Yongho Kim

Year: 2005

  • RE: Blantant misuse of a paper that I wrote

    Err, I sent this to you via email, then I recalled I had a BLOG (uh…)

    ========

    Andrew,
    so, I try to comment on your

    Blantant misuse of a paper that I wrote
    andrewsw.com/news/index.php?p=913

    and your comment spam detector thinks I am a spammer. I logged into your blog, with no luck. ):

    ================

    First, my condolences.

    I’ll vent a bit on something similar that happened recently in the south korean blogging circles regarding a web-based RSS feeding service (Daum RSSNet, rss.daum.net) that benchmarked bloglines.

    Something very similar to what was happening to you was done by Daum, and people complained their names were not showing up in the website, etc etc. Do you know what some bloggers suggested in a counterargument?

    1) That it was actually good for them because they were getting publicity (how?)
    2) That following the copyleft tradition, every single blogger on earth should let their stuff flow freely across the internet.
    3) That blogs were designed to be publicly open since they had features such as trackbacks and RSS feeding, and if people didn’t like them (if they didn’t want to be widely publized at the whims of corporations) that they should move over closed, ActiveX based, fucked up private community CMS platforms.

    Bastards.
    Yup, I just bitched about yellow peoples’ problems in front of a white guy. In english. Sue me.

    Ok, I’m done bitching.

    Now back to your case.

    Credit: TechRepublic is being an ass, but doesn’t it look like the problem in the Michigan State U Boad of Trustees? I mean, Tech Republic saw it there, it was listed as authored by MSUBT, and so they gave credit. They
    might not have found your version first. Didn’t they do all that was expected for fair use standards? It seems like MSUBT need to rectify whatever they did with your paper.

    Login: that’s messed up. I’m not sure if that violates any existing law, though. Of course it violates common sense, but customary law doesn’t apply intranational, or?

    Public domain: I just don’t get it that TechRepublic calls your paper a “white paper” and that “they are publicly available on the internet” for the sole fact that your paper is avaliable at YOUR website. There should be a
    semantic difference between the POSSIBILITY of going public and the FACT of being public, the two of them being usually linked together, but not necessarily requiring each other.

    So your papaer is factualy public, but that doesn’t necessarily imply you are giving it free rein (in particular, to be used for commercial or pseudocommercial purposes) in terms of distribution. Some people confuse the two. Some people, blatantly disregard the difference and question back, “what’s wrong with what I did?”

  • on squashed philosophers

    So today at del.icio.us , this is a site that has been linked 670+ times:

    Glyn Hughes’ Squashed Philosophers
    The books which defined the way The West thinks now
    Condensed and abridged to keep the substance, the style and the quotes, but ditching all that irritating verbiage
    www.btinternet.com/~glynhughes/squashed/

    There’s nothing new in making condensed versions of the classics. What is different here is that these are neither the opinion of one person nor mere extracts. Instead, each has begun with a very wide analysis of quotations, citations and, especially, past examination papers (including UK A-Levels back to 1976), to establish which passages, which phrases, which lines, which words and which ideas, are generally considered the most important
    www.btinternet.com/~glynhughes/squashed/about.htm

    Three words:

    Brave New World

    ugh

  • the definitive problem in information distribution

    the biggest problem (as in setting up various kinds of media for the SOLE PURPOSE of exposing promotional stuff received through email) facing ¡Adelante!, and other small organizations, is that they distribute OPEN information (events) in a CLOSED environment (emails) that are limited in their expository potential given they can ONLY propagate through a forwarded email.

    aha.

    we need set up a public email account.

    like this groups.yahoo.com/group/adelantemac2

  • white supremacy, racism, racialism

    in “White Supremacy: a comparative sutyd in american and south african history”, frederickson makes the distinction between white supremacy and racism.

    first, racism is too ambiguous. second, racism is an essentialistic mode of thought that gives racial attributes to given populations. (frederickson characterizes them as “the fact that populations groups that can be distinguished by ancestr are likely to differn in culture, status, and power” (p.xii)

    racists, then, make the claim that those are natural and bypass historical ciscumstances. white supremacists claim tha these differences favor whites.

    frederickson introduces white supremacy as an alternative, attitudinal term to racism, while leaving racism to the realm of the epistemic.

    the first reason is that in everyday discourse no one admits to being a racist anymore, because it has been conflated with a multitude of overlapping, and differing, meanings. it has been a blind spot for criticism. many administrators in south africa still admit to being white supremacists, however. alabama had a state motto praising the virtues of white supremacy.

    second reason is that scholars can deal more purely with the study of white supremacists practices, without getting stuck at accusing and pointing out the moral wrongs of racism.

    (so both reasons given by frederickson are of a methodological nature, not by some theoretical reason, such as the one given by appiah.)

    kwame anthony appiah claims in “in my father’s house” that racialism is the mode of thought where racial differences exist. then racism, is the judgement involving the placement of blacks and other colored peoples in an inferior relationship to the white race. he argues this in ch.1, “the invention of africa”, p.13, while trying to make a case for Crummell. i think he also mentions DuBois as an example of racialist thought.

    so frederickson seems to be borrowing on appiah’s theoretical framework of the epistemic aspect and activist (?) aspect of racism. but they differ in terminology

    appiah -> concept -> frederickson -> public discourse
    racialism -> epistemic division of races by attributes -> racism -> racism
    racism -> black and other races are inferior -> white supremacy -> racism

    now, rachleff briefly presented the idea of racial prejudice and racial discrimination as sub-branches of appiah’s “racism”, i don’t where he brought it from (his own?).
    appiah -> rachleff -> notion -> frederickson -> public discourse
    racism -> racial prejudice -> to claim some form of hierarchical racial order -> (no term) -> racism (reverse discrimination if the agent is not white)
    racism -> racial discrimination -> to execute out racial prejudice, e.g. school segregation -> white supremacy -> racism (terrorist, if agent is not white)

    now maybe racial discrimination and the rest of the concepts needs to be separated, because racial discrimination is a form of praxis, while the others are forms of cognition?

    back to the book..

  • aphasic narrative in Spanglish

    Independent Project Paper
    January 28, 2005
    Yongho Kim

    In this paper I argue that the recently premiered film Spanglish, a documentary about the “integration” of a Mexican single mother into white U.S. society through the eyes of her daughter, represents a form of an essentialist reading of their social texts that can be analyzed using the notion of double consciousness.

    Spanglish is the story of Flor, a single household mother, and Cristina, her daughter, who come to the U.S. via the migrant trail and get established in California. The story progresses as a narrative in the past tense from Cristina’s perspective as she writes her college admissions essay to Princeton. (The essay is read aloud in the admissions office by an employee)

    The film starts off with an image of Mexico that self-consciously works around breaking the overused image of realismo mágico, a literary device in Latin American literature that emphasizes the supernatural in everyday life. The film shows some clear examples of such device (such as a big and long tear scene with Cristina), ridicules it, and the single family moves over the border to California.

    Once Flor starts working in California, she realizes that the pay is never enough, and decides to start working for a white family as a nanny. Pay is great, and the white family is full of little middle class problems – unmotivated children, weight-complexed daughter, combative husband-wife relationships – that Flor helps solve with her “Mexican wisdom”, a remix of age old European desires regarding the good old customs that can probably be traced back to Rousseau’s noble savage.

    It could be argued that Spanglish is just a comedy film, and that none of the stereotypes herein presented intend to represent the reality of white middle class family crises nor Latina nannys. The response is twofold: first, the director already presents us with well known truisms from White America towards Latin America, which is magical realism, and crosses it out after playing with it a while, as if saying: “this is what you have been hearing all along – now let me tell you what the real thing is like”. Second, the film takes on a documentary quality insofar as it takes the voice of Cristina, the daughter, looking back at the past.

    The second essentialist reading of social realities in the U.S. is through the main theme of Spanglish, which deals with the affectionate relationship between Flor and John, the white family’s father (whether this was a deep friendship or a love affair has been purposefully hidden from the public). The main point made regarding love in the film is that white women talk too much. Naturally, for the dialectical relationship to occur, brown women ought not to talk. And so it happens. Flor cannot talk, because she cannot speak English.

    The director, James L. Brooks, portrays the scene with tact, but what remains in the center is that what awakens a sense of longing and/or loving in John towards Flor is the fact that she is quiet and yet gets the job done (i.e. making children happy, “discussing” house problems with monosyllables and gestures, housecleaning). Although there is a crucial moment in the middle where Flor recourses to Cristina as her interpreter to settle down some misunderstandings between her and John, the occasion is an eventful scene focused around the viewer’s pleasure of seeing two women ramble in Spanish (and English)

    The point might be to suggest that relationships can develop without language, and the brown woman in her quality of undocumented immigrant might be simply a device for that rhetoric. It is of noting, however, that even giving this definition (that things go smooth when problems are not talked about) is given by the enligsh speaker, John, the master signifier, who claims that “we [John and Flor] have been communicating so well through silence all this time” in the movie itself. Thus, the film gives its viewers the sense that what Mexican immigrant women want is for the English speaking male, to speak for them, and tells them that former misconceptions such as magical realism were wrong.

    Finally, the entire narrative of the film takes place in Princeton’s admissions office, where at the end of the essay, after telling how Flor was fired from her nanny work by John’s wife after she found out about the relationship and Cristina was unwilling to let go the white privileges of going to a private school, Cristina decided her primary identity was being the daughter of her mother, a Mexican single household immigrant mother, but in front of white admissions office workers, in order to get herself accepted in another stronghold of whitedom in academia. Thus identity formation is used to please and reaffirm white expectations of how minorities should perform or self-identify in the United States.

    (some references, I ended up never using for lack of sleep)
    Reference
    Dávila, Arlene
    2001 Latinos, Inc: the Marketing and Making of a People. Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press
    Dibango, Manu
    1994 “The Shortest Way Through”: Strategic Anti-essentialism in Popular Music. In Dangerous Crossroads: Popular Music, Postmodernism, and the Poetics of Place. Pp. 51-66 New York: Verso
    DuBois, W.E.B
    1994 The Souls of Black Folk. Mineola, NY: Dover Publications.
    Fiske, John
    2004 Understanding Popular Culture. New York: Routledge
    Lipsitz, George
    2001 The Lion and the Spider: Mapping Sexuality, Space, and Politics in Miami Music. In American Studies in a Moment of Danger. Pp 139-67

  • Contested Bodies: Immigrants as a Singularity in Minnesota's Political Terrain

    Contested Bodies: Immigrants as a Singularity in Minnesota’s Political Terrain
    Minnesota Immigrant Workers Freedom Ride Internship Paper
    January 27, 2004
    Yongho Kim

    The Immigrant Workers Freedom Ride of 2003 was a national movement aimed at claiming immigrants’ rights in the legislative branches of the United States. It gathered a critical mass of religious, labor, progressive and other political organizations and individuals to actively demonstrate and lobby in the Congress and the streets of New York City, and strategically located towns positioned along the path from the twelve departure cities to Washington, a move that intentionally followed the path laid by the freedom rides from the civil rights era.

    The Minnesota Immigrant Workers Freedom Ride (MN IWFR), planned by the two organizers who took a leading role during the national ride, Mariano Espinosa and Quito Ziegler, came together as a state-wide initiative that consisted of thirty immigrant riders and allies riding a bus that connected various key cities for voter mobilization and immigration law reform. Riders made connections with local organizers, contributed to voter registration efforts, and lobbied with representatives to have them support pro-immigrant legislation, symbolically marketed through AgJobs and the DREAM Act.

    In this paper, leaving the effectiveness of the movement aside (as the process is still ongoing), I argue that pro-immigrant efforts such as the MN IWFR injected a dose of instability and self-doubt in Minnesota’s political arena prior to and after various Minnesota Senate and House of Representatives, and the U.S. presidential, elections.
    (more…)

  • anth490 negoatiating the course

    Assignment: Bring in a list of at least 5 topics or skills you would like covered in the course.

    • spotting statistical exaggerations and issues of overinterpretation

    as a student who had at most two weeks of training doing linear regressions, I want to learn the basics of faulty statistical analyses.

    • macro phenomenoms

    as anthropologists mainly trained to study the observable, how do we deal with the big stuff? is there a big stuff? when can we say that the NYT is “wrong” in this and that?

    • simplifying anthro

    when people ask me what anthropology is, I usually give them the british social functionalist definition, because it sounds most “social scientific”. what could be a non biased explanation of what anthropology is for nonanthros?

    • is there a way to deal with workplace stress that doesn’t sound like another bourgeios urban advice?
    • i’ll improvise #5

  • how to browse this site

    this site can be browsed in different languages. to do so, click any of the languages under “por categorías”, and onc you are in that language, you may use the « and » buttons to navigate through.

    본 사이트는 여러 언어를 고를수 있습니다. 일단 “por categorías” 하단에 나오는 언어중 하나를 고르신 후 « 와 » 버튼을 이용해서 옮겨다니시면 됩니다.

    quick references is mostly some links for myself.

    streaming links is a live feed of sites I link as I read them or mark stuff to read in the future (or to browse back, if they have useful information)

    there is a guestbook under “contacts”

  • a decommodification agenda by capturing state power?

    so after reading Patrick Bond’s Strategies for Social Justice Movements from Southern Africa to the United States fpif.org/papers/0501movements_body.html

    Bond is thinking about circular state measures that eventually weaken local communities, and talks about fundamental change that doesn’t rely on state power, when he writes:

    …South Africa’s independent left fully understands the need to transcend national-scale capitalism. One step along the way is the strategy of decommodification.

    The South African decommodification agenda is based on interlocking, overlapping campaigns to turn basic needs into genuine human rights including: free anti-retroviral medicines to fight AIDS, at least 50 liters of free water and 1 kilowatt hour of free electricity for each individual every day, extensive land reform(…..)

    so I think, if Rachleff is sending out something, there’s gotta be something new in there. The “measures”, as I reade them, of decommodifying services into basic human rights seems to require state intervention, and as he describes local movements in environmental justice, I thought he would provide some sort of theoretical framework to understand these processes. But then., the conclusion comes back with a reliance on state-administered reform:

    The latter [change that advances a nonreformist agenda] would include, for example, social policies stressing more generous and universal state services, controls on capital flows and imports/exports, and inward- oriented industrialization strategies allowing democratic control of finance and production in order to meet social needs.
    ……
    We must capture state power through elections in which a democratic political party amasses community/worker/peasant support by generalizing the sorts of struggles discussed above, eventually contending with those elites who remain locked into neocolonial power relationships.

    so I have never taken a polisci course, and so I have always trouble figuring out the influences of macrogroups, hierarchies, and unequal relationships. In other words, when dealing with historic processes, I always started with the little practices and observable phenomenom. am I missing something in Bond’s analysis of how to materialize a “nonreformist agenda”? at least when put into words, doesn’t it look like another developmental rhetoric?

    —-

    also: what was this NEPAD business? Because the new president of Kenya about a year ago had made some strong statements about NEPAD that made the party of the outgoing president rave. It’s been a while since the news went out, thoguh

  • [Jack Weatherford] ANTH490 Checklist for Invited Speakers

    Checklist for Invited Speakers: Anthropology 490

    Before the Class:

    1. Explain to the speaker carefully what you want the speaker to do.

    2. Find out if any special equipment or handouts are needed.

    3. Decide on the format with the speaker. How long will the speaker speak? Is the speaker one member of a panel? Or will it be all question and answer, slide presentation, or what?

    4. E-mail or write a confirmation restating the time, place, topic and other relevant information.

    5. Send directions to the speaker or precise instructions on the location of the class. If the speaker is coming from off campus you might arrange to meet outside the building. Show the speaker where the washroom is located, and escort the speaker to the class.

    The Day of the Class:

    6. Have water for the speaker — but also offer tea or coffee in addition to the water.

    7. Introduce the speaker to the class in three to five minutes. Give the background of the speaker and re-state the topic or purpose of the talk.

    8. Have questions prepared and have other students who are prepared to ask them.

    9. At the end of the class, escort the speaker out of the building.

    After the Class:

    Within 24-hours, have the thank-you letter in the mail. Even if you send an electronic version, you must send a paper one for the speaker’s file. The letter must contain at least three paragraphs of at least two-sentences each, as follows:

    Paragraph 1: The General thanks in which you summarize the entire event. E.g, “Thank you for speaking to our anthropology seminar on your work educating homeless children in the …..” Always begin the letter with “Thank you.” Never begin with a phrase such as

    I want to thank you…. I wish to thank you….. I would like to thank you…

    I am writing to thank you… or I am Joan who invited you…..

    Paragraph 2: Specific thanks in which you single out one part of the presentation.
    “E.g, “The class particularly appreciated the description of how you entered this work
    and applied the skills that you had……”
    “I very much enjoyed hearing about the individuals whom you described because….”

    Paragraphs: Looking to the future. Repeat one phrase of thanks and offer good luck or success for something else. E.g,

  • Protected: MNFR second journal entry

    This content is password protected. To view it please enter your password below:

  • [Brian Rosenberg] need-blind policy change

    From: Jeanne Morales
    To: annouce list
    Sent: Tuesday, January 25, 2005 9:18 AM
    Subject: A message from President Rosenberg

    To all members of the Macalester community:

    At their meeting on January 7, 2005, the Macalester Board of Trustees approved unanimously the following resolution regarding financial aid policies at the college:

    Financial aid policies shall be maintained to meet the full financial need of all admitted students.
    The College shall establish a specific budget for financial aid. This budget shall be used to maintain an economically diverse student body while supporting Macalester’s mission of academic excellence with special emphasis on multiculturalism, internationalism, and service to society.
    Periodic reports shall be made by the College administration to the Board of Trustees to ensure that the College is meeting the aforementioned goals.

    Given the many discussions of financial aid that have taken place on and off campus during the past several months, it seems critical that I underscore again the reasons behind the passage of this motion, what the action means, and­of equal importance­what it does not mean for Macalester’s commitment to access.

    I should begin by addressing the concerns of those who question why the Board made this decision in January, when many students have been arguing for a delay until March or May or beyond. Rest assured that those arguments were communicated to the Trustees, who heard at their meeting from the President of MCSG and from other students opposed to a change in policy. I could provide you with any number of reasons for the decision to act now: the fact that our Admissions and Financial Aid offices will need time to plan for a thoughtful implementation of a new policy by the fall of 2006; that we need to be able to describe our policies accurately and openly to current high school juniors, who between now and May will begin looking at Macalester; that even with a decision now, it will not be until 2010 until the new policy is fully implemented. All this is true. More important, however, may be the observation that individuals simply reach a point when they are convinced that an action is right and necessary, that the members of the Board reached that point some time ago, and that to delay acting under those circumstances would be both ineffectual and dishonest. Ultimately the Trustees did not want to pretend to a hesitation that did not in fact exist.

    To those who have been following this discussion, I would guess, much of what I have to say will be old news. For a variety of reasons, Macalester derives less revenue from tuition that do virtually all colleges of similar kind and quality: our comprehensive fee, however high it might appear, is actually among the lowest in our peer group; because about 75 percent of our students receive financial aid grants­most of them need-based­only one in four pay that fee; both the number of students on aid and the discount rate, or the percentage of tuition that students do not pay, have been rising at a rate faster than that at other colleges. The discount rate for first-year students in 2004-2005 has reached 47.4 percent, the highest in the college’s history, dramatically higher than the rate at virtually all need-blind colleges, and nearly double what it was at Macalester only 20 years ago.

    Some have contended that what is happening at peer institutions is irrelevant; that the fact that we can spend many fewer dollars per student than other colleges is simply a tribute to our efficiency and ingenuity; and that we should define our goals and expectations wholly in reference to a set of internal standards. I believe this position to be incorrect­that is, I believe that any enterprise must avoid isolationism and benchmark itself against its peers and that, moreover, comparing colleges is precisely and appropriately what prospective students do when making one of the most consequential decisions of their lives. Even if we ignore other colleges altogether, however, we have plenty of internal indicators that signal a persistent budgeting problem, including our almost uniquely low staffing levels, our inability to increase budgets in the library and academic programs even to keep pace with inflation, and our inability to add programs and services widely acknowledged to be desirable for our students.

    Some have argued, too, that this extraordinary commitment to financial aid should be cause for celebration rather than concern and, in truth, it is something of which Macalester can be deeply proud. But a commitment to aid is not and cannot be our only commitment, given our fundamental mission. We pledge as well to meet the educational needs of those students who do enroll in the college, and our increasing emphasis on aid has meant a proportionately decreasing emphasis on all other priorities at Macalester. We are fast approaching the point at which those students who do pay full tuition at the college will actually be paying more than we are spending on their education­will actually, in other words, be getting less than they are paying for. To reach that point, it seems to me, would be to break faith with a commitment of no little importance.

    For anyone charged with the stewardship of Macalester to ignore these circumstances would be irresponsibility of the highest order. Such ignorance would certainly be possible: as many have pointed out, Macalester faces no imminent fiscal crisis, is not in danger of closing its doors, and continues to find ways to pay its bills and serve its students. But we would be purchasing our current peace at the expense of future students, faculty, and staff, who would someday and inevitably be confronted by a problem even more acute and more difficult to solve than the one we face today. It would be easier to ignore this challenge­this I know better than anyone­but it would be wrong to do so.

    The trustees’ action declares simply that our commitment to financial aid shall and must be part of the same challenging and careful deliberations as are our other fundamental commitments: to providing first-rate academic programs, to creating a diverse and supportive community, to compensating our employees fairly and competitively, to preserving the campus for future generations. No one would argue, I think, that Macalester considers any of these unimportant because we engage each year in intense discussions that attempt to balance our desires and our resources; no one should assume that financial aid will suddenly become unimportant as we make it part of those discussions.

    What precisely does the decision by the Board of Trustees not mean? It does not mean that we will end our commitment to meeting the full demonstrated need of every entering student: every student we admit will continue to be provided with an aid package that enables her or him to attend Macalester. It does not mean that we will admit all domestic students on a need-aware basis or that the most needy students will be affected the most: the vast majority of domestic applicants will continue to be admitted on a need-blind basis. In practice we expect that well over 90 percent of our admissions decisions for domestic students will continue to be made precisely as they are today and that by any conceivable measure­discount rate, percentage of students on aid, average aid award­Macalester will remain among the most accessible and economically diverse liberal arts colleges in the country.

    There are those, finally, who would contend that by failing to include strict and specific guidelines in their motion, the trustees have placed too much trust in the staff and administration of the college. Only time can provide a definitive response to such arguments. I believe, however, that the trustees have very deliberately taken the position that the Macalester community needs to be trusted in this area, as in others, to act in ways consistent with the mission and purpose of the college and that to micro-manage the process would be to declare a lack of confidence in its willingness and ability to do so. The truth is that we already have a demonstration of how the college behaves absent the guidelines of a need-blind admissions policy. We have never been need-blind for international students, and yet­unlike the vast majority of our peers­we consistently admit a diverse, gifted, and high-need group of students from around the world whose average discount rate is actually higher than that for domestic students. We could make other choices; the fact that we do not, and that we use the resources of the college so clearly to support its mission, is the best evidence I can imagine to suggest how we will behave now and in the future. History has taught us pretty clearly that those who cannot be trusted to adhere to principle without imposed rules generally cannot be trusted to adhere to principle with them.

    Thank you all for your passionate engagement in this discussion and for your many thoughtful questions and ideas. Particular thanks are due to the students who worked with great energy and care on the “Defend Need Blind Admissions at Macalester” report. Though I differ with some of the assumptions and conclusions in the report, I admire its quality and larger goals. More important in the end than the authors’ disagreement with the Board or dissatisfaction with my leadership will, I hope, be their enhanced understanding of the challenges we face and their deep and abiding allegiance to our great college.

    Brian Rosenberg

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