DagSeoul: Positions, Populations, Punk, Poetics

What’s the point?

Hey look anarcho-queer is circulating a photo of an alleged rapist sitting next to Michelle Obama because that is supposed to make a point

about what?

Want to tell a story about a rapist? Tell a story about a rapist, then. Want to say all cops are bastards? Then say it and stick to the point.

The story has nothing to do with Michelle Obama. Unless you’re trying to make another point via an implied association: or worse, you’ve lazily implemented the kind of association that relies on broad generalizations about social status, race, gender, sex, and class in order to encourage readers to properly infer unstated and unsavory assumptions that manipulate often unconscious and oppressive notions about others merely to increase the emotion for your story. There’s a surplus of unstated associations that seep from this image if you associate it with the headline “HERO COP IS A RAPIST”. And none of them are accurate, none of them useful.

If this was not your intent, then I’d like a reason for the photo to accompany the story. Is your point merely that this cop was awarded for bravery but is yet an alleged rapist? That’s not at all interesting and not at all informative. Why the photo with Michelle Obama? Did you mindlessly post the photo that accompanied the original story? Or do you agree with it’s logic? If so, then how come?

Let me be clear. Why not just admit you have nothing much to say about anything with rigor, with good writing, but plenty to say via snide association that is rather fucking meaningless and useless, most likely harmful and lazy. Do I need to explain how this photo works with this story?

Tumblr is mostly awful. And this is an example of how awful it can get without even trying very hard. I’m sure anarcho-queer is being lazy, but it’s a dangerous and uncritical laziness. And I’m not going to silently observe it.

A black man with a gun and weed? That’s a gangster. A white man? A libertarian.

Let’s not forget this. As US citizens learn to see themselves as increasingly progressive regarding drug culture and legislation, you’ll notice the attack (stop and frisk policies, for example,) on black and brown citizens increases rather than wanes as the police reorganize and re-activate. It’s no surprise marijuana will begin to become legalized for recreational use. But that doesn’t represent a victory. Quite the contrary, it represents a repression. The freedoms marijuana is associated with have long ago been almost entirely and concretely racialized.

And progressive gun-ownership culture has always been about white property owners no matter how hard white people try to revise history.

Don’t send me notes about drugs and drug culture.

#white power 101

So, here we have a study that is designed to reward liberals for their enlightenment while ignoring that liberal tolerance is rather viciously racist.

Here’s what I find to be a problematic take of it in The Washington Post.

Never mind that, but what do you think about the fact that this ignores imperialism and colonialism? Is it any surprise the blue countries were settled by colonizers while the reddish nations like Korea and India were long occupied and rejected occupation as a matter of independence? It seems like the blue nations get to congratulate themselves for their forced integration that is long in the past while the red nations are being punished for their nationalism the result of recent independence. Not at all ignoring evident oppressive bigotries in India and Korea, just pointing out that using “wealth” is convenient and might highlight a bias in the research.

And France has a different conception of sovereignty and so I’m not at all surprised that reactionary whites are annoyed that immigrants of color are as French as they are. France is the outlier here, not Korea.

What do you all think?

I do not quote the article because my response is about the unstated assumptions and tone of the article as much as anything else. Honestly, it’s a poorly written piece and haphazardly put together. It’s clearly got more than one author. The authors implement a kind of self-centered and problematic narrative foreign teachers often use to talk about Korea and Koreans, thus it’s uncritical and self-affirming. It’s enough to ask a reader to quickly read the article and then my response. If you’d like me to address a point from the article, I’m more than happy to. Feel free to send me a note or reblog with a question.

~

It’s creepy the authors use the HIV, AIDS, STD tests as a tool to scold Koreans for their treatment of foreign teachers. These guys have been on about this for years, and longer than I’ve been here. For being such professional Korea haters, they have never left. They have comfortable, happy lives here. They always use the AIDS argument and they always use a comparison to the military. I’ll try to address the problems I see with both arguments.

The conservative Korean culture that tends to worry about purity and that might most benefit from the metaphor that AIDS is a sign of foreign contamination and that foreign men want to corrupt Korean women is not opposed to the US military presence on the peninsula. So, the comparison in the article that foreign teachers are the new American soldier doesn’t really work. The comparisons tell us much more about the men making the argument and what it is they are trying to construct—a better place for them to work.

The problem—bigotry towards foreigners and its persistence in spite of evidence to the contrary—is much more complex than the authors want to present. In many ways, American occupation of Korea during and since the US War here and American cooperation with Japan’s occupation has suited both the US and Korean governments and ruling elites. Let’s not overlook and forget that leftwing uprisings have been historically slaughtered while Americans looked on and did nothing. Sure, the Korean media is overwhelmingly conservative and spreads malicious rhetoric, from time to time, about foreign teachers as it does Americans, in general, but this propaganda has served US interests as well. I certainly don’t ever hear men like the authors complaining about the US in Korea.

As most conservative governance illustrates, its constituents must fear a persistent foreign influence. The US military presence has historically backed authoritarian conservatives for a reason. It’s the leftists in Korea who bang the drum to end occupation. This, too, is complex. Unfortunately, the left is rather nationalist with its relative anti-capitalist culture, pro-labor culture, and so Korean leftist action carries with it all the complications nationalism brings to any social action, like highly-structured bigotry against foreign elements within both the movement and nation. Additionally unfortunately, nationalism is rather complex and a response to Japanese and American occupations, and so it’s explicable and not simply bigoted rhetoric. Korean independence is not as simplistic as, say, American Exceptionalism, if we want to compare nationalist extremism. It’s not only more complex (one only need know Korea’s modern history to understand how complex) but it’s more aware of itself and its mission. Nobody has occupied the US, but American conservatives find foreigners to blame. Some particular somebody has consistently been involved with a project to occupy Korea and to discipline Koreans since the middle of the 19th Century. Their worries are justified. The elite (Korean government and corporate elites often historically with US backing) have every reason to help cultivate these bigotries.

The article I’ve linked to ignores this complexity in Korean attitudes towards foreigners for a self-serving purpose. It wants to compare the way Koreans think about foreign teachers to the way Koreans think about American soldiers. The comparison doesn’t hold. Korea invites teachers and offers them outstanding benefits in comparison to the shit we take for being foreigners. It’s a cooked up comparison that loses its punch under the slightest scrutiny. I really hate how the argument composes a Korean culture that is narrow and stupid and merely self-concerned, wrapped up in old myths. It’s just not the case that Koreans are of one mind about anything.

Sure, the bigotry is present and the falsehoods often appear pointless and harmful to everyone. It’s just not as simple as the authors make it. How long has it taken for the US to even attempt to begin addressing anti-black racism? We have never done it. Not yet. We don’t even like to talk about it. In fact, people tell lies about how racism is over. That’s how bad it is in the US. Koreans know they’re bigots. This isn’t a slight. All my Korean friends admit it. It’s shameful for me to hear the confession because I can’t even get my family members to address bigotry. Koreans are talking about these things.

The major altercations of the war are only just 60 years since and people are still coping with Japanese occupation. The economic ascendance of the peninsula is only two decades old. They rebuilt an entire country under the weight of authoritarian rule. They worked for their nation. Not for a teacher to feel comfortable teaching English in Korea. I get Korean contempt for foreign teachers who naively perform privileges and constantly complain about a backwards Korea. There’s a lot that Korea has learned about the world in such a short period of time. And it’s a lot of knowledge that I don’t have. It’s not that I know something they don’t know. And this is what the article assumes with its tone. That the authors and most foreign teachers are trustworthy for some reason that Koreans just won’t accept. This is simply bullshit; and a sign of another kind of bigotry that liberals always fail to examine. I don’t think it’s asking much to let Korea work out some shit on its own and learn what it means to navigate liberal, global capitalist culture without privileged intellectualist foreigners insisting cultural occupation persist until Koreans learn to properly behave.

In the 60 years since we permitted non-white people citizenship, how much has been done to find other ways to oppress foreign people of color in the US? Do I think that it’s silly and harmful for Koreans to circulate worries that foreign teachers are capable of infecting students with HIV, with AIDS, with STDs, simply by teaching in classrooms, or that, worse, we’re perverts? It’s silly and harmful. That said, foreign teachers do nothing to change public perception of them nor do they come from societies that have learned how to solve this problem of hating foreigners. Fulfilling contracts is not going to achieve any change in perception. You have to get out of the foreign ghettoes and get into Korea and make a difference. 

Moreover, US, Canadian, and British citizens also express silly and harmful narratives about dirty and criminal immigrants. This is not a Korean concern. It’s international. So, we have an international concern about nationalism, authoritarianism, military occupation, the preservation of unique cultures, the stigmatization of sexual difference and illiteracy about illness. So, what do these authors who have decided they aren’t going to take it do? They make it a problem of convenience and ego. The article is clearly set up with the unstated assumption “judge me as an individual, not as a group” and that assumption undercuts any sympathy I’d be prepared to offer an individual who feels ashamed the result of a blood test their employer receives. It’s clear the authors don’t respect the group they want to be a member of nor do they respect the group they have constructed for themselves.

We all know for a fact that these authors aren’t activists. What work have they done? Not hard to complete research and find articles testifying about how harmful it is to be ignorant of illnesses. These are teachers who would never utter another peep about bigoted Koreans were Korea to legislate a more progressive Visa structure for teachers. Their concern is extremely narrow and strictly individualist. They don’t give a shit about the thousands of oppressed laboring immigrants in Korea. They only care about the teachers. All this whining about the UN response to their complaint is purely egoist bragging about a stupid moral victory over a perceived Korean bigotry that I have shown is much more complex and much more inclusive of the US bigotry than it would first appear.

This article is poor argumentative method and I think it’s implicitly homophobic and prejudiced. When people start talking about “gays”, bad things happen because “gays” are often treated as a monolithic identity and for purposes of establishing a kind of liberal social order in the discourse. Gays become a tool. These are straight men and women who want us to sympathize with them because their school wants them to prove they have no STDs and don’t have HIV or AIDS. In Korea, this is a means to suss out transgressive sexualities as much as it is to keep Koreans healthy. So, the teachers are embarrassed that Koreans think they are perverts. That’s what this is about. It’s terrible stuff. The authors aren’t being honest. I’ve always said, who do I care who sees a blood test result? But then I have a different experience with conservative Korean culture that these authors rail about. This dirty leftist teacher gets along just fine in spite of the annual hassle of renewing my Visa. I have never experienced one bit of pushback for who I am. Much more the opposite, in fact. I have experienced overwhelming curiosity. So, you know, the authors don’t represent me. And quite frankly they love saying they represent all of us when they clearly aren’t interested in different narratives just as they aren’t interested in other immigrants.

I may agree with their assessment of Anti-English Spectrum, much of Korean print journalism, the Korean government’s failure to appropriately address a problem that would be easy to fix, but I fail to sympathize with their methods, their rhetoric, their self-representation. The foreign teaching population is filled with self-loathing, alcoholism, sexual predation, illiteracy, and falsified credentials. None of these are so uncommon that we’re shocked when we learn about an incident. Teachers skip work when it serves them and breach contracts all the time. Sure, me and my friends, we’re dedicated teachers and work hard at our craft, but the schools and universities are also filled with teachers who simply don’t want to lose a good job and aren’t willing to do much to earn their keep. They’re in Korea for other reasons. 

We have to deal with the complicated issues with care. And I don’t think these authors have ever approached this debate with anything other than a selfish sense of unearned ambition and desire to find ways to justify becoming more free and upwardly mobile within Korean society without having to actually do any of the social work necessary to transform the problems they purport to address.

I wasn’t the sexualized Western female, the fat American, the junior coworker.

KEVIN, my Korean co-teacher, had an idea for our open class. “Let’s make a motivational video,” he suggested. “I’ll ask, ‘Would you like some more?’ you’ll say, ‘Yes, please,’ and after we repeat this a couple times, you’ll stuff your shirt with balloons. When you stand up to clear your tray, you’ll look really fat!”

“Really, Kevin? I have to be the fat foreigner?”

“It would be so funny,” he assured me, “and it would make the students more interested in the lesson.”

I sighed. I wasn’t too keen on the idea of humiliating myself in front of all my students and the classroom evaluators by acting as the stereotypical fat Westerner, but I wasn’t opposed to the idea either. It certainly wasn’t politically correct, and I would never think to create a “humorous” video like this in the United States. But I wasn’t in the United States; I was in Korea, and after several months living as an expat and teaching English in Seoul, I knew that the image of “fat people” made Koreans of all ages burst into uncontrollable fits of laughter.

Fucking Koreans, right?! I mean, Shaw knew how much they love to laugh at fat people, but there she was actually observing Koreans laughing at fat people. How did this happen? Not privilege, certainly. Except, she was going to have to be that fat person and that wasn’t comfortable. Instead of telling her co-teacher, “Kevin, I’m not dressing up in balloons to be a person everyone will laugh at because I think it’s demeaning and weird,” Sarah put on the fat-suit made of balloons anyway. After all, these teachers, these students, these people, her neighbors, all Koreans, are just part of her experiment in playing with others’ cultures.

This story is the introduction to Shaw’s essay about being foreign in Korea Apparently, two things must be included in every white narrative about life in Korea: in spite of great jobs, safe social lives, impressive health care, and a large community of foreigners in a country where an English speaker with absolutely no knowledge of the native language can get around with relatively few difficulties, authors must illustrate how humiliating it is to be a white minority and how ignorant Koreans can be.

Notice how, even though Shaw participated in the stupid project rather than creating a better one of her own, she conveniently gives herself a Get-Out-of-a-Moral-Dilemma-Free pass because “I wasn’t in the US, I was in Korea” and she just wanted to make the kids laugh, even if it was at fat people. Sounds like a wonderful teaching moment, right? Not for this teacher. Hell no. She was just a powerless foreign woman who Kevin Teacher was masterfully dominating, though he clearly had no clue about it.

We should keep track of the tourist teacher clichés in this post. We have three here. One, Koreans are mindless bigots. Two, Korean sense of humor is just crude slapstick like laughing at fat people and farts and no one in the world has ever seen other people laugh at this shit. Three, Korean men are naive sexists. With only the introduction to her foreigner memoir out of the way, Sarah Shaw is really taking it to Korean culture.

Republic of Korea 0 : 3 Sarah Shaw

After studying in Seoul as an exchange student in 2009, I returned to teach English at a public school in 2011. I was placed at a low-income elementary school located in northeast Seoul, where half of the students’ families were receiving welfare checks from the government, and I was paired with Kevin, a 40-year-old devout Christian, married with two children. Kevin was raised in the mountainous countryside and spent his youth studying diligently in order to gain acceptance at a prestigious university in Seoul. Because of his humble background, good sense of humor, and years of experience working with children, Kevin could easily connect with our 12-year-old students. We’d teach together Monday through Friday for 22 hours a week, and we’d often role play. In one instance I asked, “What are you doing?” and Kevin immediately squatted down, contorted his face, and responded, “I’m pooping!” indulging in a classic form of Korean slapstick humor. The boys burst into fits of giggles, while most of the girls wrinkled their noses in disgust. I laughed, and thought, This man is having more fun than the kids.

This is going nowhere good is it. Shaw is scoring high cliché points, though, and completely shutting the actual Korea and its culture out. In one paragraph, she professionally emasculates Kevin. Sure, Shaw admits that he makes her feel comfortable, but it’s clear he’d be offended and embarrassed by her ridiculous representation of him as obeisant to Christianity and Acceptance. In one sentence, she wonders at his years of dedication as a student to achieve such humble placement as a teacher in a working class school (another cliché) and, in the next, she infantilizes him by performing being gobsmacked that he could “easily connect with our 12-year-old students.” I could go on, but you get the point, I hope.

Korean men never fare well when white feminists write about them unless they’ve married one or are happily dating one. Then Korean men are great. Typically, though, Korean men are often not only patronized in these discussions but talked about as if they were little boys. Shaw’s essay is not only a harsh generalization, so far relying on stereotypical descriptions, but it has not one citation to back up claims like “I was placed at a low-income elementary school in northeast Seoul, where half of the students’ families were receiving welfare checks from the government… .” White people are really only ever doing good if they’re hanging around with poorer people of color. Moreover, if you had never lived in Seoul, you might think Shaw was stuck out in the dangerous ghettoes in the hinterlands of Seoul, out “northeast”. However, the truth is that she was teaching in an area where thousands of foreign teachers live.

What Shaw needs is an editor with a fucking stick standing behind her to punish her for each generalization, hyperbole, and bullshit claim she makes. Is this a memoir meant to explain what life is like in Seoul as a foreign teacher or is it an attempt to settle a score? I think the latter because Shaw has scored often in only several paragraphs.

Republic of Korea 0 : 6 Sarah Shaw

 From the first day in the classroom, Kevin made me feel comfortable. We would have contests where the students would write the days of the week in English and I would have to write them in Korean. He would give extra attention to the low-level students to encourage them to enjoy studying English, and I would laugh when he would enthusiastically respond to things that I found quite normal, such as glimpsing a screen full of women in bikinis when he googled the word “hot” for our lesson about temperature.

Because of our extroverted natures, Kevin and I were able to chat freely, but as an older man in an ageist society, he could also be quite stubborn and controlling. On Thanksgiving, we argued for 15 minutes in front of the class after he thought my explanation of American Thanksgiving was wrong. Another time, in Korean, he jokingly told the class I had failed my required drug test. “Kevin, that didn’t happen!” I retorted, “They’ll tell their parents!” He was shocked that I’d understood.

You’d think with that first sentence, Shaw was going to give Kevin a little credit. Right? Nope. She’s merely setting Kevin up again. Though he really loves his students, he’s just a little boy who gets shy seeing women in bikinis. Though extroverted—whatever that means because Shaw never explains a fucking thing—Kevin took advantage of her open nature and told the kids she was a drug addict. Here we have clichés #7 and #8: all Koreans think foreigners are drug addicts and Koreans don’t think foreigners can understand them. We have no reason not to believe Kevin Teacher said this to some of the students, though it’s strange for an elementary teacher to talk this way to the kids. What’s missing is any sort of attempt to place the accusation in context. All we get is a description of the claim itself. Shaw simply cannot or is willfully refusing to describe anything with detail. And somebody needs to teach her that this makes an author appear to be disingenuous at best, a liar at worst.

Republic of Korea 0 : 8 Sarah Shaw 

As I hope I’m making clear, Shaw is not interested in offering a complex narrative for her memoir. She’s posing as a thoughtful writer to tell on Kevin who would be horrified if he knew she wrote this. After all, her photo is on the site, her full name on the memoir, she’s already commenting on it from her Facebook account. And so, everyone will know who Kevin Teacher is whether or not “Kevin” is his actual name. Shaw notes:

When we embarked on a staff hiking trip, [Kevin] had me pose next to a sign that said “Danger! High Voltage! Do not climb!” It was all in good humor and he wasn’t intending to offend me, but I felt embarrassed to be used as the punchline of his “stupid foreigner” jokes.

The paragraph above offers a skeleton for a Shaw Score Settled Against Koreans. She provides no context whatsoever; the transition into this short paragraph follows her description of times in the classroom; the memoir is putatively about being a foreign teacher in Korea, but Shaw is merely dishing dirt on Kevin Teacher. Here, Kevin makes jokes about a stupid foreigner. And Shaw scores another point, sticking in quotation marks around “stupid foreigner” insinuating Kevin thought she was one—and this comes at an interesting transition in Shaw’s memoir where she will begin to address sex. Shaw implies nobody knows sex and sexual oppression as she does, and this Korean Christian Sexist, Kevin, will not escape criticism. He’s just a naive puritan who fucked with the wrong tourist.

One day, I was reading the book Honolulu, by Alan Brennert, a fictional account of a Korean picture bride’s life in Hawaii in the early 1900s. Kevin noticed the image of the Korean woman on the front cover, wearing an off-the-shoulder top and bowing her head in sorrow. “Why is she wearing such an obscene shirt?” he asked.

I was surprised; I thought the woman looked both beautiful and classy. “I don’t think it’s obscene. Lots of women wear shirts like that in Western countries.”

Shaw knows classy when she sees it and Kevin is too uptight. It’s at this point, when I first read this after Praise showed it to me, that I decided Shaw is pretty much making shit up. She’s not entirely fabricating situations, but she is clearly creating dialogue. To be honest, Kevin might not even exist. If we are to believe Shaw, Kevin is a big tween in teacher’s britches who is devoted to God, leers at her because she is extroverted, and doesn’t understand how classy oppressed-looking, Korean women are on book covers. It’s all rather ludicrous, but she scores points. I’m not going to post more about this section, but it ends with Kevin saying “Divorce? Oh, no.”

Republic of Korea 0 : Sarah Shaw 11

I want to address something that has me annoyed above all else. Shaw would have us believe that not only does she know about and understand Korean language, history, and culture, but that she’s a feminist extrovert who’s comfortable and cool in what can be trying circumstances. Shaw is the all-seeing, all-knowing white expert who, I’m sure she sees nothing wrong with this, is merely contrasting Korean (Kevin is a stand-in for Koreans) conservative views and perceptions of Western women with her objective representation of the reality. SHE is that representation. It’s Sarah v. Kevin. Thus, she is not even remotely objective. But not just that: Shaw is confessing her own conservative views and her perceptions of Korea and Koreans, but without submitting them to any scrutiny at all. It’s the worst kind of writing. If she were my student, I’d refuse to grade her work. Revise and resubmit. What she has done should be unacceptable and for a professional organization to provide her with a soapbox to dish dirt, make accusations, and be what those of us who’ve lived here for a while all consider racist.

At this point, we’re not even halfway through Shaw’s memoir and she has not actually talked about herself at all. I’m going to skip to where she does. Guess who fares well in Shaw’s memoir about being a foreigner? Of course she does.

Like Jess, when I first arrived in Korea in 2009, I spent my exchange semester unaware of the stereotypes that applied to Western females. I too would wear North American-style, sleeveless, low-cut tank tops. Even though I didn’t show the same amount of cleavage as Jess, I didn’t give any thought to the slut factor.

In fact, I wasn’t paying attention to how Korean society perceived me at all, since I had started dating an exchange student from the Netherlands. Although his ethnicity is Korean, he was adopted at birth, so we both were experiencing Korean culture and language for the first time. We were in love, and we certainly weren’t stressing over cultural taboos.

We both lived in the dormitory at our university, which was separated by gender, a stark contrast to my college dorm back in the States, where boys and girls were allowed to room together on specified floors, and a bottomless basket of government-funded NYC condoms were available in the lobby.

Shaw is so enlightened. Once again, Korea is ridiculously stereotyped as an oppressive puritanical society where the US is a fucking paradise. Literally, a fucking paradise, as coed uni dorms offer bottomless baskets of condoms to the students.

Republic of Korea 0 : Sarah Shaw 12

I have to be honest. I have no desire to slut-shame Sarah Shaw. I don’t even want the perception. So, I’m not going to address how she writes about her very short time in Korean university as an exchange student. It’s clear Shaw is proud of her “overt sexuality” whatever that means. As I’ve noted, her memoir is not very detailed. To avoid confusion, I’m simply going to let you check it out for yourselves.

Unfortunately, Shaw doesn’t take too long before bringing Kevin back into the narrative. She has to because he’s a character her narrative depends on. I can’t skip this part. What Shaw does is, in my opinion, unforgiveable. She consistently illustrates herself as open and curious in her discussions with Kevin. I wonder why, then, she consistently punishes him, in this narrative, for being frank and curious with her?

Kevin continued bringing up topics related to sex during our lunch break, and I always chose to respond, curious as to what he would say and, in a way, encouraging him to confront his own stereotypes. He’d talk about how he wanted to watch porn, but couldn’t because he lived with his mother-in-law, or he’d mention how he once stared at two girls in Australia for two minutes who were wearing bikinis and lying on their stomachs, hoping they would turn over.

He mentioned how he used to work at an English education center with several native English teachers, and he would frequently talk about an African-American male colleague who would indulge him in detailed accounts of his sexual escapades with Korean women. When his colleague embarked on “the midnight run,” a term for English teachers who suddenly leave Korea without notifying their employers, they found a library of porn on his office computer.

Shaw continues to dish on Kevin and other men with a story about rainbow parties. I’m not interested in discussing it. What’s the point?

Republic of Korea 0 : Sarah Shaw 13

And again, Shaw quickly scores points making herself Kevin’s teacher:

Although Kevin’s stereotypical comments often frustrated me, with the absence of Western male teachers at our school, I realized that I was probably one of the only people he could talk to about sex. Without realizing it himself, he was living in a sexually oppressive society, mainly because of his status in the church. He once mentioned that he wanted to accompany his colleague to the red-light district in Sydney during a month-long educational fieldwork excursion, but he knew he wouldn’t be able to control himself and remain faithful to his wife. “Religion is essential to preventing us from those things that we desire,” he said. While Kevin proved to be a loyal husband, I began feeling sorry for him. If he had a healthy sexual connection with his wife, he probably would have been discussing these issues with her rather than me.

I think this might be the most offensive paragraph in the narrative. I don’t know. Maybe you’ll find another one. Shaw is not only enlightened, healthily extroverted, educated about the world, but she’s also a sex counselor for Kevin who’s now fully transformed into a one-dimensional masturbating prude who hides in Church from sex and lusts after his foreign co-teacher and sneaks peeks at porn from time to time. In addition, because of Korea, he lacks the ability to properly discuss any of this. This is like a hat-trick of points and high clichés.

Republic of Korea 0 : Sarah Shaw 16

I hope I’m being rather transparent about how full of clichés and empty of meaningful focus and detail Shaw’s memoir about being a foreigner is because I’m finding it hard to re-read this crap and so am going to skip to the end. If you feel like reading it, Shaw continues to discuss sex and sexuality and nosy neighbors and love motels—because Koreans, though prudes, also like to sneak away to have sex. So, that’s good, according to Shaw, but also not good because, unlike Westerners, Koreans are not overt about it, whatever that means.

Republic of Korea 0 : Sarah Shaw 17

I think Shaw is an outright bigot. A high-minded fool. I think she’s a colonialist pig and a patronizing shit. She believes being empowered is being a flirty know-it-all who pretends to be frank without ever being genuine and claims this is empowerment. Did Kevin know he was merely an object of curious observation? I know, now I’m stereotyping. Here’s the deal, I have a lot of writing from Shaw that illustrates my generalization about her. I don’t have the stomach to continue analyzing the final 40% of her work. On the other hand, having read the entire memoir twice, I still know nothing about Kevin. Shaw’s writing about Korea is typical, not because it’s honest, which it is not, but because it serves to merely justify the author’s preconceived notions about Korea, Koreans, their lives and language.

Am I wrong? I’m here.

This uni needs to find some local antifascists to monitor these assholes. I’d organize a group to shadow the White Student Union as they “patrol” campus. And defo need to send in a student to infiltrate the organization. It wouldn’t be difficult. Let them know they are not a desired presence and that they will persistently be hassled and scrutinized. It’s the only way to beat scum like this.

dagNotes: Quick note on partisan politics in the US

While the electorate is becoming overall more diverse in the United States, Republican districts are becoming more white. It’s clear, partisan politics is racial politics in the United States. All you politics junkies who want to write about libertarianism, populism, history, law, and economics must permit an intersectionality that includes at every claim and turn of phrase a focus on race. Most of us focused on class struggle, poverty, and employees (labor struggle) have been aware of this for some time. Anyone who organized and marched in the 1990s can attest to this as a narrative, especially since 1994 when Republicans themselves overcame a decades-long engineered-dominance of Democrats in Congress.

Whiteness is now almost purely a reactionary organizing principle in American politics as “minority voters” have been increasingly actively sequestered from Republican districts. Racism is in demand.

It’s as if people believe that without white people, capitalism would be ok. 

how to do things with words

white innovations Any and all of the failures in reasoning that lead white men’s-rights-advocates to make pleas to excuse patriarchal white supremacy and anti-blackness. For example: A recent white innovation is to argue “long ago I realized that the ‘odds’ were simply not worth it when it came to race relations. Blacks are about 13% of the population—but there is nothing, literally NOTHING—that I either need or want that I cannot get from the other 87%. I suspect this is true for many if not most whites.” This is a white innovation in probability.

From The Hispanic Leadership Network (American Action Network Affiliates)

Republicans recently received the following list of dos and don’ts to consider when discussing immigration from the right wing Hispanic Leadership Network.

When engaging in conversation or doing an interview on immigration reform:
Do acknowledge that “Our current immigration system is broken and we need to fix it”
Don’t begin with “We are against amnesty”
Note: Most everyone is against amnesty and this is interpreted as being against any reform.

When talking about a solution for the millions here without documentation who could qualify to get in line first with a temporary visa, then legal residence and finally citizenship:
Do use the phrase “earned legal status”
Don’t use the phrase “pathway to citizenship”
Note: This has a different meaning and can denote getting in front of the line to get citizenship – this is not true. Most Republicans and Democrats, along with 70% of Americans, support a fair system by which those who are undocumented can come forward, register with the government, pass a background check, pay a fine, learn English and get legal status first – that is earned legal status, not automatic citizenship.

When addressing securing our borders:
Do use the wording “enforcement of our borders includes more border patrol, technology, and building a fence where it makes sense”
Don’t use phrases like “send them all back”, “electric fence”, “build a wall along the entire border”

When talking about immigrants:
Do use “undocumented immigrant” when referring to those here without documentation
Don’t use the word “illegals” or “aliens”
Don’t use the term “anchor baby”

When addressing amnesty and earned legal status:
Do acknowledge that the true meaning of amnesty is to pardon without any penalty
Don’t label earned legal status as amnesty
Don’t characterize all Hispanics as undocumented and all undocumented as Hispanics

When broadly addressing reforms:
Do acknowledge that President Obama broke his promise and failed to propose any immigration reform for five years, while using this issue as a political wedge
Do talk about the issues you support like overhauling the bureaucratic visa system, creating a viable temporary worker program, a workable e-verify system, and border security
Don’t focus on amnesty as a tenet of immigration reform
Don’t use President Reagan’s immigration reform as an example applicable today
Note: That legislation was true amnesty; in addition, border security, fixing our visa system, and a temporary worker program were parts of the reform which were never implemented.

Trailer for War in the East (2013) a documentary about nationalist violence in Poland. Looks interesting.

anarcho-queer:

On July 31, 1903, a letter addressed to President Theodore Roosevelt arrived at the White House. It had been mailed from the town of Bainbridge, Georgia, the prosperous seat of a cotton county perched on the Florida state line.

The sender was a barely literate African American woman named Carrie Kinsey. With little punctuation and few capital letters, she penned the bare facts of the abduction of her fourteen-year-old brother, James Robinson, who a year earlier had been sold into involuntary servitude.

Kinsey had already asked for help from the powerful white people in her world. She knew where her brother had been taken—a vast plantation not far away called Kinderlou. There, hundreds of black men and boys were held in chains and forced to labor in the fields or in one of several factories owned by the McRee family, one of the wealthiest and most powerful in Georgia. No white official in this corner of the state would take an interest in the abduction and enslavement of a black teenager.

Confronted with a world of indifferent white people, Mrs. Kinsey did the only remaining thing she could think of. Newspapers across the country had recently reported on a speech by Roosevelt promising a “square deal” for black Americans. Mrs. Kinsey decided that her only remaining hope was to beg the president of the United States to help her brother.

“Mr. Prassident,” she wrote. “They wont let me have him.… He hase not don nothing for them to have him in chanes so I rite to you for your help.”

Considered more than a century later, her letter courses with desperation and submerged outrage. Yet when received at the White House, it was slipped into a small rectangular folder and forwarded to the Department of Justice. There, it was tagged with a reference number, 12007, and filed away. Teddy Roosevelt never saw it. No action was taken. Her words lie still at the National Archives just outside Washington, D.C.

As dumbfounding as the story told by the Carrie Kinsey letter is, far more remarkable is what surrounds that letter at the National Archives. In the same box that holds her grief-stricken missive are at least half a dozen other pieces of correspondence recounting other stories of kidnapping, perversion of the courts, or human trafficking—as horrifying as, or worse than, Carrie Kinsey’s tale. It is the same in the next box on the shelf. And the one before. And the ones on either side of those. And the next and the next. And on and on. Thousands and thousands of plaintive letters and grimly bureaucratic responses—altogether at least 30,000 pages of original material—chronicle cases of forced labor and involuntary servitude in the South decades after the end of the Civil War.

“i have a little girl that has been kidnapped from me … and i cant get her out,” wrote Reverend L. R. Farmer, pastor of a black Baptist church in Morganton, North Carolina. “i want ask you is it law for people to whip (col) people and keep them and not allow them to leave without a pass.”

A farmer near Pine Apple, Alabama, named J. R. Adams, writing of terrible abuses by the dominant landowning family in the county, was one of the astonishingly few white southerners who also complained to the Department of Justice. “They have held negroes … for years,” Adams wrote. “It is a very rare thing that a negro escapes.”

A similar body of material rests in the files of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the one institution that undertook any sustained effort to address at least the most terrible cases. Dwarfing everything at those repositories are the still largely unexamined collections of local records in courthouses across the South. In dank basements, abandoned buildings, and local archives, seemingly endless numbers of files contain hundreds of thousands of handwritten entries documenting in monotonous granularity the details of an immense, metastasizing horror that stretched well into the twentieth century.

Read More

Something about the crass notion that the ruins of empire are glorious rubbed me wrong. Here we have evidence of the actual ruins of empire in the US. Not so glorious.

(via anarchodurian666)

dagNotes: Notes On Whiteness, White Power, Capitalism & Anti-Capitalism

dagseoul:

Bear with me fleshing out some language.

This is the mistake they* make: that whiteness is a quality we can sense, that it’s in some significant way material. That we can examine it and eradicate it without transforming society. It’s talked about like it’s a simple sin, a mistake, a form of revisionism, or an act, sometimes rising to a crime. We use words like transparent and opaque. We excuse its appearance as careless at best, mistaken at worse. We outline it as if it were a structure, like an organized cell.

Whiteness and White Power are now you see it now you don’t like part of a tacky magician’s act: white power is the reappearing thing itself, whiteness the object pulled out of a hat. Or, the result of birth. As in, I was born this way. What can I do about it.? A matter of rhetoric. Or worse, I’m not white. I’m free from guilt. I can do no wrong. Or, the not-white other who can actually claim he’s the hope himself for change simply for being not-that and nothing else.

White power isn’t material. It’s culture. It’s in the spirit of place: Great Britain, America, Europe. It hovers above the wreck of The Enlightenment. It infuses western religion with a sense of dominion over human being. It’s power is an idea that people have faith in but cannot utter. It’s a refusal as much as it is testimony or plan. It resists its own narrative but calls on the narrative of its individual constituents for proof of their allegiance to a man-made purpose. Seek self-help. Confess your sins. Do it alone.

Whiteness is powerful in the same manner Capital is self-valorizing. It’s the result of doing being. We let it happen because it’s how we tell the story of Nature organizing human action. It’s History itself. We shouldn’t romanticize it, manipulate it, look at it as a tragic formation of ideas. It’s not the debris in the rear-view mirror. It’s always already forgotten. It’s essential to character and habit.

Yet, it’s a wreck after all. A mess. On the other hand, it’s an order of being that instills within individuals a sense of duty to individualism that profits community regardless of location and direction. It’s purpose without purpose. It’s a dumb notion of Freedom based in the liberty to freely exploit. Dumb because it ignores the essential goal of its labor: to destroy everything first and then myself. It’s dumb because it ignores all science that it relies on in favor of the imaginary representations of reality in fanciful ideological formations. One wouldn’t be too mistaken to infer that individuals’ labor in white capitalist societies is to prove the value of its ideological assumptions about individual labor in white capitalist society.

White power is the will to expend everything first at the expense of Myself. (It’s always My Self in relation to others.) Forget the stupid medieval notions of the sin in the king’s hoard—the old king who takes everything for himself condemning his realm to rot and ruin and finally becoming the festering dragon protecting its useless treasure. The capitalist’s goal is nothing less than a barren landscape heaped with useless gold coin. (Ron Paul, I’m thinking of you.) The white power mad capitalist has nothing to protect. His goal is nothing less than the purposeful extinguishing of all natural resources for nobody but himself.

I often wonder how anyone would think it’s possible for me to do everything I want for myself and benefit others by so doing. The notion that such human action is possible must be based in the idea the Nature as it organizes us will infinitely provide resources to expend. It’s patently stupid thought.

This is the end of Ron Paul’s notion of Liberty, of Hayek’s Liberal Social Order. It’s the Republican reason for stalling government to promote corporatism. It’s the hope behind Obama’s neoliberalism. It’s not “Yes We Can” after all, it’s “Yes You Should Have Some, Too”.

Fleshing out the character and habit of whiteness is one manner to better understand white power. We can see it, in a way. White power, on the other hand, is a part of the practice of contemporary capitalism. No matter where you find it, what’s most conspicuous about it is its whiteness-for-itself. Capitalism uses white power as a kind of warrant for the free market (like I’m a free man,) as if its promotion were the point all along, and by simply doing things in the free market is to not be a slave.

I suppose this is why to be anti-white power, to be anti-fascist, to be an environmentalist, to be anti-racist, to be feminist, is necessarily to be anti-capitalist. To say otherwise is to accept white power, to embrace white ideology and its absurd ideological framing of societies.

*”They” are capitalists: liberals, progressives, activists. Of course, conservatives, corporatists and fascists.

(via dagseoul)

dagNotes: Notes On Whiteness, White Power, Capitalism & Anti-Capitalism

dagseoul:

Bear with me fleshing out some language.

This is the mistake they* make: that whiteness is a quality we can sense, that it’s in some significant way material. That we can examine it and eradicate it without transforming society. It’s talked about like it’s a simple sin, a mistake, a form of revisionism, or an act, sometimes rising to a crime. We use words like transparent and opaque. We excuse its appearance as careless at best, mistaken at worse. We outline it as if it were a structure, like an organized cell.

Whiteness and White Power are now you see it now you don’t like part of a tacky magician’s act: white power is the reappearing thing itself, whiteness the object pulled out of a hat. Or, the result of birth. As in, I was born this way. What can I do about it.? A matter of rhetoric. Or worse, I’m not white. I’m free from guilt. I can do no wrong. Or, the not-white other who can actually claim he’s the hope himself for change simply for being not-that and nothing else.

White power isn’t material. It’s culture. It’s in the spirit of place: Great Britain, America, Europe. It hovers above the wreck of The Enlightenment. It infuses western religion with a sense of dominion over human being. It’s power is an idea that people have faith in but cannot utter. It’s a refusal as much as it is testimony or plan. It resists its own narrative but calls on the narrative of its individual constituents for proof of their allegiance to a man-made purpose. Seek self-help. Confess your sins. Do it alone.

Whiteness is powerful in the same manner Capital is self-valorizing. It’s the result of doing being. We let it happen because it’s how we tell the story of Nature organizing human action. It’s History itself. We shouldn’t romanticize it, manipulate it, look at it as a tragic formation of ideas. It’s not the debris in the rear-view mirror. It’s always already forgotten. It’s essential to character and habit.

Yet, it’s a wreck after all. A mess. On the other hand, it’s an order of being that instills within individuals a sense of duty to individualism that profits community regardless of location and direction. It’s purpose without purpose. It’s a dumb notion of Freedom based in the liberty to freely exploit. Dumb because it ignores the essential goal of its labor: to destroy everything first and then myself. It’s dumb because it ignores all science that it relies on in favor of the imaginary representations of reality in fanciful ideological formations. One wouldn’t be too mistaken to infer that individuals’ labor in white capitalist societies is to prove the value of its ideological assumptions about individual labor in white capitalist society.

White power is the will to expend everything first at the expense of Myself. (It’s always My Self in relation to others.) Forget the stupid medieval notions of the sin in the king’s hoard—the old king who takes everything for himself condemning his realm to rot and ruin and finally becoming the festering dragon protecting its useless treasure. The capitalist’s goal is nothing less than a barren landscape heaped with useless gold coin. (Ron Paul, I’m thinking of you.) The white power mad capitalist has nothing to protect. His goal is nothing less than the purposeful extinguishing of all natural resources for nobody but himself.

I often wonder how anyone would think it’s possible for me to do everything I want for myself and benefit others by so doing. The notion that such human action is possible must be based in the idea the Nature as it organizes us will infinitely provide resources to expend. It’s patently stupid thought.

This is the end of Ron Paul’s notion of Liberty, of Hayek’s Liberal Social Order. It’s the Republican reason for stalling government to promote corporatism. It’s the hope behind Obama’s neoliberalism. It’s not “Yes We Can” after all, it’s “Yes You Should Have Some, Too”.

Fleshing out the character and habit of whiteness is one manner to better understand white power. We can see it, in a way. White power, on the other hand, is a part of the practice of contemporary capitalism. No matter where you find it, what’s most conspicuous about it is its whiteness-for-itself. Capitalism uses white power as a kind of warrant for the free market (like I’m a free man,) as if its promotion were the point all along, and by simply doing things in the free market is to not be a slave.

I suppose this is why to be anti-white power, to be anti-fascist, to be an environmentalist, to be anti-racist, to be feminist, is necessarily to be anti-capitalist. To say otherwise is to accept white power, to embrace white ideology and its absurd ideological framing of societies.

*”They” are capitalists: liberals, progressives, activists. Of course, conservatives, corporatists and fascists.