Don’t deny it: stereotypes exist at UCLA
I didn’t want to be weird and different, but just like everyone
else. I did not appreciate who I was at all and tried to
forget.
By Shari Missaghi
When I was in elementary school and we took the national
scantron CTBS tests, it asked us to bubble in our race.
Naturally since Iran is in Asia, I bubbled in Asian/Pacific
Islander. I was still blind to the concept of race and was simply
filling in the geographical location of my origin.
In the fifth grade, my friend Rachel wanted to show me on the
globe where she was born, but she didn’t know geography. So she
asked me to first point out on the globe where I was from. I
pointed to Tehran, Iran. And then she pointed to the most
Northeastern point of the continent I had pointed to. So I said,
"Wow! You’re from Siberia?" She answered "No. That’s New York."
I countered with a 180 degree turn of the globe. "No, Rachel,
New York is over here. See, it says NEW YORK." I was growing rather
frustrated with her, and when she said, "But aren’t you from
Mexico?" I was about to explode. Obviously, her ignorance had led
her to believe that just because I had dark hair and dark eyes, I
was the stereotype of what she believed to be the only people with
dark hair and dark eyes.
Rachel’s negative tone, along with the even more dissenting
portrayal by the media began to confuse me. The media was always
showing border patrols hunting people down and sending them back
south of the border. I couldn’t quite understand what was going on
and why the media blamed problems of overpopulation and such on the
people they coined "illegal aliens."
I began to hate who I was.
I tore up the certificate I had received in Kindergarten
English- learning summer school. I didn’t want to be weird and
different, but just like everyone else. I did not appreciate who I
was at all and tried to forget.
Even though I wasn’t "illegal" I was still an "alien," and I
didn’t want to be. I asked my mother, "so why don’t ‘they’ just go
back to where they came from?" My mother’s eyes grew fierce as she
looked into my black eyes with hers, and said in Persian, "Why
don’t you go back to where you came from?"
It then clicked in. Why should I have the right to be here more
than people from other nations, just because the bureaucratic
government decided that I had political asylum and other people
were just plainly "illegal?"
It wasn’t fair. People with far worse conditions in their native
lands than I could not seek refuge in the United States.
It seems that the people in their high-and-mighty chairs in the
government seem to forget that their ancestors, too, came to the
New World hoping to find a place were they would not be persecuted
for their religious affiliations.
Flash forward  junior high. Knowing that there were lots
of people as ignorant about geography and identity, and discovering
my love of learning more about various cultures I became a very
anxious student in my Lands and Peoples class in seventh grade. I
even joined the Geography Club. This may sound quite nerdy to most
of you, but my friends and I loved it, and it was a pretty popular
thing in my school. The best two years of my life were in the sixth
and seventh grades.
Then a horrible thing happened. My family moved the summer
before the eighth grade to a homogeneously white, upper-middle
class, Jewish neighborhood.
Yes, I was Jewish, but I was not European white and by no means
had as much money as many of the kids in my school. All the kids
looked the same (5 feet, 4 inches tall, light-brown curly hair,
blue-green eyes, a slight tan and designer clothes), they all
talked the same (like, ooh my God!) and I think a lot of them were
even cousins or something.
I did not fit in and I did not want to.
I had a very disillusioned sense of my own identity and became
quite self-conscious. I missed my old school and neighborhood where
everyone was different, and where that’s what everyone loved about
each other.
As time went on, I continued through high school with all these
people who talked the same and walked the same. I was by no means
happy, and I hoped college would be better.
But as I look around our campus I am disappointed in us. Here we
are, the most heterogeneous campus of a population in the world and
we still hang out in groups according to our races, nationalities
and cultures.
I don’t want to point fingers or anything, but just think about
the North Campus patio, the Kerckhoff patio, Bruin Walk, the greek
houses and south campus, and envision who you know to hang out in
uniracial groups there.
Missaghi is a sophomore majoring in history.