After reading the chapter “Hearing complaint,” I was deeply felt by what Sara Ahmed was going to talk about. Through her own experiences and testimonies she has collected, she exposes the injustices that women, non-white people, gay people and other disadvantaged groups are subjected to in all aspects of society. And I, as an Asian, have a deep appreciation for such injustice. My name is Xinyue Yu and I am from China. After being treated unfairly, I and very few people will be brave to complain and appeal to the authorities. Because the traditional education in China is to hide the bad parts and show the healthy and good sides. If not, it is not good for the family and the society.
In China, I often heard the news about racial discrimination in the United States or European, but I didn’t have a deep understanding of it at that time. But when I came to Germany, this horrible thing really happened around me. A Chinese female student of mine was harassed on the street in Berlin and was called a Chinese pig. She went to the police, but the police were very perfunctory, saying they had no way to investigate without video evidence, and it was over.
Meanwhile, the clever powers-that-be have found a new way to silence complaints about racism by buying off the Asian elite and getting them to promote the legitimacy of racism. Recently, after the outbreak of the epidemic, the Trump administration blamed China for all of their country’s problems in preventing the epidemic, and Chinese Americans received discrimination and blame. So the Chinese people had to take to the streets in protest. However, a profit-oriented Chinese American politician, Andrew Yang, in order to get the support of the white American political party, publicly published this article in the Washington Post, saying that the accusation of Americans under the new crown epidemic made them feel ashamed of being Asian, and called on Asian Americans to show their loyalty to the United States as the Japanese Americans did in World War II, and prove that they love America so they won’t be seen as a “virus”.
The stereotype of Asian Americans in American society is that they should work hard and not complain too much, so Asians are not considered to be able to attack racism. In order for Asians to continue to silently accept this stereotype, the U.S. government has come up with the idea of having Asian elites take the lead in calling on Asians to accept this stereotype. If the leaders of the Asian community say so, then ordinary Asians will have no way to oppose it. Such a sinister approach is one of the ways that Americans are dealing with racial discrimination and maintaining a white supremacist society.It reminds me of what the Roman Empire did when it ruled Israel: corrupt the Jewish upper elite, make them puppets of the Romans, and then through them call on the entire Jewish people to submit to Rome and keep the Jews in servitude to others in their own land.Asian American complaints about racism have always existed. But under the guidance of the American government, the American media, this complaint cannot change the reality and has been ignored. Because of this, whenever we see an Asian on the political stage, it is inevitable to speculate that it is another white-directed American political show, in order to show the American racial integration and diversity that is only embodied in slogans. The Asians on the stage are just the puppets of the whites.