American Books And American Bars
December 1, 2007
At San Francisco’s Everett Junior High, I read Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn and identified less with Huck and more with the Nigger Jim.
Jim was a person of color, after all, and most books didn’t have any Filipinos or Asian American anything. And Jim riding a raft to freedom? Asian Americans can relate to that.
I’m glad they still teach Twain’s classic, but readers of all ages these days have a lot more choices available, with books that scream the diversity of America.
The best of those books will be honored this Sunday, December 2, at the 27th annual American Book Awards (Laney College Theatre, 900 Fallon Street, downtown Oakland, 4 to 6 p.m.). Along with the authors, California Poet Laureate Al Young will be there, as will playwright Wajahat Ali, who will premiere a portion of his new play. Your “Amokness” will be on good behavior as host of the free event. The awards are the answer to the tradition-bound and myopic National Book Awards, normally a reflection of a small cadre of literary types in New York. The aptly named Before Columbus Foundation recognized the void and has filled it with verve, each year honoring authors that represent the full spectrum of American writing.
Most of the books are both fiction and non-fiction from university or small presses, like Beyond Literary Chinatown by Jeffrey F. Partridge or Reyna Grande’s Across a Hundred Mountains. Some are from local presses like Daniel Cassidy’s How the Irish Invented Slang: The Secret Language of the Crossroads from Oakland’s CounterPunch/AK Press. Or larger presses like Michael Eric Dyson’s Come Hell or High Water: Hurricane Katrina and the Color of Disaster from Basic Books (in 2000, I made the list with Amok: Essays From an Asian American Perspective from AsianWeek Books).
Author Ishmael Reed, Oakland’s literary lion and MacArthur genius, is the force behind the American Book Awards. I first met Ishmael while in a graduate writers program at Washington University in St. Louis. My teachers there didn’t get my references to things like lumpia and actually asked me to stop writing about Filipinos or any Asian Americans. I dutifully neutered my characters ethnicity.
But then I met Reed, a visiting lecturer, who told me to put the Filipinos back in. I did. They stayed. I’ve kept them on display — with gusto.
An American Bar?
Two men get shot in a bar, or as the headline on the Chronicle Web site read: “Two Injured in S.F. Shooting.”
It’s not a joke; it’s real. Happened this week.
But does the race of the victims matter? How about the perp? And the bar? An American bar? An Asian American bar? Would you care more if Asian Americans were involved?
Bland journalism only begets more questions. In this case, the bar, Fire Fly Sports Bar on Noriega Street, is part of the thriving Asian American scene in the City’s Sunset District.
You just don’t know the context from the spare police blotter reporting, which leaves one guessing. Fortunately, citizen journalists-bloggers added more information online, which put ethnicity back in the mix. Some bloggers even took Chronicle reporter Sabin Russell to task for the reporting. But Russell, an award-winning health reporter who deserves better than to rewrite police statements, is not at fault. Journalism is.
The custom is to see race as irrelevant. Journalists, under the guise of doing the right thing, keep their reporting on race generic because identification is often viewed as creating stereotypes. How many references to “Asian gang members” does it take to permanently scar the public psyche?
The problem is if you leave out race, you don’t provide real information. A Latino gang member means something different from an Asian gang member. If journalism is to inform, race shouldn’t be censored. Let the facts play out.
Race wouldn’t be a sensitive issue if there was just more reporting of minorities in mainstream media, period. It’s no good if all the stories are negative without a balance of stories with ethnic sources where race was a factor.
But to say that in most cases race is irrelevant is to whitewash, colorblind and ignore the diversity that exists. Even a name could use clarification. For example, in these mixed-race times, who knows if the surname Guillermo is white (my wife), Asian (I’m Filipino), mixed-race (my kids) or Latino (damned Spanish colonizers). Unless my race is spelled out, who knows what I am.
If there are no detailed references, our ethnic identity is at best implied, at worst omitted.
Yeah, we’re all Americans, but America is about inclusion and representation.
AsianWeek and The American Book Awards are reminders that we all have a place on the printed page.
E-mail: emil@amok.com
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