minorities hating on minorities: the solution is understanding

"I would argue that blacks are weak-willed. They are the only race that has been enslaved for 300 years," penned Kenneth Eng in his most recent column, "Why I Hate Blacks," featured in Asiaweek magazine. Currently he's being lambasted by Asian American and Black activist groups alike to his apparent ignorance, but to me this story is telling of a more deep-seeded intolerance among minorities. It is a dirty secret that we minorities don't want to admit to, because it speaks hypocrisy. Being a part of a minority, you face a constant struggle with your identity in a place run rampant with stereotypes and systemic prejudice, and to put another group down based on stereotypes and prejudice only perpetuates what you yourself try to fight.

What I see here, as in any other case of racial intolerance, is a lack of understanding and empathy. Asian and Black Americans are two vastly different cultures originating in different continents altogether and forced to live together in another continent. As progressive as Asian American and Black American activists are, minority children are unlikely to learn their own cultural heritage, let alone the heritage of other minorities. History books tell of the caucasian's manifest destiny in America and how they brought Africans in through slave trade and how they turned Chinese immigrants into indentured servants. Students don't learn how or why Filipinos migrated to the US, nor do they understand the Japanese American internment during WWII or the plight of the Vietnamese and Koreans due to Communism. I believe education needs to change and I would delve into it, but for the sake of brevity I'll save that for another time.

Meanwhile, as we are raised to be ethnicly ignorant, we grow up in an environment of racial overload. We think in terms of color-- red, white, black, yellow--- when we are all really just different shades of brown. We turn derogatory slurs into slang without thinking. We'd rather trust the truth in stereotypes than to see the truth to a group. And why? Because it's easier. It's easier to generalize than to go out of your way and seek answers. It's easier to believe that intelligence and personality traits are somehow related to your skin tone. It's easier to be stupid than to think. And so I challenge this to you, dear reader: be intelligent. Think and try to understand a situation before you form and verbalize opinions about a group of people. Don't be so ignorant to think you know everything.



http://www.cnn.com/2007/US/02/27/racist.column.ap/index.html