‘If you look white, then you are white’- what is this now?!

[OwlBeThere]

I’ll start this by saying this is a conversation I had on tiktok. Yes,it’s mostly younger people on that app, but there is also some fantastic political discourse and discussion around linguistics which is my field so that’s what I use it for.

I am mixed race. My mother is Asian (Japanese), my dad is Welsh. I have the kind of skin that is very pale until I see the sun then I tan quickly. I don’t ‘look’ very obviously Asian, I suppose. I do have very straight, very dark hair from my mother, and I do have a relatively flat bridge to my nose. In my welsh village where I was raised from age 4 (born in Japan, moved to Denmark when I was 2, then to wales) I was ‘that Chinese kid’ a lot in the 80s, I had my share of casual racism thrown my way. I speak Japanese, welsh and English.
All that backstory is just to explain why I was completely baffled when in a discussion around racism I was told that because my ‘phenotype’ is white and I’m ‘white passing’ then I am white and have no business taking part in a discussion on racism as I’ve ‘probably never experienced it’.
Many people ask me my heritage, so I think it’s pretty clear to most people that I’m mixed in some way because otherwise they wouldn’t ask, right?
Have any other people mixed race people come across this as a thing? This phenotype argument that appears to negate half of my family?!

@CirclesWithinCircles

Think indirect racism Xenia, with the same remarks being repeated over and over again for no discernable useful purpose.

Not the case.

I would ratrher we just used merit. I know why white boys do worse in English schools because they work less hard - it is one reason I am glad most people in my sons' school were Asian/Indian etc (and some back) as they had all those parents putting every last penny into school fees cracking the whip at home, everyone very serious about education, no distractions (no girls in the school even).... great influence if you have a slacking white or any other colour son. Buy a hard working peer group.

So we’re all okay with this?

In what sense? Some will think that parents who pay school fees are morally wrong whether the parent is white or black. I accept that.

Then the question of why studies show particular children do better than others in school is always interesting. Do Asian children do better in school exams because of money their parents have or hard work or stricter homes or innate brains or what?

The Sutton Trust found

"White British FSM (Free School Meals) boys achieve the lowest grades at GCSE of any main ethnic group, with just 24% achieving 5 A*-C grades at GCSE, inc. English and maths. They have now been either the lowest or second lowest performing ethnic group every year for a decade.

White British FSM girls are also the lowest performing main female ethnic group, with 32% achieving the same measure.

• In the past ten years, Bangladeshi, black African and Chinese FSM pupils have improved substantially more than the national average. These three groups have improved by more than 20 percentage points since 2006 on the benchmark five GCSE measure, while the national average has improved by about 13.5 percentage points.

• While certain ethnic minority FSM pupils perform better on attainment than the national average at GCSE (such as Chinese, Bangladeshi and Indian), others still struggle (such as black Caribbean and Irish"
Actually the above was 20176.

More recently the Government found

" the average ‘Attainment 8’ score for pupils in England was 50.2 out of 90.0 in the 2019 to 2020 academic year – Attainment 8 measures pupils’ results in 8 GCSE-level qualifications
pupils from the Chinese ethnic group had the highest score out of all ethnic groups (67.6)
White Gypsy and Roma pupils had the lowest score (23.3)
in every ethnic group, girls had a higher average score than boys
in every ethnic group, pupils eligible for free school meals had a lower average score than non-eligible pupils"

I know why white boys do worse in English schools

Again, another generalisation which is not helpful at all. Everyone is different

@Faultymain5

I would ratrher we just used merit. I know why white boys do worse in English schools because they work less hard - it is one reason I am glad most people in my sons' school were Asian/Indian etc (and some back) as they had all those parents putting every last penny into school fees cracking the whip at home, everyone very serious about education, no distractions (no girls in the school even).... great influence if you have a slacking white or any other colour son. Buy a hard working peer group.

So we’re all okay with this?

I mean personally, no. But its hard to know where to start TBH.

@Faultymain5 no I’m not ok with it either...there are far more issues at play in why certain demographics do better and it’s not just ‘they work harder’.
To lump all Asians as hard working is ridiculous.

@Coronawireless you appear to have tagged me in a post that’s been deleted, but from your next post you seem to think I misquoted you somewhere? I dont know how I did that. The only time I quoted you was your whole post to point out where you had misinterpreted my OP and the point.

I mean, it depends on the context obviously. I an English, light skinned with dark hair/dark eyes, and have experienced racism from people who thought I wasn’t white when younger.

If a black or brown person is speaking about their discrimination, I’m not going to chime in and speak over them as I know my handful of experiences as a kid are irrelevant. There’s a time and place - I know being white passing has given me a different and more privileged life from them. It’s not really my place to do anything but listen and be supportive.

Your experiences are valid but don’t need to be the forefront of a conversation about race imo. Again it depends on the context

@wingsnthat

I mean, it depends on the context obviously. I an English, light skinned with dark hair/dark eyes, and have experienced racism from people who thought I wasn’t white when younger.

If a black or brown person is speaking about their discrimination, I’m not going to chime in and speak over them as I know my handful of experiences as a kid are irrelevant. There’s a time and place - I know being white passing has given me a different and more privileged life from them. It’s not really my place to do anything but listen and be supportive.

Your experiences are valid but don’t need to be the forefront of a conversation about race imo. Again it depends on the context

This was exactly what I meant but I didn’t phrase it as well. Apologies to the OP if my poorer phrasing seemed antagonistic towards her. That was not intended because the OP comes across as perfectly polite and of course is absolutely entitled to her view, even if my own opinion remains unchanged. Cannot say the same about the other PP who got my posts deleted because clearly anyone who disagrees with her must be a vile racist bully!

MNHQ don’t delete posts because someone tells them to, they delete them because they break talk guidelines. If you hadn’t broken talk guidelines, your posts wouldn’t have been deleted. Hope that helps

I must have broken a different guideline. By no stretch of the imagination were the posts racist.

My opinion was and remains exactly as above.

From the Talk Guidelines:
“We're all for freedom of speech. That said, we'll remove posts we consider to contain personal attacks, to break the law and/or to be obscene, racist, sexist, disablist, ageist, homophobic or transphobic, once they are brought to our attention. We will also delete any posts that we think are just seriously unpleasant.”

I didn’t see your posts, so can’t give my opinion on them obviously, but (and I’m sorry that to can’t find a way to phrase this without it sounding massively patronising!) you might need to reflect on what you wrote and why other people (including MNHQ) would find it offensive.

I may indeed contact the admin about it as my posts had none of the above.

@Coronawireless

I may indeed contact the admin about it as my posts had none of the above.

You might as well, because you really don't understand indirect racial discrimination and how repeating the same type of comment over and over again and claiming to be "puzzled" as to someone's race and colour is offensive.

Although I doubt that anyone could explain it to you, particularly now that you've turned yourself into a victim and have pretty much taken over the entire thread and made it about you to shut down debate on the actual topic of the thread.

I can't abide racism in any form, no matter how cleverly or covertly people think they have hidden it.

I am part Chinese, and I found your remarks about not understanding how someone from my background could have experienced racism if our skin was pale incredibly offensive. It was the number of times you repeated them and claimed to not be able to understand the very detailed examples of racist remarks suffered by people of my racial background that made it offensive. To he honest, I thought, and still do think that by playing the wide eyed innocent, you are taking the p""s.

I am fed up with your multiple postings about on this thread, most of which have nothing to do with the topic of the thread. You are deliberately trying to derail the thread.

Just try re-reading wingsnthat’s post. Puts my exact point more succinctly than I did.
My points were very much on topic. This is AIBU. People are allowed to disagree.

One of the issues raised in the op was that some people seem to have the opinion that “white skinned” equals “white passing” when that’s not the case.

So when wingsandthat says “ Your experiences are valid but don’t need to be the forefront of a conversation about race imo.” that makes sense in the case of people who completely pass as white. But it does not make sense in the case of people like my kids, and circles who are mixed East Asian/white, so can have white skin but are not at all white passing.

Anyone saying that people like my kids and circles don’t experience “proper” racism is, sadly, incorrect.

The "white passing" thing is interesting. For some people, I think white is just so much the default that they just don't notice the evidence of other ethnicities unless it's really, really obvious. Others are much more aware and identify mixed heritage quite easily.

I think it can sometimes be overridden by other 'signifiers'. I was at University with a girl who was half Indonesian, but I didn't realise until I saw her with her mum, and I could see the resemblance easily. She had wavy light brown hair, very pale skin and freckles, and a very strong Glaswegian accent. My brain just skipped over some of her more Indonesian facial features going "she's obviously Scottish and will burn when the sun comes out!". If I'd met her in Indonesia speaking Malay, I might have picked up on facial features but thought "I bet she has a European mum or dad".

A bit like (although the reverse I suppose) people being surprised that Ariana Grande isn't Hispanic, which I think is probably because if you're British, the first thing you think is "she's American". So then you base it partly on your knowledge of the population of that country — if she was from Devon, you might think something different.

(I'm sorry for those of you who've had comments about your children shouldn't be wearing national dress. I've had comments about "you're not really though are you?" which is annoying enough without adding race in.)

I hate the phrase "white passing".

My dd might sometimes be described as "white passing". At other times, particularly in summer, she is much more obviously mixed.

I always wonder about the implications of the phrase "white passing". Does that mean that she is "white failing" when people happen to notice the other half of her ethnic heritage? As if white is somehow the standard to meet, and if she is lucky, she might somehow scrape a pass?

I know paralysed I had to grit my teeth every time I wrote it! That and the connotation that “passing as” something isn’t the same as being something, even if you look like you are. Like a weird kind of racial gate keeping.

Some people are just not very well travelled or haven't experienced much diversity in their lives. And some of the comments I've received are pretty awful - why do I have such a wide jaw, why are my eyes so small, I could be a Chinky with eyes like that, my eyes are apparently also the "wrong" colour because they look black, apparently I've had cheek implants and plastic surgery and people wonder what I'd look like if I'd stayed natural. Oh and I have to get special Asian fit glasses and sunglasses at great expense because that isn't catered for here. My mother used to get turned down for jobs on the basis that they didn't think her English would be good enough, despite her being born here, and people used to frequently talk down to her and talk very slowly, as if not expecting her to understand. My grandmother was referred to as "a darkie".

But according to some posters on here, because my skin is pale, thats not as bad racism as I might experience if my skin was black. Some posters can't even understand that you can experience racism without your skin being dark, and deny that it happens, or that its some special kind of racism that doesn't matter so much, because its not really based on skin colour...I think what they mean is that only people of African descent can experience racism, and the racism they experience is automatically much worse than the racism any other race experiences.

I was really, really upset by Corona's constant repetition of the above, and yes, by all means debate a subject with different views, but what does repeating the same denials of experience that people have very kindly shared on here contribute to any debate? Thats just an excuse for repeating the same indirectly racist denials over and over again. I really felt like Corona was deliberately being disengenious with their constant claims "not to understand" and its hard to believe that people still think that way in 2021.

circles god those comments are awful, I’m so sorry you’ve have to hear that. I have no idea why people think it’s in any way acceptable to make comments like that to your face (even thinking them would be bad enough!) How do they justify being that ignorant and rude?

And what blows my mind is the fucking casualness of the comments - people who would not dare use racial slurs to some groups will say, like you’ve experienced, comments about eye shape, face shape, penis size (fucking pervs), do you eat dogs/cats. (Ds got this at school. His answer was to calmly get close to them and whisper “actually, I eat racists.”)

I remember a while back dh was on a bus with some older teenagers who were calling him “chinky chink” and making Kung fu noises and shouting “chop suey” He put up with it for a while getting angrier and angrier, then turned round and yelled “I’m Japanese, you dumb crackers!”

They probably won’t even have understood the difference, but it shut them up at least. Sadly for dh, it set off a pretty bad period of depression. The shits don’t even know what their words do

@wingsnthat

I never said my experiences needed to be at the ‘forefront of a conversation about race’, but my experiences are as valid as anyone else’s about racism? I am not in my opinion white passing, I have epicanthal folds on my eyes, I have very Japanese cheek bones, I just have lighter skin than some. Just because I’m not black or brown doesn’t mean I need to shut up and not talk about something that literally shaped my whole childhood. That’s why @CirclesWithinCircles reported your posts @Coronawireless because to suggest racism against lighter coloured people is lesser IS racist.

Jesus wept. That wasn’t even the point of this post. I was talking about people who decide that you are white because you have light coloured skin.

@paralysedbyinertia yes it’s a weird one. Why would I WANT to be white passing? Any more than I want to be Japanese passing? I’m both. I’m equally proud of both. It’s societies need to put people in a box I suppose.

@OwlBeThere are Japanese not white?