THE END OF WHITE INNOCENCE

MUCH OF MY YOUTH WAS spent looking into the menagerie of white children.
Sometimes I was allowed inside, by visiting a friend?s house, and I marveled at
the harmonious balance of order and play: the parents who spoke to each other in
a reasonable tone of voice, the unruly terrier who blustered his way into the home
and was given a biscuit. Not at all like my home, which was tense and petless,
with sharp witchy stenches, and a mother who hung all our laundry outside, and a
grandmother who fertilized our garden plot of scallions with a Folgers can of her
own urine. Occasionally late at night, I awoke to my name being called, at first
faintly, then louder, which I knew was my mother. I rushed out of bed and ran to
my parents? bedroom to break up yet another fight getting out of hand.

At school the next day, I distinctly remember the mild sun and the
pomegranate trees, fully fruited in November. I sat there at lunch, my classmates?
laughter far off and watery in my ears clogged by little sleep. If reality was a
frieze, everyone else was a relief, while I felt recessed, the declivity that gave
everyone else shape. Any affection I had for my youth was isolated to summers in
Seoul: my grandmother bandaging my fingernails with balsam flower petals to
stain my nails orange; the fan rotating lazily in the wet heat while my aunts,
uncles, cousins, and I all slept on the floor in the living room; and the cold shock
of water when my aunt washed me while I squatted naked in hard rubber slippers.

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I am now the mother of a four-year-old daughter. Memories of my own
childhood flash for a second as I?m combing my daughter?s hair or when I bathe
her at night. What?s odder is that memories don?t come when I expect them
summoned. Because my parents never read to me, I first felt a deficit of weight
instead of being flooded with nostalgic memories when I began reading to my

daughter at bedtime. There should be a word for this neurological sensation, this
uncanny weightlessness, where a universally beloved ritual tricks your synapses to
fire back to the past, but finding no reserve of memories, your mind gropes
dumbly, like the feelers of a mollusk groping the empty ocean floor.

Reading to my daughter, I see my own youth drifting away while hers
attaches firmly to this country. I am not passing down happy memories of my
own so much as I am staging happy memories for her. My parents did the same
for me, but their idea of providing was vastly more fundamental: food, shelter,
school. When they immigrated here, they didn?t simply travel spatially but
through time, traveling three generations into the future. Not that I would be so
crude as to equate the West with progress, but after the war, Korea was cratered
like the moon, and the West had amenities, like better medical facilities, that
Korea lacked. Boys, for instance, didn?t last on my mother?s side. My
grandmother lost sons, my aunts lost sons, and my own brother, before I was
born, died at six months from a weak heart while my mother was giving him a
bath.

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Rather than look back on childhood, I always looked sideways at childhood. If to
look back is tinted with the honeyed cinematography of nostalgia, to look
sideways at childhood is tainted with the sicklier haze of envy, an envy that ate at
me when I stayed for dinner with my white friend?s family or watched the parade
of commercials and TV shows that made it clear what a child should look like
and what kind of family they should grow up in.

The scholar Kathryn Bond Stockton writes about how the queer child ?grows
sideways,? because queer life often defies the linear chronology of marriage and
children. Stockton also describes children of color as growing sideways, since
their youth is likewise outside the model of the enshrined white child. But for
myself, it is more accurate to say that I looked sideways at childhood. Even now,
when I look back, the girl hides from my gaze, deflecting my memories to the
flickering shadow play of her fantasies.

To look sideways has another connotation: giving ?side eyes? telegraphs
doubt, suspicion, and even contempt. I came of age being bombarded with
coming-of-age novels in school. Unlike the works of William Shakespeare or
Nathaniel Hawthorne, which the teacher forced upon us like vitamin-rich
vegetables, these novels were supposedly a treat, because we could now identify

with the protagonists. That meant that not only must I cathect myself to the
entitled white protagonist but then mourn for the loss of his precious childhood as
if it were my own in overrated classics like Catcher in the Rye.

My ninth-grade teacher told us that we would all fall in love with Catcher in
the Rye. The elusive maroon cover added to its mystique. I kept waiting to fall in
love with Salinger?s cramped, desultory writing until I was annoyed. Holden
Caulfield was just some rich prep school kid who cursed like an old man, spent
money like water, and took taxis everywhere. He was an entitled asshole who was
as supercilious as the classmates he calls ?phony.?

But beyond his privilege, I found Holden?s fixation with childhood even
more alien. I wanted to get my childhood over with as quickly as possible. Why
didn?t Holden want to grow up? Who were these pure and precocious children
who wore roller skates that needed a skate key? What teenage boy had a fantasy
of catching children in a field of rye lest they happened to fall off a cliff to
adulthood?

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The alignment of childhood with innocence is an Anglo-American invention that
wasn?t popularized until the nineteenth century. Before that in the West, children
were treated like little adults who were, if they were raised Calvinist, damned to
hell unless they found salvation. William Wordsworth is one of the main
architects of childhood as we sentimentalize it today. In his poem ?Ode:
Intimations of Immortality,? Wordsworth sees the child as full of wonder and
wiser than man because in his uncorrupted state the child is closer to God: ?I see
the heavens laugh with you in your jubilee.? Wordsworth may be one of the main
architects of nostalgia as well. By writing the poem from the adult?s perspective,
he sees the boy as a surrogated vessel into which the adult, consternated by his
failures, pours his reveries.

The legacy of Holden Caulfield?s arrested development has dominated the
American culture industry, from the films of Steven Spielberg and Wes Anderson
to the fiction of Jonathan Safran Foer. In the mid-aughts, there was even a short-
lived movement called New Sincerity, where artists and writers thought that it
would be a radical idea to feel. ?To feel? entailed regressing to one?s own
childhood, when there was no Internet and life was much purer and realer.
Though they prized authenticity above all else, they stylized their work in a
vaguely repellent faux-na?f aesthetic that dismissed politics for shoe-gazing self-

interest.
Wes Anderson was once classified as a New Sincerity filmmaker. I recently

rewatched his Moonrise Kingdom, which, as one blogger noted, is as pleasurable
and light as a macaron. Filtered through aging-postcard lighting, Moonrise
Kingdom is as much an exhibition of found nostalgic souvenirs as it is a story,
with memorable curios like a sky-blue portable record player and a Wilson tennis
ball canister of nickels. Anderson?s fastidious Etsy auteurship is to be admired,
but Anderson is a collector, and a collector?s taste is notable for what he leaves
out. Sometimes nonwhite characters, mostly quiet Indian actors decked out in the
elaborate livery of the help, have appeared in Anderson?s other films. But in the
safe insulated palette of Moonrise Kingdom, there is no hint of the Other. The
characters are all mid-century white, the scrubbed white of Life magazine ads.

The film is set in 1965 on the fictional island of New Penzance (based on
New England), where two twelve-year-olds fall in love and run away together.
The boy character, Sam, is an orphan in the whimsical children?s book sense?
odd, scrappy, full of mischief?who convinces his marmoreal love interest, Suzy,
to escape to a far-off inlet called Moonrise Kingdom. In this paradisiacal inlet,
they ?play? at being self-sufficient adults: they pitch camp, fish for their own
meals, and practice kissing. Suzy?s and Sam?s parents and guardians look for
them, and once they?re caught, they run away again because Social Services want
to send Sam away to ?Juvenile Refuge.? Meanwhile, an incoming hurricane
endangers the lives of the two runaways but they are found again in the nick of
time. The film ends happily: Suzy and Sam stay together. And adopted by a local
policeman, Sam becomes a junior cop just like his kind and rugged guardian.

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Nineteen sixty-five was a violent, landmark year for the civil rights movement.
Black protesters attempted to march from Selma to Montgomery twice, only to
be viciously beaten back by Alabaman police before succeeding the third time.
Lyndon Johnson finally passed the Voting Rights Act that prohibited
discriminatory practices in voting. Malcolm X was assassinated as he was giving a
speech at a rally in Manhattan?s Audubon Ballroom. And in August, Watts
erupted into a mass riot, after years of its citizens being frustrated by joblessness,
housing discrimination, and police brutality.

Race was the topmost concern of most Americans that year, the majority of
whom felt threatened by African Americans demanding basic civil rights. The

artist Suze Rotolo said, ?Pure unadulterated white racism?was splattered all over
the media as the violence against the civil rights workers escalated. White people
were looking at themselves and what their history has wrought, like a domestic
animal having its face shoved into its own urine.?

In 1965, Johnson also approved the Hart-Celler Act, which lifted the racist
immigration ban that prevented immigrants coming from Asia, Latin America,
and Africa. America?s disgraceful history of barring immigrants based on
nationality began with the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, which expanded to the
Immigration Act of 1917 that banned everyone from Asia and the Pacific Islands.
Finally, in 1924, using the ugly science of eugenics as their defense, the U.S.
government expanded the restriction to every country except for a slim quota of
Western and Northern Europeans. All others immigrants were restricted since
they were from inferior stock that would ?corrupt? the American populace.
Johnson downplayed the seismic importance of the Hart-Celler legislation by
saying, ?The bill we will sign today is not a revolutionary bill.? He had no idea
that the law would irrevocably change the face of America. Since 1965, 90
percent of American immigrants have hailed from outside Europe. By 2050, the
Pew Research Center predicts, white Americans will become the minority.

Despite the violent turbulence of that year, Anderson, who was born in 1969,
imbues his film with a manufactured, blinkered, pastiched nostalgia that the
theorist Lauren Berlant defines as ?a small-town one that holds close and high a
life that never existed, one that provides a screen memory to cover earlier
predations of inequality.? It?s revealing that Anderson dates his film to the last
year when whites made up 85 percent of this nation. It?s as if the Neverland of
New Penzance is the last imperiled island before the incoming storm of
minorities floods in.

On its own, Moonrise Kingdom is a relatively harmless film. But for those of
us who have been currently shocked by the ?unadulterated white racism?
splattered all over the media,? we might ask ourselves what has helped fuel our
country?s wistfully manufactured ?screen memory.? Anderson?s Moonrise
Kingdom is just one of countless contemporary films, works of literature, pieces
of music, and lifestyle choices where wishing for innocent times means
fetishizing an era when the nation was violently hostile to anyone different.
Hollywood, an industry that shapes not only our national but global memories, has
been the most reactionary cultural perpetrator of white nostalgia, stuck in a time
loop and refusing to acknowledge that America?s racial demographic has radically
changed since 1965. Movies are cast as if the country were still ?protected? by a

white supremacist law that guarantees that the only Americans seen are carefully
curated European descendants.

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Black children were historically ?defined out of childhood,? writes the scholar
Robin Bernstein in her book Racial Innocence: Performing American Childhood
from Slavery to Civil Rights. She uses the example of Little Eva, from Harriet
Beecher Stowe?s Uncle Tom?s Cabin, as the icon of white innocence. With her
halo of golden locks and blue eyes, she is virtuous in Uncle Tom?s eyes, whereas
Topsy, the enslaved girl, is wicked, perverse, and motherless. It?s not until Eva
hugs her and declares her love for Topsy that Topsy is reborn as an innocent
child.

If Little Eva is the idealized child, Topsy is the ultimate ?pickaninny,?
defined by her ?juvenile status, dark skin, and, crucially, the state of being
comically impervious to pain.? Stowe wanted to prove that Topsy can feel but it
takes Little Eva?s touch to convert her into a child. More often, the white child
was contrasted with the enslaved girl to emphasize that ?only white children were
children.? The ?pickaninny? is non-innocent, both feral and insentient, and
doesn?t need protection nor maternal care, which slave owners used as
justification to tear them from their mothers? arms to be sold as chattel. This
perception still persists today. White boys will always be boys but black boys are
ten times more likely to be tried as adults and sentenced to life without parole.

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Innocence is, as Bernstein writes, not just an ?absence of knowledge? but ?an
active state of repelling knowledge,? embroiled in the statement, ?Well, I don?t
see race? where I eclipses the seeing. Innocence is both a privilege and a cognitive
handicap, a sheltered unknowingness that, once protracted into adulthood,
hardens into entitlement. Innocence is not just sexual deflection but a deflection
of one?s position in the socioeconomic hierarchy, based on the confidence that
one is ?unmarked? and ?free to be you and me.? The ironic result of this
innocence, writes the scholar Charles Mills, is that whites are ?unable to
understand the world that they themselves have made.? Children are then
disqualified from innocence when they are persistently reminded of, and even
criminalized for, their place in the racial pecking order. As Richard Pryor jokes:

?I was a kid until I was eight. Then I became a Negro.?

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The flip side of innocence is shame. When Adam and Eve lost their innocence,
?their eyes were open, and they suddenly felt shame at their nakedness.? Shame is
that sharp, prickling awareness that I am exposed like the inflamed ass of a
baboon. It?s a neurotic, self-inflicting wound. Even if the aggressor who caused
me shame is no longer in my life, I imagine he is, and I shrink from my shadow
that I mistake for him. Shame is a Pavlovian response, its agitated receptor going
off for no other reason than I just stepped outside my house. It?s not about losing
face. Shame squats over my face and sits.

Shame is often associated with Asianness and the Confucian system of honor
alongside its incomprehensible rites of shame, but that is not the shame I?m
talking about. My shame is not cultural but political. It is being painfully aware of
the power dynamic that pulls at the levers of social interactions and the cringing
indignity of where I am in that order either as the afflicted?or as the afflicter. I
am a dog cone of shame. I am a urinal cake of shame. This feeling eats away at
my identity until my body is hollowed out and I am nothing but pure incinerating
shame.

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I recall my mother rooting through the dryer and extracting a large red T-shirt
with a silhouette of a white bunny. In retrospect, I have no idea how we acquired
that shirt. I assume it was given as a gift to my father. Anyway, my immigrant
mother didn?t know what the logo meant. The next day, she dressed me in that
Playboy shirt, and sent me off, at the age of seven, to school. When I was waiting
in line after recess to return to our class, a fourth grader pointed to the front of
my shirt and asked me if I knew what ?that means.? When I said no and I saw her
smirk and run to her friends, I knew yet again that something was wrong but I
didn?t know what was wrong. Blood rushed to my face. It is this shirt, but why?

The schoolyard was bordered by a chain-link fence and paved in gray tarmac.
Like a de Chirico painting, it was an austere open space, with no trees,
interrupted only by the stark sundialed shadows cast by the handball board and
tetherball poles, which I avoided because the taller kids whipped the untouchable
balls high into the air. I didn?t know why the bunny was bad. No one would tell

me why it was bad. And so the bunny blurred into the encrypted aura of a hex.
My temperature rose, my body radiating heat to flush the contaminant, the
contaminant that was me, out.

I had that same simmering somatic reaction when I was learning English.
Because I didn?t learn the language until I started school, I associated English with
everything hard: the chalkboard with diagrammed sentences, the syllables in my
mouth like hard slippery marbles. English was not an expression of me but a
language that was out to get me, threaded with invisible trip wires that could
expose me at the slightest misstep. My first-grade teacher read a book to her
attentive class, then turned to me and smiled, and said something in her garbled
tongue, which I took to mean ?go outside.? I stood up and walked out of the
classroom. Suddenly, my teacher was outside too, her face flushed as she scolded
me and yanked me back inside.

Shame gives me the ability to split myself into the first and third person. To
recognize myself, as Sartre writes, ?as the Other sees me.? I now see the humor in
my unintended disobedience. The teacher reads to a group of rapt six-year-olds
who sit cross-legged in a circle, and then, without warning, the quiet little Asian
girl calmly gets up in the middle of her story and walks out of her classroom. The
next year, the quiet little Asian girl shows up to school wearing a pornographic T-
shirt.

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One characteristic of racism is that children are treated like adults and adults are
treated like children. Watching a parent being debased like a child is the deepest
shame. I cannot count the number of times I have seen my parents condescended
to or mocked by white adults. This was so customary that when my mother had
any encounter with a white adult, I was always hypervigilant, ready to mediate or
pull her away. To grow up Asian in America is to witness the humiliation of
authority figures like your parents and to learn not to depend on them: they
cannot protect you.

The indignity of being Asian in this country has been underreported. We
have been cowed by the lie that we have it good. We keep our heads down and
work hard, believing that our diligence will reward us with our dignity, but our
diligence will only make us disappear. By not speaking up, we perpetuate the
myth that our shame is caused by our repressive culture and the country we fled,
whereas America has given us nothing but opportunity. The lie that Asians have it

good is so insidious that even now as I write, I?m shadowed by doubt that I didn?t
have it bad compared to others. But racial trauma is not a competitive sport. The
problem is not that my childhood was exceptionally traumatic but that it was in
fact rather typical.

Most white Americans can only understand racial trauma as a spectacle.
Right after Trump?s election, the media reported on the uptick in hate crimes,
tending to focus on the obvious heretical displays of hate: the white high school
students parading down the hallways wearing Confederate flag capes and the
graffitied swastikas. What?s harder to report is not the incident itself but the stress
of its anticipation. The white reign of terror can be invisible and cumulative,
chipping away at one?s worth until there?s nothing left but self-loathing.

The poet Bhanu Kapil wrote the following: ?If I have to think about what it
looks like when the Far Right rises, all I have to do is close my eyes. And
remember my childhood.? Friends have echoed the same sentiment: Trump?s
presidency has triggered a flashback to childhood. Children are cruel. They will
parrot whatever racist shit their parents tell them in private in the bluntest way
imaginable. Racism is ?out in the open? among kids in the way racism is now ?out
in the open? under Trump?s administration. But this trigger does not necessarily
mean recalling a specific racist incident but a flashback to a feeling: a thrum of
fear and shame, a tight animal alertness. Childhood is a state of mind, whether it?s
a nostalgic return to innocence or a sudden flashback to unease and dread. If the
innocence of childhood is being protected and comforted, the precarity of
childhood is when one feels the least protected and comfortable.

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My grandmother on my mother?s side moved from Seoul and lived with us when
my mother needed help caring for my sister and me. She was a refugee during the
Korean War who fled with her children from North Korea to reunite with my
grandfather, who was already south. My grandmother carried my mother, who
was two, on her back during the dangerous journey along the coast when the tide
was low. My mother was almost left behind. My grandmother, before she
changed her mind, planned to leave my mother with her aunt and then return later
to retrieve her. She had no idea that the border between the North and South
would be sealed forever; that she would never hear from her parents and siblings
in North Korea again; that just like that, her world would vanish.

My grandmother remained a steadfast, tough, and gregarious woman. When

my grandfather was alive, they were one of the few families in Incheon who
owned a house with indoor plumbing. After the war, she ran her home like a soup
kitchen, inviting everyone for dinner?the homeless, orphans, widows and
widowers?anyone who needed food.

She was lonely living with us in our new white suburban neighborhood. She
went on long strolls, occasionally bringing back a coffee urn or a broken lamp she
found in someone?s garbage can. During those years, my mother vacuumed every
day, sometimes even three times a day, as if she could see the dead skin cells of
her family shingle every surface. When my mother went into one of her cleaning
frenzies, I kept my grandmother company on her walks.

I was eight when I joined my grandmother for a stroll. She had recently
moved in with us. The California sidewalk was pristine and empty. Our
neighborhood was silent except for the snicking sprinklers that watered the lawns
on our street. My grandmother had just broken off a branch of lemons from
someone else?s front yard to take back to our house when we came across a group
of white kids who were hanging out on a cul-de-sac. My grandmother, to my
alarm, decided to say hello. She waded into that crowd of kids and began shaking
their hands because that is what people do in America. The kids were surprised
but then began shaking her hand one by one. I could tell they were pumping her
hand a little too vigorously. ?Hello,? she said. ?Herro,? they shot back. One of
them mimed nonsensical sign language at her face. Then a tall lean girl with limp
brown hair snuck up behind her and kicked my grandmother?s butt as hard as she
could. My grandmother fell to the ground. All the kids laughed.

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My grandmother told my father, who then made a point to look out for that girl
when we were all in the car together. Once, we stopped at a stop sign and we saw
her. That?s her, we told him. My father unrolled his window and began yelling at
her. I?ve never seen him so enraged at another white person, let alone a kid. He
demanded she apologize but she refused. She denied ever seeing us.

?How would you like it if I kicked you!? my father shouted. ?How would you
like that?? He unbuckled his seatbelt and scrambled out of the car. The girl loped
easily up the hill and disappeared. He staggered after her a few steps and then
stopped when he realized the futility of his efforts. The car was in the middle of
the road. The engine was still running and the jaw of the driver?s car door was
hinged wide open. I gaped at my father. I was scared of him but also I was scared

for him. I saw my father?s attempt to defend his family in the way our neighbors
might see it?an acting out, an overreaction?and I was deeply afraid he would
be punished for his fury.

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Another time, my younger sister was nine and I was thirteen when we were
leaving the mall. A white couple opened the glass doors to enter as we were
leaving. I assumed the man was opening the door for us, so we scurried out as he
reluctantly held the door wide. Before the door shut behind him, he bellowed, ?I
don?t open doors for chinks!?

My sister burst into tears. She couldn?t understand why he was so mean.
?That?s never happened to me before,? she cried.

I wanted to run back into the mall and kill him. I had failed to protect my
younger sister and I was helpless in my murderous rage against a grown man so
hateful he was incapable of recognizing us as kids.

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I only bring up the latter incident to compare it to an experience I had later in life.
I was in my early twenties, living in Brooklyn. It was one of those unbearably hot
July days that brought out the asshole in all New Yorkers. My friend, her
boyfriend, and I walked into the Second Avenue subway station. As I walked
down the stairs to the subway platform, a man passed us, and while looking at me,
he singsonged, ?Ching chong ding dong.? He was a neckless white guy wearing a
baseball cap. He looked like a typical Staten Island jock. But then I noticed he
was with his black wife and his biracial toddler.

My friends, who were white, didn?t know what to say. I didn?t want to make
them uncomfortable, so I dismissed it. We boarded the F train and I realized he
was in the same car as us. As the train trundled along stop after stop, I became
increasingly enraged staring at him. How many times have I let situations like this
go? I thought.

?I?m going to say something to him,? I told my friends, and they encouraged
me to confront him. I wended my way past everyone in the crowded car until I
stood over him. I quietly told him off. I not only called him a racist but I also
hissed that he was setting a horrible example for his baby. When I returned to my
friends, my head throbbing, I looked back and saw that he had stood up and was

walking toward us. As he approached us, he pointed to my roommate?s boyfriend
and threatened, ?He?s lucky that he?s not your boyfriend, because if he was your
boyfriend, I?d beat the shit out of him.? Then he walked back and sat down. I was
stunned and relieved that it didn?t end in violence or more racial slurs. My
roommate?s boyfriend kept saying, ?I wish I said something.? Then it was our
stop. As we were getting off, the guy shouted at me across the crowded car,
?Fucking chink!?

?White trash motherfucker!? I yelled back.
When we were on the platform, my friend, who had failed to say much

during the train ride, burst into tears.
?That?s never happened to me before,? she wailed.
And just like that, I was shoved aside. I was about to comfort her and then I

stopped myself from the absurdity of that impulse. All of my anger and hurt
transferred to her, and even now, as I?m writing this, I?m more upset with her than
that guy. We walked silently back to our apartment while she cried.

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Two thousand and sixteen was the year of white tears. Memes circulated around
the Internet of a black, brown, or Asian woman taking a long leisurely sip from a
white mug embossed with the words ?White Tears.? Implied in the meme is that
people of color are utterly indifferent to white tears. Not only that, they feel a
certain delicious Schadenfreude in response to white tears. Of course, ?white
tears? does not refer to all pain but to the particular emotional fragility a white
person experiences when they find racial stress so intolerable they become
hypersensitive and defensive, focusing the stress back to their own bruised ego.

In 2011, academics Samuel R. Sommers and Michael I. Norton conducted a
survey in which they found that whenever whites reported a decrease in perceived
antiblack bias, they reported an increase in antiwhite bias. It was as if they
thought racism was a zero-sum game, encapsulated in the paraphrased comment
by former attorney general Jeff Sessions: Less against you means more against
me. At the time of the study, white Americans actually thought that antiwhite bias
was a bigger societal problem than antibl