Winston Chou is a graduate student in sociology at UCLA. He is especially interested in issues of immigration and second-generation assimilation, but would almost always rather talk about obscure NBA players from the '90s. (Remember Chris Gatling?)
So it’s important to scrutinize carefully the claim that the rapid “unwhitening” of the U.S. will somehow produce new cultural frictions. Americans, white and nonwhite alike, have been experiencing and adapting to the dislocations of time, generation, and culture for decades – if not centuries. Now, as then, there are vociferous struggles over national culture, and what it means (and takes) to belong to America. But now, as then, there will also be opportunities to invent new identities, to hybridize cultural practices, and to collaborate in the ongoing fashioning of American life.
More than half of new births in the United States are nonwhite. But it’s important to scrutinize carefully the claim that the rapid “unwhitening” of the US will inevitably produce new "cultural" frictions.
Undocumented immigration and outsourcing are perhaps the two most
frequently mentioned culprits of the job heist. The imagery of theft is
misleading, of course; undocumented workers aren’t “stealing” American
jobs so much as working ogrish caricatures of them. As for those working
outsourced jobs abroad? According to City University of New York
sociologist Shehzad Nadeem, their roles couldn't, paradoxically,
look more different from the very (American) jobs they’re meant to simulate.
News coverage of the Development, Relief, and Education for Alien Minors (DREAM) Act, which passed by a thin margin in the House and will presumably be voted on today in the Senate, focused yesterday on the kind of polemical soundbites which have come to dominate public discourse on immigration. On the one hand, conservative senators called the bill a “nightmare act” that would further chip away at ordinary Americans’ tenuous economic footholds. On the other, liberals fruitlessly prodded their opponents with the provocative human element of the bill: at its core, the DREAM Act is meant to provide a path to citizenship for the several hundred-thousand undocumented immigrants who came to the United States as children.
Of course, no representative thoughtfully considered the voices on the other side of the aisle and changed the vote they walked in the door with -- it’s pure naivete to think that any ever do.
No, we didn't land LeBron, Amar'e, or even Demarcus. But Golden State Warriors fans still have plenty to be excited about for the upcoming NBA season: new addition David Lee, rising star Steph Curry, and last season's sixth-leading scorer, Jeremy Li -- ahem, Monta Ellis.
Those of you who get all hot and bothered for independent Asian American periodicals and that wondrous article of clothing known as the "free T-shirt" can now add next Friday's Asian Heritage Night to that list.
Thanks to Hilda Yao, executive director of the Claire Giannini Education Fund, thousands of teachers across California's starving public school system will no longer have to eat the cost of classroom supplies for the upcoming school year on their own.
James Lee, a 43-year-old Washington, DC, resident, was shot and killed by police following a four hour standoff at Discovery Channel headquarters in Silver Spring, Maryland.
SAALT "Jazz and Justice" Fundraiser (Washington, DC)
Thursday, Sept. 2 from 6:00pm - 10:00pm
Angie Myung, co-founder of Los Angeles-based design company Poketo, is hitting the big leagues, people. I know what you're thinking -- it gets bigger than designing an early version of Hyphen's website?
It's been a lucrative pair of weeks for Christopher Nolan. Inception, his new sci-fi dream-heist thriller, is perched atop the box office for the second straight week and -- no offense, Steve Carell and Zac Efron fans -- looks to hold that spot this go-around as well. The film, unlike most box office-rampaging mega-schlock, is no critical slouch, holding steady at 87% on Rotten Tomatoes and ranking well with the director's other dark, brainy, critically-adored flicks.
Check out this highlight video of undrafted rookie Jeremy Lin holding his own against overall first pick John Wall.
Inception, Christopher Nolan's intricately plotted tale of corporate espionage in the not-so-distant future, has been one of the summer's most hotly anticipated films since the beginning of its deliberately obfuscatory marketing campaign.
The heated race for South Carolina’s governership turned racist when State Senator Jake Knotts referred to Representative Nikki Haley as an “[expletive] raghead.” He later attempted to rectify his slur by saying he didn’t mean the expletive. As for “raghead?” Senator Knotts defended the word by arguing, “We need a good Christian to be our governer. […] We’re at war over there.”
The governor of Arizona legislated the nation’s most aggressive assault on undocumented immigration. Immigrants in the state must now carry legal documents at all times or risk detainment, arrest, and deportation.
It's been a momentous few months since my last post here on Hyphen. Our site has undergone a pretty stunning redesign. Three of the NCAA's four number one seeds have been eliminated from March Madness. Only slightly more important: last week, the House and Senate approved a budget reconciliation bill that utterly overhauled the nation's health care insurance system.
It's something that strikes me, just how briefly we've been here. My father remembers, however bare that memory may be, the year when Emanuel Celler, Philip Hart, and Ted Kennedy pushed through legislation abolishing the use of preferential quotas in determining immigration rights. That year, the trickle of immigrants from Asia turned into a flood.
Last Friday, the wrestler Umaga died. He was found by his wife, unconscious and with a bloody nose, after suffering a heart attack in his sleep. He was rushed to the hospital, where he died, still unconscious, of a second heart attack. He was 36.
When my mother drives, she wears a plastic visor that juts out like the back of Darth Vader's helmet. Her friends wear gloves that unravel to the elbow and giant white windbreakers in 80-degree weather. My sister used to tell me how jealous she was when I came home, scorched brown from hours of basketball in my friends' driveways, and my parents would ask her: "Why would you want to get any darker? You'd look like a black girl."
In the terrible 1998 remake of the Japanese monster-flick Godzilla, the mayor of New York is an arrogant buffoon who nearly dooms the city. The rumor? The character -- Mayor Ebert -- is a stab at the movie critic Roger, who has blasted Emmerich in the past for an overreliance on special effects and spectacle, at the expense of character development and plot. Consider the opening paragraph from this, his review of Emmerich's 2004 film The Day After Tomorrow.
Anyway, I have a feeling that, upon watching the trailer for Emmerich's upcoming film 2012, Roger Ebert and I had the same reaction: not this shit again.
It's probably ill-advised for me, as Hyphen's newest-minted blogger, to make this first sentence a critical one -- but I think it's fair to say that our vetting process needs a rehaul. It was a bit too easy for me to hoodwink everyone into thinking I could write intelligently about Asian America, when really I have no idea what Asian America is -- or, more accurately, where Asian America ends.
It's difficult, for instance, to locate in its borders the story of Christopher and Noriko Savoie. Rather than try to recap it all here, I'll point you to CNN's incipient report, as well as a post more sympathetic to Noriko at another blog.
