To Be Asian American - Page 2 - Tilted Forum Project Discussion Community

Cynthetiq · 05-04-2005, 11:04 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by abaya

Cyn, I will just gently point out that you were pretty damn excited about me being Icelandic (even if I'm only half, and not really culturally)... why did it matter so much to you? (I certainly don't mind, I love celebrating my two immigrant parents' halves... I call myself "Thaicelandic" as a really lame joke!)

I have been pondering this all day.

I've started responses, then scrapped them. I haven't been able to organize my thoughts into any more than bullet points for some reason today.

1) I think you're a good friend to your friends, (I hope that I'm going to be included at some point in time as IRL friendship,) because you call it like it is. I have a number of friends like that and feel it's important to keep myself real. I appreciate you pointing it out and calling me on it.

2) My interest in Iceland is genuine. I know alot about Icleand that it impresses some Icelanders, from history to locations. With only 290,000 Icelanders in the world, when I encounter them I try to meet them. There isn't a way to tell if they are Icelandic just by looking at them, I have to wait until they speak. Okay the Flight Attendants that I walk past have the Icelandair emblem on their uniforms but they are so hot I cannot talk to them. We hope to own a house in Iceland within the next few years. If we could expatriate to Iceland for a few years, we'd be there already. (She tried to get a job at Lati Baer (Nickolodeon's Lazy Town) but wasn't able to negotiate through all the political stuff.) I did not approach you and ask you what your heritage was, I picked up on it in mid thread.

3) What has fascinated me since I went to Iceland for the first time was meeting other Asian decents that did not speak their heritage tongue nor did they speak English. They spoke strictly Icelandic (Skogafoss had to translate.) It was an eye opening experience for me because I made the assumption that all Asians would have learned and spoke english. Since that time, I have paid close attention when travelling to other European countries how the Asians perceive themselves and how they are perceived. Meeting Chinese/Koreans in Madrid that spoke perfect Castillian Spanish but no English, unlike the shop owners here who speak somewhat broken Spanish to the customers and laborers.

abaya · 05-04-2005, 11:31 AM

^ Cyn, I appreciate your honesty and time in responding. I hope I'm a good friend to my friends, too!

(Btw, what's an IRL friendship?)

I am always glad to meet people who have genuine interests in countries/cultures that are not their "homelands." I think it's the only way we are every going to learn to get along on this planet.

And yes, it is interesting how Asians adapt in Iceland... that's the topic of my doctoral research, actually. Not all Asians speak Icelandic well, but I'm going to focus part of my ethnography on how important language is for identity, and whether those people consider themselves to be Icelandic once they learn the language (Icelanders, in general, respect you as one of them if you learn to speak their language.)

Quote:

Originally Posted by sashime76

Only heritage we need to know is that we are all Homo Sapiens.

As an anthropologist, I fully agree with this statement. There is no homeland, unless you wanna go back to Olduvai Gorge and have a big nationalistic...err, HUMANistic party there. Ethnicities are a beautiful thing, I try to celebrate mine while I can, but they are not everything. In fact, they are a very small part of being human, which all too many humans blow up to be uber-important and enough to start wars over, or even just to snub other human beings in Starbucks.

Cynthetiq · 05-04-2005, 11:47 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by abaya

^ Cyn, I appreciate your honesty and time in responding. I hope I'm a good friend to my friends, too!

(Btw, what's an IRL friendship?)

In Real Life

Quote:

I am always glad to meet people who have genuine interests in countries/cultures that are not their "homelands." I think it's the only way we are every going to learn to get along on this planet.

Iceland is fascinating to me. I call it the Antithesis to Manhattan, since most places we went we were the only people there. Going to Madrid this year made me realize just how Spanish influenced my childhood was via the Filipino family. The more countries I visit, the more I learn that people all over the world are the same.

Quote:

And yes, it is interesting how Asians adapt in Iceland... that's the topic of my doctoral research, actually. Not all Asians speak Icelandic well, but I'm going to focus part of my ethnography on how important language is for identity, and whether those people consider themselves to be Icelandic once they learn the language (Icelanders, in general, respect you as one of them if you learn to speak their language.)

That sounds very cool I have a CD that am supposed to use to learn how to speak basic Icelandic. I have only used it for such a short period that I don't remember it. I did propose to Skogafoss in Icelandic. I don't remember the Icelandic words I said, but the English was "Will you give me the honor of being your husband?" (cribbed from Anthony Edwards on ER, she wept when he proposed so I thought it was the right words to say.)

Zeraph · 05-04-2005, 11:57 AM

Racial labels are a joke with more and more mixing. Soon we'll all be one race (/sarcasm we already are) Even when someone might actually be considered that label, the people who would use it likely wouldn't know what it meant anyways. The only thing they seem to accomplish is bickering, racism, and seperatness.

Supple Cow · 05-04-2005, 12:10 PM

This may be a stretch, but I see this as similar to global capitalism in a lot of ways. (And that could just be because I'm reading about that right now, but I guess I'll see what kind of response I get before I decide.)

Holding on tightly to cultural values in a way that makes one easily offended - as in by certain words or actions rather than by intentions - is like economic protectionism. In a global capitalist economy (which is what we're in whether all countries want to come out and play or not), it inhibits growth and is generally detrimental to the nation that employs it, not to mention causing friction with other nations. A lot of people blame capitalism, but the real problem is when countries try to put controls on capitalism. A liberalized system of capitalism itself actually allows everyone to benefit, even if not in equal proportions.

In the same way, when we make up terms that don't even have a specific meaning, we are protecting something that doesn't need to be protected as well as causing a lot of trouble in the process. We suffer the consequences of this in the form of inhibited growth (lack of political clout, having to experience everyday racism, etc.). If there were a metaphorical free trade of culture (a.k.a. more liberalized views of race and ethnicity) , I could imagine that everyone would benefit from the interchange and that overall racism and inequity in the political and other important arenas would be reduced. In other words, it is not a case of "everyone is racist against us Asians," it's more about "us Asians" not going out of our way to be the "us Asians" GROUP and thus creating an environment where other people who don't know any better don't have anything to react to. When you take on a victim mentality, you reinforce the system which creates situations in which you experience "oppression."

Asuka{eve} · 05-04-2005, 01:16 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Janey

can you elaborate? what specifically sucks about your life?

Well it doesn't suck now being in college. But during highschool I was harrased for being part asian. It was just a single group but they were the popular group. If I tried to say anything they would mock me replying "ching chong ping pong" or another. They would always call me a chink and gook but when I clarify and say that I am part Japanese they would call me a racist JAP.

I guess what I originally said was ambiguous. This thread just made me remember that time.

abaya · 05-04-2005, 01:49 PM

Supple Cow: do you believe in liberalizing the flow of labor across borders, too? (Meaning basically, open borders, no regulation on that, just as there is no regulation on "free trade")... I think it would be interesting, and very equalizing (though that means the rich would get poorer, ooohhh too bad).

Quote:

Originally Posted by SuppleCow

When you take on a victim mentality, you reinforce the system which creates situations in which you experience "oppression."

I agree. But what if you actually ARE a victim and ARE oppressed?... then the system still exists, and something must be done to change the attitudes on the part of the dominant majority... just dunno how, exactly.

ShaniFaye · 05-04-2005, 02:13 PM

I consider anyone born in america, american...period

The thing I've had trouble overcoming, in my shortsouthern life, raised by your characteristic blue blood southern belles, is that there ARE some loveable yankees out there

Supple Cow · 05-04-2005, 03:21 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by abaya

Supple Cow: do you believe in liberalizing the flow of labor across borders, too? (Meaning basically, open borders, no regulation on that, just as there is no regulation on "free trade")... I think it would be interesting, and very equalizing (though that means the rich would get poorer, ooohhh too bad).

Yes. I do. I also understand that security concerns make stricter immigration policies popular and necessary to a degree; but in general, the more liberalization we can withstand without giving up too much control over security, the better off everybody is. The rich (rather, the rich now) would lose money in such a process, but it would only be in the short run if they were worth any beans to begin with.

Quote:

Originally Posted by abaya

I agree. But what if you actually ARE a victim and ARE oppressed?... then the system still exists, and something must be done to change the attitudes on the part of the dominant majority... just dunno how, exactly.

I'm not saying there aren't any real victims of oppression. I just think that, for example, the current racial oppression in Darfur and the racial profiling that happens in the US (like black men getting pulled over more often because they look 'suspicious' in nice cars) are two very different branches of the same tree. Yes, they are both examples of oppression. But using a heavy handed, revolution-style approach - which is appropriate for a situation like Darfur - on racial profiling in the US (e.g. radical 'people of color' and "social justice" groups today) is like taking a chainsaw to the tiniest branches of a tree. In the end, I think exerting so much muscle where it isn't necessary is not helping anybody. IMO, "social justice" groups in the US in the past couple of decades have only been reinforcing the idea that the people who get the short end of the stick are fundamentally different from everyone else... and the message that American "the oppressors" (aka everyone else) are getting, unconscious though it may be, is that people who look different should be treated that way, too.

Cynthetiq · 07-24-2005, 04:24 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by JustJess

Huh. I never realized I was an asshole.
I'm sorry, guys - and I know both SC and Cyn in regular life - why wouldn't you tell me I was being an idiot?
I have an honest interest in everyone's mixing, no matter the person. I didn't know that friends that aren't Caucasian-appearing have such constantly annoying questions on it.

So I was at an event this past week a family member was doing a book reading. There were 2 family members there that I have never met before, they are 2nd or 3rd cousins, not quite sure yet. Nevertheless, the first questions about myself reminded me that the converse of the questioning that most "Americans" would ask.

"Were you born here?"

"yes"

"Oh cool. Do you speak Tagalog?"

"yes, I can. I can understand better than I speak"

If I don't say that and just answer yes, then the conversation switches to Tagalog, which I don't mind, and I speak what I can and answer as I can.

"Have you been back "home?"

Now this one is a tricky question to answer because I know what they mean, but it infuriates me that they think that my home is the "homeland"

I think this really underlines the differences that the Asian American challenges since we don't fit into either camp and both camps feel that they need to know more information about us since we seem to be total and completely foreign to them.

And yes, I have been a "Balikbayan" (person returning home) 3 times. I'm looking forward to my next trip back but will have to bone up on my Filipino english accent so that I can just speak to people as such in english and not worry about the "American" baggage and "extra charges."

Janey · 07-25-2005, 06:58 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by ShaniFaye

I consider anyone born in america, american...period

The thing I've had trouble overcoming, in my shortsouthern life, raised by your characteristic blue blood southern belles, is that there ARE some loveable yankees out there

lol to us y'all are Yankees....

and you know what? y'all are loveable!!!

astrahl · 07-25-2005, 07:07 AM

I tend to ask anybody where their ancestry is from. I love all kinds of accents and I like unusual names and it often leads to a conversation about where parents and grandparents are from. Instead of being insulted, I would take it as flattery that somebody has been interested enough in your "look" to want to find out more.
In conversation, I often dare people to guess my ancestry since I look nothing like what I am.

Gilda · 07-25-2005, 10:39 AM

Grace sometimes is asked if she speaks Japanese/Hawaiian (she speaks both fluently) and then tends to get "How do you say . . ." questions. It doesn't seem to bother her most of the time, not as much as "What are you?". Most of the time she'll just give her standard answer, (Hawaiian of Japanese and native descent), but sometimes the questiioner, especially if it's a stranger asking out of the blue, will get human, American, a paramedic, a woman, her age, "hotter than a firecracker", "an aesthete", Dr. Light (my suggestion), her height (which surprisingly, is sometimes what's being asked), "formal model Pat Stevens", or Tia Carrere (which, sadly, has been what was being asked on two occasions that I know of). She doesn't try to embarass people, but she does seem to enjoy their discomfort at wanting to ask but being unwilling to ask directly where her ancestors are from.

There does seem to be a little bit of subconscious racism going on here, as people tend to ask me where my ancestors are from a lot less often, even though it's a subject I do enjoy talking about.

Most of the time she uses it as the opportunity to dispel a misconception or two about Hawaiians.

Cynthetiq · 01-13-2006, 09:24 AM

I was just reading something and a Time Magazine article caught my eye...still have to fully digest the article and comment.

Quote:

LINK

Sunday, Jan. 08, 2006
Between Two Worlds
Born in the U.S.A. to Asian Parents, a Generation of Immigrants' Kids Forges a New Identity
By NADIA MUSTAFA, JEFF CHU

They are strangers, but they already know one another's stories. So when Mona Rahman, 24, tells the other five people at a New York City dinner table about how her superstrict parents never let her sleep over at friends' houses, there are chuckles of recognition. There are equally empathetic, if more sober, nods when Grace Chang Lucarelli, 32, speaking in a soft Texan drawl, recalls "people making fun of me" because she was one of the few Asian Americans in her town. The people around the table grew up in rural Texas, suburban New Jersey, upstate New York, small-town Virginia and the real O.C. But they are the children of parents who immigrated to the U.S. from India, the Philippines, Korea, Bangladesh and Taiwan. What they share, says Korean American Suzette Won Haas, 31, is the sense of "feeling like the hyphen in between" the Asian and the American in Asian-American.

That particular identity was made possible 40 years ago, in 1965, when President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Immigration and Nationality Act. Exclusion laws passed in the early 1900s had reduced Asian immigration to a trickle. In 1965, the year the Civil Rights Act came into effect, says New York University sociologist Guillermina Jasso, "the racist elements of immigration law were abolished." Annual per-country quotas shot from 100â€”yes, 100â€”for most Asian nations to 20,000, with preferences for close relatives of U.S. citizens and those skilled in fields with labor shortages, like medicine. The new law unleashed a wave of immigrants who came to the U.S. to further their education or get a better job. By 1980 more than 190,000 Indiansâ€”some 90% of them college educatedâ€”had arrived. About 13,000 Korean doctors, pharmacists and nurses got green cards. The Filipino population in the U.S. nearly quintupled, to 500,000; so many medical professionals emigrated that politicians in Manila warned of brain drain.

The American story is, of course, made up of successive influxes of immigrants who arrive in the U.S., struggle to find a place in its society and eventually assimilate. But the group of post-1965 Asians was different from the Jews, Irish and Italians who had landed earlier. The Asian immigrants' distinctive physiognomy may have made it more difficult for them to blend in, but at the same time, their high education and skill levels allowed them quicker entrÃ©e into the middle class. Instead of clustering tightly in urban ethnic enclaves, they spread out into suburbia, where they were often isolated. And it was there that their kids, now 20 to 40 years old, grew up, straddling two worldsâ€”the traditional domain their recently arrived parents sought to maintain at home and the fast-changing Western culture of the society outside the front door. The six people at the New York City dinner are members of that second generation andâ€”full disclosureâ€”so are we, the authors of this article.

"The post-1965 generation really is different," says David Reimers, a historian of immigration at N.Y.U. "The process of assimilation has been much faster." The inspiration for the notion of the "model minority," the generation's members have been most recognized for their high academic achievements, a reflection of their parents' drive for a certain kind of success. But that is only part of their story. Shuttling between two worldsâ€”and seeming to fit into neitherâ€”many felt as if "they had no community," says Chang-rae Lee, a Korean-American novelist who has written about this generation's journey. "They had to create themselves." In doing so, they have updated the old immigrant story and forged a new Asian-American identity, not wholly recognizable in any of their parents' native lands but, in its hybrid nature, vibrantly American.

If you were to draw a diagram of acculturation, with the mores of immigrant parents on one side and society's on the other, the classic model might show a steady drift over time, depicting a slow-burn Americanization, taking as long as two or three generations. The more recent Asian-American curve, however, looks almost like the path of a boomerang: early isolation, rapid immersion and assimilation and then a re-appreciation of ethnic roots.

As a child growing up in Pennington, N.J., Fareha Ahmed watched Bollywood videos and enthusiastically attended the annual Pakistan Independence Day Parade in New York City. By middle school, though, her parents' Pakistani culture had become uncool. "I wanted to fit in so bad," Ahmed says. For her, that meant trying to be white. She dyed her hair blond, got hazel contact lenses and complained, "I'm going to smell," when her mom served fragrant dishes like lamb biryani for dinner. But at Villanova University in Philadelphia, Ahmed found friends from all different backgrounds who welcomed diversity and helped her, she says, become "a good balance of East meets West." Now 23, she and her non-Asian roommates threw a party to mark the Islamic holiday 'Id al-Fitr in November, then threw another for Christmasâ€”which her family never celebrated. "I chose to embrace both holidays instead of segregating myself to one," she says.

Asian Americans say part of the reason it is so hard to reach an equilibrium is that they are seen as what sociologists call "forever foreigners." Their looks lead to a lifetime of questions like "No, where are you really from?" As a teenager in the affluent and overwhelmingly white Chicago suburb of Riverwoods, Ill, Vanessa DeGuia, now 26, endured incident after incident that made her aware that others regarded her as foreign, despite how her birth certificate read. One classmate told her, "You're my brown friend. You're so exotic." Another came over for dinner, took a bite of a Filipino egg roll made by Vanessa's mom, spat it out and asked if it was made of dog. "I never felt like I belonged," DeGuia says. "Though I was born in this country and English was my first language, I was always seen as a foreigner."

For kidsâ€”who by nature desperately want to belongâ€”the feeling of alienation can be so painful that they will do almost anything to make it go away, to fit in. For years, Mark Hong, 31, shunned the only other Asian kid he knew in Davenport, Iowa, and hung out with the popularâ€”and other than him, entirely whiteâ€”crowd at school: the jocks. "I repelled anything that was Asian because it represented everything that was not cool at the time. Asians did kung fu and worked at Asian restaurants," he explains. That his Korean-born dad was actually an engineer at Caterpillar had no effect on Hong's teenage mind, which was focused on one goal: "I wanted to be cool."

Racial alienation and ethnic mockery are commonplace in the immigrant-kid experience, and the stories these Asian Americans tell of their childhood are "the same kind of talk about social exclusion that you might have found among Italians and Jews in the 1930s," says Harvard sociologist Mary Waters. But previous generations of immigrants' kids, including those Italians and Jews, lived in neighborhoods with built-in social support structuresâ€”people who looked like them, ate like them, prayed like them. They had what Marissa Dagdagan, 28, a daughter of Filipino-born doctors, who grew up in Burr Ridge, Ill, says she did notâ€”"people like me that I could corroborate with."

Many children of the Asian immigrants who came over in the 1960s and 1970s say they didn't find that kind of self-affirmation until, like Fareha Ahmed, they got to college. Raymond Yang was one of only three Asians in a class of 420 at his high school in East Northport, N.Y. "I always felt like I was between worlds, especially in high school," says Yang, 28, whose parents are Chinese. That interim place felt like his and his aloneâ€”until he got to Brown University. When Yang was a freshman in 1995, there were 854 other Asian Americans enrolledâ€”a full 15% of the undergraduate student body. "It was sort of culture shock. I had never met kids like me," he says. "We all grew up feeling the tension between trying to be Asian and trying to be American. We really bonded over the idiosyncrasies of being between two cultures." During his senior year, he roomed with five other Chinese Americans, and his close friends included children of Japanese, Thai, Filipino, Indian and Korean immigrants.

The social awakening often kindles a cultural one. Once in the return part of the curve, many Asian Americans go from downplaying their differences to highlighting them. In fourth grade, Akira Heshiki, who grew up in Anchorage, Alaska, dropped out of the Japanese-language school she attended each Saturday because she didn't feel Japanese. Instead she treasured the moments when her high school classmates told her, "I always forget you're Japanese." But once at Oregon's Reed College, where more than 10% of the students were Asian American, she began to embrace her heritage. She started the Asian student union with two classmates. Its members discussed what it meant to be Asian American, organized anti-sweatshop protests and supplied books on diversity issues, which they felt were lacking from Reed's library. Heshiki even dropped the English name her parents had given herâ€”Mayâ€”in favor of her middle name, which is Japanese for bright. "I started using it because I wanted people meeting me to have toâ€”for one minuteâ€”struggle or acknowledge I was a little different," says Heshiki, 31, now a lawyer in Portland, Ore.

Grayce Liu's cultural renaissance began when she read Amy Tan's The Joy Luck Club, a novel that parses the complex relationships of Chinese mothers and daughters. Growing up in Rancho Palos Verdes, Calif., Liu dated only white boys. She hated speaking Mandarin, the language her parents used at home. She added a y to her name and changed the pronunciation to Gray-cee to distinguish herself from two other Asians at school named Grace. "I didn't want to be like other Asians," she recalls. But The Joy Luck Club turned her into a "born-again Asian." It gave her new insights into why her mom was so hard on her and why the ways she showed loveâ€”say,through foodâ€”were different from those of the families Liu saw on TV, who seemed to say "I love you" all day long. Liu even signed up for Mandarin and Chinese-history courses at the University of California at Santa Cruz. Today she is an actor and producer, and her latest project is a kids' TV show called Bakaboo. Its goal: to teach Mandarin to American-born Chinese.

Seeing their children embrace their heritage is gratifying for the parents who withstood years of youthful rebellion and implied shame. "I was very moved by Grace's efforts," says Grayce Liu's mother Sue, who still calls her daughter by her given name. "She was finally appreciative of all the things I tried to do for her." The hardship these parents and kids have in reaching that kind of understanding reflects more than just the usual generational divide. There is also a cultural crevasse larger than that faced by immigrants' kids whose families at least share a Western civilization that makes American customs a little less alien. Sam Chang's Korean parents were horrified when he got involved in student government at his high school in Phoenix, Ariz. They viewed his extracurricular activities as frivolous diversions from the main goal of his getting into a top college. "When I came home freshman year as president, they had no idea what that meant," says Chang, now 26 and a law student at the University of Arizona. It took congratulations from other parents for them to appreciate their son's coronation as homecoming king his senior year. "They just wanted me to finish school and go to Harvard," Chang says.

Jhumpa Lahiri, author of The Namesake, a novel about Indian immigrants and their U.S.-born son, has observed the struggles of Asian Americans like Chang up close. "Asian kids are not just choosing a different way of doing things," she says. "They're choosing an entirely different [cultural] vocabulary. They're dealing with oil and water." Nowhere is that incompatibility more deeply felt than in romance. Most Asian-immigrant parents encourage their children to find partners of the same ethnicity, and many of the kids see the advantages of doing so. As June Kim, a Korean-American copywriter in Philadelphia who is engaged to another Korean American, Shane Kim, sees it, "there are certain things you don't have to explainâ€”cultural nuances, how our families work, our roles within our families." Yet 40% of Asian Americans ages 25 to 34 marry people of other ethnicities, compared with 12% of African Americans in the same age group. Both Grace Chang Lucarelli and her sister married white men. Although their Taiwanese parents weren't pleased at first, Lucarelli says they understood the odds. "They took us to Texas," she says, of her upbringing in the small town of Terrell. "What did they expect?"

Nidhi Khurana, 25, has dated Indian Americans, but for the past three years, she has been seeing an African-American man. "It definitely caused a rift with my parents," she says. "They were very confused." Her father Sunil, a gastroenterologist who came to the U.S. in 1977, admits that accepting the interracial romance "was hard. We are very active in the Indian community, [and] everybody watches you. Also, you grow up in a certain culture, and you expect that to continue."

Of course, such tension is common to generations of immigrants. But Jack Tchen, director of Asian/Pacific/American Studies at N.Y.U., says these second-generation immigrants are beginning to find a middle ground and to "define a new modern form of Asian modernity, not necessarily the same as American modernity." That is what sociologists call identity building, and for the second generation, it is based not on a common ethnicity, faith or language (except English) but on shared experience.

Which is what the six around the New York City table are discovering. For nearly three hours, they tell stories about their families, their work, their heartaches, their joys. They discuss their Asian identities and American habits. And they confess how hard it has been to walk an often lonely path. Says Mohip Joarder, 27, an Indian-American computer programmer from Spring Valley, N.Y., "I've never felt like there were people I could talk freely to about this stuff."

The talk about themselves provides some insights about their parents too. Rob Ragasa, 31, a Filipino-American high school teacher raised in New Jersey, reflects on how his parents—conservative as they always seemed to him—had to be pretty daring to immigrate. "They had to come here and struggle. They had to be the first," he says, then pauses for a moment. "Maybe we are like our parents," he adds finally. "We are going to be pioneers too." And maybe they already are.

With reporting by Kristin Kloberdanz/Chicago, With reporting by Amanda Bower/San Francisco

Paq · 01-15-2006, 03:19 AM

i admit i didn't read every response in this thread, but i just wanted to agree with everyone who is sick of the hyphenated labels. Seriously, nobody ever stopped to see if i wanted to be called an "Anglo-german-irish-scottish-african-icelandic-native-asian-welsh- .........-american" (if you're wondering, my family tree has 57 confirmed different nationalities..what can i say, my ancestors slept wiht just about anything that moved...

Besides, when you look at me, you see, "White", which kicks out about half of my ancestory or "American" which includes everything that is just me.

So, screw it all, i'm american, anyone born here is probably american unless there is some weird law with which i'm not familiar, but suffice it to say, there are no true "fill in the space here-Americans", just plain old, run of the mill, "American"

the rest just really drives me insane.

05-04-2005, 12:10 PM	#45 (permalink)
Supple Cow Americow, the Beautiful Location: Washington, D.C.	This may be a stretch, but I see this as similar to global capitalism in a lot of ways. (And that could just be because I'm reading about that right now, but I guess I'll see what kind of response I get before I decide.) Holding on tightly to cultural values in a way that makes one easily offended - as in by certain words or actions rather than by intentions - is like economic protectionism. In a global capitalist economy (which is what we're in whether all countries want to come out and play or not), it inhibits growth and is generally detrimental to the nation that employs it, not to mention causing friction with other nations. A lot of people blame capitalism, but the real problem is when countries try to put controls on capitalism. A liberalized system of capitalism itself actually allows everyone to benefit, even if not in equal proportions. In the same way, when we make up terms that don't even have a specific meaning, we are protecting something that doesn't need to be protected as well as causing a lot of trouble in the process. We suffer the consequences of this in the form of inhibited growth (lack of political clout, having to experience everyday racism, etc.). If there were a metaphorical free trade of culture (a.k.a. more liberalized views of race and ethnicity) , I could imagine that everyone would benefit from the interchange and that overall racism and inequity in the political and other important arenas would be reduced. In other words, it is not a case of "everyone is racist against us Asians," it's more about "us Asians" not going out of our way to be the "us Asians" GROUP and thus creating an environment where other people who don't know any better don't have anything to react to. When you take on a victim mentality, you reinforce the system which creates situations in which you experience "oppression." __________________ "I've missed more than 9000 shots in my career. I've lost almost 300 games. Twenty-six times I've been trusted to take the game winning shot and missed. I've failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed." (Michael Jordan) Last edited by Supple Cow; 05-04-2005 at 12:15 PM.. Reason: clarity

05-04-2005, 02:13 PM	#48 (permalink)
ShaniFaye Submit to me, you know you want to Location: Lilburn, Ga	I consider anyone born in america, american...period The thing I've had trouble overcoming, in my shortsouthern life, raised by your characteristic blue blood southern belles, is that there ARE some loveable yankees out there __________________ *I want the diabetic plan that comes with rollover carbs. I dont like the unused one expiring at midnite!!*

07-25-2005, 07:07 AM	#52 (permalink)
astrahl Insane Location: You don't want to live here	I tend to ask anybody where their ancestry is from. I love all kinds of accents and I like unusual names and it often leads to a conversation about where parents and grandparents are from. Instead of being insulted, I would take it as flattery that somebody has been interested enough in your "look" to want to find out more. In conversation, I often dare people to guess my ancestry since I look nothing like what I am. __________________ Maybe it was over when she chucked me out the Rover at full speed. Maybe Maybe... ~a-Ha

07-25-2005, 10:39 AM	#53 (permalink)
Gilda 32 flavors and then some Location: Out on a wire.	Grace sometimes is asked if she speaks Japanese/Hawaiian (she speaks both fluently) and then tends to get "How do you say . . ." questions. It doesn't seem to bother her most of the time, not as much as "What are you?". Most of the time she'll just give her standard answer, (Hawaiian of Japanese and native descent), but sometimes the questiioner, especially if it's a stranger asking out of the blue, will get human, American, a paramedic, a woman, her age, "hotter than a firecracker", "an aesthete", Dr. Light (my suggestion), her height (which surprisingly, is sometimes what's being asked), "formal model Pat Stevens", or Tia Carrere (which, sadly, has been what was being asked on two occasions that I know of). She doesn't try to embarass people, but she does seem to enjoy their discomfort at wanting to ask but being unwilling to ask directly where her ancestors are from. There does seem to be a little bit of subconscious racism going on here, as people tend to ask me where my ancestors are from a lot less often, even though it's a subject I do enjoy talking about. Most of the time she uses it as the opportunity to dispel a misconception or two about Hawaiians. __________________ I'm against ending blackness. I believe that everyone has a right to be black, it's a choice, and I support that. ~Steven Colbert

01-15-2006, 03:19 AM	#55 (permalink)
Paq Junkie Location: South Carolina	i admit i didn't read every response in this thread, but i just wanted to agree with everyone who is sick of the hyphenated labels. Seriously, nobody ever stopped to see if i wanted to be called an "Anglo-german-irish-scottish-african-icelandic-native-asian-welsh- .........-american" (if you're wondering, my family tree has 57 confirmed different nationalities..what can i say, my ancestors slept wiht just about anything that moved... Besides, when you look at me, you see, "White", which kicks out about half of my ancestory or "American" which includes everything that is just me. So, screw it all, i'm american, anyone born here is probably american unless there is some weird law with which i'm not familiar, but suffice it to say, there are no true "fill in the space here-Americans", just plain old, run of the mill, "American" the rest just really drives me insane. __________________ Live. Chris

05-04-2005, 11:57 AM	#44 (permalink)
Zeraph Banned Location: The Cosmos	Racial labels are a joke with more and more mixing. Soon we'll all be one race (/sarcasm we already are) Even when someone might actually be considered that label, the people who would use it likely wouldn't know what it meant anyways. The only thing they seem to accomplish is bickering, racism, and seperatness.