvement in Iraq, as small as it is, is extremely unpopular with average person. No one can understand why the government’s decided to send their soldiers to a country no one knew existed before the U.S. invasion.
Another interesting take on African-Americans can be found among those Latvians who’ve recently immigrated to the U.S. Since the 1990’s there has been another wave, although they don’t interact with American-Latvians as much as you’d think.
Most live in the same neighborhoods as recent Russian immigrants to the States and tend to feel more at home there. For the first time their coming into contact and living with African-Americans as neighbors. While they’re view of black people is more biased than the neutral ignorance of their European cousins, it is still relatively benign.
For men, especially, black women are seen as eminently sexually desirable above all other peoples. The ultimate sign that you’ve “arrived” or made it in this country (learned the language and acquired some kind of job) is getting a black wife or girlfriend. I’ve seen quite a few mixed marriages lately. It works sort of along the same lines as white male’s “fetish” for the mysterious Asian woman who know how to “please her man” like no other – as seen in the video we watched in class last week.
Maybe he’s not the best example because he’s kind of a criminal (part of a little gang that travels the country returning discounted Banana Republic clothes to other locations at full price) but a friend of mine from New York has a recently arrived cousin who explained the whole thing to me. We were hanging out in his (the cousin’s) apartment in Brooklyn and he was drooling over some black girls in a music video.
I asked his about his take on black women and he said that he’d never forget his first night in America and how he couldn’t keep his eyes off the gorgeous black “keninienes” (“Queens”) as drove down Flatbush Avenue (he pronounces it Flyetbyush”). Black women he explained were the most beautiful to him because they were so different – he couldn’t have been more bored with the angular straight-haired blondes back at home. He’s currently trying to convince his girlfriend, who’s have black half Latino, to get married – but she won’t until he gets am honest job.
These experiences with observing non-Americans’ takes on race are especially fascinating to me because these particular Europeans have such a different historical position and background than we do. None of them had ever participated in a society where social identity was constructed on race. They come from a country cut off completely from the social upheavals (segregation, Civil Rights, the feminist movement, the rise of consumer media and pop culture) of the second half of the 20th century.
As such, they have not inherited many of the stereotypes that drive the social dynamic of much of the developed world. But that doesn’t mean they are not keenly aware of race. In the absence of our myths, they’ve developed their own. It is as impossible for them to not see skin color first, when encountering a stranger, as it is for me. How their attitudes on race will have shifted in the next twenties years will be a good measure of how equitable their newly developing free society has become. And as they come increasingly under the influence of U.S. culture, values, and business culture – their future attitudes may be a good measure of our own country’s social progress.
Final Project
Background Notes for Final Project: a closer look at the dominant narrative
The best way I can think of to examine the dominant narrative of Latvian-American identity more closely is to recount my own family’s immigration to and experience in this country. I’m so intimately involved with my community and have so many friends, relatives, teachers, and acquaintances who’d tell the same story - that I know, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that my family’s experience (for my current purpose, anyways) is very much theirs.
This essay doesn’t allow me enough time to delve into earlier history (a shame because it is relevant and I can’t imagine anyone would know much about such a small backwater of Europe) so I’ll have to pick up with my grandparents as young adults, not long before they fled. If you’d like to learn more, the following Web sites are a good start (best I could find in English):
http://www.li.lv/en/?id=83 (Latvian Institute’s Brief History of Latvia)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Latvia (Wikipedia version)
Let me just say that if you did look at these details, you’d find that the appearance (mid 19th century) of a “Latvian identity” via the “Tautas Atmoda” movement – lit. “National Awakening” or of a region/nation called Latvia was, clearly, very much a construction in its own right. One highly motivated by political objectives - in this case 2nd class citizen peasants rallying to control the fruits of their labor by elevating the status of their 2,000 year old somewhat-in-common heritage from what their German and Russian masters referred to as that “sudu valoda” - lit. “shit language/culture”.
The most accessible (because their stories will be more familiar to you – a mandatory part of any European history class) analogy might be the development of Italian identity. Before the 19th century, of course, there wasn’t really an Italy or Italians in the way we think of these peoples/places now.
They hadn’t been invented yet because at this time Italy was a loosely organized collection of duchies ruled by various foreign powers. The idea of an Italian national identity was created by a small group of aristocrats and middle class merchants who worked to popularize the notion until it was finally realized by the hero-general unifier Giuseppe Garibaldi: http://encarta.msn.com/encyclopedia_761580632/Italian_Unification.html.
Most European nations have followed this model to greater or lesser degrees at some point in their histories. The point is, the foundations of this constructed identity (dominant narrative) are themselves constructions deeply rooted in political objectives…
In the late 1930’s, when my Latvian grandparents wed, they were simple farmers working small plots of land in Latvia’s middle-country, where their families had likely lived and raised crops, cows, sheep, and bees since ancient times.
All Latvian farms have a place name, typically having to do with something from the natural world, and my grandmother lived in Antuzi (name’s so ancient and archaic not even my great-aunts know what it means) with her sisters and mum, while my grandfather lived in Berzaune (Little Birch Stand) with his sisters and parents.
The farms were only several miles apart which is a huge distance in a horse and buggy culture (neither of my grandparents had traveled in a car before they fled the country). My uncles (actually my mum’s cousins) lived close by as did most of our extended family. Latvian farms are organized in clusters with each family’s fields extending out in a circle from a central community of houses, barns, a sauna (where babies were birthed – including my mum and all my friends parents), and buildings to store wheat, linen, rye, barely, cheese, beer, honey and the other traditional staples everyone produced. It looked something like this (although this is a somewhat older late 18th century version):
http://www.muzejs.lv/index.php?akt=3d&menu=dml/5&im=5&dml=all
Everyone, related or not, was very close and you just new and interacted with your neighbors to a degree that’s pretty much non-existent here and now – think Amish.
For example, the old man (who I got drunk with one afternoon) living in the Antuzi farm-cluster where my mum was born (he’s been there his whole life) isn’t related to us but remembers: my grandparents romance and marriage, the birth of my mum (he was ten or so), and being frightened of my great-grandmother and her reputation as the “Queen of Antuzi” – hilarious cause her personality was very much like that, from what I remember as a boy.
I can still picture her throwing tantrums when she didn’t want to take her medicine and the cops who’d routinely come to search for her when she’d “run away” as revenge. This guy even remembered my uncle the minute he saw him (I was there), after 62 years, and how he’d given a rousingly maudlin speech (at the age of 5!) at his favorite relative’s funeral - also very funny cause my uncle is a bit of an emotional loudmouth (he admits it himself) to this day.
The point of all this is everyone lived an extremely innocent, bucolic, close-knit-community pastoral life - much as they had for centuries. With one main exception: for the first time ever they owned their own land in their own country.
Before 1918 (Latvia independent for 1st time) everyone, with some exceptions starting at the turn of the 19th century, was a Russian citizen who had to pay taxes/tribute to the landed German aristocracy (Latvians had already long been freed from serfdom in the 1820’s). The Latvian language/culture was considered unworthy and crude. Good only for rough, uneducated peasants.
To be educated was to speak and study German. But after the 1st independence (in which a rag-tag Latvian army fought of Russia then turned against the German army who’d helped them to drive them out) the aristocrats were sent packing, Latvian became the official language taught in schools, and land was reapportioned to peasant farmers (80% or so of the population) – including my grand-parents and their parents.
My grand-parents generation was filled with the “Jaunais Laiks” or New Era optimism that only young people who had been born free to remake their country as they saw fit could possess. Everyone was enormously proud and a cultural and economic Renaissance began, along with unprecedented progressive social insurance and minority protection programs (the country achieved one of the highest standards of living in contemporary Europe) - complemented by a Roaring Twenties-style social life. Here’s a basic historical summary:
http://www.li.lv/en/?id=84
My favorite Latvian novels are definitely the ones from this time period in which authors (the capital Riga was pretty Bohemian – filled with painters, poets, and writers) sought to take part in the highly experimental, Modernist movements flowering in Europe.
During this period my grand-parents met in a newly built (in a German aristocrat’s castle – a populist move repeated all over the country) college for agricultural studies. They married in 1941 and returned to Berzaune filled with zeal for the good old three D’s – “Dievs, Daba, and Darbs” - God (not the Christian one though – this saying is ancient), Nature, and Hard Work. My granddad was installing his county’s first electric generator when war broke out.
Latvian World War II history is too complex to cover here but a quick summary goes like this: first the Soviets annexed the country in 1941 (mass deportations and killings – 30,000 or so Latvians) – which is referred to as “Baigais Gads” or The Year of Terror. Then the Nazis took over in 1942 and wiped out 70,000 Jews in a matter of months, but left Latvians more or less alone. And finally, the Soviets swept back in 1944 for the last time beginning mass deportations eventually totaling over 200,000 (pretty significant since the pre-war population was approximately 200,000).
About half the people sent away in cattle cars, after being seized in the middle of the night, never made it back. 100,000 or so were killed fighting in either the Soviet or German army. Another 200,000 fled and ultimately went into exile.
My grandparents and extended family, meanwhile, had been working the land as best they could and managed to avoid the first waive of deportations by hiding out in the woods. Everyone who was old enough remembers this quite well and when we tour the countryside my aunts and uncles will point out the little patches of forest where they’d hunkered down while the front swept back and forth.
In the fall of 1944, my mother was a few months old, my grandfather knew he was on the Soviet’s “list” (for owning a thriving farm), and so he and my uncles’ family loaded up a horse and buggy and fled towards the approaching Allies through Poland. My uncles remember this well and still tease my mum– in their child’s minds they thought her crying would attract the dive bombers making their runs everywhere.
Without getting into too much graphic detail, everyone who remembers saw some pretty bad shit – neighbor’s body parts splattered about, corpses lining the roads, etc. My uncles’ dad died in front of them. And the guy (who stayed at Antuzi) I’d mentioned earlier listened to his family (hiding in basement – he’d gone out for some reason) burn to death when the advancing Red army set fire to their farm house.
When you travel the midlands it’s still pretty messed up – huge bullet holes in many of the buildings, farms caved in from explosions – a lot of places were just never cleaned up or used again and have grown wild. It’s not just my family though – everyone has more or less similar stories.
Anyways, thanks mainly to my tough-as-nails great-grandmother (she made audio tapes for me and my brother) who spoke German and Russian (though never English – even after 35 years here!) fluently enough to pass the family off as the right ethnicity depending on which army they encountered, my family arrived in an American controlled section of Germany right before Christmas 1945. Just in time for my mum to play the baby Jesus in a GI Christmas play (crazy but absolutely true).
Eventually 200,000 Latvians made it to Germany and lived there in Displaced Persons Camps until the early 1950’s. Everyone, especially people of my mom’s generation and older, remembers this time fondly, cause you basically just sat around socializing and partying with little work to do (food, as meager – coffee and a potato as I was reminded when I didn’t eat my vegetables! - as it was, was provided free by Marshall Plan type programs).
In fact there’s a popular and ultra-nostalgic musical touring now about life at the biggest Latvian camp in Eslingen, which my best friend’s mom made me take her to when it came to Boston cause I’m a big sucker and he wouldn’t go:
http://www.eslingena.com/
As both the musical and my mum, uncles and teachers have often pointed out, the Latvians in the DP camps all thought, at first, that they’d ride out the Post World War II mess in safety. Then pick up and go right back to farming as soon as the Allies straightened things out and made the Soviet Army go home. But then they began to receive disturbing reports that those daring enough to return were being executed or sent to the Gulag for being Traitors to The Revolution.
Most Latvians (my mum included) will never forgive Roosevelt for “selling them out” and agreeing to let Stalin keep most of Eastern Europe at the Yalta conference.
And so the mass exodus began. This is why I, like most of my friends, have relatives all over the globe. As far as I know we have family in Sweden, Australia, Canada, and Germany. The U.S., of course, was everyone’s top pick but it was tough to get in.
Any history of illness, no job lined up, too many family members below or past working age and you were headed elsewhere. My uncles, because they were too young, lived in Denmark then Sweden until they were in their twenties, for example.
The classic and oft-repeated saying regarding U.S. immigration was a play on a passage from the bible: “drizak ka kamiels caur adatas aci” – “it’s easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle [than for us to get into the U.S.]”. There was even a cartoon illustrating this in a super-popular book of memoirs about “life in exile” that came out when I was a kid – drawn by a well-known Latvian (one of my grade school classmate’s grandfathers).
My family’s break came in 1949 when my mum received one of the many Red Cross care packages that were a hot commodity in the DP camps – from a family, last name Williams, living in Bridgewater Massachusetts. She says she’ll never forget how wonderful her first taste of chocolate was. My granddad who was studying English in the hopes of emigrating, wrote a thank you letter to the Williams’s and they struck up a correspondence.
Before you know it, the Williams family had lined up jobs for my grandparents cleaning houses and working as farm hands and in 1950 they came by boat to New York. No one but my granddad wanted to come. My grandmother, great grandmother, and mum were grief stricken – they had left sisters, family and friends behind. This was fairly common. Many families were broken up in this way – one half (often wives and younger children) left behind the Iron Curtain.
My grandparents worked so hard they earned the undying admiration of their sponsors and became lifelong friends. When I was little I’d visit the Williams family often with my mum and when they died they were buried next to my grandparents. My mum still goes every month or so to plant flowers and used to take me with her.
My grandparents were somewhat unique in that most Latvians (maybe 10,000 or so) who came to Massachusetts lived in Boston – almost exclusively in Roxbury, Jamaica Plain, and Mattapan. At this point, these neighborhoods were mainly occupied by other immigrants (particularly Jews, Lithuanians, and Poles) although African-Americans were beginning to arrive as well. My mum still knows Roxbury and Jamaica Plain like the back of her hand and likes to drive through these neighborhoods to point out where friends used to live and where the first Latvian Cultural Center (now in Brookline) was – a place well know for its all night dances and parties.
The Latvians worked hard and stuck to their values and before you know it they were in the suburbs, baby! The American Dream realized through determination and sticking to their guns. The whole time, as we’ve discussed previously, they shunned American life as much as they could – except for maybe ensuring their children had the finest in education. They were in exile. And as soon as the Soviet Union collapsed they would go home to their farms and loved ones and pick up life in the Latvian Golden Age they’d left behind.
Until then they’d vote Republican (anti-Communist), teach their children their language and customs and keep their bags packed. We were one big farm-cluster living together naively in the past, no thoughts of the outside world allowed. They’d only interrupt our desire to return.
The best way I can think of to examine the dominant narrative of Latvian-American identity more closely is to recount my own family’s immigration to and experience in this country. I’m so intimately involved with my community and have so many friends, relatives, teachers, and acquaintances who’d tell the same story - that I know, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that my family’s experience (for my current purpose, anyways) is very much theirs.
This essay doesn’t allow me enough time to delve into earlier history (a shame because it is relevant and I can’t imagine anyone would know much about such a small backwater of Europe) so I’ll have to pick up with my grandparents as young adults, not long before they fled. If you’d like to learn more, the following Web sites are a good start (best I could find in English):
http://www.li.lv/en/?id=83 (Latvian Institute’s Brief History of Latvia)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Latvia (Wikipedia version)
Let me just say that if you did look at these details, you’d find that the appearance (mid 19th century) of a “Latvian identity” via the “Tautas Atmoda” movement – lit. “National Awakening” or of a region/nation called Latvia was, clearly, very much a construction in its own right. One highly motivated by political objectives - in this case 2nd class citizen peasants rallying to control the fruits of their labor by elevating the status of their 2,000 year old somewhat-in-common heritage from what their German and Russian masters referred to as that “sudu valoda” - lit. “shit language/culture”.
The most accessible (because their stories will be more familiar to you – a mandatory part of any European history class) analogy might be the development of Italian identity. Before the 19th century, of course, there wasn’t really an Italy or Italians in the way we think of these peoples/places now.
They hadn’t been invented yet because at this time Italy was a loosely organized collection of duchies ruled by various foreign powers. The idea of an Italian national identity was created by a small group of aristocrats and middle class merchants who worked to popularize the notion until it was finally realized by the hero-general unifier Giuseppe Garibaldi: http://encarta.msn.com/encyclopedia_761580632/Italian_Unification.html.
Most European nations have followed this model to greater or lesser degrees at some point in their histories. The point is, the foundations of this constructed identity (dominant narrative) are themselves constructions deeply rooted in political objectives…
In the late 1930’s, when my Latvian grandparents wed, they were simple farmers working small plots of land in Latvia’s middle-country, where their families had likely lived and raised crops, cows, sheep, and bees since ancient times.
All Latvian farms have a place name, typically having to do with something from the natural world, and my grandmother lived in Antuzi (name’s so ancient and archaic not even my great-aunts know what it means) with her sisters and mum, while my grandfather lived in Berzaune (Little Birch Stand) with his sisters and parents.
The farms were only several miles apart which is a huge distance in a horse and buggy culture (neither of my grandparents had traveled in a car before they fled the country). My uncles (actually my mum’s cousins) lived close by as did most of our extended family. Latvian farms are organized in clusters with each family’s fields extending out in a circle from a central community of houses, barns, a sauna (where babies were birthed – including my mum and all my friends parents), and buildings to store wheat, linen, rye, barely, cheese, beer, honey and the other traditional staples everyone produced. It looked something like this (although this is a somewhat older late 18th century version):
http://www.muzejs.lv/index.php?akt=3d&menu=dml/5&im=5&dml=all
Everyone, related or not, was very close and you just new and interacted with your neighbors to a degree that’s pretty much non-existent here and now – think Amish.
For example, the old man (who I got drunk with one afternoon) living in the Antuzi farm-cluster where my mum was born (he’s been there his whole life) isn’t related to us but remembers: my grandparents romance and marriage, the birth of my mum (he was ten or so), and being frightened of my great-grandmother and her reputation as the “Queen of Antuzi” – hilarious cause her personality was very much like that, from what I remember as a boy.
I can still picture her throwing tantrums when she didn’t want to take her medicine and the cops who’d routinely come to search for her when she’d “run away” as revenge. This guy even remembered my uncle the minute he saw him (I was there), after 62 years, and how he’d given a rousingly maudlin speech (at the age of 5!) at his favorite relative’s funeral - also very funny cause my uncle is a bit of an emotional loudmouth (he admits it himself) to this day.
The point of all this is everyone lived an extremely innocent, bucolic, close-knit-community pastoral life - much as they had for centuries. With one main exception: for the first time ever they owned their own land in their own country.
Before 1918 (Latvia independent for 1st time) everyone, with some exceptions starting at the turn of the 19th century, was a Russian citizen who had to pay taxes/tribute to the landed German aristocracy (Latvians had already long been freed from serfdom in the 1820’s). The Latvian language/culture was considered unworthy and crude. Good only for rough, uneducated peasants.
To be educated was to speak and study German. But after the 1st independence (in which a rag-tag Latvian army fought of Russia then turned against the German army who’d helped them to drive them out) the aristocrats were sent packing, Latvian became the official language taught in schools, and land was reapportioned to peasant farmers (80% or so of the population) – including my grand-parents and their parents.
My grand-parents generation was filled with the “Jaunais Laiks” or New Era optimism that only young people who had been born free to remake their country as they saw fit could possess. Everyone was enormously proud and a cultural and economic Renaissance began, along with unprecedented progressive social insurance and minority protection programs (the country achieved one of the highest standards of living in contemporary Europe) - complemented by a Roaring Twenties-style social life. Here’s a basic historical summary:
http://www.li.lv/en/?id=84
My favorite Latvian novels are definitely the ones from this time period in which authors (the capital Riga was pretty Bohemian – filled with painters, poets, and writers) sought to take part in the highly experimental, Modernist movements flowering in Europe.
During this period my grand-parents met in a newly built (in a German aristocrat’s castle – a populist move repeated all over the country) college for agricultural studies. They married in 1941 and returned to Berzaune filled with zeal for the good old three D’s – “Dievs, Daba, and Darbs” - God (not the Christian one though – this saying is ancient), Nature, and Hard Work. My granddad was installing his county’s first electric generator when war broke out.
Latvian World War II history is too complex to cover here but a quick summary goes like this: first the Soviets annexed the country in 1941 (mass deportations and killings – 30,000 or so Latvians) – which is referred to as “Baigais Gads” or The Year of Terror. Then the Nazis took over in 1942 and wiped out 70,000 Jews in a matter of months, but left Latvians more or less alone. And finally, the Soviets swept back in 1944 for the last time beginning mass deportations eventually totaling over 200,000 (pretty significant since the pre-war population was approximately 200,000).
About half the people sent away in cattle cars, after being seized in the middle of the night, never made it back. 100,000 or so were killed fighting in either the Soviet or German army. Another 200,000 fled and ultimately went into exile.
My grandparents and extended family, meanwhile, had been working the land as best they could and managed to avoid the first waive of deportations by hiding out in the woods. Everyone who was old enough remembers this quite well and when we tour the countryside my aunts and uncles will point out the little patches of forest where they’d hunkered down while the front swept back and forth.
In the fall of 1944, my mother was a few months old, my grandfather knew he was on the Soviet’s “list” (for owning a thriving farm), and so he and my uncles’ family loaded up a horse and buggy and fled towards the approaching Allies through Poland. My uncles remember this well and still tease my mum– in their child’s minds they thought her crying would attract the dive bombers making their runs everywhere.
Without getting into too much graphic detail, everyone who remembers saw some pretty bad shit – neighbor’s body parts splattered about, corpses lining the roads, etc. My uncles’ dad died in front of them. And the guy (who stayed at Antuzi) I’d mentioned earlier listened to his family (hiding in basement – he’d gone out for some reason) burn to death when the advancing Red army set fire to their farm house.
When you travel the midlands it’s still pretty messed up – huge bullet holes in many of the buildings, farms caved in from explosions – a lot of places were just never cleaned up or used again and have grown wild. It’s not just my family though – everyone has more or less similar stories.
Anyways, thanks mainly to my tough-as-nails great-grandmother (she made audio tapes for me and my brother) who spoke German and Russian (though never English – even after 35 years here!) fluently enough to pass the family off as the right ethnicity depending on which army they encountered, my family arrived in an American controlled section of Germany right before Christmas 1945. Just in time for my mum to play the baby Jesus in a GI Christmas play (crazy but absolutely true).
Eventually 200,000 Latvians made it to Germany and lived there in Displaced Persons Camps until the early 1950’s. Everyone, especially people of my mom’s generation and older, remembers this time fondly, cause you basically just sat around socializing and partying with little work to do (food, as meager – coffee and a potato as I was reminded when I didn’t eat my vegetables! - as it was, was provided free by Marshall Plan type programs).
In fact there’s a popular and ultra-nostalgic musical touring now about life at the biggest Latvian camp in Eslingen, which my best friend’s mom made me take her to when it came to Boston cause I’m a big sucker and he wouldn’t go:
http://www.eslingena.com/
As both the musical and my mum, uncles and teachers have often pointed out, the Latvians in the DP camps all thought, at first, that they’d ride out the Post World War II mess in safety. Then pick up and go right back to farming as soon as the Allies straightened things out and made the Soviet Army go home. But then they began to receive disturbing reports that those daring enough to return were being executed or sent to the Gulag for being Traitors to The Revolution.
Most Latvians (my mum included) will never forgive Roosevelt for “selling them out” and agreeing to let Stalin keep most of Eastern Europe at the Yalta conference.
And so the mass exodus began. This is why I, like most of my friends, have relatives all over the globe. As far as I know we have family in Sweden, Australia, Canada, and Germany. The U.S., of course, was everyone’s top pick but it was tough to get in.
Any history of illness, no job lined up, too many family members below or past working age and you were headed elsewhere. My uncles, because they were too young, lived in Denmark then Sweden until they were in their twenties, for example.
The classic and oft-repeated saying regarding U.S. immigration was a play on a passage from the bible: “drizak ka kamiels caur adatas aci” – “it’s easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle [than for us to get into the U.S.]”. There was even a cartoon illustrating this in a super-popular book of memoirs about “life in exile” that came out when I was a kid – drawn by a well-known Latvian (one of my grade school classmate’s grandfathers).
My family’s break came in 1949 when my mum received one of the many Red Cross care packages that were a hot commodity in the DP camps – from a family, last name Williams, living in Bridgewater Massachusetts. She says she’ll never forget how wonderful her first taste of chocolate was. My granddad who was studying English in the hopes of emigrating, wrote a thank you letter to the Williams’s and they struck up a correspondence.
Before you know it, the Williams family had lined up jobs for my grandparents cleaning houses and working as farm hands and in 1950 they came by boat to New York. No one but my granddad wanted to come. My grandmother, great grandmother, and mum were grief stricken – they had left sisters, family and friends behind. This was fairly common. Many families were broken up in this way – one half (often wives and younger children) left behind the Iron Curtain.
My grandparents worked so hard they earned the undying admiration of their sponsors and became lifelong friends. When I was little I’d visit the Williams family often with my mum and when they died they were buried next to my grandparents. My mum still goes every month or so to plant flowers and used to take me with her.
My grandparents were somewhat unique in that most Latvians (maybe 10,000 or so) who came to Massachusetts lived in Boston – almost exclusively in Roxbury, Jamaica Plain, and Mattapan. At this point, these neighborhoods were mainly occupied by other immigrants (particularly Jews, Lithuanians, and Poles) although African-Americans were beginning to arrive as well. My mum still knows Roxbury and Jamaica Plain like the back of her hand and likes to drive through these neighborhoods to point out where friends used to live and where the first Latvian Cultural Center (now in Brookline) was – a place well know for its all night dances and parties.
The Latvians worked hard and stuck to their values and before you know it they were in the suburbs, baby! The American Dream realized through determination and sticking to their guns. The whole time, as we’ve discussed previously, they shunned American life as much as they could – except for maybe ensuring their children had the finest in education. They were in exile. And as soon as the Soviet Union collapsed they would go home to their farms and loved ones and pick up life in the Latvian Golden Age they’d left behind.
Until then they’d vote Republican (anti-Communist), teach their children their language and customs and keep their bags packed. We were one big farm-cluster living together naively in the past, no thoughts of the outside world allowed. They’d only interrupt our desire to return.
Monday, June 25, 2007
My Country Vs. Lee
I was especially fascinated by Lee’s “My Country Versus Me” because I remember following this story, to some extent, when it broke in 1999/2000 but had never heard the conclusion. I found this amazing: I never knew Lee was proved innocent! His ultimate release was obviously not deemed as important or sexy a news story as the initial charges. If it was and was as widely reported as his capture/incarceration, I would have definitely known about it cause I’m a news junky. I read CNN, the Christian Science Monitor (my favorite), NY Times, Wall St Journal, Boston Globe (less frequently) and the New Yorker pretty much every day (or month). I can’t remember Lee’s acquittal ever being mentioned. But stories about his capture/charges went through quite a new cycle lasting months.
At the time I thought: “Well it’s not quite clear if he was a spy or not. But the authorities are probably doing the right thing. As unfair as it seems, you can never be too careful when it comes to national security issues so it’s best to come down hard on people who are even remotely suspect”.
I love spy stories and when encountering them, part of me always thinks the punishment for spying or sharing national security secrets is too severe. Often it’s life imprisonment or even death – like the Rosenbergs in 1953. On the one hand, I always think even if the Rosenberg’s or Lee were guilty, what did they do but exchange paperwork and technical details that wouldn’t likely be used? [I just looked up the Rosenebrg’s, by the way, and they DID have a significant impact on the Soviets’ A-bomb development but I didn’t know this when I was initially reacting to the Lee story]
Anyways - It’s not like they directly murdered or hurt people with their own hands. And often, when you look back on it, you can see the charges/punishment were very much politically motivated. I doubt the Rosenbergs would’ve been rushed to execution if the US wasn’t at the height of its Cold War paranoia.
But then, the other side of me thinks: even a small detail released to the “enemy” could have the most devastating consequences. What if it gave a anti-US foreign regime the capability to kill or capture our spies/soldiers in the field? Or the power to develop a new weapon which could threaten millions of American lives? Or even info they could exchange with an even more hostile nation such as North Korea or Iran. Ultimately, as unfair as it might be to a handful of individuals, the US government is doing the right thing by going overboard and erring on the side of caution…
This was pretty much my viewpoint at the time the Lee “spy scandal” broke. And since I never heard Lee was cleared, my position (though I never consciously remembered the story for much longer than the stories of the initial charges) remained unchanged until this weekend.
This was why I was so embarrassed to find Lee was essentially charged with “being an ethnic Chinese”, as the Chinese for Affirmative Action group put it in the New York Times add (p. 303). The overwhelming evidence in his memoir leaves no doubt that this is exactly what happened.
I’ve always liked to believe in the comfortable notion that prejudice (at least official government prejudice) against Asians was a thing of the distant past – stamped out when the injustice of the Japanese internment camps was made highly public.
But even this rosy view of mine isn’t true. When I really look back, I’m ashamed to admit that, ultimately, my impressions of the case were motivated by the same ignorant views that informed the medias’ narratives: ethnic Asians born abroad (and particularly Chinese because they could be a loyal to a superpower that is in some ways still our enemy) may have stronger loyalties to their nation of origin. Especially because they look different, talk with a heavy accent, and are more comfortable speaking a language which (unlike Romance languages) is completely foreign and inscrutable to me. Who knows what secrets they could be hiding?
It’s not something that I thought consciously at the time, but this has to be the only reason I believed the medias’ heavily biased accounts at face value. Accounts in which Lee was presumed guilty. I never thought to question their logical inconsistencies although I do remember my dad pointing them out to me. Just look at the headlines from the time: “Suspected Chinese Spy Fired by U.S. Energy Department” (p. 90) or “Though Suspected as China Spy, Scientist Got Sensitive Job at Lab”. They make it sound as if Lee wasn’t even a citizen. But Lee was as American as they come – someone who’d dedicated himself to defending the US (in a way which would be unpalatable to many as going TOO far to help the US War Machine), was proud to drive a blue mustang to the Rose Bowl, and fish in the quintessentially American outback West.
These ignorant views of Asians is exactly what motivated the FBI investigators. Except they had enough intimate details about what Lee was really like that they knew better. And this is the government – an institution that’s supposed to guaranty justice.
Ultimately this book is excellent because it offers a counter-narrative to prejudiced misconceptions of Asians and shows in graphic detail (shackles, solitary confinement, unequal treatment at every step of the road) the consequences of these beliefs exposing them for the garbage that they are. How sad that we must be reminded yet again, though…
At the time I thought: “Well it’s not quite clear if he was a spy or not. But the authorities are probably doing the right thing. As unfair as it seems, you can never be too careful when it comes to national security issues so it’s best to come down hard on people who are even remotely suspect”.
I love spy stories and when encountering them, part of me always thinks the punishment for spying or sharing national security secrets is too severe. Often it’s life imprisonment or even death – like the Rosenbergs in 1953. On the one hand, I always think even if the Rosenberg’s or Lee were guilty, what did they do but exchange paperwork and technical details that wouldn’t likely be used? [I just looked up the Rosenebrg’s, by the way, and they DID have a significant impact on the Soviets’ A-bomb development but I didn’t know this when I was initially reacting to the Lee story]
Anyways - It’s not like they directly murdered or hurt people with their own hands. And often, when you look back on it, you can see the charges/punishment were very much politically motivated. I doubt the Rosenbergs would’ve been rushed to execution if the US wasn’t at the height of its Cold War paranoia.
But then, the other side of me thinks: even a small detail released to the “enemy” could have the most devastating consequences. What if it gave a anti-US foreign regime the capability to kill or capture our spies/soldiers in the field? Or the power to develop a new weapon which could threaten millions of American lives? Or even info they could exchange with an even more hostile nation such as North Korea or Iran. Ultimately, as unfair as it might be to a handful of individuals, the US government is doing the right thing by going overboard and erring on the side of caution…
This was pretty much my viewpoint at the time the Lee “spy scandal” broke. And since I never heard Lee was cleared, my position (though I never consciously remembered the story for much longer than the stories of the initial charges) remained unchanged until this weekend.
This was why I was so embarrassed to find Lee was essentially charged with “being an ethnic Chinese”, as the Chinese for Affirmative Action group put it in the New York Times add (p. 303). The overwhelming evidence in his memoir leaves no doubt that this is exactly what happened.
I’ve always liked to believe in the comfortable notion that prejudice (at least official government prejudice) against Asians was a thing of the distant past – stamped out when the injustice of the Japanese internment camps was made highly public.
But even this rosy view of mine isn’t true. When I really look back, I’m ashamed to admit that, ultimately, my impressions of the case were motivated by the same ignorant views that informed the medias’ narratives: ethnic Asians born abroad (and particularly Chinese because they could be a loyal to a superpower that is in some ways still our enemy) may have stronger loyalties to their nation of origin. Especially because they look different, talk with a heavy accent, and are more comfortable speaking a language which (unlike Romance languages) is completely foreign and inscrutable to me. Who knows what secrets they could be hiding?
It’s not something that I thought consciously at the time, but this has to be the only reason I believed the medias’ heavily biased accounts at face value. Accounts in which Lee was presumed guilty. I never thought to question their logical inconsistencies although I do remember my dad pointing them out to me. Just look at the headlines from the time: “Suspected Chinese Spy Fired by U.S. Energy Department” (p. 90) or “Though Suspected as China Spy, Scientist Got Sensitive Job at Lab”. They make it sound as if Lee wasn’t even a citizen. But Lee was as American as they come – someone who’d dedicated himself to defending the US (in a way which would be unpalatable to many as going TOO far to help the US War Machine), was proud to drive a blue mustang to the Rose Bowl, and fish in the quintessentially American outback West.
These ignorant views of Asians is exactly what motivated the FBI investigators. Except they had enough intimate details about what Lee was really like that they knew better. And this is the government – an institution that’s supposed to guaranty justice.
Ultimately this book is excellent because it offers a counter-narrative to prejudiced misconceptions of Asians and shows in graphic detail (shackles, solitary confinement, unequal treatment at every step of the road) the consequences of these beliefs exposing them for the garbage that they are. How sad that we must be reminded yet again, though…
Wednesday, June 20, 2007
Girlie-Dolls
My younger (by 2 years) and only brother, Ernests, had tons of dolls. My mother, an only child, always wanted a girl but knew she wouldn’t be able cause having Ern almost killed the both of them.
To compensate, she more or less treated him like a daughter. Until he was old enough to know any better, anyway. This included building up his doll collection. Big time. A very “girlie” collection too, much to the amusement of myself and my playmates. The dolls (mostly girl dolls) wore hats, frilly dresses, and even long hair and dainty eyelashes you could comb and style. Just what any little girl could hope for! And my mother would always coach him into acquiring more at every opportunity. “What kinds of dolls would you like for Christmas, Erni? Little Mandy is so cute! Wouldn’t it be great for her to have a little playmate?” Ern: “Yes, Mama!”.
This was before he followed me into making the switch to our main toy staple – guns, guns, and more guns. The more realistic looking (they didn’t have wimpy fluorescent colors for child safety in those days – we had “manly” guns made of metal!) and threatening the better. Soon after Ern’s “daughter-hood” ended we had already begun accumulating an arsenal befitting a small guerilla campaign. After a certain age it’s the only thing we wanted for Birthday’s/Christmas – “playing guns” as in “let’s play guns!” was, after all, the most popular game among the many boys in our neighborhood. My mother was horrified and openly sad that her youngest ‘daughter’ had broken free.
But while he was still ‘Mazais Ernitis’ (mazais = ‘my little’; Ernitis = Latvian diminutive for Ernests, pronounced Ehrrrrneetis) a favorite game of mine was to torture, “kidnap” (complete with ransom note), or “hang” these dolls with shoestring nooses. To my never-ending delight, Ern, who considered them living, breathing playmates would cry bitterly - then fight back like a wildcat.
One Halloween he was a witch – complete with an elaborate dress my mother spent days sewing herself. We still tease her about this. It was a long-held dream, she’s explained since, to sew beautiful outfits for the daughter she’d always wanted – just as my grandmother and great-grandmother (both sweatshop seamstresses - in this country) had done for her.
This girl-ification worked too. Cause Ern seemed to fully believe he was female for quite some time. Or at least not fully understand he was a he. Under my mum’s influence he’d consistently reject toys or ways of acting male. Until 6th grade or so he always seemed to have a girl “best friend” and gravitate towards girl playmates in general. Even now, I can’t help but think his pronounced and highly-developed “feminine side” – everyone, including his wife (who adores him for it!) notices and comments on this despite the fact my brother now LOOKS like a big, “jock-ie” ( he was an exceptional athlete) very-male (he has handsome, angular ultra-male features – a strong jaw line) doofus - is in no small part due to this early gender-bender phase of his childhood. If you asked Ern, he’d say the same without a trace of embarrassment (he’s actually quite proud of it and feels it’s given him an advantageous and unique viewpoint). Come to think of it, I’m pretty sure he noticed this connection and came up with the theory.
I should a say here, that despite being mortal enemies (and constant companions) until high school, Ern is now my closest friend. We’ve always had our own pseudo-language: a mix of sign-language, nonsense words that have their own grammatical rules, and Latvian/English slang. Let’s say we’re at a party where there are other Latvians about (ruling out Latvian as a secret form of communication). I can literally let him know exactly what I’m thinking (“the guy making a joke is NOT funny, let’s get out of here before we get sucked into an all-night booze fest” for example) with a couple of hand gestures and eye-brow signals. Friends will say “Oh oh, the Sabine brothers are in their weirdo mind-meld again”. It was with extreme delight of recognizing yourself in others that I read about Birdie and her sister’s “Elemeno”. Come to think of it, Ern and I always felt a little like we had dual identities, in a way. We never feel quite at home among Latvians (who were often openly hostile towards my dad and our last name – our Latvian school teachers would even add fake accents marks to it) nor among Americans (my mum taught us that). I hope to expand upon this later though…
But to continue - I can’t emphasize enough how much of a girl Ern was at this early stage, when the border between my mum and him-as-an-individual was at its most fluid and porous.
In fact, it’s legend in our family and among our oldest friends (our Latvian crew which we’re close enough in age to share). They still call him “Punjab” sometimes and love to laugh, tell-of and retell the nickname’s origins. To explain - this was the name of the Care Bear (actually ‘Sunshine Bear’) that went everywhere with Ern and who he named after Little Orphan Annie’s bodyguard – the movie was our fave when we were about 4 and 6.
But to wrap up this train of thought and move on to race, I can’t think of a better empirical example of Lorber’s (see particularly the intro to her piece where she describes a baby’s conditioning into its gender role pp. 54-56 in Rothenberg) description of how gender is socially constructed/imposed from the moment a baby’s born. Gender is, of course, the first door we must walk through (never to come back out; the possibilities of the other gender forever closed to us) as we become conscious of ourselves as individuals. In a way, perhaps my mum’s treatment of Ern to some extent delayed this inevitable step. At least while Ern lived only within our family. The pressure to gender, which is part of the air we breathe, the immutable law imposed by society-at-large, was of course too much. It was in kindergarten, where he was first exposed to others/society-at-large and my under my influence (I had already long been exposed to others and brought it home with me), when Ern began his gradual assumption of male-ness. I’m sure my mum was motivated in part by a desire to maintain his innocence and the taint of “pop-culture America”. In out family’s little Universe, Latvian-ness was definitely associated with the feminine and “being American” with the masculine – in a million, subtle little ways…
Could this strange gap-phase in our childhood also be why my brother and I became so obsessed with Mathew Barney’s Cremaster Cycle for a time? [Cremaster = organ in fetus that eventually descends to make male genitals or recedes to make ovaries/uterus; Barney’s exhibit is a fantastical multi-movie exploration of that imagined time of ultimate freedom and play – where ANYTHING is possible as well as the consequences of the cremaster’s development]. We went together to see his big Guggenheim show in NYC twice. I wonder. We DO go to museums together quite often but usually never see a show more than once…
I’m running out of time so I’ll have to blog about the racial component of our doll-play later. I DO have lots to say about this though…
To compensate, she more or less treated him like a daughter. Until he was old enough to know any better, anyway. This included building up his doll collection. Big time. A very “girlie” collection too, much to the amusement of myself and my playmates. The dolls (mostly girl dolls) wore hats, frilly dresses, and even long hair and dainty eyelashes you could comb and style. Just what any little girl could hope for! And my mother would always coach him into acquiring more at every opportunity. “What kinds of dolls would you like for Christmas, Erni? Little Mandy is so cute! Wouldn’t it be great for her to have a little playmate?” Ern: “Yes, Mama!”.
This was before he followed me into making the switch to our main toy staple – guns, guns, and more guns. The more realistic looking (they didn’t have wimpy fluorescent colors for child safety in those days – we had “manly” guns made of metal!) and threatening the better. Soon after Ern’s “daughter-hood” ended we had already begun accumulating an arsenal befitting a small guerilla campaign. After a certain age it’s the only thing we wanted for Birthday’s/Christmas – “playing guns” as in “let’s play guns!” was, after all, the most popular game among the many boys in our neighborhood. My mother was horrified and openly sad that her youngest ‘daughter’ had broken free.
But while he was still ‘Mazais Ernitis’ (mazais = ‘my little’; Ernitis = Latvian diminutive for Ernests, pronounced Ehrrrrneetis) a favorite game of mine was to torture, “kidnap” (complete with ransom note), or “hang” these dolls with shoestring nooses. To my never-ending delight, Ern, who considered them living, breathing playmates would cry bitterly - then fight back like a wildcat.
One Halloween he was a witch – complete with an elaborate dress my mother spent days sewing herself. We still tease her about this. It was a long-held dream, she’s explained since, to sew beautiful outfits for the daughter she’d always wanted – just as my grandmother and great-grandmother (both sweatshop seamstresses - in this country) had done for her.
This girl-ification worked too. Cause Ern seemed to fully believe he was female for quite some time. Or at least not fully understand he was a he. Under my mum’s influence he’d consistently reject toys or ways of acting male. Until 6th grade or so he always seemed to have a girl “best friend” and gravitate towards girl playmates in general. Even now, I can’t help but think his pronounced and highly-developed “feminine side” – everyone, including his wife (who adores him for it!) notices and comments on this despite the fact my brother now LOOKS like a big, “jock-ie” ( he was an exceptional athlete) very-male (he has handsome, angular ultra-male features – a strong jaw line) doofus - is in no small part due to this early gender-bender phase of his childhood. If you asked Ern, he’d say the same without a trace of embarrassment (he’s actually quite proud of it and feels it’s given him an advantageous and unique viewpoint). Come to think of it, I’m pretty sure he noticed this connection and came up with the theory.
I should a say here, that despite being mortal enemies (and constant companions) until high school, Ern is now my closest friend. We’ve always had our own pseudo-language: a mix of sign-language, nonsense words that have their own grammatical rules, and Latvian/English slang. Let’s say we’re at a party where there are other Latvians about (ruling out Latvian as a secret form of communication). I can literally let him know exactly what I’m thinking (“the guy making a joke is NOT funny, let’s get out of here before we get sucked into an all-night booze fest” for example) with a couple of hand gestures and eye-brow signals. Friends will say “Oh oh, the Sabine brothers are in their weirdo mind-meld again”. It was with extreme delight of recognizing yourself in others that I read about Birdie and her sister’s “Elemeno”. Come to think of it, Ern and I always felt a little like we had dual identities, in a way. We never feel quite at home among Latvians (who were often openly hostile towards my dad and our last name – our Latvian school teachers would even add fake accents marks to it) nor among Americans (my mum taught us that). I hope to expand upon this later though…
But to continue - I can’t emphasize enough how much of a girl Ern was at this early stage, when the border between my mum and him-as-an-individual was at its most fluid and porous.
In fact, it’s legend in our family and among our oldest friends (our Latvian crew which we’re close enough in age to share). They still call him “Punjab” sometimes and love to laugh, tell-of and retell the nickname’s origins. To explain - this was the name of the Care Bear (actually ‘Sunshine Bear’) that went everywhere with Ern and who he named after Little Orphan Annie’s bodyguard – the movie was our fave when we were about 4 and 6.
But to wrap up this train of thought and move on to race, I can’t think of a better empirical example of Lorber’s (see particularly the intro to her piece where she describes a baby’s conditioning into its gender role pp. 54-56 in Rothenberg) description of how gender is socially constructed/imposed from the moment a baby’s born. Gender is, of course, the first door we must walk through (never to come back out; the possibilities of the other gender forever closed to us) as we become conscious of ourselves as individuals. In a way, perhaps my mum’s treatment of Ern to some extent delayed this inevitable step. At least while Ern lived only within our family. The pressure to gender, which is part of the air we breathe, the immutable law imposed by society-at-large, was of course too much. It was in kindergarten, where he was first exposed to others/society-at-large and my under my influence (I had already long been exposed to others and brought it home with me), when Ern began his gradual assumption of male-ness. I’m sure my mum was motivated in part by a desire to maintain his innocence and the taint of “pop-culture America”. In out family’s little Universe, Latvian-ness was definitely associated with the feminine and “being American” with the masculine – in a million, subtle little ways…
Could this strange gap-phase in our childhood also be why my brother and I became so obsessed with Mathew Barney’s Cremaster Cycle for a time? [Cremaster = organ in fetus that eventually descends to make male genitals or recedes to make ovaries/uterus; Barney’s exhibit is a fantastical multi-movie exploration of that imagined time of ultimate freedom and play – where ANYTHING is possible as well as the consequences of the cremaster’s development]. We went together to see his big Guggenheim show in NYC twice. I wonder. We DO go to museums together quite often but usually never see a show more than once…
I’m running out of time so I’ll have to blog about the racial component of our doll-play later. I DO have lots to say about this though…
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