11.29 | the season for cognitive dissonance

It was much better to imagine men in some smoky room somewhere, made mad and cynical by privilege and power, plotting over the brandy. You had to cling to this sort of image, because if you didn't then you might have to face the fact that bad things happened because ordinary people... were capable of then going out and doing horrible things to other ordinary people.
– Terry Pratchett

✉️ letter #45

I don’t quite know how to put this without sounding unintentionally “edge lord”y, but it’s really hard for me to find the idea of American Thanksgiving not gross.

You can’t celebrate Thanksgiving here without untying it from its colonialist mythmaking - even in 2023, with decades of easily available readings on our country’s history of broken treaties, germ warfare, and other awful genocidal things like residential schooling, we still start off the Macy’s Day Parade with this turkey in a capotain.

I know this isn’t new commentary. I know it’s a little cringe to rehash it again and again every year. I can usually swallow the ickiness in order to enjoy socializing with friends, cooking large batches of harvest recipes, and pretending that to “gather and practice gratefulness” is at the heart of the holiday.

But this year especially, it felt so hard to do the mental gymnastics that wouldn’t link the celebration and colonization together, especially with Israel conveniently agreeing to a ceasefire to coincide with this period - a move many activists are saying has much to do with how it expects Americans to divert their attention away from the atrocities in favor of holiday indulgence.

And particularly for me as a Chinese-American, my thoughts have been caught in a constant loop of dismay around colonial American erasure of Native cultures to modern American foreign policy abroad, including its decades-long support of Israel’s settling of Gaza, a stark echo of American erasure of Native cultures, even while it condemns the Uyghur genocide in China, itself also a stark echo of American erasure of Native cultures, and aren’t there two many parallels for Chinese-Americans not to interrogate where they fit into the geopolitical equation?

My job’s final conference, NEXTChina, took place on November 2, less than a month after the first shocking terrorist act by Hamas and about two weeks after Israel’s response of indiscriminate corralling and carpet bombing of Palestine’s civilian population. The UN had already condemned the latter’s actions, and in response American leadership had already reaffirmed its stance of “we don’t see anything wrong going on here.”

One of the workshops we hosted at NEXTChina was specifically about Uyghurs, and Uyghur human rights activist Rayhan Asat was a key speaker. She spoke of the struggle to keep her people’s plight in the limelight and how the Chinese-American community’s silence was especially staggering, considering how they’ve benefited from the rise of China. We had drinks after and I got to ask her why she didn’t think that “benefiting from the rise of China” was the exact reason why Chinese-Americans will never be the loudest voices of support in the room. I wanted to know why she would expect differently?

I think the last couple of weeks watching the heated intra-Jewish-American debate about Palestine has sort of answered that. It’s both shown how vehemently some will use their own community’s history of oppression as an excuse now to oppress, but also what a counter-movement to that would look like. It’s highlighted the push back an anti-authoritarian stance should expect to get, the way supposedly anti-racist organizations will lobby “race traitor” rhetoric at their own people, how even bastions for progressive thought like blue-state universities can’t be counted on to offer space for debate… but the activism can and will keep on keeping on anyway.

We don’t have that yet for Asian-America, and especially not for Chinese-America. There is no big Chinese-American movement willing to hold China to task about its human rights record while also recognizing it as a legitimate state. Where and how do we build a community that isn’t reactionarily anti-China, can defend against racist anti-Chinese policy, but still is trying to do something about China’s oppression of minorities?

Well, I guess the one thing I knew that was publicly doing that got shut down at the beginning of the month.

I spent this Thanksgiving avoiding invites to activities, throwing off quick platitudes to like, not yuck anyone else’s yum, but also not need to participate.

It wasn’t the most productive thing I could have done, but until I can really say I’m doing productive things against what I find ickiest about Thanksgiving, it’s going to be all I can muster.

🎼 the soundtrack | Runnin - Debby Friday

🌱 the green light | an eco-focused newsreel

The GrowNYC composting program has been one of my favorite things to volunteer for this last year I've spent in Manhattan. I've hung out a handful of times on Sundays in the Upper West Side near the Natural History Museum to help the neighborhood collect food waste and I've loved seeing the community come out regularly to compost. I feel the most New York I ever feel there, because it's so obvious that half the people who bring their scraps are people who've lived in that neighborhood forever.

So I'm kind of distraught that Mayor Eric Adams is planning on cutting composting from the city budget. If you're in New York or you know people in New York who can sign a petition to keep composting going, please forward this to them. The only other options for composting right now are more greenwashing than anything else and I am so angry that this is what he's choosing to cut instead of the dumb subway police-bots he never should have bought in the first place.

• Diplomats are expected to push for a tripling of renewable power by 2030 at upcoming UN climate talks. Surprisingly, we are already on track to hit that goal even without a global agreement. [Yale E360]
• Nature magazine has some “fun” interactive charts on climate change numbers, and by that I mean I can't do anything but laugh when I see this absolutely ridiculous graph of just how steep a cut in greenhouse gasses is now required to limit warming.

• Go figure. Jeff Bezos pledged four years ago that Amazon would lead the way on carbon reduction. Since then, the firm’s emissions have risen by 40 percent — and its use of creative accounting suggests that the real figure is far higher. [Jacobin]

🪢assorted | food for thought from around the internet

GrowNYC's potential demise is not the only bad news coming out of New York this last week. Just before Thanksgiving, Governor Kathy Hochul vetoed legislation that would have granted the Montaukett Native American peoples tribe state recognition. The century-old court ruling that had stripped them of that status had found the tribe "no longer functioned as a governmental unit," partially because it had been “impaired by miscegenation, particularly with the Negro race.”

Yeah, that's as racist as it sounds. [Gothamist]

• James Webb telescope reveals gargantuan 'Mothra' star in most colorful image of the universe ever taken. [LiveScience]
• The United Kingdom has become the first country to give regulatory approval to a medical treatment involving the revolutionary CRISPR gene editing tool. [CNN Health]
• I'm messing with health insurance now and man this country is crazy. If you've ever had a health insurer deny your claim, ProPublica has created a Claim File Helper to lead you through your requests. [ProPublica]

✨enjoying: one final piece of pop culture fun

One of the Buzzfeed Princesses turned Youtube Queens, Safiya Nygaard has made a career out of buying weird things online and trying them on. Her most recent video though was actually a fascinating foray into the world of Instagram/TikTok marketing and how one viral dress (and the influencers that record themselves trying it on) will be spun into dozens and dozens of dropshipping semi-scams.

Sure, there's a lesson here about you getting what you pay for. More interesting to me though is that there are hundreds of companies out there relying on ad spend and the algorithm to get you to click that buy button and our social media overlords are doing next to nothing to make sure you're buying what you see.

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