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3 February, 2003
Lighten Up? What For?
Responding to racist images and comments isn't just an exercise in political correctness.
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A GALLERY OF UNFUNNY
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"I said it jokingly, so this guy was just trying to stir something up that's not there. He's just somebody who doesn't have a sense of humor, like I do," Shaq responded to the media.
By minimizing his motive for making the remark, and then blaming the Asian writer who was offended enough to write about it, Shaq was dismissing the impact of the remark itself. I for one don't believe Shaq is a racist in the white-sheet-and-hood, cross-burning type. But I do believe his comment was prejudiced and inappropriate, and that any Asian American who has grown up being called a "ching-chong Chinaman" would recognize it as so.
This is not a diatribe about political correctness. This is about saying something pisses you off if it pisses you off. And Shaq's comments pisses me off.
Shaq has apologized, both in the media and to Yao on the court, so as far as I'm concerned, the incident itself is over. But the disturbing elements of the general Asian community's lackadaisical response to racist remarks and stereotypes is eating at me, and so is the common response of "you're being too sensitive/PC - lighten up."
A couple of weeks ago, I received an e-mail from a man (who I assume to be Caucasian; I know for sure he's not Asian) who criticized my column from last year when Abercrombie & Fitch sold a line of t-shirts emblazoned with stereotypes of Chinese from a century ago, with skull caps, slanty eyes, buck teeth and the long queue of hair.
"C'mon now....... how anybody can find that offensive is beyond me," the man wrote. "I find your views to be the most ignorant of all. It's cute. It's clever...... it's downright comical and in no way.... attacks any race or creed in a malicious or poking fun kind of way."
I responded that I disagreed and added, "By the way, regarding what's racist and what's not... I believe that if something is offensive to someone, it's offensive. If another Asian finds something honestly racist, whether I find it as offensive or not isn't the issue. It offended another person, so that's good enough for me. Not to cast any aspersions on non-ethnic people, but I once told my Caucasian best friend that he could never really know if something's racist because he's never felt it, and he agreed. I don't think it's a matter of someone taking a joke the wrong way... if someone finds a joke to be racist, the person telling it oughta stop and think that maybe it is."
He went on in subsequent e-mails to compare Asian outrage over these stereotypes to the growing numbers of African Americans in American TV show of the past couple of decades: "Look at all the black sitcoms that came out in the late 80's & early 90's. They all glorified the black race & made white characters on the shows look like morons. I just think the Asian community has taken this issue w/ A & F way too far and unjustly!!!"
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"Tell Yao Ming,
'ching-chong-yang-wah-ah-soh.'" |
Others' feeling of Asian over-sensitivity was underscored just a couple of weeks ago, when the Miami Herald ran a story about the still-common use of the word "Jap" in Florida. According to the Japanese American Citizens League, Florida has the highest public use of the word of any state in the country, more than 2,000. "It is in the name of an adult softball team in Miramar. It can be found in newspaper advertisements and marks the site on maps where a coral outcropping in Highland Beach is called Jap Rock. And until the early 1990s, it appeared on voter registration cards of Japanese-born residents," the article explained.
The mayor of Highland Beach says the name is "innocuous," and ominously echoes Shaq by adding, "I would say whoever is raising the objection is raising trouble where trouble doesn't have to be."
The owner of "The Jap Shop" auto repair chain says critics are simply being "oversensitive."
The article went on to quote the JACL's Clyde Nishimura saying that even if the word is used as an abbreviation (as eBay continues to do despite complaints for two years), "there's still a problem."
"The word `Jap' is equivalent to `nigger,' `Chink' and `Hymie,' he told the Miami Herald. "When you put it into that context and ask people if they'd put up a sign with those words, they'd say, `Of course not.' `Jap' is no different, and that's what people have to realize."
Just this morning, I received more proof that we can't just sit idly by while others flaunt stereotypes of Asians or use inappropriate words for our people just because they're "just jokes" or because we're "too sensitive."
After reading a column about internment, a reader responded that "internment is a legal term," and that "Japanese-Americans, as U.S. citizens, can not be and were not interned. It is possible that a few who renounced their American citizenship or who held dual citizenship were interned."
So what happened to them, were they sent on an extended vacation from their homes and properties? Or is this man refuting that internment ever happened?
He goes on to write about the lack of information about internment in most American history school books, "Historians paint history with broad brush strokes and consider the relocation issue a minor blip in the continuum of American history. Japanese-Americans don't agree… but they don't write history."
Maybe we should.
As for Yao Ming, who graciously accepted Shaq's apology when the Rockets beat the Lakers in overtime, the young center isn't sweating under Shaq's shadow - he received more votes from fans than Shaq for the Feb. 9 NBA All-Star game, and will be starting for the Western Conference team while Shaq sits on the bench as the reserve center.
You can read Tak Toyoshima's Secret Asian Man comic about Shaq at: http://nikkeiview.com/samshaq.htm and also a commentary from Global Black News by Bakari Akil II at: http://www.globalblacknews.com/ShaqandYao.html