Black Like Us
In 1959, a white journalist named John Howard Griffin darkened his skin and traveled through the rural South to experience for himself what it was like to suffer the indignities of personalized, as well as systemic, racism. His 1961 bestseller, Black Like Me, has gone on to sell over 10 million copies and has been translated into 14 languages.
When I first read Black Like Me as a teenager in the early 1970s, I was struck by the small daily indignities suffered by Griffin as a black man. The averted stares, the lack of social pleasantries, and the assumptions about his wealth and status were described in a way that only someone who had actually “been there” could describe.
Yes, there were big issues such as lynching, voting rights and segregation that were on the nightly news as I was growing up. And yes, The Souls of Black Folk, Soul on Ice and the Autobiography of Malcolm X were also guideposts to race and racism in America. But, for some reason, the haunting words, and especially the haunting title, of Black Like Me have stayed with me for my whole life.
Like most Asian Americans of my generation, I came to an Asian American consciousness through evolution, not in a single “ah-ha!” moment. I grew up in suburban New Jersey and had little contact with other Asian Americans as a child. My parents had exposed me to kids of other races through weekend swims at a local YMCA and other activities, but the only Asian Americans I saw on a regular basis were family and family friends at holiday get-togethers.
In high school, I explored my emerging identity issues by reading the sacred literature of Buddhism, Hinduism and other non-Christian religions, and visiting their houses of worship. After going to a Boy Scout World Jamboree in Japan and visiting my Tajitsu relatives in 1971, it was hard coming back to a society where few others looked like I did.
I wrote a paper on “Island Feudalism” in 10th grade, comparing the official and animistic religions, castles, and other similarities between Japanese and English feudalism. I even challenged a teacher who was a former Jesuit priest as to his qualifications to teach about Buddhism in a comparative religion class. I was shocked, but pleased, when he allowed me to lead class discussions on Shintoism and Buddhism the following week.
I continued my unconscious and conscious search for a racial identity by hanging out with many Ecuadorian, Colombian and Peruvian Americans in high school. I played soccer with a team that could cuss out the opposition in Spanish, Greek, Italian and a half dozen other languages, and became aware that there were people besides myself who did not fit neatly into the black-white race paradigm.
I was in college on the East Coast in the mid-1970s, so I did not benefit from the early Asian American studies programs that had started a few years earlier on the West Coast. (In fact, I first learned Asian American history while teaching it a decade later). I continued my identity search by majoring in urban studies, and using it as a pretext for studying world cultures. And, like many Asian Americans of my generation, I studied the African and African American struggles for liberation as I looked for explanations of my own place in this society.
I remember many late nights in my apartment or in the campus library, crying, cheering or puzzling through books such as Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart and Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Mask. I anxiously followed the reports of the beating death of apartheid opponent Steven Biko in South Africa in 1977, and took up vegetarianism because of Dick Gregory’s mixture of politics and health in Cookin’ With Mother Nature.
In some ways, my later efforts to get Asian American history into the textbooks were foreshadowed by reading about the rediscovery of glorious African kingdoms in Ghana, Mali, and Songhay, which flourished while Europe was struggling with its Dark Ages.
Similar to the contributions of Asian Americans to American history, the triumphs of these African empires had been conveniently forgotten or overlooked by the history books of the time.
Asian Americans, especially those who grew up overseas watching over-dubbed racist American movies, sometimes have an unfortunate sense of superiority toward or disconnectedness from African American people and history. For those who came here or grew up here after 1965, it’s especially easy to forget that the doors of affirmative action and equal opportunity that allowed many of us to prosper were first opened by African Americans and their allies.
As we all celebrate Black History Month, I do so with a profound sense of gratitude to those African and African American pioneers whose struggles for identity and liberation paved the way for me. Hopefully, I can repay them by shouldering my fair share of the burden on that long walk toward true freedom and equality. |
