Substack cometh, and lo it is good. (Pricing)

On being foreign

When I was a child during the early to mid 1980s about once a week someone would ask me where I was from, or, would compliment me on my English. Since I had only recently arrived from Bangladesh I would tell them I was from that land and as for the compliment directed toward my language skills I took it as just that. Over the past 20 some years there has been a noticeable drop in the number of these events, roughly declining in frequency as a proportion of the time from 1980 or so. I would offer that over the past year I’ve been complimented on my English perhaps on average once every 4 or 5 months (when I say people would say I spoke good English once a week in the early 1980s, I’m really not exaggerating much). I’m asked where I’m from a bit more frequently than that, but people don’t inquire much after I simply state that my parents are from Bangladesh (since the vast majority of my life has been spent in the United States I don’t feel comfortable saying I’m from Bangladesh, and questioners generally are just disoriented when I say I’m from Oregon).


But, there’s another dynamic at work here: the likelihood that someone will compliment me on my English or ask where I’m from increases as a direct function of age. That is, it is invariably older people who ask these sorts of questions. Baby Boomers often ask who have some knowledge of India, and quite often they get uncomfortable after blurting out the question, suggesting there is now a heightened sensitivity to the possibility that just because you “look foreign” doesn’t mean you are foreign. People who are from the World War II generation though are still very unselfconscious about their compliments and questions, suggesting that they haven’t shifted their thinking much. In contrast, is very rare that someone my own age or younger will ask these questions (when it they do they often get really uncomfortable right afterward, suggesting they know they shouldn’t have asked the question in the first place).
Part of this is likely greater sensitivity toward such intrusive questions which imply that an American has to look a certain way, but, I suspect that part of it is due to the fact that the average look of an American has diversified such a great deal over the past generation. Since 1980 the number of South Asians in the USA has increased by a multiplicative factor of 5. Additionally, a far larger proportion speak “good English” (that is, without a South Asian accent) now than in 1980, and a substantial number of younger Americans are now familiar with a brown face in their classrooms so that we don’t seem quite as foreign. When I say people from the World War II generation tend to simply reflect assumptions that I’m foreign, I’m not saying here the “racist” types at all, generally more progressive & liberal sorts also reflexively project these assumptions (context: I live in an area that is more than 90% white and where 80% voted for John Kerry in 2004). I think this isn’t necessarily a conscious process at all, rather, when they were growing up the image of an American was fundamentally either non-Hispanic white or black. If the human mind is a conditional probability engine which biases inputs from one’s formative years then it makes sense that these individuals who don’t necessarily have any antipathy to a multiracial, as opposed to biracial, America, still reflect the conditions of their youth in their verbal ticks.
Addendum: No need to offer sympathy for the occasional queries and compliments I get in my life regarding my exotic foreign origins, it is really just an irritation. I’m pretty privileged in many ways.

Posted in Uncategorized

Comments are closed.