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April 28, 2006   

I know I should be posting more honeymoon stuff — not that anyone is asking for it, but for my bad memory’s sake — but I realized that for a long time, I haven’t really been… expressing myself in an honest and/or passionate way on my own blog for some time.

I’m not really sure why. This thought was brought into stark contrast when I stumbled upon an old thread on TGF. I think I’ll repost it here because it’s something that I want to have a copy of, with all its roundabout wording and its unclarity. It was posted on October 19, 2003 under a topic titled America-People. It’s about my feelings on racial identity, something that’s almost always been quite important to me. The topic was about the potential for labels to add to the polarization of races.

The polarization doesn’t find its primary source in the people who identify themselves by an ethnicity, but rather in the people who jump to label and stereotype others that are seen as different. It is a misconception to believe that it is the minority groups that are the divisive force in our American society.

When we look back on American history, it is the majority group that continues to create racial strife and to point out the otherness and differences that alienate the smaller groups. History shows us that it’s not just a white against other racial groups, although the most glaringly obvious problem is that of slavery and the enduring racism, whose ill aftermath we still can see today. Even looking back as recently as the late 1800s and early 1900s (actually, depending on your neighborhood, even to this day) shows hate crimes and rampant discrimination against white ethnic groups also, such as the Irish and Italians, because they were perceived as different and threatening to the dominant culture, whose members were worried about losing jobs to each new wave of immigrants. Sure, the immigrants were concerned with preserving the “old ways” and to make sure that their children loved the parents’ homelands, but generally, when people moved to the US, it was with the hope that we can begin anew and become more than we were in the previous lands, and to truly be Americans, which is why many people changed their family names or took on more American-sounding names in order to be a part of that “melting pot”.

When I immigrated to the US, I knew I was Korean, and would always be Korean. But I also expected that I would be an American and be accepted as an American. After all, it’s an entire nation of immigrants (aside from the Native Americans, obviously). But even to this day, after living most of my life in the US and growing up with the Transformers and Rainbow Brite and knowing almost every group on the 80s countdown on VH1 from my big-haired youth, people will still ask me on the streets where I’m from or comment on how good my english pronunciation is or tell me that they have a Filipina friend, as if this were relevant to me, a stranger in the street. As far as I’m concerned, I’m a Korean American, which is an American that has a Korean background. But alas, the mass populace does not accept me as an American and still sees me as an “other”. If you (generalized “you”) have asked an Asian person living in the US where they are from, then when they tell you a city in the US, then ask them again where they are REALLY from, then it’s not that person who is the one that is making a big deal about being different versus just being an American.

Back to the melting pot, the concept of the melting pot would assume that all cultures would learn from others. It is an admirable concept, but to buy into the pot would be to buy into the concept that we have been sharing equally. That is not true. How much do I know about the Portugese culture? How much do I know about Haitian culture? How much do others know about Korean culture? Not very much at all. We all share some dominant American culture, but it’s is a culture that is very slow to absorb changes. Because of its slowness, to buy into the melting pot concept would be to force everyone to abandon any differences we bring from our respective cultures at all, including regional/city differences. Philly would not be known for the cheese steaks. New York would not be known for the pizzas, etc. The melting pot assumes the ideal end result is homogeny. But why are differences bad?

Differences are great. Differences are why I’m not just sitting at home all by myself, being only friends with myself because no one else is exactly like me. I love learning about other people’s backgrounds and cultures. I love that I have a connection, albeit a more and more tenuous one, with a nation of people on the other side of the world. It’s cool to travel to a different country and be able to speak the language and not be totally weirded out by how different they are. I love eating new foods. I love noticing consistencies across cultures that seem to be polar opposites.

Some people are tall, some people are short. Some people are dark, some are light. Some speak with familiar accents, and some speaks with entirely different accents. Some people wear glasses, and some don’t. Some people like people of the same sex, and some don’t. We are all different, and ideally, everyone would accept that, and we wouldn’t have to explain anything to anyone, put ourselves under a label.

The world we live in is hardly ideal. We can’t address problems that exist in society unless we can identify them and try to address the source of the problem. We don’t cure cancer in a person by pretending it doesn’t exist. We learn what kind of cancer we have, then we find the doctors and right treatment and try to find a way to fight it. We have a problem in the US, and labelling the groups that we are perceived as does not intensify the problem, but give us a way to use linguistic shortcuts to address a larger issue, as well as identifying a community of people who are perhaps interested in pursuing a solution to a similar problem.

Labelling myself as an Asian American, a Korean American, a woman of color, a feminist, a socialist-at-heart-liberal-in-practice, a nerd, a math geek, a dog lover, none of these labels are intended to pull myself away from the rest of society. That is the last thing I want. They are to help identify me to other people, so that they know where I stand. Purposely presenting myself with those labels tells people that I have an interest in those issues.

The ideal society that I feel that we should strive for is not one where we all hope to be alike, but where we can truly celebrate and enjoy our differences, and not be threatened by groups that are different from ourselves. Then we can not only be citizens of the USA, but of the world community.

Damn, that totally sounded like some PSA. I can’t help it; I grew up with afterschool specials, dammit. :p

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