My Fellow [Asian] Americans: We’re Racist, Too

Hapa Mag - SEPTEMBER 16, 2020

By Sam Simahk

Mingling aromas of ginger, lemongrass, and fish sauce wafted through the Jackson Heights restaurant in which I found myself sitting on the sidelines of a conversation I didn’t understand. My grandmother, visiting from Thailand, was speaking with the restaurant owner, an old friend of hers. Every few minutes, their discussion was interrupted by attempts to connect with me in English: comments like “so handsome,” and, “oh, no, Honey — that’s too spicy for you.”

While I’ll admit that I don’t mind being called handsome (even when meant as a compliment to my grandmother’s genetics), I never appreciate the assumption that I can’t handle a few chilis in my soup; I feel similarly when my chopsticks are replaced with a fork by an industrious dim sum back waiter. The intent is to provide care, but the result is an inadvertent tribal signal: You’re not one of us. 

When presented with such signals, I tend to double down: I flag down the offending server and politely ask for my fork to be replaced with chopsticks. Or, when my tolerance of Thai chilies is questioned, I masochistically subject myself to a nigh-intolerable level of spice.

I don’t remember much about that visit, and I honestly don’t remember the woman’s name; we only spent an hour or so at her restaurant, and I haven’t seen her since. Also, most of the conversation was in Thai, and I don’t speak the language — a shortcoming that once paralyzed me with shame, especially when in the presence of multi-lingual Asian American friends.

“The guy doesn’t even speak his own language,” I remember one friend saying about another Asian actor. I might have mentioned that my own language was English, having been raised in New England by two parents for whom it was the common tongue, but I was waist-deep in impostor syndrome and didn’t want to be discovered. 

Back in Jackson Heights, the conversation again shifted to me. I was in my senior year of college and was planning to move to New York at the end of the summer; I had found a three-bedroom with some friends and was excited to make the move.

“When you move here,” my grandmother’s friend began, “where is your apartment?”

“110 and Manhattan,” I replied. “The bottom end of Harlem.” 

“Oh, Harlem. Harlem OK,” she stated in approval. “But,” she added, “don’t live in the Bronx. Too many black people.” 

Her tone wasn’t vindictive or hateful — she spoke matter-of-factly, as if telling me where to buy no-slip shoes.

In a way, that was more troubling.

I was born and raised in central Massachusetts, in a small town far enough from a major city to be insulated from many progressive values. The white side of my family is made up of hunters, fisherfolk, and championship-belt-buckle-wearing cattle ropers — no exaggeration. They’re not much for politics, but their views are more or less what you might expect from tough, rural New Englanders (and Texans — the cattle ropers).

Luckily for me and my siblings, our mother deviated from that path; she went to college, where she met my father, a Thai immigrant. She’d soon teach English to Laotian refugees and would later go on to head the ESOL (English for Speakers of Other Languages) department of a nearby public school system. At first, her relationship with my father was not well received by my family — my great uncle even asked her on the day of their wedding if it was “too late to talk her out of this.” It was, much to his chagrin and my benefit.

In recent years, I’ve found myself having the proverbial “difficult conversations” regarding race with the white side of my family. In the fallout from the 2016 election, I confronted several family members about their vote, reminding them that they had an Asian immigrant in the family. And this summer, I’ve spent too many hours trying to explain the meaning of phrases like “white privilege” and “defund the police” to countless people — family members and strangers alike — for whom those terms elicit fear and loathing.

It’s easy for any modestly progressive person to look at their familial line and find some questionable beliefs; every single white American has ancestors who would be viewed through a contemporary lens as flawed and problematic, at the very least. Our national history is tarnished by the exclusion, enslavement, and genocide of non-white people, and most of our white ancestors either condoned it or did nothing to condemn it. Anybody who refuses to accept that truth is ignorantly complicit in — or purposefully contributing to — the perpetuation of systemic racism in America.

But what about our Asian relatives and ancestors? I won’t get into each Asian country’s cultural differences, nor will I list each’s historical oppression of underrepresented ethnic groups, but I will say that Asian people’s status as people of color does not make them incapable of tribalistic persecution. Some countries embrace caste systems and corporatized slavery. Some build prison camps; others ignore human trafficking networks. There exist many vile, obviously oppressive structures in Asia, but there are other forms of tribalism that are much more mainstream in nature, and all the more insidious because of that.

Anybody who has spent time in Asia has witnessed the prevalence of colorism. Billboards for skin whitening creams line freeways, not only illustrating the impact of Western beauty standards, but also offering a cynical understanding of societal norms with a simple underlying message: 

To obtain fairer treatment, obtain fairer skin. 

This facet of Asian culture stems less from racism than it does classism; people with darker skin are often laborers who work in the sun, while people with lighter skin are often indoors, and therefore better off socio-economically. Not always true, but this simplistic categorization creates a market for pigment-lightening beauty creams, and it stands to reason that a person coming from a country with such flagrant, commercially propagated prejudices about skin color might not have the most progressive insight into the struggle of dark-skinned Americans.

Much like white Oregonian settlers who passed nearly century-long laws excluding Black Americans, many Asian immigrants settle in America with problematic beliefs intact — and they pass on these beliefs to their descendants. All it takes is a brief perusal of Asian-centric Facebook groups like “subtle asian traits” to see Asian folks condemning interracial relationships and railing against Black Lives Matter. To be fair, many participants in these online forums live in Asia, not America; their views on race, while often problematic, do not come from within the context of American history and have little to no direct impact in America. 

But there are many Asian Americans who perpetuate white supremacy, intentionally or not. They argue that while Black people have faced persecution in America, so have Asians — therefore, everybody should stop fighting the power and simply rise above their station. Bootstrap theory, trickling down the ladder of privilege. This is just one sinister effect of the model minority myth: Asian Americans have been told that we’re better than other non-white groups for so long, many of us have grown complacent, and, as a result, complicit in the oppression of ourselves and others. 

On a positive note, the Asian American community has made significant gains recently, most notably with the rapid rise of political newcomer Andrew Yang, the Chinese American entrepreneur whose platform brought the concept of Universal Basic Income into mainstream American political discourse. Even with his problematic jokes about being “an Asian who likes math,” his candidacy marked a turning point in Asian America: No longer are we societally relegated to careers in STEM — we can make waves and create movements in the political scene.

But when the spread of COVID-19 rattled the nation, conservative leaders started calling it “the Chinese flu” (among other racially charged nicknames), and hate crimes against Asian Americans began to rise. Attempting to rally the community, Yang wrote in a Washington Post op-ed:

“We Asian Americans need to embrace and show our American-ness in ways we never have before. We need to step up, help our neighbors, donate gear, vote, wear red white and blue, volunteer, fund aid organizations, and do everything in our power to accelerate the end of this crisis. We should show without a shadow of a doubt that we are Americans who will do our part for our country in this time of need.”

In other words, we should continue to fulfill the model minority myth, but instead of excelling in STEM professions, we should focus our Asian Excellence on humanitarian work — a noble idea, but one framed problematically. It reads as a she-was-asking-for-it argument, only repurposed for Asian Americans: If you don’t want to be the victim of a hate crime, maybe you shouldn’t be so Asian.

Since Yang’s fall from grace, things in America have changed dramatically. Protests against police brutality — specifically the disproportionate targeting of Black people by police officers — have been flooding major cities across the country, even spreading to other parts of the world. Black Lives Matter protests are not a new phenomenon — the activist group, and corresponding hashtag, rose to prominence a few years ago — but the killing of George Floyd by Minneapolis police officers was a lit match thrown into an overflowing powder keg, and it wasn’t carried out solely by white officers.

While ex-officer Derek Chauvin’s knee was on George Floyd’s neck, three other officers stood by — including Chauvin’s partner, Tou Thao. A Hmong American, Thao is seen in video of the arrest, standing next to his partner and trying to control a crowd of onlookers. His recently released body camera footage shows the civilians who tried to intervene, one of them pleading, “You gonna let him kill that man in front of you, bro? He’s not even f***ing moving right now.”

Thao’s response: “This is why you don’t do drugs, kids.”

When I first saw his image, I was shocked and furious. I wrote a long post on Facebook, shouting to a curated choir of like-minded friends and colleagues about Thao’s complicity in white supremacy despite the historical oppression of Asians in America. I wrote extensively about his ancestors and the persecution they may have faced, whether by white folks on this side of the world or by Asian folks on the other. But I’m not going to do that now. And I’m not going to play the role of Andrew Yang, telling Asian Americans how to behave as a monolith.

But I will say this: Asian Americans are not incapable of harboring racist beliefs — nor are Hapas. Whether we are first-generation citizens or descendants from long lines of Asian Americans, we all carry the baggage from generations of colorism, colonialism, and state-sanctioned persecution. Prejudice is a generationally transmitted disease, ironically infecting people of all colors. It can take the benign form of a waiter replacing chopsticks with a fork; it can take the malevolent form of a knee on a neck. If we are to move forward as a nation, we must first look back at our family histories and individual upbringings, rooting out any corrupting belief that does not make America a more perfect union. It’s simple and it’s urgent: If we wait until we’re standing beside murderers, it’ll be too late.

Sam Simahk is an actor/singer/songwriter based out of New York City. Born and raised in central Massachusetts, Sam attended Emerson College in Boston for musical theatre and has been in NYC ever since. He’s performed on Broadway, a couple of national tours, and many regional stages. www.samsimahk.com IG: @soapboxsam