The 21st Century American: Perspectives on a Definition in Transition
Who are they?
Who are we?
Am I you?
Are you me?
Much has been written about historical relations between American blacks and whites, but today, almost a decade into a new century, it is, or should be, apparent that American diversity is about more than two, not particularly monolithic, groups. What does ethnic minority mean when the largest ethnic group is less than a majority, while everyone else, in the aggregate, equals an overwhelming sum of many different peoples?
This question, important as it is, presumes ethnicity as the dominant, if not only, defining characteristic of Americans. Any sociologist will tell you, however, that all of us are members of multiple sub-cultural groups, be they religion, politics, sexual orientation, economic circumstance, environmental values or something else.
Who are they?
Who are we?
Am I you?
Are you me?
The 21st Century American: Perspectives on a Definition in Transition is about who we are, rather than who we are not. It is about the inclusion of us, rather than the exclusion of them. It is not a Pollyanna-ish attempt to deny the existence of racism, hatred and bigotry, but rather, recognition that in spite of all that divides us as Americans, what we share is of equal, if not greater, import to our national character and prosperity. From Frederick Douglass’ My Bondage and My Freedom and Helen Zia's Asian American Dreams to Dale Maharidge’s The Coming White Minority; from Samuel Freedman’s Jew vs. Jew to Nicolas Vaca's The Presumed Alliance, there has always been an American history that adds perspective to the officially sanctioned, and often incomplete, version. These, and similar, undertakings tell the real story of our nation.
The 21st Century American: Perspectives on a Definition in Transition will take advantage of the public desire for context, analysis, and participation by connecting messages from our past with observations of the present and aspirations for the future.
--Gene Bryan Johnson
The 21st Century American
Read Ta-Nehisi Coates American Girl, a perspective on Michele Obama's upbringing that will illuminate a segment of American society you may not have been aware of. If you are short on time, start with this short video of Coates discussing the article. It will encourage you to make time. No need to thank me. Just try it. (You can always borrow time, but the interest rates border on usury)
-- gbj
-- gbj
Songs of the Dragons Flying to Heaven
Young Jean Lee
HERE Arts Center, New York
September 21-October 14, 2006
The play opens with a darkened stage. We see nothing, but hear disembodied conversations sans context. The audience at HERE Arts Center giggles with anticipation. A video image of a young Asian woman appears without introduction. She stares longingly at an unseen presence. Time passes. Then: Slap. Slap. Slap. Her face jerks as if being struck by an invisible hand. She struggles to retain composure. We do not see the aggressor but, as the metronomic blows progressively increase in intensity, can almost feel the assault. Tears force through her stoicism. Why, we wonder, does she stand there and take it.
Young Jean Lee’s “Songs of the Dragons Flying to Heaven” is a play that attempts to answer questions. Why doesn’t she do something about this THING that assaults her? Doesn’t she know that she has options, that she can choose to make it stop? Or can she? Is the privilege of choice a Western concept? But she is Korean-American, isn’t she? As the play unfolds it becomes clear that she cannot be fully free until her very Christian grandmother dies. Whether she wants her grandmother to die is the metaphorical question driving this piece.
“Songs of the Dragons Flying to Heaven” is a series of juxtapositions. Faith and desire, Asian and Caucasian, tradition and rebellion, young and old, male and female all battling for preeminence in the mind of a young woman trying to find herself. But the lines of demarcation are not clearly defined—nor should they be. Life is not that easy for one shackled by chains of Korean tradition (that has been diluted by a Western religion) while simultaneously being drawn to a white American aesthetic that she feels nothing but disdain for. Yet she craves it, that whiteness.
Scenes changes are announced by intermittent appearances from a Caucasian couple in the process of destroying their own relationship with words that say nothing. They jab and poke and humiliate without revealing themselves. Neither to each other nor to the audience. And that omission is certainly revealing. Why would our protagonist want to be like them—shells of nothingness immersed in cruelty and drama?
The answer resides underneath the skirts of a Greek Chorus of traditionally dressed Korean women. At first they speak only Korean, yet somehow communicate to the audience how traditional Korean men dominate their lives. Each wonders what a pleasurable sexual encounter might be like, even as she demonstrates, in graphic mime, that cutting off a limb may be the only escape from the trap of her existence. The (mostly white) audience is the final character in this performance. The audience laughs nervously as the Korean performers mock them and declare just how pathetic the offstage viewers seem to the onstage viewed. But the Koreans clearly want something the white girls already have. And that seems to be Young Jean Lee’s point. The white girls, at least in the minds of the characters on stage, get to fight back.
--Gene Bryan Johnson
Young Jean Lee
HERE Arts Center, New York
September 21-October 14, 2006
The play opens with a darkened stage. We see nothing, but hear disembodied conversations sans context. The audience at HERE Arts Center giggles with anticipation. A video image of a young Asian woman appears without introduction. She stares longingly at an unseen presence. Time passes. Then: Slap. Slap. Slap. Her face jerks as if being struck by an invisible hand. She struggles to retain composure. We do not see the aggressor but, as the metronomic blows progressively increase in intensity, can almost feel the assault. Tears force through her stoicism. Why, we wonder, does she stand there and take it.
Young Jean Lee’s “Songs of the Dragons Flying to Heaven” is a play that attempts to answer questions. Why doesn’t she do something about this THING that assaults her? Doesn’t she know that she has options, that she can choose to make it stop? Or can she? Is the privilege of choice a Western concept? But she is Korean-American, isn’t she? As the play unfolds it becomes clear that she cannot be fully free until her very Christian grandmother dies. Whether she wants her grandmother to die is the metaphorical question driving this piece.
“Songs of the Dragons Flying to Heaven” is a series of juxtapositions. Faith and desire, Asian and Caucasian, tradition and rebellion, young and old, male and female all battling for preeminence in the mind of a young woman trying to find herself. But the lines of demarcation are not clearly defined—nor should they be. Life is not that easy for one shackled by chains of Korean tradition (that has been diluted by a Western religion) while simultaneously being drawn to a white American aesthetic that she feels nothing but disdain for. Yet she craves it, that whiteness.
Scenes changes are announced by intermittent appearances from a Caucasian couple in the process of destroying their own relationship with words that say nothing. They jab and poke and humiliate without revealing themselves. Neither to each other nor to the audience. And that omission is certainly revealing. Why would our protagonist want to be like them—shells of nothingness immersed in cruelty and drama?
The answer resides underneath the skirts of a Greek Chorus of traditionally dressed Korean women. At first they speak only Korean, yet somehow communicate to the audience how traditional Korean men dominate their lives. Each wonders what a pleasurable sexual encounter might be like, even as she demonstrates, in graphic mime, that cutting off a limb may be the only escape from the trap of her existence. The (mostly white) audience is the final character in this performance. The audience laughs nervously as the Korean performers mock them and declare just how pathetic the offstage viewers seem to the onstage viewed. But the Koreans clearly want something the white girls already have. And that seems to be Young Jean Lee’s point. The white girls, at least in the minds of the characters on stage, get to fight back.
--Gene Bryan Johnson
The Closer Marathon
Kyra Sedgewick
TNT Networks
September 4, 2006
I stumbled upon TNT’s promotion for a 12-hour marathon of The Closer starring Kyra Sedgewick when following the U.S. Open Tennis Championships across the channel landscape from CBS' New York affiliate to cable’s USA Network. The actor's name flashed onto the screen, catching my eye as she recently starred in Loverboy, an indie film based on a book by the mother of one my daughter’s classmates. This, it occurred to me, was an event that I would never, in a million years, have thought to participate in. I was invited to spend an entire half-day in a space created just for me! How could I resist?
The Closer marathon is a perfect example of points Sharon Zukin raises in The Cultures of Cities. For example, the consuming of what an authority has defined as “culture” in one’s own living room, which is, after all, the ultimate gated community. It is an ironic sharing of a private moment with the millions of others simultaneously watching the program. The “symbolic economy” is on grotesque display as Time Warner, one of the world’s largest media companies, literally sells tickets into my home so corporations can bombard me with highly-produced images of what someone has decided are beautiful people. They use MasterCards to consume products they can’t afford, maintain trim figures by eating Lean Cuisine Microwaveable Meals, enjoy menstrual periods courtesy of Playtex Gentle Guide Tampons and drive through urban jungles in tanks with the luxuriously misleading nomenclature of Audi Q7 SUV. I have been deluded into thinking that I have framed my personal space, when in reality my home is designed for the ease and comfort of those who want to take my money, or more accurately, money that I expect, but have not yet earned, or maybe don’t really expect to earn, but will spend anyway. I am at once the consumer and the consumed. I am viewing the installation even as I am on display.
And it is a Faustian bargain to which I am an eager signatory. I get to control my interaction with otherwise invisible immigrant workers, who deliver my meals and laundry with highly accented cries of “deliver for too gee.” I convince myself that I am safe from intrusion, while making myself vulnerable to what is a most invasive violation of my privacy by the world’s most powerful institutions of higher deception. I sit in an overpriced leather recliner, with piles of half-read New Yorkers to my left, a glass of German stout to my right and realize that I am paying more attention to the commercials than the television show. Is this, too, by design? Do disingenuous promises of the good life have more relevance for me, an African-American man, than a program about a post-feminist white female police inspector transplanted from the genteel south to the rough streets of L.A. and the sexist ranks of a paramilitary government organization? Is her ability to parry subtle, and not so subtle, verbal jabs from a racially diverse contingent of large gun-carrying men enough to make me identify with her underdog status? The answers are yes, yes and yes.
--Gene Bryan Johnson
Kyra Sedgewick
TNT Networks
September 4, 2006
I stumbled upon TNT’s promotion for a 12-hour marathon of The Closer starring Kyra Sedgewick when following the U.S. Open Tennis Championships across the channel landscape from CBS' New York affiliate to cable’s USA Network. The actor's name flashed onto the screen, catching my eye as she recently starred in Loverboy, an indie film based on a book by the mother of one my daughter’s classmates. This, it occurred to me, was an event that I would never, in a million years, have thought to participate in. I was invited to spend an entire half-day in a space created just for me! How could I resist?
The Closer marathon is a perfect example of points Sharon Zukin raises in The Cultures of Cities. For example, the consuming of what an authority has defined as “culture” in one’s own living room, which is, after all, the ultimate gated community. It is an ironic sharing of a private moment with the millions of others simultaneously watching the program. The “symbolic economy” is on grotesque display as Time Warner, one of the world’s largest media companies, literally sells tickets into my home so corporations can bombard me with highly-produced images of what someone has decided are beautiful people. They use MasterCards to consume products they can’t afford, maintain trim figures by eating Lean Cuisine Microwaveable Meals, enjoy menstrual periods courtesy of Playtex Gentle Guide Tampons and drive through urban jungles in tanks with the luxuriously misleading nomenclature of Audi Q7 SUV. I have been deluded into thinking that I have framed my personal space, when in reality my home is designed for the ease and comfort of those who want to take my money, or more accurately, money that I expect, but have not yet earned, or maybe don’t really expect to earn, but will spend anyway. I am at once the consumer and the consumed. I am viewing the installation even as I am on display.
And it is a Faustian bargain to which I am an eager signatory. I get to control my interaction with otherwise invisible immigrant workers, who deliver my meals and laundry with highly accented cries of “deliver for too gee.” I convince myself that I am safe from intrusion, while making myself vulnerable to what is a most invasive violation of my privacy by the world’s most powerful institutions of higher deception. I sit in an overpriced leather recliner, with piles of half-read New Yorkers to my left, a glass of German stout to my right and realize that I am paying more attention to the commercials than the television show. Is this, too, by design? Do disingenuous promises of the good life have more relevance for me, an African-American man, than a program about a post-feminist white female police inspector transplanted from the genteel south to the rough streets of L.A. and the sexist ranks of a paramilitary government organization? Is her ability to parry subtle, and not so subtle, verbal jabs from a racially diverse contingent of large gun-carrying men enough to make me identify with her underdog status? The answers are yes, yes and yes.
--Gene Bryan Johnson
