The Penultimate Word: Racism, Ignorance, and Western Vocabulary

A recent Youtube viral video features a UCLA student ranting about her annoyance, for various reasons, with Asian students at UCLA. The student lets her emotions – and her idiotically blatant racism – run away from her, to disgusting effect. I don't recommend watching it.

Now, I'm not going to bash this woman for being hate-filled and offensive.  The Youtube comment bar is loaded with people who are doing that for me, and she is probably receiving enough angry feedback to be aware (one would hope) that her comments were unacceptable (read: incredibly stupid). So, at least this time, I'm going to refrain from kicking a dead racist horse.

What also bothered me, though, after I got over the uncomfortable vague upsetness of a sort-of-second generation immigrant, was that she never used any word more specific than "Asians". I will let the hordes of angry Youtube prowlers devour her for her bigoted comments, but her imprecision I cannot let slide. While I suppose it is possible that she really is prejudiced against the entire population of the most populous continent on the planet, I suspect that that's not the case. Many people have the annoying habit of referring to "Asia" and only meaning China, Japan, North and South Korea, Vietnam, and maybe Thailand. They are saying "Asia" but they don't mean to include India or Russia or Oman or Azerbaijan at all. We (Westerners, that is) tend to do this with the continent of Africa, too.

Part of the reason for the contagious lack of specificity, I think, is the huge amount of contact, discourse, and study between the US and Canada and Europe, and the lack thereof between the US and anywhere else.  In high school and college, we focus a huge amount on European and US history – at Houghton, you don't have to go beyond Western Civilization to fulfill your history requirement – and, if we're lucky, get a few days to skim over the 4000 years of dynasties in China, a civilization that was flourishing 1500 years before Socrates took it upon himself to invent the United States. I think that our lack of general education about anything beyond the US and Europe is borne of a natural ethnocentricity, and also continues our semi-willful ignorance of two thirds of the population of the world.

How vague do statements about "an African language" become when we consider the fact that Africa is a continent and there are like fifteen hundred languages spoken on it. People say things like "indigenous African music", but how much less likely we would be to introduce a Bach cantata as "from Europe". Similarly, does "Asian food" mean Japanese, Indian, Russian, Georgian, or Pakistani food? When someone says "I want to serve God in Africa", do they want to travel to Cairo, which is predominately Muslim, or South Africa, with 75% of its population professing Christianity (about as much as the US)?

We - as students, as a campus, and as Christians - have to stop marginalizing the two largest continents in the world into neat, small ideas. The words "Asia" and "Africa" mean so much that they often functionally end up meaning very little, and another of our attempts at communication crumbles from inaccuracy, borne not of blatant racism but of simple ignorance.