Covering_ The Hidden Assault on American Civil Rights - Kenji Yoshino [53]
I believe I accepted my race with relative equanimity because of the racial pride my parents gave me. In this regard, their strategy of shuttling their children between the United States and Japan worked brilliantly. They permitted me to access Japanese culture as an affirmative birthright, in moments that shone like mints. Throughout my youth, they also kept steadily visible that my minority status in America was an accident of geography. In Japan, I was part of the majority.
It is a sad truth that one of the most potent psychic antidotes to racism is racism. Every racist belief I encountered in one country had its mirror image in the other, like the Escher in which doves fly into crows. I drew sustenance from that symmetry. After watching an American quiz show in which a white champion dominated the field, my mother turned to me. “Some Americans,” she said with wonderment, “actually know quite a lot.” I understood then why she assumed I would turn up at the top of any academic class—I was only competing with Americans.
Of course, Americans also expected me to excel academically. During my college years, magazines blared out headlines about “those amazing Asians.” Yet the affirmation I got from American culture for being a “model minority” still felt like a patronizing pat. I got more sustenance from Japanese nativism, which toppled the white judge from the dais. I felt like the giant son of Earth in Greek mythology who could draw strength from his mother, so that whenever he was thrown down in combat, he would spring up again, entirely replenished. As alien as Japan felt to me, it was still the earth that renewed me when I touched it.
I started to think rigorously about racial assimilation only when I was deep into my work on gay assimilation. I began to read in Asian-American politics, and recognized covering behaviors in much of what I found. In his memoir, The Accidental Asian, Chinese-American Eric Liu follows the statement “Here are some of the ways you could say I am ‘white’ ” with the following catalog:
I listen to National Public Radio.
I wear khaki Dockers.
I own brown suede bucks.
I eat gourmet greens.
I have few close friends “of color.”
I married a white woman.
I am a child of the suburbs.
I furnish my condo à la Crate & Barrel.
I vacation in charming bed-and-breakfasts.
I have never once been the victim of blatant discrimination.
I am a member of several exclusive institutions.
I have been in the inner sanctums of political power.
I have been there as something other than an attendant.
I have the ambition to return.
I am a producer of the culture.
I expect my voice to be heard.
I speak flawless, unaccented English.
I subscribe to Foreign Affairs.
I do not mind when editorialists write in the first person plural.
I do not mind how white television casts are.
I am not too ethnic.
I am wary of minority militants.
I consider myself neither in exile nor in opposition.
I am considered “a credit to my race.”
Liu stresses his “yellow skin and yellow ancestors”—he has not passed or converted. Yet he believes these covering behaviors have transformed him. Observing that “some are born white, others achieve whiteness, still others have whiteness thrust upon them,” he says he has become “white, by acclamation.” That metamorphosis is also internal. Liu says that insofar as he has moved “away from the periphery and toward the center of American life,” he has “become white inside.”
My first reaction to this list is a jolt of Linnaean pleasure. Liu’s list includes all four of my covering axes: appearance (“I wear khaki Dockers,” “I own brown suede bucks”); affiliation (“I listen to National Public Radio,” “I furnish my condo à la Crate & Barrel,” “I speak flawless, unaccented English