Nov

30

The White “We”

Filed Under Race and Racism | 10 Comments

Here’s another poor innocent struck by the Racism Fairy, although it seems he hasn’t fully realized it yet.

Senator cries, apologizes, defends e-mail
BY LAURA KELLAMS
Posted on Friday, November 30, 2007

State Sen. Denny Altes apologized Thursday for writing an e-mail saying Arkansas is overrun with illegal aliens and that we are being out populated by blacks also. Altes, the Fort Smith senator who serves as Republican leader of the Arkansas Senate, tearfully apologized in an interview with The Associated Press but said he doesnt consider what he said to be a racist remark.

The League of United Latin American Citizens called for him to resign, but the state conference of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People stopped short of that.

Calling for him to resign wouldnt do any good, said Dale Charles, state NAACP president. If he was really remorseful, it would probably help. But if your own conscience still wont convict you, its not going to matter. Among black members of the Senate, those who commented publicly gave their colleague the benefit of the doubt.

This is certainly and totally out of character with the Denny Altes that I know, said Sen. Tracy Steele, D-North Little Rock. One thing I do know is that if anybody can right this wrong, its Denny Altes. Hell do more than rectify this situation. Altes acknowledged sending the e-mail, first reported by Fort Smith-Fayetteville station KHBS / KHOG-TV, in which he wrote that hes been fighting in the trenches against illegal immigration. In it, he said hes for sending illegal aliens back to their home countries, but that he knows thats impossible.

We are where we were with the black folks after the revolutionary war, he wrote. We cant send them back and the more we p *** them off the worse it will be in the future…. Sure we are being overrun but we are being out populated by the blacks also. What is the answer, only time will tell. Altes said he made those remarks in response to an inflammatory e-mail. The text to which he was responding is not included in the e-mail on the TV stations Web site.

[...]

This reminds me of a quote by Tom Tancredo. The only Republican candidate brave enough to give a speech in front of the NAACP, he started off by calling illegal immigration “a slap in the face to everyone who came here the right way”.

Altes and Tancredo are examples of people who just can’t comprehend a concept of “we” that includes human beings other than white.? They can only pretend, and even then, very poorly.

Nov

30

Issues of Adoptive Parents of Color, Especially in Online Communities

Filed Under Family Issues, Race and Racism | 11 Comments

As background for new readers, I’m a Japanese-American prospective adoptive parent. I’m married to a white guy, we live in Atlanta (hence my name) and we’re adopting from the foster care system. I’m a multiracial person in an interracial relationship and both of us will probably be adopting transracially.

When I first started seriously researching adoption in 2006, I found a complicated online ecosystem of forums, blogs and email groups. I’ve found a lot of support there; if it wasn’t for this support, I might well have given up early on, when I started hitting some major roadblocks.

This piece isn’t really an introduction to the “adoptosphere”. I’m keeping it as short as I can and focused on adoptive parents of color, and more specifically on African- and Asian-American parents. I won’t be providing any links, because a lot of the places and people I’m referencing are anonymous and/or don’t welcome extra attention.

The first thing I noticed is that there is very, very little representation of Asian-American adoptive parents. Online today, I know many African-American adoptive parents, a few Native American, a handful of Asian-Americans and almost no Latinos. The adoptive parent community is dominated by white parents. Adoptees are more diverse. Here the situation is reversed, as I know of only a few black/African-American adoptee bloggers as compared to the large number of Asian (generally Korean-American) transracial adoptee blogs. In the small and tight-knit community of “first parents” — the increasingly preferred term for parents who have relinquished children for adoption — I don’t know of a single blogger of color.

Some of the representation has to do with demographics. I went over some of these numbers in detail in an earlier post here. Different communities have very different approaches, philosophies and knee-jerk reactions to the subject of adoption. For example, in some white communities that are very religious, a young pregnant woman may receive enormous pressure to give up her baby for adoption. In a different African-American community, the mother may be getting the opposite pressure: to keep and raise her baby. Many religious African-American women have beliefs against abortion. Asian-American women are often raised with strict family expectations as to their education and behavior, and if their family is non-Christian and so lacks an abortion taboo, they are much more likely to have abortions. In fact, Asian-Americans have the highest rate of abortion of ANY group, and twice that of white women.

As an aside, I believe this rate is a serious problem because it’s showing that birth control isn’t available or used enough. Also, while abortion rates can affect adoption rates, no one has ever proved the opposite, that adoption rates can affect abortion rates.

Private infant adoption agencies market heavily towards white adoptive parents. Because of this marketing, the average white adoptive parent increasingly has a default view of adoption as international, from China, Russia or Guatemala. These agencies almost always have separate domestic programs for white babies and biracial/black babies. There are no programs concentrating on other races, or else Hispanic and Asian babies are lumped in with the white babies. Fees are often markedly different. If an agency lists fees for the white babies as $20,000, the biracial baby may be $10,000 and the black baby $5,000.

This kind of fee structure isn’t popular with African-American parents, to say the least. What that drives most of them up the wall is the difference between biracial and black fees. While a biracial baby may look like a light-skinned black person to the rest of the world, for some reason, when marketed to white parents, the fact that the baby is “less black” seems to make them worth more. African-American parents view this practice (and I agree with them) as setting up the transracially adopted baby for a lifetime of trouble.

When African-American adoptive parents look for an agency, one major criterion is whether the agency has this kind of colorism fee structure. Another is whether the agency actually reaches out to black parents. There are many black parents that can adopt privately, but if agencies don’t reach out to them, they won’t find them.

African-American parents look more to the foster care system for adoption, and less towards international. There is a strong pressure to “take care of our own” first. This also means greater rates of informal and relative adoption. Any parent who adopted a white infant would probably come under heavy criticism. The logic is that since so many black children are already in the system, and there is low demand for them by white parents why walk past those black children? The fact that there is so little reverse transracial infant adoption is very much a function of that kind of peer pressure. On the other hand, African-American parents regularly adopt white children who are relatives, or older children from the foster care system.

African-American parents who are working class have problems affording the high fees of private domestic and international. The foster care system is free, and there are no unwelcome connotations of “buying a child”.

Asian-American adoptive parents often feel the call of China. China has a long-established and stable adoption program, although their rules are also very tight. They grant a quicker expedited status to certain Chinese-Americans. This isn’t easy. One parent must have been born in China or Taiwan, or else both of their parents must have been born there. Second-generation Chinese-Americans have a hard time proving this, and given that many Chinese-Americans are third, fourth, fifth or sixth-generation, they are completely ruled out.

There are many Chinese-Americans and some other Asian-Americans adopting from China, whose adoptosphere is a world unto itself. They tend to keep apart in separate, private communities, however. Much of what I know about this area comes from white adoptive mothers married to Chinese-American men, interestingly enough. I’ve done a lot of depressing research on the subject. The racism they face from white parents can be vicious. The worst is the resentment towards people with expedited status. The tradition in the communities is to celebrate your referral, or the day when the Chinese government matches you with an orphanage child. Some white parents have accused expedited parents of somehow “cheating” to get their referral faster. How dare they be more Chinese!

One thing I noticed early on is that white adoptive parents of black children seemed much more open to asking advice of black adoptive parents. Some of it is common hair care advice; sometimes it’s deeply involved questions about identity and racism. Black adoptive parents are often very happy to answer these questions. It’s a little inconvenient to be put in the position of race-explainer, but the mission is worthy. Of course, I’ve seen other white adoptive parents of black children dash off some amazingly ignorant and insulting sayings. But when white parents are open-minded and really want communication, there’s the potential for wonderful, mutually supportive relationships across color lines.

Now, let me think about the times white adoptive parents on a forum have asked me for advice on how to raise an Asian-American child. There are some extremely important issues all Asian-Americans have in common, for example media representation. Thinking thinking crickets chirping thinking aha, there was that one time late last year! That’s just pathetic. It shows that the large majority of these parents really do believe in the poisonous myth of honorary whiteness. To give them a little bit of credit, because there are so many transracially adopted Asian-Americans online, the TRA bloggers get a lot of requests for advice by white adoptive parents.

A few exceptions come to mind. I once saw a white adoptive mother post an intro thread on Yellowworld.org. That took some guts. I salute her!

Many parents of color get wrapped up in the issues of white adoptive parents because we’re minorities within their communities, and because we have strange, mixed allegiances. I often feel a sense of responsibility for transracial Asian adoptees. From the age of 6, I grew up in an overwhelmingly white environment with a white mother, after all. I’ve seen African-American adoptive parents show a similar sense of concern towards transracially adopted black children. Then we’re going through many of the same struggles as white adoptive parents – the waiting, ethical concerns, connections with biological families, court dates and TPRs, and on and on – and we support them, and in turn get supported. But sometimes the price is the assumption that ALL our issues are the same, which they certainly aren’t. Finally, one of the worst things we hear is that white people had to step up because their children’s families and cultures failed them. This has got to be the worst, and it gets implied quite often. We know about the problems in our own communities and cultures. For example, I’ve learned a lot about adoption and foster practices in modern Japan, which, quite frankly, are terrible. I’m all for open discussion as long as no one brings the white man’s burden into it.

For Native Americans, it’s centered on the ICWA. “The evil ICWA is keeping white people from rescuing Indian children”. For African-Americans, it’s the NABSW. “The evil NABSW is keeping white people from rescuing black children that black parents arent taking care of.” For Chinese adoption, it’s the evil sexist Chinese culture that doesnt value girls. This kind of talk insults us on so many levels. It insults the cultures and communities we feel a connection to. It insults us personally, because we’re made to feel irrelevant, invisible and useless, as if white transracial parents are the only ones that matter.

I want to paint an honest picture, but not an overly bleak one. I’ve met a lot of great people in these communities who have helped me out a lot, some of them white, some of them not. The adoption world is not any more racist than other types of “worlds”, it’s just that the racial issues come to the surface much, much quicker.

Nov

29

Arrest Made in Suburban New York Cross Burning

Filed Under Black/African American Issues, Crime/Hate Crimes, Race and Racism, Sociology | 14 Comments

Just before Thanksgiving a Black family in suburban New York city found a cross burning in their yard. The police have arrested 21 year old Christopher Hudak for this crime.

Police have charged a 21-year-old Cortlandt man with burning a cross on a black family’s lawn the night before Thanksgiving, and prosecutors said he threatened to slit a potential witness’ throat.

Christopher Hudak of 27 Ridge Road is the older brother of one of the girls involved in a fight at Hendrick Hudson High School with Timothy Artope, 15, the oldest son of the family victimized by the cross burning.

Hudak, charged with first-degree aggravated harassment, a felony, was arraigned this afternoon in Peekskill City Court. His lawyer denied the allegation, but entered no formal plea.

City Judge William Maher set bail at $10,000 and issued nine orders of protection, seven for members of the Artope family and two for people in whom Hudak confided about the cross burning. Prosecutors say Hudak threatened to slit the throat of one of those individuals if they told anyone about the crime.

Wesley Artope, Timothy’s father, welcomed the news that an arrest had been made so quickly.

“I’m relieved that someone is being held accountable, and I’m relieved that my family can relax as far as feeling that they were under any danger.”

Westchester County District Attorney Janet DiFiore said at a news conference this morning that Hudak was charged under a section of the law established in June 2006 that makes cross burning a hate crime.

Police charged Hudak late last night after searching his home. An alibi he had given police earlier in the week broke down, police said, prompting them to obtain a search warrant that turned up computer records that led to his arrest.

You can read the entire story here.

Nov

29

Have You Been Watching the Real World on MTV?

Filed Under Pop Culture | 10 Comments

Since the MTV Forums have been down for months, I haven’t been able to see what people are saying about the show.? Has anyone here been watching?

I debated protesting because they didn’t have any black cast members this time, but in the end, I’m too much of a loyal fan to skip a season. The last couple weeks have been filled with drama, including the show’s number one villain Trisha (at least the number one villain in my view) being kicked off.

If you’ve been watching, what do you think?

Nov

26

This Disgusts Me–Race Based Sex Tourism That Is

Filed Under Black/African American Issues, International Racism, Interracial Relationships, Race and Racism, Sexuality and Heterosexism, Sociology | 51 Comments

Apparently,? older white women are going to Kenya for? “sex tourism” at least that’s what this article on Yahoo! says.

They are on their first holiday to Kenya, a country they say is “just full of big young boys who like us older girls.”

Hard figures are difficult to come by, but local people on the coast estimate that as many as one in five single women visiting from rich countries are in search of sex.

Allie and Bethan — who both declined to give their full names — said they planned to spend a whole month touring Kenya’s palm-fringed beaches. They would do well to avoid the country’s tourism officials.

“It’s not evil,” said Jake Grieves-Cook, chairman of the Kenya Tourist Board, when asked about the practice of older rich women traveling for sex with young Kenyan men.

“But it’s certainly something we frown upon.”

Also, the health risks are stark in a country with an AIDS prevalence of 6.9 percent. Although condom use can only be guessed at, Julia Davidson, an academic at Nottingham University who writes on sex tourism, said that in the course of her research she had met women who shunned condoms — finding them too “businesslike” for their exotic fantasies.

I guess white women and white men are becoming more and more alike.

Emerging alongside this black market trade — and obvious in the bars and on the sand once the sun goes down — are thousands of elderly white women hoping for romantic, and legal, encounters with much younger Kenyan men.

They go dining at fine restaurants, then dancing, and back to expensive hotel rooms overlooking the coast.

“One type of sex tourist attracted the other,” said one manager at a shorefront bar on Mombasa’s Bamburi beach.

“Old white guys have always come for the younger girls and boys, preying on their poverty … But these old women followed … they never push the legal age limits, they seem happy just doing what is sneered at in their countries.”

Experts say some thrive on the social status and financial power that comes from taking much poorer, younger lovers.

“This is what is sold to tourists by tourism companies — a kind of return to a colonial past, where white women are served, serviced, and pampered by black minions,” said Nottinghan University’s Davidson.

I know I probably find this more offensive than some others since I am partnered with an African man.? It’s hard enough for people in interracial relationships (the real kind), but when some people treat interracial sexuality as an explotive and exotic adventure, I feel like it gets even harder for people like my partner and I.? On some level, it shouldn’t be that way, but since we live in a racist world it is that way.

Nov

25

Cultural Appropriation Question From a Reader

Filed Under Mail Bag, Pop Culture, Race and Racism | 72 Comments

In the comments on atlasien’s “We Are Wapanese if You Don’t Please” post a reader Dana asked,

Could anyone provide some resources that explain what cultural appropriation entails and how to avoid it? Over the years, I’ve had a healthy interest in cultures besides my own (I’m pretty sure I’ve never been an otaku/”Bapanese”, however), and I’ve always been worried about how expressing this interest may affect or impinge upon the cultures and the people who were born into them.

Personally, I think many of the discussions of cultural appropriation replicate racial essentialism (as Buster alluded to in the earlier post). In fact, I had a go ’round with Maxjulian over a year ago on this topic. I searched around trying to find the back and forth between he and I, so people could get the various positions in the debate, but the only post I found was this one over at Maxjulian’s place (unfortunately it is missing comments, which is where the debate between he and I played out. Some of the italicized comments are mine–the one about okra soup. Those quotes come from an earlier post where the debate kicked off.). The debate started because I objected to this flier because I thought it was racial essentialist.

Around the same time, Gandolf Mantooth also had several posts on appropriation that I really liked (which he mentioned in the comments section of atlasien’s post).? You can find this one, comparing Quentin Tarantino and Vanilla Ice. This was also part of a long series he put up: here, here, here, and finally go here.

In the meantime, what do you think about Dana’s question?

Nov

23

Thanksgiving Humor

Filed Under Race and Racism | 8 Comments

In a prior post the comments turned at one point to discuss a particularly stupid rhetorical strategy, the “Newsflash! Non-white people can be mean, too!” line.

Usually it takes the form of the “Genghis Khan/Idi Amin/Moctezuma was a baaaaad man”. But here’s a Thanksgiving version I read at Sadly, No!, courtesy of “Rightwing Nuthouse” blogger Rick Moran.

If European naval technology had been just a little less advanced, we very well could be speaking some Asian tongue today or perhaps even Polynesian given the enormous skill and intrepidness of their sailors. The last great migration from Asia may have occurred as recently as 6,000 BC according to some exhaustive yet controversial linguistic studies. But if European ship building improvements had lagged by just a couple of hundred years, North America would have been a ripe target for settlement by any number of Asian cultures. Then, it would have been rapacious yellow men who would have gotten tagged with killing the native population.

I’m a bit of a sci-fi geek, so I certainly don’t disagree with advancing that scenario. In fact, Kim Stanley Robison wrote a decent epic book based on this called The Years of Rice and Salt, where the Black Plague hit Europe much harder, white people are nonexistent and the two world superpowers are an East Asian secular hegemony and an Islamic Caliphate.

Kim Stanley Robinson is also not an idiotic racist desperately grasping for a way to excuse Europeans from ethnic cleansing.

Indigenous Americans could have invaded and colonized Europe. Asians could have colonized America. Polynesians could have colonized America. Africans could have colonized America. The infamous “purple people” could have colonized America. But… they didn’t.

Nov

21

Re-Teaching Thanksgiving

Filed Under Education and Academia, Original Essays and Analysis, Race and Racism, Sociology | 28 Comments

Admin’s Note: I found the article mentioned below on Yahoo! news last year, but it was after Thanksgiving, so I stored it away with my other 35 unfinished posts in hopes of putting it up this year. Since it is not up on Yahoo! anymore, I had to search around for it.

When I was in 3rd grade, I had an argument with my teacher. It was an academic argument, not one about behavior or anything like that. See my teacher told us that Columbus discovered America, and I asked her,

“Mrs. Childers, I don’t understand. How could Columbus discover American if the Indians were already here?”

I don’t remember her exact response, but I it didn’t make sense to me, so I responded,

“I think the Indians discovered America.”

This is a true story as my mother can verify. For the most part I accepted what I was taught, but this wasn’t logical.

Now some teachers are starting to re-teach American history to focus on Native Americans’ perspectives as well. This article highlights different perspective on teaching Thanksgiving and American history. One of the ethical dilemmas for small children is how real can we get. The brutal facts of history can be pretty depressing, but I do have to admit I like the exercise the teacher mentioned below uses:

Teacher Bill Morgan walks into his third-grade class wearing a black Pilgrim hat made of construction paper and begins snatching up pencils, backpacks and glue sticks from his pupils. He tells them the items now belong to him because he “discovered” them.

There are several keys issues that come up when teachers think about teaching racism to students. Things such as:

  1. What is age appropriate?
  2. How truthful can you be about what happened based on age? For example, do you tell first graders that the Europeans killed the Indians by giving them blankets with deadly diseases or do you wait until they are older? At what age, would it be appropriate to show lynching photos?
  3. How much is the curriculum teachers are encouraged to use (or required to use) biased toward a Eurocentric viewpoint? And what aspects need to be more balanced if there is a bias?
  4. The article also mentions a school where the children dressed up as Indians and wore feathers, which were considered sacred religious objects by a local tribe. So another question is would be are our teachings and classroom exercises respectful and informed. We may be using classroom techniques that are insensitive and in some cases stereotypical or ignorant.

I’m sure there are other issues to consider these are just a few that came to my mind.

And on a final note, I still think “the Indians” discovered America.

Nov

21

Where have I been? Oh, And Happy Thanksgiving!

Filed Under Blogs Blogging Blogthropology | 5 Comments

Hey folks, it’s been a long couple weeks for me.? I’ve been sick most of the time.? I had some cold or sinus infection or something that was so bad I had a fever for 4 days.? I didn’t do much blog reading or posting and because of that I forgot to promote the Erase Racism Carnival, which is now up over at Eric Stoller’s blog.? Sorry about that Eric.? Fortunately, guest poster atlasien has done a wonderful job keeping good posts up on the site.

Hopefully, within a few days I will be better, and will be back to blogging at full steam. In the meantime, have a great Thanksgiving!

Nov

19

Violence, the Pathologies of Identity and a Desperate Longing for the Islands of the Mind

Filed Under Race and Racism | 16 Comments

Warning: this piece is extremely long and rambling and ends hopefully but awkwardly. It’s about the three things mentioned in the title, illustrated through some of the more unpleasant aspects of the lives of three people, including myself.

The most painful part of this piece was trying to write about Central Florida. I haven’t done it very well. Every time I try to paint a picture in words I usually give up and starting sputtering and yelling things like “the pit, the pit.”

So as a quick preface, sorry, Central Floridians. I hate that place. But there are some beautiful things there.

——-

When I was young I was always under attack in school. Whenever I left the safety of my home I had to put my head down and got ready for the inevitable.

I don’t know exactly what to call what I went through. The word “bullying” minimizes it too much. It brings to mind a heavyset, mouth-breathing boy shaking other kids down for their lunch money Nelson Muntz from the Simpsons. The kind of boy who rules the playground, but won’t get very far in adult life.

A more accurate word would be “racist abuse.” The scary part was that the abusers were completely unpredictable. One day I’d sit next to a girl or boy and have a nice conversation about dinosaurs, and the next day they’d follow along me singing “Chinese, Japanese, dirty knees, look at these.” These weren’t sadistic kids from abusive homes. There were too many of them for that to be the case. Most of them were totally average.

I tried a lot of things to get it to stop: logical arguments, emotional appeals to stop hurting me, pretending that I couldn’t hear or see them. For a little bit I thought if I could wear clothes from Benetton and The Limited, they would stop. My family’s financial situation was comfortable, but we weren’t that well off, so I never found out if wearing more expensive clothes would have helped. The only thing that helped, a little bit, was physical violence. The one time I used my fists and knocked down a girl, that made them keep their distance. They didn’t yell in my face anymore; they stayed at a distance or left notes on my locker instead.

Recently I’ve wondered whether part of my psychic survival was due to my body. I’ve always been tall and broad-shouldered. I got my height from my Japanese father. Being tall made me stand out as a target, but it also made me look more powerful. They never managed to make me feel ashamed about my own body, although in the girl’s locker room, they tried hard enough.

When I went to college in Miami, for a brief time a young woman lived next door to me and we ended up having an intense talk once that touched on all this. She was Latina, from the north, tall — even taller than me — and dark-skinned. I usually didn’t talk about what I went through in school, and she was one of the first people I’d ever met who had some of the same experiences and was willing to talk about it. Like me, she was raised surrounded by white children who abused her. She told me she was so full of rage that when she was a teenager, she used to go nightclubs, pick fights with white girls and beat them up. She would pretend they had spilled a drink on her, or looked at her the wrong way. She said she was ashamed now, but also in a better place. It had taken her a long time to “find herself” and stop raging.

For women, the price of wielding violence is often heavier than receiving it. We’re taught from an early age that boys who fight are natural, but girls who fight are vicious and freakish. Anyway, I left that intense conversation incredibly thankful that beyond that one time, I’d never used physical violence.

Both of us felt that those children had stolen something from us, and we had to fight to get it back. The second and truly healing step was to stop fighting to get it back. What we were looking for was not in their power to give back. We had to find it in ourselves.

The third person with identity issues I want to talk about is an old friend of my husband. This friend, who is white, used to live in Atlanta but he’s moved far away and we don’t talk to him much anymore.

He grew up near the same Florida town that I did. His family was a wreck. He ran away from home to escape his abusive father and was taken in by a group of skinheads. Unlike Miami, where white-power types understandably keep a very low profile, I knew that the skinheads in that other Florida town would be of the Nazi type. They’d taken over the scene and run off the anti-racist skins during that time period. The friend, who was painfully and exhaustively honest about everything else in his life, didn’t like to talk about that time.

Later on, after he moved to Atlanta, he had a year-long relationship with an out gay black man. Then he decided he was straight and they broke up but stayed friends.

My husband’s friend was a short and small-framed man. He loved to read books, drink, get into fistfights, talk about his emotions, cry, and discuss his Irish heritage. It’s the Irish heritage thing that truly fascinated me. My husband told me all about his friend before we met for the first time. He told me his friend had a large IRA tattoo on his arm. Had he ever visited Ireland? Nope. I was astounded. I was even a bit mean to him the first time we met. “Why do you have the Italian flag tattooed on your arm?” I asked.

My husband, who has just as much Irish heritage as his friend, had gone through many long arguments about the IRA before. He was so sick of the topic that he never brought it up anymore.

I thought the tattoo was completely insane. A healthy way to explore your heritage would be through positive things like joining an Irish-American historical society, learning Gaelic, visiting Ireland it’s what I would think of from my perspective as a Japanese-American. Why jump into a conflict whose struggles you haven’t lived? It seems patronizing to the people who have lived those struggles, the ones who stayed behind.

I believe it makes a huge difference whether your ancestors arrived as entrepreneurs, indentured, enslaved, rich, or starving and desperate… but it makes a huge difference in the new country. In the old country, the division is simpler. Some stayed, some left.

Japan and Ireland have an interesting emigration history in common. In the 19th and early 20th century, they were poor countries. Many left for a better life. Now, they’re rich. Irish and Japanese nationals are not in much danger of being exploited by the descendants of those who left. Still, I think it’s disrespectful for me to assume I know what’s best for Japan because I have Japanese heritage. I have a lot of opinions on their politics as a human being and global citizen, but unless I actually move there and exercise my citizenship, I don’t want to go beyond that.

In Miami, many of the ones who left another island – Cuba – thought they would be going back. But their children are already forgetting their Spanish. I visited Cuba once, and I noticed the feelings that Cuban nationals have for Cuban-Americans are very complicated. There’s love, because many of these people are friends and relatives. There’s also anger. “We’ve lived here. We stayed. We know what’s best for our own country, not you, the ones who left for a richer one.”

The Japanese-British author Kazuo Ishiguro left Japan at the age of two. He said once in an interview that he thought he would be going back when he was a child, and he built up an imaginary Japan that was very precious to him. As he became an adult and realized he could never really go back, and that England was his home, he had to say goodbye to that imaginary Japan, and did so by putting it in his book An Artist of the Floating World. I never had that. When I left Japan I was old enough, at six, to remember it more as reality than fantasy, and to understand I was never coming back. My parents never gave me any illusions on that point I’m not saying that bitterly. I’m actually glad. I had enough problems without having to deal with an imaginary Japan floating just beyond reach. Still, Ishiguro’s words are very moving for me.

My husband’s friend, a very intelligent man, had a blind spot when it came to his own claimed island. He had to defend it from the English. It gave him a purpose, a goal, an identity. He had mellowed out a lot by the time I met him, but my husband said he used to see him get into bar fights all the time. He could destroy men twice his size because he moved so fast and hit so hard.

Luckily, there aren’t many Americans, especially in Atlanta, who have strong feelings for the other side. He may have wanted to get into fights over Ireland, but that wasn’t likely to happen here, thank goodness. Now he’s married with a kid and I don’t think he fights anymore.

The idea of Ireland must have given him a lot of comfort over the years. Perhaps it was also part of a reaction against the Nazi skinheads who idolized England. We grew up in the same horrible, horrible place, but we knew there was something else out there beyond the Central Florida suburbs and strip malls. I had the luxury of growing up in a supportive family; he had to break a pool cue over his father’s head. I had part of my childhood stolen by racist abuse; he had almost all of it stolen. I could go on like this for a while. Our similarities and differences are endlessly fascinating to me. Perhaps it’s because he was so open about how he formed his identity, when most people, especially white people, are ruled by shame and defensiveness when it comes to this topic.

All three of the people I’ve talked about are lucky. We came out the other side. Instead of abusing other people and abusing ourselves, we’re moving forward. Sometimes I wonder if I’m really a whole person, but then again, even if I’m not, so what? Human beings can go through life missing huge chunks of themselves. Wholeness can mean healing, or it can mean the impossibility of change and growth.

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