Raymond Zhou

A clear case of racist lunacy

By Raymond Zhou (China Daily)
Updated: 2007-03-17 06:32

There is a furor in the Asian-American community. It was caused by an article entitled "Why I Hate Black People" by Kenneth Eng, which was published last month in the San Francisco-based newspaper AsianWeek.

Now, I won't quote from it or link to its Web page, which was removed by the paper anyway. But the content in graphic or text form is floating in cyberspace, sparking heated debate and denunciation. And two more of Eng's opinion pieces are still available: "Proof That Whites Inherently Hate Us" and "Why I Hate Asians".

Eng is a self-proclaimed "Asian supremacist", proud of his racial bigotry and despising those Asians who he deems "inferior" "suck-up" members of his "master race". If you ponder his logic, he hates everyone except those as deluded as he is. That's why no sensible Asian could possibly side with him even though he puts Asians on the top of his racist stack.

If one agrees with his logic that one race is innately superior, it will soon follow that one place, one gender, one type of physique is destined to be the greatest the "one", the "savior" of the human race, so to speak. Doesn't that sound familiar?

It would be so easy to laugh him off as a joke. But the case of Kenneth Eng offers us a chance to look into the soil, both social and psychological, that breeds this second coming of nation-destroying racist lunatics of every skin color.

In the US, Asians have traditionally kept a low profile. As late as half a century ago, they could not have interracial marriages; and even now they have a hard time breaking into pop culture. It wouldn't be a far stretch to presume that Eng suffers from a persecution complex and tries to overcompensate it with an armor of pre-emptive attacks.

His stereotyping of black Americans is so ugly that you won't see anything like it in a public arena of discussion. But Eng is obviously not alone. Echoes of his sophomoric intolerance can be found anywhere, including here in China. Some international schools reject blacks whose native language is English, and hire whites whose first language is not, as English language teachers. This is dictated by the pupils' parents, according to the reports.

Most people harbor some form of racism. Yet, most people are good-hearted and will counter it with common sense and growing understanding. In Guangzhou, when Africans arrived to conduct business there a couple of years ago, they were sometimes avoided like the plague on buses. But with more of them coming to town, it is rare nowadays for locals to view them with suspicion.

It is not cause for alarm that a ranting and lurid racialist like Eng has burst on the scene. Any society, no matter how harmonious, always has freaks on its fringes. It should be a concern when such blatant hatred goosesteps into the mainstream.

When I browse Internet forums and blogs here, I'm under the constant impression that we have millions of Kenneth Engs spewing fire and poison like an army of deranged dragons. They start by hating people from Henan Province because some egregious crimes happened there. Then they denounce any place that receives negative news coverage or any people whose opinions differ from theirs.

It is saddening if this is a glimpse of free expression. I'm sure it cannot represent the majority of the Chinese people, but when you get vociferous enough you can drown out the rational voice. Well, at least in San Francisco, AsianWeek promptly dismissed Eng and issued an apology.

I believe that Eng's rant, dangerous as it is, should not be muzzled. We need to be aware what type of world we live in. The question is, how can we keep the uninitiated from being infected by such demagoguery?

E-mail: raymondzhou@chinadaily.com.cn

(China Daily 03/17/2007 page4)