IBARW 2: Racism in people of color

[oyceter]

This is a post for Intl. Blog Against Racism Week.

My terms, definitions, and disclaimers

I am sure some of you are reading the post title to see if you read it correctly. Yes, I am going to write about racism in POC: that is to say, I am going to write about the racism that POC display toward other POC.

But before I do that, I wanted to add an additional disclaimer: Don't use this post to argue about how POC are racist when the discussion is on white privilege and institutional racism. Don't use it to attempt to drive groups of POC apart by claiming that Asians oppress black people, and therefore the bulk of the attention should be on Asian racists, not white privilege. That is not why I am making this post, and that is not what I believe. Also, even though it's noted in my general disclaimer, I wanted to re-emphasize that I do not speak for all POC! These are my opinions about racism in POC, and I could be miles off target or not even on the right playing field.

The general Racism 101 quote is "racism = prejudice + power," and because POC as a group do not have the power and privilege that white people do, the usual argument is that POC can't be racist. In general, I agree with this. It's a good way to frame the concept of institutional racism, and it's a good way to begin acknowledging that while racial prejudice works against people universally, racism as an institution does not.

The type of racism within a POC that is most familiar to me is internalized racism, because hey, been there, done that. This is the POC who "acts white," who generally denies that she faces racism, who usually attempts to avoid finding other POC. I don't think that all POC who do this are internalizing racism; I can't possibly psychoanalyze all of them, and I'm not going to tackle questions of authenticity, of how "acting white" usually just means "not acting [race]" and how that racial behavior is often taken from outside, racist sources. Plus, nojojojo already wrote a great post about it! But speaking for myself: I did this -- the denial of racism, the attempts to "be white," the attempts to not be part of the "Asian clique" -- out of a desire to take some sort of power for myself and out of confusion about oppression and racial authenticity.

I've never felt authentically Chinese; growing up in Taiwan while speaking horribly English-accented Chinese was enough to make me completely self-conscious of how not-Chinese I was. And I generally didn't remember being oppressed while I was a kid here; I vaguely remember schoolyard chants of "Chinese, Japanese, dirty knees..." with the requisite slanty-eye gestures and a woman muttering under her breath about Asians and immigrants while I was in a public bathroom. But no one had enslaved me or beat me or hurt me. So it didn't count. I also think admitting to oppression meant admitting that the system isn't fair; that if I worked hard enough and was good enough, I still wouldn't be rewarded; that some things were just that way. It's not a good way to feel, particularly when realizing that it's you the system is stacked against, that it's you who might not get a fair chance. And it's a particularly awful way to feel when you want to complain and realize that everyone will say you're whining and playing the race card.

I call this internalized racism because for me, it felt like internalizing the power structure around me and trying to pretend that I wasn't a part of the unprivileged group, and because it contributes to things like, "Well, she's Chinese, and she doesn't mind, so why should you?" And it's so easy to try to be white if that's what you're reading and watching, it's so easy to take pride in being Chinese but to also make it so that all the characters you create are blonde-haired, blue-eyed Americans.

I don't know how many of us go through this; I'm fairly sure it's common among ABCs (American-born Chinese) just given the literature I've read, but I don't know about others. I suspect it's not uncommon though?

The other type of racism is harder. It's what people usually think of when they think "POC are racist too!" It's the Asians saying the Hispanics are lazy, the black people saying the Indians are stealing the jobs, almost everyone the world round saying the black people are less human and more brutish. I am much less confident when I get here; what can I possibly say that won't end up being "POC are racist too"?

What I guess is that it is complicated. That part of it is a reaction to white supremacy everywhere, that another is an attempt to scapegoat some other group that's finally, finally more hated than your own. I think some of it is a reaction to the multiple attempts to set POC against each other; after being told time and time again that black people are criminals and gangsters, the model minority myth, no matter how harmful, probably looks pretty damn good. Ronald Takaki's Strangers from a Different Shore points out how wave after wave of Asian immigrants attempted to differentiate themselves from other Asian immigrants. I slip more into talking about Asian-Americans here, because that's an area in which I have a wee bit of knowledge, as opposed to being woefully ignorant about everything else.

"We're not like the Chinese!" the Japanese said in the late 1800s. "We're not Japanese!" the Koreans said during WWII. "We're not Vietnamese!" everyone said during the seventies.

"I'm not Japanese!" I'm sure Vincent Chin said as he was beaten to death in Detroit in 1982, in response to "It's because of you little motherfuckers that we're out of work." (Chin was Chinese.)

And now, of course, there's the further complication of the POC here who are American and those who are perceived as foreigners, particularly in the wake of 9/11, complicated yet again by centuries of discrimination against black people. I can't help but think of Somini Sengupta's essay in which she talks about flying while brown, and then wonders where Indians were when it was driving while black.

I'm getting a little off topic. It's difficult to stay on the topic of intra-POC racism without addressing the outside context because that outside context colors so much. And I am not exonerating POC of racism; it is so easy to only see yourself as the victim of oppression and to not admit to perpetuating injustice and oppression. It is so easy to remember loyalty to your tribe, to the people who look like you, to the people who weren't allies before but now are. "Asian-American" is an identity inside the US, and I think within other non-Asian countries as well (?); looking alike and being grouped together by others is enough to make usual enemies band together (and to overlook how some are suffering more than others, as with Southeast Asians when compared to East Asians).

It's even easier to get used to defending your chosen group of people, particularly when you've had to continually justify even the fact of your oppression. And I wonder how much of that underscores intra-POC conflict: fear that what you say here will be used against you by white supremacy, awareness of where your chosen group of people is in the racial hierarchy, guilt that you would rather not fall further down the racial hierarchy.

I don't know. But looking back at what I've written, so much is colored by white supremacy (no pun intended, I swear!). And I do not say this to let POC off the hook for being racist, but just to point out that it is nearly impossible to act independently of white supremacy. It is omnipresent, and it affects so much.

And now my post is entirely too long, and I haven't even touched on intra-POC racism on an international scale. So I will simply say that I do think it is there and that it will probably increase as Asia pulls ahead of other countries in terms of finances and political power (and really, a lot of that is East Asia and India, and the Southeast Asians get marginalized again). But I also think a lot of this occurs against a backdrop of Euro-American power, including fear of that power, envy, resentment, and even a feeling of moral superiority.

So. I don't know. All I do know is that it is far more complicated than simply saying that POC are also racist.

Comments

[fmanalyst.livejournal.com]

POC are put in the situation of jockeying for position within the systems of power, with the issue that to better one's position means acting according to the values and norms of the white middle and upper class. It seems to me that trying too hard to better one's position by bending to those values further than the rest of one's group is how one opens oneself to accusations of "acting white." It also seems to me that considerable pressure is put on people not to move too far from the position that the group holds in the hierarchy, either up by "getting above one's raising" or down by associating oneself with groups lower on the hierarchy.

It's the fact that power is a hierarchy and NOT a line in which one group is on the top and the other groups are in an equal position underneath that opens the door for racism between POC. The line is there, but the groups underneath the line also find themselves being ranked.

[oyceter]

Hrm. The more I think about it, the more I have problems with the phrasing of "acting white." I do think that POC are rewarded when they act according to the values and norms of white upper- and middle-class, but on the other hand, I think when POC are "too white" (to be determined by white society), they're also seen as a threat and need to be taken down another way. Ex. how Asians are simultaneously praised for being the "model minority" while also seen as a threat if they are "too" model. Ergo the Japanese scare in the 1980s, the Indian scare now with regards to outsourcing in the tech industry, and the stereotypes of the "emotionless, mechanical, rote memorizing Asian."

And I think some of the "getting above yourself" reaction is taking on the opposite of the dominant ideology and upholding that, though it is not all of it for all people.

Definitely with the ranking, and also that the ranking shifts depending on things like the economic situation, the political situation, what's in the media, etc. etc.

[fmanalyst.livejournal.com]

Yes, "acting white" is a very problematic phrase and charge because the same traits in a different time and place might simply have been basis of success, but with a different meaning

Because the ranking comes down to whichever group is the focus of white fear at the moment, and the object panic can change at a moment's notice. Thus, when the fear was of Japanese economic fear in the 80s, there were events held to trash Japanese cars. 9/11 shifted the fear to Muslims. Right now, Hispanic immigration seems to be a significant fear. The thing I can least forgive the current US administration for is the culture of fear that they've fostered in this country. It's always been with us, yes, but this government seems to have gone out of its way to make it the base of its power.

Apropos of nothing, I'm actually in the middle of watching the film The Twilight Samurai at the moment. I just paused it to get a drink of water and check email. Very interesting film set in the late shogunate before the Meiji rebellion. Seibei's big problem is that he's not really living up to his society's values: he's poor, he's dirty, he doesn't drink with the other men. As far as his uncle's concerned, he's shaming the clan and his position as a low-ranking samurai. I've seen a fair number of samurai films, but this is the first I've seen that concentrates on the rituals of daily life. It fits, given that it's narrated as a memoir by his younger daughter. But it's also interesting in how it portrays the levels of duty between the retainers and the clan lord, who is a distant figure and whose one direct communication to Seibei is to clean up because he smells bad. I should go back in and finish watching it. Maybe I'll blog it when it's over.

[fmanalyst.livejournal.com]

Damn. I meant Meiji Revolution, not rebellion. I know better than that.

[oyceter]

Yeah, exactly. Things shift so quickly, depending on the political climate -- just look at the completely justified look at Chinese pet food and how that lead to stupid racist political cartoons about eating dog and whatnot. I roll my eyes at them.

[coffeeandink.livejournal.com]

Thank you for posting this.

[oyceter]

Thank you for reading and commenting! I was (and still am) particularly nervous about this one.

[katie-m.livejournal.com]

What I guess is that it is complicated. That part of it is a reaction to white supremacy everywhere, that another is an attempt to scapegoat some other group that's finally, finally more hated than your own.

I certainly agree with that. At the same time, I think to some extent it's just human, too. Had history gone differently, and the Mayans been the ones who became racially dominant, dollars to donuts the main structure of institutionalized racism would still exist--it's just that it would have Mayans on the top of the pyramid. (Or maybe not--maybe institutionalized prejudice would be framed in a way other than race--but I'll bet it would still exist.)

Speaking from a white perspective, I find it very useful to remind myself of that. I'm not extra-specially evil like no other racial group would ever be; I'm human, with a bunch of what I think are fairly normal human reactions around difference that happen to be backed up by an undesirable power structure, and I need to put some effort into getting rid of those reactions that I believe on a conscious are wrong and damaging to myself and others. When I demonize myself, I more strongly resist making that effort, because why bother if I'm so inherently awful?

On the other hand, I certainly get how when this topic comes up in a conversation about racism, it's normally used either as an attempt to move the conversation away from an uncomfortable topic or a "ha ha, gotcha!" moment, and that's both unkind and unproductive. So I don't feel the urge to talk about it; I just find it useful to remind myself every now and then that I don't have a special racist gene, or whatever.

[marzipan-pig.livejournal.com]

Thank you, this was very well put, that it's not like our current understanding of what it means to say WHITES ARE RACIST means it's coded next to 'getting sunburnt easily' or other things about having light skin that I cannot change. I'd like to say though that, even if it were (like how some difficult differences b/w men and women may be related to hormonal differences), it would still be worth working on moderating.

Not demonizing any of us is a big part of working against racism though.

[katie-m.livejournal.com]

I'd like to say though that, even if it were (like how some difficult differences b/w men and women may be related to hormonal differences), it would still be worth working on moderating.

Oh, absolutely--that's one good thing about being human, after all, that we can work to overcome behaviors that are 'natural' if we also believe them to be wrong.

[oyceter]

*nods* I think the desire to scapegoat is extremely human. It's only when you throw in other power structures and etc. when it gets politicized and all that fun stuff.

I spent a lot of my high school and college years wondering why the US and Europe ended up on the top of the heap, globally speaking, and questioning whether it was something intrinsic or not. (You would not believe how many books that will go "Chinese culture is just too hidebound and that is why China fell apart in the 1800s." Ok, you would, but you know ^_~.) It made me feel better finding reasons that weren't intrinsic in the culture or race or whatnot as well, though more along the lines of "my culture was not doomed to failure" as opposed to "my cultural was not doomed to enslave people."

[minnow1212.livejournal.com]

Have you ever read Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel? He basically asks what leads to dominance of some cultures, and works against the notions that it's somehow intrinsic to anyone's culture.

[oyceter]

Yeah, I have! I generally liked it, although I didn't fully agree with him -- my sister was assigned to read it for college and thought I was a total dork for stealing it from her and reading it in two or three days, heh.

[katie-m.livejournal.com]

HA! Oops. Well, great minds and all that, I guess.

[katie-m.livejournal.com]

It made me feel better finding reasons that weren't intrinsic in the culture or race or whatnot as well, though more along the lines of "my culture was not doomed to failure" as opposed to "my cultural was not doomed to enslave people."

Yeah, I can imagine. Especially given that racism is normally taught as "those bad people/that bad time which we have moved beyond now," so that message of doom isn't actually instilled in white children in my experience. Which is good, don't get me wrong, but obviously can lead to problems in dealing with subtler stuff than Jim Crow later on.

You went to an American school in Taiwan, right? So did you ever study Chinese history from a Chinese perspective, or was it all American/European-written stuff?

why the US and Europe ended up on the top of the heap, globally speaking

Well, come on--Jesus is white. Haven't you ever seen the pictures? Why would God have made his Palestinian son blond if not to signal that white people should have the most power?

More seriously, I assume you've read Guns, Germs, and Steel? I don't know how you'd react to it--I know there are some issues with the methodology, and I read it long enough ago that there may be cultural stuff in there that I'm forgetting--but he does make a serious stab at talking about some possible geographical reasons why certain areas advanced more quickly technologically.

[oyceter]

You went to an American school in Taiwan, right? So did you ever study Chinese history from a Chinese perspective, or was it all American/European-written stuff?

In which we go into the crazy details of my completely weird school! It wasn't actually an American school, even though most of the textbooks and foreign teachers were American. My school was a public school created by the govt. solely to lure back Taiwan expats, so we had this weird mix of tiny bits and pieces of Taiwan public school stuff and our own stuff. It was technically a bilingual school, and the original goal was to have kids there cross over to normal Taiwan public schools, but sometimes that happened and sometimes it didn't.

It was technically bilingual b/c most of the kids were like me, born and/or raised in the US for a few years, though some were raised in other countries. Most of us spoke English to each other, though we spoke some Chinese as well. Our classes I think were supposed to be bilingual, but it ended up being so that all classes except a few were taught in English. Chinese was the all-Chinese class -- we used the same textbooks as other public schools, but I think we went at a slower pace. We were also placed into Chinese classes, so you could be a senior but be taking sixth grade Chinese.

In grade school, we had a sort of "ethics" class, which was taught all in Chinese, and in my seventh and eighth grade, we took Chinese geography and history -- Taiwan geography was 7th grade, Chinese geography was eighth, and I think both years of history were on China, not Taiwan. These were taught all in Chinese. Also they got rid of the classes right after I got into ninth grade, which I am still grumpy about, because those classes were painful!

Um. Long story short, I sort of learned Chinese geography and history from a Chinese-Taiwanese perspective -- the textbooks were the same as in local public schools, so they were issues by the (at that time) KMT govt. which was the govt. that took over when the Nationalists fled China and the Communists and seated themselves in Taiwan. So it's not a China-Chinese perspective, and it's not a Taiwanese perspective.

But to answer your question: yes ;). The only thing was, my Chinese sucks, and I couldn't really understand the textbooks by reading them, because they were very formal and used non-everyday terms about treaties and dynasties and etc. And I was a bad student who scribbled and didn't pay attention during class, largely because I couldn't quite understand half of what was being said.

So I got enough to know that it felt very different from what was being taught in US/World history, but not enough to know the nuances. And I will not even go into the weirdness of learning Chinese history and literature in English at a college level because I have probably dumped entirely too much info on you as is!

In conclusion: my school = completely wonky

[veejane.livejournal.com]

I have often wondered how much of the insidious racism in union movements and industrial employment policies has been deliberate and top-down: an attempt to pit one ethnic group against another, rather than let them work together more easily to demand their rights. In the 19th C., the Irish and other European immigrant groups became white, magically, to make sure that they wouldn't ally with northward-migrating black industrial workers. Now that all the ethnic Europeans are white, the power structure still works to maintain discrete levels of hierarchy, so that people can dream of moving up (which would explain why, e.g., Asians most often get hit with the "But I think of you as white!" thing).

[yhlee.livejournal.com]

Howard Zinn in A People's History of the United States posits something of this nature, I think (starting with slavery and blacks vs. poor whites). Unfortunately I don't have the book ready to hand so I can't quote what he says, but it's a running theme.

[ckd]

I wouldn't be in the least surprised. While on vacation this past week, I was at the Washington State History Museum, and one of the exhibits discussed how a coal miners' strike in Roslyn was broken up by bringing in African-American workers as replacements. It'd certainly seem like an easy way for management to make sure the new workers would get extra hostility (above and beyond the usual "scab" level) and be more dependent on those specific jobs....

[fmanalyst.livejournal.com]

The film Matewan deals with the attempt to use African-Americans and Eastern European immigrants as scabs to break the union of primarily Scots-Irish Appalachian miners during the West Virginia mine wars in the 1920s.

[oyceter]

I wish I knew more! I always suspect it is "A lot," but I don't actually know.

Oh wait, no! I know Ronald Takaki mentioned the deliberate racialization of workers in Hawaii and how they would pit the Chinese against the Japanese against the Koreans against the whites and how the white workers would get better housing and etc. Screwy. The book is at home so I don't have better details.

I was just reading about a group legal case (I blanked on the terminology) in which Filipino canners in Alaska sued the corporation they were working for for discrimination (they got worse housing than the white workers, worse jobs, and etc.). I am not sure if it relates back to unionization and industrial employment practices. I vaguely remember Helen Zia referencing the Filipino workers' willingness to work longer hours with less pay, and I am betting that the cannery totally used that to their advantage and to pit the Filipinos against the white workers to get the white workers to lower their price.

Must now go home to look up name of the case.

[smillaraaq.livejournal.com]

The race/power/culture axes in Hawai'i are just particularly complicated and twisted around over time, too. It sounds like this book you're mentioning (and I'd love to hear more about it!) is focusing on the plantation era, which saw succeeding waves of immigration the Philippenes, Japan, China, Portugal, etc. to fill the sugar industry's need for cheap agricultural labor. The earliest labor unions there were organized on ethnic lines, and while there were occasional earlier glimmers of solidarity between the two largest ones, there wasn't really a truly unified multiethnic agri union until the mid-40s; meanwhile politically the islands were still essentially dominated by the wealthy minority of white plantation owners, a dominance that went back to the annexation era and lasted pretty much through statehood, which then saw a predominantly second-gen Japanese-American Democratic party dominating local politics, well, pretty much into the 1990s when that generation was dying off. And there's still all sorts of lingering tensions and weirdnesses that can be traced back to all this earlier stuff, all sorts of undercurrents of inter-group resentment where you've got one group dominating the local government and another dominating some of the labor unions etc. and all the usual perceptions of favorable treatment...plus intragroup tensions between those whose families have been in the islands for a few generations and "localized" versus the FOAB newer immigrants, or even the cultural tensions between Hawai'i-born and mainland-US-born folks of the same ethnic group. Even ideas about whiteness have odd twists to it that can be traced back to the plantation era: I remember the last time a major federal census came around there was grumbling about the categorizations used from some local Portuguese, because they didn't consider themselves "white" -- that was a category for the oldtime plantation bigshots, or the rich mainlanders who picked up pricey condos downtown, or the tourists on the beach at Waikiki, it didn't seem to fit folks who'd been lumped in as "local" along with the various Asian and Pacific Island groups they'd worked alongside with in the cane fields back in the day...

_{(Um, hi, delurk with incoherent babble much? I just found your journal by way of my recent obsessive descent into Saiyuki fandom, only to find all your more personal material on Third Culture Kid issues all sorts of RESONANT LIKE WHOA. Which is all to say sorry for the random intrusion, and thank you for all your thoughtful posts!)}

[oyceter]

Lessee... here's my old write up of it from last year. I don't quite recall when he set his chapter on the plantation era, but I think it was prior to the multiethnic unions. I do vaguely recall him mentioning that people did end up banding together though.

Also, you are not incoherently babbling! This is really interesting, and I didn't know much of that!

[smillaraaq.livejournal.com]

Oh, thank you! Sounds like a fascinating book, as I'm pretty familiar with the various waves of Asian immigration and political movements back in the islands, but am much much fuzzier on that sort of thing for the mainland U.S.; must keep an eye out for it.

_{Would it be rude to add comments to a thread from eight months ago?}

[oyceter]

Comments any time are welcome!

Oooo, I really need to read up on Hawai'ian history; I don't know much at all =(.

[smillaraaq.livejournal.com]

Thanks, I'll try to go back there and add in whatever it was I was thinking of when my brain is working again! Right now I'm a little too sleep-deprived and powwowed-out to think straight. :)

I wish I could give you some good state history refs, but the only stuff I actually have on my own shelves is a smattering of anthro/language/folklore books -- for history I usually went for library books instead of buying, and of course I can't remember any of the texts now.

[smillaraaq.livejournal.com]

Thread necromancy posted, btw!

And this article (http://kapalama.ksbe.edu/archives/PVSA/primary%202/79%20kanahele/kanahele.htm) on the Hawaiian Cultural Renaissance of the 1970s might perhaps be of interest? I was happy to find that online today, in the course of another one of those need-to-go-into-101-class-mode-just-so-my-conversation-makes-sense deals that you understand all too well. :)

[oyceter]

Oh, that is awesome, thank you!

[oyceter]

Oof. Um. Instead of trying to come up with something intelligent, I cop out and point you to nojojojo's essay. I mean, I do think some of it is the flip of what is privileged (dark over light, "black" behavior over "white" behavior), though my experience with this comes more from the Azn (AZN? azn?) pride movement that I've seen around, which reminds me a bit of Nora's note about people trying to take pride from stereotypes of their race.

Well. Let me complicate that. I don't think it's just about that; I think a lot of the AZN pride movement that I've seen around is the formation of a generationally-specific Asian-American (usually East-Asian) identity, especially if it's the second generation, because that's where the really huge generation gap is.

Um. I think I totally got off topic. Sorry! And I generalize horribly.

[kate_nepveu]

The question of people experiencing social pressure for not being _dark_-skinned enough was brought up in my comments. Here's what I said there:

"I think what you're describing is just as plausible a reaction to pervasive white supremacy as discriminating against other non-white groups, choosing to reject the exclusionary privileging of white by substituting the exclusionary privileging of black. Which is also wrong. And racial prejudice should be fought wherever it's seen. But the underlying problem, and the more pervasive one, is white supremacy, and that's where the attention is most needed.

. . . I am particularly open to correction and discussion from knowledgable people on this point, as I'm speaking here pretty much just from extrapolation."

Any thoughts would be gratefully appreciated.

(now with proper icon and spelling fixed!)

[oyceter]

Doh! Just replied to your deleted comment!

[lavendertook.livejournal.com]

I wish there was easy terminology to point out that racism between POC is still whitecentric because of the global hierarchy for the past 400 years, to easily derail people who try to use discrimination between POC to derail discussions of racism by whites. The terminology is all difficult.

[oyceter]

Yes me too! And part of me wants to think, "It shouldn't all revolve around white people!" and I do think a lot of POC interactions can be seen separately from that, but... it is still there.

[mercuriosity.livejournal.com]

The recent discussion sparked by "miscegenation" was the first time I'd seen that definition of racism as prejudice plus power, and it was like a lightbulb went "ding!" above my head. I felt that there was an inherent, important difference between expression of prejudice toward PoC by white people and expression of prejudice toward white people by PoC, but I didn't know why I felt that or how to put it into words. So having that definition really helps me clarify a lot of things. Not that either kind of prejudice is good or even "OK", but it's so important to look at the context.

What I really want to say is: a giant helping of WORD to everything in this post; it helps me frame some things I'm still relatively new at thinking about. Like:

it's a good way to begin acknowledging that while racial prejudice works against people universally, racism as an institution does not.

Yes, yes, a million times yes.

[oyceter]

OMG. When I first heard that definition, lightbulbs went off as well. That, and averse racism and white privilege. I had sort of fuzzily known it was about power, but I had such a hard time articulating it before. Because people kept saying that racial prejudice toward POC was the same as racial prejudice toward white people, and it didn't feel the same.

[skywardprodigal.livejournal.com]

Good post.

[oyceter]

Thank you!

[coniraya.livejournal.com]

Great post on a very difficult subject. The disclaimer is good too because the racism between PoC is a side effect of white supremacy not something that disproves it.

[oyceter]

Thank you! I was really worried while writing this because it's such a mine-filled topic.

[tevere.livejournal.com]

Just a driveby via IBARW...

"Asian-American" is an identity inside the US, and I think within other non-Asian countries as well (?); looking alike and being grouped together by others is enough to make usual enemies band together

That's an interesting one, because I think it might be different in Australia: we're still at the stage of differentiating our many waves of immigrants (your "At least I'm not Japanese!" point.) I've been thinking recently about the fact that racism in Australia (as far as I've observed) tends not to be so based on skin colour as seems to be the case in the US; instead racism is directed to the first generation immigrants... and that includes by the children of migrants from the previous generation, who've already become what they feel to be (and are held as such by the wider community) 'Australian'. I particularly remember my own mother, who's Chinese, pouring scorn on the "boatpeople": I think she felt that her place as a highly-skilled migrant in white society was somehow being eroded by being associated with unskilled or lower-skilled refugees who fell within the same umbrella term "Asian-Australian."

And although I don't personally know too much about this subject, I get the broad impression from the news that gang warfare in Australia is particularly vicious between Asian groups (e.g. the Vietnamese vs the Chinese Triads; the kids from Laos and the Cambodians), who still clearly hold themselves as occupying (and competing for) particular niches in society, rather than forming a heterogenous-but-united "Asian-Australian" group.

[smillaraaq.livejournal.com]

In the US, at least, I think that sort of hyphenated identity, along with being very much of a generational thing, tends to be linked to overall population numbers as well -- throughout most parts of the states, Asians overall are a very small minority, so it certainly makes sense in terms of trying to build up political clout to band together and focus on commonalities, similar to the development of a pan-Indian political identity in the 60s. I really don't recall ever seeing that much of a sense of pan-Asian identity or AZN Pride proclamations in Hawai'i, but that is the one state where Asians and Pacific Islanders, if taken together, are the MAJORITY of the population. So there's really not the same sort of need there to band together for greater impact and visibility against a majority culture that's just going to lump you together ANYWAY, when on the day-to-day local level you are the majority. There's less need to define yourself as a hyphenated-American when most of the people around you could describe themselves similarly, but don't feel the need to, because the majority looks like you, and is not going to assume that your appearance somehow indicates you're not really an American, ask where you're "really from", etc. (If anything, it's folks who appear to be Caucasian who get the you're-not-from-here presumptions all the time: I saw this time and time again as a child, where folks would presume that my American Indian mother was local while I, thanks to inheriting my white father's coloring, was surely a visitor from the mainland.) So folks will typically just identify and introduce themselves as Japanese or Filipino or whatever, without the hyphenate -- or, given the state's high levels of cross-cultural marriages, as an entire string of ethnicities. There's an openness there to espressing a multiracial identity without being pressured to choose sides that also does not seem to generally be the case in most of the mainland US...and again I think some of it is coming down to the sheer numbers, as Hawai'i is the one state where such demographics are downright commonplace.

[oyceter]

There's less need to define yourself as a hyphenated-American when most of the people around you could describe themselves similarly,

Definitely. The few times I was in Hawaii, it was awesome, because I felt like I belonged.

[smillaraaq.livejournal.com]

*nods*Growing up there and now living on the mainland US, it's one of the many things that makes my whole POV towards racism-in-the-USA feel so off-kilter -- because on the mainland more often than not it seems that talk about race defaults to black and white, or sometimes white and hispanic, and Asian or Indian stuff flies under the radar most of the time. But my formative years were spent in a world that was primarily Asian/Pacific, so even without ever having left the country it feels a lot like I'm in a different world now, and that's just WEIRD. That's a big part of why the Third Culture Kid stuff resonates so much even though I didn't move around internationally like the classic military/diplo-brat or PK examples that usually seem to get shown in the literature.

[oyceter]

Yeah... I think Hawaii is really, really different from the mainland, and can see how the TCK stuff would tie into it. Just out of curiosity -- did you end up moving back to Hawaii after living elsewhere (or was it living elsewhere, moving to Hawaii, then moving back)? Sorry to pry! I am just always happy to find other TCKs ^_^.

[smillaraaq.livejournal.com]

Nope, still on the East Coast, I've moved around a bit here on the mainland in the last dozen years, but never been back to the islands since I left...I miss it to death but even if I could afford to go I don't think my heart could handle leaving again once I got there. I'd be kicking and screaming and hanging on by my fingernails on the tarmac. ;)

And no need to apologize, I know the feeling! "OMG someone I don't have to EXPLAIN all this stuff to!" :)

[tevere.livejournal.com]

Huh. That's a really interesting example: Hawai'i as the one US state that has a non-white majority. I actually noticed it when I was there, but the implications didn't sink in until you pointed it out in this discussion. I wonder if as time goes on and Australia's immigration levels from Asia keep up, if we're going to head towards a situation that's more like yours.

[oyceter]

I wonder if as time goes on and Australia's immigration levels from Asia keep up, if we're going to head towards a situation that's more like yours.

That would be really interesting to see! I was just reading more on the politicization of the Asian-American movement, and it seemed like it took several national incidences to really get things started (most notably, the Vincent Chin murder, which also crossed some ethnicity lines -- he was Chinese, but murdered b/c people thought he was Japanese). I don't want anything like that to happen anywhere, but I keep wondering if something that drastic that crosses ethnicity lines is something that shakes people into action.

Sigh. Also, the Asian-American movement here is still pretty young -- the Vincent Chin case which really kicked stuff off happened in the 80s, and because of the US's racist immigration policy, there weren't very many Asians here until post-1965.

[oyceter]

*nods* Yeah, from what I've been reading, "Asian American" as a group identity really didn't start forming until the 1980s, with the Vincent Chin case. Before then, there were probably individual instances of separate ethnicities working together (and definitely in Hawaii), but it wasn't quite the same. And I do think there is a lot of the backlash against newer immigrants from the settled ones, particularly as a way of buying their way into the power pyramid -- one of the easiest ways to do it is to denigrate those below you. And some is in part the thought that if you rebel against the higher social order of institutional racism, you'll be whapped down for it, though of course I do not know the main reasons and am guessing at them.

And I don't mean to say that having "Asian-American" as an identity here means that there is no infighting; I think there's still a lot.