Warning: this piece is extremely long and rambling. It's about the things mentioned in the title, illustrated through some of the more unpleasant aspects of the lives of three people, including myself. It's revisiting a lot of things I've written about over the past year of this blog.
The most painful part of this piece was trying to write about Central Florida. I haven't done it very well. Every time I try to paint a picture in words I usually give up and starting sputtering and yelling things like "the pit, the pit."
So as a quick preface, sorry, Central Floridians. I hate that place. But there are some beautiful things there.
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When I was young I was always under attack in school. Whenever I left the safety of my home I had to put my head down and got ready for the inevitable.
I don't know exactly what to call what I went through. The word "bullying" minimizes it too much. It brings to mind a heavyset, mouth-breathing boy shaking other kids down for their lunch money… Nelson Muntz from the Simpsons. The kind of boy who rules the playground, but won't get very far in adult life.
A more accurate word would be "racist abuse." The scary part was that the abusers were completely unpredictable. One day I'd sit next to a girl or boy and have a nice conversation about dinosaurs, and the next day they'd follow along me singing "Chinese, Japanese, dirty knees, look at these." These weren't sadistic kids from abusive homes. There were too many of them for that to be the case. Most of them were totally average.
I tried a lot of things to get it to stop: logical arguments, emotional appeals to stop hurting me, pretending that I couldn't hear or see them. For a little bit I thought if I could wear clothes from Benetton and The Limited, they would stop. My family's financial situation was comfortable, but we weren't that well off, so I never found out if wearing more expensive clothes would have helped. The only thing that helped, a little bit, was physical violence. The one time I used my fists and knocked down a girl, that made them keep their distance. They didn't yell in my face anymore; they stayed at a distance or left notes on my locker instead.
Recently I've wondered whether part of my psychic survival was due to my body. I've always been tall and broad-shouldered. I got my height from my Japanese father. Being tall made me stand out as a target, but it also made me look more powerful. They never managed to make me feel ashamed about my own body, although in the girl's locker room, they tried hard enough.
When I went to college in Miami, for a brief time a young woman lived next door to me and we ended up having an intense talk once that touched on all this. She was Latina, from the north, tall -- even taller than me -- and dark-skinned. I usually didn't talk about what I went through in school, and she was one of the first people I'd ever met who had some of the same experiences and was willing to talk about it. Like me, she was raised surrounded by white children who abused her. She told me she was so full of rage that when she was a teenager, she used to go nightclubs, pick fights with white girls and beat them up. She would pretend they had spilled a drink on her, or looked at her the wrong way. She said she was ashamed now, but also in a better place. It had taken her a long time to "find herself" and stop raging.
For women, the price of wielding violence is often heavier than receiving it. We're taught from an early age that boys who fight are natural, but girls who fight are vicious and freakish. Anyway, I left that intense conversation incredibly thankful that beyond that one time, I'd never used physical violence.
Both of us felt that those children had stolen something from us, and we had to fight to get it back. The second and truly healing step was to stop fighting to get it back. What we were looking for was not in their power to give back. We had to find it in ourselves.
The third person with identity issues I want to talk about is an old friend of my husband. This friend, who is white, used to live in Atlanta but he's moved far away and we don't talk to him much anymore.
He grew up near the same Florida town that I did. His family was a wreck. He ran away from home to escape his abusive father and was taken in by a group of skinheads. Unlike Miami, where white-power types understandably keep a very low profile, I knew that the skinheads in that other Florida town would be of the Nazi type. They'd taken over the scene and run off the anti-racist skins during that time period. The friend, who was painfully and exhaustively honest about everything else in his life, didn't like to talk about that time.
Later on, after he moved to Atlanta, he had a year-long relationship with an out gay black man. Then he decided he was straight and they broke up but stayed friends.
My husband's friend was a short and small-framed man. He loved to read books, drink, get into fistfights, talk about his emotions, cry, and discuss his Irish heritage. It's the Irish heritage thing that truly fascinated me. My husband told me all about his friend before we met for the first time. He told me his friend had a large IRA tattoo on his arm. Had he ever visited Ireland? Nope. I was astounded. I was even a bit mean to him the first time we met. "Why do you have the Italian flag tattooed on your arm?" I asked.
My husband, who has just as much Irish heritage as his friend, had gone through many long arguments about the IRA before. He was so sick of the topic that he never brought it up anymore.
I thought the tattoo was completely insane. A healthy way to explore your heritage would be through positive things like joining an Irish-American historical society, learning Gaelic, visiting Ireland… it's what I would think of from my perspective as a Japanese-American. Why jump into a conflict whose struggles you haven't lived? It seems patronizing to the people who have lived those struggles, the ones who stayed behind.
I believe it makes a huge difference whether your ancestors arrived as entrepreneurs, indentured, enslaved, rich, or starving and desperate... but it makes a huge difference in the new country. In the old country, the division is simpler. Some stayed, some left.
Japan and Ireland have an interesting emigration history in common. In the 19th and early 20th century, they were poor countries. Many left for a better life. Now, they're rich. Irish and Japanese nationals are not in much danger of being exploited by the descendants of those who left. Still, I think it's disrespectful for me to assume I know what's best for Japan because I have Japanese heritage. I have a lot of opinions on their politics as a human being and global citizen, but unless I actually move there and exercise my citizenship, I don't want to go beyond that.
In Miami, many of the ones who left another island - Cuba - thought they would be going back. But their children are already forgetting their Spanish. I visited Cuba once, and I noticed the feelings that Cuban nationals have for Cuban-Americans are very complicated. There's love, because many of these people are friends and relatives. There's also anger. "We've lived here. We stayed. We know what's best for our own country, not you, the ones who left for a richer one."
The Japanese-British author Kazuo Ishiguro left Japan at the age of two. He said once in an interview that he thought he would be going back when he was a child, and he built up an imaginary Japan that was very precious to him. As he became an adult and realized he could never really go back, and that England was his home, he had to say goodbye to that imaginary Japan, and did so by putting it in his book An Artist of the Floating World. I never had that. When I left Japan I was old enough, at six, to remember it more as reality than fantasy, and to understand I was never coming back. My parents never gave me any illusions on that point… I'm not saying that bitterly. I'm actually glad. I had enough problems without having to deal with an imaginary Japan floating just beyond reach. Still, Ishiguro's words are very moving for me.
My husband's friend, a very intelligent man, had a blind spot when it came to his own claimed island. He had to defend it from the English. It gave him a purpose, a goal, an identity. He had mellowed out a lot by the time I met him, but my husband said he used to see him get into bar fights all the time. He could destroy men twice his size because he moved so fast and hit so hard.
Luckily, there aren't many Americans, especially in Atlanta, who have strong feelings for the other side. He may have wanted to get into fights over Ireland, but that wasn't likely to happen here, thank goodness. Now he's married with a kid and I don't think he fights anymore.
The idea of Ireland must have given him a lot of comfort over the years. Perhaps it was also part of a reaction against the Nazi skinheads who idolized England. We grew up in the same horrible, horrible place, but we knew there was something else out there beyond the Central Florida suburbs and strip malls. I had the luxury of growing up in a supportive family; he had to break a pool cue over his father's head. I had part of my childhood stolen by racist abuse; he had almost all of it stolen. I could go on like this for a while. Our similarities and differences are endlessly fascinating to me. Perhaps it's because he was so open about how he formed his identity, when most people, especially white people, are ruled by shame and defensiveness when it comes to this topic.
All three of the people I've talked about are lucky. We came out the other side. Instead of abusing other people and abusing ourselves, we're moving forward. Sometimes I wonder if I'm really a whole person, but then again, even if I'm not, so what? Human beings can go through life missing huge chunks of themselves. Wholeness can mean healing, or it can mean the impossibility of change and growth.
>>You hate traditional America and everything it was built upon, (including the evil white men who made it) and you want to build a new foreign political system more in line with your more modern, socialistic and globalist viewpoints.
including the evil white men who made the blacks and Chinese make it
I'm proudly, NOT part of the sheep pen!
Wes, haven't you got it yet? *We can't go back*. There's no way to return us to the conditions of the 19th century, however much you wish it. The attempt is destroying us: that is Iraq, that is Homeland "Security". That's the whole story here; the big one which underlies fascism everywhere. *We can't go back*. All we can do is try to coerce the present into your image of the past, with ever increasing violence, until finally there is only horror and failure. Why not go forward instead? I can't promise you your dreams, but at least there's something there.
I don't get? Sorry...........I didn't know there was anything left to get besides the Constitution. You know, limited government, the bill of rights, keep the government out of my business and pocketbook. That "stuff". I know from reading your posts that it's not important to you people. Do what you like. I wonder though, did you ever take any basic history class in school covering the basics of American Government, not written by an ebonics instructor?
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