That Time I Was Racist

By Jef Catapang

The funniest joke I’ve ever heard goes like this, maybe you’ve heard it:

Q: What do you call a Paki priest?

(Pause with a shit-eating grin.)

A: HOLY SHIT.

I can’t even remember how young I was when I heard that joke or who it was during recess that told it to me, but I do remember hyperventilating with laughter. I tried repeating it to other people and it never got the desired reaction. I assumed it was my lack of comedic timing, but probably it was just because, racism aside, it’s a pretty lame joke.

At this point in my life I had never even met any Pakistani kids, let alone any brown kids. (I’m from Mississauga, so obviously that would change quickly and drastically in the coming years.) I just knew that “Pakis” existed and that everything about them was mind-blowingly hilarious. Don’t worry, I got over it.

Sort of.

Maybe because I was one of the few Filipinos in a class of predominantly Italians and Portuguese (I was told numerous times by classmates that I would end up marrying the one Filipina in my class, and I was so worried about it I avoided talking to her for years because I assumed she was in love with me by the sheer power of DNA), but I’ve been obsessed with race since an early age. This regard has taken on many forms, from my probably-curated-on-purpose multi-culti crew of friends, to my weird high school fetishes (ALL OF THEM), to my anti-racist activist phase in university, to my long-standing love for hip-hop culture.

It’s also manifested itself in the things I find funny, and yes, I laugh all the time at racist jokes. As anti-racist as I am, I am always confused by the sensitivity we sometimes have towards comedians who dare to dig deep. One, because of that old refrain that it’s their job to do it — which isn’t totally sound but also shouldn’t be totally dismissed — and two, if I’m not able to laugh at this shit sometimes, I think I might go crazy. I’m not convinced we all already haven’t. As important as it is, I don’t think talking seriously about race all the time is that healthy. It fucks up how you see the world, and all of a sudden you’re seeing things that aren’t there or obsessing over things that don’t matter. Excuse me if IDGAF about whether or not they put Asian kids in The Hunger Games. (Akira though is another story.) (Yes, there’s a difference, and no, I don’t want to talk about it!)

Everyone should draw their line somewhere, and I realize comedy is a tricky business, but I find it relatively easy. First: is the joke actually funny? Or is the punchline lazy? As Chris Rock might put it: is the joke about what somebody does, or is the punchline just about what somebody is? More broadly, it comes down to intent, and I’d like to think if you’re clear headed you’ll know it when you see it.

And once we’ve done the requisite soul-searching on why things are funny/not funny, guys like Dave Chappelle won’t have to have mental breakdowns and run away to Africa, and we can get back to enjoying jokes about grape drink.

It catches me off guard when I’m with new-ish people who don’t know me well and I say something racy or laugh too hard at a left-field Sarah Silverman punchline and I can see it in their eyes. They think I’m ignorant about race. I hate those moments because I want to get all serious and be like, listen, I’m more concerned about race issues than you ever will be. It’s ALL I THINK ABOUT. Let me have my laughs.

Aside from finding race hilarious, though, my other brushes with racism have come from travelling. When I spent some months working in Malawi one of the stereotypes I initially struggled with was Africans being lazy. (Yes, I am one of those people who says things like “that time I worked in Malawi.”) I knew this couldn’t be true, and yet I found myself constantly annoyed that Africans were always being lazy. My office mates would start the day with customary small talk, then have a long lunch break, which would be followed later by a long tea break, followed later by some dancing, and then we’d all go home early. Not to mention the occasional desk naps.

Here’s the truth of it, though. One, it was friggin’ hot over there, and it wasn’t long before I realized that taking a siesta or a long tea break filled with laughter or dancing worked wonders for overall productivity. Two, sometimes there just wasn’t any work to be done. Over here, we always do our best to act busy and glorify the fact that we’re “grinding,” or whatever, but really, we’re just playing solitaire or hitting refresh on Twitter. My co-workers had no bullshit about perceived workloads, and really, they accomplished just as much as I did, if not more, with half of the stress or printer paper waste. I don’t know if that’s a Malawian thing or not, but that was my problem anyway, looking really hard for Malawian things.

Here’s what I did wrong: I was so concerned, being in a new environment, with being culturally sensitive that I totally lost my sense of humour. Once I  settled myself and learned to find things amusing again, my experiences became clearer, not everything was about race anymore, and life returned to normal despite the fact I was nowhere near to home and everything was different.

So yeah, some of the things I laugh at are problematic. You win. But I think without that I’d have probably grown up to be a flat-out racist. (Not sure against whom. Probably against white people.) Yuk it up once in awhile, my fellow race-obsessives. Because otherwise, you know, holy shit. Trouble.

My Racist Advice Animals

This is too internet, isn't it? Advice Animals, and not just the usually pedestrian sort that flutter between the sexist and depraved, but special ~racist~ Advice Animals that I may or may not have even written my self.

It seems like such a cop-out — and yes, I did consider titling these anon single panels as the content farm-esque "25 Racist Advice Animals" or "25 Racist Advice Animals I Have Thought Of At One Time Or The Other Without Commentary" — but you know, I thankfully held back on the link bait.

And I really wanted to go deep! To write! To share stories about those racist moments of mine! Like that time I was the small town girl on the school bus who'd avoid at all cost sitting next to the sweet South Asian girl — she was the first I believe, in 1993, to have lived on Highway 27 north of the 17th Sideroad — because I was so scared sitting next to someone that confirmed this "otherness" that I had yet to acknowledge.

Oh, and you know, I could tell you whole slew of 'em when I was constantly re-evaluating my "anti-oppression framework" in order to be "down" with the "priority" Eglinton West West kids I worked with during those after-school programs I'd coordinate at Maria A. Shchuka (Then again, that wasn't so much racism as it was about class and privilege.)

But at least by then I was walking the tragic mulatta tight rope where I avoided at all cost those seemingly-white tendencies of reacting far too incredulously to tales of violence, or talking in that impenetrable double arts-non-profit grant speak. ("I do community arts — wait, sorry, arts-based community development with youth of various ethnic backgrounds living in underserved and at-risk communities. Now do you want sign your kid up for our drop-in capoeira class this afternoon? We've got granola bars and drinking boxes too.")

You know what? I've already said to much. This has reached the tl;dr limit — and like I said before, I'd rather hide behind the blunt yet careless wisdom of these image macros.

HED: 25 Racist Advice Animals 25 Racist Advice Animals I Have Thought Of At One Time Or The Other Without Commentary

The Quiet Pleasures of Being Racist

By Navneet Alang

At the outset, I think it behooves me to say this: some of my best friends are white. Yeah, it’s a cliche joke now. But I just want to point out that what I set down here is not done in pride, defiance or in the hopes of offending. Instead, it’s with some reluctance and shame that I post this, in the hope that it is read with some mild sympathy for the odd contradictions, conflict and general weirdness entailed by being ‘not white’ and privileged while living in downtown Toronto.

1. Washing Dishes the Wrong Way

For some reason, there was a quiet that pervaded the house that day. Maybe my mum and brother were away, or perhaps there were no basement tenants. Whatever it was, something was different. For one, I was trying to be extra helpful.

I was still feeling guilty for having moved out. I had, at the ripe old age of 25, recently gotten a shared apartment in the Annex, and was much happier for it. But as (ugh) ‘progressive’ as my parents were, moving out in the same city before marriage struck them as… odd. They got it; they weren’t oblivious sitcom stereotypes. It was just strange and a little sad for them. So I was back on one of my perhaps too-often visits, and after dinner I told my Dad I’d wash the dishes. You know, to help out.

I had always washed dishes the way I had seen my folks do it: one at at time, with the tap trickling slightly. I knew there was another way of doing it. At camp and at friends’ houses, I too had filled the sink with soapy water, and fumbled through like I did it all the time. At home though, we just never did it that way. That’s just the way it is when you’re a minority. Out there, in regular public lives, there was a way of doing things that everyone else knew, but to you seemed strange.

‘Course, I had been out in the world! I lived on my own, and was recently back from traveling through Europe, too. I had seen things. So I filled the sink with foam and water – just like Canadians do! – and got through the big pile in no time flat.

When I was done, my dad and I just hung out for a bit. I think we started talking about English literature, which had always been a shared interest of ours. I was doing my MA in English at the time, and my dad had done his some 30 or 40 years prior. We chatted about these things often. Then there was lull.

“I’ve never washed the dishes like that,” my Dad said after a bit, pulling out a tea towel. It was still really quiet in the house.

“Yeah,” I responded. “Quick though, wasn’t it? I think that way works better for a big pile of them.”

“Yes. It does,” said my father.

“I guess,” I said a bit hesitantly “I’ve just never done it like that because it seemed like the white way of doing things.”

My father paused – a bit portentously if you ask me. It’s  like in that moment we were secretly bonding over something, even if we couldn’t articulate quite what.

“Hm,” my father said. “Yes, I’ve never done it that way because of that too.”

We finished drying the dishes and put them away in silence.

A few years later, when I lived with my white then-girlfriend, I made sure to wash dishes the way my father always had.

2. Breathing a Sigh of Relief.

I had brought lemon sorbet for dessert. My friends were disappointed. After barbequed shortrib steak topped with chimichuri, eaten on a patio table on a cool spring evening, what my friends were hoping for was vanilla ice cream. Or, God, at least strawberry. But I could never seem to get these sorts of things right. Who knew what these downtown hipsters did or didn’t want?

After reluctantly consuming the tart sorbet, we headed upstairs. But soon, it was clear one of our group felt sick, and she promptly went home. That left four of us: our Mexican-Canadian host, two Caribbean-Canadians, and me.

We shot pool for a bit, then sat around chatting, before finally deciding to to head off around 11. By that time it had gotten cool, and on the walk home, we pulled our jackets around us, commenting on how unseasonably warm it had been lately. Then the inevitable happened.

“And what is with white people in shorts and t-shirts the minute it creeps above zero?!”

Here’s what you may not know. Though you can almost never generalize about ‘minorities’, this phrase is occasionally like a secret code in this city for “it is now time for us non-whites to complain about all the weird, inexplicable things white people do’. You begin with the shorts in spring comment and it goes from there.

So it started. The litany of silly complaints. Drinking milk with dinner. Of how ‘they’ don’t respect their parents or, conversely, are like friends with their folks. Stupid shit. But then, depending on the crowd, it gets more serious. So we moved on to this thing a white lady at work said about ‘that crazy hair’. Of getting yelled at in the street. Of how oblivious some of ‘them’ are about their white privilege.

Yeah, white people. What do they know? Fuck them, right? That’s what it sorta’ amounted to. But unpleasant as that is, what is difficult to convey is the flood of relief that comes with saying these things among a crowd of minorities, the sudden feeling of camaraderie that erupts into something disturbingly close to joy. Phew!, you say to yourself. I’m safe to let out my neuroses here.

Now a bit older, I tend to stay away from this. I’ve started to believe that antagonism is a last resort, and even this kind of joke-y, release-valve humour is potentially dangerous. To my ‘white friends’ reading this, I don’t secretly badmouth you every time I get together with my more melanin-rich pals. Mostly.

Still. Chris Rock, who is obviously very rich and very famous, says that he can still get nosebleeds and panic attacks in rooms full of white people he doesn’t know. And sometimes now, when life demands I show up at an event or party mostly full of white people, I can relate. There’s no good reason for it. Just shyness and awkwardness coming out the wrong way. But it’s hard not to give a racial tinge to those shortcomings – and stand in a corner nursing a beer, comforting oneself by thinking: “White people. Fuck them, right?”

From Paki Dots to Gai Lan

By Denise Balkissoon [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RovF1zsDoeM]

1.

I believe I’ve written about this before, but it’s a goodie: in sixth grade, a Chinese girl on my schoolbus jabbed my forehead with her thumb and cried “Paki dot!” So when I got to class, I did the same thing to a girl in my class…who was Pakistani. At this point, a popular white girl ripped me a new one, asking me what was so funny about making fun of somebody else’s ethnicity and p.s. did I know I was a huge loser. P.s. I did, because I had a home perm, ok?

Here’s the thing about this painfully hilarious scenario: I am brown. And I had literally no idea what a “Paki” or a “Paki dot” was. Why would I? No one said Paki in my house. I am the oldest kid, so I didn’t have any wiser siblings to school me in the language of ethnic disses. I was outside of Canada from ages four to eight. I truly had no clue, I thought I was doing something trendy that would make me seem cool. Sadly, I have never been good at that.

Anyway, that white girl is now one of my oldest and dearest friends and that incident makes me laugh a lot. The moral of this story is that sometimes, white people are anti-racist loudmouths their whole lives. So really it has a happy ending.

2.

In the eighth grade, I used to take the TTC home from school with a bunch of kids from my neighbourhood. There was me, two sets of boy-girl Chinese siblings, and our white/Macedonian friend. Most days, we would run into the same set of black kids in uniforms. For some reason, we all decided to hate each other and make really stupid comments about each others clothes, intellect, etc. I’m going to say what I honestly think here, which is: they started it.

So one day it got mean for some reason, and the oldest black kid, a boy, said something I didn’t hear. One of my Chinese friends got upset. I asked what the kid had said. My friend wouldn’t tell me. I kept bugging him, so finally he said, “he called you a Paki.”

I felt hot, as I usually do when I’m mad and ashamed at the same time. Then I said “well, if I’m a Paki, you’re a nigger.” To which he replied, proudly, “always have been, always will be.”

This story still kind of bugs me. I mean, I’m mostly over it. But I’m still mad at myself for stooping to his level and for being racist and I’m really mad at him for being racist and I’m also jealous of him for having a pride in the face of racism that I didn’t.

3.

This one is hardest to write, ‘cause it’s about now: sometimes, Chinese senior citizens make me feel crazy. I’ve read Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior, and quite frankly, I don’t like the idea that older Chinese peeps might consider me a a non-person (since I’m not Chinese). I certainly get that feeling from them when I’m being pushed around at the grocery store by someone half my size. I’m also kinda grossed out by their incessant chain-smoking of Marlboros.

I am also sometimes annoyed by the pupusa ladies in Kensington, who serve all the Latinos first before deigning to look at me. So I guess I’d like to think that my racism is spurred by others’ racism, but that can’t always be true. And besides, being tolerant of intolerance is the only way to fight the battle, or so I’d like to think. Maybe bumping up against others’ irrational dislike forces me to acknowledge my own irrational dislike—as I get older, I sometimes do think that xenophobia is “natural” (as in innate, or so ancient it may as well be innate), and that finding a way to be a truly interdependent and multicultural city is a brand new, modern battle that Toronto should accept it’s fighting in order to succeed at.

Anyway, I truly also think that old Chinese ladies are pretty frigging awesome—seriously, are there any other old ladies that get out as much as the Chinese? Whether it’s 7 a.m. or 3 a.m., they are out on the street, doing their shopping, going to restaurants, having a chat at 85 decibels, wearing leopard-spotted fun fur. They don’t let age keep them back. So really, they can smoke as many Marlboros as they like. When I’m 70, I plan on pushing young chicks around to get at the gai lan, too.

When I Was Racist...

When our contributors were less than angelic... Denise Balkissoon recounts some tales of prejudice from her childhood.

Rea McNamara gets smart and funny with her racist advice animals.

Navneet Alang ponders the messiness of (ugh) "reverse racism".

Jef  Catapang on the weirdness of being anti-racist but laughing at racist jokes.

Jaime Woo writes about how all big, black ladies should hand out free things and smell like fresh laundry.

Introducing The Ethnic Aisle

GTA news, multiculti views and extra hot sauce... Welcome to the ethnic aisle. We know you’ve been craving something different. You’re tired of hearing that the Greater Toronto Area is the most diverse spot in the world, only to be bombarded with the same voices, the same ideas, the same flavour of news and commentary on every website, newspaper, tv channel and radio station. It’s boring, right? It’s so limited, which is such a shame when there’s so much more to taste.

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