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Racist love - part 1
RACIST LOVE
By Frank Chin & Jeffery Paul Chan
White racism enforces white supremacy. White supremacy is a
system of order and a way of perceiving reality. Its purpose is to
keep whites on top and set them free. Colored minorities in white
reality are stereotypes. Each racial stereotype comes in two
models, the acceptable, hostile black stud has his acceptable
counterpart in the form of Stepin Fetchit. For the savage, kill-
crazy Geronimo, there is Tonto and the Hollywood version of
Cochise. For the mad dog General Santa Ana there's the Cisco Kid
and Pancho. For Fu Manchu and the Yellow Peril, there is Charlie
Chan and his Number One Son. The unacceptable model is
unacceptable because he cannot be controlled by whites. The
acceptable model is acceptable because he is tractable. There is
racist hate and racist love.
If the system works, the stereotypes assigned to the various
races are accepted by the races themselves as reality, as fact, and
racist love reigns. The minority's reaction to racist policy is
acceptance and apparent satisfaction. Order is kept, the world
turns without a peep from any nonwhite. One measure of the success
of white racism is the silence of that race and the amount of white
energy necessary to maintain or increase that silence.
Likewise, the failure of white racism can be measured by the
amount and kind of noise of resistance generated by the race. The
truth is that all of the country's attention has been drawn to
white racism's failures. Everything that has been done by whites
in politics, government, and education in response to the failure
of white racism, while supposedly anti-racist, can be seen as
efforts to correct the flaws, redesign the instruments, and make
racism work. The object is to shut up the noise. Do it fast. Do
it cheap. White racism has failed with the blacks, the chicanos,
the American Indians. Night riders, soldier boys on horseback, fat
sheriffs, and all them goons and clowns of racism did destroy a lot
of bodies, mess up some minds, and leave among these minorities a
legacy of suffering that continues to this day. But they did not
stamp out the consciousness of a people, destroy their cultural
integrity and literacy sensibility, and produce races of people
that would work to enforce white supremacy without having to be
supervised or watchdogged by whites.
In terms of the utter lack of cultural distinction in America,
the destruction of an organic sense of identity, the complete
psychological and cultural subjugation of a race of people, the
people of Chinese and Japanese ancestry stand out as white racism's
only success. This is not to say that Asian-Americans are worse
off than the other colored minorities. American policy has failed
in Vietnam, yet no one would say that the Vietnamese are better off
than the people of Puerto Rico, where American policy has
succeeded. The secret of that success lies in the construction of
the modern stereotype and the development of new policies of white
racism.
The general function of any racial stereotype is to establish
and preserve order between different elements of society, maintain
the continuity and growth of Western civilization, and enforce
white supremacy with a minimum of effort, attention, and expense.
The ideal racial stereotype is a low maintenance engine of white
supremacy whose efficiency increases with age, as it became
"authenticated" and "historically verified."
Those stereotype operates as a model of behavior. It
conditions the mass society's perceptions and expectations.
Society is conditioned to accept the given minority only within the
bounds of the stereotype. The subject minority is conditioned to
reciprocate by becoming the stereotype, live it, talk it, embrace
it, measure group and individual worth in its terms, and believe
it.
The stereotype operates most efficiently and economically when
the vehicle of the stereotype, the medium of its perpetuation, and
the subject race to be controlled are all one. When the operation
of the stereotype has reached this point, where the subject race
itself embodies and perpetuates the white supremacist vision of
reality, indifference to the subject race sets in among mass
society. The successful operation of the stereotype results in the
neutralization of the subject race as a social, creative, and
cultural force. The race poses no threat to white supremacy. It
is now a guardian of white supremacy, dependent on it and grateful
to it.
For the subject to operate efficiently as an instrument of
white supremacy, he is conditioned to accept and live in a state of
euphemized self-contempt. This self-contempt itself is nothing
more than the subject's acceptance of white standards of
objectivity, beauty, behavior, and achievement as being morally
absolute, and his acknowledgment of the fact that, because he is
not white, he can never fully measure up to white standards.
The stereotype, within the minority group itself, then, is
enforced by individual and collective self-contempt. Given: that
the acceptable stereotype is the minority version of whiteness and
being acceptable to whites creates no friction between the races,
and given: fear of white hostility and the white threat to the
survival of the subject minority, it follows that embracing the
acceptable stereotype is an expedient tactic of survival, as
selling out and accepting humiliation almost always are. The
humiliation, this gesture of self-contempt and self-destruction, in
terms of the stereotype is euphemized as being successful
assimilation, adaption, and acculturation.
If the source of this self-contempt is obviously generated
from outside the minority, interracial hostility will inevitably
result, as history has shown us in the cases of the blacks,
Indians, and chicanos. The best self-contempt to condition into
the minority has its sources seemingly within the minority group
itself. The vehicles of this illusion are education and the
publishing establishment. Only five American-born Chinese have
published what can be called serious attempts at literature:
Pardee Lowe has a one-book career with _Father and Glorious
Descendants_(1943), an autobiography; Jade Snow Wong, another one-
book career with the most famous Chinese-American work, _Fifth
Chinese Daughter_(1950), an autobiography; Diana Chang, the only
serious Chinese-America writer to publish more than one book-length
creative work to date, has written and published four novels and is
a well-known poet; Virginia Lee has one novel, _The House Tai Ming
Built_ in 1963; and Betty Lee Sung, author of the
semiautobiographical _Mountain of Gold_(1967). Of these five,
four--Pardee Lowe, Jade Snow Wong, Virginia Lee, and Betty Lee
Sung--confirm the popular stereotypes of Chinese-Americans, find
Chinese-America repulsive, and don't identify with it.
The construction of the stereotype began long before Jade Snow
Wong, Pardee Lowe, Virginia Lee, and Betty Lee Sung were born
within it and educated to fulfill it. It began with a basic
difference between it and the stereotypes of the other races. The
white stereotype of the Asian is unique in that it is the only
racial stereotype completely devoid of manhood. Our nobility is
that of an efficient housewife. At our worst we are contemptible
because we are womanly, effeminate, devoid of all the traditionally
masculine qualities of originality, daring, physical courage,
creativity. We're neither straight talkin' or straight shootin'.
The mere fact that four of the five American-born Chinese-American
writers are women reinforces this aspect of the stereotype.
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