Smashing the American mirror

Wildcat File Photo Arizona Daily Wildcat

Somewhere in this nation there is a dark-haired, dark-eyed, dusky-skinned child in line amidst a sea of fair faces, blond and brown hair.

And somewhere in this nation that child passes in front of a window pane, and glances in by chance and looks away, lips twisted in inexplicable shame. Feels unlovely.

And all over this campus there are dusky-skinned, dark-haired, dark-eyed college kids - that child grown older - making up for that feeling of unloveliness by being as lily-lily-white as possible in words, in gestures and in dress.

Who still hates what he or she sees in the mirror.

You've seen them - perhaps you are one of them - one of the dark mass of minorities sporting the latest DiCaprio cut or the latest Friends shag.

Trying to look the way they've seen whites look in movies in magazines, in classrooms as they sit shyly in the back, watching hungrily.

Smashing their own selves, trying to fit molds that were never cut for them.

The words of American youth, of conformity roll off tongues trying hard to forget the musical foreign tongue of childhood that was mocked in playgrounds.

"Ching, chong, chang, that's your language, right?"

Haunted by the unchangeable, unable to love their black hair, slant eyes, dark skin, you - I - sit with streaked hair, heavily powdered faces painted unnatural shades of Caucasian never meant for our skin and smoke and say, "he was like totally..."

Souls whitewashed chafing against our foreign bodies, crying to breathe.

How hard it is not to love and hate sky eyes, wheat hair. How hard it is not to dye our hair the color of American lovel. How hard it is to know we still can never be American lovely even if we did. To love all that is All-American and hate how that worship of "American" tears at us.

Oh, it's not about jealousy. It never was.

It's home, and purity and safety and beauty, always beauty that has obsessed humans since the dawn of awareness.

It's about the American dream.

Talk about multiculturalism, talk about celebration of other cultures, but I swear, I absolutely swear, when you say All-American family, when you say the American dream the visions that come are the blond-haired child flying through grean grass, the sky-eyed tall dad next to the sky-eyed blond woman against their white suburbia house.

And that... that is unspeakably hideous. It's bred a new race of freaks, of people who mutilate their inherent loveliness in grotesque caricatures of this hideous ideal.

Who abandon the music of their mother tongue, who cannot speak the language their mother whispered to them when they were babies.

Who stain and roughen beautiful black hair, who iron wild, lovely hair just to get closer, that much closer to white.

Who powder their faces unnaturally, cannot go out in public without make-up inches thick because they think their natural faces are unlovely, unpresentable.

Who think safety, safety from such uglinesses as being dragged to pieces on a dirt lane by ignorant, rascist pigs, from schoolyard taunts, from the pang of looking in the mirror to see something different, lies in masking themselves in whiteness, in eradicating every racial red flag that may raise the ire or scorn of "American" society.

I hate them. I hate them. Because every fool who falls to the dominant paradigm is feeding a society that breeds on its darkest fringes creatures that destroy those of other races and every faint-hearted wannabe white is kneeling in tribute without a fight to a society that gives rise to children who cringe before mirrors.

Rather than standing proud, inutterably lovely and saying - believing - I am America also. Stop mutilating me.

Mary Fan is a journalism and molecular and cellular biology junior. Her column appears weekly in the Arizona Summer Wildcat.