...and I walked up to him and I said you know your bike's blocking my way.
And I mean he just turned around and kind of looked at me, had his helmet on, he opened his visor,
and he said "I'm busy. I'll get to it in a minute"
Sort of telling me, "I've got the power, you don't".
I felt like it was misplaced rage.
I felt like it was focused on me, but it was misplaced rage.
And I'm afraid of that.
I run into it, and I'm afraid, and I think that...
I read the media, I watch television, read the newspapers,
and all I get is this reenforcement, all I get is reenforcement about these negative stereotypes.
And it takes a real effort to, sort of, combat this.
I am reluctant and fearful of further division between us.
I'm worried that dividion between us will happen even more where we won't come back together.
That, that's something that is, runs deep with me.
That stops me from looking at areas that get hard,
when it comes to other people of colour.
I have been, uh, a little bit nervous about getting into this,
and not wanting to have us uh... y'know just laying our junk out on the table
without acknowledging that it's a, that there's a context of white racism that we live within,
that helps to separate us and confuse us about each other.
And I do agree that um, you have to look at inter-ethnic racism within the context of white supremacy,
but I disagree with the fact that you can't cover that up, because it is there
and we have to deal with it
before we can do anything about white racism.
We have to deal with that conflict,
because it's there, and in my opinion it's growing.
By exploring inter-ethnic racism, we've torn apart the unity that we built up earlier
when we were jsut attacking white people.
[Victor interrupting] ... the bit about attacking white people,
I think attacking white racism... I don't think it's about attacking white people.
There is some anger, um, underlying real anger,
and we're afraid to express it because we want to as Victor said maintain some kind of unity here
that we've established.
Maybe we should take the risk and lay it all out.
[Roberto] I mean, talking about it helps.
Bringing it out into the light helps.
It loses some of its mystery.
Some of its power.
Growing up. I picked up stereotypes
that Blacks were lazy, that they were violent, that they were dangerous.
I mean, there still is a tape in the back of my head that plays back all the time,
but there's another tape that I've developed that says that this isn't true.
When I see Asian people being, uh, praised for intelligence,
and Black people invalidated for being stupid,
I feel bitter about it.
You know, cause, I know I'm very smart, I've always been very smart,
and you know, it hurts me to see that acknowledgement given up to other people,
when it's taken away from me.
And all the people in my community, with very few exceptions where I grew up,
worked very very hard.
My mother worked hard, my grandmother worked hard, my aunts & uncles worked hard,
they worked themselves to death,
and they pulled and they pulled on their bootstraps,
and those suckers just tore off, and they didn't get no place.
You leave home every day,
your parents instill in you that you're a good person,
you know
you're a moral person.
Yet when you go out into the world, yknow,
just because of the colour of your skin, people avoid you,
they look at you as if you're a potential killer,
they don' t think you're as smart as they are,
you watch the news, who do you see being taken away in handcuffs all the time?
It's somebody that looks like you, somebody that could be you.
You're always under suspicion, so at times you do wonder if it is you.
In my father's restaurant, it was, y'know, make sure we don't have Blacks come into our restaurant
because it'll mean tha white people won't come into our restaurant.
And you know... people, white people don't want ... Blacks in the restaurant.
But all tha time, the whites were really encouraging that, without knowing it.
And that's why when I hear about the Black and the Asian community, I feel so sad about that,
because I think that there's a way in which we've been really used, used, to put down Black people.
y'know, especially the L.A. riots, y'know?
"The poor little Korean grocer, if only Blacks could work as hard as us,
with such great family values,
y'know, look what they get, then the Black people beat em up, burned down their stores",
y'know, and the fact of it was, we were both being exploited,
we've been both taught to be really scared of each other.
And I, I, it just, it's it's, I mean it hits me here, y'know?
Because, many of you know because my mother was murdered by an African American man.
I can be just as angry and buy into my father's stereotypes about African American men,
but I knew where he was headed with that.
I knew where he was headed.
That all African American men murder and kill,
and he wanted me to pass that on to my child,
but I know the stories he told me about the racism that's happened to us,
and somehow, I just wanted to say "REMEMBER what happened to us!"
Just remember what happened to us happens to everybody else.
And I know he wanted somebody to stop that.
He wanted another Asian man to stand up for him.
He wanted another Black man to stand up for him.
And maybe, another white man to stand up for him.
I have had, um, a fair number of experiences
of being, um, or feeling invisible from Black to Latino,
where essentially I've been given the message that
my issues as a brown person are not as important or as bad as a Black person's
because of the ligh..., I'm whiter, y;know.
So, um, that somehow the measuring of the colour line,
um. you're either black or you're white
and if you're in the middle there, then, it doesn't count.
Like, I watch out to see, alright, now which one are you gonna be?
The one that values my experience, or the one that says
the only thing you need to do is pay attention to what happens to Black people.
Y'know, so when I meet you, that's the kind of thing that goes through...
OK now which one are you gonna be? Which one are you gonna be?
Y'know, that's uh, the tape that goes on.
You mention the skin colour and I think if you go back to when we were slaves
or enslaved in this country,
um, the lighter skinned slaves were the house slaves,
and they usually had more privilege.
Now, you bring that into the 20th century,
and a lot of Black people may equate lighter skin with more privilege,
and that's why they don't see that you would have a problem that we would have.
In, you were talking about skin colour, within the Black community,
well in the Latino community there is skin colour also...
[Loren] What about Asians...
[Lee Mun Wah] Asians too...
And the darker you are, the kind of lower you are on the scale.
And like, mothers when they have a baby and the baby is white,
"Oh que blanco!" or whatever, "beautiful!" You know?
"_es casi rubio!" you know? "He's almost blonde"...
You know, I know that many Black folks resent any signs of assimilation,
whether it be amongst other people in the Black community, or in oher ethnic communities.
Y'know, and some of it's the skin colour stuff,
uh, whether you're in the Black community or uh other people of colour communities,
if you're lighter, there's less trust often,
and more like, "well, you might use that light skin uh that you have
to get more goodies out of white folks".
My experience has been that white folks feel more at ease with people
that are closer to the colour that they are.
You know, and that I get to do stuff that my mom can't do,
my mom's significantly darker than I am.
I have had an easier time putting white folks at ease, uh, you know, because I'm not Loren's complexion,
and that can create static between me and Loren...
[David L] I get the impression sometimes from the African American community
that Asians are perceived as privileged,
that educationally we've achieved, economically we've achieved, we're almost like white people dammit,
and therefore we're hated just, I mean...
[Loren] What you can do, and maybe I'm putting too much pressure on you but,
I think what you can do is make people understand how you achieve what you achieve,
show em how you worked hard for it, that you weren't given anything.
Again, I want to dispel the myth that all Asians have made it economically,
because, that's not the truth,
but the ones that do are very visible.
[Victor] I was just thinking "the model minority", y'know, and that it's... what a set up.
Y'know, it's like "why can't you people be more like those people?
And then you wouldn't have the problems that you have"
[David L] I think we are comparing each other based on white people.
We are not white enough and therefore we chastise or criticize each other
for not being like the white model.
I think that's, that's why I call it internalized racism,
cause I don't think that I in a vacuum am racist against Blacks,
but because I come from a white context that Blacks are not like whites,
and therefore I should be against Blacks,
or Asians are not like whites, therefore I criticize Asians for not being like whites.
I was wanting to think that I was white.
I was wanting to blend in,
I was just wanting to assimilate to this extreme degree,
til I realized who I really wanted to be,
and I looked back,
and my family's internment in the concentration camps had a huge impact on them.
They didn't want to identify with being Japanese,
because when they said they were Japanese,
they were discriminated against severely & locked up.
They didn't want to identify as being Buddhist anymore,
so my grandfather became Christian to blend in,
and he like lost his real religion,
and just now I'm starting to reclaim that.
My dad taught me a lot of lessons.
Family jokes about him being the Archie Bunker of the family, y'know?
And um, Chinese are like loud and noisy businessmen that try to take your money or something like that.
Several of my family members do not like Japanese.
I think a lot of the older ones especially
still remember the Sino-Japanese war,
in which Japan invaded China and prettymuch brutalized a lot of people.
[Yutaka]... int he process...
[David L] Yeah, and a lot of them remember that, and that continues.
I think they perceive the Japanese as arrogant, distrustful, extremely violent, and repressed.
[Yutaka] ...a lot of that... so much of that's true too, that's the hard thing to deny.
[David L] But it's not true for a lot of Japanese people...
[Yutaka]... right, for us sitting right here...
The number of times where I have not intervened on your behalf, or on your behalf,
even on your behalf, for my own people, you know,
where racism has flown, and I've let it fly
about Black people, about Asians, about other Latinos even, about Indians,
and I've, I think I have a lot of shame about that,
and so if I expose that, what are you gonna think of me now?
You know, that kind of stuff is part of what makes this heavy for me.
A woman was talking about "oh those Cubans are taking over Florida",
you know, just running with it,
and I sat there, and I didn't say anything.
And finally she said "Hugh, I wanna ask you something.
I hope you know I wasn't wanting to offend you".
And all of the things that I wanted to say, I sat on.
You know, I sat on it.
That's an example to me of being shameful and embarrassed
of not coming to intervene on your behalf, or on my behalf for that matter.
I understand.
Earlier in my life I was totally surrounded by white people,
and that was my life aside from my family.
It was all white people around me.
And every once in awhile, I'd hear a comment like that, or something like that
about Cubans or Mexicans or whatever,
"oh but Roberto you're not like that, I mean, I wasn't talking..."
I wasn't even Roberto then, I was Bob or something like that.
"Oh Bob, but you're not like that" ...