Excited
When we see white people in America from Generation X or Y, we stereotype them by cliques. Their dress gives us the clues we need to tuck them into a specific social category, like prep, goth, nerd, punk, hippie, and so on. When we see non-white people in America from Generation X or Y, no matter what they’re wearing, we stereotype them by race and leave it at that. Unless, of course, that non-white person is Asian, in which case we judge that person by race and clique, because “Asian kids are gaining ground in white culture” and “Asians are the closest to white people.” That is why Asians “are more easily able to transcend their race and find themselves in another social category.”
At least this is the contention of an op-ed article I ran into this morning at the Vanguard, see here.
Putting aside my opinion that this is a load of crap, I’m curious about why: 1) the author of this article, who I presume is white based on context, thinks Asians are more like white people than, say, Latinos or Eastern Europeans, and 2) by Asians, he must mean the yellow ones and not the brown ones and why did he completely and unabashedly omit brown Asians?
Second, the borderline defined by the author is wrong. People who see race more prominently than social cliques will see race first, even if that individual is Asian. Whites who see race more prominently may not call out the race of other white folks, but non-whites certainly do. “See that white hipster boy over there?” we say. People who see cliques more prominently than race may likely exclude race entirely. I’ve seen that happen before, too.
All in all, though, I’m glad Asians “are more easily able to transcend their race.” I mean, that’s why we have sites like APIA Blog Network, Angry Asian Man, the Model Minority forum, APAs for Progress, Hyphen, and heck, 8Asians, and why every established university in this country has to have an Asian American studies program. What kind of Asians have this author been mingling with? The white-washed ones?
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hrm. if i want to point out a particular person within a group, i find the most easily identifiable characteristic of that individual. if someone is wearing glasses and everyone else isn't, i'll say "the guy in glasses." if there is a white guy standing in a group of asian guys, i'll say "the white guy." if i'm trying to point out a south asian hipster out of a group of asian and white hipsters, first i'll say "the indian dude" and then immediately afterwards "friggin' hipsters! all of 'em!"
Oh lord. Who ticked off the Kiwi?
My trolling usually wraps around some truth-isms that no one seems to acknowledge (possibly a symptom of said trolling?). There are Slavic-"Mongoloid" mixes live in Harbin. There are Chinese Jews in Keifeng. The South Americans are a mix of indigineous peoples and Spanish peoples, who thenselves are, along with Italians, if we are to believe Tarantino's "True Romance", a mix of European and Moor (African) blood.
One of the last Sopranos episodes touched on this idea briefly, when some of the Italian kids beat the snot out of an African kid from Africa. "Come here, nigger," they said. "I'm not a nigger," he replied. Race is, sadly, for all intents and purposes, skin color, which has a correlation, though not exclusively, to hereditary origin in geographic locales.
Where do the differences in this definition of race stem from? Jared Diamond, an evolutionary biologist at UCLA makes the argument that the differences in race are nothing more than the reflections of thousands of years of sexual preference. In Asia, they liked yellow skin and slanty eyes, and in Europe they liked blonde hair and blue eyes.
Race in and of itself is simply unimportant. Race just happens to be a fairly accurate two-second indicator of culture, which is far more important in dealing with the (Huntington-esque) "clash of civilizations".
(See? I can be a pretentious hippie fuck too)
"...there are blonde-blue eyed Asians.."
It's true, in fact some poplations in Europe are considered Asiatic in origin. The Lapplanders of Scandinavia are believed to have come from Far East Siberia, the Hungarians can trace their origins partly to the Huns who came from Central Asia. Plus if you go anywhere in Central Asia, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Kirgystan you will see blondes or red-heads with East Asian eyes and bone structures. The Ainu "aborigines" of Japan also have mixed East Asian and Caucasian features although blondes are unknown. In fact I've read somewhere that the Caucasian race is believed by some scientists to be an Asiatic race by origin. Weird.
Actually, if you've heard director Justin Lin talk, Hollywood considers Asian-Americans "white" / Caucasians because our movie attendance and spending patterns are quite similar. Justin Lin said this was a real shocker when he first became an "insider" in Hollywood.
Did you know that there are actually blonde haired blue eyed Asians? I kid you not.
On the border between China and Russia, there are trading villages there and some of them are... Chinese. Go figure that eh?
Maybe the author was hanging out with those "Asians".
The omission of Brown Asians stems from the fact that the imaginary construct known as 'race' is more or less defined by similarities in outward appearances rather than geographical proximity of countries of origin or any other factors, which is probably why Chinese folks are lumped together with Japanese and Korean folks, in spite of the formers' proclivity towards inbreeding and the latter's tendencies to beat their women.
GOOD GOD THAT WAS A LONG SENTENCE.
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