A friend turned me on to an article in the NY Times detailing the post-Iraq life of Shaheen Khan, a Pakistani woman who is now paralyzed after a few months as a laundry worker in the Green Zone in Baghdad. KBR, formerly known as Kellogg, Brown, and Root, and recently delinked from Halliburton’s family, is supplying non-Iraqi contract labor to create another kind of army, one that is without the privilege of combat training, ultra protective gear, tanks, and guns. Perhaps the only shield besides the vest and other government issue nominal gear that Shaheen has is the color of her skin, easily blending in with Iraqis. But in the Green Zone, I’m not sure it makes a difference.

Shaheen is living in a nursing home, and her insurance provider, AIG, is not willing to provide her enough to cover moving out of the nursing home and being cared for at home. This has strained her marriage. This has made life in Houston so different than anything she could have ever imagined. She was asked, “What are you looking forward to?” and she responds with a blankness with the words “nothing” flitting off her lips. When reading, I stopped for a moment to think about those being contracted out to Iraq, and realized its as if the American dream can be found in the Green Zone, that everything that is used to lure immigrants to the United States – the clean homes, suburbs, grocery stores with aisles of fresh food, the calm parks and sunny shores – are maintained by war and oppression abroad. Working for KBR is a chance to see first hand what it takes to maintain the America everyone knows and loves.

And I looked it up – how many jobs does it take to show people what America is all about? As of this post, there are exactly 1019 jobs available in Iraq through KBR. Electricians, IT folks, laundry workers, truck drivers. Salaries are not listed. But everyone knows that you can get a pretty penny. I know because someone close to me works for KBR.

This got me thinking about the level of influence that we have, and what we are influenced by.

I’ve realized that one’s life is filled to the brim with influence, and if one isn’t careful, it can be swayed by corporations like KBR, AIG, Halliburton, and any others. By Starbucks. By Microsoft. By any product we buy that holds a brand. Of course, many of us don’t have much choice; Shaheen was in loads of debt when she signed up to clean the underpants of the US Army. And it wasn’t her fault that both KBR and AIG screwed her over, and vicariously the US Government for generating and stoking the fire that is Iraq. But the corporations that saturate the landscape of the American and Global economy have sway over our daily lives to an extent that we likely won’t be able to realize until years from now. Unfortunately for Shaheen the influence the corporations had on her lives were horribly negative and violent, emptying her of the hope that led her to cross an ocean once again in pursuit of an economic dream.

For me, I have always had a distrust of corporations, beginning from the first time my father was laid off by a company, forcing our family to uproot to a different state, a different set of strangers to try and befriend. The distrust multiplied each time the pink slip would arrive. It got to the point where I would remain distant from those around me so I could easily pack my bags and jet off when the lay off would come.

Although not as violent, but perhaps as disturbing is the recent iPhone phenomenon, when I saw the man who slept and shat outside the Manhattan Apple Store for a week, and whose exuberance at shelling out obscene amounts of money was matched by another kind of obscenity, with him yelling “This is amazing! I can’t believe it!” when interviewed by the media mob. People were dressing their kids up as iPhones. The media fed at the trough provided by Apple, forgetting that bombs are dropping in Baghdad, Gaza, Kabul. That HIV is eating South African families alive. That the courts are chiseling away desegregated schools.

I am trying hard not to forget that which is important.

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.

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

“Hi, are you guys law students?”
“He is, I’m not” my friend responds while pointing at the law student.

I move my head, spotting an eager-looking, blue-eyed person. His gaze on our splattered pages and laptops, empty glass tea holders, highlighters.

“Oh, where do you go to school?”
“UCLA.”
“Oh, I’m at UCLA too!” Its nice to have a conversation with a stranger, I think to myself.
“What’s your major?” my friend asks.
“History – what kind of law do you want to do?”
“Immigration – or at least something in that general area.”
“Cool – so did you go to law school immediately after school?”
“No no no, I’m old – I’ve been out of school for five years.”
“Oh.”

After we end this semi-awkward conversation, we return to our highlighting sticks and typing machines.

We two brown people in a Persian cafe that serves Brazilian coffee. A good place. There are some women sitting on the side, not far from us. No one is really far in this small place, where there are backgammon boards and wonderful-looking cheesecakes under shiny bright glass. There is hookah outside and Persian music inside.

Next thing I hear is Farsi coming from this eager person’s mouth. He has conversations with the workers at the restaurant, he talks to the women. They are astounded that he can speak and comprehend their language. His chair slowly moves towards them as the two tables warm up to each other.

It turns out that he is studying Farsi and as he speaks more and more of it, asking the women questions as he studies, they are oohing and aahing at his language mastery. He is humble and I’m not so sure it is genuine or not. He constantly asks every few minutes “don’t mean to bother you, but…” He is trying hard to seem the oblivious eager language learner.

Of course, I am always wondering. Is he really oblivious to it all, to the appropriation of someone’s else’s language, going to a cafe to try and talk it up with women who are impressed by his abilities? Are his language abilities indicative of a larger kind of respect of culture that people with immense amounts of privilege often don’t have? Or is it straight up appropriation?

Of course, he could simply be trying to learn – and what better place than a Persian cafe? Right?

Right.

There’s a fight going on right now. Its happening in Houston this time, where janitors are striking and coming together to fight for decent wages, healthcare, and perhaps more importantly, dignity and respect. Houston’s the only major city in the country that still utilizes the federal minimum wage as a standard for paying janitors. The workers are mostly Latina, mostly Mexicans and Guatemalan, don’t have health care, work ridiculous hours for little dignity and respect, are around toxic chemicals during almost all their work hours. They are fighting for their lives. How do I know? I researched it for over a year with the campaign.

Please go to the Houston Justice for Janitors site or the Indymedia site and support in whatever way you can. A strike fund is being put together. Food is gathering. Send letters to the editors of the Houston Chronicle, the Houston Press, even the LA Times. Make noise wherever you walk and wherever you drive.

SEIU’s unionizing drive in Houston is historic – its one of the largest in Texas and the South. Its building on years and years of strategy and organizing in other major cities. Houston’s not a union town by any objective measure, so this campaign is even more important.

Despite NBC’s unfortunate editing, everyone knew about it. It spread through MySpace, text messages, and blogs like wildfire. And it was shocking – especially to Mike Myers, did you see his face while Kanye was going off? Oh and Chris Tucker’s expression was equally priceless. But people started to see Kanye in a new light.

I did – it gave me a new found respect for Mr. West and the diamonds he owns…

Yesterday, Bush spoke at an NAACP meeting, his first ever in the past five years. Everytime the organization has invited him, it seems, he has declined. But this time, he showed up with a message of reconstruction and reconciliation, to build a relationship with African-Americans. He lamented how Abraham Lincoln’s party let go of its historic ties to African-Americans. The grand ole party misses black people! Bush, in fact, loves black people!

Was Kanye wrong?

Maybe I’m missing the point, but I thought parties were run by people, and as is the case with most large groupings of people (and from my own experience), people often stop attending meetings and their involvement when they see that organization no longer stands for them.

In other words, I don’t think the Republican party let go of black folks; black folks got rid of the party. It didn’t stand for them or their needs. But, Bush really doesn’t have much firm ground to stand on, so his grabbing at straws makes a bunch of sense.

But he did receive a standing ovation, once. When he discussed how the Voting Rights Act of 1965 needed to be renewed. Man, people stood up for that. Hours later, the senate passed it unanimously.

On nearly every other subject, his southern twang only hit seated silence or adversarial hooha. He tried, oh how he tried, to defend his track record. Not very easy. He was booed when discussing charter schools. A heckler heckled him while talking about whats going down in the Middle East.

He pronounced NAACP as N-A-A-C-P, not the ubiquitous vernacular N-double-A-C-P. But that is a fine sum up – Bush is so disconnected from the realities of African-Americans that he cannot even pronounce their organization’s name correctly! Granted, he might have a language problem, but still. In a speech trying to win over the hearts of the audience (tangent: can a single speech win the hearts of anyone?), the first point of connection is on the surface. And there is nothing more superficial than the name of the organization that invited you to speak.

At least get that right.

Edit:  Check out this article in the Washington Post about the speech.  Its a nice summary.

My stance is that the d-word indicates a shared experience, and is particular to the diaspora. It doesn’t indicate a homogeneity of people coming out of the subcontinent, nor some essential trait, but of something that binds the people together. Whether it be racism, classism, or more (seemingly) positive things like cultural similarities, food, or the commonalities that emerge out of hours of desi satellite TV watching, there are things that bind us, whether we want to smash other so-called desis to bits and pieces or not.

There are a ton of organizations that rely on this term, or rather what this term is rooted in, to do their work. Immediately, DRUM (Desis Rising Up and Moving) in NYC, ASATA (Alliance of South Asians Taking Action) and FOSA (Forum of South Asians) in the Bay Area, and SAN (South Asian Network) in LA come to mind. They work in different segments – with young people, with working class folks, with yuppies, with immigrants, etc. etc. But there is something shared, that desis have to deal with issues such as immigration, racism, classism and more importantly, have enough commonalities which can serve as the grounding point for organizing to change the norms that structure peoples’ experiences.

So I want to know – what do you all think? What does ‘desi’ mean to you?