I’m not entirely sure what brought this memory to surface, but when I look back at it, I feel like it deserves a bit of contribution to shaping who I am today. Meaning that someone was once harshly abrasive towards me with racist undertones, contributing towards making me the person who is astute to racist issues while laughing at them at the same time.
When I was in the fifth grade, I remember being pulled out of class, and taken to the office. Back in elementary school, I was a pretty non-descript unpopular fat kid (can’t really say that much has changed) who mostly kept quiet, so this occurrence was puzzling to me, as well as concerning as getting pulled into the office would be for any grade school kid. The lady that pulled me out of class was one of the ESL teachers; I have always spoken English, being born in the states, so this was doubly puzzling.
Anyway, I was sat down in one of the cushy office chairs in the waiting area, and the woman stood in front of me and with a narrowing of the eyes, and the finger of accusation pointed at my face, began tearing into me.
“Where are your parents from??”
“Do you know what they’ve gone through??”
But then came the words “How DARE you??” and I knew that I was being accused of something. What it was, I don’t really know, because frankly I don’t recall to having done a single thing wrong in this particular instance. The bottom line is that I don’t recall all of the specific words, but it was clear that this was a race-related issue at hand, because it was the ESL teacher (who was white, by the way), who naturally by nature of her job, dealt with all of the foreign-born students to whom English was not their native language.
The thing was though, she was approaching this lecture to me in what I thought was the absolute worst approach ever; by disciplining racism with well, racism. Her scathing reprimand on me targeted my parents, my Korean heritage, and there were a lot of undertones insinuating that my being Korean was somewhat of a pejorative. I sat there kind of leaned back, trying to get away from her finger point of righteous American justice, during her entire maniacal tirade, completely baffled out of my mind to why this was going on.