The biggest news for weeks in Taiwan’s foreign community, a story that has rippled around the world, was the lambasting of a white British national and his girlfriend by a local man on the Taipei MRT. The victim filmed the incident and earned 10 minutes of fame by posting it on his YouTube channel.
Described by ABC 99 News as a “horrendous video … of two holidaymakers facing racial abuse from a complete and utter stranger on a train in Taiwan … and it’s pretty brutal,” the video got millions of views. A Taipei City councilor investigated the “savage” incident, while police and MRT officials were forced to defend themselves. The nation’s much vaunted reputation for friendliness was at stake, so inevitably there was much introspection and self-criticism.
But, would it have been news if the victim had been any other color than white? Carlo JaMelle, an African-American who is enrolled on a PhD program studying classical Chinese literature at National Taiwan Normal University, doesn’t think so. Also a teacher of English, American culture and life philosophy at Xinzhuang and Wenshan universities, he’s married to a local, plans to dwell in the groves of academia, study calligraphy and publish a book of Chinese poems.
Photo: Jules Quartly
“I laugh at the ‘oppression’ of whites here. It must be tough looking at so many people who look like you on billboards, how do you bear it?” JaMelle asks me sarcastically. He later adds that it took a friend 10 years to figure out that the reason why white people complain in Taiwan is because they’re not used to discrimination.
“That incident on the MRT? The beauty of it is, he never once said anything about race. We (black people) get that and the race question. The white guy, it was almost like he had a need to show that Taiwanese are racists. I’ve sort of stopped talking to white people here about this because they get so excited. Back home they would just kind of ignore it. How many white dominated countries can say they are less racist than Taiwan? Of course, you can acknowledge racism, but look in your own backyard first.”
Coming from Arkansas, a southeastern state bordering the Mississippi River, JaMelle says there is far more racism in his own country than Taiwan and has a mass of texts, statistics and examples to back this up.
He recounts a story from last year when he went to New York for an atheist meeting and, “One white guy said straight out, ‘I had a friend who was so black he joined a gang.’ Then I told the meeting that I really appreciated the white friends who supported my posts about anti-racism. But this one girl got up and said, ‘I don’t like being categorized as white.” In other words, she thought calling JaMelle black was fine.
“I thought she was pretty open, but when it comes down to the real nitty-gritty, and race, and ... seeing what I saw [in the US], then the onus is on white people. I mean, after the end of slavery, white people got reimbursed but black people didn’t.”
He says after 245 years of slavery and 100 years of Jim Crow, it didn’t get much better for black people. “My mom used to say, Carlo, you will have to work two or three times harder to do as well as whites. It’s fact, a white high school graduate stands the same chances of getting the same job as a black college grad.”
JaMelle later forwards an article from Forbes, which notes some “startling” facts: if equally qualified applicants go for a job, whites are twice as likely to be called back than blacks; and whites with a felony conviction fared just as well, if not better than a black applicant with a clean police record.
Having lived in Taiwan for the past 15 years, he says he’s experienced very little racism beyond some schools not wanting to employ black teachers: “Once, a kind of overtly autistic guy called me ‘nigger’ and then sort of apologized. I think I was called heigui (黑鬼, black ghost) on the football field, but that’s about it. Racism here is different to the West, it’s not the deep-seated kind I get at home.”
“The only thing I tell black people coming here is that locals prefer white to black from an aesthetic point of view … so with dating, maybe you have to compensate with more game. The same is true in Taiwan as everywhere, if you are black you have to work harder or have some other quality that sets you apart from white people. I can’t just be a boring white teacher, I have to reinvent, step my game up with teaching to compete, like translating. I already know it’s not a level playing field.”
A self-proclaimed “Facebook activist,” he posts controversial articles, comments about racism or colonialism and gleefully points out hypocrisies. His big issue at the time of this writing is the Paris attacks. How is it, he muses, that the world is draping the Tricolor over their profile picture and telling anyone who will listen “Je suis Paris,” when suicide attacks in Beirut killed at least 43 people a day earlier.
So, JaMelle posts a Syrian flag with the words: “Before you go flying the French Flag as your profile pic, ask yourself how many white folks and other nationalities have ever flown RBG (red, green, black) in solidarity with black massacres.”
He’s interested to see whether China will get caught up in bombing Syrians now that they have had a hostage killed by the Islamic State. He’s also skeptical of the military-industrial complex, noting how the stock prices of weapon manufacturers went up after the Paris attacks and how they went down when US forces started withdrawing from Afghanistan and Iraq — causing slides on the Dow Jones.
However, his greatest ire as an activist is the legion of examples of police brutality against black people in the US, often comparing how white people are treated radically differently. It’s unlikely that JaMelle will be returning home any time soon. He’s married to the country, after all, and recounts how, “People often say I must have been Chinese in a past life.”
More prosaically, perhaps, he was inspired by Chinese culture as a kid because of the Sunday theater shows that ran kung fu films. At University of North Texas he studied East-Asian philosophy and became a dedicated follower of Laozi (老子), author of the Tao Te Ching (道德經).
Considering JaMelle thinks, “African-Americans don’t have real roots or a language and that does something to you,” this partly explains, for me, his passion for Chinese culture, its long history and rootedness.
Asked about this, he replies: “It is fair to say the African-American void syndrome led me to search out different cultures and creeds, and Chinese philosophy and literature have steered me a long way. But it was all to get me where I am now, which is just a person who is happy in his own skin.”
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