I had sent messages
asking if it would be all right to identify the pertinent people and entities
for Tuesday's and Wednesday's post. That is partly because I value consent.
Also, after following so many intersectional feminists who so often occupy
marginalized places and are targeted for abuse because of that, I worry
sometimes that praise or recommendations could attract abusers.
Generally the people I
would want to recommend are more prominent than I am, so it's probably not a
risk. Maybe some caution still doesn't hurt.
I did find that it
affected how I wrote the Dangerously White post. I would love to brag about my
diverse neighborhood, and point out the areas where you could expect conflict and
yet everyone gets along okay, but my neighbors are not prominent. They are not
wealthy (or they probably wouldn't live here). Many don't have cars; we have
good bus access but that still involves some walking and during that part of
the trip you can be pretty vulnerable. Maybe it's better not to draw attention
to it.
I was thinking about that
because I initially did not hear back from one of the requests. I simply left
out his name and identifying information, and then when he wrote back that it
was fine I added a note, and it led to me reading the post again.
That reminded me how I
did not include street names or neighborhoods for my area, but it also reminded
me of the awkward way I recounted that BART incident. There was a reason it was
awkward.
I may have seemed
unnecessarily focused on color when I called the assailant white and the target
not white. It was about color though.
Yes, the odds of a person
of color in the San Francisco area with the last name Wu having Chinese heritage is pretty high, but
that doesn't make him Chinese.
The first major wave of
Chinese immigration to the United States happened over the 1850s to 1880s. Philadelphia's Chinatown goes
back to at least 1871. Ellis Island - symbol of immigrating to America - did not open up until 1892. Granted, the US
government did a lot to try and prevent those early immigrants from staying and
having families, but there could easily be Wu's who have been here for five or
six generations. Does it make sense to still call them Chinese?
And if they have kept in
touch with their heritage, that is great. That is something that enriches life.
In my family it is a little different because on one side we have a first
generation immigrant and on the other I have to go back to the 1600s or 1700s
(depending on the line) to find the first ones born in this country. I admit we
feel closer to the Italian side, for many reasons. I am still glad to know
about the other side, and that there are people who have kept records and held
onto that knowledge.
For all of that, none of
it makes me Welsh or English or Scottish or French or Dutch. I was born here,
went to school here, and except for a layover in Amsterdam I haven't visited any of those countries. I
visit Italy, but I come back here. I pay taxes here. I belong to the United
States, and no one questions that, because I am white.
And it is certainly
possible that the people of Asian descent that you see are more recent
arrivals. For a lot of my friends, they were born here but their parents were
not. They're still American (which would be more accurately written as USian, I
know). Their lives are here.
No one wrote that an
American man attacked a Chinese man, because then the problem was too obvious.
No one would try writing that a white man attacked a "yellow" man,
because even my writing it here as an example of getting it wrong feels
incredibly gross. "Brown" man does not feel much better, though
perhaps a little less hateful. A white man attacked a person of color is
accurate, though that glides over some very specific aspects to that attack.
So then the most common
solution becomes writing that a white man attacked an Asian man, which sounds accurate
but is missing a lot. Hence, my original word choice, which I still acknowledge
as awkward, but I have to support for at least trying not to ignore any of the
key issues.
And you can get a lot
more into it with more detail. There are interesting discussions to be had
about the racist white guy pairing "Chinese" with the N-word. There
are conversations you could have about the history of the Bay area and racial
animus there. It could be interesting to note how Blackness at least seems to
be perceived as American, and yet how that doesn't really help.
It could be really
pertinent to talk about how the United States Attorney General now asks where
terror suspects are from, and if they are US born he will start asking about
their heritage because he just knows there has to be a connection. That might
be important. It could certainly be important to talk about how his
understanding only supports the goal of building a whiter society but not a
safer or more peaceful or more just one.
But I think the most
disturbing and most important question is that one, about why not being white
links you to your lineage in a way that whiteness doesn't. We should wonder why
people who are so concerned about their heritage as white people and losing
that heritage think that other people can't be separated from theirs.
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