Editor’s Note: Do Asians really hate black people? It’s a fair question these days in light of Kenneth Eng’s “I Hate Black People” article in AsianWeek and now, on a much smaller scale, actor Kal Penn’s Ku Klux Klan spoof. Helping us take the race debate beyond black and white is Dwayne Monroe, who writes our column The Afro-Asian Matrix.

KAL PENN has a bit of a following amongst young brothers because of “Harold and Kumar,” so his flippant use of racist imagery felt like a slap in the face from a cousin you really dig. Here’s what happened. In promoting his new movie “The Namesake” (out this Friday), he did a spoof interview with two hooded Klansmen (“Ed” and “Larry”), who jokingly pan the movie, presumably because there are way too many macacas running around in it.

The video skit, posted on the movie’s official blog on Feb. 21, apparently fell flat with viewers who think the KKK is off-limits as a comedic prop. One viewer posted this comment: “As an African American, I find it absolutely offensive that you would chose to make light of the KKK and what they mean in American society, simply for laughs.”

Kal’s clarification: “In deciding to shoot a video with actors dressed as KKK members discussing a film featuring predominantly characters and performers of color, the entire existence of the Klan is being ridiculed. This is done specifically without using any racial, ethnic, or gender-based indicators. It purposely subverts racism and violence rather than expanding upon or embracing it.”

This surely sounds good (and I dig Kal so I’m willing to give him a healthy slice of benefit of the doubt cake) but it seems a bit overwrought to me. That is, I don’t think the Kluxer-themed joke arose from a postmodern, consciously ironic, anti-racist project but from something more fundamental to human nature: a failure to empathize with the explicit and implicit meanings of things that don’t seem to directly effect you.

This happened when Indian and South Korean entrepreneurs opened Nazi themed restaurants. Of course, Jewish groups and others horrified by any non-serious, uncritical use of Nazi symbolism were outraged. The wider public in these two nations were not so concerned because the Holocaust does not possess the same resonances in Bangalore and Kwangju as it does in New York. This doesn’t mean that the Indian and Korean publics are unfeeling—quite the opposite is obviously true—only that they possess a cognitive distance from Nazi iconography just as Westerners harbor the same limitations about atrocities that are committed in the East.

Needless to say, if someone was foolish enough to open up a theme restaurant in Mumbai that made light of the significant violence that accompanied Pakistani partition or some jackass opened a spot in Seoul showing Japanese Imperial insignia and images of Mitsubishi Zeros dive-bombing Korean civilians, the results would be appropriately unpleasant. Because, of course, these respective histories are of direct concern to the peoples of the two nations.

Separated from historical context and emotional resonance, Nazi themes are objects to be played with, not signifiers of terror (another example is the way anime treats Christianity—there’s much more fluidity in depictions of Christian iconography because most people in the target audiences do not consider Christian symbols to be meaningful.)

A similar sort of disconnection was at work when Kal Penn came up with his Kluxer short. Of course, everyone is guilty of this same sort of thoughtlessness about something—the world has too much spilled blood for everyone to be appropriately empathetic about all of it. Sadly, there are apparently limits to what Fromm and Wilson called “biophilia,” the love of all living things. •