When I'm asked about my past struggles, color-enhanced images of the Chinese Exclusion Act, Japanese internment and Jian Li's problems with Princeton do not come to mind. Misnomers like mathlete and Lucy Liu are neither here nor there and are more likely to make me laugh than frown when inserted in a Russell Peters joke.
When I do think in colors, the pieces fall within the framework of a past I'm quicker to call my own-spanning years, from elementary school in small-town southern Illinois to church on Chicago's West Side. When I do think of racial struggle, the words and incidents that surface are attached to faces and places that are starker, often uglier to me than any picture in a textbook or the Times.
So it hit me with full ironic force, the moment I, a full-fledged member of the "laid-back minority persons of America" club, realized I was guilty of conflating others' viewpoints with the drama of "their peoples'" past.
A lot of doubt preceded that moment. Those like me tend to nod and immediately associate "color hypersensitivity" with that discussion stopper, that magic trick we call the race card. The "race card!" cry has become a defense mechanism for those helpless, unfair, once dead-end situations where, upon being accused of being racist, you could only stammer, "I have black friends!" It's the response to a brief stint of teaching third-graders why Columbus may have done more bad than good.
Because we are exhausted by what we perceive as the most visible outcome of color-consciousness: the political correctness that oils and foils the academic and social engines of our time. We feel sufficiently enlightened, blessed in an environment in which race-hate appears less of a tangible problem than global warming.
So we will not put up with the "semantic" differences between Hispanic and Latino, damn it. Haven't we suffered enough? Haven't we paid for the sins/bandaged the wounds of our fathers? Isn't it time to move on?
But can we dismiss the power of words and seek to carry on? These are not "just words" for anyone who has ever been a second-grader dressed in the wrong kind of jeans and called "a chink," or "the n-word." And later dressed in the wrong kinds of jeans and called "a loser." Depending on where you live and what you know, these words can come to sound roughly the same. Anyone who truly believes these are "just words" has never wondered self-consciously in childhood what it would be like to shed a skin-never wondered, however briefly, however misguidedly, what it would be like to be white.
"You're always aware you're a minority."
That was the moment. The moment I was introduced to my own ears-shut, eyes-closed inclination to shove others' personal views on race under the umbrella of hysterical historicalism. A classmate said it in a religion writing seminar last spring. The twelve or so of us sat like a magazine spread: one-third white, one-third black, one-third Asian. One lacrosse player.
Our graduate student-teacher had respectfully, cautiously opened the floor to our thoughts on lacrosse and the racial framework being used to interpret it.
The student speaking was responding to my comment, my objection to analyzing lacrosse within a racial framework at all. She was thoughtful, she was probing. She was not explaining away the problematic generalizations that were being made, the myopic microscope through which the incident was being scrutinized. The discussion at hand was not about turning the lacrosse players into symbols, or that night into a case study. We tried instead to make sense of this uproar that would continue through another year, this urge to simplify and stratify lacrosse supporters and protestors alike.
That day, she and I were both right, and the "race card" argument-simple, easy, obvious-was wrong.
We can tire of being politically correct. In fact we can argue that overwrought, underthought political correctness only stalls progress. Because instead of addressing our hazy misconceptions, we hide them in hazy language, for fear of having our artless ignorance mistaken for deliberate disregard. We obsess. We reduce people to skins and situations to prisms. Self-defense.
But if a friend asks that I understand the differences between Hispanic and Latino, I will listen. I will understand that his preference is not a gesture of faith in the workings of a politically correct world. His experience speaks to him, the way my experience speaks to me. He does not sit up at night, thinking up ways to twist history to fit his life. He has history enough of his own.
If I unwittingly offend, and race is put on the table, I will recognize it not as a card, but as a nontrivial part of someone's reality. I hope that in the same respectful way, should I feel offended, I will always balance my reality-race-infused though it may be-with context and regard for individuals and their own realities.
Because more than skin color colors our world. And none of these things, skin color included, are cheap plastic cards.
Jane Chong is a Trinity sophomore. Her column runs every other Wednesday.
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