103
Why do people keep asking where I'm from?
(lemmy.ca)
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 20 Jan 2024
103 points (85.5% liked)
Asklemmy
44151 readers
1534 users here now
A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions
If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!
- Open-ended question
- Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
- Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
- Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
- An actual topic of discussion
Looking for support?
Looking for a community?
- Lemmyverse: community search
- sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
- !lemmy411@lemmy.ca: a community for finding communities
~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_A@discuss.tchncs.de~
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
As a mixed third generation immigrant, I get this a lot. In my experience, most people want to know my ethnicity, but for some reason they never ask me that directly.
Yeah but that’s a somewhat sensitive topic. Asking for the region of origin might mean the same thing in practice, but asking someone what "breed" they are is very inappropriate.
Because it's none of their business and it's a tad racist, and they know racism is bad but they don't want to look as bad people.
It's not racist to be interested in where somebody is from.
It is if you assume that someone is from somewhere else because they don't look like you.
Can be, absolutely. But there is nothing inherently wrong with it. One just needs to know some tact.
"Just"? Tact is very infrequent in certain locations. I'd even say that common decency is.
It's not racist to ask about ethnicity.
It would be racist to ask about ethnicity and then discriminate based on the response.
We can easily assume the reason.
Specially if the person asking is from a certain countries where such a question is almost invariably racist.
You really can’t. If I ask one of my Indian co-workers what part of India they are from, I’m not trying to figure out where they land in the caste system. Indian-Americans know this, and because of them now I know why someone would avoid volunteering that information. There’s no one size fits all reaction here. Maybe they are super well informed racists that know specific regional race/classism, but I think more often than not, westerners are asking it just like they’d ask favorite sports, foods, leisure activities and so on.