I was a junior in high school, sitting in American History with my friends and minding my own business. It was a pretty white-bread high school in an affluent suburb of Denver in the mid-1980’s. We were studying World War II and my teacher looked at me. “Tell us about the Asian perspective of the war,” he said.
I didn’t know what to say.
“You know, the Asian perspective,” he urged. “Your parents are Asian, right?”
My dad is second generation Filipino, born and raised in Indiana. My Mom’s family is white and came across the ocean four generations ago from Scotland, Germany and England.
“Well, what was your dad’s experience with the war?” my enlightened teacher asked.
He was born in 1944, he missed the whole thing.
“But don’t you know how the Asians felt about it?”
How on God’s green earth would I know? My dad is from Indiana, he’s never lived anywhere but mainland America, and my Mom is from Durango, Colorado. We speak English; we’re a typical American family. Just because my skin isn’t pure white doesn’t mean I have a direct line to the “Asian experience”. He didn’t live in an internment, never worked as a fry-cook and he’s a mid-level executive with an MBA. How’s that for mainstream?
And these are teachers, people who are educated in American colleges and universities? They influence young minds and mold kids into thinking, empathetic adults? Maybe I could stereotype HIM into some red-neck rural box and ask him about the experience of all immigrants who came off the boat from Ireland during the potato famine. Just because he has ancestors from that time means he knows how they were persecuted and can STILL feel their pain, right?
Wrong!!! I’m mixed race and pure American. I grew up in THIS culture, in THIS nation, just like my ignorant teacher. He looked at my skin and made assumptions about me that are unfair and biased.
I hope teachers are more enlightened than the gem that headed up my American History class twenty five years ago, but I doubt it. I’ve run across ignorant people like him all across the nation. They ask questions about the “minority experience” under the guise of learning but really, they’re just perpetuating the myth that the color of my skin determines how much cultural knowledge I have. Unless he switched schools and went to teach in a school with a hugely diverse population, I’ll bet he still asks any kid who doesn’t look pure white about the “minority experience” of whatever topic he’s pretending to teach.
Subscribe to this comment's feed
