Playing Against a Stacked Deck

Mixed Asian Media - June 9, 2021

By Jaime Schwarz

I woke up in a sweat. It was the middle of a night this past summer when the Black Lives Matter protests were happening, and I had remembered an acting school exercise that I had somehow “given myself amnesia” to forget. However, the memory flashing across my dreams again last June woke me up. I suddenly remembered something — something that I would later describe to people and, upon seeing their horrified expressions, realize, “It might be a bit fucked up.”

Let me first start by saying I’m not Black. I do not at all pretend that my struggle as a mixed-race Asian and white person is at all comparable to that of a Black person's experience. If anything, my experience growing up was very much white, and I didn’t realize I was “ethnic” until college. I grew up in a town where you’re in school with the same people from kindergarten through high school, and they knew me as me, not my race. I’m still on my identity journey, and while I’ve always been an advocate for Black Lives Matter, it took the summer 2020 movement to wake me up to my own experiences and racial traumas that I didn’t think I had.

The exercise was to go up two by two and verbally eviscerate each other. Insult each other until someone “wins.” Now, I cannot tell you what the point of this exercise was to this day. I don’t remember  — Listening? Status? Power? All three? A test of your thick skin and strength in this business? To prepare you for real-life situations??? Who knows. If you’re an acting school survivor then this probably makes sense to you. All I know is this memory came flooding back to me like a bad dream.

I remember going up in class with my good friend, let’s call him Derek. Derek is a tall, white, blonde-haired, blue-eyed, lean, “All-American” (whatever that means), cis-gendered, straight boy. Oh, and did I mention tall? Derek was (and is) a good friend of mine to this day. He grew up in the midwest, a small country town where he has said there wasn’t a lot of diversity. Derek is a feminist, believes women should run the world, that men are idiots, and proclaims loving strong women. He’s also an advocate and ally for Black Lives Matter and all other social injustice causes that are trending on Instagram that you feel you’ll be shamed for not reposting. He has done many theatre productions with diverse people and stakes his claim as the “woke, white dude” who can hang with the POC’s, ‘cause he’s educated and does the work. No shade. I mean, he’s literally so tall he is the shade, but I’m just giving a bit of backstory to him.

We go up, and we’re buddies and this is a silly exercise. I have to call my peer and friend names like we’re middle school bullies? We look at each other, giggling like children. We start off laughing while calling each other “bitch.” And “dick,” “ugly,” “asshole,” “stupid,” looking at each other like, “What are we doing?” Then the insults start combining words and becoming zingers. “Weak, little bitch ass,” “piece of shit pussy motherfucker,” I mean we were quite Shakespearean with our witticisms, if you ask me. 

Then I come to a ceiling. There’s only so much you can call a good-looking, lean, tall, straight, white male. Truly. I was running out of things. I called him a “cracker.” Is that even as much of an insult as “jerk”? I called him “white trash” which… is kind of trendy in this country? He keeps going with female-centered zingers,and I realized, oh right, there are way more insults for women. “Stupid cunt,” “disgusting whore,” “fat hoebag,” etc. 

Looking back I realize that even explaining this fight is ridiculous. The whole thing is insane, but ask anyone who’s been to acting school…. none of it is “sane”.

I’m trying to come up with insults to get back at him with, but end up recycling what I had already said, which wasn’t as powerful to begin with anyway. Saying, “You’re a dick,” or “You’re an asshole”  doesn’t have as much of a punch as, “You’re a whore,” or “You’re a cunt,” right? The latter just has more “je ne sais quoi” don’t you think?

Done with the female-centric words part…. he moves onto race.

I remember looking as he was towered over me. My white peers (Did I mention I was the only ethnic girl in the class?) watching cheered for each round of zingers, as if it was a wrestling match. The audience was on his side as he had more punches to throw. 

He looked down at me and said,“You chinky-eyed bitch!”

I remember feeling every nerve in my body and my face went Asian-flush red. I choked up and felt like someone swift kicked me in the lungs. My peers went, “Oooo,” as if it had the same effect as the other zingers. I’d never had such a hateful, blatant, racist statement literally YELLED at my face, by not only a peer, but a friend. I didn’t know he saw me that way, not as me, but as an Asian person, along with what that meant to him. We drank and smoked and hung out all the time. He kept going... 

“Go back to China.” I’m half Korean, but whatever. Same sentiment.

I honestly blacked out after that. I don’t remember what else he said specifically, but I know he kept going, and I remember the room went silent — as I had gone in my head. I remember thinking, “Well, I lose. How do I come back from that? What the fuck could I say to him that would hurt a white guy as much as I had been?”

Here’s the kicker: I was the only “ethnic” girl in my entire acting class, so the thought of having my race enter the equation didn’t even come into my thoughts. I had watched everyone else go up and it never turned toward racial slurs…. oh wait, that’s because everyone else was white. Got it. I should’ve been prepared. I was different, didn’t I know that?

The teacher called him the winner. Everyone clapped, and we sat down. The next pair got up, and no one acknowledged anything. I didn’t acknowledge anything. I honestly thought, “Alright, moving on,” which I now know is a survival mechanism. Because if I held onto what had just happened and really sat in that and thought about it, I would've burst into tears. I had just “lost,” I couldn’t show the weakness.

I went home after class and lied under the covers in my bed for eight hours. In a body depression. Then, I somehow stored that memory somewhere deep in my body... until June of this year.

I bring this up because I believe I was discussing the Amy Cooper case with someone the day I woke up thinking about my friend Derek and this incident.

After remembering this incident, when I was verbally eviscerated by a close friend of mine in the name of winning a class-sanctioned exercise for educational purposes (totally not fucked up).... I realized that, at the end of the day, the white guy always wins. 

Now you’re sitting there like, WELL DUH. But to anyone who is white and still doesn’t grasp this concept, let me break it down for you.

When push comes to shove, when you are in a fight where it’s personal, it’s survival, and you have to win… that is your objective and you will do whatever it takes — you’ll pull out whatever cards you can to win. And you have more cards than me.

Somewhere deep inside of you, somewhere you think doesn’t exist — a scary, dark, deep, primal place that is groomed by the society you’re born into — is a card. The “white” card. It’s a gold card if you’re a white male. Like, if you’re related to a cop and get the gold card, that gets you out of any ticket (wink wink). It’s not so much a card as it is a secret deck. You’ve had it in your pocket this whole time, and when you’re so angry that you’ll do whatever it takes to win, for survival… you reach into your pocket and pull out this deck, and you get to play the woman card on me. Then on top of that, you get to play the race card as well.

I don’t have that card. I don’t have that deck. I don’t have any cards to play on you — and, in fact, when you play your deck, it’s actually game over for me. The hand I had becomes illegitimate. You will always have these cards in your pocket. I have never and will never have them. You will always win this game at the end of the day. because you and I grew up and live in a racist society.

I got into a lot of discussions with white people this past summer. People came to me as if I was a safe place for them to unload their white guilt. They’d ask to “listen to me,” and felt like I was “ethnic” but “safe” because I’m half white and also Asian — not Black — so I was a good middle ground to have difficult conversations with, without worrying about saying the wrong thing, stepping on a landmine, and being cancelled by a Black person. They’d say, “I’m not racist,” and I’d say, “You grew up in a racist society, so you’re racist. Everyone is racist. But what makes you A RACIST, is your actions and choices.”

Amy Cooper is a liberal white woman, who isn’t blatantly racist with her friends, and actually fights for equality — as nice, white women do. However, when push came to shove, and her objective was to get her way in a fight with a Black man… she pulled out her much smaller (but still secret) “white woman” deck, and  played her “let me call the cops on a Black man” card, a specialty card for white women when facing a Black man. He had no cards on him. He’s never had cards on him. And even if he did, he wouldn’t win. He was unprepared for a game he didn’t even know he was playing.

Looking up at my very tall friend, directly in the eyes, while he yelled these words at me is burned in my memory... along with staring into the gray stitches of my sheets as I lay in my bed, depressed, for the next eight hours. I don’t think he or any of my white classmates even remember this exercise. Hell, I made myself forget about it too.

I’m not saying we should be fighting. I’m not saying this insulting exercise was correct… I’m just trying to make it more clear: We don’t have those cards. You do, white people. So I don’t know, maybe throw them away, use them against other white people, or honestly, maybe we should make up new rules for this game. Maybe that insulting game was to prepare me for real life.

Jaime Schwarz, the daughter of a Jewish father and a Korean mother, is an actor, singer, and writer based in both NYC and LA. A BFA acting graduate from Pace University, she has worked Off-Broadway and in television appearing in shows like Difficult People, Younger, Jane the Virgin, and Sorry for Your Loss with Elizabeth Olsen. In addition to acting, Jaime is writing several projects, one of which is a story about being the child of a mixed race family, and the other is a about her grandmother’s survival of the holocaust. Along with storytelling and the arts, she’s passionate about social justice, with a personal interest in women’s and immigration rights, mixed race advocacy, and men having a skincare regimen.