The Architecture of Inequality

As I grew up in the United States, I've experienced many stereotypes about who I am. Throughout my middle and high school years, a lot of people I didn't know, including my Caucasion friends would ask me if I was Chinese. Interesting how most would stereotype me to one race rather than asking me what race I was. Although I was offended the first few times about it, I felt annoyed and soon started to ask myself how I would approach someone who was of different race and came down to the conclusion that I would be as curious as they were, however, I would address the question in a different manner rather than stereotyping them. As I matured and looked back on the experiences I went through with stereotypes, I also started to understand more why people thought I was Chinese. The two races had common biological traits, such as skin color, texture of hair, and shape of eyes. As quoted from David M. Newman, I didn't take the steretypes as offensive anymore unless it was intentionally from someone and if I felt a sense of uncomfortableness, then I would call them out on it.



The two photo's above are pictures of Gao Kalia Yang who is Hmong (left) and Ruby Lin who is Chinese (right), they both may have different ethnicities which is a sense of community derived from the cultural heritage shared by a category of people with common ancestry, however they share the same race.

Furthermore, growing up with the stereotypes of my race and ethnicity, I am encouraged to stand up for who I am and proudly explain to those who are willing to learn what and who the Hmong people are when others ask. When I first moved in to my dorm at Hamline, one of my roommates first question to me was, "What ethnicity/race are you?" and I answered back saying that I was Hmong. Even up to today, I am still in the process of teaching/explaining to my roommates who I am and what kind of family I grew up from. She told me one day that she thought all Hmong people were Bboy's and Bgirl's who likes to break dance since she came from a society where her Hmong friends were really into break dancing. After hearing that, I laughed and told her "not all Hmong people likes to break dance just because they did." I told her that I did a lot of different things besides dancing, such as knitting/crocheting, playing sports, singing, reading a book, hanging out with my friends and etc. She soon came to realize that we both had a lot more in common than she realized, although we both may view it or go by a situation differently, we were both about the same.