On Oct. 12th, Gavin McInnes, a founding member of the far-right, violence-loving group Proud Boys, was invited to speak at the New York Metropolitan Republican Club. He was met with a modest gathering of protestors and antifa messages of dissent. From his lecture’s Eventbrite description, McInnes’s keynote promised “historical context and[…] perspective on the environment that surrounded Otoya Yamaguchi in 1960’s Japan.â€
On the off chance that you’d hoped to attend an informative seminar on Japanese post-WWII politics, you would have been thoroughly disappointed. Instead, McInnes donned caricatured chink-eyed glasses and wielded a (historically inaccurate) katana. On stage alongside him was an unidentified Asian Proud Boy playing Inejiro Asanuma, the late leader of the Japanese Socialist Party, “translating†for McInnes in mock Japanese and Chinese. At the end, McInnes–in a performance that would put Ghost in the Shell’s Asian-Scarlett Johansson to shame–stormed the pulpit and thrusted his katana toward this Asian Proud Boy in a mock-assassination.
In order to understand the significance of this reenactment, we must look to Japan’s post-WWII history with nationalism, and its place in America’s contemporary alt-right movements. On October 12th, 1960, Inejiro Asanuma was participating in a televised political debate while campaigning for election in the Japanese House of Representatives. A disgruntled ultranationalist rushed Asanuma from the audience with a short sword, stabbing him through the rib and killing him. The assassin’s name was Otoya Yamaguchi, and he was 17 when authorities apprehended him at the scene of the crime. Yamaguchi spent some weeks in police custody before he hanged himself. The parting message, “Long live his imperial majesty, the Emperor!†was discovered on his cell wall written in toothpaste.
McInnes’s opening skit, which fell on the 58th anniversary of Asanuma’s murder, was a celebration of violence and nationalist extremism. Many members of the alt-right commemorate Yamaguchi as a hero martyr who took the fight against socialism into his own hands. The narrative of this nationalist and spectacular violence is co-opted by the alt-right as a galvanizing symbol.
Yamaguchi stands as a role model for stopping the purported evils of socialism by any means necessary, and his embrace by the far-right illuminates not just how white nationalists can use Asian narratives for their racist ends, but how some people of color (POC) can use white supremacy to benefit at the margins of racism as well.
McInnes wore Yamaguchi’s caricatured likeness as a costume, both to commemorate Asanuma’s public assassination and appropriate the sentiments of Japanese nationalism. McInnes has also entertained known neo-Nazi guests on his TV show/podcast Get Off My Lawn. His Proud Boys are labeled a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center, and they emerged from an alt-right publication edited by white nationalist Richard Spencer. Given these white supremacist affiliations, it’s interesting that McInnes and others choose to commemorate such a distinctly Asian nationalist narrative. White supremacy, as the name implies, sees whiteness as superior to all other races.
But ironically (and tragically) enough, white supremacists have always obsessed over Asians. We see this when East Asian peoples are lauded by white supremacists as the “model minority.†We’re fetishized as hard-working and respectably docile brainiacs; we came to this country in search of economic opportunity with nothing, and found the American dream. The “positive†racism of the model minority myth blames the socioeconomic disadvantages of other races on their race’s inherent inferiority. Because “model minority†Asians could find prosperity in this country, other marginalized groups that haven’t must not be working hard enough. This myth ignores the economic conditions that make immigration much easier for families with relative class privilege, and obscures the harsher and less glamorous lived experiences of poor and South Asian peoples.
The model minority myth uses Asians to prop up white supremacy by cherry picking immigrant experiences that support its racist ideology. The alt-right does the same with Yamaguchi’s story by using Asian narratives to buttress their fetish for extremist, racist violence.
After mock-stabbing the man who played Inejiro Asanuma, McInnes went on to deliver a speech that was at best politically incorrect and, at worst, outright racist. Rooted in his keynote’s rhetoric was a fear-mongering call-to-action, best summarized by his quote, “Never let evil take root.†This guiding principle is what makes McInnes’s little skit, and Yamaguchi’s enduring cultural relevance to the alt-right, so disturbing. His any-means-necessary rhetoric advocates for and incites the use of extreme violence in order to wipe out “evil.†To Yamaguchi, evil was Maoist communism and its influence on Asanuma, but to the modern day white supremacists emboldened by him, this evil includes people of color, queer folks, Muslims, antifa, etc. But just as with the model minority myth, their cause is made less apparently racist, because it co-opts an Asian narrative. McInnes’s chink-eyed glasses were more than a racist joke engineered to offend. The whole skit appropriates the iconography and narratives of Japanese nationalism in order to support white supremacy.
But it’s not just white supremacy taking/borrowing from Asians for their agenda. What of this unidentified Asian Proud Boy who aided and abetted McInnes? By definition of it being white supremacy, it’s far too easy for folks of color to imagine the enemy as always being a white racist. But there are liminal spaces at the fringes of white supremacy where people of color can benefit, even marginally, from racism. The alt-right boasts a small but easily tokenizable Asian membership that diversifies their movement in exchange for protecting the relative privilege enjoyed by Asian Americans.
Consider former officer Peter Liang and vigilante racist George Zimmerman, who were Chinese American and mixed-race Hispanic respectively. Both were charged with fatally shooting unarmed Black men/boys and both avoided prison time. Their trials, and the Asian Proud Boy’s shameful display, help demonstrate that the structure of white supremacy is flexible enough that it can sustain itself off of either white purity (which excludes non-white folk) or Black oppression (which uses folks of color). There are no pure positions of identity that guarantee you’re a good or anti-racist person, not while non-Black POC can find shelter at the margins of white supremacy.
The phrase “people of color†itself is meant to invoke solidarity among marginalized non-whites. It flies a banner under which Black, brown, and yellow bodies should be able to gather and mobilize, and all marginalized peoples made better for it. But the paradox of POC aligning themselves with white nationalism problematizes this rhetoric. Black folks have never been able to count on other POC to fight for their best interests. As Kejhonti Neloms put it, “All your non-Black friends say ‘n****r’ behind your back.â€
We non-Black people who want to consider themselves anti-racist have to first take inventory of the marginal privilege afforded us by our position. Ask, “How am I benefiting from my relative privilege–or, more earnestly–from Black oppression?†Consider: that Asian coworker who doesn’t “get†why Black people have to keep demanding that Black lives really do matter. Or your non-Black Latino friend singing the n-word along to all his favorite songs. Or maybe it’s your non-white partner claiming that their colorist dating habits are “just a preference.†Use your voice and call them all the way out. Take the time to discuss the implications or motivations in their latently racist beliefs, such that the burden doesn’t fall on Black people as it always has. It falls on us to stop letting our kinfolk exist so comfortably at the fringes of white supremacy.
Suggested Readings:
Newton, Arielle Iniko, “There can be no ‘unity’ with an anti-Black Left,†RaceBaitr, 2017
Gupta, Arun, “Why Young Men Of Color Are Joining White-Supremacist Groups,” The Daily Beast, 2018
Lupu, Carmen Gabriela, “Why is Japan the ideal country according to the Alt-Right movement,†Diggit, 2018
Sam Yim (he/him) is a queer Korean American. He is a senior at Beloit College, double majoring in Critical Identity Studies and Economics. He has also had the privilege of serving as an executive member of Students for an Inclusive Campus, a student-led activist group that operates independent of the school’s administration.
