OK, so since the KONY video started polluting my newsfeed, I’ve done a 180 revolt against it, and then come half-full circle back around, following some of Nick Kristof’s posts particularly, who I kind of see as the most reliable moral compass around.

Things I think are good about it:

1) Raises awareness. Even a lot of those who criticised the video for its lack of crucial context and nuance hadn’t actually heard of Kony until the video (me included). It’s also true that our celebrity culture is skewed and that those with a platform ought to be allowed to speak on important issues (but not necessarily be forced to do so by Twitter peer pressure).

2) Good to see someone harnessing social media/advertising/marketing for something which isn’t predominantly profit-driven, although of course that has been questioned… (Besides, other people have done it, cf. the Girl Effect video)

3) Debating the niceties and flaws of the video is a luxury which only those of us who live in peaceful states can afford - for the victims of Kony’s devastation, an immediate solution in the form of international troops is exactly what is needed.

(A few of the) Things that I dislike about it (leaving aside for now issues of context, the potential long-term harm, and basic inaccuracies):

1) It’s effective marketing rests a lot upon manipulating easy and questionable emotions, see the cute white kid (who deep down is JUST LIKE those black kids!), the paternalistic, gung-ho AMERICA FUCK YEAH attitude to global issues, and all those time-cheap gestures like wearing a bracelet which allow you to do just enough to get you off the hook of really doing something. (I also felt uncomfortable with them appropriating ‘Who Gon Stop Me Now’, a song which is about African-American oppression, “this is something like a holocaust/millions of our people lost” to soundtrack loads of white college students running around town putting up posters to ‘save the Africans’, but that might just be me).

2) The part when the narrator presses the boy to say over and over again, “I’d rather be dead than live like this”, his desperate words giving the West licence to bomb the shit out of the child soldiers who are, let’s not forget, still Kony’s bodyguards and troops, call it necessary collateral damage, kill “the bad guy” and go home heroes. I mean, they said it was ok by them - we got it on camera!

3) Raising awareness about human rights issues is one thing, but pitching increased militarisation and national unrest as the sole answer is another. The ‘War on Terror’ definitely raised awareness about the ‘oppression of Islamic women’, but somehow those women aren’t the ones benefiting from the whole thing, as, I suspect, will be the case for Ugandan children.  If the video was calling for donations to local NGOs who would really be improving living conditions and infrastructure/ establishing long-term foreign investment, then I would have a lot less problems with it. As it is, all those good-willed donations seem to be going into the pockets of the people at Invisible Children and into making bracelets which everyone will throw away at the end of the year. 

Happy International Women’s Day!

There are moments where I actually really like being ‘of race’ in the UK… I work at the Box Office of the student theatre, and usually spend the hours scrolling Facebook with my eyes glazed over besides when they flick to the desktop clock, and selling tickets to plummy-voiced eighteen-year-olds and eighty-year-olds. However every now and then, like just now, an older international student or research fellow comes in and asks where I’m from and I ask where they’re from, and it’s always so sweet and I think that must be what it’s like for British-British to talk to new people, not to feel my guard/bile constantly being raised and just to enjoy seeing the world in common with someone else…

^^This is Mickey Rooney playing an Oriental man in ‘Breakfast At Tiffany’s’.

Like many girls, I suspect, I loved ‘Breakfast at Tiffany’s before I’d ever seen it - it’s one of those movies with a mythology around it.  Everyone wants to be Audrey Hepburn. I had a clock with her face on it in my bedroom at home and an obscenely big poster in my room at uni.  But when it came to actually watching it, I realised that even if I was wearing chic black and pearls and sitting kookily half out my window, there was more in my way of identifying with her than my lack of perfect-face (and guitar.) (and cat.) The glamour of Holly Golightly didn’t rub off on me, but it rubbed out of the film after I saw the offensive and practically unwatchable caricature that is Mr Yunishi.

The amazing Hadley Freeman draws a line between this stereotype and the reception of Jeremy Lin (yes, the backlash begins already) in this piece in the UK Guardian: Jeremy Lin row reveals deep-seated racism against Asian Americans

I recommend reading it (and recommend against, as did the friend who passed this on to me, reading the comments): here are some excerpts.

“Chink in the armor” was ESPN’s take not once but twice when the Knicks lost a game last week, both as a headline added by ESPN writer Anthony Federico and then as a phrase used by the anchor Max Bretos (Federico has since been fired and Bretos received a 30-day suspension.) Those two muppets look the height of sophisticated decorum compared with Foxsports.com writer Jason Whitlock, whose response to Lin’s triumph over the Lakers on Friday night was to tweet“Some lucky lady in NYC is gonna feel a couple inches of pain tonight”, a comment notable for being almost more misogynistic than racist. When the Madison Square Garden Network flashed up a photo of Lin, itsuperimposed it with a fortune cookie, presumably refraining from adding some chopsticks purely because it didn’t have the graphics.

Nor does one need to look to the morons for examples. Chinstroking journal the Atlantic put forward the charming theory that Lin’s success is due to his “philosophical heritage” – ah, so! And so inscrutable, too!

Asian Americans are, without question, barely represented culturally. Black roles in Hollywood are still by and large limited to maids, drug dealers and James Earl Jones, but Asian roles are invariable limited tocamp villains, martial arts experts, dippy shop owners and exchange students soundtracked with a gong.

So the answer to what connects Mickey Rooney and Jeremy Lin is that both reveal a side of America that even this most racially aware country tends to ignore. The difference is that Rooney encouraged those stereotypes, Lin overturns them, yet the response remains the same.

ohmyasian:

(the-absolute-best-posts)

2193. Streets of Japan.  Let’s break in and steal that humungo Totoro.

I want to nap on his belly like Mei in the film

thedailywhat:

Punny HeadLINs of the Day: Speaking of which, here’s a collage of every Jeremy Lin pun made by the New York Post and New York Daily News in the past two weeks. (Click to embiggen.)

So this has been one of the issues closest to my heart for some time - the appalling, occasionally lethal conditions under which people in China genuinely slave to make iPods and iPads.

In this NYT article, the reporter describes in graphic detail the hazardous and inhuman work, and Apple’s repeated failure to care about workers’ welfare.

“We’ve known about labor abuses in some factories for four years, and they’re still going on,” said one former Apple executive who, like others, spoke on the condition of anonymity because of confidentiality agreements. “Why? Because the system works for us. Suppliers would change everything tomorrow if Apple told them they didn’t have another choice.”

 Yesterday, then, I was excited to read that Apple had finally admitted they had a human rights problem after years of criticism and scandal.  They finally decided to take action in response to a letter written by campaign group China Labour Watch last week (and not, as this shameful propaganda piece suggests, off their own backs in the interests of ‘transparency’).

However, this piece by UK journalist Archie Bland made me feel really quite sick. Entitled ‘There’s no ‘i’ in ‘brand’, but i saw myself reflected in it’, I thought it was cowardly, self-absorbed and offensive. I couldn’t stand his pretensions to be actually posing ethical questions

“People have committed suicide at the Foxconn plant. What would it take to make us give them up? Would we pay more attention if the victims were Westerners?”

as if he’s interested in the answer, instead of hiding what it really functions as, which is to neutralise the questions, to make them purely rhetorical.  To contrast the soullessness with which he paraphrases real human suffering with his equation of an iPhone with his own soul is pretty revealing.

And then, oh ok we’re done with the clever words, let’s get to the point—

“We have to decide if our products are worth the suffering they cause.

My decision? Well, I’m writing this on a you-know-what. I don’t know what this says about me, exactly. But it can’t be anything good. Once you’ve taken a bite of the Apple, it’s very hard to go back to a state of innocence.”

OH RIGHT, another cop-out rhetorical question all leading up to the climax of a shit pun you thought up at the start of this whole exercise and threw in some stats for colour.  His decision? Not to care about Chinese people - and to get paid for writing it all down.

My friend sent this to me.  Just… no words. If only the song didn’t either… (But you can always hit mute and enjoy the pandas!)

From the Guardian commentisfree blog