America’s perception of Race and Nationality

Posted by Uncle Dan on July 11th, 2008 | Categorized as General Forum | 701 views and 51 Comments

Another post made me think about this, and it also brought me back to a short exchange that Priyanka and I had. I was trying to get her to come to Zürich on her impending trip to Europe, pulling out the Street Parade (www.streetparade.ch) as a further encouragement. She went to the website, saw the photos, and said “Wow, that’s a lot of white people.”

To anywhere here in Europe, that sounds really, really silly. Having been in the US though, I understand where it’s coming from.

As was mentioned in the other thread, Europe, parts of the Middle East, and East Asia (probably Africa too, but I really don’t know) are pretty adept at dealing with different nationalities (and therefore cultures) because so many pass through all the time. Europe has had a long history of treating each other pretty differently based on nationality (and to some extent ethnicity and religion). Asia is just Asia, and… yeah, you get the point. There are still clashes of course, but often based on nationality (German and Dutch football fans, anyone?).

But if a bunch of Europeans go to the US or Canada, they become “White” or, sometimes, “European.” Sometimes their real culture gets highlighted. I’m betting that French and Germans are pretty recognized. Take the Spanish however, for example. Americans are so used to anyone speaking Spanish as a native tongue to be “Hispanic” that they have a pretty slanted idea of what Spanish culture is, not to mention whatever main characteristics they might have.

So when Priyanka said “Look at all the white people” she really didn’t realize that in that big crowd were Swiss, Germans, French, Italians, Bulgarians, Russians, Croatians, Brazilians, Portuguese, Spanish, Turks, Arabs, Greeks, English, Irish and whatever else. Take all of these different cultures, plant them somewhere in the US, and they become “White people” and, to people who can discern as much, “Brown people.”

It’s possible that this is a good thing, in that the culture of the US manages to dissolve all these national differences to mix people up and divide them again into bigger chunks of “Asians, Black people, Hispanics and White people,” but I don’t like it. The individual cultures get lost.

So why does this happen? Well, thinking out loud, for one, the US (and Canada, for that matter, being pretty similar) are very, very big countries. It’s understandable that the majority of people often haven’t had to tackle with the complexities of 800 or more years of national rivalries. The other thing is immigration. When you get to a new, strange place, you bond with what’s similar, and sometimes the most similar thing you have is race, and so you start to identify with that, rather than what came before. This is probably intimately familiar to TCKs who would’ve observed it on a smaller scale: A new kid comes to school, finds no one of the same nationality… but race, that’s pretty close, right? Asians are closer to other Asians (most of the time) than they are to the average White American. So just expand it to country-scale. Immigrants, too, are often seeking a new life. Not all of them will want to hang onto older traditions. And as the family generations continue, their kids, now in cultural limbo, have little to hang onto for a sense of identity other than race. And considering the long, long importance of immigration, that’s not hard at all to imagine.

Anyway, I did want to throw that out there for discussion, and to write my thoughts down. It’s an interesting way to approach the difference between American perception and… well everyone else’s.

And don’t worry Priya, you’re still cool in my book. You’ve just lived there too long.

Daniel Nguyen-Phuoc

Vietnamese in ethnicity, born in Houston, Texas. Lived in Jakarta, Indonesia for 14 years while going to a British International School to finish with the International Baccalaureate. Survived only two years in the University of Michigan before ending up in Switzerland. Graduated from an international (and that's meant in every word) hospitality college. Interesting life, to be sure. But not the only one.