We are writing in response to the letter from Northampton resident David Ball jeering at a recent op-ed in which the author, a white man, recounted what caricatures of Asian people taught him when he was young (“Nobody ever became a racist by reading Dr. Seuss,” April 7).
Like many, we are still mourning the Korean and Chinese American women who were killed in Atlanta last month — mothers, daughters, and grandmothers, all so much more than any caricature could convey. The letter asserts that the columnist “obviously doesn’t have an ounce of anti-Asian prejudice in his body.” It’s such a strangely intimate claim. We don’t know either writer, but we have experienced many times, intimately, what just an ounce of prejudice might look and feel like.
Our families have encountered many, many people whose ideas about other people here and in other countries have been influenced by caricatures they absorbed at home, in wartime propaganda, or in movies or in books.
Do all children “surely,” “instinctively,” reject racist caricatures as Ball claims? If that were the case, we would not have been yelled at — in Northampton, Amherst, and in nearby towns — to “go back” to another country. Our children would not have had elementary school peers taunt them with nonsense sounds, contorting their eyes and trying to force them to say they were Chinese. The former president did indeed embolden racist violence, but these everyday experiences occurred well before that.
When our children see a racist caricature in a children’s book, they realize that many, many people — authors, artists, and other children in the community, and the librarians and teachers and book sellers who have given them these books — see them this way. What do you think that feels like for a young child?
And a culture that allows one image like this is likely to allow many more similar images, in many other types of media, which all have a compounding effect on viewers of all races — reinforcing stereotypes and the general notion that Asians are “other,” “less than,” and interchangeable.
Some parents, like the columnist’s father, surely do admonish their children to reject racism wherever they see it. Many clearly do not. Like all nonwhite children, ours are learning to distinguish between accumulated ignorance and malice. But there is no need to provide space in the local paper for either one.
Jennifer Page lives in Amherst. Joy Ohm, Megan Paik and Mia Kim Sullivan live in Northampton.