Am I the Racist Next Door?

by Kenneth L. Warner

On a single day in mid-March, a deranged 21-year-old man walked into Atlanta massage parlors and shot 8 people, 7 of whom where Asian-American women.

Apparently, according to some, he was having a “really bad day”.

Now, a few short weeks later, the tragedy has slid off the front pages, replaced by lurid tales of sexual predator congressman, and at least two other mass shootings. It’s no surprise. Let’s face it. Sex sells. And, murder of white people is all more interesting. One in Boulder Colorado, the other in Indianapolis. On the other hand, in an era where shootings are common-place and armed insurgents storm the country’s capital, it hardly stands out for many people. But for people like me, and for a brief moment, the country suddenly awoke, full of astonishment and bewilderment to learn that there is an undercurrent of hate for Asian-Americans, despite a long and not too proud history of murder, rape, abuse, discrimination and prejudice against this minority.

It’s part of the American experience I have lived since childhood.

But you wouldn’t know it to look at me.

You see, in another day, in another time, my Mother was what was called a “half-breed”. Her Mother, Edith Tokanaga was a Japanese and her father was a mongrel of somewhat undetermined origin, a sailor who happened by the Hawaiian Island of Oahu in the City of Honolulu sometime in the late 1920’s. While he was there, he fathered three children; a firstborn boy Fred (named after his Father), Edith (Tita, Named after her Mother) and Margaret Mildred (my Mother, named after a sister).

Within a few years, he was gone, deserting my Grandmother and leaving her to fend for herself.

From what I can tell, she appears to have been born in Honolulu sometime around 1909. She became a Mother just 15 or 16 years later.

Edith Tokanaga was one of three daughters and was born on the island of Oahu in the Territory of Hawaii — a U.S. spoil of war from Spain after the Spanish-American War of 1898. Her father was a gambler of sorts and not a very lucky one apparently, as having three daughters in those days was about as unlucky as you can get if you are Japanese around the turn of the century. Children of the female persuasion were more or less useless as heirs, and so this “Great” grandfather of mine did what anyone would under the same circumstances — he sold them.

He kept one of them, Mildred, to help with the household work and cooking and her fortunes rose and fell with his luck at the gambling halls. Sometimes she had precious stones and pearl rings (one of which I still have) and which she shared with her sisters. At other times, she had to re-collect them and return them to their father to be hocked or lost at the gaming tables.

My Grandmother, Edith was sold to a quiet Carpenter and his wife, also to serve as a housekeeper, but apparently lived a quite happy life as they were kind and caring.

Mitsue, the third one, went to a modest couple who could have no children and sorely wanted one of their own. But she didn’t have much of a history. Apparently, in an effort to improve the family’s financial circumstances, she was betrothed in marriage to the first borne son of a wealthy family across town. Unfortunately, on or about the age of 13 as the marriage loomed, it was revealed that she was in love with the boy next door and wasn’t too keen on her impending wedding. So, to avoid the ignominy and sadness of a life spent without love, she and her young lover hung themselves in the backyard — to be together forever in death.

And so, I too have much in common with so many people in these United States — my forbears were sold as if they were cattle.

To this day, I still cannot comprehend this tragedy.

But, until the murders in Atlanta I seldom related these stories because frankly, no-one gives a good crap about Asian Americans and the discrimination they have endured.

My Mother and Father met just a year or two after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. My Dad was serving in the United States Army Air Corp at Hickam Field in the heights above Pearl. My Mother was about 14, I think, and Dad was 22. No matter. It was a different time and, as my Mother told me later, “Being a girl then was tough. There were limited choices for girls. Work in the pineapple fields, serve as waitress or — if you graduated business school — become a secretary. Your one real hope was to find a service man and get the hell off that island”.

They married in 1946 moved back to Ilion, New York and had their firstborn, my Brother who for some unknown reason, they named Wynn. They were hardly welcomed to the Mohawk Valley with open arms. My Father’s sister and husband didn’t speak to them for over 30 years because he married a “nip” and my Mother, being a half-breed, looked like one.

And, so did my brother. I “escaped” a lot because I look almost exactly like my father. By 1953 shortly before I was born, they left Ilion and moved to Rochester, New York, then Brockport just west of there.

Despite being victims of discrimination, I grew up in a house learning not to be prejudiced. When I was a kid as far as I could tell, we were the only people around who had blacks and Jews as guests to our house. Just to be clear, we weren’t perfect. Much to my Father’s chagrin, we even had gay people … “queers” come to the house.

In Fact, so insulated against prejudice were we that when I was 30 or so, I was appalled to find out that my mother did not, in fact, like Italians. “Don’t ever marry an Italian,” she warned me. “They’re a dirty people and they cheat at everything”.

I guess even my mother had to look down on someone.

But still, growing up, I didn’t comprehend that we were different …. Like I said, I looked like my Father and my brother looked like my mother. He was regularly called “Chink” and was the subject of never ending insults and hatred which manifested most on the ride home each night at the hands of a particularly racist school bus driver. Strangely, the fact that he was bullied and picked on seemed normal to me. The part I didn’t understand was that he seemed to take it all in pretty passively.

I on the other hand, fought. And, many was the time we would get off the bus after a fight between me and someone who called my brother a chink, and I being slightly bloodied and not eager to have my bad behavior discovered by my parents would slink round the back. Unfortunately, my brother was quick to tell on me to my mother, for reasons I have also never understood. But that’s the way he was.

However, instead of my Mother giving me the all-too-often received spanking, she did something practical. She told my Father to give me a few pointers about boxing.

He had been a professional tap dancer before joining the Air Corp and had fought his way through Ilion High School because of it.

There were lots of other examples of unpleasantness we endured, the most dramatic happening on a family camping trip to Texas to see the country being forced to leave a restaurant in South Carolina where “No Japs Are Allowed”.

Meanwhile, back in our quaint little canal-side hometown of Brockport, we were politely excluded from social gatherings.

Rumors. Slights. Whispers.

Though I found myself to be basically a shy kid, I kind of reveled in my “different-ness”. I grew up as the “Oriental Kid” and was often asked to bring the trappings to school: Grand-mother’s kimonos, a seashell purse, beaten plant cloth. Chopsticks. A picture of my Mother in a grass skirt. And, when my friends came to stay overnight, they left with tales of strange exotic foods. “Did you know they eat seaweed,” they would often say when back in the cafeteria on Monday.

My brother eventually got through it all by moving to Hawaii immediately after High School and marrying a Pacific Islander, immersing himself in the culture of tens of thousands of others just like him

I ended up taking the coward’s way out… I hid behind the mask of my white Irish Ass.

But with age comes enlightenment and after a strange conversation with a close friend of mine whose parents came from Italy via Argentina after WW2 (they were secretly fascists), I decided to really own the fact that I wasn’t a white Irishman.

He had an incredible vocal prejudice against anyone who wasn’t a white person. In any conversation regarding race, he had a favorite quip. “I have nothing against (insert the “N” word here)”, he would say. “I think every man should own one of them”.

Earlier that year I had signed “The Pledge”, a movement in my town where you made a promise to call out any overtly racists jokes or remarks by anyone. Here was the moment of truth. Would I speak up? Or, would I be silent?

Am I the racist next door?

Thinking of my own guarded bloodline, I asked him, “Why would you say a thing like that? You never know who you might be talking to”.

“Because those people aren’t the same as you and me,” he said.

He’s right. I remember thinking, we’re not. Though we’re both Americans, he forgot that a generation ago, no-one wanted him around either.

And so, I told him. I too was not a white guy.

“I knew there was something different about you,” he shot back, laughing.

We remained friends and I learned the lesson that the difference isn’t the color of our skin or the part of the world our ancestors came from. The difference is that he didn’t recognize how much we were alike, only how much we are different.

For me though, it was an admission of who I am.

Shortly after that, I came to my senses — literally. I took a major step and changed my census form to pacific Islander. And, I continue to interject the fact that I’m exactly the people you don’t like when I’m in a conversation with a friend who is a racist.

In many ways, hearing the news of slaughter in Atlanta hasn’t surprised me. Nor has its short-lived headline grabbing details. True, some news outlets are telling the latest about shoving, punching, stabbing and spitting on Asians in random attacks But no-one is marching in the streets.

Brought into the country to build railroads, the first Asian migration happened sometime in the late 1800s in the American Northwest. Oregon in particular was the first state to actually prohibit Asians from living there. And because of it, Asians were the target of the very first immigration legislation targeting a specific group of people. KEEP THEM OUT!

Maybe that’s why I never really appreciated the humor of “Portlandia”.

My youthful silence and cowardice at being afraid of my ancestry means that I could have been the racist next door to you, albeit with a dark secret.

The concept of America for Americans isn’t new. But we all lose due to its lack of basis in fact along with our Black and Brown sisters and brothers still suffering the ignominy of a heritage of slavery.

But there’s some hope. After George Floyd I think we’ve come a long way since I was a kid fighting off white kids in defense of my brother. It only took us 400 years to get here.

At this rate, I’m guessing Asian Americans should make the same progress as Blacks in America sometime around the year 2321.

I can’t wait.