In a purple Tuk Tuk
Aw, come on, don’t be silly. The Daily News:
Ja Du recently sat down with WTSP to discuss his racial identity, telling the outlet that although he was born a white man named Adam, he feels Filipino. He now identifies as transracial.
“Whenever I’m around the music, around the food, I feel like I’m in my own skin,” he said.
“I’d watch the history channel sometimes for hours you know whenever it came to that and you know nothing else intrigues me more but things about Filipino culture.”
You mean he sat down to discuss his very common experience of finding another culture fascinating and congenial. What’s that got to do with “racial identity”? Not a lot.
Although Ja Du can’t change the way he presents outwardly, he’s embraced all aspects of his identity as it relates to the way he lives his life.
He can often be found driving around his native Tampa, Fla., in a purple Tuk Tuk, a three-wheeled vehicle often used as public transportation in the Philippines.
The Daily News is probably being just a little sarcastic here. You can drive around Tampa or Tulsa or Tacoma in a purple Tuk Tuk all you like, it will never make you literally Filipino. I like marmalade; that doesn’t make me a citizen of the UK.
I think it’s a great thing when people are attracted to distant cultures, especially Americans, who are so at risk of thinking the US is the only country that matters. I also think it’s a great thing when people enrich their lives and expand their horizons by using their imaginations a lot, including to imagine different lives for themselves. I just don’t confuse that with actually being something you’re not. I also don’t think “identifying as” is a magic phrase that transforms people into whatever they claim to identify as.
Originally read the post title as “I’m a purple Tuk Tuk.”
Which also kinda works for the article.
I identify as someone interesting. And yet here I am.
Well that’s rather the point, I expect. I’ll change my mind the instant someone identifies as a fat old yorkshireman with a cat.
DANGER WILL ROBINSON! DANGER!
Not Bruce?, it also works for your currently purple avatar.
Personally I identify as someone who doesn’t believe that things are what they are not. Amazing to think that such obvious logic is now considered the height of heresy.
As I think I mentioned when there was discussion about Dolezal a while back, there are cultures that will ‘adopt’ a person as a member. I’ve anecdotally heard of that happening in NZ with some Iwi, although I understand that attitudes vary from Iwi to Iwi. Critically though, that happens when the person to be adopted immerses themselves in the life of the Iwi and that community over a long period of time. They are accepted as a member of that Iwi and community. But… there is no pretence that they are simply and unequivocally Maori at that point. Sure, a member of the Iwi, but they still retain their own whakapapa. It would be insulting to think that just because you liked hangi and enjoyed Maori music and dance that you were now Maori.
There are things that have happened (still happen) to Maori or Phillipino’s that people of different upbringing cannot simply adopt because it hasn’t happened to them, or the people who raised them.
So, while I don’t dismiss the idea of cultural identity applying to someone from outside a particular race or ethnicity, I’m more inclined to dismiss examples like this as premature at best and more likely deluded/sad/inappropriate.
Does this have something to do with consumerism? I mean, we’re always bombarded with the idea that stuff = x emotion or quality or lifestyle. Drink this, you’ll be happy. Drive this car, you’ll be sexy. Buy this, it’ll make you successful. It’s not a big stretch to think that “stuff you like = who you are”. If you’re impressionable and self absorbed.
Anyway, as a fat old yorkshireman with a cat, I am disturbed at the lack of people identifying as me. I thought this community was better than that.
I identify as someone who’s always right, and if you contradict me that’s identity violence right there.
I identify as someone without an identity. It’s quiet and peaceful.
In the wild Post-Viking tongue with which I identify on alternate hours some days, the phrase “Ja du” has a kindly condescending connotation — something one might say shaking one’s head in response to a little child’s silly talk. Or lila tok-talk, to mix languages for comedic effect.
(I’ll remove my horned helmet and quietly see myself out)
I think that once the idea of gender identity got firmly established, it was only a matter of time before people started claiming a changeable or “fluid” ethnic or racial identities. Sure, the right thinking crowd scoffs at it now, but good luck to them trying to plug the dam once the cracks really start to form.
Of course race and ethnicity as concepts have no biological basis at all, yet they’re supposed to be the immutable things one can’t identify out of or into. Unlike gender, which apparently is only a matter of inner feelings and nothing else, despite actually being originally based on the biological framework of sex. This modern upside down world makes my brain hurt.
@latsot #8
You cis yorkshiremen need to check your privilege. It’s hard being trans yorkshire, constantly experiencing literally violent words like “Don’t be silly,” and “But I thought you were from Los Angeles,” and “Did you forget your meds again?” We don’t need your expectations on top of that.
Now if you’ll excuse me, it’s time for my midnight snack of yorkshire pudding. Or as we call it, “pudding.”
I can’t find my Tuk Tuk!
Don’t have anapp? ;)
Here, take a look. (I tookalook) http://www.cleanmotion.se/
May not be on sale in your location yet.
Ophelia, liking marmalade certainly doesn’t make one a British citizen; it makes one a little bear from Peru.
Acolyte, that’s “Darkest Peru”.
Latsot @8, hey, I resemble that remark! Well, apart from not being from Yorkshire or (currently) owning a cat. But if we extend it to overweight, taciturn and slightly curmudgeonly, sure. Close enough right?
Or as we called it when I was a bairn, “starter”. Yorkshire pudding was what we had before the meal to fill us up so we didn’t need as much actual proper food.
I don’t know what part of Yorkshire you’re from, but that’s definitely fighting talk around here.
@Rob:
Um… yeah. welcome to the world of identifying as me. You understand that I wasn’t exactly recommending it, right?
latsot, what exactly would be the benefits of identifying as you? I have the cat, I am old (in youth terms, being in my 50s qualifies me for my students, though I did at least get a laugh out of them today when I said I wasn’t actually alive 40 million years ago), and I have the fat part. Now all I need is the Yorkshire and man part, and if there was a good reason to identify that way…though I’m not sure I could handle the accent.
Well, I’m unnecessarily pedantic, rarely leave the house and count a horse and a car among my enemies.
Am I selling this lifestyle yet?
iknklast:
I’m sure you could manage the Central Casting version of the Yorkshire accent. Sadly, mine is a mixture of North Yorkshire, Durham pit village, Middlesbrough and Geordie. Even I can’t handle my accent.
Latsot, what are you like with etymology? We were debating “pop your clogs” the other week, and the best anyone could come up with was this… https://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/287700.html
You’re ‘northern’, does that seem likely?
Rob, I’m more a Midlander than a Northerner (flatter accent / complain less) and can attest that the phrase pre-dates the 1970’s. It was one of my Grandads regular euphamisms for dying, and he popped his in ’74.
My guess is that it’s a phrase from the working classes from the Black Country and up from when many people either died ‘on the job’ or at least before being retired off; not many actually lived to retirement owing to the perilous working environments, and even those that did were mostly ‘retired’ by their employers – sans pension, of course – when too ill or plain knackered by work to be of economic value.
Kind of like cowboys ‘dyin’ with their boots on’, the working class just ‘popped their clogs’
Rob, my understanding is that the link is right and ‘pop’ means ‘pawn’. You pawn your clogs because you don’t need them any more, on account of being dead or about to die.
But I’m a bit too northern to know for sure. We didn’t have factories around here, we had farms and mines. Did miners wear clogs? I suppose they probably did. But clogs were mostly associated with the factories in and around Manchester, which is in the south of England ;) and, as Sagan says, the Black Country, where nobody goes.
Thanks Latsot and AoS! The phrase is used here, although less commonly than it used to be. It’s the origin that puzzled me. Funny about who’s northern and who’s not. I live a long way south of you guys, but my grandfather was from the Shetlands and would have considered you both a bit effete and cosmopolitan, for no other reason than you’re from England. Funny old life.
And here in the good old USA, I’m considered a coastal elite merely because I am a liberal academic, even though I live in Nebraska (which, being almost exactly in the center of the continent, is about as far from the ocean as you can get in every direction.
iknklast @27, both sets of grandparents were pretty suspicious of my parents for having gone to university. Eventually my father’s grandparents became proud of him – advancement is after all expected of men. My mother’s parents never forgave her. They accused her of being a traitor, to what I’m not sure. They said, actually out-loud to her face, that she wouldn’t respect them any more and anyway, what was wrong with working at the local store until she got married and had kids in a couple of years.
I know that was a long time ago, but it’s worth remembering that often working class people are the most staunchly social conservatives. As a result they often act and vote against their best interests Early union organisers often took physical risks spreading the word, given the level of antipathy. Same with suffragists, pacifists and promoters of other forms of social advancement. These days we’ve retreated to shouting from behind barricades and hoping that will work (it wont).
Manchester in the south of England. How very dare you, sir!
I put it to you that anyone living south of the Tees is a soft southern get.
Mind you, once you cross the equator, it’s like heading north again.
Hmmm, maybe I can identify as a northern grumpy gentleman!