Got this today from a former student:
"I just wanted to tell you a funny thing that happened to me recently. I met this guy who is a friend's friend's friend, and who struck me right away as being kind of in love with himself. I met him the first time going bowling with a group of people, and he has shoulder-length-ish hair that he would shake around a lot and put up and down and play with all the time, and he took his game very seriously. Anyway, I was at a party recently that was Olympic-themed, and I went as Mt. Olympus. I was standing talking to someone, and this guy comes up and yells, "Hey, Mt. Fuji!!"
So I asked, "Oh, because I'm Asian?" (He's white.) And he got really defensive and said a bunch of stuff about how he doesn't know a lot of mountains, and the Olympics are in China and Mt. Fuji is the only name of a mountain in Asia that he knows about, etc. It was pretty funny to me at the time, and an interesting example of the ways people's perceptions work, and what a sensitive subject race still is in a lot of ways."
I love it when the students keep feeding me these stories, these funny little everyday examples of how people think and speak. You can't make them up.
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Today at my new employee orientation, I met one of the big diversity programmers on our campus. He did a presentation on inclusion and diversity in our respective jobs. He admitted to all of us that English was his second language. The white guy at my table turns to me and says, "WOW, for speaking English as a second language he speaks it miraculously. No accent. He speaks English really well." The poor guy was really surprised (eyes big and wide).
I really wanted to turn to him and tell him that I, too, am an ESL individual, but I held back. Is it that easy of a jump to make to assume that ESL individuals should have thick accents?
Confused Mexican transplant to UC Davis. :)
It's so ignorant. I mean all of those people who either learn two languages as children, or speak their first language until they begin school and then learn English. How can it be that white people don;t know this?
I get mad when people think accent=bad English. Remember Yashmin? Her English was perfect, but she had an accent and the kids referred to her as the girl with the "bad English".
Yaaaaaaaaaaaaaaashmine! I remember. I miss her.
Working at Davis's Cross Cultural Center reminds me a lot of SCU. The other day I was told by the LGBT Center on campus that it was not right for us to be teaching about sexuality issues because that was their "area" . . . that all interests should be funneled to them. Brown people don't know gayness?
I asked her if she ever got requests for presentations on sexuality as it relates to ethnic identity. She said yes. I said, do you funnel those to the Cross-Cultural Center? (according to her, we needed to stick to race/ethnicity)
Her answer: "We have special people who handle those requests. Yes. We program for those presentations too."
Bureaucracy = Hipocracy. Unequal treatment infects even oppressed communities.
People let egos and territoriality blur their vision for abolishing oppression and privilege.
"Special people"! That's too funny.
Turf wars are silly in general. But this sounds so dumb I can;t believe it. Everybody know these things intersect, yes? So wouldn't it make sense if both groups, either working together or by themselves, addressed them from their point of view? You should do it anyway.
I remember Mayka said once "I wouldn't want to be gay in Barkada", and I was thinking of the one gay kid I KNEW in Barkada. (She didn;t know about him.) You have to do it!
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