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My Turn by Maileen Hamto

From The Asian Reporter, V17, #45 (November 6, 2007), page 6 & 7.

Art is boldest and most provocative when it is honest, raw, and real. The works of Portland-based artist and author damali ayo offer a courageous and irreverent look at race relations. From authoring a how-to "guide" on profiting from being a token person of color to organizing a performance piece on slavery reparations, ayo’s works may make some people uncomfortable.

One thing is certain: She always succeeds in drawing attention to the need for an honest dialogue about issues surrounding race and racism.

How to Rent a Negro, ayo’s 2005 book, is a satirical commentary on casual, everyday racism. Directed at "well-intentioned" white people, she writes about blatant tokenism and the hypocrisy of color-blindness. The beauty of the work is that it also applies to experiences of people of color and other so-called "minorities."

Someone wise once said that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, so here’s my stab at writing a preface for an Asianized version of the book:

As an Asian American, have you ever been in any one of the following situations?

• Been to a party where you are the only Asian person in the room?
• Invited to be the only Asian representative to your company’s diversity committee?
• Asked to say something in your "own" language?

Or perhaps you’ve been asked more than a few times:

I work with {insert Asian name}. Do you know each other? Surely, we all must know each other. When was the last time you met someone with an Irish last name and casually assumed that she knows so-and-so from another Irish clan?

Are you sure we haven’t met before? You look so familiar. Oh, that’s right. It’s hard for folks to tell us apart, since we must all look alike. Must be those shallow gene pools.

The other work that makes ayo one of the coolest people ever is the National Day of Panhandling for Reparations, a performance work that involved 70 performers across 21 states.

Performers stood on street corners, stopping people with their plea to help fund reparations for black Americans who are descendants of slaves. Monies donated by whites were immediately given to black passers-by. ayo’s primary motivation for the performance is to leave everyone with an experience, raise awareness, and inspire conversations about race relations across the country.

The true beauty and strength of any artwork is the unintended discussions that surface as a result. ayo’s brilliant performance collective caused me to contemplate the color of the world’s poor.

Rank all the world’s nations from richest to poorest, and it’s hard to ignore how the color of inhabitants gets progressively darker as respective Gross National Product (GNP) scores become smaller.

Consider for a moment the list of the top richest and poorest countries, as measured by two factors: 1) GNP, which measures the total amount of money that a country’s consumers spend on all goods and services in a year, divided by that country’s population, and 2) purchasing power parity — which measures the strength of a country’s currency against that of another.

• Luxembourg
• United States
• Norway
• Switzerland
• Ireland
• Iceland
• Austria
• Denmark
• Hong Kong
• Belgium

• Sierra Leone
• Malawi
• Burundi
• Tanzania
• Democratic Republic of Congo
• Guinea-Bissau
• Republic of Congo
• Ethiopia
• Niger
• Republic of Yemen

The long history of Europe’s most successful empires weighs heavily on the current balance of economic power and distribution of wealth. Remember that Hong Kong was under British rule until 1997, and was largely spared from the Asian financial crisis that occurred that same year.

No matter where you stand on the reparations debate, these discussions bring to mind the history of colonization of non-Euro white people all over the world. Unfortunately, it’s difficult to have a frank and candid exchange about race without bringing up that inconvenient issue of wealth disparities among people of European ancestry and, well, the rest of us.

When people of color bring up the history of the slave trade and Western colonization of indigenous peoples in the New World, Asia, and all points between, it’s not because we continue to live in the past. When communities that have survived any form of oppression talk about their history, it doesn’t mean they are unable to move on. It is not simply a tool to explain away the legacy of corruption, hopelessness, and one-upmanship in many nations and tribes — divided, conquered, and oppressed.

Think about it: Would you tell an American of Japanese ancestry to zip it already about being the only ethnic group that was rounded up and sent to internment camps? After all, the U.S. was at war with the Germans and Italians, and Japanese Americans were the only ones considered as the "enemy." In a similar vein, would you tell a Jewish person to move on already from memories of the Holocaust?

When we share and acknowledge each other’s histories, we embrace our past, understand the present, and establish a future course of action, whatever that may be.