“Purple Cloud” by Jessica Huang

Posted in Arts, Asian Diaspora, Live Events, Media Archive, United States on 2014-01-22 15:33Z by Steven

“Purple Cloud” by Jessica Huang

Mu Preforming Arts presents: New Eyes Festival
Staged readings of the newest script from the Asian American theater canon
2014-01-23 through 2014-01-26

The Playwrights’ Center
2301 East Franklin Avenue
Minneapolis, Minnesota 55406

“Purple Cloud” by Jessica Huang
Friday, 2014-01-24, 19:30 CST (Local Time)

Weaving together the stories of Lee, a Shanghai-born man who immigrates to America during World War II, his son, a first generation Asian American, and his granddaughter whose mixed-race identity strains her relationship with her conformist father. The three family members’ stories are accompanied by a quartet of Chinese Stones, brought to America in pockets and soles of shoes, who transform slowly as the Huang family acculturates over generations.

Jessica Huang (Elysium Blues) is a multi-racial, Minneapolis-based playwright, co-founder, producer and core writer of the Unit Collective, and a 2012 recipient of a Many Voices Fellowship at the Playwrights’ Center. Various stages of her work have been produced locally at the Minnesota Fringe Festival, Pillsbury House Theatre, RedEye, and Pangea World Theater, and nationally at 2nd Generation in New York City, the University of Missouri-Columbia, the Kennedy Center and the Source Festival in Washington DC.

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Going the Distance: On and off the road with Barack Obama.

Posted in Articles, Barack Obama, Interviews, Media Archive, Politics/Public Policy, United States on 2014-01-22 03:55Z by Steven

Going the Distance: On and off the road with Barack Obama.

The New Yorker
2014-01-27

David Remnick, Editor

Obama’s Presidency is on the clock. Hard as it has been to pass legislation, the coming year is a marker, the final interval before the fight for succession becomes politically all-consuming.

On the Sunday afternoon before Thanksgiving, Barack Obama sat in the office cabin of Air Force One wearing a look of heavy-lidded annoyance. The Affordable Care Act, his signature domestic achievement and, for all its limitations, the most ambitious social legislation since the Great Society, half a century ago, was in jeopardy. His approval rating was down to forty per cent—lower than George W. Bush’s in December of 2005, when Bush admitted that the decision to invade Iraq had been based on intelligence that “turned out to be wrong.” Also, Obama said thickly, “I’ve got a fat lip.”

That morning, while playing basketball at F.B.I. headquarters, Obama went up for a rebound and came down empty-handed; he got, instead, the sort of humbling reserved for middle-aged men who stubbornly refuse the transition to the elliptical machine and Gentle Healing Yoga. This had happened before. In 2010, after taking a self-described “shellacking” in the midterm elections, Obama caught an elbow in the mouth while playing ball at Fort McNair. He wound up with a dozen stitches. The culprit then was one Reynaldo Decerega, a member of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus Institute. Decerega wasn’t invited to play again, though Obama sent him a photograph inscribed “For Rey, the only guy that ever hit the President and didn’t get arrested. Barack.”

This time, the injury was slighter and no assailant was named—“I think it was the ball,” Obama said—but the President needed little assistance in divining the metaphor in this latest insult to his person. The pundits were declaring 2013 the worst year of his Presidency. The Republicans had been sniping at Obamacare since its passage, nearly four years earlier, and HealthCare.gov, a Web site that was undertested and overmatched, was a gift to them. There were other beribboned boxes under the tree: Edward Snowden’s revelations about the National Security Agency; the failure to get anything passed on gun control or immigration reform; the unseemly waffling over whether the Egyptian coup was a coup; the solidifying wisdom in Washington that the President was “disengaged,” allergic to the forensic and seductive arts of political persuasion. The congressional Republicans quashed nearly all legislation as a matter of principle and shut down the government for sixteen days, before relenting out of sheer tactical confusion and embarrassment—and yet it was the President’s miseries that dominated the year-end summations…

…Obama’s election was one of the great markers in the black freedom struggle. In the electoral realm, ironically, the country may be more racially divided than it has been in a generation. Obama lost among white voters in 2012 by a margin greater than any victor in American history. The popular opposition to the Administration comes largely from older whites who feel threatened, underemployed, overlooked, and disdained in a globalized economy and in an increasingly diverse country. Obama’s drop in the polls in 2013 was especially grave among white voters. “There’s no doubt that there’s some folks who just really dislike me because they don’t like the idea of a black President,” Obama said. “Now, the flip side of it is there are some black folks and maybe some white folks who really like me and give me the benefit of the doubt precisely because I’m a black President.” The latter group has been less in evidence of late.

“There is a historic connection between some of the arguments that we have politically and the history of race in our country, and sometimes it’s hard to disentangle those issues,” he went on. “You can be somebody who, for very legitimate reasons, worries about the power of the federal government—that it’s distant, that it’s bureaucratic, that it’s not accountable—and as a consequence you think that more power should reside in the hands of state governments. But what’s also true, obviously, is that philosophy is wrapped up in the history of states’ rights in the context of the civil-rights movement and the Civil War and Calhoun. There’s a pretty long history there. And so I think it’s important for progressives not to dismiss out of hand arguments against my Presidency or the Democratic Party or Bill Clinton or anybody just because there’s some overlap between those criticisms and the criticisms that traditionally were directed against those who were trying to bring about greater equality for African-Americans. The flip side is I think it’s important for conservatives to recognize and answer some of the problems that are posed by that history, so that they understand if I am concerned about leaving it up to states to expand Medicaid that it may not simply be because I am this power-hungry guy in Washington who wants to crush states’ rights but, rather, because we are one country and I think it is going to be important for the entire country to make sure that poor folks in Mississippi and not just Massachusetts are healthy.”…

Read the entire article here.

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And if We Weren’t Genetically Mixed Race?

Posted in Anthropology, Articles, Caribbean/Latin America, History, Media Archive on 2014-01-22 03:38Z by Steven

And if We Weren’t Genetically Mixed Race?

Cubanow
Havana, Cuba
2013-12-23

Luis Toledo Sande (Translated by Dayamí Interián)

To effectively fight racism, it’s necessary to know everything about it and expose its tricks. Otherwise, we run the risk of getting trapped by them, since they are powerful, able to “innocently” camouflage themselves in the interstices of language, which isn’t a simple code of signs but the natural medium – the easiest and most regular, together with behavior – for expressing the conscience. The mentioned tricks have an effect even when opting for “the equality of the human races,” because these terms imply accepting the existence of races within the species, and this is central to the heart of the deception. The name of the evil, racism, reinforces prejudices, even when it’s used to fight the reality it designates, because it originated from the erroneous imposition of racial divisions on the human race and carries it implicitly.

Cuba has a special and honorable responsibility in cultivating an enlightening legacy – there have been some – the one that José Martí bequeathed to this country and to the world as part of his thinking, more than a hundred years before science proved, with discoveries related to the human genome, that humanity is one only, regardless of external differences among its members. In Nuestra América (Our America), an essay published in January 1891, Martí categorically and with good reason denied the existence of races among humans. This opinion has been cited countless times, but the persistence in the world and the country of the fallacies he repudiated confirms the urgency of reiterating it more often, as the revolutionary concept it is:

“There is no racial hatred, because there are no races. Puny, arm-chair minds string together and reheat the library-shelf races that the honest traveler and the cordial observer seek in vain in the justice of Nature, where the universal identity of man leaps forth in victorious love and turbulent appetite. The soul, equal and eternal, emanates from bodies that are diverse in form and color. Anyone who promotes and disseminates opposition or hatred among races is committing a sin against Humanity.”…

Read the entire article here.

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