Growing up Texan
I have been thinking a lot about white supremacy and the nuance within the structures that uphold it. I grew up in Texas and thanks to the decentralization of our education system, was served a sanitized version of a very peculiar history — it centered on the fact that Texas was special, that we were different from Americans. We had our own folk heroes like Sam Houston and Davy Crockett, and a different martyrdom story, the Alamo, that centered on protecting Texan sovereignty. Slavery was framed as labor migration and Thanksgiving was this casual potluck between pioneering pilgrims and the “Indians.”
Because of my skin color, I grew up being bullied as a “red” Indian by white kids running in circles around me. The “red” was to distinguish apparently from “brown” Indian by clever elementary school kids already forming an understanding of the linkages between color and power. It was only until graduate school, sitting in a seminar, that I learned about colonialism and genocide. The first book on the syllabus was Ward Churchill’s “A Little Matter of Genocide” which describe white settlers murdering indigenous peoples and turning their skin into leather that they would wear as trophies. It was the beginning of an unveiling. Once you are exposed to these horrors, you can’t unsee them.
I learned how even the seemingly mundane can be used to weaponize. Like the role data collection played in shaping our origin story — and the Smithsonian’s complicity in purposely under-counting the population of native Americans to make it seem like America was virgin territory, “a land without a people.” The next book was on how property law dispossessed the native Americans who remained and that it was only until 1924, native Americans were given American citizenship (the most American of all Americans were labeled by white settlers as foreign in their own land).
We move on to discuss the brutality of slavery in this country and colonialism all over the world. How the British and French approached subjugation. The French preferred “direct” rule where their culture was violently superimposed and the British were more insidious with “indirect” rule where they grafted their oppression existing hierarchies of oppression — in India, they created a new caste subcategory “the thuggees” — a caste of criminals where we get the term “thug” from.
When we moved to South Africa, that’s where we learned the British really innovated their colonial experiment by using citizenship laws. They imported brown people from other colonized lands to build railways and fuel the service industry. In the British construction of colonial rule — whites had full citizenship, blacks had next to no rights, and the imported brown layer were in-between. The brown layer was neither full-blown citizens, nor fully subjugated subjects. The brown layer I read about in South Africa — in many ways applies to Asian-Americans in this country.
Thanks to LBJ’s 1965 immigration act, skilled brown workers (Asian/ Arab/ etc) filtered into this country and a new myth was developed “the model minority.” As Asian-Americans, we have been lauded for working hard and living the American dream (as long as we aren’t too vocal) as a foil to create false narratives of black and Latinx communities as being the opposite, either lacking work ethic or prone to violence. I have seen the complicity within my own community (and myself) in perpetuating this myth of superiority in an attempt to assimilate.
The soul-crushing devastation of the events of last week are deeply embedded into our origin story as a nation. Slavery evolved into lynchings which evolved into mass incarceration which evolved into voter suppression which evolved into food deserts which evolved into co-morbidities to COVID-19 which evolved into taking a break to bird-watch during a pandemic which evolved into a 911 call. A knee-to-the-neck crushing of a Black man calling out to his mother in his last breath, a Black woman and essential worker murdered “by mistake” in her own home, and a Black man running to get some exercise hunted down in Georgia.
The proliferation of hashtags, the protests even under a pandemic — the performative rage eventually evaporates. Until we learn our own history and our complicity in upholding structures of white supremacy and commit to actively dismantling them with whatever privilege we have, this cycle of structural violence will never end.
