I was sitting in the dorm lounge, taking in my surroundings: a hundred chattering strangers who were all my age, juniors and seniors in high school. Then I overheard a white girl next to me say, “Wow, there are a lot of Asians. It’s like Chinatown here.” My first reaction was utter disbelief. Sure, we were at a Stanford summer institute, and there were a lot of international students. And sure, maybe this girl was from an all-white part of the country, where she had never laid eyes on a real Asian. A little comment like that shouldn’t have surprised me, or made me feel so uncomfortable. But that little comment meant something much more than its face worth.
You would think that any minority living in the states would be accustomed to a bit of all-American racism. But I wasn’t in the South. I was at Stanford, one of the most prestigious colleges in the country, one that boasts intelligent and worldly students. This girl was my age, not someone from an older generation where racism was tolerated. And the greatest irony of all: I was at a humanities summer institute, and I was taking a course about racial identity in America.
When I heard that girl’s comment, I just looked away quickly. I felt a too-familiar feeling of discomfort, a lump in my throat and a loss for words. I knew what she said was racist, but I didn’t know why it was racist. Someone could even argue that it was just an innocent observation! I thought about it for way too long, longer than anyone should think about an offhand comment made by a stranger. As I went on through the three-week course, I kept the comment tucked in the back of my head. As the class progressed, I became hyper-aware of the heavy and extremely consequential social construct called race. I was encouraged to open my mind completely, consider race in all contexts and points of view, and most importantly, think for myself. I answered my own question that arose three weeks prior: exactly why was the girl’s comment racist?
America is a vastly diverse country, something that it claims to be proud of. However, a centuries-old idea still exists here: only a white person can truly be a “real” American. Everyone else is at the core an immigrant or a child of an immigrant, citizen or not. African Americans and Native Americans are sometimes stuck in a limbo, since white America is still hesitant to fully accept them but nobody dares to call them immigrants. This default white American idea is clear in every minority’s experience, from the “no, where are you really from?” to the “are you here, ya know, legally?”
That girl’s immediate connection of “Asians” to “Chinatown” exemplifies the default white American idea. And I’m not even going to go deep into the problem that she labeled all Asians as Chinese. The main issue was that she did not realize that Asian people could also just be normal Americans; she thought that Asians only belonged in a segregated and clearly labeled Asian area. I had to think hard for an analogy to explain this, since a reverse situation that adversely affects white Americans simply doesn’t exist, but here’s a hypothetical. Imagine if you, a white American, were visiting an Asian restaurant with a bunch of your white friends. You see an Asian staring at you, and hear her say, “Wow, there are a lot of white people. It’s like Kentucky here!” You would probably jump up and say, “This is America! White people are Americans and we are everywhere in America, not just Kentucky! See, reverse racism is real!”
Excluding that last part, this is what people of color have to think when they are excluded from the traditional American image. On a more serious note, when are minorities are seen as an “other” or a separate group, they are often denied the social and even legal rights promised to Americans. This could extend to the recent shootings of Philando Castile and Korryn Gaines, who were both blamed for their own deaths because they were armed. But last time I checked, the right to bear arms is the most irrationally and stubbornly defended amendment that exists. There are so many cases of white Americans facing the police while armed, and receiving an arrest at worst, not death.
So although my incident at summer camp is just a small example that didn’t harm anyone (unless you count pushing me to write an article about it), the idea of the default white American that the girl’s comment was founded on hurts Americans of color every single day. If you still don’t think that is a problem, you are part of the problem.
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