OK, if we’re going to talk about race…
And hey, look, I get to talk about music too!
Remember those concerts I was babbling about going to a few posts down? Japanese metal/punk/industrial band, Dir en grey, two shows (that I went to – more like 20 shows total), Tempe and San Francisco.
I spotted a pretty clear case of race impacting how people perceive things. During the song Dead Tree (link below if you want to hear it) they were playing an old black and white film on the projection screen at the back of the stage behind the band. The film was footage of the atomic bomb falling on Hiroshima, interspersed with some artsy stuff like falling snow and some footage shot in the city afterwards. All black and white, the newer stuff shot in such a way that you probably wouldn’t have been able to tell the difference between the older film and the newer stuff unless you knew what you were looking at.
Here’s where it gets interesting. The crowd in Tempe was mostly white kids 12-18. The crowd in San Francisco was much more mixed, both racially and in terms of age. I’d say that 30 percent plus of the San Francisco crowd was Asian
When they played the film in Tempe most people didn’t seem to even notice (too busy staring at Toshiya’s ass and Kyo’s abs, I suspect). The few who did notice mostly seemed confused – there were mutterings of “what’s that on the screen? Wow, that’s kind of creepy”. Then there was the Japanese-American guy standing right in front of me, who looked at the screen and froze. I mean that literally – I had one arm looped around his shoulder, and was leaning on his back. The reaction was kind of hard to miss. I couldn’t see his face, but I could certainly feel the tension in his body. And this from a guy who wasn't still for more than a few seconds for the entire rest of the show.
Meanwhile the rest of the kids were completely oblivious.
Now let’s move to San Francisco. I ended up right in the middle of a crowd of Japanese and Korean American kids, with 2 Japanese girls (as in they actually flew over from Japan for the show) right next to me. When they showed the film to that crowd, the reaction was completely different. Obviously I couldn’t see the whole crowd (I was right at the front, I could barely move), but the people around me? Everyone went quiet and just looked at the screen. Apart from the one white girl in the front row, who was obliviously head-banging. The mood was – pensive, kind of sad, more than a little angry. Which was exactly the reaction the footage was intended to provoke, really – I have to admit that I was looking at head-banging girl and thinking “wow, you sure missed the point”.
So there you have it. The people at both venues were about the same age, all were raised in America, presumably exposed to the same curriculum, and yet one group didn’t even recognize what they were seeing while the other group? Every one of those kids knew what they were watching. What does that say about white America? Do we just not teach kids here about what happened in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, so that they only know if their parents tell them, or is the privilege so pervasive that it actually limits people’s ability to process what they’re looking at? Or is it just that white kids don’t care because they don’t have to care?
And on another note…damn were the (white, older) security guards at both shows freaked out by the outpouring of teenage hormones directed at the band. I noticed the same phenomenon at the Family Values tour last summer – a bunch of white guys looking disconcerted and more than a little pissed off at the sight of a bunch of white girls gazing in open lust at a group of Japanese men. On all these occasions there were all kinds of hostile, threatened-looking responses from the guys including everything from “don’t see what’s so great about them” muttering to open racism (“But Japanese men are blah blah” – insert standard racist stereotypes) and even a few “huh, I’m gonna beat that guy’s ass, that’ll show him” type comments in Sacramento. Charming. Anyway, it was very clear that a lot of white guys find the prospect of white girls lusting over non-white men a bit perturbing. Not that that’s a surprise, really, but it was interesting. Also interesting in that yep, that’s definitely racism, but it’s a slightly different flavor of racism than that directed at the idea of white women with black men (think the Terrell Owens Towelgate drama). I’m not going to get into the way that white America looks at Asian men (or women) here, because that’s a subject deserving of its own post, but if anyone wants to talk about it in the comments…
So yeah, next person who says that this country isn’t racist and that white privilege doesn’t exist gets smacked in the face with a frying pan.

Links…

Dir en grey – Dead Tree

PS Let's hope the link works, I haven't tried this in Blogger before.