The Masks of Minority Terrorism

By Pico Iyer

When Actors' Equity briefly decided three weeks ago that the part of a Eurasian in the play Miss Saigon could not be taken by a European, its board members provided some of the best entertainment seen on Broadway recently. It was not just that they were asserting an Orwellian principle: All races are equal, but some are more equal than others. Nor even that they were threatening to deprive thousands of playgoers of a drama that promised to shed some light on precisely such cross-cultural nuances; nor even that they were more or less ensuring -- if the principle were to be applied fairly -- that most Asian-American actors would have to sit around in limbo and wait for the next production of The Mikado. They were also raising some highly intriguing questions. How can John Gielgud play Prospero when Doug Henning is at hand? Should future Shakespeares -- even future August Wilsons -- stock their plays with middle-class whites so as to have the largest pool of actors from which ( to choose? And next time we stage Moby Dick, will there be cries that the title part be taken by a card-carrying leviathan?

The quickly reversed decision, which effectively proclaimed that actors should do everything but act, was a short-running farce. But when the same kind of minority terrorism is launched offstage, as is more and more the case, the consequences are less comical. Jimmy Breslin, long famous as a champion of the dispossessed, speaks thoughtlessly and finds himself vilified as a "racist." Spike Lee, an uncommonly intelligent filmmaker whenever he remains behind the camera, maintains that films about blacks should be directed by blacks (what does this mean for The Bear, one wonders, or for Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs?). Lee in turn becomes an irresistible target for charges of anti-Semitism. And others contend that Marion Barry is being hounded because he is black, as if to suggest that he be excused because he is black.

The problem with people who keep raising the cry of "racism" is that they would have us see everything in terms of race. They treat minorities as emblems, and everyone as typecast. And in suggesting that a white cannot put himself in the shoes, or soul, of a half-white, or a black, they would impose on us the most stifling form of apartheid, condemning us all to a hopeless rift of mutual incomprehension. Taken to an extreme, this can lead to a litigious nation's equivalent of the tribal vendetta: You did my people wrong, so now I am entitled to do you wrong. A plague on every house.

Almost nobody, one suspects, would deny that equal rights are a laudable goal and that extending a hand to the needy is one of the worthiest things we can do. Reserving some places in schools, or companies, or even plays for those who are less privileged seems an admirable way of redressing imbalances. But privilege cannot be interpreted in terms of race without making some damningly racist assumptions. And rectifying the injustices of our grandfathers is no easy task, least of all in a country made up of refugees and immigrants and minorities of one, many of whom have lived through the Holocaust, the Khmer Rouge, the unending atrocities of El Salvador. Sympathy cannot be legislated any more than kindness can.

The whole issue, in fact, seems to betray a peculiarly American conundrum: the enjoyment of one freedom means encroachment on another; you can't school all of the people all of the time. Older, and less earnest, countries like ) Britain or Japan live relatively easily with racial inequalities. But America, with its evergreen eagerness to do the right thing, tries to remedy the world with an innocence that can become more dangerous than cruelty. All of us, when we make decisions -- which is to say, discriminations -- judge in part on appearances. All of us treat Savile Row-suited lawyers differently from kids in T shirts, give preference to the people that we like -- or to the people that are most like us -- and make differing assumptions about a Texan and a Yankee. To wish this were not so is natural; to claim it is not so is hypocrisy.

But state-sponsored favoritism is something different. As an Asian minority myself, I know of nothing more demeaning than being chosen for a job, or even a role, on the basis of my race. Nor is the accompanying assumption -- that I need a helping hand because my ancestors were born outside Europe -- very comforting. Are those of us lucky enough to be born minorities to be forgiven our transgressions, protected from insults and encouraged to act as if we cannot take responsibility for our actions (it wasn't my fault I failed the exam; society made me do it)? Are we, in fact, to cling to a state of childlike dependency? As an alien from India, I choose to live in America precisely because it is a place where aliens from India are, in principle, treated no better (and no worse) than anyone else. Selecting an Asian actor, say, over a better-qualified white one (or, for that matter, a white over a better-qualified Asian, as is alleged to happen with certain university admissions) does nobody a service: not the Asian, whose lack of qualifications will be rapidly shown up; not the white, whose sense of racial brotherhood is hardly likely to be quickened by being the victim of discrimination himself; not the company, or audience, which may understandably resent losing quality to quotas.

Affirmative action, in fact -- so noble in intention -- is mostly a denial: a denial of the fact that we are all born different; a denial of a person's right to get the position he deserves; a denial of everyone's ability to transcend, or live apart from, the conditions of his birth. Most of all, it is a denial of the very virtues of opportunity and self-determination that are the morning stars of this democracy. People around the world still long to migrate to America because it is a place, traditionally and ideally, where people can say what they think, become what they dream and succeed -- or fail -- on the basis of their merits. Now, though, with more and more people telling us not to say what we think and to support everyone except the majority of Americans, the country is in danger of becoming something else: the land of the free, with an asterisk.