"I wish I was ethnic..."

(Influenced by a post on 'Stuff White People Do')

Seldom, but every so often, I hear a white person say to me or to a person of color, "I wish I was [ethnicity here]...", or some variation of it. It usually is something more to the tune of, "Man, it must be so cool to be Hispanic", or, "I wish I was Japanese so we would eat with chopsticks". 

It seems fairly innocuous: they're just admiring the other person's identity, right? I don't think so, to be honest. I really do think there is a symptom of social ignorance here. It's not a malicious thing so much as a lack of perspective. 

Anyone who is non-white knows, to some degree at least, that being non-white means a lot more than your skin color or your second language. It signifies a place or role in society as a member of a group, whereas being white tends to mean being seen as an individual, and having that ability to self-identify as such without the strictures of having to think of how you're seen as a member of a race.

This is where I get frustrated. When white people say things like that, it makes me think that they see ethnicity only as a surface value thing: food we eat, skin complexion, music, etc. They discount the one thing that forms ethnic identity in the long haul, the facet that shapes why and how all of the surface attributes form to begin with: experiences.

In ignoring the experiences of others and wishing to be ethnic to have some voyeuristic, cool attribute, they also do harm to their own identities. They not only ignore that they do have culture and ethnicity them selves, but they do have experiences that shaped those things too. In talking about ethnicity this way, it allows them to ignore both experiences that the person and themselves have experienced and focus only on the "cool, different, exotic" ethnic traits of the "other", and ignore the "boring, average, normal" (so to speak) traits of themselves. It is in this way that whiteness becomes less and less visible to everyday society.

Would the same white person making those wishes still be inclined to do so if they know what other ethnicities had to think about, act around, and keep in mind when performing activities that "average" white folks take for granted? I would say most likely not. This aspect of ethnicity and identity goes ignored in this regard. 

The next time you feel inclined to say, "Gee, I wish I could be ethnic", think hard about what that really means, and decide instead to say "Man, I think that the music from Mexico is really cool", or "I really enjoy eating Japanese food". It's fine to identify and embrace other ethnicities, but we shouldn't ignore other aspects of what makes people who they are just by simply exoticizing the "cool" and ignoring the deeply relevant.