Barackface: john liu

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Saturday, September 22, 2012

John Liu And Being Asian American

John Liu was in the lead. Then the Chinese soldier in the US Army succumbed to racism, committed suicide. John Liu organized protest events, made some noise. And he got targeted. The FBI created a slight stink around him and drove down his poll numbers. It was a deliberate institutional attack. It was racist.

Goes on to show it is harder being an Asian American in this city than it is to be a gay woman who is friends with a Mayor who is not from her party, or a white guy married to a black woman, or a black guy who ran for Mayor and lost.

But the Asian American is within striking distance of getting the second most powerful political office in the country. It can still happen. Although I don't see me getting too involved personally. I have yet to attend an Obama event this year. And I was Barack Obama's first full time volunteer in all of New York City. I expect to be too busy with my work to do much volunteering in 2013.

But it is not like I will not be watching. John Liu's chances are as strong as ever.

Although I must admit it is an interesting field of candidates. And a Democrat is about to clinch the office in, gosh, in a long, long time.

Hoping to Replace Mayor, and Taking Him to Court
In Race for Mayor, Public Advocate Outraises His Potential Opponents Again
Quinn, Presumptive Candidate, Will Publish Memoir Before Election for Mayor
The Powers of New York Poll: Quinn up 20 Points in NYC Dem Mayoral Race
Mayoral Hopeful’s Slow Start Has Some Asking if His Heart Is in It
To Find the Perfect New York Mayor, Only 2 Years Left

How the Rules of Racism Are Different For Asian Americans

We realized that for all of Jeremy Lin’s accomplishments, we as Asians are still different, are still seen differently than other races by the vast majority of Americans...... The truth is, racism toward Asians is treated differently in America than racism toward other ethnic groups. This is a truth all Asian Americans know. While the same racist may hold back terms he sees as off-limits toward other minorities, he will often not hesitate to call an Asian person a chink, as Jeremy Lin was referred to, or talk about that Asian person as if he must know karate, or call him Bruce Lee, or consider him weak or effeminate, or so on....... Bullying against Asian Americans continues at the highest rate of any ethnic group. I remember, when I was taking the Asian American literature course, an article in a major magazine that ran pictures of (male) Asian models above the tagline, “Gay or Asian?” I remember a video that went viral last year in which people explained why men prefer Asian women and why women dislike Asian men. Some of the women on the video were Asian American...... Racist jokes were told with alarming frequency for a school billed the “most liberal in the South,” and I was friends with two groups: one mostly white, mostly Southerners in the same dorm; the other mostly black, with whom I played pick-up basketball. They joked without censor. I had a girlfriend whose aunt and uncle lived in North Carolina, and when we went to visit, they would say that at least I wasn’t black, often before some racist diatribe. This seemed the predominant sentiment then. At least I wasn’t ____. ...... Don Lee’s story collection, Yellow. In Lee’s stories, Asian American characters experience racist incident after racist incident, but these incidents are mostly background to their lives as sculptors, surfers, lovers, etc. The characters are very much of the world in which they live, the world in which I lived and a different world than the one in which white people live with the privilege of their color...... In class, the white students were incredulous. They claimed such acts of racism could never happen with such frequency. Yet if anything, to me, the racism seemed infrequent, and with minimal effect on the characters’ lives. I had grown up constantly wavering between denying and suspecting that my skin color was behind the fights picked with me, the insults, the casual distance kept up even between myself and some of my closest friends. Sometimes—in retrospect: oftentimes—these incidents were obviously rooted in race. I have been called “chink” and “flat face” and “monkey” many many times. And it is the context of these words that make a child grow uncomfortable with who he is, that instill a deep fear in him....... I remember watching, in one middle school class, a video meant to teach us that blackface and sculptures of big-lipped black people and stereotypes of watermelon and fried chicken were wrong. Later that same year, one of my best friends drew a picture of a square with a nose poking off of one side. I knew this was me even before he said it. Sometimes my friends would ask me to do the trick where I put my face against the table, touching both my forehead and my chin to the wood. I thought of this as a special ability, but underneath, I knew I should be ashamed........ I pretended it didn’t bother me. ...... That was the same year my closest childhood friend suddenly cut me off. We had been inseparable, but at the start of that school year, he made fun of me and seemed to use this attack to springboard into popularity. I spent many nights during those first few weeks of school crying myself to sleep, not understanding why we weren’t friends anymore......... the people who had hurt him most were those closest to him...... but also because they were the people in books and because I, too, feared the label, or at least told myself I did. What that fear really is, it seems to me now, is a fear of not being taken as seriously as the White Male Writer, who has so long ruled English literature...... He said something like, “Nobody ever talks about Asians,” and I said, “Asians don’t exist in Sociology.” We both laughed. It was a joke, but it stung with a certain truth. ...... it is a very real complaint that Asian descent seems to count against us in those same admissions numbers. Both Harvard and Princeton are currently under investigation on charges of racism toward Asians, whose grades and SAT scores, on average, must be higher than those of other races in order to gain admissions..... Why aren’t we happy with our disproportionate admissions and the many children who grow up to be doctors and lawyers, pushed by their parents? (The more sarcastic answer: why aren’t white people happy enough with EVERYTHING?).......... Writers always seem to mention how hard Lin works, and often mention this as a trait of Asian Americans. They mention that he went to Harvard, how smart he is. They mention that he is humble. When I wrote about the “Chink in the Armor” headline here, a commenter responded by pointing to Asian Americans being too respectful to speak up against racism. This respectfulness, he said, was something he admired about Asians...... But the positive stereotypes people think they can use because of their “positivity” continue (and worsen) the problem. Thinking you can call an entire race “respectful” is thinking you can classify someone by race, is racism. Which is what is happening to Jeremy Lin when he is called “hard-working” instead of “skilled” ..... . After ESPN ran the “Chink in the Armor” headline, the writer of the headline made a very defensive apology in which he claimed to be a “good person” who didn’t know the weight of the word he was using. He was fired, and this apology came afterward. ...... “Chink” is a very common term, probably the most common slur against Asians..... I had let a Korean American slip into my novel in a supporting role, a character who never finished his sentences, who was always cut-off or cutting himself off. .... But then a strange thing happened. I got used to seeing Koreans, and was surprised whenever I saw a white person. And after some time, not like the sudden realization in the mirror but a gradual process, I began to see myself as a person from this country. I wrote my first story with a Korean character, and something in it, the vulnerability, the honesty, clicked. In Korea, I had different differences than in America. Not that race was out of the picture—the biggest shock to people was my culture, in spite of my skin color, my inability to speak Korean—but it was like looking at race from the inside out, the opposite of how I had been forced to see myself my whole life. It was a lesson: that I had control over my differences, that I could choose to build them up or break them down, that they were not simply genetic, something that had never been true in America

Army Prosecutor Details Racial Abuse That Preceded Soldier’s Suicide

Comparing the Liu Inquiry to a Soldier's Hazing

Chinese-American leaders came to the defense of the embattled city comptroller, John C. Liu, on Thursday, comparing the federal inquiry into his campaign fund-raising to what has been called a hazing campaign before the death of Pvt. Danny Chen. .... Mr. Liu’s campaign fund-raising troubles were fanned by potent forces determined to prevent him from becoming mayor in 2013. ..... invoked Private Chen, a Chinatown native who apparently committed suicide in Afghanistan in October after being subjected to harsh treatment by fellow soldiers .... “I see another assassination. This is a character assassination. Worse than death, you lose your good name.” .... The news conference was the first time some of Mr. Liu’s ardent backers had voiced their support in so public and unified a fashion, after months of what they said was nonstop negative publicity. .... Mr. Liu has not been accused of wrongdoing. .... “This is politics,” said Nora Chang Wang, a commissioner at the Department of Employment under Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani. “When people see him as a viable candidate, such a strong solid candidate for that highest position in the city, in a way it’s a threat.” ..... Another former city official, Hugh H. Mo, a lawyer who was a deputy police commissioner under Mayor Edward I. Koch, said Mr. Liu had been denied due process. “I believe it is an effort to destroy John, who really represents the hopes and aspirations of Asian-Americans, and particularly Chinese-American immigrants,” Mr. Mo said. “We take pride in John.” .... the city’s leading Chinese-language newspaper, World Journal, sent three reporters, and two others, Sing Tao Daily and China Press, each sent two

John Liu: Mayor Of NYC: 2013
New York City

Sunday, August 22, 2010

Mainstream Media Kept Saying John Liu Was Losing

Image via Wikipedia

Last year the buzz was that John Liu was losing. From the New York Times all the way down to mid level magazines, the buzz was Yassky was winning. It was close. It was a tossup. And of course there were unfair comments about John Liu, to the point at one instance John called his opponent "the three headed Yassky."

At the end of the day John Liu won easy. Later in November he got more votes than Bloomberg.

And I am seeing some of the same media bias against Reshma. Several of the print magazines have been putting out articles that are in absolute no resonance with what is actually happening at the ground level.

It used to be Reshma Saujani, Wall Street's candidate. Now it is Reshma Saujani, sure to lose candidate. These remind me of some of the negative articles about John Liu I used to read.

The answer is to keep focused on the fundamentals of the campaign, to focus on new/social media, more on community media.

Although I must say some TV spots have been good.

More than one newspaper article has quoted polls supplied by the Maloney campaign that are months old.

Challenging an entrenched incumbent is not easy. But some of the mainstream media makes that task harder by perpetuating some outdated attitudes.

Tuesday, August 03, 2010

Organized Labor Has No Business Endorsing Maloney

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Obama Has No Business Kissing Maloney

Organized labor in this city has major business pounding the pavements for the winner of the Democratic primary, but organized labor has no business throwing its weight into the wrong hat for the Democratic primary.

Reshma Saujani is the daughter of political refugees. Talk about starting from scratch. She went to public schools all her life. The working class families of this city might be able to relate to that.

To Mansion Maloney, all labor issues are abstract.

I am a free marketeer because I believe in democracy. There can be no democracy without a free market economy. A healthy American economy is one where Main Street and Wall Street are no longer working at cross purposes. You need someone like Reshma Saujani who can claim allegiance to both sides to be able to bring about that healthy relationship. It is not one or the other. We need both. We need entrepreneurs and we need workers. We need Main Street and we need Wall Street. We need strong public schools so that it does not matter where your starting line in life is.

In Reshma Saujani families of organized labor have a living, breathing embodiment of someone they can talk about to their kids as an example of someone who has achieved regardless of what her starting point in life was.

In this city of immigrants, Reshma Saujani is the ultimate immigrant. And organized labor has to claim her candidacy as its own.

Maloney, over the years, has voted the way organized labor would expect a Democrat to vote. But that makes her a checkbox Democrat. That does not make her a leader. Reshma Saujani is a Democrat. She too is going to vote like a Democrat on issues of particular interest to labor. But she is a leader. She is going to come up with the new thoughts for a new century. Organized labor needs to change with the times and stay relevant.

John Liu: Mayor Of NYC: 2013

Sunday, July 25, 2010

Barack Obama: The NRA's Candidate

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I just did some thorough research online and have come to the conclusion that Barack Obama did not accept a dime of PAC money from the NRA when running for president in 2008. That makes Barack Obama the NRA's candidate, and progressives beware.

That has been the Carolyn Maloney camp's logic as applied to Obama 08.

Maloney has taken half a million dollars from the various Wall Street PACs. Reshma Saujani has not taken a dime from them. But that still has not prevented the Maloney campaign from working day and night to paint Reshma as the Wall Street's candidate.

That is downright dishonest. No wonder people stay so cynical of people in Congress. When Maloney does what she does, that makes the entire Congress look bad.

That is demonization. That has racial overtones.

John Liu, the next Mayor of NYC, was on Wall Street before he got into politics. Ends up that is a good thing. That means you are smart, you can get things done. (John Liu: Mayor Of NYC: 2013)

The Maloney camp needs to stop the lie. They need to stop feeding the lie to the media. They need to stop feeding the lie to Chris Mathews.

Ed Koch And Carolyn Maloney: Bush Democrats
Carolyn Maloney's Six Sins
I Am Angry At Chris Matthews
Reshma Saujani

Friday, July 23, 2010

John Liu: Mayor Of NYC: 2013

Image via Wikipedia

When I showed up for John Liu's inauguration and the after party, I got the sense that John Liu feels like Bill Thompson deserved to have another shot at the top job. It was not explicit, but it was implied, it was in the air. And that was a statement to how genuinely and strongly John Liu felt about Thompson's candidacy. They really like each other. Thompson's margin was closer than anyone thought, way closer than I expected.

Personally I was rooting for Bloomberg for deeply personal reasons. (Independent For Bloomberg) And I really liked the emphasis on immigration and immigrants that the Mayor put during the inauguration ceremony. Immigration colored the entire inauguration ceremony. (The Dumbfuck Immigration Laws) I loved that. He has been an excellent Mayor. He is a personal hero of mine. (Larry Ellison) He not only brought business sense to city government procedures, running for and being Mayor has been the best business move he ever made. Look at what that did to his net worth. His company's market valuation went up and up.

And it was great to have John show up for this Holi event put together by the Madhesis in town: Happy Holi. He did not show up for the votes. There were hardly any voters in the room. I greatly appreciated that. Although I feel like I have a doctor-patient relationship with the Madhesis of New York City. ("Madisey") Internalized prejudice is as big a problem as prejudice.

But then there are friendships, political loyalties, party affiliations, and then there is politics.

My Number One Prediction For 2013

All sorts of motherfuckers are going to run for Mayor in 2013. It is going to be one crowded Democratic primary. There is going to be no particular itch for Bill Thompson. If it is going to be Bill Thompson's year, the dude is going to have to prove himself all over again, almost from scratch.

That is going to be a statement on the long shadow Mayor Bloomberg has cast over this city for a decade. People are not going to wait in line. There is no line. There never has been. You don't wait in line. That is not how democracy works.

Three Years: A Very Long Time In New York City Politics

John Liu doing a good job as City Comptroller for three years and being in the news for three years is not going to be the same John Liu who spoke at his inauguration and introduced his brothers "Bobby and Teddy." The only reason for John to not run for Mayor would be because he feels it is better to seek guaranteed reelection than to take an iffy shot at the mayoral office.

The problem with that risk averseness is if he does a lousy job as Comptroller, his reelection is not going to be guaranteed. If he does a good job, it is going to be very hard for him to resist the enormous grassroots pressure he is going to feel to run for Mayor. Motherfuckers are not going to shy away and make room for Bill Thompson - already people are like Bill who; the same thing happened to Fernando Ferrer, two months after election day people were like, Fernando who - but many of the motherfuckers are going to wilt and wither if John Liu shows up as candidate. He is going to have a Bloomberg like aura for having done a good job as Comptroller.

One Shot: The American Way

Howard Dean did not run for president again in 2008. If it is about running for City Council, you can try it out a few different times, maybe, but that does not apply to the major offices. The office of Mayor of NYC is the number two political office in America. It is a big one. I don't see Bill Thompson even running. 2000 was close for Al Gore also. He did not run again in 2004.

Black Power?

Paterson imploded. Rangel is imploding. Thompson has evaporated already. Bill Perkins is the only black guy in town who appreciated the idea of the first black president. I am surprised he is not running for Congress from Harlem.

12% of America is black. 12% of New York City is Asian. Blacks have had their day. It is time for some Asian power.

As for Rangel, I think I am going to save my compassion for the tsunami victims.

Having What It Takes

John Liu has what it takes. He has the political ingredients. Either you have them, or you don't. John Liu has them. Just look at some facts. No politician in town today is on better terms with labor than John Liu. How did he do that? You got to marvel. He is more popular with blacks than any black politician in town. How did he do that? He earned more votes than Bloomberg last year. How did he do that? The story from last year's election is not that Thompson's margin was close, but that Liu got more votes than Bloomberg. John Liu could have beat Bloomberg, Thompson was not able to. Bill Thompson failed.

2013 Or Never

I am making the judgment call that either John Liu is going to be Mayor in 2013 or he is never going to be Mayor. Democracy asks for basic humility. It is ultimately the voters who decide, and that's the way it should be.

First of all, if he decides not to run despite being the best candidate around, that is going to show he has good political judgment but not good enough.

Second, his not running will mess up all future rounds for him. Look at a few scenarios. Someone else wins. If that person is Democratic, and is so bad that he/she is destined to be a one term Mayor, Liu still could not run in 2017. If he/she is good, Liu can not run until 2021. But if the 2013 person is a one term Mayor, and some other Democrat wins in 2017, that will bar Liu from running against the incumbent in 2021.

Obama needed to run in 2008 or he was just another Evan Bayh. Only John Liu can decide if he will run for Mayor in 2013. But if he runs, I am predicting he will win. (Jupiter And Obama) My grade for work done so far as Comptroller is an A+. If he runs, many of the motherfuckers who might otherwise run will stay out. That is not going to be true if Bill Thompson runs. John Liu has been casting a long shadow. That is remarkable for a dude who is not a billionaire. His power and potential for more power comes from sheer political skills. That is remarkable. That is beyond outstanding.

Another Dude Called John

John Liu Inauguration January 1: I Am Invited
Tibet Is Not The US South Of The Civil War Era
John Liu: Victory
John Liu Has Me Excited
NYC Local Races

Monday, March 01, 2010

Happy Holi

Facebook Photo Album

Tuesday, December 22, 2009

A More Active 2010

WASHINGTON - MAY 02: Louisana Governor Bobby ...

Image by Getty Images via Daylife

2009 has been my year for Netizen. That has been my active blog this year. But one of the things I want to do going into 2010 is jack up my activities with my other two blogs Barackface (this blog) and Democracy For Nepal. Part of the reason is I wish to seriously consider blogging (Twitter included) as my secondary career. Tech entrepreneurship my primary career, blogging my secondary career (John Chow), and politics my baseball. And I would like to monetize all three blogs.

I wish to follow the Obama presidency more closely in 2010 than I have in 2009. I think the office of the US presidency fascinates me. It is the ultimate executive office. But I also find myself wanting to follow Bobby Jindal and John Liu in the news. It is so easy to do with Google News. I guess there is an element of Blac (Black Latino Asian Coalition) Male identification in there. So be it.

Image via Wikipedia

Netizen will continue to be my primary and most active blog. That is my primary passion. JyotiConnect Inc. distills it for me. My fascination with politics and technology, my impatience with the legislative process, my wanting to find that one big cause for the Global South, all that come together in wanting to get more of the planet's people online. It is a my people thing.

I hope to put out one or two blog posts each week here at Barackface.

And I am so excited I will be there for John Liu's inauguration on January 1.

John Liu Inauguration January 1: I Am Invited

Wednesday, September 30, 2009

John Liu: Victory

This guy could be Mayor in four years. He is going to be the same age as JFK was when he became president. The point being, he is not going to be too young. I think it is a choice between four and 12 years. I would recommend four. Like JFK once said, "They will forget me, others will come along."

This guy has had me excited. For the first time in New York history, thanks to him, Chinatown now finally has an Asian American on the city council, a long time coming.

He completes the Blac equation for me, Blac as in Black, Latino, Asian coalition. John's victory has been an Obama moment for New York City. Barriers have been broken.

Barack Obama gets compared to JFK often. But John actually shares JFK's name. Rumor has it he was named after JFK. Did he have hippy parents?

Facebook Photo Albums

Monday, September 28, 2009

John Liu Has Me Excited

Facebook Photo Album: John Liu For NYC Comptroller
NYC Local Races

Obama may sit out New York City mayor's race between Bloomberg and Thompson President Obama is refusing to get involved in the city mayor's race unless Bill Thompson can somehow close the gap with Mayor Bloomberg.