Scenes of Kansas City

After the Black Men's Think Tank morning, the weather was beautiful and I took the afternoon to go down to the World War I Memorial.  In the years after the Great War, the citizens donated money to build this monument and museum and named it Liberty Park. It is now a National Memorial.

This view looking north from the monument is the classic view of Kansas City with Union Station in the foreground and downtown behind it.

The Memorial entering from the south and the entrance to the Museum itself.

The interior entrance to the museum takes is a glass bridge over red poppies, the symbol of the fallen of WWI.  The red poppy became the symbol of the war from the poem, "In Flanders Fields"

I became particularly attuned to WWI after listening to the amazing podcast by Dan Carlin and his Hardcore History series.  In it I learned that WWI was particularly brutal due to trench warfare.  This is a recreated trench.....there were other models that showed a more realistic trench with much and walls that were collapsing.

It was the first war that was mechanized and therefore the casualties were greater.  Mechanized death.  In the museum, I learned the difference between a cannon, gun and howitzer.

To me, the most interesting things to see were the propaganda posters.

Even in ITALIAN!

I learned the Blue Stars meant a family member was overseas in service.  And we know gold stars mean a family member has died in service to the country.

One interesting thing that the museum ended with is a scene of NYC.  It was in stark contrast to the beginning of the museum which had scenes of European cities.  It proffered that the center of world power moved from Europe to the United States.

If you look back to the first photos of the memorial, you'll see two smaller buildings, these turned out to be the most interesting buildings.

Inside of of was this amazing mural that I was unable to photograph because of lighting, but these flags represent the countries of the Allied Forces.  On this side, the flags at the far end entered first in chronological order......and Greece last (in this set)

....on this side The United States after Greece but then moving chronologically away towards the far wall.

In the other twinned building, I was about to grab some of the ceiling level murals.

But it was these wall maps, that detailed major battles of the war that were amazing. It reminded me of the map room corridor in the Vatican Museums.

That evening, a couple colleagues and I went out for BBQ at the famed Arthur Bryant's

I learned what Burnt Ends are.....most importantly, no bones!

Walking around one day, I happened upon this place!

On the last day of the conference, I snuck away to get some more BBQ at a place called Jack Stack.  It's clearly more of a restaurant as compared to Bryant's.  I preferred the messiness and atmosphere of Bryant's.

The saga of the flight home below, but this shows our flight path.

So our flight from Kansas City to San Francisco was scheduled to depart MCI at 1845 Central Time and arrive into SFO at 2053 Pacific Time.  Due to the fact that SFO was doing construction/maintenance on of of the two landing runways, we were under air traffic control until they could schedule our flight for a landing slot.  We eventually departed MCI at 2350 Central Time.  I napped on the flight but did notice some hubbub a few rows up.  Then at 130AM the pilot comes on to tell us we are diverting to Fresno.  And the plane just descended quicker that I have ever experienced.  We were on the ground in 15 minutes. A passenger had experienced a medical emergency and was taken off the plane by medics. And so we sat there wondering...what next?  We were informed that the Fresno airport (FAT is its code) was officially closed.  They had to reopen the airport to have our plane refueled, and it is law that the emergency medical equipment that was used needed to be replaced.  While that was happening, the airline had to file a new flight plan and get a slot at SFO (at this time, not a problem apparently).  But the real issue is that the crew had to off the clock by 341AM because that's when they reached their 12 hour day limit.  At 310AM, we took off and landed at SFO at 348AM.  It took the airport 15 minutes to find someone to drive the jetway to let us off, and so we were finally off the place at just after 4AM.  We did find out that the passenger was at the hospital and in stable condition.  I didn't go to sleep that night and just went to the gym at 6AM. 

WPC -- It's Not What You Need To Do, It's Who You Need To BE

At the point in the conference, I'm reeling from all these these new terms I've learned as well as finding that I'm making revelations and connections every few minutes and at this point in most conferences, I'm feeling tired and ready to take off, but I'm now just completely fired up and ready to take on more!  I choose my next session called, "How to Mobilize Privilege for the Benefit for All: From Shame and Powerlessness to Vision and Action."  I see the words, "How to Mobilize" and being such a person of action, I want to know, "WHAT CAN I DO?!?!?!" As I know now, what I went in for is not what I came out with.

First of all, we sat in a big circle and the facilitators were soft spoken that Bay Area crunchiness.  Of all my sessions, this one was most about feelings. Six people were chosen to speak to share why they were there at the conference and why they chose this session.  Two of those six cried in their introductions. This certainly set the tone in the room. But the theme in the room from those introductions was that there was "paralysis and fear."  People want so much to take action and affect change, but they don't know where to start. There was this sense that there is this great fear in doing it wrong. At this point, the facilitators stated that "getting it right" is an act of patriarchy, which lead to that revolutionary change and self-transformation can't be separated.  We then broke up into pairs to answer "what is hard about being here?"  Then we clumped into groups of six and answered another question.  I don't remember what exactly they were, but I do remember that we had moved from a very academic way of looking at privilege to identifying what it means to each of us individually.  Here are some nuggets:

• Privilege is a substance for needs
• Things you need, they are finite
• Only in recent history has there by the accumulation of things in the hands of a few, and the capitalist system was created to explain that
• Showing vulnerability is powerful.  Shame is telling you what NOT to do
• There is no need to wait any longer to change who you are.

And you can read below, what the essence of this session was about....although I didn't really get it in the moment.

To conclude these posts about the WPC, I wanted to end on Sunday afternoon with a session titled, "The Brilliance of White Supremacy and White Privilege" which advertised itself as a discussion on

"The premise of the brilliance of white supremacy and white privilege and its intentional and unintentional creation to render African Americans dependent on the power and privilege of WHite American's to create "equality.""

I was ready to double down on theory and discussion for the last few hours of the conference, but the session was cancelled.  I wandered around and found myself in a session titled, "Toxic Whiteness."  In short, the facilitator highlighted the fact that those white people who believe and understand white privilege and supremacy need to know that it is important to grieve about how much pain they are in.  In general, humans are taught to deny feelings, especially those that are painful. The facilitator stated that we live where we run from pain and if there are so many places in our lives that are painful we end up with nowhere to run, or stuck in a very small part of our lives.  We have to notice when we are in pain and accept it, to grieve it and by acknowledging it, we will be released from that pain.  Once that is accessed, that loss can be addressed and healed. I must have missed the introduction about how there is toxicity in whiteness, but these visual of running from pain did resonate.

And that was the end of the conference.  I'm finishing these posts a few weeks after the conference is over and I see applications of what I've learned and noticed how white supremacy shows up in so many places in life.  This was the most valuable professional development experience I've ever had.  I can't necessarily say that it will directly affect my teaching....yet, but I know it's changed the way I see the world! I'm kind of still reeling from how much I learned and experienced in just a few short days.  I didn't make any personal connections, like I usually do, but the learning and awareness that I now have is tremendous...and scary to think about how easily I have bought into this world of norms and privilege.  But it's also daunting to realize how much I still take for granted and the things I do to strengthen these privileges.  Mind blown..and still being blown.....

WPC -- Hsiao-Wen Lo

The third keynote of this WPC was given by a woman named Hsiao-Wen Lo who gave a talk titled, "Rose that Grew from the Concrete: Challenges, Resistance and Growth." It was an autobiographical talk in which she shared her journey from surviving to thriving as a Taiwanese immigrant to the United States in the mid 1990's. She came to the States, got a PHD in counseling psychology and then has lived in some challenging places, Oklahoma and Upstate New York. Unable to marry her partner until the laws changed, she was forced to live and work in places that would sponsor her visa. She relayed to us in the audience that the minute she obtained her Green Card, she quit her job and moved back to Ann Arbor to start her own private practice.

Her talk then morphed into confirming what I was hearing throughout the conference that REPRESENTATION MATTERS. When we look into the mirror and see reflected back to us nothing, there is psychic disequilibrium.  Exactly what Dr. Palmer stated the day before.  This leads to internalized oppression in which we subjugate ourselves to the white narrative and believe that we don't actually belong and that we aren't equal. She relayed a story in which she was told to walk THROUGH the Madison, WI City Hall to get to her destination, but she instinctively walked around it, not thinking that public buildings were hers.  What kind of place do we live in if we allow our students to live in an environment in which they don't see themselves?

A statement she made that floored me was her assertion that white supremacy is about capitalism.  Only in the last few hundred years has capitalism been around and it was created to justify the few to hold the control of resources.  Capitalism is to preserve human dominance over others, and it's the white world that created it.  As the saying goes, "money equals power."  Totally makes sense when you think about it.

So what do we do?  She posits the question, "Do Americans have the courage to live up to our Constitution?  To Value Life and Love over convenience?"

• We need to identify in ourselves, in what ways do I myself perpetuate white supremacy
• Put at the center and uplift those identities that are deemed "less"
• Instead of "money equals power," have "honesty/kindness/integrity = power."
• Practice Self-love

Yeah, these are totally steps to take but seemed, at the time, to be a bit hokey.  But turns out that this message was reiterated in the next afternoon session I attended. Essentially, be the change you want to be.


My other encounter with Dr. Lo was when I attended her session on Sunday morning (the last day of the session) called "Understanding White Privilege though Dialogue."  Didn't really know what I was going into but I just wanted to hear more from Dr. Lo.

Here's the essence of her talk:

I've always thought I was practicing dialogue (and been proud of it) but I learned from this document that I've been in the "discussion" column.  We learned that dialogue is about creating relationship.  If we want to change people's minds, we can't and won't ever convince them through logic.  Boy this is relevant to the politics of the moment.  When we try and win people over with logic, argument and debate, of course they are going to feel defensive.  They are being attacked and told that they are wrong and nobody wants to be told they are wrong, so they retrench farther and deeper into their beliefs.  So, we aren't going to fix white supremacy and convince those that perpetuate it all at once.  It's going to take time and building of trust and creating that relationship.  This work will take time.  This isn't a quick fix, but we need to practice dialogue.

WPC -- White Norms vs. Equity Norms

After Friday's bombshell personal revelation session with Dr. Palmer, Saturday's session choices revolved more around theory. I tried to choose those sessions that focused on actions, specifically what I could do as a teacher and person to address and challenge white supremacy (at this point, people are freely using this word), specifically in the classroom.  Therefore I chose a session called "Deconstructing White Supremacy through replacing White Norms with Equity Norms."

The fact that I realized back in the Black Men's Think tank that we live in a white normed world and how hard it was to just be present when the norms are unknown and uncomfortable, it logically makes sense that if the norms of operation are white norms, they may hold back those for whom these norms are what they are not accustomed, harder to achieve success and operate in the world. White norms are the de facto norms.

The session, unlike the first two sessions I attended was not a lecture. This was a group based activity in which we sat in trios. The three of us, one a drama teacher from an independent school in Portland, OR and the other a guy from Milwaukee who works at an engineering company, first discussed a diagram that was put in front of us. We learn norms and at this point we have a choice, we can go along with the norms (COLLUSION) which makes the norms more accepted (STRENGTHENS) and then we teach it to others (INDOCTRINATE).  The other path is to state or think that the norms (white norms) aren't the only way (CONTEND) and then act in a non white norm way (CHALLENGE) and then change the norms (highly unlikely) or suffer the consequences (most likely).  One can challenge as much as one likes but in the end "COLLUSION IS SURVIVAL."  White norms win and are then strengthened.  This made sense, and we see it all the time when people who challenge the status quo (white norms) get shut down or end up being removed from a situation.

So, what are these white norms.  At this point, the facilitator asked us to brainstorm some white norms but most of us in the room really didn't know how to start (we are SO accustomed to white norms we couldn't even look at ourselves to figure out what we were doing qualified as white norms).  So the whole room (around 60 of us) just starting raising our hands and being called on...which is the first norm we came up with.  Here's a list:

• Raising your hand to be called on
• Never raise your voice
• Eye Contact
• Standing in line
• Being on time...the concept of linear time
• Competition is a white norm (who's the best)
• Sitting quietly in your seat
• Being extroverted
• Wearing western clothes
• Certain ways to wear your hair
• Food norms (no stinky food)
• "Don't rock the boat"
• Only protest loudly when something is morally objectionable
• Insider status never identified
• Not disclosing financial status (or even talking about money)
• Length of time is a sign of knowledge
• Clarity and Confidence being rewarded
• First come/first served
• Policy and Procedures
• Threats of lawsuits
• The supremacy of logical thinking and reasoning

The facilitator then went on to say the piece of information I took as the most profound nugget for me of the session:

"Norms don't exist without sanctions" 

Yeah, that totally makes sense. If someone follow the norms above, they get punished or penalized, even if not overt.  There I sat during the creation of the list of norms and every once in a while someone spoke up and told a story or relayed a piece of information in a way that wasn't one of the norms and I immediately started to not listen or get defensive.  The sanction I imposed was not giving them the courtesy or paying attention.  There I was.....colluding with the white norms that I'm so ingrained with.

At this point, we were running out of time and so we were supposed to try and brainstorm some norms that could be implemented in our places of work or life that were more based in EQUITY.  Here's a couple that the group came up with:

• Explicitly state that norms can't be assumed and point out that de facto norms aren't automatically a given way to operate in whatever situation you are in.

• Asking "why do we do it this way" or in other words...challenge assumptions

• Change the first come/first served schedule, instead set time frames to allow those who can't succeed in first come/first served situations to have an equal opportunity

• Don't base authority and leadership based on seniority or perceived mastery of knowledge instead based on compassion and being humane

And then...in typical white norm fashion, time was up and because we have to respect linear time....we ended the session.  Getting out on time was more important than continuing this work. No one challenged it!  Ahhhh, white norms win again!

Overall, this session got me to think and made me more aware of how we operate in the world.  I clearly live and abide by white norms.....and wonder norms that are different than mine/white would be.  The one I can think of is in China how people don't stand in line, but I'm sure there are many other examples that I could come up with...mostly they would be times in which I was annoyed and pissed off.  And there we go, white privilege and supremacy.

 

WPC -- "Empowered Identity"

At this point, we are halfway through the first official day of the WPC conference and it's time for the afternoon breakout session.  There are 30 different choices, but I hone in on the one that is being given by Professor John Palmer, who was the other man who had the same ethnic look as I did in the Black Men's Think Tank the day before. I went because I wanted to know his story, which he advertised in program as "Journey to Empowered Identities: Deconstructing the Culture of White Supremacy and Privilege through the lens of Racial and Ethnic Identity Development of a Corean Adopted American." The fact that Corean is spelled with a "C" is interesting itself (revealed at the end of the post).

So I arrive in the room at there are a total of 5 people in the audience. Unlike many of the sessions I attended, this felt like an intimate affair. In the first few minutes, I quickly learn that Dr. Palmer grew up in Iowa and was friends with the WPC founder, Dr. Eddie Moore, and therefore has been presenting at the WPC conferences since the beginning. Dr. Palmer had been giving this talk at the conferences for many years so that might be why the attendance numbers were so low. I also later found out that Dr. Palmer had been a keynote speaker at previous conferences.

There I was in the room and he started to tell his story.  So much of it resonated with me that I just sat there DUMBFOUNDED just nodding my head there. It felt so much like Dr. Palmer was talking directly to me and explaining to me why I felt the way I did and put into words many of the things I had been thinking for years but really hadn't formed a cohesive conclusion to.  In approaching how to write this post, I am challenged to figure out how to structure it, but I've decided to relay Dr. Palmer's talk and then write about how it's congruent with my story.

Dr. Palmer was born in December 1969 in Corea and in 1971 adopted by a family from Iowa. As one might expect, the family is white and so he grew up as an ethnic minority in predominantly white Iowa. He grew up living in this zone of "trying to be white" and not realizing that he was always asking the question, "why do I want to be white?"  He acted like them thinking he could be them but often heard, "you're not like other Asians." Dr. Palmer relayed stories of being teased and bullied by other kids because of he didn't look like them even though he went to school with them and played sports just like them.  Growing up in the 1970's and 80's, there really were a lack of Asian role models. Asian men were either shown as evil, Fu Manchu,' or wimps, Long Duck Dong." Asian women on the other hand were depicted as exotic and submissive. We had a string of non-Asians playing Asian roles (ooh, this still happens but now at least there is some blowback). Then society called us the "model minority."  The American Government was complicit in this in that their 1965 Immigration Act preferred (if not only allowed) certain well-educated and wealthy Asians to immigrate to the United States. It was those professionals who latched onto educational success as the way to play the white game and achieve success in white America.

Maybe.....people are starting to get it.  MAYBE....

In all these cases, this was leading us Asians (men) in our ASCRIBED IDENTITY.  The outside world was reflected back to us the identity THEY wanted us to have. We weren't white because we weren't told to see ourselves in white areas of competence and achievement.  Therefore they saw us that way and we were told to see ourselves in that way.  WOAH.

Dr. Palmer, being the same age as I and living many of these issues in the same moment as I, was asking, "If I'm not white, then what am I?" He hated the reflection of what he was seeing of himself. No wonder girls never wanted to date an Asian guy, look at how we were portrayed?  Asian women of course would want to date a white guy, he's powerful and strong. The worst offender?  The Joy Luck Club!  All four Asian women marry.....WHITE MEN.  Places of Asian male strength, the martial arts, were being co-opted by white men.  Steven Segal and Jon Claude Van-Damme now taking over leading roles from Bruce Lee and Jackie Chan. White Hollywood was erasing the chance for Asian men to show strength and masculinity.  So what do Asians do?  They play the model minority game.  It's the only path we have.

After college, Dr. Palmer moves to Corea and comes to the conclusion that he's not Corean either.  Although he looks like the majority, he's not culturally Corean.  The outside and the inside don't match. He eventually gets a higher level degree from a Corean University and works there. He marries a Corean woman and they move back to the States and now live in Upstate New York where he is a professor and he has three sons.  During this time he reflects that he's never going to be Corean and he's never going to be American so what is he?  Where does he belong? How do resolve that the face on the outside doesn't match the identity on the inside?

If I correctly interpret what Dr. Palmer says about resolving this issue is that not having to resolve it and answer the question is part of the solution. Our disparate identities is what we have to love. We don't have to fit into a box and that we don't have to be told how to feel our act. We don't have to be the "model minority." We can be athletic (he notes that except for Jeremy Lin, every single successful Asian athlete was not born in the United States!) and masculine and that our feelings of inadequacy aren't our feelings, it's what is being imposed on us by a dominant white culture. In addition, for Dr. Palmer it was finding out that there were so many others like him/us out there that our situation isn't unique just to our single experience. It's the white "supremacy" culture that is the source of our identity issues.  This is now, with this lens of understanding, our EMPOWERED IDENTITY.  We can love ourselves even though white culture is trying to tell us not to be proud of who we are. 

Dr. Palmer concluded with two small anecdotes.  The first was when he saw his first son being born and seeing his son made him finally "see myself as beautiful!"  The second is when people ask him if he is Asian-American, he responds, "I'm American, it's YOU who put the hyphen in there!"  I'm going to use this last response from now until forever.

Those of you who have made it this far are wondering how it applies to my life.  For certain, I was not adopted and did no grow up in predominantly white Iowa.  I certainly was conflicted growing up Asian in Seattle, but going to a private high school shielded me from any of the teasing and bullying. And I do have to say that I have to thank my parents for never trying to play the white game and trying to ingratiate themselves into the white community. I saw some of my Asian friends' parents "play the game" by volunteering for school committees and joining clubs and hosting parties. I saw that it certainly helped their kids have more of the popular white kid friends and get invited to those social gatherings, but I knew they never really were fully accepted.  I could just tell, even as a high school kid.  But I did try and play the game in some ways.  I tried to play sports I never would have dreamed of (what was I doing trying cross-country skiing or rowing even) but mostly I put my head down and did the best I could in school.  I did, however, unconsciously recognize that my portrayal in the movies and television was stifling and not right.

It was when I came out as gay and "entered" (I never really entered so that is why the quotes) the gay community did I fully encounter the issues described by Dr. Palmer.  I felt INVISIBLE.  I moved to San Francisco and was expecting to be part of this huge great friendship circle and community (little did I realize that part of the problem was that I didn't really work at making friends and doing things thinking it would just be given to me) but it didn't happen. And then I never saw a face that looked like mine (Asian) or a body that look liked mine (a little bit chunky and not muscular) ever portrayed in the media.  Then (and still now) I would see online profiles of guys who would say, "No fats, no femmes, no blacks, no Asians."  And the worst of all?  Other Asian guys who wouldn't want to meet or be friends with other Asians.

This environment, in which I found myself here in San Francisco, lead to questioning myself as a person. It was the first time in my life where I couldn’t control the course of my life. Basically I wasn’t getting what I wanted, which was community, relationship and the picture of this full life, gay and overall.  In retrospect, I realize that I was immature in thinking that it didn’t take work but I do now realize that what I was looking for might also have been a myth itself.  This lead to some self-destructive behaviors that I now attribute to trying to equalize the playing field. I created a “community” of friends even though they weren’t always friends. And I always savored when someone told me “oh, you’re not like other Asians,” which I now recognize as a total insult and coming from a place of white supremacy.  Enough on that.

I too, like Dr. Palmer, moved abroad to escape the pain I was in. My three years in Italy were a time to clear out the system. I didn’t even deal with the identity issues. I just lived outside the United States without any expectation. In fact, I lived in a place that highlighted my America-ness and the delight the Italians took when I could piece together some basic Italian was fun when I could EXCEED their expectations.  I didn’t move to Italy to show off, I moved there to relax.  But three years was enough and the pull of China was too great.  I went to China as an American with American attitudes toward the Chinese as one big mass of people all the same, robots basically.  I learned that (DUH) there are great Chinese people, crazy Chinese people, funny Chinese people…the entire gamut. People are people everywhere.  But I loved living where I looked like everyone else….and I have to sheepishly admit, I loved the privilege and preferential treatment I got being an American in China.  I had the best of both worlds.  At this point, I didn’t have this conflict of wanting to be Chinese, but I came to be SO PROUD of China, so proud and have such love of the people that I became so proud of my Chinese heritage.  This is what living in China gave me.  

Like Dr. Palmer, I met my spouse in China.  Meeting Onions has been eye opening for me to see how differently he and I see white America. He’s never had any sense that America is better than China. He’s proud of China and sees America (white America) just another place in the world. Although he has some crazy understanding of Chinese history and American history, he lives in America without any working sense that white America is any better. He just sees it as different.  This lack of ability to see white privilege also has made it hard for him to understand the oppression of black people. I truly hope that this more neutral vision of the States is something he retains.

And then there is my nephew.  His birth caused the same feeling in me about beauty. This cute and beautiful kid, although not my son, but my blood relation….how could I not love being a part of who he is.  His beauty is my beauty, both inside and outside.

Ok, so about this Corean thing. According to Dr. Palmer, when the Japanese colonized the Corean Peninsula, the spelling on maps of Corea was with a C. But in English, Corea is alphabetically before Japan, so to move Corea behind Japan, they changed the spelling to a K. At least that’s the rumor….