Miller, I have ONE positive thing to say about you’re mom’s behavior.
She treated you different as a kid, she tiptoed around anything harsh and divisive, as many parents do. Now she doesn’t. She knows YOU have fundamentally changed. IMHO, she is accepting you as an adult, and sharing more of her reality with you.
I’m sorry it’s not a more pleasant reality. 
Ironically, that’s pretty much what the average minority person feels all the time.
Welcome to their world. 
jayjay
Awhile back:
FILsthrnaccent to KidSthrnAccent: You’re black friend sure has good manners.
KidSthrnAccent to his grandfather: Pap’s you know his name, use it and if you really can’t remember just say, “my friend”.
(and then he stomped out of the room away from his doting but bigoted grandfather)
Two days later:
FILsthrnaccent to KidSthrnAccent: Where is the boy you were playing football with from?
KidSthrnAccent: He lives over in MadeUpName for nearby subdivision.
GFather: I meant what country is he from.
KSA: Here.
GFather: Are his parents Arab?
KSA: No they’re Greek and he’s one of my best bud’s. So Pap’s what time is your flight home tonight?
All depends on how you definte ‘racism’ (or should we speak more generally of prejudice). To try to define prejudice, we must answer these questions:
“If I believe that, in a given race, there are both good people and bad people, but my experience has led me to believe that most of them are bad, am I racist?”
“If I personally dislike a certain race of people, but treat them with the same respect and dignity as any other race, am I racist?” (i.e. am I racist because of my beliefs or because of my behavior?)
“If hold no ill feelings towards races different than mine, but I feel more comfortable to be surrounded by a majority of people from my race, am I racist?”
c-man
I see dead threads.
Look at the date of the last post before, and the first post of, the resurrection.
Weeeeeeeeeeeeeird…
Let me say that my mom was always very racist, but I truly think that was out of ignorance and environment, not out of malice - she really didn’t know better. She did, however, make a conscious effort to see that her children weren’t racist, always carefully tempering her own comments and opinions around us. Now that we’re all adults, she has come to see that most of her racist opinions are wrong, and has made great strides in attempting to overcome this defect.
I am also trying to raise my daughter to not be racist - BUT (and I’m pulling on my asbestoes panties as we speak) - where we live, there’s a significant number of non-Caucasian people who seem to be doing their damnedest to undermine my efforts. I’m not talking about a few black people who are on welfare or who have more children than they can comfortably afford, I’m not talking about a few Hispanic people who live four families to one apartment and drive beat-up old Chevrolets with pom-pom fringe around the rearview mirror, I am not talking about a few Asian people who can’t drive for shit and whose children are exceptionally successful in mathematics, and I am not talking about a few Middle-Eastern people who are nasty and who smell bad. I am talking a SIGNIFICANT number of the people my daughter comes into contact with who perpetuate negative stereotypes. Almost daily, I find myself muttering under my breath: “A little HELP here, people???”
Oh, lord, don’t bring her into Boys Town. You’ll probably see a lot of limp-wristed faggots having casual sex (well, not right then and there)*, and then where would we be?
[sub]*Note for the sarcasm-impaired: please review my entire posting history and reputation before attempting to parse this post. Thank you.[/sub]
There’s a difference between prejudiced and racist. Prejudice is pretty much suspicion towards those who are not like yourself (I’m like that with EVERYONE). Racism is the belief that one race is simply superior to another. I don’t believe that.
My mother has always been prejudiced towards Indians (people from India rather than Native Americans) and Mexicans. She didn’t see them as inferior, she just generally didn’t care for them as a group.
I used to think my mother was a little bit racist. She was openly opposed to the idea of me dating a black girl, and was clearly apprehensive in big cities around black people, thinking they were all gang members.
But I learned a little more about her upbringing and got a little older, and she started to become a little more understandable. She grew up in a devout Catholic, working class community of Muskegon, Mich., made up of Eastern European immigrants and their descendants. This neighborhood abutted the local black ghetto.
My mom, like every other other Catholic kid in this neighborhood, went to the local private Ctholic school, wearing the classic schoolgirl outfit. Her family was far from rich; I believe her church pickup up the tab for her schooling.
Anyway, there was gang of black girls who used to tease her every day on her way home. She won’t tell me a lot about it, but I guess from what I hear from other relatives, this gang attacked her and tried to beat the crap out of her on many occasions.
What was their motivation? Who knows. Maybe they (mistakenly)saw my mother’s schoolgirl uniform as some symbol of wealth, and were jealous. But imagining my mother all alone, being chased by a gang of black girls bigger than her intent on doing her harm, it made it a lot easier for me to understand why she might not like blacks as a whole.
We are all the products of where we have been and what we have seen. After she hit her 20’s my mother left Muskegon and moved to a part of rural Ohio where a black person has never set foot, to my knowledge. And to this day, he doesn’t like dealing with black people, or the thought of me marrying one.
(Slight hijack) THAT’S not gonna be a problem for my daughter. When I explained to her what the word “gay” means, she asked me “Do we know anyone who is gay?” I said yes, and she asked who, and I told her that people’s private lives are private, so I wasn’t going to tell her. She thought about that for a minute and then said “Is it Uncle Michael?” (Her godfather, as it happens.)
DING DING DING!!!
(end hijack)
I had a stepfather who turned racist on us. He was white and a Sgt. Major had many black, Puerto Rican, and Asian army buddies who were always over for dinner or to hang out; and he married my mom - a light skinned Mexican woman. He ate at Chinese or Korean restaurants every other day, and sometimes attempted a phrase of Korean. He was also fairly liberal for a noncom. He seemed to hate the Rush Limbaugh style politics that were sopopular at his work. Things were fine for a few years. We were never extremely close - we didn’t have a real “father son” relationship, but we usually got along.
Then my ex-stepfather was reassigned under a black commanding officer. His attitude started to change. No black or Asian people were invited over any more. He stopped eating out and socializing with all but a couple of white friends from his hometown. I overhead him explaining to one of them that his wife was a “Spaniard” and not some “Mexican”. When he hired people for odd jobs, maintenance, auto repair, moving, and so on - he seemed to insist on a “Caucasian” while most people in those lines of work where we lived were not white. He even started to joke that once he retired he would and join the KKK in Arkansas. I think he was joking, but when I argued with him over it - his reaction was “wait until you grow up and have some gorilla for a boss!”.
My mom divorced him because he was just going crazy over his work. This guy went in two years from being a fairly liberal guy to a card carrying racist.
Anyway, I think when people are under stress - it does not lead to racism - but it can certainly expose urges or feelings that in easier times we can supress. I know after a stressful day of work, I often have little empathy for other people’s problems myself - even when I should know better.
In a similer vein…my usually calm fundy coworker just informed me the other day that, “Allah commands that you kill anyone who doesn’t believe.” :rolleyes:
Lots and lots of closet racists. I would find it sickening but I lost respect and hope for humanity as a whole quite some time ago.
I was lucky. My father was an out and out Racist, never above telling an off colour joke or explaining to me that the Jews were running the world etc etc… At the same time I lived in a very diverse neighbourhood.
My babysitter was white and married to a black man and they had two children who were my best friends.
Later in school I tended to hang around more non white kids than the white ones.
So I got to see reality from two differnet views and while my brother ended up leaning to my fathers view I had to see it as hogshit because it didn’t jive with what I knew.
I have to say the bullshit some people say about a more liberal view being unrealistic is just a cover up for your own uncomfortability with difference.
I have quite a racially diverse family - Phillipino stepmother and a couple of step-siblings, Indian sister-in-law(and half-Indian neices), Traveller brother-in-law and his kids - yet some of my white relations still come out with the most jaw-dropping racist comments. For instance, a couple of weeks ago at a family party with all these varied races present, one of my eldest neices (age 15) came up to say that a coloured bloke was knocking on the kitchen door. ‘Better be careful he doesn’t steal the silver!’ laughs my (Traveller) brother-in-law. My other brothers laugh and add similar comments of their own. I say, ‘oh, that’s probably Marilli, he’s one of the altar-servers.’ The jokes continue, even though this is now a real person and a freakin’ churchgoer they’re calling a potential theif.
I truly don’t get it. I can understand why people might have problems with some aspects of some cultures. You might strongly disagree with some of the tenets of Islam, for example. I can also understand why some people might not have had much positive contact with other races, and have formed skewed judgments of them. I can even sympathise with those who are simply following what their upbringing taught them (though that’s a pretty sheeplike attitude).
But to continue to look down on other races and stereotype them as more likely to steal, even when you have grown up with these other races, seems like willful racism - ‘I don’t care how many black friends I have or how well they do at school or how ordinary they are, I still think black people are inferior, so there!’ This is even scarier when it comes from someone whom you normally like, so that you can’t dismiss them out of hand as a stupid racist. Though now, unsurprisingly, I don’t like these relations of mine quite as much as before.
I’d just like to say, this isn’t a “white” thing in the least…
My mother was raised in a working-class community in Gary, IN. Her experiences with white people probably ran the gamut, from having a crush on a white high school teacher to being called a nigger after she had dropped spaghetti on a customer at work. But where she lived, everyone was black. So she had no white friends.
That is, until she got to college. Her dorm roommate was a white woman. She was so nervous when they first met that she had diarrhea for a week. I can’t imagine how scared she must have felt. But they became the best of friends (and still are).
Fast forward a decade or so. She and my dad moved to Atlanta, where they seemed to do their best to put us in contact with diverse populations. Growing up, I was implicitly taught that white people and black people are meant to be friends. Ebony and ivory and all that.
Fast forward to current times. My mother blows me away with her racist statements. Once, she told my sister and I that white people were going to hell (unless they repented for their horrible sins against humanity). She’s constantly telling me about how white people are “going down”. Sometimes I wonder if my mother was secretly a Black Panther. I admit, I find her sudden rage against whitey humorous sometimes. But it also scares me and makes me wonder if something bad happened to her recently, or if she’s recalling memories from her youth that she hasn’t dealt with.
This is happening to my mother, too. She turned 61 this year. I talk to her rarely, but every time I do, her “degenerative racism” is further progressed. I’m amazed at the things she says about Arabs or Southeast Asian people.
My father, OTH, has always been racist in the extreme. He once said he thought First Nations people should “adopt white people” because “they were conquered, fair and square.”
It’s happened to my dad with homophobia…
Growing up, it was very, very clear that we were never to treat people any different for any reason, including race, creed, color, physical ability, gender, or sexual preference (this was years ago - when that was the phrase). Any hint or word or action or expression that we were doing so was stopped and corrected swiftly.
Now, he & my brother will both say the stupidest, annoying things when they see or hear someone they think is (in their words) “a little big gay, ha ha.” There are also looks and gestures that go along with the statements.
It’s the most bizarre thing - it’s hard to argue back to the person who raised you that you were raised better than to even tolerate statements like that.
There must be a way to avoid it. I’ve known quite a few older people who became more broad-minded as they aged.I’ve noticed most of them lead very active lives with a lot of contact with other people – volunteer work, continued employment past retirement age, even political activism.
Perhaps it has nothing to do with age, with “life experience,” with senility, or genetics. Perhaps it has to do with isolation – a problem for everyone in the Western World, but especially for the elderly. I think most of the older people I know who are becoming bigoted get most of their information from television and newspapers – IMHO, not the best sources of a broad perspective.