Historical Amnesia and/or Racism: Asian Perceptions of Blacks, First Nations, etc.

victim authority is the biggest issue in
the black community always try to be addicted in some ways the discourse about race and racism within the United States of America has become a debate that the whole world participates in at a distance and all too often with a total lack of sincerity believe me voices like dr. Martin Luther King jr. were heard in India they were heard in Thailand they were heard in Cambodia and they were heard by Aboriginal peoples in Australia also in part because the United States has this dominant position just in cinema just in pop culture just in producing mainstream movies and you know other media like stand-up comedy people all around the world hear jokes about racism in America hear reflections and analysis and historical hand-wringing about the history of slavery and racism in the United States America to a much lesser extent today in 2017 I think the history of anti-semitism in Germany has also become part of the whole world's history the whole world stopping to reflect on what is the meaning of ethnicity in their own country's history where does it come from where is it going in the future because they don't want to repeat the mistakes of Europe's recent past but I assure you if you talk to Lotion teenagers or Cambodian teenagers they're growing up listening to rap music they're growing up watching movies and stand-up comedians that talk about race and races in the United States of America and they're more likely to think about world war two in the context of say a video game or an action movie that doesn't really deal with any of those ethical or ethnic questions so we have a very strange asymmetrical relationship when it comes to issues of racism and just I guess you'd say racial sensitivity I'm gonna play you a clip from a Japanese guy if you watch this whole video he provides many disclaimers explaining that he doesn't consider himself racist that he has black friends that he has black students that he treats black people and white people equally but he's providing those disclaimers because he's aware of that he's perceived as racist by white Americans because of what he says about black Americans now I don't want to deal with this in a very general way I don't want to deal with sort of broad vague question of Asians being de facto racist when they get involved in unique racial politics within North America United States and Canada that might be an interesting topic for another video what I want to do is actually answer the specific issues he raises here I want to speak to the question he raised this year ago being so-called obsessed with the past about a so-called victim mentality and a sense of identity that's rooted in this case in the historical trauma of slavery but in other cases what I think are really related cases in really important cases we have these same questions being posed for indigenous people in North America the Cree did G oh boy the Mohawk in Canada we say First Nations in the United States to say Native Americans the same type of questions are posed in that political context and it's really kind of sad because these questions are posed as if there is no answer and I'm gonna give you what I think is a meaningful and important and often overlooked answer but before I play this clip I'll just say again we're in an asymmetrical situation where the whole world seems to participate in examining the race problem the problem of racism within the United States of America and people in the United States of America are quite unaware of racism and how it works within Asia within Japan within Korea and then in relationships between the Japanese and the Koreans within a country like Laos in the relationship between Laos and Thailand Thailand and Cambodia Myanmar and all of the above the way racism exists within India with it's long history of the caste system or indeed very obvious to say the racism of Chinese people against people from India and vice-versa the whole world learns a lot by carefully watching the problem of racism within the United States of America and Americans learn nothing by ignoring the history of racism in these other countries around the world black people number one why I useful obsessed with the past for those who don't know yet I actually have many black friends and black students I'm teaching Japanese but pretty much every time I talk with a product person about racism they always bring up the three-body history and talk about how horribly white people treated them at some time in the same Greg Nobita don't be brainwashed by white people okay be careful because they don't like us so they are trying to make us look bad okay wait comes to slavery history of course it was bad and horrible but when that happened actually that's a long long time ago like almost 100 years ago isn't it just weird or persisting with something that happened so long the time ago I'm sure the United States is not even the same country it was back in two days and so many other things happened right like World War two oil crisis Great Depression was super exact but why so many black people just skip these things in the pickup's slavery history specifically and we even get angry to white people man blaming something that the ancestors did a long time ago just doesn't make any sense white people living in the u.s. now are not responsible for what happened 102 years ago again I know it was horrible I'm not saying we should just forget some history completely but why not was just move on why you are still living in the past that past is already gone this is 2017 dragging some slavery history who benefits what the intention that can only make white people feel shitty it's not what you want this is why victim Authority is the biggest issue in the black community always try to be a victim in responding to this or from my perspective refuting it I want to start at the shallow end of the swimming pool but in this case it's really the shallow end and not the deep end that's important this guy's argument rests on the notion of obsession and unhealthy obsession with the past that people are failing to move on and this failure to move on entails a victim mentality that he then goes on to criticize further what would it mean to be obsessed with the past let's think about the things that white people black people Native Americans do with their time I know a lot of black people and a lot of white people who play video games how many hours in their childhood did they spend playing video games and how do these hours shape their identity as children and now as grown adults dozens and dozens of hours very common to play video games for more than 10 hours a week for young boys and young girls and even for adults into adulthood how many hours do they spend watching mainstream movies or mainstream TV shows about save vampires at what point do we reproach people for being obsessed with video games with vampires with Star Trek with Game of Thrones with any given TV show movie or comic book although I was raised half Jewish the history of the Holocaust in some sense was important to my youth the amount of time I spent reading about the Holocaust was much much less than what I spent reading about Batman and nobody ever claimed I was obsessed with Batman of the Justice League that was just an important part of my childhood and most of us today in 2017 our habits as adults are really no less childish now if you met a young man I don't think the fellow meekness whoever eyes if you met a young man who really did spend more time studying the history of slavery then he spent watching Star Trek or Star Wars or whatever cartoons might interest someone his age and again even adults watch cartoons day if he was someone who really chose not to play video games but to seriously study and learn from the history of slavery would you call that an obsession I wouldn't I think that would be remarkably praiseworthy and not just for that topic but for almost any topic in the history of the world it's incredibly rare it's to try to represent this as a broad obsession in the african-american community in in North America is just surreal what he really means and this is part of the reason why his argument is indeed evil is that if African Americans take any interest in slavery at all he's gonna reproach them for being obsessed with the past failing to move on and then he's going to point the finger at them for having a victim mentality but pretty much every time I talk of is a product buzzing about racism they always bring up it's a three buddy history on the contrary we have to be honest with ourselves that the average African American how many hours of cinema will they have ever watched dealing with slavery their whole childhood their whole adult lives combined is it possible they've watched 10 hours of documentary movies about the history of slavery maybe that's a maximum but on average maybe they've watched four hours or six hours they've watched a few documentaries in their lives the average Jewish person how many hours of documentaries have they seen about World War 2 and the Holocaust and then very simply how would that number compared to the average number of hours spent playing video games or watching movies about vampires or any of the other still things that we regard as value neutral in modern Western culture and that nevertheless really do shape our identity I think in a very real sense Batman was more of a formative influence on my identity growing up than anything I read in the Bible and I think that's true of a lot of other people whether or not they can be honest with themselves in reflecting on what those influences were this is really hard and it's hard to deal with and it's a really awful argument when this guilt trip is late at the feet of First Nations people in Canada the Cree the agility the Mohawk Native Americans native Canadians would even want to say it's just horrible for someone whether Japanese are white or even if they're native Canadian themselves to say that you should move on and then if you fail to move on you have an unhealthy obsession with the past why not just move on why are you all still living in the past that path is already gone for the most part I mean again how many native Canadians have you ever met who spent more time reading books about this history than any of these other things in mainstream media the movies that exist for these people to reflect in their own past yeah there were a few documentaries by the National Film Board there are movies that are made for a white audience that they often have very mixed feelings about and feel uncomfortable watching or feel uncomfortable showing their own children if you're actually native Canadian how do you feel watching a movie like Dances with Wolves how do you feel seeing the kind of white American and white Canadian attempts to lionize the history of native peoples it was very uncomfortable it's very strange in many ways that's not their cinema it's not their voice it's not their perspective on their own history a very very small number of them might be consumed with a passion to studying out their own history to a level that you'd characterize as obsession but even then I think when you meet those people you would find that obsession admirable at least in the same way that if you meet someone who's really researching the American Civil War and almost any topic in history somebody's passionate about studying history why would you perceive that as an unhealthy obsession so what this Japanese youtuber does in this argument is to start by claiming that any interest in the history of slavery even an offhand mention in the context of them trying apparently from the little he says african-americans trying to explain African American identity and African race politics to an outsider to a Japanese immigrant even in this even this kind of brief mention any mention of it at all he sees as indicating an unhealthy obsession that people either have to move on from or else from his perspective they're guilty of so-called trying to be a victim people do assemble a sense of identity out of little bits and pieces like this you know and if we can reflect again on childhood or early adulthood honestly I think it's very difficult to come to grips with the extent to which maybe just a couple of documentaries you saw maybe just a couple of movies you saw maybe some story books you read as a child maybe real pieces of propaganda you were given as a child government propaganda school board propaganda that your sense of nation and nationality and ethnicity may have been pieced together from very few sources that took very few minutes of your time or very few hours in total if you add up all the movies you've seen on this topic and at the same time in a much less examined way our exposure to things like Batman and spider-man and Superman and videogames is also giving us a sense of our place in the world probably the single greatest influence on me and my life was the TV show Sesame Street and Sesame Street did have an explicit discourse about race and racism and equality it was designed that way from the start to show black people and white people living in harmony there is there is that kind of low-key political content to the TV shows I was I was watching as a kid Japan is a country that in many ways has a weak sense of their own national identity and of their own national destiny since their defeat in World War two and there having been reduced to basically being an American colony with a constitution written by the United States under perpetual of military occupation by the United States via the strategic airbase at Okinawa Island however I think that as I said in the intro of this video the Japanese learn a great deal from watching American politics including American ethnic politics American racism American race politics and doubtless that's going to influence and change the sense the Japanese have about themselves their own racial identity and the racist tensions between Japanese and Korean Japanese and Chinese Japanese and Filipinos Japanese and Indonesians on and on it goes and the racist divisions that exist within Japan also I feel confident that Japan has made tremendous progress and will continue to make progress partly because they're learning from the mistakes America has made I'm much more worried about the extent to which countries like the United States and Canada have become overly confident that they represent an unimpeachable standard of multiculturalism an unimpeachable standard of no non racists inclusive perfectly integrated society is perfectly democratic and liberal societies and they're failing to learn from the examples of these other countries in Asia most definitely including Japan which has its own triumphs and its own tragedies definitely its own mistakes for us to learn from