Convergence

I married a woman from Hong Kong. She is Chinese. I am not. This has never been interesting to either of us.

I married a woman from Hong Kong. She is Chinese. I am not. This has never been interesting to either of us. It is interesting to exactly two types of people, and they approach the subject from what they believe are opposite directions but somehow always arrive at the same question, which is: why?

One side asks it with concern. The other side asks it with disgust. Neither side asks what she is like, what she thinks about, what makes her laugh, whether she is happy. She is not a person to either of them. She is a racial event.

Ruth would like me to mention that she did not ask to appear in this article. She would also like me to mention that she does not think about race when she is deciding what to eat for dinner, and she finds it exhausting that other people apparently do.

The Same Obsession

I saw something on Instagram last week. One of those carousel posts, white text on a black background, the kind that usually makes me scroll faster. But this one had a premise that landed differently, and the premise was this: if you put the most aggressively progressive person you know in a room with the most unreconstructed racist you know, they would agree on more than either of them would ever admit.

I laughed. Then I stopped laughing. Then I started making a list. Then I stopped making the list because the list kept getting longer and I had to go to work.

But it has been a week now and the list has not gotten shorter, so here it is.

Both believe your racial identity is the most important thing about you. Not your character, not your work, not your mind, not what you build or who you love or how you treat people when no one is watching. Your melanin content. That is the headline. One side thinks this is liberation. The other side thinks this is biology. Both think it is destiny. Both are wrong in exactly the same way, but try telling either of them that.

I learned this one early. When Ruth and I started dating, someone on the progressive end of my social circle asked if I had examined my motivations. I had not. My motivation was that she was funny and sharp and beautiful and told me I was wrong about something within the first ten minutes of meeting her. That was my motivation. Apparently I was supposed to have a more complicated one, and the fact that I did not was itself suspicious.

Different Vocabulary

Both insist that everything, and I mean everything, should be viewed through the lens of race. You cannot watch a movie. You cannot eat a meal. You cannot read a book or hire an employee or walk through a park without first asking the racial question. One side calls this consciousness. The other side calls this awareness. They are describing the same obsession with different vocabulary and identical energy.

One says “people of color.” The other says “colored people.” That is the same words in a different order.

Both use almost the same phrase and somehow neither has noticed. One says “people of color.” The other says “colored people.” That is the same words in a different order. That is a word salad served on two different plates at two different restaurants with the same chef in the kitchen. I am not saying the history is identical. I am saying the construction is, and at some point that should bother someone.

Both believe minorities are a monolith. One side says “the Black community thinks” or “the Latino vote wants” as though forty million people share a single brain. The other side says the same thing, just with worse intentions. Both flatten millions of individual human beings into a single block that can be spoken for, spoken about, and spoken over. Both find it very convenient that the block never talks back, or when it does, both sides say it does not count.

Ruth has been told what Asian women think by white women at dinner parties. She has been told this with great confidence by people who have never been to Asia. She usually nods and then later, in the elevator, says something in Cantonese that I have learned not to ask her to translate.

The Same Destination

Both want to roll back anti-discrimination laws. This one is my favorite because it requires a level of cognitive dissonance that should be studied in a lab. One side says we need to hire based on race to fix what race-based hiring broke. The other side says we need to hire based on race because some races are better. Both want the same policy. Both want the form that asks what you are before it asks what you can do. They just disagree about which box should get the advantage, which is not a philosophical difference. It is a seating dispute.

Both arrived at the conclusion that minority faces should be removed from commercial life. One side did it through boycotts and corporate pressure campaigns. The other side would have done it through legislation if they could have. Aunt Jemima is gone. Uncle Ben is gone. The Land O’Lakes woman is gone. In the name of progress, every Black and Brown face was quietly scraped off the shelf and replaced with nothing. No one was hired. No one was elevated. The faces just disappeared. A grocery store aisle in 2024 has fewer non-white faces than it did in 1990, and the people responsible for that consider themselves the good ones. A Klansman in 1955 could not have designed a better outcome if you gave him a marketing budget and a focus group.

Both believe white actors should only play white roles. One side calls this representation. The other side calls this nature. Both agree the skin of the performer must match the skin of the character. Both would reject a casting decision that violated this principle. Both would be angry, just in different comment sections.

Both have arrived at segregation. One side calls them “safe spaces” and “affinity groups.” The other side called them “whites only” and did not feel the need to euphemize. The stated goals are different. The room looks the same. The door has a sign. The sign has a color. If you are the wrong one, you do not enter. I struggle to explain how these are different outcomes with different moral weights. I understand the argument. I have heard it many times. I remain unconvinced that the people inside the room feel as different from each other as their reading lists suggest.

Both oppose cultural exchange, though they frame it differently. One says you must not wear that, eat that, say that, play that, if it did not originate with your people. The other says the same thing but phrases it as keeping things pure. One calls it appropriation. The other calls it contamination. Both draw the same lines around the same cultures and say do not cross. Both think boundaries between peoples should be high, firm, and policed. Both get angry at a college student in the wrong earrings.

We are just eating dinner. We have been eating dinner for years. No one has been harmed.

Ruth made me char siu last week. I made her carbonara the week before. By the standards of one side, we are engaged in mutual cultural violence. By the standards of the other, something worse. We are just eating dinner. We have been eating dinner for years. No one has been harmed.

The Last One

And then there is the last one, and it is the one that should keep people up at night.

Both have arrived at the conclusion that Jewish people occupy a special category. Not white enough for one side, not the right kind of white for the other. Excluded from solidarity by progressives who draw the oppression line just above them, and excluded from humanity by racists who have been doing this for centuries. The far left has built a framework where success equals complicity, and then looked at a historically persecuted minority that rebuilt itself over and over and said, you do not qualify for protection. The far right looked at the same people and said the same thing with different words and worse plans. When your liberationist framework arrives at the same target as the people who built Auschwitz, you should stop and ask yourself some questions. Very few of them are stopping. Almost none of them are asking.

I do not have a grand theory about why this happened. I have a small theory. The small theory is that once you decide individuals do not matter, that only groups matter, you end up in the same place regardless of which direction you started walking. The horseshoe bends. The ends meet. The people at both tips are shaking hands and do not realize it because they are facing opposite directions and only see the distance behind them.

I married a person. Not a category. She married a person. Not a statement. That used to be the whole point. I am not sure when it stopped being the point, but I know exactly which two groups of people made it stop, and I know they will never admit they are standing in the same room.