Swine Flu and the Racist Discourse

The other day, someone said that he didn't want to be around "Mexican" people at all. He then observed that he didn't feel the same way when there was the media-driven SARS scare. Of course, he is East Asian.

This is an interesting illustration of a few things. First, that while ethnic minorities cannot be racist in that they do not have the social power that allows them to act out their bigotry on a level that can intimidate on a deeper level than just a personal threat, they can harbor racist ideation. Meaning they can have racist thoughts. The big difference, obviously, is that members of ethnic/racial minorities cannot plug into, resonate with, or otherwise take advantage of a long, historically-established, set of institutionalized racist agendas that have made entire racial groups feel oppressed, fearful, and exploited because they are the victims of such behavior. Racism as a practice implies the ability to do just that: plug into a larger, institutionalized, oppressive, and exploitative discourse that regulates our institutions. However, you can be a bigot.

So that was the first interesting characteristic of this particular observation.

The second is this. That the reason this person did not fear for his health during the SARS scare was that he was Asian, and he knew that the likelihood of his contracting that illness here, in the U.S., was remote. And what's more, he knew that he, as an East Asian, had absolutely nothing to do with its spread so the idea that people were demanding that East Asians be confined if they had traveled, was not only preposterous, but as he correctly had identified, was racist.

And this is the thing about identifying these illnesses along with a particular country: they plug into, resonate with, and further institutionalize people's racist ideation, especially those Euro-Americans in power. And here is the true racism, because it can be acted upon through legal, institutional avenues that then reinforce people's racist ideas.

(Chinese) Avian flu, (Mexican) swine flu, (Asian) SARS, all of these illnesses legitimized racist discourses against an entire people, here and abroad.

On returning to this man, he further said that not only would he not want to be around any "Mexicans" at all, but that he didn't think it was safe to go to entire counties because a few "possible" cases might have been identified in those counties. That is akin to asking a person who lives in Los Angeles whether they are alright because an earthquake of 4.4 registered in Morro Bay (that is in the middle of the state). In short, it is quite ridiculous.

Moreover, the chances that you will get sick from this flu strain is very, very small. I mean, really. All the people who have been confirmed to have contracted it had mostly 1)mild symptom, and 2) have added up to may 20. Or 30. All over this nation.

Who is to blame? First, and most obviously, the media. While scientists keep telling the news media that this is not hitting people very hard, even local NPR--for shame--stations rebroadcast the "threat" on the hour, along with the hourly news update.

Second, people are to blame. For being alarmist. Gullible. And watching TV news, which is not news. It's entertainment.

This country seems filled with people who always need a scapegoat, a bugaboo, or some kind of enemy to "fight." Who knows why.

Texas Rep. Betty Brown: She Didnt Insult "Asians"--She Insulted CHINESE-Americans

Here is the text, cited from Thinkprogress, below.

The problem with her subsequent apology is that it is directed at Asian Amnericans, when her racist comment was directed at CHINESE AMERICANS IN PARTICULAR.

This is an important distinction. Because the discourse of racism directed specifically Chinese either born here in the U.S. or foreign born becomes erased, elided, invisible, by the discourse of "Asian Americans" and the supposed collective group that forms.

Sorry, but Asian Americans are not a discrete group. But Asians encompasses South Asia (such as India), Southeast Asian (Thailand, Vietnam, for example) and East Asia (China, Japan and Korea). So "Asians" is not a cohesive group.

Imagine how insulted Northern Europeans would be to be confused with someone from, say, Italy, and you'll understand.

Who says racism is latent in America?

"“Rather than everyone here having to learn Chinese — I understand it’s a rather difficult language — do you think that it would behoove you and your citizens to adopt a name that we could deal with more readily here?” Brown said.

Brown later told [Organization of Chinese Americans representative Ramey] Ko: 'Can’t you see that this is something that would make it a lot easier for you and the people who are poll workers if you could adopt a name just for identification purposes that’s easier for Americans to deal with?'

Pro-Tibet Rhetoric by Euro-Americans Often Is Racist

It is interesting that many Chinese-Americans will not join in the Pro-Tibet rallies. Why not, you wonder? Are they all so awful, have they all been so indoctrinated that they simply cannot contemplate that Tibetans civil, not human, let's call it something that Americans can relate to in their own past, civil rights, are being violated?

The short answer: no. Chinese-Americans, or rather, American-Chinese, get it. Of course they are offended. They think it's wrong. So why don't they join in the debate?

Because pro-Tibet rallies that critique Chinese people are often shorthand for racism against Chinese.

How, you ask?

Let's begin with some basics. Ever notice a white person criticizing Tibet? Think about this. Do they have a lot of American-Chinese friends? No? Number one, then.

Number two, why not? Because they assume that all Chinese people must be bad, because their government, and let's face it, white people always say it's your government since they immediately forget that lots of Chinese people have been here for generations. They're still not American, hence the term American-Chinese, rather than Chinese-American. So, alright. They don't have any faith that these people have any critical thinking skills and can critique the Chinese government. Even though per capita, there are more Chinese people born here and abroad who have professional jobs than Euro-Americans, per capita.

Third, let's see. When was the last time a Chinese person born anywhere suffered from racism, I mean of the institutionalized kind that makes them feel if they are violated even verbally, they can't say anything, they just have to swallow it because otherwise people will just say, "Oh, you're being too sensitive." Yesterday? Okay, so yesterday that just happened. Sanctioned by the community, who doesn't want to hear that you're just too sensitive. You're just being too "touchy." That's right. Institutionalized racism.

Soo, that person next to you complaining about all those civil rights violations occurring across the world? Does she or he care about how the civil rights of that Chinese person standing next to them are constantly being violated, flouted, or otherwise ignored?

And does that person care about how Latinos, so often just "Mexicans" as if it's a dirty word, are being exploited? How their labor is exploited but the government won't legalize them. So they can be exploited and then deported conveniently, to whatever country they come from, when we're done exploiting their labor? Does that person crying "Foul" about Tibet care about them?

Do you see those people demonstrating in the streets? In San Francisco? In Los Angeles? Anywhere? About the poor black man caught smoking pot forty-five years ago in the South and is still in jail? Along with hundreds of his now compadres? Or protesting the government, yes, the federal government, initially introduced drugs to South and East L.A. to keep the black people down who were finally feeling their civil rights? Do you see them protesting that, and all the ills that have resulted from it? Do you see it?

I heard from someone that after all, there isn't a ranking of these kinds of social ills. The one is as bad as the other.

No. They aren't. If it's happening in your own backyard, that's worse. Because you have to take care of your own house before you go pointing the finger at how someone else's is corrupt. Something American's are soo good at doing: pointing the finger elsewhere. Can't think about how we still oppress people here.

It's so much easier to point the finger at China and Tibet. It's not an issue of condoning heinous civil rights violations abroad. It's about doing something about the heinous, continued civil rights violations here, in the U.S., of the poor, disadvantaged or just plain colored people.

If you're so worried about civil rights violations, shut up. And do something. Here. In your community. With your government. Protest that. Or are you too racist or bigoted to care about the poor people in the South? The disadvantaged colored people in the cities? And the exploited migrant women and men picking all your vegetables?

"I don't like Chinese food" Often Equals Racism

It does sound like a leap, but bear with this reasoning.

In an article the other day, an actor who was filming in Hong Kong over the summer vehemently declared he "hated Chinese food." He was there for three months, had nothing to say about traveling, the culture, different as it is from China since it was a colony for 150 years and is inexorably changed, and nothing to say about the experience. Just that he hated Chinese food.

Hmm. What happened to all the other aspects of Hong Kong that are interesting? I know, for the sanitized white tourist, it's far too difficult to embrace.

Imagine that same white tourist, this one from Boston where the actor was from, in, say, India. Suddenly things change, don't they? Because India was a colony for over 300 years, white people who find it far too intimidating to travel to China or even Hong Kong will travel to India. Why? Because int he popular imaginary, there is nothing threatening about India. The people, most obviously, have been subdued for centuries. That they finaly threw off the shackles of colonialism happened only in the recent past. Look how long it's been trying to overcome the long-lasting effects of centuries of slavery and you'll understand that fifty years means nothing compared to hundreds of years. India was a colony for over 300.

So people know that the Indians will speak English. They feel that they ar a non-threatening peole. They aren't violent. They've adopted an originally British Indianized dish of Chicken Tiki Masala, just for the Western palate, even. And theydon't do violent things. They are, in short, nonthreatening.

Imagine China, now. People do't speak the language. The government has never been touched by a Western hand. And the Communism? It wasn't as Marx envisioned. It was never an economic system in China, just another form of imperial control, under a different name. The peole have never been cowed. They do things so differently. There isn't a lot of history about China that has not aready been sanitized by hundreds of years of Western scholars. There are, in short, unknown. Hence threatening. And the likelihood that a Westerner traveling to China knows the language? Right.

So when someone says, I don't like Chinese food, what they are saying is Chinese food is a proxy for a culture and a people they find different, threatening, scary and unable to e cowed. By Western values of "democracy" or "humanity"--yes, that's why we criminalize same-sex marriage, here, homosexuality, colored people, single mothers--yes, we are humane, here, incarcerating old men over fifty years in the South because once, a black man sold some pot. Gee. And what happens to Robert Downey, Jr.? A few months? Hmm. But we are humane. Yes, we are. We value human rights. We don't incarcerate, criminalkize or otherwise discriminate. Unless somehow those groups deserve it.

And imagine if someone said, I hate hot dogs and baseball. What would be the reaction? You mean you hate America?

The Rafael Vinoly "Grant"

The premise of Rafael Vinoly’s research grant is to foster deeper understanding, one presumes, in the arenas of architecture, urbanism and material culture.

However, this premise seems to be a sham. This year’s competition explored the built environment of developing nations. The purpose was to understand and address problems inherent in countries like China, India, and presumably those in Africa. But China was the first area they specified as being interested in understanding.

So I submitted a proposal. It was a critique on the fact that Westerners, Americans and Europeans alike, assume that western designs in China, including the Nest, the Egg, CCTV Tower and the Cube, are representative of both the problems and the inadequate solutions for a unique Chinese urbanization.

The problem is that Chinese modernization supposedly victimizes the individual. It tears down “traditional” architecture like hutongs, which no one ever acknowledges are a uniquely Beijing typology.

Well, Beijing is not a stand-in for all of China. But it has become that.

As for Beijing “fatigue,” a phenomenon in which architects think they have fully explored Beijing, the problem is they haven’t explored it at all. What they have explored is themselves: Western architecture in Beijing. The editor in charge of Beijing at Architectural Record, for example, never actually explores Beijing. Instead, he helps people exoticize elements of Beijing that Westerners find interesting. Not coincidentally, these elements are the Western designs in Beijing named above.

But as for documenting the rest of Beijing, what Beijingers really experience, no, that’s not interesting. That does not reinforce assumptions westerners have about Beijing: that it dehumanizes people with its monument, that it is an out-of-control city developing with not regard for the people, and that Beijinger’s really miss their traditional architecture, which supposedly represents the pinnacle of Chinese architecture.

First, there are innumerable neighborhoods in Beijing of a human scale. No one ever bothers documenting those. And since Western architects can’t never speak the language when they go over there, how would they know what Beijingers feel about their city, anyway? Imagine if some Chinese person came over to the U.S. to study NY architecture, assuming it represented all of the U.S., and didn’t speak the language? Americans are so narrow-minded and gringoistic that they would immediately protest, “How can you study us without speaking American?” Yes, and the same goes for architectural tourists traveling in China who lament what’s going on without understanding the first thing about China. Like William Menking. The arrogance of his assumptions about China is mind-boggling: he knows nothing about it, doesn't speak the language, doesn't hold a degree in it, and has never visited there. But he sure is certain that the U.S. is superior, it doesn't trample people's human rights. Evidently, he has been out to lunch during this entire administration, doesn't understand how our prison system is racist, and knows absolutely nothing about institutionalized racism, sexism and classicism. But since he knows nothing of these problems in the U.S., it's alright to engage in architecture here.

Modernization is not defined by Western progress. It just isn’t. Other countries must necessarily define and determine their own trajectory towards a modernization that is uniquely their own. The West does not equal Modernization with a capital “M” but just typifies a modernization, one of many.

And the argument that “traditional” architecture represents the pinnacle of Chinese architectural innovation and that it should be saved? Well, as long as these people have access to other housing, do white Americans traveling as architectural tourists to Beijing know for a fact that they lament losing their housing? Have most of these hutongs actually been seen by superior Americans, or is that just a projected lament about our own inability to preserve our own monuments? Yes. That’s what these people do best: project.

Indeed, what is never specified is what elements of “traditional” architecture the hutongs represent that are so great. Never once is that specified. Instead, hutongs are used as an indictment of how the “Chinese government” is insensitive to the “people” and victimizes them. Of course, then when Americans begin talking about those “people” they begin talking about the ethnic minority, in a dizzying display of a lack of logic. These writers and architects don’t really care about the Han Chinese except as a symbol to indict the government. But as for actually understanding what these people want and need? No. That task is reserved for the ethnic minorities, the Tibetans and Uighurs are current favorite darlings of Westerners, but again, the discourse is “Isn’t the Chinese government awful?” The goal is never to truly understand but to reinforce the superiority of Americans and Western Europeans.

Finally, Rafael Vinoly grant doesn’t seem interested in people actually qualified to determine what is needed by Chinese people in order to propose architectural proposals that are not just projections. After all, in order to determine what is needed, one needs to speak the language. Have studied the history and culture so as not to exoticize. And have, finally, training in architecture. But one needs all those things. Speaking the language or living in China do not necessarily qualify one because again, one needs training in how to approach the problem.

In other words, one needs to know how to critically think. Something most architects lack. Critical thinking skills. They are too often seduced by surface. Which inevitably, always, culturally colonializes the Other.

Debunking the "Model Minority" Chinese-American Myth

There is a cohort of Chinese-Americans, of whom one suspects Amy Tan is one, who embrace the "Model Minority" mentality.

Here's how it goes:

We are Chinese-Americans in California. We have been oppressed since our relatives from the Toisan area of Southern China. Indeed, the racism and oppression was institutionalized by law that limited our status and our access. We are proud of being successful, law-abiding citizens whose ancestors hail from this very modest, indeed poor, area of Southern China, in Guangdong province. We like to wear "traditional" Chinese clothing to all events, drawing attention to our pride in our heritage. And we also try to make connections to each other wherever we can through last names.

1) We are Chinese-Americans who have been institutionally oppressed since our relatives came over from Toisan, Guangdong, China, in the 1800's.

That's true. Obviously. The issue is not merely about a singular oppression against Chinese Americans, however. In the rush to focus on "Chinese-American" issues, many of this particular generation of Chinese Americans ignore the larger issues of racism and bigotry that exist. Not in the naive sense that they don't know they exist or that something needs to be done about these issues. Rather, this particular cohort, who ranges from around their mid-50's and older, they tend to focus on how they are "special" and that this specialness has been ignored because there are so many other groups, such as Black-Americans and Latino-Americans, who have grabbed the spotlight of "We Are Most Oppressed by Whites" in this country.

Therefore, this cohort consistently draws attention to the institutionalized ways in which they were oppressed. Good. Fine.

How about thinking of ways to draw attention to themselves other than proclaiming that "We Are Oppressed, Too"? How about focusing on how to mobilize institutionalized agency and power? How about training Chinese-Americans, from wherever they originally hail, including Mainland China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, to not be so narrow-minded as to think that, simply because they have a job as a Doctor or Attorney that they don't experience racism and oppression? That racism is an institutionalized phenomenon, not an individual one. That it is not something that happens to you as an individual, but as a member of a group. Therefore, even if you are personally not a victim now that this does not preclude that possibility in the future because you are part of that group. Moreover, it does not help combat the other, more vulnerable members of your group that you yourself are personally doing alright for now--by being passive and disengaging yourself from the larger discourse, you are aiding and abetting the continued marginalization of Chinese Americans?

How about teaching people that fact instead of just focusing on historical wrongs?

2) We are from Toisan, Guangdong Province, China, and we are proud of that fact, which makes us law-abiding.

Every time this is averred by some self-proclaimed member of this group, it makes one think of Shakespeare: Methinks he doth protest too much.

The issue is not that your relatives were from a very poor part of town in a poor part of the country at the time and that, wow, look at us now, we're successful! The issue is, what can you do to raise agency, not just individual success, but agency, of all Chinese Americans? Does drawing attention to your ancestors' humble beginnings, and the fact that you are a fourth-generation American do that? No. How about focusing instead on how Chinese Americans are too focused on individual success, to the detriment of the collective? How about shifting the focus to the collective? How about teaching the new generation about getting involved in the community, rather than pounding into their heads that they have to be doctors who, by the way, have absolutely no power in the community and change nothing for the status of Chinese Americans in the eyes of White America? Gee, what a concept!

As for law-abiding, again, that's good. But it's not good to be docile. And passive. And not willing to engage the larger community that is non-Chinese American. Until we get White American to listen, we will continue being the "pet" that is really what model minority means. Model Minority was a moniker coined by Euro-Americans to emasculate and ultimately to keep the Chinese Americans down--it's a verbal pat on the head. Don't wear it like it's a good thing.

3) We like to wear "Traditional" Clothing to every event.

Don't. Unless you enjoy exoticizing yourself and reinforcing that yes, those Chinese (and believe me, they don't think Chinese Americans, they only think "Chinese") are so traditional. Read: so marginal. So backwards. They do make lovely clothing, but you know, they haven't contributed to the global society in hundreds of years, except by polluting the air--did you know that America gets China's polluted air?

Actually, America produces its own polluted air. All those factories back East. And we pollute Canada's air, too. I mean, really, how in the world can that air travel half-way across the globe just to target American airspace? Americans need to get over themselves on that one.

But Chinese Americans need to stop wearing that stuff unless making an ironical statement is the intent. Amidst lots of hipster White people who might appreciate it. Otherwise, it just reinforces how Chinese people just used to be "so clever but they haven't done anything significant in years." Truly powerful people always dress accordingly. When in Rome and all. They never wear Edwardian tea dresses to fancy balls or Consulate General gatherings. Don't do the Chinese equivalent.

4) Making connections with other Chinese Americans through last names.

Short and sweet. It's like asking someone who went to UPenn, so I have a friend so-and-so who went there--know him/her? It's not necessarily bonding to discover you have the same last name as someone else that this person you just met knows and yet you aren't related. How is that empowering? It's just annoying. Why not make connections about something more significant, like asking what the person does, what they want to do. How that contributes, etc, etc. In other words, how about making substantive conversation about real issues?