Anyway... how do we fix it? How do we allow people to accept (months/couple years') depression and losing their hustle in a competitive, scary world? That's the obstacle. We're asking people to feel serious pain to change for people they don't even know are worth feeling pain for.
I have to agree with this. It's a part of why people don't like having to tackle these issues. Why should I care about so and so, when I have my own problems, some of which society should be caring about, but don't?
It gets murkier when you consider how 'privilege' can intersect in different ways. Should a 1st generation 'white' immigrant (from, say, Russia) living on the minimum wage, think that he has it better than an upper-middle class African-American? Should a lesbian Asian think she has it better than a straight Hispanic male? And so on. And I don't think these things can be easily quantified. I saw a test of sorts online a while back, where you can determine how "much" privilege you have, with different variables being given different values - for instance, if you're white you get +20 privilege points, if you're a woman you get -7, etc. I thought it was ridiculous, frankly, because it was trying to simplify a whole range of complex issues into some simple thing a toddler could understand. Well, and I was also pissed that being Asian gave me a decent amount of privilege points.
Which, I suppose, brings me to my next point. Being an Asian-American, it's unsurprising that my thoughts on racism tend to revolve around that. I cannot speak for all Asians here, of course, given the wide diversity we have, but I feel like a good number of Asian-Americans aren't happy with how the dialogue on racism in America tends to only deal with a black vs. white binary. I've heard it several times now, about how an Asian-American activist, when she was in college and took a course on race in America, and a student asked the (black) professor what sort of racism and discrimination Asians face, and the professor just said something very brief about Asians being the model minority and not really facing anymore racism before moving on. People like to think that racism towards Asians is over, thanks in part to the model minority myth, and while I suppose overall Asians don't have it as "bad" as African-Americans do, I don't think we're quite out of the woods yet. Asians can and do still get attacked and assaulted for being Asian - for instance it's been floating around the news a bit about how Mark Wahlberg assaulted an Asian man when he was younger and basically got off the hook, and there's always an attack on a Sikh or Persian or who knows what every now and then because they're mistaken for being Muslim. There's also the fact that the majority of Asian kids are being bullied with racist attitudes and slurs by other kids (which shocked me when I found out, given that I grew up in a pretty diverse area, so I never saw a lot of racism-based bullying against Asians). One of the biggest incidents in recent memory would be the Rodney King/LA riots, where Asian-Americans (particularly Korean-Americans) suffered the majority of property damage (though, sadly, I feel as if most people don't realize this, and only think of the Rodney King incident in terms of, again, black vs. white).
There's plenty of positive discrimination as well, which is more destructive than people realize; when people expect you to be always excellent and high-achieving, it puts you in a dilnema - if an Asian does well in school or their career, people will simply think of you as the hardworking, diligent Asian stereotype, ignoring and dismissing any personal talents or struggles you went through - to them, you're just another hardworking Asian, not an individual; do well in an area not typically associated with Asians - sports, the arts, whatever - and people will still think of you as a hardworking, diligent Asian, or see you as a role model for Asians, someone who broke out the mold of the diligent, science-obsessed Asian robot; and if you don't do as well, then people think you're not really Asian, that you're something of anomaly, that something's wrong with you. It's why mental illnesses are the highest among Asian-Americans, because there's a lot of subconscious stress from trying to live up to these ideals; and why no one cares about the fact that Southeast Asians (particularly Cambodian and Laotian Americans) have the highest high school dropout rates in the nation - even more than blacks and Hispanics - because they're all subsumed into this huge, Asian blob. And of course there's always the issues with media portrayals with Asians, which is changing *slightly*, but not enough - Asian women are sexualized as some sort of feminine ideal (I can't speak of it much since I'm a straight guy, but I know a lot of Asian girls aren't happy with the fetishization, and how they have to deal with creeps because of this), while Asian guys are either asexual, passive nerds or asexual martial artists. It's a bit said, I think, when the Asian-American community is ecstatic about seeing an Asian-American male having a sexual relationship with a non-Asian woman.
And that all ties in to seeing the Asian as a kind of "other", which has been a core of Asian-American racism since it all started way back. When portrayed "positively", we're an exotic, one-with-nature, hodgepodge of oriental stereotypes; "negatively", we're passive, emotionless robots.
Now, of course, that's not to say there's racism the other way around. Asians can be pretty racist towards, well, everybody, including other Asians. They'll think that blacks (and Hispanics) are obnoxious and rude, mooching off Affirmative Action to the detriment of Asians. And they'll think white people are also obnoxious in their own way, disrespectful, and superficial. And I dunno what they'd think of native Americans, though; my father did interact with a few native Americans during his lifetime, but he didn't seem to have a lot of discrimination if any against them, and he remarked sympathetically that they all seemed very depressed and frustrated. Concerning the racism Asians have against blacks, anyways, it ties in with the "positive" discrimination towards Asians; the message some Asians are getting is that America tells them, we're helping the blacks but not you because we don't think you need help. There's also the cultural differences, which seemed to have played a huge role in the Rodney King riots - before all that happened, during their interactions with each other, Asian-Americans viewed blacks as aggressive, boorish, and ultimately impolite, while blacks thought the Asians were being unfriendly, cold, and ultimately impolite; and all that erupted into the orgy of violence and looting that happened. My father, despite having spent a couple of years growing up in a mostly black neighborhood - i.e. he has a decent idea of what African-Americans go through, and what their culture is like - still has these sort of discriminatory attitudes.
To conclude, I don't know how these issues can be resolved. Perhaps, we should look to how we can better coexist, and try to understand other people. Befriend people who aren't like you, or, at least, try to understand them. Because no two people handle racism the same way. For instance, me and my friends, growing up, we used the the c-word liberally (I guess the forum won't let me type it out fully, but you probably know what it is, if not, look it up) to describe ourselves (often self-deprecatingly) or anything relating to Asia (we'd refer to Chinese language class as "chinkinese class", for example); but older 2nd and 3rd generation Asians, or those that grew up in an area with a lot of racial tensions, they generally feel "" is the Asian equivalent of the n-word. And no two "types" of racism work the same. As the OP article said, racism isn't just evil, faceless white a-holes beating up and lynching a black guy. It's a lot of different things.
Blah, I spent too much time typing this. Hopefully it's useful to someone.
