Better to Reference Margaret Cho on this one...

So recently I got an email message from the Asian Community Online Network Chicago listserv. Looks like the Illinois Humanities Council is hosting a panel discussion on interracial dating – good for them. Seems as if they got a nice program set up; Mae Ngai, one of my old professors, will speak, and they’re showing a Kip Fulbeck film, which of course makes for fun times. I’m a little bummed I can’t be there to check it out.

I’m also a little bummed they had to drop this business into their press release:

“The romantic vision of the Middle East and Asia held by the West has been defined by the activist & intellectual Edward Said as a mixture of racist assumptions, intertwined with and underpinned by colonialist desire to conquer the so-called ‘Other.’ The exotification of the mysterious Asia was a preface to conquering and dominating Eastern civilizations by the West.”

I know I’m going to sound like a jerk here, but can we stop trying to force Said into every conversation we have about race relations? Don’t get me wrong, Orientalism was of course a very interesting and highly influential book; props to Eddie and may he rest in peace. But you don’t need to go back to his deconstruction of how European imperialism tried to represent the Middle East through misguided scholarship in order to talk about why Joe Whiteboy wants to join your taiko group (it’s not the drum he wants to bang).

For starters, while it’s worth paying homage to the thinkers and the activists who got us here, do it because of some correlation with what you’re trying to address, not because you like throwing their ideas around to prove you took an ethnic studies class. But what’s really at issue here I think is that if you want to actually get Joe to stop seeing your friend Mariko as a hot piece of geisha ass, then you better start talking about something a little more close at hand than what some 18th century philologist had to say about Egypt. Cuz while your friends will pat you on the back for playing connect the dots with all that theory (which they already know since they took that class with you), maybe you could teach that horny idiot a real lesson instead.