Thanks Mary for sharing this “open letter” by Phonte. It captures a lot of what I’ve been trying to articulate about Michael Jackson and my frustration with the U.S. media’s portrayal of his life and work. R.I.P Michael Jackson (1958 – 2009)

My Hero Ain’t Molest Them Bitch Ass Kids: A Kaing’s Tribute

I haven’t been compelled to blog in a long time.

In an era where everybody is twittering and text-messaging their lives away, a well-thought out essay that extends past 140 characters is quickly becoming a thing of the past.

But when our universe lost its brightest star on June 25, 2009, I felt a deep, overwhelming sadness that I haven’t experienced in many years and I felt moved to say….something.

My hero, Michael Joseph Jackson, is dead.

Honestly I’m still trying to process it, almost like the loss of a much-loved family member. I mean, hell, to many of us Michael WAS family. Much like Nike, or Coca-Cola, or McDonalds, Michael Jackson wasn’t so much a person as he was a living, breathing, American institution; a ubiquitous force that has seemingly existed forever and one that we couldn’t imagine a world without. Seeing Michael onstage was less like watching a musician perform and more akin to witnessing a magician at work.

But contrary to his otherworldly stage presence and magical aura, the man we called The King of Pop proved to be a mere mortal. And now my hero, Michael Joseph Jackson, is dead.

What isn’t dead, unfortunately, is the cloud of false accusations, unsubstantiated rumors, myths, slander, and outright lies that surround his life and his legacy. The greatest myth regarding Michael Jackson is that he was a pedophile who preyed on young children.

It is my belief now, just as it was 16 years ago, that the charges brought against Michael during his 1993 sexual abuse case were false. The allegations made by Jordan Chandler (the accuser) and his father Evan Chandler always seemed suspect to me for a few reasons:

1. Ask the average parent whether they’d want justice or money for their abused child and more than likely they’d say justice, if for no other reason than to protect their child (and other children) from a future attack. The fact that Evan Chandler was willing to essentially let Michael off the hook for a few million (reportedly 2-3), made their case seem like a well-orchestrated extortion attempt. In regards to the case, Evan was later caught on tape saying, “If I go through with this, I win big time. There’s no way I lose. I will get everything I want and they will be destroyed forever…Michael’s career will be over.” Notice that homeboy ain’t mention jack shit about his son. So much for being a concerned father…

2. Generally when victims of abuse come out with allegations against someone, other victims come forward to corroborate their story (i.e. the Catholic Church scandal, where a few parties came forward and it later led to thousands).

Very rarely do child molesters stop at just one kid, or even two for that matter. An alleged pedophile with only two accusers is kinda like an alleged serial killer with only one body. Or an alleged sneaker addict with only two pairs of Jordans in his closet. It just doesn’t make any logical sense, nor does it coincide with the recurring psychological characteristics of most people who fall into those categories.

In the case of Michael Jackson vs. the Chandler family, not a single corroborating witness could be found to help prosecute the case and after raids were conducted on several of Jackson’s homes, no hard evidence of sexual abuse was gathered.

Michael later settled the Chandler case out of court, not as an admission of guilt, but at the behest of his lawyers and financial advisors who warned him that a criminal trial could cost him millions of dollars in legal fees, as well as the loss of hundreds of millions in touring and endorsement revenue. With the Chandler case finally over, Michael continued to tour and released his greatest hits package “HIStory” in 1995. Ten years later though, he would face another trial that, in my opinion, would be the one to literally and figuratively, kill him.

Martin Bashir’s heinous, Machiavellian documentary “Living With Michael Jackson” aired in 2003. It was in this documentary that Mike (albeit foolishly) talked about his fondness for sharing his bed with children, and was seen holding hands with a young boy. Shortly afterwards the young boy from the documentary, 13 year-old Gavin Arvizo (a cancer survivor who had all his medical bills paid for by Michael), accused him of sexual abuse.

When Mike’s case against Arvizo hit airwaves in 2005, I must admit that I had my doubts. Much like the Chris Rock joke, I too shook my head in disbelief and said “ANOTHER kid!?! Mike, what the fuck?!! How could you be THAT stupid?!?!” As the case unraveled though, the financial motivations of the accuser’s family became much more apparent.

Similar to the Chandler case from ‘93, the prosecution couldn’t produce any credible witnesses to corroborate Arvizo’s testimony against Michael. Many of the prosecution’s witnesses were either former employees of Michael who had financial disputes with him, or had criminal convictions themselves. Arvizo’s testimony contradicted previous statements he’d made to officials saying that nothing ever took place between him and Michael, and Arvizo’s mother Janet Arvizo, an eccentric woman with a prior conviction for welfare fraud, single-handedly killed the case with her flippant remarks on the witness stand and overall bizarre courtroom behavior.

Actor Macaulay Culkin came forward in Michael’s defense and testified that no inappropriate behavior ever took place during their many times together, as did many other associates who had spent time at Neverland. Ultimately, Michael emerged from the Arvizo case with a Not Guilty verdict on all counts, but it proved to be a pyrrhic victory. The damage was already done. In the court of popular opinion, The King of Pop was an unrepentant child molestor.

When defending Michael Jackson against his detractors, I am often asked if I would let one of my sons sleep over at his house. The answer is no. Shit, I wouldn’t let my sons sleep over at YOUR house. But that doesn’t make you a pedophile, it just makes me a concerned and protective dad who doesn’t leave his kids around people I personally don’t know well enough to trust.

When it came to children, the only thing Michael was guilty of in my opinion, was naivete. While cuddling in the bed with children isn’t technically illegal, it does violate several social norms; norms that a man who dresses funny, lives at an amusement park and refers to himself as “Peter Pan” would certainly pay a higher price for breaking. When I hear the tales of Michael laying in bed with those children, watching movies, tickling, and engaging in general horseplay, it sounds less like the work of a pedophile and more like the actions of a man trying to experience a childhood he never had. (emphasis added)

During his investigation for the Arvizo trial, Michael was examined by Dr. Stan Katz, a clinical psychologist who concluded that Michael didn’t fit the profile of a pedophile but instead that of a regressed 10 year old, an analysis which I agree with wholeheartedly. I mean after all, only a person with the simple, unsuspecting mind of a child could truly believe they could sleep in the same bed as their pre-pubescent buddies and not pay a price for it.

Still, the most saddening myth surrounding Michael’s life is that he was ashamed to be Black. During the mid 80’s, in the midst of his ever-changing skin complexion and facial features, popular opinion in the Black community was that Mike was a sellout. This was an opinion that would unfortunately haunt him for the rest of his life, but a closer look reveals quite the opposite.

As echoed by my man Scorpeze of the house music duo Windimoto in his excellent blog, Michael Jackson never tried to disown or separate himself from his Blackness at any point in his career. In fact, he was probably the most openly pro-Black pop entertainer of his time. Michael Jackson ashamed to be Black? I mean, this was the same guy who:

-portrayed Black people as kings and queens in ancient Egypt (“Remember the Time” video)
-called Tommy Mottola (his then label boss) a devil and a racist
-sang “white man’s gotta make a change” live on the Grammies in ‘88
-sang about a beautiful African woman in “Liberian Girl”
-featured an African chant at the end of “Wanna Be Startin Somethin”
-donated over $25 million to the United Negro College Fund
-sang “I ain’t scared of no sheets” in “Black or White” and upped the ante by morphing into a BLACK PANTHER at the video’s end
-wrote a song called “They Don’t Really Care About Us,” with a Spike Lee-directed video that featured prisoners raising the Black power fist
-uhhh “We Are The World” and USA for Africa, anyone?

What about this man wasn’t Black enough? Was it his battle with vitiligo and how it caused skin discoloration? Was it his excessive facial surgeries, due I’m sure in no small part to the teasing and ridicule he faced about his looks as a teenager?

Why did we turn our collective backs on a man who always reminded us that he never forgot who he was, or more importantly, whose he was?

This essay is my plea to all people who consider themselves a fan of Michael Jackson, but especially to Black people: Don’t let them talk about our Brother. Don’t let his naysayers convict him of crimes that were never proven. Don’t let people reduce the memory of one of our greatest heroes to that of a weird guy who wore a shiny glove and molested little boys.

When Elvis Presley died, did the media remember him as an overweight, drug-abusing racist who dated a 14 year-old, or was he eulogized as The King of Rock and Roll?

When Woody Allen dies, do you think the media will focus on the controversy behind him marrying his own stepdaughter, or on the films “Annie Hall” and “Manhattan” and how great they were? (Ditto for Jerry Lee Lewis, the rock and roll pioneer who married his 13-year old cousin.)

When people accuse Michael of being a pedophile or a child molester, ask them to provide hard evidence. Ask them to provide an opinion rooted in fact, rather than one based on gossip, hearsay, and conjecture. Chances are, they won’t be able to. The Black community has done a great disservice in not reciprocating the love that Michael Jackson showed us when he was alive. The least we can do in honoring his death is ensure that his legacy is remembered properly for future generations.

Was Michael Jackson a weirdo? Of course he was a weirdo.

But maybe if you had been in the public eye since you were 7, had grown ass women throwing themselves at you since you were 13, suffered physical abuse at the hands of your father, watched your father and older brothers engage in sex with groupies on tour as a child, were called “Big Nose” and “ugly” by both family members AND fans, developed a skin disease that took away the one thing you repeatedly expressed your pride for, and spent the last half of your life as the most famous person on Earth, you’d probably be a bit of a weirdo too.

I am not attempting to paint Michael Jackson as a saint, as no man ever lives up to such a lofty title. But to me, the phrase “no good deed goes unpunished” seems to sum up Michael Jackson’s life more than ever.

Why would people try to tear down a man who constantly used his power, money, and influence to help others?

Why would people express such disgust and contempt for a man who constantly sang of love and peace, and used his talent to entertain, uplift, and inspire millions?

Tell em that its human nature, I suppose…

Rest in Peace, Brother Michael. I love and miss you dearly.

-Phonte

We featured Kian Goh at the Unspoken Borders Conference this year, during the Talk20 session.   Having Goh be part of the conference was fantastic, particularly because of her direct engagement with the queer community on design issues.  One of her projects is featured in our hot-off-the-press publication.  She was also recently interviewed by the American Institute of Architects – be sure to listen to the mp3 of the interview.  She articulates the importance of promoting social justice through design.  Though she specifically speaks to an architectural audience, her words resonate well with other design fields.

Amidst the discussion of what designers can do about social inequities, a related question emerged: should design education address the root causes of those inequities? “There’s no lack of design-build studios going out to poor neighborhoods to build houses, but there’s no discussion [in architecture school] of why those neighborhoods exist,” said architect Kian Goh. But isn’t there a trade-off between expertise and generalism? Some participants thought so, and urban designer Felipe Correa countered: “It is important that we not overextend the net, that we bring it back to what we know how to do best,” he argued. “Allow sociologists to deal with the sociology.”

I’m smiling. The NY Times reported that the Obama’s will be planting an organic vegetable garden at the White House, complete with an educational program with local elementary students to help harvest the produce.

For urban dwellers who have no backyards, the country’s one million community gardens can also play an important role, Mrs. Obama said.

When the Obamas made made the call for people to get more involved with volunteering and service projects in their communities, I witnessed thousands turning out on MLK Day in DC.  Imagine the new surge of urban residents participating in community gardens, urban farms, CSAs and other local food programs!

Detroit’s abandoned Chin Tiki restaurant has been razed.  This New York Times article alludes to rumors about a new hockey arena planned by the Ilitches. Yikes. The last thing that area needs is another big development. The Cass Corridor, once home to Detroit Chinatown, is a portal to downtown Detroit and imposing a large sports stadium will further hurt the already-damage the urban fabric of the neighborhood.  There’s no doubt that Chin Tiki participated in the exoticism of Asian cultures yet there seems to be a loss of historical significance  and cultural memory resulting from its absence.

…the loss of Chin Tiki is an example of bad city planning…with the right people behind it, Chin Tiki could have been a downtown success story, like the once-mothballed Cliff Bell’s, the deco-style jazz club nearby that reopened recently.

More urgently, Detroit should steer away from relying on big box entertainment venues placed in the heart of the city, where a tangle of freeways already intersect once-intact neighborhoods. What Detroit needs is to find a new direction for the economy, one that could foster small local businesses, less auto-dependent infrastructure, and even promote urban agriculture/community gardens.

This is one of the few, if only, student-run conferences at PennDesign that explicitly explores the intersection of race, politics and design. The theme, “Ecologies of Inequality”, investigates the systems and institutions that create and perpetuate disparities in public health, transportation, economic access and spatial disenfranchisement. It will also feature projects that are using design to develop new systems of equality and justice.

We’ve got an amazing line-up, so check out the website when registration opens on February 15.

The Philly Chinatown community is once again fighting to maintain their survival.  Threats to Chinatown’s future began as early as the projects that brought the Vine St. Expressway (I-676), Market East and the convention center  during the urban renewal period.  Because of the fast-track nature of the casino proposal, the community and its allies are put in a tough position to respond quickly, and the op-ed sums up the questionable package put forth by the mayor. Perhaps Philly activists can take a cue from Detroit’s anti-casinos struggle. Detroit former mayor Coleman A. Young challenged the anti-gambling activists to go beyond merely protesting the construction of casinos and to answer the question: if not casinos, what kind of development could save our city?

Thanks to Joanie for sharing this op-ed with me.

City is a slots laughingstock

By Helen Gym

IT’S HARD TO imagine how answering a call to revitalize American cities could go wrong for Philadelphia, but somehow it happened.Last month, the Nutter administration submitted a $2.6 billion wish list for President-elect Obama’s economic stimulus package. Out of 400 cities, Philadelphia ranked No. 2 in the amount of money requested. And second on the city’s list (in dollars) was $125 million for the redevelopment of Market East in anticipation of a proposed casino.

Never mind that city officials rushed through a rezoning process saying the casino itself would be the catalyst for development in the area. Never mind that four months later, there isn’t even a plan in place.

As one city official explained it: “We just want to make sure the opportunity for funding doesn’t go away just because the project’s not ready to be defined.”

It’s not only Philadelphians who raised an eyebrow at that logic. Earlier this month, national GOP leaders flagged the development as a prime example of a pork-laden stimulus package. It also got top billing in the Washington Post and on CNBC, which ridiculed the request.

As one TV commentator put it: “These projects are supposedly shovel-ready. The question is what are they shoveling?”

Regardless of the characterization, the city’s request for $125 million for Market East and related casino costs raises many questions. First and foremost: How much will casinos end up costing the city in these hard economic times?

While the city has been quick to add up supposed revenue, it has budgeted zero costs. The mayor said he wouldn’t even pay for added public safety since he expects the casino to pay for it.

Turns out that even the city doesn’t believe its own hype because we’re apparently hoping U.S. taxpayers will foot the bill.

This includes:

* $100 million in infrastructure, acquisition and construction costs.

* $25 million in public safety costs for the “Casino Entertainment Corridor.”

Now, if we’re paying for this development with our tax dollars, remind me again why we need a slots house on top of the Gallery? And if Philadelphia doesn’t get that $125 million for the casino corridor, what then? Who pays for this development and what are we getting for our money?

Meanwhile, the city is crunched for financial and human resources. The mayor apologizes for not making time to meet and talk about issues like library closings. How then does a “casino corridor” with no plans (and maybe insufficient financing) eat up so much time and city resources?

To view gambling solely as a revenue generator and not realize the cost of a predatory industry is a major failure for the city and state leaders, who are already planning gambling expansion. It’s easy for Atlantic City and Las Vegas to ignore those costs. They’re gambling destinations where the money stays and the problems go home.

BUT IN Philadelphia, placing slots atop the central transit line at a prime youth hangout where everyone is a SEPTA fare away is asking for trouble on a scale that no U.S. city has dared. And as the casino industry tanks nationwide, the city stubbornly continues to hitch its wagon to this crapshoot, wasting time and resources and earning itself a sorry national reputation to boot.

In these times, we need stimulus dollars for investments in energy, education and sustainable economic development. But rather than make a compelling case for the city’s future, it feels like our leaders squandered a chance to put forth a thoughtful vision. And while nobody wants to see the city get a bad rap, maybe the administration is getting what it needs: motivation for a course change to re-evaluate its priorities. *

Helen Gym is a board member of Asian Americans United.

This just came across my inbox! I’m very excited to see Obama and efforts to promote investment in urban infrastructure. Someone has also put up a website that lets you vote on specific urban policy issues. I’m not sure whether this site is officially connected to Obama’s administration, but it’s worth checking out. Maybe if there is enough internet traffic, it will pick up on Obama’s radar screen!

Obama to Create White House Office of Urban Policy

November 12, 2008 8:59 AM

On National Public Radio’s “All Things Considered” yesterday, longtime Obama family friend and Obama-Biden transition team co-chair Valerie Jarrett said that the president-elect would, as pledged during the campaign, create an Office of Urban Policy.

Jarrett said the office would “have a comprehensive approach to our urban development,” who will be an “advocate for cities” within the White House, taking “all the variety of different federal programs and help target them in a logical and systematic way.

“For those of us who have worked in city governments across the country, we recognize how invaluable that person will be,” she said.

Obama discussed this idea in June in a speech before the U.S. Conferen.

“Yes, we need to fight poverty,” he said. “Yes, we need to fight crime. Yes, we need to strengthen our cities. But we also need to stop seeing our cities as the problem and start seeing them as the solution. Because strong cities are the building blocks of strong regions, and strong regions are essential for a strong America. That is the new metropolitan reality and we need a new strategy that reflects it -– a strategy that’s about South Florida as much as Miami; that’s about Mesa and Scottsdale as much as Phoenix; that’s about Stamford and Northern New Jersey as much as New York City. As president, I’ll work with you to develop this kind of strategy and I’ll appoint the first White House Director of Urban Policy to help make it a reality.”

- jpt

UPDATE: ABC News Polling Director Gary Langer points out that Obama lost small towns and rural areas by 8 points, won suburbs by a scant 2 points, and won cities (population 50,000+) by 28 points, 63-35 percent. (That includes a 59-39 percent margin in cities with a population of 50,000-500,000, and an even wider 70-28 percent margin in cities with more than 500,000 residents.)

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Huma Khan

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It’s been a long time since I’ve read something that’s motivated me enough to start a new blog post.  Attending design school has been one of the most consuming and exhausting endeavors I’ve undertaken. But today I read an explosive speech by Jeff Chang, and it has helped me re-orient myself back to the first reason I decided to become a landscape architect/urban planner.

I’m starting to piece together and articulate how the policies that the past 40 years, which Jeff summarizes in his speech, also encompass the physical and spatial disenfranchisement of communities of color. When Jeff describes hip-hop as a response to the “story of the rise of the politics of abandonment and the politics of containment”, it is not just that these policies have socially disenfranchised communities, but that there is a a physical displacement and exclusion of communities that has resulted.  The urban renewal policies of the 1950s, combined with the drug economy, destroyed our Paradise Valleys and Hill Districts around the country, p

In school, this sense of urgency is mostly absent among students.  Too bad most of us are caught up perfecting our renderings and drawings, clicking away in front of computer screens (and here I sit blogging).  We need more conscious, justice-oriented designers to join the fight to restore our communities and take up the questions that Jeff posed at the end of his speech.

Jeff Chang

UCLA SPEECH: Beyond Borders: Education In Action
11/15/08

Whether or not you realize it yet, you made history on November 4th.

You’re America’s new majority.

HONORING OUR ROOTS

We can celebrate our victory now because of the vision and courage of the Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders who four decades ago launched an uprising.

They wanted to confront the structural conditions that left many Asian Americans impoverished, in poor housing, subject to individual and state violence.

They wanted to shape cultural identities that were familiar and real to them, not the kind imposed through the eyes of the colonizers.

They wanted to define the link between the wars their country was waging overseas and their own status as second-class citizens at home.

They wanted institutions that would be accountable to the people, that would produce justice and equality and honor real diversity. We should remember that diversity used to be radical word. At the time, students of color numbered less than 10% at most campuses. History dictated that they weren’t supposed to be there.

Their journey led them to join with others who weren’t supposed to be there―African Americans, Chicanos, Latinos, Native Americans and progressive whites.

In 1968, they came together to launch the Third World Liberation Front at San Francisco State University. On November 6th, they went on a 4-month strike and won the creation of a School of Ethnic Studies. Their strike sent shockwaves from Berkeley to Harvard to Columbia to UCLA, where ethnic studies and Black Studies programs were soon set up.

So began the Ethnic Studies movement.

There were immediate results. Over the next 2 years, the East Coast’s first Pan-Asian organization―Asian Americans in Action―was founded by two women in New York City. Asian American student groups would start up at 60 campuses, precursors to the Asian Pacific Coalition. And in the following decade, regional progressive Asian American networks would spring up on the west and east coasts, and in the Midwest.

These were times that produced a movement, a movement that forged an engaged identity for Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders through the production of knowledge, culture, and political action. It has been described as a golden age of API activism.

Two decades later, during the 80s, a time some have very wrongly dismissed as a dark age of API activism, students of color made UCLA and UC Berkeley majority-minority campuses.

Many of us fought to force the University of California to divest $1 billion in investments in South African apartheid. We demanded Ethnic Studies graduation requirements, increased support and outreach for graduate students of color, and more hiring of faculty of color. When Don Nakanishi was denied tenure, we had his back because it was a clear example of the way institutional racism works―how brilliance can go unrewarded because of bigotry. But we argued that the changing demographics of the state and country demanded nothing less than a transformation of the university.

And we won many of these battles. We forced the university to divest from South Africa and the apartheid regime fell. We got ethnic studies graduation requirements at UC Berkeley and UCLA and across the country. We saw Don Nakanishi secure tenure and become one of the most revered teachers in the country.

We won because we stood on the shoulders of those who had come before us, because we did not back down, because history was on our side.

And so we come today to pay tribute to those who came before us.

But let’s not be too nostalgic. Nostalgia is no way to honor those who came before. It’s too late for nostalgia anyway.

THE TRAGEDY OF THE 60s

Because as much as we need to pay tribute to the student activists of the 1960s, we must also fully understand the tragedy of the 1960s.

In 1968, Richard Nixon and George C. Wallace won 57% of the popular vote around politics rooted in a racist backlash against civil rights and an abiding disgust for young people. The shape of that defeat, the crushed hope of that tumultuous year, have dominated American politics ever since.

All of electoral politics since 1968 has centered on the desire to find a mythical white middle. Nixon’s “Silent Majority” was parsed into demographic slivers, a process we saw this year in coded terms like “hockey moms” and “hard-working Americans” and “the real America”.

It’s been about trying to find these minute fractions of a “white center”, honing in on the ever-smaller, ever more reactionary minorities. Two pieces of supposedly “common-sense” political wisdom came out of this―that this country was essentially “center-right” and that the only voters who mattered were the white voters of the mythical middle.

Schisms over race and generation have defined 40 years of politics in this country.

This, in a nutshell, is the story of the hip-hop generation. It’s the story of the rise of the politics of abandonment and the politics of containment. And the sorry results are all around us.

We have the tragedies of Katrina. The hurricane simply exposed the accumulated horrors this country’s politics of abandonment have visited upon poor people of color for 40 years.

We have the biggest prison-industrial complex in the world, and an entire generation of young men and women of color behind bars in a society that no longer cares about rehabilitation, that’s about locking people up and throwing away the key.

We have an immigration system that is inhumane and out-of-date, that divides families and closes the borders even as the destinies of nations are increasingly lashed together.

We have a nation torn asunder by economic policies that have exacerbated the wealth gap and hastened an environmental collapse.

We have pre-emptive shock-doctrine wars justified by Orientalist views of the world, and a ruthless disdain for its human toll.

Folks, we have issues.

Yet amidst all of this, conservatives wanted to raise the old racial fears in this election.

They returned the election to 1968, an era when racist housing covenants had only recently been made illegal and racial intermarriage had only recently been made legal.

Of course, it was the most ridiculous kind of nostalgia─a battle for a world that was already gone. But at the Republican National Convention, I watched Rudy Giuliani and Sarah Palin try to hype a newly discovered breed of subhuman: the community organizer.

They blew their racist dog whistles all the way until November 4th, and not without effect. Arab Americans and Muslim Americans were silenced by the loud racist whisper campaigns, until Colin Powell stepped up to ask the right question, “So what if Obama was Muslim?” Authorities foiled at least a half-dozen white supremacist schemes to kill Obama. And when McCain began his concession speech that night by celebrating Obama’s history-making election as the first Black president, his supporters actually booed.

Conservatives all attempted to portray Obama as an unknowable Other. So maybe Obama is our first API president? He was certainly treated like a stranger from a different shore.

WELCOME THE NEW MAJORITY

And yet on November 4th, we saw past all of that.

Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders and young people voted 2-1 to elect Barack Obama. In doing so, we became an essential part of the new majority.

This past summer, as Obama was bodysurfing at Sandy Beach in Hawai’i (which makes him the first API bodysurfing president), ABC pundit Cokie Roberts said his vacation to that “foreign” place made him seem “a little bit more exotic than he perhaps would want to come across.” But days later, new census projections were released showing that the U.S. might become majority-minority by 2042, a full eight years earlier than previously expected. The Brookings Institution followed by noting that those under 30 will reach that point in 2028.

But the new majority couldn’t wait. We showed up on November 4th, two decades early. And yes, we beat the hell out of McCain’s and Palin’s asses with good-old fashioned community organizing.

The size of the victory―365 electoral votes, 67 million votes, and historic turnout rates for young people and people of color―is resounding proof that the country is hardly “center-right”, but in fact may be “progressive-left”. It’s hard to think of a greater repudiation of the racist politics of Richard Nixon and George Wallace and the reactionary psychographics of Karl Rove and Mark Penn.

On election night, my cousin―a recent graduate of Punahou School, Barack Obama’s high school in Hawai’i―was in Accra, Ghana. She watched as American expatriates screamed and sobbed and hugged, Ghanaian boys waved an American flag, and women fell to the ground to pray. When Obama stepped to the podium in Chicago, she said, the sun rose in the African sky. It was a new day.

You helped make that day a reality.

You are the new majority once imagined and embodied by those who formed the Third World Liberation Front.
And through this historic moment, you have resoundingly entered the world stage.

“POST-RACIAL AMERICA”?

Now, a lot of people have been suggesting that we have arrived in a “post-racial America”. And I say to them, well damn, I must have missed that train stop.

The last time someone made slant-eyes at me was not so long ago. The last time someone sneered at my family and asked if they spoke English was not so long ago. These are just the small slights.

If we are in a post-racial America, why didn’t Barack Obama and John McCain want to talk about immigration? Why didn’t they want to talk about the prison-industrial complex?

These are some of the issues that progressive Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders must be ready to raise.

We were on the winning side, but we can’t surrender our principles. We have an important role to play, and we cannot shy away from our responsibility.

THE REAL QUESTION

I want to close with a cautionary tale, one I have been talking about a lot lately, and one I have raised here at UCLA before.

During the 1980s, one of our biggest political victories came when we challenged UCLA and UC Berkeley on the question of Asian admissions.

We began fighting so-called elite universities to change policies that seemed to cap the percentage of Asian Americans admitted to UCLA and Cal at 20%. We brought in the community, we brought in the state legislature. We put pressure on the University administrators until they broke.

And we won. The universities changed their policies to reflect greater cultural sensitivity. And the results are clear to this day. After the 80s, the numbers of Asian Americans at UCLA and Cal climbed sharply.

But this story does not have a happy ending

We believed that we had taught the University a lesson―that admissions is a process in which we must carefully balance social needs, with a special eye towards helping those who have been historically underserved and an understanding of what it means to shape the polity of the future

But neoconservatives were able to twist the lesson of our fight into an all-out assault on affirmative action. Several years after the admissions fight was resolved at UCLA and Cal, they marshaled the passage of Proposition 209. Asian American admits continued to climb, but UC campuses are less economically and culturally representative than they were in the 1980s

So we won the battle. But you all are continuing to fight the same war today, as forces within the university once again attempt to pit communities of color against each other. They have no care for a racially just society. It’s all just a numbers game to them

On the other hand, we must confront some very delicate questions, especially now that we constitute the de facto majority on this campus: What do we do when we win? How do we understand our needs in the context of the entire struggle for racial justice? What are our responsibilities to the whole and not just ourselves

These are the problems, I might add, that we also must now confront as part of the new majority. What do we do when we win?

This questions undergirds all the other questions we want to answer: How do we bring the troops home, reverse economic injustice and the abandonment of the impoverished, expand educational opportunity, dismantle corporate consolidation, ensure diversity of media representation, rethink immigration, establish national healthcare, colorize the green economy, abolish prisons, and begin rehabilitating our people and our country and the world

What do we do when we win

When we look back across the sweep of history, we learn this: There is no golden age, there is no dark age, within each is the other

There is always the need for change. And there is always only now. The struggle of now. What Martin Luther King Jr. once referred to in a speech calling for an end to the Vietnam War, ‘the fierce urgency of now’

We learn that no one will ride to our rescue. We will not be saved. We must save ourselves

Our work as artists, as organizers, as agents of change cannot stop now. Too much has happened. Our elders and forebears have created too much for us to leave the legacy aside.

The best way to honor our history is to continue to make it. As Martin Luther King Jr. said, “We are now faced with the fact, my friends, that tomorrow is today.”
It’s your time now. This urgency is yours now. Go out and make history.