White Flags

December 7, 2005 | Laughing Knees | 10 Comments 

With Chris Clarke’s call for an on­go­ing dis­cus­sion about racism in Blog Against Racism Day my ears have pricked up and heard the buzz of blogs around me again, and I made the rounds of old, fa­mil­iar blogs, and in the process trip­ping over some new ones. There cer­tainly has been a lot to say by lot of peo­ple. Some of it quite mov­ing.

My first re­ac­tion, as a per­son of very mixed her­itage, was that the idea of set­ting aside one day to honor sen­ti­ments against racism seemed cav­a­lier and ir­re­spon­si­ble. Af­ter all, how can some­thing that fol­lows you every­where from the mo­ment of your birth, poi­son­ing so much of what you touch, ex­clud­ing you from a com­plete and fair ex­pe­ri­ence of the so­ci­ety that you hap­pen to in­habit, be vil­i­fied within an afternoon’s blithe hat-​​tipping? It just seemed il­lu­sory. Guilt-​​ridden with­out ac­tion. Pedan­tic by so many who I pre­sumed never ex­pe­ri­enced the fruits of racism.

I de­cided to give the topic time to fer­ment, while read­ing more en­tries and let­ting the thoughts I read mix with my own ex­pe­ri­ences and con­clu­sions. Big­otry comes in so many forms, much of it so­lid­i­fied into stereo­types based purely on pre­sump­tions of one’s skin color or cul­tural bent or sex. “Whites are racist.” “Mus­lims are all de­voutly re­li­gious.” “Blacks un­der­stand dis­crim­i­na­tion.” “Asians study and work hard.” “Amer­i­cans are ar­ro­gant.” “Jews don’t com­mit geno­cide.” “Na­tive Amer­i­cans have done no wrong to the Eu­ro­pean set­tlers.” “Women re­spect life and would never start wars.” Every­where you look, in every­day life, in each in­di­vid­ual you meet, you see the ker­nels of dis­agree­ment, mis­un­der­stand­ing, dis­like, and ill will. Who’s to say that racism would not grow among any group of peo­ple, given the right con­di­tions? At what point is an in­di­vid­ual ca­pa­ble of dis­tin­guish­ing their own right­eous­ness from the con­fu­sion of all oth­ers’ wrongs?

In my own life, liv­ing be­tween the self-​​battering an­guish of my Filipino/​ Amer­i­can Black side and the self-​​searching, con­fused out­look of my Ger­man back­ground, all I have been cer­tain of is that peo­ple in my fam­ily have con­tin­u­ally sur­prised me. I dis­cov­ered that my Ger­man grand­par­ents risked their lives dur­ing the Sec­ond World War at­tempt­ing to pro­tect a Jew­ish fam­ily, all of whom were even­tu­ally cap­tured and sent away. My pa­ter­nal grand­fa­ther, a Fil­ipino who left the close-​​knit com­mu­nity of his child­hood in the Philip­pines, wan­dered halfway around the world to South Car­olina, there to marry a black woman, a woman who would never be ac­cepted back in the Philip­pines. An­other Filipino-​​American side of the fam­ily ve­he­mently sup­ported Bush’s at­tack on Iraq. My Brazilian-​​of-​​Japanese-​​descent wife re­sents peo­ple as­sum­ing that she can dance. Even in my­self, in spite of my pride in my tol­er­ance of all peo­ple and cul­tures, re­cently find flares of re­sent­ment and im­pa­tience with Japan­ese, es­pe­cially on the trains where the worst of people’s ug­li­ness comes out while crushed up against a train door. The other night a busi­ness­man, dis­lik­ing be­ing forced to share shoul­ders with for­eigner, shoved me away and snarled, “Fuck you!” at me in Eng­lish. I stum­bled out of the train at the next stop, dazed, and soon af­ter find­ing my­self silently curs­ing at all the Japan­ese around me for this feel­ing of be­ing knocked out of kil­ter. I know very well that few Japan­ese har­bor any real re­sent­ment against non-​​Japanese, but the feel­ings bub­bled out of me nonetheless.

The only way I can see over­com­ing racism is to for­get iden­ti­fy­ing with any group and con­sider each in­di­vid­ual you meet on their own mer­its. It is the very act of set­ting pa­ra­me­ters by de­clar­ing “We…(fill in a racial group, cul­tural group, na­tion­al­ity, sex…)” that cre­ates the breed­ing grounds for ex­clu­sion. Those who are pas­sion­ate about rend­ing the walls of­ten dif­fer­en­ti­ate the dis­crim­i­na­tion into neat cat­e­gories: racism, sex­ism, ageism, na­tion­al­ism, fa­nati­cism… But aren’t they all one and the same? Peo­ple find­ing things to refuse or dis­re­spect in others?

In the end it all comes down to me liv­ing within my own skin. I’ve lived in enough dif­fer­ent places and cul­tures to re­al­ize that the tides wash both ways, that what you thought of as set in stone here, has been for­got­ten else­where. And that peo­ple will al­ways sur­prise you.

When I stud­ied at the Uni­ver­sity of Ore­gon I lived in an apart­ment a mile or so out­side the cam­pus. The apart­ment faced a tiny, in­ti­mate al­ley that didn’t ad­mit cars and that set the houses and apart­ments close enough that many of the res­i­dents greeted each other on a daily ba­sis. One day a woman moved into the empty cot­tage across the street from my apart­ment. She was stun­ningly beau­ti­ful, blonde, and white. From the first day she waved at me and shouted out a bright, guile­less “Hello!”. I of­ten sat out on my deck and leaned over the rail­ing, con­vers­ing with her as she sat on her doorsteps. We learned quite a lot about one an­other, con­fess­ing de­tails of our lives that nor­mally we would not have shared out­side the so­ci­eties we both hailed from. I learned that she had been a model for Play­boy and that her fa­ther was a mil­lion­aire. She es­chewed soror­ity life, but spent a lot of time hang­ing out with men and women from the Greek world, some­thing that I had never once been in­vited to, and which seemed to me a sur­real form of he­do­nism cater­ing al­most solely to whites. She learned about my grow­ing up in Japan and my fa­ther in the United Na­tions. And about my el­e­men­tary school days at a school in Harlem and my ac­tiv­i­ties in the Asian-​​American club in which mem­bers barred whites from par­tic­i­pat­ing in events (an at­ti­tude that even­tu­ally made me quit the club). These bits of in­for­ma­tion didn’t come be­tween us and our friend­ship grew, to the point where I be­gan to fall in love with her.

But I no­ticed that all her boyfriends were white, well-​​off, and straight from the cover of GQ. My whole ex­pe­ri­ence of wealthy white women, dat­ing from my high school years in a school of am­abas­sadors’ chil­dren, con­sisted of ex­clu­sions from con­ver­sa­tions, be­ing beaten up by older broth­ers out­raged at my temer­ity at even think­ing that their sis­ters might have an in­ter­est in me, con­de­scen­sion by the girls them­selves in the form of co­quet­tish dis­missals, as if I couldn’t un­der­stand where my place was, “the skinny In­dian”, as one French girl, the dar­ling of the class, dubbed me dur­ing a chem­istry class one af­ter­noon. So though I fell in love with the woman across the street, I kept it to my­self. My per­cep­tion of her was re­in­forced by her never once at­tempt­ing to come up to my deck and sit with me. I just as­sumed that she would make friendly talk with me, but al­ways at a dis­tance. Sev­eral times she in­vited me to have din­ner with her in her cot­tage, but I al­ways de­clined, cit­ing the need to spend time at my ar­chi­tec­ture stu­dio. When she started dat­ing this ath­letic, he-​​has-​​everything man I backed into the wood­work of my apart­ment, leav­ing her to be with a man who most likely wouldn’t give me a sec­ond glance.

Then in the mid­dle of the night my phone rang. It was the woman from across the street.

“Miguel, can you come over? Please?” Her voice was shaking.

“What’s wrong? Are you okay?”

There was a sob and then a thin wail, “Oh, please… Miguel. Please…”

“Okay, I’ll be right over.”

I threw on a jacket and ran across the al­ley to her door. No lights were on. I knocked. No an­swer. So I pushed the door open and peered in­side. She was curled up in a ball on her couch, wrapped in a blan­ket. She lifted her head and turned to look at me. Her face was streaked with tears. There were clothes all over the floor.

I rushed to the side of the couch and kneeled be­side her.

“God, are you all right?” I asked in whis­per. I dared not touch her.

She broke down sob­bing again and af­ter some time I ten­ta­tively reached out a hand to touch her shoul­der. I rested it there, feel­ing her body shud­der. She cried for a long time. Then, “He… he…”

I shook my head. “It’s okay… Don’t speak. Just let it out for the mo­ment…” She cried again for a long time. When she seemed a bit calmer, I asked, “Would you like me to call your fa­ther?” Her mother was no longer alive.

She shook her head, her eyes wide with alarm.

“Okay. Then we’ll just sit here like this for now. How about I make you some tea?”

She nod­ded.

“Okay.” So I got up and put some wa­ter on to boil. When the wa­ter was ready I made two cups and brought them over to my friend. I handed her cup to her, sat down be­side the couch, and to­gether we sat in the dark­ness, not say­ing a word. We sat like this un­til dawn, when the cur­tains be­gan to glow with the first light.

And all the while my mind shifted be­tween the strange numb­ness of re­al­iz­ing that this white woman had all along ac­cepted me for who I was, and the odd peace­ful­ness of be­ing handed her vul­ner­a­bil­ity and trusted with it. I had been car­ry­ing around a racism all my own, blind­ing my­self to the gen­uine­ness of her smile, and al­low­ing stereo­types built up over past wrongs to shape her in my mind. I’m not sure if her ac­cep­tance of me was with­out ex­clu­sion, but per­haps it was the very fact that I did not live in­side the sphere of her white world that she found safety with me at that mo­ment. My vis­age dif­fered from the fa­mil­iar faces of the men she knew. She had trusted me enough to al­low those quiet dawn hours, be­fore the tele­phones rang and the of­fi­cials came ask­ing questions.

To blog against racism. Per­haps it is the very act of sit­ting and think­ing about what you are writ­ing and at­tempt­ing to make some sense of it that points to the value of the ex­er­cise. You come away with the feel­ing that the mote in your eye has splin­tered and dis­persed. Up­load the act and it is like the smoke of in­cense at a tem­ple: the gods will surely hear your confession.