No. I’m not your average face.
Clara Chun,
Los Angeles, CA.
I’m a Thai-Chinese, Korean, White girl. It’s about as confusing as it sounds, but I refuse to not acknowledge a single part of my identity. Because all of it exists.
Complicated, a foot in two worlds.
Javiera,
San Diego, CA.
My husband often jokes that I’m not “brown” because my light skin makes me look like an average white person. But growing up in rural Missouri, I never felt like a “white” person because I was teased for my hispanic features. I’m not mixed race and was born in a Latinx country, yet somehow feel like I have a foot in both worlds since I lived in the US my whole life. I feel like white people and hispanics want me to choose a team, but being hispanic is more complicated than that; I’m technically both. Despite being percieved as white by some, I have felt discrimination and rejection for being hispanic.
I feel even more conflicted when I think about the children I will eventually have with my white husband. I feel guilty that I’m glad his/her features will most likely be white enough that he/she will not experience discrimination. I’m also sad that because my child will look white he/she won’t feel the connection to a hispanic heritage, and he/she may even feel like an outsider when around other hispanics.
Just an average, boring white guy.
Bradley Hogan,
College Park, MD.
I’m learning to recognize privilege and want to do what I can to even the playing field
Can you help me with math?
Samantha,
Seattle, WA.
I’m an Asian American woman who gets this all the time. Throughout high school, people assumed that because I was Asian, I should be smart. Most times I laughed it off, but that’s allowing the stereotype to live on. It’s interesting to look back and see how other Asians in my year lived up to that stereotype and looked down on me for doing ONLY academically average. The stereotypes need to stop.
Heritage-less Scandinavian – sad to be ‘average’
Michelle Sweeten
O’Fallon, IL
I grew up in an average small American town in the Midwest. I remember the first black family to move to my town, and then the first Asian family. As a child, it didn’t mean much, though I think the town had a harder time accepting them than I and my young friends did. In Middle School I moved to a suburb and learned that Americans were more colorful than I knew, but still, it was nothing mind-blowing.
At the end of high school / beginning of college, I began to wonder about my heritage. Sure, I’m white, but not all white people are from the same place- where did I come from and why did I not have a rich cultural background such as my African, Indian, and Vietnamese friends had? Turns out my family comes from various Western and Northern European countries, mostly centered around Scandinavia, England, and France. But the part I had the hardest time swallowing is that when they all immigrated, they left everything behind from their past lives- they did not share their cultures or even their languages with their first-generation American children. They wiped their histories out, cleared the slate. My family doesn’t have a single contact from our families still in those countries. No aunts, no uncles, no cousins. They are there, but they are lost to me.
I’ve had a hard time coming to terms with this. I know that my ancestors were brave men and women who wanted a better life, and I am grateful that their sacrifices allowed me to be born in one of the greatest countries in the world, but I feel like I’m missing something. If I could meet them, I would beg them to not give up their culture just to be American. They were afraid they would not be accepted if they continued in the old ways, but America was (and still is) a melting pot- it gets better the more you add, not the more you hide or pretend. I think that is why I have spent so long learning about another culture (I got my Bachelor’s in French)- because I don’t have a cultural heritage of my own. I promise to change this for my children. I cannot give them the Scandinavian culture that I don’t have, but I will teach them everything I can about myself, my parents, my grandparents so that their great great grandchildren can someday say “My great great great grandmother was a true American and live like this….”
Do You Think I’m White, Really
Chris Hamby
Bethalto, IL
On my exterior, I look like a average Caucasian man, yet there is a little more to me than what people may think. First off, let me paint this picture for you. I am a large,(athletic built now)bald man, for all purposes white. I went into a Wal-Mart in Vandalia, IL and a young black man said, “That shit won’t fly in the hood”, looking directly at me. Little did that young man know, I am a mutt. I have multiple nationalities in me, none more prevalent than Cherokee Indian. He was looking at the color of my skin and does not know a thing about me, this should be a lesson for us all, don’t judge a book by its cover. We are all more complicated than just a skin color.
