NO REST FOR THE AWAKE - MINAGAHET CHAMORRO

Last year I got the chance to work with a great group of people on a film project. It is tentatively titled Lalahen Sinahi. I co-wrote the script with Kenneth Gofigan Kuper, and we made it almost entirely in Chamorro. We had an intense couple of weeks filming it, only to have some of the scenes disappear on us. Ken is currently off-island attending graduate school, but when he returns next month we'll need to figure out what to do next with the project, if we should shoot it again or try to salvage what we have.  As we were writing the screenplay, a specter who was always shadowing our discussions was Quentin Tarantino. His dialogue driven stories was something we both wanted to capture in small and large ways. Sometimes people can get irritated with that type of storytelling, but when it works, it is incredibly effective and ridiculously engrossing. The flavors that he infuses into the dialogue, the tension he builds can be amazing. I am hoping that in either this project or o

This is a pretty good interview with Nicholas Kristof, discussing race, inequality, privilege and the inability to perceive that privilege among white people in the United States. Comedian Bill Maher recently made a joke, that the idea of white Christians being an oppressed group today, which is being attacked on all sides, is bewildering, because there are no articles and videos of white pastors and priests being brutally attacked and sometimes killed by cops with itchy trigger fingers. Privilege comes in so many forms, and part of its power and the reason it is so difficult to give up, is because as a regime of knowledge and power, it comes equipped with ways of projecting blame elsewhere, or doing everything possible to justify and mystify it, even to the point of taking ludicrous positions that in any other context, you would see as being shameful and embarrassing. It is easy to not realize the ways in which the color of your skin privileges and protects a person, at so many diff

Audre Lorde and James Baldwin interview Essence 1984 JB: One of the dangers of being a Black American is being schizophrenic, and I mean ‘schizophrenic’ in the most literal sense. To be a Black American is in some ways to be born with the desire to be white. It’s a part of the price you pay for being born here, and it affects every Black person. We can go back to Vietnam, we can go back to Korea. We can go back for that matter to the First World War. We can go back to W.E.B. Du Bois – an honorable and beautiful man – who campaigned to persuade Black people to fight in the First World War, saying that if we fight in this war to save this country, our right to citizenship can never, never again be questioned – and who can blame him? He really meant it, and if I’d been there at that moment I would have said so too perhaps. Du Bois believed in the American dream. So did Martin. So did Malcolm. So do I. So do you. That’s why we’re sitting here. AL: I don’t, honey. I’

Put i estaba yu' giya Hapon gi este na mes, ti meggai na tinige'-hu gi este na blog. Para unu na mes tinane' yu' nu asunto Hapon yan i fina'pos guihi, ya ti hu gof tatityi hafa masusesedi giya Guahan yan gi Estados Unidos. Lao pa'go matto yu' tatte para Guahan, ya achokka' bai hu konsigi tumuge' put i inaligao-hu giya Hapon, bai hu tutuhun kumukubre ta'lo otro na asunto, put hemplo i botasion para i presidente gi sanlagu. Desde humalom Si Trump gi i inacha'igi manatlibas todu. Esta kalang manracist i meggaina na taotao gi patidan Republican, lao manlasinehyo siha ni sinangan Trump. Ya mas oppan yan annok ayu na chinatli'e'. Estague ocho na puntan para taotao Asian (lao sina lokkue' Pacific Islanders) ni' taimanu sina ta nega (kontra) ayu na klasen kandidatu siha. **************** Here's 8 Ways Asian Americans Can Stand Up to Racist Presidential Candidates August 26, 205 by keithpr Republican presidentia

I'm currently reading Harper Lee's new novel "Go Set a Watchman." I am reading it after reading several dozen articles about how much people are detesting the book, because of the way it doesn't stand up to the "timelessness" and "beauty" of Harper Lee's first book, the widely read and praised "To Kill A Mockingbird." Gi minagahet, all the hate towards the book just made me want to read it more. I didn't enjoy "To Kill A Mockingbird" when I read it in school. I didn't enjoy watching the movie either. This new book is supposed to delve more deeply into many of the issues of race and class that the first book barely rubbed up against. I am excited to see where Lee takes this, or rather where she initially took it in her writing, because this book was actually written before Mockingbird. I found myself not really identifying with the Finch family in the first book and found myself more interested in the supporting

There is so much that we can say about "terrorism." For most people this is something you connect to the most terrible acts humans can commit. You hurt people, soldiers, civilians, anything. You treat them like objects, and use them like weapons, wood to create flames from your political fire. Although we my be accustomed to conceiving that some cultures are more predisposed to commit acts of terrorism that others, in truth we find the potential for this type of human damage within all peoples. But there is generally a difference in how we assign value and meaning to these acts. Although people may articulate that there is a clear and simple truth to naming something terrorism, this is not the case. People will hedge and fudge constantly when confronted with this type of violence, depending on their relationship to who has committed it and how they see that person in terms of the ideological coordinates that form their identity. Terrorism in its most virulent form, in