“If we all could just admit/That we are racist, a little bit/Even though we all know that it’s wrong/Maybe it would help us/Get along.”—“Everyone’s a Little Bit Racist,” Avenue Q (watch the full song at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x9CSnlb-ymA)
I’ll admit it: I’m a racist.
If you read my post a few days ago about how the Sakae program is going (which I have since deleted), you’ll remember that I made some comments about the Japanese students’ accents. Now, I admit that I was tired and a bit crabby when I wrote that post, but still, racism seems to be something that comes out at our worst moments. During economic downturns (like the depression that we seem to be stuck in), hate crimes are on the rise. People need someone to blame for their troubles, and immigrants seem to be popular scapegoats. During good economic times, someone might not care that a nonAmerican gets a certain job, because there are more than enough jobs to be had. However, when times are tough and work is scarce, a lynch mob might form when someone outside of the narrow WASP category gets work while the “poor” and “helpless” white man is being kept down by the “impure” races.
Of course, you don’t have to be part of a lynch mob to be a racist. Most of us agree that hate crimes are terrible things. We gasp in horror when we hear about cross burnings on the news. If a foreign exchange student is teased, we bemoan (rightly) how ignorant Americans are of the rest of the world. Guess what? We can still be racists.
Racism doesn’t have to be that big. It can be much more subtle. It can be thinking that someone isn’t as smart as you are just because that person has a different accent. It can be holding onto your purse just a little bit tighter when you pass a black man in the street. It can be complaining about road signs written in English and Spanish. (To any American who has a problem with this: Go to a big Chinese city like Shanghai or Beijing. There street signs, restaurant signs, and advertisements are written in at least four languages—Mandarin, Japanese, English, and German. Sometimes more. And you don’t hear the Chinese complaining about it.) It can be thinking that the Native Americans are a legendary people who lived in America a long time ago. It can even be well-meant at times. For instance, if you speak Standard English normally, but greet a black person by imitating Ebonics, that’s a form of racism.
Often, I like to think that Americans aren’t that racist, but after spending several days with the Japanese Sakae students, I’m beginning to realize my own racism.
Guess what? That’s okay. Admitting that I have biases, that I buy into stereotypes, and that I make quick and often unfair judgments about people is fine. We all do it! We’re surrounded by it. The other American program assistant (PA) and I were watching an episode of Family Guy in which the Griffin family breaks Lois out of jail and goes on the lamb in…Asiantown! The other PA and I looked at each other with a mixture of amusement and horror. “Do you feel racist?” I asked him. “Yes!” he answered. My point: racism is everywhere. It’s built into our society. (By the way, he is writing a blog about his experiences in the program at http://www.ctlgsakae.blogspot.com/. Forgive him if he doesn’t update it very often. We’ve all been very busy these past few days.)
Before the Sakae program, I probably would have watched this Family Guy episode and analyzed it from an objected, distanced, English-major point of view. I would have applied postcolonial criticism and planned a paper discussing how Family Guy both deconstructs America’s Asian stereotypes by self-consciously calling attention to them and yet also supports these stereotypes through humor.
Post-Sakae, however, I couldn’t see the episode that way. I couldn’t laugh at it. All I could think was, “This is wrong.”
It’s wrong that all Asians look like Jackie Chan. There are thirty-one students in this program, and they all look completely different. I could never mistake one of them for the other. They all look too different, and they all also have different personalities. Some of them are tall. Some of them are short. The bone structure in their faces is different. Their eyes are different shapes and hues. Their body types are different. Their hair styles are different. They don’t look the same.
It’s wrong that all Asians don’t pronounce their r’s and l’s correctly. One of the students actually speaks English with a thick British accent. And even though we think that the Japanese pronounce those letters incorrectly, in their language, they don’t. In Japanese, the letters r and l are rolled together so that they sound a little bit like both letters at once. (I really can’t explain what this sounds like. It’s a bit like the v being pronounced like b in Spanish, but it’s also different.) The fact that this sound really doesn’t exist in English makes the Americans seem a bit ruder, because we can’t correctly pronounce some of the Japanese students’ names. Confusing “playing” with “praying,” might be a minor mistake, but incorrectly pronouncing someone’s name is a bigger mistake.
And what right do Americans have to criticize how the Japanese speak English in the first place? Most Japanese students start learning English when they are ten years old. When do American students start learning Japanese? Most never learn it.
So, I know all of this. I know that I tend to stereotype groups of people based on their race. I also know that these stereotypes are wrong. Does that still make me a racist? Yep. However, the difference between me and a member of the KKK is that I know that my racism is wrong, and I’m willing to work around it. I’m willing to admit that I need to learn about different cultures and different races. I’m willing to get to know people of other races and relate to them on a level that goes beyond race. I’m willing to see them as human. I’m willing to admit that no race is superior to the other because race is actually not biological at all but is a social construct.
Genetically, you have more in common with someone of a different race who is the same height as you than you have in common with someone of the same race but of a different height. And since we all share 99.9 percent of our DNA with every other human being in the world, biologically, we’re all pretty much the same. So, where does race come in? Race was actually an invention of Western people to justify the African slave trade and colonialism. (This doesn’t mean that racism wasn’t around before in some form, but this is when a lot of our contemporary ideas about race start to come up.) Before, people judged other cultures as inferior because they had different religious traditions. But, as black slaves began accepting Christianity, abolitionists began pointing out that there was something wrong with treating your Christian brothers and sisters like beasts of burden.
However, people were unwilling to get rid of their slaves and stop enforcing their own systems of government on foreign peoples, so they had to come up with a new reason to feel superior. Western whites tried to justify their prejudices with pseudoscience and flawed logic. People who were not white were incapable of higher thinking, they said. People who were not white were only fit for grueling, manual labor. People who were not white did not have the mental capacity to be properly educated. However, the reason that people who were not white were this way had nothing to do with biology. It was because of the environment that white people placed them in. Black slaves seemed ignorant to educated white men because the educated white men did not provide the black slaves any way to be educated. Whites created a self-fulfilling prophecy by making bogus assumptions about people of different races and then creating conditions in which those assumptions became true…some of the time.
Unfortunately, even though our scientific understanding of biology should have done away with racism, our fears and prejudices are still with us. A lot of us know that these prejudices are wrong, but we don’t seem to know how to get over them. Now, I think I’ve found a solution:
One of the things that I hoped working for the Sakae program would do would be to confirm my theory that getting to know more about something or someone makes that thing less scary. So far, this theory y seems to hold true. At the beginning of the program, I was terrified of meeting the Japanese students. They were all sitting in the common room of the dorm for dinner, and they were all chatting away in Japanese, which I do not speak. I was afraid that I wouldn’t be able to understand them. I was afraid that they wouldn’t be able to understand me. I was afraid that they wouldn’t like me. I was afraid that I would do something that would offend them.
But, I took a deep breath, smiled at them, and started talking. I showed interest in them and their culture. I showed interest in them as people. And they have returned the favor. I’ve taught them about American culture, and they’ve taught me about Japanese culture. I’ve helped them speak English more fluently, and they are teaching me some basic Japanese. I’ve gotten to know them, and I’m not afraid of them anymore. I know that with a little patience, we’ll be able to find some way to understand each other.
As I’ve gotten to know the students, I’ve stopped seeing them as Japanese. That’s not to say that I don’t still realize that they are Japanese. However, when I look at them, I don’t think of them as just Japanese. I might think of one as an excellent percussionist, who also happens to be Japanese. I might think of another as a good baseball player, who also happens to be Japanese. I might think of another as a serious student, who also happens to be Japanese. In other words, I have a more complete understanding of them as people. Their nationality is still something that I recognize, but it isn’t the only defining factor of who they are to me.
The only way that we can get past our own racism is to interact with people of other races. We need to learn more about their cultures and customs, as well as who they are just as people. We need to be open to the idea that not everyone looks like us or behaves like us or values the same things that we do. That’s okay. Neither group has to be wrong or right. We just need to accept that we will have some differences. If we are aware of these differences, it can make getting to know people of different races easier and less scary.
We need to know what our initial assumptions about people of different races will be, and we also need to be open to adjusting those assumptions, because when you meet people of different races, a lot of your initial assumptions will change. And, trust me, they will change for the better. But if we’re going to go about changing them, we have to first recognize that they exist.
Life as a Cup of Coffee 