The Fighting 44s

As a follow-up to my previous piece on Extremism in the “Inter-Racial Debate” I want to share a few more thoughts on extremism in race-discourse, and where I think we stand on related issues of race.

A few months ago I described my basic approach to race here. Essentially, I state and explain what I thought were pretty self-evident points:

1. Race has physical, mental, cultural, and socio-economic components.
2. Just because we “construct” knowledge doesn’t mean knowledge isn’t real.
3. Stereotypes are not total lies.

Basically, I say that, looking the way I do, I just can’t be as Black as Denzel Washington, no matter how I think or act. I say that just because we made up the notion that 1+1 = 1+1, it doesn’t mean that the notion doesn’t have some factual reality outside of what we think. I say that just because there are lazy, dumb, fat Chinese-Americans around, it doesn’t mean there aren’t a ton of hard-working, (book-)smart, skinny Chinese-Americans everywhere I look.

These are, in my opinion, fairly reasonable things to say.

In my piece on Asian-American advocacy and inter-racial relationships, I basically put forth the notion that perhaps a race-based organization made by and for Asians ought to be represented by someone who unequivocally stands by and for Asians.

Again, it didn’t sound to me like an awesomely radical thing to say.

And we get labeled as “extremists”?

I want to say as clearly as I can that this is a false, irrational, misleading, and hurtful label.

Let’s go through the spectrum of thought on these issues, shall we? Let’s begin with ideas of what race actually is.

It used to be a common idea among all “races,” but most prevalent among Western Europeans who tried to rationally justify their ethnocentric beliefs, that humanity was split into various “races” who displayed certain absolute physical and mental attributes. Race was taken by people to be a very objective thing: based on your physical characteristics, you were part of a certain race category, and this also defined your mental capacities. (This sort of thinking was, and is, also applied to gender.)

There are many people around today, both inside and outside America, who believe that race is still largely defined by physical, objective attributes. They believe that there is a very real, very observable, very factual basis for race. “Your race is in your blood,” they might say.

With the rise of post-modernity and the various critical social theories over the last few decades, people realized that much of what we considered real, absolute knowledge and values were actually socially “constructed” and used to justify and perpetuate the dominance of the powerful majority. Various thinkers and social activists began to vigorously “deconstruct” these ideas by pointing out irrationalities and incompleteness and re-contextualizing notions of race, gender, sexual-orientation, class, physical ability, intelligence, and just about any label or category we could imagine (because we did “imagine” them). Race, and indeed, any social label, were taken by some to be totally fictitious, with no factual reality, a toxic idea used by the powerful to dominate and oppress.

In short, on one end of the spectrum, people believed that race, that any social category, was “real,” that it existed, that it had definitive objective form, and that was the way the universe was made. On the other end of the spectrum, people believed that race, that any social category, was fictitious, did it not have any intrinsic objective existence, that it was a fuzzy subjective idea, and it was just something (bad) that we made up.

Race is definite and objective, race is purely subjective.

Race is real, and race is imagined.

Two extremes.

Looking at those, it’s clear, at least to me, that my position is somewhere in between, that my position looks like a reasonable integration of both sides. Because I say that they both have a point, and that race has both subjective and objective components. Certainly, race is not as “hard” a thing as, say, a mathematical equation (the basis of which isn’t as “hard” as some might think), but it’s not quite as “soft” a thing as a literary interpretation (the basis of which isn’t as “soft” as some might think, either). Race has a subjective and an objective component: it matters what you look like, how you act, how you think and feel, and what you believe.

That’s about as moderate, balanced, and inclusive an approach as I can conceive. Is this an extreme view?

Let’s move on, now, to ideas of how race-based organizations should be run.

On the one hand, there are a number of people who believe that an Asian rights or Asian pride organization should be composed and run exclusively by Asians and for Asians. Anyone not Asian should be kept at a healthy distance, particularly if s/he is, say, fucking an Asian. The Black equivalent of this stance has been discussed at length in Black American discourse for decades.

On the other hand, there are people out there who believe that an Asian rights or Asian pride organization would not only benefit from non-Asian involvement, but that it would be perfectly acceptable (and even encouraged, if the person were really “qualified”) that a non-Asian could even lead and represent the group. Forget all that nonsense about whether a leader should be fucking a non-Asian, have the leader BE the non-Asian!

I’m sure you’re getting the pattern now. Again, two extremes: “No non-Asians in my group or fucking my group for any reason!” and “Bring in all the non-Asians and we’ll have a political and cultural orgy of love!”

And here I am, in the middle, saying “Hey, I agree that an Asian-focus is good if we’re going to have an Asian group, and I also agree that love and diversity are good if we’re going to have a peaceful and compassionate human society.” I’m saying that this little group we have is trying to promote certain interests and certain values, like pride and self-confidence and self-respect, and we should have representatives who embody those values, and who look like they embody those values. We can find a middle ground.

And I’m extreme? I’m radical?

If I’m going to be called radical, I might as well take this opportunity to put forth a truly “radical” notion: that my position and my character are being attacked because I’m not radical enough.

I’m not extreme enough.

I don’t subscribe 100% to either side. I take what I think are the good points, the healthy points, the reasonable talking points of both sides, and I put them together into something which I feel honors and incorporates the opposing views without sliding too far into either extreme, without looking like a moral amputee, presenting a partial truth, a partial life, and damning everyone who didn’t cut off her own leg to follow, a limping, screaming perpetual victim of racism, sexism, and ignorance.

You criticize my position because I’m not extreme enough. You project onto my views the excess lurking in your own heart, the excess you can’t see because you’ve had to push it down into the dark to make your own position seem normal and reasonable, when it’s anything but.

Isn’t that what fanatics do to moderates? Isn’t that the sort of thing we see in the Christian Right and radical Islam? Isn’t that what we heard from Bush when he shouted to a disbelieving world, “If you’re not with us, you’re with the terrorists!”

Isn’t that a bit extreme?

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 8th, 2007 at 3:12 pm and is filed under Features. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.

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