Kathang-Pinay

On a different but related topic: Pinay Power

FANHS Sonoma County's Oral History Project: Yesterday was a big day of sorts. The documentary crew filmed a re-enactment of a gambling scene, conducted interviews, viewed historical photos, introduced new members, and shared a sumptous potluck lunch. What is great about this group is that after the day was over, as soon as Delia, the president, got home, she thanked everyone in an email, for the work they accomplished that day. Alicia, the project team leader also thanked everyone and is preparing to send handwritten notes to all who participated.

The reason I highlight these gestures of affirmation/thank yous, kindness, and generosity is because they invoke the "spirit of the manongs" as their inspiration. Our FANHS chapter is led by the children of the Manongs who are now at a time in their lives when they can devote time to recovering the legacy of the Manongs and Manangs via this historical documentation project. Those of us who came later share this legacy as well and join in this effort to honor them.

I had to leave FANHS early because two young Pinay graduate students came up from San Francisco to interview me. Ellen came prepared with three pages of questions. What is pagtatanung-tanong if it doesn't also include story-telling, eating, laughing, and sober intellectual talk.

Elsewhere in this blog I've talked about these young powerful Pinays who are drawn to the intellectual vocation that is rooted in their passion for social justice. More importantly, they are drawn to something deeper. This deeper that is hard to name and categorize so we call it babaylan, loob, kapwa, indigeous/lumad, cosmic, animist. At one point, as Ellen tried to use Foucouldian language, we started laughing as we noted how English limits what we want to say.

As we talked about fragmentation/decentered subjectivities under patriarchy and capitalism, decolonization, postcolonial trauma, war and militarization, sexual trauma, cross-cultural alliances, non-hierarchical and nondualistic modes of being and knowing, it seemed much more facile to just say (as Fr Alejo* does): Create Energy out of the depths of your Loob.

Indeed, yesterday was a "Create Energy" day! And what makes the difference is that all the folks above have reclaimed their Filipinoness and the power that comes from knowing what that means. So they relate to others from a place of security, self-worth, and empowerment that is not individualistic but rather from a sensitive sense of kapwa caring for each other.

These are my kind of folks.

*More on Fr. Alejo

Linguist George Lakoff on Obama's "A More Perfect Union" speech.

Rev. Jeremiah Wright writes to Jody KAntor of New York Times. Read it here because NYT didn't publish this. Or here:
***
Six months ago a friend told me that she would write-in Al Gore in the primary elections as a way of foregrounding the importance of the global climate crisis. Yesterday she told me that she changed her mind and cast her vote for Obama because, in times like these, the country needs someone who inspires and appeals to our better natures.

This story seems to repeat itself: Friends who said they are voting for someone else have, within the last few months, switched to the Obama camp. I even suspect that one friend who works for the Clinton campaign will also end up voting for Obama.

Until now I have avoided blogging about this campaign. Until recently I've never donated to a political campaign. But there is too much at stake. And I'm reaching for Hope.

So you like Jeffrey Sachs and Angelina Jolie?

Unanswered questions:
When Jeff Sachs refers to "improved seeds" does he mean genetically modified? When he says "fertilizer" does he mean chemical, therefore toxic? When they say "education" do they mean western-style learning and thinking?

The "feeding program" in the African village of Sauri reminds me of my elementary school years when we were fed with "US Aid" food -- dry milk, bulgur wheat, cornmeal. Come to think of it, I didn't feel poor and we weren't starving in those days but now that I look back (as the Jolie/Sachs video diary has reminded me) we kids from the third world must have seemed poor, needy, starving, and worthy of such beneficence.

I'm looking forward to meeting with several graduate students this week who are engaging my work in their theses projects. This is always exciting for me because it assures me that there will be continuity in the intellectual vocation that is rooted in communities' struggle for justice. The questions they pose challenge me to rethink my theorizing as it gets recontextualized. Sample questions:

• Share your reflections on teaching practices of decolonization and its effect on Fil Am students shaped by American culture.
• How to avoid the insularity of movement organizing that seeks to recruit only Filipinos. What about cross-cultural and cross-ideological alliance building?
• Do Fil Ams who "go back to their roots" practicing colonization through cultural appropriation?
• How can we cultivate the agency to continue resisting?
• What other capacities do we need to build ethical relationships with difference?

This is Jim Perkinson's email to CNN re Jeremiah Wright:

I am writing in response to your broadcast of the Jeremiah Wright clip tonight. I am a white man who is appalled at your treatment of the issue. To present two sound bite surveys of Black Liberation Theology and then ask your audience what they think of that theology is the height of stupidity and arrogance. Black Liberation Theology is far more complex and nuanced than you have represented and the effect of your coverage is merely to continue to circulate the stereotype of legitimate black anger (at American policy toward peoples of color) as "hatred." It is far from such and in fact represents some of the deepest patriotism, historically and in the contemporary moment, in the country. The most profound patriotism is one that dares criticize power when it does damage to others, even if that power is being exercised by one's own nation. That kind of criticism is hard to come by once the drums of "my country, right or wrong," get rolling. And they have been rolling in this country ever since 9/11 in ways that not only have harmed thousands of Americans and 100s of thousands of others around the world, but now arguably threaten the very economic stability of the country. The inability of white people, generally, in this country to listen to black pain, without instantly reacting with affront, is evidence of how far we have not yet come in dealing with the racial history and racialized present of our polity. If you want to shed light on, rather than merely pillory, black expression, do a serious special on the reality of black theology and invite black theologians such as James Cone to speak in a format other than thirty-second sound bites. Otherwise, stop the biased reporting!

James W. Perkinson
Associate Professor of Social Ethics
Ecumenical Theological Seminary
Detroit, Michigan

Of National Lies and Racial Amnesia:
Jeremiah Wright, Barack Obama, and the Unacceptability of Truth

By Tim Wise

March 18, 2008

For most white folks, indignation just doesn't wear well. Once affected or conjured up, it reminds one of a pudgy man, wearing a tie that may well have fit him when he was fifty pounds lighter, but which now cuts off somewhere above his navel and makes him look like an idiot.

Indignation doesn't work for most whites, because having remained sanguine about, silent during, indeed often supportive of so much injustice over the years in this country--the theft of native land and genocide of indigenous persons, and the enslavement of Africans being only two of the best examples--we are just a bit late to get into the game of moral rectitude. And once we enter it, our efforts at righteousness tend to fail the test of sincerity.

But here we are, in 2008, fuming at the words of Pastor Jeremiah Wright, of Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago--occasionally Barack Obama's pastor, and the man whom Obama credits with having brought him to Christianity--for merely reminding us of those evils about which we have remained so quiet, so dismissive, so unconcerned. It is not the crime that bothers us, but the remembrance of it, the unwillingness to let it go--these last words being the first ones uttered by most whites it seems whenever anyone, least of all an "angry black man" like Jeremiah Wright, foists upon us the bill of particulars for several centuries of white supremacy.

But our collective indignation, no matter how loudly we announce it, cannot drown out the truth. And as much as white America may not be able to hear it (and as much as politics may require Obama to condemn it) let us be clear, Jeremiah Wright fundamentally told the truth.

Oh I know that for some such a comment will seem shocking. After all, didn't he say that America "got what it deserved" on 9/11? And didn't he say that black people should be singing "God Damn America" because of its treatment of the African American community throughout the years?

Well actually, no he didn't.

Wright said not that the attacks of September 11th were justified, but that they were, in effect, predictable. Deploying the imagery of chickens coming home to roost is not to give thanks for the return of the poultry or to endorse such feathered homecoming as a positive good; rather, it is merely to note two things: first, that what goes around, indeed, comes around--a notion with longstanding theological grounding--and secondly, that the U.S. has indeed engaged in more than enough violence against innocent people to make it just a tad bit hypocritical for us to then evince shock and outrage about an attack on ourselves, as if the latter were unprecedented.

He noted that we killed far more people, far more innocent civilians in Hiroshima and Nagasaki than were killed on 9/11 and "never batted an eye." That this statement is true is inarguable, at least amongst sane people. He is correct on the math, he is correct on the innocence of the dead (neither city was a military target), and he is most definitely correct on the lack of remorse or even self-doubt about the act: sixty-plus years later most Americans still believe those attacks were justified, that they were needed to end the war and "save American lives."

But not only does such a calculus suggest that American lives are inherently worth more than the lives of Japanese civilians (or, one supposes, Vietnamese, Iraqi or Afghan civilians too), but it also ignores the long-declassified documents, and President Truman's own war diaries, all of which indicate clearly that Japan had already signaled its desire to end the war, and that we knew they were going to surrender, even without the dropping of atomic weapons. The conclusion to which these truths then attest is simple, both in its basic veracity and it monstrousness: namely, that in those places we committed premeditated and deliberate mass murder, with no justification whatsoever; and yet for saying that I will receive more hate mail, more hostility, more dismissive and contemptuous responses than will those who suggest that no body count is too high when we're the ones doing the killing. Jeremiah Wright becomes a pariah, because, you see, we much prefer the logic of George Bush the First, who once said that as President he would "never apologize for the United States of America. I don't care what the facts are."

And Wright didn't say blacks should be singing "God Damn America." He was suggesting that blacks owe little moral allegiance to a nation that has treated so many of them for so long as animals, as persons undeserving of dignity and respect, and which even now locks up hundreds of thousands of non-violent offenders (especially for drug possession), even while whites who do the same crimes (and according to the data, when it comes to drugs, more often in fact), are walking around free. His reference to God in that sermon was more about what God will do to such a nation, than it was about what should or shouldn't happen. It was a comment derived from, and fully in keeping with, the black prophetic tradition, and although one can surely disagree with the theology (I do, actually, and don't believe that any God either blesses or condemns nation states for their actions), the statement itself was no call for blacks to turn on America. If anything, it was a demand that America earn the respect of black people, something the evidence and history suggests it has yet to do.

Finally, although one can certainly disagree with Wright about his suggestion that the government created AIDS to get rid of black folks--and I do, for instance--it is worth pointing out that Wright isn't the only one who has said this. In fact, none other than Bill Cosby (oh yes, that Bill Cosby, the one white folks love because of his recent moral crusade against the black poor) proffered his belief in the very same thing back in the early '90s in an interview on CNN, when he said that AIDS may well have been created to get rid of people whom the government deemed "undesirable" including gays and racial minorities.

So that's the truth of the matter: Wright made one comment that is highly arguable, but which has also been voiced by white America's favorite black man, another that was horribly misinterpreted and stripped of all context, and then another that was demonstrably accurate. And for this, he is pilloried and made into a virtual enemy of the state; for this, Barack Obama may lose the support of just enough white folks to cost him the Democratic nomination, and/or the Presidency; all of it, because Jeremiah Wright, unlike most preachers opted for truth. If he had been one of those "prosperity ministers" who says Jesus wants nothing so much as for you to be rich, like Joel Osteen, that would have been fine. Had he been a retread bigot like Falwell was, or Pat Robertson is, he might have been criticized, but he would have remained in good standing and surely not have damaged a Presidential candidate in this way. But unlike Osteen, and Falwell, and Robertson, Jeremiah Wright refused to feed his parishioners lies.

What Jeremiah Wright knows, and told his flock--though make no mistake, they already knew it--is that 9/11 was neither the first, nor worst act of terrorism on American soil. The history of this nation for folks of color, was for generations, nothing less than an intergenerational hate crime, one in which 9/11s were woven into the fabric of everyday life: hundreds of thousands of the enslaved who died from the conditions of their bondage; thousands more who were lynched (as many as 10,000 in the first few years after the Civil War, according to testimony in the Congressional Record at the time); millions of indigenous persons wiped off the face of the Earth. No, to some, the horror of 9/11 was not new. To some it was not on that day that "everything changed." To some, everything changed four hundred years ago, when that first ship landed at what would become Jamestown. To some, everything changed when their ancestors were forced into the hulls of slave ships at Goree Island and brought to a strange land as chattel. To some, everything changed when they were run out of Northern Mexico, only to watch it become the Southwest United States, thanks to a war of annihilation initiated by the U.S. government. To some, being on the receiving end of terrorism has been a way of life. Until recently it was absolutely normal in fact.

But white folks have a hard time hearing these simple truths. We find it almost impossible to listen to an alternative version of reality. Indeed, what seems to bother white people more than anything, whether in the recent episode, or at any other time, is being confronted with the recognition that black people do not, by and large, see the world like we do; that black people, by and large, do not view America as white people view it. We are, in fact, shocked that this should be so, having come to believe, apparently, that the falsehoods to which we cling like a kidney patient clings to a dialysis machine, are equally shared by our darker-skinned compatriots.

This is what James Baldwin was talking about in his classic 1972 work, No Name in the Street, wherein he noted:

"White children, in the main, and whether they are rich or poor, grow up with a grasp of reality so feeble that they can very accurately be described as deluded--about themselves and the world they live in. White people have managed to get through their entire lifetimes in this euphoric state, but black people have not been so lucky: a black man who sees the world the way John Wayne, for example, sees it would not be an eccentric patriot, but a raving maniac."

And so we were shocked in 1987, when Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall declined to celebrate the bicentennial of the Constitution, because, as he noted, most of that history had been one of overt racism and injustice, and to his way of thinking, the only history worth celebrating had been that of the past three or four decades.

We were shocked to learn that black people actually believed that a white cop who was a documented racist might frame a black man; and we're shocked to learn that lots of black folks still perceive the U.S. as a racist nation--we're literally stunned that people who say they experience discrimination regularly (and who have the social science research to back them up) actually think that those experiences and that data might actually say something about the nation in which they reside. Imagine.

Whites are easily shocked by what we see and hear from Pastor Wright and Trinity Church, because what we see and hear so thoroughly challenges our understanding of who we are as a nation. But black people have never, for the most part, believed in the imagery of the "shining city on a hill," for they have never had the option of looking at their nation and ignoring the mountain-sized warts still dotting its face when it comes to race. Black people do not, in the main, get misty eyed at the sight of the flag the way white people do--and this is true even for millions of black veterans--for they understand that the nation for whom that flag waves is still not fully committed to their own equality. They have a harder time singing those tunes that white people seem so eager to belt out, like "God Bless America," for they know that whites sang those words loudly and proudly even as they were enforcing Jim Crow segregation, rioting against blacks who dared move into previously white neighborhoods, throwing rocks at Dr. King and then cheering, as so many did, when they heard the news that he had been assassinated.

Whites refuse to remember (or perhaps have never learned) that which black folks cannot afford to forget. I've seen white people stunned to the point of paralysis when they learn the truth about lynchings in this country--when they discover that such events were not just a couple of good old boys with a truck and a rope hauling some black guy out to the tree, hanging him, and letting him swing there. They were never told the truth: that lynchings were often community events, advertised in papers as "Negro Barbecues," involving hundreds or even thousands of whites, who would join in the fun, eat chicken salad and drink sweet tea, all while the black victims of their depravity were being hung, then shot, then burned, and then having their body parts cut off, to be handed out to onlookers. They are stunned to learn that postcards of the events were traded as souvenirs, and that very few whites, including members of their own families did or said anything to stop it.

Rather than knowing about and confronting the ugliness of our past, whites take steps to excise the less flattering aspects of our history so that we need not be bothered with them. So, in Tulsa, Oklahoma, for example, site of an orgy of violence against the black community in 1921, city officials literally went into the town library and removed all reference to the mass killings in the Greenwood district from the papers with a razor blade--an excising of truth and an assault on memory that would remain unchanged for over seventy years.

Most white people desire, or perhaps even require the propagation of lies when it comes to our history. Surely we prefer the lies to anything resembling, even remotely, the truth. Our version of history, of our national past, simply cannot allow for the intrusion of fact into a worldview so thoroughly identified with fiction. But that white version of America is not only extraordinarily incomplete, in that it so favors the white experience to the exclusion of others; it is more than that; it is actually a slap in the face to people of color, a re-injury, a reminder that they are essentially irrelevant, their concerns trivial, their lives unworthy of being taken seriously. In that sense, and what few if any white Americans appear capable of grasping at present, is that "Leave it Beaver" and "Father Knows Best," portray an America so divorced from the reality of the times in which they were produced, as to raise serious questions about the sanity of those who found them so moving, so accurate, so real. These iconographic representations of life in the U.S. are worse than selective, worse than false, they are assaults to the humanity and memory of black people, who were being savagely oppressed even as June Cleaver did housework in heels and laughed about the hilarious hijinks of Beaver and Larry Mondello.

These portraits of America are certifiable evidence of how disconnected white folks were--and to the extent we still love them and view them as representations of the "good old days" to which we wish we could return, still are--from those men and women of color with whom we have long shared a nation. Just two months before "Leave it to Beaver" debuted, proposed civil rights legislation was killed thanks to Strom Thurmond's 24-hour filibuster speech on the floor of the U.S. Senate. One month prior, Arkansas Governor Orville Faubus called out the National Guard to block black students from entering Little Rock Central High; and nine days before America was introduced to the Cleavers, and the comforting image of national life they represented, those black students were finally allowed to enter, amid the screams of enraged, unhinged, viciously bigoted white people, who saw nothing wrong with calling children niggers in front of cameras. That was America of the 1950s: not the sanitized version into which so many escape thanks to the miracle of syndication, which merely allows white people to relive a lie, year after year after year.

No, it is not the pastor who distorts history; Nick at Nite and your teenager's textbooks do that. It is not he who casts aspersions upon "this great country" as Barack Obama put it in his public denunciations of him; it is the historic leadership of the nation that has cast aspersions upon it; it is they who have cheapened it, who have made gaudy and vile the promise of American democracy by defiling it with lies. They engage in a patriotism that is pathological in its implications, that asks of those who adhere to it not merely a love of country but the turning of one's nation into an idol to be worshipped, it not literally, then at least in terms of consequence.

It is they--the flag-lapel-pin wearing leaders of this land--who bring shame to the country with their nonsensical suggestions that we are always noble in warfare, always well-intended, and although we occasionally make mistakes, we are never the ones to blame for anything. Nothing that happens to us has anything to do with us at all. It is always about them. They are evil, crazy, fanatical, hate our freedoms, and are jealous of our prosperity. When individuals prattle on in this manner we diagnose them as narcissistic, as deluded. When nations do it--when our nation does--we celebrate it as though it were the very model of rational and informed citizenship.

So what can we say about a nation that values lies more than it loves truth? A place where adherence to sincerely believed and internalized fictions allows one to rise to the highest offices in the land, and to earn the respect of millions, while a willingness to challenge those fictions and offer a more accurate counter-narrative earns one nothing but contempt, derision, indeed outright hatred? What we can say is that such a place is signing its own death warrant. What we can say is that such a place is missing the only and last opportunity it may ever have to make things right, to live up to its professed ideals. What we can say is that such a place can never move forward, because we have yet to fully address and come to terms with that which lay behind.

What can we say about a nation where white preachers can lie every week from their pulpits without so much as having to worry that their lies might be noticed by the shiny white faces in their pews, while black preachers who tell one after another essential truth are demonized, not only for the stridency of their tone--which needless to say scares white folks, who have long preferred a style of praise and worship resembling nothing so much as a coma--but for merely calling bullshit on those whose lies are swallowed whole?

And oh yes, I said it: white preachers lie. In fact, they lie with a skill, fluidity, and precision unparalleled in the history of either preaching or lying, both of which histories stretch back a ways and have often overlapped. They lie every Sunday, as they talk about a Savior they have chosen to represent dishonestly as a white man, in every picture to be found of him in their tabernacles, every children's story book in their Sunday Schools, every Christmas card they'll send to relatives and friends this December. But to lie about Jesus, about the one they consider God--to bear false witness as to who this man was and what he looked like--is no cause for concern.

Nor is it a problem for these preachers to teach and preach that those who don't believe as they believe are going to hell. Despite the fact that such a belief casts aspersions upon God that are so profound as to defy belief--after all, they imply that God is so fundamentally evil that he would burn non-believers in a lake of eternal fire--many of the white folks who now condemn Jeremiah Wright welcome that theology of hate. Indeed, back when President Bush was the Governor of Texas, he endorsed this kind of thinking, responding to a question about whether Jews were going to go to hell, by saying that unless one accepted Jesus as one's personal savior, the Bible made it pretty clear that indeed, hell was where you'd be heading.

So you can curse God in this way--and to imply such hate on God's part is surely to curse him--and in effect, curse those who aren't Christians, and no one says anything. That isn't considered bigoted. That isn't considered beyond the pale of polite society. One is not disqualified from becoming President in the minds of millions because they go to a church that says that shit every single week, or because they believe it themselves. And millions do believe it, and see nothing wrong with it whatsoever.

So white folks are mad at Jeremiah Wright because he challenges their views about their country. Meanwhile, those same white folks, and their ministers and priests, every week put forth a false image of the God Jeremiah Wright serves, and yet it is whites who feel we have the right to be offended.

Pardon me, but something is wrong here, and whatever it is, is not to be found at Trinity United Church of Christ.

The White Privilege Conference is April 2-5, 2008!
Visit: www.uccs.edu/~wpc/

On impulse, I sent these comments to the Obama website after watching the media spin on the sermons of Rev. Wright.
***
Senator Obama:

Re the comments of Rev. Wright: Please do not capitulate to the media spin on this issue. There is an opportunity here to educate the American people about the "possessive investment in whiteness" of white folks who, instead of trying to understand the differences between the Black experience and the White experience, would rather deploy all power within their means to refuse to understand the comments of Rev. Wright within the context of black theology, black history, and black experience. (Only David Gergen's comments were close enough to show some understanding).

It is unfortunate that you have to distance yourself from your own spiritual mentor because sound bytes will not allow you to explain fully the context of his comments. I hope your staff and volunteers will be able to craft an intelligent and passionate response to these attacks by pundits who don't understand theology, esp. black theology, and how to many black folks, whiteness (all that it embodies and signifies) continues to represent "terror" in their imagination.

I think the white Americans who have chosen to support your candidacy are ready for this kind of reckoning with the historical consequences of white supremacy and how they are wanting to unlearn and dismantle their white privilege along with their patriarchal, class, and other privileges. These are the folks who understand what solidarity means, what an ethics of accountability is, what it requires of white folks.

The Christian ethicist Mary Elizabeth Hobgood (Dismantling Privilege) calls on white privileged folks like herself to enter into grief and mourning as they awaken to the truth of American history's underbelly of white supremacy for it is only in allowing themselves to feel the pain and suffering of the "other" do they also become fully human.

Obviously, most white folks are not ready to grieve and mourn. Sociologists are warning that as economic hardship becomes more and more real, white folks will deploy their racial privileges to continue to secure their (false) sense of security. Instead of realizing that it is in the interest of poor and middle class white folks to ally themselves with people of color, they will be blinded by the idea that their whiteness will provide some sort of insurance against what they fear most.

I sense that this is the larger calling that is on your shoulder as you lift the nation to imagine itself differently. Your opposition will try to undo this and will do everything to make sure you don't win the nomination and election. You are now larger than this candidacy.

He sold his stamp collection for a million dollars...

and then created The Right Livelihood Awards...

known as the Alternative Nobel...

two Filipinos won this award in 2003: Walden Bello and Nick Perlas

Women's Amazing Journeys:

Grace is back from a "roots" journey...
Jean and Gracie are moving...
Eileen and her major conjuration project takes her to Latin America... and Michelle is going with her!
Karen is going inward...and deeper still...
Bec is finding the path to a place she knew but didn't have a name for...
Gladys is a mom...and Rona is getting married...
Girlie teaches people about "grief as source of energy"...

thank you, dear sisters! changes swirling all around. some of us are getting sure-footed and others are "getting undone." it is all marvelous!

Story of Sister Christine Tan.

I'm noticing my recent posts and they all have something to do with religion and spirituality. And I just remembered that next Sunday is the start of Holy Week, Palm Sunday.
Although not Catholic, as a child I was immersed in the sights, sounds, smells, and heat of semana santa. From the weeklong reading of the pasyon over loud speakers blaring from the bisita/small church, the maroon-robed cross-bearing penitents, the bloodied flagellants, the cruxifictions (sp!) -- this vivid imagery is still with me around this time of the year. So no matter how secular my present whereabouts are, there is a kind of pallid pause, a somber mood that descends around me at this time. I've decided I will no longer resist it or try to distract myself.

As a young girl, I dreamt of Jesus Christ once. In the dream he was serving me the bread of communion. There were various pieces of it and I chose the smallest morsel. He looked at me and said: why take the smallest one? here, take this. I love this dream.

Last week, my students read accounts of the American Holocaust and watched The Mission. You could just imagine their questions about the actions of Christopher Columbus and all those who followed him and the genocide of 100M natives that followed. How can we ever live down this history: this marriage of sex, race, and holy wars? And yet this weekend I was with Methodists providing input on how best to grow Fil Am churches. During q and a, one clergy asked: So are you saying that the Empire must die? And I quickly said: Yes!...so that it can be born again.

Maybe this is what Sr. Christine Tan and my other friends who are resisting the empire within the folds of its religious institutions are teaching me. Use the master's tools to take down the master's house.

A stations of the cross pilgrimage to the Filipino American sacred sites in San Francisco, led by Christina Leano.

Mindanao Mothers sing for Global Cooling! Thank you, Geejay!

An American Portrait

The Methodists are calling...and I am obedient because you can take the girl out of the Methodist Church but you can't get the Methodist out of the girl. So off I go this Friday to a California-Nevada Methodist consultation on how to grow Fil Am Methodist Churches.

This is always nerve-wracking for me. I am currently unchurched so am not sure how the Methodists have changed in the past decade but I think what I know about racial politics, colonial and postcolonial subjectivities, issues re multiculturalism in the US remain relevant so these I can lecture about. Am not being asked to do hermeneutics, soteriology, or exegesis (just showing off my religious vocabulary haha!) so I suppose I'm on safe ground.

But this is, more or less, how I want to end my talk:

Decolonization is a spiritual path. A path to transcendence without bypassing history and politics. We need to think of our spiritual calling in a cultural context. What are God's gifts but those that we bring with us from our deepest cultural memories and indigenous consciousness?

Renewal of faith for Methodist Filipinos must be rooted in who we are as a people and in doing so must learn how to parse our theological formation (via colonization) on the one hand, and the core of Christ's teachings on the other . Winnowing this difference is followed by an integration, healing and reconciliation. Coming full circle, then, is to embrace one's childhood (term is deliberately used) faith with informed awareness of history and politics. Understanding that faith must be grounded in community where 1) individual spirituality is nurtured and at the same time 2) one's gifts are given back to circulate for the benefit of one's kapwa and sakop.

Remembering that Jesus was a revolutionary and was killed by the righteous and moral authorities of his time, similarly we are called to speak to the powers that dominate and marginalize peoples of color. How do we talk and write back (and act) to the dominating ideologies of white supremacy and western superiority when we feel complicitous? How do we do the work required of us?

***

I miss Dennis Kucinich.

Watching the Clinton and Obama campaigns on C-Span, I keep waiting for answers to these questions even though I know they will never be answered.

So the US pulls out of Iraq when you are elected, what are you going to do with the military base that the US built in Iraq -- which is the biggest in the world? and built precisely to protect US interests in the region under the ideology of "The Project for the New American Century?" - a neocon agenda.

How can you continue to promise the American Dream when you know that Capitalism is a self-destructing ideology and that the Earth's natural capacity to support this lifestyle is now beyond its capacity?

How can you promise to restore the world's respect for the US without changing its fundamentally flawed assumption about itself as the "end of history?" and that the rest of the world only need to learn its lessons from the US?