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A Trip to My White Fragility
My first visit to the U.S. took me from a tourist’s ignorance to recognizing my white guilt.
In April of 2017, I visited New York City for the first time. It was my first time in the U.S., actually, but raised on American sitcoms and Hollywood movies as I was, I felt surprisingly at home from my very first moment there.
Strolling around the city on my first night, I met a guy who invited me for a cup of coffee, and I accepted his invitation. I felt it was a very New York thing to happen, to be asked out just like that, and very similar to that Hollywood education I had received. And we had a nice time, at least for a while. He was a New Yorker, born and raised in Manhattan, of Korean parents.
But when I asked him what he did for a living, he told me to guess. “I go to Scandinavia a lot for work,” he hinted.
I thought for a second and responded: “Umm, maybe something in a tech company?”
He looked at me like I’d done something truly horrible.
“Because I’m Asian? That’s racist.”
“No,” I corrected him. “Because I’m Finnish.” I know he mustn’t have had a clue about Finland, but it is the country of Linux, Nokia and Angry Birds, and to me the only reason I could think of for someone traveling to the Nordic countries for work was that they worked in…
