Dr. Seuss 1942 comic calling for the internment of Japanese Americans as a dangerous "other," due to their supposed loyalty to the Empire of Japan. Geisel (Dr. Seuss) commented "But right now, when the Japs are planting their hatchets in our skulls, it seems like a hell of a time for us to smile and warble: "Brothers!" It is a rather flabby battle cry. If we want to win, we've got to kill Japs, whether it depresses John Haynes Holmes or not. We can get palsy-walsy afterward with those that are left."
I had an exchange in the comments of a certain diary that struck a nerve with me, so while I usually write about the Ukraine War, I’m taking a moment to write about a very different topic—racism and Asian Americans.
The context in which this arose was in some ways a defense of a man that I personally despise. Republican Presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, a very wealthy Indian-American near-billionaire who’s devoted his money and power to fighting “wokeness.”
Ramaswamy entered the Republican public consciousness by writing a book called “Woke, Inc.: Inside Corporate America’s Social Justice Scam,” warning that “wokeness” and liberal politics were infecting the purity of American corporate leadership. He became a regular on conservative radio talk shows and Fox News, discussing the insidious ways in which opposing sexism or racism were poisons that harmed the economic viability of America.
To say that I have no favorable feelings towards Ramaswamy is an understatement.
With that being said, a comment that called Ramaswamy “Ramalamadingdong” really touched a nerve with me.
Here’s why.
I’m Japanese-American and more broadly Asian-American. I will be the first to say that Asian Americans experience racism not just differently, but in most ways less severely than African Americans or Hispanic Americans.
I’m very lucky to be married to a wonderful Mexican-American woman, the love of my life. The types of racism that she’s encountered with the Maricopa County Police under Joe Arpaio, or the experiences that her grandmother and cousins have had, just do not compare to the experiences that I’ve had.
Nearly a hundred black men per 100,000 Americans will be killed by the police in their lifetimes. Over fifty Hispanic men. By contrast, only around 35 white men, and less than 20 Asian men will be killed. When facing the police, it’s actually better to be Asian than to be white.
Now, I think this plays into a certain racist caricature of Asian men regarding our supposed non-threatening emasculated nature that plays to our advantage in not being perceived as a threat, but that’s a discussion for another time.
While Asian Americans don’t experience racism as severely or in the same ways as other People of Color in America, one more unique aspect of racism directed at us is our perceived “alienness.”
By alienness, I mean the idea that Asian Americans are permanent outsiders to “real America” (TM) as Donald might put it.
Asian Americans have been part of the American fabric for a long time. The first major wave of Asian Americans were Chinese-Americans, mostly arriving in the mid-19th century. The first wave of Japanese immigrants arrived in Hawaii in the early 1870s. These continued until Asian American immigration was all but cut off by one of the first restrictions to immigration imposed by the US government in 1907.
These waves of immigration preceded, for example, the first major wave of Italian-American immigration that started in the 1880s and continued into the 1910s. Yet people express surprise at the idea that there are fifth or sixth-generation Chinese or Japanese Americans.
I have a friend who is a sixth-generation Chinese-American, born and raised in Iowa. He’s experienced many times incidents where people express surprise at his proficiency in English or ask what country he’s from despite hearing his perfect accent-less English.
Indeed, one way in which the “alienness” of Asian Americans is emphasized is through language.
One memorable example would be Rosie O’Donnell’s comments on The View in 2006 when she repeatedly described Chinese Americans talking about Danny DeVito as “ching-chong, ching-chong” in describing their Chinese accents.
But a particular way in which both East and South Asian Americans experience racism is in the way in which our names are treated.
This issue came up during the 2020 Presidential Campaign involving Vice President Kamala Harris, who is both African American and Indian American. Kamala’s mother, Shyamala Gopalan, was a first-generation Indian immigrant. The name “Kamala” is of Indian origin.
Harris ran a series of ads highlighting how to pronounce her own name in part responding to a number of Republicans and right-wing news figures, most prominently Tucker Carlson. Tucker Carlson was particularly memorable in that in an interview in August 2020 despite being repeatedly corrected by his own guest, continued to mispronounce the name Kamala.
Former Georgia Senator David Perdue followed this up by saying “KAH-mah-lah? Kah-MAH’-lah? Kamala-mala-mala. I don’t know — whatever.”
The mispronunciation was pointed to be a way of “otherizing” Harris. To brand her as a non-American Other who should not be allowed to be Vice President or an American leader. The mispronunciation was a show of disrespect and racism for Kamala’s heritage and family.
This certainly isn’t some kind of isolated example. When the 2021 Ovation Awards were held to honor Los Angeles’ best stage actors, organizers not only butchered the pronunciation of Jully Lee’s (pronounced like Julie) name but posted a different Chinese-American actress’ photo when presenting her award.
When the racism of such selective carelessness was pointed out in an opinion column in the Los Angeles Times, many readers responded by mocking “Asian victimhood” and repeatedly misspelling or characterizing the pronunciation of Jully Lee’s name as somehow inscrutable and absolving the organizers of any blame.
I can personally attest to this frustration. When I was in third grade, I started spelling my first name differently from how it is legally written. My legal name has a “u” at the end of it, but unlike in most English pronunciations, it is a very short “u” sound, not a stretched-out “uuuuu” sound. Most Americans when they first see my name, pronounce it with the latter, which I wouldn’t have minded so much if it wasn’t for the fact that many of my white elementary school peers noticed me being bothered by that mispronunciation and began tormenting me for it, intentionally stretching out the sound.
I grew to hate that so much, that I started spelling my name without the “u” at the end, which sounded at least somewhat like my real name but made things easier for white people.
I’ve gone by my self-imposed nickname for so long, that I go back and forth as to whether or not I want to go by my legal name publicly—my wife is virtually the only English-speaking person in my personal life who calls me by my real name.
Intentional mispronunciation of names is a type of “otherization” have real consequences. The idea of Republicans trying to drum up hostility to Kamala Harris among voters by characterizing her as having an implicitly “un-American” name is a case in point.
Japanese internment during WW2 was entirely justified and built around the idea that regardless of citizenship or however many generations one has lived in America, Japanese-Americans are never “real” Americans deserving of basic rights or societal trust.
So this circles back to the joke about “Ramalamadingdong.”
Another commenter pointed out, this joke isn’t OK as it’s making fun of a name as “foreign.”
At this point, I opened a whole can of worms by commenting that East and South Asians experience a state of “permanent foreignness” as a type of racism, which people named DeSantis, Boebert, or Guiliani do not experience.
The pushback included
- Calling my comment “careless purity of nonsensical bullshit righteous ignorance of language, syntax, humor, & history”
- Noting that “People on here mutilate the names of TFG and his kids and of Ron DeSatan and other GQP pols all the time.”
- In the same vein, a different commenter compared the “foreignness” of Ramaswamy to “DeSantis? Boebert? Giuliani?”
It was frustrating.
I compared the idea of intentionally misspelling Ramaswamy’s name to making a joke about Donald Trump clogging his arteries by gorging himself on KFC, then swapping Donald Trump with African American Republican presidential candidate Tim Scott.
While it’s clearly appropriate to make that joke about the Donald, the same type of joke as applied to an African American becomes blatantly racist because it plays into a racist caricature.
Intentionally altering or misspelling DeSantis or Trump’s name is fine. Calling Ramaswamy “Ramalamadingdong” is not OK.
