At home in the D.C. area, I'd read articles in the Washington Post about black women who experienced stress upon merely seeing an interracial couple. I remembered black women's brutal words about the murdered Nicole Brown Simpson. In my own high school experience, I was harassed by many of the black girls for reasons I could not then understand. After I graduated, I wondered if their animosity had been caused by many of the black boys' attraction to me. I hadn't even dated any of them, but the mere attraction of black boys had been enough to make the girls bitter toward me.

During junior year, my interest in Northeast Asian cultures and Asian-American issues prompted me to search the Internet for Asian-American sites. At a message board I frequented, nearly all of the posts were young Asian men enraged over high numbers of Asian women who dated and married white men. A few of these men were absolute fanatics, calling all these women whores and demanding a burning of all Amy Tan and Maxine Hong Kingston books. Of course such extremists are the minority, but still, I've sensed a malaise among most Asian-American men and boys I know.

My thesis, I decided, would be that interracial marriage could cause hostility between the races. Because of my observations, I knew that interracial marriage is more sociologically complex than commercials of black hands holding white ones would lead us to believe. I knew that anecdotal evidence was not appropriate for scholarly research, so my English teacher directed me to the sociology department.

I went to see the only sociology professor whose office hours fit my schedule. Then I saw who it was: I'd gone to a few of the Sociology Club's meetings, and I had heard this man use a lot of clichéd jargon about giving center stage to the marginalized. Sitting in his office, I explained my thesis. He sat back in his chair and sighed.

"I don't agree with you," he said, "but I'll try to help you." He paused. "That was what they were arguing 30 years ago." His lofty, condescending tone reminded me of a psychiatrist. I tried to explain my case

"Padding the O.J. jury with black women helped acquit him, because many of them felt that a white woman who married a black man deserved whatever she got," I paraphrased from an article I'd found. He said there was "a lot wrong" with that case. I talked further about the hostility that a lot of black women have for white women.

"Well, black women have suffered a lot," he replied. "They were denied their anger, their sexuality." I was barely listening, trying to think of how I could end the conversation. I asked him if there was any literature or research validating my thesis.

"There is, but it's old, and a lot was racist." He trailed off. "You could read Nazi literature."

In the end all he could give me was the name of an African man who wrote about his marriage to a white woman. Despite my rage at being compared to a Nazi, I stiffly thanked him and darted from his office. I scurried down the hall, until I realized that I was not headed toward the building’s door. I turned around, but realized that to leave I would have to walk past his office. I escaped through the side door. Safe on the rocky, dusty path outside, I ran spasmodically for a few minutes until the anger left my body.

Yet it remained, mixed with humiliation, in my mind; I had been dismissed as a racist, my ideas deemed unworthy of academic inquiry. I trudged the rest of the way until I reached the computer lab. I curled my hand around the mouse and settled into a comforting bath of green light. I tramped around the Internet until I had forgotten the incident enough to get on with my day. But it was a long time before I was able to write my paper.
salon.com | Nov. 10, 1999

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