After Donald Trump told journalists on Wednesday that his presidential opponent Kamala Harris “turned Black” for political gain, Trump’s comments have impacted the way many multirace voters are thinking about the two candidates.
“She was only promoting Indian heritage,” the former president said during an interview at the National Association of Black Journalists convention last week. “I didn’t know she was Black until a number of years ago, when she happened to turn Black, and now she wants to be known as Black.”
“Is she Indian or is she Black?” he asked.
She’s both.
Harris, whose mother was Indian and her father is Jamaican, would make history if she is elected president. She would be both the first female president and the first Asian American president.
Multiracial American voters say they have heard similar derogatory remarks about their identities their whole lives. Some identify with Harris’ politics more than others but, overall, they told NBC News that Trump’s comments will not go unnoticed.
Multiracial American voters say they have heard similar derogatory remarks about their identities their whole lives.
half asian here. from childhood onward, i get asked “where are you from,” and by the look on their face they’re not satisfied with “tennessee” because obviously you can’t be from anywhere in the states if you’re less than 100% white. so anytime someone says “where are you from” what i hear is “what chingchong chinaman land are you”
Honest question here. It’s something I avoid asking most of the time because I’m not sure whether or not it’s appropriate, but would it be okay to ask, “where did your ancestors come from,” or would that still be offensive to a multiracial person? It’s not something that comes up regularly or anything, but occasionally I’ll end up in conversation with someone who is multiracial and clearly another American and I’ll think, “I wonder what their family story is? How did their predecessors get here? Where did they come from?” But I usually don’t ask because I don’t want to offend them.
Obviously I wouldn’t just walk up to a stranger and ask them, I mean if I’m getting to know someone.
Edit: I should add that I’m white, but my family history is pretty weird, so I do like to hear about others’ history regardless of their race, I just don’t want to broach the subject where it might be a sensitive one.
i can’t speak for all multiracial people (or anyone else for that matter). but personally any question that doesn’t pretend to be something other than it is is fine. if the thing you want to know is someone’s ancestry or ethnic background, then don’t ask “where are you from.” that’s all.
also, still not speaking for anyone else, but i’ve gotten pretty numb to people being racist towards me, because i decided that if someone’s going to judge people by their race (or anything else they didn’t choose for themself), then there’s no reason to care what they think anyway. though i will mock and ridicule racists for the sake of others who experience suffering from racism. especially kids.
Thanks for the answer, and I’m sorry you’ve become numb to the racism. It sucks that there’s even a reason to feel a need to be.
Really, the only two times I could imagine asking someone where they were from no matter what they looked like is if they had an especially weird accent, and I would probably precede it with, “you have an interesting accent,” or if I found out we were both from the same state, so I’d be asking them where in the state. Otherwise, it’s kind of a stupid question to ask of anyone most of the time, at least in the U.S., even if you aren’t trying to be a bigot.
So, from your answer the question “Are you from around here?” would be fine or would it sound to close to “where are you from?” ? I’ve had similar thoughts about ancestry as to @FlyingSquid, but don’t ask. Usually best not to ask if there is a high chance of offending someone.
Honestly don’t like terms like “black-Americans”, "asian-Americans or “mexican-Americans”. I rarely here “white-Americans”, they are just Americans. Feels like a way to segregate verbally.
As a full Asian, asking “What’s your ethnic background?” is far better than “where are you from?”
It’s so fucking annoying when people ask me “where are you from?” Because I’ll answer “Oh, I live just a few miles away.” And then they go, “no, I mean where are you really from?” And then I’ll answer, “I’m from a few miles away you fucking racist.”
Btw, at a funeral I got this line of questioning one too many times and actually said that.
It’s also contextual. Asking this after a few beers and some light conversation, asking about my background is cool. But it being the first or second question makes it weird.
Thanks for asking FlyingSquid.
“Oh, I live just a few miles away.” And then they go, “no, I mean where are you really from?” And then I’ll answer, “I’m from a few miles away you fucking racist.”
Amen to that! As your South Asian brother I feel exactly the same, and do the same, just without the cursing.
So, @FlyingSquid@lemmy.world, if you ask me where I’m from, accept the first answer. If you want to know my ethnicity, you can ask that. Or you can just take your time getting to know me and I might share how I identify ethnically on my own when it makes sense in our relationship.
I’ve gotten “dude, what the fuck are you?!” you before, which I thought was a hilarious way to breach the subject.
I’m tall, had very long (black) hair at the time and had a dark tan. I could pass as part native, black, Hispanic, Asian, pretty much anything.
It was a fair question.
Assuming the context is appropriate I think an acceptable way to ask is “what’s your heritage” - imo the important thing is not to sound like you’re assuming they’re a foreigner just because their ethnicity / appearance. I think asking about someone’s family story or where their family is from is also a good way to ask because it’s clear you’re asking about their family and not assuming that it has bearing on the person’s upbringing.
It also can be really confusing when you’re a mixed and natural born citizen and you have no idea if “where are you from” is just smalltalk and they want to know where you grew up or if they’re assuming based on your appearance that you immigrated and assuming that the answers to “where did you grow up” and “where are your ancestors from” are 1 and the same. So personally I like when people are more specific because when asked where I’m from I’m just going to ask if they mean where I grew up or where my parents are from.
I would definitely make it clear I was asking about their family history, not them personally. I told the other person who replied that the only two times I could envision asking someone where they were from were if they had an unusual accent or if I found out we were both from the same state. I just didn’t know if it would be touching upon a sensitive topic that they get asked about way too much and it’s just not something that should be broached until you know someone pretty well.
My personal fall back to get others to open up in any type of conversation is to start talking about food. Comfort food, junk food, family recipes/traditions; it’s all good because people can’t help but share when it comes to food. I’ve learned so much about different cultures and some damn good recipes just talking about food with everyone.
Yeah, that’s how I wound up mistakenly assuming my girlfriend was Latina for our first year together. Nah turns out she was just a white lady of Mediterranean descent who was raised alongside a bunch of migrant farm workers in Tennessee and so she finds Mexican culture comfortable and grew up with a ton of Spanish.
And I’m not saying that as a bad thing. I didn’t call her Latina because she didn’t and I just asked when she started getting into genealogy and talking about her ancestors. As far as I’m concerned the fact that she likes to decorate her home like a tacky taqueria and that she speaks Spanish when she’s too drunk are far more important than her ethnicity
It’s different for everyone. For me, I don’t like it when strangers ask so I don’t ask when I’m the one who is curious. If it’s friends or someone getting to know me, it doesn’t matter how it’s asked. I do not mind. If I’m handing you a beer and say " that’ll be x dollars." And you respond by asking where I’m from, it bothers me. It’s the difference between getting to know someone and trying to fit them in a box. I get that sometimes people are curious but not every curiosity has to be satisfied. When I tell them that I’m from US it’s common to be followed by “fine! Where are your parents from?” That’s just weird. I’d never approach a stranger and ask about their parents.
Yeah, sorry, I meant when getting to know someone not just asking a random stranger. I didn’t know if it was something I should hold off on until I knew them really well.
but would it be okay to ask, “where did your ancestors come from,”
I’d suggest it would be best if someone’s racial background wasn’t made to be an important part of the conversation at all.
At least not unless it happens to have some relevance like in relation to places they have personally experienced or languages they speak or something like that.
Where a person’s grandparents came from isn’t (or shouldn’t be) a big deal compared to most other things about that person.
It isn’t a big deal, but family histories really interest me and I guess I’m trying to find a way to ask a multiracial person about their family history without trying to make it sound like it’s about race.
Like I said to someone else, it’s much more informative to know that Kamala Harris’ father was not just black, but Jamaican. But if you do want to introduce race as well, it’s also more informative to know that he was also multiracial, having a parent who had a European parent. I think that can show you where a person comes from in the sense of what they consider their heritage to be. Which is not so much about race as it is about where people’s ancestors have lived in the past and what sort of cultures have been passed down through the generations.
Does that make sense?
I disagree with this. A person’s heritage can be important. Racists attitudes can grow out of not understand a person’s culture. of course, a person’s heritage can also NOT be important. People do lose connections to the homeland and this seems to be more common in America.
That seems to me to be almost as bad as “where are you from?” It’s not something white people are usually asked after all.
Half Asian here. At least in my experience, those questions don’t tend to come from a place of malice, just a genuine curiosity of ethnic background since they can’t figure it out by look.
Sure, there are some racists too. But I’ve had plenty of ambivalent conversations that start off that way. Beats starting a conversation on weather or other generic topics.
It may not come from malice but it sure makes them stupid when interactions like this is normal.
https://youtu.be/d_CaZ4EAexQ?si=ty9I1zv8isihm8nY
Also, not everybody is comfortable talking about that as a starter conversation.
Half Asian here and yeah I never assume someone’s coming from a bad place when they ask.
I hope people don’t become too afraid to ask where someone’s from in fear of looking racist or some dumb shit. It’s natural to be curious and I’ve had people take guesses from Indian to India.
Meanwhile my wife is from overseas. But because she’s white, they’ll quite happily let her know about all their xenophobia and racism, because they think she’s one of them.
“Not you, you’re one of the good ones” is trotted out constantly among those who suddenly remember who they’re talking to.
because obviously you can’t be from anywhere in the states
try it with native american ancestory that is no longer native due to the pogroms in the 19th & 20th centuries; it doesn’t matter that we were here first, we truly can’t be from here anymore because nearly all of the ones who lived on this side of the border were genocided out of existence so now we have to get permission to live on the land we’ve been inhabiting for thousands of years.
the icing on this cake is pointing this out brands you a malcontent for doing so.
And then you also get a bunch of white people (like me until a few years ago) who think it’s a point of pride they are 1/16th Cherokee without realizing it likely means their great great grandmother was raped by a white guy. My great great grandparents were married, but I have no idea whether it was a forced marriage by him stealing her or if it was a love marriage.
i always felt that the cherokee great great grandma thing was a nicer/kinder american version of the mexican thing.
dna tests have confirmed beyond a shadow of a doubt that the european contribution to modern mexicans is extremely minimal and very concentrated in the few places where it becomes statistically significant enough to measure, but the popular cultural consensus minimizes native contribution; meaning that the great great grandma raping was at such a hugely pervasive scale that it literally created countries all throughout latin america full of people that have actively chosen to forget about all the great great grandma rape.
i used to think that it was a crazy one-off occurrence from a century ago and that any sane person today would never cooperate with that kind of groupthink in the modern day; but hearing people on lemmyverse and reddit minimizing an active genocide is merely a “privileged single issue voter perspective” and i think i’m starting to understand how that great great cherokee grandma story came into existence.
Most people who claim they are 1/16th or 1/32nd native are not at all. It is a very popular family myth. My mom told me that her mother said her great grandmother was native. I viewed that as possible since my grandmother was an orphan. I did 23andme and there is no native American. I also went through ancestry.com to build out my family tree and indeed there was no native American in there. The 60s and 70s were a period of growing acknowledgement of Native communities and I feel like that was kind of a way that people made it seem like they were at least nominally supportive.
Or it was just one of the batty things about my grandmother. Orphanages back then were simply work houses. You did school for a little bit and then went to work manufacturing. The discipline must have been pretty strict considering one of the teachers beat her so bad that she lost an eye.
That reminds me of the scene in Parks and Rec where someone asks where Tom Haverford (Aziz Ansari) is from. He responds Illinois. Then the person asks “but where are your parents from?” He responds “Georgia.”
I lived in Tennessee for a few years. I’ve never been greeted so many times with “do you speak English?” Sometimes I’d just be like “nah!” And walk away.
I really hate that racists have ruined a perfectly good question. I often want to actually ask people where in the US they’re from, but I can’t ask the straightforward “where are you from?” if the person isn’t white because I know it can easily be interpreted as the racist version.
Instead I now ask “are you from [city we’re in]?” to try to make it clear I’m assuming they’re from the US.
“You’ve got a bit of an accent where in the country are you from?”
“Are you originally from around here?”
And various other phrasings can take the racist edge off of it. It also helps avoid people answering that their family is Vietnamese when you really want to know that they’re from Dayton.
Good suggestions, and yeah if someone has an accent I’m trying to identify I’ll usually ask about the accent and region I think it’s from.
I still feel a slight ick from “originally.” And usually I’m talking with people from my general region and I’m really just asking what local town they grew up in, so it’s sometimes more “did you grow up in [current location, or area they’re talking about]?”
My grandmother on my mother’s side was Chinese-American. She and my grandfather met in Hawaii during WW2, and that’s where my mom was raised, so we observed a lot of Hawaiian and Chinese traditions when I was growing up.
My grandfather on my father’s side was raised Jewish by Romanian immigrants, but converted to Christianity, and my father eventually became an atheist. But we still occasionally celebrated certain Jewish holidays to honor his ancestors. My dad’s mother was the child of German immigrants. She taught me to make some delicious German treats.
For my part, I pass completely as white (I’m a super pale ginger). But I’m proud of all my heritage, and my whole life I’ve hated questions on forms that ask me to pick one. If there’s an “other” option or a “prefer not to answer” option, that’s what I pick.
Ancestry isn’t a box you check, it’s a story you tell.
I always take the opportunity to mess with people who ask me that question.
Where are you from? - (a city in the US).
Where did you move from. - (an other city in the US).
Where where you born. - (a city in Europe).
Uhhh… So uh… I mean… What’s the… <starts sweating about a politely way to say, “the not-white part”>
“where are you from?”
“Tennessee”
“No, I meant what country you originaly come from”
A conversation like that was front page news not so long ago.
“No, what part of Africa are you from?”
“I don’t know, they didn’t leave any records”
This is perfectly captured in the recent Civil War movie, the Jesse Plemons’ scene, “What kind of American are you?”.
I’m not American and don’t live there, but “where are you from” shouldn’t be offensive, unless you’re native American. Just normalize asking white people where they are from, too.
It’s because the question is weaponized. It makes the assumption that just because you don’t look like me that you can’t possibly be a “real” American. And asking the same in reverse doesn’t work, because white people in the US love saying where their ancestors are from.
My response is mostly a joke anyway. But how’s their originally being from somewhere else different from an Asian person’s originally being from somewhere else?
I asked the question to a mixed race Asian guy. Not because I care about what country half his family originally came from, but because he was the first Asian guy I met that had a deep southern accent.
Jesus people don’t even see how racist they are, pretty sad.
Hint - it was quite racist of you to ask that of somebody because they didn’t match your stereotypes.
Racist: characterized by or showing prejudice, discrimination, or antagonism against a person or people on the basis of their membership in a particular racial or ethnic group, typically one that is a minority or marginalized.
I was none of those things. I was genuinely interested in him simply because it’s not something I had run across before. It’s quite ignorant of you to assume my intentions or actions outside of that.
For example, the first time I heard an accent that sounded like my grandfather’s outside of visiting his family (my extended family) I asked where she was from because I was curious if it was near there. If someone says they’re from a state I have lived in I ask where from because we may have some common experiences.
But I guess since I’m a racist now I’ll never ask anyone again. I’ll just be who you have decided I am.
