the big race
Race is a funny thing.
When I first arrived in Europe for my year abroad, I immediately got the impression that this was a racially discriminating place. Why? Because during the first meal in my dorm I distinctly heard a large group of British co-eds say, while looking upon an African girl in somewhat ethnic garb, "Ugh, don't sit there! The foreigners are sitting there!" Everyone concurred without a thought and went to sit far away. I had never heard anything like that before in the states, at least not blatantly in your face that way. Not to mention an inordinate amount of people baldly came up to me trying to speak bits of broken up Asian languages and making crude Asian-referencing innuendos. OK, that happens in the states too, but here you'd expect that from those of the illiterate or drug-addicted or deep blue-collar mold. In Britain, you wouldn't be surprised getting that from an average bloke with no one in the vicinity so much as blinking an eye. A goodly amount of the people I ran into would've been branded racists within seconds in the states! Obviously, these European scumbags are all racist bigots!, I thought.
Then as time went on things started looking a little different. Sure all the Europeans were almost shockingly bold about asking you about racial matters and I, along with other foreign-looking people, was almost always approached at the first as a foreigner. But as soon as people learned I was American they never considered me as anything but American again and race was simply never an issue I was really subjected to after that (other than open discussions of race which happened occasionally, only with no one feeling as if they were stepping on eggshells). I realized then that these people probably had a strong cultural association instinct, not so much a racial one. In fact, I realized I had never felt more American in my whole life. There were none of those wonderful racial qualifiers like "Latino-American" or "Sri-Lankan-American". I was just a normal American, like I had never been before in my life. In fact, it was to the point where you'd see a heavily-accented Vietnamese guy in the Polish Society and, when I'd ask (racist American that I am) what was up with that, the Poles would say "oh, yea he looks Vietnamese and he was born there or something, but he's actually Polish." If you were Polish, you were simply Polish and that was that. If you had 110% of your ancestral blood from Norway and you grew up in Italy, well by God, you were Italian! People were associated with their national and cultural affiliation, not their racial one.
Contrast this to to the US. This is a place where I was once angrily accused of racism by a friend simply because I tried to avoid a group of loud obnoxious men who simply happened to be mostly black (something I didn't even notice because I avoided eye-contact with the loud vociferous group at all costs). We are ostensibly extremely racially sensitive. Yes, no one should really mention it.. you shouldn't say anything negative about a race unless you are in fact a member of the race. But we should be really careful of showing respect to all races by never letting them forget their origins and always labeling them with qualifiers like "Puerto-Rican-American" and "Korean-American" even if their ancestry can be traced to like 5 generations back in the US. We are very sensitive indeed; we always categorize people carefully based on their race and for every person that is attacked for any reason we must consider that their attacker (be it vocal or physical) may be a racist and thus if the defendent is in a racial minority we must immediately give a handicap in case it's about race. Even if it isn't about race now, it COULD be about it in the future, right? And if you ARE of a racial minority in the states, why you're always being attacked! You poor things, you must stand up for yourselves. You can't let them get away with it.. even that guy who cut you off on the road this morning, he might've done it out of racism. But don't worry, this country will protect you. Though we dare not mention race too openly/honestly even with our closest friends (oh we fucking have our prejudices despite all this and well you know it), we'll damn well make sure that race is a constantly-present force in everyday life that we should treat with kid-gloves. But in the end we're all protected from all the racism flying about, don't worry. This all makes us non-racist right? Hmmm I wonder...
Racism is not like pornography. You don't just know it when you see it. In fact, is there even a definition? So who, really, is racist: the ones who are insenstive and open or the ones who are hypersensitive and obsessed...
When I first arrived in Europe for my year abroad, I immediately got the impression that this was a racially discriminating place. Why? Because during the first meal in my dorm I distinctly heard a large group of British co-eds say, while looking upon an African girl in somewhat ethnic garb, "Ugh, don't sit there! The foreigners are sitting there!" Everyone concurred without a thought and went to sit far away. I had never heard anything like that before in the states, at least not blatantly in your face that way. Not to mention an inordinate amount of people baldly came up to me trying to speak bits of broken up Asian languages and making crude Asian-referencing innuendos. OK, that happens in the states too, but here you'd expect that from those of the illiterate or drug-addicted or deep blue-collar mold. In Britain, you wouldn't be surprised getting that from an average bloke with no one in the vicinity so much as blinking an eye. A goodly amount of the people I ran into would've been branded racists within seconds in the states! Obviously, these European scumbags are all racist bigots!, I thought.
Then as time went on things started looking a little different. Sure all the Europeans were almost shockingly bold about asking you about racial matters and I, along with other foreign-looking people, was almost always approached at the first as a foreigner. But as soon as people learned I was American they never considered me as anything but American again and race was simply never an issue I was really subjected to after that (other than open discussions of race which happened occasionally, only with no one feeling as if they were stepping on eggshells). I realized then that these people probably had a strong cultural association instinct, not so much a racial one. In fact, I realized I had never felt more American in my whole life. There were none of those wonderful racial qualifiers like "Latino-American" or "Sri-Lankan-American". I was just a normal American, like I had never been before in my life. In fact, it was to the point where you'd see a heavily-accented Vietnamese guy in the Polish Society and, when I'd ask (racist American that I am) what was up with that, the Poles would say "oh, yea he looks Vietnamese and he was born there or something, but he's actually Polish." If you were Polish, you were simply Polish and that was that. If you had 110% of your ancestral blood from Norway and you grew up in Italy, well by God, you were Italian! People were associated with their national and cultural affiliation, not their racial one.
Contrast this to to the US. This is a place where I was once angrily accused of racism by a friend simply because I tried to avoid a group of loud obnoxious men who simply happened to be mostly black (something I didn't even notice because I avoided eye-contact with the loud vociferous group at all costs). We are ostensibly extremely racially sensitive. Yes, no one should really mention it.. you shouldn't say anything negative about a race unless you are in fact a member of the race. But we should be really careful of showing respect to all races by never letting them forget their origins and always labeling them with qualifiers like "Puerto-Rican-American" and "Korean-American" even if their ancestry can be traced to like 5 generations back in the US. We are very sensitive indeed; we always categorize people carefully based on their race and for every person that is attacked for any reason we must consider that their attacker (be it vocal or physical) may be a racist and thus if the defendent is in a racial minority we must immediately give a handicap in case it's about race. Even if it isn't about race now, it COULD be about it in the future, right? And if you ARE of a racial minority in the states, why you're always being attacked! You poor things, you must stand up for yourselves. You can't let them get away with it.. even that guy who cut you off on the road this morning, he might've done it out of racism. But don't worry, this country will protect you. Though we dare not mention race too openly/honestly even with our closest friends (oh we fucking have our prejudices despite all this and well you know it), we'll damn well make sure that race is a constantly-present force in everyday life that we should treat with kid-gloves. But in the end we're all protected from all the racism flying about, don't worry. This all makes us non-racist right? Hmmm I wonder...
Racism is not like pornography. You don't just know it when you see it. In fact, is there even a definition? So who, really, is racist: the ones who are insenstive and open or the ones who are hypersensitive and obsessed...
In Japan, I experienced two types of discrimination...negative discrimination from people who assumed that, as a white person, I would be dumb, unruly, dirty, and rude...and positive discrimination from people who knew I was Jewish and thought that I was therefore good at math and had high-level connections in the American government...
ReplyDeleteI have learned to treat racism as the joke it is...