Race and emotional baggage

In My Humble Opinion
1

As most here know, Obama gave a speech today on race and politics and the divisions it creates. We’ve had a few other threads active of late on the race topic, but each seems to touch the topic with a subset topic - creating a microcosm of sorts. This may be naive, but I’d really like to see a thread where people just try to understand the racial dynamics and baggage that each person in America carries.

Disparities in opportunity. Disparities in treatment. Unequal histories. Fears, hopes, hurts, and aspirations.

I’d like to see us lay out our own racial baggage. I know as the white parent of biracial kids… I am, myself, quite dissonant in how I feel about race. “It shouldn’t matter.” “But it does.” The government makes my kids chose one race that they are. I urge them to chose black. It helps the school (my kids do well in school) and it will help them in the transition to college. It’s selfish, but if they have to choose… why not choose what helps?

Is it fair? No. All I can do is point out that at current trendlines any of my three shouldn’t have a problem getting into a decent college. Even so… there will always be the shadow of a double standard.

I want a place where we can post our own fears. Hopes. Dissonance. And not judge each other. Where the CONVERSATION will clear old thoughts, hurts, and bitternesses.

You might say I’m a dreamer, but I’m not the only one… what if we all suspended disbelief long enough to try?

2

I’d like to hear Clinton and McCain weigh in on race issues in America. I’d like to hear what they think about the issue.

3

As would I.

In the interest of the topic, if this thread even takes off, I’d like to stay true to race - and not make this about candidates, cults of thought, or what network a person watches - unless germane to the discussion of race.

In hindsight, I should have included that disclaimer in the OP.

4

Intended as a genuine question: May I ask why you do not urge them not to choose? (Or insist that their race / ethnicity is “American”).

The census takers in NZ added “New Zealander” as an ethnicity option to the 2006 census. This was not available in the 2001 census, but a significant number of people had indicated Other: New Zealander on their forms rather than (more traditionally) selecting “European” or “Pakeha”.

5

Racial baggage, Northeastern white liberal style:

I was born in 1949 and grew up in a mostly middle class white suburb north of Boston. There may have been a black family or two in the town, but black people were pretty much an abstraction until I went to college. My family and their friends never made racist statements, that I can remember; they didn’t demonstrate anger and alarm at the civil rights movement of King’s time; heck, I have a vague memory of participating in some racial justice and harmony march in Boston, as a teenager.

And I was in the company of Negroes (the polite term then) for the first time in my life, and I didn’t know how to talk to them, how to even look at them (being naturally shy didn’t help). I departed from that experience no closer to any understanding of those people than I’d had before.

Those people. That’s what black folks were to me. Beings so different from me that I couldn’t see past the abstraction to the real people. Oh, I had imbibed the tenets of civil rights, even though my parents were lower middle class Republicans – Republicans of that ancient strain that flourished when fiscal conservatism and belief in a strong defense hadn’t been hijacked into a patriotic cover for extreme social-issues fanaticism and empire-building. The Congregational church I grew up attending was socially conscious and taught it from the pulpit. I believed in equality and justice and the American Dream for all – but I never had to confront the reality of their application to those people.

In college I met blacks and got to know them as individuals, as real people, for the first time. I tried hard to comprehend what small glimpses they granted me of the black experience. Can’t pretend that I did very well at it, but still, it built bridges for me, for my appreciation of folks whose differences, sometimes vast differences from me did not belie the underlying fact of our mutual humanity.

And yet, deeply rooted in my mind, ineradicable to this day, from childhood on were and are a whole host of ugly racist stereotypes. Where the hell did they come from? How did they get in there and why can’t I cleanse my mind of them?

Where did they come from? From the society I grew up in, of course, a childhood time and place where blacks on professional sports teams were still a novelty; where the faces on television were all white, all the time; where assumptions of white superiority were so deep-rooted that they didn’t have to be declared or debated – that’s just the way it was.

Now, I don’t concede any validity to these stereotypes – in my conscious word, deed, or thought. Over the decades since college I’ve tried my damnedest to live up to the liberty and justice for all ideal. I’ve rejoiced at the rolling back of prejudice and constricted opportunity in so many ways.

But the ugly thoughts are still there. Beaten back, beaten down, beaten into a low dull intermittent muttering – they refuse to die. I’ve become resigned, at age 59, to the fact that, shameful as it is, difficult as it is to admit, I’ve got some racism in me that I can’t scour out; the best I can do is shut the closet door, ignore the tiny hammering on it, and live my life according to the ideals I want to believe are the real me.

And that, my friends, is the racism of one Northeastern white liberal. Whether I like it or not.

6

I’m not saying that you’re wrong to tell them that, but I am reminded of what my friend Jodi said to me in high school, after the cast list was put up for South Pacific.

“I know I should be excited that I got a speaking role this time. But I’m always going to wonder if it’s because I gave the best audition, or because I’m the only Filipino girl who tried out.”

From a parental point of view, it’s easy to urge them to chose the option that will make things easier for them (and, be honest, for you). But I’ve got to wonder what those same helping programs do to a kid’s psyche in the long run.

7

There is no other option. In an effort to make sure all races are being properly educated… they HAVE to pick. I’ve left that determination up to them from an early age. That’s an identity issue and I feel like all I can do is make the argument that a few more opportunities will be there if they chose black. Nevermind that they are being raised by a white guy…

In short, they have to pick. And there are advantages for picking a minority status.

8

At the (e-mail) request of the OP, this is being moved to IMHO as Anomalous Reading was hoping to poll the TM regarding their views without actually arguing about them.
(Given ther standard behavior of some of our membership, I will not be surprised if it comes back to Great Debates, but we’re going to give him a chance to conduct his poll, first.)

[ /Modding ]

9

I understand your point and all I can do is find comfort that they are each sharp in their own way.

It is at least telling that Obama, a biracial person, is being cast as the first “black” candidate. How watered down does black have to be before you aren’t black anymore? Is it because those genes just tend to be dominant - and they are?

So… anyway… that’s how people will tend to see them.

10

I think everyone is racist, to some extent. Everyone has preconceptions. Is it worse in America than anywhere else, I wonder? And if so, is it just our isolationism that’s holding us back from getting past deeply ingrained racial issues? The fact that different ethnic groups are spreading deeper into the country in larger numbers can only be viewed as a good thing. I think nationalism plays a part, as well.

I’ve raised my kids to see people for who they are, not what color. And while it’s worked for the most part… they’re still exposed to racist statements. That’s (sadly) inevitable; it’s impossible to raise them in a completely tolerant bubble. But it does seem to be getting better by degrees generationally. Possibly my grandchildren will see a time when biracial couples in this country aren’t viewed as noteworthy, or biracial, just couples.

11

If it’s any comfort, I think Maureen is right. We are innately wired to racism. Without an ongoing exposure to people of other races - and people who you respect… that wiring just doesn’t get over written.

It makes sense, evolutionarily, for us to detect in-group and out-group quickly - so quickly that it’s unconscious.

That’s part of why I wanted to have this discourse. And thank you for being willing to be honest - more honest than most. I’m interested in hearing a wide range of experiences, anecdotes, stories, thoughts… whatever.

I do think that if we can discuss race issues in a respectful way, we all win.

12

Even in Barack’s speech he said:
*"I can no more disown him [Reverand Wright] than I can disown the black community. I can no more disown him than I can my white grandmother – a woman who helped raise me, a woman who sacrificed again and again for me, a woman who loves me as much as she loves anything in this world, but a woman who once confessed her fear of black men who passed by her on the street, and who on more than one occasion has uttered racial or ethnic stereotypes that made me cringe.

These people are a part of me. And they are a part of America, this country that I love."*

That was awesome. He just came out and said it…it was unbelievably honest.

When I heard his speech today I thought to myself that this was the most honest discussion of American racism I’ve ever heard in my lifetime. There was no finger-pointing, no condemning, just real people doing and saying real things and a man standing up for love and respect.

Truly great.

13

I’m a 46 year old white gal, California born, with my mom’s sense of equality, as Californians are wont to do. Moved to the South as a 13 year old, in the 70’s, not at all knowing how you were to act as a white person then. Made all kind of friends in high school there, and when elected to a president of a school social group (still don’t really know why, perhaps smart and rational minded), I wanted to better integrate it, and invited all the great young black women I knew. I didn’t know that was a bold move, it was a natural move for me, but later heard it was a not norm. Yay for youthful exhuberance! It just made plain sense to me then. And, it worked. Honestly, I still wonder why what I said was paid attention to, but I know I just saw purely that people were people, and I suppose that honest truth was seen. Perhaps because I had no baggage, or at least, I saw that the bags could be equally caried.

Went to Mississippi in my late twenties, and documented blues music culture there, learning from some tremendous older men and women, the best life lessons I’ve had the priveledge of learning. In interviews about the music, I learned from elders who went through very hard times, and survived by immense creativity and stalwart wits, learned what it is to be a human being in the face of all hardship, and retain your grace and human sensibility in spite of all odds. I’ve heard some very painful stories about how life was from those older folks, and have seen, in Mississippi, how many of their same sons are falling prey to times of despair. And, it hurts, immensely. I understand it.

I’m in Chapel Hill, NC, where the UNC Student Body President was recently murdered by gunfire, by two young black men, with prevoius criminal record. I, as well as the whole community here, are trying to make sense of it, and, well, it is just a trajedy. Eve Carson was a bright light, who truly would have made a difference. Today, listening to her memorial service on the local radio, I was reduced to tears by what her father chose to say. Here’s a reduced version of it, but, today, in the expanded version, he chose to say that all the young people listening were the ones to solve the problems, of all inequality. He didn’t cast blame, nor hatred, yet, his daughter had died in the worst way in a senseless shooting. What a tremendously strong man, to do that. No baggage at all, from the git go, when he might just have a whole big righteous trunk of despair to unload.

Grace.

14

We do appear to have a hard-wired system for determining “Us” (my family, my tribe, etc) and “Them” (scary, dangerous foreign types from over the next hill). Because of the age of the system it is inter-wired with our view of self; people who look like us are (by default) “Us-like” people who look different are (until proved otherwise) “Them-like”.

Unfortunately the system is out of date (and upgrade patches don’t seem to be available). We have moved around so much, and interspersed and interbred our tribes so much, that the in- and out-group system often gives inaccurate or undesirable results.

(A little illustrative anecdote: some years ago, taking a tour of Victoria, BC, my tour guide was a young Canadian woman of Chinese descent. She commented that American tourists had complimented her on her English… to which she had replied: “Thank you, yours is quite good too”. Her family had come to Canada in in the 1920’s and she didn’t speak a word of any Chinese language. The point here isn’t to rag on US tourists however, but rather that if her family had come from, say, Poland, or Croatia then no-one would have considered her anything other than Canadian. But because she looked Chinese, she triggered some people’s out-group detection if you will).

My young son goes to school with kids from a wide range of ethnic backgrounds, of whom European-descent kids are a small minority. (He’s got teased a bit for having “white hair”, and sometimes gets referred to as the “blond boy”). Of his friends one is Fijian Indian/Indian, another has a (black) South-African father and a Texan mother (originally from England), others are from Chinese, Maori, and Pacific Island families. These are his in-group, his peer-group, his tribe.

To me, creating hyphenated folk – Indian-New Zealander, Chinese-New Zealander, European-New Zealander – emphasizing their differences rather than their shared cultural experiences and upbringing serves little or no good purpose.

Anyway, enough soapbox. :slight_smile:

You said above however that your children must choose a race, “There is no other option.” But if enough people chose simply “American” – even if necessary crossing through all other options and writing in their choice – could that not effect change?

15

Glad to have you in the thread. It’s much appreciated and I share your thoughts.

To the question above, no… it’s multiple choice, pick-a-category kind of thing. And the district is strident. By law they must have a race for each child. Otherwise the metrics break down.

16

It is one of the ironic neccesities of post-Apartheid South Africa that we continue to classify our poeple according to the racial groupings used in the past. How else are we to tell whether members of a group that was previously oppressed are now prospering - or not? Sad but true…

Grim

17

I was raised in an almost entirely white suburb of Chicago. I attended a large high school - 2400 students or so - and in my 4 years there, we had 2 black students. One had been adopted and raised by a white family as an infant. Only one was a black child of black parents. So my exposure to black people as a kid was limited to seeing them when we went downtown or to Ford City mall with my grandmother. (Once in a while, a black person would come into our neighborhood stores, and when I was 3 or 4, I did that embarrassing kid thing: I asked my mother why “that woman” was “so dirty”. :smack: )

When I finished high school, I started working at the local Blockbuster Video, which was the first business I knew of that was staffed almost entirely by black people. (I didn’t know it before applying, but it wouldn’t have stopped me from applying if I had.) The store manager was a Jehovah’s Witness, and nearly all his employees were members of his Kingdom Hall. In fact, I only got the interview because my IRL maiden name was a stereotypical “black name”. The manager actually did a double take when she saw my white face and checked her paperwork to make sure she had called the right girl!

When I worked there, I got along great with everyone. But every so often, I’d get into a conversation with one of the other girls about “black things” and “white things” - stuff like, “Wow, so for y’all, a perm means to make your hair straight? Weird!” While I’m grateful for all the knowledge I gained and the friendships I formed, I cringe a bit, wondering if I was a little too much like these people in my youthful exuberance.

But anyway, I felt like I had grown up with a theoretical open mindedness, and that I had passed my first real life “test” pretty well. I was not a racist. Yay. I dated a few black men, not as a fetish, but just as I met and fell for them at random, along with a few white men.

Then I got married and moved to Evanston, a suburb on the north side of Chicago. At the time, I made the choice primarily because I wanted to raise my son in a more urban, multi-cultural environment than I had grown up in. My son went to a school that’s about 50% black. His first year there, 2nd grade, he was invited to a couple of black kids’ birthday parties (as well as white kids’ birthday parties) and we went and had a great time. (Another of those weird differences - when I was trying to amuse 20 kids, I rubbed a balloon on my kid’s head and stuck it to the wall with static. The other kids were amazed, they had never seen this before! So I rubbed a balloon on DeVante’s head. Couldn’t get it to stick. Tried Antoine’s. Nope. I couldn’t get a static charge off a single head of black hair. Weird.)

By 4th grade, there was not a peep from DeVante or Antoine or any of the black kids. No phone calls, no more invitations…I asked my son what was up, and he said the black kids and the white kids didn’t socialize much. We talked a bit about racism and why it was not good, and he said, “No, it’s not that. They just like different music and different movies, and we don’t have anything to talk about.”

That made me really sad. It made me question whether I had inadvertently passed on some unconscious racism to my son.

In 6th grade, DeVante stole my son’s bike out of our backyard. Climbed a locked fence to do it. I felt so betrayed by this kid whose birthday party I had helped out at 4 years earlier. This kid who, once upon a time, had been a friend to my son. And I will admit there was an undercurrent of, “that damn black --” Oh. Oh, shit. There it is. I found, deep down, that kernel of racism. I have no idea who planted it or when or how, but when DeVante finally lived down to the stereotype, he was no longer DeVante in my heart, but “that damn black kid”.

My son is 15 now, and at a Chicago Public School which is 90% black, and 99% low income, and now the social barriers are even more rigid between the black kids and the white kids. Again, my son says it’s not out of “racism”, but because the black kids are into music and movies and language and behavior that he finds objectionable. He has white friends and Asian friends and Middle Eastern friends and Latino friends (the only ones that seem able to cross the racial divide without problem), but no black friends. And I don’t know what to do about it. Certainly I don’t want him to hang out with black gang-bangers just to assuage my own guilt over my own racism. But OTOH, I find it unlikely that every single black kid in his huge high school is, as he puts it, “a delinquent”. But he can’t even get to know them - these kids have segregated themselves, without us having to go to the expense and legal wrangling of doing it for them.

18

FWIW…my kids are also biracial. We live in a nice middle class suburb in the San Francisco Bay Area. Not affluent, but nice. My kids attend an extremely diverse high school, and their friends run the gamut in terms of nationalities and races. They all seem to share the same interests and worries…“teenager stuff,” as my daughter puts it.

Some months ago, my 17 year old son (who works for the homeowners association) was mowing a lawn, and was changing the bag. A woman with a small girl walked past, and the little girl waved at him. He stopped, smiled and waved back. Her mother pulled her around and said “let the Mexican finish his work, sweetie.”

When my son told me about this, several emotions and thoughts hit me at once. Anger, outrage, shock that anyone (especially in this area, where we wear our diversity and tolerance as a badge of honor) would actually start entrenching such bigotry in their own child… all of which coalesced into one thought: “How dare you make my son ashamed of his race?” Had I been there, I’m not sure I would have reacted as calmly as I did when he recounted it to me.

I know my children will encounter racism. I sometimes wonder if it hasn’t escalated for them because of the immigration hoopla. My daughter was asked by one teacher at the middle school if she was born in this country. The best things that have come out of both the blatant and the subtle racism we encounter are the conversations we have. I think it’s made them a bit more thoughtful, and a bit more willing to accept people for who they are, not their pigmentation.

19

Breaking the metrics rather was my point. No “Other” category? :slight_smile:

What I find odd is segmentation into races on, what essentially comes down to, skin tone and facial structure, rather than segmentation (if such is felt necessary), based on similarities in culture, language, religion, etc.

I’m not really familiar with the situation in the US, but the impression I get is that a generation on the Irish, Basque, and Russian immigrants will all be considered “White”, while the American of Chinese descent whose family came out for the California gold rush, whose grand-father fought in the US army in WWII, will still be considered Asian-American.

(Thinking of WWII also reminds me of the internment during WWII of American citizens of Japanese descent, purely for having Japanese ancestry… but no similar imposition on Americans of German or Italian ancestry).

This is just my impression; if I’m wrong I’m keen to understand how things really work… it just all seems very odd to me.

20

You’re not wrong, and it is indeed quite odd when one stops to think about it.

Not that many people do stop to think about it unless they’re grasped by the scruff of the neck and forced to.