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November 1993: Labels
Prologue As any regular reader of this blog will know, right up until I was 14, I'd spent my pretty much my entire life living around homesick American ex-pats. Thus, I arrived in the Midwest with a rather romanticized vision of what life there was like, and I quickly noticed a plethora of idiosyncrasies where what I was seeing didn't quite match up with what I had been told. One of which was the prevailing attitude to race. Not having actually witness much of American life for myself, I had grown up believing that America was the world's only true multi racial society. A place where black, white, Asian, and everything in between simply mingled together and lived in perfect harmony. I was wrong. I had also grow up believing that nobody in America really thought about race because everybody was American, and that was what mattered in the end. I was wrong here too. Labels At this point I could start to write about racism. All of the bad things that I have seen Whites doing to Blacks, and Whites doing to Asian, and even Whites doing to other people who weren't the right kind of White, but I probably wouldn't be telling anybody anything that they didn't already know, and I'm certain that I would start to sound like a broken record after the first few sentence. So, I shall refrain from this and instead talk about a particularly puzzling incident that occurred soon I started high school. An incident which demonstrated to me that race and racism are far more complicated than merely what color somebody's skin or, which accent they speak with. Indeed, it can often be far more about “thinking” than actually “being”. Japanese When you get down to it, I am Japanese. There's no two ways about it. I am a Japanese citizen and I hold a full Japanese passport. Which makes me Japanese in the eyes of the law (Don't ask me about dual nationality, it's an American idea that doesn't wash quite so well with the government over here). Both of my parents were also born in Japan, although my Mother likes to pretend that this is just a dirty rumor (Again, don't even think of asking about dual nationality). I was also born and raised in Japan, meaning that I speak fluent Japanese and that I consider Japanese culture to be my culture. Which makes me Japanese in the eyes of just about everybody else on the planet who is also Japanese. Even if you were to dig down to very lowest depths of skin color racism, or to delve into those areas of genetics that Western governments like to pretend don't exist, I'm also, undeniably, Japanese. Unless, of course, you happen to come from a certain backwater town in my part of the Midwestern. In which case, I'm classified as being Hispanic. Hispanic? It's true that my family has some Spanish connections. I speak fluent Spanish and so does my Mother, and (on my Mother's strict instructions) Spanish was the language that we used to in the home . It's also true that I have some Spanish ancestry on one side of my family. However, it's not true that I am, in any way, Hispanic. My families connections to Spain are from a very long time ago. Hundreds of years ago in fact. They go back so far that all trace of them was lost for a several generations, and it was only by dint of a great deal of digging that we know about them at all. Quite some time ago, during the 1930s to be exact, , my Hawaiian born grandfather went through a phases in which he wanted different. He decided that just being Hawaiian wasn't good enough, so he went rummaging. eventually finding a handful of old letters in a box his Mother's attic in which one of our long dead ancestors wrote to another long dead ancestor about how an even older ancestor had arrive in on a boat from Spain. From that moment onward my grandfather decided to take up that lineage, and he declared himself to be Spanish (not Hispanic, just Spanish). This reportedly caused much hilarity among my great grandparents, neither of whom had known about the Spain connection until that time. It also caused much hilarity in the comity, particularly as my grandfather could barely put two sentences together in Spanish. From this beginning, my grandfather passed down the idea of being Spanish to my Mother, whom must have mentioned it to somebody in my new town, because it quickly got back to my teachers. Some of whom took it far too much to heart for my taste. Roots, and Disputes The first time that I found out that I “supposed” to think of myself as being Hispanic, and that people actually cared that I didn't, was during Social Science class, about two months after I arrived in the Midwest. In general, I considered Social Science to be dull, and to have no educational merit whatsoever (My Social Science teacher was basically a religious conservative who'd heard of the separation of Church and State, and had decided that it needed 'fixing'). As such, I normally chose not to participate in the class beyond the point of actually turning up. This, however, ceased to be an option part way through November 1993, when started to study the nature and importance of roots to in modern America. As part of this study, we were required to give a presentation on our roots and what they meant to us. Which I did. I prepared a report about my family's history in Japan, about Japanese culture, and about what being Japanese meant to me, and I presented it to the class as per instruction. When I was finished, my teacher gave me a long stare and said, "Your family used to live in Japan, that's nice, but roots doesn't mean where you lived. It mean where your family originally came from. Could you tell the class what being Hispanic means to you?" I gave the teacher a puzzled look "I'm not Hispanic”, I said, “I'm Japanese". As you might expect, this was greeted by an appreciative roar of laughter from my classmates. My teacher, however, was not quite so easily amused. She looked at me over the top of her glasses and blithely said, "No you're not, you're Hispanic". Everybody else in the class might have been laughing, but I wasn't, I almost threw my desk at her. “No” I responded stoically, “I'm Japanese. I can trace my ancestry back several hundred years”. Again, my teacher looked less than happy, but time was moving on so she called up the next student and let me get back to my seat without further argument. Flareup While the classroom incident ended with a whimper, the issue of exactly what race I was was far from resolved. As I would later find out. As soon as the bell went I headed out for recess along with the rest of my class, but I didn't make it more than 2 steps outside the building before my path was blocked by a pair of girls whom I recognized from Social Studies. The next thing I knew, both of them exploded in my face. I don't think that I need recount what they said word for word because it loosely went like this: "Where is your sense of Hispanic identity? How dare you deny who you are? You're insulting everything that your ancestors fought for." I don't get angry all that often, but, in this case, I was feeling particularly tetchy due to the remarks that the teacher had made just 15 minutes prior, and the fact that the girls had chosen such an unfortunate phrasing didn't improved my mood any (My Japanese grandfather made certain that I knew exactly what my ancestors had fought for, and exactly why it must never be allowed to happen again). So, to put it gently, I exploded right back at them. I told them. in loud voice. that I had absolutely no sense of Hispanic identity, and no Hispanic ancestors to betray, so they could get right off my case . Predictably, this didn't exactly calm things down any. Especially as they had shouted at me in Spanish, and while I had returned fire in English. Leading them to redouble their attack, and to accuse me of "pandering to English speaking culture". Which, being militantly Japanese, I had never done in my entire life. Of course, such a sudden, not to mention vocal, confrontation didn't go unnoticed. Within a matter of seconds we had attracted quite a large crowd of onlookers who, drawn by the prospect of an interesting maiming, quickly formed a semi-circle of eager anticipation. This, in turn, attracted the attention of the faculty. Whom arrived at a running pace. Having at least some semblance of rational thought left in my head, I shut my mouth the second that I heard them coming. The girls, on the other had, didn't stop even after the the teachers had arrived, and they had to be manhandled away. Kicking, and screaming about how "people like me" were the reason why nobody took Hispanic issues seriously. After the girls had been removed from the scene so that they could cool off, I was asked about the incident, and so were the classmates who were with me when it had started, and the teacher doing the asking concluded that I'd been the victim rather than the perpetrator, and so I could go on my way. Which I did. A little later, though, I was called out of class and told to see the councilor about what had happened. Now, in my school, the councilor routinely speaks to anybody who has been involved in an altercation of any kind, and I'd already been given the all clear by a more senior member of staff, so I went along expecting a standard counciloresque debriefing along the line of “did this traumatize you? Do you want to talk about it? No? Good, now go back to class I've go better things to do”. Instead, I was greeted by an extremely angry councilor who told me that the school had a “zero tolerance policy on racism”, and that I had just broken it. At first glance, this might sound quite serious, especially given what schools with zero tolerance policies usually do to students who break them. However, by this time I'd developed an understanding of how the school worked and about how the councilor thought, so I didn't panic. Instead I stood there and asked, in as calmly and reasonably I could manage, which rules I had broken, and how? When he chocked and refused to answer me, I knew that I wasn't actually in any real trouble, and that I hadn't actually done anything that I could be punished for, but that I was likely going to be shouted at anyway because I hadn't acted according to the some unwritten social script (being shouted at by the councilor, for doing things that weren't against any actual rules, was a regular occurrence for me). This was confirmed a few seconds later, when he preceded to launch into one of his standard speeches about "Why must I always be so different form everybody else?" and "Wouldn't life just be better for everybody if I just went along with things like everybody else?". Which he tended to deliver regardless of why I had been sent to see him. Outburst After about 10 minutes of being told that my life would be easier if I forgot about being Japanese, and simply went along with the idea that I was Hispanic (read: Spanish-America. Everything to do with the councilor always came back to being American, in the end), I was told that I had to apologize to the two girls for being insensitive 'to our shared race'. You can probably guess how I felt about that. Fortunately for my future relations with the school, not to mention my permanent record, I didn't even have the chance decline. The second councilor opened the door, the two girls went for me. Literally. I'm talking shouting, screaming and fingernails aimed at my throat. The full works. At that age I wasn't exactly a small person. I was pretty tall (particularly for a Japanese boy) and broad at the shoulders too. Plus most of the school already knew that I had been trained in martial arts since I was old enough to stand up. So, the girls must have been very angry indeed to go for me like that. Especially right in front of the school councilor. I'd never seen anybody that angry in my entire life, and I haven't seen anything even remotely like it since. Fortunately for me, by this age I was just about smart enough to know when not to fight back. So, rather than stepping up to the plate and slugging it out, I adjourned to the other side of the councilor's desk and tried to look suitable victim like. Al in all, it took five minutes, two teachers and the councilor, and a hall monitor, get the girls out of the councilor's office. After this there was no reasonable way that the councilor could attempt to get me to apologize. Or even risk putting myself and the girls in the same room sufficiently long enough for an apology to be made. There was also no reasonable way that he could continue to berate me for supposedly being the party in the wrong. Of course, this didn't mean that it was the end of the matter. Things were rarely that simple when dealing with my school Councilor. |
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