Melehan's Post
I believe that a future where differences are embraced and celebrated is realistically the only type of future where a lot of the problems society generally has with non-homogeneity will be resolved.
I run into the effects of so-called "color-blindness" all. The. Time. And I hate it sosososososososososo much because I'm very much mixed, and yet people regularly reduce my heritage down to a single label that they decided applied to me. And then they argue about how the label applies to me when I tell them it doesn't. I have to convince them that I know my own heritage better than they do.
It's ridiculous and exhausting, and I run into it everywhere, including in Asian communities, though in my experience, it's not as bad as in white or black communities. (I do have to be careful which aspect of my heritage I play up or down depending on the type of Asians I'm interacting with though because you don't want to be Japanese around Chinese or Koreans, or any other type of Asian around Japanese. And then for all the other types of Asian, I typically play up the very American mixed-European (non-British and non-Chinese) side of my heritage because I don't look like those other types of Asian.)
Meanwhile, white and black people regularly ask me "so what do they do in your country?" or "where are you from?" and I'm like, "... *sigh* What do you mean?" because they're usually asking "what do they do in China?" or "where in China are you from?" which drives me up walls because of all the types of Asian out there, Chinese is the one type I'm not mixed with. They never accept the simplest and truest answers of "I'm American" or "I'm from Pennsylvania". It's always, "okay, but like, what about your parents???"
At that point, I usually begin the long, sordid tale of how my my parents met in NYC after my father was discharged from the Navy after his fiancee cheated on him back in Montana, which was where he grew up even though most of his family actually lived in Oregon on the family farm that was settled after the trip along the Oregon Trail, of which some family members remained in various states along the way, with about half the family remaining on the old plantation back in Virginia, which went under after the slaves were freed, although even that beat being killed for being the wrong type of Christian nobility back in Alsace-Lorraine--oh yeah by the way I'm American enough to be related to George Washington, first President of the United States.
Like, as soon as I bring up that most of my family live on the West Coast, people interrupt to go like "Oh so they came in from Angel Island!" and I'm like, no. They didn't even pass through Ellis Island because the US didn't even exist yet.
I run into the same sort of attitudes and the exhausting necessity of arguing one's own identity in gay communities all the time as well. It's one of the reasons why I prefer identifying as queer rather than gay, because queer communities in my experience are more explicitly inclusive than gay communities, which tend to be more focused on acceptance by mainstream society than acceptance of differences.
Like, my very existence defies being placed into a tidy box, and I take pride in it because my cultural heritage is so incredibly rich and varied. And while I will use specific labels to build connections with others, because those labels stand for shared experiences, those labels are just a small aspect of my identity, and they do not singularly define me.
It would be nice if others recognized and accepted the mix of labels that apply to me in gestalt rather than individually.
