By Rewa Atre, Contributor, Emerson College
One of the best parts of my college experience is going out every weekend with my friends. I love getting dressed up and going to parties, and because we live in a city with a huge population of students, there’s never a shortage of new and interesting people to meet. But no matter how many different guys I talk to, there is one part of the conversation that is consistent for most of my encounters. I’ll be making conversation with a guy and everything is going fine, but the moment we start to talk about our backgrounds, I’m asked questions like this:
“Where are you from? No, I mean, where are you really from?”
“What are you?”
“Where are your grandparents from?”
Translation: What’s your race?
The question itself does not offend me, and I myself am interested in other peoples’ heritage and ethnic backgrounds, but when someone points out my racial difference in such a blunt manner, five minutes into a conversation, it’s more than a bit off-putting. I’m Indian-American, but when I share this fact with other people, on several occasions, I’m often met with a response such as this:
“Oh that’s so cool, I like exotic girls.”
I’ll be honest: when I first came to college, I took that statement as a compliment.
I was once flattered by the special attention I got from guys because I looked different than most of the girls at Emerson. For a while, I took “exotic” to mean “special” or “interesting,” rather than acknowledging what the word actually means, which is “foreign.” But now, after years of many people assuming I’m a foreigner or an immigrant purely on the grounds that I look different, I feel uncomfortable. That word has connotations that simply don’t apply to my life.
What’s worse is that some guys, in an effort to flirt with me, like to elaborate on their previous statements with this particularly offensive follow-up:
“I love that you’re different, I’m not really into white girls.”
That’s where the line of questioning goes from dubious to downright insulting. It also made me wonder, why do these guys have to prove to me that they like women of color by openly rebuffing white girls? Since when is attraction based on race and not personality?
These kinds of statements are offensive to all women, regardless of race, because they imply that one race is more desirable than another based on physical characteristics alone. Oftentimes, women of color have simplistic cultural stereotypes assigned to them. These stereotypes include, but are not limited to: Asian women are passive and docile, and Latinas are outspoken and fiery, etc. In my experience, I’ve been asked if I was sexually conservative, if I was forbidden to wear skimpy clothing by my religion, and my favorite, if an arranged marriage was inevitable for me.
Assuming that someone is foreign based on ethnicity alone is a fallacy. Ethnicity, race, and nationality are all different concepts; for example, my ethnicity is Indian, my race is Asian, and my nationality is American. I’ve witnessed people using these words interchangeably, with disastrous results. Using this flawed logic, I’m exotic just because I’m of Indian descent, despite the fact that I was born and raised in New Jersey. The word “exotic” is defined by Webster’s dictionary in several ways, as “not native to the place where found”, “strikingly, excitingly, or mysteriously unusual”, and, the most old-fashioned, “foreign or alien.” All of these definitions have a similar theme, which is that anything exotic is foreign and mysterious, and therefore implies that what is exotic should be treated with differently than anything “normal.”
Although Emerson College is trying very hard to create a culture of inclusivity, I’ve frequently witnessed these kinds of micro-aggressions on campus, as well as off. When people use terms like “exotic” to describe people of color, it often diminishes them to a stereotype and only serves to perpetuate cultural misconceptions. Calling someone out for looking “different” is not the same as appreciating someone’s heritage. It’s okay to be curious about someone’s ethnicity or racial background, but people should approach the topic in a respectable manner and shouldn’t single someone out for looking different.
Rewa Atre is a Communication Disorders major who loves to write essays about sex, love, and racial identity at three in the morning. In her spare time, she fangirls about Game of Thrones, spends her friday nights trying to twerk, and her saturday nights watching history channel specials.
Image: saynotomean.blogspot.com
One of the best parts of my college experience is going out every weekend with my friends. I love getting dressed up and going to parties, and because we live in a city with a huge population of students, there’s never a shortage of new and interesting people to meet. But no matter how many different guys I talk to, there is one part of the conversation that is consistent for most of my encounters. I’ll be making conversation with a guy and everything is going fine, but the moment we start to talk about our backgrounds, I’m asked questions like this:
“Where are you from? No, I mean, where are you really from?”
“What are you?”
“Where are your grandparents from?”
Translation: What’s your race?
The question itself does not offend me, and I myself am interested in other peoples’ heritage and ethnic backgrounds, but when someone points out my racial difference in such a blunt manner, five minutes into a conversation, it’s more than a bit off-putting. I’m Indian-American, but when I share this fact with other people, on several occasions, I’m often met with a response such as this:
“Oh that’s so cool, I like exotic girls.”
I’ll be honest: when I first came to college, I took that statement as a compliment.
I was once flattered by the special attention I got from guys because I looked different than most of the girls at Emerson. For a while, I took “exotic” to mean “special” or “interesting,” rather than acknowledging what the word actually means, which is “foreign.” But now, after years of many people assuming I’m a foreigner or an immigrant purely on the grounds that I look different, I feel uncomfortable. That word has connotations that simply don’t apply to my life.
What’s worse is that some guys, in an effort to flirt with me, like to elaborate on their previous statements with this particularly offensive follow-up:
“I love that you’re different, I’m not really into white girls.”
That’s where the line of questioning goes from dubious to downright insulting. It also made me wonder, why do these guys have to prove to me that they like women of color by openly rebuffing white girls? Since when is attraction based on race and not personality?
These kinds of statements are offensive to all women, regardless of race, because they imply that one race is more desirable than another based on physical characteristics alone. Oftentimes, women of color have simplistic cultural stereotypes assigned to them. These stereotypes include, but are not limited to: Asian women are passive and docile, and Latinas are outspoken and fiery, etc. In my experience, I’ve been asked if I was sexually conservative, if I was forbidden to wear skimpy clothing by my religion, and my favorite, if an arranged marriage was inevitable for me.
Assuming that someone is foreign based on ethnicity alone is a fallacy. Ethnicity, race, and nationality are all different concepts; for example, my ethnicity is Indian, my race is Asian, and my nationality is American. I’ve witnessed people using these words interchangeably, with disastrous results. Using this flawed logic, I’m exotic just because I’m of Indian descent, despite the fact that I was born and raised in New Jersey. The word “exotic” is defined by Webster’s dictionary in several ways, as “not native to the place where found”, “strikingly, excitingly, or mysteriously unusual”, and, the most old-fashioned, “foreign or alien.” All of these definitions have a similar theme, which is that anything exotic is foreign and mysterious, and therefore implies that what is exotic should be treated with differently than anything “normal.”
Although Emerson College is trying very hard to create a culture of inclusivity, I’ve frequently witnessed these kinds of micro-aggressions on campus, as well as off. When people use terms like “exotic” to describe people of color, it often diminishes them to a stereotype and only serves to perpetuate cultural misconceptions. Calling someone out for looking “different” is not the same as appreciating someone’s heritage. It’s okay to be curious about someone’s ethnicity or racial background, but people should approach the topic in a respectable manner and shouldn’t single someone out for looking different.
Rewa Atre is a Communication Disorders major who loves to write essays about sex, love, and racial identity at three in the morning. In her spare time, she fangirls about Game of Thrones, spends her friday nights trying to twerk, and her saturday nights watching history channel specials.
Image: saynotomean.blogspot.com