Interesting poll to take.
Why am I starting today's IBARW entry with a link to someone else's post? Well, quite frankly, she did what I'd intended to do -- took the Invisible Knapsack article and turned it into a poll.
In my case, when I read that, it made me realize how much white privilege I don't have.
See, I'm Asian. South Asian, to be precise. And Asians keep getting held up as the model minority.
They're good at school. They become doctors. They don't go around joining gangs or dealing drugs or becoming busboys. They're quiet and keep their heads down.
Or, as someone else put it, "Asians are practically white".
Uh, no. Definitely not. Just because Asians blend better and are culturally more likely to go along with authority instead of resisting it doesn't make them "practically white".
But there is definitely a difference between black, white, South Asian, East Asian, South East Asian and any other racial group you'd like to toss in there. But for right now, I'm only focusing on black, white and Asian. All Asians. And I'm wondering why they tend to be fewer complaints of racism from Asians.
Whites can claim "reverse racism", as stupid an argument as I think that is. Blacks have slavery, Jim Crow laws and a whole host of other things to point to. Asians? Well, there's colonialism. Which doesn't even come close to what black people went through, obviously, and maybe that's why you get less Asians complaining about racism, especially in fandom.
Maybe there are fewer Asians in fandom. Maybe the Japanese don't mind the whole 'wapanese' trend at the moment. But also, maybe it's that Asian culture, on the whole, tends to not encourage speaking out against things we find injust.
Or maybe it's because there's not all much in fandom that actually affects South Asian people to make them want to complain. I mean, really, how many South Asian characters are there in popular fandoms to get butchered? Parvati and Padma are there in HP, but they're such minor characters that I doubt they'd ever cause a huge uproar about race, especially since it's been clear from the start that they're South Asian, as opposed to Blaise who was suddenly outed as black.
(That, incidentally, always makes me think of the joke that it's better to be gay than black, because if you're black, you don't have to tell your mother.)
Still, when the whole miscegenation argument came up a while ago, I remember arguing with someone and getting accused of taking it too personally and feeling a little dizzied by that argument. Because my first thought was "I'm not even black!". A black friend of mine explained it as an example of privilege, because it wasn't directly connected to me. And that made me take the Invisible Privilege test, which in turn made me realize exactly how lacking in privilege I am.
I'd always asssumed that as an upper-middle-clas Sri Lankan, I was doing pretty well. I had most of the rights other people did, even if I do live in Austria, home to the Holocaust.
And then I took that test, boggled at how little of it I could tick off (I suppose that I should be glad that I can tick any of it off but it just kept making me think of the "practically white" comment), and watched my world view shift.
( My Test Results. )
Please feel to post your own results in the comments, or post only those that you think you can tick off instead of posting the whole list.
Why am I starting today's IBARW entry with a link to someone else's post? Well, quite frankly, she did what I'd intended to do -- took the Invisible Knapsack article and turned it into a poll.
In my case, when I read that, it made me realize how much white privilege I don't have.
See, I'm Asian. South Asian, to be precise. And Asians keep getting held up as the model minority.
They're good at school. They become doctors. They don't go around joining gangs or dealing drugs or becoming busboys. They're quiet and keep their heads down.
Or, as someone else put it, "Asians are practically white".
Uh, no. Definitely not. Just because Asians blend better and are culturally more likely to go along with authority instead of resisting it doesn't make them "practically white".
But there is definitely a difference between black, white, South Asian, East Asian, South East Asian and any other racial group you'd like to toss in there. But for right now, I'm only focusing on black, white and Asian. All Asians. And I'm wondering why they tend to be fewer complaints of racism from Asians.
Whites can claim "reverse racism", as stupid an argument as I think that is. Blacks have slavery, Jim Crow laws and a whole host of other things to point to. Asians? Well, there's colonialism. Which doesn't even come close to what black people went through, obviously, and maybe that's why you get less Asians complaining about racism, especially in fandom.
Maybe there are fewer Asians in fandom. Maybe the Japanese don't mind the whole 'wapanese' trend at the moment. But also, maybe it's that Asian culture, on the whole, tends to not encourage speaking out against things we find injust.
Or maybe it's because there's not all much in fandom that actually affects South Asian people to make them want to complain. I mean, really, how many South Asian characters are there in popular fandoms to get butchered? Parvati and Padma are there in HP, but they're such minor characters that I doubt they'd ever cause a huge uproar about race, especially since it's been clear from the start that they're South Asian, as opposed to Blaise who was suddenly outed as black.
(That, incidentally, always makes me think of the joke that it's better to be gay than black, because if you're black, you don't have to tell your mother.)
Still, when the whole miscegenation argument came up a while ago, I remember arguing with someone and getting accused of taking it too personally and feeling a little dizzied by that argument. Because my first thought was "I'm not even black!". A black friend of mine explained it as an example of privilege, because it wasn't directly connected to me. And that made me take the Invisible Privilege test, which in turn made me realize exactly how lacking in privilege I am.
I'd always asssumed that as an upper-middle-clas Sri Lankan, I was doing pretty well. I had most of the rights other people did, even if I do live in Austria, home to the Holocaust.
And then I took that test, boggled at how little of it I could tick off (I suppose that I should be glad that I can tick any of it off but it just kept making me think of the "practically white" comment), and watched my world view shift.
( My Test Results. )
Please feel to post your own results in the comments, or post only those that you think you can tick off instead of posting the whole list.