Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning(20)
Despite the violent turbulence of that year, Anderson, who was born in 1969, imbues his film with a manufactured, blinkered, pastiched nostalgia that the theorist Lauren Berlant defines as “a small-town one that holds close and high a life that never existed, one that provides a screen memory to cover earlier predations of inequality.” It’s revealing that Anderson dates his film to the last year when whites made up 85 percent of this nation. It’s as if the Neverland of New Penzance is the last imperiled island before the incoming storm of minorities floods in.
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.
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Black children were historically “defined out of childhood,” writes the scholar Robin Bernstein in her book Racial Innocence: Performing American Childhood from Slavery to Civil Rights. She uses the example of Little Eva, from Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, as the icon of white innocence. With her halo of golden locks and blue eyes, she is virtuous in Uncle Tom’s eyes, whereas Topsy, the enslaved girl, is wicked, perverse, and motherless. It’s not until Eva hugs her and declares her love for Topsy that Topsy is reborn as an innocent child.
If Little Eva is the idealized child, Topsy is the ultimate “pickaninny,” defined by her “juvenile status, dark skin, and, crucially, the state of being comically impervious to pain.” Stowe wanted to prove that Topsy can feel but it takes Little Eva’s touch to convert her into a child. More often, the white child was contrasted with the enslaved girl to emphasize that “only white children were children.” The “pickaninny” is non-innocent, both feral and insentient, and doesn’t need protection nor maternal care, which slave owners used as justification to tear them from their mothers’ arms to be sold as chattel. This perception still persists today. White boys will always be boys but black boys are ten times more likely to be tried as adults and sentenced to life without parole.
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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.”
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The flip side of innocence is shame. When Adam and Eve lost their innocence, “their eyes were open, and they suddenly felt shame at their nakedness.” Shame is that sharp, prickling awareness that I am exposed like the inflamed ass of a baboon. It’s a neurotic, self-inflicting wound. Even if the aggressor who caused me shame is no longer in my life, I imagine he is, and I shrink from my shadow that I mistake for him. Shame is a Pavlovian response, its agitated receptor going off for no other reason than I just stepped outside my house. It’s not about losing face. Shame squats over my face and sits.
Shame is often associated with Asianness and the Confucian system of honor alongside its incomprehensible rites of shame, but that is not the shame I’m talking about. My shame is not cultural but political. It is being painfully aware of the power dynamic that pulls at the levers of social interactions and the cringing indignity of where I am in that order either as the afflicted—or as the afflicter. I am a dog cone of shame. I am a urinal cake of shame. This feeling eats away at my identity until my body is hollowed out and I am nothing but pure incinerating shame.
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I recall my mother rooting through the dryer and extracting a large red T-shirt with a silhouette of a white bunny. In retrospect, I have no idea how we acquired that shirt. I assume it was given as a gift to my father. Anyway, my immigrant mother didn’t know what the logo meant. The next day, she dressed me in that Playboy shirt, and sent me off, at the age of seven, to school. When I was waiting in line after recess to return to our class, a fourth grader pointed to the front of my shirt and asked me if I knew what “that means.” When I said no and I saw her smirk and run to her friends, I knew yet again that something was wrong but I didn’t know what was wrong. Blood rushed to my face. It is this shirt, but why?