The curious way kids today have of dealing with race.

[Cartooniverse]

My kids are South Korean. They've got their gang of pals over. Two Hispanic kids, a Phillipino kid and two white kids. All friends.

They cut eachother down over dinnertime about what race they are, etc. All laughing and having great fun, but I sat there struggling. I felt old. Maybe it's a lot healthier to be more in-your-face about the fact of different races and backgrounds, and it was clear that not a single kid felt put off or left out. ( From what I could tell...... from what I could tell. Who knows? )

I don't know what to make of it. If you are a teenage/college age Doper, tell me- do you joke about your friends' race with them, and they with you? ( Assuming there's a difference in race ). Is this something I missed as a kid but was just as prevalent in the 1960's? I think my parents would have beaten me with a belt if I joked about a kid's racial background while playing with him.

:dubious:

Cartooniverse

p.s. these are 13 and 14 year olds. Regardless of race, they are slowly and methodically eating everything that does not have a pulse. My kids play with Locusts. Nice. :)

[Ephemera]

I'm 23 and if I feel comfortable enough with the friend, I will joke with them about their race, age, gender, sexual proclivities, geographic background, or pretty much everything else and take the same in return.

[Johnny L.A.]

I think my parents would have beaten me with a belt if I joked about a kid's racial background while playing with him.
When I was nine I beat up a neighbour kid for using the N-word after I told him not to. I knew it referred to Black people, and I knew it was a 'bad word', but I didn't really understand the racism behind it. (I still don't, having lived in another country when I was little and not being taught that races are 'supposed to be different'.) I said, 'If you say that word again, I'll beat you up!' He used it again, so I did.

[Millit the Frail]

Yes. Regularly, in college. Nationality mostly, because there wasn't much racial diversity at my school. I'm the stupid Polish girl, Mr. Frail's the drunken Irishman, etc. I think it help us feel like we're distancing ourselves from racist/nationalist attitudes by being able to laugh about it and bring that sort of thing into the open. Political correctness--been there, done that, isn't much of a comfort to anyone, so we make fun of it.

[Dark Side of the Floyd]

Well... yes. To a random eavesdropper, the things we tell each other would sound quite horrid. But we know that we don't mean anything by it, and we both have an understanding that it's all in good fun.

For example:

Me: Man, "keke"? You're such a gook.
Christina: Shouldn't you be eating watermelons?
Me: Only after you're done harvesting the rice.

(Christina's Korean and I am black.)

And:

Me: :raises fist: White Power.
Joe: :raises fist: White Power.
Me: See you at the rally.
Joe: I'll wear my hood. Say, whaddya call a black priest?
Together: Hoooly shit.

(Joe's white.)

If anything, the ability to joke about race relations show that we REALLY don't care about anything stupid like skin color or ethnicity, and that we are making fun of those who do. Though in your case, it could be good old-fashioned ribbing.

[FilmGeek]

I did this in high school with a samoan friend. She was extremely funny and we'd laugh at a joke and she'd say "you only laugh at me 'cause I'm brown". It became a thing with us.

[SnakesCatLady]

About two years ago I worked with a black girl and we joked about race all the time. I was the shelter manager, and sometimes when I asked her to do something she'd say "yes massa" - or - "I can't do that, only white folks with red hair are allowed to do that." I really enjoyed working with her because she had such a great sense of humor!

[Mr. Blue Sky]

The only times I made a race-based joke was with a friend whose mother was German and his father was Mexican. I told him he could take over the world, but he was too lazy to do it. He laughed.

His girlfriend was Korean. She once gave me a kiss on the cheek. I said, "That's it? I thought you were supposed to love me long time!"

She laughed and slapped me on the arm.

When I was a teenager, though (mid-late 70s), my friends and I wouldn't have dared to joke around like that.

[dare_devil007_]

The majority of my school is Korean and Chinese. The rest of the students are a mix of Arabic, Caucasian, black, Indian, etc., etc. Interestingly, we don't have many Hispanic students. I'm Korean, but most of my friends are Chinese and Korean just because of the fact that there are so many more Chinese and Korean kids than others. But, I am friends with most of the Caucasian and non-Asian kids in my class. And we do make jokes about our races. My Arab friend always talks about how if she didn't take gym class, she'd probably be obese because she jokes that all Arab people care about is food. My Korean friends and I joke about how our mothers are the Korean versions of Bree from "Desperate Housewives" with OCD. And we do this when we're all together sometimes, so it's not just between a specific group of friends, but all of us. We dp it because we don't care and it's funny.

Example:
My friend, Angel, is Sri Lankan and she has a glass eye (a long story).

Me: Angel, are you done with my notes?
Angel: Stop it! I'm not a big nerd like you!
Me: You stop...it's because I'm Korean, isn't it?
Angel: Whaaaat? You're just harrassing me because I'm brown and have one eye!

(On preview, Angel's kind of like Filmgeek's Samoan friend.)

[Johnny L.A.]

If anything, the ability to joke about race relations show that we REALLY don't care about anything stupid like skin color or ethnicity, and that we are making fun of those who do. Though in your case, it could be good old-fashioned ribbing.
Good attitude. Come to think of it, my best fiend and I used to joke with each other, though it was ancestry-based instrad of race-based. He'd joke about the wee bit of Irish ancestry and my English ancestry, and I'd joke with him about his Polish ancestry. He'd also joke about my destroyed knees. Remember the video game Berzerker? He'd make the character gimp across the screen and say, 'Look! I'm Johnny!' You can do that with friends.

[Johnny L.A.]

About two years ago I worked with a black girl and we joked about race all the time.
I once worked with a girl for two years before I realised she was Asian. I just thought she was really cute! :o

We were talking once and she made a comment about 'not being White'. She didn't believe me that I hadn't noticed.

A friend of mine who lives in New York worked on a film about a White rapper who used the N-word to show how hip he was in the rap scene. The rapper saw it as joking with his friends, but everyone else dumped on him.

[Corporate Hippie]

I'm 21 and all through high school and college me and my friends always openly made wise cracks about each other's races and religions. We know each other and our senses of humor well so we understand that basically anything goes as far as jokes. Still, I'm reserved with that kind of thing when dealing with new people because you never know where people's buttons lie.

That said, me and my friends are intolerant when it comes to racial slurs like "Ahhfricunnnn-Uhhhmerricunn."


Yeah, sorry for that. :)

[friedo]

I had a black roommate in high school and we used to delight in hurling racial epithets at each other. It was just part of the normal insult-play that friends do.

It was especially funny in public. He was a huge musclebound jock, and occasionally, if I was with someone who didn't know we were roommates, I would mutter some racist remark under my breath as he walked by, just loud enough for him to hear. Then he'd pretend to get all pissed off as if he was about to kick my ass, and scare the piss out of the other guy. Then we'd all have a big laugh about it.

Man, we were dicks. It was fun though.

[Regallag_The_Axe]

I'm 23 and if I feel comfortable enough with the friend, I will joke with them about their race, age, gender, sexual proclivities, geographic background, or pretty much everything else and take the same in return.
I'm 19, but otherwise, it's the same deal.

[Miller]

Two of my closest friends and my boyfriend are all named Charles. To differentiate them, we call them Charles, Charlie, and Chuck. Guess which one of them is Vietnamese? Even with my fellow pigment-impaired friends, we mess around. My friend Sal calls me a bog-hopping mackrel snatcher, I make a show of keeping my wallet where I can see it, because (as I tell him) "You just can't trust the eye-ties." When I came out to my friends, they were all super supportive of it for the first day, and started calling me "fag" the second. It's all cool. We're friends, we know there's nothing bigoted behind it all.

[Amazon Floozy Goddess]

Oh yeah. I've seen that before. If each party is on a totally laid back comfort level with each other, it's not a problem to joke about that. Case in point - my brother and one of his best friends, Roberto, whose family is from Mexico:

(Roberto shows up at door)
Bro: Hey, you friggin' greasy spick.

Roberto: Hey, you half-breed paint huffer.

I think it's a guy thing, though. I've never greeted any of my friends like that and never heard any other girls do it, either.

[CrankyAsAnOldMan]

My town picks a city-wide book to read each year (then they schedule discussions and events around it; a lot of book clubs jump on the bandwagon).

A couple of years ago it was "Why Are All The Black Kids Sitting Together In The Cafeteria." It was a pretty interesting look at kids and race and their attitudes and race relations throughout childhood. Any parents (or other people) intrigued by the topic, I'd recommend it.

[Cartooniverse]

I guess what threw me was that it was all the kids chipping in. ( Obviously I am in the minority here, and that pleases me. Sure, pick on the fat old white guy !!! :D )

Shortly after the kids' annual summertime sojourn to Korean Culture Camp, the Fem-Bot would be told No about something and come at me with, " it's cause I'm Korean, isn't it? Huh? Huh? I bet it is. Korean-hater ! ". I admit this amused me, but I'm her father.

Perhaps it is indeed a true show of comfort and mutual appreciation that they are able to go around with that level of scathing yet humorous language. I'm not upset by this, I was just caught by surprise tonight.

Frankly, the one thing I give a damn about is that each boy on his way to the car that someone's Mom drove over, said to me, " Thanks so much for having me". That stuff counts in my book. The lot of 'em can come over and strip-mine my kitchen any time.

I'm glad to read what you folks are posting- it makes me more comfortable with what I heard tonight and makes me feel as though my children have chosen their friends fairly well. :)

[wolfstu]

Among my classmates at engineering school, there's a running joke of the "non-whites" (Arabs, Hispanics, etc) giving each other a greeting that includes pressing fists together and saying "White Power". It doesn't seem to bother anybody, and we mix without issue in our work and studies. It's more to mock the idea of racism itself than to mock anyone of a particular race. Also made fun of: the fat guy, the mexican guy (http://www.cubis.ca/index.php?counter=127&a=1), the french guys, the gay guy, the women, the rural northerners, and the white guys.

It doesn't seem to phase anybody in that peer group, though outsiders sometimes have a hard time adjusting to the number of (well-intended, but straight-faced) insults flying around. :D

[John Carter of Mars]

I don't know what to make of it. <snip> Is this something I missed as a kid but was just as prevalent in the 1960's? I think my parents would have beaten me with a belt if I joked about a kid's racial background while playing with him.

The times they are a changin'.

I would never feel comfortable making a joke about a friend's racial or ethnic background. It's a generational thing. My kids are grown now, but when they were still at home they frequently jawed with their black friends in a manner that would have been unthinkable for me.
My son once pulled up beside the barn at our farm with a black kid in the car and yelled: "Hey Dad, get the gun! I finally got one out here!" Then they both broke out laughing. I don't think that kid's father would have enjoyed the "joke" any more than I did. But they both enjoyed it, and that's what counts.

I can't help but believe that things ARE getting better, and the freedom to express such humor is one of the things I base that belief on.

[Silver Fire]

Characters: Me, 20-something white chick (5'2"). Dammon, older 20-something black dude (6'+). Cory, my age, white.

Setting: a different's friend's yard, we're about to leave in Cory's car to go somewhere.

Me: Shotgun!
Dammon: What?
Me: You heard me.
Dammon: *looks at me; looks down at himself* I'm over a foot taller than you. (It's a small, small car.)
Me: Yeah? Well, I'm white. *shrugs*
Cory: ZING!

I let him have shotgun, though.

[NinjaChick]

Yes.

In high school, all the time. My college isn't the greatest for racial diversity, but we jokingly give each other hell about everything. It's no different than when we joke about my distinct lack of height (5 feet flat).

[ZipperJJ]

In high school (in the 90's) I had pretty much the same experience as everyone else here.

Same groups of friends, new friends, and co-workers post-high school have all had the same attitudes as well.

[Strinka]

Yep. Heck, we even make fun of our own races. My Jewish friend once said while trying to stick his fingers in a small space to grab something, "These fingers are meant for counting gold coins!"

[Cat Whisperer]

I guess my generation isn't old enough to not make jokes at each other's expense, race included (I was born in the sixties). Teasing a friend about his race - totally cool. Excluding someone because of race - unheard of.

[elfkin477]

We teased in college, they typical pick on people for the stereotypes of their nationalities - most of us had a few to chose from. Susey would throw things at us for calling her "part Nazi" but even she wasn't really mad.

My brother and his friends do even more. What amuses me is him (red hair, fair skin, blue eyes) and his best friend (blond, fair skin, blue eyes) talking about how they're tempted to give the next cop a hard time for pulling them over for racial profiling. "It's because we're Latino, right?" You would never guess by looking at them, but they are in fact both part Latino - not only is his best friend is 1/2 Cuban he has a Hispanic name, both first and last. I hope they have the sense not to do it, but I'd sure like to see the cop's face if he took the friend's license after that accusation... :p But do they ever pick on each other and their other friends!

[cbawlmer]

Until I was 11, I lived in a smallish town in West Texas where 95% of the population consisted of two varieties: white and hispanic. The other 5% were rarely seen except on TV, but my parents were very careful to make sure I knew that racism existed, was wrong, and never to use racial slurs. When I moved to Houston (diversity!) in junior high I went out of my way not to bring up anyone's race unless it was in an extremely positive way. It was all new to me and I didn't want to offend anyone.

My husband, on the other hand, was an Army brat. He spent his childhood in the '80s at Fort Hood in central Texas, which was by its nature an ethnically diverse environment. At least half his friends' mothers were from foreign countries, where their G.I. dads met and married them, so he was surrounded by every imaginable ethnicity of combination thereof. As a result, the kids weren't necessarily colorblind, but they were definitely color-not-freaked-out-by. They all made the kinds of wacky ethnic jokes at each others' expense and a good time was had by all. For his part, my husband filled the role of the cracker son of Arkansas parents.

So yeah, I think things are slowly getting better, mostly in the places where things are truly desegregated and nobody gets a chance to seem terribly "other".

[Snickers]

I've an Indian friend (that is, his parents were from India, but he's as American as they come) that we'd always refer to as a "dot not feather" Indian, but never in any sort of a derogatory way. It's one of those things - up here in da Nort', it's pretty obvious he looks different than everyone else. Better be up front about it and go for laughs than be uncomfortable. And if he showed any sort of offense, of course we wouldn't have gone any further, or referred to him as such again. But he didn't care, so neither did we.

[Obsidian]

My friends and I make fun of each others' races and nationalities all the time. Our most entertaining jokes often revolved around a friend who was a french citizen. Given recent politics, you can see the ripe opportunities. Then my best friend started dating this guy who's korean. We've actually told him we're excited to have a new ethnicity to flay.

A few weeks ago we were relaying a story about how the french guy and the korean guy were going around with the teasing, and the french guy says: "Oh, just shut up and get started on my pedicure," to which the korean guy replied, "I don't do that, but I'll give you a great blow job." (The rest of us in the car just about died at this point). We discovered that older people who were at the party listening to the story just did not feel that subject was something to joke about.

It's such a generational thing.

[Anaamika]

I'm 19, but otherwise, it's the same deal.
You're 19? I thought you were, like, 40, dude.



Anyway. My SO and I are two different races - he's Chinese, I'm Indian - and racist jokes are a staple of our conversation. And if I'm close enough friends with someone, I'll dip into it too. I've been known to say at work, "Ah, I'm just here to fill the quota." (Currently being the only non-white person they've hired in NY, I think).

[The Weird One]

Count me in as another person who's suprised to find out that Regallag_The_Axe is a mere youth.

My friends and I will readily kid each other about differences in race, religion, etc. After my brother once bemoaned the fact that, as a white middle-class male, all of history's injustices were laid at his feet, we used to kid him when something went wrong: "It's all YOUR fault!" In college, I took it on the chin for being from Wisconsin. I did have one friend, though, who was very uptight about...well, a lot of things (except doing her damn dishes, apparently). We never kidded her about being Jewish lest we get the evil and and an accusatory, "What's THAT supposed to mean?"

[kunilou]

As the non-white half of our interracial marriage, Mrs. Kunilou has no problem teasing the children about race -- or mixed race as the case may be. But while I'm perfectly content to tease them about pretty much anything else, that's where I draw the line.

[Cartooniverse]

--snip-- to which the korean guy replied, "I don't do that, but I'll give you a great blow job." (The rest of us in the car just about died at this point). We discovered that older people who were at the party listening to the story just did not feel that subject was something to joke about.--snip--

-Chortle- Indeed. There is absolutely nothing funny about blow jobs. Got that? Nothing at all !!!!!

:)

[Cat Whisperer]

<snip>I did have one friend, though, who was very uptight about...well, a lot of things (except doing her damn dishes, apparently). We never kidded her about being Jewish lest we get the evil and and an accusatory, "What's THAT supposed to mean?"
In my group of associates, that would make her the prime target. She'd either loosen the hell up or find a new group of friends.

[Hung Mung]

I think Dave Chappelle really encapsulated the whole movement with his "Black White Supremacist" skit. If you haven't seen it, Dave plays a blind black guy who somehow becomes a Klan leader (since no one ever told him he was black, he thought he was white).
Thus, a skinny black dude shouting "White Power!" throughout the skit.

I think it's a kind of game that lets people explore the roles that are expected of them because of race, gender, etc. Thus armed with understanding, one is free to deviate from those roles without guilt. And it's good for a laugh.

[Cartooniverse]

==Squints carefully== You calling my kids deviants?

:D

I agree, if they are secure enough to play at this then they are secure with their sense of equality and interaction.

[Cervaise]

I just spent the last couple of weeks catching up a friend with the first season of "Lost" and the first few eps of the second season. He's black, from Puerto Rico.

Don't want to give away the plot point from the show, but let's just say that something bad happens to a guy while a white woman he knows is off getting nooky with a brown-skinned guy. When she comes back and learns the news, she reacts emotionally.

And I sez: "That's her punishment for bangin' the darkie."

Cracked my friend right up.

I think what this thread shows is that it is not the words or the opinions that matter: it's the attitude behind them that makes all the difference in the world.

[Marley23]

They cut eachother down over dinnertime about what race they are, etc. All laughing and having great fun, but I sat there struggling. I felt old. Maybe it's a lot healthier to be more in-your-face about the fact of different races and backgrounds, and it was clear that not a single kid felt put off or left out. ( From what I could tell...... from what I could tell. Who knows? )

I don't know what to make of it. If you are a teenage/college age Doper, tell me- do you joke about your friends' race with them, and they with you?
I'm 23, so I've also been involved with a lot of this. I think the people who do this kind of joke understand the politeness and sensitivity they're supposed to show to people who are different, and I'd say they usually do that without a problem - so it's funny to go WAY over that line. It's satirizing racism, in a way.
I've posted a few times about a college friend of mine who had spina bifida and used a wheelchair all the time. We made TONS of jokes about that. "Too lazy to walk," etc etc etc. He lead the way with that, and I found it a major relief, since if he hadn't been okay with jokes about it, I would've had to bite my tongue constantly. He's also Jewish, so there was that extra angle.

[Lola]

I work, for want of a better word, in an International school in Hong Kong. British, American, Canadian, Chinese, Phillipino, Indian, Korean, Australian, Mexican, African (and so on) kids. Every colour imaginable.

I just don't hear the racial jokes. And I don't think it's because the kids are particularly nice (although they are) or because they're cool enough to ignore it. It's simply not an issue with them. They'd be as likely to make a joke about someone having legs as about someone being Korean or whatever. To me, this suggests that the world, or this little, priveleged, bit of it, is growing up about racial matters.

[Cartooniverse]

The kids said both "chink" and "gook" tonight during dinner.

-cackle- apparently they feel they're pushing the envelope. They wanted me not to feel left out, but didn't know a derogatory term for a Polish , Russian or German person.

THAT amused me. Asian, Black or Latino they've got down. White sub-ethnicities are lost on em. :)

[Misnomer]

I think the OP is pretty well addressed, but I'll just chime in to say that I'm in my 30s and my friends and I still tease each other about things. Race gets brought up very rarely (and only if the joke is simply too good to pass up), just because it can still be a sore subject. But I've been teased about being half Irish, being short, and being ~10 years younger than some of my friends -- likewise, my best friend is 13 years older than me and I tease him about his age sometimes (he'd probably say all of the time, but he has memory problems ;)).

Hell, I used to tease my cat about not having opposable thumbs. :D

Thus, a skinny black dude shouting "White Power!" throughout the skit.A few years ago my white cousin married a black guy, and the music at their reception was eclectic. At one point we'd all been out on the dancefloor rocking to some 80s nostalgia, and a rap song came on that I didn't really know -- but, being in the flow, I just kept right on singing and dancing. Well, the chorus was something like "fight the power," and at one point my cousin and I made eye contact: there we were, a couple of white chicks, with our fists raised and singing "fight the power!" At that moment we both realized what we were doing/saying, and nearly fell down laughing. :)

The kids said both "chink" and "gook" tonight during dinner.Huh ... for some reason I'm more comfortable with the idea of kids teasing each other about stereotypes than I am with them using racial slurs. No idea why, it's not like one is inherently worse than the other. I didn't even realize I had a "preference" until I read your post!

[OtakuLoki]

Cartooniverse, I'd have been with you, sitting on the sidelines, wondering whether I should be horrified, concerned or pleased.

Thinking about it, rationally, it seems a better reaction to the different backgrounds of the kids - no worse than ragging friends about hobbies, or other likes - than the way that I suspect you or I were raised to deal with different ethnicities: walking around on tippytoes, trying not to disturb the invisible elephant. I suspect, that you had just been giving a pretty cool compliment, too. Not only were all the kids comfortable enough with themselves to talk like that without appearing to offend anyone, they were comfortable enough to do it around you, trusting you not to have a conniption fit.

[Derleth]

I'm guessing a lot of the younger people in this thread watch South Park. Anyone too uptight about racial issues (well, anyone too uptight about anything, but racial issues would top the bill) would find it extremely difficult to really laugh at the average episode, especially a Cartman-centric one, but it's a runaway hit in the US.

Rosa Parks is dead and I think we're finally moving beyond the aspects of our culture that needed her. I find it very encouraging, actually.

[Johanna]

When I was a kid in the 1960s, the German-American kids used to gang up on me for being Italian. That, and telling Polack jokes, was as far as intramural race issues went in my Catholic school in a suburb of Cleveland. Ohio. It was 100% white. Lots and lots and lots of Irish, plus Poles, Slovenians, Hungarians, and the aforementioned Germans and Italians. That was it. No Latinos and no blacks. The most exotic kids there were Lebanese, and they looked almost otherworldly to me because I had never seen anyone brown skinned before except Father Mendes from Goa, and he was like an emissary from another universe. No doubt the demographics of my grade school have changed drastically in the 32 years since I graduated from there. There just aren't anymore the monoracial white establishments there used to be. It wasn't till I read this thread and it made me think about my grade school days, that I realized how old-fashioned WHITE the whole thing was.

The ironic thing was, this school was where the nuns taught me racial equality. The all-whiteness of it was accidental, not deliberate. It just took a few years for integration to take effect.

We were kept updated on the Civil Rights movement while it was happening. We sang all kinds of leftist songs, Woody Guthrie, Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, they told us about Martin Luther King and the Poor People's March, about Bobby Kennedy and his efforts to relieve poverty in Appalachia. We had a group of young black girls from the inner city come out to our church basement and perform songs of racial struggle, including "Skip A Rope" during which they actually skipped rope. I had several years of anti-racist indoctrination in that school that made me the woman I am today. Even though I quit being Catholic long ago, the racial justice education the nuns gave me was the real thing of lasting value.

[Johanna]

IIRC, nobody teased the Lebanese kids for their ethnicity, because none of us had any idea what Lebanese even was, no frame of reference in which to situate it. We just sort of tacitly accepted that these mysterious beings moved in our midst with no explanation.

Johanna, who grew up to become a professional Arabist

[ladyfoxfyre]

We did it in high school all the time. I went to a pretty small school, so we all knew eachother and joked about everything imaginable. We had a friend who was half black and half hispanic, so we called him the blaxican. :D
I agree with the sentiment that it's more a way to mock racism than to emulate it at all, our (my?) generation just doesn't see it as an issue anymore, I don't think anyway. Plus everyone feels like they are a part of the group, I mean, if you aren't a minority you're being left out of all the jokes.

-foxy

[Dorjän]

Hey Johanna, fellow Clevelander here. What school did you go to?

[Johanna]

Hey Johanna, fellow Clevelander here. What school did you go to?Gesù, in University Heights. In the '60s, UH was 100% white: about 75% Jewish and 25% Catholic. Protestants were another exotic species that we only saw on TV but not so much in real life. I grew up in an almost entirely Jewish neighborhood. It's integrated now, less Jewish and more black.

My area was not majority Italian, I don't know how my parish got an Italian name. (Probably from the Christmas song A Gesù Bambino.) But no one knew Italian, no one knew that it's supposed to have an accent on the last syllable, so we all pronounced it wrong with the stress on the first syllable.

[Sleel]

I just saw this (http://www.machall.com/index.php?strip_id=150) comic the other day. It's very appropriate to the original post.

[davmilasav]

I went to a small, Christian college in Beaver Falls, PA (Home of "Broadway" Joe Namath!) When I say small, I mean it. We had a total enrollment of around 1800, with 60% commuters.

In 1989 my friend Dave's floor hockey team, FUBAR, was in a playoff game one night and his roomie was cheering him on from the stands. Dave was so white we called him the Abdominal Snowman. Dale, the roomie, was like a negative image of Dave. At one point Dale jumped up yelling, "Kill them all! Kill all them white boys! Except that one....I sleep with him!"

Brought the house down.

[Johanna]

OMG, your friends were out in a small Christian college in PA? :eek: Boggling. The Christians were cool with them?

[PinkNailFile]

All. The. Time. Short jokes. Race jokes. Gay jokes. Fat jokes. Jewish jokes. Whiter than white kids going "It's cuz I'm black, right?" We're so comfortable with each other that nobody really cares. My Ecuadorian friend embraces the Ecuadorian banana-picking stereotype.

However, if you get something wrong (calling Deni, who is Ecuadorian, Mexican, for instance), we will jump down your throat. Or if an outsider does it. They're not part of our group of close friends, so it's not really a good idea. And one kid always makes race jokes or Jewish jokes with a mean intent, and we get mad at him for that.
But among our big group of friends, we all know we're kidding.

[slaphead]

I don't think this is curious at all. Friends rag on each other ALL THE TIME about EVERYTHING (well, blokes do, anyhow). Ethnicity is just one more thing to work with and make jokes about. It's not even anything particularly new.

Several of the people I work with are good friends of mine, and we'll randomly flip each other the bird and insult each other and so forth for no particular reason during the day*. Half the things we say would get us a dressing-down from the diversity monitor if they knew about it, but it's just funny. You get two brits, a Norwegian, a Moroccan, a half-Indian Belgian and a guy from Trinidad all trading abuse it can get pretty off the wall.
If some random person gave me the finger or called my friend a thieving arab it would be fighting time, but that's what friends are for - insults :D

*Best one ever being when I was on a conference call and glanced up to see three of them walking past my cube all giving me the finger with both hands in a sort of choo-choo train style while gurning like chimps. That took some explaining to the others on the call.

[Daithi Lacha]

I worked with an Indian (feather-not-dot) a few years ago, and she delighted in making me blush by loudly referring to me as "Great White Father" in front of our customers. And we would regularly raise the blood pressure of my Korean-born manager by asking her if, at lunchtime, she wanted some of our Chinese food, and then say, "Nah, guess you eat enough of this at home, right?" "Dammit," she'd yell in her up-Island voice, "I'm AMERICAN!!!"
It would never occur to make a joke like that to another one of our workers, though - a sensitive young Chines lad. Guess we did have boundaries, after all ...

[Daithi Lacha]

*sigh* "... occur to us to make ..." & "... Chinese lad"

[Cartooniverse]

I am reading in on this thread, lest youwonder if I OP'd and then left. I'm also spending some time with this gang of kids. I like em. I like how they relate. They are clearly forming a good honest bond and- as pointed out just above- while they can trash eachother, I suspect that an outsider would be given a rather chilly response to the same level of abuse.

Live and loin. :)

[Ol'Gaffer]

I still run around with a group of guys that I have been friends with for more than 20 years (I'm 34). We got a couple of Mexicans, a Filipino, two Japanese guys, a Japanese/Mexican guy, a Native American, and a couple of white guys. Race was a constant issue with us...as was being fat, skinny, bald, hairy, rich, poor, having a crappy job, having a great job, music tastes, driving a shitty car, not having a driver's license, spending too much time in front of the mirror, spending too much time in the gym, not being able to hold your liquor, becoming obsessed with a female, not clipping your toenails, only being able to play one song ("Wanted Dead or Alive" by Bon Jovi) on the guitar, having a fat grandma, eating weird food(s), gambling too much, snoring too loudly, wearing tighty-whities, becoming a cop, owning guns, being a liberal/conservative, etc., etc., etc.

I think that the only things that have ever been truly off-limits were moms and (now) kids. And, as a number of posters have pointed out, these were OUR taunts and not to be shared by anyone else. In fact, if you were hanging around with us and nobody was giving you a hard time...it was probably a pretty good sign that no one really wanted you around.

Slightly funny story...We were in Reno some years ago and I had won a fair amount of money on the first night while everyone else was losing. I had gone off to the bar or something and when I came back I saw a bunch of my buddies all sitting at one table together. I strolled up to the table and (before I had even said a word) the dealer turns to me and says "You must be that lucky inbred hillbilly that everyone keeps talking about!" I replied, "Well, I don't know about lucky but the rest is true!"