500 words about anything

by Urvashi, May 17, 2013:

White in America

I cannot remember a single time where I have had difficulty stating where I am from. I have always been aware of the fact that I am Indian, born in Fiji, and raised in America. Most often, I can sum up my ethnic identity in two words: Fijian Indian. Since it has always been easy for me to concisely say who I am, I would get frustrated listening to white people list off fractional portions of where their family was from. “I’m one eighth German and one eighth Italian and I think, one eighth French with a little… ” Why couldn’t they just say they were white and save us all some time? Listening to their never-ending lists was a nuisance and it felt as if we were both deceiving one another; they were pretending to be anything but white and I was pretending to listen. I would start out feeling guilty whenever having such conversations with white people because they were always genuinely interested in my response to the question. When they guessed India and were blindsided by Fiji, I felt gratification because I was not who they expected me to be. However that guilty satisfaction turned right back into frustration when I suddenly became “exotic” to them. I guess being exotic requires only two cultures. Yet my problem with some white people is not that I am foreign to them but that they so desperately want to appear foreign to me. In my opinion, if you cannot speak the language, don’t eat the food, or have no knowledge of the culture, you’re not fooling anyone. Especially me. Its time to accept your whiteness and realize there is nothing wrong with being just that. Instead of listing the countries their ancestors were from and they should embrace the culture that they have created here in America. What that culture is, is unknown to me. But that’s a puzzle for them to figure out.