With rumors of deportation and walls being designed to keep immigrants out, we’ve forgotten that the United States was founded by foreigners. This diversity is the quintessential reason why America is so unique.
A lot of people ask me where I'm from originally and I've been labeled with a myriad of ethnicities.
“Are you Columbian?”
“Persian?”
“Maybe Egyptian?
“Half Sicilian?”
“No, Armenian, like the Kardashians!”
Not quite—but good guesses. Having thick, dark hair, brown eyes and light skin that tans well immediately prompts people to assume you're not from Kansas.
I was born in the US and I speak English fluently, but many people I worked with, the customers I’ve served, the job interviewers I’ve had always asked me where I’m really from.
Maybe it’s just a harmless question, a way of getting to know someone. Whatever those peoples’ intentions were, I used to get this nagging feeling that I was being separated from them. I interpreted it as their way of politely saying: “you’re not one of us.”
“You don’t belong.”
Having grown up and lived in the same town of predominantly white Jews, I knew lacking ‘gold’ ‘stein’ or ‘berg’ in my last name immediately gave me away. I didn’t see a division between me and them. We all worked too hard, signed up for too many extracurriculars and had tough parents who expected us to make it big.
It wasn’t until I got older that I realized our society is obsessed with categorizing people.
I had to fill out demographic questions many, many times for the SATs, job applications, random surveys and anything in between. But every time, my face gets red and my breathing kicks up a notch because I don’t know how to answer the race question.
There was White, Black, Asian/Pacific Islander and Other. There was no category for me, so I marked myself as ‘other.’
I didn’t like how that looked. I felt like I was cheating the question by marking the default category and thus failing to properly represent my lineage properly.
According to my American Studies class from freshman year, ‘Middle Eastern’ is counted as ‘White.’ But that sounded even more inaccurate. It felt like all the color in me, the Farsi my family speaks, the chai they drink, the colorful hand-sewn carpets in our home was all gone.
And then I went to Florence.
Italy was the first place I ever traveled to in Europe. It was the first place where most people greeted me in the native language when I entered restaurants, went shopping and stood at the bus stop.
But even in Italy, I was always asked about my heritage. The owners of my favorite pizza shop (O'Scugnizzo's) in central Florence sensed I was foreign.
It was then that I realized identity is fluid. If we all took an ancestry test, we’d probably find a number of similarities and far too many ethnicities within us to be able to label ourselves as one.
So embrace the diversity, learn from the different cultures around you and educate yourself. Ignorance will only divide and conquer us.
