Hey there! My name is Danny and I’m from New England. I love it here and even with any issues I have had its still my favorite part of the country. Now you may ask what that tidbit of info has to do with the title.. Well you see where I grew up I was always the only kid of a different background…or well at least the only one with a dark complexion. Now before you go jumping the gun I am not saying that being a dark kid in a whitewashed environment was the root cause of the unaware racism or prejudice I dealt with….er….actually maybe it kinda is.

You see back when I was going to school my parents insisted of giving me the best life possible. They value things like a nice house, job, a healthy meal, and oh…right…education. So since my parents came from a different country they were really committed to giving me the life they never had.

By all standards I have gotten the life a kid could ever want. I was spoiled rotten and never have to worry about money. I got a nice luxury car for my 16th birthday as well as my 19th birthday. Hell my parents even bought me a upgraded version of my Mercedes in 2011. So as you can imagine when certain “apologetic” people of a caucasian background come up to me and say something along the lines of “I realize white privilege is a thing and that minorities like yourself don’t have access to many things” or “I have an indian friend who is just like you” can be very awkward to hear.

You see I get it, they mean well by what they say. Some of these individuals who recognize their privilege are using it help gain equality for other groups but when they say things like the quotes above, what hat they think they are doing is being politically correct but in reality they are being unintentionally racist. Well in case you are seeing this and shaking your head saying I don’t get it…how are those two quotes racist then I ask you to do this: Take those two quotes and replace “white” in the first quote with whatever other race and picture someone saying that to you and take “indian” and replace it with “white” or “black” or any term that best describes your background. So in an essence you can see why saying something like “Hey man I totally have this white friend who is just like you”  or ” you are really cute for a white guy” can sound hilariously stupid.

I could go on hours of what people have said to me that they think is out of good nature but ends up making them look the opposite. Obviously this isn’t limited to my background and happens to people of many other backgrounds. So this brings me to another point. That point is that obviously we all come from different backgrounds whether it be Indian, Chinese, English, Latino etc. So it doesn’t sit well when someone refers to me simply as a person of color and goes on to apply all the struggles and success of different groups to me. To be more frank I hate when white people come up to me and talk about people of color referring to me but then they also talk about an asian or hispanic friend they have applying that term to them as well. See the problem? Well some of you might be thinking “hey if you are dark skinned you are colored…so therefore this term applies to you.” To which I would respond with No shit! you have eyes!!. But that’s not the issue I have with it rather my issue is the grouping of people of different backgrounds into one category to justify to ourselves that we aren’t being racist or not acknowledging someone’s race.

I am sorry but someone who is hispanic would not understand what it was like to grow up as a punjabi boy in New Hampshire and vice versa. The fact that minorities in the United States are grouped together is horrendous. People all have different experiences and they should be acknowledged. You are not going to offend me if you use the words dark skinned, brown, indian to physically describe me but you will offend me if you use indian or brown to describe me as your brown friend or indian friend. I understand that this might some weird to some but remember how I said I grew up in New England? Well I was forced to go a private christian school for elementary all the way to the end of high school. To many of them I seemed foreign and people even referred to me as black because they didn’t understand the difference. When I would explain to them that I am Indian..their first response would be “what tribe do you belong to?”….yeah….not even kidding that actually happened multiple times.

It was not until college that I saw people in class and made friends who weren’t of this limited mindset.  It was nice to finally escape from the mindset of where even mentioning the notion that Jesus Christ was not white but looked middle eastern would make you a laughing stock to entering a place where that is actually a valid point. Instead of learning how bad democrats were and how muslims are supposedly trying to destroy the world I learned about how equality is still a work in progress and that you know being muslim does not equal terrorist.

So my point is if you are someone who says to your friend that you know someone just like them based on their ethnicity, take the time to acknowledge that it is wrong. It might be surprising to some but people of other ethnicities have differences amongst themselves too. For example, I am indian but I am also Punjabi whereas someone else you may know may be indian but may be from a different part of india or may not even know where their family comes from. Based on different regions of India people speak different languages and have different customs. It’s like saying that a kid from New York City is just like a kid from Nashville.

If you are someone who has had a similar experience to mine or has heard friends say such things, do what I didn’t do back then or was afraid to do..SPEAK UP. Some of your friends/acquaintances just may not be aware they are hurting you by saying such things and need to be educated on the matter. Hopefully telling them would make them be a little more aware about not grouping people together and may help avoid awkward stares or conversations with someone in the future.