Category Archives: the state

An ideological project attributing unity, morality, and independence to disunited, amoral, and dependent practices of government

Billionaires for Wealthcare

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Billionaires for Wealthcare toasted the rightwing demonstrators that gathered in DC this past weekend to protest healthcare reform, legislation to stave off climate change, and all attempts to provide a safety net for working families and folks of color.

They describe themselves as “a grassroots network of health insurance CEOs, industry lobbyists, talk-show hosts, and others profiting off of our broken health care system. We are not a political, religious or even particularly well-organized group. We’re simple folk, thrilled profiteers pouring out of our corner offices to dance on the grave of ‘Change.’ We’ll do whatever it takes to ensure another decade where your pain is our gain. After all, when it comes to healthcare, if we ain’t broke, why fix it?”

See more at their website.

Racializing Uighurs: The Story of Internal Colonialism in China

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Uighur women protesting, July 7, 2009China extends 3,400 miles from the west to the east and falls into five different time zones. Yet, the country operates on a single standard of time, eight hours ahead of Greenwich Mean Time, all year round based on the time zone for Beijing, the country’s capital.

A single Chinese time zone is as much a fiction as a single Chinese ethnicity; recently, this truism was illustrated in the blood of Uighur protesters. Noon for Beijing was still seven in the morning for the western province of Xinjiang, the site of recent racially motivated uprisings that started this past weekend, on July 5, 2009.

Though China is often rendered ethnically homogeneous in the West’s narratives, the truth isn’t so simple. 92% of the population is members of the Han race, the dominant group with a monopoly over political and economic resources. But over 120 million citizens identify as members of some other ethnic group, known in China as “minority nationalities,” each with their own cultural practices, histories, and experiences. Some, like the Uighurs and Tibetans to the northwest, practice religious beliefs distinct from the Han. Others, like the Miao in the south and Koreans in the northeast, speak a distinct language. Still others, like the Hui, are indistinguishable from the Han in appearance and dialect, but practice a variation of Islam and trace their ancestry to the Muslim traders who settled in China along the Silk Road.
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Empire Strikes Black

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“I want to join the Starfleet Academy!” I exclaimed to a colleague when leaving the theater. Watching the new Star Trek movie left me with a sense of optimism about intergalactic governance, a desire to trust and give of myself wholly to the Federation, who will school me, train me on how to kill Romulans, and then (if I’m a white man) make me captain of a starship.
Obama as Spock
But, that’s the thing: I’m not a white man. Neither are most on this planet. Then, why in Gene Rodenberry’s vision of the future, a utopia where peace reigns on earth, where nation-states no longer threaten each other with nuclear annihilation or terrorist attack, why are there so few people of color?

Okay, yes there is Uhura. There’s the Asian man who’s name I can never remember. And, there’s also the one with the thick Russian accent, proof that the Cold War is over as humans unite to conquer the dark space. But, scanning the faces of the instruments of empire, the Starfleet Academy located in the center of liberal white U.S.: San Francisco, I saw very few faces similar to my own. There was the obligatory green woman, a love slave on former episodes of the television series, the weird alien-thing, and a black man with a striking resemblance to Tavis Smiley as head of a council. Every other face is white, white, and more white.
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