Before I rant, I would like to compliment the participants of Saturday’s Mabuhay performance. I continue to be impressed with the level, amount and diversity of talent in the arts at Wesleyan, and I greatly enjoyed the productions put on by the dancers, martial artists, musicians, and poets of the Asian/Asian American community at that show.
With that said, I was shocked by the conduct of the two MCs who presided over Mabuhay. Their on-stage antics that did nothing but alienate the crowd and cast an unnecessarily cynical shadow over the night’s proceedings. What should have been an appreciation and celebration of Asian and Asian American culture was instead appropriated to serve as a soapbox for a string of political tirades, thinly veiled in tasteless humor and the played-out “irony” of which we are so fond at Wesleyan. While cultural appropriation, exoticism, and ethnic “invisibility” are certainly relevant issues, Mabuhay was neither the time nor the place for these issues to be expressed, and the methods that were used were inappropriate and petty.
Numerous statements were made by those MCs to the effect that if you don’t have Asian “blood” in you, you best not identify with Asia or Asian culture whatsoever. At one point, the hosts called for the “most exotic” people to come on-stage in a “skit” that was neither enlightening nor entertaining. Of the four students who volunteered, the one white person seemed to be mocked for her “lack of exoticism,” a situation somehow remedied by clothing her in an ambiguously “ethnic” skirt-wrap-thingie and a Halloween-store plastic Hawaiian-style coconut halter. Apparently, the other students on stage were “exotic enough” merely by their skin color, thereby reinforcing the same stereotypes supposedly under attack. After this pointless charade was mercifully ended by sending the confused volunteers back to their seats among a speechless audience, one MC’s now-nude back revealed the statement “Whitey Wins Again” scribbled in thick black marker across her skin.
Are you kidding me??
I think a lot of people at Wesleyan are saying: “We know what you’re trying to say, and we agree with you, damnit! We all take classes on post-colonialism and post-modernism; on ”exoticism“ and ”orientalism;“ on ”ethnic studies“ and globalization. We sign petitions and attend rallies. We plan and participate in multi-cultural events. We are shocked by cultural stereotyping in the media and mainstream culture. We are frustrated and angered by the indifference of Americans towards our suffering brothers and sisters around the world. In short, we are with you! But we do not support the divisive and condescending methods you use to further those causes, and we find them both offensive and, more importantly, completely ineffective.”
What’s really disturbing is the growing commonality of events like the Mabuhay Incident here at Big Brother Radical University. Look at the uproar over the burlesque shows this year at Wesleyan. I know I’m going to get lots of hate-mail for this one, but it seems more than a little hypocritical for some of the same people who have vociferously condemned the “demeaning” and “disempowering” strip-shows involving women to whole-heartedly support queer strip-shows or strip-shows involving men. It’s like there’s this unelected shadow government at Wesleyan who gets to arbitrarily and unilaterally decide what is allowed or acceptable and what isn’t, like a radical permutation of the Thought Police.
What are we accomplishing by creating divisions instead of uniting people? Nothing! Really, we are just losing ground and scaring away potential allies. We have to pick our battles here, people. While my own identification with liberal causes will not be affected by this sort of Double-O C (Out Of Control) radicalism, the Wesleyan Thought Police—utilizing social pressure, intimidation, and propaganda (sound familiar…?)—have alienated many people who came to Wesleyan to support those same causes. Instead such potential activists have been increasingly marginalized between ultra-radicalism and “everything else” for being too “white” or too open to other ideas, or even by expressing discomfort at the inappropriateness of certain methods of activism as I am doing now. Infiltrating radical politics into too many aspects of academic, social, and cultural life here at Wesleyan has resulted in nothing but a growing antagonism towards the excessive means and methods of Big Brother activists on campus.
We all must take a long look in the mirror and ask ourselves exactly what went wrong here. Otherwise, the changes that we really are after will come to nothing but petty disputes between friends and comrades, (which I’m sure is how this article will be mistakenly interpreted). What happened to all voices being heard? Let’s put the “open-minded” back into “liberal” before we make all radical politics on this campus completely irrelevant. Let’s not suffocate The Revolution with its own shortcomings.
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