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Gook: John McCain's Racism and Why It Matters
By Irwin A. Tang
Paul Revere Books / Paperback, $14.90
/ 186 pages
Book Review by
Kam
Williams
“’I hate the
gooks,’ said John McCain in the year 2000. ‘I will hate
them as long as I live.’ It reveals something when a
senator calls people ‘gooks’ and volunteers it for mass
media broadcast… The fact that Mr. McCain carries such
everlasting hate within him – that says something too.
My mother does not
want me to publish this book. I know exactly what she
meant even though she did not say it. My mother simply
wants no trouble, no heartache, for me or my family.
I grew up in East
Texas and my parents still live there… the Ku Klux Klan
is still very active there. Black people still get
‘nigger’ yelled at them. I got spit on for being Asian…
growing up. I was called ‘gook’ every so often. Other
times it was ‘Jap’ or ‘Chink’ or some other racial
epithet. [And] the name-calling was never as bad as the
violence.
Have you ever been
an object before? It is difficult to describe my own
personal experience as a ‘gook’ in America… What I am
doing here is not an attack. It is a public service for
my nation. If you’ve ever been called a ‘gook,’ you know
this in your heart.”—Excerpted from
the Introduction
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While on the presidential campaign
trail in February of 2000, John McCain was confronted by
the press about his use of an ethnic slur against
Asians. Instead of apologizing, the notoriously
short-tempered Senator from Arizona arrogantly went on
the offensive, asserting that he would always hate
“gooks.”
It is now eight
years later, and the country is facing the possibility
that this inveterate racist might actually win the White
House on Election Day. For this reason, Irwin A. Tang
decided to publish Gook: John McCain’s Racism and Why It
Matters. Tang, also the author of How I Became a Black
Man, is an outspoken anomaly among Asian-Americans, a
group dubbed the “model minority” because of their
deference in the face of discrimination based on their
skin color.
This timely tome
makes a powerfully persuasive case against celebrated
POW and presumed patriot McCain in several ways. First,
Tang talks about the psychic and sometimes physical
wounds he and other Asian-Americans have silently
endured at the hands of bigots on account of prejudice.
Then, he shows how McCain has courted the support of
numerous white supremacist organizations over the course
of his checkered political career. Most importantly, he
then shows why this warmonger cannot be trusted to set
the tone for tolerance either domestically or in terms
of international affairs, given his history of
dehumanizing ethnic and religious groups he doesn’t care
for.
The eye-opening
book’s basic question is this: Have we as a country
really become so desensitized to hate speech that we’re
willing to elect someone President who so openly
stereotypes and acknowledges his dislike of a large
segment of the society he is supposed to govern? After
reading this heartfelt memoir/impassioned polemic, I say
Irwin Tang, not John McCain, is the true American
patriot.
"For, at
considerable risk to his own personal safety, the author
of this shocking exposé has revealed the Republican
presidential nominee as little more than an incendiary
race-baiter more reminiscent of a Jim Crow-era
segregationist than a straight-talking maverick."
A moving must-read for any voters
still undecided about who they’re going to support in
November.
To
see a video of the author discussing Gook, visit:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j6iqLcidbhg
Irwin Tang
was born and raised in College Station, Texas. As a
child, he fought agains racist kids and small-town
nothingness, all the while unknowingly embracing the
spirit of Aggieland. Upon graduating from A&M
Consolidated High School, he attended his hometown Texas
A&M University on a major scholarship.
At Texas A&M, he
was a campus leader on various issues, and when César
Chávez spoke at the university, he asked Tang to work
for the United Farm Workers. After graduation, Tang
worked as a community organizer for the union and then
earned a master’s degree in Asian Studies at UT Austin.
Tang wrote his
master’s thesis on the history of the political
organizing surrounding anti-Asian violence in the United
States. While studying at UT, Tang co-led a movement to
establish the university’s Center for Asian American
Studies.
After enlightening
experiences as a substitute teacher and a worker in a
social program for the homeless, Tang earned a master’s
degree in fiction and screenwriting from the University
of Southern California. In 1998, he took a trip to La
Paz, Bolivia to witness the work of then-medical student
Chi Huang, who was treating street children for ailments
and police brutality and gang violence. From this came
the publication by Salt River/Tyndale House of
When Invisible Children Sing: a true story of five
street children, an idealistic young doctor, and their
dangerous hope by Dr. Chi Huang, M.D., with Irwin
Tang. and
more
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A modern horror story: John McCain The
make believe maverick
TruthOut
For those interested in more from
McCain's past, here is a collection of stories about The
Maverick from his hometown alternative press, the
Phoenix New Times. The stories go back through years of
local coverage, which didn't always make it to the world
outside of Arizona. The themes remain consistent with
the Rolling Stone piece. PhoenixNewTimes
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Post-racial and Post-racist societies
We come closer to the most likely probability that a
non-white man will be elected the president of the
United States. It will be an extraordinary historical
event. Many wonder what impact it will have on the
relationship between the races, whether it will improve
the status of blacks in American society.
|
In “Black
Atlantic and a post-racial society,” Ali A.
Mazrui makes a helpful distinction between a
“post-racial society” and a “post-racist society.” The
former he finds less likely to rise until the rise of
the latter. Racial consciousness (as culture) will
likely continue as a positive event long passed the
demise of racial politics (racism).
Many of us are hoping that with the election of Obama to
the American presidency that racism will become less and
less a factor in American politics. How much that is
possible even with a two-term Obama presidency none can
say with certainty, though there are those like Charles
Johnson and E. Ethelbert Miller who are extremely
optimistic. |
 |
I am rather pessimistic. For the essential factor
in racial politics is and has always been the economic.
The economic disparities between the races are
tremendous and seemingly will continue beyond the
management of status quo American politics, even under
the influence of an Obama presidency. What foundations
he can lay to facilitate a swift movement forward are
quite vague. He hopes that all boats will rise with an
improvement of the overall American economy. But, as
long as the economic disparities continue with such
intensity, a post-racial society as well as a
post-racist society will be out of reach for decades.
Such worlds I am sure will beyond my life time. Mazrui
believes that South Africa has the most likely
possibility of building a post-racist society. Hopefully
America can become a student. For that to occur, the
notion or myth of American exceptionalism will have to
decline as the centerpiece of American politics. Joe
Six-Pack (i.e., whiteness) as a tool by which to avoid
addressing the economic factors of racism in American
society will also have to be retired—Rudy
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McCain and Palin
Are Playing With Fire—I—and, I suspect, millions of
Americans like me, Republicans and Democrats alike—
couldn't care less about Obama's middle name or the
ridiculous six-degrees-of-separation game that is the
William Ayers non-issue.
The Taliban are clawing their way back in
Afghanistan, the country that I hope many of my fellow
Americans have come to understand better through my
novels. People are losing their homes and their jobs and
are watching the future slip away from them. But instead
of addressing these problems, the McCain-Palin ticket is
doing its best to distract Americans by provoking fear,
anxiety and hatred. Country first? Hardly.—WashingtonPost
* * *
* *
McCain-Palin
Supporters Gone Wild—A
video titled The McCain-Palin Mob is the No. 3
most-discussed video on YouTube today, with more than
675,000 views since it was posted Wednesday. In the
clip, Ohio rally-goers tell blogger Tim Russo (who’s
behind the camera) they have reason to believe Obama is
a terrorist. Russo’s questioning is clearly aimed at
putting his subjects on the defensive, but they take it
to another level, in particular one woman who keeps
pushing her way back on camera. Viewership of the video
is partisan as well, but on the other side of the
spectrum, with more than 130,000 views coming from
the Huffington Post and many more from other liberal
blogs.
Another, separate
video from a Pennsylvania rally has McCain
supporters calling Obama a “commie faggot” among other
epithets, and is the No. 25 most-discussed YouTube clip
today.In a campaign where off-hand remarks by candidates
regularly become leading nightly news items, citizens
with video cameras wield a lot of journalistic power.
And so it’s a bit hard to take Russo’s point of view, in
that his disdain for his subjects is so clear (see some
unprintable, for us,
comments he makes about them on his blog). But at
the same time, the mocking response he evokes from the
woman at the McCain rally, which would have never aired
at length (or at all) on TV, made its way out into the
world. We live in interesting times!
NYTimes
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Labor warns
McCain about crowds—"Sen. John McCain, Gov. Sarah
Palin and the leadership of the Republican party have a
fundamental moral responsibility to denounce the violent
rhetoric that has pervaded recent McCain and Palin
political rallies," said John Sweeney, president of the
AFL-CIO, which has endorsed Obama. "When rally attendees
shout out such attacks as 'terrorist' or 'kill him'
about Sen. Barack Obama, when they are cheered on by
crowds incited by McCain-Palin rhetoric—it is
chilling that McCain and Palin do nothing to object.
"In a world where unspeakable violence is too often
promulgated by extremists, it is no small or trivial
matter to call someone a terrorist— or to incite
potentially dangerous individuals toward violence,"
Sweeney said in a statement. "John McCain, Sarah Palin
and Republican leaders are walking a very thin line in
pretending not to hear the hateful invectives spewed at
their rallies. McCain should end this line of attack in
the strongest possible terms. Anything less puts McCain
in the same camp as the racists and extremists who are
bringing their angry rhetoric to his campaign events."
Boston News
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Some of McCain’s
black relatives support Obama— Sen. John McCain was
born in 1936 at the Coco Solo Naval Air Station, a
segregated military installation in the Panama Canal,
where his father was stationed in the U.S. Navy. His
family returned to the states shortly after his birth;
where he went on to attend segregated schools in the
Teoc community and elsewhere around the country.
He served in the Navy, where he was a prisoner of war
during Vietnam, before being released and eventually
running for Congress.
After he was elected to the U.S. House of
Representatives in 1982, McCain voted against the Dr.
Martin Luther King Jr. national holiday in 1983. When he
arrived in the U.S. Senate in 1986, he joined North
Carolina Sen. Jesse Helms in opposing the holiday again,
and voted in 1994 to cut funding to the commission that
marketed it. John McCain also aligned himself with
former Arizona Gov. Evan Mecham.
Mecham was the governor in McCain’s home state of
Arizona from January 1987 to April 1988, when he was
impeached and removed from office for campaign finance
violations. As a state senator and governor, Mecham
publicly used racial slurs against black people and
other minorities. He was also a member of the John Birch
Society, which opposes civil rights legislation. In
1986, Mecham campaigned for governor on a promise to
rescind the state’s recognition of the Dr. Martin Luther
King Jr. holiday, which he did in 1987.
Earlier this year, during the 40th anniversary
recognition of King’s assassination, McCain, by this
time a presidential candidate, said he was wrong for
opposing the national King holiday.
South Florida Times
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Two Families
Named McCain: Candidate's Kin Share a History With
Descendants of Slaves— According to members of the
white McCain family, the plantation in rural Carroll
County, Miss., was purchased by Sen. McCain's
great-great-grandfather, William Alexander McCain, in
1851, when many of the flat vistas of the Mississippi
Delta region in the state's northwest corner were still
swampy wilderness. After his death in 1863, his widow
and a brother, Nathaniel Henry McCain, maintained the
family's position among Mississippi gentry.
William Alexander
McCain's son John Sidney McCain ran the plantation and
served in local politics, including a term as county
sheriff. A son of his, also named John Sidney McCain but
known as "Slew," graduated from the Naval Academy in
1906 and began a military life that would eventually
supplant the family's long history as cotton barons.
He became an
admiral and top naval officer during World War II. His
son, the third with the same name but known as John S.
"Jack" McCain Jr., also rose to the rank of admiral, in
the Vietnam War era—while his own son, Sen. McCain, was
a Navy pilot and then a prisoner of war.
Sen. McCain's
family lived primarily on military installations around
the world. But they remained attached to Teoc, visiting
repeatedly during Sen. McCain's childhood, often for
long periods. When they went to the farm in the 1940s
and 1950s, the future Sen. McCain and his brother stayed
in the rambling house, now abandoned, of their
great-uncle, Joe McCain, who had become the plantation's
owner.
Sen. McCain's
younger brother, also named Joe, said that though their
father "moved around as the son of a naval officer, he
too always thought of Teoc as his 'blood ground' and
loved visiting there."
The McCains in the
early 20th century were known among African-Americans
for relatively equitable treatment of their workers and
tenants, especially compared with the abuses happening
on many other farms. A visitor to the plantation in 1923
published an account that described "a tradition and a
policy of fair dealing between planter and laborer."
"That's how I remember it," said
Frank Bryant, 90, a black former Teoc sharecropper.
The 19th century
had been a different story for African-Americans in
Carroll County. In 1886, after two black men filed a
lawsuit against a white man, a white mob rushed the
courthouse and murdered more than 20 blacks there,
according to court documents and newspaper accounts at
the time. They weren't prosecuted.
Earlier still, just
after the Civil War, Sen. McCain's ancestors, like many
former slave owners, made use of newly passed laws
designed to temporarily force some freed slaves back
into the control of their former masters. Records in a
dusty storage room in the Carroll County courthouse show
that in February 1866, Sen. McCain's
great-great-grandmother, Louisa McCain, and her
brother-in-law Nathaniel filed petitions to take legal
custody of three girls under age 15 whom the McCains had
owned before emancipation. In court, the girls were
identified with the surname "Freedman," a common
practice with emancipated slaves.
Wall Street Journal
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posted 6 October 2008 |
