Hasta La Gadget!

Earlier this year the Economic Innovation Group ranked Cleveland as America’s most distressed big city. To Deborah Hoover, that means Forward Cities came to Cleveland “at exactly the right time.”

Hoover is the co-chair of the Cleveland Forward Cities Council, the group’s local advisory board, as well as the president and CEO of the Burton D. Morgan Foundation. Hoover has been engaged in promoting entrepreneurship in northeast Ohio for nearly a decade, and she says multiple other local organizations have done the same. But until recently, she says the community has “fallen short” on supporting minority-owned business ventures.

“While northeast Ohio is moving forward and a lot of really great things are happening, great things are not happening for everybody who lives in Cleveland,” she says. “We still have a lot of distressed census tracts that need our attention so that all of our residents can benefit from the economic growth that we are experiencing now.”

So when the Cleveland Forward Cities Council first came together in 2014, Hoover and her other co-chair Randy McShepard worked to identify which areas of the city most needed their help. “Initially the council was asked to identify one commercial corridor or neighborhood to focus on, but being the overzealous group that we are in Cleveland, we selected four,” said McShepard.

One of those was the Opportunity Corridor, an ongoing roadway construction project connecting the dense cultural center known as University Circle with several of Cleveland’s most distressed neighborhoods. Working with Forward Cities, representatives of the Opportunity Corridor neighborhoods developed an informational map or grid based on a model in Detroit called the “Bizgrid” which they learned about as a result of Forward Cities. This Cleveland grid helps new entrepreneurs to find access to capital, real estate assistance, and other business startup resources and support services.

Another target area was West 25th Street Corridor, a Cleveland neighborhood that includes the densest Latino population in the state of Ohio. McShepard says the community had long struggled to establish an incubator for Latino businesses. As a result of Cleveland Forward Cities’ efforts, the neighborhood was able to secure a planning grant from the Business of Good Foundation to help advance the Villa Hispanic project along.

“Small, minority-owned businesses are trying to find their way, and they just need a helping hand,” McShepard says. “We advocate on their behalf with the city, plus find ways to get them coaching, community support, civic support and help them with strategy.”

In addition to these direct efforts to promote inclusive innovation in Cleveland, Forward Cities has fostered a new sense of collaboration among the many area organizations involved in such work. Before Forward Cities came to town, McShepard says many of Cleveland’s key community organizations were divided into “silos” by type (i.e. philanthropic foundations, academic institutions, small business support organizations, etc.) But Forward Cities’ collaborative mindset has resulted in some impactful new working relationships and projects.

“The beauty of this initiative has been that it’s brought us all around the table to figure out what the problems are, and then working together to quickly respond to those problems,” McShepard says.

For example: working with the Innovation Council, Cleveland State University (CSU) recently compiled a comprehensive, up-to-date list with contact information of every minority-owned business in the city. Two days later, the resulting document was mentioned in a meeting between Cleveland Mayor Frank G. Jackson and representatives of the Republican National Committee (RNC) convention, which will take place in Cleveland in July. Encouraging the RNC to work with local minority-owned businesses, Jackson referred the RNC staffers to McShepard, who furnished them with the Forward Cities and CSU list of Cleveland area minority businesses and entrepreneurs.

“It really was wonderful that we created that list and then were able to pass it on,” McShepard says. “Had we not done that, they probably would have said, ‘Hey, we tried a couple of these lists other groups have, but the addresses weren’t valid,’ et cetera, et cetera. But thanks to Forward Cities we had an up to date, reliable list, and we hope that some of those minority businesses did get the opportunity to do business with the RNC.”

As the two-year Forward Cities project approaches its culmination this month at the Cleveland convening, Hoover says there’s still plenty of work to do. She and McShepard firmly assert that the work they’ve started with their Forward Cities Council members will continue beyond the convening.

“We’re not there yet,” Hoover says. “But I think the conversations we’re having…are getting these issues on the radar screen of more people, so more people in the nonprofit sector and the for-profit sector can really put their heads together, roll up their sleeves and do the work that needs to be done.”

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For me, racism directed toward Asian Americans can be less troubling than the response when Asian Americans dare to say something about it. I mean both the egregious examples, the brutal hate crimes, and the casual cruelties of daily life, the slurs and slights. I am an optimist. I do not expect to come into contact with bigotry. But even more than that, I am surprised by the pushback from friends.

Here is my test case. I have had this experience (more than once, much less than daily), and I bet many other Asian Americans, however assimilated, also have.

You are looking for a parking space. Two drivers go for the same opening. There is nothing unusual about that. It’s life in the big city — for that matter, it’s life in the suburbs too.

But then the stranger rolls down their window to shout something about Asian drivers, “go back to where you came from,” or “you know that’s not how we do it in our country.” What was simply a dispute, not all that serious, escalates into a racial encounter, and not due to any action by the Asian American individual who is involved; the other person intends to turn it into their argument for how the nation is in decline

I concede freely that I might have made a mistake — maybe I didn’t see the other person signal that they were waiting. But I assert that there is no cause for the person who wishes to confront me to fixate of ethnicity, as if that explained who should have priority or why I am the one at fault.

Or the instance that is altogether unprovoked. A car pulls up alongside you, teenagers pull back their eyes into that slant look, chant, “Ching Chong,” maybe throw garbage at the window, then shout about “Commies” as they speed off.

My point is what happens when you share these stories. We all do that. We have to process what happened. We need to “vent.”

So we tell someone when we return to the office, a co-worker. “You won’t believe what happened to me at lunch . . .”

The phenomenon is the “perpetual foreigner,” the notion that someone Asian is not a “real American,” irrespective of how many generations her family has been here, but owes loyalty to another sovereignty. We are tourists, guests, invaders, temporary inhabitants, who can, should, maybe must return elsewhere. That also is the rationale for dismissing our concerns. We lack the standing of equal citizens, and, besides, we are better off than we would be if we were back “home.”

I have found there are five stages to the reaction.

The first is denial of the facts. “No, really? That doesn’t happen, does it? Not here, not anymore.”

The person who expresses this sentiment at least implies they agree it would be not quite appropriate for someone to call you “chink,” “jap,” or “gook.” They are more comfortable suspecting your integrity than confronting contemporary bias. They are anxious to change the subject.

The second is denial of the pattern. “Well, that person is just ignorant. They don’t represent this community. I am sure it will not happen again.”

I am not sure this is much progress. That is especially so if the tone has that condescension of a metaphorical pat on the head. It suggests that there is a problem only if it is intentional and overwhelming, a vast infrastructure of racism. A person who “didn’t mean to offend you” (not sure how that is possible, but, sure, let’s give ’em the “benefit of the doubt”) or a lone miscreant is not worth further consideration.

The third segues from challenging what you have said to wondering whether it is significant. “That’s not about race, is it?”

The person who makes this move sets their standard at the indifferent end of sensitivity. They would excuse “Oriental” or “Chinaman” was colloquialisms, but even if such a term was uttered they refuse to recognize it as racial. Whatever it is, it shouldn’t be upsetting.

The fourth commits the logical fallacy of asserting if an act is not among the worst than it is not wrong at all. “That isn’t as bad as what blacks face, is it?”

In the aggregate, I do not doubt that Asian Americans are relatively privileged: measures such as housing segregation and employment disparities confirm Asian Americans are worse off than whites and better off than blacks. But a contest of suffering has no winners. In particular circumstances, an Asian American can be deprived an opportunity for a home or a job, as an African American would be. Telling that person that, in general, Asian Americans enjoy advantages is neither right nor persuasive.

The fifth brings us back to the beginning by ejecting me once again. “That’s no different than how Chinese treat Americans, isn’t it?”

I am supposed to be assuaged. It’s all the same the world over. But the analogy is not apt. The comparison should be between how Europeans treat Americans of Asian descent and how Asians treat Americans of European descent, because the category of American is not, in principle, based on racial nationalism. The cycle is repeated. It is to render equivalent how Asian Americans are treated in America, their home, as other Americans are treated in Asia, where they in fact are foreigners.

It also assigns Asian Americans as apologists for people with whom they do not have a meaningful relationship. We are allied with Asia against our will.

If all this were only about hurt feelings, then it would be unseemly to aggrieved. On the “Maslow” hierarchy of needs, we reach self-actualization and the sense of belonging after safety and food and shelter. Yet more serious incidents are driven by the same impulses as “it’s just a joke.” Attacks on Asian Americans have that common characteristic: they are expressly revenge for Pearl Harbor or Vietnam, or resentment over the success of Japan Inc. and the rise of China. Likewise government discrimination: the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 was justified by the notion the Chinese were not Christian and by nature couldn’t become Yankees; the Japanese American internment during World War II, the fear of treason; contemporary espionage prosecutions that lack probable cause, the paranoia about economic competition blended with military threat.

To be well adjusted, to cope effectively, I have trained myself. I have set my internal calibration to be sparing in calling out racial prejudice, and I’ve striven to catch it in myself and see how it affects others, especially African Americans.

In fulfillment of our ideals, I offer these thoughts for those who are sympathetic and open-minded. Perhaps other Asian Americans will be assured they are not alone.

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Finding Dory should not be a good movie. It’s a film the filmmakers didn’t want to make, starring a character who was considered a sidekick, and made more than a decade after the original—an original which was incredibly successful and award-winning, and needed no sequel. But somehow, not only is Finding Dory good, it’s great.

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Last Friday, Joanne Barnaby went mushroom picking in a forest near Fort Smith in the Canadian Northwest Territories. It was an inauspicious beginning to what would end up being a 12-hour ordeal, one involving a desperate wolf, swarms of mosquitoes, an unwitting bear cub—and a can of beer.

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In the latest chapter of bad news for Apple in China, Beijing is trying to halt the sale of the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus. The Beijing Intellectual Property Office just ruled that because the devices infringe on the patent rights of the 100C, a phone made by Shenzhen Baili that almost no one has ever heard of. Weird, huh?

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