I'm WHITE!

"You're Chinese. You're white!!!" Ashake yelled at me like I made no sense. I wondered if she pitied me for not understanding my own identity.

"How do you know?"

"Look-- They are Chinese," she pointed at a few Chinese boys hanging out across the yard, "and you look just like them. You're white!"

"But what is white?"

A Cambodian middle-schooler chimed in, "Their skin. You know based on their skin."


Ashake and Jason continued to chat. So I left the conversation there. "I am white?" I asked myself. Did she mean it in the "honorary white," "model minority" sense? If she did, what experiences taught her this? Shit, does she and the other black and Latino students see me as white? What do I do as a "white" teacher? Later, I decided maybe she meant that literally my skin can be compared to white Europeans' skin tone. If so, both Jason and her have a strong grasp of what is whiteness, at its basic level. They reminded ME of that.

Nothing like a conversation with middle-schoolers to remind you that you don't what you studied for 4 years and you don't even know yourself.