Getting Up On Whitey.

Black/Asian Tensions - A Convenient Euphemism?

An article in an online mag called "Mic" that covered the recent Akai Gurley killing by Chinese-American cop, Peter Liang, caught my attention recently. The piece makes the argument that it is the social and political dimensions of the death - rather than the specific circumstances of the incident - that should persuade us against supporting Liang. Furthermore, supporting Liang, the title of the article suggests, will result in "worse racial tension". The article does not explain why this should or would be the case, and neither does it question whether such a reaction would be reasonable or ethical.

Instead, the implication is that such an outcome - i.e. worsened racial tensions - is both natural, reasonable and possibly acceptable. Sadly, justice is not served by committing further injustice. Levelling disproportionate charges against an offender because it satisfies political requirements (which is the fundamental concern of those who support Liang - and not racial prejudice on the part of his supporters) and assuages our frustrations about historical and ongoing racial injustices is as unjust as not indicting policemen who commit brazen murder.

For justice to be justice, the social and political conditions that gave Gurley his hand in life cannot play a role in how Liang is charged or tried. Liang is not guilty of creating the housing projects, nor of their state of disrepair, nor of racial inequalities that makes those living in poverty more likely to be black. If those factors are considered in the case, then justice is not served. Those who support Liang are demanding that he be tried not with social and racial injustices that are beyond his control in mind, but that the specific circumstances of the incident be given the utmost consideration. But the Mic piece fundamentally argues that we should overlook the injustice of charging Liang disproportionately because  there exists so much racial injustice in society. That sounds more like vengeance and scapegoating and less like justice.

Nowhere in the piece is this idea of scapegoating more clearly illustrated than in the words of New York City Council Member Ritchie Torres whom the Mic piece quotes thus...

"If we were as aggressive in policing the housing conditions as we are in policing the residents"  [this might have never have happened.]

This would be hilarious if it did not come on the tail of such a tragedy. The New York City Council bears the sole responsibility for approving the city budget and also monitors the performance of city agencies - which includes New York's public housing authority responsible for the maintenance of the high-rise project where Gurley was shot. How does the New York City Council doing a piss-poor job of ensuring decent housing conditions in its jurisdiction have anything to do with the charges levelled against Peter Liang? In effect, what is being said here is that a membere of the NY City Council admits that it failed in its responsibilities to the people who it represents, contributing (greatly) to the circumstances that led to the tense situation that resulted in the death of an innocent man, and maybe even contributed to the manner of, and raison d'etre for vertical patrols. Yet the implication is that these factors should be considered in Liang's case. This is as unfair as institutionalized racism itself.

Yet it is the dramatic title of the Mic piece - "Supporting This Chinese-American Cop Who Shot a Black Man Only Makes Racial Tension Worse" - that I find to be most disturbing. The idea that an entire community will experience negative outcomes from the actions of a few of them is a classic example of racist thinking. More specifically, it is an acknowledgment that there exists an intolerance amongst blacks for Asian-Americans such that their merely voicing a different opinion of advocating against possible racial injustice against Asians is sufficient to make racial tensions worse.

It looks worse when we consider that Chinese-Americans account for a mere 20% of the population of Asian-Americans and that those who seem to support Liang account for a fraction of that. Yet, their actions will serve as the catalysts for "worse racial tensions". I cannot think of a more clear example of racist mob reasoning. Furthermore, I wonder if - but doubt that - the piece would have been published if it had been directed at white-Americans.

In the aftermath of the Ferguson shooting, there were no commentators claiming that Ferguson's white residents' support for Darren Wilson would worsen racial tensions. Yet, here, in the Liang case where there are, objectively, several reasons to be concerned that justice is being twisted for political expediency, we are told to expect a potential worsening of racial tension possibly because those questioning the indictment happen to be Asian. Why, then has no (as far as I know) African-American commentator published an article warning of worsening racial tensions when whites support white cops who kill? Whatever the reasons, there seems to be a clear message that - unlike Asian-Americans - the entire white community will not be held accountable and subject to worsening racial tensions because a minority of them supported killer cops.

An examination of the nature and character of black/Asian tensions might provide some insight to this disparity in attitude. In short, "black/Asian tensions" means two different things to each group. For Asians, these tensions are often experienced as violence. Whereas Asian on black violence is almost unheard of, black on Asian violence seems to be far more prevalent. By contrast, African-Americans seem to experience black/Asian tensions most often as a series of interpersonal slights that are perceived to be an affront to dignity and pride. African-Americans complaints of anti-black violence committed by Asian perpetrators are rare, but there is a long list of Asian victims of violence - ranging from school children to the elderly - at the hands of black perpetrators. Clearly, there is a vast difference in how these "racial tensions" are experienced by both groups.

In the context of the Mic article, to say that there will be an increase in racial tensions could - and should - be viewed as a way of saying that the experience of these tensions by both groups will be intensified. Or, put another way, blacks will experience more hurt pride at the hands of Asians and Asians will experience more hostility and violence from African-Americans.

On the other hand, white-Americans hold most of the power in society and violence between the black and white communities is more mutual. Asians possess no such institutional power. Thus, it could well be that this idea of worsening violence towards Asians reflects a belief that it is less likely to be met with the kind of potential for retaliatory violence that would arise from white society. If not, why were there no commentaries proclaiming the prospect of worsening racial tensions in the aftermath of violence against Asian children and the elderly? The answer is that there is no expectation or probability of anti-black violence to flare up amongst Asian-Americans, and at worst Asian store owners might commit more acts of effrontery to African-American pride.

But it is not just that there seems to be a proclivity towards a casual attitude when it comes to anti-Asian violence in black America. The increasing presence of African-Americans in positions of political and social authority has altered the landscape of black and Asian relations in unexpected ways and there is another extremely disturbing phenomenon that seems to be emerging in the saga of black/Asian relations that goes beyond mere "tension" and hints at more deep-rooted anti-Asian racism in black-America.

In many of the communities where some of the worst and most violent incidences where "black/Asian tensions" have been reported, African-Americans hold influential positions as local politicians, heads of police, heads of school boards, school principals and so on. This means that in many of the spaces where the lives of many Asian immigrants and African-Americans intersect, it is African-Americans who often wield the power of America's institutions. This has not always turned out too well for Asian-Americans.

Council Member Inez Barron and Assembly Member-Elect Charles Barron will be holding a press conference at 12 noon in front of the Brooklyn DA’s Office, following a meeting with District Attorney Ken Thompson’s Office, regarding the shooting death of Akai Gurley, by Police in the Pink Housing development. - See more at: http://www.blackstarnews.com/ny-watch/news/charles-barron-calls-for-arrest-of-liang-nypd-cop-who-killed-akai#sthash.oZM2rYgo.dpuf

The Liang case produced its own example of a skewed application of institutional power.....

Council Member Inez Barron and Assembly Member-Elect Charles Barron will be holding a press conference at 12 noon in front of the Brooklyn DA’s Office, following a meeting with District Attorney Ken Thompson’s Office, regarding the shooting death of Akai Gurley, by Police in the Pink Housing development.......“We are calling on the arrest and indictment of Officer Peter Liang,” says Charles Barron.

This seems like a blatant case of elected officials endeavouring to influence the judiciary to bring about a criminal prosecution - charges which could, objectively, be viewed as disproportionate and biased. After all, why hasn't Liang's partner - Landau - also been charged for not calling in the shooting and not administering first aid? Aside from the fact that democracy itself is predicated on the principle of the strict separation of powers and that there seems to have been an open and unapologetic flouting of this principle to target an ethnic minority individual, the idea of institutional power of elected officials targeting an Asian policeman while ignoring the fact that a white officer also neglected his duties reeks of racial bias. The words "persecution" and "bias" come to mind here.

Even worse, here, these local politicians explicitly stoked, and threatened to stoke, the flames of violence if the judiciary failed to bring the charges that they wanted brought against Liang...

"Unlike my colleagues, I am not calling for peace and calm. I’m calling for us to be hot,” state Assemblyman-elect Barron said, standing beside Gurley’s gal pal, Melissa Butler, at a press conference outside the Brooklyn District Attorney’s office.....If you want somebody to be peaceful and calm, tell the police to be peaceful and calm!.....He also demanded that Officer Peter Liang, who fired the single shot that killed the 28-year-old Gurley on Thursday night at East New York’s Louis Pink Houses, be charged with criminally negligent homicide.

To paraphrase this, an elected official insinuated the use of populist violence to pressure the judiciary to bring specific charges against an accused man. Oddly - but not surprisingly considering that the accused is Asian - no one seems disturbed by this abuse of institutional power. At least I have now learned not to expect Asian advocacy to take note, saving me from disappointment that always follows in the wake of expectation.

Sadly, there are several cases in which Asian-Americans - most often immigrants - living in neighborhoods where much of the power of the local institutions rests in the hands of African-Americans find themselves on the wrong end of institutional apathy and apparent bias. The racial targeting of Asian immigrant students by their African-American peers at South Philly High School several years back was investigated by the Justice Department after claims that the victims' reports to school administrators went ignored by the principle and the District Superintendent, both of whom were African-American. The Justice Department found in favor of the Asian students, finding that the district abused their civil rights and engaged in racial bias against them.

More recently, Rochester, NY has seen another explosion of violent racism against Asian immigrants perpetrated by African-Americans under the apathetic eye of African-Americans who hold positions of institutional power. According to the victims, their reports to the police were ignored or not taken seriously even after community leaders held a meeting with police officials.

The anger [of the immigrants] is fueled, he and more than a dozen other residents interviewed say, by hundreds of incidents of robbery and violent and verbal bullying in recent years.......they kept loose documentation of some 300 incidents before a meeting with police two years ago, and hundreds more since, only to see nothing change.........The refugee community typically doesn't report crimes to police because they either fear retaliation, they don't trust police (sometimes because of conflicts with authority in their homelands) or don't think police take their plight seriously.

So, according to the immigrants, the violence cannot be put down to crimes of theft against a vulnerable community - the verbal and violent bullying adds a dimension that goes beyond mere criminal opportunism. The comments of the former African-American police chief - John Sheppard - who met with community leaders are far from inspiring.....

Sheppard described the immigrants as easy targets for crime because they stand out from the rest of the community because of their lighter complexion and facial features.......They may dress different, they may talk different, they tend not to fight back and so that just made them easy victims, easy to identify and the fact that they didn't call police that just made it happen more often.

...that's also known as racism. But it gets even less inspiring. Another officer suggests the following.....

Police Lt. David Gebhardt, who was at the meeting two years ago, said police offered safety classes following the meeting to help the refugees make themselves less inviting to criminals and to become more street smart.

As though somehow the victims of racial violence can change racially motivated crimes by altering their own behaviour. Maybe one of the suggestions to make themselves less inviting to racially motivated crimes might be eye surgery? But Sheppard adds the following.....

There was a time when a lot of Southern blacks were moving from Florida and South Carolina into the Rochester area looking for jobs and they went through the same cycles of discrimination and having to fight back and get a foothold. Then, when they established a foothold, other groups came in whether it was Puerto Ricans or other nationalities and they had to go through the same rites of passage.

This is disturbing to say the least. The idea that racially-motivated violence is some kind of normal rite of passage meted out by African-Americans for newcomers to this country is merely a way of avoiding condemnation of racial prejudice directed at Asians by elements in the black community. No one would dare to make such a suggestion if the perpetrators were white, so why do African-Americans get a pass? Furthermore, the very suggestion that the way to resolve violent racism by "fighting back" avoids the social and political conditions that foster anti-Asian sentiment, but also is an explicit endorsement for the perpetuation of violence - all from the mouth of law enforcement.

In Baltimore itself, despite early indications that there would be targeting of Asian stores, the black mayor of the city did and said nothing to stave off any potential racially-motivated looting - even as the police failed to respond when Asian business owners reported that looting was taking place. These examples illustrate that Asian immigrant experiences of black/Asian tensions engender a gamut of circumstances from black on Asian violence all the way up to apathy and bias amongst African-Americans who hold institutional power that - either by design or unintended consequence - enables or encourages aggression and intolerance of Asian-Americans.

The Mic piece seems to casually accept this aspect of black/Asian tensions and implicitly endorses classic self-righteous racist reasoning that places the blame for racial intolerance on the targets and victims of it. This is not only reprehensible but also extremely disturbing that such an attitude could be expressed and not challenged for its implicit endorsements of racism. Of course, since black/Asian racial tensions manifest most dramatically as black on Asian violence, the article implicitly justifies anti-Asian violence.

This is worrying to say the least, but in the present climate when Asian-American progressives have been prominent in voicing their support for black causes, participated in anti-anti-blackness protests, and shown a willingness to castigate (but also exaggerate) racism within their own community, it is beyond disappointing that those efforts have not translated into a more tolerant and nuanced approach in this black commentary. As Jeff Yang points out (in an article that would have been better suited as a response to the Mic piece), there are many examples of black/Asian cooperation and mutual support, the question is, why is this cooperation and community building between the two groups so easily tossed aside when some Asians voice opposing or unpopular opinions?

If the author of the Mic piece believes that support for Liang will worsen racial tensions, then fine - that may be objectively true - but the passive acceptance of this possibility without any questioning of its rationality or fairness merely serves to justify anti-Asian racism in black-America.

There is nothing implicitly anti-black about the concerns voiced by Liang's supporters - rather, they have highlighted some extremely problematic aspects of the case. Framing their activism as racist - apparently to justify ratcheting up the violence - is the kind of simplistic racist thinking common to all bigoted thinkers. And I'm sorry, but I just don't hold to the notion that racial oppression can justify racist thinking or that those whose communities are heavily victimized by it should be given space to express it uncritically. This would be like saying that we can somehow end racism and racial injustice by being racist and unjust.

This might make sense to some people, but I see no sense in it at all. If a white writer had penned the Mic piece, then I have absolutely no doubt that our advocates would be jumping up and down decrying its implicit endorsement of racial violence. But Asian-America has gotten itself into the habit of dismissing incidents of anti-Asian violence committed by African-American perpetrators out of hand - see Jeff Yang - as though it is a necessary by-product of the fight against anti-blackness. Of course, this merely legitimizes anti-Asian violence and normalizes it as an implicit aspect of the black racial experience. 

Asian-American advocacy's apathy on the plight of the violence against some of the most vulnerable members of our community is a huge dent in the credibility of its pretensions of intersectional activism. There is no logical reason to exclude Asian victims of black racial violence from considerations of justice and failing to do so only reveals the extremely flimsy ethical and intellectual foundations of Asian progressiveness. After all what credibility is there in raising one hand in a fist proclaiming "anti-anti-blackness" whilst flipping the bird at the vulnerable immigrant victims of anti-Asian sentiment with the other?

Anti-Asian Pogrom?

The Looting of Asian Businesses In Baltimore. 

The high-profile shootings of unarmed black men by the police in recent months has brought the state of black/Asian relations to the fore of progressives' discourse - at least for Asian-Americans. Although much has been written over the past several months by Asian-American commentators - often with titles like "Why Asians should care about such and such a black issue" - attempting to forge a narrative of a common black/Asian political and social agenda, it has been noticeable that pretty much all of the commentary to forge this partnership of visible minorities has been done by Asians, with apparently little being said by the other half of the alliance.

Perhaps there does exist an extensive body of work and conceptual analyses that envision a mutual black/Asian power block from an African-American perspective, but so it seems not to be a high priority for them. It seems as though Asians are more invested in the alliance than their black counterparts. The one area where Asian advocates and their black cohorts seem to be in perfect alignment is in their response to reports of anti-Asian sentiment that seemed to creep into the Baltimore riots following the killing of Freddie Gray. In short, the reports of alleged targeting of Asian businesses and the subsequent destruction of many of them have largely been ignored by both Asian-Americans and African-American commentators alike.

The first report that hinted that Asians were being targeted came from the respected news source, NPR, whose piece, although brief, offered a clear picture of the tensions that seem to exist between Asian merchants and the black community in some parts of Baltimore hit by riots. The NPR article notes that although there are those in the black community who have positive and even close relationships with Asian shopkeepers, there are others who harbor resentments and view Asians as interlopers who "give nothing back" to the community.

At least forty-two Korean-owned stores were looted and/or destroyed in the area whilst reports suggest that black-owned businesses were protected and spared. It could certainly be argued that evidence for racially driven looting is inconclusive, although the  main reason for that could be that there seems to be little interest or motivation to actually thoroughly investigate either the experiences of Asian merchants, or claims of racially motivated targeting of their stores. But most noticeable of all is that Asian-American advocacy seems to have no stance, opinion, or point of view regarding this apparent targeting of Asian stores by some black locals.

The best that we seem to have come up with is the effort of progressive CNN writer, Jeff Yang, whose piece seems more concerned that America will get the wrong impression about the character of the riots whilst completely avoiding any hint of empathy for the Asian-American victims of a brutal and terrifying pogrom. It is this disconnect between those who act as spokespeople for Asian-Americans, and those Asian-Americans who have the least political and social clout but who find themselves in the no-man's land of America's racial dialogue that I find troubling.

This disconnect allows Asian merchants - who are most often immigrants with poor English language skills, and who are amongst the poorest and most vulnerable group within Asian-America - to be repeatedly excluded from the dialogue on their own experience. Instead, their experience is lost and diminished (and even "gaslighted")  in narratives put forward by progressives such as Yang who exhort us to accept the big picture that effectively leaves targeted Asian merchants as necessary collateral damage in the fight against anti-blackness. Yang quotes Jennifer Lee  thusly....

..the mainstream media continues to pit minority groups against one another to draw attention from larger structural problems that plague poor, disadvantaged communities. By directing our attention to interminority conflict, it directs blame away from the structures that perpetuate gross inequality and toward individual problems.

As you can see, there is no mention of the human tragedy experienced by Asian merchants nor of their looted and destroyed livelihoods - it seems to be forgotten that Asian immigrants often count as poor, disadvantaged and vulnerable. It is probably true that the media promotes this narrative of inter-ethnic conflict - most probably because it makes for exciting viewing as much as for the purpose of deflecting attention away from real social issues - yet, that does not mean that we should ignore the very real possibility that there are elements in black America who harbor racial bias and hostility towards Asians.

The problem is that there is no reason to believe that any anti-Asian sentiment would be assuaged by an improved economic situation, or even that such sentiments are the result of dire economic circumstances. Adhering to this belief ignores the larger picture of xenophobic anti-Asian sentiment in American society that blames Asian economies for taking jobs, resources, and prestige away from Americans who are more deserving of it. The parallels with sentiments expressed by African-Americans are striking - the idea that Asians are taking an economic slice of the pie that rightfully belongs to African-Americans by operating in black neighbourhoods, Asians are taking jobs from locals by unfairly self-employing, and Asians are flaunting their prosperity by looking down their noses at locals, all speak of an entitlement complex that is too similar to mainstream America's negative attitudes towards Asia to be so easily dismissed.

Yang...

....there's little evidence to suggest a pattern in which Asian businesses have been actively targeted out of racial animus.......Instead, it seems as if Asian-owned stores have experienced damage partly because they make up a portion of establishments operating in the most economically vulnerable and socially volatile of neighborhoods. In other words, they were collateral damage, along with other stores in the vicinity of riots.

This is extremely insulting to those Korean-Americans whose stores were destroyed in Baltimore. Does there have to be a pattern of racial animus for racist hate-crimes to be considered as such? The NPR piece that Yang is responding to explicitly reported eyewitness accounts where Asian stores were the only ones targeted.....

But on this particular stretch - picture three treeless blocks of row houses, a lot of them boarded up - the only shops that were targeted were ones owned by Asian immigrants - mostly Koreans.

Speaking of racial animus, one local had this to say......

It's almost like payback, I guess you could say.......For all of the unspoken things that has happened between those businesses and our people, I feel like it was payback.

So, yes, the NPR piece does provide us with sufficient reason to believe that (at least in some cases) Asian stores were specifically targeted and that it was the result of racial animus. Whether or not this constitutes a "pattern" of any kind is completely irrelevant and I think Yang is intelligent enough to know that just because not all looters were targeting Asians stores does not remove the possibility that some were. The absence of a pattern of racial animus in no way precludes incidents of racial animus.

What I find most appalling about the Yang quote above is that he seems perfectly happy to hand-wave away these possible incidents of racial animus (that destroyed people's lives) in order to refocus our attention on what he terms the "real issues". In case he hasn't noticed, racism in America is a real issue and for those Koreans whose stores do seem to have been targeted, it was a very real issue, but Yang has presumed the moral authority to school us on what should really matter to us and whose suffering we should prioritize. That's easy for him to say and it seems his conscience permits him to view the livelihoods of targeted Korean merchants as a price he is willing to pay - all, I suspect from the comfort of a safe neighbourhood that is patrolled by a racist police force. The Koreans on the other hand might not be so thrilled and I don't find this sanctimonious posturing to be particularly ethical either.

Yang's piece gives absolutely no indication that he knows enough about the circumstances of the people or circumstances of that community whose experiences he, remarkably, presumes to be knowledgeable enough of to frame for us. He simply does not seem to have sufficient information to dismiss any reports of racial animus or what seem to be reports of clear incidents of targeting of Asian stores.

Yet, he has presented his piece (and himself) as authoritative on what was happening in a community which he seems to have no first-hand experience of nor does he seem to have actually gone to Baltimore to investigate whether the claims made by NPR are true or not. Thus, I fail to see on what grounds he was able to so thoroughly dismiss the NPR report. His only argument seems to be that we should dismiss claims of racial tension in Baltimore since the media has in the past - and does still - stoke the flames of urban violence with hyperbolic reporting on inter-ethnic tensions, 

It should go without saying that hyperbole does not mean untrue and that just because tensions are melodramatically reported, does not mean they should be dismissed outright.

Interestingly, the NPR piece is actually far from being hyperbolic - if anything it seems balanced and presents several different perspectives. What the NPR report showed was that there are African-Americans in the community who view Asian merchants with great fondness, while others are hateful. No hyperbole there.

I genuinely believe that most African-Americans - even in poor neighbourhoods that are subject to oppressive policing - do not harbour anti-Asian hostility. And I would even suggest that for many (hopefully most) African-Americans, these Asian-owned stores provide an important and convenient service to the local community. If this was not the case, then it is hard to explain how some of these Asian stores could remain in business for the years and decades that they have if they were such terrible racists as some locals suggested. But Yang's approach to frantically dismiss any and all suggestions of racially motivated looting merely plays into the hands of the hyperbolic mainstream media.

It could be that be that one reason the media is even able to stoke racial tensions between blacks and Asians is because prominent Asian-American journalists like Yang marginalize the racial experiences of Asian merchants in black neighbourhoods. The vacuum is naturally filled by the mainstream media. As far as I know, no prominent Asian-American journalist has even bothered to report on what these 42 Korean merchants went through. So don't complain and freak out when the mainstream media does the work of giving these marginalized, invisible, and neglected members of Asian-America a voice and then shape what they say to suit their own racial agenda (although the NPR piece didn't actually do that). Maybe, if Asians themselves were to include these merchants in the narrative of vulnerable communities then the mainstream media would not have the opportunity to take advantage of their invisibility?

I don't agree that Yang's proclaimed "real issues" should exclude the suffering or hardships experienced by Asian merchants in depressed areas. If people are looking to these merchants to be part of the solution to urban dysfunction then it is logical to include them as part of the "real issues" - particularly when their stores are targeted by resentful looting mobs. Losing your livelihood is a real issue and, by its silence or casual dismissals, the Asian media is complicit in protecting, defending, and excusing those who perpetrate these kinds of crimes against Asian merchants. 

Editing Is A Bitch

Another Update......

Way back in November of last year I wrote that I had completed my novel, was beginning the process of editing, and was slowing my blogging activity because of this. I had hoped to have the novel finished and either published via a publishing company or (more likely) self-published, probably with Amazon by this summer.

Unfortunately - as the title of this post suggests - editing is turning out to be a far more laborious and painstaking process than I could ever have imagined. My wife is doing the edit and we have, so far, passed the edit between us three times which has taken months. She did the initial edit and gave it to me, I approved - or not - her edit but also found things that I wanted to change! This process has happened three times, which may be normal for the editing process, I don't honestly know.

Every time I read back through the book I find things that I want to fine tune. What I am realizing is that the editing process may not have a natural end point, and that at some point one has to simply say "enough!" and move forward to the next stage of the process. Anyways this is still the reason why my blog productivity has been diminished.

As for the novel, it is an Asian-American historical thriller. I won't promise readers Shakespearean high-literature, but I also know it won't have many - or any - of the qualities typically present in the most highly-regarded Asian-American literature that finds itself embraced by mainstream America. I certainly do not expect mainstream America to embrace my novel! I do promise, however, a narrative of the Asian-American experience that is honest and, in some ways, uncompromising.

Stay posted, will have a new post up within the next few days.

The Eddie Huang Scandal

Reactivism For Its Own Sake

A wave of internet reaction has swept the Asian-American online disgruntled-o-sphere, not, as one might fancifully imagine because of reports that anti-Asian sentiment had seemingly crept into the riots in Baltimore, but because of something that Eddie Huang - of Fresh Of The Boat notoriety - said on Twitter.

I don't know much about Huang, except that he is some kind of celebrity chef/media personality who published a well-received memoir (Fresh Off The Boat), which has been turned into a sit-com. The sit-com has been met with huge support from Asian-Americans who seem happy that we are finally the main characters on an Asian-American-centric show. All that came crashing down over the past few days.

It began with Huang's interview on the Bill Maher show, in which - as you can see in the video linked to below, starting at around 5:20 - he stated that....... 

Asian men have been so emasculated in America that we are basically treated like black women......when I sit on OKCupid no one wants to talk to me either..........

Granted, there is a presupposition on Huang's part that the audience will be savvy to those references, but I see no churlish intent on his part. In fact, the comment is vague - too vague to really draw any conclusions about intent or significance unless one is familiar with Asian-American debate subjects. Huang's comment unleashed a Twitter-confrontation and a storm of condemnation from, initially, several black feminists and, subsequently, Asian-American progressives. The whole back and forth can be read here, at Storify, and was initiated by a black feminist blogger who goes by the moniker of Black Girl Dangerous (BGD). Here's the first few exchanges.....

BGD.....

*  Does Eddie Huang have a twitter account because I HAVE QUESTIONS.
*  When you say "Asian men are basically treated like black women" what are you  saying
*  If the point is that society says both groups are undesirable, you need to do a better job of making that clear.
* Otherwise, it sounds like you're just trashing black women for no reason at all. Which frankly, we've had enough of.
* To go on television and lament being "treated like black women" is misogynoir.

Huang replies.....

* in terms of OKCUPID which is what I was referring to, we are least desired, that's what I said
* no one is saying we have the same struggle. i was SPECIFICALLY talking about parallels re: the way we're

BGD...

* But you didn't make it at all clear what you meant. Do you think that audience understood that?

Huang...

* mentioned it because at a ton of my talks i speak about emasculation of asian men and black women in audience sound off too

BGD...

* And right now, this black woman is sounding off. Black women sounding off is only okay if it doesn't challenge you?

Huang....

* that's not what anyone said. you trying to argue or you trying to understand?or you trying to get followers

*they also didn't understand my big lebowski jokes. i'm not going to apologize because people aren't aware. i am.

My take is that both are right - Huang was very vague and even though his intent was benign, if he chooses to speak about issues that mainstream America may not be familiar with, he should be less vague. At the same time BGD did seem to be looking to start an argument regardless of what Huang said - it all turned sour after she (strangely) implied that Huang had an issue with her interrogation. Yet, as any reasonable person can read for themselves, Huang seemed pretty open about answering the questions and explaining himself until that point.

All this aside, what has been most interesting for me is the condemnation of Huang by Asian-American commentators. The general tone of these commentaries has been self-righteous condemnation both for Huang's twitter conduct but also for his actual comments on the Mahler show that led to the ensuing twitter scandal. Yet, Huang did seem to be doing the very thing that the progressives who are criticizing him insist that Asian-Americans do when they try to talk about Asian issues - which is to mention anti-blackness. Remember all those posts I've done on Asian-American progressives which criticize any Asian who focuses on Asian issues without mentioning anti-blackness? Well, Huang did just that - he drew a parallel between an Asian demographic's experience and a black one and now he is being called a racist for doing it by the very people who insist we do just that! It would be laughable except that these guys are serious.

As I have written elsewhere, this Asian-American progressive obsession with anti-anti-blackness reactivism itself seems like a lazy piggy-backing of Asian issues onto black suffering in lieu of taking the time to actually formulate an autonomous Asian-American worldview. In this sense, Huang has more integrity than those Asians who criticize him - he is being honest about his adoption of blackness to promote an Asian agenda, Asian progressives are surreptitiously (even if unintentionally or more likely obliviously) adopting blackness to allow themselves to remain racially invisible and avoid a direct confrontation of society's anti-Asianism.

Yet, if I was to criticize Huang, it would actually be because he, too, has fallen into the trap of trying to explain the Asian experience through anti-blackness, when, in truth, Asian emasculation was the essential spark for the genesis of white supremacy itself, and anti-blackness is a sad and sorry by-product of it. As I pointed out here, people have got things backwards - anti-blackness is ultimately the by-product of the feminization of Asia. This means that the emasculation of Asian men is a subject that need not reference the black experience since it precedes anti-blackness and forms the basis upon which European self-conceptions of superiority are based.

For example, contemplate the musings of such influential thinkers like Aristotle....

The power possessed by all of these [non-Greek Kingships] resembles that of tyrannies, but they govern according to law and are hereditary; [20] for because the barbarians are more servile in their nature than the Greeks, and the Asiatics than the Europeans, they endure despotic rule without any resentment. ....[LINK]

The peoples of Asia on the other hand are intelligent and skillful in temperament, but lack spirit, so that they are in continuous subjection and slavery. But the Greek race participates in both characters, just as it occupies the middle position geographically, for it is both spirited and intelligent......[LINK]

...and Hippocrates....

I say, then, that Asia differs very much from Europe as to the nature of all things, both With regard to the productions of the earth and the inhabitants, for everything is produced much more beautiful and large in Asia; the country is milder, and the dispositions of the inhabitants also are more gentle and affectionate..... Manly courage, endurance of suffering, laborious enterprise, and high spirit, could not be produced in such a state of things either among the native inhabitants [of Asia].....[LINK] 

with regard to the pusillanimity and cowardice of the inhabitants, the principal reason the Asiatics are more unwarlike and of gentler disposition than the Europeans is ......the Asiatic race is feeble, and further, owing to their laws; for monarchy prevails in the greater part of Asia, and where men are not their own masters nor independent, but are the slaves of others.....[LINK]

From an Asian-American perspective, it is almost impossible not to notice just how contemporary these stereotypes of "Asiatics" seem to be. Note the feminization of the Asian character? Or the representation of Asians as servile and submissive to authority? How about the cowardly and "feeble" nature of Asiatics' masculinity as reflected in their non-aggressive predisposition? How anti-anti-blackness reactivism can address these philosophically ingrained modes of thinking about Asia that emerged as the very foundation of white supremacist thinking which informed European self-conceptions about their right and necessity to rule throughout the centuries is yet to be explained.

How these ideas have survived and been handed down throughout the generations is a subject of ongoing investigation for me, but it is almost self-evident that these archaic notions of European exceptionalism through the feminization of Asia have persisted over the centuries. The emasculation of Asia has been both the by-product and driving force of white supremacy's proclaimed right to rule and the subsequent wars and colonial endeavours that this ideology has prompted and justified. This means that the question of Asian emasculation must be at the forefront of the struggle against white supremacy, not a mere footnote in Asian-American progressives' convoluted agenda.

Consider this; in Aristotle's age, the Greek states looked out across the Aegean Sea in both fear and awe at the sheer diversity and size of the unknowable Asiatic masses within the Persian empire that stood poised to engulf Greece's way of life. Racial stereotypes arose describing Asiatics' subservient and submissive nature that seemed to serve as both a reinforcement of the superiority of Greek values and a justification for Greece's right to rule and conquer.

Now, over twenty-five centuries later, we in America, look out across the Pacific at the frighteningly vast and unknowable Asiatic masses, content in the superiority of "our" values and way of life which has justified, and continues to justify, our involvement or interference in their societies. We decry their lack of democratic thinking and subservience to authority and dehumanize the enemy by reminding ourselves of their femininity, all the while contemplating and expecting the inevitable war (with China these days) that will once and for all put them in their place. The deja vu is disquieting. 

Clearly, the biggest problem with Huang's conceptualization of Asian emasculation is not that it inappropriately found intersectionality with the black female experience. Rather, Huang simply failed to relate the sheer vastness of the scope of this emasculation and the terrible effects it has had on the world throughout history. The world we inherited today - the existentially grave East/West ideological divide of our modern world is a testament to the vast scope of this issue.

It has to be acknowledged that these lofty concepts are extremely difficult to convey in a seven-minute segment on live television, and really deserves an inquiry that is integral to, and focused on, Asian-American identity itself. But to do this one would have to acknowledge that there exists a fundamental aspect of white supremacy that cannot possibly be informed by anti-blackness. Sadly, we are not allowed to do this because such an Asian focused approach is (inanely) labeled anti-black by our own reactivists.

So we are stuck in a Catch 22 situation; in order to truly understand white supremacy and the feminization of Asia that lies at its deepest root, we have to accept that emasculation of Asian men must become the fundamental concern for Asian-American discourse. Yet, our friends in the world of Asian progressiveness discourage this thinking which not only contextualizes white supremacy throughout history but also anti-blackness itself.

For these reasons it simply makes no sense to criticize Huang's version of masculinity as lacking credibility because it appropriates "blackness" or it tries too hard in other ways, since these same critics insist on avoiding the philosophical and historical evidence that would re-acquaint Asian-Americans with the historical experiences that could form the basis of an autonomous Asian identity that doesn't justify itself by feeding off black suffering.

What Is Wrong With People?

This Week In Asian-American Reactivism.

It has been both interesting and disconcerting to observe events unfolding around the shooting of Akai Gurley by Chinese-American police rookie, Peter Liang. I alluded to the Liang case in a previous post in which I decried the offhanded manner in which Asian-American progressives and self-proclaimed justice advocates have all but condemned him to guilt weeks before he has even had his day in court.

The case has divided, somewhat, Asian-Americans into two camps: on the one hand are those - mentioned above - who seem like a rabid lynch-mob determined to use any media means necessary to destroy the reputation and character of Liang and shape public opinion against him; on the other hand stand Chinese-American FOBs who obstinately refuse to allow the cynical application of justice to go unnoticed and unchallenged. Sadly, in addition to the attempts to taint Liang's reputation and character, Asian-American reactivism has sought to characterize those who support his cause as, by definition, anti-black.

A recent article by blogger, David Shih, that has made the rounds in Asian-American cyber-country, offers some insight into the issue, but doesn't start out well.

As a Chinese American, I know that my racial identity occupies a space in the cultural imagination somewhere between white and black. I know that white supremacy often works in my favor to give me privilege and the benefit of the doubt. I know that the world is this way until it isn't. Peter Liang, who is also Chinese American, must know this too. On February 10, a grand jury ruled to indict the NYPD officer for killing Akai Gurley, who is black.

Unfortunately, the agreed upon facts of the immediate aftermath of the shooting stand in blaring contrast to the above assertions.....

Officer Peter Liang told his partner Shaun Landau, 'I think I'm going to get fired,' moments after he 'accidentally' fired his gun on Thursday evening at the Louis Pink Houses in the East New York section of Brooklyn, and before he was aware of the fact that he had even struck someone with a bullet.

Liang's reaction in the immediate aftermath of the shooting was the complete opposite of what one would expect if Shih's assertion are true. The rookie cop had no sense that he would be the beneficiary of privilege and that his mistake would go unpunished. If anything, in light of the recent killings of black men in the weeks before Gurley's death and the lack of indictments for the officers involved, Liang exhibits an acutely painful awareness that he would likely be treated differently than white officers - and this is before he had even realized that he had shot someone. He certainly seems not to have expected any kind of benefit of the doubt.

In fact, in choosing to serve in the police force, it is possibly far more likely that Liang was acutely aware that he was entering a profession in which has in the past discriminated against Asian officers and in no way shown any proclivity towards "privileging" them. It is simply dishonest - not to mention inflammatory - to make a random generalization about the Asian racial experience, and then assert that this generalization applies to Peter Liang. But the Shih piece goes on in blissful oblivion....

But there should be no confusion: Peter Liang should stand trial. Liang's supporters are asking for the same standard that exonerated Wilson, Williams, and Pantaleo. It is a racist standard.

This is simply untrue, and such an assertion is unbecoming of anyone who is genuine about their claims to stand for justice. According to a press release - which Shih links to in his post and which he seems to not have read - the The Coalition of Asian-Americans for Civil Rights has this to say....

They...announced an upcoming day of rallies on April 26, 2015, to be held in cities across the Nation from NYC to California as a sign of protest against the unduly harsh and unequal treatment afforded the rookie police officer.... 

"The charges in the indictment against Officer Liang is to please the general public. Officer Liang is simply sacrificed for political reason," .... 

“Our community demands Officer Liang receives fair treatment under the law”....
The coordinated protests are a call to action for Asian-Americans, their neighbors, and allies to demand a fair trial and transparency from the office of Brooklyn District Attorney Ken Thompson, which has so far failed to address community concerns........ 

“The fact only Officer Liang was indicted raises many questions regarding fairness. Why was there no consideration of an indictment of “NYCHA” for failing to restore the lighting and causing a dangerous condition of darkness in the staircases? Why was only Officer Liang indicted for failing to immediately report the incident when Officer Liang’s partner was also present and also failed to immediately call in the incident?”...... 

“We understand that there's a loss of life. This was an unfortunate tragic accident. Officer Liang's misfiring should have been under NYPD disciplinary actions, not under our legal system. The charges are simply inappropriate,”.... 

“What we have here is a political prosecution,” Queens civil rights activist Phil Gim and Co-Chair of the CAACR said, continuing “the Brooklyn DA’s office thought they would easily steamroll the Chinese community and that we would stay quiet, but they were wrong. We’re standing up for ourselves, and we’re demanding that Peter Liang get the fair, unbiased treatment he deserves.”..... 

“Officer Liang is being used as a scapegoat,” Nassau County Community Leader and Co-Chair of the CAACR Doug Lee said. “As the tragic death of Akai Gurley was clearly an accident, there is no logical explanation for the severity of charges against him and the aggressive manner in which he is prosecuted. This is clearly selective enforcement of the law for political purposes.”....

Clearly, the above statements issued by Liang's supporters are making a far more nuanced argument than Shih seems willing to acknowledge. Instead of demanding that Liang simply not be prosecuted, they are demanding that charges be proportionate to the crime. The sentiment is repeated in an article covering a pro-Liang protest.....

[a protestor says] “I think it was an accident. He deserves a chance. I think his manslaughter charge is too high, but he should be charged with something, but not manslaughter. I think it’s an accident and accidents happen. I feel really sad for the victim’s family, but I don’t feel it is a criminal case. This one is an accident and hopefully the evidence will show that and that’s why we need to support Liang.”

If anything, Liang's supporters seem to have a more reasonable - and rational - grasp of the concept of justice than the progressive justice workers. There is not a single point made by Liang's supporters that has been adequately answered either by the actual prosecutors in the case or the online progressive Asian prosecutors who seem keen on a media trial for Liang.

That to me is big problem: if the points raised by Liang's supporters are valid, then there is no logical reason to oppose their point of view. In fact, some seem to agree that Liang's supporters make good points but then - bizarrely - conclude that the objectively unfair application of justice that has brought his indictment is, in fact, a good application of justice. In order to reach this conclusion, logic and reason are subjugated to ideology.

Racefiles....

If we begin from the premise that racism is unacceptable, then it does not make sense for Chinese Americans to rush to the defense of Officer Liang simply because he is a fellow Chinese.

Apart from the fact that this makes no sense, I am horrified that this thinking even comes into the debate. The writer seems to be asserting that race played a role in Liang's actions and the death of Gurley. This is extremely inflammatory and defamatory. Unless our friends in the progressive movement have some hitherto undiscovered evidence of a racial motive for Liang's actions and those of his supporters, they need to control their reactionary impulses and stick to the facts of the case. Remember now, that there is more at stake here than petty considerations of reputations and progressive justice worker credibility.

The problem with both the Racefiles and Shih articles is that there is very little to tie their claims and assertions to the actual case in any meaningful way - they neither shed light on Liang's actions nor on the actions and motivations of those who voice concern that Liang is a victim of injustice. Instead, they construct ideological racial narratives and squeeze the motives of the people involved into it, and present this as facts in the case and reasons why Liang should be unfairly treated. This is clearly - whether they realize it or not - a charge of guilt based on ideological grounds.

Again, there is no evidence that race played a role in Gurley's shooting - unless you choose to suspend intelligence to claim that Liang took out his firearm hoping that it would accidentally go off so that he could shoot blindly into a dark stairwell hoping to kill a black man. Furthermore, there is no merit to the claim that Liang's supporters are motivated by anti-black racism or that pushing for a proportionate application of justice for what amounts to a tragic rookie mistake upholds white supremacy.

Liang's supporters raise compelling points that - in keeping with the custom of ignoring Asian claims of racial injustice - are being ignored. It is the greatest irony that it is Liang's supporters who make no grandiose and pretentious claims of their own justice credentials - and not the self-proclaimed racial justice workers - who are actually challenging the establishment. Meanwhile, the movers and shakers of Asian-American progressive"thinking" can't seem to formulate a meaningful assessment of the case that takes into account the nuances of race and justice. They very literally are unable to think outside of the "black/white" narrative box and therefore are unable to see anything other than black or white.

Nowhere is this more clearly illustrated than in an open-letter released on behalf of "more than fifty" Asian organizations calling for Liang to be cynically treated by the justice system.

As Asian and Pacific Islander community leaders and organizations from across the country, we strongly oppose calls coming from some members of the Asian American community to drop charges against NYPD Officer Peter Liang for the death of Akai Gurley.
This demand is misguided and utterly hurtful to Akai Gurley’s family and to communities that have been subjected to discriminatory and often deadly policing practices across the country.
We stand with Akai Gurley’s family and all those who have lost loved ones to police violence.

It is neither accurate nor honest - but it is highly inflammatory - to call Gurley's death an act of police violence or imply that it was in any way discriminatory. We are being asked to believe that opening a door holding a loaded gun is racist or indicative of racist intent and is an act of deliberate violence- and not simply and tragically an irresponsible thing to do. They go on......

 The fact that Officer Liang is Asian American shouldn’t mean that we as Asians and Pacific Islanders support him unequivocally. Quite the opposite — it should compel us to think about what justice looks like and how Asian Americans can contribute to the movement for police accountability and broader racial justice.

Police violence against Black communities is a systemic problem, and when police officers are not held accountable, they are enabled to kill with impunity. Without accountability for police officers who use deadly force and a complete and thorough overhaul of policing practices and other institutional policies in the U.S., we will have more Akai Gurleys and more Officer Liangs, more Mike Browns and Darren Wilsons, more Rekia Boyds and Dante Servins.

This would be laughable if the repercussions weren't so serious. The gist of this statement is that Liang should tried with the actions of specific acts of racially-tinged police brutality committed by people other than Liang himself in mind. Furthermore, justice should keep in mind systemic racism against blacks when trying Liang - in other words, he is to be held accountable for systemic racism even though none of these reactivists have presented an ounce of evidence that race, racism, or systemic racism had a role in Gurley's shooting. Thus, justice for Liang should be disproportionate to his crime merely because others - like Darren Wilson and Pantaleo - are guilty of racist policing and the system is racist.

It would be easy to believe none of the fifty Asian organizations cheer leading for the unjust and disproportionate charges leveled at Liang have even read any of the concerns voices by his supporters. The stated concerns of Liang's supporters show a far more nuanced position than merely one of providing unequivocal support based on race. They are fundamentally concerned that Liang's race is counting against him in the overly harsh charges being brought and the cynical application of justice. One need not even look beyond the Gurley case at the Tamir Rice and Eric Garner killings to notice the unequal application of justice at play.

To me, there seems to be a far more serious legal - and moral - transgression in Liang's failure to provide CPR than in the actual accidental shooting itself. If he had acted, then there remains the possibility that Gurley may well have survived. There were two officers on the scene and neither administered CPR, yet, only Liang is being charged for his failure to provide assistance. His partner - whose name is Shaun Landau  and whom I presume is non-Asian and possibly white - has not been charged.  Forget the failure to indict white officers in other cases - a, presumably non-Asian, officer at the scene who committed the same crime as Liang is not being charged for it.

The point here is that Asian progressives - with their unreasonable and irrational insistence on keeping America's race narrative firmly within the confines of the black/white narrative - seem literally to only be able to think in black and white. They don't seem able to conceive of the possibility that there could be levels of injustice being perpetrated within the same scenario. Charging Liang disproportionately to his actions - if true - is an injustice. To insist unquestioningly on seeing Liang disproportionately charged is not upholding justice, but rather is supporting vengeance at any cost. Liang should not be charged as some kind of pay back for the - far, far more serious police crimes where the intent to kill is objectively more obvious - of other members of law enforcement and the racist system itself. Nor should he be some kind of sacrifice to deflect criticisms away from racist law-enforcement and justice systems that enable it. This seems to be what the seemingly blood-thirsty Asian-American progressive movement is supporting unquestioningly. That is simply unjust.

Those who support Liang have made cogent points and raise some very significant questions regarding the cynical application of justice, and in so doing are challenging the establishment's presumptions and practices. By contrast, Asian progressives with their un-nuanced and childishly simplistic approach are fundamentally upholding the status quo of racial injustice in law enforcement and the justice system.

Akai Gurley deserves justice but that does not mean that it should come at any cost including the cynical, disproportionate application of it. Nor should it mean that Liang should be sacrificed to assuage public anger at other police killings and judicial failures to indict. Liang's supporters are asking the right questions that challenge the failures of the establishment and are calling for justice to be proportionate. This is a far cry from the inflammatory misrepresentation of their stance as merely some kind of racial tribalism. It clearly is not.

David Shih argues the following....

The CAACR claims that because Peter Liang is Chinese American, he is being treated differently from Darren Wilson, Sean Williams, and Daniel Pantaleo. But this possibility doesn't mean Liang shouldn't be tried...........Those supporting Liang only because he is Chinese American should know that they are not fighting racism. If the CAACR truly desires justice, it will not lobby for Liang to be treated the same as the white officers. To do so would be to ask for an ad hoc dispensation from a racist system.......

...which is simply false. As I've clearly illustrated, Liang's supporters have presented a far more nuanced stance than the one Shih misrepresents. As readers can see for themselves earlier in the post, the organization that Shih refers to - The CAACR - is not arguing that Liang not be charged. They are arguing that the charges are disproportionate and overly harsh for what even the prosecutor says was an unintentional shooting. Furthermore they argue that these overly harsh and disproportionate charges are only being - and can only be - brought and made to stick against a minority demographic that has little political influence and is mostly on the margins of the political agenda, such as Chinese-Americans. Furthermore, demonstrators who support Liang have explicitly stated that they believe that he should be charged, but that should these charges should be proportionate to the crime. But that fact does not win brownie points in the narrative.

Sorting The Wheat From The Chaff

Or, Racial Experiences Suck - Who Knew?

I came across an interesting article from the Huffington Post written by a guy named Mason Hsieh in which he describes his experience of being asked the question "Where are you really from?". Hsieh does a great job outlining the racist presumptions that makes this line of questioning uncomfortable for Asians, as well as the socially inappropriate practice (bordering on harassment) of interrogating someone about their national or racial origins after they have already explained to you several times over that they are, in fact, American through and through.

Hsieh describes the incident thusly....

A few months back, I was at a party and was introduced to a random, white girl (let's call her Tammy). We hit it off relatively okay and began that boring, yet inevitable, game of "tell me about yourself." .........Everything was going fine until she asked me: "So, where are you from?" The conversation went as follows: 

Tammy: So, where are you from?Me: I'm from California.T: But where are you really from?M: I'm from the Bay Area.T: But, like, actually. Where are you really from?M: Oakland.T: Okay, what I mean is your face is not an "American" face.M: Excuse me?T: Like, your eyes... 

At this point, I simply fell silent and walked away from the conversation.

Strangely, even though Hsieh raised many pertinent points about the racial presumptions and ingrained racialized thinking that makes such conversations a common, uncomfortable, and sometimes a potentially dangerous experience, I can't help but feel as though he missed a golden opportunity to advance his own sense of personal empowerment from the situation.

I concur with Hsieh's views about the racial presumptions that drive such interactions, yet his own presumptions about the intent of people who engage in this line of racial interrogation is where he lets himself down both in the article and in the moment of his interaction with the interrogator. Although he acknowledges that he cannot know "Tammy's" intent, he continues as though he has judged her intent to be negative for no apparent reason other than it left him with negative feelings. Worse still, he then goes silent and then storms off, leaving Tammy's presumptions unchallenged.

To me, this defeatist behaviour is the natural, detrimental outcome of Asian-America's feminized anti-racist narrative that promotes feelings of offendedness as the foundational point from which counter-racist  commentary proceeds. As I have tried to explain many times before, our hurt feelings and sense of affront at meda slights and other hate crimes are un-compelling and un-inspirational as a means to galvanize empathy and hopelessly inadequate as a philosophical point of view to provide a strong unifying force for the community that can make coherent and compelling commentaries expounding on our racial experiences.

Amongst adults and in the world of the mature minded, feelings - hurt or otherwise - are things to be managed, and those who operate from emotion and make their feelings the subject of public debate are - often justifiably - viewed with suspicion and lose credibility. In short, Asian-Americans just don't have the privilege of making their feelings a matter of concern. We don't have the option of storming off and leaving the "fight" and we certainly don't have the privilege of allowing racialized or racist experiences go unchallenged in the moment.

To my way of thinking, Hsieh would have better helped himself if he had conveyed some of the ideas and feelings that he wrote about in his piece to the person who had actually caused him the distress. By storming off, he fundamentally conceded defeat by leaving the "floor" to the "offender" - at the end of the day the last man (or woman) standing is the one whose worldview prevails.

Don't get me wrong here, I'm not saying Hsieh should have been aggressive and responded with anger to his interrogation, but he may well have felt a greater sense of personal empowerment if he had stood his ground and made his case rather that allow himself to be driven by emotion. This is where the intent of the supposed micro-aggressor becomes important. To my mind, these situations provide a myriad of opportunities for personal growth in which we can educate those who are well-meaning, but conditioned to react this way to Asians, or conversely, we can call out and confront those who understand and utilize racialized presumptions to engage in what amounts to harassment or bullying of Asians. It is well and truly a process of separating the wheat from the chaff and that is something that has to be done in the moment on, unfortunately, a daily basis.

Some might argue that Asians should not have to educate people out of their racist conditioning and I would understand the sentiments behind that. Reality, however, has a way foiling such high-brow ideological pronouncements. By storming off and not seeing out these kinds of situations through to their conclusions, Hsieh and any Asian-Americans who react in this way are allowing such racialized conditioning to persist unchecked and unchallenged.

It doesn't really seem like it even comes down to "re-educating" people. It is more of engaging in a process of enquiry in which you assume the responsibility to shape and define the racial dialogue in your own personal spaces. In other words, you will be the one being educated and all of the ambiguity that surrounds these kinds of day-to-day interactions will fall away and you will be in a better position to judge the intent of those who approach you with this kind of interrogation. It could be that if one chooses to engage rather than storm off that one could end up with a friend who examines their presumptions. Conversely, the situation could turn into a full-on hate-crime. Either way, at least you will know where it is you stand and, hopefully, have a clearer picture of the most appropriate response for the moment. Plus, the article one writes about the encounter later is sure to be far more interesting.

To conclude, I want to emphasize that such situations are always awkward and knowing how to deal with racism is extremely difficult, particularly in the moment and when the intent is deliberately - or not - ambiguous. But that is merely an accurate summary of the Asian racial experience; there is an ambiguity about Asians as an ethnic minority that places us firmly outside of the considerations of both side of the racial equation. This ambiguity results in a wide gamut of outcomes ranging from awkward questioning and racial slurring, to employment discrimination and violent hate-crimes. So I don't fault Hsieh if he simply was at a loss at how to deal in the moment - we have all been there, including myself. It is a process and sometimes one fails.

It is in our interest to move away from the approach of haughty offence and wounded racial pride as foundations of our commentary and begin to think about and relate how we engaged in such situations so that we shed light on what it requires for us to have the kind of normal social and personal interactions that others take for granted.

Rapism...(TM)

The Curious Case Of Peter Yu.

Peter Yu is a Chinese national living and (previously) studying at Vassar College in upstate New York. Athletically and academically gifted, Yu was a well above average student who was popular with his college peers and seemed to be enjoying a fulfilling campus life. All that changed back in 2012 when female student and fellow rowing-team member,  Mary Claire Walker, accused Yu of rape. Undoubtedly, rape is not a light matter and although I do not have access to the details of the incident and would never seek to pass judgment from a distance, there are aspects of the case that are disturbing to say the least.

According to the accusation made by Walker, Yu had non-consensual sex with her in his dorm room - taking advantage of her state of inebriation. Walker's story is that....

[she and Yu] consumed alcohol at a team party in February 2012; one of Walker’s friends seems to have thought she was very drunk. After the party ended, Walker accompanied Yu back to his room. They started to have intercourse, but Yu’s roommate entered the room and interrupted them; Walker then said she didn’t want to go any further, and she left.

Yu was subsequently expelled from Vassar by a college tribunal for the alleged rape. Yet, the story is not so simple as it at first might seem.

Walker's accusations were made almost exactly one year to the day that the incident was alleged to have taken place (a significant point which I will address later), which doesn't diminish the possibility of her claims, per se, but it does cast doubt on them. In the intervening period - an entire year - Walker neither made a police report, nor sought any kind of medical exam in the immediate aftermath of the alleged rape. In fact, she seemed to have quite merrily exchanged Facebook messages with Yu, apologizing for her own behaviour (Yu was apparently a virgin and Walker seemed to believe that she had taken advantage of him), and ensuing messages between the two of them were cordial if not downright friendly - Walker even sending a message the following day that she had had a "wonderful time" and later, inviting him to dinner.

Although, the trauma of rape makes these kinds of actions entirely plausible, there is enough ambiguity to cast significant doubt on the accusations. But that isn't even the main problem with the case; the manner in which the accusations were made and the college tribunal's actions in response have left a major question mark over the fairness the treatment of Yu and the clear possibility that his legal and civil rights have been trampled upon. Within days of the accusations, a college tribunal had was convened and  less that two-and-a-half weeks later, Yu had been found guilty and expelled.

According to several reports, and Yu's lawsuit, the Vassar college tribunal had all the trappings of a kangaroo court in which a guilty verdict would be the only outcome regardless of the evidence. The deck was stacked against Yu for several reasons. First and foremost, his accuser was the daughter of a long-time professor at the college and the tribunal consisted entirely of colleagues of his accuser's father despite Yu's requests for a student to be on the judging panel. Yu alleges that the short amount of time between the charges being filed and his tribunal offered him little opportunity to mount a reasonable defense or have legal representation, and furthermore, he alleges that the tribunal did not allow cross-examination of his accuser nor did it give suitable credence to the cordial exchange of e-mails between Walker and himself which would seem to be significant counter-evidence to the accusations.

In light of this, the timing of the accusation has, for some, come under suspicion. Vassar has a statute of limitations of sorts which gives alleged victims one year from the date of any incident to file a complaint. By filing a complaint on the final day that the school permits claims to be made, it is suspected that Walker cleverly avoided a counter-claim that she, in fact, was the sexual predator. Walker's e-mails in which she expressed regret for "taking advantage" of Yu - who was a virgin at the time - when they were both extremely drunk are a testament to this possibility.

With the deck stacked so heavily against Yu, it is no surprise that he was found guilty by the tribunal and subsequently expelled. Yu has since applied to and been rejected by several schools and told not to bother applying by several others. The harm to the man's life has been huge and to make matters worse his lawsuit has recently been dismissed.

Surprisingly - or maybe not - Yu's case has gone largely unnoticed and ignored by Asian-American media and advocates. To me there is more than sufficient cause to view the way Yu has been treated as a major miscarriage of justice. I cannot know if Yu's race - or nationality - played a role in his case, but there are disturbing echoes of racially inflected false rape accusation from the past in which a white woman's mere allegations and a rigged jury has been enough to ensure guilty verdicts for minority men.

The silence of Asian-America is all the more acute given the apparent fearful ambivalence towards Asian men's sexuality of some in the Asian-American Progressive Reactivist Wannabe movement. Seemingly ever-ready to frame any hint of a strong Asian male sexuality as somehow threatening or implicitly unhealthy, Asian-America once again throws the baby out with the bathwater with its inability to offer a nuanced position on issues relating to Asian men's sexuality. Perhaps the intellectual process is unable to get past the fact that Yu's case cannot be framed as part of the black/white narrative that causes Asian advocacy to draw an ontological blank. Regardless, it is disturbing that Asian advocacy and commentators have little to say about Asian men's sexuality unless the sıbject is framed as fundamentally negative or reinforces racial stereotypes of the angry Asian sexual predator.

In the bigger picture, Yu's case is part of a larger problem of campus rape and how colleges are addressing the issues. Schools have been accused of not taking rape allegations with enough seriousness or sensitivity and there is a cultural history of treating rape victims poorly by authorities so in some ways, efforts by colleges to soften the process for victims has merit and may be necessary. The Yu case, however, seems to go far beyond this and there are reasons to suspect that Vassar's tribunal process denied Yu any chance of a reasonable and rightful defense and may have allegedly been biased in favor of a fellow professor's daughter.

Asian-American Cops.......

....And The Asian Progressives Endangering Their Lives.

My last four or so posts have explored the strange world of Asian-American progressives and their advocacy which seems to promote the idea that Asian-American advocacy should be about anything but advocating for Asian-Americans. Some even suggest that the idea of any race discussions outside of the standard black/white narrative is implicitly an expression of "anti-blackness" - suggesting that any Asian-American endeavour that focuses on Asian-Americans is somehow anti-black. Of course this means that things like Asian-American studies is anti-black simply because by its very nature it exists outside of the black/white narrative and focuses on Asian-American identity.

In order to maintain these bizarre beliefs, Asian progressives resort to progressively convoluted conspiracy theories that hold to the idea that the racist white establishment maintains its own power by privileging Asians with economic and academic rewards - at the expense of white people even. Furthermore, although it is more likely that the model minority myth was created as a means to soften the rampant anti-Asian racism in light of dramatic changes to immigration law in 1965, Asian progressives maintain that it is merely a plot to embarrass civil rights activists and passive-aggressively erode civil rights legislation enacted in the 1960's. In short, Asian-American advocacy is about performing dramatic intellectual backflips to actually avoid advocating for an autonomous Asian voice for the community they claim to speak for.

Instead, Asian-American advocacy is somehow conceived of as an appendage to anti-anti-blackness activism with little of substance to say of its own experience - I don't blame the Asian experience for that. The flurry of reactivism within the Asian blogosphere in the wake of recent police killings of Michael Brown and others has highlighted the ways that this unhealthily co-dependent approach to Asian advocacy has exposed the absurdity of this aspect of Asian progressiveness. Two incidences in particular show how in the rush to piggy-back a weak Asian voice onto black suffering, Asian-American advocacy has both abandoned the necessary nuance of the 21st Century American race experience and, in doing so, failed to present a voice of advocacy for Asian-Americans when it would seem to be the most necessary.

Nowhere has this been more evident than in Asian-American advocacy's response to the shooting death of policeman officer Wenjian Liu and the suspiciously cynical-seeming indictment of Chinese-American cop Peter Liang for the shooting of unarmed African-American, Akai Gurley. Poor Wenjian has been completely ignored by the progressives in Asian-American advocacy and Peter Liang has been basically abandoned and condemned even before he gets his day in court.

Wenjian was an innocent as much as Tamir Rice and Eric Garner, a first-generation Chinese-American immigrant who arrived in America when he was twelve, learned the English language well enough to enable him to provide a much-needed service to the NYPD as a bi-lingual officer, and whose choice of career as a police officer makes him not only a man who had a sense of responsibility to his adopted country, but it also makes him a pioneer in a career path notoriously devoid of an Asian presence. It is men and women like Wenjian who are are breaking down social barriers by their actions and willingness to walk their talk and put their lives on the line in careers where they assume responsibility for upholding the democratic laws and principles of their nation. Sadly, for Asian-American progressives, none of this was worthy of even the most minimal of note.

This highlights the intellectual poverty of those progressives whose thesis seems based on the notion that merely acknowledging the autonomous Asian-American experience is implicitly anti-black. Wenjian Liu simply does not fit this stupid narrative, because his life tells a story of the Asian-American experience that does sit well within the framework of the simplistic and hopelessly inadequate black/white narrative of race in America. Thus, Asian-American progressives merely reinforce the invisibility of the Asian diaspora - Wenjian is the most clear and tragic example of this process in action. Sadly, we cannot blame whitey for it this time.

Awkwardly, though, people like Wenjian quite possibly do more to break down barriers facing ethnic minorities and recent immigrants and galvanize the resolve of the Asian minority than all the reactivism of Asian-American progressives. Why he has been rendered invisible by Asian progressives is bizarre but not surprising. By defining an autonomous Asian-American experience as  implicitly anti-black in order to assert the primacy of the black/white racial narrative, Asian progressives leave no room for such awkward characters as Wenjian. As one of the under-represented demographics in America law enforcement Wenjian is one of the pioneering figures breaking down barriers that restrict Asian-Americans from entering the field. I think he deserves more from Asian-America than to be reduced to barely a footnote in the black/white narrative, his life is worth far more than that.

The case of Peter Liang has offered us a stark illustration of how Asian-American progressive thought defines itself out of all relevance to the race dialogue of 21st Century America. Liang is the Asian-American rookie cop who shot and killed an unarmed black man, Akai Gurley, in the stairwell of a Brooklyn apartment complex. Liang states that his gun went off accidentally and Gurley's death was a tragic fluke. To my reading his story seems sound - the victim was standing one floor below Liang in an unlit stairwell and the bullet ricocheted off a wall striking Gurley square in the chest. If the killing was intentional, then that would make Liang an incredibly gifted marksman who was able to guesstimate the trajectory of his aim (in the dark and from one floor above) so that it bounces off a wall straight into the heart of his victim.

Granted, there are some questions about an alleged failure to follow established procedures that could have averted a shooting, but what makes the Liang case contentious is its timing and the decision of prosecutors to indict the rookie cop. Gurley's killing happened in the wake of the high profile and controversial killings of Eric Garner, Tamir Rice, and Michael Brown, in which the white police officers responsible were neither indicted nor investigated. Brown's death has been more or less ruled as justifiable by a Department of Justice enquiry, but the (white) officers responsible for the deaths of Garner and Rice - both of which were caught on camera and strongly appear to show police recklessness and excess - have escaped indictment. In short, the two cases of police killings of an unarmed black man and a child playing with a toy gun (Garner and Rice) which appear to be unjustified and intentionally excessive have gone unpunished and uninvestigated whilst the case of Liang which appears accidental has led to an indictment.

Whatever the merits of the Liang indictment, it is impossible not to feel discomfort at what some people claim is a legal double standard. Liang, of course, is ethnically Chinese, whilst the killers of Garner and Rice are both white, and for some Asian-Americans this fact is an indication that the law is being enforced cynically such that Liang is being held up as some kind of scapegoat to show that the law works and is not biased against blacks. A petition with over 120,000 signatures calling for the indictment to be dropped, notes that the law seems to have been applied unevenly and suggests a political motive on the part of the prosecutor.....

Prosecutors indicts Officer Liang for Political Gain! Asian American Police Officer Becomes Scapegoat! 

NYPD Officer, Peter liang told his superiors that his gun had gone off unintentionally, the bullet rattling off a wall and into an unsuspecting man’s chest, killing Akai Gurley. 

Nonetheless, the circumstances surrounding Mr. Gurley’s death lead to a manslaughter indictment this week, whereas police officers in the Michael Brown and Eric Garner case were never charged. Criminal charges appeared more likely in the later two cases, but these two non-Asian Police Officers were never charged.

These seem like salient points; both Garner and Rice deserve justice for what looks like deaths resulting from either excessive force and an inappropriate use of deadly force on the part of white officers. Indicting Liang does not prove that the justice system works for blacks, but what it does imply is possibly equally disturbing. If public prosecutors are willing to scapegoat one Asian-American police officer in order to stave off criticisms of bias in the legal system, then all Asian-American police officers are vulnerable to the same injustice. If the law is being used cynically to indict an Asian police officer to appease the justifiably angry black community, then that puts all law-enforcement officers of Asian descent in a very difficult position which could complicate life-threatening situations and make them more vulnerable in such circumstances.

Whilst the use of deadly force should never be approached lightly, sending Asian officers out into the field knowing that they might face a harsher scrutiny and unequal, or unfair, application of the law places another layer of pressure on them that not only increases the danger to their lives, but also has the potential to endanger the lives of innocent bystanders during violent confrontations. In the case of Graner and Rice, the police acted excessively and with a casual use of deadly force, Liang - at worst - may simply have been irresponsible and clumsy. So, whilst there may be reason to indict for failure to follow procedure, the very fact that Liang's mistakes are being received with such gravity when blatant, recorded police brutality and inappropriate use of force in the Garner and Rice cases are being overlooked should set Asian-American alarm bells ringing.

Sadly, as one might predict based on my previous writing on Asian-American advocacy, the potential damage to the advancement of Asian-Americans in law enforcement, as well as the blatant, cynical application of scrutiny and the law has been ignored by those who proclaim themselves to be the spokespeople for the community. Even worse, some of these Asian actvists are actively promoting racial hostility to both Asian-Americans in law enforcement, as well as the general community.

In the immediate wake of the Gurley shooting, Asian-American advocacy group - CAAAV - issued the following statement.....

We put out this statement to be clear: that the murder of Akai Gurley is a part of the systemic targeting of Black people by the police, and that Officer Liang must be indicted. As a police officer, he is a part of the institutional injustice we see everyday with law enforcement. We demand an indictment of Officer Liang, just as we have with Darren Wilson and Dan Pantaleo........When the police abuse their power, kill, and aren’t held accountable for their actions, officers are affirmed that they can kill with impunity.....Without a complete and thorough overhaul of these systems, we will have more Akai Gurleys and more Officer Liangs, more Darren Wilsons and Mike Browns, more Rekia Boyds and Dante Servins.

 In other words, in the minds of CAAAV, Liang is guilty of racial bias merely by virtue of his being a police officer. The facts of the case be damned, according to CAAAV, a shooting that is being acknowledged even by the prosecuting District Attorney as unintentional can in no way be viewed to be equal in kind to the obvious abuses of power in the Garner and Rice cases. Again, the grandiose proclamations of CAAAV has hung Asian-American law enforcement officers out to dry in a job where they already face difficulties and discrimination. Asserting a racial motive on Liang's part - without an ounce of evidence - is merely  charging guilt by association and is little more than a call to deny justice rather than implement it.

An article in Salon earlier this month goes even further and not only takes it as a given - again without evidence - that Gurley's shooting was grounded in racial injustice, but also implies a racist motive to those who speak out against his indictment......

But in turning from protests against police brutality to outreach at the Chinese New Year parade, #Asians4BlackLives is refocusing its energies on confronting the ongoing existence of anti-black prejudice within many Asian immigrant communities. The recent indictment of Chinese-American New York City police officer Peter Liang for shooting and killing an unnamed black man, Akai Gurley, in the staircase of a housing project last November, is a stark calling of the question that #Asians4BlackLives is putting forward: “Which side are you on?”

This, in a nutshell, is why I have struggled to find intellectual value in the claims and proclamations of Asian-American anti-anti-blackness activists. There are absolutely no reasons to believe that those who oppose the indictment of Liang are acting out of any anti-black sentiment. None. What Asian-American reactivists seems unable to comprehend is that there are nuances about race and justice that their rigid adherence to the black/white narrative cannot possibly cover. Worse still, by forcing the Asian racial experience into an inflexible heuristic that effectively renders Asians invisible, Asian anti-anti-blackness reactivists are merely contributing to the creation of even more layers of injustice and racism.

Asian "anti-black prejudice" is little more than a point of rhetoric that Asian progressives like to assert but never seem to want to seriously investigate. I don't claim to know how prevalent - or not - anti-black racism is in Asian-America, but there is something slimy about implying that Asian reactivists' canvassing for support within the community is itself an indication of these alleged prejudices. It's more likely that Asian reactivism knows next to nothing about the community it claims to speak for. Focusing on the "outreach" efforts of various Asian-American Al Sharpton wannabes and not the actual response from the community (since that may disprove the rampant racism claims) may well indicate that Asian-American progressives are more married to their self-aggrandizing narrative as morally superior outliers in a community of Nazis, than to any real commitment to truth and justice. Which brings me to the far more serious point.

Support for Liang is in no way, shape, or form, implicitly anti-black, and those who question the circumstances of his indictment show a far more genuine commitment to justice and fairness than the adherents to the hopelessly simple-minded black/white racial narrative ever could. The case has even neighbours of Gurley questioning the indictment....

But for several residents, the indictment of Officer Liang — coming after grand juries in Ferguson, Mo., and on Staten Island declined to indict white officers in other deaths of unarmed black men — only underscored how capricious justice could be.........How could they have faith in the system, they asked, if it seemed to value their lives only intermittently?......“You think if the officer’s not a minority, he would get indicted?” said Mr. Rosario, who grew up in the Pink Houses. “If he was Caucasian, he wouldn’t be indicted. In Eric Garner, they had everything on the table and they didn’t do anything. Here there’s no video, no proof, but they indicted him.”

The avoidance of this blatant nuance on the part of Asian advocacy groups is a stark reminder that Asian advocacy avoids advocating for Asians and that any Asian-American that makes any kind of mistake or even merely questions the prevailing black/white orthodox narrative can expect to be marginalized and all but expelled from the community.

Liang's indictment jeopardizes the opportunities of, often lower-class and poor, Asian-Americans seeking advancement through law-enforcement careers to be treated fairly and with equality. By pompously and self-righteously washing their hands of Liang, Asian-American advocacy is also washing its hands of justice for Asian minorities who find themselves in situations where the black/white narrative does not apply. Liang's case is a prime example of this; he does not have the protection of white privilege, nor a powerful black voice noting the cynical and uneven application of the laws. This is a classic of the Asian racial experience; not black enough to be considered vulnerable to racial injustice, and certainly not white enough to share in the benefits of whiteness. Asian-American advocacy seems not to possess the intellectual nous to fathom the autonomous Asian narrative that this state of affairs deserves.

Finally, I cannot help but emphasize just how damaging this simplistic approach to America's complex race narrative may be for Asian-American law-enforcement officers. The kinds of sentiments expressed in the CAAAV statement and the Salon article have the potential to increase the dangers faced by Asian-American police officers as they carry out their duties. This may be particularly acute in situations where Asian policemen and women interact with the black community. From the privileged  comfort of their trendy apartments in recently gentrified urban neighbourhoods, paid for by Ivy-League educations, Asian-American progressives have seen fit to hold court and pass judgment on members of their own community - like recent immigrants and lower-class Asians- about whom they know nothing, and about whom they probably don't want to know anything. 

Sadly, the narrative that these self-aggrandizing wannabes want to push of an Asian-America brimming with anti-black racism that they are working like superheroes to eradicate may lead to more confrontation in the field, and less support from law-enforcement institutions for Asian officers faced with life-threatening situations involving black suspects. Good one.