{"id":1380,"date":"2008-04-10T00:25:00","date_gmt":"2008-04-10T05:25:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.terrorware.com\/geoff\/2008\/04\/10\/race-in-america-ii\/"},"modified":"2008-04-10T00:25:00","modified_gmt":"2008-04-10T05:25:00","slug":"race-in-america-ii","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.terrorware.com\/geoff\/2008\/04\/10\/race-in-america-ii\/","title":{"rendered":"Race in America II"},"content":{"rendered":"

Chris Colvard<\/a> forwarded me this great opinion piece on multiracial identity<\/a> in a recent edition of the Herald Times.\u00c2\u00a0 It was written by an 8th-Grade student in Bloomington:<\/p>\n

I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m half Korean, half white, but my mother was born and raised in China. Her mother came to a small, Korean-dominated Chinese town during the bombings of the Korean War. Whenever people ask about my heritage, I have to explain all this, and sometimes I can tell from their faces that even today, though they nod politely, they can\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t really tell the difference; through unfortunate ignorance, to them all Asians are one big, squinty-eyed community.<\/p>\n

While browsing various Web sites in search of the half-Asian identity that I couldn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t define, I stumbled upon a white nationalist forum \u00e2\u20ac\u201d the usual bunch of faceless online bigots who quote Hitler and predict a \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Saxon uprising.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d They said that multiracials, and half-Asians especially, lack a \u00e2\u20ac\u0153national identity\u00e2\u20ac\u009d and should go find their own country.<\/p>\n

This racist ranting was easily dismissible, laughable even, but it made me wonder: What identity are we supposed to have, we mixed-breeds? Do whites see the world through the lenses of their whiteness? What is the elusive \u00e2\u20ac\u0153minority standpoint?\u00e2\u20ac\u009d Race never seemed all that important to me. At most, it was a useful tool to get in with certain crowds. Sometimes it was a comedic device: Look at the half-Asian who can\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t hold a pair of chopsticks, whose only Chinese vocabulary is \u00e2\u20ac\u0153hao chir\u00e2\u20ac\u009d (tastes good). But of course, I look white, and this is a diverse town \u00e2\u20ac\u201d the few slurs are uttered just out of earshot of the group they concern.<\/p>\n

In fact, I look so white that whites have occasionally entertained me with their private bigotry. When I hear people talk about \u00e2\u20ac\u0153annoying Asians,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d when I hear their disgusting imitations of a Chinese accent, when I see Mickey Rooney do his Jap act in \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Breakfast at Tiffany\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d I don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t have to show my anger. I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m not obligated to take a risk and stand up for myself, for my heritage. Because to them, I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m just another white kid.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Chris Colvard forwarded me this great opinion piece on multiracial identity in a recent edition of the Herald Times.\u00c2\u00a0 It was written by an 8th-Grade student in Bloomington: I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m half Korean, half white, but my mother was born and raised in China. Her mother came to a small, Korean-dominated Chinese town during the bombings of… Continue reading Race in America II<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1380","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","entry"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4wnIz-mg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.terrorware.com\/geoff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1380","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.terrorware.com\/geoff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.terrorware.com\/geoff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.terrorware.com\/geoff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.terrorware.com\/geoff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1380"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.terrorware.com\/geoff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1380\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.terrorware.com\/geoff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1380"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.terrorware.com\/geoff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1380"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.terrorware.com\/geoff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1380"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}