The Antidote to Racism -
Excellence
If you look up the word “human” or “humanity”, you will wonder about the root “hu”. This root actually gave rise to “humanity” and ultimately “hues”, which refers to the lightness of a color. We are, therefore, well advised to remember that skin colors are just one color. However, when so many people are claiming ethnicity and heritage, are we supposed to have already ushered in the post-racial era or are getting ahead of ourselves?
Admittedly, racism still persists today: it is any form of oppression based on prejudice. Overt racism has become obsolete but doesn’t die out: it emerges in other names.
Black people and Hispanic people are overrepresented in show business and sports in the same way that Asians are overrepresented in academics, especially science and engineering. Do we simply jump to the conclusion by alleging that racism is at work here? Or are such characterization overly simplistic and thus unfair?
Discussing racism oversimplifies the issue. The cognitive tendency to situate racism in black and white, no pun intended, hides away part of the picture. So much gray area goes into this. For example, racism is not always victimizer-victim, in fact, Asians are not completely innocent of the charges. So much of racism is actually directed inwards: Asian parents who urge their children that they should go for math and sciences are just as unhelpful as the society as large expecting black people to excel in sports and rapping.
Sexism and racism share the same DNA: it’s all about domination and imposing will on others. Although the backlash was predictably fast and furious in reaching a crescendo, the MeToo movement quickly touches a chord everywhere in America and beyond.
When one group takes it as a prerogative to lord over the others, everybody loses, not just the oppressed. Guys, when you allow sexism and sexist ideas to continue unimpeded and unchallenged, it makes you less of a man, less of a human being. Putting women down doesn’t elevate you. When women lose, men lose out too. Let’s break from the grip of conventional sexist ideas. Women are not men’s extension or even imitation; women are men’s equal. And ladies you really have put up with men for too long. The oppressed need to be a little bolder. You can benefit from questioning the passive acceptance of things as you are.
The Metoo movement mirrors the civil rights movement in so many ways, but a common theme threads through them: enough is enough.
From my personal observation on my extended traveling experience of 20 countries and 40 cities, I’m always struck by the realization that humans have so much in common than they are different from one another and thus convinced that there is power, in fact, there is justice, in plurality. We can all benefit from imaging a world in which how it manifests itself not through domination and subjugation but through sharing and fairness.
As I’m embarking on higher education in the US, I’m beginning to envision my place in the racial prism of each country. I often hear Americans say, “I don’t see people that way.” But this is just not true, we all notice a person’s skin color in the first encounter. Of course, a person’s skin color will register, it really doesn’t matter, what really matters is ultimately how we treat people. I don’t want the protective shield of political correctness and identity politics. Please judge me solely on the content of my character, my actual performance, and my contribution to society.
We should disempower oppression and should marginalize prejudice and hate, not marginalize people. We shouldn’t demonize any dominant white group anymore should we marginalize the black people. Let initiate conservation based on facts but end the conversation on a note of inclusivity and understanding.
Because racism seems to have sprung from tribalism that is ingrained deep in the human psyche, the deep-seated fear of otherness, racial divide, and other forms of bigotry and prejudice will always be with us. There’s little we can do about such inevitability of human nature; what we can do, however, is continuing and deepening the dialogue.
There’s always a kernel of truth in every stereotype however unpleasant it is. This proposition, however, is in no way exonerating racism and prejudice. For example, Asians are indeed overrepresented in science and medicine and underrepresented in so many other areas.
Quick. Name one Asian in sport. And don’t say, Jeremy Lin. He’s too lonely.
Name one Asian in politics. And don’t say, Andrew Young. He’s pretty much a long shot.
A saying from Oprah Winfrey comes to mind, “Excellence is the best deterrent to racism.” We can go so much further in so many more directions if we as a group strive to excel in other unfamiliar areas.
I have a dream today!
I have a dream that all racist, sexist, classist, and ageist involving unfairness and oppression are solved within this generation. Because if they are not, they’ll spill over to the next generation, which is us in 20 years. Let’s make a difference, not tomorrow, not today. Right now.
And the day will come!
It will be the day when we see many more Asians, you and me, going in politics, sports, Hollywood. Only then are we liberated from the chains and locks with which we restrained ourselves from this colorful world! Let freedom ring!
A Reflection
The United States is a nation that has long been the subject of sustained racism. As an Asian new to this country, I drew views from an academic article into a speech addressing the stereotypes of ethnicity in society that people have conformed to. Titled Interconnecting Race and Gender Relations: Racism, Sexism and the Attribution of Sexism to the Racialized Other, this academic journal article written by Lavinia Gianettoni and Patricia Roux based their study on a survey conducted in Switzerland and argued that gender and race relations are interconnected: racism and sexism, primarily caused by exaggerated cultural differences, are branches of the same tree. My speech similarly associated racism with sexism under the theme of domination and prejudice; however, “when the audience changes, your message has to change, sometimes drastically” (Reid, 9). Hence, along with the change of audience during the translation, the focus of the speech shifted in the end to the idea of excellence being the only way out of racism.
“Academics write primarily for other academics” (Rosenberg, 213). This article is no exception. The specific terminologies used in this academic article target researchers and peer specialists in the social psychology and sociology field: the term “attribution”, for example, refers to inferences that people make about the causes of events and behavior in social psychology, which is distinct from its meaning in colloquial language. These terms, including “the Other”, “social categorization”, and “racialization”, all go without prior definitions, implying that the audience must be relevant professionals that have basic knowledge of these technical terms. In contrast, terms central to the argument such as “racism” and “sexism” that we often take their meaning for granted are specifically redefined in the paper: “we define racism as an institutional and ideological system that prescribes race relations and legitimizes the superiority of some groups” (Gianettoni, 375). This property manifests the unambiguous, succinct, and precise diction and a formal register of an academic article. Even though no writing can be free of bias, the arguments in this paper are delivered in a fair narrative tone, often comprised of a passive voice that gives an impersonal, polite, and neutral touch to the words, despite the authors’ stand.
My speech, on the other hand, aims at Asian-American and Asian college students. Mostly being free of societal bias, college students are mature enough to be critical thinkers and responsibility takers. Among them are those with Asian backgrounds who may best resonate with the Asian stereotypes addressed in the speech. This shift in the audience also resulted from the shift in the purpose of the original article: filling “a theoretical vacuum regarding the ways in which sexism and racism are interconnected” (Gianettoni, 376). For it is the ultimate purpose of the speech to correct the audience’s perspectives — to focus on one’s excellence and accomplishments instead of color and gender that set no difference from one another — it is crucial that the audience of this speech are youngsters who have not yet enter the real world; that is, their outlooks on human relationships are generally not yet fixed before adulthood and can still be reflected and altered. Having that said, this speech is flexibly designed to be delivered on any major occasions where college student audience are in majority, for it is everyone’s responsibility, regardless of race or gender, to eliminate stereotypes and prejudice. It’s obvious that the speech is not targeting academic professionals given that the speech does not contain any technical terms specific to an area of study nor require any pre-requisites to listen to the speech; however, vocabulary such as “exonerate”, “marginalize”, and “prerogative” are used. They not only reveal the peculiar diction but also imply that the speech asks for an above-moderate education in literature from the audience: it is not for kindergarten children. The register of this speech, unlike A More Perfect Union by Barack Obama that targeted audiences across the age spectrum, is relatively informal and colloquial with certain grammar syntaxes and conventions broken and some idioms used to appeal to a younger audience.
Speech is an appropriate choice of text type that puts forth a serious, controversial subject like racism because it allows the speaker, I, to directly and personally engage with the audience. A speech is an aural genre. When compared to most written texts, a speech provides a distinct way of perceiving: the audience listens to, instead of reading, a speech. Words can be more powerful when they are heard, allowing the message of the text to come across more memorably. This is especially effectual when repetitions and parallelism are used: “contemporary Americans have a very high tolerance for repeated messages; we even come to depend on them” (Reid, 11). For example, the parallelism used in this speech (“Name one Asian in sport ... Name one Asian in politics....”) allows me to sprinkle a sense of humor on top of the serious subject of the speech, easing the solemn atmosphere before the ending. A speech can also take on many purposes, but those that greatly evoke emotions, especially those that touch on sensitive topics, are usually delivered to persuade. While the research conclusion and implications of the original article can take pages to get to the point, the powerful ending of this speech, convincing the audience to take a different viewpoint towards racial and gender difference and calling the audience to action to diversify multiple areas of profession, employs short and powerful phrases (“I have a dream today!”, “Let freedom ring!”) that alludes to the famous speech I Have a Dream by Martin Luther King Jr., which serves a similar purpose — call for an end to racism.
A speech is also a convenient first-person genre. Unlike the original article that is bounded by the academic convention to remain neutral in its use of pronouns, namely, third-person pronouns only, a speech is boundless. The speaker can strategically utilize the choice of pronouns to best engage with the audience. Notice that this speech starts with a third-person perspective, a seemingly objective point of view that is used mostly in analyses, to reveal the true nature of racism and sexism. The first person pronoun “I” then jumps in to share a personal anecdote, linking my experience to that of the audience, who mostly are in the same age spectrum as I am. The collective pronoun “we” finally concludes the speech, emphasizing that the purpose of the speech is a common cause and highlighting the fact that there are no “U” or “I” in “we”, humans. In contrast to the authors of the academic article, who stayed professional by insulating any personal emotions and by keeping a fixed distance from the readers, the role of the speaker in this speech, I, shifts from a guider at the start, who gains credibility and authoritativeness from the audience through the third-person perspective, to a common teenager, who appeals to pathos by bonding himself to the audience, then to a human being: not an Asian, African, or American but a human being.
“Adapt to your audience’s needs and accomplish your goals” (Reid, 4). Rather than relying on the richness of evidence and coherence of reasoning like what consists of an academic genre, a powerful speech is often one that relies on evoking strong emotions and appealing to ethos and pathos. A speech is often delivered not to one or two but to a crowd, where the bandwagon effect kicks in. What the crowd remembers afterward isn’t how plausible the speaker’s words are but rather how promising the speaker made them sound like. Therefore, when translating this academic article into a speech, I sprinkle the reasoning content on top of the figurative speeches and imageries that can empower the audience into changing their perspective. For instance, I have disregarded specific survey data of the correlation between sexism and racism or the bar graph on family sexism presented in the article (Gianettoni, 381); in fact, I have excluded the whole surveying process. Instead, I let the underlying ideology of the article — parallels of racism and sexism — do the magic. I have also discarded the formulated, sequential, and fixed structure of an academic article. In such an article, “the words inside a paragraph worked together for a common purpose. They had some specific reason for being inside the same fence” (Alexie, 1). However, speech, though still written in paragraphs, has essentially no paragraph structures when delivered verbally. Rather, the audience relied on “major road signs” (Rosenberg, 213) such as rhetorical questions that indicate the transition of arguments.
Translating a rational academic article into an emotional speech is no easy task, especially when “the author will assume prior knowledge that you likely don’t have” (Rosenberg, 214). The trick, however, is to read “Like an Architect” (Bunn, 74): “examine the things you read, looking at the writerly techniques in the text in order to decide if you might want to adopt similar techniques in your writing” (Bunn, 72). Peeling off the redundant evidence and arguments, I preserve only the core values, ideas that can truly help my speech evoke emotions. Unlike the original article that was primarily written for the readers to digest the content, reasoning, and data repeatedly, a speech is a one-shot genre where the presenter has only one chance in delivering the message. This is also why it’s all about “making clear points early so that your audience can spot your expertise or passion right from the start” (Reid, 4), just like how I have begun the speech with a discussion of the word “human” and linked it to the meaningless behaviors of racism.
A research paper and a stirring speech may seem like two ends of the spectrum, and indeed it is. Not only the audience has distinct tastes, but the authors’ messages also differ greatly; however, they may not be substantially different in their core ideas: only the packaging is different. Only through effective rhetorical reading to integrate information from the article and a full understanding of the nature of both the speech and the academic journal article genre was I able to successfully adapt the article’s core idea to a new genre.
Bibliography
Alexie, Sherman. “The Joy of Reading and Writing: Superman and Me.” The Most Wonderful Books: Writers on Discovering the Pleasures of Reading. Minneapolis: Milkweed Editions, 1997, pp. 3-6.
Bunn, Mike. “How to Read Like a Writer” Writing Spaces: Readings on Writing, edited by Pavel Zemliansky and Charles Lowe, vol. 2, Parlor Press, 2010, pp. 71–86.
Gianettoni, L., & Roux, P. (2010). Interconnecting Race and Gender Relations: Racism, Sexism and the Attribution of Sexism to the Racialized Other. Sex Roles, 62(5-6), 374-386.
Reid, E. Shelley. “Ten Ways to Think About Writing: Metaphoric Musings for College Writing Student.” Writing Spaces: Readings on Writing, edited by Pavel Zemliansky and Charles Lowe, vol. 2, Parlor Press, 2010, pp. 3–23.
Rosenberg, Karen. “Reading Games: Strategies for Reading Scholarly Sources.” Writing Spaces: Readings on Writing, edited by Pavel Zemliansky and Charles Lowe, vol. 2, Parlor Press, 2010, pp. 210–20.