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| Protest sign at July 15, 2015 Kimono Wednesdays protest |
Please see my original post for background: Monet's La Japonaise Kimono Wednesdays at the MFA.
Due to the length of this post I am publishing it in three parts. I strongly urge readers to read all three parts – they were written as one piece. Please see the introduction in Part 1 for comments on my bias.
Part 1: Kimono Wednesdays protest postmortem: media, public, critics
Part 3: Kimono Wednesdays protest postmortem: MFA, my role, final thoughts, further reading
(continued from Part 1)
The Protesters
The final protest was the first time I saw the protesters holding two signs invoking Japanese American human rights activist Yuri Kochiyama (see also Wikipedia). The signs read "CHANNEL YOUR INNER... Kochiyama" and "CHANNEL YOUR INNER
"My Creed...22"
"To never humiliate or look down on any person, group, creed, religion, nationality, race, employment, or station in life, but rather to respect."
"To love everyone; to never know the meaning of hate, or have one enemy. (An enemy, to me, is only created in one's mind). Should another dislike me or hate me because of some of my weaknesses, my actions, or what I have said, or how I have felt, or through prejudice, I will accept it without resentment, but all the while I will do all in my personality to better my ways and make myself acceptable.
To stay on the same "side of the track" as whoever I am with, but still live within the limits of my own ideals. Regardless of whatever my actions seem wrong in the eyes of society, I will do that which I am doing as long as I am not infringing on the happiness of another, hurting another, and as long as I can look at myself without feeling ashamed.
To never harbor a feeling that someone has been unfair to me, but rather to feel in such a case, that I deserved it; to take every disappointment, disillusion, sorrow, and grief as a part of life; to never expect another to be indebted to help me, but should I be able to help anyone, to be grateful that I could be of use.
To give the advantage, but never to ask for it; to be strict with myself, but not with others; to be humble enough to stoop to any degree as long as it is in service and another."
From the very beginning the protesters seemed to be doing everything possible to alienate potential allies including fellow Asian Americans. One of the criticisms that I saw early on was that their original name "Stand Against Yellow-Face @ the MFA" was offensive to Asian Americans. I found it absurd and offensive and refused to use it in any of my posts. I saw commentary from Asian Americans saying that the protest group's name was the most offensive thing about the whole situation. Some people couldn't understand the name because they didn't see how dressing up as a white woman was equivalent to yellowface. In spite of the criticism they stuck with that name for four weeks before rebranding as "Decolonize Our Museums", which it seems people find even less understandable than their first name.
One major misstep they made was allowing their white allies to tell Asian Americans how they should be feeling about the protest. I understand that sometimes this happened because the protesters were tired of engaging with the public on Facebook but it should not have been permitted. It was somewhat ironic given that one of the protesters' main complaints against the MFA is that due to the white power structure Asian Americans and other people of color are represented in ways they don’t want us to be represented, yet they were allowing white allies to represent the protest and speak for them. I asked a white friend who has done social justice work about this and she said that the first thing she was told when she started that work was that white allies are never allowed to speak to people of color. They are there for support and to talk to other white people but you absolutely never have them telling people of color how they should feel or taking them to task if they don’t support the protest.
There was also some feeling from Japanese and Japanese Americans that the Asian American protesters who were not of Japanese descent had no right to tell them how they should feel about representations of our culture and that if there was a fight to be had with the MFA, that it was between Japanese/Japanese Americans and the MFA, not other Asian Americans and the MFA.
If they had taken a different approach they might have garnered more support because there are some Japanese Americans and Asian Americans who are uncomfortable with the MFA's actions. However, even those who understand some of the issues the protesters have brought up don't want to be associated with them because of their rhetoric and vitriol. I don't see that changing. They have said that they never said they were against white people wearing kimono but one of their first signs said that doing so would help you "learn what it's like to be a racist imperialist !!!today!!!" I'm not sure how else people were supposed to interpret that sign. It doesn't go after the MFA, it goes after the people trying on the kimono. The photo they've used for publicity of the person holding that sign talking to the elderly white couple in the uchikake didn't help since it made it look like they were calling the couple "racist imperialists".
Many people were critical of their use of “big words” and incomprehensible short essays on their signs which may have been an anti-intellectual dig but was a valid criticism. They called out "classism" in one of the their signs yet the language of the protest itself was elitist. It wasn’t clear to me and others, who they were trying to reach. Maybe they thought that using academic language would be appealing to rich white museumgoers but even if you’re educated, unless you studied women and gender studies or critical race theory, a lot of the lingo would be unfamiliar. Some activists argue that this argument is itself elitist because if you dumb down the language of a protest for the least educated, then you keep them down by not educating them. This isn't the argument that I'm making. I heard from plenty of educated people who weren't able to understand what the protest was about because their education was in other areas of study or because English was not their first language. By using language from critical art, race, and feminist theory they made the protest inaccessible to most of the public, especially those who lack the educational background or language fluency to understand and discuss many of the concepts they brought up.
One of the biggest criticisms I saw was that the protest seemed to be poorly researched. They appeared to get many basic facts wrong as well as making assumptions without having all the information. It is also possible they obscured the facts in an effort to fit the story to their narrative. Here is a list of what they got wrong:
- They portrayed Kimono Wednesdays as having been dreamt up and executed by an all-white MFA staff. As has been widely reported, the uchikake replicas were commissioned by NHK, Japan's public broadcaster, and similar events were held at three museums in Japan. This was something I dug up on my own with less than a day of research.
- They assumed that Japanese people would also be offended which goes back to the likelihood that they didn't know that this event had origins in Japan.
- They mischaracterized the "kimono" as "dress" (though it's unclear if they meant "a dress" or "clothing") and implied that the MFA had done something wrong by using this venerable garment for a "'costume' event," perhaps not understanding that the uchikake that Camille Monet wore is actually a robe that was used in a performance (believed to be kabuki) at the Exposition universelle de 1867. This information would have been harder to find – I got it from my friend who got it from a book, however the information is available online. Of course, someone with a working knowledge of kimono would be able to deduce this, as the author of this Tumblr post did. The original uchikake didn't have some sacred significance and the replica uchikake were made by Japanese people for the express purpose of being used at "costume events". Crying foul that the MFA was using a replica costume for a costume event doesn't make sense.
- They didn't appear to have any idea that kimono try on is something commonly done as a Japanese cultural sharing event. They took issue with both the trying on and the photographing, something which is done at Japanese and Japanese American events all over the US.
- They seemed to conflate japonisme and orientalism. Most people seem to understand japonisme as a celebration of Japanese influence on Western culture as distinct from orientalism which is seen as "a general patronizing Western attitude" towards all non-European societies.
- One of their signs proclaimed, "We stand in solidarity with all marginaliz
ed people whose histories have been stolen by institutio ns like the MFA," which if it was meant to apply to Japanese art means they didn't research the history of Japanese art at the MFA. The MFA's first Japanese curator, Okakura Kakuzō, came to the MFA in 1904 as an expert on Japanese art. Much of their Japanese art collection came from New England collectors with a deep love of Japan. Edward Morse feared that Japan's push towards modernization would bring about the loss of Japan's historical culture and he urged his friends to help preserve "Old Japan." This is why so many of Boston's art museums have Japanese art collections. I went to see the Hokusai exhibit with a Japanese woman who told me that some of the best preserved Japanese art she has seen was that which left Japan and was cared for elsewhere. The MFA's Japanese art was not stolen.
Following these errors, the protesters invited the public to "dialogue" on their Facebook page but when the public showed up, they dismissed everyone who had a differing opinion from them:
- Japanese Americans and Asian Americans were told that they were propping up the white supremacist power structure by failing to get on board with the protest.
- Japanese nationals living in the US were told they just couldn't understand or didn't care because they weren't American.
- Japanese nationals living in Japan were told their viewpoint was irrelevant because they don't understand what it's like to be an Asian or Asian American living in the US.
- White Westerners with Japanese spouses and children were told that as white people, they couldn't possibly be Japanese and it wasn't their place to speak for their communities. They explained that the reason they had come to share the Japanese view was because most of their friends and family didn't have the necessarily English language skills to follow and participate in a conversation this complex.
- One white woman who shared similar views with the white men living in Japan was told she was propping up the patriarchy by being on their team.
- White people were told they were being blind to the white supremacist power structure they are part of.
- Non-white critics were called apologists for white people.
This is not how dialogue works. The definition of dialogue is:
noun A discussion between two or more people or groups, especially one directed toward exploration of a particular subject or resolution of a problemIt seemed that the protesters were only willing to speak to people who thought similarly or were genuinely confused and asking them to explain themselves, though eventually they got tired of talking to those folks and stopped engaging with the public on their Facebook pages altogether. I don’t think the protests or the online "dialogue" had to be as divisive as they were. The protesters had an opportunity to educate a lot of people because of all the media attention they got. It's possible they had better luck educating people in person or in private online but from what I could see publicly, they completely wasted the opportunity.
The protesters seemed to be approaching Kimono Wednesdays and pretty much the entire world through the lens of their Western educations. Many critics pointed out that their view was a myopic Americocentric view. They appeared completely unable to comprehend that the world doesn't revolve around America and that many more groups had a stake in an event like Kimono Wednesdays than just Asian American women. The protesters had a specific agenda and didn’t seem open to other interpretations of history and art, including the Japanese one which seems pretty relevant to me. They want the MFA to teach a very particular view of history that is uniquely American – that of the West as aggressor and appropriator. I’ve been surprised to learn just how different the Japanese view is. The assumptions that the protesters made about how Japanese people feel about Japan being forced at gunpoint to open to trade, their relationship with Monet and other artists of the time who were fascinated with Japan, and even their relationship with America today were way off-base.
La Japonaise is celebrated in modern Japan. Monet is very popular and modern Japanese are very proud of the influence Japanese artists had on his work and the work of his contemporaries. They don't seem to view it as cultural appropriation or orientalism as the protesters kept insisting it was. Many people tried to share these views with the protesters but they didn't seem interested in hearing a non-American view of the world, because "we live in America." It seems the vast majority of Japanese people are more than happy to have their culture shared, used, and "appropriated" by other cultures today. They especially love seeing foreigners wearing kimono and there are some who are working actively to promote kimono outside of Japan. (For more on this see "The Public".)
The protesters didn't appear to understand or care about the things people living in Japan were sharing with them about the possible impact of their little protest on the kimono industry and Japan's already shaky relations with their neighbors (see China–Japan relations, Japan–South Korea relations, Japan–North Korea relations). It was arrogant of the protesters to demand that the world listen to them while simultaneously refusing to listen to Japanese nationals and residents. I did wonder to what degree these fears were exaggerated but I heard them over and over again. One Japanese woman who lives in Tokyo was so concerned about the protest and what it was doing to undermine Japan's efforts to share their culture that she flew in from LA where she was working to meet with the MFA and see the protest for herself. Japanese worry that American and other Western organizations may back away from promotion of kimono because they won't want to attract this kind of controversy. Even if Japanese fears were exaggerated, the protesters' self-focused Americocentric view and denial of Japanese concerns exacerbated the situation.
Many of the critics commented on the fact that the protesters were often referencing events and treatment of Asians that happened decades ago – everything from the 1982 murder of Vincent Chin to the Japanese American incarceration during WWII. I saw only two citations from incidents this year – a police brutality incident in Alabama and American Twitter celebration of the US Women's World Cup win over Japan. We've certainly had more recent examples of racism against Asian Americans so I don't know why they didn't cite more of those examples.
Some Japanese Americans, including myself, found the protesters' use of the Japanese American incarceration in service of their arguments offensive. While it's certainly one of the most egregious examples of the racism and oppression that a group of Asians and Asian Americans have faced in the US, what happened to Japanese and Japanese Americans during WWII was specific to our community and doesn't reflect what was going on for Chinese Americans and others Asians who were able to keep their freedom and who didn't show solidarity with us during the war. Chinese and Korean Americans were actively letting whites know they were not Japanese and “hate the Japs more than you do". I understand that this was a matter of survival for them, but Chinese America benefited from not being incarcerated the way Japanese Americans were. Most major US cities have a Chinatown. We’re down to three US cities with Japantowns (Los Angeles, San Francisco, and San Jose) thanks to the incarceration, the post-war Japanese American push to assimilate, and a decline in Japanese immigration. Chinese Americans have had an easier time preserving their language and cultural heritage because they didn't feel the same pressure that Japanese felt after the war to assimilate into American society. To now say this is an example of how Asian Americans are oppressed to this day is offensive when many Japanese Americans who have a family camp history don't make that connection. I see far more commonalities between the Japanese American incarceration and the treatment of Muslim Americans today (some of whom are Asian and some of whom are not) than I do with current Asian American experience. People in power continue to look to the Japanese American incarceration as a template for how to handle the War on Terror, something which Japanese Americans have continued to speak out against. Comparing Kimono Wednesdays to the Japanese American incarceration is absurd.
The protesters have sent mixed messages about what they want. When they were accused of wanting to ban art they said that was something they had never said and that all they wanted was better education. When the MFA announced that they would discontinue the uchikake try on the protesters celebrated the decision. However, they responded by continuing to demand that the MFA "Stop ‘Kimono Wednesdays’" and said they would continue to protest "because the museum is still displaying the kimono and encouraging people to touch it "under a continued and creepy orientalist gaze"." Stopping an event is the opposite of providing better education. Stopping an event results in no education. Every week their complaints shifted in response to the MFA’s actions and public reaction. I heard a lot of people say it seemed like the protesters were just looking for something to complain about. I’m sure it was more complicated than that, but the fact that their messaging was so scattered makes it unsurprising that the public was so confused.
I was disappointed but not surprised to see that the protesters did not actually back up their claim that they were for education. Prior to their July 8th protest (week 3), they did spend time preparing what they called “educational literature” – a dense two-page printout of their “LIST OF DEMANDS AND CHARGES” which is more akin to propaganda: “a form of communication aimed towards influencing the attitude of a population toward some cause or position.” They were blocked from distributing the fliers by “a representative” who told them it was the MFA’s “policy for visitors not to hand out flyers.” They questioned whether it was true. I contacted the MFA and confirmed that “it is the Museum’s policy that visitors are not allowed to distribute pamphlets or written materials on-site.” If they had been protesting on the sidewalk, which is city property, they would have been permitted to distribute whatever they wanted, but they chose to be in the gallery. The protesters complained at every turn that they were being victimized by the MFA (at one point complaining about the presence of their "security guards") when I think the reality was quite different. The museum bent over backwards to accommodate the protesters by allowing them to remain in the gallery and by making sure they had enough protective services staff on hand for the duration of the protests.
Many people, including Japanese Americans and Japanese felt that the mainly non-Japanese American protesters had appropriated a Japanese cultural event for their own agenda. Initially I wasn't willing to go down that road because I'm not sure that it would have mattered if the event had been related to China, Korea, Vietnam, or the Indian subcontinent, I think the protesters would have objected. However, after observing the degree to which they refused to acknowledge the views of the many dissenting Japanese, Japanese Americans, and other Asian Americans I do feel that they used Kimono Wednesdays to further their own agenda, most of which had nothing to do with Japan or representations of Asian women in America. They’ve made remarks about how Japan deserves better than this even though it seems like Japan is just fine with it. Japan has a long history working with the MFA. There is no way the MFA would have moved forward with the event if Japan had been upset about it. The protest has given the wrong impression to some members of the public that Japanese and Japanese Americans think it’s racist for white people to wear kimonos which isn’t what most of us think. The protesters have continued to act like Japan is the victim here (it's not) and we don’t have the agency or education to speak for ourselves which I, and other Japanese Americans, find incredibly patronizing.
The protesters' main objections seems to be focused around the MFA's white staff and white museumgoers. I admit that I cringed when I read that the only MFA staff the protesters saw were white, however, the idea that Japanese art can only be shared with white people in the presence of Japanese people is rather tokenizing. Japanese people don't need to be present to give white people permission to enjoy Japanese culture. The protesters also assumed that white museumgoers must have a certain level of ignorance of history. I don't understand why the protesters seemed so focused on gearing the programming towards ignorant white people. They also assumed that the only people who went to the MFA to experience Kimono Wednesdays were rich white people. Two of the counterprotesters I talked to who tried on the uchikake the first week are young and not wealthy as far as I could guess based on their talking about their shifts at work. During all three visits to the MFA last month I heard languages other than English and saw a lot of Asians as well as other people of color. Also, as I keep pointing out, the museum is free on Wednesday nights if you want it to be – admission is "by voluntary contribution" – so it's completely accessible to people who aren't wealthy.
Here's some commentary from Disorderly Politics: So . . . Can I Wear a Kimono Then?. It's a point-by-point response to the protest FAQ (please note the piece contains strong language and profanity). It is the only commentary on the protest that I've found from a black writer (Seph Rodney is from Jamaica but he didn't bring his race into his Hyperallergic piece):
"Well, I’m black and I’m offended at you calling white people racist. Also, me, I guess. I’m still not sure if other POC are included in the whole “this promotes white supremacy” thing. This [FAQ] has done a tremendous job of acting like no slightly tan person on the face of the earth was ever interested in attending that event or angered that it was canceled after someone cried racism. It was only the whites. And those poor white people. They don’t have pseudo-intellectual bullshit to fall back on to justify how saying “making people feel bad for no other reason than their race” isn’t racist. That’s something only we coloreds have."Much of the protest language appeared to be appropriated from the Black Lives Matter movement, something that many critics commented on. That is probably because the language that Black Lives Matter uses comes out of black nationalism and critical race theory. Although the protesters have spoken of solidarity with black and indigenous people until the last couple of weeks of the protest I didn't see that solidarity returned. Almost everything I’ve read about black and Asian solidarity has focused on what AAPIs (Asian Americans & Pacific Islanders) can do for the black community, not the other way around. I’m not sure if that’s because everyone recognizes that overall, the black community is facing more serious problems than the AAPI community or if it’s due to a failure to take AAPI issues more seriously because the big problems are only happening to some members of our community.
Many people pointed out that it was false equivalence to link Kimono Wednesdays to black social justice concerns with their appropriation of the #whitesupremacykills hashtag and signs like, "This exhibit perpetuates violence against Black and Brown bodies." I think this was where the protesters lost most people who saw that they were conflating Asian American issues with black issues. There are some Asian Americans and other people of color who see the struggles of all people of color as interconnected. While I agree with this to some degree I think it varies a lot depending on where you live and what the demographics and power structure in your community are like. Many Asian Americans are part of the power structure in Hawaii and some parts of the West Coast. Asian American parents don't sit their kids down for "The Talk" that black parents have with their kids about how to survive an encounter with the police. According to The Guardian's, "The Counted" project so far this year out of 777 people killed by the police in the United States, only 14 were Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders (as of this writing). Compare that with 201 black people and 115 Hispanics/Latinos. As a group we clearly don't face the same level of lethal force by the police.
It's true that some groups that fall under the Asian American umbrella may have experiences closer to black experience (strong link with poverty) but the reality is that as a group our outcomes on many measures – educational attainment, incarceration, and homicides – are better than whites. As of July 25, 2015, there were 3,186 Asian people in federal prisons compared with 78,021 black prisoners (I couldn't find state prison numbers). As of 2009, Asians, Native Hawaiians, and other Pacific Islanders experience the lowest [reported] rates of violent crime, including rape, and property crime. In 2013, 4.6% of hate crimes were due to anti-Asian bias compared to 66.5% due to anti-black or anti-African American bias. It's important to note that Asian hate crime numbers are low due to underreporting but it's difficult for me to imagine that the actual numbers are anywhere near as bad as they are for black people.
I thought that one of the major shortcomings of the protest was their lack of quotes or citations of the work of Asian American civil rights activists (see also Japanese-American civil rights activists). I only saw citations of black activists, which implied to me that the protesters were unaware of the work Asian American activists have done, which would again show that the protest was poorly researched. They made no mention of Yuji Ichioka, a nisei historian and civil rights activist who is "widely credited with coining the term "Asian American"" and was one of the founders of the UCLA Asian American Studies Center, the first Asian American studies program in the US. They made no mention of the fact that Japanese American arts activists elsewhere in the country have been critiquing orientalist portrayals of Japanese culture in recent years (see Tina Takemoto's Notes on Camp: From Orientalism to Incarceration and Scott Tsuchitani's Memoirs of a Sansei Geisha: Snapshots of Cultural Resistance and Lord It's the Samurai: Myth + Militarism + Man-Boy Love). The protesters didn't mention that just last year we had another local controversy when some Asian Americans protested the Providence Opera for their uncritical staging of Gilbert & Sullivan's The Mikado last summer. That protest followed controversy the month before when the Seattle Gilbert & Sullivan Society also staged The Mikado. (The Mikado first opened in 1885 and is now widely viewed as being an outdated stereotypical portrayal of Japanese people, though it seems that the opera being set in Japan was incidental: "I cannot give you a good reason for our ... piece being laid in Japan. It ... afforded scope for picturesque treatment, scenery and costume.")
They didn't even reference the work of sansei scholar Dr. Mari Matsuda, who is credited with the development of critical race theory. (Note: Dr. Matsuda is of Okinawan and Japanese descent and identifies as Asian American.) No disrespect to black civil rights activists, who have long inspired Asian American activists, but if you're protesting about representations of Asian culture and Asian American women, it would be more appropriate to acknowledge and reference the work of other Asian American activists than to be referencing Black Lives Matter.
The protesters linked Kimono Wednesdays to a lot of things without providing proof of their assertions. They relied heavily on their feelings and lived experience, something which they may have gotten from critical race theory, which relies on storytelling. The problem with relying on lived experience is that if your experiences are in the minority, you can always find someone else with different, if not completely opposite lived experience. Then what? Do you play janken to see whose lived experience wins? I don’t accept feelings and anecdotes as proof of a trend. I want to see original sources from reliable sites. I want to see statistics. I want to see what people with credentials are saying about it. I know I’m not alone in this. These days there’s so much false information on the Internet and people claiming to be authorities on subjects they know very little about it that it’s hard to sort out fact from fiction. Sometimes there is no clear fact or fiction but only a gray area inbetween that is open to interpretation.
I think there are a few instances in which most Asian Americans would agree that someone is being racist – if someone is using racial slurs or caricaturing Asians by ching-chonging or pulling the corners of their eyes to narrow them. But once you get into situations where an individual or organization's actions and intentions are open to interpretation, you won’t have a unified reaction. Unless you can prove that the individual or the environment is a fundamentally racist one, not everyone can agree that ignorant or culturally insensitive behavior should fall into the category of "racism" nor that the cause of this behavior is "white supremacy" and white structural racism. I think the protesters' reliance on personal stories was one of their major weaknesses. If you can't back up your assertions, there's no reason for anyone to believe you.
Another major criticism that the protesters faced was that even if you accept that there is a problem with Kimono Wednesdays, there are more important problems to address. Their response in their FAQ was, "White supremacy is a major problem in the world. This kind of programming fuels and propagates it." While I don't disagree that white structural racism is a problem, this is a much bigger and longer fight than is going to be resolved by a small protest of a small event in a museum. The protest didn't do anything to help the Asian Americans who can't read, are struggling to feed their families, or are living in the United States without authorization. Many criticized the protesters as being privileged and spoiled if the most racist problem they faced was white people trying on a kimono at an art museum. I have no idea what their socioeconomic backgrounds are but it does seem that the energy spent on these protests by the protesters and everyone who spent time covering the protests and talking about them would have been better spent on helping disadvantaged Asian Americans with more immediate problems.
I have heard mixed things about whether or not people thought the protesters behaved aggressively at the MFA. A few of these comments came from people who claimed to have seen them or spoken to them, although I think most were based on the impression the public got from the signs and photos the protesters posted of themselves engaging with museumgoers. I wrote about that here and said that I thought it depended on how you define aggressive and who you talk to. I think that for some museumgoers the protesters created a tense and intimidating environment in the Rabb Gallery. When you have 10-20 people holding signs about white supremacy and racism and glaring angrily at you it doesn't make for an environment conducive to learning. Some visitors were amused and laughed it off but I saw and heard a number who were disgusted, sometimes with the protesters and sometimes with the MFA for allowing the protesters to be there disrupting their peaceful museum experience. Museums should be safe spaces for learning but some found, and I agree, that it was difficult to concentrate surrounded by an angry group, when you could overhear heated exchanges and when you weren't sure what the protesters were going to do.
During the final protest on July 29th, I witnessed the tail end of an incident between one of the MFA's protective services staff and the protesters. You can see photos of the beginning of the incident in their Twitter feed. The part that I saw, which they make no mention of was when one of the protest organizers chased the staffer across the gallery and grabbed his arm to turn him around, shouting that what he had done was not okay and demanding his name, which they shouted after reading it on his nametag. I noticed later when I was returning from a quick trip to the Japanese Garden that his boss had sent him down the hall, most likely to de-escalate the situation. It was the first time I had seen the protesters get physical with anyone. I was surprised that the Head of Protective Services opted to let them stay for the remainder of the event.
One of the things online critics struggled to understand was the protesters' assertion that they were not racist in spite of a lot of hateful speech, mostly directed towards white people, but sometimes towards others. When confronted by a critic who identified himself as half Filipino, half black, one of the protesters called him "Uncle Tom" yet was not censured by the rest of the group. Several days later that post hadn't been deleted. Although they had a lengthy list of rules that they came up with after things got ugly on their now deleted original Facebook event page, they didn't seem to enforce it for themselves, saying that they were entitled to speak the way they were speaking because they were angry and because of their deep pain as a result of all the trauma and racism they'd faced in their lives. While it's true that many times white people will tell people of color to calm down because they can't cope with the anger, it is possible to express anger and frustration without making it personal as the protesters did.
The protesters provided this article to explain why reverse racism doesn't exist (see Can Blacks Be Racist? by Dr. David Pilgrim, founder & curator of the Jim Crow Museum, for a nuanced counterpoint to this). The formula "prejudice + power = racism" is widely credited to white organization consultant Dr. Pat Bidol-Padva's 1970 book Developing New Perspectives on Race: An Innovative Multi-media Social Studies Curriculum in Race Relations for the Secondary Level. Some people seem to have adapted it to "privilege + power = racism." Putting aside the question of whether reverse racism exists there is no doubt that the speech the protesters engaged in was hateful, harmful, and discriminatory. This included a statement about hating white people, posting memes about white people, joking about white people's tears, making cracks about weeaboos, and accusing those who had Japanese families of having an Asian fetish. When called on their behavior, they accused their critics of tone policing and respectability politics.
I've really come to hate both of these terms. While I know these things do happen to women, LGBT people, and people of color, it feels like many people use it as an excuse to behave however they want, an excuse for contempt and hatred, and an excuse to vent their anger at people they perceive to be their oppressors, which I think ultimately waters down the argument and makes it useless for those times when it's actually happening. There is a big difference between expressing your anger at the MFA and talking about how you think Kimono Wednesdays contributes to the everyday racism you face versus attacking your critics for their race, intelligence, spouse choice, interests, etc.
I will never understand why some people think it’s okay to heap all their anger on a total stranger, call them names, and then when called on it say that their opponent is tone policing them. Some of it may have been a derailment tactic but I saw plenty of legitimate calls for the protesters to stop treating people with such utter contempt. Many people clued in to the double standard and it wasn't just the people participating in the conversation but those who were just reading as well. As this writer points out, "If we don’t uphold the level of respect that we expect, we’re not helping anyone, least of all our own cause. It doesn’t matter if we’re right if no one is listening."
If you approach people with hate it often just gets reflected back at you. I saw a lot of conversations on the protest Facebook pages that they could have been de-escalated but instead the protesters escalated them and then kept going. Then they complained about all the harassment. I'm sure that there was plenty of unprovoked harassment but I think they should have just blocked all the trolls and harassers immediately and ignored them. It would have made for a better environment for everyone who had genuinely shown up to dialogue.
Something else they did repeatedly was to tell people to check their privilege. While I appreciate how frustrating it can be to have conversations with people who aren’t mindful of their privilege, shouting it at random strangers at the MFA or throwing it out in a conversation on Facebook at people who don’t even understand what it means does nothing to further dialogue. It seems to me that the only appropriate time to use it is among friends and allies who already understand its meaning. I don’t think it has any place in a conversation with strangers who aren’t versed in the language of social justice.
The protesters have said that these are just facts – that Kimono Wednesdays were racist, that white people are racist, that the system is inherently racist. These aren’t facts, these are their opinions that other people disagree with. No white person who isn’t already versed in social justice lingo is going to say "okay, you’re right" and just listen. Judging all white people by the color of their skin is no better than when white people judge people of color by the color of our skin. You don’t know that all white people are racist. Looking at a white person you don’t know if they have an AAPI, Arab, indigenous, Latino or black partner or children. Unfortunately, it seems like the protesters have a lot of preconceived notions about white people and no one likes to be told that someone else knows better than they do about their life experience and how they should be in the world, which was what they did to a lot of white people, especially the Westerners with Japanese spouses.
Some people will say that we can't hold the whole group responsible for the actions of some individual protesters and organizers. I already addressed what I think of that in "The Critics" section. Protest organizers are responsible for setting and maintaining the tone of a protest so I hold the whole group responsible. Many people said to me that it was no surprise that things had gotten ugly because it was social media after all, and the protesters are young. I don't accept the "oh, that's just how young people behave on social media these days" attitude, not to mention that the protesters are old enough to behave civilly. I'm sure the harassment was hugely stressful for them but if you're going to invite people to dialogue with you and say you've created a safe space, it needs to be a safe space for all, not just for you.
Since the protesters rebranded and set up new social media accounts I wondered if that meant they planned to carry on protesting. They confirmed that they "aren't done" on Twitter last week. It will be interesting to see if they can undo the damage they've done and move forward in a productive manner. They should ask themselves whether they really want to educate or just be angry.
I spent a while reading up on respectability
politics and tone policing trying to decide how to address the fact
that I
know I will be accused of both of these things by criticizing the
protesters' behavior. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to find anything in
defense of criticizing tone that wasn’t ranting rightwingers but when I was taking a
break and reading about Jon Stewart who just retired from The Daily Show, I came across his October 8, 2013, interview with then 16-year-old Pakistani activist and Nobel Peace Prize laureate, Malala Yousafzai. She talks about what she thought after she found out
that the Taliban had made her a target. (You can watch the clip beginning at 3:46, although I recommend watching the whole interview. If you want to be humbled, watch her 2013 address to the United Nations Youth Assembly.)
"I started thinking about that and I used to think that the Talib would come and he would just kill me. But then I said, "If he comes, what would you do, Malala?" Then I would reply myself that, "Malala, just take a shoe and hit him," but then I said, "If you hit a Talib with a shoe then there would no difference between you and the Talib – you must not treat others that much with cruelty and that much harshly you might fight others but through peace and through dialogue and through education." Then I said, "I'll tell him how important education is and that I even want education for your children as well," and I'll tell him that's what I want to tell him, "Now do what you want.""So basically, a 14-year-old is being hunted by a terrorist organization and she has the grace to think about how she will be respectful to the man who comes to kill her for being outspoken about education for girls in Pakistan. You cannot tell me that anything the protesters have been through is worse than having a terrorist hit squad coming for you. Women like Malala Yousafzai and Yuri Kochiyama prove that it is possible to fight for what you believe in without diminishing your opponents.
Continued:
Part 3: Kimono Wednesdays protest postmortem: MFA, my role, final thoughts, further reading
Acknowledgements
Further Reading
Notes
- I decided early on that I would not name the protesters, post photos of their faces, or link directly to their personal social media accounts or specific posts they made on Facebook. I know that the protesters have chosen to put their names and faces out there, but as I became aware of the level of harassment they were facing I tried to balance my desire to continue writing about the protest without contributing to the harassment. I talked with one of the protest organizers on July 22nd and explained my policy and they thanked me.
- You may have noticed a lot of links for terminology and idioms in this post. I added those to help non-native English speakers and people unfamiliar with those terms.
- I follow Densho's terminology convention for referring to the "Japanese American internment" as the "Japanese American incarceration."
- I used to use the term "African American" because I thought it was the correct term, but after doing some reading last year I learned something completely obvious – not all black people living in the US have African ancestry nor are all black people American so "African American" is not an appropriate term for them. I have done my best to follow the conventions in the National Association of Black Journalists's Style Guide. It should be noted that individual black people may identify in different ways, just as Asian Americans do. Also, public perception sees the term “black” more negatively than “African American” according to a study published last year in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology.
Updates
- 9/5/15: Corrected error in Yuri Kochiyama's creed. Was "...I will accept it without resettlement..."Should have been "resentment". Added introduction and title of creed from Passing It On. Added link to Can Blacks Be Racist?
Related posts
- Monet's La Japonaise Kimono Wednesdays at the MFA
- Protests continue at the MFA
- Japanese people talk about whether it's okay for foreigners to wear kimono
- Counterprotest this Wednesday @ the MFA
- Japanese American and Japanese reaction to Kimono Wednesdays
- Part 1: La Japonaise replica uchikake @ Kimono Wednesdays
- Part 2: Protest and counterprotest @ July 15th Kimono Wednesday
- Myths and facts about Kimono Wednesdays and the protests
- Center for Art Law and NCAC critical of the MFA's decision to modify Kimono Wednesdays
- List of Kimono Wednesdays protest issues, concepts, and related history
- Part 1: AARW/NAPAWF Kimono Wednesdays Panel @ MassArt
- Panel: Kimono Wednesdays: A Conversation @ MFA
![more likely to identify as "[insert Asian country name] American," than as Asian American](http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/files/2012/06/2012-sdt-asian-americans-0151.png){kind=link}
