Undercover Asian: Multiracial Asian Americans in Visual Culture

3. Tiger Woods and the Perils of Colorblind Celebrity

chapter 3 Tiger Woods and the Perils of Colorblind Celebrity For many, Tiger Woods—undoubtedly the single most famous multiracial African/Asian American in the world—symbolizes multiraciality. He is both the singular and prototypical multiracial Asian. The narrative of his celebrity (before the scandal of his extramarital affairs) depended on his difference from everyone else, melding a worshipful admiration of his exceptional athleticism with his racial exceptionalism. Yet as contradictory as it may seem, it is this very discourse of exceptionalism that typifies so much of our public conversation about multiracial people. Rather than seeing Woods as a particular case with little to say about race generally, we can paradoxically find a shared history in his supposed difference from everyone else and a common perception of what place Asian Americans occupy in the more familiar black/ white binary of multiracial representation in the United States. Woods’s early public images embodied the liberal multicultural fantasy of the disappearance of race through interracial reproduction. Even though his fame at the beginning of his career promoted the myth of the multiracial browning of America, he eventually retreated from this narrative in favor of a disembodied, deracinated exceptionalism, thus replicating the contradictory (but normalized) pairing of a multiracial solution to the “problem” of race with a colorblind ideology. The story of Woods’s publicly enacted rise and fall provides an object, and perhaps abject, lesson on the rewards and the costs of the simplistic equation of multiracial people with a colorblind 42 utopia. The intellectual dishonesty that underpins colorblind ideology falls away under direct pressure to show its flip side of unresolved racial hostility. A similar binary racial logic bridges the gap between early celebratory narratives of Woods’s rise and the savage public response to his infidelities. While they appear to be oppositional, both depend on and perpetuate the divisions between Asian Americans and African Americans. Popularmedia,suchasthefilmCrash,tendtolocatethesourceofthissplitin personal animosities between individual Asian Americans and African Americans and propose friendship or romance as the solution. However, as noted in theintroduction,governmentalandstructuralforceshavehistoricallymobilized AsianbodiestobuttressnotionsoftheUnitedStatesasacolorblindspacewhile still maintaining racial inequalities. The story of Tiger Woods is also the story of Asian Americans within the black/white binary of the U.S. racial system. The presumptive assimilation of Asians into white America powers the fictions of a colorblind utopia, and Woods’s Asian-ness seemed also to fade as he came to symbolize a raceless future. It is telling that the primary way Woods represented a multiracial Asian/African American self was through an erasure of that self. The anger and disappointment in the wake of his public disgrace is not only about his infidelity but is also about the betrayal of his public image. In the media following the scandal, Woods is highly racialized but in ways that pit an African American against an Asian American identity. Images of Woods abruptly shifted from a neither/nor rejection of any racial identification to an either/or of Asian or African American identities. It would be more accurate, then, to understand Woods less as an examplar of multiracial visual culture and more as its failure. Yet, its failure has much to tell us about the role of multiracial people in maintaining racial categories and hierarchies even as those bodies provide the visual symbol of the demise of race. The Postmodern Invisible Man Early in Woods’s career, a Sports Illustrated feature addressed the U.S. media’s infrequentacknowledgmentofhisThaiheritage.Itquotedhismother,Kultida: “‘All the media try to put black in him,’ she says, rising off the couch. ‘Why don’t they ask who half of Tiger is from? In United States, one little part black is all black. Nobodywanttolistentome.Ibeentrying to explain to people, but theydon’tunderstand.Tosayhe is100percentblackistodenyhisheritage.To deny his grandmother and grandfather. To deny me!’”1 Her protest recognizes and then rejects the long history of both racial mixing and the visual culture of African American images in the United States. undercover asians 43 It also underlines the predominant way the media racialized Woods in the early stages of his career. Habiba Ibrahim notes that even though Woods pointedly and publically acknowledged his mother, she still did not achieve the public visibility granted his father.2 Woods was celebrated as an African American athlete breaking into a white-dominated sport traditionally conducted within the segregated and exclusive domain of whites-only golfing clubs. Even negativecommentsfocusedonWoodsasanAfricanAmerican .Inawidelyreported incident,fellowgolferFuzzyZoeller“joked”aboutWoods’ssuccess.“Thatlittle boy...