i'm a racist

i was at my son’s wrestling practice, when the coach made a kid stand in the middle of the room.

he said the boy’s family doesn’t have a car and would anyone give him a lift to the team’s away matches.

this boy was very awkward looking…chubby, thick coke bottle glasses, cross eyed. pasty pale skin, stains on his tee shirt. and looking mortified to be the center of attention

and no one was exactly leaping to help him.

i felt terrible for him so i volunteered.

the coach sent the boy’s father to me to make arrangements.
well, i was surprised to notice the boy’s “father” was a black man.
i made arrangements to pick up the boy and gathered up my son’s gym bag and headed for the car.

it was cold and rainy so i offered to take the boy and his dad home. they gratefully hopped in.

well, now i’ve somehow turned into a taxi for this family. and i really don’t mind that part. they live less than a mile from me. i have to go past their apartment to get to wrestling practices and competitions.

what upsets me, is that i can’t get past the fact that he’s black. on our way back from the meet i took the kids to McDonalds for a happy meal. i felt every eye on me as i sat with him.
i have a personal rule about doing anything that even “APPEARS” like a date with any man who isn’t my husband. so i tried to convince myself that my discomfort was because i was dining out without my husband, but no, truth was, i was embarrased to be seen publicly with a black man
while this man is clearly very poor, he has never behaved as anything less than a perfect gentleman
so basically what i’m saying is i’m a hypocrite. i talk a good game about racisim being nothing more than ignorance and fear, but i fall into the same traps.

(actually, usually i get on my soapbox and start preaching how racism is a tool of the Devil and it’s only purpose is to separate us from each other, and from God. and that as Christians we will be recognized by our love for each other. but i realize this isn’t a Christian forum so i’ll leave it at that.)
well, anyway, what i’m trying to say is that as human beings go, i have room for improvement, and i’ll work on it. racism in any form is unacceptable and it’s gotta go.
i still plan on keeping my rule about no men except my husband. and usually my husband rides with us to wrestling matches. but sometimes he works on saturdays.
well, those of you who do pray, pray for me
i’m a hypocrite

I’m pink therefore I’m Spam

You know, I’m not convinced you’re a racist.
But I do think you’re waaaaaaaay too concerned about how you appear to others. Do you think anyone really gives a shit if you’re walking with a man who’s not your husband? Do you think anyone would have a heart attack if they saw you having lunch with a black man?

Sorry to break it to ya honey, nobody cares that much about you and/or who you’re seen with. Haven’t you learned from this board that people have bigger problems than to be concerned about your appearance?

Perhaps I’m being a little harsh, but I think you have self consciousness issues. Are you one of those attention seeking people who butt into everything?


“All those who believe in telekinesis, raise my hand.” Stephen Wright

actually, that’s why the whole thing surprised me, usually i don’t care if i look like the wild woman of Borneo.
i go out in sweatpants, holey tee shirt and my hair standing on end
i’m usually completely indifferent to people looking at me and i thought i was color blind.

basically i’m surprised to find out i’m not the person i thought i was.

I’m pink therefore I’m Spam

Melanie,
First, the fact that you recognize this and want to change it is a great thing. Second, your actions seem reflect a non-racist attitude. All of us were brought up with tons of influences from our family and friends that can’t be wiped away just because you "feel wrong about it. What is imporatnt is that you never act on it. I am guilty of a million things like this. Yesterday I had an elderly patient who was acting very strangely and I said to myself, "God, old people are weird! I had to catch myself right after I said that. I catch myself all the time and try never to act on these impulse thoughts that seem to spring from nowhere. The it is the same with racism, sexism, etc… I wouldn’t question your Christianity. You know what is right and what is wrong. Follow your heart.

“Everybody wants a rock to tie a piece of string around!”
-TMBG

Also, don’t try to post before you have had any coffee or you will mispell, mispunctuate and so forth…

First racism is defined in the American Heritage Dictionary as The notion that ones own ethnic stock is superior

Is this how you feel? Do you feel that white people are superior to black people?

If not it is not really racism. Is it a problem? Only if you make it one. If you treat this man and all other races with respect and the only problem is your own thoughts, then as long as you are aware of your thoughts and do not act on them, then no problem.

Just continue to be aware of your thoughts and actions in regards to all people.

Jeffery

I felt different around the first black person I got to know.

I grew up in a very WASP town and had only met two black people before I got to know Carl. He was my cabin counselor at summer camp. (To really throw me into culture shock, he was married to one of the white women counselors.) I didn’t feel prejudiced; it was more self-consciousness that I’d do or say something to offend him.

After less than a day, though, I was over my feelings and really developing a warm friendship with him, as were all my cabinmates. (We were pulling practical jokes on him in a couple of days.)

On the last night of camp, we raided the kitchen and brought our booty back to the cabin. We were halfway through stashing it in the attic when Carl returned from saying goodnight to his wife. He was cool and asked for a spoon so that he could dive into the ice cream. Then he asked what else we had. I reached in and grabbed a whole watermelon. He said we should have waited for him for our raid; he would’ve carried the watermelon. We laughed at his self-depreciation, then dug into our goodies.


What would Brian Boitano do / If he was here right now /
He’d make a plan and he’d follow through / That’s what Brian Boitano would do.

so i guess what your saying is that the emotion i feel is several hundred years of cultural programing clashing with liberal white middle class guilt.
and Democritus…all the coffee in the world won’t help my spelling. it’s just a lost cause.

racisim is an ugly, dangerous monster that has killed many people.
and just because in my particular case it appears to have a leash and muzzle. it’s still very deadly. (would you live with a psychotic angry rabid mountain lion just because it was in a cage)
saxface is right, there are people with bigger problems, hey, even i have bigger issues, but this is an issue that can be fixed. maybe not quickly and easily, but it can be done.

I’m pink therefore I’m Spam

I admire you’re honesty to yourself. That’s the most important thing. But I agree with the others that it doesn’t sound like a race issue. I think it sounds more like a class issue. Could it be that your embarrasment comes from the fact that the father and son are poor and rather dirty? You mentioned that several times in your OP. How would you feel if the two were Mexican? Or Oriental? Or how about if they were just “poor white trash”? Does the color of the skin really bug you, or is it the outward appearance of the two? If the dad wore a Brooks Bros. suit and the kid wore [insert cool kid’s brand here] clothes, would you still be embarrased? While judging people based on income level is bad, I’d hate to think that you’re judging these people on something as unimportant as skin color or ethnic background.

Good luck to you in any event. You CAN overcome this. Just remember to be honest with yourself. And question those feelings you’re having until you know exactly why you feel them.

I thought this might be a good forum to share something that I once witnessed. I call it “good parenting”.

Last summer, a little girl and her mother were sitting on one side of a park bench in Central Park. I was sitting on the other side. We were all watching two young boys kick a soccer ball back and forth. For the story, you need to know that one boy was white, the other black.

The little girl said, “Mommy, that boy goes to my school!” and pointed to one of the kids.
Her mom said, “oh, which one?”
The girl said, “the one in the red shirt!”
“Both of them have red shirts on!” noticed the mother.
“The red red shirt. With the white tennis shoes!” etc etc

The little girl never said, “the black boy” or in any way showed that she saw any difference between the boys’ genetic features. I thought that was pretty cool. Clearly, the mother had somehow taught her daughter that we’re all people, not black people, white people, etc. Pretty cool.

I wish all cities and towns were as racially diverse as New York. I don’t know anyone here who has any problems with people of any other races/nationalities/backgrounds/poverty levels. Like I said before, don’t people have more important things to worry about?


“All those who believe in telekinesis, raise my hand.” Stephen Wright

I know what I want to say here, but It’s hard to put into words without pissing everybody off.

I always knew I’m not a racist, and have been fortunate enough to not spend my time hating and loathing. But when I moved to the south, and went to a school with a 50/50 black/white population, it was a real culture shock at first. It took time to get used to and feel comfortable. But I did, and have many black friends now. I came from the NorthWest, where I’ve literally only seen 3 blacks in my home town.

Sadly, people who aren’t around different looking people very much, don’t know how to act around them. Or how to feel. I’ve been around Mexican imigrants, African Americans, gays, Koreans, and I’ve learned to love their cultures. You don’t have to be ashamed of the shock. I’m sure if you went to luch with a Samurai worrior, it would be a real culture shock. You’d be wondering what he thaught about you, where he got those funny clothes, why are people staring at a white lady and a Samurai worrior at lunch? But when you got to know him, and used to how it feels to be around him and why you feel the way you do, you accept him as a friend, and just don’t care about what others think.

Hope I didn’t piss anybody of too much.

SaxFace:
I place a lot of my hope for the future in the kids who see like the child you talked about. For my own children, skin color is a descriptive term, nothing more or less. It indicates nothing to them about the person except what they look like.
The best thing I have heard all three of them say about various discriminatory tactics they have learned about is, “Well, that’s just stupid!” They just don’t understand why people would treat others badly, and I love that.

MelanieTarrant:
May I make a suggestion? While we pray for you, why don’t you pray for the boy and his father? (My guess is you already are.) It’s really hard not to love someone you pray for.
And at this point, regardless of the thoughts you have, you are treating them in a loving manner. I think your thoughts will begin to reflect your actions.

I don’t consider your feelings evidence of racist attitudes on your part, particularly by the stricter definition. At worst, they’re prejudiced, but no human being is devoid of prejudice – it’s just not how the human mind works. We’re always making snap judgements about the world and the people around us based on limited or nearly non-existent information. We tend to be very good at it when it comes to our environment, but perhaps less so when dealing with other people who differ from us. Perhaps a tendency to regard people from groups other than our own suspiciously was selected for in our evolutionary development – one can see how suspicious individuals might be more likely than non-suspicious ones to live to reproduce.

There’s a hierarchy of ways in which we mentally deal with people different from ourselves. I suppose the highest state is open-mindedness based on ignorance, when we’ve never seen or heard of people having a particular characteristic. That never lasts, however, past first contact. The human mind always tries to extrapolate based on past experience, to assume that one person with aquamarine hair is likely to resemble another in ways beyond hair color. And as soon as you even hear of such a person, you begin forming a mental schema of what they’re like.

The next stage, inevitably, is prejudice. In this stage, you’ve formed a mental model of what individuals belonging to other groups are like. It’s always being refined, but is always there. To berate oneself for it is counterproductive – you won’t eliminate it, and you’ll make yourself miserable if you hate yourself for it. There are three strategies, IMHO, that work to mitigate the negative effects on your relations with other people. The first you’re already doing: be aware that your thoughts and attitudes toward others are inevitably colored (you should pardon the expression) by the prejudices you’ve formed. Second, spend as much time as practicable around individuals from other groups, and behave toward them as you would want them to behave toward you (sound familiar?). As I said, your mental model of what other groups are like is always being revised and updated as more data comes in, so the best thing you can do is collect lots of data from lots of individuals so that your mental model is built on a broad and deep sample. The third, and perhaps the most difficult and most important, is to resist social pressure to solidify your identification with your own group by ostracizing and demonzing other groups. Small children who grow up around children different from themselves often do so with surprisingly few negative notions about other groups, only to become extremely bigoted as they grow and become socialized to bigotry by the attitudes and practices of older children and adults.

For bigotry is the next stage. I consider someone bigoted when they have formed their prejudices so strongly that they begin to assume an existence independent of evidence. For whatever social or individual reasons, a bigoted individual no longer allows their mental model of what another group is like to be modified by data that does not match the model (it does allow for reinforcement of the model by data that supports it, however). A bigoted individual stops seeing anything with regard to another group except that which they already believe to be true of that group. Note that I’ve carefully constructed this description to avoid defining bigotry in terms of either negative or positive attitudes about other groups; it’s just as possible to be bigoted in favor of a group as against one, though we more commonly treat of bigotry as being a negative predisposition.

The evidence rarely, however, ceases to be accumulated at some level by the bigot, and as the dissonance between what the bigot holds to be true of a group and what they experience grows, either the bigot is compelled to reconsider, or to put the matter beyond question by asserting the absolute inferiority of the other group. If the group against which the bigot sets his mind is defined in racial terms, then it behooves the bigot to declare that the other race is inferior, is the way he perceives them, as a result of an inherent defect in their race, resulting in the final stage: racism.
Prejudice, then, is inevitable (if regrettable); bigotry and racism, deplorable in individuals and intolerable in our public institutions. Unfortunately, in our endeavors to eliminate publicly sanctioned bigotry or to denounce it in individuals, we too often level the more serious, more narrowly defined charge of racism, eroding its precise meaning to the extent that the second definition above does reflect current usage (though not the original intent of the term).

Racism is, as you say, unacceptable. You shouldn’t be accusing yourself of racism, however; as long as you keep trying to prevent yourself from having any sort of prejudices, you’ll fail. If, on the other hand, you ackowledge that you do and try to be conscious of the effects prejudice has on your thinking and, far more importantly, on your actions, you’ll be doing as much as anyone can be expected to. In this regard, Judaism perhaps has this edge on Christianity: that it is concerned far more with actions than with belief. You can question just about anything in halachah, but you’re still obligated to behave in accordance with it. Considering only your behavior, you are not to be blamed but praised; you’ve offered assistance to others without regard to their race, wealth, or social standing – indeed, to people who were being shunned by others in your position. What you did is laudable. What you thought is between you and G-d.

SaxFace, while I’ve done a bunch of stuff wrong bringing up my kids, no doubt, this is one thing hubby and I have done right, and we’re damned proud of it: our kids are colorblind the way the kids in your story are.

When Youngest Son was in third grade, there were FIVE children named “Marcus” in his class (of about 40 students – this was Catholic school). One was black, two were Hispanic, one was Filipino, and one was white. Y.S. was invited to “Marcus’s” birthday party at the park. He misplaced the inviation, but we remember the date and time, and went to the park expecting no problem hooking up with the party.

WRONG! Must’ve been a dozen or more parties in this fairly large park that day. We didn’t really know Marcus or his family at all. “Honey, what’s Marcus’ last name?” (since some of the space had “Jones party” type signs up." “I dunno.”

We wandered a bit, hoping to see someone we would recognize. Certain parties were more heavily populated by different ethnicities, and knowing that, I tried, “Honey, what does Marcus look like?”

“I dunno. He has dark hair. He wears glasses. He’s about as tall as I am.”

We finally found someone we knew to identify the right party for us – it was the Filipino Marcus. Y.S. never used that as an identifier – he still doesn’t, nor do his brothers.

That’s a world I want for my kids and my grandkids.

-Melin


Siamese attack puppet – California

Still neglecting and overprotecting my children

That’s super cool, Melin. Good job.


“All those who believe in telekinesis, raise my hand.” Stephen Wright

Except, oh, maybe the mayor!


In the manned space program’s early days, NASA spent $1 million
to develop a pen that wrote upside down. The Russians used a pencil.

Except, oh, maybe the mayor!

And Melanie, you’re not the first person that felt this way, if that makes you feel any better. The great Abraham Lincoln struggled with his own racism for years.


In the manned space program’s early days, NASA spent $1 million
to develop a pen that wrote upside down. The Russians used a pencil.

SaxFace said:

Melin said:

So I’m to gather that simply noticing that someone is of a different race than we happen to be is a form a discrimination? I don’t buy that. It’s all fine and dandy to say that we’re color blind, but in reality, we’re not. We notice if someone is black, or hispanic, or wears glasses, or is shorter than average. Why is it necessary to pretend that we don’t see the differences between people? Certainly, making judgements about people based on race is wrong. But when we decide that simply noticing that Marcos is Filipino, and (gasp!) saying that out loud in order to differentiate between the black Marcos or the German Marcos is simply using the most obvious difference between them in order to clarify your statement. 'taint no discrimination there.

It’s not possible to simply not notice the differences between human beings. Trying to raise children to be color blind is a noble thought, but it’s simply impossible. The trick is to raise them to not care about the difference. Telling your kids that they must absolutely not mention to anybody that their friend happens to be Filipino (or black, or Jewish, or gay, or Italian…) is shuffling the issues under a blanket.

PS - a good article about this kind of stuff is here: http://www.lasvegaspi.com/Charlton_Heston_Speech.htm

Melanie, I don’t think you’re a racist, for the numerous reasons already posted above. I’m replying for a different reason.

As a mature and intelligent human being, you must certainly know that life is a process. You don’t stop growing and learning simply because you’re an adult. Your discomfort is the result of years of attitude conditioning, but it is an attitude that can be unlearned, also. Perhaps this is why this very opportunity has arisen in your life.

It would be sad (and wrong) for you to turn away from these people simply because you were uncomfortable about your feelings when you’re with them. But you have already gone beyond that, since you have resolved to continue providing rides for them. That’s admirable, and your actions will ultimately influence your attitude readjustment. It is part of your learning process, and may very well be the reason you’ve been put in contact with them.

I believe things like this happen for specific reasons. In their case, you came along to lend them a helping hand (or car, as the case may be). But in your case, they may have come along to teach you something and allow you to grow (or mature) as a person.

Think about it. And don’t be too hard on yourself.


The Dave-Guy
“since my daughter’s only half-Jewish, can she go in up to her knees?” J.H. Marx