How to Hijack National Identity
Stop asking where someone is “really” from.
Once my friend and I were at a bar in New York and some dudes tried to spark a conversation with the cliché “So, where are you from?” We are Brazilian, so we said, “Brazil.” His response was “Naaah, you’re from China or something.” We rolled our eyes and moved to the other end of the bar. Yes, if you do the whole “Where are you really from” thing and don’t get flipped off it’s because the person is being really polite. In the past 10 years of my work as an activist and writer I’ve seen situations like this happen too many times, and as time passes it doesn’t seem to be happening any less. So, let’s unpack some situations I’ve witnessed while traveling the world, and let’s clarify why this is happening and why it should stop.
The friend I mentioned before is second generation Japanese from São Paulo, a city home to 1 million people of Japanese descent. People have been migrating from Japan to Brazil for over 100 years, and Liberdade is a wonderful neighborhood in São Paulo where 400 thousand Japanese people live; there are Japanese gardens, shops, restaurants and street fairs. My friend’s parents spoke Japanese, and even though she doesn’t, her house does have a rice cooker and more than enough long and heavy chopsticks — not those unused disposable splintery take out ones at the bottom of a drawer. We would have explained all of this to the dude at the bar if he had been humble enough to say something like — “Oh, I didn’t know there were Brazilian people who looked like you.” But he chose to be belittling and patronizing, so we didn’t engage.
To doubt someone’s identity is to say that how they identify is unimportant, which is belittling. And to insinuate that you know better than them how they should identify is patronizing. Within the white supremacist structure, people of color are much more likely to be belittled and patronized than white people. I, for instance, am a white passing Brazilian and occasionally people say to me they thought Brazilians were darker. “You look like you could be Scandinavian,” “French” or “Russian,” sure. But it never happened that someone doubted me when I said who I was. Sometimes I say I’m from New York, because I lived there for a decade. Sometimes I say I’m Portuguese, because I have double citizenship. I’m never doubted (even though that doesn’t mean I don’t have to deal with the whole “go back to your country” attitude).
When I lived in the Netherlands, even when I was perceived as a white USAmerican, I had to deal with stereotyping and anti-immigrant sentiments. Sometimes people would hear me speaking English and insist on a debate about gun ownership or politics. But no one ever asked what was my true ethnicity, even though I have an accent when I speak English and white people from the United States are all immigrants.
That’s almost nothing compared to what black Dutch people deal with. I’ve seen a black man introduce himself as Jan Janssen (a very Dutch name) and white Dutch people completely freak out. “No fucking way!” “How can you be called that?!” “I don’t believe you, show me your ID.” Yes, the man actually showed his ID and became the joke of the night, and many nights after that as everyone would recount the story to each other. You won’t see that happening with white South Africans though. The most you will get is a “Hm, interesting, you must be a minority there.” Or with Australians, no one inquires about the true ancestry of white Australians. In fact, Aboriginals’ right to their own lands is relentlessly revoked.
White people belong where they say they belong. People of color need to ask permission, and are often denied.
These stories happened throughout the last 15 years, the issue has always bothered me, but what finally pushed me over the edge to write this piece was an incident that happened 2 days ago. Again, I was at a bar with a friend (I guess these are the situations where I get most of my rage-induced inspiration). This time it was in Niterói, Brazil and this friend is from the Netherlands. We were speaking English, so a man from Virginia, USA, noticed us. This is understandable, when surrounded by people who speak a language you don't understand, it can be quite lovely to hear something more familiar. The problem was when his response to my friend being Dutch was “Stand up! You're way too short to be Dutch. What's your family background?" Now, my friend has some family from Suriname and Indonesia, countries the Netherlands colonized, but most of her family is Dutch, she is Dutch, period. I asked him if he asked his wife where she was really from when she said she was Brazilian, because she “looks more Dutch” (blonde and blue-eyed) than my actual Dutch friend. He said no... So, this article is everything I wanted to say and tried to say to him.
People of color are the ones who need to deal with the question “Where are you really from?" Unless you want to start asking this question to white people, you shouldn't be asking it at all.
The next day, my Dutch friend and I went out to celebrate Carnaval in Rio de Janeiro, and at one point we saw two women talking. They were both blonde and very tall, I thought “they look really Dutch." I came closer, and they were indeed speaking Dutch. My friend introduced herself, spoke Dutch to them, they didn't question her true Dutchness, which means we made some new friends and had fun. It can be as simple as that.
We all look a certain way, and, sure, it's related to our ancestors. I have Portuguese and Indigenous ancestors, that means when I travel in China I do stand out, people even ask to take selfies with me. I have another good friend who has a Korean mother, a Dutch father, grew up in Italy, and considers herself to be all three (or neither). Also, one who is the child of Indian immigrants in Hong Kong, he considers himself to be from HK and speaks perfect Cantonese. The important thing is to listen to people's experiences and to respect the sovereignty they have over their own existence.
Sovereignty over one's own existence, abstract as it may be, is a powerful weapon against Nationalism. Who decides that Indians can't be Muslim? That Germans can't be Jewish? That Latinxs can't be American? That Dutch people can't be Black? When we are imposed a National model, we are pushed further away from a true understanding of who we are. Even anarchists are not immune to culture. Culture and country may be closely associated nowadays, but they are not intrinsic to each other. It's disingenuous to claim that being an anarchist means you are not from a country and have no National culture, we all have ancestry and culture. Anarchists should learn to use culture and ancestry to hijack the National model and undermine the Nation itself.
Since I have my own culture and ancestry, I'm not going to assume that my way of approaching this will work for everybody. You don't have to go look for inspiration at a bar either. But I hope inspiration comes to you from somewhere, and perhaps starting from here.
Mirna Wabi-Sabi
is a writer, political theorist, teacher and translator. She is an editor at Gods&Radicals, founder of the Enemy of the Queen megazine and of the Plataforma 9 media collective. Her work orbits around Capitalism, White Supremacy and Patriarchy, and the proposals involve resistance to Eurocentrism and Western Imperialism. (You can find her on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook)