bridging gaps in understanding

AAAAAAARGGGHHH, I had a four part post that went the way of the dodo when I had too many windows open and Firefox crashed, and even when I hit restore session, the "recover post" link on the new blogger didn't do jack for me. What use is the new Blogger I ask?!?!

So now I have to do a really abbreviated walk-through of what I was thinking because I already wasted 2 hours of time that should have been spent working/sleeping.

Item one: congrats to Beau Sia, slam poet extraordinaire, who finally got Rosie O'Donnell to apologize (not in the trite "I'm sorry if you're offended" way but in a genuine fashion (hat tip Mike2Cents.) I know that I didn't think Rosie's outburst was very funny or a big deal, but I'm glad that others pressed the point and turned it into a teachable moment, a means of educating through discomfort.

Item two: I've been following the Anna Mae He story. My heart broke when I heard that as a result of all this conflict, she no longer considers herself Chinese, but Mexican:

The attorneys representing the Hes were also upset by comments made in a national newspaper by Anna Mae saying she was Mexican not Chinese.

"Our hope is that the Bakers will do everything they can, to make this transition easy for Anna Mae and not have her say things that don't really serve this transition process," they said.

It reminded me a lot of the young girl in the "A Girl Like Me" video which replicated the psychology study that the Supreme Court referenced in Brown v. Board of Ed which ended segregation (officially if not practically.) The interviewer gives a young African American girl 2 dolls, one white and one black. She asks the girl to point to the good doll, and the girl points to the white one. Then she asks "which is the bad, evil doll?" The girl gestures to the black doll. Then the interviewer asks, "give me the one that looks most like you?" and the girl's eyes, hands stray to the white doll, but then she hesitates and pushes the black doll across the table. The pain in her round eyes is as deep as the racial divides that still exist.

The Bakers even put out photos of Anna Mae, in a desperate attempt to win public support, even after the Supreme Court handed down its ruling in favor of her biological parents. I hope that they can come together to help ease the transition because this is one confused girl and she's going to grow up really angry if this isn't handled properly.

Item Three: Kenneth Eng's op-ed in Asianweek called "Why I Hate Blacks" which was taken down by the site (you can find a copy of it within the link.) I haven't been reading the papers as much recently because I have been slammed with a double whammy of work and travel, but I had read Eng's increasingly deranged writings and dismissed them as the work of a science fiction writer, which is to say "not based in reality." However, this one included jawdropping statements like this:
Contrary to media depictions, I would argue that blacks
are weak-willed. They are the only race that has been
enslaved for 300 years. It’s unbelievable that it took them
that long to fight back.
On the other hand, we slaughtered the Russians in the
Japanese-Russo War.

I don't even know where to begin with this one. Eng needs to apologize and Asianweek needs to stop running his "thought" pieces. I read Asianweek because of strong writer like Emil Guillermo, Phil Tajitsu Nash, and Maeley Tom. I enjoy it because it is a weekly publication that I can go to for national and Bay Area APIA news. But I will stop reading and publicizing it if Asianweek does not amend its ways.