Cathy Park Hong argues that white and nonwhite Americans tend to think differently about the past. Families of color are likely to have come to the U.S. more recently, under more pressing circumstances, and this informs their perspectives on American life. This is especially true of Asian Americans, Hong notes, and she uses her own Korean American community as an example. Hong’s parents lived through the Japanese occupation, the Korean War, and the Rhee dictatorship. Then, they moved to start life anew in a foreign but rather unwelcoming country. Together, Hong argues, this traumatic history gives Korean Americans a feeling of han—or a characteristic mix of “bitterness, wistfulness, shame, melancholy, and vengefulness.” But other immigrants have their own versions of han, too; their migration stories are tied to other kinds of conflict, violence, and hardship, which are often the result of U.S. foreign policy.
In contrast, Hong notes, many white Americans have very little understanding of history, especially when it comes to race relations. Their information about the past tends to come from popular culture, which often erases nonwhite people from history. For instance, Hong notes that Wes Anderson’s Moonrise Kingdom offers a nostalgic fantasy of the 1960s, but without people of color and the civil rights movement involved. Such fantasies appeal primarily to white viewers and shape the way they think about the past—for instance, they are more likely to think of the U.S. as a traditionally white country and see diversity as a new phenomenon. Similarly, Hong argues that innocence and ignorance play a similar role in white childhood: while nonwhite children learn about racism through experience, white children have the privilege of remaining ignorant of it. Thanks to this “sheltered unknowingness,” white children don’t have to recognize how they benefit from racism, nor do they think about how to stop it.
In short, Hong argues that one reason racism remains an unspoken cultural norm in the U.S. is because many white Americans don’t understand their own racist beliefs and behaviors. They don’t understand why Asian families like Hong’s immigrate to the U.S., which they believe (contrary to historical evidence) to have historically been an all-white country. And they often don’t understand the links between Asian American migration and U.S. foreign policy. Thus, Hong argues that teaching accurate information about U.S. history—particularly the history of immigration and U.S. involvement in other countries—would help white Americans develop the same sense of history that many Asian American immigrants already have. For Hong, providing this basic education is one of the most tangible, effective ways that Americans can fight racism today.
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History, Ignorance, and Racism Quotes in Minor Feelings
When the 1965 immigration ban was lifted by the United States, my father saw an opportunity. Back then, only select professionals from Asia were granted visas to the United States: doctors, engineers, and mechanics. This screening process, by the way, is how the whole model minority quackery began: the U.S. government only allowed the most educated and highly trained Asians in and then took all the credit for their success. See! Anyone can live the American Dream! they’d say about a doctor who came into the country already a doctor.
Patiently educating a clueless white person about race is draining. It takes all your powers of persuasion. Because it’s more than a chat about race. It’s ontological. It’s like explaining to a person why you exist, or why you feel pain, or why your reality is distinct from their reality. Except it’s even trickier than that. Because the person has all of Western history, politics, literature, and mass culture on their side, proving that you don’t exist.
In other words, I didn’t know whether to tell this guy to fuck off or give him a history lesson. “We were here since 1587!” I could have said. “So what’s the hold up? Where’s our white Groupon?” Most Americans know nothing about Asian Americans. They think Chinese is synecdoche for Asians the way Kleenex is for tissues.
The writer Jeff Chang writes that “I want to love us” but he says that he can’t bring himself to do that because he doesn’t know who “us” is. I share that uncertainty. Who is us? What is us? Is there even such a concept as an Asian American consciousness? Is it anything like the double consciousness that W.E.B. Du Bois established over a century ago? The paint on the Asian American label has not dried. The term is unwieldy, cumbersome, perched awkwardly upon my being. Since the late sixties, when Asian American activists protested with the Black Panthers, there hasn’t been a mass movement we can call our own. Will “we,” a pronoun I use cautiously, solidify into a common collective, or will we remain splintered, so that some of us remain “foreign” or “brown” while others, through wealth or intermarriage, “pass” into whiteness?
On its own, Moonrise Kingdom is a relatively harmless film. But for those of us who have been currently shocked by the “unadulterated white racism … splattered all over the media,” we might ask ourselves what has helped fuel our country’s wistfully manufactured “screen memory.” Anderson’s Moonrise Kingdom is just one of countless contemporary films, works of literature, pieces of music, and lifestyle choices where wishing for innocent times means fetishizing an era when the nation was violently hostile to anyone different. Hollywood, an industry that shapes not only our national but global memories, has been the most reactionary cultural perpetrator of white nostalgia, stuck in a time loop and refusing to acknowledge that America’s racial demographic has radically changed since 1965. Movies are cast as if the country were still “protected” by a white supremacist law that guarantees that the only Americans seen are carefully curated European descendants.
Innocence is, as Bernstein writes, not just an “absence of knowledge” but “an active state of repelling knowledge,” embroiled in the statement, “Well, I don’t see race” where I eclipses the seeing. Innocence is both a privilege and a cognitive handicap, a sheltered unknowingness that, once protracted into adulthood, hardens into entitlement. Innocence is not just sexual deflection but a deflection of one’s position in the socioeconomic hierarchy, based on the confidence that one is “unmarked” and “free to be you and me.” The ironic result of this innocence, writes the scholar Charles Mills, is that whites are “unable to understand the world that they themselves have made.” Children are then disqualified from innocence when they are persistently reminded of, and even criminalized for, their place in the racial pecking order. As Richard Pryor jokes: “I was a kid until I was eight. Then I became a Negro.”
Whether our families come from Guatemala, Afghanistan, or South Korea, the immigrants since 1965 have shared histories that extend beyond this nation, to our countries of origin, where our lineage has been decimated by Western imperialism, war, and dictatorships orchestrated or supported by the United States. In our efforts to belong in America, we act grateful, as if we’ve been given a second chance at life. But our shared root is not the opportunity this nation has given us but how the capitalist accumulation of white supremacy has enriched itself off the blood of our countries. We cannot forget this.
As a writer, I am determined to help overturn the solipsism of white innocence so that our national consciousness will closer resemble the minds of children like that Iranian American boy.
Cha doesn’t ever direct your reading of Dictee. She refuses to translate the French or contextualize a letter by former South Korean leader Syngman Rhee to Franklin D. Roosevelt or caption the photo of French actress Renée Jeanne Falconetti in Carl Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc. The reader is a detective, puzzling out her own connections.
[…]
Cha spoke my language by indicating that English was not her language, that English could never be a true reflection of her consciousness, that it was as much an imposition on her consciousness as it was a form of expression. And because of that, Dictee felt true.
The length to which scholars will argue how Cha is recovering the lives of Korean women silenced by historical atrocities while remaining silent about the atrocity that took Cha’s own life has been baffling. […] The more I read about her, the less I knew. And the less I knew, the more I couldn’t help but regard Cha as a woman who also disappeared without explanation.
Sow the cratered lands with candy and from its wrappers will rise Capitalism and Christianity. About her homeland [South Korea], the poet Emily Jungmin Yoon writes, “Our cities today glow with crosses like graveyards.”
In 1968, students at UC Berkeley invented the term Asian American to inaugurate a new political identity. Radicalized by the black power movement and anti-colonial movement, the students invented that name as a refusal to apologize for being who they were. It’s hard to imagine that the origin of Asian America came from a radical place, because the moniker is now flattened and emptied of any blazing political rhetoric. But there was nothing before it. Asians either identified by their nationality or were called Oriental.
I bring up Korea to collapse the proximity between here and there. Or as activists used to say, “I am here because you were there.”
[…]
My ancestral country is just one small example of the millions of lives and resources you have sucked from the Philippines, Cambodia, Honduras, Mexico, Iraq, Afghanistan, Nigeria, El Salvador, and many, many other nations through your forever wars and transnational capitalism that have mostly enriched shareholders in the States. Don’t talk to me about gratitude.
