08/09/2023
From The New York Times opinion section:
In Paris, I Get Judged on What I Speak, Not How I Look
Aug. 8, 2023By Euny Hong
Ms. Hong is a Paris-based journalist and cultural critic.
I moved from New York back to Paris in the summer of 2020, partly to get away from the spate of anti-Asian assaults that had emerged after the Covid pandemic. The last straw was when I became the victim of a drive-by yelling: Two white guys driving past me stuck their heads out of a car window to shout a racial epithet plus the word “coronavirus.”
I thought: I tried, America. And then I started packing. …
Sometimes — and I don’t expect to make friends with this statement — all you have the energy for in this life is to go where you are most likely to be treated like a white male. For me, that’s France. In the United States, I am an Asian female, an invisible minority, until we’re not and we’re being harassed. Meanwhile, my life in France, as a somewhat assimilated fluent French speaker, is the closest I’ve ever come to the luxury of feeling like a privileged member of the dominant majority. It happens, in particular, when I am surrounded by non-French-speaking Americans.
… At one restaurant, a friend and I asked for a table on the terrace and were seated right away, even though an American couple ahead of me had just asked the same question and were told, “No room.” The only difference was that I had asked in French.
I admit it: I find this satisfying. …
French is, as Monsieur Hamel said, a key. And if it occasionally grants me a chance to cut the line and grab a waiting table on the terrace, well, I think I’ve earned it, at least as much as any white male ever did.
Euny Hong is a Paris-based journalist and the author of “The Birth of Korean Cool: How One Nation Is Conquering the World Through Pop Culture.”
An interesting question is when did it become acceptable to do this kind of not funny, un-self-aware cliched anti-white male dunking in the columns of The New York Times?
My guess would be that at no point since WWII could you write something like this about blacks. I could imagine the NYT letting Woody Allen tell Jewish American Princess jokes during the edgy 1970s, but not in more recent years.
When was the last time you could tell mother-in-law jokes in the NYT? Heck, the President of the United States lived with his mother-in-law in the White House from 2009-2017 and, so far as I’ve been able to discover, only one joke was told about it on TV in eight years: Jimmy Kimmel did a weak joke on it, the audience disapproved, and that was that.
To me, the Obama White House mother-in-law situation sounds like the ultimate topic for meta-comedy: e.g., Rodney Dangerfield comes back to life and finds out that the President is a black guy named Barack Obama and he lives in the White House with his mother-in-law.
Comedy ensues.
But, that didn’t happen over eight long years. Today, mother-in-law jokes are out of fashion and mother-in-law jokes about the saintly Michelle Obama’s mother are unimaginable.
But nobody is even doing funny anti-white man jokes in 2023, they’re just doing:
Comediatrix: White males!?! Ammiright?
Audience: [A handful of mild chuckles]
Audience: [Applause]
Audience: [Applause carries on nervously]
Audience: [Applause mounts to frenetic standing ovation]
Audience: [Standing ovation goes on and on]
Audience: [Elderly applauders begin to collapse]
Stalin-Like Buzzer: [Buzz]
Audience: [Sits down, mops brow relievedly]
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