power, privilege, and everyday life.

I am an Asian woman. It's Halloween today and I walked by a white woman dressed as a geisha, with her face painted and hair darkened. We made and held eye contact for a few seconds, and I think she looked embarrassed. It made me feel me angrier somehow. If it was so easy for her to recognize that this was an embarrassing thing to do, why did she still do it?

Every summer or Christmas I come home from college to see my family, no one ever asks me about classes, only if I have a boyfriend yet. The summer I got my first girlfriend and was public on facebook about it, all of the questions have stopped about my relationship and the subject is always changed to my degree and my classes and where I'm working.

When I'm meeting my partner's extended family for the first time, his rather well-off aunt latches onto the fact that I might be from a different socio-economic background and takes the opportunity to grill me about every life detail: who are my parents; what they did for work; what sort of house I lived in as a child; where I attended college...you get the idea. Much to her chagrin, I reveal that I didn't go to college and did in fact grow up poor in rural America. Another family member has to tell her to leave me alone. 

A friend and I are talking about what it would be like if I got dreads. I tell him there's no way my parents would let me have them. In response he says, "They'd probably be glad you're finally doing something black!" How the hell is some South Asian kid going to tell me what it is to be black? It's not the first time someone had the gall to presume they knew more about my race than me just because I'm not down with the latest rap music and get good grades, either.

I am a 62-year-old female associate professor who has been teaching with technology at a state university since 2002. Most young people under 25 working retail check-out think I need them to explain how to use the card-reader screen.

I am talking to the owner of a towing business. He says, "Oh, the phone companies are just raping me..." I am a survivor of rape and sexual assault. I email him later to ask him to consider changing his language - that using a term of violence so casually contributes to a climate of seeing rape as "no big deal." He said he's not politically correct and that I should learn self-defense. He tells me to "Grow up, kiddo." Then he complains that I didn't consider his feelings when I told him what had happened to me.

When my father (who is Mexican) picks me up from school, the people in the office assumes he is the gardener or custodian. The yard duties are also not as kind to him like how they treat the white parents. 

In Houston, there is a nasty, classist habit of deliberately mispronouncing Spanish-language names and words. I used to hear people who self-defined as "upper class" mispronounce "San Felipe" (a street) as "Sen Flippy", mispronounce the names of Latino/as to their face, and pretend in Mexican restaurants to not know how to pronounce the items the menu (really? they're Texas-born adults and they can't say "enchiladas"?). 

You don't look Jewish.

On multiple occasions, when I tell people about how I'm secular, but still culturally Jewish, they tell me, "You can't be culturally Jewish, it's a religion." Yes, please dictate to me my own cultural and religious experiences. One man once told me, when I explained my situation, "Oh, then I don't consider you Jewish. You're an atheist." When I told him, "You can't tell me what I am or am not," he said to me "I just did."