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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 CAMILLE KOCHIYAMA".
Sansei author
Jan Morrill,
who has been researching Ms. Kochiyama's life and work after learning
that it parallels the lives of one of her characters in an upcoming
book, told me that as far as
she can tell the protesters are
not following in Ms. Kochiyama's footsteps. She directed me to Ms. Kochiyama's creed, something that she wrote in 1939
at age 18. It was published in her memoir,
Passing It On (pp. xxiv-xxv) with the following introduction: "My family found something I wrote long ago as a teenager. While my religious and political beliefs have changed quite a bit since 1939, my basic personal values and philosophy of life have remained the same." You can read it in full in this
article (One error on
Ohmynews: "resettlement" should be "resentment". Good catch
@CYamatin!)
These were the sections that stood out to me and most definitely were not
exemplified by the protest itself or the behavior of many individual
protesters (emphasis mine).
"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 marginalized people whose histories have been stolen by institutions 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
problem
It 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.
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?
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