I read Elaine Hsieh Chou’s excellent piece “You Know What I Say About Men Who F--- Asian Women?” in Vanity Fair on Thursday and my thoughts were too extensive for a pithy tweet so I expanded on them here.
Full disclosure before I continue: I grew up in extremely white enclaves, and my parents and I were never part of the larger Indian-American community despite my spending grades 8-12 in the Seattle suburbs, which have one of the largest Asian-American populations in the country. Our trio (now a quartet with Jude, the golden retriever) arrived in the Dallas suburbs in September of 2000, and settled down in a part of the city that was approximately 85% white back then, and even now, after 2 decades of demographic change, is represented by Republican Beth Van Duyne, who voted to overturn the 2020 election despite Joe Biden winning her Congressional district.
I went to Cornell for undergrad, and tried to believe that what’s on the inside is all that matters after high school. Needless to say, I was painfully naive. I already referenced this story on Twitter so here it is in greater detail: freshman year, I met a (white) guy who the (white) girl who lived across the hall had been in love with since the 5th grade, but I liked him and he liked me back. He was dark haired and heavy-browed in the way rich city boys are, not nearly handsome enough to warrant his reputation let alone his arrogance, and we were involved for longer than we should have been, but the point is, he was part of the social elite in a way I would never be for immutable aspects of my being.
When my dorm neighbor found out, she tried to force me to apologize but since I’ve never been good at placating irrational outrage, especially not at 18, I was like, “It’s not my fault he’d rather have sex with me than you,” which she didn’t appreciate (for some reason). She put my number on a few hundred fliers with “Text Dhaaruni for a good time!” and I was fielding vulgar texts for a month, she put a dead rat in my bed that she got from a biology lab, and that’s aside from the many probably unintended and external repercussions of her outrage. I was too proud to complain, so I endured it, never telling the guy in question let alone our RA or the administration, because in retrospect, I think subliminally decided I deserved the punishment for stepping outside my socially prescribed role.
The reason I’m bringing this story up now is that when I read that Vanity Fair article, I remembered that time I suggested to a (white, male) friend that this whole situation was extremely racialized, where I was the exotically beautiful non-white mistress, and the other girl was the staid long-suffering wife, he told me I was being hypersensitive. I don’t know if the other girl was racist, but I think that’s what Elaine Hsieh Chou may be getting at in her piece (and she should feel free to correct me if she’d like!): when white women are faced with women of color they see as competition for the attention of “desirable” men, even if they’re otherwise “not racist,” their subliminal racism is triggered. As long as women of color aren’t threatening to social order, we aren’t always actively victimized by racialized misogyny, but when we infringe on what’s considered the property of white people, we’re to be annihilated. I’m hyperbolizing and simplifying, but that makes sense, right?
Moreover, I’ll take this idea a step further and propose a hypothesis that got me screamed at the last time I suggested it online: while women of color can’t be racist to white women, I think that women of color, just like white women, can be misogynistic to other women of color as well as to white women out of sexual jealousy. I’m not claiming this phenomenon is systematic like racism by white people or misogyny by men but I also refuse to pretend that Porochista Khakpour dragging Dev Patel’s white girlfriend’s ass is anything but internalized misogyny and well, sexual jealousy.
So when it comes down to it, what’s the difference between that girl in college hating me because I “stole” the guy she liked, and women of any race hating other women for the same reasons? In a patriarchal society, women are considered commodities, we’re prizes to a bazaar of men, and we naturally want to be valued more than our rivals. We’re raised to see other women as competition for the attention of men, and in a racist society, white men are considered inherently superior to men of color. So it follows, women of any race deemed to be objects of desire to white men get a target on their back because they’re perceived to have won the game of love or lust or whatever, and absolutely nobody in the world likes to lose.