Californians become the Third-World

This class and all its text has been incredibly insightful.  One thing I've been thinking about as I was finishing up my final paper is the border crossing that exists within in the Parable of the Sower.  California and Californians are labeled as trash, and seem to be looked down upon much of the rest of the US and world.  They seems to take on the status of the illegal.  They are used and abused for cheap labor.  Work is out-sourced to California, like we out-source work to third-world countries currently.  The borders and border crossing are incredibly dangerous, even deadly for Californians.  Butler seems to be criticizing Californians of the 80's and 90's attitudes towards illegals and Mexicans by showing them how easy it would for things to change.  How easy the lack of wealth dehumanizes you in our society.

Butler's imagery and description of the violence and the need for people to escape the violence truly mirrors what was going on in Central America and Mexico during the 80's and 90's.  It is something we as Americans take for granted, and that can easily changed for us if the circumstances were right.  Even today, 20 years later, the attitude and treatment of Mexicans and illegals really hasn't changed that much.  Maybe we should take note of Butler's point and finally change our attitudes.  We should not punish others for our own luck at being born in this country.

IDK: Forget the Historical Context

 The LA Riot Spectacular 2005 starring Snoop Dogg, Emilio Estevez, etc

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g52ZSnNB500 - [The LA Riot Spectacular trailer]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VWjAPFcw7Tc - Crips & Bloods [The LA Riot Spectacular]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-lJtE7DzyTc - Mr. Kim's Riquor Store (that was the actual spelling) [The LA Riot Spectacular]

 Fabolous ft. Chris Brown- Ready (January 2013): http://youtu.be/7VpYgPdGgn4?t=2m14s
Need ice to numb it down, 

Night stick to beat it up
Rodney King that team girl
Can’t we all just get along
You could get along
You already know
But is you ready though

 So...in relation to these two examples, there is something to be said about erasure of historical context toward Rodney King's beating and the reason how it became a catalyst for the LA riots of 1992. there is something to be said that he has now become the symbol of commercialization. How can a symbol of injustice as well as an engine for change and reform turn into a commercialized figure to be exploited for the sole purpose of how profitable and renowned his namesake is?

The first example is set 13 years after the riots. The film, The LA Riot Spectacular, directed my music videographer, Marc Klasfield,  was released in 2005 as a satirical comedy about the riots starting with Rodney King's beating all the way through the trial and the riot itself. The film also gives other perspectives within the main narrative by looking into the urban landscape of LA by focusing on different aspects of LA life i.e. LAPD, the media, gang life, etc. However, the film fails in its commentary on high crime rates, gang violence, police brutality, etc. by showcasing these events in such a ludicrous manner that these sketches are just morally wrong as well as a tool to reinforce stereotypes. For example, the scene listed above tries to explain the reason for the Bloods and the Crips peace treaty which is staged in a cemetery. The two groups are lined up on opposite sides of an empty grave as they shoot each other. Their bodies falling into the plot below. When another pair are about to shoot each other, a member from the Bloods basically asks why are we doing this? The Crip  replies "for colors." Once each side hears the stupidity in it, they hug it out while telling the other the atrocities they committed to the other member's family and friends. For example, one says to the effect that I am sorry for kidnapping your grandma and putting my dick in her mouth. What The Fuck? Then the scene finishes with Snoop Dogg, the godlike figure or narrator within the film, by pouring some Malt Liquor onto the grave for all the fallen soldiers and justifies it by saying its a Black thing just do it. Again, What The Fuck? This scene alone is disregarding the historical context of the treaty itself by rationalizing to fit into the memory of Black stereotypes. The malt liquor as an association with African American males in and of itself is call to memory in popular culture that has its own negative connotation that cancels out the socio-poitical commentary the film is trying to make in relation to gang violence and the famous peace treaty. This film is just one instance in which the La riots have become a call to memory that can now be exploited for commercial gain.

The second example is set 21 years later in the current year of 2013. The song Ready by Fabolous ft Chris Brown is about literally being ready for the sex that is about to happen between the speaker and the female partner. However, the line listed above stating, Night stick to beat it up/Rodney King that team girl, are you serious? Well in order to analyze the song, I tried to ignore the fact that line was used and take the song for what it is. It is a commercialized anthem to be used as a slow jam, but that's only if you can ignore the choppiness of Fabolous' rap game and focus on Chris Brown's generic chorus to the tempo of an R&B song. But by doing this, you realize it is a sex anthem. So why in the world would they use a line about a brutal beating in reference to "beating the pussy up." Sorry had to use that phrase. But, this phrase helps to explain what exactly this song is doing. Sex becomes a violent act through association alone. Hell, you want another example of guilty by association, check out the controversy with Justin Timberlake's song title, Take Back The Night, in relation to the actual event, Take Back The Night.

Personally, I do not have a full fledged conclusion to how these two atrocities have supplanted themselves into popular culture, but it goes to show how the lack of education and historical distancing has allowed these two instances to occur. I think by learning and  acknowledging our history, we are able to catch these atrocities and help to prevent others like these from happening. 

Sidenote: another example to add is Russell Simmions' Def Digital parody, Harriet Tubman's sextape. No joke it is real and it is atrocious.

American Whitemare

        Violence and bigotry seems so common place in the world.  It is the elephant that is always in the room that everyone refuses to see and is afraid to even admit exists.  If it is not talked about, then maybe it will just go away seems to be the social consensus.  It doesn't and it hasn't.  It grows larger and is mutating into something grotesquely socially acceptable.  It is turning into a nationalistic multiculturalism that stems from denial and the falsehood that is "colorblindness," which nearly everyone seems to be practicing at this point in time, replacing the more blatant racist rhetoric of the past with a more subtle disguise of the socially demanded "cultural" vocabulary.  It is not racist if it is someone's culture because they should be proud of their culture and embrace it, even if it is being used in a way in order to make a cultural hierarchy, placing of course, the "American" (white/ Aryan specifically) on the top; the culture to look up to and emulate.  Everyone in the world is looking for the white capitalist American Dream.  If you fall in line, no matter the color of your skin or where you're from, you can have it too.  Just be the model minority, be a part of racial tokenism.  Set an example for your race and all other races.
        The celebration of one's culture (non-American white, of course) becomes a circus, a zoo.  It is a spectacle to gape at in its alieness, in its non-American whiteness.  It is happening in the appropriate neighborhoods at the appropriate accepted times. 

Jackie and Waverly: Vehicles for Historical Fictions

"Historical Fiction: the genre of literature, film, etc., comprising narratives that take place in the past and are characterized chiefly by an imaginative reconstruction of historical events and personages."

When reading Southland, the character, Jackie Ishida, is constructed in semblance to other historical fiction characters especially to that of the character, Edward Waverly, from the novel, Waverly, by Sir Walter Scott. Sir Walter Scott is the creator of the supposed first historical novel which created the format for certain themes to become prominent within this genre. Waverly is the Romantic figure within the historical backdrop of the Jacobite Uprising of 1745. Romance or the Romantic, in this novel, is the glorification of war, the beautiful landscape, as well as his romantic relationships. He becomes a vehicle for the reader in order to traverse the Scotland landscape and meet the various historic figures who were a part of this uprising. As a Romantic figure, his characteristics are extremely different from the men and women he encounters. This allows him to become a vehicle for the reader in order to traverse this history through his eyes. The reader is then vaulted into this historic world in which the author allows us to view the discussed event without the bias of a character who is heavily involved in the narrative, but instead, a tourist wandering through history. 

First, it is interesting how both these characters tour through similar times of revolution, the Jacobite Uprising of 1745 and the Watts Riots of 1965. However, they tour through these events in a very passive manner. This passive state is created through the distinct opposition to other characters within the novel. In Waverly, the characters are seen in the lens of a realist novel versus the romanticized Waverly. Jackie Ishida is the same in this regard. The other characters are seen in this realm of realism, Frank's life before and after internment, Frank and Alma's the complexities of an interracial relationship in the 1950's, race relations in regards to law enforcement, etc. However, Jackie is always seen in the realm of the romantic, more specifically with her various relationships: Laura, Rebecca, Lanier, and Frank. In terms of her relationship with Frank, though her character should be seen as a biased figure due to her biological relationship to her grandfather, their distant relationship allows her to become the vehicle for the reader to see the historical events of 1965 and even earlier. Second, because of these two different genres working against each other, Jackie and Waverly become awkward figures never really at home within their own worlds, Romantic figures in a Realist world. Because of this awkwardness which often shows them as apathetic characters, they become selfish figures in which the uncovering of history is not for the people in relation to them but for themselves; Waverly wishes to experience his own Romanticized narrative versus Jackie finding out who she is through Frank's past. But because of this apathy, they are then used as a vehicle for the reader in which we can see these events and imagine for ourselves what this time was like.

Steve King... or Stephen Colbert

In a recent "Stop Amnesty" rally that was sponsored by the Tea Party, a Republican representative from Iowa, Steve King, made some pretty big accusations, extremely ignorant accusations. You know, sometimes I wonder just how certain people make it into office; as the great J. Cole said, "Who you have to kill, who you have to rob, who you have to fuck, just to make it to the top dammit?" Rep. King claims that the further South in Latin America one goes, the more increasingly violent the civilizations get. Now it is beyond me how a Congressman from Iowa could possibly know such things, so I decided to do a little more research into the man with all the answers. In a July 18 interview with Newsmax, King claimed that for every child that is the valedictorian of an illegal immigrant, there are one hundred who are smuggling drugs. This comes in response to his nay vote to the DREAM Act, which proposes people between the ages of 12 and 35 who came to the United States aged 15 and younger and meet a list of qualifications, as such obtaining a high school degree and having “good moral character,” can eventually become citizens. Supposing King's assessment is correct, if there were say, 10 valedictorians that were made citizens by the DREAM Act, there would be 1,000 that were smuggling drugs across the border...very plausible analysis Steve. With the DREAM Act potentially paving way for citizenship for around 2 million people, roughly split down the middle between men and women, and if 1,000, 1/20th of a percent, were valedictorians, then 100,000 would be drug smugglers (1/10 of the men).  Not only does he lack comprehension of basic argumentative reasoning, but he also claims that there is only one valedictorian per class, which is false considering many schools have begun to award the prestigious title to sometimes more than 100 at some schools. But to add to his lack of common knowledge and understanding, he was quoted during an Iowa town hall meeting denouncing Global Warming and environmentalism saying that sea level isn't an exact measurement. Really? King claims, ""We don't know where sea level is even, let alone be able to say that it's going to come up an inch globally because some polar ice caps might melt because there's CO2 suspended in the atmosphere." Steve...do you have eyes? I guess Iowans probably aren't the best at understanding how sea level works, but still, if you don't know, keep your mouth shut. Anyway, back to the Latin America comment. Maybe so many Latin Americans wouldn't want to come here if we didn't train all their soldiers who are led by the U.S. installed dictators to torture and murder anybody opposing the totalitarian regime we set in place. Perhaps Steve King should do some fact checking before he opens his mouth. Here is a Colbert Report in which Stephen Colbert rips apart Steve King for his ignorant comparison of immigrants and dogs...yes....dogs. Colbert

History's Repetition

 Rodney King Beating
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SW1ZDIXiuS4


 Oscar Grant Shooting
http://youtu.be/S0P8TSP2YJU?t=1m2s

The commonalities between these two men is that 1) both were victims of racial prejudice, victim of civil rights violation, and police brutality, 2) both were widely media circulated: amateur videotape received widespread circulation and amateur video phone recordings widely circulated through youtube, the press, and other online video hosting websites; 3) and lastly, these men became symbols which resulted in demonstrations, followed by violent rioting that resulted in destruction of property, looting, and largely arrested demonstrators. The difference is that these incidents are almost ten years apart, King 1992 and Grant 2009. 

This narrative is not new. Other largely media circulated deaths of Black men that brutalized or killed and were unjustly tried in court is not new, Emmett Till, Trayvon Martin. As W.E.B Du Bois states that Baldwin reiterates within his essay, The Fire Next Time, is that "the problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line (378)", and this problem creates and recreates the "new" Negro. "And therefore when the country speaks of a "new" Negro, which it has been doing every hour on the hour for decades, it is not really referring to a change in the Negro, which, in any case, it is quite incapable of assessing, but only to a new difficulty in keeping him in his place, to the fact that it encounters him (again! again!) barring yet another door to its spiritual and social ease (370)." This is how these narratives keep repeating. The problem is not resolved, because the tactics are reused except in different forms and visages. In the choreopoem play, for black boys who have considered homicide when the streets were too much, the repetition of the line, niggas are numbers, understands the same narrative that progression tries to erase, African slaves as chattle, numbers, those who were murdered by lynch mobs, numbers, those who have been wrongly imprisioned, beaten, and killed, numbers. Names, Till, King, Grant, Martin, the opposite of the multicultural lens, forages these names in order to recreate a history and build a narrative in which maybe one day there maybe a "new" Negro.

Yet Another Example: Are We Weaker Now?

         In October of 2010, a 23-year old Santa Monica student was tasered and brutally beaten by a dozen police officers because of his beer in a brown paper bag. Aibuidefe Oghogho was walking accross the street from the liquor store where he had just purchased a 40oz. to drink on his way to a nightclub. Oghogho was stopped by an unmarked undercover police car and questioned for his open container.  The officer then proceeded to push the African-American student which prompted him to place his hand upon the officer's chest and ask him to stop, but he did not stop. “They picked me up, threw me onto this fence and they threw me onto the fence started hitting me while I was on the fence and then they slammed me down like head first,” Oghogho tells CBS2. “And I’m…and it’s the whole time they’re doin’ it, the whole time they’re doin’ it, I hear one officer keep punching me in my face, he’s telling me, ‘stop resisting arrest, stop resisting arrest’ and all I could say to myself was, ‘I’m not resisting.’” Aibuidefe has no criminal record and has never been arrested. Video was captured by the night club security cameras only 50 feet away from the incident where twelve officers responded to the call. After he was hit with a 5-second taser shot and his face bruised to a pulp, he was charged with felony resisting arrest. Here is the video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PLoBeifQeXA

         This video for some reason hasn't surfaced as national media news and with only 49,000 views on youtube hardly got any recognition at all. The District Attorney of Los Angeles waited 18 months to even look at this case to bring criminal charges against the officers. Less than 20 years ago Rodney King sparked one of the biggest riots in the history of the United States, and today, with so much more technologically savvy instruments, somehow this video cannot gain momentum and circulate as the Rodney King video did. Did the media downplay this incident? Was it swept under the rug? Or have the citizens of the United States given up the fact that they will never be able to stand up to brutal and racially biased policing? Maybe the US just isn't putting up that much of a fight anymore, hopefully that can change.
        With the release of surveillance drones and the passing of the Patriot Act it seems as if United States citizens have less freedom than they ever have. Internet censoring bills such as SOPA are at the forefront of the fight against American liberties all the while the police departments get more efficient in their way to hide their mistakes while highlighting the mistakes of (mostly minority) citizens. There was a fire this time and then a fire next time... but are there any more fires to burn down the injustice that has for so long rendered us frozen underneath a layer of ice that traps us between the abyss and freedom? If the beating of an innocent young black man trying to better himself through college doesn't strike a chord in this nation anymore what will?

Rambling on Racism

         Everything has a hierarchy it seems.  There is always a list of justifications and allowances placing one group of people above or below others on differing scales.  Gender, religion, sexuality, financial status.  What is becoming more and more startling to me through my life, which has become more and more prevalent through the little bit of reading that we have done for this class, is the hierarchy of races through racism.  What I mean by this is the allowances that are allotted and accepted due to race.  The stereotypes that are accepted and acted out by that race.  I am constantly trying wrap my head around why people want to not only exist within the negative stereotypes of their race, but also take pride in them sometimes?
        Do these stereotypes exist because their is truth in them?  Or have the people been told this by the ruling class, society and the media for so long they just believe it is true?  Or maybe they just have given up on trying to prove everyone wrong?
         I personally feel that ignorance on all sides of the equation has brought to life these expectations of all races by society.  It has caused bitterness and distrust.  What I find interesting about all this though, is that the only racism that has the spotlight in this country is the white on black.  This, of course, comes from the societal guilt of this country about slavery.  What this leaves out is all the other racial tensions, and at times it seems to give black racist an automatic pass on racism.  If they want to insult Hispanics, Asians, Indians or even whites, it is much more easily shrugged off.  Racism can come from any side and on all forms, and should be never tolerated or accepted.
      What this has placed a wedge between black Americans and other minorities inadvertently.  The Korean and Asian Americans constantly are reminded of their non-whiteness, meaning non-acceptance, during the 1992 riots because the government did not come to protect them, their families, their businesses or their homes, unless they luckily enough were already in a predominately white section of town.  They were left on their own along with all the other minorities.  They were left out of the group that the police were supposed to "serve and protect."  They were subjected to a different kind of misjustice then the other races.  This is why so many of those Korean store owners still wanted justice for Rodney King, even though the media tried make it appear as if it were a Korean/Black race issue, instead of the favoritism the law had for whites in LA.  They saw and felt their non-acceptance and lack of justice by the LAPD as well, and they knew that what was the real issue, even though many of their stores were burned and looted by blacks, Hispanics and poor whites, they also knew the white stores were protected by the LAPD.

LAPD: Then and Now

In a new era that has transformed from the rage and angst spawned from the LA Riots of 1992, the LAPD has seen less and less media coverage and consequently less public criticism. Over 20 years after the revolutionary uprising that destroyed parts of Los Angeles due to the mistreatment of minorities, especially African-Americans, the focus of attention has shifted from internal American issues to the fear of terrorism from international enemies. With media outlets such as Fox, CNN, and ABC reporting on nearly every violent or potentially harmful transpiration Americans have found themselves anticipating an external attack when the real problems lie within our political, judicial, and law enforcement systems. The west coast race struggle has migrated to the east coast with the NYPD on blast because of their new stop and frisk law allowing any NYPD officer to stop any “suspicious” character and frisk them at their will. This new enforcement policy commanded the headlines for about two weeks then fell out of the news and out of the public eye. Out of sight, out of mind right? That’s the way the media (corporate business moguls who have a hand in nearly every political movement because of their monetary value and power) controls what the public hears, sees, and ultimately feels. However, there was one man who took matters into his own hand in February of 2013 in order to bring the attention back on the racism and corruption flowing within the department. Dorner was fired from the LAPD in 2008 for giving false statements regarding a female officer beating an schizophrenic man after he was already down and hand cuffed. Dorner began his vengeful spree with the killing of Monica Quan, the daughter of a former police captain who represented him in the hearings. Dorner maintained the notion that this officer was out of her legal authority when striking the man. Something like the murder of a women’s basketball coach at Cal State Fullerton in the second safest city in all of the United States, Irvine, is hard to keep out of the news. For the first week there was a statewide manhunt for this “cop killer” who also fired upon and killed two county sheriffs just south of Big Bear Lake. However, the manhunt ended rather abruptly at a cabin in Big Bear, and after that it was like none of this ever happened. Not a trace of what actually happened in that cabin or the manifesto Dorner wrote to expose the corruption and racism in the department were to be found on a major media scale. I find it quite alarming that this man was so easily disregarded as “crazy” and “disgruntled” because at one point he was a part of the most controversial police agency in the United States. What most people didn’t hear was that in their search for Dorner, who was to be shot on site, was that two Hispanic paper delivery women were shot by LAPD officers because their truck was similar to Dorners. The thing that I just don’t get is how an entire nation can see this happen and yet somehow nobody digs deeper and tries to uncover some of the truth that was potentially hidden in the manifesto full of anger and hatred. This one-man riot of the LAPD in 2013 will never have as much of a historical identity as the riots of 1992. It seems to me that nobody will even remember Dorner if 1992 any indication as to how important social uprising is to the contextual history of our country.