Bill Gates was in D.C. lobbying Congress to loosen immigration policy in order to provide American companies more access to overseas talent. This is one of the things that came out of that session:
Rep. Phil Gingrey (R-Ga.) expressed unease that "Asian and Indian names" increasingly dominate newspaper lists of top SAT scores in his Marietta district, and asked Gates whether "youngsters who look like me" - the congressman is white - might find the influx of skilled foreign workers to be a deterrent in pursuing careers in technology and engineering.
From angryasianman.com, who helps me stay angry. As he says in a separate post, "We're here. We're growing. Get over it."
4 comments:
Today I had a patient ask me if I was Chinese. I said that I was Korean. His reply was, "close enough"
Later on he apologized for mistakenly calling me Chinese since he knew "you all don't like each other anyways, right?" Then I told him my wife is Chinese.
I used to get really upset about things like this, and I still do, but not so much this time. I'm realizing that some people just do not know better or grew up in a different era or environment. His comments were not malicious, just ignorant.
Thank goodness I'm not Oriental...
How is that different from calling Black people Black or White people White? They have identities more specific than that, but no one makes a fuss about that.
I think that is totally different from calling Black people Black. Not sure what you're getting at.
I was referring to the way people classify the world around them in generalities, including race. The patient had a 1/5 chance of guessing DJ's ethnicity even if he was blindfolded, just by guessing Chinese. It's not wrong to be uninformed. To jump down someone's throat for that would be wrong.
The "close enough" was not what I was referring to. That comment was a refusal of the patient to acknowledge the difference between what DJ identifies himself as and how this person viewed DJ. That was just rude, as DJ made a distinction. It was important enough for him to mention. Maybe the patient didn't understand the difference, but he could have asked once he knew DJ was making a point to differentiate the two.
Hopefully I made my point clear enough. It's late. I have yet to pack for my trip to be culturally insensitive to the people of Taiwan.
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