Immigrant Crossing: Intersecting Race and Gender

Next week, I am releasing a novel about an immigrant who is accused of murder. The book is a thrilling and creative exploration of what it means to be an American, and who gets to make that decision. We glorify the immigrants who crossed the country in covered wagons, and the immigrants who first landed at Plymouth Rock, while militarizing the southern border and deifying new immigrants as gangs of thugs. The reasons for these seemingly complicated conflicting feelings are rooted in the same old triumvirate of dickishness; subjectification, the warrior/thug complex, and the consolation prize.

OH MY GOD! THE HORDES!

In 2011, I wrote about how Tom Tancredo and his masculinity clones were attempting to highlight the MS-13 gang as an example of how immigrants from Latin America were thugs. We pick a group with whom we identify, and label outside groups as thugs. This is the Warrior/Thug Complex. With immigration, it's easy. Immigrants come from other cultures,

Yeah! A wall. It worked so great for the Chinese!

they often speak other languages, and usually speak it with a funny accent (like those darn Canadians). Best yet for deciding who is not a proper warrior, immigrants from lower latitudes are usually brownish. It's like a storm trooper's uniform except they can't take it off.

In a society that suffers remarkably little violent crime, masculinity will not survive unless males can be convinced that they are at risk of imminent violence at any moment. Thugs must be identified in order to allow men to be warriors, otherwise advocates of irrational violence just seem like tinfoil hats (thanks to Eric Schultz for that phrase). Immigration provides masculinity in the new world and increasingly in Europe with hordes of thugs needed to make men believe they must continue to glorify violence or suffer the consequences.

ESL- English as a Second cLass Marker

Americans of a certain educational class get goose pimples every time they spot errors in how people use English. We cite old wives' tales as grammar rules, and try to pretend that language is static. This is ridiculous considering just how rapidly language evolves, and is ever-evolving. Just consider that the word selfie is now in every major American dictionary.

Sorry to those looking for solid rules. Language doesn't fit into neat categories,
and when it does it is still evolving and changing.
1- Ever heard of sarcasm? e.g. "I could care less by completely ignoring you."
2- Except in a plural acronym e.g. M.D.'s.
3- Just because 'literally' is the antonym of 'figuratively' does not mean it cannot be used figuratively. If that were true, it would be bad grammar to write the word 'large' in a small or medium-sized font.
8- Except when 'effect' is a transitive verb.
10- Just because it's nonstandard, doesn't mean it's not a word.
Addendum i- Prepositions are fine to end sentences with. Please stop spreading this old wives' tale. To quote Churchill, "This is just the sort of nonsense up with which I will not put."
Addendum ii- I find it ironic when people claim there is only one narrow definition of  'irony.'
Conclusion- Grammar is a nefarious tool to discover those who don't belong.
Feel free to use proper grammar, but don't think less of those who don't!

The reality is that grammar is now what it has always been, a way of telling the unwashed masses from the educated elite. When a grammar sheriff of Nottingham tells Robin Hood that he should not end a sentence with a preposition, he is reflecting the belief of extreme elitists from the 17th Century who designed a grammar which reflected Latin in order to better determine which of their peers had been to a proper Latin college (i.e.- not Shakespeare).

Today, we mostly use grammar and "proper English" to determine who has been middle class or above for long enough to be considered properly American, and therefore a properly subjectified man (or privileged woman). Better yet, by pointing out "errors" in grammar, we can objectify others instead of considering the substance of their ideas, arguments, and legitimate claims at liberation. By focusing on how an Asian immigrant speaks funny, or on how black men don't speak "white," we can lump these people into groups less deserving of the consolation prize.

Overseers Over Seeing

And our consolation prize is the same as it was in the antebellum south. We are White (Straight) Men. This fact may alienate us from our children, other men, even our wives and lovers, but at least we are at the top of the heap, the head of the pack. Even within the group of white men, we may not be the CEO in charge of Georgia Pacific Paper Company (The Koch Brothers), or even a small-business owner. But at least we are not brownish. Seeing the welfare state erode before us, knowing that starvation and ostracism awaits us if we fail to succeed as proper men, we are rightfully terrified that we could fail even if we are hard working and relatively competent. Most men don't realize that it's just a Cracker Jack prize. We have little individual control over our economic situations, even if we are white, but we have a little more than those brownish guys do.

Give us your sick, tired, and poor
so that we can laugh at them as
we point out how they are not real men.

Immigration is the great story of the new world. If America is exceptional, it is not exceptional like a souffle. It is exceptional like a potager, a mix of all the vegetables in the garden in one tremendous stew. It seems like blindness that leads so many Americans to fight each wave of immigration, or complete disregard for history. I assure you it is not. The reason that Sheriff Joe is elected to office repeatedly in Arizona isn't that people don't know how important immigration is to our success, but because immigration provides too great a foil for American masculinity. Hating immigrants is one of the costs of masculinity.

On its own, masculinity is a great weight on men. We would not carry that burden unless there were carrots and sticks. Xenophobia provides both. It is another part of masculinity that we must dismantle before we can be free.

Living Without Gender: A Conversation with a Trailblazer

Making Men Interview- 

Beau Laurence 7/5/2012 at the Gypsy Coffee House in Capitol Hill

Gypsy Coffee House

When I asked hir for an interview, Beau Laurence wanted to meet me beneath the fabric folds hanging from the ceiling at the Gypsy Coffee House. Beau is thin and freckled, with an Irish face and hair cropped in a pixie cut. Xi joked with a  straight face, and leaned forward in hir chair for most of our 90 minute interview, thinking and picking hir words with the intensity of a scholar.

Peeing in the Gender Woods

For Right Be Done, I was interested in hir thoughts about masculinity. Xi is making a conscious choice to adopt some of masculinity, keep some of femininity, and move to something new. If men are ever to be liberated, we must make the same kinds of choices as Beau. Because no conversation about masculinity can ignore our historical relationship to it, I started by asking about hir past. Surprisingly, Beau answered by talking about how we toilet.

Right Be Done (RBD): What is your earliest memory of what it means to be a man?

Beau Lawrence (BL): Probably the earliest difference that I remember is about how boys go to the bathroom. So, I have a brother who is two years older, and I grew up… I was born into, and until I was 10, we lived in a commune and I was the first female child. There were three boys. They were older than me. My brother and two other boys. So, I didn’t have other girls to hang out with when I was a little kid, I just had the boys.

Girls Peeing in Urinal by Paul Avril

So, we all played together. They climbed trees, so I did all of these activities and didn’t think anything of my body being different, or "I’m not supposed to do that," until it came to actually urinating and it was like, “Wait. I don’t have that. That doesn’t work for me.” I specifically remember asking my dad to teach me how to pee standing up so that I could be like the other boys. Because to me it wasn’t a boy/girl thing, it was a kid thing. Like, I couldn’t do what the other kids did. But I was the youngest one, so it’s like, you know in your kid brain, you don’t necessarily revert to gender as the reason you couldn’t do this. It’s, “I’m the youngest one and I haven’t learned yet and I want to be like the big kids and do this.”

RBD: What did your dad say?

BL: My dad was like, “Okay.” And I actually did learn. Then, I was at my grandmothers and I was like, “You wanna see?” And she was like, “you will never do that again.” That’s when I learned that it was definitely not a girl thing to do and that I was a girl. It was really her that sort of reinforced what a girl was NOT, more than, “This is what boys or men are like.”

In a society where “man” is neutral, it is normal for someone who was raised as a girl to learn only what man is not. Perhaps, the biggest problem with feminism has been that we have not discussed traditional masculinity from an objective point of view. However, Beau later told me about one person in hir life that did create from scratch a conscious definition of what it meant to be a man.  Television isn’t normally a place to break stereotypes, but xi cited one example of a man who strayed from convention.

The Radical Politics of Mork and Mindy 

BL: I hadn’t thought about T.V. shows until you asked this question. Lone Ranger.

RBD: Supermale. The Lone Ranger is definitely a super male.

BL: I remember being really offended. I was always really offended the way that he treated Tonto. I was really hyper-aware of… Wow this really is kind of awful, but straight white men were always pigs, and so whatever they did was definitely like, there are other ways to be because there are other males, and there are strong females, but these white males are awful.

Fair use for political comment,
from Mork and Mindy publicity.

BL (Cont): But, the first thing that popped into my head as an alternative male T.V. character was Mork from Mork and Mindy.

RBD: But wasn’t he an alien.

BL: He was an alien, but…

RBD: So, he wasn’t really a man.

BL: He was an alien impersonating what it was like to be a male getting coached by Mindy.

RBD: Strangers in a Strange Land sort of masculinity where he had this opportunity to point out how ridiculous masculinity was.

BL: And he could do really fun.., really childlike sorts of things and get corrected for doing gender wrong.

The writer’s of Mork and Mindy gave America a chance to question basic assumptions of masculinity, the same kind of assumptions that this blog is attempting to undermine. And here I thought I was being a radical when in fact Hollywood did it 40 years ago and in tight pants.

Condescending to be Helpful

Later, I asked about the best and the worst traits of masculinity.

RBD: So what is the worst trait that has traditionally been associated with the word masculinity?

BL: Certainly patriarchy. And condescension. But those really aren’t unique to masculinity.

RBD: What makes condescension in particular traditionally masculine?

BL: It’s so hard to separate the traditional concept of masculinity. It's so wrapped up in white northern European culture that it’s kind of like, “It’s all the same.” It may be more that whiteness, that religiousness, more than masculinity that [condescension] comes from. That manifest destiny, we know better, we’re chosen by god, sort of everything is our minion. Women and children and people of color are our property. That to me is the worst thing about traditional masculinity.

RBD: How about the best thing about traditional masculinity? The best trait?

BL: I struggle with this because the thing that I, throughout my life, have sort of really maybe wanted to emulate more than anything else is not necessarily a positive quality, but the self sacrificing is sort of…

RBD: I call it loyalty.

BL: But not just loyalty. Chivalry is a real awful thing that implies condescension and all of that negative, but the, “I’m going to take the burden on so that somebody else doesn’t have to,” is something that I’ve always really liked. I know that in a lot of ways it’s not healthy because it’s a lot of it ego, but I have always enjoyed being the kind of person that would give my seat to somebody else. Or carry something that was really heavy so that somebody didn’t have to. And it wasn’t that they’re not capable of doing it, but that I’m strong and capable, and I can help in this way. And I think that’s something I value about masculinity. That sort of willingness to, not help the old lady across the street, but sort of like, you need somebody to move heavy furniture, I can do that, and it doesn’t have to be somebody who has a penis that does it. But I think that there is that attitude of masculinity in that offer.

RBD: In a way it seems like two sides of the same coin. The thing that you dislike the worst (condescension) and the thing that you like the best about masculinity (helpfulness).

Petersburg- Caviar by Walter Smith

BL: And that’s what I really struggle with actually. And as I broaden my own awareness of who I can be, and it doesn’t have to be butch or femme. There’s been a lot of that sort of cafeteria masculinity, picking and choosing what you want to keep and what you want to reject, and it’s not just all bad. And the parts that I have traditionally thought of as good, have their origins in something that’s not necessarily positive.

The idea of cafeteria masculinity is close to the image of liberated men that I hold in my imagination. I originally conceived of writing an article about hors gendered folks for that very reason. We men who are seeking liberation are looking for role models ourselves. We are looking for people to pave the path to freedom. Those like Beau who have decided to take on the underpinnings of gender are acting as our Moses, leading us out of the constructs that have kept us in lives of solitude and violence. It is hard to imagine the threat under which they live as a result. The reaction to non-conforming gender is morbidly violent, and theirs is a unique courage born of a mix of desperation for acceptance and a rebellious character. Regardless of Beau’s reasons for trailblazing our liberation, we owe hir and those like hir a debt of gratitude.

Breaking Down Stereotypes 

At the end of our interview, we spent a long time just letting the conversation flow, and at one point I wondered if xi felt like society was becoming more free because of the breaking down of traditional gender norms in society at large.

BL: It is, but here’s the double-edged sword about all that. In the kinds of circles that I’ve traveled in, the radical political stuff. When there’s a meeting, people go around and introduce themselves and say what gender pronoun they prefer. It is sort of a thing for a lot of people to say, “It doesn’t matter.” And that’s really marginalizing and erasing for those of us who have to choose and are so aware of the choices that we make and that other people make. So when an obviously cis-gendered straight man says, “Oh, you can call me ‘she,’ I won’t be offended.”

Beau Laurence's profile pic from Facebook.

That’s really a place of privilege to be able to say that. "You do your gender so well that you won’t be offended if you are called 'she.'" For those of us who may not do gender very well, what other people perceive us as has a huge emotional impact, so that place of, “It doesn’t matter,” is like, “You’re not really taking seriously that it matters so much for some of us.”

RBD: That’s true, but being exposed to non-normative gender associations can break those stereotypes for cis-people.

BL: It absolutely can, and just like every other thing, this is sort of the natural way of progress. You have these very rigid boxes, and they start to get broken up, and then you have conventionally perceived or attitudinally conventional people who then start to co-opt the language. And that is something that is a natural progression, but it’s annoying.

(If you have a complicated relationship with masculinity, and would like to have your life broadcast on this blog, please contact me to set up your own Making Men Interview.)

Slumdog is About America, not India

Protests in India over Danny Boyle’s Slumdog Millionaire have puzzled some in America. At the same time that we are inspired to visit India, and maybe even take one of those “slum tours,” some in India, including major Bollywood actors and some politicians, have decried the film as “Poverty Porn.” We in America see the movie as optimistic, even great, and hail it with Golden Globe after SAG Award after Oscar.

This dissonance can be explained by the fact that Slumdog Millionaire is really about America. Danny Boyle creates a fantasy land, and like all fantasy lands there are great dangers that await the heroes of Slumdog. Instead of goblins and trolls, we have religious conflicts and slavers. We in America are familiar with both. However, unlike the Revolutionary War, Slumdog’s religious conflict does not involve Christians, and unlike Jamaica, the slavers are not “white” as we understand the word “white” to be used. The problem is not that this fantasy world is pornographic. All fantasy worlds are pornographic in the way that they allow us to act on our greatest and most secret desires. Danny Boyle’s own Trainspotting, Millions, and 28 Days Later all present us with worlds filled with these same kinds of gratification fantasies. The problem with Slumdog is the fact that progressives in America have given such importance to it. Our friends call us to tell us that it is “eye opening” and reviewers (writing for no less than the New York Times) call it a lesson in “cross cultural understanding.”

For an America that is suddenly in the control of the Democrats, this movie is important because it is progressive and distinctly American. In Slumdog, the entire fantasy world is endangered, not by the Great Eye of Mordor, but by the kind of poverty that progressives rail against. And the hero in the film is the Game Show. What could be more American and hopeful than a Game Show. It’s as if Ronald McDonald himself came down in his Coca-Cola shaped rocket ship and gave everybody Wal-Mart gift certificates. And it is not just the hero that is saved by this doppelganger for American culture. The entire Indian nation seems to be caught up in the moment. India's cross cultural lesson is the Great American Myth that no matter how poor you are, if you keep trying and working hard, some day you will succeed. The myth rings hollow to an India currently hurtling up the list of the worlds largest economies while leaving behind the poorest and the most needy, but we in America are much more easily convinced.

The newly progressive leaning America loves this film because it is the satisfaction of three of our most secret and powerful desires. The first is that our economy will fix itself. We don’t need to make sacrifices, like those of us who have jobs paying higher taxes, and making deep cuts into our largest and most wasteful spending (military spending and laissez faire health care). If we give our economy a nudge and a little time, we too will soon be millionaires. Every game show and lottery in history is essentially this kind of solvency porn. The second progressive desire is that we will no longer be seen throughout the world as the malevolent and violent imperial power. In Slumdog, it is Hollywood and not the Pentagon that represents America. The American influence in Slumdog is the game show, and a couple of American tourists who wise crack “This is the real America” while giving a desperately poor orphan a $100 bill. While both of these symbols spread a powerful myth, they are doing so with money and wit instead of with bullets and body armor. This is benevolent imperialism, where we can spread the myth with kindness the way that the Catholic preachers struck out with their missions into the Heart of Darkness or the Georgian Cherokee tribes. Progressive Americans see this form of imperialism as a stark contrast to the preemptive attacks of the last eight years. But our greatest and most secret desire that is satisfied with this progressive porn romp is that everything is going to be okay for all those orphan children living in extreme poverty throughout the world. Those are the children that we had drilled into our brain every time that we didn’t finish our vegetables who were “starving in China.” This movie reassures us by showing us that the child will not starve even if we do not finish our vegetables. It shows us that the children that make our coffee in slavery conditions in Ghana will eventually grow up to own the plantation. It allows us to say that the children begging for change in the markets in Cairo are better off than those who were blinded or mutilated for the same purpose. With this knowledge, we can go out and buy the blouse made in Bangladesh with Turkmen cotton, because in the end, everything is going to turn up Bollywood.