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2 NEITHER BLACK NOR WHITE Angelo N. Ancheta In his 1989 feature film Do the Right Thing, filmmaker Spike Lee explores urban race relations by tracing the interplay of a set of characters during a sweltering day in the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn, New York. Lee’s film tracks the life of a neighborhood during a twenty-four-hour span, punctuated by interracial tensions that culminate in violence and rioting. A climactic scene near the end of the film features the movement of an angry mob outraged by the killing of a black youth by white police officers. The crowd’s rage is turned on Sal’s Famous Pizzeria, a neighborhood restaurant owned and operated by a white family. After Mookie, Sal’s only black employee, throws a garbage can through the front window, others in the crowd rush into the restaurant, ransacking and setting fire to it. As flames engulf the pizzeria, the mob turns toward a new target: the grocery store across the street owned by Korean immigrants. Tensions build as three men lead the others to confront the store’s owner, Sonny. Anxious and confused, Sonny swings a broom wildly through the air in a desperate attempt to hold back the crowd. He shouts out: I not white! I not white! I not white! I black! I BLACK! Several people laugh and scoff at Sonny’s pleas. He responds, “You, me— same!” One of the men retorts incredulously: “Same? Me black! Open your eyes!” But others in the crowd begin sympathizing with the grocer. They nod their heads in agreement with Sonny and move closer to restrain the men who first challenged him. Sonny extends an open hand in friendship, as another man says, “He’s all right. He’s black.” Tensions subside, and the crowd turns and moves on. 22 A N G E L O N . A N C H E T A Real life is rarely as tidy as cinematic fiction, but the imagery and dialogue from Do the Right Thing offer a glimpse into the potential violence that many Asian immigrants encounter in the nation’s inner cities. And since the film’s original release, reality has proved to be far more dramatic than fiction. The country witnessed the destruction of thousands of Asian American-owned businesses during the civil unrest in Los Angeles and other cities in the spring of 1992, following the acquittal of Los Angeles Police Department officers on trial for the beating of Rodney King. The scene illustrates the volatility of urban race relations, but it also encapsulates some of the distinctive problems that Asian Americans face as a racial group. On one level, the idealistic and convenient ending to the mob scene offers an insight into the parallels between Asian Americans and African Americans. The grocer identified himself as black and many in the crowd agreed with him because Asian Americans and African Americans share similar histories and experiences with racial subordination in the United States. On another level, though, the scene portrays a more complex dynamic: the grocer, caught in the middle of a race riot, invoked an inaccurate but successful appeal to he treated as if black. The crowd initially equated the Korean grocer with the white pizzeria owner because of his store ownership and his economic stature within the neighborhood. But the grocer took on a new identity when confronted by the crowd. The entreaty “I black” placed him squarely on one side of the conflict, resolving any ambiguity about his alignment within the neighborhood’s racial matrix. The grocer’s transformation is an extreme example but it illuminates a dilemma that Asian Americans typically encounter in matters involving race. When discourse is limited to antagonisms between black and white, Asian Americans often find themselves in a racial limbo, marginalized or unrecognized as full participants. The assertion of other experiences, different from black or white, can be misunderstood, become trivial or ineffectual, or even prove to be dangerous. Within a less perilous context, the grocer might have been expected to declare a different identity—Korean or Asian American. But placed within a conflict that had been reduced to black versus white, the grocer assumed the safety of a black identity. RACE RELATIONS IN BLACK AND WHITE “Are you black or are you white?” For Asian Americans the obvious answer would seem to be “neither.” Yet, when questions of race relations arise, a dichotomy between black and white typically predominates. Formed largely through inequities and...

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