So I received this tweet from @Rashnu_TheOther
Thank you for the reply. But may I ask: to mistreat whom?
It is important to point out that if you are Asian and White, and somehow find echoes of your heritage in a colonial past, you will not emerge from any introspection without realizing you were both colonized and colonizer.
I don't want to be anything other than be sincere. And this is the truth. Historical Eurasians, those in Malaya and the Indian Subcontinent and Borneo and Hong Kong etc., were a mezzanine class, under Europeans, above the masses with "darker skin and flatter noses" to borrow a phrase from Conrad.
It is an unsettling thought. But it is true. No amount of spotlighting an external imposition makes up for the fact that historical Eurasians "played ball." They did the deal. The were the "house negroes" of Western Imperialism in Asia. See Malcolm X here to refresh on what I'm talking about.
This history amounts to a stain on mixed Asian and White people, one that remains today. The intellectual battlelines are drawn though. Most mixed people will go directly to blaming this stain on someone else. They will say they were powerless. They will use fancy words to rhetorically absolve themselves every chance possible, as the power/circumstance/fate was external, it was some institution, some structure, some formidable cabal dripping with bloodlust.
I wrote my book to say that the internal matters. In my opinion the moral gravity of the stain I mentioned above is made worse by the obfuscation of that stain. The get out clause is that many people obfuscate that stain and claim they were victims almost as a reflex. Sure. That deserves cutting you a little slack. But it is time to call it like it is.
I'm sorry, right this moment, now, it is time to be sincere.
Most people will fall into one of three categories
- apathy
- victim
- something else
#1 and #2 are not sincere. They may be other things. But they are not sincere. And simply put, the goal of my advocacy is for category #3, something else... Which I believe can and will be sincere.
To be continued