And now, a point from the other side: I’ve spent the last 15-odd years pretending I’m mixed-race* to avoid irritating questions of the same type.
My parents are Indian. Dots, not feathers. I was born and raised in the UK. I have a faint British accent (nearly entirely replaced by a pretty generic American one), and no Indian accent at all. I don’t speak Hindi. I don’t know Babu.
This confuses Americans. Apparently, it confuses them enough to require a half hour conversation:
“… you’re British? You don’t look British.”
“My parents are Indian.”
“Then how are you British?”
“I was born there.”
“So you’re Indian.” :smack:
The alternative is to tell people I’m Indian, at which point I get all the questions about Babu and where in India I’m from and so on- and invariably ends with, “so you’re British.” :smack:
So, I tell people I’m half English, half Indian. This seems to satisfy the “dark-skinned British guy” disconnect.
*depending on how you categorize races.
This is one of the most insightful things you’ve ever said here.
I’m not mixed race, but my wife and I get something like this once in a while when out in public with our kids. It’s mostly just that people who are confronted with something they are not used to, sometimes they say the first thing that comes into their mind, and it is often something dumb.
I try not to be a smart-ass, because they don’t (usually) mean anything by it. But I can see how it can get wearing.
Mention some topics, and sooner or later, usually sooner, you get certain responses.
Mention you are trying to get pregnant, and someone will tell you to start wearing boxer shorts. Mention you are adopting, and someone will tell you that you will get pregnant. Mention that your kids are from Korea, and someone will ask “do you know anything about their real parents?”
Although I would be seriously tempted to fire back a zinger if I ever got anything like this -
Yes, 2square4u. Let me see if I can explain it in a way that will make sense to you and not irritate our Americans too much.
First, and this was part of the legal system until very recently, in the US pretty much anybody who’s got any black ancestry would be considered “black” (the “one drop rule”). You could have 1 single “coal-black” great-great-grandparent and still be considered black. (If you feel like watching it, I think it was in Showboat where it was an important plot key; the 1951 version has Ava Gardner playing that character)
So, Barack Obama or Halle Berry, who in other countries would be viewed as mulatto, are viewed as black in the US. They certainly have lighter skin than their fathers did, but they’re as black as their fathers were - mixed race (because their ancestry includes “something other than black”), but black. And this concept of calling someone “mixed race” is recent, a couple of decades ago it wasn’t a Census option.
Now, if Obama and Berry had children, the kids would also be black. And they would also be relatively light-skinned. What if Berry had children with Tiger Woods? He’s got 1 black grandparent IIRC - but he’s still black. But it’s possible that a combination of her genes and his would produce someone who’d be “able to pass” physically, yet still would have grown as culturally black (the possibility would exist with either gent, but would be greater with Woods as he’s got more non-black ancestry) and still have enough black blood to be considered black.
A while back, I started a thread on properly snark responses to people asking where you’re from, and had people shouting “It’s just a question! You’re in America!!! Deal with it!!!” down from the roof tops.
Yet when skin color’s concerned, what do you know. People begin to realize that “What are you?” is a jack-assish question to ask.
I guess it doesn’t bother me too much, though I never ask strangers anything about their ethnicity. Hell, I never even ask people I know about their ethnicity unless it comes up naturally…but honestly, if I let myself get bothered by it, I’d be in a furious rage all the time. People always ask me where I am from. They think I look Puerto Rican, though I don’t really agree - I think I look Indian. But perhaps because I am fairly Americanized and have no Indian accent, they think “brown person - what could she be? Ah, lots of Puerto Ricans around.”
I have been yelled at before for not speaking my “native language, Spanish”.
My SO would probably feel your pain more, since he looks Chinese but is as American as you can get. At least I was born in India so it can be said truthfully that I am “from” India but he has absolutely no affiliations with China, pretty much hates the country, doesn’t speak the language, and yet everyone assumes he is Chinese just because of the way he looks.
Not to say I don’t agree with you all. I just have gotten used to it, I guess.
The term used, Medicine Man, (pejuta wicasa) is quite a complex concept in the Lakota Sioux culture. There is no direct analog in contemporary society.
My friend would have made a pretty disappointing GP, or podiatrist, or brain surgeon. Yet Sioux elders would still have noted his wakan abilities.
You are…aware, perhaps, that America has a lot of remaining cultural baggage about race that makes “What are you?” a much different question than “Where are you from?”?
This used to happen to me fairly frequently, but now not so much. Maybe I’m becoming less ambiguous looking with age. Or maybe I wear a “don’t be stupid around me” expression on my face that I didn’t when I was younger.
I guess it also doesn’t hurt that I live in the DC-Baltimore area, though. The more diverse an area is, the more work it is to separate people into little boxes. DtC is right about why people do this. Some people feel uneasy when they don’t know how to categorize you. It’s more than mere curiousity.
And I feel the OP on how obsessed people can be about mixed people’s pedigrees. It still irks me that we know so much about Obama’s parents relative to other presidents. Yes, he wrote books about them, so that certainly accounts for some it. But the cynic in me says he wouldn’t have been elected if less light had been shown on his parents (read: his white mother and grandparents). People would have felt as if they didn’t know enough about him; he would’ve been too much a stranger. They needed those white faces in the background to make him relateable and safe. When you add in that he has a black father, suddenly he’s not only relatable and safe, but he’s exotic too!
I’ve been going through this my whole life and my feeling about it in general is bfd. It can be mildly irritating if say your running late and some random stranger decides to strike up a conversation, but in general I don’t see why it’s any more intrusive than any other random conversation starter. If one is admittedly ambiguous looking then why on earth would you be surprised when someone asks about your nationality? And why is that such an insult anyway?
The Spanish & Portuguese colonies used castas for classification of people. The system had some legal standing & eventually got quite complicated. The main results visible nowadays are rather charming pictures.
Oy. Now you know damn well every non-white person in America, regardless of race or ethnicity, has had to deal with this. I’m not mixed race (we’ll get into my heritage later), and this has come up more times than I can count. It wasn’t very common for me growing up in Los Angeles, a place where we have dark people, but when I leave, I’m some kind of a show-and-tell exhibit, and everyone needs to touch my hair. Straightening my hair doesn’t lessen the curiosity, either. “Is that your hair?” Yes. “It’s real?” They’ve clearly been watching too much Katt Williams, or something. Yes. “But it’s straight.” Lord help me…
Why? Because you think it’s a silly thing to have to answer, or because you feel the options don’t accurately describe you?
I find those boxes frustrating too. I’m black of Costa Rican parentage, and the race options always seem to tack on “not of Hispanic origin” after each race. I know Hispanic is not a race, but it feels wrong to select that box, even though I suppose it’s technically accurate. It also feels wrong to check “black” when “not of Hispanic origin” is part of the option. But I am of Hispanic origin. Bastards! Sometimes, though, they’ll have two separate questions, which ask whether or not you’re Hispanic/Latino, then a separate race question. I usually just check black: not of Hispanic origin (grrr), but will go with Hispanic depending on my mood, or occasionally “other.”
This reminds me. Sometimes my Costa Ricanness comes up.
Person: You’re Costa Rican?
Me: Yes.
Person: But I thought you were black.
Me: …
I can commiserate. While I have a very ethnic (Sicilian) last name, I am mixed. My mother’s side is native american and black, with some plantation owner thrown in. Twice in my life I have been scolded by Spanish speakers for forsaking my heritage because I didn’t learn my native language. Which is true, because my father never taught me Sicilian, and my grandmother, who passed through Ellis Island, wanted to integrate so much that most of what they spoke was English so they could learn and make a better life here. Because of that, my father only spoke broken Sicilian at best, and wasn’t comfortable trying to make his children bilingual.
I wanted to post something to the effect of “BFD,” but when something makes **MeanOldLady **respond with a serious answer, big shit’s going down.
I apologize in apostrophe to the girl my friend was dating in 1995, when I drunkenly told her whatever heritage she was, it made for a lovely skin color.
rogerbox, I’m sorry you’re ugly.
Seriously, race affects how one looks. Is it wrong to notice that? If you tell someone they’re fat, it’s not cool, but if you notice someone is tall, or has red hair, or something, is it such a big deal? It’s just neutral, and humans are curious.
I don’t have a problem with the syntax there. If you identify as “African-American”, that tells me that a (most likely significant) fraction of your ancestors came (most probably as slaves) to America from Africa and stayed/survived long enough to procreate. There’s no contradiction in terms there. However, “light-skinned black” is, if you disregard old US and SA race rules, a contradiction in terms to me.
ETA: Because I didn’t grow up in the more or less racially diverse and to some degree racially segregated US of A, “black” is a descriptive term to me, not a genetic heritage-related term
My mother - have I ever mentioned her here before? - would get a kick out of this thread. We moved to Texas when I was ten from “up North” and my mother, who has a very strong Polish accent, was constantly asked “Where are you from?” as soon as she opened her mouth. Result:
Mom: blahblah
Texan: Oh, uhh … where you from?
Mom: Connecticut.
Texan: * blink *
Occasionally, they’d then add, “Oh, is *that *how they talk up North?”
Somewhere out there are some dumbfuck grocery store cashiers who think people in Connecticut have Eastern European accents.
- would get a kick out of this thread. We moved to Texas when I was ten from “up North” and my mother, who has a very strong Polish accent, was constantly asked “Where are you from?” as soon as she opened her mouth. Result:
