WRITING THE CONJUNCTURE: RACIST LOVE

If I’m still intact in ten or twenty years, I will definitely want to write about these fucked-up times we’re living through. How could you not attempt to wrest some human insight or artistic argument from this depraved murderous sepsis — to pull from the murk an illuminating spark to send forward to the future as a warning or a hope or more. In a polycrisis like this, you got to do something to fight back, even if it’s only writing. Only writing might not be much in the face of a thousand howling calamities, but sometimes not much can mete mano, if you know what I mean.

To that end I’ve been keeping as honest a record as I can of our conjuncture’s strange dimensions. I’m not trying to compass everything — I’m not trying to pierce the heart of our demoralizing darkness — I’m just trying to do my bit, to sketch the river a little. And trying to be accurate and unsparing as possible in the hopes of evading the very human habit to forget, diminish or sentimentalize, given enough distance. Trying to keep the memory of the past, no matter how imperfect, alive. Because as we all know the present has a nasty habit of colonizing the past; because memory unaided is often treason itself and because hegemonic operations erase themselves, have anti-memetic qualities.

The record I’ve been assembling, these rememories for my future self, the Not Stories To Pass On, are no regular diary or checklist — it’s more of a devil’s dictionary, a series of provocations that I’m composing as writing advice from my present self to my future self.

Whether these dark madelines will be any of use to my future self (and whether the future will still have any use for reading) only time will tell, but futurity aside these writing instructions to my future self have turned out to very useful to present me, helping me see and understand our conjuncture more clearly.

Anyway, that’s the context and I figure, while I wait for the future that might never arrive to arrive, I might as well share some of this writing advice from my present self to my future self here because maybe someone in the present or the future will have use for them.

Without further ado, an entry in this series, in no particular order.

Dear J—

You must remember this: Racist Love.

Racist Love is pervasive in this time and place across all racial formations.

First identified by Frank Chin and Jeffery Paul Chan and theorized incisively by Leslie Bow, Racist Love is an ostensibly positive opinion held by one racialized person towards another racialized group (or subgroup) that despite its surface positivities actually reinforces the structures of white supremacy, the asymmetries of social power (to paraphrase Bow).

Racist Love is a slur traveling under the passport of a compliment.

When a non-Asian male (my taxi driver in Lisbon) declares they love Asian women — that’s racist love.

When a person only pursues and dates a person from another racial group — that’s racist love.

When a country claims that a racial group is a “model minority” — that’s racist love.

When a Supreme Court justice can grant care and humanity to the Haitian children they have adopted but not the larger community they hail from — this wildness could be explored quite interestingly through the concept of racist love (among others, naturally).

Racist Love is the flip-side of Racist Hate — both transform human beings into objects of anxiety or desire, reinforcing the hegemonic structures that determine who is worthy of being approached as fully individualized human beings and who must be approached as a generality — who (in other words) is human and who is not.

How Racist Love and Racist Hate express themselves in the Real might be radically different, but what’s alarming is that their psychic grammars are the same, which explains why Racist Love can flip to Racist Hate in a heartbeat. Said differently, the ideological generalization circuits that characterize “Latin” women as womb invaders are no different from the ideological generalization circuits that valorize “Latin” women as sexually desirous.

Racist Hate tends to be straightforward — characterized by discrimination, revulsion, fear, sadism and a desire to accuse, punish, impede, impoverish, harm, and criminalize.

Racist Love is far less obvious, costumed in affection, attachment, in the cute. Racist Hate revolts nearly every feeling thinking human being, but Racist Love often passes unnoticed and un-contested even in dique progressive spaces.

Trust me, J, when I say this shit is ubiquitous. Don’t believe what the TV and movies show. It is not uncommon in this time and place to encounter all sorts of folks — young old poor privileged white of color straight queer intellectual know-nothing activist conservative — who deploy Racist Love with zero compunction, without any sense of its corrosive powers.

You may not remember this trip I’m currently on in Europe, the memorial trip. Well, on this little jaunt, while most of Europe is dying under heat waves, I’ve repeatedly encountered this scalding bullshit. A professor of color who actually teaches Bow’s book actively limits his intimate partners to a certain other racial group. A Copenhagen hipster who confides her love for Caribbean men, especially those from one specific country.

Racist Love really is an equal opportunity derangement — a discrimination that does not, when choosing its executors, discriminate.

Maybe this will have changed by your time, have taken on another disguise; maybe it will not. Maybe you will conveniently forget the sharpness. Try not to. Try to remember it.

This is not a story to pass on.

Try to remember the aegis of innocence that it arrogates. Try to remember how generalized it is, even among those who know better. Try to remember that if you saddle only your unsympathetic characters with Racist Love you will be doing the texture of this time a disservice, absolving rather than witnessing.

For further reading see Leslie Bow’s Racist Love: Asian Abstraction and the Pleasures of Fantasy.

Frank Chin and Jeffery Paul Chan’s Racist Love