Who I Am and Why I Chose My Thesis Topic
It was a week before I turned 13 that I moved to the suburbs of Boston from Tokyo. I didn’t speak a word of English, yet I did not need the language skill to understand how alien I must have seemed to my peers in the dominantly white, upper middleclass junior high school: everything from the way I dressed to what I brought for lunch and how I smelled signaled that I was not one of them. Like many 1.5 generation immigrants, however, in a matter of few years I assimilated to New England, eliminating my Japanese accent, pretending that my family ate meatloaves and mash at home too, and ditching graphic novels for Harry Potter. All this came at a cost, of course. A cost that I had neglected until now.
My thesis, “Hacking the Racial Binary: design provocations for empathy and shame,” is an exploration on identity struggles for model minorities. Model Minority refers to an idea that was popularized in post-WWII America to refer to how selective ethnic minorities such as Asian Americans could prove themselves through hard work and assimilate into mainstream culture. This idea is most often criticized for its false parallel to the racism that black Americans have faced. The rhetoric goes, if Asians can climb up the socio-economic ladder through hard work, the reasons that the black Americans have failed to do so must be their pathology and deficiency, and not the systematic dehumanization that they have withstood.
While my thesis journey started out by exploring identity and immigration more broadly, two key insights from user interviews forced me to pivot my direction and focus on race. Speaking with more than twenty immigrants and children of immigrants, it first became clear that the central tension in their identities was between the community they assimilated to and the community they came from. Many described their shame in both not being American enough and losing touch with their cultural heritage. Secondly, this tension was deeply colored in their relationship with race because the communities they aspired to assimilate were white, while their heritages signaled how exotic, primitive, and childlike they were.
This thesis addresses the problems in articulating, resolving, and navigating race, but at the same time it is also rooted in my personal experience. User interviews revealed that many immigrants and children of immigrants felt white-washed as they worked to assimilate in the United States, just as I have. The stories took different forms, but the common thread was always the challenge in navigating one’s race in this country as a non-white and non-black person. Thus, while addressing the problems common to model minorities, this thesis defines the core audience as Asian immigrants who migrate to the US in formative years of their identities. The problem they face is that the current binary discourse of race assigns black or white race onto immigrants, and this prescription of race is a mutilation of their identities. Its effects must be reversed through broadening the binary into a spectrum. Specifically, the spectrum takes form of battling stereotypes and creating safe space for them to resolve the tension in where they are from and their aspirations in assimilating to a community.
