June 18, 2009
So I admit, I don’t really think about race that often. For one thing, I’m a white middle-class suburbanite living in Johnson County—that means my daily exposure to non-white people is the Hispanics who mow my neighbors’ lawns. For another, I somehow managed to come out of my racist, small-town upbringing relatively unprejudiced (my mother panicked when I transferred from an all-white high school to one with a large population of black students, saying I’d get raped if I wasn’t careful, and admonishing me to “stick to my own kind.”).
The issue has been coming up lately, though, and in vastly different ways. First, my father-in-law has been having some seriously strange issues trying to buy a new car. He wonders, as do I, why dealerships find it necessary to send the twenty-year-old part-time black salespeople to him each and every time he sets foot on their lots. I wonder if it’s prejudice on their parts, or their perceived prejudice on his. He’s not so old (was it Chris Rock who said that there’s no racist like an old black man? My FIL agrees wholeheartedly, and you would, too, if you met his dad) that I would think, upon first seeing him, that he would be uncomfortable or intimidated dealing with a white salesperson.
I’ve noticed this, myself, on several occasions. Most recently, I went into my local Verizon store to resolve an issue with my new Alias (which kicks ass, btw—I heart me some softkeys). There were three sales associates in the front of the store—one Hispanic, two black. But rather than helping me themselves, one of them went into the back and brings out a young white guy to work with me. None of the others were busy with other customers—I was the only customer in the store. And to be perfectly frank, the white guy was kind of incompetent, and I wondered why the black manager didn’t handle my issue himself, since it was a glitch with the hardware, an issue which he identified before sending out the junior associate who clearly struggled with resolving it, to the point of having to ask the manager’s assistance at one point.
Anyway, I had another rude awakening a few weekends ago. I was back down in good old SEK, visiting the folks and friends from high school. We ended up spending the evening with said friends, our children running wild through the eight square blocks of the tiny town I went to school in. As I sat on the front porch swing sipping whiskey with the lady of the house, she was waxing nostalgic about the benefits of living in a small town, namely that you can let your kids wander around and as long as they know to stay away from the highway, you really have nothing to worry about. “Well, you know, this town doesn’t have anyone in it you have to watch out for. You know what I mean. There are some Chinese across the street, but my kids know not to talk to them.” I pretended to not understand her meaning, then a few minutes later managed to “casually” mention that my kids’ grandfather is black. “Well,” she said, “you can’t control who your in-laws marry. As long as your kids don’t pick up any bad habits.” I responded with, “Yeah, like voting for Sarah Palin. They ever pull that shit on me, I’ll beat them senseless.” She just looked at me funny and changed the subject.
If I had been up for a fight, I would have pointed out that when I regularly check the sex offender registries for various neighborhoods, the white offenders greatly outnumber the non-white offenders, way out of proportion to the ratio of white-to-non-white residents, and asked if she’d checked out how many good, white child molesters were in her town. Had I not been a guest in their home, and just cancelled my hotel reservation, I would have called her a racist bitch and grabbed my babies and bailed. Maybe my silence was just as bad as her blatant racism. Probably.
But my kids give me hope. My four-year-old has no idea that there’s anything abnormal about her grandfather being “brown”, as she calls it. One of her favorite people in the world is her black great-grandmother. The cousin she’s closest to is a gorgeous mixed race child, black, white, and Puerto Rican, which prompted her to tell me, soon after I brought Wendy home from the hospital, “Mommy, next time I want you to have a brown baby. They’re so pretty!” She speaks Spanish to the work crews in the neighborhood, runs up to Asian kids in the store and screams out, “Ni hao!” And yesterday she sang her baby sister this improv lullaby: “Oh, there are all kinds of Wendys in the world, there are brown Wendys and pink Wendys and white Wendys, and they all sing together because every kind of Wendy loves to sing.”
Sure, it was kind of like a four-year-old’s version of a Benneton ad, but it still gives me hope. Maybe I need to crank out another kid who’s going to be race-blind from birth, just to tip the scales a bit.
Comments
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alm77 (anonymous) says...
Like you, I grew up in an all white town. Okay, not all white. We had the one black kid, but he was adopted, so he was perfectly acceptable.
Here in Lawrence, though, my kids are exposed to every shade of skin color God ever made. In our neighborhood, on a *daily* basis my kids interact with kids from a Hispanic family, three black families (also described by kids as having "brown" skin, not that it comes up very often), a Native girl, a kid that I thought was Asian, 'til I got to know him but now I don't even know where his family is from but he doesn't eat pork (it's "against his religion" as my kids say). There is also a kid with learning disabilities that they all play with. As I type this, my daughter is having a conversation with four black kids and the Native girl (my 4 year old is over there, too) while my other son is shooting hoops with the new black kid. This is a very normal day at our house. The school my kids attend is the most racially and economically diverse school in the city. I am SO incredibly glad to be able to give my children the opportunity to make friends with kids who aren't like them (so proud I take pictures and put them in a folder labeled "The Neighborhood" all the time). This is one of the reasons we'll probably never leave Lawrence.
June 18, 2009 at 8:50 p.m. ( permalink | suggest removal )
DOTDOT (anonymous) says...
I'm glad I ain't like them bigots.
June 19, 2009 at 1:19 a.m. ( permalink | suggest removal )
meganstuke (Megan Stuke) says...
My sister's youngest one went down the list of her family members (she was maybe 4 at the time)... "You know, Mom's white, I'm white, Aaron's white, James is white, Dad's black."
(Her husband, by the way, is lily white.)
I loved knowing that while she had black friends, she still didn't really see the difference. Basically, it was a matter of a ruddy complexion or not, if anything.
Once, my grandma asked my brother when he was a young boy if he could see a difference between the men who were doing construction on her street. He said "Ya! Some have hats and some don't!"
Awesome.
June 19, 2009 at 9:50 a.m. ( permalink | suggest removal )
mitzibel (Misty Nuckolls) says...
Awesome indeed.
Dotdot, sometimes it's really hard to tell when you're being sarcastic. Use more emoticons, dammit! Yeah, I have my own bigotry--I hate homophobes, and religious fanatics of any breed, and stupid people . . . the list goes on and on.
But I think it's pretty damn cool that my family has gone from "stay away from blacks because they'll rape and kill you for being white" to "I love people with pretty colored skin" in two short generations.
June 19, 2009 at 12:28 p.m. ( permalink | suggest removal )
ladylaw (Terry Bush) says...
While I sincerely wish it were otherwise, I doubt very much that racism is ever going to completely go way. There will always be people who fear what they don't know, hate what differs from them, and use sterotypes as short hand in figuring out this world. As for your recent hosts, as grand-pa Boo points out, it's far easier to cope with (and avoid) blatant racism as opposed to the covert type that isn't recognized or socially acceptable. Just keep the kids away from that woman from now on, and know that there's a good chance her own children will one day bring home a spouse of a different shade. It makes me feel a little less afraid for the world when little 4 year old children aren't told they should only associate with people who look just like them. What a dull and small minded world it must be for people who choose to live in such tiny boxes filled with ignorance and fear.
June 19, 2009 at 8:41 p.m. ( permalink | suggest removal )
DOTDOT (anonymous) says...
(^_~)
June 20, 2009 at 12:34 a.m. ( permalink | suggest removal )
mitzibel (Misty Nuckolls) says...
Much better!!!
June 20, 2009 at 1:25 a.m. ( permalink | suggest removal )
cutny (anonymous) says...
Nice to read your writing again. Most of the people that seem to dislike a giant homosexual like me (I'm 50 ft. tall) are white. Thus I enjoy a life of reverse racism against whiteys of my own kind. Glad I moved to Brooklyn, but they've even started infiltrating my neighborhood with their strollers and dogs clogging up the sidewalks.
June 21, 2009 at 11:44 a.m. ( permalink | suggest removal )
Joel (Joel Mathis) says...
Wait...
Snoop is BLACK!?
June 22, 2009 at 4:54 p.m. ( permalink | suggest removal )
DOTDOT (anonymous) says...
Cutny: is it true what they say about 50 ft tall dudes?
Just askin.
June 23, 2009 at 12:32 p.m. ( permalink | suggest removal )