Tag: baldwin

Asian Hate and Anti-Black Racism

Content warning: descriptions of violence

In reading Audre Lorde, “The Uses of Anger: Women Responding to Racism” and Revolutionary Hope: A Conversation Between James Baldwin and Audre Lorde, there were moments that made me think of the discourse that has been happening between the Asian-American and the Black community in the U.S. in 2020 and 2021. Alongside the fight for accountability regarding the murder of Black Americans (Ahmaud Arbery, George Floyd, Breonna Taylor), there has also been a call for accountability toward hate crimes inflicted upon Asian Americans (61-year-old Filipino man Noel Quintana slashed in the face as he rode the subway in New York; 84-year-old Thai man Vicha Ratanapakdee shoved to the ground in San Francisco, resulting in his death) due to Sinophobic rhetoric from the media in the midst of COVID-19. Prominent Asian-Americans have taken to the internet to criticise the “lack” of media attention for these anti-Asian hate crimes, comparing it to the media coverage surrounding the Black Lives Matter movement by saying “Asian Lives Matter.” An example tweet of this sentiment reads “Those of you who were so vocal w BLM, where are you on the 1900% increase in Asian-directed hate crimes?”

The reason I bring this up is in this quote from Lorde’s The Uses of Anger: “Most women have not developed tools for facing anger constructively… There was usually little attempt to articulate the genuine differences between women, such as those of race, color, age, class, and sexual identity. There was no apparent need at that time to examine the contradictions of self, woman as oppressor. There was work on expressing anger, but very little on anger directed against each other.” In some Asian-American’s attempt to guilt-trip others into being as “vocal” about anti-Asian racism as much as anti-Black racism, they have unknowingly done what Lorde criticises Baldwin for in Revolutionary Hope, that is — assuming to know what the other groups lived experiences feel like. Asian-Americans who try to evoke guilt from the public for not giving the same response they did for the murders of Black individuals are refusing to “look at our differences and not allow ourselves to be divided” (Revolutionary Hope), and are contributing to anti-Black racism with their adaptation of the “Black Lives Matter” slogan and their erasure of Black struggles. On the surface, this sentiment of “we care about you, why don’t you care about us?” may seem harmless, like a cry for help, but in reality it trivialises equity and reduces the work of anti-racism into one that is purely transactional. It expresses a displaced anger that radiates dissatisfaction and jealousy, rather than solidarity and joy at the fact that movements like BLM have gained more traction in the public eye than ever before. It reduces injustice to instances of objectification, which is mentioned by Lorde in The Uses of Anger. The purpose of highlighting Asian and Black oppression should not be making people feel guilty, but should rather be a way for us to meet as peers “upon a common basis to examine difference, and to alter those distortions which history has created around our difference. For it is those distortions which separate us. And we must ask ourselves: Who profits from all this?” 

The Novelty of American Protest

In his “Everybody’s Protest Novel,” James Baldwin criticizes the American liberal and reader of American protest novels, writing that the problem with the American Protest novel is that the text itself frames the social issues it claims to address as remote and removed from the reality of the author and the reader. He writes that the only benefit the reader gets from such a text is that “finally [they] can receive a very definite thrill of virtue from the fact that [they] are reading such a book at all” (Baldwin 15).

Reading this last week, I was naturally taken back to the Summer of 2020, when Americans were rapidly disseminating and consuming protest media regarding the fight for racial equity and justice in the United States. Though I do not entirely share all of Baldwin’s criticism of protest novels and protest media in general, I can definitely see how passion for change in a nation that was built upon protest and dissent can be misguided and misdirected in a destructing manner. Although much of the media disseminated in the Summer of 2020 were not novels/fictitious—much of them were notable documentaries, essays, journals, infographics, op-eds and nonfiction books—I would argue that they did the work of coddling the liberal American. These pieces of media, though not created with poor intention, seem to be the easiest pieces of media for a troubled and well-intentioned American to grasp onto. They provide the illusion of protest, without the hassle or promise of activity.

Baldwin specifically detests how the American protest novel, particularly regarding race and racism, often still does the work upholding anti-Blackness and white supremacy; he uses Uncle Tom’s Cabin as an example of a text that was written and published to appeal to the white American liberal. Baldwin argues that the novel takes an outward stance against racism, but really it only sees Black Americans as having potential for redemption through performative whiteness.

I don’t think that the texts and pieces of protest media that were being passed around this past summer did exactly what Baldwin accuses of the American Protest Novel, but I will say that the novelty of protest for many liberal Americans made it so that even antiracist media could be used for white complacency and inadvertent anti-Blackness.

In his “Everybody’s Protest Novel,” James Baldwin criticizes the American liberal and reader of American protest novels, writing that the problem with the American Protest novel is that the text itself frames the social issues it claims to address as remote and removed from the reality of the author and the reader. He writes that the only benefit the reader gets from such a text is that “finally [they] can receive a very definite thrill of virtue from the fact that [they] are reading such a book at all” (Baldwin 15).

Reading this last week, I was naturally taken back to the Summer of 2020, when Americans were rapidly disseminating and consuming protest media regarding the fight for racial equity and justice in the United States. Though I do not entirely share all of Baldwin’s criticism of protest novels and protest media in general, I can definitely see how passion for change in a nation that was built upon protest and dissent can be misguided and misdirected in a destructing manner. Although much of the media disseminated in the Summer of 2020 were not novels/fictitious—much of them were notable documentaries, essays, journals, infographics, op-eds and nonfiction books—I would argue that they did the work of coddling the liberal American. These pieces of media, though not created with poor intention, seem to be the easiest pieces of media for a troubled and well-intentioned American to grasp onto. They provide the illusion of protest, without the hassle or promise of activity.

Baldwin specifically detests how the American protest novel, particularly regarding race and racism, often still does the work upholding anti-Blackness and white supremacy; he uses Uncle Tom’s Cabin as an example of a text that was written and published to appeal to the white American liberal. Baldwin argues that the novel takes an outward stance against racism, but really it only sees Black Americans as having potential for redemption through performative whiteness.

I don’t think that the texts and pieces of protest media that were being passed around this past summer did exactly what Baldwin accuses of the American Protest Novel, but I will say that the novelty of protest for many liberal Americans made it so that even antiracist media could be used for white complacency and inadvertent anti-Blackness.