Don’t Ask Me “What Are You?”
I’m a Scientist. I’m an Educator. I’m a Person.
“What is that?”
“What is that thing?”
“I’ve never seen anything like it!”
The Mola mola, or ocean sunfish, is one of the most perplexing animals to be found from a boat in Monterey Bay. Like a massive bloated silver dollar, the ocean sunfish lies prone at the water’s surface, rolling its bulbous eyes, flapping its tiny side fins, and waving its top and bottom fins like sculling oars. The shine on the fish’s scales catches the eye from a distance.
Adults and children alike shout when they see these animals. A particular features a pair of fishermen who encounter one of these animals; the more vocal man spends a full five minutes screaming about the “big sea turtle,” the “baby f***ing whale,” or their newly-discovered “tuna” in earnest, thrilled rasps.
“What is that?” is a perfectly reasonable question to ask when faced with a denizen of the deep like an ocean sunfish
I was used to answering questions about the nature and appearance of local wild wildlife. “What is that?” is a perfectly reasonable question to ask when faced with a denizen of the deep like an ocean sunfish, or a 45-foot humpback whale, or a smack of colorful jellyfish, or a distant pod of several hundred dolphins.
I was 23 years old, wind-swept and sunburnt, sturdy boots planted on the deck of my workplace, a whale-watching boat in central California. I was a naturalist, guiding daily whale-watching trips, spinning facts and stories into a monologue about the creatures we could see from the ocean’s surface. It was my job to answer questions, and I undertook to do it with enthusiasm.
But every trip, the subject of the questions eventually turned from the natural world around us to me — the guide. Passengers asked how old I was, where I’d “got my training,” whether I planned to do “real research” someday. And eventually, at least once a week, I’d be asked the question: “what are you?”
It always took me by surprise, coming under the bright-eyed gaze of my passengers. Pinned under their curiosity, my face and my body the object of their scrutiny, my palms sweated and my stomach dropped. But I smiled, shrugging off what I expected was probably just nervousness — it was my job to answer questions.
“Are you… an Indian?” I was asked by a woman with a thin face. “Because I’ve always thought that orcas speak to me. They sing to my soul, you know? They’re my spirit animal?”
Her voice lifts on the last syllable, as she squints into my face. I’d worn two braids that day, swinging down from either side of my baseball cap, and apparently that was enough to bestow upon me the ultimate moral authority to determine a nervous white lady’s totem.
I laughed it off.
“I’m a scientist, ma’am. Orcas are pretty great, though, aren’t they?”
It was a spectacularly blue day — blue sky, deep sparkling blue water. We were nearly fifteen miles offshore, and we were completely still. The only sounds were seabirds and, every few minutes, the enormous gusting blow of a pair of humpback whales. Salty, rotten-broccoli-scented breath issued from each whale’s blowholes, drifting in a rank clinging mist across the faces and clothing of delighted whale-watchers.
We’d come across a pair of “friendlies,” humpback whales that had decided through mischief, curiosity, or some kind of ill-understood magic to interact with our boat. 43 feet from bow to stern, our entire vessel was shorter than the larger whale. When it rolled over underneath and spread its side flippers as if to embrace us, we could see sunlight reflecting off the whale’s wings on both sides of the boat at once.
We dashed from one railing to another, watching the whales conduct a slow ballet beside and below us.
“What’s THAT?” gasped a young man, whirling to see the smaller whale’s chin looming ten feet over our heads. The whale was “spy-hopping,” rising with incredible silent control out of the water so that its eye, down at the base of its jaw, could get an unobstructed peek above the surface. Coated in barnacles, the underside of the whale’s chin looked like a dripping, parasite-encrusted sea monster; its wet grapefruit-sized eye rolled in our direction as if offended by the shout.
“So, where are you from?”
“Where are your people from?”
“What’s your background?”
“What languages do you speak?”
These were all proxies for the question that people really wanted to ask me. Framed more precisely, the question was:
“What, exactly, is your racial background, so I can decide how to respond to you, an ethnically ambiguous person?”
I was an educator, and I wanted nothing more than for every one of my passengers to leave with a smile, a love for the oceans, and a vow to use fewer plastic bottles, throw-away straws, and party balloons.
“My mother’s family is from China, and my father’s is German-Jewish,” I would reply. “But I get why people get confused!”
Not every person who asked me this question was white. I occasionally heard it in Spanish, spoken by a tourist or a local family desperate for a little bit of translation. In those cases, my high-school language skills served me well when it came to pointing out bathrooms and illustrating basic scientific concepts.
But although my vocabulary was limited, my accent was decent enough that speaking Spanish only bewildered nearby non-speakers even more. I’d get more questions about what my parents did for a living and how I’d “managed to do so well,” and fewer about graduate school or other opportunities. I found that my sweaty palms and the ache that grew between my eyebrows weren’t just anxiety on my own behalf, but irritation, nearly anger.
What am I? I’m a member of the Homo sapiens sapiens subgroup of my species. I’m a relatively young female-identifying bisexual individual with size 8 feet. I’m a little overweight. I’m a Leo. I’m a middle child. I’m both a cat person and a dog person. I’m nearsighted.
“Oh, so you’re a mutt!” the white woman laughed. “My dogs are always rescues. They’re just healthier that way, aren’t they?”
“I…” Confronted by this particular metaphor I stalled out in my usual glib responses. Internally, my mantra echoed. You’re an educator, it said, you’re a representative of this company, of scientists, of the natural world and the oceans. You also rely on tips to make the rent.
“So many people used to think that mixing races wasn’t right,” the woman trilled, dissecting the genetic core of me, flattening the history of my twice-oppressed family, slicing out and discarding the similarity baked into my parents’ childhoods both growing up poor in southern California, throwing away the blended beautiful warmth of my many aunts and uncles and cousins. “I’m so glad people don’t think that way anymore,” she added.
I didn’t for a moment suspect that she considered herself a racist. When she started telling me that “hybrid vigor” makes plants grow better, that mixed seeds were more likely to survive harsh weather, that races should all combine and then maybe someday everyone would be as beautifully unplaceable as me, I didn’t think she heard the echoes of eugenics and supremacy bouncing through history.
It was usually this kind of middle-aged white woman, educated, wearing a men’s t-shirt with a progressive slogan on it, who wanted to know what I was. What, not who. I’d inadvertently become the poster child for a kind of illiberalism disguised as tolerance. Well-meaning ladies thinking grandly on their charity toward me, congratulating themselves on how encouraging they’d been.
Every bead of sweat, every anxious nod and furrowed brow I’d suffered from this precise conversation countless times on this salt-scoured deck rushed back to me. What am I?
I’m a scientist.
I’m an educator.
I’m a person.
I’m allowed to be angry, and I’m allowed, like the whales we watched, to blow that hot air out and away from me, and let the water vapor roll off my back.
For more stories about race and identity, follow Fourth Wave.
