Writing for a pop culture blog:

By nature, we are curious beings. We love to know how things work, what things are, and most importantly, how things are made. Let’s linger on that last one for a bit.

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As human beings, we love to know how things are made and who they are made by. It’s a natural curiosity we all have. As humans we also love putting things into categories. Organising things by colour and type, or sorting through things in alphabetical, ascending, descending, and/or numerical order. You name it, we’ve sorted it. We did it all throughout school and were taught to think that way all our lives. It’s just what we do.

However, being curious and harbouring the incessant need to categorise absolutely everything can leave us with the burning desire to do the same with people too. People are constantly trying to categorise other people. Whether it’s by who we hang out with, or what we wear or by – dare I say it – race, people need to put other people into categories to simply understand them. It has become almost mechanical. Even process like. It often starts like this, “Where are you from?... (pauses for answer)… No, no, I mean where are you from originally? … (pauses for answer) …Oh I see… and what about your parents? Where are they from? ” Usually we get to the idea pretty fast. But sometimes (quite often actually) - when the lines are still blurry, and we feel the ‘curiosity muscle’ pulsating overtime - we have to go that one step further.

“So what ethnicity are you?”

There, we said it.

The minute we meet someone who doesn’t quite go through our flow diagram of ‘people placing’, we feel that swell of curiosity build up inside us. I think for many people it comes from a place of innocence. There are no pre-conceived judgments lurking in the next response. We are quite satisfied with whatever the answer may be – because now we know. And that is all we ever set out to achieve: to simply know. And now that we know, who and, so-to-speak, ‘what you are’, we are quite happy to take the conversation in a new direction. We are comfortable again - comfortable that we now know the person standing front of us for who they truly are. But do we truly know them now? Or are we running a series of stereotypes in our minds about what we think we know, based on whatever their answer was to our question? Isn’t it almost alarming how quickly we are to dismiss the rest of what they have to say after that exchange? It’s almost as if, even without consciously judging we have done it anyway. Our subconscious did it for us. And quickly too. Alarming, isn’t it?

But what If we could de-code and de-engineer this way of thinking? What if you were absolutely fine with not knowing the ethnicity of the person standing in front of you? Does it really matter? It really shouldn’t. Whatever you were about to say before asking about that person’s ethnicity, should be the same even after asking, right? So it surely should not matter? I, at least, seem to think so. Although, I must admit – this belief was actually strengthened after I met my husband. My husband has no idea who his biological parents are, and having grown up in a loving home with two supportive parents since he was 2 months old, he has no desire to ever know his biological parents.

This dumbfounded me on many levels. I have always been an ‘over-thinker’, and there is probably no scenario in any parallel universe where I would have been able to resist the need to know who my biological parents were. Not just to know what they look like, but for so many, many other reasons too. So the fact that my husband was (and still is), so at ease going through life “not knowing”, he has truly inspired me and opened my eyes to a whole new level “not knowing”. It’s one thing to be okay with not truly knowing the ethnicity of somebody else, but it’s a whole new level of self-acceptance to not even want to know your own ethnicity. I find it so confusingly beautiful. I find it refreshing and modern and forward-thinking, all in one. Imagine if the whole world was like this? A race-less society.

Well, first, baby-steps. Let’s start with learning to respect that some people may not want to share every detail of their life and that may very well include their ethnicity. I know in many countries, it is acceptable to talk about race in public - but why assume? And why does it matter? Truly – in 2019, does it still matter? I would like to think as a human race we will one day get to a point where it really does not matter. But until then, let’s respect the very thin line between innocent curiosity and intrusion. This does matter.