Christina H. Vents on Anti-Asian American Racism

This Cracked article isn’t very funny, but I think for the most part it is pretty insightful: 4 Things the Jeremy Lin Story Reveals About Modern Racism.  Actually I think the title is pretty misleading.  It is really pretty focused on anti-Asian American racism, and I don’t think most of it is highlighted by the Lin story, but it’s still an interesting perspective from someone who grew up facing this crap.

Here’s one of my favorite paragraphs from it:

[I]f someone called me a "gook," for example, my immediate gut reaction, before even thinking "racism," would be "THAT'S NOT EVEN THE RIGHT RACE." I know that critiquing the accuracy of a racist joke seems sort of like criticizing the construction quality of a cross being burned on someone's lawn, but in a weird way, someone not even being informed enough about you to use the right slur is a sting in its own right.

You want to annoy a Chinese-American? Make some sushi jokes, or kimchi jokes, or maybe even some sweet and sour pork jokes. Apparently not a lot of people know this, but there's a number of dishes that Chinese people really don't eat a lot of, and they're mainly for appeasing the mostly white clientele of many Chinese restaurants. Sweet and sour pork is one of them.

If you want to do a "This is what Chinese people be like" joke, you probably want to talk about how they can't get enough of the tapioca tea or something. That'll hit a little closer to home.

There is some nits to pick.  For instance in modern taxonomy, the Vietnamese are not a separate race from other Asians, but only a separate ethnicity—although it is worth noting that about a hundred years ago, what we call ethnicities they called “races.”  So they believed there was a “French” race, an “English” race and so on.

And talking about the piece as a whole one of the big things she leaves out is the “perpetual foreigner” stereotype, that somehow Asian-Americans, however long they live in America, are assumed to be FOB (Fresh Off the Boat).  And it’s a really big oversight in her article.  For instance, she talks about how sentiment against Asian countries often bleeds into sentiment against Asian Americans.  Which is obviously true, but you can’t really convince people to stop disliking China or something like that.  I mean it is a dictatorship after all, so while this is really pretty clumsy...

…you can’t exactly take criticism of China off the table.  What really has to be done is an uncoupling in our minds between an American and their “mother country.”  I mean I am almost 50% German, and none of my family spent a day in an internment camp.  If memory serves a few Germans and Italians were rounded up, but it was extremely selective, based on things like individualized suspicion and evidence.  You know as opposed to our policy with the Japanese, which was to say “frak it” and round up every man, woman and child.  With Germans and Italians it was generally assumed that they had broken ties with the “mother country” that indeed now America was their “mother country.”  On the other hand, it was assumed that Japanese Americans were still ready to go all kamikaze for their Emperor-God.

And it leads to strange results.  To talk about another group that is unfairly maligned as perpetual foreigners once I was in an airport talking to an acquaintance of mine and she mentioned off-handedly that her family came to America relatively recently from “Persia.”  Well, I am not a fan of B.S. even when I sympathize with the reasons, so the exchange was something like this:

“You mean Iran, right?” I said.

“Yes,” she said, probably a little nervous what I would say next.  (She didn’t know me that well.)

“It’s sad that Iranian Americans feel like it is necessary to do that,” I said, “I mean the fact your family left the country suggests that ya’ll weren’t fans of the way things were being run over there.  We thought it was great when a Russian defected during the Soviet era, or when a Cuban escapes that country today, but somehow the people fleeing Iran are still under suspicion.  For my money, I tend to think recent immigrants to the United States are the most patriotic because they know what they are missing.  That goes double if they are fleeing an oppressive regime.”

So the solution isn’t to stop denouncing China, North Korea, or even Iran, but to combat the thinking in too many people that assumes these kinds of ethnic groups have more loyalty to a foreign country than America--even when they are apparently fleeing that country's oppression.

My other nitpick is that she seemed to condemn the famous “Chink in the Armor” headline, when I think the evidence that it was meant in a racist way is kind of thin and the parties deserve the benefit of the doubt.  But even with all those critiques, I think it is an excellent piece.

Now some conservatives really don’t like to talk about racism.  That feeling has increased, not decreased in the last few years, and I get the reason why.  These days it is all about using it as a weapon.  So you get Keith Olbermann claiming the Tea Party is racist because he looks at a crowd of multi-ethnic Tea Partiers and concludes that everyone is white and because of their insufficient pigment, they must be racists (which is actually a pretty racist thing to say, on several levels).  We get to the point where even the word “break” is claimed to be a racist term.  And then there is the almost certainly fabricated claim that a Tea Partier spat on Congressman Cleaver and called him a racist term (we know he wasn’t spat on, we can only assume that he is lying about the other part as well).  These are not sincere attempts to ferret out racism, but to demonize people who have genuine and sincere disagreements about policy as bigots.  So I think we can understand why conservatives are sick to death of hearing of it.

But that is only a proper reason to ignore it when the charge of racism is used as a weapon to browbeat everyone into agreeing to policies that we wouldn’t otherwise accept.  But it’s not a reason to ignore the problem of racism, when it is really there.  We shouldn’t say it is okay to use bigoted terms toward Jeremy Lin just because someone else has been abusing the concept.

Besides Anti-Asian-American racism can be downright useful.  Like remember how Olbermann accused the Tea Party of racism?  Well, consider this.  Of course, it shouldn’t shock us that Olbermann would say something that smacks of racism in relation to Michelle Malkin, but it does put things into relief.  As does some of her hate mail from so-called liberals.  (And I have pointed out before, there is more than a little bit of sexual wish fulfillment in their hate.)  I can't tell you how many times I have seem smug, self-satisfied liberals who suddenly break out into the ugliest stereotyping of Asian Americans.  Its illuminating.

But the more important thing is that it is just plain wrong.  As I say to friends and coworkers, it pisses me off to see it.  And the misuse of claims of racism and racial discrimination shouldn’t blind us to that fact.

But then again I warned liberals for years that crying wolf on racism would have the effect of harming genuine claims of racism and racial discrimination.  So to a certain extent this is the chickens coming home to roost.

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