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As an enthusiastic sixth grader helping his parents out at their Chinese takeout restaurant, you’re confused-why are people making up lies about your food, about your culture? At eleven, you are beginning to connect the dots-understanding how your race and class define how your classmates and teachers view you. Whiteness is your mother, sleepy-eyed and sick, telling you to cancel the order that you helped her make because the customer thinks that her General Tso’s Chicken is made of dog. Nobody is embarrassed to speak to their grandmothers, in their native tongues, at the bus stop like you are. You may currently be a naïve elementary school student who cannot yet fully understand racial difference, but you are already beginning to realize it around you. Although you don’t understand it yet, your upbringing-in an eighty percent white town on middle-class, suburban Long Island-will shape how you view the world. You feel different hearing these stories, thinking about how you must eat alone, how you must wait for your parents to come home from work at 11pm every evening in order to first see them. It’s the feeling of inferiority that ignites every time your classmates share stories about their families-families that eat dinner together at 6pm every night, with dinner plates decorated with roast beef, steak, and peas.

#RUMPUS MAGAZINE YALE FULL#

It’s the collective stares that all the kids give you, the American kids who come from big, loving homes full of families who speak English, that make you feel like an animal in a zoo while they are the spectators. Whiteness is sitting on the bus at the age of six, on your way to kindergarten, and being called “that weird chink kid” from a fifth grader sitting in the back.

Rumpus magazine yale