So this video 'What Kind of Asian are You?" by David Neptune and Ken Tanaka has been making the rounds on Youtube recently and by far I find it is the best and most humorous portrayal of what I like to call 'Ignorant Racism'. By definition, its not intended to be racist, just in trying to appear non-racism, you actually achieve what you intended to avoid. In the video the racist, if you want to call him that, is attempting to come off as worldly, liberal and open to foreign cultures while failing to flirt with the woman, in fact his attempt comes off making him look completely ignorant and a total ass.
But this topic, while funny for some, is one that has been extensively researched by others. While its not common in many countries, it is one that has been creeping up in the increasingly politically correct and culturally liberal people of America, where our 'great melting pot' welcomes all cultures... as long as they don't exist outside our preconceived notions of what different ethnic groups should act or look like.
I seriously recommend all Americans take a read of the article, it can be a real kick in the pants to those that originally thought of themselves as liberal and open... its the reason why I actively try to avoid asking the question... "Where are you from?"
Take a few minutes to read it here, I'll wait.
Alsultany's pain, frustration and annoyance is a feeling I relate with all too commonly and worry about constantly. A worry that tends to creep up not in America where this trend predominately tends to occur more along racial lines than cultural and more out of unintended ignorance or honest confusion than any true malice or ill-intent. Instead it is in my second country, Ireland, where I feel at odds at what defines me as a true Irish citizen and as an unwanted outsider.
In Ireland, most especially in my family’s ancestral hometown of Bandon in the south, people can effortlessly identify me as Catholic due in part because of my appearance. To many it is confusing, how you can be identify by your religion based on your appearance? In this case I quickly point out what do you think a Muslim or a Buddhist looks like, and instantly they know what appearance to supply; skin colour, accent and all.
Yet in what many outsider’s view as a a racially homogeneous country such as Ireland, hundreds of years of cultural and ethnic mannerisms have been defined on only the slightest differences. To be Catholic is as simple as the shade of your hair or the colour of your eyes. I am moderately tall, thin verging on lanky, ice gray eyes, near cream skin that never seems to tan and blond hair. Most people would call these features Aryan in appearance but in Ireland this is the look of the southerner.
When I enter a restaurant they see my face and smile, chatting with me and asking a whole array of questions out of shear curiosity. Having an American accent but speaking in the native slang they quickly inquire how I have developed such combination. I speak like a native, have no problem understanding the accents and never once ask them to slow down when they talk. In fact quiet often I have to remind them that I am not just some American tourist and they don’t have to dumb down their conversations for my benefit. This ease I attribute to my mother who until the age of four was a native and a vast majority of my extended family still remains bound to the lifestyle of farming or shop keeping in the central regions of the island country.
Yet when they inquire for my name I can always see the flash on confusion and even hostility when I half-heartedly mutter my surname... I won't repeat it here, the anonymity rules apply...
"You're not Irish," one woman actually scolded me as if I was some stupid child. "You're a northerner."
I've never been to the north, as the south calls Northern Ireland. I don't know anyone in my family that has. In fact my grandmother regards the idea in the same realm as jumping off a cliff, to do so either means your insane, stupid, lost a bet or all the above.
Among the Irish, although it has officially and publicly dwindled in recent years, a general animosity between the southern Catholics of the Irish Republic and the Protestants of North Ireland, which is controlled by the United Kingdom. Many see them as traitors, foreign invaders, turncoats and secretly undermining Irish sovereignty. To the world at large this is preposterous but to the natives, it is a grave insult.
We call these thirty years of violence The Troubles and though its name sounds melodramatic, it lead to over 3,529 deaths, half of which were people caught in the crossfire as the Protestant North Irish battled it out with the militant Catholic North Irish.
Few would say it today but I know one or two elderly members of the community who still refer to the IRA as freedom fighters, even if our hometown of Bandon is as far south as you can go in Ireland, making it the furtherest from Northern Ireland and the conflict zone The Troubles created. There people had the luxury of loathing the North Irish Protestants without having to see the damage done by both sides, to understand that terrorism leaves no victim free of scars.
The Troubles are however and thankfully regarded with a shame by most of my hometown, but that only helps to temper the hate, a cautionary tale parents tell their children and then roll their eyes in exasperation as their elders begin to spout their almost visceral hate of the North. I'm sad to say that few bother to correct their elders, age always denotes seniority and wisdom in Irish culture, second only to the church in the power and faith it is given.
Maturity of body does not always guarantee maturity of mind and old wounds always fester when they are not addressed.
When I try to explain this relationship and inherited hate, I get a few odd glances from my friends who's countries were also former British colonies when I explain it was because of the British colonization of Ireland that lead to all this animosity and fighting. They don't seem to be able to comprehend the idea that we share a common history, that through my ancestors, the few stories that have survived and several large tomes of Irish history, I can understand how it feels to be a former colony violently trying to free itself from a foreign imperial power and feeling a sense of national failure when it legally can not. They see a white man, claiming to understand the plight of their ancestors who lived among the British colonies.
A few have actually reacted with anger or scoffing laughs that I'd even think I could ever relate to them on that topic.
Few realize that Ireland was the English's first colony, before the Americas, before Africa, before the concept of a round world was really drilled into the public mind and the colonies in Asia began to spring up.
Ireland was the first test bed for an overseas British territory... we were 'colonized' first... and that carries not an ounce of pride it in... but usually is spoken with anger.
The invading Protestants of the 16th century brutalized and mistreated the ancient Irish, who were almost entirely Catholic with a fair sprinkling of Pagans. These new arrivals disenfranchised the natives and turning their ancestral lands over to British colonists, called the Protestant Ascendancy, predominately from England but a few Scots among them. New laws were quickly enacted, baring land ownership to all Catholics and even Presbyterians.
These British colonists arrived in droves, the majority in the north, this would led to the eventual modern partition of Ireland into the Republic and North Ireland. They were more than happy to administer their new lands and the people that came with them, gleefully happy to civilize the natives, which meant working them on their farms as just a step above slaves, what you called in the contemporary world, serfs. The first act was to repress the Catholic faith, which in England at the time went against the teachings of Protestism and the faith of their most hated enemy, the Spanish. Spain attempted numerous times to conquer England in the name of their faith, leading to an inherent fear of Catholicism's spread in their country, even if it largely was misplaced. Spain was only trying to garner points with the Pope and Church, they were just plain greedy and trying to hide it with religious rhetoric... rhetoric that spawned angry prejudices in the English who saw the Irish as part of the Catholic fanaticism threatening their great country.
Sounds a bit familiar today, how a few bad apple Islamists can paint the entire faith as a danger to national security and sovereignty. Its one of the reasons I am very leery whenever organized religion springs up in politics, it is too often used to single out another minority and limit them in some form.
Anyone who know's an Irish man or woman knows one thing, we can be a stubborn people, we prefer to be left alone, almost verging on isolationist and we can take a lot of punishment before cracking... but never mess with an Irish person's faith unless you want that bloody nose...
Centuries of fighting, persecution and brutally crushed rebellions followed, coupled with the economic exploitation of Ireland's few natural resources. The English colonization radically changed the country. Most wouldn't realize it but Ireland use to be heavily wooded. The country is now the most deforested in the world, its forests used immensely by the arriving colonists for shipbuilding. The lose of those vast forests radically changed hundreds of years of Irish culture, who predominately were herders or isolated villagers.
Irish history is not something that can be looked at through rose coloured glasses, its something you have to read through with a strong stomach. The Great Famine of the 1840s, rebellions of 1803, 1848 and 1867, claims of neutrality during both World Wars, the Irish Civil War, the independence votes and trade wars of the 1930s only helped to cement some of these long standing beliefs, that a Protestant would sooner sell you out for a hot meal or stab you in the back if it got them ahead in life. While these tensions have dwindled in the more moderate and progressive regions of the country, such as the ever popular Irish city of Dublin, in my family's southern home of Bandon, those tensions are still unfortunately kept alive and prevalent.
And caught between that history of violence and hate, of clearly defined but unseen lines is someone like me. My surname is a predominately Protestant name, namely a Welsh and Northern Irish name, to have it labels you as a northern and as such, very much NOT Irish.
It gets even worse when I attempt to explain my patronage, my mother is Irish Catholic, my father is an America who was raised Protestant.
Like many bi-racial people face when having to declare their race or ethnicity on the US Census, one drop of Protestant blood automatically dilutes a long Irish Catholic family line that can be tracked back over 230-years. Great-Great-Granddad could possibly be spinning in his grave for knowing that his descendant, my mother... married a Protestant!
But it means nothing to many, they see me as just a North Irish, some of have even treated my attempts to convince them otherwise as a act of 'slumming' with the southerners.
Even if I was raised Catholic, went to a Catholic grade school, attended more masses then I care to count and read the Bible so many times I can see the words behind my eyelids, the mere mention of my surname is enough to sever me from the very heritage that makes me who I am.
It shames me to say that when given the choice to renew my citizenship papers and passport I instead took my mother's maiden name instead, a very common Catholic name that would cause far less confusion and annoyance for me in the long run. But to no end I feel like I have just put on a façade to hide myself from the constant annoyance of explaining myself, even more so from the anger of arguing my very right to call myself Irish in my own country.
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