The Moment I Realized I Wasn’t WHITE

by Zach Roknipour

There are moments in life when we begin to question everything we have come to know about ourselves. For me, that moment came one night after a long day of work, followed by a long day at school. The only thought on my mind was getting home as soon as I could. I was stopped at a red light, preparing to merge over to the next lane as soon as the light turned green. Next to me, there was a black Dodge Ram, the car of a person who refuses to back down. I, on the other hand, was in a black four-door Honda Accord, with a determination to get home as soon as possible. When the light turned green, I sped up to pass the man next to me as he did the same thing with the same thought on his mind. When the dust settled, I had emerged victorious; an insignificant victory that wouldn’t matter to most people. The White middle-aged man in the Dodge Ram that was now behind me, however, did not take this loss lightly. He proceeded to follow me home, which I did not realize until I pulled up to my gated community. Before I could enter the code to get in, the man had already pulled up at an angle so that I couldn’t get past him. He then rolled down his window to yell at me. I did expect him to yell at me (after all, I had just recklessly sped past him), but what he said shocked me. I thought he was going to say something along the lines of “watch it” or “slow down”, but no: he instead yelled, aggressively, “GO BACK TO YOUR COUNTRY.”

I sat there in a moment of disbelief. Why would this random person say such a thing to me? I was born in the United States at the Tarzana hospital in California on July 21st, 1993 at 8:04 pm. So I retorted quietly, but still loud enough so that he could hear me: “I was born here.” He replied with an arrogant smirk, as if he knew everything about me. “Yeah, right. Just look at the way you look, and look at the way you speak,” he said.

I sat there in disbelief, because it was at that moment that I realized that this stranger in a Dodge Ram had taken one look at me and seen what he wanted to see: a dirty immigrant who had come to “his” country, to a White man’s America. After he’d said those painful words, I just stopped speaking. I did not know what to say or how to react. This only infuriated him more; he kept yelling, but all I could hear was white noise. I was completely frozen and felt as though I had left my body. The only thing on my mind was, “Please, can this just be over?”

Suddenly, he opened his car door, and the fear that I felt forced me to return to my body as if it were some natural hidden defense mechanism. I was preparing for him to approach me. However, I caught a glimpse of someone in the passenger seat signaling him to close his door before he could leave the car. He then backed up and drove away as if this was a regular occurrence for him. I could do nothing more than try to get home faster than before, so I punched in the code to the gate and quickly drove to my house.

When I walked through the door, my dad was casually sitting on the couch watching a Lakers game. I told him what had happened, and his reaction shocked me even more than what the stranger had told me. He said, “Why did you speed past him?” It was as if the stranger had had a valid reason to do everything he had just done. I replied to him, “What…what do you mean ‘why did I speed past him?’ Why does that matter?” His reply is something that I don’t think I’ll ever forget. He said, “If you didn’t speed past him then he wouldn’t have followed you home and yelled at you to ‘GO BACK TO YOUR COUNTRY’”.

In the moment, I was furious with my father’s response. How could he say this? Especially after some random man put me in a traumatic, and possibly life threatening situation? Over the next couple of days, though, I reflected on what my dad had said and my anger turned into sympathy, as I had realized why he had said what he said. It was because this is how he and all other minorities and immigrants had needed to act in order to survive in America. For me, though, up until that moment in my life, I had never experienced anything like that.

I am biracial. My mom is White, and my dad is Iranian. Growing up, I was a white-passing biracial kid who grew up in suburbia, and I was far removed from my Iranian heritage. These factors had given me the false sense that I blended into this stranger’s version of White America. I had had the privilege of going through my day-to-day routines without experiencing the racism that affects minority communities — at least that’s what I thought. After the incident, I began to reflect on my interactions with strangers and friends and all of the microaggressions that had been made towards me started to flood my brain. Strangers would often ask me three different variations of the same question. The least offensive was, “What is your ethnicity?” A harmless enough question, although I will say that one doesn’t need to ask this in order to find out. That’s the beauty of making friends, after all; one finds out little details about them, like who they are and what they like and dislike. The second variation was, “Where are you from?”, which is just a nicer way to say what the stranger in the Dodge Ram had screamed at me: “based on your appearance, I’m just going to assume you weren’t born in America.” The third and final variation of this question was “What are you?”, as if I were some different species from a distant planet in a galaxy far far away. Then there were the things that the people who knew me would say. These were jokes that referred to me or my dad’s side of the family as terrorists with ties to Al-Qaeda, or about how I somehow would have access to Saudi oil money because I’m half Iranian — even though Iran and Saudi Arabia are two totally different countries. Some of them even had the gall to ask me if I had ever been called a sand n-word (with a hard R), a word that I had never known existed up until then.

Over the years I have continued to think back to this moment as one of the defining moments in my life. It serves as a reminder that no matter how much I think that I blend into White America, they can always tell that I am not entirely one of them. I think of that moment in juxtaposition with what my father told me about how “I shouldn’t have sped past” this stranger in a Dodge Ram. His words, which had made me so angry in that moment, only make me sad for him today. That is because they serve as a reminder of what he has had to endure in America ever since immigrating here from Iran during the Islamic Revolution; and how he had to change parts of himself to “fit in” to White America. Having to always turn the other cheek and just let other people say and think what they want, because if he didn’t, he would just be another one of those “evil” brown people who are destroying America. He walks a thin line, just as all non-White minorities do, the line between acceptable and criminal. All because they don’t fit the mold of what White America says they should be. But the truth is they never will, and the reason for that is because they aren’t and will never be White, just like how I am not and will never be just White.