I can't tell you how often I've seen the Facebook meme, "What is a word people use that bugs you?" You wanna know my pet peeve word lately? It's "race" or any of its forms. Here we have a few things that are being called "racism." Going to Chinatown to get a Chinese perspective is not one of those things in my book, however. You find people from China there, some very new to the country, many who can't speak English, and all with some experience living in another country. AND, it's cheaper (not to mention time saving due to Covid restrictions) than sending a reporter to China. Chinatown in New York might actually be the PERFECT place to have sent Jessie Watters. That said, we laugh along with Ronny Chieng's comedic complaint that it's like going to the Taco Bell to get a Mexican perspective, even though it's quite different as Jessie Watters and later, Ronny Chieng himself, showed. You wouldn't be nearly as likely to find a Mexican making chalupa boxes at your local Taco Bell as you would to find Chinese people in Chinatown. After badmouthing Watters about going to Chinatown to talk to Chinese people, Chieng goes to Chinatown and talks to Chinese people. He doesn't nail the ones who don't speak English like Watters did, but he obviously prepared his respondents that we are meant to believe were random, and coached them into giving funny zinger answers in English. Indeed, if one wanted to be adversarial, one could question which report was actually the more "racist." But that's not the direction I wanted to go here today. I'm more interested in another aspect of this whole thing.
I want you to ask yourself, and be honest - it's only you asking you, nobody else will know, when the dude at the end was calling Watters a chicken-shit reporter; Chieng calls him a douchebag piece of shit; O'Reilly was called a LARGER chicken shit too afraid to go to Chinatown himself; Watters, the dude alleges, has no testicles; he made fun of people in the worst possible way; then Watters is called an asshole; when all of this was happening, were you laughing ha ha ha, or was it more like "ha ha ha yeah fuck them!"? I hasten to add that it is not even presumptuous on my part to say that the latter was the intention of the piece. Fox News, Bill O'Reilly, Jessie Watters, FUCK THEM for being racist assholes! Am I right?
I was rolling my eyes when the song, "Kung Fu Fighting" was playing and Watters was asking if a Chinese guy knew Karate then fighting in a Tae Kwon Do gym! China, Japan, Korea - they're all the same and their martial arts are all the same, right? Was that racist? The "Snap out of it" clip after the guy couldn't think of Bill Clinton's wife's name? Would any American in Americatown, Beijing, being asked in Chinese the name of Xi Jin Ping's wife "snap out of it" and come up with the right answer? So THAT'S racist, right? What about the old guy at the end who is asked if it's the year of the dragon? Or is it the year of the rabbit? His response was to take a drag on his cig. Do you suppose he knew any English? Or enough to understand Jessie Watters? Surely showing this guy as a representative of ignorance rather than a language barrier is racist, no?
Well here's my point: It seems like more and more we are all being bombarded with the term "racism," we're concerned with BLM and cultural appropriation, we "like" facebook posts about candlelight vigils for victims of police brutality, anti-Asian hate, Native Canadian residential school graveyards, and all racism, hell, we might even light up a candle ourselves! We seem very self-assured that we understand what racism is... but I don't think we really do. In fact the part of racism I'd like to focus on in this post is our collective ignorance of it. Let me go a little further, as I sometimes like to do, and say that quite often, and maybe as near as make no difference, almost always, when people use the term "racist," or "racism," they are assuming they know the races to which people belong, which includes the rules for defining those races, and that someone is using race as a motivation for committing a harmful act, and they are not correct. Does this, in and of itself, not qualify as the pot calling the kettle black? Oh geez, PHRASING! What I'm saying is the people who are calling other people racists just might be the ones committing a more clearly definitive act of racism.
Let me give you an example from the video. The lady from Queens. She definitely has the look of a Chinese lady. She speaks Chinese. She's in Chinatown. But while speaking (in Chinese) about Americans and their perceptions of the Chinese, she uses "we" as a pronoun referring not to the Chinese, but to Americans. Then when she says, "I'm from Queens," it gives us a pretty clear impression that she considers herself to be American. How long has she lived in America? Does it matter? Was she born in China? Does it matter? What was her first language? What could we find in her blood and bone structure? Was it racist for Ronny Chieng to spark up a conversation with her in Chinese? Does she even know her own race? And does any of this matter? If so, how much? What are the criteria that are used, and in what measure, to determine a person's race? The answer may not be as simple, in fact it's WAY the hell more complicated (and I dare say more STUPID) than you might think. Let's explore that, shall we?
The term "race," was first used in the English language as a categorizing term in the 16th century. Believe it or not, the English considered the Irish to be of a different "race" during the 17th century. They were a race of savages incapable of being civilized. Half the words in that sentence should have quotation marks around them, but I will assume intelligence enough in my reader to understand those NOT to be the opinions of the writer. More to follow...
But let's jump ahead to 1684 when in his writings called, "Nouvelle division de la terre par les differentes espices ou races qui l'habitent," or New divisions of the earth by the different species or races that inhabit it, Francois Bernier had the gaul to attempt to classify the people of earth by race. He did travel a lot and he was part of the superior race, so I guess that qualified him. His "4 or 5" divisions were not very clear, so let's move on to another attempt in which some similarities could be found. It was Carolus Linnaeus in his book "Systema Naturae" (1735) that came up with a more interesting and more detailed 4-category analysis. The first category was the best, which is why it was first - the white European. They were characterized as pale-skinned, active and creative. The second classification was the red American. They had reddish skin and were patient. Thirdly the yellow Asian race had yellow skin and were melancholic and lacking in flexibility. And bringing up the rear was the black African who was, you guessed it, black-skinned. They were also crafty, lazy and careless in nature.
I guess folks lacked detail and some may have been unhappy that their category of race included people they didn't see as being of the same race, so a guy named George-Louis Leclerc Buffon wrote "Histoire Naturelle" (1749) in which he divided the earth into 6 races. 1. Laplander 2. Tartar 3. South Asiatic 4. European 5. Ethiopian 6. American. The Tartar was equivalent to others' Mongolian or Asian. Buffon believed that all races came from a single species of Caucasian. He believed in the Biblical tale of Noah. Noah and his family, being pale-skinned, somehow managed to grandfather all the races on Earth. The "first race" was, and unbelievably, still is called Caucasian due to the belief that Noah's ark came to rest after the great flood atop Mt. Ararat, which is located in modern day Turkey just south of the Lesser Caucasus mountain range.
So when you hear a person in real life or in the movies referring to a "Caucasian male committing a 2-11" or whatever, that racial term has its roots in a Biblical fable and some flawed geography. I'm not going to say a worldwide flood didn't happen. I'm not even going to say there wasn't any Noah or an ark... well, yes I am - the logistics are impossible. But the idea that Noah and his family were the only people on the Earth after the flood and all the races came from them? That's just silly! And when you factor in the more than 200 flood myths just like it from around the world, shouldn't we feel just a little bit stupid using the word "Caucasian?" The Caucasus region includes more than 50 ethnic groups for crying out loud! Their birthplaces vary and their skin colour may range from pale white to very dark brown. Confused? Wait there's more!
In 1790 a German (I'm not going to say anything about a German being the person we look to for racial characterization, but I think my saying nothing might say something about that) Johann Friederich Blumenbach in his book "Decas Craniorum" gave us 5 categories, but as the title might hint, the categories were not just derived from geography or skin colour, but also from cranial morphology. From my understanding, there were three types of skulls, which were called Negroid, Mongoloid and (ffs) Caucazoid. From this and a combination of geography and how people looked and were perceived to behave, he came up with the following races: 1. Mongolian, 2. Ethiopian, 3. Malay, 4. American, and 5. Caucasian. So the majority of Americans, the ones with white skin, are they Americans? Americans should have reddish skin. Can they become Americans if they live there long enough? What if they were of group of African people with skin as light as Asian? What if they were of a group of Mongolian or Malay people with skin as light as Caucasian? Are they Caucasian, Malay, American, African, Mongolian, What-the-hellian?
The act of racial classification hasn't come far since. In the rest of the 18th and even 19th centuries, the ideas bolstered by this pseudo science that natural laws made "white" people smarter, and more capable than non-white people became accepted worldwide and evidence of it still exists. "White monkeys" in China are people who are hired to promote products who, due to their skin colour, are considered more trustworthy by ad watchers, and therefore in high demand. The initial attempts at racial classification had their roots in tribalization and hierarchical organizing of the people of the world that were arrogant, childish, dangerous, and have been roundly considered invalid biological concepts. In the 20th and 21st centuries, race is now considered a social construct by most of us. But even so, I challenge you to come up with accurately socially defined ideas of race.
Why do we even use the words "racist," and "racism?" I believe the usage of these words is maintained along with some of the original purposes of racial classification. The tribalization and separation through abstract ideas of blood purity, cultural superiority, and here comes that word again... PRIDE in something we don't even understand creates within us all a platform from which we can be manipulated to fight and die under the command of some false leader or another. When it changed over the years from the biological white=good and not white=bad to the social construct of white=better and not white=worse, it did little to get rid of racism. Listen to Dave Chappelle:
If we want to get rid of social, ethnic, cultural, or any other kind of division, it makes sense that we get rid of words that were created to encourage them. Words are powerful. Well, that's not even exactly what I'm trying to say either. Maybe it's like my "Proud" Canadian problem. As we all know, it's the context behind the words that is important. If you are "proud" of Canada that's not such a bad thing. But if your pride can be used to create in you sentiments of negativity against any other country, it IS a bad thing. And sometimes, it doesn't even matter. It's the assumption of context made by the person you're talking to. If you say you're a proud Canadian to your friends, you'll probably be okay. If you walk into an Alabama biker bar on July 4th wearing a Canadian flag as a shirt and say it, be prepared to chuck some knuckles. Best example ever:
So what is the context when we use the words "race," "racism" or "racist?" The context is rooted in ignorance and largely in ethnic and cultural division (or racism) itself. It has become convenient for us to use these terms thinking we have a common understanding of them, but we don't. I put it to you, dear reader, that very few people know their own race let alone what they're talking about when they use the word. Maybe if they did, they wouldn't use it so much. Maybe they'd use more accurate words like "bigotry," "prejudice," "discrimination," and such. To close, here's another example of how the context of words is so important. Not sure if it's 100% true, but it's a great example:
"Alternative fuel source." lol Anyway, this is where I'll end my pet peeve post. What do ya reckon?
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