"Shut your white ass up!" A student shouted across the room.

I looked around, bewildered at his profanity and statement. There wasn't a white person in the room, so instead of correcting him, I had to find out:

"Who are you talking to?" I asked him.

"You, Mr. Fan," he said.

At that point, I looked to him in confusion and astonishment. White? Me?

"You think I'm white?" I asked.

He replied in the affirmative. I asked the other students in the class if they thought I was white, and they also said yes. I tried to give a short lecture that I was yellow, and not white, and very different from white people. As an Asian-American growing up in a Chinese, low-income immigrant family, I grew up in very different circumstances than their white counterparts. I had to explain that kids in the school called me Jackie Chan and Bruce Lee, and how a lot of Asians find that limiting and insulting. I had to explain that the lack of representation of Asians in popular culture and film led to the thought process that automatically attributed an Asian man to Jackie Chan or Bruce Lee.

But my middle school kids told me there were only two skin tones in the world: white and black. I have heard my kids talking about Hispanic kids in the school, who they also referred to as white. While I made a dint in their knowledge of race, I had to think about the reality of the white-black binary in my school, in society.

I don't have a single non-black kid in my class. To my students, my race is invisible. The same kid that told me to "shut [my] white ass up!" told me that I was one of the only Asian people he's ever met. Other students told me the same.

For me, I wonder: where do I fit in the white-black binary of American culture? Is it an entirely bad thing that my students see me as white?

The answer is that, yes, it is bad that a white-black paradigm of race exists. According to Juan F. Perea in the California Law Review, that paradigm entirely omits the struggle of Mexican-Americans for desegregation, and leads to the further "marginalization of non-Black peoples of color."

All people of color have faced discrimination and prejudice, and the division between races seeks to further divide us in the common fight against racism. That's the ideology we're all aiming for, but how do we get there? How do I get my students to not see myself and their Hispanic students as "white"? How do I complicate their understanding of race in a world where there is only white, and only black?

The truth is that I don't see myself as white. I don't see myself as a white teacher, but as a teacher of color that can relate to my students in many shared experiences. However, my student telling me to "shut [my] white ass up!" was a reminder that my students don't see it the same way. To them, I was just another white teacher with a savior complex.

Maybe. The truth is that very little of our conversations and lessons revolve around race. Throughout my day, dealing with executing lessons and correcting behavioral issues with my students, I spend very little time thinking about race, mine or theirs. A part of me believes that viewing the educational experience through the lens of purely race will limit and reduce me as a teacher, as well as limit or reduce my kids' education.

But that doesn't mean it doesn't matter. My race has always been an important part of who I am, no matter how much I might deny it. I have always longed for more representation of Asians in film, which is part of the reason why I am such a fan of "Master of None" by Aziz Ansari.

Even those representations of Asians, however, neglect the role of Asians in the American inner-city. I have never seen a representation in media, or in my personal life, of an Asian adequately serving a troubled inner-city environment plagued by drug addiction, school segregation, poverty, and police violence. The limits to those representations and of the Asians I do see in those environments are invisible. Not only that, but often they choose to be.

You have to be inside an Asian family and understand the language to adequately understand the internalized racism that comes with many familial conversations. I have had family members tell me blatantly racist things, like what areas to avoid and why I shouldn't spend so much of my time around darker-skinned people. I have had other family members tell me to stop running because it would make me much darker.

I am only generalizing my own family and my own experiences, but the truth is that minorities can be very racist aganist other minorities. Interminority racism is a very big thing, as you can ask any person of Asian descent as to how their family talks about other Asians.

For many people, invisibility is a good thing. It means not getting involved in the larger conversation, not being pulled into a conversation that has long neglected us. But for me, as a teacher serving in an inner-city environment, teaching predominantly African-American kids, how do I stop from feeling out of place?

Where do I find my place in the narrative?

My kids and I will go through our daily struggles and ordeals as we always have. We'll learn, struggle productively, and interact together. I often lose the forest for the trees, and it's not likely that in the fight-or-flight environment that is an inner-city school that I'll think about the complexities or race, representation, and invisibility often.

But a part of me feels like my family's early days in the United States was invisible for a reason. My family chose to be invisible because that's how they survived. Any person with depression can tell you why the first instinct is often isolation and withdrawal, and perhaps that mental health reality is emblematic of the Asian-American experience. Right now, it's just not time to fit into a culturally mainstream, dominant conversation narrative about race.

I grew up in New York, and spent a lot of time in New York City. I was around many Asian communities and enclaves, especially in Flushing, that intentionally chose to be around people who looked, spoke, and thought like themselves. And right now that's just part of the human condition that we as a society have not transcended: we gravitate towards people who look are similar to us. It's natural that we choose to associate with people like ourselves.

But I believe that everyone has to be part of the narrative and conversation. How can you be an agent for change if you choose to be outside of the solution? How can we, as Asians, become a part of our local communities when those communities are seen as a binary?

I'll think about how my students see my race as invisible often in the future. I don't know what the answer is, but I know that this world is much more complex than just white and black, and I know that I can be an agent for change than to be invisible in the binary. It's a work in progress, and it might take a long time, but one day I believe that day will come, God willing.

For my students, I know it's not their faults. There's a white/black binary because that binary is a reality in their daily lives. If minorities harbor racial prejudices against other minorities, if people in my family harbor internalized racism against other minorities, and have anti-black prejudices, it means that I do, too. Just because my racism is implicit and internalized doesn't mean it's not there.

I think my students realize a lot of their souls. Part of why my race is invisible to them is because people of every other race might see them the same when they traverse the world. To them, perhaps there aren't many representations outside white people. Or perhaps it's because people of every other race treat them like white people. I don't know the answer, just like I don't know the solution.

All I know is that we press forward from here making our new world. It is unknown and uncharted. But it is exciting. To my students, my race is invisible. But seven months from now, in June? We'll see what we learn together.