Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning(15)
Pryor’s monologue perpetuates the sexist stereotypes that black women are aggressive and manly as opposed to white women, who are passive and ultra-feminine. Meanwhile, Pryor sets himself up as the prized virile black male. And yet, this trope also belies a dynamic that’s a bit more complicated, in that Pryor reserves a secret admiration for black women because they don’t put up with his bullshit, while tacitly acknowledging that the passivity of white women is not due to hyper-femininity but, as Hilton Als writes, white guilt. In the end, Pryor makes himself the object of derision, admitting that he has a hard time satisfying any woman, black or white. Just at the point where I abruptly stop laughing and think, This is— Pryor unzips the muscle suit of black male machismo to expose his own shame.
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It may be odd that I also felt a “shock of recognition” when I first saw Pryor. But watching Pryor reminded me of an emotional condition that is specific to Koreans: han, a combination of bitterness, wistfulness, shame, melancholy, and vengefulness, accumulated from years of brutal colonialism, war, and U.S.-supported dictatorships that have never been politically redressed. Han is so ongoing that it can even be passed down: to be Korean is to feel han.
Pryor’s rage and despair waver in and out of his concatenation of impressions. When he says, “I’m glad I’m black and I’m not white, ’cause you guys have to go to the moon,” Pryor’s melancholy lingers long after I’m done laughing, a melancholy that enables him to see the world as clearly as he does. Henri Bergson writes that humor is godless and entirely human since humor runs counter to the sublime: instead of transcending, you are made acutely aware of the skin in which you exist. In other words, Pryor is also “continually filling some other body,” but unlike Keats’s poet, who is without identity, Pryor is always channeling other characters “while black.”
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In Pryor, I saw someone channel what I call minor feelings: the racialized range of emotions that are negative, dysphoric, and therefore untelegenic, built from the sediments of everyday racial experience and the irritant of having one’s perception of reality constantly questioned or dismissed. Minor feelings arise, for instance, upon hearing a slight, knowing it’s racial, and being told, Oh, that’s all in your head. A now-classic book that explores minor feelings is Claudia Rankine’s Citizen. After hearing a racist remark, the speaker asks herself, What did you say? She saw what she saw, she heard what she heard, but after her reality has been belittled so many times, she begins to doubt her very own senses. Such disfiguring of senses engenders the minor feelings of paranoia, shame, irritation, and melancholy.
Minor feelings are not often featured in contemporary American literature because these emotions do not conform to the archetypal narrative that highlights survival and self-determination. Unlike the organizing principles of a bildungsroman, minor feelings are not generated from major change but from lack of change, in particular, structural racial and economic change. Rather than using racial trauma as a dramatic stage for individual growth, the literature of minor feelings explores the trauma of a racist capitalist system that keeps the individual in place. It’s playing tennis “while black” and dining out “while black.” It’s hearing the same verdict when testimony after testimony has been given. After every print run, Rankine adds another name of a black citizen murdered by a cop to an already long list of names at the end of the book. This act acknowledges both a remembering and the fact that change is not happening fast enough.
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My term “minor feelings” is deeply indebted to theorist Sianne Ngai, who wrote extensively on the affective qualities of ugly feelings, negative emotions—like envy, irritation, and boredom—symptomatic of today’s late-capitalist gig economy. Like ugly feelings, minor feelings are “non-cathartic states of emotion” with “a remarkable capacity for duration.”
Minor feelings occur when American optimism is enforced upon you, which contradicts your own racialized reality, thereby creating a static of cognitive dissonance. You are told, “Things are so much better,” while you think, Things are the same. You are told, “Asian Americans are so successful,” while you feel like a failure. This optimism sets up false expectations that increase these feelings of dysphoria. A 2017 study found that the ideology of America as a fair meritocracy led to more self-doubt and behavioral problems among low-income black and brown sixth graders because, as one teacher said, “they blame themselves for problems they can’t control.”
Minor feelings are also the emotions we are accused of having when we decide to be difficult—in other words, when we decide to be honest. When minor feelings are finally externalized, they are interpreted as hostile, ungrateful, jealous, depressing, and belligerent, affects ascribed to racialized behavior that whites consider out of line. Our feelings are overreactions because our lived experiences of structural inequity are not commensurate with their deluded reality.
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There is no immediate emotional release in the literature of minor feelings. It is cumulative. Change is measured in the internal “waverings of the mind” or in shape-shifting personae. Because minor feelings are ongoing, they lend themselves more readily to forms and genres that are themselves serial, such as the graphic novel (the Hernandez Brothers, Adrian Tomine) or the serial poem (Wanda Coleman, Solmaz Sharif, Tommy Pico) or the episodic poetic essay (Bhanu Kapil, Claudia Rankine), but also, and more increasingly, are seen in literary fiction (Paul Beatty, Ling Ma). White male authors who have written books that expose warts-and-all personas, like Philip Roth and Karl Ove Knausgaard, have been traditionally lionized. It’s as if readers relish white male writers behaving badly but they demand that minority writers must always be good. And because of this, we put our minor feelings aside to protect white feelings.