Hey miss, whats an ‘other’?”

Abstract

“HEY MISS, WHERE ARE YOU FROM?” I was born in Canada to immigrant parents from India and China, and by growing up in a large metropolitan city, I have always been surrounded by individuals from a wide range of racial, religious, and cultural backgrounds. These differences were never an issue, and always more of a given fact: An unremarkable part of daily life. My classmates and teachers were first and foremost individuals before they were ever relegated to the colour of their skin, the language they spoke at home, or the country where they were born. Looking back, I still struggle with whether this type of environment was actually desirable. because while growing up exposed to diverse individuals taught me at a young age that differences are to a certain extent ‘normal’, that diversity always went unexamined. The implications of being a nonwhite person were never discussed, never explored, and always overlooked during my K-12 public education. As a result, you can imagine my surprise several years later into the future when I stepped back into a school, this time in the role of a teacher, and suddenly found that questions about my ethnicity, culture, nationality, and language simply became routine. By working in the same diverse communities that I had grown up in, I noticed that these questions were always asked by racialized students.