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

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[quote=Anonymous]I sympathize, OP. My family is FIFTH generation Chinese American (traced back to Northern California), so we have been in the US far longer than many of the white people we meet here in DC. And yet, I still get the, "Where are you really from? question all time time--from white people at private schools, but also from Ethiopain cab drivers on the way to the airport.

Because there hasn't been a large community of Asians in the DC metro area for multiple generations, people here are just ignorant. That, plus you get a lot of transplants who grew up in parts of the country where there are even fewer Asians there than there are here.

I think that the admissions people where, in all honesty, just trying to be nice and inclusive, even though it came out very awkward and ignorant. Still, you have to ask if this is where you want to send your child to school.

In my experience, visiting mostly NW DC private schools, you don't have as much of the ignorance about Asian AMERICANS (vs Asian nationals) because so many kids in these schools are half-Asian. The presumption (rightly or wrongly, but usually rightly) is that the Asian parent was raised in the US, if not born here.[/quote]

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