T-shirts, Lattes, and Assimilation
Let's put down our iPods and hold off on the text-messaging just long enough to appreciate the sacrifices of our ancestors. Maybe some of us will even be inspired to continue the fight for human rights.
Thanks to the efforts of those who came before us, Japanese American youth are fairly well assimilated into the greater American culture.
And while it is true that we are confronted with dramatically less discrimination than those of generations past, we are still the victims and products of ignorance. While I can only write from my perception of the world as a young JA, perhaps my observations will have some significance for others.
JA youth of today can only imagine the horror faced by earlier generations during the World War II era. We have seen the anti-Japanese war propaganda and read about the nationalistic extremism of some white Americans at that time. For that generation of JAs, this was their reality. And while my grandparents and I unfortunately do not discuss this period of their lives often enough, I do know that they, like so many others in their situation, tried to make the best of it.
After the war, my grandparents were married and had children, two girls and a boy, who would later become my father. While they do not speak openly about it, one can speculate that as victims of racial warfare coming out of Heart Mountain, they devoted themselves to raising a truly "American" family so that their children might not suffer as they had, a selfless endeavor, but nonetheless a very tragic one.
I consider my grandparents, father, and aunts to be cultural casualties of war. The patriotic fervor that becomes distorted into hatred has devastating effects on any targeted minority which is accused of not being "American enough." My grandparents' decision to leave behind an overwhelming portion of their Japanese heritage for the sake of their children's well being resulted in just that.
For this I thank them. Yet I also mourn the loss of a culture that was left to die at the hands of American racism. No one should have to surrender their own customs and traditions to be accepted into the majority society. But in the United States, that's just the way it is. We would all like to believe that America welcomes cultural diversity, but perhaps the Great American Melting Pot is really more like a Jell-O mold, in which everyone is sooner or later forced to conform to the pre-set standards of white Americans if they want to achieve any legal or political clout in this country.
Some ethnic groups that have succeeded in molding more to the white European American majority at the cost of their culture have also gained more social backing on the national level. However, many groups are far behind. A good point was once made in a Pacific Citizen opinion piece; it ran something like, "Everyone knows if you want to make fun of a racial minority in the United States, make fun of the Asians."
We have seen in the last few years, that when a celebrity makes one anti-Semitic or anti-black remark in this country, they are legally hounded, publicly condemned, and mass media devotes countless hours of attention to the issue until they make some effort to apologize. However, if it's an anti-Asian statement, the situation is entirely different because it is commonly felt that there is less legal power and national support behind Asian civil rights groups.
Take the Abercrombie & Fitch t-shirt case of 2002 for example. For a company whose advertising strategy is primarily based on the sex-appeal of 10-foot-tall posters of men's bare chests, it probably was not necessary to take it a step further by marketing t-shirts depicting stereotypical buck-toothed, squinty-eyed Chinese men in conical hats, accompanied by sayings such as: "Wong Brothers Laundry Service: Two Wongs can make it White."
The fact that these shirts were able to make it to retail store shelves and be sold without earlier interception makes a powerful statement about the ignorance and passivity of the culture we live in. While discriminatory t-shirts may seem trivial when compared to violent hate crimes, we must keep in mind how extremely influential fashion is on the minds of young people in general.
Given that clothing companies define what is "in," and what is not, they have the power to sell not only clothes to the masses, but beliefs and ideologies; ideologies which devalue a particular group of people and position them in a racial hierarchy. Thanks to a number of enraged individuals, the t-shirts were eventually pulled off the shelves. But one must wonder, would the situation have been the same if, say, the shirts featured Lil' Black Sambo?
More importantly, what are we doing about it as young JAs? While there are outstanding warriors for justice in this country, the majority of all American youth, myself included, voluntarily envelop ourselves in the world of the mundane: school, work, video games, rock bands, text-messaging, latté-drinking, and an occasional bit of adolescent soul-searching.
We are a group so overexposed to the happenings of this world that we have become desensitized to even the grossest of human rights violations. For a generation with so much information at our fingertips, we are shamefully uninformed and apathetic. So when we hear of an act of genocidal horror on the news, we coolly flip the channel to "Grey's Anatomy" without a hint of guilt.
As JA youth today, many of us have the social advantage of being better assimilated into the greater American culture than previous generations of our families, who have labored so that we might enjoy such integration. However, it appears that our assimilation sometimes distances us from the racial issues that are targeted toward us and to even less powerful minority groups in the U.S.
If we don't continue to fight for our own values and for the rights of today's new victims, then our predecessors' efforts for the rights we ourselves enjoy now will have been made in vain. The first step is to simply put the cell phone down and really discuss these issues with other human beings. While we may feel disconnected from our roots, we can never forget them.
To order the 2007 Holiday Issue, email circulation@pacificcitizen.org.
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