Hate-Equal Opportunity Style

After reading the article below I had to scratch my
head and ask how and why did this paper allow this
wet behind the ear youngster to write and then they
publish such garbage. Kenneth Eng should not bear
the brunt of this alone. His boss editor Ted Fang
should also be fired, he after all is solely responsible
for what gets printed in the publication.


WHERE DID we go wrong? That was the predictable question raised last week, notably in the ethnic press, after Kenneth Eng wrote a column titled "Why I Hate Blacks." The column, published in the San Francisco-based AsianWeek newspaper in the waning days of African American History Month, was so astonishingly hateful that activists of all stripes immediately rushed forward to condemn it. AsianWeek Editor Ted Fang issued a lengthy apology and fired Eng, who is in his early 20s and also writes science fiction novels. The small press that published Eng's books announced last week that it was taking them off the market. There was a hastily arranged community forum about strengthening black/Asian relations and improving coverage across color lines. More are surely on the way.

This kind of hand-wringing is to a degree appropriate. It's also inherently limited, a first step that all too often stands as the entire response to ugly racial moments that generally say more about our so-called enlightenment than we like to imagine. Containing the mess, therefore, is critical. From Trent Lott to Michael Richards to Kenneth Eng, our impulse in the wake of black insult is to kick-start big, rhetorical debates about race that tend to divert attention from hard questions about accountability, about who said what and why.

In Eng's case, that's easy. A quick check of his writing reveals an immature, belligerent, insensitive, self-aggrandizing, self-described "Asian supremacist." His previous AsianWeek columns include such subtle titles as "Why I Hate Asians" and "Proof that Whites Inherently Hate Us."Eng comes off as an equal-opportunity hater — he derides religion, calls white folks "Aryan" and once proclaimed that Hitler was "not a coward." But his hatred is stoked by the idea that blacks are exempt from the rules of political correctness, especially when they make derogatory remarks about other groups.

Eng himself got away with racist stuff for months; he only got caught when he blasted blacks. What this genius missed is that anti-black venom has a particular history in this country and is the bedrock measure of our national principles of fairness and equality. Put another way, blacks are historically the least advantaged group, and their treatment by the more advantaged — i.e., everybody else — is where the rubber of democratic ideals hits the road.




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