/ Malena Amusa
My 55-year-old mother can’t stop looking at this Obama-Beyonce spoof on YouTube. In it, a man bearing Obama’s scrunched eyebrows and sandy skin-tone, re-enacts Beyonce’s “Single Ladies” video, nailing her wobbling rump shakes and hilariously re-wording her look-at-me rhymes.
Since Obama’s campaign, my mother’s online usage has spiked tremendously and in large part because of this spoof and other Obama media, which is never-ending. My mom loves Obama for putting the “can” back in ’American’ —and if she has to follow Obama’s rise onto a star-ship enterprise, she would.
Among the Internet’s latest newcomers, I bet half of them were following Obama’s story. Now, it’s a matter of time until they beam-up new inspirations and solutions.
And it’s because of people like my mother that I can say — among all the changes under President Barack Obama’s first seven months in office, I am most comforted by the shifts of consciousness among everyday people.
People are talking a lot more about owning their right to a more fulfilling life (even if that means mastering YouTube)—which is probably why Tim Ferriss’ motivating life-design guide: “4-Hour Work Week” still dominates global bookshelves, after two years on top.
The thinking goes: well if Obama can battle the recession’s depression and healthcare’s coverage disability, all the while speaking clear and intelligent sentences, appearing very-good-looking on date nights, and rallying self-reliance in Africa—well, then who are we to go about our lives, complaining of hard times?
Through Obama, we are realizing the un-ceasing river of human potential. And with this, many of us are shedding bad habits and adopting new eye-opening ones.
Ultimately — it’s by looking into the change within ourselves — that I assess the seven months of Obama’s term.
Sure we can keep watch on the bailout and surely put our nose to the healthcare grindstone. But in the end, will we be more advanced friends, mothers, lovers, brothers, and doers? Well, we must.
*** Terry Keleher, with the Applied Research Center, explains why calling wolf on reverse racism is at the heart of Sonia Sotomayor’s trial and America’s problem with racism.
Recently I called a news-thumbing girlfriend to give me her quick review of the Judge Sonia Sotomayor hearings. I was instantly moved by my friend’s passion — and her belief that Sotomayor’s trial might reverse decades of intellectual progress regarding race in America.
“Once again, elected officials have succeeded in beating the race horse even further,” said Jessica Harris, a 24-year-old marketing strategist and health activist. “With a history of erasing culture from conversations about whiteness, whites are forced to confront the realities of human experience and its inevitable involvement in decision making. The Senate’s mis-analysis of Sotomayor’s “wise Latina woman” comment is simply groveling.”
Rather than recognizing America’s long dependence on the “balance of [cultural] bias” to make progressive changes, Harris said, it appears the American justice system will promote so-called objectivity in lieu of coming clean about its hustle to maintain white patriarchal domination over our laws and our land.
This is serious. You agree?
Obama-era dancing (Salsa in Delhi!?) and now
*Anish Popli, founder of Choreotheque dance institute in Delhi, India, talks about why sharing through dance is an important agenda for our new global economy. ***
Art activists led by Quincy Jones are lobbying to get an arts department under Obama’s administration.
I hope dance gains a whole White House floor — to promote formal and informal dance spaces, companies, dance movies, and dance health and education.
From Miley Cyrus’ view-hogging YouTube dance battles to the ever-contagious and selling Bollywood dance movies — dance remains the people’s choice of entertainment and catharsis.
And at the same time, dance is political. Unlike any science or sociology, the way we twirk our bodies to music reveals patterns of social movement, the immigration of ideas and people, the modernization of societies, and the definitions of gender, race, and class, which like dance, are identities bound by their transience.
In Delhi, where I’ve spent the last six weeks, Salsa dance is everywhere. Seeing Indians break down the intricate Latin, Spanish, Caribbean, and African style told me that above all qualities, dance imbibes understanding. After eight years of Bush, our world can roll and bounce right into a culture of exploration and learning.
Dance harbors history and innovation, and therefore dance can both measure and mend the disjointedness of social change.
Anish Popli, a dancer in Delhi, believes dance prepares people for sharing. And sharing is how we grow into productive change.
Popli runs Choreoteque, a visionary dance centre teaching Salsa, Merengue, Jazz, Hip-Hop and Modern — and I was moved when Popli said that dance should inform policy in our Obama era of opportunity.
Watch him and his students move — and you’ll see why he’s right!
—Malena Amusa
Delhi gays gain right to kiss; America should be proud
Thursday, gays and lesbians in India won the battle over a persisting British Raj penal code which banned consensual sex between homosexuals, when the Delhi High Court ruled to de-criminalize the colonial law.
While cheering among blaring pop songs and inside news stations covering the landmark decision— I met with India’s conservative right, bemoaning the shift toward tolerance.
Most interestingly, popular Indian opponents of gayness almost always warn that gay rights woefully Americanizes the thousands-years-old Indian culture pronounced for its straight marriages and love gurus. They think acting American is the last siege of despair sweeping over India.
But that Indian conservatives are whistle-blowing American culture for its signature knack for rights is just simply thrilling. No matter our issues, swaths of people think America and social change are inseparable lovers. Even the sun-setting generation of India’s gay-hating activists can see this: Americans and their America are still guiding lights.
So what are young Americans going to do about it? Set even better examples of liberal activism or coil behind a reputation tarnished by Bush? Whatever we do, I hope we don’t settle for embracing just hotdogs and spangled skies.
No time is more apt than the first Independence Day of the Obama Administration to re-declare personal and political visions for our freedom. And because of our inter-dependent world, the possibility for border-jumping change is an inevitability. It’s an exciting time to be launching new ideas and movements.
History might look at the short life of Michael Jackson and point to the world’s first truly global star’s obvious contradictions. How could a man who turned his face to plastic rail against the degradation of our environment in his song “What About Us?” How could a man who slowly became white, rise to charts with a hit jam about the futility of racial prejudice?
To many, Jackson — who sadly passed away Friday due to a heart attack—will remain this bundle of ambitions and tragedies. But what Jackson’s music show us time and time again is that Jackson was ultimately a student of redemption.
He made music history by singing about love and his vision for a new earth that prepares for the thriving of its children. Jackson believed we could save ourselves.
By the mid-1990s, Jackson had launched a campaign of socially conscious songs that attacked our indifference toward genocide, poverty, and hate.
“Scream,” which barked back at the tabloidization of mainstream news, “Black or White,” which popularized multi-culturalism, and “What About Us,” which siren-called political forces destroying lives — were viral policy speeches, and a virtual map of a new foundation President Barack Obama is burning midnight oil now to form.
We can’t forget that Jackson’s life vision is being reborn in the administration of Obama — and his views on saving our planet must outlive the man and the media scandal that silenced his spirit. That is —if we are to truly honor this man and our important power and agency, we have to see past the Jackson hype and sing the praises of the Jackson hope.
—Malena Amusa
Recently, a reporter interviewed me about racial prejudice against blacks in Delhi for India’s Outlook Magazine. Suddenly, it’s very cool to talk about racism, that way of pushing people out of mainstream avenues of respectability based on race.
After my talk with this reporter, an Outlook photographer asked me and two other black expats Diepiriye Kukuand Yoyce Jones to pose for a cover picture in a busy Indian market where we could really capture folks gawking at us— pushing us out of comfort zones with their bald stares.
Now, as soon as we started capturing this scene –my tangible misunderstanding of racism was made so clear and wide.
While there were many disdainful looks darting our way, the people most confrontational with us were a number of street kids, I mean, flat-out-broke homeless Indian kids seeing our photo shoot as a chance to beg up cash from stars.
Still, we three black Americans kept eyeing the camera with these tough and hard looks, like the racism we experience by being so different in India is on par with the lives of those begging children.
Within minutes, the crowd of homeless kids grew so bold, our photographer wound up raising his hand at them, threatening to slap them out of the picture.
Strangely, in the process of capturing the racial prejudice we experience everyday in Delhi, the slurs and violent confrontations, I overlooked the true final calculation of racism: the economic disenfranchisement of people.
These days, with the Obama buzz of race talks so loud, it’s hard to say that people as poor as the kids I see everyday on Delhi streets are a product of racism – but they are. A whole system has decided these kids are unfit for opportunity based on their dusty skin and lives, based on the poverty they inherited.
But we have to take a harder look at racism: especially the opportunities for a bold, thriving world that are lost due to inequality. Racism is a poverty of a culture, and ultimately, of a people.
— A confession from a shark lender on the targeting of black America for time-bomb loans.
I’m having intense talks about civil rights with Delhi’s small cluster of black academic scholars working in India.
Every day, we encounter a dominant culture in India that believes in born identities and the immobility of power rankings which inscribe inequality along gender, skin-color and caste and class.
While we see great striving among everyday Indians here, many people relinquish a fight for their individual expression and wellbeing to support family loyalties and maintain cultural hierarchies. What results is an environment that views black people as intruders and black women, subjects of conversations about sex and not love.
But the idea of turning to America as an example of freedom, even with the beaming light of Barack Obama as president, becomes muddled in sweet-n-sour realities, especially after reading this Sunday’s New York Times article, “Bank Accused of Pushing Mortgage Deals on Blacks,” about the confessions of an American house-loan shark who spelled-out how one big bank targeted black people and women for subprime, foreclosure prone-loans, even when the borrowers qualified for manageable prime loans.
Americans calling themselves loan officers wrote some of the worst discrimination policy into the fabric of America by scheduling “ghetto loans” to “mud people” – which many theorists including myself say thrusted Wall Street into the foreclosure fire that is still burning up global economies. The NYT reported:
“The company put ‘bounties’ on minority borrowers,” Mr. Paschal said. “By this I mean that loan officers received cash incentives to aggressively market subprime loans in minority communities.”
Both loan officers said the bank had given bonuses to loan officers who referred borrowers who should have qualified for a prime loan to the subprime division.
…
Loan officers employed other methods to steer clients into subprime loans, according to the affidavits. Some officers told the underwriting department that their clients, even those with good credit scores, had not wanted to provide income documentation.
Now, and among friends in Delhi, I keep explaining why after learning of American bank corruption, I feel safer in Delhi, where uncivil rights on the rough and dangerous roads and in decrepit hospitals constantly challenges the value of life. But in India, I’ve come to expect struggle and strain. And I’m comfortable fighting prejudice here because it rains as sharp and visibly as Delhi’s pre-monsoon showers.
Like many American expats abroad, and as much as I’m advancing my global citenzry, I want to return to America and help define our Obama era from home, but my trust in the business culture of America has faded, especially seeing so little financial crimes coming to trial.
—Malena Amusa
Will Sotomayor think global? Foster Gen O?
The news of President Barack Obama’s selection of Judge Sonia Sotomayor for the U.S. Supreme Court hasn’t reached Delhi’s Times of India newspaper yet, and from now, Sotomayor’s acclaim may only float through time and space, largely ignored by everyday Delhi-ites I now call my community.
And while Americans living in Delhi may mention the record-cracking appointment, I have a hunch that many Americans supporting Obama and living in other countries are broadly granting Obama a thumbs-up on virtually all his policy positions and appointments, and that comes in place of hard investigation into changes, which now include promoting Sotomayor’s record and her hopes for the future.
But I also think the choice of Sotomayor must enter a global discussion, and mainly because Sotomayor is from the epicentre of world culture — New York City, the Bronx, and via two working-class Puerto Rican parents. How she uses her cultural capital, perhaps as a channel for global progressive values, will help us figure if America can really emerge as emblem of dynamic democratic identity, one that treats race, gender, and orientation as sites of positive economic exchange and social activism, rather than categorical hindrances to determining rights.
Will it be enough for liberals to cheer at Sotomayer’s ambiguity on abortion as signs of pro-choice inclinations or see her seeming support of gay people as a challenge to California’s recent marriage ban renewal?
Or must our highest judicial interpreters also understarnd that right now — Americans living abroad may be experiencing greater rights and freedom from oppression in new homelands? And that ambitious people in my generation are reversing the historic migration-to-America tale Sotomayor witnessed in New York, by departing America in droves for bolder chances at success and opportunity?
The important question looms: what kind of America will Sotomayor help define for Generation O?
Flying business class to Delhi; an Obama dream re-interpreted
This past Saturday, I flew to Delhi, India to finish a book. And for the first time in my 24 years on earth, I flew business class.
Before I took off, my parents called and warmly expressed their awe at seeing me fly in style. Friends clucked, cheered, and thanked me for bridging a power schism. And I recalled hearing President Barack Obama, at the time he announced his race, say that he’d only fly coach.
Here’s a man who knows you can only test your driving by riding alongside many others.
Even now, and though Obama’s flying activism has changed to accommodate his secret-service-clad existence, he joins a swell of people in Generation O who are really pushing to make success more and more about results and networks, rather than by club-house symbols of status.
What frustrates people so much about business class flying is that our society has come to conflate business class with life achievement. In turn, a flying strata that reflects America’s problem with class, distorts the meaning of success because it suggests that the folks in coach are just not working hard enough to earn better.
But Gen O is changing this — we’re making creative room for people to reconcile success with a sense that our work only matters in the company of others, wired and tapped into our plans all over the world.
And while I loved my business class trip — those cheese cutlets and the pampering service - I loved more the simple engagement by one stewardess who yelped in support of my writing about opportunity and adventure in India. “I’m sure we’ll be in touch!” she said. There’s no reason not to be.
I met Ali, a gas station clerk, last Friday while on an adventure to learn what folks in St. Louis City thought about a street recently named Barack Obama Blvd. The 26-year-old Ali from the Middle East said he’d vote for Obama 10 times. But was the working-class neighborhood I grew up in ready to embrace Obama’s first go-round?
Last Friday, I drove up and down Barack Obama Blvd. and Martin Luther King Blvd. in my hometown to find out.
Would the newly-named Obama Blvd. become the joke of Generation O like Martin Luther King Blvd. was for 1990s black comedians such as Chris Rock (who warned that “you can be certain” violence will “go down” on Martin Luther King Blvd.)?
On my way, I stopped by a rug-and-poster store-front between those Blvds., owned by a couple I always watched while growing up. The man and woman duo always intrigued me, their collective economics, persistence and adaptability. For decades, they rose every morning to set-up the out-door displays that over the years changed from MLK rugs to posters of Biggie Smalls and now, Obama family portraits.
“Hi, I want to know what you think about Barack Obama Blvd.,” I said to the man.
He then looked at my camera, and then to me. “We haven’t opened yet.”
“Well,” I said. ”I’ll be quick, how did you…”
“I said we’re still setting up.”
“Oh, okay. I’ll come back.”
So I drove off and down a few blocks to Obama. Blvd. and parked in front of a Hollywood Video and Taco Bell, as if my self-imposed assignment was to find my way back to Chris Rock’s 1990s.
Soon, I walked up to several people, hoping to get some fun exchange.
One middle-aged woman shook her head at me. “I’m trying to figure out why I missed my doctor’s appointment today.”
Right after, a hat-and-suit-wearing elderly crossed my path. “I don’t be around here, so I don’t know,” he said.
Another man, 40-something David, was patient enough to talk with me about voting for Obama. But today, the name of a street was the last thing on his mind. He had to catch a bus and he didn’t have fare.
Later, I met Ali inside a gas station and he was eager to talk with me. He said the intersection has improved since being flanked by Obama Blvd. People move about more upright.
Before we finished, a nervous-looking woman walked in the store.
“Hard liquor?” she said.
“We don’t sell it,” Ali said.
The woman bolted out the door.
***
Around Martin Luther King Blvd., local business people are renovating the neighborhood alongside crime scenes.
Still, a pattern of closed single-story churches, liquor stores, and empty buildings outnumbered people on foot, mostly boomers getting from point A to point B.
After 10 minutes, I had seen enough. I returned to my car and I rolled off.
Then suddenly, a red-faced image of Obama, bulging from a wooden canvas on a vacant building, caught my eye. And in clear and bold letters, the painting depicted a banner: “A change is ‘still’ coming!”
That silver lining grew stronger throughout Mother’s Day weekend, as my mom and I delighted in the vibrancy of St. Louis on a mother-daughter spree of dance concerts. At least in the art world, the beat of St. Louis was alive!
This Monday morning, I took another drive between Obama and King streets.
I was thinking of high-fiving that couple.
But instead of hanging rugs — the two were sweeping glass, looking for clues behind a robbery of their store.
Change might have to leave town.
Malena Amusa
