Video From Angle Event Reopens Subject of Race
By SUSAN SAULNY
Louie Gong, a 36-year-old Seattle resident who is a mix of American Indian, white and Chinese, is often mistaken for Latino.
“Most people don’t look at me and say ‘Chinese,’ ” he said. “Then I tell them what my heritage is, and they argue with me, saying, ‘No, you look Hispanic.’ That’s offensive on a whole other level — it’s like their sensibility of racial aesthetics trumps my 36 years of life experience, and the fact that my last name is Gong.”
Mr. Gong, like many other racial and ethnic minorities, was taken back to some of his own uncomfortable encounters with being assigned a heritage that was not his own when a video circulated widely on the Internet this week showing Sharron Angle, the Republican candidate for the Senate in Nevada, telling a group of Latino students that she did not know if they were all Latino because “some of you look a little more Asian to me.”