My submission for the Feed the People Collective zine.
Toni Morrison made mainstream the idea of writing without the “white gaze” which is now commonly used as a lens in which to examine art, music, and texts by non-white creatives, and it has taken root in the lexicon of anyone doing “anti-racist” work or creating art. Writers, musicians, actors, and other celebrities are often accused of sacrificing their authenticity for the acceptance and accessibility of white people. Hong claims that doing this is exhausting; she writes, “Patiently educating a clueless white person about race is draining. It takes all your powers of persuasion. Because it’s more than a chat about race. It’s ontological. It’s like explaining to a person why you exist, or why you feel pain, or why your reality is distinct from their reality. Except it’s even trickier than that. Because the person has all of Western history, politics, literature, and mass culture on their side, proving that you don’t exist” (Hong 18). Even though the vignettes that follow are hued with the exhaustion created in the midst of whiteness, I also hope that Asian readers will connect with the examples of minor feelings that also create strength and connect us all.
My vignettes below are inspired by Cathy Park Hong's memoir Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning. The memoir is a series of seven essays that explore minor feelings: "the racialized range of emotions that are negative, dysphoric, and therefore untelegenic, built from the sediments of everyday racial experience and the irritant of having one's perception of reality constantly questions or dismissed" (Hong 55). For an Asian woman who reads them, the lack of explanation is for you. In that, I hope that there is a shared understanding.
“But...you’re like white, ya know?”
In third grade, I had my race explained to me by a white person for the first time. While writing about our family heritage, I claimed that my family was Irish, English, and Maidu (my adopted parents’ nationalities and heritages). I knew I was born in Korea, but at that time I never considered myself Korean. The only other Korean people I knew were my adopted brother, my adopted cousins, and the other adopted Korean girl who lived in the same town as me (did you know that adopted-kid-playdates are a thing?)
I did not understand why I made my teacher so upset by talking about my family. In retrospect, I think that she did not like that I was claiming whiteness on my terms, not hers. In my life, whiteness has been projected onto me by other white people whenever my “Asian-ness” makes them uncomfortable or when they are reminded of it when they say something racist in front of me. It happened in school, in sports, in casual circles of friends, in intimate friendships, and even in my family.
I’ve been called a “Twinkie,” a “Zinger,” and a “banana” ( all are yellow on the outside, white on the inside) my whole life when I’ve never felt white on the inside. Since that moment when I was racialized by my third-grade teacher, I’ve been hyper-aware of my race in any and every social context. Those who are not white intimately know Jean-Paul Satre’s theory of “the look.” They know that the gaze of another transforms who we are once looked upon. The gaze of another turns us simultaneously into “the other” and into an “object for another.” We are looked at, but not seen. With that look comes a projection of what I should be or what I am supposed to be. When white people casually attempt to affirm me by saying that I’m “like white, ya know?” they are also implying that being white is desirable. That’s where they are wrong. Toni Morrison said, “[It’s] as if our lives have no meaning and no depth without the white gaze” (Greenfield-Sanders). Even though white people think that their approval shines a spotlight on me, the times that I have felt most free, most understood, and the least amount of stress has been when I am standing in my light and not the shadow of the white gaze.
“Wow! You’re so extroverted.”
I’ve learned to be extroverted when needed because without that skill, I would be erased. I used to think that I was shy, but I now realize that I was never the introvert that people made me out to be. White people just would never listen. Talked over, interrupted, ignored, tokenized, stereotyped.
Instead of mimicking white, dominant behavior, I listened, plotted my ins, counted the number of times I fake laughed at someone’s joke before I told them an uncomfortable truth (the trust was built with a “Ha-ha, you suck, but I kind of like you” tone), tricked white people into thinking that my ideas were their ideas because when brought forward as my idea, they would thumb it into pulpy oblivion. In a gentle, passive-aggressive way, of course, “I need more time to think about that,” “I am unsure about how that would work,” “That does not seem to fit my style.” I learned to plant the idea and then let the callus of my rejections take the blow. Then, while revisiting the same issue or plan or idea, I’d say, “I think last time we talked about you had mentioned ___, but I can’t remember it. It feels fuzzy.” To which they would reply, “Yesssssssss. That’s a great idea. Let’s figure that out and move forward with it.” *eyeroll*
“What are you talking about? Asians are, like, whiter than white people.”
When the film, Crazy Rich Asians came out, I cringed a little bit inside. People touted the symbolic representation for Asian Americans. I worried that people were overlooking the problematic parts of the film in order to be entertained by (finally!) Asian main characters from a Hollywood film.
We’ve seen (and know!) what happens when the media turns race into a trope; the trope informs our biases and our biases create damage in our realities. The first scene of the film includes the matriarch purchasing a hotel after it refused to host her family. The wealth of the Young family allows them to exert their monetary power when faced with racism, something not many of the Asian families I know can actually do. The Young family’s wealth creates a veneer of assimilation, coupled with the implied legacy of colonialism. The Young children have British accents from boarding schools and attending Oxford (and might the spelling of their name suggest a desire to further assimilate on paper?). Applauding these characters creates a respectability politics that suggests that these types of Asians are the “right kind” of Asians.
Once an image like this is created, proliferated, and stamped on our memory because of our regular diet of visual media, one cannot help but notice the amount of wealthy, young, international Asian students in the Bay Area that go to the grocery store in their designer loungewear and accessories. This image becomes the rule instead of the exception, especially for non-Asian people.
My partner and I once had our old roommate over for a double-date. While in conversation, someone (I cannot even remember the context because what the date said will haunt me forever) jokingly invited my opinion, “What do you think, Nichole, our resident Asian?”
Wanting to be a part of the joke, she chimed in, “What do you mean? Asian people are, like, whiter than white people!” She laughed at her own joke and touched my arm.
In short, I was hurt and angry. She had no idea of...anything. How do you begin to explain the implications and damaging effects of race to someone who does not want to understand?
Her joke was wound in the stereotype of Asians as displayed in Crazy Rich Asians that was an over-correcting swing of the pendulum from the foreign, nerdy, accented, and sexualized images that we have seen in films in the past. It overcorrected so hard that it made Asians seem “like, whiter than white people.” And ultimately, as I fight and unlearn my own white supremacist thinking, I never want to be white or “whiter than white.”
Are you exhausted yet?
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