By Wayne Chan
We don’t live in a color-blind country, but most of the time, that’s OK.
It’s naïve to believe that race doesn’t matter. You might even say that it’s naïve to believe that race SHOULDN’T matter. As far as I’m concerned, race matters – at least for the little things.
Here’s an example – I belong to an athletic club, and I am one of the few non-white members there. The group of guys that I hang out with are all decent, honorable people, and one thing we have in common is that we like to have a good laugh.
Every summer, we get out on the tennis court, and the conversation inevitably leads to recent injuries, and oftentimes, who had a spot burned off their face or arms due to damage from sun exposure.
My typical reaction is to say, “I dunno guys—you should all try being Asian.”
I usually get a laugh from the guys with that one. I don’t pretend to even understand why, but those with darker skin tones seem to be naturally more resistant to sun damage.
Conversely, my friends may also express mock revulsion when we go out for dim sum and I order chicken feet. They simply can’t fathom it. My reply usually has something to do with not understanding the attraction of taking ground beef and vegetables and stuffing it into a bread pan to make a loaf of meat, a la “meat loaf”. What’s the point?
That’s what I mean with the little things. My friends and I don’t really care about our inexplicable affinity for chicken feet and meat loaf, but it makes for a funny conversation.
I know I live in a relatively sheltered world. I live in the suburbs, in a community where people have achieved some level of success and a higher level of education. I am surrounded by people where topics of race are usually relegated to the little things. I am the first to acknowledge that I am fortunate. My friendships continue to be my friendships because race was never part of the equation.
But for the first time in my adult life, race has become much more about the bigger things. I know it’s always been there, but to a far greater extent, for our country as a whole, those who have hate in their hearts for those they consider “others” seem to have found a freedom to voice that sentiment without shame or consequence.
It amazes me that those in power can so easily pit people against each other and allow those who are willing to unleash their inner demons to do so to the detriment of all.
Since the civil rights movement, when Martin Luther King Jr. first proclaimed, “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice,” I’ve always hoped and believed that to be true. But over the last ten years, it seems that that arc is more like a series of peaks and valleys.
The peak is when we start running out of superlatives: Ichiro Suzuki is the first Japanese-born player to win an American League MVP award. Bad Bunny is the first Latino artist to headline the Super Bowl halftime show. Barrack Obama is the first African American President. Kamala Harris the first female black and South Asian American Vice President of the United States. When we start running out of firsts, that’s a good thing.
A valley is when you start questioning whether the absence of racist remarks or actions in the past is because of ongoing progress of a civil society, or whether such things were held back and just waiting for a more opportune time.
The past year, with ICE conducting raids and stopping people without judicial warrants based simply on how they look or speak, while welcoming white South Africans as refugees into our country, is a blunt example of how the current administration is using race as it relates to the biggest things, such as life and liberty.
This November’s elections will tell us whether we are still in a valley or whether a peak is just ahead.
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