Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning(23)
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Two thousand and sixteen was the year of white tears. Memes circulated around the Internet of a black, brown, or Asian woman taking a long leisurely sip from a white mug embossed with the words “White Tears.” Implied in the meme is that people of color are utterly indifferent to white tears. Not only that, they feel a certain delicious Schadenfreude in response to white tears. Of course, “white tears” does not refer to all pain but to the particular emotional fragility a white person experiences when they find racial stress so intolerable they become hypersensitive and defensive, focusing the stress back to their own bruised ego.
In 2011, academics Samuel R. Sommers and Michael I. Norton conducted a survey in which they found that whenever whites reported a decrease in perceived antiblack bias, they reported an increase in antiwhite bias. It was as if they thought racism was a zero-sum game, encapsulated in the paraphrased comment by former attorney general Jeff Sessions: Less against you means more against me. At the time of the study, white Americans actually thought that antiwhite bias was a bigger societal problem than antiblack bias. They believed this despite the fact that all but one of our presidents have been white, 90 percent of our Congress has been historically white, and the average net worth of whites is ten to thirteen times greater than the net worth of nonwhites. In fact, the income gap between races is only becoming greater. Thirty years ago a median black family had $6,800 in assets but now they have just $1,700, whereas a white median family now has $116,800, up from $102,000 over the same period. The hoarding of resources has been so disproportionate, writes scholar Linda Martín Alcoff, that the racial project of whiteness is, in effect, an oligarchy.
And yet their false sense of persecution has only worsened, as in the case of Abigail Fisher (known as “Becky with the Bad Grades”), who in 2016 took her lawsuit to the Supreme Court, claiming that she was denied admission to University of Texas–Austin because of her race, when in fact it was because of her scores. Their delusion is also tacit in the commonly heard defensive retort to Black Lives Matter that “all lives matter.” Rather than being inclusive, “all” is a walled-off pronoun, a defensive measure to “not make it about race” so that the invisible hegemony of whiteness can continue unchallenged.
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In 2018, I saw an installation by the artist Carmen Winant, who covered two walls at the Museum of Modern Art with two thousand photographs of women in the process of giving birth. She taped up pictures, clipped from books and magazines that spanned three decades, of women squatting, or on all fours, or in a birthing pool, or with legs splayed out in stirrups—all of them in the abject throes of labor. Some photos feature newborns crowning, the dark rinds of their heads splitting open their mothers’ ursine vaginas. One picture offers the back of a mother on all fours, with her gown hitched up to her armpits, while her newborn’s squinched face pokes out near her anus. Emotions are exposed in their raw glory: joy, anguish, adoration, and relief.
The photographs are almost all of white women. When I look at the photos individually, I’m moved by the mothers’ exhaustion and joy, but when I step back, I can’t unsee the wall of whiteness. Winant taped up every photo of realistic childbirth she could find in used bookstores, an exhaustive process that only insists on the sameness of these images. Reviewers described the installation as “universal” and “mind blowing.” And yet, rather than the visceral “radical exposure” of birth, all I see is its whiteness. In Winant’s obsessive efforts to evoke the “all,” I feel walled off.
I can argue that I’m able to see whiteness as opposed to these white reviewers who are unable to perceive whiteness as a racial category. But lately, I’ve been questioning if my habit of noticing white spaces impairs me from enjoying anything else. I’ve become a scold, constantly pointing out what is, or should be, obvious. In José Saramago’s novel Blindness, when the characters go blind, their vision doesn’t go dark but turns white as if they “plunged with open eyes into the milky sea.” I see whiteness everywhere I go. I sense its machinations. I see that even my mind is stained by whiteness, as if it’s been dyed with the radiopaque ink used for X-rays. This stain makes me incessantly analogize my life to other lives. I no longer think my life comes up short. But even in opposition, I still see my life in relation to whiteness.
Recently, I read a tweet by the poet Natalie Diaz, who asked, Why must writers of color always have to talk about whiteness? Why center it in our work when it’s centered everywhere else? On the train ride back home from the museum, I thought of my grandmother who lost three children before they reached eighteen. If I tell her story, will it just be denatured into a sad story, a story to tape up on that wall to accent its whiteness?
I have to address whiteness because Asian Americans have yet to truly reckon with where we stand in the capitalist white supremacist hierarchy of this country. We are so far from reckoning with it that some Asians think that race has no bearing on their lives, that it doesn’t “come up,” which is as misguided as white people saying the same thing about themselves, not only because of discrimination we have faced but because of the entitlements we’ve been granted due to our racial identity. These Asians are my cousins; my ex-boyfriend; these Asians are myself, cocooned in Brooklyn, caught unawares on a nice warm day, thinking I don’t have to be affected by race; I only choose to think about it. I could live only for myself, for my immediate family, following the expectations of my parents, whose survivor instincts align with this country’s neoliberal ethos, which is to get ahead at the expense of anyone else while burying the shame that binds us. To varying degrees, all Asians who have grown up in the United States know intimately the shame I have described; have felt its oily flame.