By Michael Patrick O’Brien–
Recent news headlines tell the stories of red-faced politicians apologizing for appearing in blackface sometime during their foolish youthful past. Unfortunately, I have to join the chorus of mea culpas, but my own transgression is what I call the “whiteface scandal.”
It was Halloween 1977 and I was a junior in high school, a teen who by all appearances was smart and showed relatively good judgment for someone without a fully-developed prefrontal cortex (see https://brainconnection.brainhq.com/2013/03/20/decision-making-is-still-a-work-in-progress-for-teenagers/). Still, I resorted to some very questionable decision making in my costume choice.
It was not as bad as some others, and no photos of stupid me appeared in the yearbook, but I can’t be casting any stones here. A friend and I decided to dress up as Chinese men. We donned what we thought looked liked Asian robes, wore what in Chinese is called a “douli,” literally meaning a “one-dǒu bamboo hat”, or in English a conical or rice hat. Worse yet, we painted our faces white.
I am not sure why I added the white paint. I am pretty white already. There apparently is a paleness-as-beauty trend for some Asians, but this typically is for women. Some male actors wear white face paint in kabuki theatre performances, but that is Japanese and not Chinese, and this was not kabuki. And then, of course, there are the whitefaced geishas, which is certainly not a look we were trying to achieve.
Hindsight is 20/20, certainly, but sometimes looking backwards is the only way we see something clearly. Whether intended or not, my white facial paint portrayed persons of Chinese descent as stereotypically different, as not-the-standard, as exotic and unusual compared to my own race. I caricatured a whole race as abnormal, ostensibly trying to be funny or clever, but doing so at someone else’s expense. I did not mean to be mean, but it was mean, and I wonder now how my schoolmates of Asian descent might have felt when they saw me.
It likely was how I felt was when I heard about the Stanford University band’s halftime show during the 1997 football game with my alma mater, the University of Notre Dame, the Fighting Irish. It was about “Seamus O’Hungry” and the Great Famine, aka the Great Hunger, in Ireland in the mid-1800s. The band’s show described O’Hungry’s “sparse cultural heritage” as only involving “fighting, then starving.” It was intended to be funny, but about a million people died in the Great Hunger and a couple million more left Ireland so they could eat. I have ancestors who endured one or the other. Stanford later apologized for the incident.
I should follow Stanford’s good example and apologize too. I am sorry for my own whiteface scandal. It was stupid (and maybe even racist). Ironically, there is a much better point that the Irish me could have made about my Chinese brothers and sisters. I did not make it then, so I will make it now.
In a few months, we here in Utah will celebrate the 150th anniversary of the completion of the first transcontinental railroad. (FYI, my friend Doug Foxley has organized a full set of sesquicentennial celebratory events, see https://www.sltrib.com/news/politics/2018/08/16/ready-party-like-its/.) On May 10, 1869, workers from the Central Pacific Railroad met workers from the Union Pacific Railroad in Promontory, Utah and connected- by a golden spike- the railroad tracks that ran from the Pacific coast to Omaha, Nebraska. Most of the workers were Irish and Chinese.
I am not suggesting that race relations in 1869 should be a model for today. Yet, the diverse group of workers who built the transcontinental railroad show that we can do so much more by rolling up our sleeves and working together than we can accomplish by mocking or singling each other out based on either the color of our skin or from where we come.
