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Re: This is for all us minority/ "colored" TAs in here...
Racism is a funny thing. Not funny as in hilarious but as in "peculiar", for the lack of a better word.
As far as "race" is concerned, I'm either white, hispanic (gotta love this one) or multi-racial - actually, I was advised to get the quota for "black" people in university as anthropologists would analyse my face rather than the colour of my skin and some white people were accepted into their criteria. So I guess that would make me black and I would be a part of a minority without even have acknowledged it. Or maybe not.
Have I ever experienced a minority status? Kinda. As some of you might know, I study Japanese literature and culture, and I know an absurd amount of Brazilians of Japanese ancestry (in fact, the first time I met an actual Japanese, I thought she was Brazilian as well, and took a while to figure out why her accent was so thick). One of my best mates, who shares the usual "Amerindo-Afro-European" ancestry most Brazilians have, would often complain that he was being called gaijin in a derogatory way (by people who seemed quite friendly to me) and that he was segregated by the aforementioned group. Then a funny thing happened when I started dating my girlfriend, who is also Brazilian but has Japanese ancestry - the so-called "Japs" of that first group would often seem to segregate themselves, having some difficulty recognising themselves as "Brazilian" (my girlfriend didn't seem to have this problem as much as they had) even though many of them were aware of the fact that they were not "Japanese" in Japan. Most likely, this is what happens when you're identified by an "ethnicity" belonging to a country different than your own. There are loads of papers written about it.
Back to topic, I wouldn't consider the facts mentioned in the first post as "racism" but rather "jokes" considering that, if he looks Chinese, people who are not familiar with the Chinese migration to the US will perceive him as Chinese. I actually laughed when I read the "Ching Chong" bit. It's not like he had been abused or anything, although it can happen as Jackson once reported that his girlfriend (whose parents come from China) was rudely treated by some old lady in the UK.
I would keep writing (in order to finish my point) but I need to do a little something here.
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Last edited by Lira on May-04-2005 at 13:06
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