Why Racism against Asians is Muted.

My writing and literature teachers all praised my work — with the exception of one professor who thought people of my color shouldn’t be writing and should be sticking to things “we” were good at like science or math, and as I thought he couldn’t do me any more harm, he outdid himself by managing to insult me further by requesting that I stop wasting his office hours ‘when good white or Jewish students could be using them to advance their art’. But for the rest of the professors who did love me, they often used my essays and written pieces as examples they’d show off in class. I was glad to acquiesce a skill I didn’t know I had. I delved into the creative word with much joy and aplomb. I read even more than I did in high school and widened the breadth of what I read by taking an eclectic variety of courses. One class I particularly loved was the East Asian Women Studies course. I was the only guy in a class of ten. The professor was an adorable, but fierce white lady. The rest of the students were mostly Asian or Asian American women. The group sat around a table to discuss reading material and share stories of their own experiences. I sat humbly and had the privilege to listen to the tragedy our women had been going through. How the Asian woman had been sexualized during the wars. Many American men’s only interaction with Asian women were through forced prostitution. Back home, American women hated Asian women because they accused them of taking their husbands and making them cheat on them. During one of the classes I remember a Vietnamese student recalling an interaction she had with a white male parent at her high school. He was an older man who had gone to war and come back. In this particular year of high school her body had just filled out. (The girl who was telling this story happened to have a large chest.) She told us that on her first day of her junior year, in a small homogenous town in Kentucky, everyone was looking at her with menacing eyes. This one particular white man locked his gaze onto her and told her, “I probably fucked your mom over there, I wouldn’t mind me some seconds.” I was appalled. The girl sobbed intensely as she concluded her story. It was the first time she was able to share that story with anyone. Our professor had done a beautiful thing to create a safe space for these ladies to be allowed to share. I was honored and blessed to be in the wings of that sanctum, to know that I was entrusted to hear this atrocity against her.

In my upperclassmen years at school, I began to ponder upon the instances of racism against myself and other Asians and Asian Americans. I unfortunately witnessed and heard countless stories from friends and classmates alike. But many of them mentioned similar sentiments of this being the first time they could share with anyone. It bothered me to know that these major issues were so hidden, so tucked away. I called my mom for the first time in a while to ask her opinions on these things and asked her if she ever experienced racism. I wasn’t prepared for her answer. I hadn’t spoke to my mom for that length of time since I was a kid. She told me of how she was bullied by the Hispanic girls all throughout middle and high school, which was when she first arrived from Korea. She told me the Koreans stuck together because there were so few of them, but also frankly, for safety. She also told me a story that she had never told anyone either about a perverted white man pulling up to her asking her for directions and then exposing himself to her while masturbating. I cried so hard, but didn’t let her hear my tears over the phone. Even my mother, my sweet, innocent mother. How could our people go through this and say nothing? The fury built up inside me like I wanted to physically assault someone, but there was no one to physically attack. All I could do was slump down and cry in anger. I felt helpless, there was nothing anyone was going to do about it. Why did the world not know? If they did, why did they not care?

I began to contemplate and search within what I knew about my culture and about what I had learned about our neighboring Asian cultures. I started to understand that our society was based in hiding your guilt and shame. Broadcasting a story about how you were dishonored was not something we were supposed to share. The only open lamentations of race in America were done by our black brothers and sisters and it was in their media that I was able to find some solace of how I felt. Unfortunately, Asians didn’t have a platform to talk about our race in television or film so I could only consult the other non-white presence in the media. I watched a lot of Dave Chappelle, Chris Rock, Eddie and Charlie Murphy, Russell Peters, even Tyler Perry movies. I learned a lot, laughed a lot, and cried just as much. In one black television show (Justin Simien’s ‘Dear White People’ on Netflix), I was struck by a line articulated by one of the black female leads who lived amongst the echelon of the wealthy white Americans. For whatever reason, my heart understood her. She had come into the upper class from nothing because she did anything and everything to be a classy, successful, respectable, black woman. When she went to her people, she was accused by her black friends, who was suffering bigotry from the upper white class, for becoming like them, and in return she plainly stated, “it’s not assimilation, it’s self-preservation.” And that line suddenly represented the Asian American struggle to me. Our mother cultures, which were so proud, wanted for us, the children, to be great. To only be a part of the top of society. They wanted us to be doctors and lawyers because they believed that that was the fastest way to join the upper class. Along the way, they probably experienced racism too, but they paid no attention to it out of self-preservation, not because they accepted or assimilated into the American culture. That’s why rich Asian Americans still have ancient, traditional, expensive, Asian art, and cultural decorations at their house. The goal wasn’t to become an American person devoid of their mother culture, but to make it all the way to the top and then expose their original lives that were preserved on the way up. They didn’t view it as a necessity to be treated well on the journey to the top as long as they made it there. They could do whatever they wanted, once they had gotten there. This desire to do whatever it took to be considered an equal by the elite was greater than the desire to be treated well, like an equal person, as long as you got there. I remember seeing an older Asian woman in line getting mistreated by a white man, and when I tried to intervene, she saw me and motioned me away and then turned around to mistreat the black people behind her. I asked her why she did that, and she said, “the man deserved to be there and talk to me that way, he’s richer and more educated than me, the kids behind me are poor, they didn’t earn their place before me.” She didn’t point out their race, but she acknowledged socio-economic status and accepted the hierarchy presented. Like this woman, for other Asians, once they made it to the top, who could question or insult them? In a culture where hierarchies are so willingly accepted and a part of every nook of society, if these people, who thought this was the way to reach the top of their self-realized hierarchy, if they got what they wanted, the rest was dismissible. This unfortunate interaction helped me understand why Asians brushed off a majority of racist experiences, because the people on the ‘higher level’ than them had the right to mistreat them, it was acceptable to them because, as sad as it sounds, they know they would do the same. To use a phrase of Mark Zuckerberg’s, Asian culture teaches you to be bracing pain, willingly, till you had ‘fuck you money’. We were not going to fight a petty thing like racism for each other because we were too busy selfishly pursuing our own goals of getting to the top. Climbing the mountainous ranks of society was a 25/8 kind of lifestyle. The problem with racism against Asians and Asian Americans is that they, nay we, accept it because the motherland’s culture mandates you to hide your shame, to be passive and non-confrontational, and accept that you are not the ruling class.

The first step is admitting you have a problem.

I don’t think we ever will.