Woke Preacher Clips (@wokepreacherclips)

You've Heard Of "Whiteness." But What About "Multi-Ethnic Pan-Whiteness"? Call this an "Ancient Woke Preacher Clip," the earliest dated WPC so far. Dr. Jonathan Tran of Baylor University discusses "rites of passage" into "multi-ethnic pan-whiteness" in this 2009 lecture. —TRANSCRIPT— Historian Matthew Frye Jacobson describes the 20th century in terms of two simultaneous racial developments. Prior to the 20th century, there had been a ranking of Europeans such that whiteness and its encodings for power and privilege was reserved for Anglo-Saxons and denied to the likes of eastern Europeans and Jews. However, in the 20th century, there emerged what Jacobson calls "multi-ethnic pan-whiteness" that now imagined whiteness inclusive of even eastern Europeans and Jews. This pan-whiteness did require as a prerequisite for those who desire to become white first do two things. First, they had to shed identity markers and ways that made them not white. For example, using whitening cosmetics to hide skin colors of the eastern European or discarding the ethnic practices of Jews and their religious beliefs. Second, they had to perpetuate acts of discrimination and violence against non-whites in order to prove they had become white. In other words, shedding of ethnic identity and committing violence against non-whites purchased one's passage into whiteness. ... I fear that for the Asian-American church, something of these realities are starting to come into play. The development of multi-ethnic pan-Asian communities, similar to the development of multi-ethnic pan-whiteness, operates according to the same logic and involves the same political capital. ... For lots of us second- and third-generation Asian-Americans, making fun of and mocking first-generation Asian immigrants, very often our own parents, becomes a rite of passage of leaving behind Asian-ness and becoming Asian-American. I validate my membership within Asian America by doing violence to non-Asian Americans, which includes whites, blacks, and Mexicans and others. Let me offer another example. It has become a common practice for Asian-Americans to make money by establishing businesses that glean off the surface of the urban poor, basically making money off of their desperation. We do this without ever investing in their local economies or working on their infrastructures. We simply want to use them for the desperation that comes out in our profit. We refuse to befriend them, though we build our wig shops and our liquor stores and our convenience stores and our cleaners in their communities but our houses and our churches in other communities, as if they are only there for the sake of our profit. It is through violence against Mexicans and blacks that we show the rest of America we are better than Mexicans and blacks and, by doing so, gain approval into white America. Source video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u7NWEAk05ZI