Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning(24)
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Two thousand and sixteen was the year when whiteness became visible due to several factors: the looming demographic shift in which white Americans will soon be a minority; the shrinkage of fixed employment that has caused some whites to feel disempowered and lash out at immigrants; and the media attention to black and brown activists who since Ferguson have protested racial inequities in sectors ranging from the judicial system to education to culture. White Americans, if they hadn’t before, now felt marked for their skin color, and their reaction for being exposed as such was to feel—shame.
Shame is an inward, intolerable feeling but it can lead to productive outcomes because of the self-scrutiny shame requires. This has been the case for white progressives who have been evaluating how privilege governs their life. Years ago, whenever a conversation about race came up, my white students were awkwardly silent. But now, many of them are eager to listen and process the complexities of race relations and their roles in it, which gives me hope. Alcoff calls this self-examination “white double-consciousness,” which involves seeing “themselves through both the dominant and the nondominant lens, and recognizing the latter as a critical corrective truth.”
But while shame can lead to productive self-scrutiny, it can also lead to contempt. In Affect Imagery Consciousness, the psychoanalyst Silvan Tomkins clarifies the distinction between contempt and shame in a society:
Contempt will be used sparingly in a democratic society lest it undermine solidarity, whereas it will be used frequently and with approbation in a hierarchically organized society in order to maintain distance between individuals, classes, and nations. In a democratic society, contempt will often be replaced by empathic shame, in which the critic hangs his head in shame at what the other has done; or by distress, in which the critic expresses his suffering at what the other has done; or by anger, in which the critic seeks redress for the wrongs committed by the other.
It’s also human nature to repel shame by penalizing and refusing continued engagement with the source of their shame. Most white Americans live in segregated environments, which, as Alcoff writes, “protects and insulates them from race-based stress.” As a result, any proximity to minorities—seeing Latinx families move into their town, watching news clips of black protesters chanting “I can’t breathe” in Grand Central Station—sparks intolerable discomfort. Suddenly Americans feel self-conscious of their white identity and this self-consciousness misleads them into thinking their identity is under threat. In feeling wrong, they feel wronged. In being asked to be made aware of racial oppression, they feel oppressed. While we laugh at white tears, white tears can turn dangerous. White tears, as Damon Young explains in The Root, are why defeated Southerners refused to accept the freedom of black slaves and formed the Ku Klux Klan. And white tears are why 63 percent of white men and 53 percent of white women elected a malignant man-child as their leader. For to be aware of history, they would be forced to be held accountable, and rather than face that shame, they’d rather, by any means necessary, maintain their innocence.
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On February 1, 2017, a five-year-old Iranian child was handcuffed and held at Dulles Airport in Washington, D.C., for five hours because he was “identified as a possible threat” despite his minor status. This happened as a direct result of Trump’s executive order banning travelers from seven Muslim-majority countries from entering the nation. Never mind that the boy was an American citizen from Maryland. The press secretary said, “To assume that just because of someone’s age and gender that they don’t pose a threat would be misguided and wrong.” The outrage against the administration was still fresh and bright that day. Thousands of New Yorkers rushed to JFK Airport to protest the ban. When the boy was finally reunited with his mother, a crowd of protesters cheered as they embraced. Watching the news clip, I took solace in their reunion. But how will that day shape him as he grows?
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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. His is an unprotected consciousness that already knows, even before literacy, the violence this nation is capable of, and it is this knowingness that must eclipse the white imaginary, as his consciousness, haunted by history, will one day hold the majority.
BAD ENGLISH
I HAD A SPECIAL, ALMOST EROTIC, relationship with my stationery when I was young. I collected stationery items the way other kids collect dolls or action figures. “Really I must buy a pencil,” Virginia Woolf said, without warning, before rushing out the door to begin her peregrination through the wintry streets of London. I would have related to her urgency. I too felt passionately for the lead pencil, as long as it was a thin lavender mechanical pencil with a Hello Kitty bauble clasped to the tip with a delicate silver chain. And erasers too, scented raspberry or vanilla, molded into plump pastel wall-eyed Sanrio critters. I adored my erasers so much I had to repress the urge to bite their heads off. I was careful at first, gently brushing the bobbed feet against my notebook. But once my eraser was spoiled with graphite, I ruthlessly rubbed away my errors until all that remained was a gray dusty nub of face with one sad punctuation of an eye.