The Fighting 44s

I came across an interesting website recently, “The Fighting 44s”, a sort of in-group community for Asian-Americans to express their anger at what they perceive to be the egregious injustices dealt to them by the white power structure in America.

A cursory browse of their message boards gives a brief overview of the subjects the community collectively views as relevant to their plight: asian stereotypes, anti-asian bias in the workplace, media, political scene, and in every day life. The following is a random list of post titles I found on the first 2 pages of the website’s message board:

-Racist Volkswagon commercial?
-Blatant acts of point our your’e Asian
-Why do white people tend to make more average(sic) than Asians?
-Why do PC white people...
-White privilege at its most blatant

The above threads, among many others, are full of a unique yet utterly boring vitriol apparently posted without any hint or notion of irony. If I hadn’t known any better I would have guessed that the entire forum was a decent attempt at self parody, an exaggerated way to show the humor of complaints registered by a group who has nothing better to do than create problems of out thin air. But nope, the people on this website are dead serious.

So why the anger? The average Asian household in America makes $57,518 a year, the average white household $48,977, and the average Hispanic and black households make $34,241 and $30,134 respectively. Clearly the Asians in America are not doing too bad financially.

But then I found it, the ‘features’ section. Herein is contained what can only be described as hate concerning the state of interracial dating in America today. The main target of the outburst: white guy, asian woman relationships. The following are quotes from some of the editorials:


“…nothing affects Asian Americans quite like the Eurocentric racial preference in dating. It affects us through alienation and misunderstanding. It causes a societal loss of spirit, a zeitgeist of hopelessness that permeates everything that we do. Between Asian men and women, it has caused countless misunderstandings and mischaracterizations, even in interactions that are not sexual in nature.” http://www.thefighting44s.com/archives/2008/02/13/so-what-do-your-parents-think-about-the-white-guy/

“Remember, that when you choose your wife or husband or life partner or relationship, you are not only making a statement to yourself, not only making a statement to that other person, but you are also making a statement to the world. You are saying that at present, this is the person I love, the person I trust, the person I can most relate to in all the whole wide world. And if the person you love, trust, and most relate to in all the whole wide world, is not Asian, and you’re an Asian activist, then that is a symbolic statement to the world that you don’t actually stand for the advancement of Asian interests in opposition to colonial racist interests, you stand for some broader human interest that takes you out of the Asian advocacy sphere. You have found that you relate best to someone who is not Asian, and you have gained better access, willingly or not, to some of the advantages of colonial racist privilege which you are supposedly struggling against.” http://www.thefighting44s.com/archives/2007/07/18/inter-racial-dating-by-asian-americans/

“You are an Asian advocate. You speak for Asians. You fight for Asians. The question is simple: do you stand for “Asianness” or not? If you marry someone white, then you don’t stand for “Asianness.” You stand for something else entirely.”

“Remember, racism and colonialism benefits heterosexual white males the most. When you treat everyone “equally” in the classical Liberal sense without accounting for social and economic power structures, the heterosexual white man ends up on top. So to actually achieve “equal” treatment, you have to form advocate and special interest groups (a distinctly “unequal” thing to do) to chip away at that heterosexual white male power. It’s very hard to chip away at heterosexual white male power when we are making love to the heterosexual white male.”

Do you smell it? If you don’t you should. It’s the stench that permeates every bad argument, every false premise, every empty platitude. It’s the smell of bullshit, and it is rank within this site and these quotes.

As a member of the ‘white colonial establishment’ the members of this website would have me labeled a domineering racist simply because my wife is from Taiwan. My marriage to her, in their egotistical vision of a racist America, is one of subjugation and oppression. I must have married her because of an innate desire to oppress the asian male, to support the white-power status quo, and to satisfy some perversion of the mystical ‘woman of the east’.

Now, lets indulge an interesting thought experiment. Take the above quotes from the Fighting 44 website and replace “asian” with “white” and then read them aloud. What results is something anyone and everyone would identify as unabashedly racist, yet when written by an asian man it becomes a critique on American culture. Sniff, sniff?

Am I offended? Not really, and offense is not an argument anyway. What does anger me is the brazen stupidity of this type of ‘racial awareness’. In the attempt to eliminate what they view as vestigial biases of a past age they unwittingly resurrect the rotting corpse of racism. Without any apparent self-awareness these editorials advocate against interracial marriage, advocate for race-pride, and perpetuate empty and dangerous stereotypes. Now of course you can only expect so much from our species, given our love of everything irrational, but this website just reeks of self-flagellation. Asian men angry that some Asian women are marrying white guys. Cry me a river.