Please Phở Give Me
Scrolling through my Twitter feed, I came across the latest accusation of racism. I must admit that there’s something of an alluring quality that subconsciously attracts my lizard brain when I see the word racist/racism. I bet the same neurons light up when I’m watching the postmodern American 2020 elections or the train wreck that is the “Tiger King” series on Netflix.
Of course, the big tech companies that designed these social media sites are fully aware of this psychological effect. These outrage pageants keep me coming back with eyes fixed on the well-lit octagon where the culture wars play out. Sadly, the show turns sour for me when public and seemingly sincere mea culpae actually seems to embolden the thumb-typing rabble. This leaves me to believe that these accusations have more to do with unprocessed small-t trauma and revenge rather than racial justice.
One such controversy drew me in like a bloodthirsty moth to a glowing black mirror. Evey Kwong, A Chinese-Canadian podcaster and writer for The Toronto Star recently posted a Twitter thread lamenting about Ripe Nutrition, a white-owned downtown pop-up broth and juice bar that she felt was appropriating cuisine from cultures of color such as her own.
Part of the reason she took issue with this was that, when she was a kid, white classmates at school made fun of her Chinese food. She tweets: “I legit threw out my Chinese food lunches cos white kids would make fun of it all day. I bought into pizza day and dry ass turkey burgers. so did many others. and now you taking our culture and selling it? and people think it’s legit? Damn”.
This tugged at my heartstrings because the exact same thing happened to me with my “smelly” kebab and brown lamb stew lunches in grade school. As a way of coping with the hurt, I learned to devalue any visible element of my Persian roots and opted to put anything white on a pedestal. To this day I cringe to think that I let bullies Stockholm Syndrome me like that, but in my defense (and in Kwong’s) an immigrant kid is like a fish out of water. I was a refugee with a hard-working pizza delivery guy for a dad and it was hard to fit into a white world that only seemed to see narrow versions of itself as suitable and any outlier as undesirable or at least not normal.
Within a day of Kwong’s tweet, an apparel store that was hosting Ripe Nutrition’s products ended their relationship. The following day, the shop owner, Alexandra Baird, issued what seemed to be a sincere apology on her shop’s Instagram. She accepted blame and didn’t gaslight the people of color that were claiming to be hurt by her products. She even writes that “it isn’t the job of people of colour to educate me, a white woman on why cultural appropriation isn’t acceptable”. Baird stated that her company would immediately stop making “culturally-insensitive products” and that she and her entire staff would enroll in “cultural sensitivity training”.
Even though I don’t agree with the concept of cultural appropriation in general, I felt a calming wave rush over me after reading Baird’s apology. It felt as if I saw Obama and Trump hug it out to the acoustic backdrop of Rodney King’s “Can’t We All Just Get Along” speech. But this blissful hippie-high only lasted until I saw some of the most up-voted comments.
One commenter continued to decry her transgressions as “racist and problematic.” And that she is “actively upholding white supremacy” as if the apology was written in a dead language with invisible ink. Others seemed even angrier than Kwong herself. A few people demanded that the accused should donate money to local chefs and restaurants that represent the cultures she exploited, while others felt that the apology itself was “performative liberal identity politics language” and that she was profiting from the “optics of an apology”. My mind raced in disturbing wonder; I mouthed to my smartphone: “what more could she have done?”
Another example of digital apologies that backfired on the unindoctrinated is the case of StevenBe, a wool and fiber knitter in Minneapolis that posted on his Instagram the following: “Let’s escape reality! Let’s knit! I just woke up to the news headlines, ‘Minneapolis is burning and 100,000 dead’ just a block from StevenBe!”
In the spirit of generosity to the “other side”, I can see how this would come across as insensitive or even self-absorbed in the wake of the George Floyd protests. This is why he deleted the post that left him “mortified” and issued a swift apology which garnered 1,150 comments, most of which were irate. One claimed that the knitting entrepreneur was “monetizing murder” and that his apology was “not enough” and “meaningless” until he “does the work to examine [his] privilege”. Another self-appointed morality-pope wrote, “pay someone to teach you, go seek out educators, work hard and listen and take in the lessons…people are dying. Do better”.
Minneapolis liquor burned down in the wake of the George Floyd protests. Photo: AFP
Within 24 hours, StevenBe offered a second, more comprehensive apology that detailed how and why his comments were disrespectful to the memory of George Floyd and the BIPOC community. He vowed to attend diversity training workshops and donate 5% of his profits to organizations that are working against anti-black racism. To the relief of my bleeding liberal heart, the reactions to this subsequent apology were mostly positive but interestingly enough, the bulk of the vitriol was now aimed at StevenBe’s white followers who were told to “resist the urge to comment with messages of forgiveness” and to ask themselves “could my comment be read as absolving this company of racial injustice? If so, *tap tap tap that delete button”. The reasoning behind this that it’s up to the people of color to decide whether the culprit is worthy of their absolution.
What disappoints me in these rather boring online melodramas is that there doesn’t seem to be a path to redemption for the accused — even during a pandemic that is forcing small businesses to close their doors under impossible conditions after years of operation in the community. The StevenBe story was a dumpster fire of both toxic agreeableness and blind moral grandstanding in pixel-form. Are people actually allowed to make mistakes and grow in public?
As for the Ripe Nutrition tale, Kwong has yet to even acknowledge the steps the defendant has vowed to atone for her “hurtful” actions, even after clearly stating that she expects a response. It’s like asking someone for a ride to the airport, and not answering the door when they pull up to your house. The lack of response to Baird’s deficient apology seems to be purposely left open-ended, which situates the accusers in a perpetual position of moral power over the accused. The more the guilty try to inch their polluted body out of the quicksand, the quicker and bigger the shaming stones were thrown at them become.
Psychologist Leon F. Seltzer, Ph.D., who specializes in anger and trauma resolution, explains in Psychology Today that “there are people whose actions and reactions toward others are determined by an overriding predilection toward vindictiveness and revenge. They might see your ‘I’m sorry’ as offering them ample justification for punishing you, that you’ve just given them a perfect excuse for retaliation”.
Your boy in 9th grade.
A younger, more insecure version of myself can relate to this feeling. I learned to formulate my own vindictive version of protective, anti-white ethnocentrism as a way of coping with anti-brown/anti-Middle Eastern racism. After living abroad, learning new languages, and quite frankly maturing, I began to shed the baby teeth of petty “punching up” racism and replaced it with hard-earned self-actualization that made me more resilient to negative emotion and I haven’t looked back since.
If I didn’t catch myself falling dangerously in love with my own desire for revenge against the ghosts of my childhood racist-bullies, I too can see myself scraping the internet and my city streets for racist slights. And if I race-baited against whiteness consistently enough I’d soon have a following large enough to bully any perceived racist into a struggle-session-style public apology. These sorrys would of course be ignored if not rejected — just like many of them are in our day and age. We live in an environment that actually encourages and rewards this vigilante behavior and views such attacks as brave — all under the guise of “progressive antiracism”.
Unprocessed pain has the potential to turn yesterday’s racialized victim into today’s woke despot that uses the fallacy of cultural appropriation as a tool to feel powerful — or at least less small. This cultural phenomenon sets a bad precedent for race relations, sustainable reconciliation between socio-political tribes and unknowingly works to prolong the release of my beloved first-generation immigrants and refugees from the traumatic specters of our varied pasts.
What the accusers of cultural appropriation need isn’t the soft bigotry of low expectations that woke-Twitter offers, but a hard-nosed therapist that works towards a sustainable balance between one’s rights and responsibilities — irrelevant of skin tone.