Dear Friends – Please come out to this conference on April 13th and 14th, 2007 at UCLA School of Law. It will be an opportunity to discuss some of the most critical issues of our time, to discuss Critical Race Theory and where its been and where its going, and to engage with practitioners, organizers, students, and others invested in contributing to and building a racial justice movement.

Attendance is FREE and spots are filling up quick so please follow this link to register and to check out the agenda: http://www.law.ucla.edu/home/apps/crs/.

I wonder how we deal with these ripping situations. Where people are ripped out of their lives and into others lives in such a way that it creates a sense of isolation so extreme and perhaps evokes an individualism that cannot be paralleled and likely will never be because as long as metropoles exist, there will be migrants. The kinds of draws we hold, the kinds of concerns we have play under the shadow of these big gravities.

I think there is much more to this than we think and I think there is a lot more to things than that which we would hope it to be. I think living life in the metropole is part of an economic, cultural, social, mental, psychological, and a somewhat sticky and mildly disgusting assimilation. The way it makes us want to leave, physically, from our families, from where we’re from, to something entirely different. The ways our economies bring migrants to LA, Houston, NYC, Chicago, to the cities in between.

The Global North is stockpiling itself with those from the Global South.

But is it in case something happens? Or has it already happened? The wars of political economy that wage miles, years, moments south of where I sit and write so often spell out the thoughts of migrants, that where they were is no longer where they want to be. I make presumptions and assumptions, no doubt, but I feel there’s something here.

The metropole brought someone to the immigrant detention center. He was explaining to me how he came over, what he did to come over to this city of angels. How he paid a coyote twice to come over, how he had worked as a mechanic and then started his own business at his home. He didn’t do anything wrong, got married, had two children, and was then picked up by immigration officials. His glasses were broken, and he had a barber pole colored string that let him keep his glasses functional. I didn’t ask him why he came over, but I guessed, why would anyone wade over miles of mountains and rivers, duck from headlights, keep eyes peeled and ears perked for hours and hours?

So what do people do? How do we deal with the ripping? We just do, as in so many situations. Negotiations happen constantly at braincell, telephone, email, and holding hand speeds. I was struck with the immensity and intensity of the story I heard. He is being held because he wasn’t proper in the eyes of the metropole, he is somehow an odd piece that the metropole’s racist and xenophobic apparatus feels compelled to keep for inspection and then push out, with strings of family still tied to him as he is jettisoned just south. I was in awe of his story and his experiences, he’d been through much more than my life ever probably will – and yet, I’ve been perused, processed, and deemed just fine in the cracked lens of the metropole. I can stay here; he cannot.

The gravity of it all both silences, and angers.

I write in English. I read in English. I mostly think in English. I have dreams in English. But when I listen to something in Hindi (my first language), when I read or write something in Hindi, or when a thought only makes sense in Hindi, I feel a little something different. Like when I speak to my parents or friends in Hindi, theres a piece of beautiful I’m tapping into.

As if my indigenous tongue’s platonic qualities are tied to deep meaning, connection, livelihood, memory. Hindi’s an old language, no doubt, but I’m not talking about rendering it exotic. I’m talking about what it means to me, that the language is tied to family, of times growing up and on the phone – a world with which I am intimately familiar. And which is made apparent to me almost every time I open my mouth and sound out an English with a slight southern twang.

One time, when I was in India and I was about 15, I was riding on the waves of a perky mind that picked up Hindi in a snap. I was speaking in Hindi, cracking jokes in Hindi, thinking in Hindi. Upon coming back to the states, I started reminiscing of times traveling long distances in dusty Marutis with drivers with working-class roots and cousins who loved to sing. And when I did, the conversations I remembered fondly were transformed into English; those long conversations had mutated upon stepping off the jet. It was the strangest thing, and it was the first time I realized how easy I could switch between languages, how this balancing, juggling act would remain with me the rest of my life.

I sometimes regret not studying more of Hindi. Nowadays, I listen to as much Hindi/Urdu as I can, I try to read Hindi when I remember. But to be honest, I don’t speak it as much as I’d like, and the more I continue this way, the more it’ll keep reminding me of a distant, uncurrent past.

You’ll be charged a hundred dollars
if you can’t pay back the debts
Work your soul and work your lifetime
without money you can’t buy
Can’t you see
six feet underground?
Identify the system
Identify the system
Watch your neighbours
and their big dreams
Silent envy on your face
A life deluxe, it would be easy
What would you give to join the club
Can’t you see
six feet underground?
Identify the system
Identify the system.

I think identifying the system is merely the first step.

But I’ve never been a huge fan of Sanjay Dutt’s acting or fashion sensibilities. Now I have another reason to sway away. He was recently convicted of his participation in the Mumbai bombings earlier this year. According to the BBC, he is the most controversial Bollywood star around. He has spent some time in jail for his involvement in the 1993 Mumbai blasts.

Now, this brings up a tricky situation for that space between the personal and the politic. I love most of his films, especially the recent ha-ha-laugh-til-you-hurt films but my stomach starts hurting a different way when I think of his complicity in the blasts designed to kill hundreds of people in strings of eyeblink moments.

But thats the essential rub of all the pieces of our lives. They’re filled with contradictions, of scattered remnants connected in some ways to someone being oppressed, having to die, somehow, somewhere.

He states that he’s some kind of chosen one. I wonder what kind of chosen one he’s trying to be.

Responses to the tazing incident two weeks ago have multiplied. I’m involved with a few graduate student groups across the UCLA campus trying to re-frame the issue as one of police brutality and race and take some action so that these kinds of egregious abuses of power don’t happen again.

I am not startled that such brutality spans from UCLA to Houston and back. But I am startled that this is happening in my tiny world. I spent more than a year working for the Houston Justice for Janitors campaign and feel connected to the pound of flesh I left there. A friend had told me the other day that he was considering participating in the civil disobedience to support the Janitor strike. I was immensely supportive and tried to make him do it. So when I got that text, my fears about an impersonal, courtesy-of-you-tube police brutality – a political set of fears – became intensely personal. This tangled mess made me, well, a bit of a mess.

I went to the Houston Janitors website and watched the video – people I knew in the video were getting arrested but I couldn’t see my friend. I made phone calls and didn’t hear back. No one was picking up. No one would answer.

I eventually got a call from him and he reassured me that he’s OK. He had decided not to participate in the civil disobedience. I exhaled.

But after attending the protest today at UCLA, where the messaging was around public safety rather than police brutality and race, I realize that we do not have much time. We don’t have time to obfuscate, to skate over the issues that dig deep into us and threaten to rip us all apart.

If we don’t call things as they are – that Mostafa was targeted because he was a Persian male, that he was cuffed and then tazed more than four times because he was a person of color, that the UCPD’s actions have created a climate of fear for people of color all over campus, that ’safety’ as a message only means more cops and no change in accountability – then we all suffer.

We don’t have time to call things otherwise because eventually we all are going to be hit by this. And it will hurt like hell when it happens to us or to someone we love.

Update:  My blog posts have been picked up by WireTap, an excellent on-line magazine run by AlterNet.  Please visit and post!

But my severely optimistic head never expects it. I would never expect it at all. And everytime I hear about when it, I feel disgusted angry victimized angry mad lost hurt.

This is how I felt yesterday when I first heard about what happened at UCLA at the Powell Library, which was mere minutes from where I was studying. UC cops were checking undergraduate students at the Powell Library’s computer lab for IDs. Mostafa Tabatabainejad, a Persian UCLA student, did not have his ID and after some time, the cops were tasering him repeatedly because of his ‘non-compliance.’ They were asking him to stand up but kept tasering him (which immobilizes muscles and often prevents control of one’s body for up to 10 minutes). Students gathered round and many people recorded the incident through their cell phones. After being tasered several times, the cops took Mostafa to a holding cell and later released him.

Mostafa was never asked for an alternate means to show he was a student. Is it justifiable that a person should suffer massive electric shocks for not having a small piece of plastic? How much power should police be given in regulating a computer lab?

The video can be linked to here through the Daily Bruin. Be careful, its really disturbing. I couldn’t watch all of it.

There is much more that needs to be done about this. A google news search of “Mostafa, taser, UCLA” will uncover more than 100 news articles, including a few indicating that Council of American-Islamic Relations is justifiably calling for a deep investigation into all of this. The LA Times calls this a third incident in a recent wave of cell phone videos documenting police brutality.

While this was happening, Mostafa was yelling “Here’s your Patriot Act…here’s your abuse of power.” Those who are at UCLA, pressure the UC Police Department and anyone else who has abused their power at the UCs to conduct a full, thorough, and impartial investigation into all of this.

Update – Here are some things you can do:

Contact the UCLA Police Department and express your disapproval of how the situation was handled: http://www.ucpd.ucla.edu/

Contact UCLA Acting Chancellor Norman Abrams About the Incident at Powell Library:

Dr. Norman Abrams (Interim Chancellor) – chancellor@conet.ucla.edu
Dr. Daniel Neuman (Executive Vice Chancellor and Provost) – evc@conet.ucla.edu
Dr. Maryann Jacobi Gray (Assistant Provost) – mgray@conet.ucla.edu
Dr. Robert J. Naples (Assistant Vice Chancellor and Dean of Students) -
dean@saonet.ucla.edu

So how do I make this bloggable? Have I gotten so deep into this that it becomes near ridiculous to bust out another blog post? Sometimes, it feels as if it does. But once I get my head out of the books, I naturally arrive here, probably because I haven’t written in a while and because it feels normal, in a sense, to be here.

So what’s been going on? I’ve been learning that the lives I read about in cases – who have been shot, stabbed, battered, wounded, defrauded, misrepresented, left to die, left with a bad deal – are mere characters that explain a staggering array of rules that are designed to govern us, that set up normative bounds within which we can play and do whatever we like. But once we cross those bounds, sirens abound.

The characters are many and they are mostly women, people of color, and others who live their lives in the margins. Most of our law is designed by problematizing their suffering. And yet, I see a discrepancy, where are a disproportionately high number of men of color behind bars, immigrants in detention, people shot without compensation. Clear indications that the law doesn’t work for the people that made it the way it is.

But is what I am seeing true? That it was “designed” by those most residing in the margins? I’m not sure – if it weren’t for people challenging the status quos of their time, the law wouldn’t be where it is now.

I feel that I have a lot more to learn – I’m only 8 weeks into this mess. Come back to me in a year and I’ll tell you what inconsistency I obsess about then.

In the meanwhile, I’ll keep my nose in the books.

My initial impression is that the LA Weekly is LA’s equivalent of the Houston Press (Here I am stoking my Texas nostalgia by leveling pieces of my LA life with segments of my humid, I mean Houston, memory). In the latest Weekly that I picked up, there’s a story called ‘Girls Gone Border Patrol!‘ by Karl-Erik Stromsta. It describes teenagers living at the Naco, Arizona – Naco, Mexico Border and how U.S. teenagers are interns in the ‘Border Patrol Explorer Scout’ program. And yes, it was started by the Boy Scouts of America.

Border Patrol Explorers learn to raid buildings, pull cars off the road, shoot guns, and track ‘illegal immigrants’ with night-vision goggles on ‘moonless’ nights. In other words, these teens are learning how to be part of the nation’s largest domestic army, the Border Patrol. Stromsta refers to it as the “internship of the 21st century,” and I think he’s right because these kids are learning what it takes to be American these days. They are learning to invade other peoples’ spaces, to profile on the basis of skin color and/or national origin, and are enforcing a partition that exists between one nation and another — a verified line of power.

Naco, Arizona is an economically-depressed town, with few opportunities for jobs and advancement. As one of the teens mention in the article, there’s not a whole lot to do in Naco – which makes this internship a precocious catapult into, as Stromsta mentions, one of the two largest regional employers in Naco (the other one is…the Military!). When I spent bits of time in El Paso, TX doing work for the Border Network for Human Rights (BNHR), I sensed a similar dynamic – Border Patrol vans are everywhere, and a military base (Fort Bliss) is located mere miles away from BNHR’s office. The hotel I stayed at was filled with vans and trucks sporting military and U.S. government license plates. I’m not sure ’safe’ is the right way to describe what I felt when I stayed there, especially when my bill was paid by an immigrants’ rights organization.

Stromsta interviews teens on the other side of the border, who do not like the corrugated metal slicer that separates them from the city of the same name. The teens interviewed in Naco, Mexico decry the Border and its negative effects – it brings drug and people smugglers into the city and has created a climate of fear, particularly at night. Across the border from El Paso is Juarez, where hundreds of women have died. When I was there, I was part of a human rights tour around the city, where the situation was discussed at length by local human rights advocates and city officials. They described the deaths as a result of the existence of drug and people smugglers, gangs, and most perversely, the increasing idea that women are disposable, objects capable only of providing nuisance. This disgusting morality has pervaded the area over time, and with every woman that dies, the patriarchy is further entrenched, as though each death justifies the ideas that women are, indeed, disposable.

Juarez is not the only place where this is happening – women are dying all across Mexico, in Latin America, and in South America. This is aggravated by maquiladoras, where mostly women work and who travel at odd hours of the night to/from work. As sustainable economic opportunities dry up in parts south of the border, they are replaced by those that generate fast cash – drug and people smuggling, mafias, and the black market increases its demand for blood.

I wonder if any of the teens in the Border Patrol Explorer program realize that they are not learning to catch ‘illegal immigrants’ but rather, economic refugees – people who need someplace safe and sustainable to work. People who are just trying to survive.