Thank you for adding that. I see a few posts later we turn another corner to talk about the US history in regards to Chinese, Japanese, etc.
Race comes in so many colors. It’s beautiful in a way - if we allow ourselves to see it. And if we’re allowed to keep it.
Well put.
I think the challenge is more layered than people care to admit. Much of race actually breaks much more clearly along CLASS lines than racial lines. My ex-in-laws were very much a middle to upper-middle class household. Firmly black, but with a more… determined work ethic - he came out of the Houston projects and his kids just weren’t going to live that way. He really did claw his way to where he got. I respect him for that.
He lost a leg below the right knee - in Vietnam - to a remote detonated land mine. He got a degree while working two jobs. He made a career in black radio early on in San Antonio. He lost that job to his ego and a mis-speak. He worked his way back up in the Post Office. It’s interesting…
I do think the mindset determines a LOT more than people want to think. If a black person crosses a certain bar in behavior, white guilt will carry them further - finally a black person they can like and respect. I’m not saying that’s good. In fact it’s a horrible commentary. But… at times, in places, it’s there.
imo.
As for the classification by features - you kind of have to. How else to determine that there isn’t a soft racism.
I could talk about my ex-niece - very bright. Her first teacher refused to challenge her and wanted to talk instead about how much of a trouble maker she was. She was just bored…
We do this stuff to ourselves… ya hafta wonder why sometimes…
I was born in Mississippi in 1960, and I came through childhood in a very tumultous time for the South. I won’t bore you with all the details, I know everyone has read/heard all about those times.
I wanted to touch on something ETF said, and relate it to something which Obama made me think of. It’s this part about the buried racism:
That is what many people of my age grapple with. I know this gal, who is fairly sharp, who is about 50 years of age. She is against ‘interracial’ marriage/relationships. She says that ‘separation of the races’ was taught to her in Church; that her parents told her it was ‘in the Bible’. I have explained to her that there is no such thing as ‘race’. I have explained to her that nowhere in the Bible does it contain such nonsense. She has looked all through the Bible and cannot find it. The problem is … she can’t let go of it. Because her parents taught her this, and she loves her parents (now deceased), she can’t bring herself to believe otherwise. I suppose she’s like Obama’s grandma.
I’m not saying that it’s OK for her to believe this. I’m not even trying to garner sympathy because of her struggle with herself. I bring this up to show that un-learning racism is not always simple nor easy, for people who’ve been brainwashed.
That brings me to Obama’s speech. What occured to me is this: older folks are going to look at issues of racism with a tainted lens. Tainted by past baggage not only from societal norms of their childhood, but by their own experiences with family and friends. Younger people don’t suffer from that (yet). Younger people can take a fresh look at society and figure out ways of doing things that an old fart like me (or Hillary) cannot.
And that gives me hope. Hope that the anger and anguish of the past which hobbles my generation will be tossed out before our children begin running things. I don’t mean forgotten, but laid to rest.
One day my kids were playing some game - Life? - the one with the little people that you put in the little cars and go all around the board. They were choosing their professions. My daughter’s friend said “I’ll be a preacher!”. In the next room, I overheard and stopped for a second. “A girl preacher ??!!”. Then in the next second I laughed at my silly self. “Of course girls can be preachers !”
I wish folks could look at matters of race in that way.
I’d like to chime in with a few quick, unnecessary thoughts. I hit some of this mindset in my parents when I expressed my intentions with my ex. My points were simple - “there is neither Jew, nor Gentile, Barbarian, nor Greek” Or something like that - Paul said it. That IS in the Bible and seems to work against the separate-the-races argument.
I’d submit that a careful reading of the New Testament shows that the main point is Love. Hence the highest two commandments.
Then… the Jews WERE prohibited to marry outside their race. But back then… race=religion. The New Testament maintains a not unequally yoked position - much as the OT did.
This reminds me of a woman I knew some 15 years ago, a decade or so younger than me. She was of white and Japanese parentage, with a Japanese surname, and simply gorgeous, as a person as well as in her looks. She had two young sons by a black father. They were also lovely, lovely little young men – physically, yes, but also in demeanor because my friend worked her butt off to raise them well despite being a single mother holding down a full-time, demanding job.
She was living in a close-in suburb of Boston when I knew her, but within a couple of years of our meeting she told me she was moving to Hawaii. “It’s because,” she said, “well, because…”
“Because you want to live where you and your kids look like everyone else,” I interjected.
“Yes! Yes, that’s exactly it!”
And we had a discussion of how hard it was for her to live among people who couldn’t matter-of-factly accept her and her children because they didn’t fit into the mold of their milieu.
I’ve been thinking about her a lot lately.
This is actually untrue. There is a brief mention here.
Fair enough, thank you; an over-broad brush on my part… though I suspect (looking at those numbers) that while some German-Americans were interned (and I have no doubt it was not pleasant), the overall population of German and Italian Americans didn’t have imposed on them the same wholesale relocation and internment that the Japanese-Americans did.
You’d be correct; I stumbled across the information in something I read in the last year or so, so I had a hard time finding a cite. I just thought I’d mention it because I’m sure that many would find it as surprising as I did.
I was disowned by my parents because of my ex-boyfriend, a guy with a Mexican heritage who had nonetheless been in Texas for five generations…as long as my own family on my dad’s side and a lot longer than my mother’s family.
That didn’t matter, though. What mattered was, in my mother’s words, that she “didn’t want any half-breed grandchildren.”
My parents were raised in West Texas. There’s a type of old-school “it’s a given” racism up there that I do not understand. It has a lot to do with their generation and where they were born. That doesn’t excuse them. Just because something has an explanation doesn’t make that explanation a defense, or even/especially an excuse.
My ex used to shrug and say that their opinions and beliefs would die with them.
I’m sure he was right, to an extent; they raised a daughter in South Texas who didn’t understand that The Brown People were off limits. People are people. I was raised down here. As a white girl, I am a minority myself; there are more people with a Hispanic heritage than there are Caucasians. At least in Corpus Christi and San Antonio, which is where I was born and now live.
But that doesn’t mean I’m not racist; there aren’t a whole lot of black folks down here and I am guilty, I am sure, of stereotypes. I didn’t grow up with them. I also didn’t grow up with Jewish people, with Middle Eastern people, with Asian people…so while I try not to stereotype them, I am positive that I do. Whether I like it or not, whether I say anything or not. I am ignorant of their culture and I am not exposed to it, to any real extent, so I am not positive that I don’t have generic stereotypes in my head about them.
Constant exposure is the only thing, IMHO, that will really rid people of hasty judgments on others who are not like them. We like and we trust only what we are familiar with. It isn’t fair and it isn’t right but it is in some ways inevitable, because we are human and fallible and ignorant.
If a non-american may answer?
To me, as a native, family-been-here-since-the-ice-age scandinavian mutt, now living in Norway, there is still one bit of rasism I can’t shake - and that is against first-generation immigrants and their children.
I grew up in a place where everyone was white, with one notable exeption: adopted children. There were a handfull among my playmates, two or three in my school and a few babies adopted while I was a grown girl among my parents’ friends. They were a mixed bunch; some were originally from colombia, india, some looked asian…but they were raised here, and they were just like me. They had the same culture, language, and interrests, they were among my friends, and there was no differences. And so looks, in and of themselves, mean nothing to me. (I remember once, when I was about 14, how my mother pointed out a classmate of mine to a friend of hers and said “that’s the little girl so-and-so adopted from Colombia, she’s all grown up now.” I’d never even noticed she looked different!)
I didn’t get to know people of a “different race” who were not raised in Scandinavia till adulthood.
A bit of background: Norway has a sizable immigrant population, many of them from Pakistan, but there is also a recently arrived Somali minority. Most of them have adapted quite well, and, aside from skin and all that, are just like everyone lese. Sure, many have an accent, and the girls wear a scarf on their head; who cares, right? But some, especially the people from Somalia, have, for various reasons, segregated themselves; they won’t mix with ethnic norwegians, their children (born here) don’t speak norwegian, and they wont adapt, or even respect, norwegian culture and law.
And, most distressing of all, it is estimated that some of them send their preteen girls “back home” for a “holiday”; what really happens is that the girls are subjected to female genital mutilation. A few cases come to light every year; many more are suspected. Sociaty does what it can to stop it, but it seems to be an upphil battle.
And, from this, my rasicm: I cannot, when I see a happy, seemingly foreignborn father playing with a toddler girl in a park, stop myself from thinking “are you going to mutilate that little girl you sick fuck?”.
I can’t stop myself; I’m sorry.
I remember a poem I read many years ago. It said that there shouldn’t be any “Italian” in “American”, no “African” in “American”, no “Asian” in “American”. I don’t recall who wrote it, but I always remembered the point. For a United States and “one people”, we find an awful lot of ways to divide ourselves up amongst ourselves. The problem comes after these arbitrary divisions. When divisions are made, it’s almost human nature to rank these divisions, because these divisions are surely made for a reason, right?
As gonzomax told me when I was growing up “people are people”. It’s simple, but that’s it.
There are many ways to stick out in a sea of people. The most obvious one is physical appearance, but different ways to seeing things or even mental states are worth mentioning as well. Again, I think the key is to point out our similarities, not our differences.
That was a simple matter or practicality. In 1940 if you had tried to detain everybody with German or Italian ancestry you would probably have had one third of your population in camps. Not to mention cutting your recruiting base, and gutting the farming and Manufacturing capacity. Plus all the Congressmen and Business leaders you would have to detain. It simply would not have worked.
I grew up in Korea on a military base and most of my friends were half Korean half white. There was the usual mix of races at my DOD school that you will find in the army anywhere but I don’t remember having any friends that weren’t white or Asian. When I moved back to the states I moved to a farming town in California and now that majority of the population was Hispanic my friends became white and Hispanic. I went to a lily white school in Colorado and our biggest complaint on my football team was that we needed more brothers because the two black guys on the team either weren’t black enough. I have gone the 25 years of my life with out being exposed to black culture or people to any great extent and I’m sure that colors my view of racism.
My friends that are of other races get made fun of constantly for the stereotypes of their race and they make fun of the crackers as well. The racial epitaphs that are used when one of them walks into a room have truly shocked outsiders to my group of friends. As a lower middle class group of people there is no divide between the jobs that my friends do or a difference in pay, with the exclusion of myself. We all go to either “Mexican” or “white” bars as we feel like it, mainly based on music. While we used to make fun of the lower class Mexicans taunting them with yells of “La Migra” as we drove by in high school. It was more from youthful assholeishness then racism especially since it was Mexican friends that taught us the phrase and yelled with us. There is much more classism then anything else in my life because the mayor of my town is of Mexican descent and no one minds, but the field workers tend to be segregated.
This could also be a problem due to a communication barrier. But this I believe comes more from frustration then racism. When people are trying to do a job and are unable to because of a communication problem there is a tendency to lash out at the person that they are trying to communicate with. I have seen this in some of my friends and we try to explain that they don’t hate Mexicans or Indians just the fact they don’t speak English, but to a certain extent it’s understandable, if nothing else look at the frustration scene on this board to a confusing business e-mail. It normally helps that they are complaining to the race that they are complaining about to get them to understand this.
I guess because I don’t see racism in my life that I have taken a lighthearted approach to it, I filled out my college application with my race as other – EuroAmerican. I realize that there are problems in the U.S. but I have seen people move past the racism and seen the children of immigrants progressing up the ranks in society. I’m not sure how this helps the discourse but it is my point of view.
“I don’t discriminate; I treat everyone like shit” my Dad
I’m not sure how I feel about this. Talking about a single American culture always makes me wary, because what most people view as “American culture” usually is only representative of the mostly white upper-middle-class. A point of conflict in a lot of ethnic minority communities is that to be American is somehow seen as a betrayal of your roots, but to retain your culture is seen as being “anti-American,” or at least resistant to assimilation. You’re either a FOB or a twinkie. I’ve read a lot of case studies about American soldiers who brought home Korean brides after the war and forbade them to talk to their children in Korean or teach them Korean. “This is America!” was always the argument. This in a country that prints e pluribus unum on its money. I’m perfectly comfortable with my Asian American-ness, as long as people understand that I’m not Asian AND American - I’m an American of Asian descent, if that makes sense. The adjective “Asian” does not make us any “less” American, yet that is how it’s perceived in many people’s minds, and that is at the heart of a lot of racial issues in the US - particularly when it comes to immigrants and their descendants.
I am a white male, 58 years old, raised in Portland, Oregon.
The house where I grew up was next to an informal color line. Our side was all white, although I would call it a mostly blue-collar neighborhood of mostly very modest houses. The other side was mixed race. I had to travel through this area by bus to the doctor twice a week for allergy shots by myself, starting at age 7 (this was in the mid-50’s) and I shared the bus with black people. I tried not to share a seat, but sometimes a black person would sit next to me. Sometimes I thought these people smelled funny, but later I recognized that smell as either of two things - the unwashed smell of street people, or the smell of someone who has been drinking. This was a minority of people I had to sit next to, but the memory stuck.
I should add that my father made occasional bigoted remarks, more I think out of ignorance and failure to examine his attitudes than through true bigotry, and he changed later as his views widened.
My grade school (Alameda School) was 100% white, not even any Asians, let alone Latinos or blacks. I matriculated to high school in 1963.
High school was very integrated, and I met and was friendly with a few black students, but most of the black kids, it seemed to me at the time, tended to stay in their own social groups. Since I was quiet and shy and didn’t mix much, I didn’t even think of trying to belong to any of those groups. By the time I was in high school, also, the color line was broken a couple of blocks up the street when a black family moved in. As far as I know, there was no big deal about it.
While I was in high school the civil rights movement grew and came to a head, and I came to realize intellectually that racism was stupid. But there were still seeds of it deep down from my childhood, relatively innocent as it was. Over time I have known and liked (and had sex with) lots of folks of different ethnicities. But I confess to some ambiguity even today about some black people that I see but don’t know.
Specifically, there are some things about “black subculture” (I don’t know if that term is offensive to anyone) that bother me:
People who talk/argue in very loud voices in public (especially women/girls). They seem to think that whoever can holler the loudest has won the argument. And if someone else is trying to read a book or hold a different conversation, that’s just too bad.
The current black patois seems to be almost another language, which I mostly can’t understand. Maybe that’s the point of it. I guess this shouldn’t bother me any more than Chinese people speaking a language I don’t understand, but it does, and I’m not sure why.
There are lots of people in the world who seem to feel entitled in various ways. Some black people (again, more women than men) seem to feel entitled to be jerkish and inconsiderate. This may be confirmation bias, which speaks to the racism issue.
Mostly, I try to tell myself that I don’t know these people and so I don’t know what their lives have been, nor what might have led up to this behavior which I find objectionable or unpleasant. On a conscious, rational level that mostly works. Not so much deeper down. The bottom line seems to be not that I wish there weren’t black people in the world, but that I wish they would behave more like me. I don’t think I feel that way about other ethnic groups.
Thank you for opening this thread. This has been a very useful exercise for me that has helped me look a little deeper at myself.
Roddy
I’m the thirty-four year old product of the collective white guilt machine, from guidance counselors to Diff’rent Strokes to G.I. Joe commercial breaks; I’ve been inundated in bad propaganda and good intentions practically since birth. A little less heavy on the “education” and I think maybe I wouldn’t feel as apathetic as I do, but I don’t care anymore who’s feeling oppressed and who wants to be called what and who’s getting screwed as long as it isn’t me and mine. Or maybe it’s because I grew up in a very multicultural area of the country, and watched every other racial and ethnic group openly hate on each other all the time. Trinidadians vs. Jamaicans, Cubans vs. Mexicans, Haitians vs. Southern Blacks, Puerto Ricans vs. Cubans, Eastern Europe vs. Everyone…grow up in South Florida and you learn quick that white Americans/Western Europeans are apparently the only people on the planet who feel guilty about rascism, because most everyone else around here is prone to at least threatening outright interracial violence at the drop of a hat. A sprinkling of Arabs and a good dose of Asians and we could have a full-on global race war sparked right here…and we probably would, if Whitey and the Cubans didn’t have most of the guns.
So forget it, forget the BS guilt trip and all the rest. I’m dead on the inside where this issue is concerned. Everyone’s a rascist, I’m not a rascist, you’re a rascist, he’s a rascist blah blah blah. You know what? I don’t care. Someone pays more than me for a car because the salesman thought he could get extra from a black guy? Guess what: he was right. And I hope my car costs a dollar less because of it. Not because the poor sucker was a black guy, but because it got me a dollar. A whole dollar and it’s mine.
Right, and you’ve expressed the other side of that coin. The “receiving” culture has to be open with this change. Bring in the new languages, words, and cultures. It’s like an immune system. The more stuff we bring into it, the better it gets. It’s not about diseases (usually) though, it’s about knowledge. You can’t have too much of that.
I live in Cameroon, and the racial baggage is just absurd. I’m looked upon as a god because I’m white. I’m given things I’ve done nothing to deserve. Every single man in town wants to marry me. I’m given the best seats, the most food, the first place in line. I’m happiest when I with my collegues, who have learned to look past my race (mostly). And I try not to be like some volunteers who ask for things like the best seat on the bus. I’d rather be with the crowd.
But sometimes I do get used to the idea that I am treated specially. Like, I expect to walk into the most exclusive dance clubs without paying. When people question something I’m doing or do something I don’t like (like drive the motorcycle taxi I’m on badly, or give me a funny look when I try to check into a fancy hotel) I do find myself thinking stuff like “Can’t you see I’m white?”
Conversly, I get higher prices at the market, a lot of conversations about me (I’ve learned enough of the local language to comment back when people begin talking about me), and puzzled looks wherever I go. I feel like a big old white alien when I walk through town. Every day of my life, I am a total freak.
It doesn’t help that everywhere I go I am greeted with a chorus of people yelling “Nassara! La Blanche! White man!” I’ve lived here two years and I still can’t walk down my own street without hearing it. Added to that, for some reason half this town thinks blonde haired blue eyed me is Chinese, so I get “Hee-Haw! Ehhhhh Chinois!” in the mix.
As for Africans, I hear a lot of self loathing- comments like “We are Africans, we cannot learn” are an everyday thing. People here have bought into our media stereotypes about them. There really is a strong belief here that blacks are worse than whites. There is also a lot of bitterness about colonialism and suspicion of white people- quite understandbly.
Anyway, I don’t know how this all going to translate at home. But I know I’ve learned a lot from spending two years as a visitor to a different culture and a total freak.
Wow. That’s interesting and I never knew any of that. Thanks for sharing.