A white country-boy’s journey of living and working with (Asian) people
I myself come out of the blue-collar diaspora of Americans who nurture a deeply held generational distrust of Asian peoples. A distrust that stems in part from a history of conflict and aggression that includes the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, and the ensuing World War II, followed by the Korean and Vietnam Wars. Families whose siblings, spouses, parents, cousins, and neighbors died, were maimed, or otherwise mentally and emotionally damaged from these conflicts.
Families who learned the language of distrust and de-humanization and passed it down by modeling those beliefs in the stories and jokes they told, and the way they rejected Asian peoples in their communities. The way these same kinds of folks today can dismiss Chinese peoples because of their communism while blindly embracing Putin-led Russian communism. Because, Putin’s a “strong-white-man” who has the “right” values, and the Chinese are not, and don’t.
The summer before I entered middle school, my first cousin came to live with us. His father, my uncle, was a career Air Force pilot. His mother, my aunt, from Thailand. My cousin (I’ll call him Gabe), was five years old and lived in Texas. My uncle was rarely at home, usually away on missions and training. My aunt was not able to care for Gabe, as she was caught in a cycle of drugs and gambling, and probably deep loneliness missing her own country and family.
When Gabe came to live with my family in Indiana he wasn’t healthy and seemed little and somewhat malnourished. Although we were light bronze tanned from always being outside in the sun, we were somewhat fascinated with Gabe’s brown skin that he didn’t need to be in the sunshine to inherently display. Skin that was married to mitochondria in his DNA that stretched back millennia into Southeast Asia of his mother’s ancestors.
He seemed more like a toddler at that time than a Kindergartener. He had never been to any school. He didn’t have a very good grasp of English and didn’t know basic things like the names of colors or how to count. He was, however, able to recount, as only a five-year-old can, of times when his mom didn’t come home. He was left for days at a time on his own. He would push a chair in front of the refrigerator and climb up to the top door, open the freezer, pull out things like frozen French fries and popsicles, eating those to stay alive.
That first summer with Gabe my sister and I spent most of our days with him and became surrogate teachers. We taught him how to say things, how to learn the basic things that a child his age generally knows. Gabe never caught on to school or that way of learning through academics and being in the world. Growing up with Gabe, he was like a brother, but if I’m honest, not as close to me. That might have been partly a factor of me growing into my teenage years, as I didn’t have as much to do with my own biological brother at that time either, who was ten years younger than me. It seemed to me that my parents did their best to include and treat Gabe as their son.
When Gabe was twelve, I discovered that he had been sneaking out in the middle of the night and taking my 1970’s Chevy Malibu for joy rides all over the county with other friends. That explained the strange jumps in miles on the dashboard and the frequent and nearly empty gas tank that had me searching for a leak in the system.
Not long after Gabe turned sixteen and got his driver’s license, I had come home on a weekday from my graduate school courses to grab a textbook and lunch and found him on the couch. He said he was ill and couldn’t go to school. I offered to take him to see a doctor, but he said he could drive himself and had an appointment.
I watched him drive out of our long gravel lane in our old Ford farm truck. At that moment I didn’t know that I wouldn’t see Gabe again for two more years. His mother, still living in Texas, had hatched a plan to have Gabe drive down to Texas to see her and then get on a plane and return together to Thailand. I believe Gabe and his mother missed each other fiercely. His dad had a year earlier retired from the Air Force, divorced Gabe’s mom, and was living locally to us in a nearby small town in Indiana, but had not been able to rekindle a relationship with Gabe.
It was quite a shock to my family to lose Gabe in that way. That he had abandoned us. I could understand why he wanted to be with his birth mother, but at the same time, it felt like a slap in the face to my parents. If I’m honest, that experience likely made me mistrustful of not only Gabe but also at an unconscious level reinforced distrust and biases against any Asian person that my culture had already inculcated within me.
Fast forward nine years, and I started my first full-time professional position at the local university. Although in the early years of my career I didn’t work very much directly with Asian students or staff, by mid-career I was interacting frequently with students and staff of Asian descent. At first, I admit, I had a very difficult time conversing, remembering, and pronouncing names, often having to ask them to repeat things.
Many staff I worked with used terms like “foreigners” to refer to the international students. Looking back, I think there was a general low simmering resentment of Asian students, with a belief that they were taking “our” spots. Meaning, somehow their presence at the university meant that “our” American sons and daughters were displaced from the university at that same rate that these “foreigners” came in. The same old scarcity mindset ruled the day. Never mind that the university already had dedicated slots for international students because it was great for the financial bottom-line. It was then that I started banishing words like “foreigner” from my vocabulary.
I realized this prejudice against Asian students was as much my issue as anyone else’s. I made a commitment to do a much better job of being an active and aware listener. I was determined to be able to surpass my old filters of distrust and to be open to learning from and collaborating with people who were not just like me.
Ten years ago, as I opened myself to go on a life-long journey of addressing my implicit biases, I started to see the full worth and the divine in each person no matter where they come from. My world has opened and has become much richer. In part, this has been a result of working directly with people of Asian descent.
I fully have committed to understanding and teaching others about implicit bias, and how inclusive diversity makes us a better community, better people, and a better country. It is far past time that we as a nation grow beyond our petty fears of people who are not just like us. To instead embrace all people, welcoming them with open hearts and open minds, and realizing that inclusive diversity is our ultimate strength.
This means it requires people like me to have the courage to enter into being vulnerable to our fears and to our unknowns, showing up day in and day out with open hands and open hearts. To take the uncomfortable journey of laying yourself bare to see all the culturally inculcated biases within that prevent us from becoming wholehearted human beings, that stunt us from our full potentials. To actively choose to be anti-racist. To be an active ally for those who are oppressed.
There is no room for hate. There is no middle-ocean island called “not racist” where one can perpetually vacation as a bystander to prejudice and racism. Tolerance is not enough. The time for Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s vision and dream is nigh. This arc of justice and freedom is a long journey, the first steps of which each individual must decide to take by addressing their own biases. None of us will ever get this perfectly. We will make mistakes. But, make no mistake that there is never, ever, any room for hate.
#StopAsianHate
About the author: Brent Thomas Ladd is a writer, musician, and professional educator. He blogs at emergewild.com, connecting wild hearts with the wild world.
