“Guess Your Ethnicity”

PETER ONUF: Earlier we heard from a listener who wrote to us about her own experience of passing. We wanted to share the perspective of another BackStory listener, one whose American identity has been shaped by passing and immigration.

MALE SPEAKER: Hi, my name is [INAUDIBLE]. And as you can probably tell, I’m not super fond of the “guess your ethnicity” game, but I say my dad is from India. And that inevitably prompts a question, oh, OK, well, you only told me about half your family. Where is the other half from? And then I explain that my mom is white and from the Midwest, and that typically raises some eyebrows.

I wish that we were in a society where we could choose our own racial identity, or to be more accurate, where other people didn’t project categories onto us, onto people like me. I think it’s important that mixed people fully explain their experience and really discuss how it is that we came to be, because we’re not visible. If you saw me walking down the street, you could just think that’s another Indian person. That’s another brown person.

Immigrants and people of immigrant descent in the Asian community are still seen as foreigners, of not being fully American, of potentially having other loyalties. I think there’s the idea that you could just go back to your home country. You’re only one generation removed.

And I think that, as a mixed person, I choose to emphasize that I’m mixed, because that means that I am American in a way that defies that categorization. I’m not part of that group. I don’t speak Tamil. I don’t speak another Indian language. I can’t just go back to India.

There was a time when my parents were wondering if it would be easier if I had a white name. Where I myself thought life might be easier if I had a white-sounding name, despite the fact that I look sufficiently nonwhite enough that I could never credibly pass to actually be nonwhite. Certainly from a white standpoint I could pass as Indian, and that would be the end of the conversation.

I choose not to pass. Growing up as someone who is mixed it means that we can take the best of both cultures, not that necessarily that’s going to be understood by everyone. But we have that unique opportunity to be culturally bilingual, if not literally bilingual.

PETER ONUF: [INAUDIBLE] is a business consultant based in New York City who’s currently working in Brussels, Belgium.