ORANGE COUNTY VOICES : A Racist Slur: Tiresome Bigotry Goes On

Slowly and suddenly I became aware that someone in the restaurant near us was making a racist crack about Asians. I stared at the source of the remark, an American woman about 35 years old, and two companions. There was nothing in their dress or demeanor to suggest what had come: a slur loud and vivid enough to be heard by other groups of diners nearby.

My instinct was to make a scene they wouldn’t soon forget, but the woman who was the target of their remark shook her head at me. She is 25, with stunning good looks who turns heads when she enters any room. She is Vietnamese, a refugee living and working in Orange County.

They come more and more frequently, these asides uttered loud enough to be overheard in restaurants, in theater lobbies, in stores.

As the white-on-white American picture changes, the slurs seem to become more blatant, less mindful of the social civilities, lethal sound bites of hatred.

There are predators about, and none of us are immune. The Vietnamese girl and I were riding point that afternoon, targets of race-baiting simply because we were in that restaurant at that particular time.

The aspersions, in this case against Asians, were true to form, garden variety bigotry of a piece with the sign defacements in Little Saigon, the paint sprayed on houses in Westminster. This sort of thing has a knack of catching on, as if it were suddenly fashionable to go public with defamation. This is the immemorial voice of resentment, gospel of those always fearful of some usurpation of American privilege. It is another name for what sociologist Jane Jacobs called “our tendency toward Master-Race psychology.”

Anything, it seems, will serve to candle hostilities-- even two dissimilar faces in a restaurant. What social motives are operable here? What hot flare of emotions takes hold among those doing the taunting? Maybe the hard pounding of their own failure, some domestic astringencies never overcome in their lives make the indiscriminate slander come easy to them.

Maybe this is just prejudice as pastime. It is the time bomb ticking away, here and everywhere, the zealot’s ardor, the bravado buttressed by a crowd. The invective aimed at this Asian girl is a microcosm of what’s out there, an augury of something worse. Bigotry, far from being eradicated, is worsening.

One needn’t look far. “Will the last American to leave Garden Grove (California) please take the American flag?”--the large signs appeared in Orange County in 1986, their sponsorship hidden.

It is not just Asians who will find themselves at some point on the map of some bigot’s shrapnel. The fanatics and the scriptural crews whose agenda battens upon the defilement of the foreign-born, the gay, the black, the Jew, are offspring of the same ideology, and they allocate their poison equally. The “rise” of neo-Nazism and white hate groups is just a new installment of an old familiar American theme, a somber sequel for this new decade.

These racial slurs are emblematic of far more than a collapse of civility: This is the cast of the Ku Klux Klan with a California face. There is something unbridgeable here, some deformation of spirit that reason could not begin to address, in their sullen roll calls of who’s native born and who’s not, in their preoccupation with all those “others” whose very existence they take as insult.

That they are running on empty, that time will probably overtake their sad tableaux of off-kilter righteousness and render them unseasonable, offers some consolation to those of us who are scanning the darkness with an eye to survival. I suspect that the acrostics of intolerance will no longer ensure the garrison state of American insularity. “Them,” those “Others,” have become the touchable people living next door. The prospect is a smorgasbord of lives whose authenticity will make these blinkered screeds beside the point.

The cultural and geographical coordinates of our world are changing, and the changes will require mid-course corrections by all of us, and we had best grasp that fact quickly. My Vietnamese friend and I are poised at the edge of departure, where the boundaries are finally, rightly, becoming meaningless, where the future waiting for us all can be huge with possibility.