Quote:
Originally Posted by Original Position
I don't support a norm against asking about people's ethnic background during social conversation. If this was a question asked while the person was being interviewed for a job, that would seem inappropriate, but asking it while mingling afterwards seems fine to me. Obviously this is context dependent, and there are certainly situations or ways of asking about someone's ethnicity in a social conversation that would be inappropriate, but not as a general rule imo. I'm guessing that math faculty at university are unusually cosmopolitan anyway.
This is a strange response. I didn't suggest a norm or rule that one could
never inquire about someone's ethnic background in a conversation. The specific connection to this conversation was as an anecdote about South Asians, as non-Indian South Asians are commonly mislabeled as Indians. Anyways, while I similarly agree this question can be appropriate in some contexts, I think it fairly clearly wasn't in this case, and indeed is a pretty decent example of a microaggression.
First I should clarify the scenario. The candidate finished their talk, walked up to the Sri-Lankan person, said hello, and then said "Are you from India?". So it wasn't, for instance, something that came up organically in a back and forth conversation about their personal lives. Secondly, I think that mingling after a job talk is absolutely part of the interview and provides relevant information about the candidates potential collegiality and I would expect audience members to submit negative feedback if in the mingling they clearly were unable to speak about their research or teaching with some effectiveness.
Now why do I find this inappropriate? Many POC report that this kind of question is a persistent and annoying part of their lives. It puts their ethnicity up front in how people perceive them, as opposed to small talk that focuses on, say, their research or teaching interests. Why in an academic job interview would you ask "are you from india" and not "what courses are you teaching this semester"? Asking the former centers the conversation on a persons ethnicity and not other aspects of their identity. If someone was making small talk and said they went back home for vacation over the summer I'd have zero problems asking "are you from India?", for example, but that is a significantly different context.
For interest sake, their response was immediate and blunt: "You shouldn't have asked me that". I agree.