The Iron Chink

The local history museum here has an object in its collections called "The Iron Chink." It came up in our oral history class last week. The Museum planned an exhibition with this object, where some of the label and didactic information repeated the racist language of the object. It was a piece of machinery created by a white inventor to displace Chinese laborers - not unlike the story of John Henry. Anyways, the museum took an institutional party line that although the language of the exhibition was offensive to some that Chinese-Americans could "take it." This as opposed to their perspective that African-American visitors couldn't deal with an exhibition using the "N-word." So it was very interesting that people in the class had no problem saying "chink" but tiptoed around using the N-word. At one point, I became very irritated. MOHAI sent the institutional message to the public that certain kinds of racism are acceptable, and what is this perception based on? On stereotypes of Asian-American docility and good manners, the organized power of the collective, and the level of perceived threat or danger that they might be called out and branded by the public with the "R-word" - i.e. racist. So I'm working on a new poem called "The Iron Chink" that explores some of these tensions.