03/21/2022
I’ve been trying to come up with the words to address this “controversy” that isn’t even controversial. Grateful for this post and insight.
Last week I had a truly humbling experience. Before I get into that though, I want to talk about a few things.
A couple of days ago Jess wrote about “Turning Red”, the fabulous Pixar film about a young Chinese girl entering puberty, and a white film critic who, while totally able to see the appeal and relatable nature of a movie about a white boy and his talking toys, suggested that a movie centered on a Chinese girl going through puberty was really just for the director’s family and friends. He said that “Turning Red” was “exhausting”.
While most commenters on Jess’ post were supportive, there were a significant number of people who pushed back and pushed back hard. I’ve seen this push back elsewhere on social media as well, with the running themes being along the lines of “maybe he just didn’t like it!”, or “why do you have to make this about race?“, or “why do all movies nowadays have to be about non-white people?”
You get the idea.
Part of the issue here is that the critic, along with those pushing back, feel uncomfortable. There’s a bit of unfamiliarity because the media, in this case the movie, is not white-centered. If you’re feeling uncomfortable already with this post, I ask that you take a beat and read to the end.
This brings me to my next point about white-privilege: no one should feel embarrassed or guilty about how they came into this world. A person with white-privilege didn’t choose to be born with it, and I would argue that the vast majority of people who talk about privilege don’t want to make the privileged feel embarrassed or guilty - they want the privileged to use their power to help those less fortunate than they.
The truth is, as is so often the case, when one has privilege, one doesn’t think about it because one doesn’t have to. The way the power structure here is set up, white men, and to a slightly lesser degree white women, don’t have to worry about their “place”. If you are born into a power position, why WOULD you ever have to think about it?
However, when that hierarchy is challenged, even in the smallest way, say with a movie that centers on a Chinese girl as opposed to a white boy, some people who have never really had to think about their own privilege get uncomfortable. That discomfort is often misunderstood by the discomforted as oppression or discrimination.
So much of the literature we teach our kids centers around white characters or characters we have made white over the course of centuries.
In the meantime, children of color and LGBTQ kids, particularly non-binary children and girls of color very rarely see themselves in the stories we read and watch. Too often when there is finally a character that looks and acts like them, that character is a sidekick, or a villain, or a disposable two-dimensional side character whose storyline is left unresolved.
When our children only see themselves this way in the stories they are told, they start to believe that that is all that they can be in American society. Representation matters.
But just as important is the presentation of that representation.
This is the very reason why I created the Asian and Asian American Literature class at my school three years ago. After several years of teaching I saw that my Asian students never got to read about a character who looked like them who saved the day, or won the fight, or fell in love and lived “happily ever after”.
Which brings me back to the beginning of this post: Last week I had a truly humbling experience.
I was on a student-teacher panel kicking off our school’s AAPI Awareness Day. We were in the lecture hall of our school and the room was packed. Our discussion was being live streamed so many of the classes that could not get into the lecture we’re able to watch too.
Much of the discussion revolved around what it meant to be Asian or Asian American in America. Several students from my literature course were on the panel as well.
As the discussion progressed, students kept coming back to my class, essentially saying that Asian and Asian American Lit was the first time they truly saw themselves in literature and that the experience of seeing themselves in stories was transformative.
Transformative!
Sit with that for a moment. Several of these young people had to wait until they were 17 or even 18 years old to see themselves in the school’s curriculum.
My eyes welled up several times as they all spoke eloquently about their experiences, but the moment that truly humbled me was when the moderator asked the students on the panel who in the AAPI community was a role model for them.
I expected to hear the names of celebrities or politicians or activists, but several times I heard my name: “Mr. Wilson”.
At that point there was no point in trying to keep my eyes dry. I was truly humbled by the weight and power of their words.
The point in all of this is that representation matters. There’s a reason why women are way better at writing the male perspective than men are at writing the female perspective. Men have rarely had to put themselves in a woman’s shoes when reading classic literature or watching movies and shows. Women have to do it all of the time. The dynamic is the same when we talk about race, ethnicity or s*xuality. Cis-gendered, white people, through no fault of their own, haven’t had to do the work. They just haven’t.
So, in some ways, I can’t and don’t blame Sean O’Connell for his white-centric, racially insensitive review of “Turning Red”. That said, I hope he, along with every other white person who brush aside movies like “Turning Red” or “The Eternals” as exhausting, unrelateable, “woke” movies, take the time to deconstruct why they feel the ways they feel and to understand that their “feels” are similar to what members of every minority group have felt from day one.
