These days, I am involved in a bunch of things, aside from raising our little baby Mason. At this moment while he’s strapped to my chest and I have two free hands to type, I thought I’d dump a few words off of my mind onto the Internets.

One of the things I’m involved in is a coalition group of volunteers across Los Angeles to fight for homesharing, or short-term rentals. Since I operate one on the side in Eagle Rock, this is a cause that is near and dear to my heart. In the last few months we formed a volunteer group that has grown to a about 350 members, and represents over 13,000 hosts of short term rentals in Los Angeles. On November 1, 2019, many of the new laws that were passed last year to essentially curtail and stop short term rentals in LA will go into enforcement. Hence, a great many of us have mobilized to show our support of council motions and actions that would keep us able to operate freely.

In this volunteer group, I am one of the board of directors. We meet biweekly to discuss key agenda items and actions we can take as a group. I would say, it’s actually a rather impressive guerilla group of people who are all coming together for a common cause. In joining, I felt for the first time like a true Angelino, fighting for the little man against big corporate, corrupt interests that have infested the politics of LA City Hall.

This meeting we last held had mostly women, two men, and most of the group was white. One of the topics we were discussing had to do with a survey that we are thinking of creating to get more precise demographic data on our constituents to strengthen our case with the City Council. A good amount of time was spent discussing the question elements of the survey. “Are you 55+ years old?” “Military veteran?” “Single mom/dad?” and so forth. Then, there was an oddly listed question to discuss that simply read: “Person of color?”

When I read this, I thought it was interesting that someone would think to ask this question this way. Of course, there are more modern ways to ask this question, which I later modified to be a bit more PC. But as we looked at this question, and looked around at the table of mostly white women, I couldn’t help but to notice just how flustered this group looked as we pondered this question. We threw out ideas like, “How about ethnicity or nationality?” One person said she did not identify as a white woman, but rather with multiple ancestries. I suggested that we follow the same format as the US Census, which accounted for basically every possible permutation of a person’s ethnic identity, not to mention – it was the US Census. 

But in this group of energetic, strong-minded and outgoing women, one woman challenged my suggestion. What she asked me knocked me off my rocker, but I was intent on maintaining my composure.

“Peter, you don’t identify as a person of color, do you?” 

She looked at me straight in the eye as she said this. Now, I decided not to take offense at this, because I did not perceive this to be a deliberate racial slur – but rather as a comment that was made in sheer ignorance. I decided to leave it – not even make it a learning opportunity for this person as I was deep inside still a bit shocked. My response, “Ummmm, yeah, I am a person of color, <name redacted>.” I will have to specify that this person was an older white woman, so she may have had a perception from her experience on what a person of color would be.

After I had let this go and went home after the meeting, I was still a bit reeling from how someone could pose a question like this so matter-of-fact to me to my face. She asked the question almost in a way that was like, “you’re OBVIOUSLY not a person of color, RIGHT Peter?” I wondered where this mentality came from. Could it have been that she thought that I had “made it” as a person sitting in the room, conversing amongst a table of white women as if I was “one of them?” If this was the case, while I would in some odd way relish the compliment, it just didn’t seem right to me. This person who asked me in such a matter-of-fact way if I was a person of color, did not know what it was like to grow up in the 1980’s and 1990’s being called a chink or a gook. She never knew what was it was to be ridiculed at school to be asked where I was from, and then be told to go back to China (I’m Korean American, born in Corvallis, Oregon – USA). Would she know what a lunchbox filled with Korean kimbap even looked or smelled like, much less know what it feels like to be ridiculed by persons not of color for eating what they thought were exotic, weird foods? She never knew the ways in which folks that looked like me, and had my color, were ridiculed, oftentimes beaten up, mocked, spat upon, and misunderstood. She doesn’t know that even while I was growing up, looking in the mirror how badly I had wished to be white but couldn’t do anything about my almond-shaped eyes.

In 2019, I feel like in some ways we’ve gone back to this era of dumb misunderstandings. It seems as though folks like this woman can get away with saying something as asinine as what she said – and not even bat an eye. Maybe I’m just being one of those uber-sensitive folks that don’t have thick skin. After all it’s hard not to offend anyone these days, right?

In this light, I let a lot of nonsense go these days. If it doesn’t affect the well being of my family, or me personally, I let folks like these enjoy their remarks. Hey if it makes them feel better, more power to ’em. My revenge is my own success and independence, which I fight hard to maintain every day. And when people make dumb remarks asking if I identify as a person of color, I simply look at them and smile. It’s a smile of pity.

What do I learn from things like this? That I’ve got to make my little Mason be a strong man of character who won’t even be fazed by things like these. With any luck, someday he’ll be the one who asks a white person someday if they identify as a person of color. 🙂