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. In other words, I didn’t know whether to tell this guy to fuck off or give him a history lesson.
THIS! This is exactly how I felt when I talked about race and gender with my Public Policy master’s practicum teammates. Sebastian would say something along the lines of, “Rachel! We are all human! All human beings are equal! We’re equal!” to which I’d respond, “well yes, we are and we should be, but we’re also not!” “why?!” “because you’re a white man and I’m not!”
This is why it’s so frustrating when cis het white men boast being “able to have civil, calm discussions” when it comes to topics like race, gender, and sexuality. Well yes because your identity is not being discussed/debated. Emotional distance and ignorace are not something to brag about. In fact, it just shows how little you care. The ability to afford emotional distance whilst discussing such issues are the very sign of privilege, not one of superior character or intellect.
It’s funny though because the very people that need to hear these stories/read books like Minor Feelings probably aren’t reading them.
Most Americans know nothing about Asian Americans. They think Chinese is synecdoche for Asians the way Kleenex is for tissues. They don’t understand that we’re this tenuous alliance of many nationalities.
I know now that the term ‘Asian American’ was coined to unify lots of people for the purpose of racial justice, but the term also makes it too easy for people to view the group as a monolith, ignoring the centuries of history between each Asian country.
Sometimes, I get frustrated by other people’s lack of knowledge about things like the Korean War but then I realize that I also know very little about some other countries’ histories. While I do think that the American education system should do better in including important historical events that are currently not widely taught (but then again who decides what’s “important” and what isn’t? and how?), I also don’t think it’s realistic or fair for me (and other Asians) to expect others to know as much about our own histories as we do.
…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 questioned or dismissed. Minor feelings arise, for instance, upon hearing a slight, knowing it’s racial, and being told, Oh, that’s all in your head.
Was that person being rude, racist, or both? Or none of the above?
Innocence is, as Bernstein writes, not just an “absence of knowledge” but “an active state of repelling knowledge,” embroiled in the statement, “Well, I don’t see race” where I eclipses the seeing. Innocence is both a privilege and a cognitive handicap, a sheltered unknowingness that, once protracted into adulthood, hardens into entitlement.
What Erin and I talked about a few weeks back — when you’re a child, or even up to the early years of college, your parents are mostly responsible for what you know and how much you know. Marie Antoinette said, “let them eat cake” because she was never allowed outside her palace walls. But as we grow older, whether we stay ‘innocent,’ sheltered, or ignorant or we learn more about other and different parts of the world/types of people is a choice that is deliberate, both when taken and not taken. ‘That’s just the way they were raised’ works as an excuse (even then, to a certain extent) only up to a certain point.
English was not an expression of me but a language that was out to get me, threaded with invisible trip wires that could expose me at the slightest misstep.
I’d always thought of language as a means of expression, so I’ve never thought of it as something that could feel like a thing that was “out to get” someone, but reading this helped me realize that this is probably how English feels to a lot of ESL speakers, including my own family.
In our efforts to belong in America, we act grateful, as if we’ve been given a second chance at life. But our shared root is not the opportunity this nation has given us but how the capitalist accumulation of white supremacy has enriched itself off the blood of our countries. We cannot forget this.
Don’t tell me — or look at me as if I am rudely forgetting —to say thank you about the American troops who fought in the Korean War or the troops who are currently on our soil.
English tuned an experience that should be in the minor key to a major key; there was an intimacy and melancholy in Korean that were lost when I wrote in English, a language which I, from my childhood, associated with customs officers, hectoring teachers, and Hallmark cards.
Thought the first sentence was so poetically and beautifully written.
Sow the cratered lands with candy and from its wrappers will rise Capitalism and Christianity. About her homeland, the poet Emily Jungmin Yoon writes, “Our cities today glow with crosses like graveyards.”
Damn
The most damaging legacy of the West has been its power to decide who our enemies are, turning us not only against our own people, like North and South Korea, but turning me against myself.
Damn!!
My ancestral country is just one small example of the millions of lives and resources you have sucked from the Philippines, Cambodia, Honduras, Mexico, Iraq, Afghanistan, Nigeria, El Salvador, and many, many other nations through your forever wars and transnational capitalism that have mostly enriched shareholders in the States. Don’t talk to me about gratitude.
Julia and some other friends had recommended this book to me, and I’m glad I finally came around to reading this book. I went into it thinking that there’d be some parts that I found resonating/relatable and some parts that didn’t, and I was right but I actually was pleasantly surprised by how Cathy Park Hong so eloquently captured some of the things I’d thought before. There were some parts that I didn’t find relatable, of course, (we are two different individuals from different generations and backgrounds, after all, despite the fact that we share the identity of being Korean American women) like her weird/toxic friendships and relationship with her family. And there were times when I thought the way in which she talks about the Asian American experience broadly were in contrast with her point about how we are a ‘tenuous alliance.’ I’d like to think that there were invisible asterisks next to her generalizations that other readers would have been able to infer as well. I wouldn’t be surprised if this book were already ‘required reading’ for many Asian American studies/history classes in colleges. I just wish that some people who really should read this book (who are probably not found in the classrooms of Asian American studies) could also read this and educate themselves, instead of asking the Asan people around them to educate them or worse, harassing them. It would be a big mistake for someone to read this, pat themselves on the back, and think they’ve done their ‘homework’ on reading up on the Asian American experience, though — this book should serve as a starting point, if not just one of many perspectives we read.
