Why do my co-workers keep confusing me with other Asian people?

This is part of the problem: White people and even Asians themselves dismiss the issue. We laugh at it because it’s not malicious. The Asian women I’ve spoken to have largely rolled their eyes when this has happened or have tried to be good-humored about it. (Several Asian women I know have switched seats with the other Asians in their offices to see if their white male bosses noticed; they didn’t.) America Ferrera and Eva Longoria recently made fun of these types of errors in a routine at the Golden Globes.

Nicole Chung, writing in the Toast, calls these experiences “casual racism” and notes that, as Asians, we are often afraid of how white people will feel if we call them out. “What does our dignity matter, what do our feelings amount to, when we could embarrass white people we care about? When our white relatives or friends or colleagues might experience a moment’s discomfort, anxiety, or guilt?” she writes.

People talk now of unconscious bias, which sounds more innocuous than racism. (It’s a particularly popular buzzword at tech companies, which have notoriously non-diverse staffs.) “You can’t call it racist,” one friend said. “It’ll just turn people off.” Another friend opined, “It’s just stepping over social poop piles white people leave.” But in important ways, it is a kind of racism: People swap you for other Asians. They leave a Chinese calendar on your desk (happened to a friend). They grill you about where you’re “from.” They ask dumb questions, make dumb statements. Whether or not it’s done out of malice is irrelevant. It’s rude, and it’s racial.