{"id":29308,"date":"2013-03-03T19:14:32","date_gmt":"2013-03-03T19:14:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/wordpress\/?p=29308"},"modified":"2013-03-03T19:33:10","modified_gmt":"2013-03-03T19:33:10","slug":"mmxlii-viewpoint-what-are-you","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=29308","title":{"rendered":"MMXLII Viewpoint: What Are You?"},"content":{"rendered":"

MMXLII Viewpoint: What Are You?<\/strong><\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

MMXLII: the power of diversity<\/a>
\n2013-03-01<\/p>\n

Joel Wacks<\/strong><\/p>\n

Our guest correspondent Joel Wacks is back with another intriguing article as he takes time to reflect on his personal life. As a person of mixed race there is a common question he seems to always be asked, and for one reason or another\u2026it doesn\u2019t sit too well. Hit the jump and take a look at his opinion and see what many other people of mixed race have to deal with constantly. Take a walk in their shoes so you can think about how that question may come across for some people. And if you are of mixed race, this is probably a story you can relate to.<\/em><\/p>\n

A week or two ago I spent a weekend in New York, where I happened to chat, briefly, with a girl from Maryland. Or at least a girl who went to school in Maryland- it might be that she was from somewhere else originally. There were several minutes of generic pleasantries, and then she asked me, just as pleasantly as she\u2019d asked my name and about my flight, what I was. Those were her exact words. \u201cWhat are you?\u201d<\/p>\n

It was a question I found jarring and unpleasant. Which is unfair- it wasn\u2019t unpleasantly, I\u2019m sure, and I certainly had no excuse for being jarred. It\u2019s a question I\u2019ve been asked many times, by many people, for as long as I can remember. The truth is, though, that the more times I\u2019m asked what I am, the more bothersome I find it. On the flight back to California, I had some time to think about why.<\/p>\n

As an English major, I\u2019ll start the discussion with a close reading, an analysis of the diction used in this three-word query. I\u2019ll go ahead and say right now that it could usually be phrased more sensitively. I\u2019ve heard stabs at this, actually- \u201cWhat ethnicity are you?\u201d \u201cWhat nationality are you?\u201d \u201cWhere are you from?\u201d invariably followed by the clarifying but not necessarily enlightening \u201cNo, I mean originally?\u201d For whatever reason though the most common formulation remains the simplest- \u201cWhat are you?\u201d (Of course the evidence for this is purely anecdotal, as much as I wish I had I haven\u2019t actually kept track.)<\/em><\/p>\n

It\u2019s the \u201cwhat\u201d I think, that\u2019s the sticking point.<\/strong> There\u2019s some ugly implication, not entirely accidental I suspect, that you don\u2019t fit into acceptable categories or genres, that you\u2019re something completely different, unrecognizable, freakish. It\u2019s telling that the snarky response most often suggested by my friends and family is \u201cHuman.\u201d After all, who else is asked what they are besides the racially ambiguous? It\u2019s what you ask the Terminator when his flesh scrapes away to reveal the robot beneath. It\u2019s what you ask the newest Batman villain, right before he does you in. It\u2019s what you ask Frankenstein\u2019s monster, when you notice all those stitches. \u201cWhat\u201d is for monsters.<\/strong> When you\u2019re talking to people, you usually say \u201cwho.\u201d But of course, if you ask someone \u201cWho are you?\u201d they\u2019d just tell you about themselves, and might forget to mention race at all.<\/p>\n

Which brings me to the second issue I have with \u201cWhat are you?\u201d I never know how to answer. When I was younger, I would tell people that I was half Chinese and a quarter Jewish, falling prey to the racism of marked terms and assuming that the final fraction of unadulterated WASP DNA needed no explaination. At some point I figured out that the fractions didn\u2019t add up, and switched to \u201cHalf Chinese and half white.\u201d That formula lasted for years, before I began to worry that it sounded too much like a formula. \u201cHalf and half.\u201d It made me feel like a cocktail, or a dairy product…<\/strong><\/p>\n

Read the entire article here<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

MMXLII Viewpoint: What Are You? MMXLII: the power of diversity 2013-03-01 Joel Wacks Our guest correspondent Joel Wacks is back with another intriguing article as he takes time to reflect on his personal life. As a person of mixed race there is a common question he seems to always be asked, and for one reason […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,16,125,8,20],"tags":[13830,13832,13831],"class_list":["post-29308","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-asia","category-identitydevelopment","category-media-archive","category-usa","tag-joel-wacks","tag-mmxlii","tag-mmxlii-the-power-of-diversity"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29308","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=29308"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29308\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=29308"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=29308"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=29308"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}