Race and Perception...

Enough has been written on the issue of race that I doubt I can contribute anything substantial in the grand scheme of things. 

However, an old friend from the neighborhood mentioned this special and it made me think about a lot of things:

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/divided/

Race is an issue that I almost deliberately suppress because the implications were something that caused me a lot of anxiety as a young person.

It's amazing to me how much the world has changed since my younger days.  For one thing, immigration policy changed monumentally right around the time I was born.

When I attended school, until about the 3rd or 4th grade, I was literally the only minority in my elementary school, and quite possibly in my town's entire school system.

Due to the changes in immigration policy, it's very rare that you can find a school system anywhere without at least a handful of asian students.

A person might reasonably draw the conclusion that my anxiety was self-imposed and that this was an issue that dealt mostly with my feelings of isolation, etc.

Unfortunately, that's not true.  I was subjected to racial taunts and slurs.  I was physically attacked once in a while.  During the 2nd grade, the kids made my bus ride a living hell by calling me names so vile I can barely bring myself to say the words now as an adult.

7 years old.  Younger than my son is, today.  And these kids were older.  I just didn't stand a chance.

It shaped my life in ways I probably will never fully understand.  To this day, I am a confrontational person who gets unreasonably angry when I feel I'm being cornered.  I had a lot of difficulty with assimilating socially in school.

Now some might point out that others are isolated and ostracized and bullied and have difficulty assimilating in school for reasons unrelated to race.  I agree and I don't mean to say that my experience was unique or that nobody else ever had it bad in school.  If a thumbnail anectdotal poll of most people's friends is any indication, a whole heck of a lot of people were pretty damned glad to get out of High School with their sanity intact.  I'm just saying I'm one of them and this is a large part of the reason why.

The thing that stood out to me about the documentary, though, was the premise that people have to experience something akin to racism before they can fully understand just how bad it is.

I sufferred more racism than most people.  At an age that was right around the age of the kids in that documentary. 

Now, I do HATE racism with a passion.  I will not tolerate it from anybody.  I don't believe it has any place in any aspect of civil society. 

But that's not because of my experiences.  That's because I'm a rational human being.

The perspective of the documentary discounts the fact that many, many fair-minded people are that way despite never having had to experience something like racism.

Facebook has allowed me to reconnect with a few friends from the past.  A few that stand out are John Pander, Stu Kemper... I never did lose contact with Patrick Hoffman.  At various times in my life, they were all good friends to me.  If they, or their families, had a racist bone in their bodies, they all did an admirable job of hiding it.

Same for every girlfriend I've ever had.  Especially true for one particularly beautiful woman who married me. 

The surprise for me in life is not how much racism has hurt me:  it's how truly fair and wonderful most people are. 

The amazing thing to me as I've gone on through my life is not that racism exists or that it has an ugly impact on life.  Hey, stupidity of all kinds exists.  Some people just want to hate.  If they don't hate your race, they'll hate your country or your religion or your gender or your football team. 

The thing that continues to amaze me is that so many people are good and fair-minded and truly beautiful inside.

I remember getting back in touch with some of the Korean linguists who I had served with in Korea.  It stood out to me that a whole heck of a lot of them had Korean wives or girlfriends today.

For the most part, these were white kids from the suburbs when they joined the Army.

Really, it makes sense, though.  These were guys who respected foreign culture and language and devoted several years of their lives to living them.  That's just not the background you find in a closed-minded bigot. 

The other shift we're seeing is one where race isn't some sort of binary construct.  It's not a "you are or you aren't" situation.  I've always been completely and totally offended at having to identify my "race" on a piece of paper.

Am I Asian?  I'm as white as I am Asian.  I lived most of my childhood seeing about 200 white people for every Asian person I saw.  I was raised by my grandparents who were Hungarian and German.  We ate kielbasa and stuffed peppers in my house.

This is not to downplay my Asian ancestry, but of what possible use could it be to classify me as "Asian"? 

The box that said, "other" was even more offensive.

Nowadays, those idiotic forms will let you check "all that apply".  My understanding is that various minority advocacy groups are the main driver in keeping the boxes at all.

Meet the new boss.  Same as the old boss.  Whereas in the past, whitey wanted to know who the brown people were to keep them down, now a bunch of poverty and race pimps want to know who the brown people are to make sure we get our quota of whatever somebody wants us to get.

We live in an age where our president is a combination of white and black.  I had to chuckle at a comment about a Korean male golfer, when somebody said something to the effect of, "Wow, looks like Asians might be getting good at golf."  I had to point out:  Tiger Woods is Asian.  In fact, racially, he's more Asian than black.

Soledad O'Brien, more than a decade ago, spoke of how she liked the fact that more and more people look like her.  I liked that thought.  That we were entering an age where it was okay to be a hodgepodge of ethnicity.

I don't believe you have to suffer an evil to understand it is evil.  Civil right laws were written and passed by people who were almost exclusively male, white and overpriviledged.  The supreme court justices who enforced those laws?  The same.

Back to the documentary:  maybe the kids learned something about racism.  My suspicion is that instead, deep down, they were simply good and fair-minded people.  That with or without the experiment, they were going to grow up to be decent folks.

I don't believe that making people experience ugliness is that valuable an exercise.  There's already enough of it in the world.  You don't need to contrive opportunities to make people experience it.  It's just something that happens.

I also find it ironic that the teacher in the exercise appears to have been a very fair-minded person despite not having been raised with an episode like this in her childhood.

So, despite my somewhat rocky past, combined with my somewhat more positive observations later in life on the issues of race, I am still a believer in the goodness in people.  At least here in the United States.  Which is yet one more reason why I wouldn't live anywhere else.