The curious way kids today have of dealing with race.

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
41

I think the OP is pretty well addressed, but I’ll just chime in to say that I’m in my 30s and my friends and I still tease each other about things. Race gets brought up very rarely (and only if the joke is simply too good to pass up), just because it can still be a sore subject. But I’ve been teased about being half Irish, being short, and being ~10 years younger than some of my friends – likewise, my best friend is 13 years older than me and I tease him about his age sometimes (he’d probably say all of the time, but he has memory problems ;)).

Hell, I used to tease my cat about not having opposable thumbs. :smiley:

A few years ago my white cousin married a black guy, and the music at their reception was eclectic. At one point we’d all been out on the dancefloor rocking to some 80s nostalgia, and a rap song came on that I didn’t really know – but, being in the flow, I just kept right on singing and dancing. Well, the chorus was something like “fight the power,” and at one point my cousin and I made eye contact: there we were, a couple of white chicks, with our fists raised and singing “fight the power!” At that moment we both realized what we were doing/saying, and nearly fell down laughing. :slight_smile:

Huh … for some reason I’m more comfortable with the idea of kids teasing each other about stereotypes than I am with them using racial slurs. No idea why, it’s not like one is inherently worse than the other. I didn’t even realize I had a “preference” until I read your post!

42

Cartooniverse, I’d have been with you, sitting on the sidelines, wondering whether I should be horrified, concerned or pleased.

Thinking about it, rationally, it seems a better reaction to the different backgrounds of the kids - no worse than ragging friends about hobbies, or other likes - than the way that I suspect you or I were raised to deal with different ethnicities: walking around on tippytoes, trying not to disturb the invisible elephant. I suspect, that you had just been giving a pretty cool compliment, too. Not only were all the kids comfortable enough with themselves to talk like that without appearing to offend anyone, they were comfortable enough to do it around you, trusting you not to have a conniption fit.

43

I’m guessing a lot of the younger people in this thread watch South Park. Anyone too uptight about racial issues (well, anyone too uptight about anything, but racial issues would top the bill) would find it extremely difficult to really laugh at the average episode, especially a Cartman-centric one, but it’s a runaway hit in the US.

Rosa Parks is dead and I think we’re finally moving beyond the aspects of our culture that needed her. I find it very encouraging, actually.

44

When I was a kid in the 1960s, the German-American kids used to gang up on me for being Italian. That, and telling Polack jokes, was as far as intramural race issues went in my Catholic school in a suburb of Cleveland. Ohio. It was 100% white. Lots and lots and lots of Irish, plus Poles, Slovenians, Hungarians, and the aforementioned Germans and Italians. That was it. No Latinos and no blacks. The most exotic kids there were Lebanese, and they looked almost otherworldly to me because I had never seen anyone brown skinned before except Father Mendes from Goa, and he was like an emissary from another universe. No doubt the demographics of my grade school have changed drastically in the 32 years since I graduated from there. There just aren’t anymore the monoracial white establishments there used to be. It wasn’t till I read this thread and it made me think about my grade school days, that I realized how old-fashioned WHITE the whole thing was.

The ironic thing was, this school was where the nuns taught me racial equality. The all-whiteness of it was accidental, not deliberate. It just took a few years for integration to take effect.

We were kept updated on the Civil Rights movement while it was happening. We sang all kinds of leftist songs, Woody Guthrie, Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, they told us about Martin Luther King and the Poor People’s March, about Bobby Kennedy and his efforts to relieve poverty in Appalachia. We had a group of young black girls from the inner city come out to our church basement and perform songs of racial struggle, including “Skip A Rope” during which they actually skipped rope. I had several years of anti-racist indoctrination in that school that made me the woman I am today. Even though I quit being Catholic long ago, the racial justice education the nuns gave me was the real thing of lasting value.

45

IIRC, nobody teased the Lebanese kids for their ethnicity, because none of us had any idea what Lebanese even was, no frame of reference in which to situate it. We just sort of tacitly accepted that these mysterious beings moved in our midst with no explanation.

Johanna, who grew up to become a professional Arabist

46

We did it in high school all the time. I went to a pretty small school, so we all knew eachother and joked about everything imaginable. We had a friend who was half black and half hispanic, so we called him the blaxican. :smiley:
I agree with the sentiment that it’s more a way to mock racism than to emulate it at all, our (my?) generation just doesn’t see it as an issue anymore, I don’t think anyway. Plus everyone feels like they are a part of the group, I mean, if you aren’t a minority you’re being left out of all the jokes.

-foxy

47

Hey Johanna, fellow Clevelander here. What school did you go to?

48

Gesù, in University Heights. In the '60s, UH was 100% white: about 75% Jewish and 25% Catholic. Protestants were another exotic species that we only saw on TV but not so much in real life. I grew up in an almost entirely Jewish neighborhood. It’s integrated now, less Jewish and more black.

My area was not majority Italian, I don’t know how my parish got an Italian name. (Probably from the Christmas song A Gesù Bambino.) But no one knew Italian, no one knew that it’s supposed to have an accent on the last syllable, so we all pronounced it wrong with the stress on the first syllable.

49

I just saw this comic the other day. It’s very appropriate to the original post.

50

I went to a small, Christian college in Beaver Falls, PA (Home of “Broadway” Joe Namath!) When I say small, I mean it. We had a total enrollment of around 1800, with 60% commuters.

In 1989 my friend Dave’s floor hockey team, FUBAR, was in a playoff game one night and his roomie was cheering him on from the stands. Dave was so white we called him the Abdominal Snowman. Dale, the roomie, was like a negative image of Dave. At one point Dale jumped up yelling, “Kill them all! Kill all them white boys! Except that one…I sleep with him!”

Brought the house down.

51

OMG, your friends were out in a small Christian college in PA? :eek: Boggling. The Christians were cool with them?

52

All. The. Time. Short jokes. Race jokes. Gay jokes. Fat jokes. Jewish jokes. Whiter than white kids going “It’s cuz I’m black, right?” We’re so comfortable with each other that nobody really cares. My Ecuadorian friend embraces the Ecuadorian banana-picking stereotype.

However, if you get something wrong (calling Deni, who is Ecuadorian, Mexican, for instance), we will jump down your throat. Or if an outsider does it. They’re not part of our group of close friends, so it’s not really a good idea. And one kid always makes race jokes or Jewish jokes with a mean intent, and we get mad at him for that.
But among our big group of friends, we all know we’re kidding.

53

I don’t think this is curious at all. Friends rag on each other ALL THE TIME about EVERYTHING (well, blokes do, anyhow). Ethnicity is just one more thing to work with and make jokes about. It’s not even anything particularly new.

Several of the people I work with are good friends of mine, and we’ll randomly flip each other the bird and insult each other and so forth for no particular reason during the day*. Half the things we say would get us a dressing-down from the diversity monitor if they knew about it, but it’s just funny. You get two brits, a Norwegian, a Moroccan, a half-Indian Belgian and a guy from Trinidad all trading abuse it can get pretty off the wall.
If some random person gave me the finger or called my friend a thieving arab it would be fighting time, but that’s what friends are for - insults :smiley:

*Best one ever being when I was on a conference call and glanced up to see three of them walking past my cube all giving me the finger with both hands in a sort of choo-choo train style while gurning like chimps. That took some explaining to the others on the call.

54

I worked with an Indian (feather-not-dot) a few years ago, and she delighted in making me blush by loudly referring to me as “Great White Father” in front of our customers. And we would regularly raise the blood pressure of my Korean-born manager by asking her if, at lunchtime, she wanted some of our Chinese food, and then say, “Nah, guess you eat enough of this at home, right?” “Dammit,” she’d yell in her up-Island voice, “I’m AMERICAN!!!”
It would never occur to make a joke like that to another one of our workers, though - a sensitive young Chines lad. Guess we did have boundaries, after all …

55

sigh “… occur to us to make …” & “… Chinese lad”

56

I am reading in on this thread, lest youwonder if I OP’d and then left. I’m also spending some time with this gang of kids. I like em. I like how they relate. They are clearly forming a good honest bond and- as pointed out just above- while they can trash eachother, I suspect that an outsider would be given a rather chilly response to the same level of abuse.

Live and loin. :slight_smile:

57

I still run around with a group of guys that I have been friends with for more than 20 years (I’m 34). We got a couple of Mexicans, a Filipino, two Japanese guys, a Japanese/Mexican guy, a Native American, and a couple of white guys. Race was a constant issue with us…as was being fat, skinny, bald, hairy, rich, poor, having a crappy job, having a great job, music tastes, driving a shitty car, not having a driver’s license, spending too much time in front of the mirror, spending too much time in the gym, not being able to hold your liquor, becoming obsessed with a female, not clipping your toenails, only being able to play one song (“Wanted Dead or Alive” by Bon Jovi) on the guitar, having a fat grandma, eating weird food(s), gambling too much, snoring too loudly, wearing tighty-whities, becoming a cop, owning guns, being a liberal/conservative, etc., etc., etc.

I think that the only things that have ever been truly off-limits were moms and (now) kids. And, as a number of posters have pointed out, these were OUR taunts and not to be shared by anyone else. In fact, if you were hanging around with us and nobody was giving you a hard time…it was probably a pretty good sign that no one really wanted you around.

Slightly funny story…We were in Reno some years ago and I had won a fair amount of money on the first night while everyone else was losing. I had gone off to the bar or something and when I came back I saw a bunch of my buddies all sitting at one table together. I strolled up to the table and (before I had even said a word) the dealer turns to me and says “You must be that lucky inbred hillbilly that everyone keeps talking about!” I replied, “Well, I don’t know about lucky but the rest is true!”