Who Do You Think I Am?

My name is Julie. I'm a senior at BASIS Scottsdale High School. I enjoy playing violin and eating ramen. 

Did you make any assumptions about me based on those three sentences? What if I told you my last name is Cho? Regardless of whether you're aware of it or not, your brain will continue to make presumptions about how I will think and act based on my Asian American identity.

Racial stereotypes are everywhere. Most people think of violent and unjust discrimination, such as the Eric Garner case, when asked about racial stereotypes. Most of the time, however, racial stereotypes pop up in everyday conversations, advertisements, television shows. Here is a short video clip to demonstrate:

Did you notice the abundance of racial stereotypes satirized by this clip? If you didn't, please watch it again. 

I'll admit I laughed a bit when I first watched this clip. But when I watched it again, I realized how insulting this video was. I'm from a Korean family; my mom doesn't wear a kimono, my dad doesn't know any martial arts, my grandpa doesn't speak in proverbs, and my house doesn't have any gongs, decorative fans, or Buddha statues. This video creates and reinforces the idea that all Asian homes—Korean, Chinese, Japanese, Indian, Taiwanese, Filipino—are exotically the same. An idea that isn't true, but still negatively affects Asians who watch the clip.

It’s the little things that add up. By a sense of competence or incompetence cued by both conscious and subconscious racial stereotypes in my daily life, I struggle with my identity. Since everyone jokes I must excel at math, I find myself discouraged and questioning my ability to learn when I don’t understand multivariable calculus. After I see that my eyes are half-closed in my yearbook picture, I wonder if the photographer would have retaken my picture if I were White. But until I take a moment to reflect on my internal conflicts, I’m unaware of the seemingly insignificant details that cause them.

Racial inequality is not simply the the product of mass genocides or crazy cults, rather the culmination of mundane remarks and actions. When we laugh at comments like “I can only see his eyes because it was dark in the picture” or “started from the border now we’re here,” we’re unintentionally reinforcing the very stereotypes that oversimplify and misrepresent people around us. Some say that it’s okay if someone jokes about his own race, but it’s not. Although the situation may appear less directly threatening, the stereotype is still strengthened. Do you want to always be expected to think or act in a certain way because of your race?

This question is what drives me to research more on race and its meaning in society. Throughout the next ten weeks, I will be interning with Dr. Brandon Yoo at ASU Tempe's School of Social Transformation to examine the effects of racial stereotypes and discrimination on adolescents of color and how these effects are either buffered or worsened by the different ways that race was presented to the individuals during childhood. Following my proposal, I will give a presentation in mid-May about what I have learned in these ten weeks (more details coming soon).

Here is a link to my project proposal:

http://hyejicho.blogspot.com/2015/01/senior-project-proposal.html

By the end of my project, I hope that both you and I will become more aware of little, everyday moments of racial discrimination and try our best to look beyond skin color.