My father spent the first five years of his life in China. I have a niece and a nephew who are half Japanese. Nothing about either of those pieces of family history seems abnormal to me — although at some point each posed a problem for one or two family members. I’m also pretty much as P.C. as your average Massachusetts liberal progressive. And I grew up with Dr. Seuss.
I’m surprised not to have read more references in the press this month to the remarkable, terrible coincidence of two events: Dr. Seuss’s publisher’s decision to discontinue publishing half a dozen of that author’s memorable books, because of their offensive caricatures of Asian people, and, a few days later, the shootings of eight people, six of them Asian or Asian American women, in or near Atlanta.
Was the motive for the shootings racism? The alleged shooter says no. Most other people say yes. I think the alleged shooter actually does not know, does not entirely, consciously realize what his motivations were.
Guilt about his own sexual misbehavior, fantasies, addiction? Surely yes. A sense that there was something less than three-dimensional, less than fully human, about the people who were his particular targets? I think yes, regardless of what the suspect or the police have said to the contrary. I bet most of you reading this think so too and may wonder why I’m even bringing it up.
We’re thoroughly attending to the subject of racism nowadays — aren’t we? — and to the subject of how to be anti-racist. And yes it’s about time. As Andrea Ayvazian wrote here (March 22), a bunch of us need to pay attention and keep learning. “Anti-racism work,” wrote the Rev. Ayvazian, “involves white people not knowing, not being the expert in the room … not constantly speaking up.”
My friends have patiently tolerated my own tendency to speak up, whether or not I have anything to contribute. Thank you, Andrea, for this reminder, and I’ll try to say here only what I do know.
One of my favorite books in childhood was Dr. Seuss’s “If I Ran the Zoo.” From it I learned rhyme. I learned about made-up words and all sorts of verbal acrobatics (“a nerkle, a nerd and a seersucker too!”). I learned about fantasy (a ten-footed lion?). And I learned that Chinese people’s eyes were slits that slanted upward at the sides, and that they wore funny clothes and had buckteeth, and … and I have much for which to ask to be forgiven.
If you think this is bleeding-heart liberalism, please try to think again a bit harder. True, at 6 years of age, never having seen a Chinese person or any other Asian, I was simply absorbing the contents of the images put before me. However, as my father used to say, that fact was an explanation, but it was not an excuse. My father also pointedly told me that Chinese people do not at all look like the people in Dr. Seuss’s books. That admonishment helped. Still, that book’s images of inhabitants of some far-away part of the world as being distinctly alien persisted.
If you know Theodore Geisel’s history, you may know how he came up with those caricatures in the first place. During World War II, he drew numerous cartoons as anti-Japanese and anti-German propaganda, with slanty-eyed Japanese and a snotty Hitler. He was patriotic in his support for FDR, his skewering of Charles Lindbergh’s isolationist (and rather pro-German) comments, and his reminders to Americans to buy war bonds and to think beyond selfish interests. He was a staunch supporter of Jews and of justice and equality for Black Americans. He was supporting America’s war effort.
But as a cartoonist he was too good. As he wrote and illustrated children’s books, his images continued to include caricatures that dug deep, that settled themselves somewhere below my conscious awareness — deep enough that it has taken a while to recognize how they inculcated in me some instinctive sense of people as either Like Me or Other. I expect to spend the rest of my life digging myself out from that one. Listening more, assuming less. Being wrong often.
When the family moved from Beijing back to Westfield in 1925, my father was fluent in Chinese. When his cousin started teasing him about being “a Chinaman,” Dad blocked out every Chinese word from his brain, willfully forgot the language, and did whatever else he thought he had to do to fit in with his second-grade white American society. Sixteen years later, he and my future mother and the rest of the Greatest Generation joined the war effort.
My father told me about a U.S. Navy combat training center where they hung, displayed for all to see, an America lifeboat from a battle in the Pacific. On the side of the boat were dozens of machine gun bullet holes, every one of them circled in blood-red paint. A reminder: the Japanese did this — we’ll get them. To fight in a war, it’s easier (I think — I’m not a veteran) to regard the enemy as something alien. Not us. And racial differences evidently make it easier. My family name is German. Why weren’t my relatives put into internment camps during World War II?
When my brother got engaged to a Japanese woman he had met while teaching overseas, my generally liberal grandmother sighed, “I only wish he had picked someone of his own race.” My mother, who had never forgotten that the Pearl Harbor attack was the event that sent several of her male college friends to their deaths in the ensuing years, maintained a careful silence. By the time her half-Japanese granddaughter was born — on Dec. 7, no less — she was wise enough to understand that her grasp of human history and relations was no more perfect than anyone else’s.
I was blessed with parents who learned that they did not know everything. Dr. Seuss evidently learned something when he visited Japan in 1953, witnessing the effects of destruction in Hiroshima. A year later he published “Horton Hears a Who,” dedicated to a Japanese friend and reminding readers (and himself) that “A person is a person.” Protecting lives.
I don’t know enough to say what combination of circumstances constricted the mind of the alleged shooter in those Atlanta-area massage parlors, but I think I understand that we have a long collective history of damage to undo, including a lot of damage to ourselves.
John Stifler lives in Florence.