Stop Dying for My Sins

What we want are allies, not saviors.

Allies stand along side each other as equals in their own regard while saviors stand up for people.

If we as people of color really want to achieve liberation from oppression under a white supremacist society, we need to learn to stand on our own two feet and fight for our own liberation. We need to do this ourselves. If we continue to ask and rely on the white man for our own liberation, all we're going to get is bureaucratic red tape and hand-outs. We'll never achieve liberation on our terms because the white man can't see liberation on our terms, but can see liberation only on his terms and as long as we're playing by the white man's rules, we'll always be fighting an uphill, bound-for-watered-down-failure struggle.

White liberals who don't check their privilege, in my opinion, are worse than the white person who is out-right racist. As people of color, we have to understand that white liberals aren't doing us a favor with their single-issue non-profits going to save Africa bullshit. They're crippling us because they're confining us to single-issue non-profit crutch reform in lieu of real revolution - once again, this is liberation on their terms which translates to our continual oppression.

Real liberation means divesting from whiteness. This means revolution - not reform - because the system itself is the problem. The system serves the interest of the White capitalist, therefore, we need to do away with the current system and as a community - white allies included, envision a society that we want to see that serves the specific needs of the community where everyone has an active say and everyone has access to visibility.

Race Mixing is for Commies!

http://www.typepad.com/services/trackback/6a00d83451c45669e20120a5edb6f1970c

http://www.racialicious.com/2009/10/13/%E2%80%9Crace-mixing-is-communism/

On point. Socialism, Communism, or whatever society we want to envision after Capitalism, must encompass more than redistribution of wealth, but must also include radical redistribution of privilege.

I am NOT an American

I despise the label 'Asian-American'.

To me, it denotes ownership, more specifically, a nationalist ownership of generalized Asians by Americans. Just the very notion of adding a hyphenated term to my so-called ethnic identification signals being thrust into limbo - I am obviously not American otherwise they would just call me American but there's a need for the colonialist to have a sense of ownership over me, otherwise I'd be called asian.

Asian is what the colonist labels me. I had no say in my identity. The term Asian doesn't take into account my own personal narrative - a son of Vietnamese refugees. It doesn't take into account where I come from, where my parents come from, what language I speak, what food I eat, but rather, the label is a way for the colonialist to signify that I am not white - that I am different and therefore don't belong.

I sure as hell don't identify with the title 'American'. To be American, you must be a citizen of America. Being a citizen, to me, signifies a certain attachment to the country of America - a certain loyalty, but more importantly, it signifies someone who shares in the fruits of the country and shares a common language, culture, and practice. I don't share in the fruits of a country that was made for whites and is still run for whites. My community, the Vietnamese peoples obviously didn't share in the fruits of this country when it dropped more than 6.7 million tons of explosives and sprayed more than 40 million gallons of Agent Orange on our homeland, displacing millions of people. Don't let those numbers escape you. A 1-ton bomb is more than capable of killing 130 people and the amount of Agent Orange sprayed on Việt Nam has destroyed 1/4 of the arable land that was available before the war.

It is obvious that I am not a citizen because other citizens don't recognize me as such. Laws are all talk about equality but when I am still called gook and chink by white racists and when the pigs on the block condescendingly ask me if I speak english before threatening to arrest me, it is made painfully clear to me that nothing has actively been done to achieve any sense of equality.

Unfortunately, however, I'm certainly not Asian, or more accurately, Vietnamese, because America's social colonialism has made it so that I don't know how to fluently speak the tongue of my parents. I no longer know my parent's culture as my own, but rather, the culture I am faced with is a sad compromise in which, unless something is done to resist colonization, the culture of my parents will eventually be lost throughout generations as was done with blacks or more assimilated peoples such as the Japanese in America.

So fuck Asian-American, call it what it is: I am a colonized person. Every day American society tries to rid me of my culture and the culture from of my parents. Every day the generation gap widens between the colonized youth and the colonized adults and elders. We of the colonized youth hardly speak our language (in fact, we're told that our parents speak funny english!), know our customs, or can eat our own food. We look to the white person for a standard of beauty (or specifically for Vietnamese, we sometimes look to more 'higher' asians such as Japanese and Koreans). We've been taught not only to hate ourselves, but to hate our community.

So it's time to fight back against this continual colonialist take-over of our every day lives. Every time someone speaks Vietnamese, tries to cook Vietnamese food, questions where and why Vietnamese people practice certain customs - these are all forms of active resistance to dominant colonialism. We must be proud of who we are (and I'm talking about all colonized people - not just Vietnamese) because if we are not, this racist society will be quick to brainwash us into hating ourselves.

Montagnards/Degar Peoples and Racism Beyond Whiteness

When I went to visit Việt Nam last winter, I was taken to visit a Montagnard village by the Catholic Bishop with whom I was staying with in Đà Lạt. It was the first time I've ever heard of the Montagnard peoples and it wasn't ever made clear to me that the Montagnard people were not Vietnamese, but rather, a separate indigenous population (I would later find out that Vietnamese is not even their native tongue). .

It is important to note that the Montagnard are not Vietnamese, but rather, are a recognized indigenous peoples. In fact, they never had contact with foreigners (Vietnamese included) until the 1800s when the French missionaries came to Việt Nam (which wasn't Việt Nam back then). The Montagnard's first contact with Vietnamese people came later when the French brought their Vietnamese servants with them to the highlands where the Montagnards lived. Also, the term Montagnard didn't exist before the French. The population refers to themselves as the Degar people. Montagnard means 'mountain people' in French and it was the term used by the French to identify the Degar people.

This complicates the narrative of Vietnamese independence and Vietnamese refugees because while Degar people are lumped into the category of Vietnamese in America, they are considered an ethnic minority in Việt Nam. In fact, Degar people do not speak Vietnamese and don't share cultural practices with the Vietnamese people. The Degar people have been trying to liberate themselves and establish a self-autonomous state recognizing Degar peoples as independent from the Vietnamese people (BAJARAKA and FULRO movements).

This brings up an important point to illustrate: Minority-Majority narratives always involve a disparity and unequal balance of power. This highlights the need to move away from glorified democracy to an actual working consensus model that takes into account all narratives and eliminates the rule of majority over minority. For example, in Việt Nam, we currently see a movement to modernize Vietnamese culture, however, this is in reference strictly to Vietnamese culture, which is the majority culture while leaving out and threatening minority narratives such as that of the Degar people. Also, the idea of Vietnamese as the national language once again leaves out Degar people who are indigenous to the Central Highlands of Việt Nam and who don't speak Vietnamese. As we can see, the minority-majority narrative extends itself beyond whiteness, just as racism extends itself beyond whiteness as well. Racism often involves the minority-majority narrative because it is often those who are the majority who have the most institutional and systematic power to oppress minorities. It is the majority that are also able to achieve hegemonic power as well. The key thing to note, however, that the majority-minority narrative that I was referring to, especially in regards to racism, applies strictly to nation-states. In the global scene, racism is still predominantly a white supremacist structure because we now live in a system of globalized capitalism where imperialism no longer limits itself to physical colonization, but also to colonization of the mind. We see examples of this through a spread of the Western standard of beauty to almost every corner of the world.