In recent years, a great deal of emphasis has been placed on issues of race. Not only are we challenging the integrity of deeply-rooted institutions like the police and the entertainment industry regarding race, but we are also opening dialogues about systemic racism in the smallest aspects of our society. Recently, programs focusing on these issues, like the one at Clark University introducing freshmen to the dangers of subtle microaggressions, have drawn a lot of attention.
The plight of Asian Americans is getting more visibility with such discussions, but there is still the harmful ‘model minority’ stereotype that persists. Asian-American experiences are often dismissed because of the perception that they are not actively discriminated against; They are seen as the quiet, hardworking, academically inclined and wealthy minority.
There are only negative stereotypes. I will always think everything I do is either an exception, a purposeful and rebellious deviation from the constraints of my skin color or is a defeat, a concession to the caricature that society expects me to adhere to, a source of regret and lost opportunity.
The model minority stereotype has effectively turned me into a walking dichotomy, a thing that doesn’t belong anywhere, that no matter how hard she tries, will never be quite right. Even in realizing that I am no longer ashamed of my Asian-American identity, I accept that I am resigned to a life constantly on tenterhooks, of feeling too much of or too little of and of trying to grasp onto a “quite right” that is just not encoded into my DNA.
There are those who resist the concept of microracism think that by delving so far into the minutia of our daily lives, we are grasping at straws, that if the term “micro” can be applied to any concept it is not legitimate or worthy of investigation, that we are just looking for new ways to be offended.
But it cannot be denied any further that language is a lens through which we subconsciously navigate the world, and that the ways in which we use language today very much excludes and erases minorities. The fact that prejudice is so deeply ingrained in our society that it appears in the littlest places is very worthy of investigation; It will be very difficult for minorities to completely assimilate if racism is woven into the daily fabric of all of their lives.
Most importantly, what many people don’t seem to understand is that it has nothing to do with the content of the assumption and everything to do with the act of assuming, that after being erased and drawn in over and over again, it becomes very hard to answer the question, “Why are you so angry?”
What they don’t understand is that all we want is to be seen and not be passed over, for our stories not to be assumed, our livelihoods, passions, likes, dislikes and complexities to be reduced in one glance. They will never know the tedium of automatically counting the number of Asians in any given room, of learning to calculate what kind of person you will be based on the answer to that, of having to be hyper-aware of your every action in a desperate attempt to push away the walls of a box.
What they don’t understand is that constantly feeling like you have to prove yourself is physically exhausting, that at the end of the day when we are by ourselves we must painfully pluck off our disguises and we go to sleep more tired than you. Every time you tell me you thought I was premed at first, my heart gets so heavy I can hardly stand it and that sometimes, in a crowded room I want to scream louder than my lungs permit, “I’m here, too.”
Allison Jiang is a freshman Writing Seminars major from Holmdel, New Jersey.
