Me, Myself and My Skin Colour (Part II)
More for International Blog Against Racism Week (although mine is really more Blogging About Race than Against Racism)!
And, if you missed it: Part 1.
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"I can't be racist!" was a smug claim I made in my AS Sociology classroom, and I just thank my lucky stars that my teacher let me know that I was wrong via tact, and not justifiable disgust. It's a claim I genuinely, firmly believed until maybe a year later, when I began to question my relationship with a particular section of society: non-Caucasians. I had recently become interested enough in anime to travel to London, the only place I could buy manga and artbooks, and old enough to want to do so on my own. One of the first times I ever travelled in the Underground, I noticed that over half of the carriage was not Caucasian. I realised that I was in the minority - then had a confusing re-realisation that actually, I wasn't. If I had to choose one moment as the catalyst to get me thinking about race, my identity and the world around me, this would be it: on the Tube with a minority of white people for the first time in my memory, I introduced myself to the idea that I had something in common with dark-skinned people that I did not share with Caucasians.
Since then, many other people have made this connection between my skin-colour and minority ethnicities when looking at me, and I'll get to those people in a minute, but first I want to point out the large number of people who look at me and see a white person like themselves, as I did for so many years. Despite my griping about people ignoring everything English about me in favour of the one thing that isn't, their colourblindness towards me isn't always a good thing. Dads of friends have been particularly bad for this, giving me a lift home and going into detail about just how much they resent "the immigrants", especially "the freeloaders" and "the ones taking all our jobs", a conversation I have had to sit through in silence on several occasions. The fact that I am the daughter of an immigrant who could not have existed without said immigration makes me uncomfortable in such conversations, but without the knowledge to counter their views with any success and often in a position where to do so would be awkward and even inappropriate.
As a clearer illustration of this, the night of the "Fucking Asian bitch!" incident, I was actually walking home from my job in telesales for a double glazing company. It was a decent enough weekend job for a couple of months, but there were things I didn't especially like, such as everyone lighting up and filling the space with smoke every time we had a five-minute break, smoke I chose to ignore for the sake of fitting in. Another poison I chose to ignore was the fact that my boss and the staff, most of them teenagers like myself, would refer to anyone with an accent as a "fucking Paki." My boss was like one of the cool kids I steered clear of at school, with short skirts, high heels and carefully styled hair. On one occasion I used the words, hated myself immediately afterwards and vowed to speak up about discrimination that made me uncomfortable from then on - but what can you do if it's your best friend's dad?
Now, away from the people who completely miss the colour/minority connection on sight of me, and back to those who do. Earlier on I mentioned the inevitable question, "Where are you from?" Even though I'm well aware of what they're asking, I answer "England" every time. This is in large part because the question itself irritates me in its lumping together of nationality and ethnicity and in its presumptions of my identity based on looks alone, overriding what they can hear in my clear English accent. However, it is also because, being the wrong question, I have to give a lengthier answer than I would like, considering the chances are that I do not want to be making conversation with this person. I am from England, and so is my father, a blond, blue-eyed Londoner with a blonde, blue-eyed family. My mother, on the other hand, was born in Calcutta, India, lived there until she was four, then moved to England with her father, who ordered her and her siblings and mother to forget everything they knew of the culture and language they had known up until then. My mother was the youngest so it was less tough on her than everyone else, but it should explain why I don't know a word of Hindi, have never worn a sari (much to my sadness), know very little of Indian cooking and identify myself as English. What about me is Indian, other than half of my skin colour and a string of relatives I rarely see?
There are two types of reactions though, when people actually clock that I'm not Caucasian and feel curious about it. Either they suspect they know exactly where I come from, or they have no idea at all. Just to make one thing clear, I have no problem at all with people wondering where I'm from and asking about it, whether I know them or not. I look different in a way that most people find hard to pin down, and I have no objections to answering questions on the subject unless the context is such that I feel trapped (e.g. in a taxi) or harassed (walking down the street on my own). I'd prefer it if people used "What's your ethnicity?" or "Where are your family from?" or even "How did you get your skin colour?" over "Where are you from?" but I don't mind the expression of curiosity at all. I've heard some great guesses about my ethnicity, ranging from Italian to Arabian to Hispanic to Japanese, but I've only been offended by it in two circumstances: once when a girl rebuked me in our sociology class for not admitting to being black, and the numerous times people have assumed I'm completely Indian.
Sometimes this offense is offensive in itself, as with the time within the last two years when a friend remarked on my resemblance to the people of a particular area of India (my mother's area, in fact) and I reacted very strongly against it. I also burst into tears later once I had thought through just how wrong it was to react in that way, but I still felt repelled by the idea of being seen as Indian. It's my very own institutionalised racism cum identity crisis. Sometimes, however, this offense has less to do with the assumption and more in the actions resulting from them. Frequently, when people suspect that they can pin down my origins, this is because they, like the friend who accurately labelled my mother's original home, are Indian, and don't suspect so much as recognise. Not just Indian, either: Indian men. I have never been approached by an Indian woman, not to ask about my race nor for any other reason. Indian men I now cross the street to avoid, and have done since I was about seventeen, at which point I figured that yes, I probably could be racist.
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Read Part 3
And, if you missed it: Part 1.
-------
"I can't be racist!" was a smug claim I made in my AS Sociology classroom, and I just thank my lucky stars that my teacher let me know that I was wrong via tact, and not justifiable disgust. It's a claim I genuinely, firmly believed until maybe a year later, when I began to question my relationship with a particular section of society: non-Caucasians. I had recently become interested enough in anime to travel to London, the only place I could buy manga and artbooks, and old enough to want to do so on my own. One of the first times I ever travelled in the Underground, I noticed that over half of the carriage was not Caucasian. I realised that I was in the minority - then had a confusing re-realisation that actually, I wasn't. If I had to choose one moment as the catalyst to get me thinking about race, my identity and the world around me, this would be it: on the Tube with a minority of white people for the first time in my memory, I introduced myself to the idea that I had something in common with dark-skinned people that I did not share with Caucasians.
Since then, many other people have made this connection between my skin-colour and minority ethnicities when looking at me, and I'll get to those people in a minute, but first I want to point out the large number of people who look at me and see a white person like themselves, as I did for so many years. Despite my griping about people ignoring everything English about me in favour of the one thing that isn't, their colourblindness towards me isn't always a good thing. Dads of friends have been particularly bad for this, giving me a lift home and going into detail about just how much they resent "the immigrants", especially "the freeloaders" and "the ones taking all our jobs", a conversation I have had to sit through in silence on several occasions. The fact that I am the daughter of an immigrant who could not have existed without said immigration makes me uncomfortable in such conversations, but without the knowledge to counter their views with any success and often in a position where to do so would be awkward and even inappropriate.
As a clearer illustration of this, the night of the "Fucking Asian bitch!" incident, I was actually walking home from my job in telesales for a double glazing company. It was a decent enough weekend job for a couple of months, but there were things I didn't especially like, such as everyone lighting up and filling the space with smoke every time we had a five-minute break, smoke I chose to ignore for the sake of fitting in. Another poison I chose to ignore was the fact that my boss and the staff, most of them teenagers like myself, would refer to anyone with an accent as a "fucking Paki." My boss was like one of the cool kids I steered clear of at school, with short skirts, high heels and carefully styled hair. On one occasion I used the words, hated myself immediately afterwards and vowed to speak up about discrimination that made me uncomfortable from then on - but what can you do if it's your best friend's dad?
Now, away from the people who completely miss the colour/minority connection on sight of me, and back to those who do. Earlier on I mentioned the inevitable question, "Where are you from?" Even though I'm well aware of what they're asking, I answer "England" every time. This is in large part because the question itself irritates me in its lumping together of nationality and ethnicity and in its presumptions of my identity based on looks alone, overriding what they can hear in my clear English accent. However, it is also because, being the wrong question, I have to give a lengthier answer than I would like, considering the chances are that I do not want to be making conversation with this person. I am from England, and so is my father, a blond, blue-eyed Londoner with a blonde, blue-eyed family. My mother, on the other hand, was born in Calcutta, India, lived there until she was four, then moved to England with her father, who ordered her and her siblings and mother to forget everything they knew of the culture and language they had known up until then. My mother was the youngest so it was less tough on her than everyone else, but it should explain why I don't know a word of Hindi, have never worn a sari (much to my sadness), know very little of Indian cooking and identify myself as English. What about me is Indian, other than half of my skin colour and a string of relatives I rarely see?
There are two types of reactions though, when people actually clock that I'm not Caucasian and feel curious about it. Either they suspect they know exactly where I come from, or they have no idea at all. Just to make one thing clear, I have no problem at all with people wondering where I'm from and asking about it, whether I know them or not. I look different in a way that most people find hard to pin down, and I have no objections to answering questions on the subject unless the context is such that I feel trapped (e.g. in a taxi) or harassed (walking down the street on my own). I'd prefer it if people used "What's your ethnicity?" or "Where are your family from?" or even "How did you get your skin colour?" over "Where are you from?" but I don't mind the expression of curiosity at all. I've heard some great guesses about my ethnicity, ranging from Italian to Arabian to Hispanic to Japanese, but I've only been offended by it in two circumstances: once when a girl rebuked me in our sociology class for not admitting to being black, and the numerous times people have assumed I'm completely Indian.
Sometimes this offense is offensive in itself, as with the time within the last two years when a friend remarked on my resemblance to the people of a particular area of India (my mother's area, in fact) and I reacted very strongly against it. I also burst into tears later once I had thought through just how wrong it was to react in that way, but I still felt repelled by the idea of being seen as Indian. It's my very own institutionalised racism cum identity crisis. Sometimes, however, this offense has less to do with the assumption and more in the actions resulting from them. Frequently, when people suspect that they can pin down my origins, this is because they, like the friend who accurately labelled my mother's original home, are Indian, and don't suspect so much as recognise. Not just Indian, either: Indian men. I have never been approached by an Indian woman, not to ask about my race nor for any other reason. Indian men I now cross the street to avoid, and have done since I was about seventeen, at which point I figured that yes, I probably could be racist.
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Read Part 3