“Where are you from” is a question you most often hear indeed in response to a person of color. However for the first time I’ll have to disagree with an article on Medium.
I’m from Finland, the origin of my people caused the American justice system some confusion as “white people” had always been “caucasian”, whereas Finns who have a melanin level so low it makes most “white” people blush have zero roots shared with the Indo-Europeans.
Why not call me Uralic instead of “white”? Or Finno-Ugric? Because “white” rolls off the tongue so much easier and assimilation of multitudes of cultures necessitates easy words like “black” or “white”.
People will use religion, worldview, skin color, language and politics to justify hate. People are irrational things. There’s two chief ways to fight this:
- Use the words they use and make those words irrellevent
- Silence the words
Silencing discussion has never helped anyone. For 400 years my ancestors were disallowed the use of Finn in government matters under Swedish rule. The language survived just fine.
Calling everyone who looks a lighter tone “white”, is no lesser a form of racism and cultural re-appropriation than calling every person of darker tone “black”.
An adopted Chinese/Korean child in a Japanese family going to Japanese schools faces such hard racism in Japan as well as in America as to take the “this thing needs to be talked about” metric right off the charts.
Every human that I’ve met and gotten to know deeper than an acquaintance has one uniting detail about them that I also share: We’re formed most by the way in which we face adversity. Having to form a clear concise picture about what makes you different is something you carry all your life.
As a parent you might wish that your kids don’t have to make “race” one of these dividing issues, you’d rather they were judged on merit and thought instead of the color of their skin, but that goes both ways.
If we want to solve racism, and make people stop asking questions like “Where are you from?”/”Where is your child from?” you can go the yankee-doodle way and embrace the difference, or you can take a hitherto unknown path and somehow solve the problem by shaming people for “stupid questions”.
The final point I have about this is more about geography + skin color = origin of person. This more or less holds water, before the airplane and the steam boat the amount of kids being adopted by non-culturally-related parents was pretty tiny. This is a new thing, the fact people are “surprised” or “shocked” is completely natural.
They are homo sapiens seeing something for the first time in the world’s history — kids, not families, travelling thousands of miles and landing in families who are not their biological relatives, in such numbers as have never been recorded before.