Rant of the Exiles

Critical Race Theory (CRT) has been around for a long time. I pursued an education minor at UC Berkeley during the mid-1990s and Paulo Freie’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1968) was required reading in my ED190 class. Power dynamics is the bedrock of critical theory - the broader belief system for various types of oppression including racial, gender, socioeconomic, cognitive, disability, and sexual orientation. I vividly recall a class session where my instructor, a female graduate student, dressed in black leather, barked commands, and marched around the classroom, slapping a black riding crop on students’ desks. Her cosplay was exhibit A on the oppressiveness of traditional education. I remember classmates rolling their eyes at one another and taking it all in with amusement.  The non-role play class sessions were stimulating in other ways. We had good discussions and our instructor worked hard to treat us as peers and engage us in dialogue. This emphasis on dialogue as both a mea...

I’m not sure if I’m on the #YangGang bandwagon yet but I’m certainly intrigued. Yang is funny and self-deprecating. His humor is evident throughout his book “The War on Normal People” with lines like “This was back when people dated in college” and his mom’s endorsement of universal basic income (UBI). My favorite chapter is the first, titled “My Journey”. I love how he tells his growing up story in a couple pages and I resonated with his stories of being bullied with ethnic slurs. I couldn’t relate to his entrepreneurial success but admired how he “had gone from being an underdog to one of the guys with the answers, from finding the most marginalized or excluded person in the room to finding the richest person and making him or her feel special” (pg. 9). I love how he visited various cities - Detroit, Cleveland, and Pittsburgh among many - and personally witnessed the hollowing out of the middle class. These rapidly increasing negative effects on America’s cities, Yang calls the G...

Identifying as Asian American means being woke. That’s a tough pill for most Asian Americans to swallow.  Jay Caspian Kang’s insightful NY Times article got me thinking about Asian American identity and masculinity. At first glance, this piece about 20-year old Michael Deng’s death during a weekend fraternity getaway seems to be an expose on the excesses of fraternity hazing. That’s absolutely not what it’s about - as the title should indicate but the majority of commenters seems to miss.   Through the lens of an Asian American fraternity’s initiation ritual, Kang highlights the challenges of defining an Asian American identity. The article concerns the trial of four of Deng’s fraternity brothers for their involvement in the death of Deng. Ultimately, Kang’s article is not so much about ethnicity but a man’s hunger for belonging and the male need to define and express their identity through aggression. I didn’t realize I was Asian American until I moved...

A Yale Law graduate gives his first-hand perspective of growing up amidst the white working class. Hillbilly Elegy is a great book -  a well-written and poignant memoir of J.D. Vance’s childhood in small town Ohio and how his Appalachian-raised grandparents became the intact family that his biological parents never were. His dad abandoned him as a baby and his mom was a substance addict with a conga line of boyfriends and the accompanying rotation of homes. Vance’s memoir is every bit about being an exile in America as Russell Jeung’s book. I recognize white privilege is a real thing. Being white confers advantages that ethnic minorities do not benefit from. And yet it's difficult to typify Vance’s experience as benefiting from white privilege due the tremendous disadvantages of his upbringing. J.D. Vance’s memoir offers a contrasting data point on how members of the...

Here's the  link  to the best Christian response I've found to the Supreme Court's 5-4 vote to legalizing same-sex marriage in all 50 states.   The Background:  I first heard about about the decision through Facebook. A number of my friends and youth in our church celebrated the ruling through social media posting, with the most popular expression being rainbow-filtered profile pics.   The conservative Christian response could not provide a starker contrast. There's a sense of loss and tragedy. There's a sense of hiding out and starting a commune. There's a sense of panic and consternation. There's a lot of fear, especially for our children. A friend of mine half-jokingly said we should move our families run off to a European country where laws follow traditional Christian sexual ethics. Like many in this camp, I too was initially saddened when I heard about the court decision. But here's my conundrum: I have ...

Carly Fiorina says the Chinese "are not terribly imaginative" And I agree with her (1:54 or so in the video). The average native-born, raised, and educated Chinese citizen is not terribly imaginative, innovative, or entrepreneurial, as compared with the average American citizen. Is that truly a racist comment or a cultural/national one? I haven't worked in China for decades like Fiorina but I've worked with native Chinese people for decades and I'm fairly confident no native Chinese person would take issue with Fiorina's comments. The Chinese educational system is superb at preparing students to excel in standardized tests.  Asian countries are awesome at rote memorization in a way Western countries couldn't begin to approach. China also indoctrinates people from birth in communist philosophy. Chinese people are not trained to think critically as individuals, at least not in the way the American universities do (which helps explains the massive ...

My college roommate wrote a history thesis that went on to be published in the Berkeley Undergraduate Journal. His essay concerned views of Providence from both sides of the Civil War. Providence is the belief that God will provide in one's favor despite adverse circumstances. He argued that Christian leaders from both North and the South firmly believed that God would vindicate their respective causes. He cites Abraham Lincoln's second inaugural address in 1865: Both read the same Bible and pray to the same God, and each invokes His aid against the other. It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God's assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men's faces; but let us judge not, that we be not judged. The prayers of both could not be answered. That of neither has been answered fully. The Almighty has His own purposes. Lincoln acknowledged that both North and South believed that God was on their side. And it was only in the afterma...