Race to the Bottom

Don't worry, this isn't a Chip Tsao post. But this is going to be about race, so you can skip to yesterday or tomorrow if you don't want to hear about it.

I think I became conscious of race when I went over to a friend's house to do homework back in grade school. I couldn't have been older than ten at the time, and I was, in ways, a concentrated version of the man I was going to be - bouncing and exuberant with a healthy helping of boyish charm. But when my friend's mom came over and started speaking to me in rapid Fukien, I was taken aback. I had always been good with parents, but this time I could manage not more than a few awkward smiles as she grilled me over and over. I finally got the courage to say that I couldn't speak, at which she asked in Tagalog if my parents had ever taught me. I said no. She then gave me a look that perplexed me, whose meaning I now know: you're one of "them." And from that moment on I knew I was somebody else.

Granted, it was mostly my ethnicity and cultural upbringing as a fifth-generation Chinese Filipino in a westernized liberal household that was being targeted. But as someone who can claim actual Filipino ancestry, I know that any discussion about cultural value is somewhat connected to racial ideals. It is my indio blood, after all, that led people to exclude me from their circles, that led girls to tell me they couldn't go out with me, that made me cringe when I would go to my friend's houses and hear their parents who I kissed on the cheek moments earlier throw around all the racial slurs that Chinese people call Filipinos. On the whole though, despite pockets like this, the Philippines is still a largely homogenous society, and, for better or worse, race is rarely an issue in the goings-on among Filipino lives.

I guess the fact that I attended a school where most kids were ethnically pure Chinese helped compound my consciousness of being an actual mixed Chinese-Filipino. But my awareness of race reached a new level when I came to America. All of a sudden, there were black people, in the flesh! We'd get the occasional white person in Manila but black people, come on! It's like being on TV!

Of course, I soon found out that bigotry is still alive and well, even in true-blue Boston, Mass. Less than twenty-four hours ago, some of my friends were harassed by a drunk student during their dance practice. After he came between them and mocked their dance, he got in their faces and tried to verbally instigate a fight. He eventually got physically violent and my friends had to restrain him and hold him down all the while he was screaming:

"FUCKING CHINKS! GO BACK TO YOUR COUNTRY! I'LL FUCK YOU ALL UP!"

Although it didn't occur to him that my friends were all Korean, he still managed to hurt them very deeply. Questions jarred my mind as I listened to this account. Why is it, that at one of the most liberal schools in the country, one that prides itself on being among the most diverse, ethnically and economically, do we still get people who are so ignorant and mean-spirited? Why do they still feel they can act this way? Why couldn't I have been there to send that motherfucker to the hospital?

This incident reminded me that as unconscious as I was of my race in my home country, now that I'm in the states, I like all other people of color have to deal with race and its associated issues on a daily basis. I'm just saddened that racism is still so alive and so real even in a day and age when we can elect a black president. I just hope that Tufts does something about it so that kids who go in nasty and mean can at least, after four years, leave changed in some way.