Last night I watched a comedy special featuring comedian Jimmy Yang. He's funny. You laugh at him, his parents, yourself. His humor exposes a truth about people.
He starts his monologue by describing how he must represent Asians, periodically, saying the one word: Represent. It confused me. How can a man raised in Hong Kong and the United States represent all Asians? It is as if I claimed to represent white Americans, or more in tune with the Asian American tag, European Americans.
I recently moved from Connecticut to the coast of Delaware, a small town, not a resort town, of mostly blue-collar workers and fishermen. Half of the homes are mobile. There isn't even a stop light. Without fail, every person whom I met differs from me in their outlook and attitude towards living. Not better, not worse, only different. They're tan, I'm pale. They work with the hands and bodies, I work with my mind. Many wear rubber boots, I sandals. Many have facial hair, I've none. Most aren't Catholic and never-were Catholic, I'm ex-Catholic. Most have lived in the town their entire lives, I've lived in Brooklyn, Connecticut, and now Delaware. Most have never left the country except for military duty, I've traveled to Canada, Mexico, the Caribbean, and throughout eastern Asia. They've lived near salt water for their entire lives, I've too have lived near salt water my entire life. In totality, we are different. Do I represent them? They would shout "No way." I'm an outsider.
I married into an Italian Irish-Hungarian family. My wife claims she had an intestinal flu one year and she lost all her Irish-Hungarian parts. Was her family different from my predominantly Irish (with a little German) family? Yes.
I flew to Florida to visit them. I was seeing her family only for the second time. I told her mother that I wanted to give my now wife an engagement ring, a family heirloom. When I entered the terminal, I was greeted with hugs from her mother and her cousin, whom I never met. At his house, we popped the tops of a couple of cool ones (an expression I never heard). He offered me a Bush beer, a brand not available in Brooklyn where I cam from. He had a pool, small but beautiful. I had puddles along the curb. We arrived at my wife’s home, and there were hugs and kisses from her mother, father, sister, and reluctantly her younger brother. I loved the enthusiasm, I hated the hugging. Over the course of a year, they hugged more than my family did in my lifetime. My family never hugged and kissed. Or rarely. They held hugging in reserve. It was intimate, a moment of shared vulnerability as each person broke through the personal barriers we erect. Definitely no kissing.
We celebrated the engagement. My future mother-in-law created a traditional Italian meal—antipasto, pasta, meat, vegetables, salad, and dessert of nuts and fruits. The antipasto, meat, vegetables, and salad were seasoned before they hit the table. There were no condiments. Almost forgot, wine. It lasted more than two hours.
My Irish celebratory meals paled in comparison: potatoes, string beans, meat, and maybe a salad. Bottles of French and Italian dressing, ketchup, salt, pepper, butter sat in attention. We would pour, shake, and lather the condiments on meals. If there was a great deal of conversation, the meal was over in 45 minutes.
Physically my future in-laws were different. They all had black hair. It was curly. Their skin, especially with their sun tans, was darker than mine. Her mother described my skin color as sickly. They spoke with the mouths and their hands. I also was told I was not emotional. Not once, but enough times that it pissed me off. Being new to the family and not wanting my future wife to feel uncomfortable, I swallowed my anger. I did think: I’m just an emotional as you are. I’m not as demonstrative as you.
Could I represent them? Not them or any Italian-American family.
In both cases, economics and culture determine the differences.
Jimmy claims to represent Asians. Who?
First, is Asia a continent or a construct of Western[1] civilization?
More than 26 centuries ago, the Greek philosopher Anaximander came up with the idea of Asia. The Romans picked up on the idea. “Experts” debated the boundaries, and they settled the argument. Asia comprised land east of the Ural Mountains and Ural River and north of the Suez isthmus.
Geologically, that ancient definition makes no sense. The place called Asia is part of the landmass or continent called Eurasia. That mass is connected to Africa. That creates a single landmass named Afro-Eurasia. Essentially, Asia along with Europe and Africa is a Western conceit, just as the concept of race is a Western conceit but more on that another time.
Presuming Asia exists, does Jimmy represent all Asians as implied in his routine? Israelis? Arabs? Palestinians? Iraqis? Afghanis? Kazakhs? Iranians? Indians? Pakistanis? Siberians? Armenians? Azerbaijanis? The Ainu peoples? The people of Altai and Tyva? As well as the Chinese, Mongols, Japanese, Koreans, Vietnamese, Thais, Cambodians, and Burmese? Their cultures, religions, cuisines, languages, and economies differ. I have more in common with my new Delaware neighbors and my Italian-Hungarian in-laws than Jimmy Yang has with all these groups. I’m no different than Jimmy. Culturally I’m not the same as my friends raised in Polish, Greek, Spanish, Swedish, or French homes. Culturally, Jimmy is different from individuals raised in Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese, or Cambodian homes.
These regions have vilified, attacked, or conqueror other Asian regions. They believed that they were superior for one unsubstantiated reason or another. They were no different from their European brethren. They all quested for more land, more power, more wealth.
The construct of Asian American Is political in its nature. It was born from the European immigrants’ self-identity in the U.S. They would describe themselves as Irish-, Italian-, or Polish-Americans. As the terms negro and colored fell out of favor, African-American took hold. It made sense. For most people whose forebears were enslaved, there was no means to track the birthplace of the first people kidnapped from the continent.[2] The phrase had appeal. It put the heritage of blacks on parity, if you will, with that of European immigrants. More precisely, the phrase forced white society to finally see African Americans on par. With that, politicians had a new word for their lexicon. More than a century earlier, politicians and world leaders tossed around the term Latin America. It was used to unify those nations/regions south of the U.S. border as if it could be one nation. The term came from the three main languages of the region—Spanish, Portuguese, and French, all descendants of Latin. Times changed. Nationalists rebelled. Spain left the continent. The leaders of these new nations had no time for a confederation of Latin America. The term lingered. It is now used to describe immigrants who have come from Latin America.
The terms created voting blocks. It was no longer blacks from the North and blacks from the South. It was the African American voting block, and they made up slightly more than 12% of the U.S. population. The same was true for Hispanics. Instead of presenting themselves as Puerto Ricans, Cubans, or Mexicans, they created the Hispanic or Latinx block, which comprises 17% of the U.S. population. Combined, they transform into a formidable voting block.
The term Asian American accomplished the same goal. Lumped together, Asian Americans make up 5.6% of the U.S. population. Separately, their political clout crumbles. For example, Chinese, Filipinos, and Indians each make up about 1% of the U.S. population. Vietnamese, Koreans, and Japanese each have less than 0.5% of the U.S. population. It’s even lower for Pakistanis, Cambodians, Hmongs, Thais, Laotians, Bangladeshis, and Burmese.
The terms, European American, Asian American, Latino (Hispanic), and African American, present this notion of blocks of power and influence. They are rhetorical illusions. They simply do not exist, or not at least as people presume. It’s tribalism. Within the illusory tribe, we feel loyalty, camaraderie, shared values, and finally and maybe most importantly, a sense of power. Alone we are weak, together we are strong.
Each “block” fosters its own conflicts. People of northern European heritage look down on people with a southern heritage, and by look down, I’m referring to bigoted behavior. Similar views are held in Asia. I’ve even heard it expressed in China itself, the northerner thinking the southerners as lazy. I’ve heard similar bigotry shared by Hispanics about Hispanics not from their country, as in Puerto Ricans seem to be every other Hispanic’s punching bags. And African Americans are the ones who perpetuate the terms like blue and yellow to describe the skin of fellow African Americans, a stigma associated with the two shades.
There’s no immunity to bias. Individually maybe. There are those people who live what we may call saintly lives. That’s not most of us. When you cluster people together—whether by ethnicity, religion, region of birth, wealth, or political belief—bias appears. My ethnicity is superior to yours; I’ll find eternal salvation, you not so much; I live in a better place than you; I’m richer than you are, ha, ha; and finally, you’re wrong, I’m right. We’ve littered our language with these biases.
I, for example, am a Paddy papist born in middle-class Brooklyn and a socialist. Paddy is a derogatory term for the Irish, papist is defaming term for Catholics, Brooklyn of the 1950s and 1960s lacked the cache of the then suburbs and today’s Brooklyn, and I am a Democrat. By all standards of the day, it’s not all that bad when compared to the bias faced by African Americans, Jews, Muslims, and Hispanics, and Asians.
Think about the terms used to denigrate these five groups. They’re unpleasant, disgusting, vile. So what? There’s always that “sticks and stones may break my bones but names will never hurt me” argument. That doesn’t work. Names carry meanings that have implications. They drag down an individual or a group, making her or them less than human. They no longer are on parity with the people in power or who wish to be in power. Therefore, “the named” have fewer rights as citizens, they have less value, and therefore, the people of means can treat and pay them poorly, enabling the wealthy to get richer.
This was the reason for slavery. This was the reason for de facto and de jure Jim Crow laws. This was the reason why the powerful allowed hundreds of thousands of Irish onto the nation’s eastern shore. It was the reason why railroads and others imported Chinese workers in the 19th century. It was not a matter of “Give us your tired, your poor, your huddled masses, yearning to be free.” It was “Give us your tired, your poor, your huddled masses, so we can make more money.” It’s no different today with the immigrants from Latin America. They take the jobs Americans won’t primarily because the pay is so poor. Why? So Americans, the wealthiest of people on the planet, can have cheaper produce, roofs, and landscaping.
Too often we, meaning all human beings, don’t examine the underlying presumptions to our beliefs. We have built some on strong foundations, but we stand others on timbers rotting with illogical, inconsequential, and irrelevant ideas and facts. We don’t want to examine them; we are frighten what they may portend—altering, changing, and dropping beliefs once held sacrosanct.
We need to strip away the bullshit. We all descended from ancestors who lived in Africa, not the Tigris-Euphrates River Valley.[3] We all evolved from a group of people living on the same landmass, with the exception of those who migrated in Oceania. We are the same with the exception of a few genetically and biologically insignificant physical characteristics. We all want to be love and to love. We all want our families to be safe. We all want our children to have a better life than we. We all fear death. And few of us can sustain prolonged violence, such as war.[4]
We are one and the same. We are one.
There’s one hitch—our biases. They obscure our outlook, our philosophies, our religions, our economies, and our languages. Each culture has woven those biases into the context of their existence, justifying them and, more importantly, elevating them, perpetuating the illusion that they are special, endowed with greatness.[5]
America is no different. We have woven bias into our history, culture, politics, and economics. (Our religions usually came with them set in place.) And it has always been in the name of wealth. America’s ruling class, meaning European Americans, with intent and without have perpetuate those myths in the way we vote, the movies we watch, the books we read, the history we study, the museums and symphony halls we have built, and some of the wars we have fought.
Our systemic racism, as much a part of the U.S. as the red, white, and blue, will not vanish with a few protests peaceful or otherwise.[6] White Americans need to examine the fabric of their society, the presumptions that went into weaving that fabric, the false threads that bind it. We also need to make sacrifices, primarily economic, to compensate for the “sacrifices” inflicted on African Americans for four centuries.
Even though the protests for racial justice appears as a homogenization of America’s different groups, I have my doubts things will change much. Americans will change its methods of policing. Americans will listen more carefully for the dog-whistle phrases of bigots, especially coming from our leaders. We need to do more. Congress must build the moral muscle to create an economically more equitable country. It will need to raise taxes, especially for the top 20%. It will need to create parity in all educational systems across the country. It must create a reparation program for African Americans.
Will Congress do that? Not in what is left of my lifetime.
It’s too easy to blame Congress, too easy.
Congress is but us. We must call for change. We must demand change. We must accept change.
Will white Americans do that? Your call.
[1] West of what?
[2] The terms African American and black are used interchangeably, but the descriptor black has taken on a different significance with the publication of Debra Dickerson’s The End of Blackness. In it, she argues that only people whose forebears were enslaved and shipped to America should refer to themselves as being black as opposed to those people whose forebears immigrated to the U.S. from Africa.
[3] The oldest homo sapient remains were discovered in Morocco in 2017.
[4] War is a political and economic function of society, perpetuated by the ruling class of that society, most of whom rarely participate in combat.
[5] Doubt me? Study the myths and beliefs different groups have for their origin.
[6] The New York City Draft Riots occurred in 1863. The new Irish immigrants rebelled against the new draft laws, which allowed the rich to buy their way out. They looted, destroyed property, and killed. In fact, they turned their anger against the free slaves living in the city at the time, killing more than 100 (presuming the count of the day was accurate). Nothing was accomplished.
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