Racism on the Left Part 1: Interracial Relationships

The left wing and racism. The left has traditionally portrayed themselves as the one anti-racist force in the world that buffers the inherently bigoted right. Is this true? Are conservatives really the only ones who are racially discriminatory, or is the left guilty of it as well? I've been wanting to do a series like this for some time but have held myself back due to the fact that the left does tend to label people as racists or crackpots should they ever call them out on their own hypocrisies. However, there are many topics I want to discuss that I feel need to be discussed. I argue that the left does not have the clean hands it pretends to have when it comes to racism. They are neither anti-racist nor non-discriminatory. This series is intended to make you question the values liberals hold, particularly now as they in the United States are about to present their first minority president to the world.

The Mulatto: From Cosmic Race to Shamed Mutt
The first topic I'd like to cover does involve Barack Obama since he is the product of it; interracial relationships. Human beings are a bit like dog breeders; they tend to value purebreds higher than they do the mutts. Take Obama for example. He is a mulatto: a person who is half black and half white. However, he and his supporters only identify him as black. It's as if he wants to hide or is ashamed of his European heritage. Of course, there are many tactical political reasons for doing so. Similarly goes with Tiger Woods, who is half black, half Asian. He does identify himself as such, unlike Obama, however, the mainstream media does not. During the colonial period in Latin America, interracial relationships were vary common and people of mixed ancestry were highly regarded in society. One Latino writer even called them the "Cosmic Race", believing that they were inherently superior, since they were a mix of the best of all other races. However, this celebration of racial mixing has hit a bit of a brick wall in the last decade. In the 80s and 90s, it was trendy to be involved in an interracial relationship, if you were a white woman. So what changed? Well, nothing did. The environment of our society requires people to make clean, black & white definitions of themselves. Mixed race people can only be one or the other, yet not both at the same time. They're like a square peg in a round hole.

The left has forced this view more than any other organization through their race relations policies. They pretend that mixed race people simply do not exist. Such people usually pick their minority side to identify themselves for a variety of reasons. I believe because this can open more doors to them, but also due to negative stereotypes of whites in society as well as pressure from the minority community. For their parents, the road can be equally difficult. For the sake of argument, we'll look at how white men and their partners in Asian-White relationships have been treated in recent years. Particularly given how controversial this paring has become.

Yellow Fever's Bitter Pill:
There is a stereotype that white men like Asian women. However, it doesn't exactly put a positive spin on this. There are a lot of misconceptions floating around. First off all, it is not as prevalent as some people think it is. There are roughly 504,000 Asian-White marriages in the United States as of the most recent census in 2000. This includes both white male/Asian female and Asian male/white female pairs. This is less than there are homosexual couples, with roughly 660,000 pairs according to the same census. Homosexuals account for 1% of the US population. 3.6% of the 2000 population were Asian and 75% were Caucasian. So instances of WM/AF marriages are rarer than claimed by opponents to such relationships. Secondly, the stereotype's reasoning for entering such relationships is what has really raised my ire over the years.

While I was in university, I took a course on how Western cultures portrayed the history of "the other". The "other" being foreign cultures such as those in Asia, India, and Africa. One particular reading for the course described a 19th century man's first encounter with a Japanese woman while on a trip to the country. He described her as being more beautiful and elegant than the European women of the time. While discussing the article, the class was led to come to the following conclusion. A white obsession with the exotic, the desire to dominate other cultures, and the desire to impose European culture on the Japanese were the reasons he found her so attractive.

The left in academia has created this image of the 19th century white man, and according to them, this way of thinking has persisted right into the 21st century. This point of view is racially discriminatory against whites, since it has been used to demonize white males who enter into such relationships. Of course, this form of racism is a two way street because it has been used to attack Asian women as well, deeming them to be too submissive. This is supposedly why white men "take" them. I have yet to meet one of these so called "submissive" Asian women. The left has basically said that a white man cannot love a woman of another race or culture in the same way as he would a white woman. If he marries a white woman, it is about love. If he marries an Asian woman, it is about dominance and control.

Why the Academic Left Has Done This:
The problem with this liberal academic view is that it is based on numerous old and outdated concepts, and they know this. It assumes that men are dominant and the only ones who can actively seek out a mate; that women do not ask men out. This concept has been dead as long as Sadie Hawkins dances have been in existence. So why are supposedly progressive academics still using it? Secondly, it attempts to take the broad concept of 19th century colonialism and cram it into modern interpersonal relationships. Thirdly, it assumes that all whites are racist and the only reason they enter these relationships is out of racist thinking. Their goal is to assimilate "savage" women and give them "superior" European values.

In their own perverted egalitarian view of the world, liberals like to see all cultures as being inherently homogeneous and isolated. It's as if every society is an lone island in a vast sea. This belief asserts that everyone in a particular culture thinks the same, has the same tastes, and stays limited to within their own narrow, and unchanging cultural practises. Academics believe that notions of individualism and personal taste are a Western phenomenon and do not exist elsewhere. This is why so called "Western" culture has been demonized, despite it largely being a mishmash of different world views. They still see it from the 19th century view of western dominance and fetish for the exotic. To liberals, any sort of cultural mix is a no-no and threatens to pollute these "isolated" cultures of the other with decadent Westernism.

Anti-Interracial Backlash
The point of view projected by the Western left has become so persistent that there has been a great deal of backlash, especially among Asians, regarding these kinds of relationships. Asian men have accused whites of "stealing" their women and leaving no women left for them. Esther Ku on the 2008 season of Last Comic Standing pointed out in her act that Asian men were going to go extinct because of this. Her act was extremely controversial, though more because she joked about old Korean stereotypes.

Ku perpetrated numerous myths about interracial relationships in her act. However, no more fierce has this been said than in a controversial blog post by someone going by the screen name of "SomeKoreangirl", a post which reeked of anti-white racism that made the rounds on the Internet last year. She basically listed out why she would never date a white man, using the vary myths I've noted. That whites were out to control and dominate Asian women, and are taking them away from Asian men. If I had written something on here saying I wouldn't date black women because they're (to quote Don Imus) "nappy headed hoes", I'd have the Canadian Human Rights Commission breaking down my door. White men have also been accused of polluting the Asian race by having children with Asian women.

Once again, this assumes that men are dominant in seeking out mates, and that women do not have their own preferences. It goes against the ideals of women's liberation, a concept the left likes to claim as their own. There are Asian women who prefer and actively seek out white men, contrary to what the myth would have you believe.

It is ironic in a sense that I know more Asian man-White woman relationships that I do the other way around. This includes a close family friend of ours, who is originally from southern Europe. She has been married to a Japanese man for a number of years. Indeed, the stigma does not exist for these types of relationships, or at least is not as prevalent. An Asian man marrying a white woman is seen as empowering or at the vary least ignored, but a white man marrying an Asian woman is scandalized. This could also help partly explain why their children identify themselves as just Asian rather than mixed.

The notion of white men stealing Asian women is ludicrous. As noted earlier, there are less of these marriages than there are gay couples, despite Asians and whites making up a far higher proportion of the American population. It has been said that all stereotypes have some shred of truth but I was unable to find any statistics that back up these "stealing" claims. 1 million people in a nation of 300 million, or 0.33% of the population, is a rain drop in a deluge. The idea that a white man cannot love an Asian woman in the same way he would love a white woman is equally, if not more absurd. The Asian man has become what Ann Coulter has described as the liberals' false victim. They pretend like they're the ones under siege, which allows them to be openly racist against whites. The couple who are scandalized and their children who are forced to deny and be ashamed of their heritage are the real victims.

Conclusion
Liberals claim they are a progressive group despite frequently trying to adapt archaic ideas to modern society. No more has this been seen with interracial relationships. They have taken the broad concept of 19th century colonialism and have tried to apply it to a different time and society. Any competent historian will tell you that while cultures are not islands, history is. You cannot try to fit historical events in to events of a different time. History does not repeat itself. Yet the left still insists on claiming that it does.

The left has created a racially discriminatory atmosphere between white men and Asian women. The idea that white men are inherently controlling, obsessed with the exotic, and seek out submissive, naive "others" is just not true. He can love a woman of another race just as much as he can a woman of his own race. Those who try to claim otherwise are simply bigots. This belief hurts both partners who engage in such interracial relationships, as well as their children who are forced to be torn between two identities when they should celebrate both. In a society that supposedly proclaims racial blindness, no more has racial identity divided people. People should not be made to feel ashamed of their loved ones, or their heritage, simply because they do not match.

(Note: White some have tried to lump Indians, Bangladeshis, and Pakistanis into the mix, I define Asians as being from nations that border the Pacific or from the Indo-China subcontinent. ie Chinese, Japanese, Vietnamese, Korean, Filipino, etc.)