The Marmot’s Hole

Won Joon Choe

This episode seems uncannily similar to an op-ed that appeared in The Dartmouth Review, while it was piloted by Dinesh D’Souza. That op-ed essentially was written from the perspective of a newly admitted African-American student at Dartmouth, and laced with indecipherable ebonics.

http://www.dartreview.com/arch.....ve_bro.php

The difference is that the Dartmouth Review episode caused national uproar–a veritable orgy of righteous indignation; I doubt this will ruffle any feathers, given that it is still kosher to make fun of Asian-Americans and Arabs in the U.S.

Won Joon Choe

Dear Mr. Jackson,

I initially wrote a rather hot-tempered and bellicose response to your comment #12. But I deleted that after having remembered that I made a vow to try to emulate Ben Franklin’s rhetorical approach after reading his Autobiography. Namely, that “the chief Ends of Conversation are to inform, or to be informed, to please or to persuade” and one must not assume the adversarial “Manner that seldom fails to disgust, tends to create Opposition, and to defeat every one of those Purposes.” Nonetheless, I will not try to aim for persuasion here, because I possess neither Franklin’s wisdom nor eloquence, and I also frankly think this is one of those problems where understanding or sympathy is not available unless you have experienced the wrong yourself. So I will be brief and to the point.

First, viscerally speaking, and for the record, I do not think the “parody” was funny at all, given that I have been jumped by neo-Nazi skinheads and subjected to much racist verbal abuse. In fact, you would be surprised how many Asian-American students have to put up with racist slurs in the very “tolerant” academic settings, similar to the ones this Princeton incident took place. In fact, the racial slurs I and my Asian-American friends heard at Dartmouth College were of the same variety as the slurs used in this “parody.” Hell, I had to even hear these racist remarks from a very old and old-fashioned white male professor! (And it’s too bad that I was a clueless freshman lamb, overawed by the venerable professor, as my Confucian upbringing taught me, when it happened, rather than the “rights-bearing” individual of today.)

Second, intellectually speaking, I cannot understand how someone who is otherwise so careful writer cannot see a distinction between regional stereotyping among white men and racial stereotyping of Asian (or other minority race) individuals by white men. How many southern men in America have been lynched by northern men, or otherwise brutalized, solely due to their place of origin? The distinction is nothing less than, to borrow from Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. (who is actually an old-fashioned patrician liberal and not exactly a race warrior), the distinction between cultural snobbery and hardcore racism.

In particular, what is particularly surprising about the tenor of your comment is that you too are a stranger in an alien land, potentially facing the same vulnerabilities as Asian-Americans do in the U.S. Perhaps the fact that you (as a white minority male in Korea) are not sufficiently aware of the vulernability attendant to living in Korea by your outsider status is a demonstration of the fact–in spite of the constant bleatings in the ex-pat blogosphere–the xenophobic Korea is more hospitable for outsiders (and certainly for white men) than the land of egalitarian empire?

Finally, I understand that this is “only online” (and a comment space at that), and people are not always inspired to etch their most rigorous thoughts or exacting prose on this medium. God knows I have said a lot of flippant and stupid things in the comment spaces here and elsewhere too. Nonetheless, I don’t think levity is warranted here.