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[loligo]

Coincident to some ongoing discussions of whether Jews are white, Chuckles got her yearbook this week, and I find myself very curious about how the many Middle Eastern students at her school fit into the race relations picture

Comments

[casperflea]

I'm not sure at what age children become aware of race categories; I don't think Casper has them yet, really. Her favorite friends at school are 1) Logan, white male, 2) Lauren, black female and 3) Alejandro, Latino male. She has a classmate who is a white female (the only one besides her, actually) whom she'd been in day care with since the age of 2, and they are not really friends at all. It's interesting

[serrana]

Herself hit a point last summer (age 4) where she suddenly became "race-aware" in the sense of noticing that people didn't all look like her.

Of course, this happened at the municipal pool, and of course she demonstrated it by shouting, "What are those brown childrens doing in the pool?" *facepalm* And of course we were standing next to their dad, a nice man I'd been chatting with during lessons for the previous few weeks.

Y'know, there are a lot of Muslims in eastern Europe (and I just had my own run-in with "are they Muslim?" with our very sweet daycare lady, who became convinced that the new kid in care is Muslim because the family doesn't eat meat or dairy. I think I've persuaded her that these are not Muslim dietary restrictions, and that it is, in fact, possible for non-white folks to be vegan....*eyeroll* I love her dearly, but...erm, yeah.)

[casperflea]

Hm, they could be of Albanian descent... The mother speaks English like an American-born person, though (making recent immigration unlikely, and Albania and much of Eastern Europe were closed off until recently), and in my experience (which is mostly with Albanians, in Albania) Eastern European Muslims do not wear headscarves or cover up.

[serrana]

In California in the early 90s we had (understandably) a big influx of former-Yugoslavians, and presumably the ones I went to school with then would be our age now...and probably reasonably accentless. On the hijab front, I got nothin'. *shrug*