Shoot Promos on Race, Class, Gender, Etc

"All too often we think of community in terms of being with folks like ourselves: the same class, same race, same ethnicity, same social standing and the like... I think we need to be wary: we need to work against the danger of evoking something that we don't challenge ourselves to actually practice." - Bell Hooks Continuing from my blog last week about the fallout and trauma response from the Will Smith/Chris Rock incident at the Oscars ( and that my friends is what we in the business refer to as a callback; no I am not in the business ), I was left with the feeling that I had no place in a world that perpetuates and indirectly rewards such broken masculinity. I felt isolated. I felt disconnected. I felt defeated. Because the truth of the matter was, I was broken too. Maybe not in the same way that caused Will Smith to lose his sh*t, but I identified with that hurt even while recognizing how toxic it was. It's why I had such an intense reaction and why it elicited a ...

"So called 'late-bloomers' get a bad rap. Sometimes the people with the greatest potential often take the longest to find their path because their sensitivity is a double edged sword - it lives at the heart of their brilliance, but it also makes them more susceptible to life's pains. Good thing we aren't being penalized for handing in our purpose late. The soul doesn't know a thing about deadlines." - Jeff Brown In August of 2000, I attended the freshmen orientation at UC Irvine. We spent a weekend in the dorm, took a tour of their donut shaped campus, played a few orientation games with other incoming freshmen, and met with our academic counselors. After being shy and very much a loner in high school, this was my opportunity to start over as a social being with a clean slate. Undoubtedly influenced by Scary Movie and American Pie , I took part in a skit where I walked out with my pants down holding a vacuum hose implying that I had masturbated with it. L...

  "Maybe the journey isn't so much about becoming anything. Maybe it's about un-becoming everything that isn't really you, so you can be who you were meant to be in the first place." - Paul Coelho The model minority was introduced by Sociologist William Peterson in 1966 to describe the success of Japanese Americans ability to achieve success that other minority groups didn't. It was a concept adopted by Ronald Reagan and the right wing to characterize AAPI (Asian American Pacific Islander) as smart, wealthy, and compliant compared to the "welfare queens" of the Black & Brown communities, ignoring the fact that if it wasn't for the Civil Rights Movement and the passage of the Immigration Act of 1965, the vast majority of AAPI immigrants wouldn't be here. Because most of us arrived after 1965, Asians collectively didn't experience Jim Crow, housing discrimination, and lynching. Racism was largely a Black/White problem; the "Americ...