Originally posted by Sardaukar:
Minorities feel a hidden resentment,simple as that.
For ...'s sake,I am Chinese-Indian-Portueguese mix and I have to put simply Chinese on my IC simply because I have to follow my dad's line.I want to be able to proudly say that I am of multiple heritage!
eh... how? by putting chinese-indian-portuguese on your IC ? where got space?
u are what u are... u're not solely what your IC says u are. not that i'm being frivolous with your identity, but knowing the historical context of such things changes your perspective a little...
such categorizations happens everywhere... they are legacies of the colonial state... if u want a category that does justice to your mixed heritage, u might try
mestizo since part of your ancestry does hail from the iberian peninsula...
but the connotations are much worse than
chinese since the term was used to distinguish between these (if u'll forgive the terminology) half-breeds, from the pure blooded
peninsulares and the inferior
indios...
specifically, u would be a
chinese-mestizo if u lived in the philippines before 1870... one of the most apt apparently, but not a good category either...
corozon aquino wouldn't tell u that part of her heritage too... and try telling your philippino maid that jose rizal is a
chinese-mestizo guaranteed to provoke a reaction... they'll rather just call him an
illustrado, which really means "rich kid who had money to study in europe " ... talk about the myth of a national hero
and as a historical footnote, the portuguese really did not care for such categories... its mostly a spanish thing... the generic term here is "eurasian " even though the term was not always used in a neutral manner, especially when it addresses portuguese-eurasians... (words like "indolence" , "lazy" , and "drunken" are usually prefixes to "portuguese-eurasian" if the writer was a brit... )
the brits really weren't very politically correct in the bad old days... its something our history books don't address in enough details
and since identity here is patri-lineal, let's not split hair... there are no categories that would please u completely if u only knew what they REALLY meant...
even in the States, the have a rather narrow categorization system as well...
are you:
1) hispanic
2) african american
3) caucasian
4) native american
5) asian
and several sub-categories that doesn't do justice to the big, messy, genetic mix of modern life... so how?
well, not having it made explicit isn't always a bad thing...it makes for good conversation topics at parties