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In Fun^Da^Mental's music video for "Dog Tribe," white working-class men commit racially-motivated violence, white upper-class men (the disinterested politician) practice negligence, Asian men suffer and retaliate, and Asian women (or more like woman) mourn. The sole female figure represented in "Dog Tribe" takes the form of a young veiled Asian woman dressed in black kneeling in front of a grave implied to hold another victim of a hate crime. Her character exists simply to look beautiful and mournful, to grieve quietly and passively while the men take on the valiant responsibility of retributive justice. She is confined to the graveyard sitting in one position amongst the flowers forever, to wallow over the consequences of some injustice without ever being able to do anything about it. Meanwhile, her male counterparts are free to come and go as they wish, taking their moment to grieve but returning to the living world to tangibly enact change. While "Dog Tribe"'s call for revolutionary anti-racist violence is necessary, it's clear that, while they may be useful as a pathos-invoking tool of the revolution or a beautiful reprieve from the political (i.e. Sonya Aurora Madan), women are not included in the concept of a revolutionary.

I really appreciate messy stories about gay people of color, especially when the majority of counterculture literature or imagery in the West chronicles white people. I remember reading Buddha of Suburbia and Crying in Hmart in high school and feeling liberated and inspired by their aimless drug and sex-addled alternative queer Asian lives. Even though I would never wish distress upon anyone like the kind Habib and Ali had to suffer at the hands of their own families, I think it's necessary to see these flawed immigrants be flawed or sexual or complicated, see them make bad choices and lead non-traditional lives but still be considered worthy. I myself need to know and see that it's possible to fuck up and still end up okay... I think we know by now that representation is not enough but it's still very valuable for people who need some help imagining the possibilities...

I also noticed the overlooking of South Asian women/women in general in Bald's discussions so far. A particular passage from the introduction of Bengali Harlem that I found noteworthy: "The most important neighborhood to their operation was New Orleans’ Tremé. Here, some of the Bengalis married and started families with African American women, who were part of recent black migrations into the city, or with Creole of Color women who had deep generational roots in Tremé. These local women of color became as important to the operations of the network as the women who remained in West Bengal villages; while Bengali women produced the embroidered goods that would be sold in the United States and tended to the homes, land, and families that the peddlers left behind for months or years at a time, women in New Orleans helped Indian men settle and establish themselves locally; they gave the peddler network stability and longevity" (Bald 8).

Maybe I am interpreting this incorrectly, but I read the passage as implying the Bengali businessmen had wives and families both at home in West Bengal and in the US. Though it positions the women/wives from both continents as crucial to the success of the business networks that were established, the mention of their contributed labor and experience is so brief and cursory. Were these wives and families aware of each other's existence? What were the social and economic dynamics of that sort of polygamous arrangement? Hopefully, I am misunderstood and the Bengali women left behind were more like mothers and sisters but even then... Like you say, under the orientalist gaze, brown women are reduced to servile "abject objects" without much voice.

And then of the South Asian women that did make it to America: "Fantastical images of “the Orient” saturated the Mardi Gras parades of this period, while “Eastern” fantasies thrived within the walls of the city’s brothels" (Bald 51). Say more!!!!

It's interesting that what ultimately commutes Dom Sing's sentence is Verma's angle of Sing's inherent masculinity as given by his marital status, specifically catered towards the Western sensibility. "Verma emphasizes the wife’s ‘‘miserable condition’’ and her ‘‘cries for help’’ because she was without means of male support and would become destitute" (Shah 128). A damsel in distress is conjured to remind the court of Sing's patriarchal responsibilities, that he, too, is an honorable man like any other with a woman/family to provide for. This institution of Christian/moral monogamous heterosexual marriage so inherent to colonialism and white supremacy is used to reinstate the reputation of the non-white man and essentially undermine the white man's dignity in the process.

Prior to these readings, I was unaware of a precedent of Syrian migration to North America, that they could even be considered the first Arabs to have done so. I wonder to what degree my ignorance could be attributed to just that (my ignorance) or to the success of Syrian assimilation. All the readings emphasized that Syrian immigrants to the US and Canada argued for non-Asiatic, white recognition and were varyingly granted it. Their Christian status, which was further tied to the Greek or Russian Orthodox (two ethnic groups further along the white status come up) with substantial institutional power in the West, certainly helped Christian Arabs enter at higher rates than their Muslim compatriots. Asal also provides the example of Challenger victim Christa Corrigan McAuliffe whose parents' anglicized names concealed their Arab origins. It seems that across the many generations, much of the Syrian population intermarried and anglicized to the point of disappearing from the modern conscious.

Marcus Garvey's Black American Islam emphasized black empowerment through entrepreneurship and "amassing earthly power" (Curtis 49). Perhaps recognizing the capitalist system that prevailed in America, his idea of achieving black freedom involved amassing capital within the black community and it follows that he was staunchly anti-communist. Meanwhile, Malcolm X's enlightenment post-conversion to Nation of Islam involved an understanding of the ravages of imperialism and capitalism worldwide (he describes Western imperialism in Africa, India, China, etc.), offering a more critical and politically-backed distaste for the white world than Garvey or Noble Drew Ali were able to (so far as the reading details). In general, Malcolm X's faith in the NOI was more pragmatic than mystical as with Noble Drew Ali's earlier NOI predecessor, and I wonder how much of this owes to the difference in educational material available to them as a result of generational circumstances. Malcolm X had the benefit of an experimental rehabilitation center stocked with a wealthy man's library of history and religion, whereas Noble Drew Ali's texts and theology/ideology seem only to reference (read: plagiarize) largely esoteric religious interpretations and derivations.