The Race Card Project
By Michele Norris
Sydney,
Baltimore, MD
Being Italian makes up a big part of who I am. My Italian Great Grandmother who I call my Nona has taught me that food is so much more than something to eat. My Nona takes pride in each step of making a meal, even the not-so-fun parts such as the cleaning. The love she puts into her cooking has made me appreciate my Italian heritage.
Joanna Chan,
Superior, CO
I heard this when my husband and I were living in Indiana. We studied at Bloomington, and I got a job offer in Indianapolis after graduation so we moved there. We rented a low-end apartment that we could afford at the time.
On the first Halloween we lived in that apartment, some kids threw raw eggs at our balcony window. The next morning, we went to the rental office and reported the incident. The clerk reluctantly took down the information, but since we did not see the faces of the kids, she said that there was not much they could do.
Well, we thanked her and were about to walk out of the office. She then said: “We received some complaints about the smell of YOUR food… Remember! Turn your cooking fan ON when you cook.”
We left her office without dignifying the comment, and we moved out once the lease was up.
Shania,
USA.
She is tired of all the cooking and cleaning. She just wants to be a normal girl and be free.
Catherine Kehl,
Cleveland Heights. OH.
When we divide ourselves into “us” and “other” we don’t only lose the other, we lose ourselves. I was twenty-seven before I realized that my mother sometimes spoke to me in Spanish not because she’d picked some up in college before travelling in South America in her twenties, but because her side of the family, some of whose forebears had been (wealthy) Spanish speaking settlers of California had maintained the language so as to be able to speak to their Mexican maids. I suppose that touches on some of the Cal-Mex cooking, anyway.
But does my late discovered hispanic background, such as it is, have more to do with who I am than having grown up close to my Japanese aunt, or having been a second language speaker of Chinese, and enmeshed in parts of the Chinese community for the last twenty-some years? I am an oversized white girl daughter of the Pacific Rim, I suppose, a fact that became more clear when I moved to Cleveland and couldn’t easily find half my kitchen staples in the supermarkets there.
Susan A.
Chicago, IL
Stereotypes that are now labeled as racist, actually have nothing to do with race. Actually, it is cultural difference which causes problems. Culture is what forms differences in values, ways of speaking, ways of dressing, whether people talk in loud voices or quiet voices, what people eat, what their cooking smells like- all this is cultural, not racial.
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