{"id":6206,"date":"2013-08-26T14:16:42","date_gmt":"2013-08-26T18:16:42","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.racefiles.com\/?p=6206"},"modified":"2020-12-16T17:10:58","modified_gmt":"2020-12-17T01:10:58","slug":"why-i-dont-date-white-boyz","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.racefiles.com\/2013\/08\/26\/why-i-dont-date-white-boyz\/","title":{"rendered":"Why I don\u2019t date White Boyz"},"content":{"rendered":"

Are you alarmed? I won\u2019t be offended if you are. Many White Boyz have been alarmed by this, for instance on Craigslist where once upon a time I sometimes looked for dates. \u201cYou\u2019re a reverse racist!\u201d \u201cWhite guys can\u2019t catch a break!\u201d If you aren\u2019t alarmed, it\u2019s possible that you are an Asian woman who has visited the Internet during the last 2 decades. Maybe you, like me and the creator of Creepy White Guys<\/a>, have been messaged by this guy on OK Cupid (yes, he copies and pastes this message to many lucky Asian ladies):<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Or maybe you\u2019re into really terrible music and watched the music video called \u201cAsian Girlz\u201d by Day Above Ground. My absolute favorite lines, as hard as it is to choose, are: Butt fucking all night\/Korean barbecue\/Bitch I love you\/I love your creamy yellow thighs\/Ooh your slanted eyes\/It\u2019s the Year of the Dragon\/Ninja pussy I\u2019m stabbin\u2019<\/em>. Don\u2019t get me wrong. I love the Year of the Dragon (not so much the racist movie with Mickey Rourke from the 1980s, but the actual lunar calendar year). I also love Korean barbecue, although it doesn\u2019t usually come to mind while some flabby, tatted-up White guy with appropriative tribal plugs in a ninja costume is romancing me, i.e. calls me a bitch and \u201cstabs\u201d my privates.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

My choice (and note that I never say never, there may be a very special White Boy for me out there going through some anti-white supremacy, anti-heteropatriarchy, class-conscious, feminist reconditioning program) is not a judgment of any other woman\u2019s choice (which would be ridiculously anti-woman, by the way), but few can deny that some of the most comprehensive political, historic, racial and social convergences occur at the sites of dating, love and intimacy, sex and sexual desire. The personal is political, and though I shouldn\u2019t have to bear the burden of representation (e.g. like Day Above Ground didn\u2019t have to worry about backlash from members of the White race in the way Levy Tran and the sad Indonesian guy did after Asian Girlz) I am intensely aware of and made uncomfortable by the historical and contemporary context<\/a> of interpersonal relationships between Asian women and White men. Here\u2019s a contextual list, borrowing in part from Day Above Ground\u2019s brilliant and complex lyrics:<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. \u201cBitch I love you.\u201d<\/strong> It\u2019s hard enough dating men. Period. We live in a white supremacist patriarchy if you haven\u2019t noticed. I\u2019ve been cheated on, lied to, and disrespected by men of color plenty, but I\u2019m still holding onto the belief that collective, shared experiences can play a role in humanizing love.<\/li>\n
  2. \u201cHappy endings all over…Tofu\/All over you all over me.\u201d<\/strong> I don\u2019t know how to participate in \u201cnormal\u201d couples behavior, i.e. massage, cooking, eating, without these lyrics repeating over and over again in my head.<\/li>\n
  3. \u201cOh, tradition, tradition, tradition, yeah yeah.\u201d<\/strong> And? Everyone has traditions. For instance, Christmas, Rosh Hashanah, birthday cake, missionary style, driving on the right side of the road, the Gregorian calendar. In a racial context that doesn\u2019t fit in the Eurocentric imagination as normal, basically everything that is non-white, becomes exotic, alien, \u201calternative\u201d and other, with no room to expose the racial and cultural hierarchy that deems them as such.<\/li>\n
  4. \u201cCome on sit on my lap (right here baby). Or we\u2019ll send you back.\u201d<\/strong> Um, no thank you, gross colonizer. I think Sonia Shah says it best: \u201cIt is about understanding the global, driving forces that shape Asian America–imperialism, military interventions, trade, resource extraction, environmental degradation, forced and voluntary immigrations. These are the international forces that have created an Asian America.\u201d* If you understand all this, maybe I will consider sitting on your lap, or at least let you sit on mine.<\/li>\n
  5. \u201cFa ra ra ra ra ra ra ra ra ra ra.\u201d<\/strong> Essentially, this fifth point is meant to capture topics I will be reflecting on in future posts. I mean, there are so many. These are some things I jotted down some notes while (trying to) listen to \u201cAsian Girlz\u201d: rape and sexual violence; Orientalism and essentialism; militarized prostitution\/war brides; yellow peril. You\u2019re really in for a treat.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    In closing, I really do want to thank Day Above Ground. Now when I Google \u201cAsian girls\u201d, some of the top hits are something other than porn or dating sites. Score.<\/p>\n

     <\/p>\n

    *2003, Sonia Shah, Race and Representation: Asian Americans. In M. Evelina Galang, editor. Screaming Monkeys: Critiques of Asian American Images. Minneapolis, MN: Coffee House Press<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    Are you alarmed? I won\u2019t be offended if you are. Many White Boyz have been alarmed by this, for instance on Craigslist where once upon a time I sometimes looked for dates. \u201cYou\u2019re a reverse racist!\u201d \u201cWhite guys can\u2019t catch a break!\u201d If you aren\u2019t alarmed, it\u2019s possible that you are an Asian woman who […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":13,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[184,874,878],"coauthors":[],"class_list":["post-6206","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog","tag-anti-asian-racism","tag-asian-girlz","tag-day-above-ground"],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.racefiles.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6206","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.racefiles.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.racefiles.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.racefiles.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/13"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.racefiles.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6206"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/www.racefiles.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6206\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6208,"href":"https:\/\/www.racefiles.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6206\/revisions\/6208"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.racefiles.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6206"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.racefiles.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6206"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.racefiles.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6206"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.racefiles.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=6206"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}