Wash Your Face: Reflections on Lambda Theta DeltaPaKou Her, Lead Campaigner - 18 Million RisingEach

Wash Your Face: Reflections on Lambda Theta DeltaPaKou Her, Lead Campaigner - 18 Million RisingEach morning I awake to the same general routine: my daughters, ages 2 and 4, begin rustling at 6:45 a.m. and then promptly stomp their way into the bedroom I share with my spouse. I switch on the bedroom television to some annoying kid show, beg the girls to watch quietly, and begin the first steps of my workday as an online organizer. (Yes, I do this in bed while the kids stare with mouths agape at the boob tube. Go ahead and judge.)My mornings almost always begin with a good once-over of top news stories that erupted overnight while I caught some zzzz’s. Yesterday I scanned the media horizon with relative ease, following my tried and true method of scavenging the interwebs for its first bits of early morning information. I hit up Twitter. All good. Swung over to several mainstream news outlets. Nothing terribly unpredictable. Then I checked out Facebook … THUD.My Facebook feed blazed with a story about several Asian American fraternity brothers (from UC-Irvine’s chapter of Lambda Theta Delta) who videotaped themselves gyrating to Justin Timberlake while one of them pranced around in blackface pretending to be Jay-Z. Breaking my normal a.m. rule of remaining prone as long as possible, I sat up and immediately began reading threads from irate commenters. Those offended spanned the entire reflective spectrum, from “these guys are douchebaggery embodied” to “this proves that Asians are just like white people” to “I can’t believe racism is still this bad.” The more I read, the angrier I became. I wanted desperately to find these young men and knock some sense into them the way only a disappointed older sister can. I mean, really – black face? On a bunch of kids with yellow faces? Are you kidding me?!By afternoon, the furor surrounding this story turned full tilt, with a lot of people calling for an all-out public flogging. Fingers wagged to and fro; folks blamed poor parental guidance for such offensive behavior; others charged the racist history of Greek life in general; tensions between Blacks and Asians seethed beneath every other bit of commentary I read. After a full day of reactions to this story, I grew hungry for a different kind of conversation, something that addressed the power racism and white culture have in shaping how we as People of Color behave in this race-obsessed nation.Not a peep.So in the absence of a heartier analysis of “Asian frat boys behaving badly,” I began digging at the story myself, focusing primarily on what this college campus drama tells us about internalized racial oppression.You should know that for many years, I fancied myself a “radical” Person of Color. I was the kind of person who knew what was wrong with the world and was happy to school anyone on classismracismsexismnationalismmilitarism. (I also had a sizeable chip on my shoulder, by the way.) As far as race was concerned, I was positive only white people perpetuated racism, and that we People of Color were but victims of a system designed to serve white society. That was all fine and good until an elder African American mentor of mine, Anne Stewart, challenged me to chew on the concept of internalized racial oppression and invited me to consider that People of Color, while victimized by institutional racism, also participate in our own marginalization. That is, we internalize all kinds of negative racial messages about ourselves and one another, and then we regurgitate and act them out on one another, essentially supporting and maintaining racism and white supremacist culture. My first reaction: “Uh, come again? Thanks, but no thanks, Miss Anne.”Nearly two decades after that first conversation with Anne, and with 15 years of antiracism organizing under my belt, I see my misstep when I first resisted her invitation to talk about internalized racial oppression. (Thankfully she issued a second invite.) I am more certain today than ever that racism persists not just because of white power and privilege, but because the entire system of racial oppression depends so greatly on People of Color’s participation. Racism can continue to exist because we feed it, sometimes with excited awareness and other times with total lack of consciousness. Enter: my young Lambda Theta Delta brothers.A day after my Facebook feed blew up with their racial prejudice, when I was forced erect in my bed, I am still really angry and disappointed in these young Asian American men whose foolishness has now been broadcast for all the world to see. But even more, I am deeply sad for them – and for our entire society. In them I see the ahistorical racist humor of Greek life, complicated all the more by their own lack of racial self-awareness as “other” in a white world. The irony of their “otherness” wrapped up in the fake face paint of another “other” is not lost on me. And the damage done between People of Color by this racially ignorant theater isn’t lost, either. This is precisely how internalized racial oppression works.The call at this point shouldn’t be to spend all eternity persecuting these young Asian American men. Should they be held accountable? Yes, of course. But I hazard to believe that it’s much easier to shame and blame than it is to get real with ourselves as People of Color about how we participate in a culture that allows these boys – and countless other People of Color just like them – to exist with such racial blindness. Disrupting the status quo requires more than pointing a finger and hoping no one realizes we’ve all been taught the same racial lessons, whether or not we paint our faces. Rather, it’s calling all of us into account for the behavior of these Lambda Theta Delta members, and choosing to find our most radical selves in order to disturb our own socialization as People of Color living in a racist world. -- source link

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