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There is no history of racism in this country that chalked ‘up only to race.’ You can’t really talk about stereotypes of, say, black laziness unless you understand stereotypes of the poor stretching back to 17th century Great Britain. You can’t really talk about the Southern slave society without grappling with the relationship between the demand for arable land and the demand for labor. You can’t understand the racial pogroms at the turn of the century without understanding the increasing mobility of American women.

And this works the other way too. If you’re trying to understand the nature of American patriotism without thinking about anti-black racism, you will miss a lot. If you’re trying to understand the New Deal, without thinking about Southern segregationist senators you will miss a lot. If you’re trying to understand the very nature of American democracy itself, and not grappling with black you, you will miss almost all of it.

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- Ta-Nehisi Coates on white resentment, Obama, and Appalachia. (via theatlantic)

(via theatlantic)

"My mom subscribes to Cultural Bucket Brigade Theory, which is to say, every generation hands a pail of culture to the one that follows, and winces as the latter clumsily lets half of it spill out."

- Jeff Yang (“The Real Reason Why Asian Americans Are Outmarrying Less,” WSJ)

Internalized Racism | The Good Men Project

aahousecourse:

“So, yes, I’m racist. And so are you. And if that pisses you off, allow me to elucidate.

Much of the problem, to my mind, comes from the fact that we tend to identify people as racist, making it an adjective, or worse, as a racist, turning the adjective into a noun. By saying “that guy’s a racist” we implicitly wall-off the racism, imprison it in his flesh, and by implication taint every aspect of his being with it. We free ourselves from the idea that “a racist” is something we could ever be, allowing us to remain the stainless heroes of our own stories. After all, we don’t burn crosses on people’s lawns, we don’t use certain epithets, and we don’t consciously think “Gosh, I sure do hate people of ethnicities different from my own!””

Some pretty good shit.

Yeah yeah.

DIFFERENT RACISMS: On Jeremy Lin and How the Rules of Racism are Different for Asian Americans | The Rumpus

“[F]or a long time, I wrote only about white characters….The breakthrough came when I started to be able to read my own stories objectively. Something was not making sense. Why were my characters who they were? I inserted plenty of flashbacks and backstory to try to “explain” them. But in the end, I realized that what they were missing…was a crucial piece of me that had gone into them. They were Asian, like me.”

Wow, I did not see that coming. (It probably means something that no one really questioned the characters in my writing before.) I’ve always written white characters, I guess, under the implicit assumption that they were raceless (because their race was not mentioned, therefore white was default), and that this would give my writing more universality, would provide it more literary oomph somehow. And Salesses is right that Asian-American writers are relegated to some other, non-mainstream realm, where the connotation is that their work is somehow reductively about race only. On the other hand, just as there is no ungendered subject, there is no unraced subject either - we can’t remove those filters from our experience of reality.

But now that I think about it I always fought a somewhat subconscious battle with naming my characters. Whenever I named someone Jordan or Caroline or Esther or something that to me very obviously indicated their whiteness, I felt this tug of cognitive dissonance - in a way I think I was reacting to the fact that I’d distanced myself from them by giving each of them a white identity and therefore the experiences/background/lived history of a white person. And that if I’d done this to my characters - made them white - then did I still know how to write from their perspectives? Recently I’ve found that I’ve started avoiding names entirely, leaving my protagonists with only generic gendered pronouns instead.

Coming as this does at the tail end of my creative writing thesis, I have to say I’m perturbed and perplexed. A lot to unravel here.

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That is precisely how I feel when I consider my own journey, my own family’s travels. For here I am now, standing in a new country. Not as an expatriate or a resident alien, but as a citizen. And as I survey this realm — this Republic of Privilege — I realize certain things, things that my mother and father might also have realized about their new country a generation ago. I realize that my entry has yielded me great opportunities. I realize, as well, that my route of entry has taken a certain toll. I have neglected my ancestral heritage. I have lost something. Yes, I can speak some Mandarin and stir-fry a few easy dishes. I have been to China and know something of its history. Still, I could never claim to be Chinese at the core.

Yet neither would I claim, as if by default, to be merely “white inside.” I do not want to be white. I only want to be integrated. When I identify with white people who wield economic and political power, it is not for their whiteness but for their power. When I imagine myself among white people who influence the currents of our culture, it is not for their whiteness but for their influence. When I emulate white people who are at ease with the world, it is not for their whiteness but for their ease. I don’t like it that the people I should learn from tend so often to be white, for it says something damning about how opportunity is still distributed. But it helps not at all to call me white for learning from them. It is cruel enough that the least privileged Americans today have colored skin, the most privileged fair. It is crueler still that by our very language we should help convert this fact into rule. The time has come to describe assimilation as something other than the White Way of Being.

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- Eric Liu (“Notes of a Native Speaker,” The Washington Post, 1998)