Experiencing Racism in High School and Beyond
In May of 2020, I resolved to dig the damn thing up because I knew it was in my house, my room, somewhere! I do a good job of archiving and organizing everything that has meaning, as if my life were a museum. And there it was, just as I remembered.
I search up definitions of the word. According to the Merriam-Webster dictionary, "elfin" returns two definitions:
- of, relating to, or produced by an elf OR resembling an elf especially in its tiny size
- having an otherworldly or magical quality or charm
Good old Merriam-Webster says it means:
- of, relating to, or befitting an imp
- a small demon
- a mischievous child
Aside from the absurd amount of emphasis on my being small and magical, I searched my mind and could not remember a time I had caused enough trouble in class to deserve the label, "demon," or "a mischievous child." If I made people laugh, why not call me "witty," or a "comedian?" Why use words that were dehumanizing and infantilizing? Though most of the descriptors on this parting gift were wonderful adjectives and associations, these ones sincerely threw me off and left me with a bad taste in my mouth.
In 2018, researchers Mukkamala & Suyemoto published a peer-reviewed, multi-method qualitative study that focuses on the experiences of Asian-American women. 96% of the women interviewed in this study said that they had experienced or encountered racism or racist stereotypes. Such stereotypes encompassed being "exoticized and objectified," possessing a "special sexuality," being "[i]nvisible," and... you guessed it, being "[c]ute and small." [1]
It's nice that peer-reviewed research backs up my experiences and lends me more credibility; however, the phenomenon I experienced is reflected in a wide variety of anecdotes from a wide variety of settings. When "Tidying Up with Marie Kondo" became a Netflix hit, people initially gravitated towards her show before a massive wave of backlash coalesced on social media sites like Twitter. People described her as having "tiny magic hands," and mocking her technique for waking up the books as "fairy finger motions." Sounds awfully familiar to the word "elfin." [2]
And in a 2019 op-ed to the New York Times,
novelist R.O. Kwon describes her experience of constantly being
described as adorable at professional events a "racism of flattening and erasure, a continuing
unwillingness to recognize Asian people as full human beings." It pops up in "even the most progressive corners of this country, [as] an acceptable
variety of racism, one that dresses up its violence in praise." [3]
Observations and stories alike about friends and famous people who happen to be Asian women helped me understand that I was not alone. At the time I received this word cloud as a "gift" from my high school teachers, I was young. The adults who wrote those things did not unpack their own racist biases and as a result, cast discomfort and shame onto an 18-year-old who remembered the incident for 7 years. I may not have had the words or life experience to put a finger on the incident and how it didn't sit well with me. Now, I do. I notice how it's a pattern. If you beg to disagree, you can try the simple exercise of typing "asian women" into Google or PornHub and being mindful of which stereotypes and patterns emerge. Or, you can wander over to Gizmodo's article about how the word "asian" is blocked by the adult content filter on iPhones, verifying how deeply ingrained Asian fetishization is in our society and the algorithms that humans in it create. [4]
The emphasis on describing actual human beings as non-human beings is,
simply put, dehumanizing. I was dehumanized by my high school teachers before I went to college.
Dehumanization is a trademark of racism. It is necessary for racism to flourish. This is because seeing other human beings as less than human justifies enslaving them, or making them side characters in certain stories, or making fun of the way their languages sound, or waging countless wars in their homelands, or trying to "save" them from being uncivilized, or trying to rebrand their culture as more palatable, or treating them like unusual sex objects, or sending them death threats when they don't act the way you expect them to, or maiming them, or killing them.
When I was a 9th grader, I logged into Facebook using a library computer. I was proud of my profile picture at the time - I took a bunch of cute selfies wearing 辫子* and a cute grey top while holding up the peace sign with my left hand. I accidentally forgot to log out. The next day, I checked my Facebook status, and was horrified to see that somebody had posted a status reading, "I eat penis for breakfast." I quickly deleted the post in an attempt to do damage control, but that incident shook me to the core. A student at this "wonderful," private, close-knit, renowned high school decided to humiliate someone like that for fun. Imagine a society in which a 14-year-old student blames herself for not being more careful, while not having the language or tools to identify that what happened to her was sexual harassment. Unfortunately, it's not that hard.
In hindsight, perhaps I shouldn't have expected much. When I began at that school, I thought maybe only students were happy to dehumanize me, but when I was about to graduate, I realized that teachers were also willing to do that too. Sometimes I wish I had taken my wait-listed ass far, far away from this place that implied I did not belong there.
But then the question became, "Where DID I belong?"
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When I first started college as a freshman, a stranger asked me out to lunch and I accepted, not knowing what else to do. I learned that he was a transfer and perhaps 10 or more years older than me. I didn't let him fetch my water for me, because I had a nagging suspicion that he might slip something into it. He proceeded to regale me with his love for kung fu movies. It didn't seem like my actual personality or interests mattered to him. He texted me later to comment on the weather. I didn't respond.
When I was a junior in college, I had worked in the lab of a PI who deemed it appropriate to tell me that his wife was Chinese when I first had a one-on-one meeting with him. In a lab meeting, he later attributed my independent project with 6 months of work behind it to a different female Asian-American undergraduate in that lab, much to the shock and dismay of the graduate-level researchers who had just been onboarded at that time. I still had no choice but to ask him for a letter of recommendation to secure a future internship, and he proceeded to tell me he took out a section about one semester's worth of experiments because he didn't believe that I had actually done them.
When I was a graduate student, COVID happened. 3,795 hate crimes against those of Asian descent were received by the Stop AAPI Hate reporting center from March 19, 2020, to February 28, 2021. [6] A recent shooting in Atlanta, Georgia, left eight people dead. The shooter targeted Asian spas and four of the victims were Asian women. As more details come about the shooter's past behavior of frequenting these massage parlors for sex, and his alleged desire of wanting to "remove a 'temptation'" by killing his victims, it is striking how deeply this mass murder confirms what the AAPI community had felt and understood was brewing underneath the surface all along: Asian bodies and other folks in the crossfire are disposable. Asian women are to be ridiculed, blamed, and killed for making White men uncomfortable. [7]
If you all see me as a stereotype, as a unique flavor of eye-candy, as interchangeable with any other female Asian student in your diversity quota, as less than human... who do I trust? Who, in an institutional setting, truly believes in my potential and my vision as a human being? How am I supposed to own my sexuality? And, how do I live?
When I feel invisible, it is not because I am invisible. When I feel unheard, it is not because I am not worth hearing. I have to remember that I am worth more than that. How easy it is to sit with the discomfort, sweat, terror, and panic of not being seen, and simply brush it off while laughing nervously. How accustomed we have become to things that are not okay, and internalize them as shame - somehow thinking that what other people do to us is our burden to carry. It is an uncomfortable existence, but I do get relative comforts, don't I? These are what Cathy Park Hong describes as "[minor] feelings" -- the feelings which "occur when American optimism is enforced upon you, which contradicts your own racialized reality, thereby creating a static of cognitive dissonance." [5]
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Lately, I have tried opening up to my parents about how my professor in nursing school couldn't get my name right, only to be met with a, "So? I can never remember White people's names either." Or, "when your dad was studying in Germany, a bunch of guys pushed [him] off a bike in the middle of a street." There is this implication that things are much better for me anyways, so I should just be grateful. And I understand it, I truly do. My parents are like me in some ways, but there is still a gulf of difference between us. I was born and raised in the United States, and they were not. I spoke fluent, unaccented, West Coast English, and they did not. I am sure that the racism that they faced is much worse and more dangerous than the racism I face: A classmate approaching me to say, "No offense, but your poetry is
actually really good." Me struggling to cover and hide my dumplings in 5th period
math class when another classmate asked if someone farted. But, the truth is that this stratification did more harm than good. It taught me that I was the problem.
I remember high school as a time where I had terrible self-esteem and Imposter Syndrome. I acknowledge that there were many individual character struggles I had at the time -- I struggled with time management and was chronically late, I was always afraid of being judged due to my history of being bullied and excluded in social settings throughout elementary and middle school, and I felt like I couldn't truly be myself or express interest in the things I loved. But then again, I was only a high schooler. When I reflect on adolescence, it's hard to tell where the impacts of some social constructs end and where others begin, as if they are converging rivers meeting a sea.
Now, I know this for sure. In any learning environment, it is vital to denounce racism and purge every aspect of it to keep students safe. In any environment - period - it is vital to denounce racism and purge every aspect of it to keep people safe, helping them thrive and live without fear of inequity (by the way... Black Lives Matter, and there are plenty more stories of how my high school failed to protect its Black students too, available at @blackatcollegeprep on Instagram).
Understanding the intersection of racism and sexism that I sit at allows me to recognize the degree by which I've been hurt by racial trauma, and the importance of choosing to love myself in spite of it. I must choose to visualize myself as I see myself, and not within the
paradigm of society that may or may not have my best interests at heart. My understanding has informed the way I set and assert the boundaries with other people in my life. It teaches me to notice when others talk over me, assume I'm quiet or timid, crack jokes about my height, give me dirty looks on the subway, assume I'm a piano accompanist but not a singer, and underpay me. It has impacted the fact that now I can envision myself as a leader - with the skills, experience, and confidence to make a difference. It is the path to healing.
I am fully worthy of being loved and seen for who I am. Acknowledging the pain allows me to begin moving past it and embracing the infinite possibilities of what I can become.
The older I get, the more I realize that my current work of addressing gender-based violence and lifting up health promotion is tied to my own lived experience. However, let us not glorify trauma as a way to resilience. Let's work towards creating a community where people will never ever have to feel this way again.
Engage with the history lessons about xenophobia, dismantle the "model minority myth," call in your family and friends, donate to grassroots organizations, and more. Not because you're performing or trying to act like a good person, but because you actually care about people like me.
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Citations:
1. Mukkamala, S., & Suyemoto, K. L. (2018).
Racialized sexism/sexualized racism: A multimethod study of
intersectional experiences of discrimination for Asian American women. Asian American Journal of Psychology, 9(1), 32–46. https://doi.org/10.1037/aap0000104, https://www.apa.org/pubs/highlights/spotlight/issue-119.
2. Zhang, M. (2019, Jan 18). "The Not-So-Subtle Racism behind the Marie Kondo Criticism." Paper Magazine. https://www.papermag.com/marie-kondo-racist-criticism-2626402092.html
3. Kwon, R.O. (2019, Mar 23). "Stop Calling Asian Women Adorable." New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/23/opinion/sunday/calling-asian-women-adorable.html
4. Song, V. (2021, Feb 4). "Your iPhone's Adult Content Filter Blocks Anything Asian." https://gizmodo.com/your-iphones-adult-content-filter-blocks-anything-asian-1846200028
* I really just don't like how the word "pigtails" is sexualized in English. Let a femme-presenting person wear their hair up in a way that lets them rest their head against the car's headrest in peace.
5. Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning
6. Stop AAPI Hate. (2021, Mar 16). "2020-2021 National Report." https://stopaapihate.org/reportsreleases/
7. Multiple Authors. "Atlanta Shootings Live Updates: Suspect had visited targeted spas before, police say." New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/live/2021/03/18/us/atlanta-shootings-massage-spa
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