Nguyen discusses the critique of whiteness in The Sympathizer. (Essay Sample)

Name Professor Course Date Nguyen discusses the critique of whiteness in The Sympathizer. People who enjoy this privilege often remain unaware of the power system that whiteness represents. Since it is regarded as the prototypical or default condition in the society, its privileges are often overlooked as it keeps on influencing cultural, political, and intellectual systems, leading to systemic inequalities that disadvantage people of color and perpetuate a cycle of privilege for white individuals. Robin DiAngelo, in her manifesto of new racism, clarifies that whiteness entails the fundamental rights, resources, privileges, and experiences that are presupposed to be like an industry and therefore the common work of every individual; however, in reality, they are only accessible to white individuals (DiAngelo 123). When such privileges are understood as normal rather than racialized benefits, the question of racial hierarchy can be maintained without much overt recognition. The Sympathizer by Viet Thanh Nguyen reveals such a dynamic by showing that white Americans are the ones who dictate the representation and interpretation of the Vietnamese culture and make their control sound neutral or objective. Nguyen uses the characters, like the auteur, the chair of Oriental Studies, and Dr. Hedd, to expose the existence of whiteness in media prototyping, academic expertise, and cultural stereotyping. Through parodying these structures of power, the novel criticizes how whiteness forms the representations, study, and treatment of Asians and conceals its authority. Nguyen's criticism of whiteness is most clearly illustrated through Hollywood movies and their impact on media representation. The narrator in The Sympathizer is a consultant in a Hollywood movie on the Vietnam War produced by the auteur. The narrator soon realizes that the film claims to depict the war realistically, but he discovers that Vietnamese characters are being turned into mere shallow stereotypes. Vietnamese are portrayed in the script as only silent peasants or vicious gooks (Nguyen 125). Such descriptions kill the complexity of Vietnamese experiences and turn them into a set of background characters of an American soldier-centered narrative. Instead of showing Vietnamese views, the film supports the well-known American stories of sacrifice and heroism. When the narrator sees that the Vietnamese cannot represent themselves and have to be represented, he perceives the injustice of this representation. This utterance shows the inherent power imbalance, which Nguyen criticizes. Vietnamese are deprived of a chance to narrate their stories, and white filmmakers retain the authority of the memory of the war. The narrator also comments on the arrogance of the auteur, who believed that his approach was something novel in the world, as it was the first war where the defeated would write history rather than those who won (Nguyen 134). Although the United States was defeated in the Vietnam War by the military, Hollywood has the authority to construct its history. By such a depiction of the film industry, Nguyen shows the way whiteness holds cultural power by taking control over the process of representation and defining shared memory. Whiteness is also criticized by Nguyen through the exoticization of the Asian identity, especially in the life of Ms. Mori, a Japanese American woman who recounts her experience in meeting the Chair of Oriental Studies during a job interview. The Chair happens to ask at once whether she is a Japanese speaker and gets excited when he hears that she is a nisei, which refers to a person of Japanese descent born in the United States, as though this single word can make him realize his interpretation of her identity. The Chair tells Ms. Mori, who explains that she was born in Gardena, California, that she has lost her culture because she is a second-generation Japanese American. This remark shows what assumptions he made in his perspective. He does not see Ms. Mori as a person who is American and who has a personal history but sees her more as having racial and cultural expectations. Since she is not an obedient girl to the concept of what it means to be a true Japanese, he believes that she has somehow lost her culture. Nguyen employs this exchange to emphasize the fact that whiteness tends to exoticize Asian identity and reduce it to a subject of fascination or study instead of considering the real individuals who are quite complex. Although Ms. Mori was born in the United States, the Chair presupposes that she must have another place where she can be her authentic self. This view supports the idea that Asian Americans are always foreigners, and their identity is based on cultural stereotypes, not their experiences. In the narrative of Ms. Mori, Nguyen unveils the role of whiteness in strengthening racial boundaries and postulating it as intellectual curiosity. Another way that Nguyen criticizes whiteness is in the nature of the Chair of Oriental Studies that he uses to define what Asian identity is. Though the Chair presents himself as a specialist of the Asian cultures, it is clear that he makes many assumptions that are racially based. Commenting upon the mixed background of the narrator, the Chair takes the case of interracial relationships and compares them with breeding plants, where the combinations of native vegetation with a foreign one often result in a tragic outcome (Nguyen 145). This analogy implies that racial mixing is not natural and it is harmful, and as such, human relationships are downgraded to a biological experiment. Although the Chair makes his comment seem like an intellectual observation, it is a long history of racial thinking that puts whiteness as the default setting. The Chair also states that Americans with Oriental origins are victims of the major identity issues, which suggests that he is more aware of the inner world of the narrator than the narrator is (Nguyen 165). He even requests the narrator to name his "Oriental and Occidental traits," trying to classify his identity in terms of races. These remarks show that whiteness tends to control other cultures by making its judgments seem to be objective knowledge. Nguyen uses the character of the Chair to satirize how academic institutions can uphold racial hierarchies while pretending to be intellectual. The issue of whiteness, as discussed by Nguyen, is even more evident in the character of Dr. Hedd, whose study of Asians shows how racial privilege can influence academic knowledge. Though Dr. Hedd is not Asian, his work is popularly considered legitimate literature, which enables him to shape and project the Asian identity to the Western audience. In his work, he states that life is abundant and cheap in the Orient (Nguyen 260). Such a blanket statement reduces the diverse Asian societies to a stereotype that devalues human life. Although one sees the big prejudice behind this statement, the work of Dr. Hedd is considered credible since it is from an esteemed scholar in the most esteemed academic institutions. DiAngelo argues that whiteness is often treated as the invisible norm, which allows white individuals to speak from positions of authority without recognizing how racial privilege shapes their perspectiv...