Words of wisdom from my language partner, Stanley.
For those of you that don't know, I have a job on campus working with international grad students to help them with their English and help them understand American culture better. I have one special partner this semester. Here's an account from tonight's meeting:
Stanley went to a conference for theoretical computer science this past weekend in Atlanta. He was telling me about his travel experience which quickly lead to a discussion on airports. From there a discussion of the cities that he has visited and a comparison of different parts of the US. He mentioned that he thought that the West coast was much more multicultural than the East. When he was in LA he saw a sizable representation of many ethnic groups: Black, white, latino, asian. And then he told me his theory about Latinos which basically boiled down to thisWhen the Spanish/Portuguese came over to the Americas they brought slaves from Africa and the white Europeans had interracial relations with the slaves and that's how Latinos became brown.
Yup. Also, on our first meeting he told me that I was not Indian because I didn't look Mongoloid. According to Stanley (who's Asian by the by) Native Americans had come over from Asia via the Iberian peninsula as ancestors of the Mongolians. So, in order to be Native, you have to have Mongoloid features. Black hair, more Asian looking eyes, darker complexion. My hair is too light, I have an Aryan nose and I'm too pale (According to him, my only redeeming feature was my eyes which are "kind of" mongoloid) so I'm not Indian. Oh and since American Indians are traced back to Mongolians, his experience is that he gets along better, as an Asian, with Indians. OOOOOk.
As much as I tried to explain that identification with a certain cultural group does not depend on fitting a phenotype, yadda yadda yadda etc, he would not understand or even consider what I was saying as a possibility. This is the first time that I've had a serious cultural misunderstanding with one of my language partners and it's very frustrating.
Stanley went to a conference for theoretical computer science this past weekend in Atlanta. He was telling me about his travel experience which quickly lead to a discussion on airports. From there a discussion of the cities that he has visited and a comparison of different parts of the US. He mentioned that he thought that the West coast was much more multicultural than the East. When he was in LA he saw a sizable representation of many ethnic groups: Black, white, latino, asian. And then he told me his theory about Latinos which basically boiled down to thisWhen the Spanish/Portuguese came over to the Americas they brought slaves from Africa and the white Europeans had interracial relations with the slaves and that's how Latinos became brown.
Yup. Also, on our first meeting he told me that I was not Indian because I didn't look Mongoloid. According to Stanley (who's Asian by the by) Native Americans had come over from Asia via the Iberian peninsula as ancestors of the Mongolians. So, in order to be Native, you have to have Mongoloid features. Black hair, more Asian looking eyes, darker complexion. My hair is too light, I have an Aryan nose and I'm too pale (According to him, my only redeeming feature was my eyes which are "kind of" mongoloid) so I'm not Indian. Oh and since American Indians are traced back to Mongolians, his experience is that he gets along better, as an Asian, with Indians. OOOOOk.
As much as I tried to explain that identification with a certain cultural group does not depend on fitting a phenotype, yadda yadda yadda etc, he would not understand or even consider what I was saying as a possibility. This is the first time that I've had a serious cultural misunderstanding with one of my language partners and it's very frustrating.