I wasn’t too surprised to see the same tactics of social intimidation, emotional propaganda, and even racial stereotyping that I previously highlighted used in the raucous responses to my April 20, Wespeak. Take these: “You’re not one of us” calls to mind racial exclusion. “You’ve taken enough classes and seen enough Kung-Fu movies to know what it’s like” contains an assumption about my character and interests based essentially on my skin color (not to mention the questionable assertion that “what it’s like” is somehow the same for all Asians). I am also made to take personal responsibility for the historical exclusion of Asians from American citizenship, the stereotyped portrayal of Asians in American cinema, and even for representing the very epitome of “the Man.” I am told that my only interest in non-Westerners is entertainment, and I am accused multiple times of being driven by masturbatory-level fantasies for other cultures. And all of this presumably gleaned from my being white.
It is a dangerous and retrogressive attitude to start reacting to peoples’ interest in other cultures with charges of “exoticism” and paternalism. While these are certainly phenomena that have recurrently surfaced throughout Western contact with the non-West, it is also impossible for Westerners to get involved in a progressive and helpful way with non-Western peoples without contact and interaction. Now, Ms. Osato is not the first person I’ve heard on this campus basically say “get out and stay out, we don’t want or need your [i.e. white peoples’] help or input.” Perhaps in an ideal world the best way for non-Western civilizations to recover from 500 years of repressive Western imperialism would be for all “whiteys” to spontaneously decide to leave everyone else alone. Guess what? It won’t happen. Through the vehicle of globalization, Western business interests are set to persist in exploiting the rest of the world no matter how much we bitch and gripe here in our little bubble. Even if the West did spontaneously sever all contacts with the non-West, the level of dependency and desperation in many of those areas is so great as to expose this as a death-wish. The question is, do we want to continue to divide the progressive left with unrealistically separatist ideologies or actually do something for the people whom Ms. Osato and Ms. Ing claim to be global representatives?
You label my world music column “exoticism.” Banish the thought of African musicians making a decent buck from their music! After all, Westerners get to make millions off their music; thing is, they already have Rolling Stone and MTV advertising for them. The music has got to be publicized somehow, so does it matter that I’m white when I’m in a position to facilitate that critical coverage? The World Music Collective, of which I am a part, is bringing Rokia Traore in the fall, one of the top female vocalists in Mali. For her 11-piece orchestra, paid gigs mean a hell of a lot. You can deny it as a Western manipulation all you want, but modern-day Africans want money, too, especially the American dollar. If I am somehow coming off as a paternalistic Great White Father in your eyes for assisting in the inexorable transition of non-Westerners from being outsiders in the global system to potential players in it, then so be it. International cultural and political separation is a fool’s dream, no matter how much we might desire it. By denying the inevitability of globalization instead of making an attempt to mold it towards the greater equality and well-being of all people we are just mouths expressing anger and frustration—as justified as that anger may be.
Looking back on my April 20 Wespeak, I realize that instead of political the word I was really searching for was polemical. By using political, I was reinforcing its misleading use on campus to denote the radical lexicon. What I am criticizing is not the politics of social change at Wesleyan but the politics of language used and manipulated by certain campus activists. The point is not whether you can say “whitey wins again” or whatever, but whether it is truly helpful to anyone other than as a mode of catharsis.
All of this is not to say that concrete activism isn’t still flourishing at Wes. EON’s environmental successes in pushing for a green-friendly campus and the students that marched on Washington last week are but two examples of recent, tangible social activism here. Of course, it would no doubt be naïve to reject the importance of the war of ideas also being fought. But eventually all ideas are exposed as mere air. The changes that last are those spoken through action and involvement, not rhetoric and polemic.
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