Reddit reviews Portnoy's Complaint

This is going to be a little wordy, but it's because the phrase internalized racism isn't a psychological term or diagnosis. It's a political term that comes from the 1970s Black Power movements and from Jewish literature. The American Black and Jewish experiences do not really parallel much of Chinese history.

I would add that it's not created but merely narrated by people like Amy Tan in the 1980s. Amy Tan was cut off from Chinese culture when her parents migrated and her parents had negative opinions of the revolution as well. They had a political refugee context for their mindset which changes the way someone views their ancestral country. Remember that the modern AAPI movement galvanized around the murder of Vincent Chin in the 1980s as well as the Japanese American reparations push, and that's when people started talking about issues.

The reason I don't think this was invented by AsAm activists is because I've heard the internalized racism discussion before. I've heard it from Jewish writers, and I've heard it from African American writers. One classic book about internalized racism is Portnoy's Complaint by Philip Roth, which is about a Jewish man avoiding Jewish women. Another one is The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison.

Both of these do not take place in the context of an ethnic enclave, or within a non Western society, and they both take place in massively different historical contexts from modern Asia.

The issues that Jewish Americans and Black Americans faced in the 1950s and 60s (where most internalized racism narratives are written) were very different from what Asians face in Asia or Asian enclaves in 2016.

Remember in the 1950s the narrative for diversity was assimilation. Today it's multiculturalism and you're supposed to 'celebrate your identity'. In 1965, the US moved from a melting pot model to a mixed salad model.

The context in which Jewish women had a nose job in 1950s in suburbia is vastly different from Jewish women having a nose job in Israel / an enclave, or a Jewish woman having a nose job in 2016. The context in which Black women applied skin whitening cream in 1950 in the South is very different from the context in which African women apply skin whitening cream in Lagos in 2016.

This is because the narrative of assimilation in the US has changed - and a US narrative cannot even be applied completely to another country or culture.

Portnoy's Complaint