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Brooke Erickson
English 2292-001
Dr. Yaw Asante
22 January 2023
The Ignorance of the Dominant Culture
On October 31st, 2008, I arrived at my first grade classroom with my face painted chalk
white, my light hair secured in a bun with two chopsticks, and my skin itchy from the cheap teal
kimono my mother had purchased earlier from a costume store. According to her, I was dressed
as a geisha, a term my six-year-old brain struggled to understand and explain to my fellow peers,
who excitedly asked about my appearance. From what I could gather, a geisha was a very pale
and serious woman with bright red lips and a severe looking cat eye. She was from that far and
mysterious place I knew as “Asia”, a name that I believed to be interchangeable with “China”. It
was my understanding that this far away land, Asia or China, was a strange place; the people did
not look like those of my small, predominantly-white Canadian town, and their culture was
unfamiliar. I looked at Asia with ignorant generalisation and confusing ambivalence. It seemed
that people from this place were different, exotic creatures, both fascinating and inferior;
fascinating in ways such as their beautiful artwork and styles, like the floral print I observed on
my kimono, and inferior in their distinctive “otherness”.
This “otherness” was observed early on from the media I was exposed to. Asian people
were never the protagonists of any of the films or television shows I watched, and when they
were present in media I consumed, they were depicted either as exotically-lethal seductresses or
wacky comedic-relief characters. The clothing these characters wore, the way they spoke and
acted, were all exaggerated and alien to the common white viewer. After all, no white performer
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was ever shown throwing ninja stars with extreme precision, or speaking in a foolish
over-the-top accent. From a young age, I drew the conclusion that Asian culture could entertain
and enthral, through halloween costumes for example, but was not something meant to be taken
seriously.
For a long time, I kept the limited and ignorant views of orientalism that were taught to
me by my culture. It wasn’t until a few years passed and I came into contact with peers who were
of Asian descent that this interpellation began to unravel. The people that I met were unlike those
I had encountered in the media, and did not behave at all like the Asian stereotypes I saw on
television. When one of my classmates, a girl of Chinese descent, presented pictures of her
vacation to China one fourth grade class, I felt simultaneously awed and ashamed. The great
beauty and intricacies of her culture made me feel embarrassed at my previous attitude towards
Asian cultures. I began to question whether or not there was any truth to my previous beliefs
about orientalism.
As I grew older, I learned that Geisha’s were not a product of Chinese culture and
actually hailed from a country called Japan. I learned that Asia was composed of many different
countries, whose people were vastly diverse in appearance and culture. I began to realise that,
contrary to what I had been led to believe, these cultures were not inferior to my own, and were
worthy of respect. Most importantly, however, I learned that despite all the distinctions between
cultures, Asian people shared more similarities than differences from white people. The
“otherness” I observed as a child was fabricated, a lie spread by a colonist culture intent on
preserving and justifying its corrupted ideas. After all, it is much more difficult to validate
colonisation when forced to confront the fact that colonised individuals are not at all inferior to
those that colonise them.
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