Strength in Our Diversity

Red, Blue, Slave, Free

by Scot Nakagawa posted on 11/15/12 in RaceFiles / 2 responses

The maps above (originally from PolitiComments.com) were cut and pasted into this post from the new Changelab report, Left or Right of the Colorline? Asian Americans and the Racial Justice Movement. The first one describes the Red-Blue electoral breakdown in 2004, and the second indicates in tan and red those territories that were once open to slavery. The chilling correspondence between these two maps used to feel like our unchangeable political destiny. Forget the political parties. Both sides have had their day as the party of white supremacy. What we should remember is that whichever side racially sensitive whites chose Read more »

The Original Construction and Intent

by Scot Nakagawa posted on 11/13/12 in RaceFiles / 1 response

According to Webster, conservative can be defined as: tending or disposed to maintain existing views, conditions, or institutions : traditional I start with that definition because a few political colleagues have (gently) called me out for flipping back and forth between using the terms “conservative” and “right wing” to describe the faction of the right wing led by Republican, pro-corporate, anti-regulation, small government elites. They point to this faction’s participation in fomenting a backlash against civil rights laws and attacks on Roe v. Wade as indications that they’re radicals, not conservative; not “disposed to maintain[ing] existing views.” I concede that Read more »

Politics is a Battle for Position: More Thoughts on the Election

by Scot Nakagawa posted on 11/8/12 in RaceFiles / 11 responses

As relieved as I am about the outcome of the national elections, I can’t get the thought of how much we’ve lost in order to “win” out of out my mind. Something an old colleague of mine told me in the 1980s keeps popping into my head: politics is a battle for position. What he meant by that, I think, is that political fights are won or lost based on how one is positioned vis a vis the public, and relative to one’s opponents. He told me that in order to help me wrap my then relatively inexperienced mind around Read more »

Thankgiving and the Conundrum of Cultural Racism

by Scot Nakagawa posted on 11/8/12 in RaceFiles / 0 responses

Every time I try to write about culture, I end up stuck with a lot of big words. For instance, the word conundrum. A conundrum is a problem for which the solution is a matter of conjecture. In other words, we can only guess at how to resolve a conundrum. Our white supremacist culture is a conundrum. I’m not talking here about the culture of cross-burning and white sheet-wearing. I mean culture as in the collective racist beliefs of our society reduced over generations to common sense. Here’s how Merriam-Webster defines culture: a : the integrated pattern of human knowledge, Read more »

The Right, The Election, And What’s Next

by Scot Nakagawa posted on 11/7/12 in RaceFiles / 4 responses

A while back I wrote a post called “The Party of Lincoln.” In it, I said that the GOP, [has] become the instrument of power of a right wing movement bent on resetting the social, political, and economic clock in America to a time when women were marginalized, the rich were beyond accountability, and overt racism and racial codes were business as usual… The majority of the Republican activist base is made up of ideologically inflexible, overlapping rightist factions. They include the Tea Parties, the religious right, libertarians, white nationalists, anti-communist conspiracy theorists, and assorted more exotic white supremacists. That’s Read more »

The Invisible Minority: Why Creating Myths About Asian Americans Is So Easy

by Scot Nakagawa posted on 11/2/12 in RaceFiles / 9 responses

Early in October, the surprisingly high percentage (1 in 3) of undecided Asian voters popped up in the media. It took about a minute for that story to cycle through and then, poof! No further discussion. Pundits and political analysts have talked about Jewish voters, Black voters, Latino Voters, White Voters, young voters, older voters, low-income voters, gay voters, and voting veterans, ex-felons, and independents. But Asian voters? Almost not at all. Or at least that was my theory. To test that theory, my firm, ChangeLab, conducted a study. We pulled the transcripts of seven weekly political commentary programs televised Read more »

A Short Note on Ex-Felon Voting Rights

by Scot Nakagawa posted on 10/26/12 in RaceFiles / 1 response

This may be too little, too late for many, but perhaps it will be of use to people in the future, if not in this election cycle. It’s commonly believed that all incarcerated people and all ex-felons lose their voting rights. This belief holds true even among the formerly incarcerated, elected officials, and elections clerks in states where those with past felony convictions are allowed to vote. I once worked for a group that was active in 7 states working with incarcerated people, their families and loved ones to stop new prison building and win progressive reforms of state prisons. Read more »

A Rising Tide or a Flood?

by Scot Nakagawa posted on 10/24/12 in RaceFiles / 5 responses

Visiting New Orleans has me thinking a lot about cross-racial solidarity among people of color. New Orleans, one of the Blackest cities in the country, is also home to one of the largest Vietnamese-American communities in the U.S. That the mainly working class Asian immigrant communities here are increasingly well organized gives me hope. But the color line in the Deep South is so brightly drawn, and the penalty for being on the down side of unjust racial power relations is so steep, that I find myself struggling to remain optimistic. My worry brings to mind that old saying, “a Read more »