The Po Show

American=White

I have the tendency to believe that the only people who read my blog are my same five friends who always read my blog (hi Same Five Friends! Thank you for continuing to read, and your comments mean more to me than I can say! :)). So it always comes as a great surprise when someone else leaves me a comment (my NIECE left me a comment the other day, which was a real surprise!). I assume that my friends know me and know where I'm coming from, so I don't have to explain certain things in my posts, like my post yesterday, but now I'd like to explain where I'm coming from, for anybody out there in the blogsphere who doesn't know me personally (hi Sonetto and anyone else who has been kind enough to read here! I sincerely appreciate you taking the time to read my ramblings and ravings! :)).

I am an American of Japanese descent. I am a first generation American on my father's side, and a second generation American on my mother's side (slightly complicated by the fact that my mother was kibei, meaning she was born in America but her family moved back to Japan). I used to joke that I am ni-hansei, meaning two and a half generation.

I am married to a man of Dutch descent. He's a purebred, with both sides of his family directly originating in the Netherlands (or Holland, depending on who you talk to). I don't say that I'm married to a Dutch man, though, because that makes people think he's an immigrant himself. So I say that I'm married to a white guy. I don't say Caucasian, because I firmly believe that that refers only to people from Caucasus, so unless you're Armenian or Georgian (from the Republic of Georgia, not the place in the US where Atlanta is) or Azerbaijani or Southern Russian, you're not Caucasian. I also don't use Anglo, because that means English.

And what my post yesterday was all about was the equation above, in the subject title to this post. For many, many people, American means white (or black, sometimes). I've been living with this conception my whole life.

In 1974, my sister married a white guy. It was less common in those days than it is now, and thus notable to many. I would have elementary school friends come over and see my sister's family picture on the piano and they would remark, "Oh, your sister married an American." This struck me as somehow incorrect, but I would just say yes.

In high school, I dated white guys. And people were constantly remarking to me how I seemed to only like "Americans" and why didn't I ever date Japanese guys? Um, because the guys I liked happened to be white guys.

Ross and I were married in 1988 (yes folks, it's a month and a half away from our 20th anniversary!). We moved to Japan after college to teach English. And I truly got to see this equation from a cross-cultural perspective. The Japanese Japanese could NOT accept the concept of Japanese American. American meant white, and a face like mine, that looked like theirs, just did not compute in conjunction with the label "American." It extended further too, as I found when I met the German teacher at my new school. When I told him I was American, he said, "Funny, you don't look like you come from the States."

Ross and I went to grad school at the University of Hawaii from 1991-93. He majored in Asian Studies and I majored in American Studies. When people would hear that, they would titter and say, "Oh, how funny! You're studying each other!" Yes, that would have been hiLARious, if I'd been Asian, rather than American.

All my life, I've been told how well I speak English, I've been asked where I come from (I say, "L.A." and the questioner gets that half-embarrassed, half-annoyed look of "You KNOW what I MEANT!" and says, "No, where are you REALLY from?"), I've been asked if I'm Chinese (this happens ALL the time, and I still don't quite get it).

And it extends to the next generation. Matthew gets called "Chinese" by kids all the time at school, which makes him crazy. He tells them he's not, but they fling it at him like an epithet, which is not only weird, but sad. Why should calling someone Chinese be like an insult?

I'll tell you what's behind it, though. What this all boils down to, and what American=white truly means, is hearing a constant message of "You are foreign. Different. Not one of us." It is stripping away identity. No one EVER asks a white person in America, "Are you English?" Certainly people of European descent in America identify with their heritage, and certainly in years past Irish Americans or Italian Americans or other groups encountered significant discrimination from "real Americans," but assimilation and acceptance occurred for European Americans in a way that it just has not happened, more than a century of immigration later, for Asians and Hispanics. I'm not talking about recent immigrants who speak accented English. If he had been blindfolded, would have Stan the Man have been able to tell which customer was "American" and which was not?

So for those who complain about the PC police and who wish that all of us hypenated Americans would just get over it, please recognize that we HAVE TO keep emphasizing the American in our designation, because it is far, far from assumed.