Do you even know how smart I am in another language?

"Do you even know how smart I am in Spanish?" 

Gloria is my favorite character in Modern Family, not just because she's funny but because she embodies what many of us, whose first language is not English, feel. I grew up speaking Cantonese and Mandarin with my immigrant parents and never felt embarrassed until I was told at school that my "English was weird."

Just like how Campoverdi, in her memoir, would duck down to "tie her shoelaces" when passing by her school to prevent others from seeing her in her abuelito's old car, I would have my popo (grandma in Chinese) drop me off at the school's back entrance to prevent others from talking to her. I was ashamed that my grandma couldn't speak English to communicate with my teachers and that my parents were always busy working seven days a week. On the other hand, other people's parents were in attendance, helping out at every school function.

Seeing how my family members who couldn't speak fluent English were less respected and struggled to get opportunities, I bought into the idea that achieving the "American Dream" required complete assimilation into American culture, that meant English fluency. From then on, I spoke English whenever possible, even though it isolated me from the rest of my family.

The better my English got, the worse my Cantonese and Mandarin got. The way words are pronounced and the tonal changes in Chinese are drastically different than in English. This drastic difference is true of the written languages too. So, by becoming more fluent in English, I became more and more detached from the Chinese language, my culture, my family, and my identity. For many first and onlys, this is a common struggle because it appears to us that the fastest way to progress in our society is to "play the game right". The end-goal is to be amongst the people who are successful socially and career-wise, so you imitate their way of being to make it easier to get there.

It wasn't until I got to college, an environment much more diverse than the community in which I was raised, that I realized the error in my thinking. Meeting people from different states, countries, and socioeconomic backgrounds helped me learn the value of what makes me different than others. Being multilingual is a blessing in many ways. 

Living in the dorms with two roommates and a packed floor during my first year of college, I had little privacy. However, I could speak privately to my family in Chinese without having to leave the room. In job interviews, I can leverage my ability to connect with certain communities in our primary language. At restaurants, I can connect to servers and show them my appreciation for their food. 

Through these experiences, I got in touch with my identity as a Chinese-American again. However, something that still stumps me to this day is how certain languages and accents are more respected and valued. Despite a couple of my high school friends struggling with speaking broken English, they didn't face these same struggles. 

A recent conversation with a law school friend made me more curious about this accent and language preference phenomenon. We talked about how certain languages and accents have more positive connotations, like sounding more educated. For example, we have noticed that when someone speaks with a British accent, they are often perceived to be smarter or more attractive. When our friends spoke French, Italian, or other romance languages, their bilingualism was considered very admirable. 

Yet, I've been told in college to steer clear of certain professors with Indian accents, not because it's hard to understand the concepts they're teaching but because it's hard to understand what they're saying in general. This seems to be a common trend, not just in the United States. The stark differences in our experiences with those who speak in highly regarded accents or languages in American society are fascinating. I often hear about and see privilege in the context of being white, conventionally attractive, and wealthy, but I think this accent and language preference phenomenon is also notable.

I'm sure there are many underlying explanations, but what stands out most to me is that people like accents, languages, and people who are more similar to them, but just different enough. Certain accents and languages are associated with disadvantaged and low-prestige minority groups and are less "standard", and therefore viewed less positively. This makes them vulnerable to negative bias. For many first and onlys, this poses an additional challenge, along with all the other ones, to navigate.

Yet, we must not be discouraged because we need to remember that, despite our unique and different identities being a source of struggles, they're also what make us strong and resilient. They are what motivates our hard work. So even if others don't know how "smart we are in Spanish," it doesn't matter because we, ourselves, know our capabilities. 

A new conceptualization of whiteness

Since I came to some sort of consciousness about race and the prevalence of it, whiteness has been a topic that consumed much of my teenage years and young adulthood. Having grown up in Chandler, Arizona surrounded by white peers and subjected to copious amounts of bullying for my very non-white appearance, I grew resentful of white people and the privileges that were afforded to them for simply being white. 

The white girls at my school always had the most friends, the best clothes, and an abundance of attention. My social capital paled (no pun intended!) in comparison and I was deemed a loser for all intents and purposes. I took every step a child could take to assimilate into white culture and have my appearance reflect that. 

I shaved my arms behind my mother's back and tried to clumsily tweeze my eyebrows. I asked my mom for Victoria Secret leggings and Uggs because it was what all the white girls that mocked me wore. I was so angered by the fact that no matter what I did to make myself look "prettier" I never got the attention that the white girls did. As Dagmar Myslinska wrote in Contemporary First-Generation European Americans: The Unbearable "Whiteness" of Being:

I consciously tried to 'Americanize' myself. I avoided or, at least, felt ambivalent about  having ties to other polish immigrants, and I prided myself on being more American than most of them. In fact, I took it to be a sign of my acculturation when I was able to  spot less assimilated immigrants by their hairstyles, modes of dress, and body language that set them apart as being fresh-off-the-boat.  

(Mylinska, 2014). 

Now you might be wondering why I referenced a white woman's words when speaking about assimilating into whiteness. The point I am trying to make is that the particular brand of whiteness I was aspiring to was unachievable, even for some white people. It was a unique brand of white suburban American whiteness that one could only be born into.

After many years of struggling with my identity, I chose to take college classes focused on critical race theory. They helped me to conceptualize whiteness––what it meant and, why it mattered, and how it related to why I was the target for relentless bullying throughout my childhood. While whiteness is a social construct, the meaning we gave to it as individuals is what allowed it to have detrimental effects on people of color, and at times, white people (take for example Myslinska's piece).

I went out in to the world uncomfortably aware of my non-white self. This was exacerbated by the fact that in the upper middle class suburb of Chandler, Arizona, where I lived, white people were everywhere. And they were not exactly friendly. 

So much of that changed, however, when I moved to Davis and started law school.

Here in Davis I immediately took note of the diversity. Maybe diversity isn't even the right word for it due to the small population of Black and Hispanic students here. Nevertheless, what I saw was an absence of overpowering whiteness. 

Whites make up about 60 percent of the Davis population. While white people remain a majority, what made it seem like the white population was so much smaller was the population of Asian people, accounting for 23 percent of this university town's population. I saw many more people that looked like me and shared my culture. I felt immensely comforted by that.

However, whiteness has a way of working its way into spaces. I recognized that there was a distinct pattern in who spoke up the most in class and whose group of friends felt the most exclusive. In Davis, while there was no outright displays of micro/macro aggressions like there were back home, in Chandler, I still saw how white people navigated their whiteness, albeit in a different way. It just took me a little bit longer to recognize that. 

It seemed like because the white people here were "leftists," that absolved them of any harm they could inflict with their identity, with their skin color. Maybe they thought the space they took up was inconsequential because they were self aware and were doing work to undo the effects of whiteness.

Unfortunately, resisting the toxicity of whiteness is never that simple. As much as I genuinely find the environment here preferable to what I experience in Arizona, there is much work to be done to prevent the isolation of people of color. As Camille Gear Rich writes in Marginal Whiteness, 

whites are generally aware that being white provides them with certain 'statistical advantages,' and potentially with cultural capital; yet they do not perceive how these advantages assist them on a day-to-day basis.

(Rich, 2010).

I have no answer for how to go about solving the issues that whiteness presents. In all honesty, I don't think there is one. 

Why are we so poor? Working-class whites, capitalism, and racial scapegoating

These past couple weeks we discussed whiteness, specifically the complication of experience that arises from racial advantage but economic disadvantage. This quote from Sarah Smarsh’s Heartland really stuck with me: “If a person could go to work every day and still not be able to pay the bills and the reason wasn’t racism, what less articulated problem was afoot?”

To a lot of working-class white people, especially Republicans, ascertaining the answer to this question can be difficult. If there is no structural oppression preventing them from reaching class privilege, maybe the issue lies with them personally. Facing this is difficult, scapegoating minorities and political opponents is easy. I believe the complexity of this exact question has informed and supported the recent wave of Trumpism we have seen across the U.S.

However, to me, the answer to Smarsh’s question is extremely simple: capitalism is to blame. These white Americans are mistaken if they think there is not a structure oppressing them—because there is. Capitalism is keeps poor people of all races from reaching class privilege. So what is preventing white working-class Americans from recognizing this fact?

I’ll begin with an anecdote: a conversation I had with my Trump supporting, working-class, white cousin. Back in 2016, he was explaining to me why he was voting for Donald Trump. His biggest complaint with the past years was Obamacare, specifically the requirement that he have and pay for healthcare insurance. In his view, he would rather not have healthcare than pay for it, and he was upset that government was making the decision for him.

I guess I could kind of understand his perspective. If he really can’t afford it, why should he be forced to pay for it against his will? But then again how can anyone be comfortable living without healthcare insurance? (Note: my cousin has since gone to the hospital for a snake bite, so he should be thankful that Obama forced him to pay for insurance; otherwise, his out-of-pocket costs would have been enormous).

What astounded me most from that conversation, however, was the way my cousin accepted such a tradeoff as normal. He didn’t question what kind of society would force you to choose between going bankrupt and being able to take care of one’s health. For him, it was all about the way the choice was made for him; he didn’t even that he had only two choices and why that was.

This was the same cousin who loves to blame almost all his problems on Democrats and illegal immigrants. If Democrats weren’t letting the illegal immigrants come here, take our jobs, and freeride off our welfare, well then he would probably be able to afford healthcare, he said. He was sure this was the case, but I was not so convinced.

I asked my cousin what was preventing him from supporting someone like Bernie Sanders, whose plan would not raise taxes for him, but would provide him free healthcare. His response was immediate and visceral. He dismissed it with “well that’s socialism, so it’s bad.”

The limitations of his worldview are not uncommon among working-class whites. It is the product of years of the Red Scare and Cold War propaganda to create an emotional and uncompromising hatred of socialism. If working-class whites, the largest demographic in this country, were to figure out that capitalism was causing their problems, the wealth elite could be overthrown, losing their money and power.

To distract working class whites from capitalism, conservative propagandists employed racial division and scapegoating. For a lot of the current generations, this resulted from the Southern Strategy, a tactic by notable conservatives such as Ronald Reagan and Richard Nixon that focused on increasing white support for Republicans by appealing to racism against black Americans. Through coded language and dog-whistle politics (such as “law and order” or wanting to preserve “safe neighborhoods”), Republicans were incredibly successful at exploiting racial polarization to win elections.

Donald Trump revived this strategy. He has openly admired Richard Nixon and one of his main platforms was to restore “law and order” to American suburbs. This, coupled with his racist comments about Mexican immigrants, is clear indication of how Trump employs racial scapegoating to galvanize his support base, largely white working-class Americans.

In my opinion, this tactic is so successful because of the way it divides the lower class and blinds working-class white Americans from the actual root cause of their economic disadvantage. It gives them something else to blame besides themselves or their own work ethic. Truly, structural disadvantage is easier to stomach if you can blame it on evil people you refuse to understand like Democrats, Black people, and illegal immigrants (who are stealing our jobs and freeriding off our welfare!).

The reality of this is disheartening and contributes to an incredibly polarized society. However, I have reason to be optimistic. For one, Donald Trump was one of the least popular presidents in history. Additionally, support for socialism among young people is higher than ever, even rivaling the support of capitalism.