“You’re beautiful for a Spanish woman. I love it when Spanish girls speak Spanish.”
“Are you full Asian? You don’t look full Asian.”
“You’re the first black person I’ve ever dated.”
The intention is to flatter by highlighting difference. To compliment a person of color by making them feel “exotic”. These are just some of the examples we got by going out on the streets of New York City and asking people of color if they’d ever experienced what author Rula Al-Nasrawi calls #FlirtyRacism.
In her article for VICE, “Calling Me A Terrorist Is Not Flirting,” Al-Nasrawi talks about the many times she’s been exoticized as a Middle-Eastern woman and the not so few times people have hit on her by jokingly calling her “a terrorist.”
At first, people on the streets were a little bit confused with the term. But when Al-Nasrawi told them one of the many outrageous pick-up lines she gets, people suddenly got it. Almost immediately, the men and women of color we talked to remembered a pick-up line that turned out to be incredibly insulting or awkward, because it focused on their ethnicity.
We found the many subtypes of flirty racism out there. From the very common “you’re cute for your ethnic group”, to the exotic generalization (“you look like that only other actress I’m aware of from your ethnic background”), to the incredibly insulting “you can’t be … you’re too tall.”
We also asked people on the streets of New York City what the new flirting etiquette should be and we even got some sailors to react to Al-Nasrawi being cat-called a terrorist.
Rula Al-Nasrawi is a freelance journalist living in New York City. A California native, her work has been featured on the San Francisco Bay Guardian, VICE, The Atlantic and Galore magazines. Rula is a hardcore pug lover, and always finds time to giggle at a good pun. Tweet her @rulaoftheworld.
Photo by Tiziana Fabi AFP/Getty Images
I’m a small, white woman with a degree in engineering. When I was in college and a guy came up to me at a party it was fun to see his jaw drop when I told him I was an engineering major. Later, in the workplace, the prejudice stopped being fun or funny. For example, I had a summer internship at a ceramic factory where we all wore heavy, industrial glasses; the classic nerd type with big black frames. At the going away luncheon with my all-male co-workers, one of them said, “take your glasses off for a second.” I did and there was a collective intake of breath. “Oh, your cute,” he said. I wanted to crawl under the table. When I worked a desk job in engineering for 18 years, I wore contact lenses. At one point, I got an eye infection and had to wear glasses again. A male colleague saw me for the first time with glasses at a symposium and said, “You almost look smart with glasses on.” Apparently, a woman could be attractive or smart but not both.