I was fuming. Disregarding my two best friends’ attempts to alleviate my conniption with “I don’t think that was addressed to us” assurances, I unleashed a verbiage of explicit and absolutely disgraceful diction in my head.
Two boys had yelled, “Go back to Asia!” And their rancor rendered me disgusted, disturbed, dumbfounded and most of all, disappointed.
I was born in California, and I am an American, as is my entire family.
America is a country of immigrants and treasures cultural equality, while UCLA is a school that prides itself on its multifarious student body. But to some, our various ethnicities still serve as tragic demarcations between “us” and “them.”
In August 2008, the U.S. Census Bureau reported that America’s present ethnic minorities ““ East Asians, South Asians, blacks and Hispanics ““ would comprise the majority of the population by 2042. Such melange of “minority-majority” has already struck certain sectors of the United States, and the repercussions in those areas are resentment and retaliation directed towards nonwhites.
UCLA is such a community: Asians have displaced whites from the undergraduate plurality, outnumbering them by more than 1,000 students.
As a generation that embraces progress, where there is racial tension nationally, I (and hopefully most students) envision egalitarianism at UCLA. But interpreting ethnic amity as universally harmonious at this school is a noble delusion.
Racial exclusivity prevails in a myriad of student organizations at UCLA; the Korean American Student Association, Hermanos Unidos and Black Business Student Association are just a few.
Although these cultural clubs may welcome people of disparate nationalities, labeling a group with a specific ethnicity creates an impression of insiders versus outsiders.
“Whiteness” was once the pinnacle of being American. But such a divisive distinction elucidated above can seem threatening to strangers, potentially insinuating an abstinence from assimilating into stereotypical Americans while implying a propensity for the motherland and its accompanying norms.
Prior to the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s, immigrants aspired to emulate white America. But almost half a century later, racial distinctions cease to be buried and are very prevalent today.
Frankly, I sincerely believed I was above such ethnic labeling.
However, upon closer inspection, I realized that when illustrating a person to my friends and family, the foundation of our imagination starts with his or her skin color. The inclination proves that we primarily associate an individual with their cultural background.
But the epithet is a precarious one. A 2010 study done by a University of Chicago professor and child psychologist, Margaret Spencer, showed that American children continue to give more value to light skin color as opposed to dark skin color. A world of entitlement where white children fervently adhere to social stereotypes (much more strictly than black children) and racially related micro-aggression isn’t nonexistent.
Regardless, there is no doubt that America is starting to celebrate its ethnic affluence ““ the most obvious indicator being Barack Obama’s election as president.
But the gradual deterioration of whiteness as the requisite for being America’s poster child can be a foreboding and nerve-wracking experience ““ a sensation I can only imagine as “national dislocation.”
Laugh if you must, but the incident with the boys completely traumatized me. There is so much more to a person than their race: character, education and athleticism, among others.
Hopefully, one day, we will be able to overlook ethnic castes and treat every individual as a person.
_Think cultural clubs are counter-productive? E-mail Lee at
jlee@media.ucla.edu. Send general comments to
opinion@media.ucla.edu._