The Race Factor in Asian American Life
By wchung | 22 Feb, 2025

Recognizing racism may be the hardest part of dealing with it.

An Ohio football coach was convicted of setting fire to his own house and, presumedly, spray painted racial slurs on his own car to lend creedence to his argument that he is the victim of racial hatred. The fire was set a few days after the coach — a black man — was charged with sexual battery on a 15-year-old girl — a charge of which he was later convicted.

On the other extreme are Asian Americans who draw blanks when asked if they have ever suffered racial prejudice.

Two strategies for dealing with a sticky area of life for minorities.

We might call the first an example of the active exploitation of victimhood while the second amounts to active denial of victimhood. It would be easy to write off both extremes as being divorced from reality. That wouldn’t be completely accurate either. I have personally experienced extreme racial hostility of the kind the misguided coach was trying to conjure up. I have also experienced long stretches of life devoid of encounters with discernible racial prejudice during which it was tempting to believe that race was a non-factor.

But as most of us know, in a multi-cultural society like the U.S. our race is always with us, whether we want to acknowledge it. With a little luck most of us avoid becoming the targets of extreme racists. Few of us are lucky enough to avoid entirely the sting and indignity of racial prejudice or hostility.

My encounters with racism come mostly in three forms: rejection, stereotypes and racial slurs.

Rejection is the trickiest to talk about because, typically, racism can only be suspected, rarely proven. If I am rejected for a date or a job, I can’t be sure it isn’t because I am just unappealing for qualities that have nothing to do with my race. Maybe it’s the way I dress or speak or walk. Or maybe it has to do with qualities that are incidental to my race. For an Asian man in America, rejections cast a longer shadow of doubt than they ought to. Most men learn to shake off rejection from women like a duck shakes off water. But for us Asian American men it lingers a while as we mull the aspects of social and cultural psychology that might have played a role.

Stereotypes are annoying. They are also deceptively corrosive, being the insidious poison that destroys normal interactions. Some random stereotype could have been the basis of a rejection. Another could have provided impetus for a racial slur muttered in passing or shouted from a car. You can’t tell how deeply stereotypes distort the psyches of those with whom you’re dealing and how much they twist the motivations behind others’ behavior.

Slurs are angering because they seek to demean by reducing me down to a monosyllable. They’re little paintballs of hate splattered into what might have been a perfectly pleasant moment. If you make an issue of it, it can further damage the moment for others arround you. If you don’t, it sullies your peace of mind for a long time. They are rarely uttered so as to give me a chance to address the speaker face to face. They’re the weapon of choice of cowardly racists who have nothing to lose by showing themselves to be dirtballers.

Yes, racial prejudice and hatred have a presence in my life. They are by no means front and center, but they do discolor some of my experiences. They also provide a powerful motivation for the empathy I feel toward not only other Asians but all persons in the minority, no matter their race. Even that coach in Ohio — despite the convictions — got me wondering if he was the victim of a racist setup. It wouldn’t have been the first time and won’t be the last, not even under a black President.

And those Asians who claim never to have experienced racism — I can only wonder at the depths of pain behind that self-deception.