Fresh Off The Boat: More Yellow-ish than Black-ish

baritonepats:

firehawk12:

It’s hard not to compare Fresh Off The Boat with Black-ish, ABC’s other “ethnic”sitcom.  Both sitcoms start very much inthe same way, aggressively setting the stage for what it means to be a racial minorityin America.  Black-ish’s pilot episode went out of its way to tell the audiencethat this was a show with a defined perspective.  Unlike the ABC mainstays The Middle or Modern Family,Black-ish wants you to understand that this show is about a Black family and
the specific anxieties that a black upper-middle class family would have in
contemporary America. 

[…]

One of the conflicts that Eddie faces is
drawn from an experience that many Asian children can probably identify with –
being sent to school with an “ethnic lunch”. 
When Eddie unpacks his mother’s lunch, the other kids in the cafeteria
tell him that his food “smells” and ostracize him for eating something
different.  Eddie, just wanting to
assimilate comfortably into the school, chooses to reject the food that he “loves”
(as we are told by his mother), and wants his mom to buy him “white people
food” or specifically, Lunchables.  In a
society that asks for conformity and ostracizes difference, embracing the
pre-packed lunch is the perfect way for Eddie to try to fit in with the rest of
the kids at his school.  As his mother
quips when she sees that every single Lunchables box is exactly the same, “You
want to fit inside a box?  That’s so
American”.

But life is never that easy, and trying to
fall in line with the rest of society doesn’t mean that you still won’t stand
out.  Rejecting his Chinese name and
rejecting Chinese food doesn’t change the one undeniable fact that Eddie cannot
change: he is still Chinese.  So in
climax of the episode, we have what the real Eddie Huang described as “two kids
of color forced to battle each other at the bottom of America’s totem pole on
ABC”.  

The only Black kid at school and
the only Chinese kid at school are pitted against each other by the implicit
racism that pervades the culture of the student body, and we get perhaps the
most honest moment of the pilot when the Black kid tells Eddie: “You’re the one
at the bottom now.  It’s my turn,
chink”.  Literally, the kid tells Eddie
that it’s his turn to use the microwave at the cafeteria.  Figuratively, he is trying to say that he is
tired of being the one to stand out at school and sees himself as more “white”
than Eddie ever will be.  It’s a sad
moment that speaks to the racial politics in North America, where the people at
the “bottom of America’s totem pole” fight each other for the scraps of
acceptance.  You’re not meant to blame
the Black kid for calling Eddie a “chink”, you’re meant to blame society for
putting both of these vulnerable kids in a position where that has to happen in
the first place.

[…]

I cut off some of the OP’s post that aren’t relevant to my response. You can follow this link to see the OP in its entirety [x]

No…. no no no no no. This exactly the kind of multicultural, neoliberal, decontexualized misreading of the first episode’s cafeteria scenes that I feared most of Asian America would do. This “fight for the bottom of the totem pole”, “see’s himself as more white” framing is all wrong and completely misses what’s really happening. 

See, everyone (read: Asian America) is stuck on the explicit *ch**k* slur scene, but everyone forgets the first cafeteria scene. Everyone’s focusing on the Black student’s explicit “You’re the one at the bottom now”, they forget that Eddie said the exact same thing when he left the table to join the white kids. There’s this excessively dangerous people-of-color-blindness (see Jared Sexton[x]) myth that “people of color are pitted against one another” and that “Black people want to play oppression olympics”. That’s a factually inaccurate reading of history. What the first episode does masterfully in replicating the case of the Mississippi Chinese but that went over most of Asian America’s heads is that the first act of aggression, of “fighting to be on top” was perpetrated by the Asian American, not the Black American. 

In the late 1800’s and early 1900’s there was a community of Chinese Americans who lived basically as neighbors with the local Black community. This is not to paint a picture of perfect racial harmony, but they didn’t hate each other, they worked together, the Chinese Americans were grocers because they had more access to capital than their Black neighbors and were excluded from White areas. But because of school segregation laws, the Chinese kids were sent to the dilapidated and unfunded “colored schools” with their Black neighbors. These schooling conditions were unacceptable for anyone, but in the 1900’s a Mississippi Chinese American sued up to the Supreme Court to have his daughter placed in the white school, on the argument that “white schools enable whites to avoid contact with Black people, Chinese Americans deserve the same equal protection from having to interact with Black people”(my paraphrase)(see Sora Han[x]). His lawsuit gambit failed, but instead of working with the Black community to fight against unequal and unjust segregation laws, the Mississippi Chinese abandoned the Black community, formed their own separate Chinese schools, and generally tried to move away or avoid interaction with their former Black neighbors.

This is important because, back to Fresh Off the Boat, the first cafeteria scene shows us the Black student WELCOMING EDDIE WITHOUT QUESTION (his initial “no” is arguably a joke because he immediately retracts it and lets Eddie with him). Here is an Asian kid who is clearly fetishizing Black people and what he thinks is the imagery of Black culture, who is clearly only approaching the Black student because he’s been ostracized by the whites. Yet the Black student accepts Eddie. He even let’s Eddie know “FYI I have some quirks you might not be used to”(these quirks are non-racial, but that doesn’t matter, these are kids), to which Eddie gives a disgusted look just after being invited to sit down. (The “forty year old friend” snipe comes back to haunt the Black student at the end of the show, at the hands of ADULTS, how fucking wrong is that, could they stop beating on the Black kid?)

Immediately, we see the white kids give Eddie a chance to align with whiteness and abandon the Black student. Eddie takes it without even looking back at the Black student by using Blackness as social capital. And when Eddie goes to the white table and shows his Chinese lunch, in effect showing “FYI I have some quirks you might not be used to”, the white students give a disgusted look and exclude Eddie. 

This is what I mean by Asian Americans are stuck on the slur scene and miss the entire context. And this is the same for how Asian Americans politically misunderstand the context when, for example, Black organizers simply don’t know whether or not Asian Americans are “down for the cause”. We focus on the slur, the immediate scene, we don’t account for the HISTORY THAT IS RIGHT THERE. We don’t account for the uncountable times Asian Americans have politically and interpersonally abandoned Black people and communities and radicalism who helped us. The *ch**k* slur is unacceptable and of course it’s racist, but we consciously or unconsciously forget that the Black student tried to be friendly/welcoming to the appropriating, blackfacing Asian kid, only to be stabbed in the back within a minute without even an apology. Yes, the Black student called Eddie a “ch**k” in the second cafeteria scene, but Eddie was the one who chose first to leave the Black student “at the bottom”, arguably implicitly calling the Black student the *n word* because that word is the oppressor’s way of telling Black people “what their place is”. Eddie was the one who gave up the chance for solidarity. Black people aren’t the ones who want to play “oppression olympics”, aren’t the ones who see the “bottom” as a competition; it’s usually Asian Americans and other non-Black POC who want to play the damn game. 

"It doesn’t matter anymore what shade the newcomer’s skin is. A hostile posture toward resident blacks must be struck at the Americanizing door before it will open. The public is asked to accept American blacks as the common denominator in each conflict between an immigrant and a job or between a wannabe and status. It hardly matters what complexities, contexts and misinformation accompany these conflicts. They can all be subsumed as the equation of brand X vs. blacks.” - Toni Morrison in “On the Backs of Blacks”[x]