Wednesday, June 29, 2005

Keep your hands off my heritage, part 1.

So, I'm half Korean and half Norwegian. And by "Norwegian" I do not mean white. Fairly white, but not 100% white. Norwegian in the sense that my Korean mother made codfish and lefse every Christmas dinner, after we had avvel skeevers for Christmas breakfast. I am half Korean in the sense that my mother came from Korea as an adult, about 30 years ago. What I do not mean is that I cling to some vague ideas about my ethnicity in order to feel all connected to my roots and show my "diversity" and all that shit. Fuck that. I am the purest bred half and half you can get.

I am uniquely qualified to be absolutely correct in making some comments about ethnicity.

First of all, I am sick of white people and their obsession with diversity/culture/heritage/ethnicity.

White people are white, Black people are black, Asian people are Asian, and then there are some people who kind of fall in between the traditional red and yellow, black and white categories. What this means is that if you are white, and you are living in the United States, no one cares that you are 1/512th Shawnee Indian. You are not a "mutt" with French, German, and Italian, and some Greek on your father's side. You are white. News flash, everyone in the US, with the exception of actual American Indians, came to this country within the last 200 years.

The new Absolutely Correct rule is that if more than 50% of your family's life happened in the United States before 1900 and/or involves Europe, you are white, just white. Stop trying to be all ethnic. It is not remotely interesting and it pisses real ethnic people off.

Furthermore, stop honoring diversity. It's annoying. I hate going into Safeway (or wherever) and seeing these "We honor diversity" posters with a Black guy, Asian girl, and Hispanic guy on them, with about 100 white workers milling around. It's bullshit and it's vaguely insulting.

People are not diverse because the color of their skin is different and they eat spicy food. Furthermore, white people cannot make themselves more diverse by eating spicy food and getting kanji tattoos. Fucking gapers. Don't even get me started on anime.

I'm also fucking sick of people telling me how they shape their lives based on some vague attachment to their imagined cultural history. "Oh, the real FRENCH pronunciation of my last name is Bouquet, but it got changed when they came over." No, your family name is Bucket, and it's been that way for a hundred years. Stop trying to be so special. "Oh, I really love bratwurst, it's my German heritage." No it's not, it's sausage.

I'm half Korean and I don't drive a Hyundai. I drive a Volkswagen. A nice Nazi car from Germany, assembled in Mexico. My first name and last name are bland and boring and I have no compulsion to change them or explain them. I don't need to cling to something just because it vaguely corresponds to my "roots" and neither should you.

Just be white. Get your identity from your actual personality, if you have one. If you don't, try to make one up, preferably without looking to a pop star for inspiration. All this standing around trying to be something you're not makes you into that kid who hung around outside the group of cool people in highschool, basking in reflected glory.

Things people say that piss me off.

irregardless.

This should be self-explanatory. The definition of this "word" is regardless. So, why add "ir-" to the front, other than to sound stupid? The irony is that the same people who will go to all this additional trouble to add useless letters to a word cannot be bothered to type "yo" in front of "u." For the people in my life who use this word, I treasure your friendship. Oh wait, no I don't. And I'm absolutely correct.