I never think of you as Asian.
Virginia,
Cambridge, MA.
I’m half Filipina. And I’ve always thought of myself as half. But one day at a faculty meeting a colleague told me I “passed” as white. It’s bothered me ever since.
White mom hoping Filipina daughter’s prepared
Yael Silverberg Urian,
Montclair, NJ.
Three Cultures. Two Races. No Home.
Kristen Ellerbe,
Richmond, VA.
As a mixed child, I have never felt at home with any culture. My mother was born in the Philippines and my father was an airman stationed there. They are wonderful parents who are absolutely in love with one another. I am one of three children, the middle child and only girl. I am mixed. I grew up in white middle class America. So where do I fit in?
Though to America’s confusion, I identify more with my Filipina roots that anything else, despite not speaking Tagalog. That is another story for another time though. My mother and her surrogate Filipino family made up of her best friends were they people I grew up around. My nearest cousins on my father’s side lived too far away and were all boys. I just could never really fit in anywhere. At the same time, I was always aware that I did not look like my Filipino friends either.
My hair isn’t kinky enough or my skin is not light enough. My speech was not black enough, or I had never actually been to the Philippines. There was no place for me.
Furthermore, I attended a white school and I was accurately aware of it. I remember one year, I had an angel costume. Right before Halloween, I told my father I couldn’t wear it. When he asked me why, I told him that I didn’t look like an angel. Angels were white and blond and pretty. And I wasn’t. Instead I had my mother make me a Pocahontas outfit, because I looked like her. I am not Indian, but that was the closest thing I could find to me. I was in elementary school. And I didn’t think I was pretty.
I felt like a dog in a shelter where people walk up and cock there head. Then they say. “What is it?”
I had three cultures, two races, and no identity.
Biracial White/Asian Travels to Southern States
Sean B.,
Riverside, CA.
I am half white and half Filipino. Growing up in a melting pot such as Southern California has been awesome. I never truly understood how lucky I was to live here until I traveled to the south (multiple states) to visit family. My wife is Filipina (born in the south). While I seemed to get along OKAY in the south (most people thought I was Mexican or Southern European of sorts because of my dark hair), people would stare at my wife as if she were some sort of unknown entity. People weren’t necessarily rude, but they would just stare as if they had never seen an Asian person in real life before. A white waitress even bowed her head to my wife after serving her a drink (which was HILARIOUS btw). I guess that I can see how people get comfortable in small towns, and that’s all they know, which leads to them never wanting to leave their small town. This especially makes sense for individuals who are part of the majority, and never traveled to coastal areas where whites are sometimes the minority.
I never really thought of myself as a minority until I traveled to the south. To all of the biracial individuals in the south: You can have a better quality of life in most coastal and liberal states. I think that Florida and some parts of Texas seem okay for minorities as well.
Here in the melting pot of California, I am the unknown. I’m used to it, and if anything, I’ve learned to use it to my advantage. I view myself as somewhat of a social chameleon. Latinos/Asians assume I’m white, but once they find out I’m half Asian it’s like we all of the sudden have this shared ‘you’re a minority so you get it’ bond. Which is fine by me. Whites are usually unsure of what I am because while I have an Irish first name and French last name, my hair is a little on the dark side. They assume I must be some kind of European. Perhaps Spanish? Maybe even part Mexican since this is Southern California. I grew up in a diverse neighborhood and had a lot of Mexican, White, Filipino and Black friends, so I honestly feel that I can relate to most people. I’ve had a black person tell me, “I don’t really view you as a white person-you’re just Sean.” I have a diverse group of friends and family, and we all bring our different cultures to the table, and we all have a great time. We bust each other’s chops a lot, but it’s all in good humor.
I have a good career, and I make pretty good money. Sadly, I’m not sure that I would have been given the opportunities that I’ve been given had I been viewed as a minority, which would certainly have been the case had I went to school and started my career in the south. I never really thought too deeply about racism until I traveled to the south. Racism is just not as prevalent here. I guess that this is somewhat cathartic for me. Soon, I will be applying to schools for a very competitive field that requires a professional/doctorate degree. A lot of programs are in the south. While I am admittedly somewhat hesitant to apply, I feel that it might be a good life experience. Surprisingly enough, my wife loves the south and wouldn’t mind moving–Go figure?
Is It Racist to Ask People Where They’re From?
URI FRIEDMAN, The Atlantic JUL 2 2014, 9:05 AM ET ASPEN, Colo.—”The moment was fine for me…. But I don’t know, how was it for you?” That’s New York Times columnist Mark Oppenheimer asking Tessie Guillermo, president and CEO of the consultancy ZeroDivide, how she felt when he inquired about her ethnicity.
“Context is really important,” Guillermo responded. “The context, the place of the situation in which the question is asked, really dictates the answer. I guess I’m one of those people that are always trying to put folks at ease.” Guillermo had just recalled that when she was young, her mother used to clean her with a stone “because she thought she could rub some of the color off of us.” “We were the only non-blacks on our block,” Guillermo explained, “and she wanted to make sure that we weren’t thought of as black.” “What are you, ethnically?” Oppenheimer had asked in response. “Filipina,” Guillermo answered.
The exchange took place at the Aspen Ideas Festival, which is organized by The Atlantic and the Aspen Institute, during a panel discussion on The Race Card Project, a four-year-old effort by NPR host Michele Norris to solicit people’s frank, unfiltered thoughts on race in bite-sized, six-word essays. She’s received tens of thousands of responses from people in 63 countries.
Watch the The Race Card Project’s, Say What?!? Performance at Belly Up, Aspen
“One of the most common submissions to The Race Card Project is some formulation of, ‘So, where are you really from?'” Norris said. “To a lot of people that hits their ear the wrong way. It feels like someone is trying to point out their otherness: ‘You’re quite obviously not American, so where are you from?'” The question, Norris added, is, “How do you express curiosity without stepping on someone’s feelings?” As these testimonies demonstrate, some people resent the question, others embrace or at least tolerate it, and still others find it thoroughly confusing. And sometimes people experience all these feelings at once, or different emotions depending on the situation. Immigrants around the world struggle with the question.
Here’s how the researchers Virginia Mapedzahama and Kwamena Kwansah-Aido reflected on this “quintessential question of identity” in a 2010 paper on African identity in Australia: While acknowledging that a certain ‘curiosity’ sometimes drives the asking of this question, we still question the implications and multiplicity of meanings to those whom it is asked. We contend that being asked the question raises three key issues for us. First, we perceive it as exclusionary, in that in a white dominated society it is asked, mainly of certain groups of people who are visibly different. Second, the assumption behind the question—that one is not ‘from here’, constructs an/other whose identity is fixed and tied only to one faraway place, thereby erasing our hyphenated identities, which define our everyday lived realities. Third, it invokes feelings of ambivalence about place when it is interpreted as demanding a justification of the claim to belonging and being ‘from here’.
Watch the Say What ?!? Performance from The Afternoon of Conversation at The Aspen Ideas Festival, 2014
The importance of context was a recurring theme throughout the Race Card Project discussion. Norris pointed out that the audience laughed when one card—”Not all Mexicans can do landscaping”—was read aloud. “The people who wrote this didn’t write” with the intention of being funny, she observed. “Is it nervous laughter? Is it laughter because of recognition? Or is it the fact that laughter plays a role in creating a bridge to each other? I have always thought that the most honest conversation about race in America takes place on a comedy stage … where people can say things that are impolitic almost everywhere else.
Where you’re allowed to laugh.” The panel also debated whether the fact that some stereotypes are based in truth makes them any less pernicious, and whether it’s corrosive or cathartic for ethnic groups to stereotype and poke fun at themselves. “It doesn’t bother me to have a little inter-ethnic humor, frankly,” PBS anchor Gwen Ifill said. “I think you have to be careful about calling everything racism. Making self-mocking, humorous, loving references to stereotypes can be pretty funny. It’s not so funny if those same things are said by someone else whose attempt is to hurt or scar or limit you.”
The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg found the practice more troubling. “There are people in African-American communities, Jewish communities, other communities, who internalize some of these stereotypes and actually begin to believe them. That’s the nature of minority self-hatred,” he said. “We’ve seen this in comedy. Dave Chappelle went silent for six years, and many black comedians have this … where suddenly they realize they’re making these jokes about black people, and white people are laughing, not benevolently. They’re running with this stuff.”
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Uri Friedman is a senior associate editor at The Atlantic, where he oversees the Global Channel. He was previously the deputy managing editor at Foreign Policy and a staff writer forThe Atlantic Wire.
This article was originally published on The Atlantic. Click here to view the original. © All rights reserved. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency. http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2014/07/question-where-are-you-from-racist/373818/
