The Study of Racialism

oevega · Posted: Sat 09 Jul 2005 13:11 Post subject: Are you Greek? Where are you from?

Hi,

It happens to me while living in Western Canada. I was walking down the street when a farmer approached me talking loudly in a very weird language. I though he was a mad fellow, so I warned him to stay away.

He said:

-Are you Greek?

-No sir. I am Chilean, from South America.

I very well I could have used the word MARTIAN instead of Chilean because the impact was the same. Who knows how South Americans look anyways?

He could not believe I was not Greek and explained me his ancestores were of that country. That was not the only time this thing happened to me. Europeans keep confussing me with Greek. In Western Canada there were so few Latinos nobody knew us. So I was usually confussed with Arab, Middle Easterner or Jew. I was even invited to become Muslim !

My wife also suffered those experiences. She was confussed with Native American by white Canadians, with Italian by Europeans and Ethiopians and, for her surprise, with Chinese by a Chinese woman!

Well, if something like that has happened to you, it could be interesting to know.

Here is an article I found in the site "ColorQ" that speaks about the same issue of confussed indentities.

Regards,

Omar Vega

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We are all in this together!
Mixed-race individuals often encounter mistaken identities. The stories and racial mixes featured below only represent a small slice of human diversity on this planet:

Tamil mistaken for black American
Black American resembles East African
A Chinese-Arab mutt misidentified as Vietnamese
Afro-European American looks like Arab
Chinese-Indian woman assumed to be Malay
Indian-Japanese student thought to be Bhutanese/Nepali
Some South Asians pass for Latin American
Jewish boys mistaken for Latinos
Eritrean man can pass for Asian Indian
Burmese family assumed to be Latin American
A Mizrahi Jewish man and an Indian boy bear a strong mutual resemblance
Some Chinese-European biracial individuals pass for Mexican

Story 1:
A group of African American tourists stopped a Tamil boy on the streets of Singapore, thinking he was also a black American. They asked him which state he was from. To their surprise, he replied, "I was born here".
Background: The Tamils are a South Indian group. Some South Indian males residing in the U.S. have been mistaken for African Americans.

Story 2:
An Eritrean man sees a picture of a black American of European and West African descent, and remarks "He looks like my (biological) brother."
Background: Eritreans, and other East Africans like the Ethiopians and the Swahili, have absorbed Arab immigrants from Asia since ancient times.

Story 3:
A Chinese of Arab and Persian descent is often addressed in the Vietnamese language by Vietnamese people.
Background: Many Chinese of Arab/Persian descent are almost 'full-blooded' Chinese, because their ancestors came to China in the Middle Ages. But West Asian features can still surface after skipping a few generations.

Story 4:
Someone comments on a young American of European and African descent, "He doesn't look black, he looks like an Arab".
Background: A large proportion of black Americans have European ancestors, a legacy of the slave days.

Story 5:
A Chinese and Indian mixed race young woman was assumed to be a Malay.
Background: Malays are a Southeast Asian people spanning in Malaysia and Indonesia. They are part of the Austronesian family and are related to the Filipinos and Pacific Islanders.

Story 6:
A Japanese and Indian mixed race student was thought to be Bhutanese or Nepali.
Background: Nepal and Bhutan are 2 countries between China and India.

Story 7:
A young South Asian woman growing up in the US was mistaken for a Latina so often that she eventually started learning to speak Spanish.
Background: In the US, some Asian Indian individuals are mistaken from Mestizo Latin Americans of European and Native American descent. Ethnic South Asian actress Sarita Choudhury played a Latina in a American film Gloria (1999). Other Asians like the Armenians are sometimes also misidentified as Spanish or Mestizo. An Armenian boy in the US started picking up Spanish just by the fact he had been addressed in Spanish so many times.

Story 8:
A 6 year old Russian Jewish boy growing up in America thinks the Hebrew words his father taught him are really Spanish because he is often mistaken for Latino.
Background: In the US, many dark-skinned Jews from the former Soviet republics are often mistaken for Latinos. Young, naturally tan Jewish boys are followed around stores.

Story 9:
An Eritrean man is mistaken for an Asian Indian.
Background: Eritreans, like many other East Africans, are of mixed Arab and Negro heritage. A young woman from Djibouti (in East Africa) was also misidentified as a South Asian. An Indian man also remarked how much some East African women resemble Indian women, both in traditional dress and appearance.

Story 10:
A Burmese family is assumed to be Latin American at the US INS.
Background: The people of Myanmar (Burma) have a mix of Indic and Mongoloid ancestors.

Story 11:
An Indian boy bears strong resemblance to a Jewish man of Arab descent working in the same corporation.
Background: Most Jews in Arab countries have no European ancestors (unless they come from relatively recent European immigrant communities). They are derived from Jews who migrated to Arab countries without passing through Europe. Some Jews in Arab countries came via Europe, but not the ancestors of the Jewish man in question. The color of both men is a chestnut brown.

Story 12:
The offspring of a Chinese man and an ethnic European woman were described by relatives as "Mexican-looking".
Background: Other Chinese-European offspring have also been described as Mexican-looking.

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What is the purpose of telling these 12 stories aside from the fact they are interesting personal anecdotes? This is to illustrate:

The futility of trying to decide who to reject and who to accept on the basis of race.
You might misidentify an individual from a despised group as someone of an acceptable race, or vice versa. e.g. an East Asian who looks down on Southeast Asians as "dirty and vulgar" may find out the Southeast Asian-looking individual he despises is really a Chinese-Persian mix without a drop of Southeast Asian blood.
The silliness of saying, "That is another race's problem, that's not my problem."
For individual people of color who function in a majority-European society, who they actually are has little bearing on how the 'mainstream' treats them. It is what they look like that matters. For example, In the U.S., an European Jewish boy questioned by cops who think he is Hispanic cannot escape by responding, "Actually I am Jewish. I do not belong to an ethnic group stereotyped as criminal!" Even though he officially qualifies as 'white', he cannot claim the racial profiling of minorities does not affect him.
We people of color may be biologically unrelated and come from vastly different cultures, but we are in this together. Some of us racially-unrelated individuals could even be passing for each other's siblings or cousins. Why do we even bother fighting among ourselves when all of us alike are oppressed by the Eurocentric power balance of the modern age?
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