Monday, November 27, 2017

That was awkward


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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