My First Experience With Race

SARA CAO JOHN BURROUGHS SCHOOL

As an outspoken yellow girl in Missouri, life hasn’t always been stained with the utopian yellow tinges of happiness, because in America (and quite frankly everywhere else), everything is about race. Yellow trails me everywhere I go, and somehow, the country painted with red, blue, and especially white always finds a way to reject other colors from seeping onto its perfect palette. I had a pretty normal childhood up until the moment I realized that my skin, the suit I felt most comfortable wearing, separated me from the rest of picture-perfect America as if I didn’t fit the dress code. This transition from being just a child to a child of color is a defining moment for many BIPOCs, and my first experience with race was a rude wake-up call to my otherwise idyllic childhood. When I was eight in second grade, I distinctly remember a chant white girls in my grade would continuously sing at me while pulling their eyes back into lines, and with those lines, those girls crossed into the land of racism. The chant went “Chinese, Japanese, dirty knees, look at these!” At first, I didn’t realize the harm of the chant, as its catchiness clouded the blatant discrimination behind it. However, as time went on, I noticed that my classmates would direct the chant at me, and I made the connection that it was because of the color of my skin that they uttered those words. As an 8-year-old, that realization stripped me of some of my naive innocence that white people have the privilege of holding for their entire childhood. I immediately wanted to paint myself white upon my racial consciousness, as it seemed to be the purest color. It would give me something the color yellow seemingly could not: the ability to fit in. The notion of yellow being an afterthought was life-changing for me. This experience accounted for many years of self-deprecating jokes about my eyes, my “godly math abilities”, and my overall yellowness. In a predominantly upper-class white elementary school, I struggled with my identity, and I made up for my hidden insecurities by ignoring the toxic relationship between my true inner self and my external yellowness. During that period, no one asked me why I made Asian-jokes; instead, I was greeted with waves of laughter after each joke. I was so eager to please my white peers that I sacrificed my own integrity I held for the color of my skin for ignorant acceptance. And this is how at only 8 years old, my ears became addicted to white validation.