Just got a call from Joe giving me a little background on Tiger Woods.
Ya know, the guy who was all over the news the other day for being the
first African-American person to win some big golf championship? Only
according to Joe, Woods isn't simply Black - more like half Yellow,
one-quarter Black and one-quarter Red. His mom is Asian (Thai), and his
dad is a mixture of African-American and Native-American.
So what? Aren't people people? Well, yes and no. In an ideal fantasy
world, skin color wouldn't matter. But in the United States, being a
person of color means you don't have rights - only privileges.
And the only people with the "right" to give you these privileges (and
remind you to be grateful for having them) are
the
"real Americans",
who are continually produced as "normal" through the tools of
national culture - the TV (like Baywatch), the movies (like Forrest
Gump), the government (like the White House), the magazines (like
the National
Review), the newspapers (like The New York Times), the high school history
textbooks, the national holidays, the immigration laws, and sometimes
even the parking lot outside of your neighborhood Denny's.
I'll give one specific example of what I'm talking
about. Once on Electric
Shadows we got into a discussion of how some
U.S. movies and plays will cast white actors to play yellow characters.
It came down to some of us talking from the "political" POV ("there's
something wrong with that")
and some of us talking from the "artistic" POV ("there's nothing wrong
with that").
Of course I was on the "political" side of that one, simply cuz I don't
buy the idea that there's this pure, abstract thing called "Art" that's
indifferent to who's got more socio-political power in the form of money
or land or
Aryan looks or whatever. Anyway, as a relevant
issue, somebody mentioned that in some Vietnamese movie there were white
characters played by yellow actors. Although she didn't explain how
exactly this was relevant, the implication was clear - "they" put yellow
players in whiteface, so why can't "we" put
white players in yellowface?
Isn't that fair?
Well, I didn't want to speak to that cuz
I was tired, plus people on both sides had put sincere effort into
winding the argument down and making peace with each other. But it
bothered me anyway,
and I'll tell ya why. That implication, as I saw it, was based on the
assumption that "they" who make Vietnamese movies are yellow and "we"
who make U.S. movies are white. Well, I think it's
perfectly OK to think of Vietnam as being yellow, just like Germany or
France would be
white and
Jamaica or Kenya would be black. But since when is the U.S. just white?
Since
white
people started saying "Let there be white", that's when.
The truth is
that obviously red people were here before whites even were, black people
were brought
over as slaves and yellow people were brought over as exploited labor
more than a hundred years ago. At this point, when I start trotting out
the PC cliches, some will respond with another cliche:
"If ya
don't like how things are in our country, why don't you just leave and go
home?" Well, I say this is my home just as much as it is anybody else's.
I also say that the wealth and power of the United States was not only
built on the good ol American resourcefulness of the whites who settled
it and the whites who continue to write the laws and history books. It
was also built on
the blood and sweat and trampled human rights of black slaves, yellow
cheap labor, and working class cheap labor of all colors, including white.
It was also built on
the opportunism that followed the end of World War I and World War II,
when civilian cities in Asia and Europe were getting decimated, while the
closest we came
to getting invaded was an attack on a military base that wasn't even in
the continental United States. It was also built on the U.S. military,
economic, and dare-I-say-it even
cultural imperialism that followed the crumbling of the old empires of
England, Spain, France, and Japan that allowed us to move into places
like the
Mariana Islands, the Hawaiian Islands, and Puerto Rico. So I say if the
money and the power of
the United States belongs to anyone, it belongs to everyone in the world
of every color. So no, "we" are not white. And "we" need to continue to
try hard to get used to that fact.
So what does any of this have to do with poor Tiger Woods? Hey, I have
nothing against the man - I'm happy for him. And like Michael Chang, he's
helping people of color to move into a sport dominated by people who are
white and also financially middle-to-upper class.
But the way I see it, making a big deal over the fact that he's the "first
Black-American to win the so-and-so" sounds a lot like the mainstream
culture congratulating itself over a bogus kind of "equal opportunity" -
look, even
a Black person can excel in a suburban, middle-to-upper class sport (golf
ain't
exactly basketball) if only he's willling to work hard! The implication:
all you people of color talkin about racism and how it's unfair should
get off your butt (get off welfare, Affirmative Action etc.) and start
working like "us", and soon you'll be making enough money to play golf and
hang out in
country clubs too. (Maybe not now, but "soon".)
But if they had to mention that he was half Asian, a quarter African and a
quarter Native American, that'd mess up the feel good story in a
number of ways.
1. First of all, it would imply that there's such a thing as people from
mixed backgrounds,
none
of which have to be white. That people of color can get together
and fall in love and have nothing to do with the colonizing white father.
Looked at this way, Tiger Woods stops being a success story built on the
dialectic of the driven Black Man and the fair-minded, welcoming White
Man, who encourages individualism and then hands out rewards for hard
work. It turns Tiger Woods instead into a symbol of how anything is
possible - even a colored person beating white people at their own
game - if only the different marginalized races of the U.S. would get
together and make families and alliances amongst themselves. Tiger Woods
then turns into a kind of superheroic figure, combining the powers of
Black, Yellow, and Red. In the storm of that many-sided dialectic,
the paternalistic white country club starts to seem less involved - less
relevant, and even less important, for all its power and money and
"normality". The old national narrative of "W + B = American Success
Story"
gets transformed symbolically into a new possibility of "B + Y + R =
New American Who Attains Success In Spite of the Old Stories".
To a conservative interested only in maintaining the status quo, the old
"balance of power" that was historically engineered through the strategy
of
"divide and
conquer", this new equation might seem scary. Why do I say that? Because
the mainstream media has shown a marked willingness to suppress any
evidence of this kind of new possibility in the past. During the Persian
Gulf War, all we heard was of how Iraq was isolated and even Saudi Arabia
and Iran were begging George Bush to personally come over and kick Saddam
Hussein's ass for them. What did not get such central coverage in the
news was the
explosion of protest demonstrations among the students and common people
in the Middle East (including Saudi Arabia) who wanted the U.S. to stay
out. I admit they got coverage, but only as side show freaks in the
greater
media circus - the real spotlight was on the political leaders of the
Persian
Gulf (who would never have antagonized the U.S. for anything because their
riches were tied up with U.S. corporations).
Likewise, when the People's
Republic of China started staging aggressive missile tests off the shores
of Taiwan, much of the hysteria over the coming invasion of Taiwan (and
the speculations about the impending, inevitable World War III between the
U.S. and
the P.R.O.C.)
came from the U.S. media. Again, the story was coming from the political
leaders of Taiwan - politicians as corrupt as any in Asia, who had
slaughtered thousands of native Taiwanese when they conquered the
island
themselves, and imposed a state of martial law for decades afterward. The
story did NOT come from the people, who were generally more cheery and
even blase about the situation. Even
Asiaweek, a conservative
magazine (well, by my standards anyway)
published by Time Inc., downplayed the
Chinese threat to Taiwan. They were capable of seeing this side of the
story because unlike the mainstream U.S. media, they were interviewing the
common people of Taiwan, not just the politicians who had built their
careers on negotiating with the U.S.-dominated world economy.
The point of all this is that the media helps to produce and perpetuate
the narrative of Uncle Sam as the peacekeeper, the global sheriff, the
benign father without whose wise, gentle hand the foreign countries
outside - and the peoples of various ethnic descent inside - would go nuts
and rip each other to shreds. (Nevermind that this engineering of peace
is sometimes more a result of bullying than wise negotiation, as in our
"diplomatic mission" to Haiti.) There is a widespread feeling
that only the white mainstream culture can bridge the gap among all other
cultures. One place I saw this expressed was in Smithsonian
Magazine, which presented an entire article devoted to Native Americans
who have embraced capitalism. Out came the historical references to
Native Americans who hated Blacks, and swept under the rug remained
the too-many-to-count examples of solidarity among Blacks and Reds, as we
see
alluded to in Toni Morrison's Beloved, and as we see now in Tiger
Woods's father.
2. The truth about Tiger Woods would also mess up the
media fairy tale by making clear that he's more Asian
than African. Of course, this doesn't mean it's right to simply label him
differently, but if the media were to admit that they'd made the mistake
of saying one quarter was more than one half, then we might be tempted to
wonder why. (You could point out that numbers and fractions don't matter
when it
comes to scientifically bogus quantities like race, but they're the ones
who reported the story like that, not me.) This simple mathematical error
was made because patriarchal cultures
in general are often unwilling to admit that the background of the mother
is just as significant as the background of the father. This is one of
the reasons why I personally am more troubled by mixed relationships where
the male is white than mixed relationships where the female is white. I
understand that my double standard implicates me in that patriarchal bias.
I don't claim to be better than anybody else. I do think that a
commitment
to feminism requires that we at least admit our biases, so that we can get
them out in the open and talk about them. But the U.S. media is not known
for its willingness to do that - it allows that kind of discussion in talk
shows, but not in "the news". (When I hear a radio news program air a
retraction where they say something like "after thinking it over for a
couple of days, our writers have decided that we reported that story in a
way that was kinda sexist, and we're really sorry about that," then I'll
take back what I just
said too.)
3. The third way in which revealing the complexity of Tiger Woods's
background would mess up the perfect feel-good story is that it
would remind us that whites are no
longer the majority
in this country - they are only the biggest minority among a plethora of
different peoples. And that is why I still have faith in the United
States - not because I trust in the white rich people who define the
national culture by running the
government and the media. I trust in the power of
diversity,
and the potential of a land where people of every background can and will
reclaim their inheritance, an inheritance of wealth that was stolen from
every people on earth, including the old colonial masters of Europe.
So
why am I saying all this? Am I saying news sources like 1010 WINS in New
York
ought to go ahead and air a "retraction" saying they were wrong, Tiger
Woods
isn't African American, he's Asian-American? Of course not. First of all
I personally have never heard a radio news station air a retraction. In a
newspaper it's ok, cuz you can hide it in a corner, but on the radio you
can't even admit to having played the wrong tape - you're supposed to just
cut to a commercial, or go on reporting the news as though nothing
happened. Second of all, it's not right to say he's "Asian" either,
unless
he happens to identify himself that way, and maybe he doesn't. What I am
saying is that this kind of factual slip-up should not be dismissed as a
neutral and meaningless error, but rather as a kind of Freudian slip, a
mistake
that can illuminate the hidden assumptions and unspoken narratives
about race, parenthood, class, "hard work", "success" and "social
progress" that
underly the national discourses promulgated by the TV, radio, the movies
(hell, even the internet) and the
newspapers.
But the truth is that this probably will be forgotten. And
I'm tempted to say that that's because the mainstream culture would prefer
a simple lie over a complicated truth. I admit I have no evidence
for
that assumption. But I wonder what evidence the newswriters at 1010 WINS
had for assuming that that was what their listeners wanted to
hear?