KoreanPower999's Xanga

Thursday, October 18, 2007

Thu, 18 Oct 2007 06:38:28 GMT

I have a new blog:

http://koreanpower999.wordpress.com/

Tuesday, August 28, 2007

Tue, 28 Aug 2007 00:21:04 GMT

Vick 'reaction' has racial aspect

Posted on Mon, Aug. 27, 2007

By DAN LE BATARD

As the reaction to Michael Vick gets louder, pressure builds to make an example out of a black icon.

We are watching Michael Vick's glorious life fall apart on TV. The details of his cruelty to dogs are shocking, nauseating and illegal. He is wrong, case closed. To defend him is to defend the indefensible, and the felonious. If a white quarterback such as Peyton Manning had been at the center of this, he would become just as radioactive, maybe more so.

How could anyone take any other side on something this black and white?

If you are asking that, you must have missed that little trial involving O.J. Simpson.

There is so much baggage and history and emotion and volume here that a lot gets lost in translation. I don't hear many black people defending Vick's actions today. What I hear is many black people objecting to the size and intensity of the reaction. Those are two very different things. But they start to sound the same when white people yell with disgust, ''Not the race card again!'' and black people counter with, ''Race impacts everything.'' Not a lot gets heard clearly when people are trying to talk while standing that far apart.

And the louder and angrier the reaction gets, the more pressure is put on authorities -- usually white authorities -- to make an example out of a black icon.

Quibble with our country's laws if you like, but you have to abide by them if you want to be free here. That's nonnegotiable, and it is going to get Vick jailed. But it is after that when things get muddier. The question isn't whether Vick should lose money or freedom today. The question becomes how much of his money and freedom he should lose. The difference there is between penalizing a black icon and ruining him.

It makes sense, based on past history and personal experiences, that black folks might not trust the system to treat one of their own fairly once we go from letter-of-the-law jail to subjective suspension.

The people making the decisions about how much of his life Vick gets to keep post-jail are white and applying their sensibilities -- which is how you arrive at rules that ban the black athletes who like to celebrate from dancing too much in the end zone. All the team owners and the commissioner are white, as are the richest of Vick's endorsers and most of the consumers of all this product. You'll forgive black people if they aren't terribly comfortable with white people making the rules for them. That hasn't gone so well in the past.

Then there's this: The white athlete tends to get more room to rehab his image than the black one. There is no black equivalent to reckless addict golfer John Daly, throwing away talent but nonetheless popular and embraced. Some of that has to do with Daly harming only himself, not teammates or fans of that team, but not all of it. Darryl Strawberry and Doc Gooden aren't perceived quite like drunk heroes Mickey Mantle and Billy Martin. Some of that has to do with Mantle's more innocent era, but not all of it.

It would be interesting to see the reaction if it were an NBA team instead of baseball's St. Louis Cardinals (Tony La Russa, DUI arrest; Josh Hancock, drunk-driving death; Scott Spiezio, rehab) that had the substance-abuse problem. Would they feel more like the Bengals? And how is the reaction different if Michael Doleac, Chris Quinn and Jason Kapono fought fans in Detroit instead of three giant black guys with braids and tattoos? Have you noticed how differently basketball fights are covered than baseball brawls? Is the pressure and penalty as large on Quinn as it was on Ron Artest? If the action is exactly the same, is the reaction?

COMPASSION FACTOR

Race doesn't always amplify the noise around a national scandal. The Beltway Sniper was black and randomly killed 10 people, and you didn't hear folks taking sides on that one. But that's the exception, not the rule. Vick makes for a bad martyr, but it is human nature to feel sorry for your own while watching him beat up daily on television as his life unravels. That's not racism. It is compassion. And human.

Our experiences always shape our perspectives. We saw it with O.J. Simpson. Blacks were so thrilled to finally beat what they saw as an unfair system -- a system that jails them at a disproportionate rate -- that the thrill of winning ignored even someone getting away with murder. When the distrust is that large and pervasive, it is going to seep into some places it doesn't belong -- like, for example, this Vick case.

CULTURAL DIFFERENCES

Dogfighting is glorified in segments of the hip-hop community, so there are some cultural differences that complicate matters here. There isn't much of a difference between killing dogs for sport and the art of bullfighting.

You are walking a thin line if you see a lot of distinction between pitting dogs bred to fight and shooting a deer just to put the head up in your office. Go to Hialeah, and you'll see that one man's cruelty to animals is another man appeasing his god. Heck, our own states can't agree. Dogfighting is but a misdemeanor in two of them. Vick couldn't have known dogfighting had consequences this large or he wouldn't have been doing it. And it can be jarring to see one of your own lose his livelihood and freedom and name for something that isn't a lot different than bullfighting.

This isn't to say dogfighting is a black thing. It isn't. It is an illegal thing. It is just to point out that there are shades of gray in here even as we discuss black and white.

And you are more likely to find them only if you are interested in doing so.

Thursday, May 31, 2007

Thu, 31 May 2007 07:45:49 GMT

I went to Barnes and Noble a few weeks ago and reread John Eldredge's book, "Wild at Heart" and the follow up, "Captivating," which he cowrote with his wife Stasi. I wanted to see if I would like it better reading them again. And I realized I actually disliked it even more when I read them again. I think the book uses some questionable theology, reinforces societal power dynamics when it comes to gender roles, and makes culturally insensitive claims of masculinity that ignore the fact that he's coming from a white middle class male perspective. Maybe someday I'll do a talk called "Tame at Heart" or "Uncaptivating."

Saturday, May 26, 2007

Sat, 26 May 2007 06:01:11 GMT

Today I was pondering what you would hear from your middle school teacher:

"Character is what you do when no one is looking."

Even though it sounds so simple, but yet it's very deep. Why do we choose style over substance? charisma over character? Why do we honor those who are the loudest and tout their accomplishments and ignore and neglect those who live with integrity away from the spotlight? Why do we choose "do" over "be?" Why are we willing to ignore character and integrity issues and forgo accountability for people who produce for you?

I think it's been constantly validated by experience to me that you will always find people with many gifts and talents. But if those gifts and talents are not flowing out of character and integrity, it is basically worthless. Character and integrity are indispensable. I love that God has high standards. This is not to say that we are called to be perfect, because we will always fall short, which includes especially me! We are not called to be legalistic. But I love that God has high standards for His children because He wants what's best for us.

Friday, May 18, 2007

Fri, 18 May 2007 07:58:48 GMT

These are some vidoes I found on youtube about the Asian American experience. May is Asian Pacific American month. (Caution: Some of the videos have curse words)

Confusions of the Asian American Male

LA Riots - Remember Sa-I-Gu - Korean American perspective

This is the video we watched at Asian American night - Unraveling Asian America - Columbia University

Spoken Word: Slip of the Tongue - What's Your Ethnic Make Up?

Kelly Tsai - Spoken Word - Making Guacamole

Spoken Word - Def Poetry Jam - Yellow Rage

Kung Fool - The Do's and Don'ts of Reacting to Ignorance

Spoken Word - Know Choice - Model Minority Freeverse Live - Seattle University

Culture Shock - Columbia University -Harry Potter - Yellow Fever/Fetish

UC Davis - Asian American Film Festival - Where Are You From?

Thursday, May 17, 2007

Thu, 17 May 2007 03:23:31 GMT

THE ASIAN AMERICAN JOURNEY

CNN has done a whole montage about Asian Americans as May is Asian Pacific American month. Some of the videos are pretty well done. Others like the one on mail order brides are too accepting of the abhorrent practice.

The Cost of Diversity

An Asian Glass Ceiling?

Asian Men Want "Real" Roles in Hollywood

The Hopes of Asian Mail Order Brides

Growing Up Hapa

CNN's Betty Nguyen on Being Asian American

Dr. Gupta: Spotlight on Asians' Health

CNN Anchors Recount Their Experiences

Thursday, May 17, 2007

Thu, 17 May 2007 03:08:32 GMT

Korean rappers defining their own experience through rap

POSTED: 11:59 a.m. EDT, May 11, 2007

LOS ANGELES, California (AP) -- Crammed into a room on the third floor of a church, rapper DumbFounDead spits freestyle rhymes with six other emcees as a small group of 20-somethings bob their heads to the music.

It's not the music that makes the scene notable; it's the rappers. DumbFounDead, whose real name is Jonathan Park, is one of two Korean-Americans present. The others include three blacks and two Hispanics.

Park is part of a thriving Korean rap scene in the city's vast Koreatown, where concerts and impromptu rap battle sessions are held in churches and cafes, and aspiring lyricists swap songs and jabs on MySpace.

The music is allowing young Korean rappers to build bridges with blacks half a generation after thousands of Korean businesses were torched in one of the country's worst race riots. In doing so, these young Koreans with hip-hop style are defining their own Korean-American experience in a way their parents couldn't.

The 21-year-old DumbFounDead said blacks used to snicker "Bruce Lee" or "Jackie Chan" references when he began rapping at 14. But he's earned acceptance with his talent and by reaching out.

"It comes down to relations between blacks and Korean people," said Parks, considered one of Los Angeles' best young rappers of any race. "I couldn't even be an emcee without having good relations with black people. They started hip-hop."

Los Angeles County has nearly 200,000 Koreans, more than anywhere else in the country, most of whom live in Koreatown. While most Korean rappers are too young to remember much from the race riot, they feel its effects.

"The riots definitely have a big impact on the K-town rap scene," said Brian Kim, or Oddsequence, a 26-year-old who is part of the group Yello Belly Bastids. "Those race relations still affect how I'm seen when I'm chilling in South Central."

The violence that exploded April 29, 1992, left 55 dead, more than 2,300 injured and about 2,500 Korean businesses destroyed, mostly in South Central and Koreatown. The acquittal of several white police officers in the beating of black motorist Rodney King lit the fuse.

Under the surface, however, were years of cultural clashes and misunderstandings between blacks and Korean shop owners. Many blacks saw Korean grocers, many of whom spoke little English, as opportunists who took money out of poor neighborhoods but disrespected customers by not talking much to them or looking them in the eye -- cultural norms for Korean business owners.

Such frustrations reached a boiling point a year before the riot when black teen Latasha Harlins was shot and killed by a Korean grocer in a dispute over a bottle of orange juice. Ice Cube's 1991 song "Black Korea" expressed the frustration many blacks felt.

"So pay respect to the black fist / Or we'll burn your store right down to a crisp," goes the song, which turned out to be tragically prophetic.

Bridging generations and cultures

The riot was so traumatic for the Korean community that even today many parents don't allow their children to listen to rap, or "black music."

But there was no keeping the vibes away from young Koreans' ears, especially in a city that has produced many of the country's best rappers.

"Many friends were like 'forget rap music' after the riots," said Sonny Kang, 31, a Korean actor who stood guard outside Korean stores during the rioting. "Then when Dr. Dre dropped 'The Chronic' album in the summer of '92 it was like 'Wow, this album is so good we can forgive anybody."'

By the late 1990s, a handful of Korean-American rappers had achieved commercial success, but mostly rapping in Korean and selling their music in Korea.

The first annual Asian Hip Hop Summit, inaugurated on the 10th anniversary of the riot, was created as a way for Koreans to reach out to blacks and Hispanics and solidify the growing Korean rap movement.

There still is prejudice toward blacks in older Korean generations, said Kublai Kwon, who founded the summit. "But with all the Koreans doing hip-hop, I don't sense any prejudice," he said.

Black and Korean rappers are cautious when reflecting about how much rap music can improve race relations in Los Angeles. Rap music, they say, is a world of its own.

"Open Mike Eagle," 26, is a member of the group Thirsty Fish, which includes DumbFounDead. "When we leave here, we go back to our own families," Eagle, who is black, said during the recent church session. Pausing and reflecting, he added, "But we do take this experience with us into the world."

The riots and race relations are among many themes Korean rappers explore. Like artists the world over, they make music to recount personal experience.

For some, that means broken homes or pressure from their parents to be a doctor or engineer, acceptable careers in a community where education is paramount. For others, it means violence, gang life or illegal immigration, also very much a part of Koreatown.

DumbFounDead is an example. He dropped out of high school in 10th grade and moved out on his own by 18 because his parents had separated.

Mixed into Korean rap lyrics is vocabulary to express questions of identity felt by many young Koreans living in America.

"FOBs" are Koreans "fresh off the boat," while children born here to Korean parents are called "bananas" because they are "yellow on the outside and white on the inside."

In one song, American-born Doc Whisperer, who is 26-year-old Peter Yoo, and Korea-born Viruss44, or Sean Rhee, 26, who moved here when he was 14, rap about feeling alienated.

"I've been through a whole lot of insecure years / Cause I'm the first in my family to be born here / Raised in California, I crawled in Eight Zero ('80) / And when growing up I couldn't recall an Asian hero," Yoo rapped at a recent "Ghetto Musik" concert, which included dozens of Korean rappers and dancers.

In the crowd was 15-year-old Keith Smith and three of his friends, all of whom are black.

"I just came to check out my Korean homies," said Smith, who would later lose a freestyle contest against DumbFounDead. "This is some good stuff."

Thursday, May 17, 2007

Thu, 17 May 2007 02:00:41 GMT

Push to achieve tied to suicide in Asian-American women

POSTED: 8:45 p.m. EDT, May 16, 2007

ATLANTA, Georgia (CNN) -- One evening in 1990, Eliza Noh hung up the phone with her sister. Disturbed about the conversation, Noh immediately started writing a letter to her sister, a college student who was often depressed. "I told her I supported her, and I encouraged her," Noh says.

But her sister never read the letter. By the time it arrived, she'd killed herself.

Moved by that tragedy, Noh has spent much of her professional life studying depression and suicide among Asian-American women. An assistant professor of Asian-American studies at California State University at Fullerton, Noh has read the sobering statistics from the Department of Health and Human Services: Asian-American women ages 15-24 have the highest suicide rate of women in any race or ethnic group in that age group. Suicide is the second-leading cause of death for Asian-American women in that age range. (Watch more about Asian-Americans' feelings of pressure to hide depression )

Depression starts even younger than age 15. Noh says one study has shown that as young as the fifth grade, Asian-American girls have the highest rate of depression so severe they've contemplated suicide.

As Noh and others have searched for the reasons, a complex answer has emerged.

First and foremost, they say "model minority" pressure -- the pressure some Asian-American families put on children to be high achievers at school and professionally -- helps explain the problem.

"In my study, the model minority pressure is a huge factor," says Noh, who studied 41 Asian-American women who'd attempted or contemplated suicide. "Sometimes it's very overt -- parents say, 'You must choose this major or this type of job' or 'You should not bring home As and Bs, only As," she says. "And girls have to be the perfect mother and daughter and wife as well."

Family pressure often affects girls more than boys, according to Dr. Dung Ngo, a psychologist at Baylor University in Texas. "When I go talk to high school students and ask them if they experience pressure, the majority who raised their hands were the girls," he said.

Asian-American parents, he says, are stricter with girls than with boys. "The cultural expectations are that Asian women don't have that kind of freedom to hang out, to go out with friends, to do the kinds of things most teenagers growing up want to do."

And in Asian cultures, he added, you don't question parents. "The line of communication in Asian culture one way. It's communicated from the parents downward," he says. "If you can't express your anger, it turns to helplessness. It turns inward into depression for girls. For boys it's more likely to turn outwards into rebellious behavior and behavioral problems like drinking and fighting."

But Noh says pressure from within the family doesn't completely explain the shocking suicide statistics for young women like her sister.

She says American culture has adopted the myth that Asians are smarter and harder-working than other minorities.

"It's become a U.S.-based ideology, popular from the 1960s onward, that Asian-Americans are smarter, and should be doing well whether at school or work."

Noh added that simply being a minority can also lead to depression.

"My sister had a really low self-image. She thought of herself as ugly," she says. "We grew up in Houston in the '70s and '80s, and at that time in school there were very few Asian faces. The standard of beauty she wanted to emulate was white women." In college, Noh's sister had plastic surgery to make her eyes and nose appear more European-looking.

Heredity, Noh says, also plays a role. She says in her study, many of the suicidal women had mothers who were also suicidal. She says perhaps it's genetic -- some biochemical marker handed down from mother to daughter -- or perhaps it's the daughter observing the mother's behavior. "It makes sense. You model yourself after the parent of the same gender."

As varied as the causes of depression, Noh says she saw just as many approaches to overcoming it.

While some women in her study did seek help through counseling and prescription drugs, most of her subjects were ambivalent or even negative about counseling. "They felt the counselor couldn't understand their situation. They said it would have helped if the counselor were another Asian-American woman."

These women found help through their religious faith, herbs, acupuncture, or becoming involved in groups that help other Asian women.

"It shows the resourcefulness of these women," she says. "They had really diverse healing strategies."

Elizabeth Cohen is a CNN Medical News correspondent. Senior producer Jennifer Pifer and associate producer Sabriya Rice contributed to this report.

Thursday, May 17, 2007

Thu, 17 May 2007 01:46:52 GMT

Silver and black eye

By Adrian Wojnarowski, Yahoo! Sports
May 15, 2007

The San Antonio Spurs never much cared about endearing themselves, starting with sullen star Tim Duncan and grumpy coach Gregg Popovich. They won three championships wearing Al Davis' colors, but the kids never took to those black-and-silver jerseys the way the Oakland Raiders did. For so long, San Antonio has tortured the public with professionalism and poise.

After a decade of inspiring indifference, if not a grudging admiration, one series has suddenly reshaped and repackaged the Spurs. They'll no longer be simply celebrated as the relentlessly resourceful champions, but they'll also be derided as dirty, cheap-shot artists. They've earned it in these Western Conference semifinals against the Phoenix Suns.

What's worse, they've gotten away with it. Nothing happened when Bruce Bowen sideswiped Amare Stoudemire and kneed Steve Nash, and two games for Robert Horry drilling Nash into the scorer's table does little to balance the Game 5 suspensions for Stoudemire and Boris Diaw.

In some ways, the series has done irreparable damage to the Spurs' reputation. They've never cared about popularity, but they do relish respect. If they win this series, they'll do so with the taint of bad behavior and bad character.

Popovich doesn't help the Spurs' credibility when he defends Horry's vicious hit as "just an end-of-the-game foul." That's a load of crap and Popovich knows it. The Spurs are no less tough guys for Popovich, maybe the best pure coach in the NBA, to acknowledge that Horry's hit was over the line.

Horry had always been Big Shot Bob in the playoffs, never Cheap Shot Bob, but something about the tone of this series made Nash an appealing target late in Game 4. Once again, San Antonio provoked, the Suns reacted and they'll be playing at a steep incline without Stoudemire on Wednesday.

The Spurs are winning the battles on technicalities and letter of the law, but they're losing on spirit and intent. San Antonio hasn't gotten away with murder in this series, just aggravated assault. Rest assured, the NBA would love nothing more than figure a way to get the ratings-free Spurs out of these playoffs and move along Steve Nash and the space-age Suns.

Only, it doesn't work that way. The judgment was fair on Tuesday, suspending Horry for two games and delivering the hardest hit of all – Stoudemire and Boris Diaw out for Game 5.

"It's not a matter of fairness, it's a matter of correctness," NBA vice president of operations Stu Jackson said Wednesday.

Listen, all these people screaming for the league to selectively enforce the rule about leaving the bench for an altercation are missing the point. This rule is simple: It is there to stop that first punch getting thrown. That's it. Assistant Marc Iavaroni should've done his job on Phoenix's bench. For all the clipboards and notes these armies of assistants are buried under, they have but one job: When all hell breaks loose, stop the superstar.

Stop Stoudemire.

But this doesn't excuse the instigating San Antonio has done in the series. The shame is, the Spurs are good defensively and too talented to reduce themselves to this garbage. Bowen believed he could intimidate Stoudemire and Nash with those hits. It didn't happen. Yes, the Suns are the ultimate finesse team, but they've shown it shouldn't be mistaken for softness.

The irony is that, earlier this season, Popovich was livid with Jackson for telephoning Bowen without his knowledge to warn Bowen about sliding his foot under the ankles of jump shooters again. Vince Carter, Steve Francis and Isiah Thomas had complained about that with Bowen, and Popovich did not want Jackson getting into his star defender's head about the way he played the game. As it turns out, Horry probably never would've felt so empowered to slam Nash had Jackson punished Bowen for his transgressions in the series.

San Antonio is never a brash team, but it's never been so arrogant. The Spurs are a great franchise, great champions, but they've honored those black-and-silver colors in all the wrong ways this series. Right now, they're behaving like they're bullet-proof, like they can do whatever they want on the floor. So far, the NBA has given San Antonio no reason to feel otherwise.

Now, it's on the Suns. They were suckered into leaving the bench in Game 4, and now, they get to show whether they can stand up to the bully without their big tough guy, Stoudemire. Now, they get a chance to hit back the only way that'll work: running.

The West is still the Spurs' street corner. Whatever damage they've done to their good names, they'll always take the fight to you.

Adrian Wojnarowski is the national NBA columnist for Yahoo! Sports.

Saturday, May 12, 2007

Sat, 12 May 2007 21:14:38 GMT

I'm tired of so many people saying that the answer to every problem is to get a gun. These are the people who think society would be safer with more guns. We only have 250 million guns in this nation! I guess that's not enough for some. I get the idea for some men, having a gun is better than sex. Having that power in their hands gives them a power trip. People probably get their cue and loose trigger finger from George W Bush, whose foreign policy is all about shoot first (more like bomb first) and ask questions later. In light of the prevalence of gun violence in this nation (the US has more gun deaths per year than all the industrialized countries combined), if I hear another person say that guns and more guns will solve every problem, I'm going to puke.