Although I need to wear glasses with a particularly strong prescription (blame my genes), I don’t find myself ever confusing two different people. Especially not when they stand right in front of me, face to face. That’s why it was strange for me to be called the name of my much shorter friend of a completely different Asian ethnicity. To my face.
It was a regular day in Spanish class, and we were separated into groups to discuss “la naturaleza.” My friend and I stood side by side. My teacher, looking at my friend dead in the eyes, motioned toward for her to come closer. My friend returned after my teacher was furiously whispering to her, her mouth was twisted in a way that suggested she was holding back some laughter. She stopped in front of me, giggling about how my teacher thought that I was her and sent out an email to my parents about my alarmingly low attendance rates.
Safe to say, my parents were not happy. To make it worse, it happened more often than not especially with my teachers. There was one time where my teacher wrote someone else’s name when grading one of my essays- an astonishing feat considering there were only ten people in my English class at that time!
More than just an annoying occurrence, it felt truly wrong to be constantly mistaken for other people of the same race. It was like I wasn’t even considered an individual to other people, but an amalgamation of several Asian girls into a single, formless identity. An identity that goes by whatever name comes to mind first. This identity, forced onto me by my teachers, my peers, and even my acquaintances, was like a personal attack on my character. Even if their intentions were harmless, I felt unseen, like the bland wallpaper rather than the porcelain vase at the front of an office building.
But beyond my personal experiences, this problem does not only happen to me, a high schooler. It happens on a much larger scale, where its repercussions are much more than small. It’s extremely prevalent for Asian women in the workforce, who are often discriminated against, to be confused with other Asian women. Moreover, they are one of the least promoted minority groups into senior, executive, or managing positions, likely due to this racist factor.
To give an example, in the scientific world, properly citing names is extremely important to give credit where it’s due. Even the order of the names matters. It means that any sort of confusion between individuals could result in losing credit for all the hard work these researchers put into an experiment or paper. The fact of the matter is that the normalized racism against these Asian individuals may prevent them from reaching the proper recognition in their field that they deserve.
My friend, who is a year older than me, spoke to me the other day about just how frequently teachers confuse her submitted assignments for another Asian girls’ work, just like my past experiences. To make matters worse, this class was a difficult, all-year course on Calculus Physics. Even the name sounds daunting- and having to deal with the stress of getting the wrong grades on your hard work could only raise one’s cortisol levels.
Being mistaken for someone else over and over again isn’t just frustrating. It’s dehumanizing. What seems like a harmless mix-up is actually a reflection of a deeper issue: the erasure of individuality, particularly for Asian women, both in classrooms and in professional spaces. These experiences may start with something as small as a misdirected email or a mislabeled assignment, but they point to a larger pattern of racial bias that can have real consequences. At the end of the day, we all deserve to be seen for who we truly are—not as interchangeable names, but as individuals.