Black, White, and FOB

The senior engineering student sat next to me, the one from India--where in that huge, diverse subcontinent I do not know. He was all to ready to call himself "Asian." We had never met before, and faciliated by a mutual friend we went through the motions of an introduction.

I asked him what his major was and he replied "electrical engineering." He asked me the same question, and I replied "College Scholar." A quick silence that I had not even noticed fell upon the table. I stared into my plate, content. I had long ago grown tired of trying to explain to disinterested people my major, my courses of study, my program. Those who asked never seemed to care.

But the two chuckled and the mutual friend commented and complained teasingly that I just blurt out "College Scholar" and expect to move onto the next topic when people really want to know what exactly that means. I giggled a little with them at my evasiveness and then looked at him. With a big deep breath and a calm, methodical, confident voice I began, "I'm studying multiculturalism," I micropaused, "and globalization," micropause, "in the 21st century." Marcopause.

"Multiculturalism," the Indian who calls himself Asian and studies electrical engineering repeated in a heavy, voice as though his CPU was really processing something.

"...in our generation in America." I clarified and finished.

He repeated "multiculturalism" as though almost hypnotized. Everyone has their unglamorous way to change topics from this or brush me aside, I figured this was just his. Instead, though, this was just a prelude to something more serious.

He wanted to know what my thesis was, and he spoke seriously, his voice carrying a gravity that betrayed his ignorance.

I took another breath of air and explained to him that in this program I'm not required to produce an academic paper with a thesis and an argument laid out point by point. I told him that instead I was trying to compile a series of short stories and essays that somehow characterize the topic.

He stared at me for a prolonged second, taking in the bits and bytes that generated my image, but returned no response. Some time lapsed and as we were about to leave the dining hall he mused "multiculturalism" and brought up my project again.

I sensed that he had a deep, unstoppable, magnetic desire to discuss the topic. It was close to home for him, an immigrant to this multicultural nation, an "other." And yet, despite his life experiences that generated insights, itches, and unresolves issues pertaining to this topic, I sensed that perhaps his education had ruthlessly robbed him of a vocabulary and an opportunity to think through these very issues in which his life, his identity, was enmeshed.

Perhaps as a result, when he spoke his words were clutzy and uneloquent, evoking stereotypes and embarrasingly old, vomitted view points; and yet, despite all this he spoke. "I believe that multiculturalism in America should be thought of as a triangle, not just black and white."

I blinked, in my studies I had read about the "pentagon" (i.e. David Hollinger Postethnic America), a view more complex than a black and white, two-dimensional take on multicultural America. There were Hispanics of all sorts, Native Americans of all sorts, Asians of all sorts in addition to the black and white. Moreover, these very five terms are ones I evoke only with the most discomfort; for, each betrays the possible combinations of them and the ocean of diversity waiting to burst from the confining seams of each category.

"There are two Americas," he continued. "There are the blacks who like hip-hop and rap and dress a certain way and play sports like basketball and football, and there are whites who like more classical music or country and play sports like golf, baseball and hockey."

We had left the dining hall and by this point I had wanted to leave conversation too. I could not believe the words that were spoken to me in utmost seriousness; stereotypes, greasy gross generalizations with which I had to deal in "serious" conversation. This is what we constitute serious; a serious conversation on a college campus?

I suggested to him that America is far more than black and white and that even those two categories he constructed are far, far, far cries from a comoprehensive view of reality. For a moment I felt like this engineer's humanities distribution requirement and in the traditional approach of U.S. PC pedagogy I stopped far short of telling him that viewpoints like the one he expressed are not only inaccurate but lead to unfair judgments of people that almost always harm and undermine attempts at intercultural, interracial, interethnic, inter-any-kind-of-difference understanding and tolerance.

Willing to neglect this binary view of multicultural America, he proposed his new theory to me, "After we moved from Asia to America my mother asked me, 'well what are you going to be now in America? Are you going to become black or white or stay FOB (fresh off the boat)?'"

In my mind, my jaw dropped to the floor.

"I think," he continued in all seriousness, "we need to think of multiculturalism as a triangle." He began to mumble something about "FOBs" and how that should represent "Asian" culture, but I could not take it any longer, and I had some place else to be.

"Listen," I told him, hating how I was about to cut this short. I felt like I really was a humanities distribution requirement now--attempting to teach something important and inevitably finishing before my students really learned anything. "This country is so diverse, and the groups in this country are so diverse. You can't just say there are certain people who behave certain ways and like certain things. Be who you want to be. Sure you can pick and chose and embrace things not from your own culture, but ultimately you just have to do, be, what makes you happy."

The thought of hearing his take on "FOB Asian culture" sent shivers up and down my spine as I walked away and fought off involuntary twitches. Yes, let's take the biggest continent on earth and pretend it's one small community, with one religion, one language, one history that makes up one culture: Asian. Time, energy, patience; I did not have what it takes to methodically and sensitively explain these things to him now on the cusp of my graduation during thesis writing-cramming. Instead I rehearsed a common rant in my mind... how universities produce one-dimensional geniuses who for the life of them cannot begin to understand themselves much less the complex societies in which they live. And me... I'm just not the person I had hoped I'd be. Crying shame.