“Where are you from?”: re-examining national identity and microaggressions in context.

An apparently descriptive question, that might be classed as an innocent “ice-breaker”, has come under fire in the last decade or so as a potential vehicle of hidden racism. Asking “where are you from?” has come to be seen – especially in the US context – as a covert way to interrogate people on their ethnicity, when this is different to the one of the dominant groups. By not engaging with interactional/conversational data and replying on heavily edited anecdotes or “vignettes”, the literature in psychology/counselling (Sue & Spanierman 2020) and philosophy (Rini 2020) runs the risk of producing a sweeping generalisation, i.e. this question invariably encodes racism. This paper presents four instances of nationality-based microaggression narratives occurring in connection with the question “where are you from?”, analysed in their local context. This study suggests that individuals engage in complex identity negotiations in response to nationality-based microaggressions, straddling across the personal and the professional domains. Moreover, our data shows that national identity itself is not fixed or uniform: instead, it is questioned, challenged, and developed in ways that are more nuanced than suggested in the psychology and counselling literature. In addition to stable identities, local identities occasioned in context embody coping strategies demonstrating the participants’ resilience in the face of adversity. This suggests that focusing on the “where are you from?” question in context is a more promising way to reach a greater understanding of such a controversial question.