Being The Other

There’s a lot of talk now about the “other.” Talk by some of “real Americans,” bitter complaints that our president does not share “our” values, or even understand our “Anglo Saxon” traditions. Killings of Sikhs, burnings of mosques, and that’s just this week, and just in America itself. What is going on around the world, in our names, doesn’t bear too much thinking about.

Who is this “other?” And what is this “other” thing?


The Prototypical Other: Me

I’ve been in Thailand for eight years now, so I’ve had plenty of time to experience being the “other,” the foreigner, the Farang. That’s what the Thais call us, Farang. I’m sure that it comes from a few hundred years ago when some of the first Europeans that they saw introduced themselves in French and it sounded like the Thai word farang, which means the fruit, the guava. (“So, you guys are the guava people?”) That’s so gentle that I never object to it at all, not even being compared to a Frenchman. It’s a lot nicer than the Japanese calling us “White Devils” (Gaijin).

Some aspects of being the other in Thailand are positive. I am seen as a citizen of a very developed, advanced industrial country, and I am imagined to possess all of the advantages that might come with that status. I am perceived, for instance, to be rich, wise in the ways of the world, savvy in business, and enormously practical of mind. I am assumed to have an adventurous nature, after all I have traveled half way around the world and decided to stay. I have resources, a good job, and a comfortable lifestyle. I get additional credit for having white skin and a high nose, and not only by virtue of being a White man. Both things were esteemed by Asians before we showed up, the fashion for whiteness and noses is an ancient tradition here. Thais find my blue eyes fascinating as well. But being the other has a darker side too, another side to the coin altogether.

Prejudice is involved. There are hostilities real and imagined. I know what it is to be handled in bulk, judged as a type, a category. When it is working in my favor I humbly accept the fruits that it offers; when it is working against me I try to remember that I am a guest here, and that after all I am genuinely the other in this situation.


Khun Fred, The Other

Without laboring the point . . .

Here, I am a big smelly thing. Different races, with different diets, have different smells, and different is not a good smell, usually. Look up some cartoons from post-war Japan featuring depictions of White, American soldiers, you’ll get some idea of how Asians perceive White people. Big, hairy, bestial things. Here, I try very hard to be polite but I get it wrong sometimes. The intricacies of Asian etiquette can be hard to master. Here, if something goes wrong I am likely to be blamed; if something goes right, someone else is likely to get the credit, because after all I am just a foreigner who doesn’t know shit from shoe polish. Here, I am liable to be hated because a Thai man, or his friend, or his cousin, was once dumped by his girlfriend after she decided to go with a Farang. Or, hated because the Thai man or woman knew a woman who was treated badly by a Farang. Or, just on principle, hated for coming to Thailand in the first place and expecting Thai women to fall all over me (which would be silly; nothing is further from the truth in my case, neither in my expectations nor in the actions of Thai womanhood). Here, Thai English teachers hate it that native speaking foreigners, with no teaching experience, can come to Thailand and immediately get a job teaching English for considerably more money than they are paid, and even those teachers that don’t know me hate me because they assume that I am an English teacher, which I’m not. Here, I am immediately grouped with all of the foreigners who come to Thailand and expect everything to be much more like their home countries; who expect all Thais to speak good English; who expect to be waited on hand and foot. Grouped with all of the rude, White foreigners who come to Thailand from countries that I will refrain from naming and who walk around drunk at 10:00 a.m. pulling at the clothes of modest Thai girls and asking in broken English, “how much!” I’m sure that I could go on, but this is a blog, not “War and Peace.”


The Real Lesson

Being the other has reminded me to be generous when considering the other and to wonder about all of the issues related to the entire other thing. The current situation in my miserable country begs the question: why is there now such a fury of vituperation about the nature of realness and otherness in America?

The simple answer is that a Black man is president. A justly elected Black man, not like that fool W, who had the election stolen for him by some close family friends.  Our current president is a legitimate winner of a national election for president. And people of all races and creeds voted for him, this Black person. This President of the United States.

Does it matter that his father was an actual African? Not constitutionally, because the president himself was born in America. Does it matter that his mom was a White woman? Or that his antecedents did not experience the slavery days in the old America? Not in the least. He is Black by the only test that matters, the mirror test. If your face shows enough of Blackness that you suffer from anti-Black discrimination in America you are a Black American as far as I am concerned. And he’s the president by the only test that matters, a properly won election. Now it is strongly hinted to us, by the people that he beat in that election, that his Blackness is a problem. The problem is phrased as anything from “socialist” to “anti-colonialist,” anything but the blunt statement: “duh! he’s a nigger!” Message received, thank you.

There is, obviously, a terrible streak of something beneath the surface of White society in America. Something that was exposed by the mere election of a Black president. Sure, evil forces have nurtured it, and financed it, and publicized it, forces that would do anything at all, literally, to push their selfish agenda. Does anyone think that his Blackness would be such a problem if he’d been elected as a Republican president, with solid Republican goals? No, then he’d be their . . . oh, jeez-Louise I almost said it again. But if he were on their team, it’d all be coolsville. As a Democrat though, it makes a wonderful fulcrum for the lever of Republican anti-everythingism. It’s the greatest gift they ever got. His Blackness will allow them to pick up some of the stupid vote on the cheap. The people in charge of this effort may not even be anti-Black themselves, as individuals, but they’re sure not above using it as a tool at their disposal.

I say the stupid vote, and I mean it. Let’s be real here, I mean we’re all friends, I have so few readers that I’m pretty sure I know all of you personally. Anybody who doesn’t like President Obama, considering that he inherited a seat in the modern Imperial Presidency, I just don’t understand it except at the level of racism. And racism is stupid. I mean, what’s not to like? He’s a good man. If I have to explain that to you, you’re not so good yourself. Except maybe the drone thing, but I’m pretty sure that whoever happened to be the president that stuff would be going on (that’s another blog post altogether; see “Shadow Executive;” see “Permanent Executive.”). He’s a mensch, for Christ’s sake, if I may mix my metaphors.

The disloyal opposition attack President Obama as being somehow alien to the American way of life, they paint him as the other, they use coded language like, “take our country back,” with stupid smiles, like they were getting away with some very clever ruse. What, I ask you, is so “other” about Black Americans?

I’m a White American, mea maxima culpa. It’s a group that I’m not particularly proud of these days, frankly. You would be forgiven to think that I was a “real American,” but you’d be less than totally correct. Oh, I’m White enough, it’s the American part that’s a little dodgy. One of the secret advantages of being White in America is that you might actually know what countries your antecedents came from. Overrated as an advantage, but it’s true. My families, the whole list of them, only got to America in the mid-Nineteenth Century, so I can safely say that the furthest south in Europe that any of my blood came from was Switzerland, and German Swiss at that. So White it is, not even a Frenchman in the mix. But coming so recently, how American is that? And a bunch of Catholics in there too, how American is that? Are those papists even Christians? All of my great-grandparents were born in old Europe, how American is that?

This America as a White country, a White Christian Country, is a terrible illusion and it leads to strange results. Now we are to believe that somehow Black Americans are not real Americans? But somehow I am? How’s that work out? The families of most Black Americans got to America long before any of my people did, and worked harder too, on average, and with quite different incentives. If Black Americans aren’t real Americans by this time, they never will be. Is that the point? They’re sure not real Africans anymore, just ask an African if you don’t believe me. They’ll tell you in a heartbeat (“Nope, not Africans.”) Shit, I’d get a warmer welcome in Ireland than a Black American would get in Africa.


My Ass

America is a White, Christian country my ass. Wake up, all you Iowans out there, you have nothing at all to do with America except for the couple of weeks every four years that the real Americans pay attention to about one hundred and seventy five of you eating giant breakfasts before starting the whole farm work routine. America takes place on the coasts, and maybe Chicago, where the money, the culture and almost all of the people are. And the coasts are diverse, DIVERSE, population wise, so get over it. We get along with Black Americans, Hispanic Americans from about fifty different countries, Asians from countries that you never heard of, and about seven ‘Stans. Religions you never heard of either, like you’ve actually heard of any to mention. You couple of thousand White people out in Kick-Stump don’t matter anymore, and no amount of taking-back-America hysteria is going to put you on top, where you never were to begin with. Those million plus Koreans out in Los Angeles, and that’s just Los Angeles mind you, they’re not going anywhere, and they’re as American as you, so get over it, get over yourself.

And if people at you church, or on your TV, or on your right-wing echo-chamber web site are telling you otherwise, it’s just because they’re convinced that you’re stupid enough to go for it. Wake up, smell the coffee, and vote for your actual interests for a change, vote for someone who will do something to help you. Sure, the drone strikes, endless detention, yadda, yadda, yadda. Anyone who still expects a perfect world should be committed to a mental institution, if they can find one that they can afford.

President Obama is us, the real us. Maybe if we can join forces, the real us, we could do away with these bullshiters who are trying to convince American voters to “take back their country” from the legitimately elected president. And get on with the real business at hand. Take my word for it, there’s plenty of it, work to do that is. Issues, real ones.

So let’s go! What’d’ya say?