Can you imagine if a New York museum funded a series called “Kike/Kite: Speak Out?” Do you think members of the Jewish community would be sitting around discussing the post-modern importance of “kike.”

The larger fallacy is for Latinos/Latinas to go to colleges and universities and then adopt the theories of white folks wholesale and then apply them to Latino/Latina culture without any real examination.

El-Museo does not have to resort to gimmicks to develop programming. As if stands now, it is already culturally de-linked from the very Latino community that it is a part of (which is a conversation in itself) and this program merely demonstrates why it might as well be just like any other white museum in New York City that has no regard for the real cultural contributions of Latinos/Latinas.
Report this comment

The body looks to absorb the world it’s in. A larger world than one country, one name. When “place” is determined as “name,” is when body disappears. I lose identity in ‘identity-based’ work because I don’t want to relate to “your name” I want to relate to “your body.” Person-to-person-light. Body-being is my claim, my challenge…to remain relevant to a world in constant motion.

If our molecular mass is in concert with the earth’s gyration, getting stuck in racist tags is what shuts the flowering body, keeps it from its natural state of evolving. In the re-invention of identity beyond “being” into “language”, is there a chance of a word’s existence as my new identity? Do I re-appropriate racism if my territory is no longer a nation but a letter, a poem?

As advanced as the mainstream may feel that society has become, this is a reminder that dismissing our differences is another obstacle to our natural state.
Report this comment

When a racist word is used — In my personal experience — the idea rises whether this person is using this word out of ignorance because social constructs have forced him/her to have this gut reaction of using this specific word associated with this specific ethnicity when anger/frustrated/or with feelings of being wronged or perhaps some sort of complex and they do not actually feel that way. Whichever. Or it could mean they actually do feel that way (another form of ignorance). There are many possibilities. Whether people chose to believe this or not, I believe it isn’t always about the word(s) being used but the ignorance behind having to use such a word.

“So I’m thrust into reflection over name-calling versus body-being”

-and-

“Say, I am better than one word. Claim word as name. Say yes, and face what name brings.”

Body-being, yes. I like this. But I do not wish to claim word as name. I wish to claim body as name to move body beyond name and name beyond body. When two are one two no longer can exist, it is now one.

We are better than one word, but can one be better than a global construction of ‘ways of thinking’? Such as distinctions between being black/brown/white/yellow/red, when, scientifically speaking, we are all various shades of brown. And even when you pointing out this obvious linguistic mistake by holding up a black object and a white object, for example, and asking people if they are either of these colors, they tend to scoff. It must take the deconstruction of constructed (with purpose) thought, to move beyond the cycle of what “claiming word as name” brings. Then we’re only getting on a bus that drives in concentric circles; the illusion of movement.
Report this comment