Happy Labor Day — belated.
This blog has been sitting in my hard drive for a few days now, waiting to be published. It’s probably the toughest one because it’s about a theme that is (regrettably) central to the American psyche, yet systematically hidden from view lest we start yet another controversy or worse yet, confront and challenge our own personal beliefs, that which we have been raised to believe is righteous and true. But publish it I will.
Interesting thing happened a few days ago while having dinner with a friend. We live in a section of San Diego highly populated by Asians; some Chinese, Vietnamese, Koreans and mostly Filipinos. What happened was, as we waited for a couple cars to pull out of their parking spots and clear the lane, a Vietnamese woman and her kids were walking through the lane as well, so we had to wait a few seconds longer. My friend said, quite clearly, “Damn zipperheads.”
That was surprising, considering. So I asked, “Did you just use a racial slur?” Of course he said yes. “Zipperhead” is a generic slur for anyone of Asian persuasion: Japanese, Chinese, Thai, Korean, Laotian, Cambodian and Filipino. Other slurs for Asians: Slopes, slant-eyes, Japs (specific to Japanese of course) and “gooks,” a term I picked up while in the Marine Corps and generally referred to Vietnamese. We really didn’t make a distinction between North and South Vietnam, they were all “gooks.”
And just to be more specific, we were taught to use that word in boot camp (Marine Corps) in an effort to make sure we, as lean, mean killing machines, hated our enemy, the North Vietnamese and their brethren in the South, the Viet Cong. It worked. For years my blood would boil every time I traveled through Linda Vista, a neighborhood in San Diego heavily populated by Vietnamese.
It took years of training and personal re-education to wipe that word from my vocabulary because, in the end, a racial slur is meant for one reason and one reason alone: to demean and insult the person to whom it is being hurled. Yeah, in years past, the word “gook” rolled effortlessly off my tongue with nary a concern for its purpose in my speech. They were the enemy.
My mother, now dearly departed, had an unyielding hatred of the Japanese and on the rare occasion she would use a word like “Jap.” That was odd, considering her very strict adherence to her Catholic religion and her normally open and generous nature towards the downtrodden. The one question that would always dog my thoughts whenever she used such a term was, “The war is long over, why still stir up all those bad feelings?”
Her motivation became clear when I finally confronted my own bigotry, acquired in wartime to demean and insult the enemy. For my mother, the passage of a mere 40 years was not enough to erase her bitter memories of living through World War II; her husband, my dad, was nearly killed on several occasions and some of the young men she grew up with never returned from the War in the Pacific. I knew the feeling — finally.
Racism is alive and well in America; maybe a bit more subtle than in years past, but still very much visible and audible in out society. The current whipping posts of bigotry are the Hispanics. The anti-immigration crowd is focusing its unbridled racism on “illegal” aliens under the guise that these immigrants are somehow destroying America by being in our nation. The whole illegal immigration hoax is a totally different subject altogether, but nearly every sector of society — including the unions — has a reason why these immigrants are bad for America.
Racism is timeless. It lives on. Americans have always had pejorative terms for groups of people they didn’t like; Italians are wops, the Irish are micks, spick and wetback for nearly everyone of Hispanic background, and so on and so forth. The deepest, most vicious racial slur is of course the “N” word — “Nigger.” Unlike the racial slurs for other ethnic groups, “nigger” has endured in America for nearly 500 years, since the Dutch first began enslaving Africans and bringing them here to slave in the fields.
“Nigger” is a different slur altogether because it denotes second-class humans, it means less than human and most definitely less than white, the very rationale for kidnapping millions of Africans and forcing them to work in the fields and homes of those who could afford to buy them. To be called a “nigger” is to be called less than human and it has been that way — and continues to mean just that — today.
“Nigger” wasn’t a word created by the Africans who were kidnapped in their homeland and brought to the New World as property to be bought and sold. The word is derivative of the Latin word for black, “niger.” In Spanish, the word is “Negro,” which was the socially acceptable word for African-Americans until the Civil Rights movement.
So “nigger” was specifically created to identify a group of people deemed less than human and therefore no better than—maybe not even as valuable as—a man’s other possessions. To be called a “nigger” was to be labeled a slave, less than human and today, no matter what reason we have for using that word, it’s only purpose is to remind the person we are speaking of or to that they are no better than a man’s other possessions, like a horse or cow; that they are sub-human.
This just popped into my head: sometime ago I got into a discussion about slavery, in particular slavery in our Nation’s history. You wouldn’t expect anyone in this day and age to be in support of the institution, but I was proven wrong once again.
The person I was speaking to rationalized slavery in America, brushing it aside as if it was of no great importance, with the caveat that slavery has existed in human society since the dawn of man and it continues today in some areas of the world. In other words, slavery is okay because it’s always been a part of human history.
When I hear that kind of rationale used to dismiss one of the darkest, most vicious blemishes in our nation’s history as insignificant and forgivable because, what the hell, everybody was doing it, the Civil Rights movement appears to have been a collective dream.
Granted, the other person vociferously denies being in favor of slavery, but when we rationalize something that we know is evil, aren’t we then giving that evil — slavery — legitimacy?
I’ll end here for now, there will be Part 2 in a couple days. Racism, and the words we use in that behavior, is a big subject.
TheForkesReport