PSA: stop asking people where they're really from

In light of my last post--specifically, in reference to Leonard Nimoy's take on immigrant assimilation, code switching, etc.--I thought I'd tell you about speed dating last night.

First of all, I don't hate speed dating as much as one would think. It's actually pretty interesting, even if a little awkward. I still kind-of hate it, but I don't actually hate it. The previous round wasn't awful, and this time was even less awful. For example, nobody asked me whether vegans can breastfeed (in fact, veganism didn't come up at all). One guy was mildly intoxicated, but he was still able to hold a conversation--mind you, an annoying one. He asked me what I did for fun or where I went out; I said I'd recently seen "Sleepy Hollow" as a ballet and that it was meh. He kept on asking me why it failed, even though I kept reiterating that it didn't fail; it just wasn't a must-see. He asked me what my favorite three ballets were, and I couldn't really answer. In recent memory, "Dracula" was probably the best and "Alice in Wonderland" was very good. The conversation made me think about how (1) dudes often feel the need to quantify things and also to reduce them and (2) I don't think about ballet the way I do about theater. I can't really tell you why I loved "Dracula" and mildly enjoyed "Sleepy Hollow" but was glad I hadn't paid a lot of money for it, whereas I can definitely tell you why I loved "Bad Jews" and barely tolerated "iHo."

My assessment of that conversation is a microcosm of my assessment of speed dating: it's interesting and thought-provoking, but fruitless. I'm happy to have the thoughts provoked by the annoying, reductionist conversation, but I sure as hell wouldn't want to date someone who (1) insisted that I quantify or even rank things, particularly experiences and (2) continued to resist my attempts to reinfuse nuance into the discussion.

Another guy asked me where my accent was from. Of course I have an accent, in the way that everyone has an accent, but I don't have an accent in the sense that anyone I interact with on a regular basis would identify that accent as remarkable or foreign. So I asked him where he thought my accent was from, and he said the Ukraine. Because I speak from the back of the mouth. Which, linguistically/phonetically is bullshit. That was his seemingly inoffensive way of identifying me as foreign by appearance, and trying to legitimize his inquiry. Indeed, I'd thought earlier that day that I was looking ethnic (it doesn't take much; depends on how my hair falls, etc.). When I said I was from Boston, he said, "born and raised?" which was another way of saying, "no, where are you really from?" And we know how I feel about that.

Being white, I get this much less frequently than my Asian and Latina friends (I also have African American friends who are often assumed to be Caribbean, which is its own thing). Not only do I get it less, but I get it almost exclusively from a certain kind of people (and I get the opposite from another kind of people--those who can't believe I was born abroad, to foreign parents, because I'm white and foreign-accentless). The latter people can't fathom that there are ethnic, foreign-born white people all around that just don't fit their stereotypes of what ethnic, foreign-born people should be like. The former people--the "where are you really from" people--think they know something. They can tell by the way someone like me looks, that I'm ethnic, and they want me to know how discerning they are. Even when they do this to non-white people, they're often just trying to connect, in ham-handed ways (that random Korean person doesn't care that you like Korean food; although Ethiopians in the Afghan market do always remark on my buying injera).

I honestly don't quite know why I openly tell some people about my ethnic heritage (usually when it comes up in conversation) but so resent it when others try to pry it out of me. Is ethnicity a form of personal data, like income? Or is it public information (when it's not already clear)? I tend toward the 'personal data' because I don't want to deal with it, unless I do. I don't want to talk about it, unless I've ascertained that the person I'm talking to can handle it. I don't want to talk about it when the person I'm talking to is going to come out with, and continually insist on, some ignorant bullshit like, "your family must have been really well-connected to get out of the Soviet Union at the time." I got out the same way Julia Ioffe did:

In the last two decades of the Cold War, Jewish groups in America began to lobby actively for their brethren trapped inside a Soviet Union that both abused them and refused to let them leave. Washington smelled a geopolitical opportunity and railed against Moscow’s callous treatment of the Jews, starting with the Jackson-Vanik Amendment (1974), which applied trade sanctions against the Soviet Union for not letting its Jews leave. President Ronald Reagan pushed hard on the idea that everyone had a right to emigrate if they so chose, and by the time the Soviet Union collapsed over half a million Soviets, many of them Jews, had emigrated to the U.S. (Another million or two went to Israel, and a few hundred thousand to Germany and Canada.)

It's fine if you didn't know about that, but until I get the sense that you're not going to insistently mansplain my family history to me, I'm not going to want to deal with you. So I'll tell you where I'm (really) from when I feel like telling you where I'm from. Until then, it would behoove you to quit asking (also quit asking nonwhite people and people with foreign accents). In other words, let's not reduce people to a single, physical aspect of their identity. While we're at it, let's stop asking trans people about surgery and such. Thanks.