.jpg/dims/resize/740/optimize) |
I had a great time in America (including Hawaii) and Japan over the long, cold, winter break earlier this year.
During my trip, one of my really good friends, an entrepreneur and model, introduced me to her new boyfriend, also a model and a pre-med student.
I mention her boyfriend only because a joke I made upon encountering him for the first time. It was an off-handed joke about explosions.
Trans-Pacific flights, Grey Goose and Cîrocvodka, jetlag and poor sleep couldn't excuse my behavior. Her boyfriend is of Middle Eastern descent.
Now, everyone took the joke as good fun, even her boyfriend, a testament to his maturity and decency and my lack thereof. People make jokes for a variety of reasons. I'm sure mine was partially from fear, and not of him but, I'm sorry, "his kind."
A decade and more of absorbing the news: Foiled terrorist plots; drone strikes obliterating Islamists and innocents alike, (a program dramatically, and controversially increased under President Barack Obama); seeing the bombings by terrorists in Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen, Pakistan, and elsewhere; the terror alerts; and the mass shooting at Fort Hood by an Army officer radicalized, with, as my conservative counterparts call it, "Islamofascism."
There is more. The Boston Marathon bombings. The hours spent in the long lines at airports. My being touched here, there, under my arms, between my legs ― the government striptease I'm forced to perform time after time. All of it has changed me, and global society, and not for the better.
I have learned, without meaning to, without even noticing it, that I fear other colored people, those who look like what I read about and see on the news.
In subways, especially towards Itaewon, I nervously look at the tanned and brown-skinned folks who may be Indian, or Arabian. I am not sure what they are, but I fear them all the same. Death by a shrapnel bomb on a subway car seems like a horrible way to go.
Osama Bin Laden, evil as he was, may be the most important figure in human history since the rise of Hitler. His actions have changed the course of world affairs, creating an American national security apparatus larger and more complex than even that of World War II and the ensuing Cold War.
As I reflect on this, I think about how I am perceived by some Koreans. What, after all, do they consume via American pop culture ― whether it is in movies, the news, or popular music ― when it comes to African-Americans?
They've been given a steady diet, over decades, of seeing African-Americans ensconced in poverty. They see black folks portrayed as lazy, unwashed, bestial, sexually pliant, uneducated, Un-American, crude and bordering on inhuman.
Now, the difference between these particular Koreans and me is I critically interrogate my presuppositions and know them to be empirically and historically ill-informed.
It was Christians who perpetuated, via colonization, the near complete extinction of the indigenous peoples of the Americas, the Atlantic slave trade (the peripheral genocide of which caused the murder of tens of millions of Africans), Jim Crow, nuclear warfare, the internment of Japanese Americans into prison camps without trial or evidence during WWII.
Then there were political assassinations of democratically elected officials in foreign lands deemed non-compliant with American and Anglo-European interests. The list is quite extensive.
Surely, people of Middle Eastern descent, Muslims and those who practice Islam, don't have a penchant for cruelty, malice or religious fundamentalism. Humans have that penchant, all of us.
Intellectually, I know all of this to be so, and still I am, even slightly, afraid when I see "one of them."
We probably can't control how we feel about certain things, but we definitely must control what we do with said feelings.
When we see white Americans, themselves radicalized, murder other Americans for ideological reasons, as we saw with Timothy McVeigh and the Oklahoma City bombings (over 150 dead); or right-ring fanatics bomb abortion clinics and assassinate doctors who perform abortions (like that of Dr. Tiller, shot and killed as he attended church); or the six Sikhs slain in Wisconsin by an alleged white supremacist; or the three Jews murdered in an upscale Jewish neighborhood by a white Neo-Nazi in Kansas City; we need to be reminded that a terrorist is not a Muslim or a Christian, a Jew or Buddhist, someone tan or dark in skin color, but a person who has given themselves over to the darkest parts of the human condition.
Law enforcement tells us to look out for suspicious behavior, not skin color or religious garb. The Boston Marathon bombings were allegedly perpetrated by young men from the Caucus Mountains. That is, they were intrinsically Caucasian (the politest way to say white).
I apologized for that joke I made, by the way. This column is my absolution.
Deauwand Myers holds a master's degree in English literature and literary theory and is currently an English professor outside of Seoul. He can be reached at deauwand@hotmail.com .
