BITING THE HAND

A Korean American scholar and writer reflects on how America's White supremacy culture has shaped her life and politics.

Lee, a professor of African American and Caribbean literature, begins her story with an anecdote about she and her mother hurling bottles of juice at each other in a mutual fit of incandescent rage. Their anger, writes the author, arose from their multigenerational exhaustion with coping with the pressures of White supremacy. Lee then describes a White teacher’s negative response to an essay she wrote “about how the ‘popular girls’ at our school were invariably white and wealthy and (often) blond,” and she also digs into relevant historical moments, including the response to the Rodney King verdict in 1992. In doing so, the author traces how her relationship with Whiteness has both fueled her rage and stoked her desire to resist the oppression inherent in America's racial hierarchy. At first, Lee remembers being unwittingly tolerant of this structure, as when, at age 8, she rejected a Black Cabbage Patch Kid because she said she wanted an Asian doll—even though, secretly, she admitted that she would have taken a White doll instead. In adulthood, Lee realized that no matter how hard she tried to align with Whiteness, that culture would never serve her. “Asian Americans,” she writes, “are the beneficiaries and the victims of white supremacy…but we have a choice. We can uphold the power structure or we can dismantle it.” Throughout the book, the author advocates for choosing the latter. From the opening scene, in which Lee takes “passive-aggressive” revenge on a racist professor by coming to class in an “Angry Little Asian Girl” shirt, the text consistently glimmers with humor, vulnerability, idealistic clarity, and, as promised, incandescent rage. Lee’s honest, compassionate analysis of her past mistakes leaves readers plenty of space to address their own.

A lively, wise, and immensely insightful memoir about Asian America's relationship with Whiteness.