Metaphors for Palatable Discussions on Racism
Multicultural stew (ˌməltēˈkəlCH(ə)rəl * st(y)o͞o) – noun: a mixture of diverse cultural backgrounds that create a common identity while still retaining some distinction of their original cultural identity.
She did not say that I was not welcome here. She never said that I do not belong. In fact, she did not even dare to accuse me of not being American. Just that I was not American enough—that my citizenship papers served merely as a qualifying statement of my production history:
Parts imported from some Asian country (1). Assembled in the United States.
Nolan tells me this after learning that I come from Filipino ancestry, born in Saipan—an island of U.S. territory in the middle of the Pacific Ocean.
“Well … yeah, but you’re from an island,” she says, kicking her shoes off as she enters the apartment of my friend, who also happens to be her roommate. Her skin is a lobster-cooked pink from being outdoors. Most days, the sun is tucked away from the northeastern side of Big Island, Hawai'i. Except today. Today, the sun was at its peak and we were stewing underneath.
Nolan did not come from an island. No, she grew up in her white picket-fenced home somewhere in Fairfax County, building rockets out of Lego blocks and playing head baker with an Easy Bake Oven. She collected porous rocks and looked at the night sky through a telescope in her family’s backyard. And that was enough. For her, that was enough.
But I grew up in bloodied land, picking sticky birds from the hem of my shorts, running from geckos, and singing along to the star-spangled banner playing each morning at the kindergarten school 15 minutes away from the only McDonald’s in Saipan. I grew up with plumeria-scented sunrises, saw images of Betsy Ross before I even knew what my mother’s mother looked like, and learned about the settlement of Jamestown in the Americas.
Still she insists, voice flat, “So that’s not really American America.”
[ 1. It does not matter which Asian country. See Melting Pot for additional information. ]
I do not correct her. I do not ask her what she believes an American is, or what an American America looks like. Instead, I recite, as though it were some pledge of allegiance, that Saipan was captured by America in July 1944 and turned into a U.S. military base in 1953 (2).
She shrugs, pattering off into the kitchen. I hear the faucet water start and the cracking open of a can’s pop tab (3).
[ 2. On November 4, 1986, U.S. Citizenship was acquisitioned by the people of Saipan under the CNMI Covenant.
3. This means nothing to her. ]
…..
Salad bowl (ˈsaləd * bōl) – noun: a mixture of different people with different backgrounds living together harmoniously without having to concede their distinct cultural identity.
“You’re just trying to make us feel bad about ourselves,” a student accused.
Outside, the traffic of downtown Toronto was slowly decongesting from the slush-covered streets. Inside, the classroom air remained uncomfortably stuffy.
The professor, a retired immigration lawyer who was teaching a course on Policies and Advocacy in Social Work, assures the student that guilt is not the intended outcome of the exercise—self-reflection is.
The exercise in question was a single sheet of paper, printed on both sides, which the professor had given to us this morning. It was a questionnaire checklist.
A checklist on privilege, that is.
“Still, the question is so specific, it’s practically baiting us,” the student, a brown-haired boy in his mid-twenties, insisted.
The question he was referring to had been:
Have you ever had a complete stranger act surprised and tell you that you “speak English well”?
“I mean, how is that a privilege?” He continued, teeth sharp as he crunched at the bones of the word ‘privilege’ until it was merely a bloodless bolus of letters. “I get people all the time who tell me how surprised they are that I’m ‘so well-spoken’.”
He looked around the room, eyes poking around the tossed salad bowl of our classroom for support. A few shoulders shrugged and a small number of heads gave uncertain half-nods, but all twenty-six pairs of eyes avoided him.
The silence was tasteless, tired and flat, unappetizing for someone with the mouth of a shark. Still, it persisted. Even after we graduated, together, in the late spring of 2017 (4).
[ 4. At this, I wondered to myself why I had never been told that I was “well-spoken” instead of being marveled at for “speaking English well.” ]
…..
Melting pot (ˌmeltiNG * pät) – noun: a place where various people of different cultures are blended together to assimilate under one common identity.
During the early 1900s, Truman Hunt featured one of his most popular displays of the St. Louis World Fair human zoo exhibit in Coney Island—the Bontoc Igorrotes tribe of the Philippines.
Following the annexation of the Philippines by the United States, the importation of Filipinos to America became common practice. Among the cargo of human exhibits during the period of such practices was a baby girl, about two years old. Her hair is straight and dark, much like mine, reaching just below her neck and framing a moon-shaped face.
I do not know her name.
But in one instance, she sits in a wooden enclosure with an absent look in her eyes, a hand loosely holding on to the tassel-tailed end of a rope.
Around her, the fair-skinned men look on expectantly at the bizarre spectacle.
—a jostling laugh is thrown into the air.
It was a boy. He was fully dressed in a long-sleeved shirt, cargo pants, and New Balance shoes. He wore an olive sun hat. Alongside him were three other people—an older man and two, both of whom wore pallid smiles as they tried to navigate the rugged riverside towards the edge of Onomea falls. The boy tossed another belly laugh as one of the women slipped on an algae-dressed rock, soaking her feet in the process.
Beside me, my friend’s roommate, Nolan, lazily pushes her toe against my yellow floaty before challenging me, “Bet he’s from California.”
The heels of my feet bounced from the movement and dipped into the thinning body of the Onomea rivers. We were resting in floaties near the fall’s edge during another humid day when the waters were lower than usual, revealing its geological bones. Still, the water was cool and kind against my blistered feet after having hiked down a steep, ‘secret’ trail of rocks and roots that my friend had taken Nolan and I through.
I ask her what she means.
“The one in the sun hat. He’s probably from California … maybe Seattle? They’ve got a lot of Asians there too.”
The clouds casted a sheer net across the sky right above us, and the flies huddled closer to me for comfort.
“How can you tell? Is there a particular way they dress or walk in those places?” I turn slightly in my floaty to face her. She is taking a panoramic shot of our surroundings on an old iPhone encased in a waterproof pouch tied around her neck.
“Well … it’s not so much in the way that they dress. But America’s a very diverse place—there are all sorts of people.”
It isn’t funny, but I want to laugh. I want to laugh at her and roll my eyes because I’ve heard this line before (5). But she is young, white, educated, and the roommate of my friend (6). So instead, I tell her that I didn’t say America wasn’t diverse: “I just wasn’t sure how you could be so sure about where someone’s from—we don’t know them like that.”
Nolan shrugs her left shoulder, shaking her head in the slightest. “Of course, but America’s a melting pot! There are lots of people that look like you—I even have friends that look like you.”
It isn’t funny, but I want to laugh. I want to laugh and roll my eyes because I should have seen that one coming. But she is young, white, educated, and the roommate of my friend (7)—I didn’t want to be the one to stir the pot.
So instead, I nodded and smiled, letting the remnants of our conversation sink to the very bottom of this melting pot’s floors, where the bones of the people who looked like me continue to simmer to a broth.
Around me, Nolan had gone back to taking panoramic pictures while my friend had fallen asleep in her floatie, and the boy in the sun hat and his three friends were already gone.
Maybe he was from California. Or Seattle. I didn’t think it really mattered—the diversity of a land’s population did not guarantee that people were seen, heard, treated, and accounted for as beings of equal value, including the people that look like me.
[ 5. Just about every place boasts its diversity, though they are seldom able to confront the atrocities that its diverse communities have been subjected to.
6. My friend who happens to be Korean.
7. I wonder if she looks like me, too? ]
