The Test of Our Civilization
I'm writing this from Japan, which has a problem. The drawbridge has been up for 30 months, and the business lobby would very much like the government to shift from viewing COVID as a pandemic to accepting it as endemic.
Regular readers will know I am fond of quoting former U.S. Speaker of the House Tip O'Neill's aphorism, "All politics is local."
After centuries (and 30 months) of telling the populace that foreigners are a danger, the government has to figure out how to reopen the borders and deal with the inevitable spike in infections (which are spiking anyway; Japan has the highest COVID totals in the world right now) that will be seen as entirely the fault of foreign tourists and businesspeople. Not of the Japanese salarymen who for two years have been returning from Los Angeles strip clubs carrying the virus.
The real issue, of course, is racism and xenophobia. Otherism.
As usual, I hope you find it interesting, and thanks for reading! Subscribing is free, so please feel free to forward to anyone you think may also be interested.
Remember when President Joe Biden nominated Ketanji Brown Jackson to the U.S. Supreme Court and Republicans lost their minds? Biden’s selection process was “racist” because he had previously committed to appointing a Black woman to the court, and therefore would not be considering qualified applicants from other demographics. Never mind that until Thurgood Marshall was appointed to the court in 1967 and Sandra Day O'Connor was appointed in 1981, every justice since 1789 had been white and male.
An interesting thing about Justice Jackson’s appointment was how relentlessly Republican (and other) pundits got her name wrong. Deep-red Trumpers such as Tucker Carlson were obviously trolling. Remember how excited they were to point out that President Barack Obama’s middle name was Hussein? But many others, I think, simply could not get their heads around a name that was not ‘Murrikan enough for them. A name like George. Or Martha. Or Billy Bob. Or Amber or Brandi.
My name is Roberto, and as I once told a girl who said to me, “Is your name really Roberto?”, yes, that’s really my name. It’s the Italian/Spanish version of Robert. Not super-hard, I would have thought, but people get it wrong … All. The. Time.
Twice this week I have been called Robert by people who should know better (one of whom I have slept with … more than once!), and over my lifetime I have been called Ricardo, Ronaldo, and … Roger.
I have a friend who takes this sort of slight very personally, and as a Black woman, assumes the cause to be racism and/or misogyny. In some cases (looking at you again, Tucker Carlson), yes, that’s true, but I assume that most people who call me Robert (or Roger) are not trolling me; they’re just inattentive, and inconsiderate. They’re people who either can’t be bothered to read/hear my name properly, or are so overloaded that they can’t process the information (for example, it seems many of them make it only 85 percent of the way through my name before giving up).
I feel sorry for my friend, seeing every slight as a racist attack on her and her heritage. Having lived outside of my native culture for most of my adult life, in three Asian societies in which race dominates the social construct, I have seen and experienced plenty of xenophobia and racial prejudice, but I try to give people the benefit of the doubt, even when that means assuming they are simply ignorant or rude rather than racist.
Years ago, I dated a Chinese girl from Hong Kong who was from a privileged background (remind me to tell you about the time I changed a light bulb for her parents, so they didn’t have to wait for their handyman to do it two days later). She and I took a holiday trip to Myanmar, which at the time was run by a military junta, but had been previously controlled, disastrously, by the Burma Socialist Programme Party.
Most countries that have spent decades pursuing hard-core communist/socialist/Maoist ideals (and I have been to a handful) are short of energy, food and toilet paper, among other things. As the old Soviet joke went, "So long as the bosses pretend to pay us, we will pretend to work."
This was the case in Myanmar in the 1990s. It was not a sophisticated economy, and the quality of accommodation and food was well below what you would find at the George V in Paris.
On our first or second night in the country, at dinner at the Inya Lake Hotel (which believe it or not was a gift to the government of Myanmar from Nikita Khrushchev, and flaunted its overtly Stalinist architecture), the waiter emerged from the kitchen with our drably plated, socialist-prepared main courses, and placed my plate in front of me before he served my girlfriend.
She was incandescent with rage, and absolutely certain that the waiter had served me first because 1) I was a white “European”, and therefore superior in the colonial pecking order, and 2) she was a Chinese woman with a white man, and therefore probably a prostitute.
My take on it was different. I thought it extremely likely that the waiter had not been trained in Paris or London or Tokyo (or Cairo, where I have experienced the best restaurant service of my life!), and simply deposited my plate first because I was closer to the kitchen door, and it was easier for him.
Perhaps I was wrong, but the service did not improve during the remainder of our stay in Myanmar, and I don’t think it was because every Burmese waiter we encountered was trying to tell my girlfriend she should have been dating a Chinese.
More recently, I was in South Africa, which is famous for racial prejudice and oppression. Apartheid is gone, but some of its proponents live on in the country, grumbling about ANC misrule (of course, it’s not only the Boers who complain about ANC misrule; the vast majority of South Africans are deeply unhappy about the relentless corruption and incompetence of their leaders) and very probably discriminating against Black, Coloured and Indian South Africans.
One day I was out running, and from what I had seen on Google Maps, there was a trail along a contour line several hundred meters up the side of the mountain behind the house I had rented. The map seemed to show access through a small housing development just over a kilometer away, and I thought I would try to find the path.
At the end of one likely road, I came up against a locked gate, and after getting no answer from the video intercom in the gatepost, I gave up and turned around. But then, a few hundred meters down the road, I saw a man in a field in front of a house. I shouted to get his attention, and to get close enough to make myself heard, I ducked through a fence and approached.
He was a large, florid man who, if I’m visually stereotyping, might have been a finalist in a Boer of the Year contest. I said, “Excuse me, do you know if it’s possible to access the mountain from here?” He said, in an unfriendly manner (and in strongly Afrikaans-accented English), “This is a private road. You shouldn’t be on it.”
At that point I had all the information I needed about our encounter (no, he would not be helping me get to the other side of the locked gate!), and said my goodbyes and ran off down the hill, never to connect to that trail, but during the next few minutes, I thought about my Black friend and what she might have made of that encounter if she had been in my place (not that she would have been running up a mountain trail!).
She definitely would have believed “the Boer” to have been a racist, and I have no doubt at all that he was/is, but his treatment of (white) me was merely rude and misanthropic. Had my friend been in my shoes, she would have seen the interaction through the lens of hundreds of years of South African history, but I just saw a grumpy bastard.
The other night I went out in Tokyo for ramen and was told, after sliding open the door to a restaurant at 9:00 p.m., that the restaurant was closed. The sign on the door said the restaurant was open until 10:00. Were they really closed? Had they decided that in the complete absence of customers at 9:00, they should quit for the day? Or did they see my non-Japanese face and think, “Nah, not serving this guy.” [For those who don’t know, this happens all the time in Japan, and if you can speak Japanese you may persuade them to change their minds, but probably not.] I’ll never know, but I choose to assume they had decided to go home early.
A couple of weeks ago, when I tried for 45 minutes to flag down a taxi in Singapore’s central business district at around 1:00 a.m., but no driver would stop for me, did I think I was the victim of a racial conspiracy? I did wonder, but I prefer to assume that all those drivers with green lights on top of their cabs were heading home (Singapore’s taxi drivers notoriously choose if and to where they are willing to take passengers) or simply concerned that any fare – white, Malay, Indian or Chinese – in the CBD after midnight might be a threat to throw up in the back seat (for the record, I was in no way a threat to throw up in the back seat).
If I don’t have all the facts, I try to give people the benefit of the doubt, but of course I do know racism when I see (and experience) it.
Here’s (Black) New Yorker Baye McNeil writing about those last two empty seats on Japanese trains. The empty seats that are on either side of you, the foreigner. That’s racism with a silver lining (and elbow room), of course. I met Baye many years ago, we’ve hoisted a few beers together, and I’ve been a strong supporter as he has become a vocal critic of the racism and xenophobia that is pervasive throughout Japanese society.
Then there was the time I was out on a long run during the steamy Japanese summer. I often stopped at gas stations to drink from a hose, but on this occasion I stopped at a windsurfing shop, where I thought a runner might get a warm reception. I went in and asked the young-ish (mid-30s, I guess) proprietor, in Japanese, if I could have some water. He said (in Japanese, of course), “No.”
I thought for a moment (benefit of the doubt!) that maybe he was refusing because he was concerned that the tap water might not be clean enough for me, so I said I would be fine drinking from a hose outside.
He looked me right in the eyes, and said, “I’m saying … no.”
Then I got it.
Without a word, I turned and left, and got water at the gas station 400 meters down the road. Where the attendants didn’t mind at all if I had some water, pointed me to the hose, and wished me good luck for the rest of my run. They were as Japanese as the windsurfing shop owner, of course.
I have met so many generous people over the years.
One day, on another long run, in Hong Kong during the middle of summer, my training partner and I found ourselves out of water with another eight kilometers (five miles) to go. We were in a country park, nowhere near a convenience store or a gas station, but right when our situation was getting dire, we passed a large ranger station.
We jogged through the gate, but no one was around. I shouted “Hello!”, and after a minute, a ranger emerged from one of the buildings, tucking in his shirt. I explained our situation and said we would be very grateful to drink from his sink or a hose, but he wouldn’t hear of that. “No, no, please! Come in! Sit down! I will make tea!”
We made our apologies; we were in the middle of a training run and preferred not to stop. He looked quite regretful that he wouldn’t have company for morning tea, but quickly he brought us several cups each of chilled water from his refrigerator.
The loveliest park ranger ever.
He was Chinese, of course, and we were not. But he saw two human beings, who needed help. My training partner and I saw a human being, who was big-hearted.
Nelson Mandela said, “No one is born hating another person because of the color of his skin, or his background, or his religion. People must learn to hate, and if they can learn to hate, they can be taught to love, for love comes more naturally to the human heart than its opposite.”
I’m certain Mandela is correct, but perhaps a more relevant view for our times was expressed by Mahatma Gandhi: “Our ability to reach unity in diversity will be the beauty and the test of our civilization.”
I’m going to keep on giving people the benefit of the doubt.