Wednesday, April 09, 2008

Can You Afford Insurance?

Many non-Asian American people of color indulge the common fantasy that Asian Americans as a group do not suffer from American racism. For these pitiful anonymous, Asian Americans as a group have so ingratiated themselves into White supremacist America that the phrase 'model minority myth' has become a hollow throwaway from the arrogantly underprivileged towards those they consider lucky at best, and unimportant usually.

Personally, I found this phenomena most prevalent during my Cornell days where, from my perspective, the most international and ethnically diverse Ivy League university in this nation never once encouraged intense dialogue within its student body on multiculturalism and diversity. Now, the campus operated daily with those buzzwords; even the Campus Life residence hall directors and building managers and cafeteria workers and janitors attended monotonous meetings without end designed to indoctrinate cross-cultural unity perspectives in every facet of student life, all to little effect.

'Multiculturalism' and 'diversity', like their precursor 'integration', serve one purpose: to convince young scions of the privileged and alienated majority that people of color matter enough to their personal and professional lives that basic social interaction between the races must emerge to preserve the Establishment. This interaction, social sometimes but financial usually, is literally the only way the iconic institutions of the United States of America - our imperiled dollar, our vaunted ingenuity, our inhuman military supremacy - can thrive amid the real and imagined geopolitical Katrinas of the Twenty-First Century - an international energy crisis, global warming, stateless terrorism, welfare state financial meltdown, etc. Leave it to academia to decipher Ben Franklin's handwriting on the dusty walls of our nationally forgotten past -- after a building takeover best described as a bastardized hybrid between passionate student activism and the death of liberalism itself shocks Cayuga's genius into paying attention.

The point? In balkanized liberal America, no one offers guidance on race to those the majority expects to teach. At Cornell, one on my favorite sayings was "I don't get paid to be your professional Negrologist, and I wouldn't cash that check if you offered." (I'm obviously paraphrasing; this is a family blog.) But I'm convinced - then and now - that a major reason so many non-Asian American people of color express ambivalence and/or outright contempt for the racialized plight of Asian Americans derives from the unchallenged concept that Asian Americans are all smart, wealthy, hardworking, and too polite to cause trouble. What's more, in the absence of consensus among Asian Americans on the political worth of the model minority myth, many non-Asians indulge a defensive antagonism toward Asian American politics, one that excludes Asian Americans from much of the anti-racism activism in this country.

Even in 2008, when national media covers a race story, it involves the senseless murder of an African American teenager in Los Angeles, or Newark, or Washington D.C. It involves the influx of undocumented workers from our porous southern border who wish for nothing more from this country than to work hard at backbreaking labor in exploitative plantation conditions just to provide the rest of us with cheap lettuce (and benefit from the American welfare state, of course). Race in America involves the vision of an untried and brilliant biracial Senator who offers national unity -- wearing racial absolution's summer Sean John -- to mainstream White America, and the automatically beneath contempt sermons of his respected and beloved pastor, immortalized after decades of spiritual and political service to the Chicago African American community as a frothing, rabid throwback of a forgotten era when Whites were a silent majority and Blacks like the good Reverend deserved the water hoses and German shepherds for 'stirrin' up the good Negroes'.

Mind you - nowhere in our current race dialogue can Asian Americans speak about themselves. Nowhere.

And frankly, we lose something important this way, when some people of color, usually African Americans, are always called on to discuss themselves. America defines race dialogue today as teaching White people the specific racial etiquette necessary to never under any circumstances allow a person of color to detect their individual racism or their individual benefits from the institutional racism constructed by Whites past, and to prevent any real racial dialogue at any time for any reason that any White person must engage and/or respect. When people of color employ this dynamic publicly, I consider it selling melanin, and we should never forget that the whole world lines up for this new-age auction block. Just ask Juan Williams. And Boyce Watkins, for that matter.

None of us gain encouragement to look beyond our own racial or ethnic or gendered or economic oppressions in this country. Between reality television's faux-documentary visual immediacy where Viacom cameras offer a behind-the-scenes gaze on twenty-two year old oiled, muscular Caucasoid cavemen who consume enough Budweiser in thirty minutes to piss alcohol throughout the insipid physical challenges that offer money and prestige to the moronic and pathetic, between popular music's endless parade of gaudy, half-naked thirty-plus songstresses still begging you the consumer to inject the mountains of China White necessary to believe the Duchess is only twenty-five (and could ever sing), between the ever-present U.S. Marines recruitment commercials featuring all the dirt and grime and explosions a Santa Monica sound stage can glean from wartime Tikrit footage and a Puddle of Mudd single, between the self-centered rappers who devolve Black masculinity amid urban blight into bulging muscles glistening with baby oil and meaningless beefs over money, 'hoes and clothes to replace lyrical content with insipid controversy, between the cable-news pundits who sell introverted xenophobia and unapologetic racism in a folksy Main Street cadence ripped from President Ronald Reagan himself, the master at hate-your-neighbor politics, between the Ferraro feminists who despise Sambo success in exactly that language and hate their own booty shorts-clad Obama Girl daughters in the New York Times Sunday opinion page and the Wright "revolutionaries" who bellow and scream and screech over a basic Fuck Whitey! speech so they can gather the strength to serve Missy Anne Ferraro in our modern corporate big house with the marble tile and wood-grain tables and plasma screen televisions in the slave quarters' break room -- between all the insanity living in America generates the Millennium Generation has progressed into the All About Me! Generation, and our anemic politics panic at the disco.

Progressed, not evolved. A new study lays waste the claim that all Asian Americans are wealthy enough to afford healthcare in this nation, and that Asian American healthcare concerns do not exist. Pockets of economic uncertainty derived from small business ownership have left the rates of healthcare insurance ownership abysmally low for Korean Americans, and this study provides much more incentive for Americans to elect a President concerned with slashing the exorbitant costs from our current system while we push for universal healthcare. Also, this study encourages our nation to stop treating people as if they emerge from monolithic, homogenized groups. Poverty and lack of access to healthcare exists among us all, even the so-called model minorities among us, and a concerted focus on the specific groups affected by these problems, whether inner-city African Americans, immigrant Mexican Americans, small-business owning Korean Americans or working poor Native Hawaiians, would in my opinion, go a long way towards crafting and executing needed solutions, while all of us learn to look at each other without typecasting.

And we'd better: I work for a political campaign right now, and I don't have insurance. I can't afford it.

*Originally published at Reappropriate.com