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The use of a slur has solidified a rule for our National conversation: no racial slurs. When ESPN radio, TV and web used the phrase "chink in the armor" the outrage was swift and unequivocal. The headline was removed in 35 minutes, the radio and TV announcers were disciplined, and 28-year-old headline writer Anthony Federico was fired. Some argued that the initial use was inadvertent, and Federico claimed his headline was an "honest mistake". I felt a little bad for Federico, but in the bigger picture, the loss of a job is not a great harm. He will find new work soon enough, and he has learned a big life lesson. The bigger picture is a major news outlet has recognized that slurs, even inadvertent slurs, are absolutely not acceptable. The bigger harm would have been perpetuating racist humor at the expense of an Asian American community that is vulnerable by its position as a minority group—a community that has historically suffered great harm over the course of American history.
Slurs are an obvious way that one group exerts its authority over another. Stereotypes and humor are often used to exert dominance as well. As this Psychology Today article points out, the ancient Greeks believed humor to be essentially aggressive. Rod Martin, a psychologist at the University of Western Ontario, has studied humor as a form of communication, and finds that it reveals much about the inner workings of our minds and the ways we adapt to situations. You can take this quiz adapted from Dr. Martin's Humor Styles Questionnaire to find out what types of humor you use: put down, bonding, hate me, or laugh at life. I am strongest at laughing-at-life and bonding humor, and very low on put down and hate me humor. I would expect that people who are trying to exert dominance score much higher at put down humor.
Freud, in his seminal book The Joke and the Relation to the Unconscious (1905) and the article Humor (1928) attempted to divide humor into different categories, but basically posited that the superego determined what kind of humor was released by the ego. So a person's humor could reveal the nature of their superego demands. A benevolent superego would allow bonding or laugh-at-life humor, and more critical superegos would yield put down and hate me humor. Of course, we all have mixes of benevolence and criticality, yielding different kinds of humor in different situations, but it's something to be aware of.
Racism is many things, but I think we can agree that it is a failure of consciousness and the superego. One group exerts power and control over another group based on skin color or ethnic difference, and finds ways to justify itself. This is obviously an error in the superego—an inability to properly judge right from wrong. I say it is a failure of consciousness because it stems from the ignorant view that another person can be inferior or hated based on a racial difference (this has been resoundingly disproven by science—see, for example, Stephen Jay Gould's The Mismeasure of Man). Going further, racism is proof of the ignorant view that one race should have dominance over another. Thus, we have ample proof in the Constitution (which allowed slavery and counted non-whites as 3/5ths of a person) and in American history that ignorance runs deep. The promise of an Obama or Jeremy Lin (and the shoulders they rise on) is that we can have a new paradigm in the collective American consciousness, or really a confirmation of our oldest declaration, the Declaration of Independence: that "we hold these truths to be self evident, that all men are created equal, endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, among these the rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness."
Stereotypes, slurs and attempts at humor are bound to occur when one group encounters another. Saturday Night Live had a particularly lame sketch last weekend. My objections to this sketch are manifold, but foremost—it wasn't funny. I have dozens of Asian American friends who could write better humor than this about Linsanity, absolutely without trotting out every racist stereotype that's been in the media for the last 40 years. (For example, see this You Tube video by Hasan Minhaj and this article by Jeff Yang, especially the punch line on page 2. Particularly hilarious is the My Parents Are Linsane Tumblr.) Moreover, the SNL "joke" was that African Americans are "overly" sensitive to racial taunts, and the "poor white guy" gets fired if he crosses the line with them, but Asian Americans are fair game. I'm guessing the SNL script writers knew they had to take advantage of Linsanity, but they had no clue about how to react to an Asian American in the news. So they resorted to old ways of knowing. However, in one sense, they were right on target—sportscasters and media personalities can be total idiots and deserve to be fired sometimes for being boneheads. And SNL's prophecy—of stupid announcers doing stupid things has actually been borne out. Check out this announcer who seems to be chiming in on physical attributes, but with likely racial undertones. The word on the street is that Greg Kelly has a history of making questionable remarks. If true, Mr. Kelly needs to work on his superego and consciousness. Maybe he needs some time off to think about it. (That's about as far as I go with put down humor. What can I say? Some things deserve to be put down.)
Stereotypes simplify reality, making it "digestible" for minds that are not yet capable of dealing with the complexity and nuances of a multilayered, rich world. They are also used malevolently by the dominant group to subordinate any group considered to be a threat. Asians and Asian Americans have been stereotyped and slurred by Whites as sneaky, treacherous, devious, manipulative, lecherous and filthy from the time of the first Chinese Americans and the building of the railroads, through the Tong Wars, to the Chinese and Alien Exclusion Acts, Fu Manchu, Japanese American Internment, World War II and the misguided prosecution of physicist Wen Ho Lee. Now sports announcers are finding ways to call Jeremy Lin's plays "deceptively quick or deceptively athletic". They see Lin's preternatural ability to take all the action into account (see this great article by Dr. Harsha Sen) and turn it into some kind of "Oriental sneakiness". I call bad superego on this one. We don't have to fall back into historical prejudices and stereotypes to make sense of new phenomena. We can move to a new paradigm—one where society, and indeed each individual, can be viewed as a mosaic of traits and aptitudes, strengths and shortcomings. As anti-Apartheid activist Stephen Biko said (paraphrase), "I didn't fight to become a free black man. I fought to be me."
The media images trotted out by SNL deserve a proper funeral, or perhaps a stoning then a funeral. They have done damage to the individuality of all Asian Americans, and the community as a whole. Asian American women are angry at being viewed as sex objects by male fantasists. Asian American men are angry at being viewed as "asexual drones" as one commenter on my last blog entry put it.
We are fighting to be ourselves. We're angry, we're funny, we're smart, we're compassionate, we're a lot of things—and we're on your block. We're neighbors.
And we're ballers.
© 2012 Ravi Chandra, M.D. All rights reserved. Subscribe by RSS above.
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Update 2/24/12: Another example of faulty superego/racism. Ben and Jerry's introduced a "Taste the Lin-sanity" ice cream. Flavored with fortune cookie and lychee. Read about it here. Submit your comments here.
