Feb

11

Who Benefits from the “Asians Hate Blacks” Meme?

Filed Under Uncategorized by atlasien  

(Cross-posted at new blog venture APA for Progress)

Once I heard that Asian-Americans had gone 3-for-1 for Clinton on Super Tuesday, my Spidey Senses started tingling. What kind of mainstream media coverage would this story get? Would it be analyzed by comparing different campaign strategies, listing the complex socioeconomic forces affecting diverse Asian-American communities, examining their past voting patterns, drawing on the perspectives of people within those communities?

Ha! Not likely. It’s so much easier to say “Asians won’t vote for black people”.

The recent CNN coverage I read about here at Reappropriate sounds terrible, but it really could have been a lot worse. For the raw white supremacist take, I’m going to quote a comment I received on a short guest post of my own at Rachel’s Tavern. That comment didn’t see the light of day there, since it comes from a banned troll, but on second thought, it’s useful to show what these people are thinking.

The reason is simple. Non-whites are taught to look out for their racial and group interests and they know other non-whites do the same. Look at all the non-white organinizations, NAACP,LA Raza, Lulac, etc. It’s only racist for whites to do the same and non-whites know it . As such, they don’t want Obama because he will be concerned about black interests only whereas whites, trained that white racial interests are racist, will be more supporting and helpful towards hispanics and asians. Dare ya to print this but you won’t because ya can’t handle the truth.”

Let me attempt to paraphrase the argument, but with better spelling. “Wily Asians are taking advantage of white guilt. They take and take, and the guilty white people just keep giving. Voting for a black person might cause the handouts to stop. White people better wise up, stop being guilty and start looking out for their own interests.”

Only the most racist people believe this exact scenario. But the less racist, more mainstream belief is somewhat similar. If Asians are notable black-haters, the effect is to highlight the nobility of white people. Though white people extend a helping hand, the black person bites the hand and takes advantage of them; this forces white people to be racist against their will (this is incredibly common, that a person will admit to being racist to some degree but blame other people for making them racist). In contrast, Asians are naturally racist… nobody forced them into it. They’re just plain racist. It’s a fact!

You don’t even need black people in order to use Asians to make white people look better. I’ve seen many discussions in which people who deny the existence of white privilege or institutionalized racism will say something like: “Hey, Japanese are ethnocentric/racist/xenophobic. How come you don’t talk about THAT?” They don’t see it as changing the subject; they really believe it’s a valid argument.

So “Asians are racist” can make white people look better. It can also make black people look worse, of course. If you’re convinced that black people ruin everything, you can use Asians as justification. “It’s not just me, the Asians don’t like them either. And those Asians are smart!”

All of this may sound terribly cynical. I don’t want to generalize and say that all white people have these kinds of beliefs. I think they’re definitely out there, but they vary in strength. They can be at the forefront of the mind or in the background, entertained only temporarily before being discounted. I hope that by drawing them out into clearer light, they can more easily be discounted and then replaced with more sophisticated analyses of race and racism across the spectrum.

I’m very dubious about any statement that says “such and such a group is more racist”. Here’s a great comment that explains why. And when it comes to actual Asians actually being racist or not, I have to admit, I really don’t have an informed opinion. I’m a 1.5-gen Japanese-American living in the deep South; I know little about, say, the Chinese-American community in Los Angeles. I just know enough not to generalize. I also know that if the vote had gone 3-to-1 for Obama, it wouldn’t have proved that Asian-Americans WEREN’T racist. Yet, it seems so very easy to believe that 3-for-1 for Clinton is proof that we ARE racist.

(At the suggestion of Rachel, comments here are closed. Please go to the cross-post at APA for Progress to leave comments.)

Comments

2 Responses to “Who Benefits from the “Asians Hate Blacks” Meme?”

  1. links for 2008-02-14 at Racialicious - the intersection of race and pop culture on February 14th, 2008 8:23 am

    [...] Who Benefits from the “Asians Hate Blacks” Meme? : Rachel’s Tavern “So “Asians are racist” can make white people look better. It can also make black people look worse, of course. If you’re convinced that black people ruin everything, you can use Asians as justification.” (tags: asianamerican black racism white) [...]

  2. Carnival time in old Mobile « The Angry Black Woman on February 14th, 2008 5:07 pm

    [...] wait, you mean there isn’t some mass brown conspiracy to hate on black people? Wait, you mean there might be something else going on here? Wait, why the heck didn’t you say that in the first damn — oh, never [...]