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IBARW: This is my story
So, I've been seeing the International Blog Against Racism Week show up on my flist. And it got me thinking. A lot. And I've never really talked about this before, I think it needs to. Because I'm seeing the intersection of various -isms in my life, and they're not the good -isms. And I've been meaning to write an essay about growing up a gamer geek in the Midwestern USA, but as I thought about it, that's just a fraction of all of this. So even though I don't have an icon for IBARW, we're doing this anyway.
I'm mixed. Actually, I'm exactly 50/50 on ethic backgrounds. My dad is of Eastern European (Slovak) decent, and was born and raised in the US, in a fairly ethnic (Slovak and Polish -centric) neighborhood. My mom immigrated to North America from Guyana at age 17, first to Canada on a student visa, and then to the US after graduation. It was at my mother's knee that I first learned about what a terrible thing judging another person by their culture, race, or creed really is.
You see, when my mom was a child, her country was nearly ripped apart by race riots (instigated in no small part by the US CIA in an attempt to destablize the government. Oh, US Cold War politics, you piss me off so much sometimes.). It pitted those of East Indian descent against those of African descent. My mother told me of getting beat up by black kids on the way to school, of running from thrown rocks, from tear gas, from her house that was going up in flames. And after she told me all this, she told me how she's ashamed that she still gets nervous when she sees a large group of African-Americans. (Large group, not individuals or small groups. I never really pressed for a number) Because she flashes back, and hits that fight-or-flight response. And, I love my mother, and if nothing else, I can understand exactly why she has this reaction. And I feel so damn bad for her because she doesn't want to be "that person", but it was a hugely traumatic experience and of course it left scars.
And then, as if this wasn't complicated enough, when I was older I learned that her father had once expressly forbade her from dating my dad. And how when she ignored her father, they didn't speak for a year and it was getting fairly close to all out disownment. Because my dad is a white American, and Grandpa had heard stories about how white American guys just try to get into a girl's pants and then leave them once she gets pregnant. No, I'm not joking. My grandfather was scared, but I'm not condoning this reaction at all. In fact, it absolutely boggled me when I heard the story, because Grandpa loved my dad. He loved all his sons-in-law, most of whom are, in fact, white. The fact that he pretty close to hated my dad until he proposed to my mom shocked me. (My uncles had an easier time of it, since my dad set the example and convinced Grandpa that the stereotype and stories were wrong.)
But those are my parents' stories, not mine. I only share them now because I want to explain why I was taught to abhor intolerance in any form. That if I must judge a person, then judge them by merit and personality alone, but that I'm better off not judging. (And that, after all that, if I still dislike a person, then for the love of god, be civil.)
So where does my story start? I guess it starts, really, with the first time I realized that everyone else wasn't taught the same thing I was by my parents. Like I said, I'm mixed. The first time I learned that some people apparently didn't know the meaning of the word was when I was about 11 years old. I went to a (rather homogeneous, looking back on it) Catholic grade and middle school. I remember standing in the bus line after school when another kid and I got into an argument. I forget what the topic was, but I remember him angrily yelling at me "You're white!"
I was utterly flabbergasted. I don't even think it was the dead of winter, so he didn't even really have the "you haven't been out in the sun for months and you've gone kind of pale" excuse. Plus, the school was small enough that everyone above a certain grade pretty much knew everyone else and their families. "What?" I spluttered.
"You're white! Don't deny it!" I think I gaped at him lots, because eventually he dragged the principal over. "[redacted], tell![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
ultranos she's white!"
"[redacted], you have met my mother." I remember her looking really uncomfortable, and then herding us out the door. Maybe she muttered to the kid that I was right. I don't remember.
And after that, I became so much more aware of it. I remember nearly screaming in Student Congress events in high school when mock bills about getting rid of affirmative action came around, because I always ended up saying "no" because someone had to argue against the white, affluent suburban boy whining about how he's never going to get into college. (This was in a competition to go to Nationals. Yes, I'm serious.) Because while affirmative action has its problems, the root cause is still there and I still believe it's better than nothing. So it's hardly a surprise it fell on the kids from the urban public school (who honestly had the most diverse team in terms of race and ethnicity of any other school in the state) to take up the cause.
Actually, Student Congress in general was hell on the belief that racism doesn't exist anymore. When flying out of state for a national competition, we all kind of looked at each other exasperated when three of us were "randomly" picked to be specially searched by the TSA: myself, the black girl, and the Palastinian boy. (Out of the other kids on the team flying that morning? One wasn't white.)
But back to affirmative action for a moment. When I was filling out college applications, I hated all the damned tick boxes for "Race". Along with the instruction to "Choose one". I agonized over it, just like how I hated myself when I got my driver's license the first time and tried to identify myself as mixed, and was told that "it wasn't recognized" and I had to choose "White" or "Asian". Every time I could, I checked the "Other" box, but more often than not, I had to choose between "Caucasian" and "Asian/East Asian". And god help me, I chose "Asian" enough times my mom once asked me if I was ashamed of my dad's race.
I died a little inside when she asked me that.
Because I do identify myself as mixed, as 50/50 both ways, and I'm proud of it. But society keeps trying to fit me in this little box. And I don't do boxes very well.
I tend to blow preconceptions and boxes up. I'm a girl who's always been more fascinated by science and building things than by anything stereotypically "girly". My hair is cut boy-short mostly because I don't want it to get caught in lathes and mills in the machine shop and scalp me. My mother has long since thrown in the towel on the "form vs function" debate in terms of clothing. I am majoring in one of the most male-populated majors at my school.
You better believe I face all kinds of sexism. Between questions about my sexuality and the galling assumption that I can get easy grades by sleeping with a TA if I wanted, do I even have to say how frustrating it is? Perhaps the best example is when I took an intensive design and engineering class my sophomore year. Most of the time, for that class, you are stuck in the machine shop. Space and machine time is at a premium. The machinists down there mostly sit back and make sure you don't kill anyone and mock you about what you're doing wrong. Except, well, I was told that since I was female, I could probably just get the machinists down there to do my work for me just by looking "cute" and acting vapid. The only time, for that class, that ANYONE but myself made any of my parts was when my LA made parts off my drawings because I had broken my foot and couldn't be in the shop.
The sad part is that I'm used to that. Even before college. Like I started out saying, growing up a female gaming geek kind of forced the necessity of a thick skin. (Age 16: going into a game store, picking up Final Fantasy Anthology, going up to the counter and standing there staring at the cashier boy for a good minute before finally waving the game in his face with "I'd like to buy this?" After which he scowls at me and swipes the game out of my hand? Oh yeah. These are valuable learning experiences.) You learned to play with the boys or not at all. And of course, taking gleeful pleasure in stomping them into the ground when they assume they're better at Soul Calibur because they have a Y chromosome. Standing at a machine in an arcade. While I'm on crutches.
And the sad thing is that people wonder why more girls don't play games. (Well, they used to. They're getting better about it. Somewhat. Renaming the Harvest Moon game with a girl protagonist Harvest Moon Cute is not helping. But there was that entire kerfuffle about poor Jade Raymond, who's only crime was to be fantastically attractive, photogenic, and well-spoken in addition to be amazingly competent at her job. She was on the design team for Assassin's Creed, but some people decided to take more interest in her chest than her brain. Poor woman got dragged through the mud. (I talked about this before). And it still pisses me off.
Because these are things I enjoy, things I love. I don't go into a machine shop or a gaming store to get leered at. I go because I want to either do my job or do something pertaining to my lifelong hobby. I am not your preconceived notion, I am not your stereotype, I will not fit in your or society's nice little box. I don't fit in that box. You need to get a bigger one because I never will. And if I have children, they probably won't either.
Actually, how about we ditch the boxes all together?
I'm mixed. Actually, I'm exactly 50/50 on ethic backgrounds. My dad is of Eastern European (Slovak) decent, and was born and raised in the US, in a fairly ethnic (Slovak and Polish -centric) neighborhood. My mom immigrated to North America from Guyana at age 17, first to Canada on a student visa, and then to the US after graduation. It was at my mother's knee that I first learned about what a terrible thing judging another person by their culture, race, or creed really is.
You see, when my mom was a child, her country was nearly ripped apart by race riots (instigated in no small part by the US CIA in an attempt to destablize the government. Oh, US Cold War politics, you piss me off so much sometimes.). It pitted those of East Indian descent against those of African descent. My mother told me of getting beat up by black kids on the way to school, of running from thrown rocks, from tear gas, from her house that was going up in flames. And after she told me all this, she told me how she's ashamed that she still gets nervous when she sees a large group of African-Americans. (Large group, not individuals or small groups. I never really pressed for a number) Because she flashes back, and hits that fight-or-flight response. And, I love my mother, and if nothing else, I can understand exactly why she has this reaction. And I feel so damn bad for her because she doesn't want to be "that person", but it was a hugely traumatic experience and of course it left scars.
And then, as if this wasn't complicated enough, when I was older I learned that her father had once expressly forbade her from dating my dad. And how when she ignored her father, they didn't speak for a year and it was getting fairly close to all out disownment. Because my dad is a white American, and Grandpa had heard stories about how white American guys just try to get into a girl's pants and then leave them once she gets pregnant. No, I'm not joking. My grandfather was scared, but I'm not condoning this reaction at all. In fact, it absolutely boggled me when I heard the story, because Grandpa loved my dad. He loved all his sons-in-law, most of whom are, in fact, white. The fact that he pretty close to hated my dad until he proposed to my mom shocked me. (My uncles had an easier time of it, since my dad set the example and convinced Grandpa that the stereotype and stories were wrong.)
But those are my parents' stories, not mine. I only share them now because I want to explain why I was taught to abhor intolerance in any form. That if I must judge a person, then judge them by merit and personality alone, but that I'm better off not judging. (And that, after all that, if I still dislike a person, then for the love of god, be civil.)
So where does my story start? I guess it starts, really, with the first time I realized that everyone else wasn't taught the same thing I was by my parents. Like I said, I'm mixed. The first time I learned that some people apparently didn't know the meaning of the word was when I was about 11 years old. I went to a (rather homogeneous, looking back on it) Catholic grade and middle school. I remember standing in the bus line after school when another kid and I got into an argument. I forget what the topic was, but I remember him angrily yelling at me "You're white!"
I was utterly flabbergasted. I don't even think it was the dead of winter, so he didn't even really have the "you haven't been out in the sun for months and you've gone kind of pale" excuse. Plus, the school was small enough that everyone above a certain grade pretty much knew everyone else and their families. "What?" I spluttered.
"You're white! Don't deny it!" I think I gaped at him lots, because eventually he dragged the principal over. "[redacted], tell
ultranos she's white!""[redacted], you have met my mother." I remember her looking really uncomfortable, and then herding us out the door. Maybe she muttered to the kid that I was right. I don't remember.
And after that, I became so much more aware of it. I remember nearly screaming in Student Congress events in high school when mock bills about getting rid of affirmative action came around, because I always ended up saying "no" because someone had to argue against the white, affluent suburban boy whining about how he's never going to get into college. (This was in a competition to go to Nationals. Yes, I'm serious.) Because while affirmative action has its problems, the root cause is still there and I still believe it's better than nothing. So it's hardly a surprise it fell on the kids from the urban public school (who honestly had the most diverse team in terms of race and ethnicity of any other school in the state) to take up the cause.
Actually, Student Congress in general was hell on the belief that racism doesn't exist anymore. When flying out of state for a national competition, we all kind of looked at each other exasperated when three of us were "randomly" picked to be specially searched by the TSA: myself, the black girl, and the Palastinian boy. (Out of the other kids on the team flying that morning? One wasn't white.)
But back to affirmative action for a moment. When I was filling out college applications, I hated all the damned tick boxes for "Race". Along with the instruction to "Choose one". I agonized over it, just like how I hated myself when I got my driver's license the first time and tried to identify myself as mixed, and was told that "it wasn't recognized" and I had to choose "White" or "Asian". Every time I could, I checked the "Other" box, but more often than not, I had to choose between "Caucasian" and "Asian/East Asian". And god help me, I chose "Asian" enough times my mom once asked me if I was ashamed of my dad's race.
I died a little inside when she asked me that.
Because I do identify myself as mixed, as 50/50 both ways, and I'm proud of it. But society keeps trying to fit me in this little box. And I don't do boxes very well.
I tend to blow preconceptions and boxes up. I'm a girl who's always been more fascinated by science and building things than by anything stereotypically "girly". My hair is cut boy-short mostly because I don't want it to get caught in lathes and mills in the machine shop and scalp me. My mother has long since thrown in the towel on the "form vs function" debate in terms of clothing. I am majoring in one of the most male-populated majors at my school.
You better believe I face all kinds of sexism. Between questions about my sexuality and the galling assumption that I can get easy grades by sleeping with a TA if I wanted, do I even have to say how frustrating it is? Perhaps the best example is when I took an intensive design and engineering class my sophomore year. Most of the time, for that class, you are stuck in the machine shop. Space and machine time is at a premium. The machinists down there mostly sit back and make sure you don't kill anyone and mock you about what you're doing wrong. Except, well, I was told that since I was female, I could probably just get the machinists down there to do my work for me just by looking "cute" and acting vapid. The only time, for that class, that ANYONE but myself made any of my parts was when my LA made parts off my drawings because I had broken my foot and couldn't be in the shop.
The sad part is that I'm used to that. Even before college. Like I started out saying, growing up a female gaming geek kind of forced the necessity of a thick skin. (Age 16: going into a game store, picking up Final Fantasy Anthology, going up to the counter and standing there staring at the cashier boy for a good minute before finally waving the game in his face with "I'd like to buy this?" After which he scowls at me and swipes the game out of my hand? Oh yeah. These are valuable learning experiences.) You learned to play with the boys or not at all. And of course, taking gleeful pleasure in stomping them into the ground when they assume they're better at Soul Calibur because they have a Y chromosome. Standing at a machine in an arcade. While I'm on crutches.
And the sad thing is that people wonder why more girls don't play games. (Well, they used to. They're getting better about it. Somewhat. Renaming the Harvest Moon game with a girl protagonist Harvest Moon Cute is not helping. But there was that entire kerfuffle about poor Jade Raymond, who's only crime was to be fantastically attractive, photogenic, and well-spoken in addition to be amazingly competent at her job. She was on the design team for Assassin's Creed, but some people decided to take more interest in her chest than her brain. Poor woman got dragged through the mud. (I talked about this before). And it still pisses me off.
Because these are things I enjoy, things I love. I don't go into a machine shop or a gaming store to get leered at. I go because I want to either do my job or do something pertaining to my lifelong hobby. I am not your preconceived notion, I am not your stereotype, I will not fit in your or society's nice little box. I don't fit in that box. You need to get a bigger one because I never will. And if I have children, they probably won't either.
Actually, how about we ditch the boxes all together?
no subject
I might say more, but I'm at work, and I have a TON of crap to do before I can go.
no subject
Hah, I know about the work thing. I'm just lucky I'm having a slow day and my boss hasn't realized it yet to dump more coding projects on me.
no subject
Actually, how about we ditch the boxes all together?
This is kind of genius. And word.
no subject
no subject
what irks me is that all human groups arrange the world into boxes.
so...*hugs you* is sadly about all I can offer.
sorry.
no subject
And yeah, it's kind of distressing that human beings have the tendency to try to fit everyone into pre-defined categories and labels. It just...doesn't work so well. (I'd argue it's a lot like H.P. Lovecraft's opening sentence to "Supernatural Horror in Literature": "The greatest and oldest human emotion is fear, and the greatest and oldest fear is fear of the unknown." Labels and boxes get rid of that unknown.)
Aw, thanks. Really, I do see things getting better. Maybe it's because I moved out of the Midwest for school and don't have to deal with race-instigated stupidity. As for the sexism, well, mechanical engineering is very much a boys'-club (and at my school, also has the stereotype of "frat boy"), but I am noticing an upswing in the number of females present in my classes.
no subject
no subject
I have no idea how we're expected to sum ourselves up by a single ticky box.
no subject
I'm familiar with some of these experiences, unfamiliar with others and generally, um, yeah. The world, it is a crazy place.
[I will say reading your story about elementary school and the kid declaring you white, made me think of being a kid in town you were a kid in, and I feel like at least when I was a kid there, racial relations were so very much either you were black or you weren't]
Anyway, thanks again for stepping out and sharing your story.
no subject
I figured you'd be familiar with some of these experiences. And yes, the world is an insane place.
[Oh yeah, I totally agree with you. I mean, my high school demographics were either "black" or "non-black". No joke. It's like there was no in-between, and people had no idea what to do with you or how to classify you if you weren't either black or white.]
no subject
I figured you'd be familiar with some of these experiences. And yes, the world is an insane place.
*nods* There was a college I almost went to, until I realized that their physics and chemistry departments each had one or two women among 30 profs and that when they bragged of how many women were in science, they didn't mention that most of them were in nursing and I just...decided I didn't want to deal with that.
[Oh yeah, I totally agree with you. I mean, my high school demographics were either "black" or "non-black". No joke. It's like there was no in-between, and people had no idea what to do with you or how to classify you if you weren't either black or white.]
*nods* And I don't know how much of that is common elsewhere, but racial relations just felt different there than other places I've been.
no subject
I don't blame you. I mean, mechanical engineering isn't exactly the most...welcoming (?) place for women. But my advisor is female and she's just plain awesome. And the department is really trying to make it more appealing to women, in the "hey! This stuff is cool! Try it! You can totally do it!" sense. It has the unfortunate stereotype of being the "frat boy major", but I'm really happy to say that I'm seeing more and more of the pretty much polar opposite type in my classes (the geeky, hair-cut-short-and-dyed, I'm-going-to-play-with-explosives-I-mean-Coffeemate girls).
That doesn't mean I don't spend time rolling my eyes and asking "did you really just say that? Did you? Did you have to say that? *thwap*"
And I don't know how much of that is common elsewhere, but racial relations just felt different there than other places I've been.
I don't know either. I mean, where I am at now is pretty skewed, because it feels pretty diverse. But then again, there are a LOT of colleges around here, and I feel I'm dealing more with classism and that ilk.
no subject
So, yeah, word.