Oceans Yet to Burn

the-grey-tribe

I guess one of the symptoms of this “identity confusion“ is that asking “Where are you from - originally? What are you?“ is sometimes considered a micro-aggression, and sometimes people identify strongly with that place, and sometimes people from the Old Country ask you “Where are you from?“ in exactly the same way, but it can’t be a micro-aggression in that case.

Is it a grave insult to order a pizza in Italian when it turns out the waiter is Greek? Is it a grave insult to order a pizza in Italian when *you* are Italian? Is it an insult to ask somebody for directions in Mandarin because that person *looks* Chinese? Does it matter if you are a Mandarin native speaker? Does it matter if you’re a Cantonese native speaker? Does it matter if this happens in the US, or in France, and you don’t speak French?

Does it matter if your family was forced to renounce their heritage in one of the World Wars or by Stalinist resettlement?

If you try hard to keep your identity and culture alive, you will have an answer ready to “Where are you from?“.

Treating “Where are you from, originally?“ as a kind of slight enforces the mainstream US categorisation into back, white, brown, Asian, Latin American, native American.

Sometimes, the question is where *in China* are you from? What place exactly? Are you from the same place *I* am from?

argumate

what is your ethnoracial heritage? wait, just spit into this test tube and I’ll send it to 23andme myself.

the-grey-tribe

For what it’s worth, Americans always want me to really specifically say where I’m from, even if they have never heard of the place, and are most satisfied with my answer if I also give the distance to the next NATO base that has marines on it.

Americans also really specifically tell me what state they are from, what the chief export of that state is, and the distance from their home town to the state capital.

My point was that these “microagressions“ are only microagressions if you ask them as a member of the wrong ethnic group. There is something there that gibes me pause. But if you assume we are all members of one nationality, without any subcultural divisions, that is a microagression as well.

Identity politics claims that ethno-cultural divisions are fundamental to our identities, at least until a white person asks about them to understand a person’s identity better, at which point the ethno-cultural divisions become a socially constructed tool of oppression and marginalisation.

argumate

I can answer this: it’s polite to ask an African person where they are from, it’s a microaggression to ask an African American person where they are from.

It’s polite to ask where in China a Chinese person is from, it’s a microaggression to ask a Chinese American person where in China they are from, or (worse) where in Asia they are from, or (even worse) where in the world they are from.

What, you can’t tell if someone is Chinese or Chinese American just by looking?

mitigatedchaos

> in which Augmented Reality Zuckerbook™ simultaneously clears up nation of origin, allowing users to instantly disambiguate whether it is polite to ask where someone is from according to their appearance and Zuckerbook™ profile, while simultaneously showing the entire life history of every user hovering above their heads, making the entire line of questioning irrelevant

See, that’s what the app is perfect for.

Where are you from