them

 

A friend told me about some work she had done in the countryside with an assitant. She is half-Chinese and her assistant was rural English. At one point the assitant told her she was "hard to read", in other words, inscrutable - which, if you don't know, is a British stereotype of Chinese people.

From F's point of view they simply didn't get along. They just weren't compatible as people, as personalities - but it's interesting how that incompatibility can be racialized. How sometimes, if we don't get along with a person who doesn't look like us, we'll assume it's becuase of their "race" or culture, instead of any other potential reason, like when we meet "normal people", people like us.

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