I’m writing my paper about “Mango” (the short story), and I did a mini survey about the first sentence of the story. (My brother and I were the sons of my mother’s clients.) I thought it was pretty clear that she was an Asian prostitute, but it occurred to me that this was probably because I read it in the context of this class. I asked my roommate about it, and she thought it was obvious that she was a prostitute, and would guess that she was not white. I wanted to get an idea of what people tended to assume about her from the first sentence, so I asked 15 people what they thought of when they read the sentence, and what assumptions or conclusions they drew from it about race and profession.

Most people guessed that she was a prostitute (12/15), but what surprised me was the race assumption. Many people had no assumptions about race (9/15), but the next largest group of people thought that she might be white (5/15). The remaining person guessed that she might be African American. I found the fact that a third of the people I asked assumed that the mother was white quite interesting, because I had thought that if anything, people would tend to assume that she was a minority, or anything but white. While conducting the survey, I thought that maybe people were guessing white for race because they hadn’t lived in Asia where there simply aren’t any white prostitutes, and we most commonly see and hear about Asian prostitutes (most notably, Thai prostitutes, but really, they’re all over Asia but never white). Looking back at the results, even people who had lived in Asia or are living in Asia didn’t assume that the mother was Asian, they either assumed that she was white or had no assumption. (Except the one person who guessed that she might be African American)

The fact that people would assume that she is white is intriguing, and I’m not entirely sure why this is, but I’m thinking that it’s because whiteness is so dominant, in terms of power and societal norms. Because of this dominance, when race is unspecified, many people assume whiteness. I think we were talking about this in my women’s studies class. Basically, if race, gender, and sexuality are unspecified, people tend to assume that the subject is a white heterosexual male. This idea is reinforced by the way people speak. We have different words to denote men and women, for example “waiter” and “waitress”. The example cited in our class was doctors. Doctor is a unisex word, but many people use the word doctor to refer to a male doctor, and “woman doctor” to refer to a female doctor. Apparently, to denote anything that’s different than the accepted norm, we have to add a word to mark the subject as irregular.

So in conclusion, my results were surprising on the issue of race. Did anyone expect this?