Racism and the Fight for Rights Collide in a Painful Paradox : China: Attacks on black students make its democracy movement an imperfect one, but it does not negate the struggle; the contradiction exists here, too.

Racism and democracy simply don’t mix. The American dictum that “all men are created equal” never made sense while Americans were killing Indians and enslaving blacks. How do we reconcile the principles of democracy with mobs of white demonstrators, whether those of Selma in 1960 or Bensonhurst in 1990, chanting for “white rights” even as they deny the rights of others?

The question goes beyond America’s borders and other democratic societies. It is also a question for people seeking to build democratic societies a year after the rise and fall of the Chinese democracy movement.

Months before Chinese students began to engage in mass demonstrations for democracy some of them were demanding the expulsion of African students from Nanjing’s Hehai University. Like most foreign students, the Africans enjoyed greater standards of living in China and dated local women. Among the signs in the crowd that Christmas Eve, 1988, were placards demanding greater democracy alongside ones proclaiming “death to the black devils.”

What are we to make of this painful paradox? I asked Wuer Kaixi, a student leader and president of the Federation for Chinese Democracy in the United States.

We met last December at an awards ceremony in Boston. Wuer, like the other honorees, had put his life on the line fighting for human rights. He was a fugitive from China, wanted for agitating for democracy.

Halfway through the awards dinner I felt it necessary to interrupt the solemn reflections on the demise of the student movement to ask Wuer and other Chinese students sitting at my table to reconcile their legitimate passions for democracy with the actions of the students who physically attacked Africans at Hehai University. How, just before erecting the “goddess of Democracy” in Tian An Men Square could some proponents of a more open and just society rampage through Nanjing and other cities exhorting their countrymen to “kill the black devils?”

The movement’s contradictions infuriate me. As strong as the lure of freedom and equality is the widely held Chinese belief, shared by Japanese, Korean and other Asian cultures, that the darker a person’s skin the lower his status and worth.

It is prejudice more emblematic of Jean-Marie Le Pen’s National Front in France than Martin Luther King’s civil-rights movement. That Chinese students at Tian An Men Square sang choruses of “We Shall Overcome” only underscores the dichotomy.

Even the barrage of bullets fired at unarmed chanting figures in the early morning of June 4, though shocking, did not quiet my concern over the contradiction of racism and democracy.

I shared these thoughts with Wuer Kaixi. With eyes moist from the speech he had just given, he spoke of friends who died at Tian An Men and those who “disappeared.” He talked about fear and courage. Most important, he acknowledged that the democracy movement, like Chinese society as a whole, is ridden with various degrees of xenophobia, including racism. He conceded it was an imperfect movement.

Wuer’s sincerity sparked in me a great degree of self-examination and criticism. We African-Americans had also suffered the disappearance of loved ones, on dark Mississippi highways, and killings in the boroughs of New York. But ours, too, is an imperfect movement for civil and human rights, sprinkled with numerous contradictions. Among them: the Al Sharptons of our movement--characterized by naked opportunism and hate mongering; the black organizers of a boycott of Korean markets in Brooklyn--rightfully angered about various manifestations of bigotry on the part of Korean merchants, but refusing to negotiate or compromise; violent attacks on Vietnamese in Brooklyn by blacks who assumed them to be Korean. These contradictions, despite their severity, do not negate the struggle of African-Americans for human and civil rights. The lesson elucidated by Wuer Kaixi is that the fight for freedom anywhere is rife with contradictions. Reflecting on America’s painful history, I told him that the issue of racism will have to be dealt with if any of us are to be truly free. He agreed. I raised my glass to Wuer Kaixi and toasted his quest for democracy.