Making a Scene

by Constance Wu

There are real people who genuinely embody stereotypical attributes—they’re our mothers and fathers, our uncles and aunts, our brainy cousins—I don’t want to hide their voices or their stories. They are human too. Stereotypes are not harmful for their mere existence; they’re harmful for their reduction of a person or group. Stereotyping reduces a person to his most obvious attributes, and then exploits that reduction.

What’s so embarrassing about an accent? Our parents have accents because they know two languages.

It’s like my favorite passage in The Velveteen Rabbit. “Real isn’t how you are made,” said the Skin Horse. “It’s a thing that happens to you. When a child loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with, but REALLY loves you, then you become Real.” “Does it hurt?” asked the Rabbit. “Sometimes,” said the Skin Horse, for he was always truthful. “When you are Real you don’t mind being hurt.” “Does it happen all at once, like being wound up,” he asked, “or bit by bit?” “It doesn’t happen all at once,” said the Skin Horse. “You become. It takes a long time. That’s why it doesn’t happen often to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don’t matter at all, because once you are Real you can’t be ugly, except to people who don’t understand.”