Nowadays, we don’t call Africans ‘Black’ or Asians ‘Chinese’ anymore in the United States. The new politically-correct terms that have been put into everyone’s brains, even Blacks and Asians, are ‘African-American’ and ‘Asian-American’. If you really think about it, however, this is a form of subtle segregation, separating People of Color from Whites, who get to be ‘real’ Americans. Whether it be only to a small extent, these terms have racist implications.
African-Americans and Asian-Americans are born in the United States and are, therefore, citizens of the country. They identify as Americans, and rightly so. The main issue seems to be that people think they cannot be simply called Americans because of their ethnic backgrounds. However, people fail to recognize that the term ‘American’ is a nationality, not a race. Yet a large number of citizens in the U.S.– and even misinformed people from around the world– may see ‘White’ as the official race of the USA. Let me remind you that America is a country of immigrants. People of colour have as much right as whites to be called ‘real Americans’.
I am sure that if you are a person of colour living outside of your typical country of origin, you may be constantly bombarded with questions such as ‘But where are you really from?”. However, if someone is white, they are spared such questions. They are immediately labelled as Americans. When have you ever heard someone label another person as ‘French-American’ or ‘German-American’ or ‘Irish-German-French-in-a-nutshell-white-Americans’? Let me give you more substantial examples. The president-elect Donald Trump is of German ancestry on his father’s side and of Scottish ancestry on his mother’s side, and all four of his grandparents were born outside of America. So why don’t we call him a German-Scottish American? Or even simpler, a European-American? Why does he get the right to call himself a pure American while Obama, who is actually half-white, is always referred to as an African-American? Why not be fair and simply call them both Americans—because they are?
It is frustrating that if you are white in colour it doesn’t matter if you have just moved to America from Canada or from England. People simply assume you’re American. The irony here is that the majority of blacks have been in America for decades, even centuries, as the descendants of slaves who were forced to reside in America. Similarly, most Asians have also immigrated to America and have been there for decades to find work. Yet they are still not accepted as pure Americans even though most of them have completely adopted American culture and the American way of life and its language. A prime example of this would be of an article posted by the New York Times and written by an American of Taiwanese roots: ‘An Open Letter to the Woman Who Told My Family to Go Back to China’. Although born and raised in America, Luo, the writer, was subjected to racist insults such as ‘Go back to China’. Luo is able to encapsulate the conditioned mindset that all people of colour may feel to some degree:
‘That no matter what we do, how successful we are, what friends we make, we don’t belong. We’re foreign. We’re not American.’
What most frustrates me is that whenever self-proclaimed ‘real Americans’ tell others to go back to their countries, they are being hypocrites. If they really want to judge whether or not one is an American by their skin colour, then why don’t they ‘go back’ to Europe where they were originally from?
The message that I want to get across is that your ethnicity does not equal your nationality and your nationality does not equal your ethnicity. All too often I’ve witnessed remarks such as ‘No you’re not Australian you’re Chinese’. This was a real remark said by a white Australian teacher at my school, to a boy of Chinese ethnicity whom was born and raised in Australia, with a thicker Australian accent than he did. Thus it is clear that such problems are quite universal, rather than simply in the US. It is to my great frustration that the boy had every right and every opportunity to retaliate and tell the teacher that ‘No you’re not Australian either, you’re most probably a descendent of a criminal from England’, but in the relatively inferior position of being a student, I doubt that would have been a good idea.
To all the people of colour reading this, of course, if you strongly identify with both terms such as ‘African-American’, you can feel free to call YOURSELF whatever you feel comfortable with. Obviously these terms are not used intentionally to express racism and are seen as politically-correct terms, but if you really think about the origins of these terms and why they exist, they aren’t as innocent as they seem. From what I have seen and heard, most coloured Americans feel extremely discriminated against when you add something unfamiliar to their identities, especially if they are born and raised in the country. To the youth reading this, I am sure the majority of you, regardless of your race and identity, are more accepting and aware than any other generation in history. I want to make it clear that I am not specifically attacking white people. I am simply conveying what I observe, and, in most cases, whites see themselves and only themselves as ‘real Americans’. Please, try and understand how a typical American of Asian or African or any other ethnicity must feel. If you are to take one thing from this article, it is this: if someone says they’re American, you have no right to say they aren’t. Unless, of course, you’re Native American.
