Ba-na-na. It rolls nicely off the tongue, doesn’t it? It’s a part of a lexicon of words that are used to describe the extent of someone’s Asianness. “Yellow on the outside, white on the inside.”
Now, it is an insiders’ term among Asian Americans and our prevalent use of the term is empowering and feels like an act of subversion. We can finally say for sure that our identity is not a binary, but a fusion of two cultures.
However, when this interpretation of banana is upheld, we might be guilty of comfortable indulgence. The concept of a “banana” is deceptively simple and fails to take into account the institutions that helped to shape it.
In my earlier definition, I failed to include a crucial caveat. One’s Asianness is being measured not for their Asianness, but against how “white” they are. In a country as ethnically diverse as the United States, race, in addition to ethnicity, are essential to the banana discourse.
Ethnicity and race are not interchangeable; ethnicity is a matter of physiology, but race drags scientific discourse out of the conversation and uses physiology to categorize individuals. At its core, race is a social construct that justifies marginalization.
Society has taught Asian Americans to use their yellow skin tone as a proxy for Asian ethnicity and associate it with the “non-American” parts of them.
As a result, we have internalized society’s unacceptance of something that we cannot help. We have been backed into a corner of self-hatred, which is emphatically outlined in the qualifying phrase that often follows banana — “yellow on the outside, white on the inside.”
“No, you mustn’t think that we’re Asian! You see, we only look Asian. We’re real Americans. We’ve assimilated.”
An Asian-American, Andrew Yang, is running for president. There was an entirely Asian cast for “Crazy Rich Asians,” which became an instant blockbuster. We are the fastest growing minority group in the US. Why are we trying to be something that we’re not? Isn’t that assimilation enough?
These circumstances are unprecedented. By using banana in a way that attempts to prove ourselves to the white community, we aren’t reclaiming anything. We aren’t fighting anything.
We’re merely reifying the very notion that white, Western culture is the standard. We are reinforcing the apparatus that makes us the other every day.
Even the term “banana” itself is white washed; it attempts to separate who is really Asian or American, and who’s faking it. By doing so, we’ve surrendered to our marginalization.
When we do this, how are we any better than those that attempt to undermine us with the term? We’ve done the very deeds of standardizing whiteness as normal and presume our non-white, non-European American identities as inferior.
This is what being white-washed looks like, not wearing Patagonia around campus and drinking out of a Hydroflask. Self-worth shouldn’t be dependent on how much you can identify with white America.
So please, don’t call me a banana.
