Help Wanted: Allies -- all races encouraged to apply

I am a firm believer in allies. When I teach the novel Donald Duk, I point out how Frank Chin, a man renown for his ethnic-nationalism (as well as his misogyny) and one who is quick to bash white racists, has carefully crafted the character of Arnold Azalea, the rich, white best friend of the eponymous protagonist, Donald Duk. That Frank Chin, of all people (Mr. Yellow Power himself) recognizes the importance of white allies in the fight against discrimination should be a signal that allies are seriously needed and wanted for all types of reasons, causes, movements, and paradigm shifts.

And I have written about allies elsewhere in this blog. And I want to return to the topic of allies because I think for some people, the idea that you can cross lines of affiliation, be they ethnic, racial, sexual, gender, class, or religion is impossible. In other words, as a straight woman I can't possibly understand the discrimination that a queer person experiences. True. I probably can't. But that doesn't mean I can't fight on behalf of queer people. And really, it's not so much, for me, fighting on behalf of queer rights as it is fighting on behalf of my own rights as someone who embraces a social justice worldview. Their fight IS my fight.

Let me also be clear--I'm not talking about appropriating someone else's cause or speaking FOR a community (I don't know that I could even speak for Asian American female academics, a community that I do identify with, but who am I to make pronouncements for my peers?). I am talking about being an ally. On educating yourself on topics, not because you want to fetishize or save the world (and here I'm thinking in particular of the disturbing narrative that emerged at the RNC in September of Cindy McCain "rescuing" a poor little orphan girl in an impoverished third world country, saving her from a life of destitution by bringing her to the bountiful bosom on the U.S.), but because you feel you are part of the larger world and because your commitment to being a world citizen requires you to understand others regardless of your subject position.

Which brings me to a little plug I want to make on behalf of a playwright who recently left a comment on my post on Yuri Kochiyama. The commenter has written a play about Kochiyama and other Japanese American girls who wrote letters to Japanese American soldiers fighting in the 442nd/100th battalion during WWII (largely on the European front in Italy, although there were other Japanese American soldiers involved in intelligence and translation in the Pacific theater during this time). The commenter noted that she was hesitant to write about the history of the Japanese American internment due to her distance from the subject as a Russian-American-Jewish woman, but then she was inspired by the example of Yuri Kochiyama herself, because she had expressed similar apprehensions before meeting Malcolm X, and certainly Kochiyama's life is an exemplar to us all of how to be an ally across multiple lines of affiliation.

So. If any of you are reading this and live in the Bay Area, let me share some information with you about the one-act play Bits of Paradise (click here for original notice in Asian Week):

Play Excerpts to Honor Freedom Fighter Yuri Kochiyama

San Francisco’s Marsh Theatre will host excerpts from the one-act play Bits of Paradise, based on the letter-writing campaign between Japanese American girls and women in U.S. concentration camps and Japanese American soldiers during World War II, at their Monday Night Series Nov. 17 and Dec. 1 at 7:30 p.m. Known as “The Crusaders,” the internees were led by then-20-year-old Mary Nakahara, who went on to become a prominent civil rights activist, and Nobel Peace Prize nominee Yuri Kochiyama.

Together they proved the saying that “Occasions do not make heroes, they simply unveil them.” Playwright Marlan Warren directs the young, all-Asian American cast that includes Chanelle Yang, Pisha Wayne, Linda Wang, Connie Kim, Wesley Cayabyab, Jean Franco, and Wilton Yiu. Kochiyama will attend, along with other original octogenerian Crusaders. Tickets are $7.00. No reservations. For more info, contact 415-202-0108.

Go out and see it--and write back and leave a message for all of us who aren't able to take in this performance.

The White Spokesperson

When I was in grad school I once told a white friend from Alabama (also a fellow grad student) that there were days when I felt tired just walking into the English Department at our New England University because I knew I'd be the only person of color I'd see the whole day (at the time we were in grad school there was one black Caribbean professor who taught Creative writing and one half-Japanese, half-Jewish professor who taught Literature--there were five students of color, all of whom were either Asian or Asian American, not all of whom were still in coursework and so may have been off-campus someplace finishing their dissertations). I was trying to express to my friend the loneliness and psychic drain of being one of less than eight people of color amidst a department and grad student population numbering over sixty to eighty (give or take the vagaries of MA and MFA acceptances each year).

My Alabama friend grew quite defensive, demanding to know if I had experienced bad treatment due to race, if I had ever been a victim of racist remarks, and, quite frankly, disputing how I could feel in any way, shape, or form uncomfortable, especially since I wasn't black, but Asian and an Asian American woman at that, which means that I was not only not reviled but revered in terms of being from a valued minority group.

You can imagine my anger and frustration and deep level of hurt. This was a close friend--someone I had had numerous conversations with about race--someone who expressed, or seemed to express, a real understanding of race and racial politics, especially black-white relations, especially in the South. We argued, at length, but it was only when another friend, a white male friend, rephrased my words and explained to the Alabama friend my feelings of alienation due to race, that the Alabama friend got it.

And that made me even angrier--that it took my white male friend to reinterpret for my white Alabama friend what I was saying--that only through having a white spokesperson was I understood.

I have been thinking about this lately as I've been immersed in reading books about racial passing--especially because this is something that Black Like Me (by John Howard Griffin) does. Griffin, a white man wanting to understand real race relations between blacks and whites in the South in the late 1950s, took a drug that turned his skin dark, tanned himself, and also added vegetable dye to his skin, and traveled throughout the deep South, passing as a black man. The book charts his growing evolution from being a participant-observer to understanding his own racism as a white liberal. And although the book/Griffin does act in this "spokesman" role, in the epilogue, Griffin is also aware of the role he is playing for other whites about a black experience:

"[I]t was my embarrassing task to sit in on meetings of whites and blacks, to serve one ridiculous but necessary function. I knew, and every black man there knew, that I, as a man now white again, could say the things that neeed saying but would be rejected if black men said them" (190-91).

Unfortunately, this still goes on today--sexism is taken more seriously when men talk about it; racism more seriously when whites discuss it; homophobia when straight people take on queer issues. And don't get me wrong--I think we all need allies--we need to stand up for one another as well as ourselves, or perhaps to see that gaybashing is a form of discrimination that hurts all people and sexism hurts men as much as women, and racism impacts all of us. But it'd also be nice not to need white spokespeople to interpret the very painful experiences of racism that people of color experience.