Long…rambly… Possibly without a point.

[adelheide]

Well, it’s Blog Against Racism Week. At first, I thought, What the heck do I, as an educated white woman, have to say about racism? Well, plenty. First and foremost that racism has to be one of the dumbest, direst -isms around. I mean, how can you reject someone just because of the color of their skin or the shape of their features? That makes

Comments

[adelheide]

I'm not sure if that was the case. It's entirely possible that branch of the family was just prejudiced. Yes, I have some abolitionists on my mother's side of the family, but I think it's more an example of "sticking to our own". They didn't dislike people of color. They just didn't associate with them.

Of course, when I was 16, my granma said to me, out of the blue, "Well, I hope you have the sense not to date a Puerto Rican." I just looked at her like she'd sprouted another head. And then, full of teenaged righteousness, I told her that it didn't matter what any potential dating material looked like. It only mattered how they treated me.

I think it became less of an issue for my parents because they are both veterans. They joined the service to escape their small towns and experience life. As a result, they had to deal with people of other ethnicities and I think that showed them that people are just people.

Sometimes, other folks think it's odd when I say, "Race was never an issue in our house." One black woman slyly said, "Well, you being white..." That may be part of it. We had the "privilege", if you will, of not being racist. But we honestly never talked about it because it never occured to us to be racist. I learned about race relations outside my home.

[dizzycadence]

*puzzles* I wasn't talking about your family, though - just saying that in the case of some midwestern towns where "I dunno, I don't think I really know that any black people live here..." it's because not so far back it was the spoken or unspoken policy to keep families of color from settling there. Most people, especially today, don't have a clue about it... and for white folks, why would they think about it? (Ah, the things privlige keeps us from having to worry about. *eyeroll*) They're town is just all white people. It's only weird for persons of color (and white people like you and I who HAVE been in more racially diverse situations), who have to scratch their head and wonder why the high school for a town of 40,000 or so has one token black kid and the only way the young generation knows how to interact with people who AREN'T white is through weird stern lectures from people full of white liberal guilt, which can lead to an overdeveloped awareness of exactly what someone else's skin color is at all times. Buckets of fun.

Basically I was saying that being IN racially diverse situations is the best way to help one either grow up without or get rid of racist thought trends, but that in some geographical areas quietly nasty history has, well, written the chance for true diversity out of the equation. It takes a long time to recover from the Elite White Suburb factor, both for the town itself and for anyone unfortunate enough to have been raised there - they don't so much grow up with exposure to racist thought as they do surrounded by a very thick layer of white privlige because they've never had to think about it at all, aside from "slavery is bad, mmkay." in history class.

Of course some of this might be projection on my part, since the suburbs give me the hives. *shudder*

[adelheide]

Oh, I know what you meant. And the whole "sundown town" thing is entirely possible (I checked the lists, but didn't find some of my main towns, so I'm going to breathe a sigh of relief on that).

I think diversity is not only good but important, for the reasons you stated. It's much better to get to know people than to have an idea of some theory. People aren't theories. And anyone who doesn't understand that needs a beating.