"Black nerds unsettle the myth of a monolithic Blackness."

"In an American imagination that has historically stereotyped Black people as alternately ignorant and emotional or sexualized and cool, the nerd — smart and cerebral, unsexy and decidedly uncool — creates cognitive dissonance. Not only do Black nerds confound racist stereotypes, they also pierce the protective orthodoxy of Blackness passed down in the United States across generations. Under slavery and Jim Crow, Black people maintaining — or at least projecting — unity proved a necessary protective practice. Strength came in numbers, as did political influence and economic clout. What would happen if we all announced publicly that we were going to start doing our own human thing without regard to the group? Few considered it worth the risk to find out. But who in 2021 benefits from thinking of Black people as just one thing? Certainly not Black individuals, who, like all individuals, are complex amalgams of shifting affinities, of inherited and chosen identities. And certainly not Black nerds, whose very existence is often rendered invisible because they present an inconvenient complication to a straightforward story of Blackness in America..."

From "The Black Nerds Redefining the Culture/By pushing back against centuries-old stereotypes, a historically overlooked community is claiming space it was long denied" by Adam Bradley (NYT).

I learned the slang term: "blerd."

Why do white people want to use the N-word?

 Question flipped:

@kendonfahr

HIT THE PLUS SIGN for more common-sense content! #fyp #CaliStarChallenge #xyzbca #JohnHughes

♬ original sound - kendonfahr

"Accompanying one original piece on the known facts, the NYT ran nine — nine! — separate stories about the incident as part of the narrative that this was an anti-Asian hate crime..."

"... fueled by white supremacy and/or misogyny. Not to be outdone, the WaPo ran sixteen separate stories on the incident as an anti-Asian white supremacist hate crime. Sixteen! One story for the facts; sixteen stories on how critical race theory would interpret the event regardless of the facts. For good measure, one of their columnists denounced reporting of law enforcement’s version of events in the newspaper, because it distracted attention from the 'real' motives. Today, the NYT ran yet another full-on critical theory piece disguised as news on how these murders are proof of structural racism and sexism — because some activists say they are. Mass killers, if they are motivated by bigotry or hate, tend to let the world know.... When the cops reported the killer’s actual confession, left-Twitter went nuts. One gender studies professor recited the litany: 'The refusal to name anti-Asianess [sic], racism, white supremacy, misogyny, or class in this is whiteness doing what it always does around justifying its death-dealing … To ignore the deeply racist and misogynistic history of hypersexualization of Asian women in this ‘explication’ from law enforcement of what emboldened this killer is also a willful erasure.'" 

From "When The Narrative Replaces The News/How the media grotesquely distorted the Atlanta massacres" by Andrew Sullivan (Substack). 

Sullivan brings up a second issue: 

Asians are targeted by elite leftists, who actively discriminate against them in higher education, and attempt to dismantle the merit-based schools where Asian-American students succeed — precisely and only because too many Asians are attending..... The more Asian-Americans succeed, the deeper the envy and hostility that can be directed toward them....

He doesn't mention the big lawsuit that's knocking on the door of the Supreme Court, Students for Fair Admissions Inc. v. President & Fellows of Harvard College. This is an effort to overrule the case that permits race to be taken into account in admissions decisions, and it is premised on the problem of discrimination against applicants with Asian ancestry. 

I've been wondering about mainstream media's intense focus on anti-Asian sentiment. Do WaPo and the NYT not notice that this newfound empathy for Asian Americans threatens to undermine affirmative action at this moment in the development of constitutional law? 

Now, I'd like to see the news told straight, without bias one way or the other, but if narratives are chosen, why are they chosen? Are they chosen carefully, with attention to collateral effects? Maybe WaPo and the NYT just plunged headlong into its narrative because it seems to work as anti-Trump or to continue the momentum of Critical Race Theory, but if you really took Critical Race Theory seriously, you'd worry that these powerful institutions were fortifying white supremacy. In that light, I'm pointing out that there's a real risk of losing affirmative action. Also visible in that light is the question whether affirmative action itself is (and always was) a mechanism of white supremacy.

Does deviousness outweigh recklessness? I really don't know.

"[N]ot all massage businesses provide sexual services... To suggest as much, as the suspect in the Atlanta area attacks did, is a 'racist assumption.... It ties specifically to the fetishization of Asian woman'...."

According to Esther Kao, "an organizer with Red Canary Song, a New York-based collective of Asian and Asian American advocates for massage parlor workers and sex workers," quoted in "Fetishized, sexualized and marginalized, Asian women are uniquely vulnerable to violence" (CNN). 

From the article: 

The way their race intersects with their gender makes Asian and Asian American women uniquely vulnerable to violence, said Sung Yeon Choimorrow, executive director of the non-profit advocacy group National Asian Pacific American Women's Forum.

The perceptions of Asian and Asian American women as submissive, hypersexual and exotic can be traced back centuries. Rachel Kuo, a scholar on race and co-leader of Asian American Feminist Collective, points to... the Page Act of 1875... enacted seemingly to restrict prostitution and forced labor. In reality, it was used systematically to prevent Chinese women from immigrating to the US, under the pretense that they were prostitutes.

US imperialism has also played a significant role in those attitudes, Kuo said.American service members, while abroad for US military activities (including the Philippine-American War, World War II and the Vietnam War), have a history of soliciting sex workers and patronizing industries that encouraged sex trafficking.

That furthered denigrating stereotypes of Asian women as sexual deviants, which were memorialized on screen. All of those perceptions "have had the effect of excusing and tolerating violence by ignoring, trivializing and normalizing it," Kuo said.Those stereotypes also feed into perceptions of "Asian women as cheap and disposable workers," said Kuo....

ADDED: This analysis functions to characterize the murderer as racially motivated even if it is true that he was, as he's said, motivated by tormenting sexual addiction. Why did he think killing these women had to do with sex? As Kao, puts it, above, it is racially prejudiced to look at these masseuses as see them as prostitutes.

"Asian-Americans are AMERICANS/They have nothing to do with a repressive Communist Party or with a virus that originated 7000 miles away on the other side of the world/Anyone without enough common sense to understand that is an idiot."

Tweeted Marco Rubio yesterday. I'm reading that quoted in a WaPo article: "Democrats link Atlanta massacre to anti-Asian rhetoric during pandemic." 

From the article: 

Authorities investigating the spasm of violence in Georgia say early signs pointed to a disturbed suspect who claimed he was a sex addict and who saw the spas as “a source of temptation that needed to be eliminated.” Authorities said it was too early to know whether the killings were also racially motivated. 

But many advocates and Democratic lawmakers said it was hard to separate Tuesday’s killings from the recent increase in anti-Asian animus, including rhetoric from President Donald Trump.... While many Democrats were quick to condemn the shooting and link it to Trump’s rhetoric, Republicans remained mostly quiet....

Trump repeatedly blamed China for unleashing the virus on the world — and tanking the United States’ economy. During the tirades, Trump repeatedly used racially insensitive names like “China virus,” “Wuhan virus” and “kung flu.”...

An Asian American schoolteacher and her husband found a slur spray-painted on the side of their Nissan Altima after leaving a movie theater. An Asian American man on his way to a boba tea shop was told, “Thanks for covid.” Across the nation, authorities have investigated roughly 3,800 incidents of anti-Asian abuse, advocates say....

Rubio's tweet is important. Imagine a new rule against criticizing China! But how many of us Americans are the "idiots" Rubio is talking about? These "idiots" are on both sides, politically. Trump, criticizing China, didn't highlight the distinction between China, the country, and people with Chinese ancestry. And Trump's antagonists enthusiastically blurred the distinction. 

I put "idiots" in quotes for 2 reasons:

1. I don't use that word, because it risks collateral damage to people who have lesser intellectual gifts.

2. Many of the people blurring the distinction between China, the country, and people with Chinese ancestry are intelligent and devious. To call these people "idiots" is to let them off the hook.

From the Online Etymology entry for "idiot": 

early 14c., "person so mentally deficient as to be incapable of ordinary reasoning;" also in Middle English "simple man, uneducated person, layman" (late 14c.), from Old French idiote "uneducated or ignorant person" (12c.), from Latin idiota "ordinary person, layman; outsider," in Late Latin "uneducated or ignorant person," from Greek idiotes "layman, person lacking professional skill" (opposed to writer, soldier, skilled workman), literally "private person" (as opposed to one taking part in public affairs), used patronizingly for "ignorant person," from idios "one's own" (see idiom).

In plural, the Greek word could mean "one's own countrymen."... 

Ha ha. That took a funny turn. 

ADDED: I read this post out loud to Meade, and he said: "We’re idiots, babe/It’s a wonder we can even feed ourselves." And: "From the Grand Coulee Dam to the Capitol."

Source material:

Idiot wind, blowing like a circle around my skull 

From the Grand Coulee Dam to the Capitol... 

Idiot wind, blowing through the buttons of our coats 

Blowing through the letters that we wrote 

Idiot wind, blowing through the dust upon our shelves

We’re idiots, babe

It’s a wonder we can even feed ourselves

"Suddenly, Robinson’s daughter went from being an outlier to finding herself in a six-student pod where most of the children were mixed-race, like her."

"The teacher Young had hired to run the pod, Teenisha Toussant, a former teaching assistant at P.S. 41, happened to be Black, too. Robinson said that her daughter seemed to notice the difference. 'I think, for her, it was, like, "Oh, it’s not so strange to have biracial parents."' Another student in the pod told Toussant, 'This is my first time not being the only brown person in my class and having a brown teacher. It makes me happy.' As for the parents, Robinson said, the pod had created a 'temporary reprieve' from school politics. 'It’s just taken the stress level down.'... Life may be easier in a pod, Robinson said, but that’s because it’s not the real world. 'It’s a fake world that we created,' she said, 'because the real world is dysfunctional. We can’t have our children growing up thinking that life is always like that. Like, "You’re only going to be surrounded by people who love you, and you’re not going to have any conflicts, because, even if you did, your parents are friends and they’re going to fix it for you."'"

From "Why Learning Pods Might Outlast the Pandemic" (The New Yorker).

Robinson is Katrina Robinson, who is identified as a lawyer who lives in the West Village (in NYC). Her daughter is a kindergartner, who, we're told "has one Black parent and one white parent." I didn't read the article carefully enough to know if the mother — the parent who's quoted a lot in the article — is the black parent or the white parent. Here's another of her quotes:

"The issue of race isn’t discussed at the school, period.... The kids are not being equipped with the tools to talk about race... Here’s my daughter, who’s Black—and who recognizes that she looks different from everyone else, and that she has one Black parent and one white parent—but there’s no discussion of any of it. It can leave a kid feeling rather isolated. It’s sort of like being the only alien in the classroom. And thinking there might be other aliens around but not knowing for sure.”

Do you think that's the black parent or the white parent talking? I don't know! Isn't it important? Why is The New Yorker being race blind about just this one thing? I'll just guess it's because this is the white parent speaking. 

The husband is referred to at one point and just called "Robinson's husband." That low level of recognition makes me think he's the white parent. I genuinely don't know, and I feel it's a little rude to wonder about the internal dynamics of mixed-race couples and the effect on their children, though I've noticed that there are academic papers on this subject — as well as folk theories.

Anyway, notice that Robinson is saying that racially segregated education is good for nonwhite children (at least in the context where the parents are choosing it voluntarily). By the way, the public school Robinson was complaining about is PS 41, a famously great school.