Jon Carroll responds to the "Why I hate Blacks" article

[n2doc]

Jon Carroll
Wednesday, February 28, 2007

See, the person I worry about is Samson Wong, editor in chief of AsianWeek, a free publication aimed at the Bay Area Asian community and published by the famously powerful Fang family. I put myself in his place. He gets a new column from his feisty young columnist Kenneth Eng. The title of the column is "Why I Hate Blacks." Maybe the first thing he thought was, "I sure hope this is a fashion column." It is true that this "black is the new black" thing is way out of control, and it's about time some feisty young columnist started to ridicule it. But no, it was not a fashion column -- it was a column about why Kenneth Eng hates black people and, by extension, why you should hate black people too. Does it get more racist than that? I mean, here people are mulling over the idea that Eddie Murphy's movie "Norbit" might be racist because of its depiction of black women (even though Eddie Murphy is black) -- your assignment: Compare and contrast "Norbit" with "Tyler Perry's Daddy's Little Girls" -- and then comes something that puts all those nuanced discussions on the back burner. Racism in the grand old manner! It's the 19th century again!

(You might wonder whether the column was some sort of satire. It really wasn't. No one is even pretending that's true. This is a column about hating black people by a guy who hates black people.) So Samson Wong apparently says to himself, "Sure, why not, it's a free country," and he prints the column. Did he not perhaps think that a newspaper has many missions, and fostering community understanding is one of them? This wasn't a reasoned screed against affirmative action; this was a goddamn "Why I Hate Black People." One has been in the newspaper business many years; one's jaw is agape.

I also fret about David Lee, spokesman for the Chinese American Voters Education Committee. He said that Eng's column reflects the way some Asians really feel and that it's good to get this stuff out on the table. "Rather than refute and bury this, we should be calling for a community dialogue to address this." I'm just guessing here, but if I wrote a column called "Why I Hate Yellow People," I'm pretty sure that David Lee would not be quite so sanguine about it. I imagine he would refute the column, probably really strongly, and I don't imagine he'd want to have a town hall meeting first. I'm all for dialogue, but there's a baseline of respect that's necessary for the dialogue to work. If there's no respect, then the dialogue can often turn into what we like to call "war."

So, you may be asking yourself, why does Kenneth Eng hate black people? Here's a sample: "Blacks hate us. Every Asian who has ever come across them knows they take almost every opportunity to hurl racist remarks at us."
Kenneth, two words: Tiger Woods. Tiger's father, Earl Woods, was 50 percent African American; his mother, Kultida Woods, is originally from Thailand and is 50 percent Thai and 25 percent Chinese. I don't imagine their courtship involved a lot of epithet hurling. And there are a million other examples just like that, a lot of them going to high school in the Bay Area. If Kenneth Eng's experience with African Americans has been entirely bad, maybe he needs to get out more.

"Contrary to media depictions, I would argue that blacks are weak-willed. They are the only race that has been enslaved for 300 years." Well, no. The word "slave" has the same root as the word "Slav" because most of the slaves in the Caliphate or Islamic Empire were from what we would call Eastern Europe. And the feudal system in the imperial China of the Qin and Han dynasties created a vast underclass of serfs whose life was pretty darned slavelike. And so forth. It's a silly argument, really, because the premise is so laughable.

"Blacks are easy to coerce. This is proven by the fact that so many of them, including the Rev. Al Sharpton, tend to be Christians." Note gratuitous Al Sharpton reference -- the paragraph doesn't work so well if the name "Martin Luther King" is inserted, because he was so famously difficult to coerce. Oh, and there are lots of Korean Christians and Filipino Christians, too. And, since Christianity was originally a sect of Judaism, I guess pretty much the whole world is easy to coerce. Feh. Another idiotic argument.

Of course there is racial tension in the United States. Ignorance only adds to the tension. If Samson Wong knew how ignorant the column was and published it anyway, that's one kind of bad. If he didn't, what's he doing editing a newspaper?
As someone once said, ignorance can be cured but stupidity cannot. I'm afraid we have a deadly double-barreled strain of the disease here.

[e-mail].

http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/02/28/DDGRJN7J9F1.DTL