But these little historiography lessons doused critical theory don't move the needle at all. In fact, I think for most average observers, and those who are not POC, they are flatly unconvincing. Think of it this way: you telling me I can't do the right thing vis a vis race relations 'cause I don't understand the "structures," the "systems" of oppression and how they work in predictable ways is codswallop exactly in the same way a Christian telling an atheist he can't be moral because he doesn't know Jesus is bogus.
Don't do blackface simply because it is disrespectful. If POC convince white people of that, I suggest POC should accept that win and move on. I don't think it is wise to foreclose the "face-saving" way out for white people, which is the plausible deniability (and it may be true or not true) that they had no idea indeed precisely how much offense they have caused, and therefore how much disrespect they are on the hook for.
Read MoreAll it took was one manslaughter case and all hell has broken lose in the "Asian-American community."
What I think is really going on here is Chinese, no matter where, I'm convinced are programmed to think of themselves as rarefied and singular even. To think of yourself as Chinese is to think of yourself as distinct. The "younger, often non-Chinese Asian Americans" as Jenn Fang describes them, seem to imagine a "fellow suffering" with other minorities, namely Blacks and Latinos. The starkest dividing line--the dividing principle, if you will, between these "younger, often non-Chinese Asian Americans" and the more Chinese-identifying American citizens/residents who have come to the defense of Peter Liang can be summed up rather neatly:
Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. (MLK Jr.)
This quotation is the DMZ. You are either on-side. Or you are off-side.
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Du Bois, put it this way: “one ever feels his two-ness,—an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.”
In Booker T. Washington it was clear there was a heavy emphasis on the “self” in self-help. But in the integrationist leanings of W.E.B. Du Bois, one can’t help but think the enterprise of being black in a white America was fraught with irreconcilable differences. Du Bois often spoke of the “color line,” which was his characterization of the dichotomy, the stacked relationship in American between black and white. The existence of intermediate racial steps like the awful-sounding “quadroon” and “octaroon” in the U.S. Census in the 1800’s betrays a stark binary. Nonetheless, the duality Du Bois and other black intellectuals grappled with conjures a Faustian one, where as Goethe’s Faust said: “two souls, alas, are housed within my breast.” It seems to be an implacable duality, one not easily quieted, one not easily realized.
When I think of bothness as it pertains to being mixed Chinese-Western, I imagine lumpy Cream of Wheat. It sounds strange yet the metaphor is clear. Bothness does not mean smoothness.
Read MoreThinking about Ta-Nehisi Coates' words: " Indeed, the lack of "purity" is parcel to the injury."
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