When I think about being an outsider, the first thing that comes to mind is not being white. This is a feature that’s been attached to me but I never really thought about race until middle school where I realized that races were a thing in society and I’m not in the dominant one. At my middle school asians were a majority in my classes so I wasn’t really an outsider yet, until my first year of high school. I was constantly self conscious realizing that pretty much everyone at West High school was latino or white. I was very quiet back then. One of the teachers asked if I could speak english while I spent time thinking about what to say. I don’t think that was intentionally racist, but I’m pretty sure that guy heard me speak before which should’ve cleared that up. Its sometimes weird talking to white people, because they don’t have the experience of thinking about how their race fits into society with people who don’t know them. Its also kinda weird learning about the Vietnam War from the POV of the americans, and how unimportant seemingly south vietnam was and their people. Like I get its kinda complicated as both a civil war and a proxy war but the american perspective is seemingly that american men were being sent to kill the vietnamese. Of course to be fair the south vietnamese government wasn’t very good, but I can’t help but think about my own family who were there when it happened and I can’t invalidate their own experiences in the war and their dissatisfaction with the north. Another thing is when I head into VRChat, I just become a regular american, and one time I was playing with this group of french people. Almost none of them spoke english, and we were playing VR Among Us. Thats a huge problem in such a communication based game. I tried speaking english slowly and using tons of hand gestures and body language to explain things I saw. One of the things on my mind was how basically to them, they thought I was white. Another thing was that I hoped to create a bond with them even with the huge language barrier. I think these experiences can help me understand the experience of people in subordinated groups through having been through it myself.
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