Characters: Me, 20-something white chick (5’2"). Dammon, older 20-something black dude (6’+). Cory, my age, white.
Setting: a different’s friend’s yard, we’re about to leave in Cory’s car to go somewhere.
Me: Shotgun!
Dammon: What?
Me: You heard me.
Dammon: looks at me; looks down at himself I’m over a foot taller than you. (It’s a small, small car.)
Me: Yeah? Well, I’m white. shrugs
Cory: ZING!
I let him have shotgun, though.
Yes.
In high school, all the time. My college isn’t the greatest for racial diversity, but we jokingly give each other hell about everything. It’s no different than when we joke about my distinct lack of height (5 feet flat).
In high school (in the 90’s) I had pretty much the same experience as everyone else here.
Same groups of friends, new friends, and co-workers post-high school have all had the same attitudes as well.
Yep. Heck, we even make fun of our own races. My Jewish friend once said while trying to stick his fingers in a small space to grab something, “These fingers are meant for counting gold coins!”
I guess my generation isn’t old enough to not make jokes at each other’s expense, race included (I was born in the sixties). Teasing a friend about his race - totally cool. Excluding someone because of race - unheard of.
We teased in college, they typical pick on people for the stereotypes of their nationalities - most of us had a few to chose from. Susey would throw things at us for calling her “part Nazi” but even she wasn’t really mad.
My brother and his friends do even more. What amuses me is him (red hair, fair skin, blue eyes) and his best friend (blond, fair skin, blue eyes) talking about how they’re tempted to give the next cop a hard time for pulling them over for racial profiling. “It’s because we’re Latino, right?” You would never guess by looking at them, but they are in fact both part Latino - not only is his best friend is 1/2 Cuban he has a Hispanic name, both first and last. I hope they have the sense not to do it, but I’d sure like to see the cop’s face if he took the friend’s license after that accusation… 
But do they ever pick on each other and their other friends!
Until I was 11, I lived in a smallish town in West Texas where 95% of the population consisted of two varieties: white and hispanic. The other 5% were rarely seen except on TV, but my parents were very careful to make sure I knew that racism existed, was wrong, and never to use racial slurs. When I moved to Houston (diversity!) in junior high I went out of my way not to bring up anyone’s race unless it was in an extremely positive way. It was all new to me and I didn’t want to offend anyone.
My husband, on the other hand, was an Army brat. He spent his childhood in the ‘80s at Fort Hood in central Texas, which was by its nature an ethnically diverse environment. At least half his friends’ mothers were from foreign countries, where their G.I. dads met and married them, so he was surrounded by every imaginable ethnicity of combination thereof. As a result, the kids weren’t necessarily colorblind, but they were definitely color-not-freaked-out-by. They all made the kinds of wacky ethnic jokes at each others’ expense and a good time was had by all. For his part, my husband filled the role of the cracker son of Arkansas parents.
So yeah, I think things are slowly getting better, mostly in the places where things are truly desegregated and nobody gets a chance to seem terribly “other”.
I’ve an Indian friend (that is, his parents were from India, but he’s as American as they come) that we’d always refer to as a “dot not feather” Indian, but never in any sort of a derogatory way. It’s one of those things - up here in da Nort’, it’s pretty obvious he looks different than everyone else. Better be up front about it and go for laughs than be uncomfortable. And if he showed any sort of offense, of course we wouldn’t have gone any further, or referred to him as such again. But he didn’t care, so neither did we.
My friends and I make fun of each others’ races and nationalities all the time. Our most entertaining jokes often revolved around a friend who was a french citizen. Given recent politics, you can see the ripe opportunities. Then my best friend started dating this guy who’s korean. We’ve actually told him we’re excited to have a new ethnicity to flay.
A few weeks ago we were relaying a story about how the french guy and the korean guy were going around with the teasing, and the french guy says: “Oh, just shut up and get started on my pedicure,” to which the korean guy replied, “I don’t do that, but I’ll give you a great blow job.” (The rest of us in the car just about died at this point). We discovered that older people who were at the party listening to the story just did not feel that subject was something to joke about.
It’s such a generational thing.
You’re 19? I thought you were, like, 40, dude.
Anyway. My SO and I are two different races - he’s Chinese, I’m Indian - and racist jokes are a staple of our conversation. And if I’m close enough friends with someone, I’ll dip into it too. I’ve been known to say at work, “Ah, I’m just here to fill the quota.” (Currently being the only non-white person they’ve hired in NY, I think).
Count me in as another person who’s suprised to find out that Regallag_The_Axe is a mere youth.
My friends and I will readily kid each other about differences in race, religion, etc. After my brother once bemoaned the fact that, as a white middle-class male, all of history’s injustices were laid at his feet, we used to kid him when something went wrong: “It’s all YOUR fault!” In college, I took it on the chin for being from Wisconsin. I did have one friend, though, who was very uptight about…well, a lot of things (except doing her damn dishes, apparently). We never kidded her about being Jewish lest we get the evil and and an accusatory, “What’s THAT supposed to mean?”
As the non-white half of our interracial marriage, Mrs. Kunilou has no problem teasing the children about race – or mixed race as the case may be. But while I’m perfectly content to tease them about pretty much anything else, that’s where I draw the line.
-Chortle- Indeed. There is absolutely nothing funny about blow jobs. Got that? Nothing at all !!!
In my group of associates, that would make her the prime target. She’d either loosen the hell up or find a new group of friends.
I think Dave Chappelle really encapsulated the whole movement with his “Black White Supremacist” skit. If you haven’t seen it, Dave plays a blind black guy who somehow becomes a Klan leader (since no one ever told him he was black, he thought he was white).
Thus, a skinny black dude shouting “White Power!” throughout the skit.
I think it’s a kind of game that lets people explore the roles that are expected of them because of race, gender, etc. Thus armed with understanding, one is free to deviate from those roles without guilt. And it’s good for a laugh.
==Squints carefully== You calling my kids deviants?
I agree, if they are secure enough to play at this then they are secure with their sense of equality and interaction.
I just spent the last couple of weeks catching up a friend with the first season of “Lost” and the first few eps of the second season. He’s black, from Puerto Rico.
Don’t want to give away the plot point from the show, but let’s just say that something bad happens to a guy while a white woman he knows is off getting nooky with a brown-skinned guy. When she comes back and learns the news, she reacts emotionally.
And I sez: “That’s her punishment for bangin’ the darkie.”
Cracked my friend right up.
I think what this thread shows is that it is not the words or the opinions that matter: it’s the attitude behind them that makes all the difference in the world.
I’m 23, so I’ve also been involved with a lot of this. I think the people who do this kind of joke understand the politeness and sensitivity they’re supposed to show to people who are different, and I’d say they usually do that without a problem - so it’s funny to go WAY over that line. It’s satirizing racism, in a way.
I’ve posted a few times about a college friend of mine who had spina bifida and used a wheelchair all the time. We made TONS of jokes about that. “Too lazy to walk,” etc etc etc. He lead the way with that, and I found it a major relief, since if he hadn’t been okay with jokes about it, I would’ve had to bite my tongue constantly. He’s also Jewish, so there was that extra angle.
I work, for want of a better word, in an International school in Hong Kong. British, American, Canadian, Chinese, Phillipino, Indian, Korean, Australian, Mexican, African (and so on) kids. Every colour imaginable.
I just don’t hear the racial jokes. And I don’t think it’s because the kids are particularly nice (although they are) or because they’re cool enough to ignore it. It’s simply not an issue with them. They’d be as likely to make a joke about someone having legs as about someone being Korean or whatever. To me, this suggests that the world, or this little, priveleged, bit of it, is growing up about racial matters.
The kids said both “chink” and “gook” tonight during dinner.
-cackle- apparently they feel they’re pushing the envelope. They wanted me not to feel left out, but didn’t know a derogatory term for a Polish , Russian or German person.
THAT amused me. Asian, Black or Latino they’ve got down. White sub-ethnicities are lost on em.