How can one be proud of one’s heritage yet feel it is rude to ask about one’s heritage?
Is it any different than asking about “where are you from?” to someone from one of the United States? I know people who would jump on “AMERICA” as their answer, when all we were trying to figure out “are you from Jersey or not?”.
'Cause if you’re not from Jersey, you wouldn’t get it (whatever “it” is, food, property taxes, and so on)…
Any proof of ulterior motives?
I can see JUST as much reason not to answer the following questions posed to me by a stranger:
Do you know if it will rain tomorrow?
Do you think having twins is more difficult than having two different-aged siblings?
Do you think Obama is doing a good job?
Which church do you go to?
What toothpaste do you use?
Where did you get that nice jacket?
If people are truly strangers as in don’t know you, and you have no reason to talk to them, who bloody cares if they ask “what heritage are you?” or “what shoe size do you wear?”? Why would you want to talk to them anyway?
Do you think it is fair if your son was dating a girl in a wheelchair or who is blind, a friend of yours could ask “why is she in a wheelchair?” or “why is she blind?”. Or is that off limits? How about “what beautiful blonde hair, is she Scandinavian?”?
Is that last question different than “what beautiful black hair, is she Nigerian?”? No one acts like someone with blonde hair, pale skin, and blue eyes should take it as an affront to be asked if they are Swedish or Scandinavian. Or should they?
My grandparents were Irish Protestants brought up in divided Ireland. My fiance (now H) was Catholic, but we wouldn’t tell my grandmother. She kept asking “What kind of a boy is he?” and I just replied “A very nice one.” She was too ill to come to the wedding, so she never found out.
My D looked like me (dark curly hair, dark eyes). S was white blond, blue-eyed, like his dad. More than once, i was asked if they had the same dad. I could not believe the rudeness. Once someone asked if he was adopted. Some people! I was so shocked I just said, Um, no.
One thing that hasn’t been mentioned yet in this thread. Some people don’t know…
I come from a family in which adoption is very common. The adoptees in my family are white, but some are “white plus” so to speak. By that I mean that, based solely on appearances, they probably have some people in their bio family trees who aren’t Caucasian, but they haven’t a clue as to what they are or how far back they are or whether they are just part Italian, Portuguese, Lebanese or have some other ethnic background which might explain their looks. Adoption is NOT a recent phenomenon in my family; some of the adoptees now have great-grandchildren.
There’s no need for a parent to have to explain to a stranger “We don’t know where her eyes/skin color came from. My mom’s adopted and doesn’t know anything about her parents, so our hunch is her eyes/skin color came from some unknown branch in the family tree.”
Because, @rhandco, for the nth time, many times, those questions are not just about heritage. They’re a veiled inquiry into if someone is “foreign”, “other”, “not American”, etc etc etc. Often they’re not, I know that. But often it feels like it is. You just don’t understand if you’re not in one of those groups. It gets tiresome. It can be embarassing if you’re a kid. It’s judgmental in some situations.
“I have a blond, blue-eyed, white, long-haired daughter. No one has ever called her “exotic”, tried to touch her hair, or asked where she’s from, much less where I got her.”
I, as a White American with light brown hair, green eyes and freckles, was quite exotic when I traveled to a rural village in India earlier this year. No joke - all the villagers came out to stare at me, and they came over and patted my hair and skin.
As a child visiting China, I had the exact same experience. Although my parents look like adult versions of me, apparently it was more “accepted” to stare/point/touch a child than an adult. It was definitely an unnerving experience.
Except that we don’t live in China or India. We live in the US, where it’s not exactly ok to go around touching young children’s hair or asking their mother where she was from.
In south Asian countries most people have dark hair and eyes so they haven’t seen people with blonde, red, or maybe even light brown hair. Even seeing blue or green eyes is rare but if seen is considered very beautiful.
Long time ago when dd was just a baby I had joined a new job. My boss took me around to meet everyone in the company. Later one of the employees came up to me and told me" I can’t figure it out whether you were white or black. " For a second I got surprised. I finally said neither. I later told my family and we laughed about it. Apparently some people don’t know there could be another option.
Imagine the more pernicious, subconscious reasons for wanting to know: people have been known to become violent, and certainly different than they had been in prior interactions, when they feel they have been betrayed by another who appears on the surface to be one thing (belong to one group), and then reveals themselves to actually be another (member of a different group).
My youngest son has had this happen in social arenas where it has pointedly been asked of him why the heck should he care what is being said about Blacks, ‘What difference does it make to [you]?’ When he has answered that he is Black, other kids have become … vehement… that that cannot be so, because “Black people don’t look like you,” is their charge.
He has always had a close friend nearby when this has happened, and when his friend has had enough, and realizes that things are going nowhere with the “Yes, I am/No, you can’t be” tensions, resolutely speaks up, and delivers what must feel like a grave and solemn note that ends it all: “His mother is Black.”
Both my children, who are black/white bi-racial, were asked the “what are you?” question while growing up more times than they can count. Most of the time, they found it tedious, and more than a bit boring. How they answered depended on a lot of things, but mainly the social context of the question, and who was doing the asking. A challenging or condescending tone of voice (or facial expression) that indicated the questioner had already passed some sort of negative judgement (which thankfully, didn’t happen often), illicited a very different response from one that merely indicated interest or curiosity. Both my kids had an extremely diverse group of friends, whose racial/ethnic origins ran the gamut, and the kids of “mixed origins” sometimes sat around the talked about their family makeup and the ways in which it affected their social dynamic. In such cases they often asked that question of each other, comparing and contrasting their experiences, and looking for things they had in common. This was the only time that question ushered them into a sort of inclusive clique of hail-fellows-well-met.
Seems that as a multicultural and accepting society we should be quite okay with people living in America and of Chinese or Indian heritage behaving proudly according to their heritage - which would include touching hair and asking questions. Or are you suggesting these individual hide their culture and behave ‘otherly’?
You can’t win, it seems. If you don’t ask people questions about their cultural habits / traditions, then you just don’t care, and you think everything is mayonnaise and white-bread, and you aren’t honoring diversity or showing any desire to break out of your own little box. If you do ask people questions about their cultural habits / traditions, then you are displaying your ignorance because you don’t already know, and you’re making them feel like show-ponies put on for your display, and how dare you try to re-appropriate them for yourself.
There was some article in (I think) the NYTimes the other day written by a black woman who resented whenever she saw white women wear cornrows in their hair; from her perspective it was cultural re-appropriation, how dare they steal her African heritage to make a fashion statement, and so forth. One of the comments in the comment section was to the effect of - so, when black women do straighten their hair, why don’t white women complain that they are re-appropriating their culture? Frankly it’s a fair point.
^Not equivalent–for generations, African-American women were expected to straighten their hair to fit the “norm” (read: white people hair.) Even now, AA women are fired or not hired for having natural hair.
I think it was obnoxious cultural appropriation when Pat Boone earned big bucks for watered-down versions of Little Richard’s songs–but cornrows? Not so much. “Not so much” is my reaction to the extreme end of the spectrum that contains most legitimate complaints.
I think Pizzagirl has a very good point,and as a European person (whiter than white. I’m practically translucent!) I don’t know what the “right” answer is. So I am asking persons of color (is that an okay term?) for help knowing; in a perfect-er world, I would be able to ask, and that person would receive it as a teachable moment, and let me know what is okay. But then we wander into the weeds of is it someone else’s responsibility to teach me? Or mine to figure it out? Do we think about the end result or the process that gets us there.
DH worked with an older AA man, and as was DH’s habit, often referred to him as “sir”. This particular person was offended by the term, which he saw as pandering/slaveholder/antiquated. After realizing DH was going to keep calling him that (and that DH didn’t mean it any way but politeness) , he took DH aside and explained why he wanted it to stop. My husband took the request to heart – he did feel badly for being misunderstood — and appreciated being told.
That’s why it’s a self test–some people would not like such a question from a stranger, because “it’s none of their business.” Others would welcome such a question as a compliment, or as a simple conversation-starter.
Absolutely, if I saw a woman on the street wearing fabulous shoes or shoes of a type that I had been looking for, I would not hesitate for a second to say, “I LOVE your shoes! Would you mind telling me where you got them?”
I can’t imagine a person being anything other than flattered. Now, if I went on to ask how much they paid for them, that would be going too far. Although many women, if they had gotten a huge bargain at some place like a resale or oddlots store, might volunteer that information.
@Pizzagirl that was a horrible example. This thread was initially about offensive ethnicity questions, not about folks inquiring about cultural traditions. I absolutely welcome questions when folks are honestly trying to learn about Black culture. I have several coworkers who ask me questions all the time, and I gladly answer them. Asking us about our culture is totally different than walking up to someone and touching her hair, or asking “where did you get her”.
Regarding the woman in the NYT article, we couldnt care less if Whites wore cornrows. The problem lies in the fact that once they start, you have Vogue, Glamour etc, featuring these women with cornrows, as if it is something new and exotic, when weve been wearing them for years, but they were never seen as beautiful.
To illustrate your naivete regarding our culture, we never wanted to straighten our hair, so no the commenter doesnt have a point. We have been indoctrinated to straighten our hair, because Whites set the standard of beauty. I cannot tell you how many times that Black women have been approached by managers to say, “I like your hair better straight”, or äre you to change your hair when the client comes". I can tell you that we will straigten our hair, wear a weave or wig, just to get a job, then change it when we get there. This is especially true in the conservative midwest. No one should have to conform like that, but when we wear our hair natural we are seen as not pretty, or threatening regardless of our qualifications.
I have to teach my white friends things all the time, like when we say we are getting a perm, it means we are straightening our hair, and not making it curly. Or we dont have to wash or hair everyday, or every week for that matter, it doesnt become an oily mess like others.