Why does that bother you. Anybody with an intelligent sence of their surroundings is going to notice things when they don’t quite fit the local average, it has nothing to with racism. Yeah I notice if there is one black guy in a room of white people. I also notice if there is one redhead in a group of blondes. I also notice the really tall guy, the chick with the huge nose, the guy with a prosthetic hand, the girl with the f***ed-up hair, and the guy who looks kind of like of Bill Gates.
I think I can safely say that both sides of my family are firmly bigoted, with a few noteable exceptions. Everyone’s from the South - Tennessee and Virginia.
My parents are in their early fifties. Hearing this stuff is particularly disturbing in my father, because I know he’s really too intelligent - way so - to believe what he says. It’s like he’s got to maintain some kind of honorary good ol’ boyism and tell a certain quota of racist jokes each day. I guess it’s just that he grew up in a way that doesn’t leave him any manuevering room.
My mother would seem better on the surface, but she’s just more skilled at hiding it behind a smile. Still, I would without hestitation tell her I was dating a black woman, because I know she’d never confront me over it. My father, though… he’d think I was insane. Although I have a theory that he’d have to surrender if kids came into the picture.
I really don’t know how I came out halfway decent. I was a social outcast until college, though, so perhaps I have an understanding of being treated differently. Still, though, a lot of crap is ingrained in my system and I cringe when it kicks in. Living in a big city has helped, though.
What wolfman said.
I notice, and don’t mind that I notice. It’s the same in my mind as noticing that Steve’s wearing his company shirt again, or that the new girl in the cube just outside my office is kinda cute. Now, thoughts and judgements placed upon people, based upon superficial characteristics, that’s something to be concerned about.
My father is a strange mix of egalatarianism and prejudice. He takes each and every person on their individual merit, except socially. For instance, his favorite sergeant was a black lesbian. Nothing to do with her as far as race or sex, but because when he needed something done, she made sure it got done. His favorite political candidate is Allan Keyes. On the other hand, he told me that he was glad I never brought a black girl home (this after I was married). He’s very quiet about his general beliefs, and it’s really hard to get a grasp of his true feelings.
My In-Laws, especially my MIL and FIL, are just flat-out bigoted. FIL is pretty quiet about it, and I handn’t caught on until just recently (See above linked thread), but my MIL is right out in the open, and although she isn’t rude directly to minorities, I’m sure they can get her attitude quite clearly.
Me? I’m reasponably sure I’m OK, but that’s not a judgement I get to make. You’d have to ask someone who knows me. My wife, however, is the real hero here. Despite have been raised by bigots, and having been fairly bigoted herself, she’s consciously re-educated herself. I’m not talking about the “Oh look how enlightened I am” disguise, but actually learning to accept people at face value. Yet one more reason why Mrs. Tranq rocks.
My parents were not bigoted (still aren’t). In fact, I think sometimes they went out of their way to expose me to people different than us. We lived in an area that is almost all white (some minorities are there now, but when I was growing up there weren’t any at all).
My mom’s dad (who died when she was 13) was apparently pretty racist. He would use the n-word in casual conversation, and just generally felt that “those people” had their place. Mom’s older brother is still like that. He had a neighbor from Ethiopia who was moving out, and there was some alarm that he might sell the house to a black family. I asked my mom, “Well, if the guy is from Africa, isn’t he black?” So my mother explains, “Well, according to your uncle, that’s different. He’s from another country. People from here who are black are just plain old black people, and that’s what he doesn’t like.” Uh-huh. IOW, he’s pretty racist, but will admit that there are some people who are “exceptions to the rule.” (I’m assuming here that my sister’s boyfriend is one of those exceptions. He’s Mexican, and my uncle just loves him.)
The funny part is that my uncle’s wife is Assyrian (sp?), so she’s basically Middle-Eastern. I asked my cousin (their daughter) about it once, since I find it ironic that someone so racist would marry someone dark-skinned. My cousin told me that her mom is just as racist as her dad.
So my mom came out of a fairly racist background without too many prejudices. And my cousin is as open-mined as you can get, and look where she came from. Someday I’ll tell you all about the lovely comments I’ve heard over the years from my uncle and a few of my other cousins. [sarcasm]They’re just so open-minded, it really gives you hope for the future[/sarcasm].
here’s some recent info re school desegregation.
I’d grown up in a lily white suburb. There was one Hispanic family, and two Asian families while I was growing up. Going to a major big ten U was a big change. When I moved a couple of years back from the inner city to the rural outlaying districts, I noted that the school district was another really pale setting, and I decided to not let my son go there. Went through hell and highwater to achieve it (we were two counties away), but in the end were able to (the superintendant failed to respond to my repeated phone calls and letters, I finally just showed up at a school board meeting with my son in tow. Of course, I’d asked him to ‘punk up’ first, so he was wearing his rudest t-shirt, torn over shirt, painted his hair orange, his nails and lips black etc. She took one look at him and agreed to let him continue at the other school 
)
Yep. I got kicked out when I was under 16 years of age for having two older male friends that happened to be black. That was my dad, my mom was cool with it. He’s not like that anymore. It took hours of yelling (on both our parts), but it worked out in the end.
Hoo, boy, was Dad a bigot. He looked and acted like the Stacy Keach character on Titus. He used to describe people with whatever derogatory term was the handiest - but in a totally dispassionate tone, like he was talking about shirt color or something. “They hired a new ni**er at work. Name’s Bob.” Or, “Hey, that wasn’t the usual ch*nk who delivers our food.” And he saw nothing wrong with this.
I grew up in East Nowhere, populated entirely by white working class, so these comments were pretty rare. When I went away to college in Los Angeles, it was my first real opportunity to mix with different ethnic groups. My first roommate was a black girl - and I couldn’t have gotten a better wake up to reality. She was a great person, and we had some very frank discussions about race; we ended up being inseperable friends until she left school.
As an adult, it took Dad a few years to adjust to hearing me say “black” or “Hispanic” instead of using his terms. (He passed away in 1992; in spite of everything, a damn good guy.) He finally gave up. My current SO, the greatest man on earth, is Mexican-American - my father would have been horrified. Tough, dad. If you’re looking down (or up, as the case may be), I hope you’ve learned.
So, yes; there is hope that racist garbage will not make the child a racist. It may come down to chance school friendships, but there’s hope. If you get the chance, maybe you can take your niece on outings where she will get the chance to mingle and she’ll notice we’re all just people. Good luck!
Har.
I LIVE in Canada, and anyone who tells you there isn’t racism here is a liar.
A friend of ours, who I’ll call Jim, is black. Jim goes to school, comes from an upstanding family, and has never gotten so much as a parking ticket. He’s a gentleman in every way and there is no conceivable legitimate reason why the police would be interested in him. And when he’s driving, he gets stopped, on average, two or three times A WEEK for “routine checks” or “there’s an APB out on a car like yours.”
I’m white. I have never been stopped for a “routine check” in my entire life. Not once, ever. I would guess that the odds of one guy being “routine stopped” fourteen times in the last six weeks, while another never being “routine stopped” in fourteen YEARS of driving, to happen purely by chance is about one in seventeen zillion. Do you think Jim’s being black might have something to do with his being stopped all the time?
Jim, incidentally, is a waiter at Mrs. RickJay’s restaurant, and just recently a couple refused to let him sereve them because they did not want “dirty blacks” touching their food. Can you imagine putting up with that kind of shit? I can’t.
In Winnipeg, the police like to pick up Indians, drive them out of town in the dead of winter, and dump them in the middle of nowhere with no winter clothes. Some of them have frozen to death this way. In Quebec, the surete du Quebec has more minority-abuse cases on its hands that it does biker gang members in its cells (half of them are on the take anyway.) They had race riots in Nova Scotia just a few years ago. Toronto is where my friend Jim keeps getting pulled over because he’s black. We have an entire provincial government that just barely manages to keep its fascist history under wraps and whose current premier once bawled out a hotel clerk for being a visible minority.
Canada has a long way to go yet.
I’m not sure, though, that being “separated” from minorities makes you a racist. I grew up in a mostly white neighborhood, with few minorities around. In elementary school I had only two classmates who weren’t white. But if I’d turned out to be a racist or joined some skinhead group, my parents would have kicked my ass so hard I’d have to adjust my shorts to pick my nose. I was taught that tolerance and respect were the only acceptable ways to deal with other people.
On the other hand, the folks in Bosnia-Hercegovina all grew up in mixed communities, and look how well that turned out.
Scarlett, FairyChatMom – take in what Wolfman wrote. There is absolutely nothing wrong with noticing skin color, or other superifical information, about other people.
You HAVE to notice - it’s very difficult to switch one’s brain off so as to not recive information about one’s surroundings. One’s REACTION to this information is what counts – not one’s PERCEPTION of that same information.
To answer the OP – my parents were bigoted, but never displayed it in public. Their flavor of bigotry was to expect less of African-American or Hispanic people in various situations. For instance, poor customer service was not expected from a white person, but was assumed from a black person. Whenever a A-A or Hispanic person broke ther stereotype, they would credit that person as being a “decent black person” or whatever.
My folks drew distinctions between “decent black or Spanish people” and “trash” who fully deserved the epithets “n***s" & "sps”. So some of the bigotry depended a good deal on socio-economic status, (perceived) ethics or culture, as opposed to skin color.
Another Canadian checking in here…
RickJay is right. Racism is far from nonexistent in Canada.
Some of my relatives are/were on the Toronto police (I am NOT going to name names!), and one year I heard very disturbing racist comments from one of them. I thought later, “You may be my cousin, but I’ll never be able to quite trust you again.” And the thought of him on police duty just gives me the willies.
My uncle was predjudiced against French people–thought they were the font of all evil. My aunt told me that, when he was stationed out west years ago, he would go around on the airbase and spray-paint out all the French on the roadsigns. A grown man of 43! Stupid.
And another cousin… arrgh. I could go on, but I won’t.
Let’s just say I’m very grateful for the non-prejudiced members of my family. And to some degree I’m trying to inoculate myself against these attitudes…
I can imagine this attitude leading to that couple having a lot of “extra attention” paid to their food by kitchen staffs everywhere. 
I had a bigoted step-father. He had no problem saying aloud, “The only good nr is a dead nr.”
Of course, he was Mr. Nice Guy before he married my mother.
The proverbial straw for me was when he told me I couldn’t go to the school dance with my neighbor, Michelle. She was a goddess! He said, “No one in this family is dating any n****rs!”
We then had a throw down at the dinner table.
He had no problem, however, with borrowing Michelle’s Dad’s tools.
Well, my mom’s mom was so upset at my mom’s choice of husband #2 (technically live in boyfriend) who happened to be black that she moved to Hawaii and hasn’t spoken to her, me, or my sister for 12 years. Since then my mom and Step-father have broken up (which is itself a long story, moral is don’t buy a house with someone you aren’t married to) My mom has tried a few times to get in contacted with my grandma, but to no avail.
My parents weren’t bigoted, at least not openly. The subject never came up, and when my older sister was dating Ty (now her husband), I wondered how my parents would react because he was black. End result? Happy marriage, happy parents.
Now my younger sister is dating an Asian man. I feel somewhat left out, almost as if I -should- date someone from a different ethnicity…
My parents have gotten better over the years but I would still have to say they qualify as bigots. My dad is more vocal about it than my mom. For example, when we were watching a movie in which a man struck his wife of a different race, he said,“See? You don’t never marry out of your race.” My reply was “Yeah, God knows there’s no record of a white man ever hitting his wife.” My mom actually has some friends at work who are black, but I don’t know if my dad does.
My grandparents, on the other hand, are still horrible. I know that when I see them I’m going to get pissed off at some point in the visit. Their main source of contact with minorities is in stores and on the evening news, so it’s not as though their attitudes are tempered by contact with actual people. My grandmother has even developed a mental categorization for Hispanic people she’s met and liked. Anyone she knows and likes is called Spanish, rather than Hispanic or Mexican. She always refers to the woman my brother has dated through their entire time at law school as Spanish, even after hearing the story of how her grandfather crossed the border and went to work on a ranch, then became a carpenter after the ranch owner paid to bring the rest of his family to Texas. It’s a habit that really, really pisses me off. My grandfather likes to bitch about immigrants who come to the US looking for work, as though the idea of leaving one’s country in order to build a better life elsewhere were completely alien. I wonder if he thinks his my dad’s ancestors left Italy because they just really liked boat rides.
I’ve managed not to absorb these beliefs. I think this has to do with actually meeting people of different races, plus education. It’s sad, because it does really eat into the respect I have for them.
Yes, but only if we broaden the term to include things other than race. My parents, especially my dad, are moderately intolerant of people who aren’t heterosexual. I say “moderately” since while they’re not of the opinion that they deserve death and torture, they think the lifestyle is flat-out wrong. While I’m not ashamed of my bisexual friends, I have never mentioned that they are to my parents- because I know my parents would think less of them, even the one they quite like. Maybe it’s cowardice, but until one of them comes to my (hypothetical) wedding with a SO of the same sex, it’s not something my parents ever need be concerned with, as far as I believe.
My brother and I, on the other hand, are of the “live and let live” mentality. We don’t think they chose their orientation, so they can’t be doing anything wrong(as long as they’re concenting adults). The bible can say whatever the fantatics want, the part of the bible that contains the idea that homosexuality is a sin condemable by death also suggest we make burnt offerings, and we don’t do that any more, either. We find our parents views sad, so there’s hope.
My first post may have been slightly misleading. Bordelond’s description fits my father perfectly. He’s just convinced that any non-white person who serves him will be incompetent. The most recent example is when he needed to rent a truck from U-haul. He made the arrangements, but the company somehow messed up and didn’t have the truck available on time. My dad somehow convinced himself that the one black employee that he had been in contact with must have been responsible for this. When he was telling other people about this experience, he always mentioned that the women was black, but he certainly wouldn’t mention that an employee was white in a comparable situation.
However, my brother had a black roommate during his first year at college, and my first roommate was born in Vietnam. Dad never objected to this, I think that he felt that academically successful people were ok regardless of skin color.
My Mom, on the other hand, has never issued a racist comment about blacks or Hispanics. In fact, she is very observant and aware of the problems of racism, and she taught my brother and I about these issues whenever she could. Her only bias is against Muslim immigrants from Turkey. There are many Turkish immigrants in our city, including three households on our block, and my Mom is convinced that they’re all involved in various forms of criminal activity, just because she’s heard of two or three of them being arrested.
Oddly, I’ve never heard my family make remarks about homosexuals, either in or out of the presence of my firmly closeted aunt.