The Pains of Prejudice & The Road to Racial Recovery

Today, I was struck by NPR’s Michele Norris’ newest Race Card Project subject, Elysha O’Brien, a Mexican-American married to an Italian-American.

O’Brien was not taught Spanish. Her parents wanted to spare her the pain of prejudice. Not learning Spanish at home silenced her Mexican voice, but her appearance would often betray her. In the interview, she says that when she was teased in her teens by other Mexican children she says:

“It was my parents’ language; it wasn’t my language. When you’re kind of rebellious and you’re trying to find your identity, I used to say, ‘Well, I’m not Mexican, my parents are.’” 

Like many of us who are trying to assimilate to our American Imposed identity, O’Brien is struggling with the pain of rejecting her Genetic racial identity. She says very effectively in response to her teen reaction, “I think it sounds very flip. It sounds very much like I’m trying to make amends for a really deep wound — just trying to put a Band-Aid on something instead of digging out the infection that’s there.”

As a mother, she, like me, is struggling with the best way to guide her children and help them celebrate this part of themselves that has been suppressed in her. Her conversation with her children when they are presented with the ethnicity box, a box that creates confusion and frustration, is mirrored in our family. She recounts the scene:

“And there was a box for ‘white,’ there was a box for ‘black,’ a box for ‘Asian’ and a box for ‘Hispanic.’  

And my son says, ‘Well, where’s the Italian box?’ And I said, ‘Well, that’s just if you’re white.’ And he goes, ‘And what about Irish?’ I said, ‘Well, that’s white, too.’  

‘But Hispanic’s there and Italian isn’t?’ my son asked. And ... I couldn’t really answer him. But it’s interesting that when you look at the Hispanics ... Mexicans are very different from Cubans, and Cubans are very different from Puerto Ricans, and Puerto Ricans are very different from Peruvians. But yet we are all lumped together as Hispanic, and we are all assumed to ... speak the same language.  

My children have the O’Brien last name, and they’re all fair-skinned, and they appear white. I always make sure I check off that ‘Hispanic’ box. Because I know that as a white male, they’re not going to be given certain privileges as if they were a Mexican male, which perhaps is slightly racist on my own part, but I want them to be able to have access to things.”

I understand this dilemma. I often felt so confused by the ethnicity questions and the boxes.  As you have read, a college researcher changed my ethnicity when she read my name and saw that I had “checked the wrong box” for Asian.

O’Brien is determined to make sure her sons learn her native language, despite the fact that she doesn’t know it. I also want my children to learn my Cognitive identity native language, Spanish. 

While my son is learning Spanish, he does not feel the same connection to the language that O’Brien’s sons will. But I will keep steering him down my road to racial recovery.

Race Matters

“No one will date you because you’re mixed race.”

My heart sank this past week when my son told me someone had said this to him, but I hid my hurt.

I said, “Did you tell him, ‘That’s okay, because I won’t date racist people’?”

“No!  I never thought of that,” he replied excitedly, “That’s good.”

I explained I had many years of experience thinking of comebacks. Yet, this wasn’t the first time my son had experienced prejudice. At eight, he had his first bout with it as I described in this post. At the time, he didn’t seemed phased, but he admitted this week that he had held onto that memory as well.

As we talked further, he felt better. He realized that he was not alone, that his mother had grown up with the same, and that as author Eric Hoffer once said, “Rudeness is the weak man’s imitation of strength.”

I’ve spoken about some personal incidents of racism in this blog, but recently, I’ve been able to pinpoint some things for myself.

From the 1970s to the 1990s, my life was about assimilation. I wanted to be white. I wanted to blend in to the Appalachian human fabric and disappear. During those years in the South, those around me often reminded me that I was different, strange, or simply “not normal.”

My mother tried to console me when these things happened, but after time, I realized that she truly did not know how I felt. My father, on the other hand, did to some degree.  As a Puerto Rican whose English was heavily accented, he had endured his share of racism. We spoke some but rarely about it.

I have spent my life longing to “fit in” racially. In Virginia, I found my two closest friends, Katherine and Adrienne, strong Asian women. I have blogged on how they taught me a great deal about Asian culture, another crucial step in my development.

What they lacked was the experience of being raised in a family where one feels racially out of place. Enter my next step in development … meeting two adult contemporary Korean adoptees.

We are just learning more about one another. In the coming days, I hope to share with you the continuing maturation of the person I haven’t fully known … myself.

Inspirational Children

Tonight, my son shared a video with me. His struggles with being happy in his own skin and his need to be accepted has been worrying me. He’s entering the age where one questions oneself and often takes on the attitudes of those around him.

As a parent, I know he must make the journey, but having gone down the same road, I know the conflicts he will face. He has faced some in the past … being called “Chinese” (not that China is bad, but it is often said in a very derogatory way). I explain that such references only means that the speaker is uneducated about the different Asian races.  While I say this as neutrally as possible to him, I cannot deny that it puts a pit in my stomach as it did when the same was said to me as a young girl.

I was called “Chinese” as well as “Cambodian Refugee,” and children would pull their eyes into slants to mock me.  In gym, I was paired with the only other Asian child, a boy, during square dances. While I struggled to just fit in, I was always reminded that I was different. I was not white, nor did I have a plain Jane name.  I wanted to blend into the background; I wanted to be white or black, for those were the two races in my hometown. I wanted desperately to fit in.

Before our decision to become parents, my husband and I talked about my childhood and what we could do to save our children from the heartaches I had felt in rural Tennessee.  We decided that we would always live in a racially diverse community. We chose the Wisconsin home we did because of the racial make-up of its public schools.

As my boy entered middle school this fall, we felt we had done all we could to make sure he would blend in. But in reality, we have learned that no matter what we do, there will be children who want to belittle others. No matter what we, as parents, have done, we cannot protect them fully from the growing pains of bullying and belittling.

What we have done is made sure that he knows that he is well-loved and that he is beautiful just the way he is. Tonight, I realized as I watched this video with him that he not only knows he’s special in his own way, but that he sees that he is not alone. He understands the lyrics of this Lady Gaga song, and he felt a kinship with this little girl.

This is just the kind of performance I needed to see … shared by my boy.

The Latino side

I don’t often write about my Latino side. Usually, I forget about it unless someone whom I have never met in the flesh reminds me with a casual “Hola” or “Hasta Luego”.

Last night on the eve of 2009, I was reminded of the prejudice against the Latino community.

Our town of Charlottesville has a First Night celebration every year. Various groups perform, and my son performed with his Taekwon-Do group. As a perk, the group was offered entry buttons for the participants. However, in a misunderstanding, the buttons were not delivered to the school before the event.

After the performance, our family accompanied my son’s instructor, the leader of the group, over to the registration area for First Night. The Taekwon-Do instructor is a young, Latino man. The executive director of the event informed the instructor that if he hadn’t gotten the buttons beforehand then they had none for him now. While that my have been true to some degree, she was unusually curt. I sensed that she felt that the instructor was trying to pull something. She kept giving him excuses and saying she was not authorized to give him buttons.

At this stage, I stepped forward and told her that our family had already bought buttons for the rest of us, but not for the two who had been promised buttons. She then said she would see what she could do. In the meantime, a more friendly volunteer coordinator walked over and tried to help as well.

The executive director did return with 25 buttons for our group. But I do wonder what motivated her at first to resist helping our young, Latino instructor. Was it doubt? Was it skepticism? Was it prejudice? While I will never know for sure, I did sense some of the indescribable feelings that I’ve had in my own small Tennessee hometown. Feelings my father expressed when he visited the very caucasian Colorado.

It’s a feeling of being outside of a group. A feeling of not belonging. A feeling of being excluded.