I was 22 when I noticed "race".

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

When I was growing up, race was not an issue in my family. I don’t mean that I was taught that people are the same, although they might have different skin than I; I mean that it just wasn’t brought up. I guess I saw that my parents treated people the same, and so I never noticed people were “different”. I watched Mod Squad, Star Trek, I Spy, and Julia; but in my young mind the black characters were just characters. Any race-related issues went over my young head unnoticed.

I was talking to the secretary at work when I was 22. Nice conversation. Then she mentioned that she “didn’t have the same opportunities as others, because she wasn’t white”. Huh? I had worked with this woman for two years, and never noticed she was of Japanese descent (born on Okinawa). I guess I had a comical look on my puss, and I explained to her that I hadn’t noticed. She didn’t believe me. But, honest to god, I hadn’t!

After that, I started to notice “Hey. That guy’s black. That guy’s Hispanic,” and so forth. I still treated people the same, but it felt weird noticing. I felt as if my innocence had been taken from me.

I grew up in San Diego, and I lived for over a year in Japan when I was very young. I was even as fluent as a four-year-old could be in the language. My father was a Naval officer, so I had some exposure to other cultures. My parents did not point out racial differences, but taught me to be polite. (“Please, sir” and “Please, ma’am” were common at our table.)

I think I was lucky. I’ve seen scary documentaries on television featureing white racists. I worked with a black guy who told me that “all white people are racists”. Racism frustrates me to the point of anger. I consider myself an intelligent person, but I just can’t seem to wrap my head around such hatred. It just doesn’t make any sense to me, and I’ll be damned if I can find any sense in it. I’m glad I was not brought up that way!

I told my mom once that if I ever get married, my wife might be white, or black, or Hispanic, or Aisan, or who-knows-what. She said, “Well, I guess we brought you up right.” Funny; I never knew I was being taught not to judge people by their colour.

2

Interesting post.

I feel I should say more, but I’m not sure what!

3

Hey, I was the same! Only I was 16 and I am an ethnic minority.

My dad was as white as a caucasian can be, my mom is Latin. I grew up with all sorts of diversity with half my family being very, very dark (live in NM and were always tanned to a rich acorny-chestnut color), and many family friends of diverse ethnicity. Race was always an utter non-issue.

So when I went to school and there were other races, I didn’t give it any more thought than most people do to hair or eye color. I saw other kids as individuals, with individual attributes, thusly:

Mike is blond and always wears a blue shirt; he and cries a lot…
Natalie has black hair and almond shaped eyes, smiles a lot…
Jim has ears that stick out and he’s really loud…
Mark has chocolate-colored skin and neat hair…
Missy has thick glasses and is really pale…
Nigel sounds really neat when he talks and doesn’t make noise when he laughs…
Little Mark likes to play with mud…

When I was sixteen a nutty drunk in a donut shop started swearing at me and calling me a “f***ing spic.”

:confused: Huh?..

Oh, hey! I’m an ethnic minority!

Never occured to me before. I was dumbfounded.

I even said “Hey, Ma! I’m a minority!” when I got home (she looked at me like I was nuts.) I had never thought of myself as being of any particular race either because it was never important.

In hindsight, it explained a handful of “racism” experiences I had as a kid (e.g. “Ooohhh, so that’s why those kids called me a ‘n***er’ and tried to beat me up…”). But never really thinking about people in generalized ways, the concept of “race” and “racism” had never really sunken in like that.

“Race” didn’t really mean much. Skin color, eye shape, accents… bah, all that was just general descriptive stuff like the color of your jacket and whether or not you had a cool lunchbox.

The concept of “race” had elluded me all that time.

4

Well, I was eleven when I figured out that I was black. My mother was very light-skinned, my father a rich chocolate color, and none of us kids were the same shade. Meanwhile, the family whose back yard faced ours had kids who were all the same skin color (or close), but two brunettes, one redhead, and two blondes. I assumed that some families had more skin tone variations, and others had more hair color variations. Took a while for the concept of “race” to sink in.

5

I knew all about race even when I was a little kid. Living as one of the few white guys in an almost all black neighborhood helps you to notice that sort of thing fairly quickly. But I was reminded of a story I’d like to share.

I was 18. I was working at a gym as a membership salesman. I remember one time my boss came up to me and asked me to do something. I told him I couldn’t, because I was showing a prospective client around. He asked me to point him out, and I heard myself say, “That black guy, right there.”

Until I said that, I hadn’t even noticed that he was black.

6

I had the same experience in my early 20s.

I grew up in a town that is 99% white. So white that the local “ethnics” are the Finnish population. We have Finlander jokes instead of moron or <insert your favorite minority to make jokes about> jokes. I occasionally see black or asian people here, but not very often.

My mother raised me in the way Johnny LA describes. I knew there were people of other color out there, but I just considered them people.

When I was 18, I moved away. Sometime around 22 I realized that some of the people I worked with were hispanic. I’d really never noticed before someone in the office told an off-color joke that slammed hispanics and half the office was a-twitter over it.

Now, I’m a little more aware of race when I meet someone. But I’m nowhere near as aware of it as Mr. Athena, who grew up in California and Texas and had much more exposure to Hispanic and black people.

7

Very interesting post, Johnny.

I guess I can’t claim I didn’t notice race as a kid. Growing up, I went to a fairly low-class elementary school. By that I mean that the social and economical status of most of the kids’ parents was probably on the lower end of the income scale. The kids were white for 90%, but we always had a few Turkish and Moroccan kids as well. Other than their looks and perhaps a slight accent, they were never anything else than regular classmates to me. But I did hear my parents talk about racial tensions - not that they themselves were racist, mind you. But there were racial tensions around the Turks and Moroccans in Holland at the time. There still are, to an extent.
It made me think, all of a sudden. So, Teyfic whom I played with after school was somehow different. Different enough that people would judge him for his background? How weird!

Another real eye-opener was when I was about to introduce my fiancée to my parents for the first time, about 2 years ago now. She’s a delicious shade of caramel, stemming from her rather mixed (and interesting!) background. I don’t particularly care whether she’s deliciously chocolate, deliciously caramel, or deliciously white, so she really caught me off guard when on the way over, she asked me, “Do your parents mind the fact that you’re dating someone who’s not white?”.

I was dumbfounded. “Of course not, silly!”, was my response. Or words to that effect.

Then, 10 seconds later, I realised how easy it is not to be preoccupied with race - when you’re part of the majority. White Dutchmen, in my case. In her case, a girl of mixed ethnicity, growing up in South Carolina. The stories she can tell are bone-chilling, and can get me enraged like nothing else.

Whether my parents accepted her was a valid question for her, and it never even crossed my mind. I’m not going to pound myself on the chest for the way I was raised, glad though I am for it. But I’d rather contemplate the fact that racism creates so much pain and anger in this world, to this day. And that we all have a role in eradicating it. And, that a lot of people don’t seem to realise that they have that role.

Like I said, interesting post. :slight_smile:

8

I was equally agog when, in my university days, someone asked me if my parents would freak out if I ever dated a black guy. I think I stood there for several minutes having no idea about what to say or how to answer. Ethnic heritage was simply irrelevent and it would never even have come up in discussion with my parents.

At the time, I was dating a guy whose adopted brother was black and whose adopted sister was Aboriginal (Native American for those of you south of the border.)

To me, they were all just “Fred’s Family.” So it was weird when people were surprised by the racial diversity of his family protrait. A visitor would be confused by the family portrait then I, in turn, was confused by their confusion. Couldn’t figure out why they were baffled.

Since my grand revelation at sixteen (perhaps it should be in the “Embarassing Epiphanies” thread) I’ve been more aware of race, but still sort of vague on it. Different culture I notice – it’s cool, it’s exotic – different colour I’m still more oblivious to.

9

This is great, but honestly, do you guys want a trophy or something? I was 25 before I learned the Spectral Theorem, but that doesn’t take away from the validity of the concept.

Considering that most people can immediately identify the race of most of the people they meet, perhaps we should focus on the ways people react to race.

10

No one was debating the validity. We’re just commenting on how the concept totally escaped us and we were totally oblivious to it.

But since you offered, I would like my trophy too look kind of like an Oscar, but bigger and shiner.

And make sure my name is spelled right because most people screw it up.

11

I don’t notice race unless I consciously choose to. If that makes any sense. (Hate that word "race. Sounds like someone should be winning.)

I have taught in a fairly multicultural school. About halfway through one year it suddenly occurred to me that the class before me was more diverse than usual. Turns out that only one was born in this country and among the 28 students, 20 different languages were spoken. I was aware of them as individuals and knew that they had different cultures, but it had never occurred to me to do the big classification thing. To me it was a class of 28 interesting individuals and not sixteen separate ethnic groups.

12

I lived in Japan as a child, too, but a little older than you were, 9-11 years old. I can assure that if you weren’t so young, you would have known damn well about race. “Gaijin”, the polite term that people called you, meant “foreigner” or “outsider”, in other words, “One who isn’t like us”. And that was the common polite term for any white person.

I think your parents raised you correctly, but the reason you didn’t understand racial issues is because you were sheltered, not because your parents were enlightened. My parents raised me the same way, but I dealt with being a minority (I am white) until I moved to the US when I was 17.

13

My experience is so much the opposite, it’s hard to imagine we grew up in the same country. I grew up in a blue collar south suburb of Chicago named Harvey. Integration was a hot issue. There were riots, and arson was a pretty coommon form of real estate tranaction. The story was that certain real estate dealers were engaging in what was referred to as “block busting” – forcing white owners to sell to black buyers. Getting a single black or hispanic family onto a block would make property values plummet for everyone else, so the theory went. Everyone else would then “have” to sell off their homes cheap to the only people who would then be willing to buy them, other minorities. Supposedly these realtors were trying to intimidate people by torching some homes. I learned later that it was more likely that homeowners torched their own homes for the insurance value, which in some cases was more than the market value.

My father owned a small apartment building and wouldn’t rent to minorities. I personally witnessed him brushing off potential black tennants many times. I asked him why, and he claimed that others in the neighorhood would torch the building if he brought in a black tennant. He may even have been right about that part, as a significant part of that town ended up torched.

There were racially motivated riots in my older sister’s high school. I didn’t go to that same school, because I was bused to another, due to racial considerations in redistricting the school system.

I ultimately came to the conclusion that white people can be as unpleasant, dishonest and stupid as any other race could possibly be, and we all indeed are equal.

Ah, home sweet home! :rolleyes:

14

Very interesting post Johnny L.A.. I had more or less the same education by my parents, in France. So today I don’t really notice skin color much more than the height of the person : it’s part of a person, help me to recognize him/her and that’s pretty much it… My boss is from Dominican Republic origins so dark skinned and the only thing that makes him look different for me is his goatie :slight_smile:

BUT… during my childhood in the south of France and after, I had contacts with a lot of arabs (coming mainly from the North African old colonies) and found myself sometimes with not really racist reactions, but falling into generalization: oh, the arabs, they’re all, etc, etc… Being not a racist I ended up with an arabic girlfriend several years ago and now a half-arabic wife. But still I asked myself: why I had those thoughts? I came up with the fact that I was more or less a “culturalist”.

What is a culturalist? It’s somebody that has more or less problems to accept/face/understand a different culture than its own. The further the culture, the more culturalist. The arabic culture is very different from a western culture. I’ve been living in the US for more than 3 years now and never had really a big cutural problem, just minor adjustments. But with arabs it was another story, especially when you see only a immigrant minority which is usually from very poor peasants origins and somehow prone to delinquency in urban environments. They have themselves a very set culture, usually linked to the very strict muslim religion (the arabic side of my wife family being maronites christian, I can tell you it’s not always a matter of islam) . Their views on women, head scarfs are a hot subject in France and Europe today: Freedom of religion vs. secularism. A cousin of mine just married an arabic girl. Her mother didn’t want to talk to him, he his christian. He met her only once: at the marriage. They had numerous problems planning the ceremony because they wanted a 100% arabic/muslim wedding. Just an example: they didn’t want alcohol served, in France, the country of wine and Champagne! Cultural clash!

So yes, I may have culturalist reactions. Fortunately I know why and if I may speak of such matters I always keep my mind open and try to understand if the ‘problem’ comes from ME or from them. Usually it’s from me.

The US being a cultural melting pot, did some of you had the same experience? I noticed something at work : we had an assistant manager from Indian origin. The Indian langage, the way it’s spoken, is kinda fast, with a lot of consonents. The way he spoke in Englich was the same : short burst of sentences. Although he was a nice guy, nobody liked him, and I think this was the main reason, because he was speaking “hard” and was feeled like being rude. The langage is also a cultural barrier.

15

I used to live with an Pakistani girl and a black girl and another white girl. The black girl used to complain a lot with ‘because I is black’ type comments (very Ali G but before his time), but the pakistani girl said that most people don’t even notice that she has a different skin colour until she mentions it, I certainly don’t notice.

16

I had a similar experience. We adopted my little sister when she was ten, and the fact that she was black and we were white meant that, when growing up someone being a different colour from me didn’t really register to me at all. Still doesn’t really, and occasionally I have been talking to people and after several minutes suddenly gone to myself: oh, they’re black/Chinese/whatever. However, in monoethnic-until-recently Dublin, it is more noticeable.

I only really started to think about it when I was about 18 and met a really militant Pakistani guy who turned everything into a race issue. (“He thinks people hate him because he’s Pakistani - actually they hate him because he’s a dick.”)