Individual presentation
Who is the ‘Other’?
Christian W. Chun
University of Massachusetts Boston
This talk explores the history and ongoing usage of specific words and the discourses at large that continue to Other fellow humans in society. This will primarily focus on examples in US society, with attempted (or at least given the appearance thereof) 'neutral' terms and phrases such as "redlining", which refers to the racialized segregating of urban neighborhoods by local governments, and the current discourse of "All lives matter!" that insist on "Black Lives Matter" being 'discriminatory' against people who are not Black. Another issue that will be addressed is the discourses of assimilation - who is seen as assimilating and those who are not. I will also draw on my lived experiences with various encounters throughout my life in which people would say and/or ask the following, "you people!", "where are your people from?", "No, I mean, where are you really from?!", "What's your cultural background?". One example of the role of language in attempting to co-construct a specific identity to assimilate due to my "forever foreigner" visage is my given name, "Christian". In the context of the US circa 1960s, were my parents naming me in this manner their attempt to have me viewed just as an 'American' as Whites rather than as a 'Chinaman' who was 'fresh off the boat'? In addition, I will explore possible ways in which discourses could address and dismantle the "psychological wages" of Whiteness (e.g., Du Bois, 1992; Roediger, 2007) with specific interactional examples of how the discursive wages of Whiteness in the US have co-constructed who is the Other at historical junctures in which immigrants time and time again have been accused of stealing jobs from 'native-born' workers, but a selected few were eventually accorded Whiteness.
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