learntoquestion ltq discussions

I do agree with Winona and Priya’s assumptions about race being something inescapable, that impacts all areas of life. People of color are faced with people’s stereotypes about them on a daily basis, and those stereotypes may often be used as ammo to prevent someone from getting a job they applied for, being respected in an institution, etc. However, I’m not sure I’d say race is a “cancer.” Racism, yes, but race is heavily connected to one’s ethnic and cultural identity, which I think are two very beautiful parts of identity that should be celebrated and treated respectfully, not like a terminal illness.

I thought that Justin’s comments about how his whole life he’s been code-switching in different situations was really interesting. How at school or somewhere predominantly white he’s his “school self,” praised for being well-spoken, intelligent, clever, the perfect student, and when he goes home he’s his “home self.” Almost every person of color in this chapter mentioned how they wished they didn’t have to be the ones to educate white people on anti-racism, but that other white people would take up the responsibility. That was never something I’d thought of before, how (based on their racist bias) these white people wouldn’t be as willing to listen to what a person of color had to say on the matter than they would if it was another white person talking to them. I found that to be very poignant.

Two of the footnote things that stuck out to me were the “model minority” one and the one about Africa being a continent not a country. The “model minority” refers to Asian people, stereotyped as being smarter, or more “put-together” than other minorities. I have definitely heard this stereotype before, but I wasn’t aware of how it could be used to minimize other minorities’ struggles, it already being a messed-up stereotype in itself. For the second, I had never thought about how incorrect it is for someone to say they “went to Africa” or only referred to a specific location within the continent of Africa as “Africa,” I just found that interesting.

I like this book!!! I think sociology and human identity are some of the most interesting topics out there, and really enjoyed reading about all these different people’s experiences.

Race, as presented by Guo and Vulchi, is akin to wallpaper: it has no real bearing on the actual usability of a room, but to some people, it means everything. That is to say, race isn’t a scientific way of classifying or even just grouping people, it is a systematic way of marginalizing, discriminating, stereotyping, and classifying people based purely on the basic visual perception of those who call themselves White. This, I completely agree with. It’s a scientific matter, really, when it comes to grouping people, it is nigh on impossible to be accurate and uncomplicated, given the vast amount of genetic diversity in any population. Furthermore, modern racial ‘taxonomy’ is based on essentially the same highly questionable assumptions as social darwinism. That alone should be a red flag. Despite this, race and how modern society views it still influences many people.

That leads into Chef Tu, the individual whose story stuck out to me. He describes in his account how his complex heritage and commonly underrepresented style of Vietnamese cooking causes non-Vietnamese people to call his food or even him non-authentic, despite his actual family origins. The way he describes the difference between the boxing of people and the freedom of food though, was what really set his account apart. Food, he explains, can incorporate ingredients from all across the world, and styles and methods from multiple traditions. This allows for fusions that are never seen as valid among their original chefs, because that wouldn’t be authentic, which to Tu, is ridiculous. I think that’s very meaningful, and really challenges the obsession in America with authenticity.

On another note, the two facts which I found the most important to lift up regarded the 2015 Texas public school history curriculum and the history of Native American treaties. The history curriculum outright censors the history of racism and slavery in America, barely referencing slavery and claiming the Civil War was about state rights, while omitting the KKK and Jim Crow. This doesn’t really need much explanation; needless to say, this is horrific. It will shape the views of possibly whole generations of Texans who will be conditioned to support this wholly incorrect view of racial history. Speaking of what is often censored, one note also alludes to the 500/~500 treaties broken by ‘White’ Americans out of all of the treaties made. This is important to recognize, because it reminds us that all of our land should, legally, belong to Native peoples, which should humble us.

Finally, yes, I have enjoyed this book so far! It’s fascinating, because while the core stories are very insightful, I feel that I am learning so much more than I have in some history textbooks just from the footnotes and anecdotes.

1. I agree with Winona and Priya’s presumption. When you’re a young kid, you’re not thinking about race. Everyone is just a human being. But as people get older and we see the way of the world, race is so built into our heads and how we think that it can’t no influence everything. It impacts everyone and affects opinions and how people think. People can deny it as much as they want but it’s so engraved into our brains because of society that it always will be, even in an underlying way. It doesn’t impact every little second but it is a deep-rooted distinction in the back of our minds (like how the only way to categorize people on those files we looked at in class was by race)

2. I’m choosing Alexa and the part of her account that I want to focus on most was her talking about how being an undocumented Latina has affected her growing up, how she’s treated, and getting jobs. It’s noteworthy because I think it’s kind of a controversial way to talk about her privilege based on other POC's perspectives and other stories in this chapter. “There is anger about my skin tone because, based on that, I get treated better. It’s not okay that they made fun of me, but it makes sense and there’s a reason behind it, and I know that and I do know, even if I am undocumented, there are so many other undocumented kids that are not in the position that I’m in now.” I just thought this was a really interesting perspective on racial identity and struggle.

3. My first one is the one about how undocumented people have the same right to attend public school as anyone else and are required to until a certain age. I think this is important to know because this is really important and useful information to know for people who may need to flee their homes because of a dangerous situation or something. Also, there are racist/biased people in the country who might use the fact that a student is undocumented to treat them a certain way or give them fewer rights, but by people knowing this that can happen less and people can stick up for themselves with concrete proof.

My second one is the one about post-traumatic slave syndrome which says how generational trauma from slavery can still affect the brain chemistry of African American descendants of slaves today. I think this is an educational fact that everyone should know. It emphasizes how much African American people are still affected by the horrible oppression they’ve dealt with in all of history and how it may never leave them for generations to come because of how bad it was.

4. I like it because it’s very educational and shows different views from different groups of people.

I agree and I disagree to an extent with Winona and Priya’s assumptions about race. I am Southeast Asian, I am no stranger to racism. I agree that it pervades our very existence, and that it is the heaviest factor of our identities, and that it is the first thing people will notice about me. I understand how white supremacy and racism go hand in hand and how it is impossible to be “colorblind” or to act like these racial lines do not exist when they do. However, I don’t know how to explain it but it feels like Winona and Priya view race itself as a bad thing. Obviously, racism is a bad thing, but I don’t know how I feel about race itself. I think that humans will always find a way to categorize themselves; before racism and white supremacy there was ethnicity, before ethnicity there was language, etc. I kind of feel like Winona and Priya are pushing for “colorblindness”, and I personally have never seen a future where race as an idea is abolished as a good one. I do not like the racism I have had to endure, the violence against me and my family, the deaths and deportations. However, I do not see my race as “cancer”. I would never want to be seen as white, or analogous to white. I think that to some extent striving to eradicate the cancer that is race is to assimilate, an attempt to approximate oneself to whiteness. I think the ideal world is one where everyone is granted equal opportunity to succeed, where we can all understand and love one another, but also acknowledge our differences and respect where we come from. I do not feel self loathing in respect to my identity as Southeast Asian. I no longer scrub my skin until it bleeds praying that it would make me paler, I no longer go to bed pinning my nose so that it would be narrower, I no longer starve myself to make up for my big bones, I no longer shave in desperation to be closer to the pretty white girls on TV. I came to understand that I would never be beautiful in that way, and for a long time that destroyed me. However, I have grown up surrounded with other Southeast Asians, with latinas and black girls, and I have danced and dressed up with them. I had found sisterhood, and while none of us were Natalie Portman or Taylor Swift, while we were all berated for how we dressed and looked, we all found sisterhood in each other and we were all gorgeous. At some point I came to understand that I am not ever going to be some lithe, pale skinny blond person, and that was never a bad thing. Race is not inherently a cancer, some malignant evil. To me that was only ever one part of it.

Jennifer’s statement was something I found very interesting, as another Vietnamese person. She noted how she grew up in a very tight knit Vietnamese community, and how she grew up viewing both black and white communities as racial “others”. She also mentions how she is light skinned and how she is expected to be a model minority, and how after moving into a white neighborhood she felt she didn’t fit into the concept of a “real American”, and how in her attempts to assimilate she became “whitewashed”. I find this noteworthy because as another Vietnamese person I can both relate and also I find a lot of differences in our experiences. I grew up in Dorchester, surrounded with immigrants from both Vietnam and the Caribbean. My grandparents ran a local laundromat, my father spoke Spanish, my friends were mostly immigrants. For a large portion of my life, my schools were primarily Black and Latine, and the white people I did know were Irish. In that sense I can relate. On the other hand, she mentions her family being conservative, and how they told her to stay away from black and brown children; something she unwittingly promoted segregation by doing. My family was no stranger to dated beliefs and language, but the times they did mess up largely came from wording things wrong. My friends were mostly people of color growing up. On top of this, I was not light skinned; I was often told by my family members to lighten my skin. I was not exactly a model minority; I was told all my life to focus on college and to graduate highschool, I was told I could only wear certain things and say certain things because my mom was paranoid of being seen as the “ghetto” Asians. Due to colorism, my community is often regarded with disgust even within the Asian community as a whole. Rather than nerdy model minorities, which is terrible on its own, my people are regarded as uneducated “FOBS” (“fresh off the boat”) who hail from a “third world” country. I think that Jennifer’s account in relation to mine is important because it can highlight how different our experiences can be even within our own communities, and it also reflects how even just a difference in skin tone or neighborhood can completely change someone’s perspective on race.

One of the notes mentions how Asian Americans have a higher median household income than white Americans, but 12% of Asian Americans live at the poverty level compared to 10.4% of White Americans at the poverty level. I think more people should know about this because I feel like American society focuses more on how Asians are successful or intelligent than Asian struggles and the diversity within our community. I think this is a result of the American subconscious really asking: “What can Asians do for us?” and on the Asian side: “How can we be seen as useful, and therefore worthy of acceptance?”; this line of thinking is inherently exploitative, and I feel like that reflects how the West views the East as a whole.

Another note mentions how the model minority myth was supplanted by White Americans and serves not only to exploit Asian Americans but also to minimize Black Americans’ struggles. I think this should be more well known because there is a lot of discord between our communities, with rampant antiblackness within the Asian community and xenophobia within the Black community. I think that being systematically pinned against one another is something by design; if we are too busy fighting each other we are too busy to unite. I think that in order to make a stand against white supremacy, communities of color are better off finding solidarity rather than infighting. If this fact were more well known, if other Asian people knew that the things that affect them also have an impact on other people, I believe that it would cultivate more empathy towards the black community. I think if many of the older generations, or even some of the young ones, truly understood how race informs their existence and how antiblackness and white supremacy are the root of it all, it would generate understanding.

So far, I really like this book. I like where it is going, I like how it has been so far. I can tell that there was extensive research done by the authors, with them even mentioning the Hmong community (Something I’ve never seen anyone else do!) and how they interviewed people across all different backgrounds.