This, good people of color, caught my attention. A bunch of Asian-American students at the University of California Irvine decided to put up a video of themselves dancing. In blackface. This riled me up good. I've had to face ignorance and a daily dose of bullshit from white people, but this? This takes the "estupido" cake. To top it off with a lil' cherry of irony, the melody is apparently taken from Lift Every Voice and Sing. The same song that epitomized the civil rights movement. Double kill in this case =.='''
I won't go into excessive details here, but there's a noticeable strain of anti-blackness amongst Asians and Asian-Americans. Be they from the Far East, the subcontinent, the maritime crossroads in between the continent, among others; it's there. Admittedly, it's not as bad as the prevailing system in the US, but noticeable enough that it cannot possibly escape one's attention. Initially I believed that folks in Asia are playing out their racism, which I disagreed to my detriment in some form or another. But browsing (more of lurking really =P) through the race relation posts online, particularly Tumblr, and a new vista opens up for me.
Essentially, anti-blackness is the driving force of white privilege and by default white supremacy. It's fulcrum and propelling thrust. How else can one explain the courteous and polite treatment a white person would normally get whilst in Asia, in contrast to a black person, even if said black person were more cultured, well-mannered, presentable, etc. ? For those of you my black sisters-in-arms who have been to Asia, this I'm confident is true in every way. Asia may no longer be under colonial power, but the damage and mentality still lingers like a stench that just won't go away.
The tragedy is, many Asian-Americans buy into this apparent hierarchy where yellow is below white, but above black & brown. As Russell Peters once put it, this is bullshit. The validity thereof, I mean. It serves no purpose other than to disenfranchise PoC of trust amongst each other. True, intra-PoC racism, prejudice and violence occurs. But is not the fact that all of us have a common cause against the very system and people that placed us here in the first place; be it subconsciously or otherwise. I've been asked before, what happens if the disease that is whiteness is successfully vanquished. Will we turn on one another? Honestly, I'll worry about that when the time comes.
