IBARW 3: When Minority Becomes Majority

[keilexandra]

This is the last day of IBARW, and I found myself with two possible topics. I debated between them for a while before realizing that IBARW should not be a week of awareness and nearly a year of ignorance. So--I've met my goal of a post a day, and here's a bonus post

Comments

[mrissa]

On the other hand, I hope that white people who do go to UC don't place too much weight on their experience as a numerical minority there. Where we lived in the Bay Area, there was no one racial/ethnic group that achieved majority status, and white folks were not the largest plurality. And that was a different experience from living here, where we have more racial/ethnic diversity than people who've never visited expect, but white folks are still the majority. But I could not honestly say that I now understand The African-American Experience or The Arabic-American Experience or whatever because I lived in an area where very few people shared my ethnicity and only about a third shared my race. There was still a whole bunch of white privilege wafting around on the breeze, and lots of it blew straight into us.

[sanguinity]

:: There was still a whole bunch of white privilege wafting around on the breeze, and lots of it blew straight into us. ::

Yeah. My guess is that the curriculum at UC is still rooted in white-POV culture and history; and that there are privilege issues about who has work-study and student loans, and who gets their way paid for them. Plus lots more stuff.

[keilexandra]

I don't think it's possible to fully understand another racial/ethnic group simply by living as a minority, but it -is- different from the norm, and I think that is important to experience.

[mrissa]

I wonder if it would have felt more different to me if my primary internal identity was "white" rather than "Scando." One of the oddest things about living in California for me was that most of the white people I encountered seemed to have white for an ethnicity, not just for a race -- so most of the white people I encountered had vastly different cultural assumptions than mine, and seemed to assume that they wouldn't have.

The difference between race and ethnicity is being really interesting around here right now: for a lot of African-Americans, I think "black" is both their race and their ethnicity. But in the Twin Cities in the last 10 years or so, we've had a large influx of Somalis, so now there's not just "black" there's "American black" and "Somali black." Which is how it is for most Asian-Americans I know -- they think of themselves as Asian but also as Korean-American or Chinese-American or whatever specific Asian ethnicity they have. And it's the case for some white people but not all. Very complicated.