Which one am I?

I initially planned on doing three interviews in order to approach the Asian stereotype topic from different perspectives. However, only one interview has been conducted so far, with a friend named Latisia who is an African-American but her mother is Asian. With her mother being a hematologist, she feels some pressure to perform well in school, especially in sciences. It’s not because her mother is forcing her to study sciences but because she feel like a degree in something is less value than her mother’s would be deviate the tradition of progressing with every generation.

Like most parents, Latisia’s mother emphasizes the importance of an education. Although Latisia is a biology major, her mother never really placed any pressure on her to study in the science or math field. Latisia says she is studying biology on her own free will. While it is a tough subject to study, Latisia accepts the challenges of her major and uses her mother’s success as fuel to work hard, graduate and continue her education through graduate school.

While she feel pressure to perform in school in order to get a job as good or better than her mother’s, Latisia says that she feels no pressure from society to perform as an Asian. She doesn’t possess any physical features of an Asian so people don’t normally consider her to be Asian at first glance. Although society don’t have as high the expectations of Latisia as they would had she the physical features of an Asian, Laticia says she doesn’t take it as an insult because there aren’t really any low expectations of her either. As a result, she is free to perform at the intensity of her choice.

The interview with Latisia illuminated me to a new approach to my topic and it reinforces what I already knew. Even though Latisia possess Asian blood, she is seldom included in the Asian stereotypes because she lack the physical features of an Asian. This led me to conclude that people stereotype Asians mostly by physical features. I’ve decided to use Tiger Woods as an example on my paper and maybe compare the way Latisia and Tiger are viewed by the public as Asians who don’t have the physical features of Asians.

The interview tempted me to do research on the stereotype of an individual who is of two or more different cultures or background. My question is which stereotype applies to an individual, Like Tiger Woods or Latisia, who is for instance, half Asian or half black? Is that individual stereotyped athletic like an African American is “supposed to be” or into his/her book like an Asian.

Laticia’s interview enforced the idea that stereotypes do not apply to everyone in the group being stereotyped. Laticia’s mother does not fit the stereotypical Asian mothers who, according to the some of the sources that I’ve found, are strict and forces their children to study studiously. As a result, Laticia is not a stereotypical Asian student because she does not spend a bevy of her time in the books and, as the most obvious reason, she does not posses the physical features of an Asian student.