One of the great speeches of all time was delivered at the Asian Law Caucus Banquet in April of 1990, by Dr. Mari J. Matsuda. I was not there to hear the speech. I read it one day online. I wish I had been there. This was a powerful speech, a call out to the pride and history of her people. The title was: “We Will Not Be Used: Are Asian-Americans the Racial Bourgeoisie?”
“Living in 19th century Europe, Marx thought mostly in terms of class. Living in 20th century America, in the land where racism found a home, I am thinking about race. Is there a racial equivalent of the economic bourgeoisie? I fear there may be, and I fear it may be us.
If white, historically, is the top of the racial hierarchy in America, and black, historically, is the bottom, will yellow assume the place of the racial middle? The role of the racial middle is a critical one. It can reinforce white supremacy if the middle deludes itself into thinking it can be just like white if it tries hard enough. Conversely, the middle can dismantle white supremacy if it refuses to be the middle, if it refuses to buy into racial hierarchy, if it refuses to abandon communities of Black and Brown people, choosing instead to form alliances with them.”
She continues:
When Asian-Americans manage to do well, their success is used against others. Internally, it is used to erase the continuing poverty and social dislocation within Asian-American communities. The media is full of stories of Asian-American whiz kids. Their successes are used to erase our problems and to disavow any responsibility for them. The dominant culture doesn’t know about drug abuse in our communities, about our high school dropouts, our AIDS victims.
Suggestions that some segments of the Asian-American community need special help are greeted with suspicion and disbelief. External to our communities, our successes are used to deny racism and to put down other groups. African-Americans and Latinos and poor whites are told, “look at those Asians — anyone can make it in this country if they really try.” The cruelty of telling this to crack babies, to workers displaced by runaway shops, and to families waiting in line at homeless shelters, is not something I want associated with my genealogy.
There is more:
Yes, my ancestors made it in this country, but they made it against the odds. In my genealogy and probably in yours, are people who went to bed hungry, who lost land to the tax collector, who worked to exhaustion and ill-health, who faced pain and relocation with the bitter stoicism we call, in Japanese, “gaman.” Many who came the hard road of our ancestors didn’t make it. Their bones are still in the mountains by the tunnels they blasted for the railroad, still in the fields where they stooped over the short-handled hoe, still in the graveyards of Europe, where they fought for a democracy that didn’t include them. Asian success was success with a dark, painful price.
To use that success to discount the hardship facing poor and working people in this country today is a sacrilege to the memory of our ancestors. It is an insult to today’s Asian-American immigrants, who work the double-triple shift, who know no leisure, who crowd two and three families to a home, who put children and old-folks alike to work at struggling family businesses or at home doing piece-work until midnight. Yes, we take pride in our success, but we should also remember the cost. The success that is our pride is not to be given over as a weapon to use against other struggling communities. I hope we will not be used to blame the poor for their poverty.
Still, there is more:
Nor should we be used to deny employment or educational opportunities to others. A recent exchange of editorials and letters in the Asian-American press reveals confusion over affirmative action. Racist anti-Asian quotas at the universities can give quotas a bad name in our community. At the same time, quotas have been the only way we’ve been able to walk through the door of persistently discriminatory institutions like the San Francisco fire department.
We need affirmative action because there are still employers who see an Asian face and see a person unfit for a leadership position. In every field where we have attained a measure of success, we are underrepresented in the real power positions. And yet, we are in danger of being manipulated into opposing affirmative action by those who say affirmative action hurts Asian-Americans.
She goes on to say:
What’s really going on here? When university administrators have secret quotas to keep down Asian admissions, this is because Asians are seen as destroying the predominantly white character of the university. Under this mentality, we can’t let in all those Asian over-achievers and maintain affirmative action for other minority groups. We can’t do both because that will mean either that our universities lose their predominantly white character, or that we have to fund more and better universities. To either of those prospects, I say, “why not?” And I condemn the voices from our own community that are translating legitimate anger at ceilings on Asian admissions into unthinking opposition to affirmative action floors needed to fight racism.
In a period when rates of educational attainment for minorities and working class Americans are going down, in a period when America is lagging behind other developed nations in literacy and learning, I hope we will not be used to deny educational opportunities to the disadvantaged and to preserve success only for the privileged.
The crescendo:
I love my Asian brothers, but I’ve lost my patience with malingering homophobia and sexism, and especially with using white racism as an excuse to resist change. You know, the “I have to be Bruce Lee because the white man wants me to be Tonto” line. Yes, the J-town boys with their black leather jackets are adorable, but the pathetic need to put down straight women, gays, and lesbians is not. To anyone in our communities who wants to bring their anger home, let’s say, “cut it out.” We will not be used against each other.
If you know Hawaiian music, you know of the ha’ina line that tells of a song about to end. This speech is about to end. It will end by recalling echoes of Asian-American resistance.
In anti-eviction struggles in Chinatowns from coast to coast and in Hawaii we heard the song, “We Shall Not Be Moved.” For the 90’s, I want to sing, “We Shall Not Be Used.” I want to remember the times when Asian-Americans stood side-by-side with African-Americans, Latinos, and progressive whites to demand social justice. I want to remember the multi-racial ILWU (International Longshoremen and Warehousemen’s Workers’ Union) that ended the plantation system in Hawaii. I want to remember the multi-racial sugar beet strikes in California that brought together Japanese, Filipino and Chicano workers to fulfill their dreams of a better life. I want to remember the American Committee for the Protection of the Foreign Born that brought together progressive Okinawan, Korean, Japanese, Chinese, and European immigrants to fight McCarthyism and deportation of political activists. I want to remember the San Francisco State College strike, and the Asian-American students who stood their ground in a multi-racial coalition to bring about ethnic studies and lasting changes in American academic life, changes that make it possible for me, as a scholar, to tell the truth as I see it.
Dr. Matsuda broke ‘em off something as it is said. This speech is one poli chic should listen to and heed.
That speech was..... stirring. I get the gist but not what the speaker was trying to accomplish if it was something other than "white man bad". So to refresh some memories don't forget how the Irish were treated when they came here in great numbers or how jews (who are also white) were despised and kept out- and I'd also say the red man was at the bottom of the totem pole in US History-
What many, and apparently even scholars, refuse to recognize is the rules can and will be broken, written or unspoken makes no difference. They will be broken and someone (like scholars) who profess a lot of knowledge would be better served IF they encouraged vs discouraging with self serving speeches- personally, even as a "white man" (with Indian blood) I encourage ANYONE and everyone who will listen to beat the suckers at their own game - no matter who "the suckers" are or what Party they associate with.
A saying I read on a Church marquee said it all- putting out anothers light doesn't make your's shine brighter- that applies to everyone, especially scholars and partisan hacks.
We also shouldn't forget how some Irish (if they were self hating enough) managed to escape that persecution by dropping that accent and changing that last name....
And thru the magic of "labeling" -- white supremacists just decided to put their beefs against the Irish aside and declare them as white like the rest of them....to consolidate power against the "darkies" of course...
They did this for Italians and other Europeans too.....
Blacks had a harder time pulling off this "passing for white" thing....so some of them decided to be docile minstrels instead for acceptance...
"Blacks had a harder time pulling off this "passing for white" thing....so some of
them decided to be docile minstrels instead for acceptance... "
WHAT??????
A minute ago you were sayin' you were part of the 'hip hop world'......
There's no loyalty any longer......
Let me know when you can refute a single thing I said??
Who, exactly, is white? The answer sounds obvious — we know a white person when we see one, we think. But when Italians poured into America in the late 1800s and early 1900s, they were not considered white upon arrival. A century later, though, when Teresa Giudice of The Real Housewives of New...
theundefeated.com
“If he proves himself a man, and … acquires wealth and cleans himself up — very well, we might receive him in a generation or two. But at present he is far beneath us, and the burden of proof rests with him. They ultimately met that burden and crucial to their success was that they were not black and they actively helped in maintaining a racist society. ” -- they were talking about European immigrants......
But wait...there is more....
"Greeks, for example, fretted about being mistaken for Puerto Ricans, mulattoes or Mexicans. J.D. Ross, an Alabama politician, dubbed himself the “white man’s candidate” and campaigned on Greek disenfranchisement. In Utah, Greek and Italian copper miners were classified as “nonwhite.” White workers in Steelton, Pennsylvania, refused to take “hunky jobs” — jobs traditionally held by Hungarians — even during the poor economy of 1908, preferring unemployment. "
So like I said -- there were blacks who tried to pass for white........if you were fair-skinned enough, you could pass for white and avoid the discrimination that blacks endured....
My great grandmother was very very fair-skinned -- but that came about due to her mother being raped -- so she found it a slap in the face to deny her black mother in order to pass just to be accepted by the same folks who raped her mother.....
From the time of slavery, some light-skinned African-Americans escaped racism by passing as white. The new book, A Chosen Exile: A History of Racial Passing in American Life, explores what they lost.
www.npr.org
Why?
This is what brought you crawling in......
When The Good Ship ‘Democrat’ Ran Aground.
Or....There no longer is a Democrat Party
And poor Captain Nancy-Bligh has had to walk the plank!
What it means is that the last remnant of the Democrat Party being an American political party has been eradicated. The old Liberal war cry ‘Better Red Than Dead’ has come to pass….both options.....
'Red' and 'Dead.'
There is no longer any doubt that
the current iteration of this party is closer to Lee Harvey Oswald than it is to John F. Kennedy.
But don’t cheer just yet. It hurts all Americans.
1.Congressional Progressive Caucus was founded in 1991 by
Bernie Sanders-the openly socialist then Congressman from Vermont,
Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) and the radical Washington DC based "think tank"
Institute for Policy Studies (IPS).
Many members were and continue to be
linked to DSA and/or the Communist Party USA, IPS or other radical organizations.
From small beginnings the CPC has grown to embrace more than 80 members of Congress and three in the Senate.
Congressional Progressive Caucus - KeyWiki
2. I can trace it back even further, but, focus on Bernie….” he spawned the CPC himself nearly three decades ago. With respect to 2020,
Democrat Party is embracing the ideas of Sanders and the Squad, as well as the person of the octogenarian and his ideological progeny. As liberal comedian and political observer Bill Maher pithily describes it, his fellow
Leftists are “coming across as unserious people who are going to take away all your money so migrants from Honduras can go to college for free and get a major in ‘America sucks.’”
What Bill Maher gets completely wrong
Bill Maher said, "All the Democrats have to do to win is to come off less crazy than Trump — and, of course, they're blowing it." But Julian Zelizer argues that playing it safe could cause Democrats to lose the White House in 2020.
www.cnn.com
They portray support for anything less than open, “decriminalized” borders as heartless, immoral and un-American. Democrats have by and large endorsed AOC’s Green New Deal, and the decarbonization and therefore deindustrialization of our economy, believing that absent the abolition of capitalism and the redistribution of its remaining fruits, the Earth will end in about a decade.
Where 2020 candidates stand on the Green New Deal and climate policy
CNN’s Presidential Climate Change Town Hall Was Insane
Democrats are proposing climate-change policies that would not only require massive societal upheaval but mass coercion to enforce.
thefederalist.com
The Democratic Party now also supports third-trimester abortions—if not outright infanticide upon delivery—for all who seek it, including illegal aliens
Ilhan Omar: America Has a Responsibility to Provide Abortions to Illegal Immigrants
Who is it Democrat voters bow the neck and the knee to?
3. Pelosi WAS in charge.....not anymore.
“
PROTESTERS WITH THE environmental group Sunrise marched on Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi’s office on Tuesday. The group, made up of young people pushing for urgent action on climate change, planned to send a clear message to party leadership just one week after Democrats regained control of the House.”
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Joins Environmental Activists in Protest at Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi’s Office
Ocasio-Cortez’s decision to break with decorum and join the protesters could, paradoxically, open up space for her to support Pelosi on the House floor.
theintercept.com
4. Before 2019 even began, Rep. Alexandria
Ocasio-Cortez joined the Sunrise Movement and the Justice Democrats activist group she led, in a climate change sit-in held at Speaker Pelosi’s office. This was the first sign of the insubordination to come—an insubordination based in a belief that the establishment was no match for the freshmen insurgents.
Ocasio-Cortez joins climate change sit-in at Pelosi's office
Congresswoman-elect Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez joined 150 youth activists in a Tuesday sit-in at House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi's Capitol Hill office, where the group called for congressional action on climate change.
thehill.com
Poor Captain Nancy thought she could hold the rebels back…..wrong.
Clearly everything in every one of my posts is 100% true, correct and accurate.
www.cnn.com
thefederalist.com
theintercept.com
thehill.com
