Reply to Kind of Felt Uncomfortable Because of My Ethnicity On a Tour

Forum Index » Private & Independent Schools

Reply to "Kind of Felt Uncomfortable Because of My Ethnicity On a Tour"

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous]I recently visited an open house/tour of a pretty nice private school.  It's kind of an upscale place, with a very nice campus.  The admissions staff and volunteer parents were extremely nice and raved about the school.  They did this really cool slide show presentation and I really started to like this school.  However, I kind of got weirded out when the teachers kept asking me about my race.

I'm asian, but I've lived all my life in New York.  I went to school in DC, worked a bit in California, and just came back to the DC area with my family for a new job.  I don't have an accent, except for a Brooklyn one.  Other than the color of my skin, I'm about as American as you can be.  Maybe too much as my mother likes to complain.

So when I go through this tour, I think of myself as a regular parent.  But for some reason I am constantly asked where I am from teachers, as part of the small talk.  At first, I just say Brooklyn, as I thought my accent would give it away.  Then it becomes an awkward conversation where I think they are trying to ask about my ethnicity without actually saying it.  I throw them I bone and casually mention where my parents are from.  They then launch into this cultural awareness spiel and talk about "culture day," etc.  They then bring up this other asian parent who comes in with wearing a traditional outfit and talks about customs from his home country where he grew up and how the kids really liked hearing about it.  It was really weird because I never brought any of this stuff up.  Two teachers and a parent brought this asian parent up in conversation unsolicited and the "culture day."  Another teacher kept talking about some Chinese new year thing the kids are doing (only to me, not the other parents; by the way, I'm not Chinese).  The art teacher brought up how they have done origami in the past year.  Another brought up how he loves to travel to asia (that's nice, I've never been there, sounds fun).  One weird thing was that there was a parent actually to his wife in Spanish on occasion and no one asked them about where they were from.

Anyways, I was kind of weirded out by it and thought that these teachers are kind of tone deaf on how to interact with minorities.  I've told this story to my wife who says I'm just overly-sensitive and they were just trying to be nice and trying to establish some rapport or commonality with me.  So it was them trying to be nice.  We know a few asian or half asian mothers that have done the tour and they say nothing like that happened to them.

I'd also mention this school did have some racial diversity, about 15% of the students were black, but I only saw a few asians students.  They did have a few asian teachers as well.

Am I over-reacting?

[/quote]

Options

	Disable HTML in this message
	Disable BB Code in this message
	Disable smilies in this message

Review message

Search Recent Topics Hottest Topics