IBARW 2: Racism in people of color
This is a post for Intl. Blog Against Racism Week.
My terms, definitions, and disclaimers
I am sure some of you are reading the post title to see if you read it correctly. Yes, I am going to write about racism in POC: that is to say, I am going to write about the racism that POC display toward other POC.
But before I do that, I wanted to add an additional disclaimer: Don't use this post to argue about how POC are racist when the discussion is on white privilege and institutional racism. Don't use it to attempt to drive groups of POC apart by claiming that Asians oppress black people, and therefore the bulk of the attention should be on Asian racists, not white privilege. That is not why I am making this post, and that is not what I believe. Also, even though it's noted in my general disclaimer, I wanted to re-emphasize that I do not speak for all POC! These are my opinions about racism in POC, and I could be miles off target or not even on the right playing field.
The general Racism 101 quote is "racism = prejudice + power," and because POC as a group do not have the power and privilege that white people do, the usual argument is that POC can't be racist. In general, I agree with this. It's a good way to frame the concept of institutional racism, and it's a good way to begin acknowledging that while racial prejudice works against people universally, racism as an institution does not.
The type of racism within a POC that is most familiar to me is internalized racism, because hey, been there, done that. This is the POC who "acts white," who generally denies that she faces racism, who usually attempts to avoid finding other POC. I don't think that all POC who do this are internalizing racism; I can't possibly psychoanalyze all of them, and I'm not going to tackle questions of authenticity, of how "acting white" usually just means "not acting [race]" and how that racial behavior is often taken from outside, racist sources. Plus, nojojojo already wrote a great post about it! But speaking for myself: I did this -- the denial of racism, the attempts to "be white," the attempts to not be part of the "Asian clique" -- out of a desire to take some sort of power for myself and out of confusion about oppression and racial authenticity.
I've never felt authentically Chinese; growing up in Taiwan while speaking horribly English-accented Chinese was enough to make me completely self-conscious of how not-Chinese I was. And I generally didn't remember being oppressed while I was a kid here; I vaguely remember schoolyard chants of "Chinese, Japanese, dirty knees..." with the requisite slanty-eye gestures and a woman muttering under her breath about Asians and immigrants while I was in a public bathroom. But no one had enslaved me or beat me or hurt me. So it didn't count. I also think admitting to oppression meant admitting that the system isn't fair; that if I worked hard enough and was good enough, I still wouldn't be rewarded; that some things were just that way. It's not a good way to feel, particularly when realizing that it's you the system is stacked against, that it's you who might not get a fair chance. And it's a particularly awful way to feel when you want to complain and realize that everyone will say you're whining and playing the race card.
I call this internalized racism because for me, it felt like internalizing the power structure around me and trying to pretend that I wasn't a part of the unprivileged group, and because it contributes to things like, "Well, she's Chinese, and she doesn't mind, so why should you?" And it's so easy to try to be white if that's what you're reading and watching, it's so easy to take pride in being Chinese but to also make it so that all the characters you create are blonde-haired, blue-eyed Americans.
I don't know how many of us go through this; I'm fairly sure it's common among ABCs (American-born Chinese) just given the literature I've read, but I don't know about others. I suspect it's not uncommon though?
The other type of racism is harder. It's what people usually think of when they think "POC are racist too!" It's the Asians saying the Hispanics are lazy, the black people saying the Indians are stealing the jobs, almost everyone the world round saying the black people are less human and more brutish. I am much less confident when I get here; what can I possibly say that won't end up being "POC are racist too"?
What I guess is that it is complicated. That part of it is a reaction to white supremacy everywhere, that another is an attempt to scapegoat some other group that's finally, finally more hated than your own. I think some of it is a reaction to the multiple attempts to set POC against each other; after being told time and time again that black people are criminals and gangsters, the model minority myth, no matter how harmful, probably looks pretty damn good. Ronald Takaki's Strangers from a Different Shore points out how wave after wave of Asian immigrants attempted to differentiate themselves from other Asian immigrants. I slip more into talking about Asian-Americans here, because that's an area in which I have a wee bit of knowledge, as opposed to being woefully ignorant about everything else.
"We're not like the Chinese!" the Japanese said in the late 1800s. "We're not Japanese!" the Koreans said during WWII. "We're not Vietnamese!" everyone said during the seventies.
"I'm not Japanese!" I'm sure Vincent Chin said as he was beaten to death in Detroit in 1982, in response to "It's because of you little motherfuckers that we're out of work." (Chin was Chinese.)
And now, of course, there's the further complication of the POC here who are American and those who are perceived as foreigners, particularly in the wake of 9/11, complicated yet again by centuries of discrimination against black people. I can't help but think of Somini Sengupta's essay in which she talks about flying while brown, and then wonders where Indians were when it was driving while black.
I'm getting a little off topic. It's difficult to stay on the topic of intra-POC racism without addressing the outside context because that outside context colors so much. And I am not exonerating POC of racism; it is so easy to only see yourself as the victim of oppression and to not admit to perpetuating injustice and oppression. It is so easy to remember loyalty to your tribe, to the people who look like you, to the people who weren't allies before but now are. "Asian-American" is an identity inside the US, and I think within other non-Asian countries as well (?); looking alike and being grouped together by others is enough to make usual enemies band together (and to overlook how some are suffering more than others, as with Southeast Asians when compared to East Asians).
It's even easier to get used to defending your chosen group of people, particularly when you've had to continually justify even the fact of your oppression. And I wonder how much of that underscores intra-POC conflict: fear that what you say here will be used against you by white supremacy, awareness of where your chosen group of people is in the racial hierarchy, guilt that you would rather not fall further down the racial hierarchy.
I don't know. But looking back at what I've written, so much is colored by white supremacy (no pun intended, I swear!). And I do not say this to let POC off the hook for being racist, but just to point out that it is nearly impossible to act independently of white supremacy. It is omnipresent, and it affects so much.
And now my post is entirely too long, and I haven't even touched on intra-POC racism on an international scale. So I will simply say that I do think it is there and that it will probably increase as Asia pulls ahead of other countries in terms of finances and political power (and really, a lot of that is East Asia and India, and the Southeast Asians get marginalized again). But I also think a lot of this occurs against a backdrop of Euro-American power, including fear of that power, envy, resentment, and even a feeling of moral superiority.
So. I don't know. All I do know is that it is far more complicated than simply saying that POC are also racist.
My terms, definitions, and disclaimers
I am sure some of you are reading the post title to see if you read it correctly. Yes, I am going to write about racism in POC: that is to say, I am going to write about the racism that POC display toward other POC.
But before I do that, I wanted to add an additional disclaimer: Don't use this post to argue about how POC are racist when the discussion is on white privilege and institutional racism. Don't use it to attempt to drive groups of POC apart by claiming that Asians oppress black people, and therefore the bulk of the attention should be on Asian racists, not white privilege. That is not why I am making this post, and that is not what I believe. Also, even though it's noted in my general disclaimer, I wanted to re-emphasize that I do not speak for all POC! These are my opinions about racism in POC, and I could be miles off target or not even on the right playing field.
The general Racism 101 quote is "racism = prejudice + power," and because POC as a group do not have the power and privilege that white people do, the usual argument is that POC can't be racist. In general, I agree with this. It's a good way to frame the concept of institutional racism, and it's a good way to begin acknowledging that while racial prejudice works against people universally, racism as an institution does not.
The type of racism within a POC that is most familiar to me is internalized racism, because hey, been there, done that. This is the POC who "acts white," who generally denies that she faces racism, who usually attempts to avoid finding other POC. I don't think that all POC who do this are internalizing racism; I can't possibly psychoanalyze all of them, and I'm not going to tackle questions of authenticity, of how "acting white" usually just means "not acting [race]" and how that racial behavior is often taken from outside, racist sources. Plus, nojojojo already wrote a great post about it! But speaking for myself: I did this -- the denial of racism, the attempts to "be white," the attempts to not be part of the "Asian clique" -- out of a desire to take some sort of power for myself and out of confusion about oppression and racial authenticity.
I've never felt authentically Chinese; growing up in Taiwan while speaking horribly English-accented Chinese was enough to make me completely self-conscious of how not-Chinese I was. And I generally didn't remember being oppressed while I was a kid here; I vaguely remember schoolyard chants of "Chinese, Japanese, dirty knees..." with the requisite slanty-eye gestures and a woman muttering under her breath about Asians and immigrants while I was in a public bathroom. But no one had enslaved me or beat me or hurt me. So it didn't count. I also think admitting to oppression meant admitting that the system isn't fair; that if I worked hard enough and was good enough, I still wouldn't be rewarded; that some things were just that way. It's not a good way to feel, particularly when realizing that it's you the system is stacked against, that it's you who might not get a fair chance. And it's a particularly awful way to feel when you want to complain and realize that everyone will say you're whining and playing the race card.
I call this internalized racism because for me, it felt like internalizing the power structure around me and trying to pretend that I wasn't a part of the unprivileged group, and because it contributes to things like, "Well, she's Chinese, and she doesn't mind, so why should you?" And it's so easy to try to be white if that's what you're reading and watching, it's so easy to take pride in being Chinese but to also make it so that all the characters you create are blonde-haired, blue-eyed Americans.
I don't know how many of us go through this; I'm fairly sure it's common among ABCs (American-born Chinese) just given the literature I've read, but I don't know about others. I suspect it's not uncommon though?
The other type of racism is harder. It's what people usually think of when they think "POC are racist too!" It's the Asians saying the Hispanics are lazy, the black people saying the Indians are stealing the jobs, almost everyone the world round saying the black people are less human and more brutish. I am much less confident when I get here; what can I possibly say that won't end up being "POC are racist too"?
What I guess is that it is complicated. That part of it is a reaction to white supremacy everywhere, that another is an attempt to scapegoat some other group that's finally, finally more hated than your own. I think some of it is a reaction to the multiple attempts to set POC against each other; after being told time and time again that black people are criminals and gangsters, the model minority myth, no matter how harmful, probably looks pretty damn good. Ronald Takaki's Strangers from a Different Shore points out how wave after wave of Asian immigrants attempted to differentiate themselves from other Asian immigrants. I slip more into talking about Asian-Americans here, because that's an area in which I have a wee bit of knowledge, as opposed to being woefully ignorant about everything else.
"We're not like the Chinese!" the Japanese said in the late 1800s. "We're not Japanese!" the Koreans said during WWII. "We're not Vietnamese!" everyone said during the seventies.
"I'm not Japanese!" I'm sure Vincent Chin said as he was beaten to death in Detroit in 1982, in response to "It's because of you little motherfuckers that we're out of work." (Chin was Chinese.)
And now, of course, there's the further complication of the POC here who are American and those who are perceived as foreigners, particularly in the wake of 9/11, complicated yet again by centuries of discrimination against black people. I can't help but think of Somini Sengupta's essay in which she talks about flying while brown, and then wonders where Indians were when it was driving while black.
I'm getting a little off topic. It's difficult to stay on the topic of intra-POC racism without addressing the outside context because that outside context colors so much. And I am not exonerating POC of racism; it is so easy to only see yourself as the victim of oppression and to not admit to perpetuating injustice and oppression. It is so easy to remember loyalty to your tribe, to the people who look like you, to the people who weren't allies before but now are. "Asian-American" is an identity inside the US, and I think within other non-Asian countries as well (?); looking alike and being grouped together by others is enough to make usual enemies band together (and to overlook how some are suffering more than others, as with Southeast Asians when compared to East Asians).
It's even easier to get used to defending your chosen group of people, particularly when you've had to continually justify even the fact of your oppression. And I wonder how much of that underscores intra-POC conflict: fear that what you say here will be used against you by white supremacy, awareness of where your chosen group of people is in the racial hierarchy, guilt that you would rather not fall further down the racial hierarchy.
I don't know. But looking back at what I've written, so much is colored by white supremacy (no pun intended, I swear!). And I do not say this to let POC off the hook for being racist, but just to point out that it is nearly impossible to act independently of white supremacy. It is omnipresent, and it affects so much.
And now my post is entirely too long, and I haven't even touched on intra-POC racism on an international scale. So I will simply say that I do think it is there and that it will probably increase as Asia pulls ahead of other countries in terms of finances and political power (and really, a lot of that is East Asia and India, and the Southeast Asians get marginalized again). But I also think a lot of this occurs against a backdrop of Euro-American power, including fear of that power, envy, resentment, and even a feeling of moral superiority.
So. I don't know. All I do know is that it is far more complicated than simply saying that POC are also racist.