The Fighting 44s

In his recent post on Asian American feminism, Jaehwan was able to summarize where many thoughtful, empathetic Asian American men are at on the feminism issue. As I felt it, “trying, but tired”.

We certainly have all been there, but I think we need a wake-up call on this issue. I want to challenge Jae and the rest of us because “feminism” is a concept with a core, fundamental meaning, so it shares little with a symbol like the Confederate Flag. If the wrong people carry a flag, the flag is worse than worthless, but if the wrong people carry an idea, that doesn’t mean the idea was wrong before it was appropriated.

For me, “feminism” could never have a negative connotation. It’s a pure social justice ideology like “ethnic equality” or “equal pay for equal work” or “the empathy of Jesus”. When something is just, we must always pursue the “beautiful struggle”–reminding ourselves to tirelessly and lovingly frolic in battle because this is a concept that we can always return to its righteous center no matter how it has been perverted. It concerns me that you may be falling into a similar trap ethnic majority folks often do–the idea that if you can find a “bad” minority figurehead, it legitimates writing off justice entirely.

“Obama talked to Wright who said something that made me as a white dude feel uncomfortable, so I’m going to vote for a candidate who will continue to push segregated schools.”

There are not particularly good thinkers that the mainstream racist society and maybe folks who have not grown enough in our own community have labeled as “Asian American feminists” and they cause more harm than good.

That sucks.

But it doesn’t mean we could ever throw out a cornerstone of social justice ideology– gender-free/gender equal feminism. And that’s not just out of some martyring self-sacrificing spirit. As Asian American women and men, we should know better than anyone how the institutions of sexism are deeply tied into the fates of the institutions of racism that seek to cripple us all.

Furthermore, we must remember that while they were created by the ethnic majority to subjugated us, they are not even beneficial to the privileged group. In our evolutions as powerful, society changing Asian American heroes, we must learn to crush the impulse to envy the dominant culture and power groups. These days, I cannot feel envy to an ignorant white heterosexual male. I feel pity tempered with some hope at what they could become.

Finally, we must never forget the role that the class plays in all of this. Is it any coincidence that a predominantly middle class and above group of brilliant Asian American internet activists are killing each other over race and gender and barely touching class? We shouldn’t dismiss the issues of race and gender, but let’s not forget that we are all pretty lucky to as privileged as we are.

Everyone should be so lucky. Let’s live and love our activism. Let’s grow and stop acting surprised that our mainstream certified “Asian American leaders” or “Asian American authors” or “Asian American feminists” suck just as much as everyone’s “mainstream leaders”.

Let’s stop cursing that we can’t lie back and be fed grapes of wisdom.

Let’s find the feminist, anti-racist, anti-war, anti-oppression leaders that already exist in our communities–our Kelly Yen-Tsai, our Kristina Wong, our Phil Yu, our Ikoi Hiroe and Byron Wong, you and me–and grow our wisdom and strategy to synthesize on all of these fronts. Let our love for each other and our community and the human community lead us to fight on all of these fronts at once: Sexism. Racism. Sexual Orientation discrimination. Classism. Many heads of the same hydra.

Most of all, let’s fucking win. I’m sick of rationalizing why I have a right to my pain here or there. I’m sick of venting. I’m fucking sick of doing everything except build our masterplan to finally and permanently replace the historical American traditions of genocide and slavery and white supremacy with the real American traditions equal opportunity and treatment and. Justice.

My classroom is blowing up. It is the most dangerous place in America even though there are bullets flying by its windows and a hundred fights going on just outside. It is teeming with ten dozen devastating minds already reacting with each other and expanding outward to touch every corner and break down every barrier of ours, the most segregated city in the nation. To touch New Orleans and Osaka, Japan and beyond.

Our Asian American community is bigger. It has more a billion times more potential power than the bombs of Hiroshima and Nagasaki which vaporized hundreds of thousands of people, but did nothing to eradicate the subjugation of Korean Japanese. More power that the torrent of six decades of history, which brought the complete change of how we exchange information and communicate to each other as human beings, but have only translated wartime chinkified propaganda from posters into racist chain emails and “take out” fonts.

The place is here. The time is now. We have no time for insecurities or ego boosts. We have a thousand victim groups for the holocausts of American subjugations and need not a single one more–we need a central command. We need to look ourselves in the mirror, seeing all of our faults, real and imagined and conjure Kristina Wong (long before Harry Fucking Potter), “I am a beautiful animal.”

You see, when I look in the mirror, I can see both. I can see that I am indeed what white America always has seen as “a hybrid of the most despicable, a mongrel of the most detestable that has ever afflicted the earth” and an unattractive, impotent, invisible blight upon the society. And I am proud to be such. Because all of the qualities that make me that, also make me and every one of you the ones in the position to deliver a new society.

This entry was posted on Friday, March 28th, 2008 at 10:21 pm and is filed under Features, Opinion. 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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