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- SERIES ON DISCRIMINATION: PART 3
- MORE WHITE THAN WHITE
- By: John S. Davis
- The
UMJ Volume 5.1
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To assimilate
or not to assimilate?
Do any of us really want to become one of
“them?” Actually,
we already are: We
are people just like “them.” Assimilation
used to be a popular theme in
American sociology.
As I always approached the subject from an
academic point of view and as I was not personally an
immigrant, I
am not sure how this process looked from the standpoint
of the immigrants themselves. As far as I could tell
though, it was just assumed by them that they would do
certain things—most especially,
that they would work hard and if possible climb
up the economic ladder or enable their children to do so
by providing them with a better education than they
themselves had had or etc..
Since English was the American language, they
learned it if they didn’t know it, or at least enough
to get by, and their children learned English at school
and had little interest in responding to their parents
in their native language, though they may have retained
a fair degree of comprehension.
Once their “foreign” background was once or
twice removed (by generation) and the children or the
children’s children spoke only English, they were
considered to have been totally assimilated, though they
may or may not have viewed themselves in such terms.
The difference with the more recent crops of
immigrants is that there are too many of them and they
are able by a combination of choice and necessity to
retain their language and community even in the USA.
In addition, they are more likely to be yellow or
brown than white or pink.
The theme has therefore shifted from assimilation
to acceptance
of diversity while the lowly are kept low, in part
through monolingual English educational policies even in
many communities where other languages are spoken both
at home and in the streets. In the
words of Pierre Bourdieu, education is a kind of
cultural capital, as distinct from both social capital
and economic capital. Accumulating any kind of capital
leads to certain opportunities and privileges in the
society. It
is of course harder to obtain other types of
capital if you lack economic capital, but it is
not necessarily impossible and the possessors of capital
do not coincide completely.
Much social capital—for example an extensive
network of family relations—may somewhat compensate
for a deficiency of economic capital. Economic capital
without social and cultural capital may lead to ruin and
certainly greater difficulty in extending the dynasty.
Cultural capital,
in the form of educational
qualifications, for example,
give one a greater access to the certain types of
employment opportunities, more access to the media, and
so on. This
sort of vocabulary is very different from the vocabulary
of assimilation, but it may be useful to shift a bit,
from one to the other and back again.
Aren’t there a few fundamental levels of
assimilation? One
is the economic/physical type.
We are here and we are working here; therefore,
at that level, we are assimilated.
From the standpoint of this sort of economic
level assimilation, we must be equal under the law. How
outrageous that though we are prepared to pay the same
rent or pay the same price, we cannot live in a certain
place or shop at a certain shop
because we are “foreigners!” The Japanese
constitution doesn’t really cover those situations
inasmuch as it is interpreted to apply to “the people
of Japan” (kokumin) legally defined by Japanese nationality, and most of us
don’t have it. The constitution needs to be
re-interpreted to apply to “residents” of Japan (as
opposed to “citizens”), whereupon it
would instantly be in conformity with the
international commission on human rights and human
rights treaties that the Japanese Government has signed,
including the INTERNATIONAL CONVENTION ON THE
ELIMINATION OF ALL FORMS OF RACIAL DISCRIMINATION. Come
to think of it, couldn’t kokumin
in the first place have meant “people in
Japan?!” Without the infusion of “foreigners,” the
problem as stated would not have arisen. The terminology
itself may have been
a kind of culmination of a
unification effort actually, not between Japanese
and foreigners, to
be sure, but among the “Japanese” themselves who
until only four or five generations ago were regionally
scattered and regionally identified, with dialects
created to affirm regional autonomy
and make for easy recognition of spies,
a diversity of social customs (including
areas where the dead were buried instead of
cremated, maternal instead of paternal lineages existed,
etc.) and nothing like the monolithic concept of
Japanese culture invented during the Meiji Era and
leading up to World War II.
After the war, colonial citizens under the
colonial policies (Koreans living in Japan, for
example), were deprived of their citizenship, and the
remaining Japanese
all became kokumin
under the constitution, translated as “people” in
the English version—or was “kokumin”
in the Japanese version translated from “people” in
the English original? If the latter is true, was it only
a slip of the pen or was it another attempt to
distinguish “them” from “us”?!
In any event, Japanese Culture in its monolithic
version was clearly an ideological construction which
we—and they—are supposed to believe represents
something real. However
“pickled in” it becomes, though, through
media and educational centralization, I refuse to
believe it. “They” are all different,
just as “we” are all different, even if
they/we come from the same village.
Using another one of Bourdieu’s terms, the
“habitus” of Japan is not as homogenous as all that!
Instead of citizens and cultures, we should be
talking about people and laws, fixing the latter to
serve the former. And
what about cultural capital? The apex of the cultural capital hierarchy in Japan is
probably graduation from Tokyo University,
consistently “ranked” the top university
in Asia. So how does a “foreigner” raised in
Japan gain
access to that particular chip?!
Think about it! The process is discriminatory at
best, for them as well as for us, but that is how the
chips fall, probably in almost any society.
To get to that point, one would probably have to
be more white than white, or, more precisely, more
yellow than yellow.
Everyone knows that in order for the
discriminated against to “succeed” in assimilation
to the top class, they have to be ambitious and
reactionary, leaving their fellow creatures behind. Oh,
yes, there are “exceptions,” but do you really think
your child will be one of them? Help
us help you help your children! |
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