When I was four years old, a girl came up to me and asked, “What are you?” I was confused at the time. No one had ever asked me anything like that before. “A… a girl?” I responded, trying to give her some sort of answer. “No,” she said back to me, “What’s your race?” It all seemed to stem from that one incident on a playground in preschool. After this, these events occurred with frightening consistency. When I was in sixth grade at a new school, I met someone who I thought wanted to be my friend. Only a few days into knowing her, however, she asked me, “Just to clarify, are you black or white? -because I can’t really tell.” It hurt me when she asked this. All I could wonder was, why? Why did she need to know? And as I lay in bed only a few nights later, I realized why people has been compulsively asking me these questions all my life, why they always had to ask- and it was because they had to figure out how they were going to look at me. They had to find some sort of glass to look at me through, and everything else came after that. This is why people who I had never met before would stop me as I walked around at school or while I spoke to my friends to ask me the question, “What are you?” Because, according to them, race is inherently what you are. Not who, but what. And they could not go a day without knowing what I was, even if they did not know my name. I felt as if my whole life was set up by boundaries constructed by this concept of race.

I am sick of living in this divide, this tension between people based on something as trivial as their skin tone and the way their face is composed. People claim that things like jokes about race are not racist, but simply funny things for all races to enjoy. Once, I was sitting at a table in a class at school, and there was a person right in front of me making jokes about Asian people. Then, a friend of the person telling these jokes asked me, “Are you Asian?” I suppose this was because I wasn’t laughing, and he wanted to check if he was offending me. Because we are all people, why does racial insensitivity change depending on who is around us? If we’re all the same, your joke is just racist, and it doesn’t matter who is sitting next to you. So, my goal for the future, my goal that I am looking at right now, is to remove the question, “What are you?” I want to transform myself, and everyone around me, into “whos” rather than “whats.” My goal is for someone to look at my future daughter and take her for who she is, and not think about labels like “black” and “white,” and she really will be just a girl. Even in this modern day and age, people find it so ridiculously important to find a glass to look at someone through. These pieces of glass that we use to look at people are scratched and flawed with prejudice, bias, and insensitivity.

Emma Watson, a young actress as well as a women’s rights activist once said, “I don’t want people to decide who I am. I want to decide that for myself.” I could not agree more with these words. I am tired of people attempting to put me into a box so they can decide how they feel about me. I am tired of my race coming before everything else in my life. I am tired of being asked what I am, because I am not my race. I’m a person, and my race just happens to be how that person looks. And despite everything that I, and many others have experienced, I still know that people are good. I know that people are taught racism and racial insensitivity by the environments that they grow up in, and that nobody is born seeing race that way that society views it. Nobody comes out of the womb believing that anybody with dark skin is incompetent, and that Asian people can’t drive, and that anybody from the Middle-East is a terrorist. We learn this. My goal is to take away these teachings, and leave people with the understanding they had when they first came into this world. As you read these words, I am not going to tell you my race. I am not going to continue this idea that race is everything. It’s time to wipe away the prejudice and stereotypes that smudge the glass we see the world through. It is not only time to clean the glass, but remove these glass walls altogether. And I know, someday, that “What are you” will not exist, because we will all know exactly what we are- human.