Saturday, March 14, 2015

What do you mean I'm racist?

Oh I'm sure the title alone got your attention.  A recent poll says that 38.4% of all Americans do not have friends of other races.  But that says all.  Guess what the averages are by race?  Well, according to the study that sparked the poll, African Americans have friends of other races about 65% of the time.  Hispanic Americans hit an all-time high at over 93% of them have friends of other races.  So why's the study say only 38.4% total have friends of another race?  Sounds like that number should be much higher.  White Americans, Caucasian of European decent, guess what?  They report that they as a whole, no kidding, only 25% of them have any friends outside of their own race.  Are you one of those white people?  Do you only have other white friends?  Think about it.  You live in a community or neighborhood.  How many other races are represented?  I lived in a fantastic neighborhood, upper middle class in Kansas.  The whole neighborhood was white, except me and one other family.  The other family was Chinese.  I'm part Chinese.  Asian Americans were not reported.  We tended to be represented in every facet though with African Americans reporting an average of 3 of us as friends.  White America tended to report 1 of us if they were part of the 25% that actually have other races represented.  But yea, White America is 75% totally white.  No other influences.  

Now what's that mean?  Well, I started thinking about my friends and who they socialize with.  Most of my friends are, well, white.  I have quite a few black friends, a couple Hispanic friends, a couple of Native American decent, but mostly white.  And by white, they don't have any other non-white friends other than me.  I'm that in percentage.  I'm the Asian friend and guess what?  I'm not full on Asian.  Is that their fault?  I don't know.  I know people that give Native Americans and Asian Americans a different status than African Americans and/or Latino Americans.  Stereotypes maybe?  I mean we are still a society of stereotyping and profiling and most of us know absolutely nothing about profiling yet we love to judge a book by the cover.  Most of my "white" friends claim to not be racist.  Honestly, and if you're one of them reading this and recognize this as you, well, yes, then I am probably using you as one of the gauge here, but I'd say that half of them are sort of.  

Sort of?  What's "sort of"?  They don't have any friends outside of white other than me.  They make snipe comments when they see people of other races where they think they don't belong.  Don't get me wrong.  They don't see it as racist at all.  But, yes, to a lot of people it is.  Pretty much anyone of "color" (I hate that term) would probably find it racist or at least naive at best.  I've been called a racist before.  The statement made me confused and I really did quite a bit of "soul searching".  Am I racist?  I have a good friend, like a sister to me, who I introduce that way, who just happens to be black.  If she needed anything, if her kids needed anything, I wouldn't hesitate to help her.  She's a great woman, good job, works hard, owns her own home, taken care of her 3 kids on her own and honestly probably 10 times the mother I have ever been.  She's like family to me.  In another life she damn well might have been.  God knows that most Southerners, white or not, probably have some Native or other in the mix somewhere.  Plenty of "high yellow" blacks would relocate themselves where no one would know them and passed themselves off as white back 100 years ago.  It was the nature of the beast then.  I'd like to think it's not anymore, but well, yes, it still is...sort of.  

How do you seriously go through life, where your race is no longer even the predominant race in the country, hasn't been for the last decade, and have no friends of other races?  I'm blown away.  Then I thought about it.  I went to high school in a white community.  I think we had one black family in the whole school.   We had several Hispanic from a small town on the outskirts of the county.  I was friends with none of them.  All my friends were "white" and because of the fact that I have a Germanic last name, there was a lot of Hungarian decent families in the community, well, no one ever questioned whether I was white or not.  I had to be white.  I looked just like most of the Hungarians.  In fact, I was a little fairer skinned than most of them being Chinese which is one of the more pale of the Asians.  My first black friend was in college.  I had become a friend of a Delta who shared my enthusiasm for billiards and both being in sororities we had a kind of kindred mindset.  One of the guys we all hung out with was a black football player.  He had been one of my first sweethearts best friends.  They had gone to Catholic school together, played ball together, and the friendship extended to college.  His family bent over backwards for him to go to a predominantly white school for the "opportunities", but one time he and I had talked about why he didn't date much.  Most of his friends of course were white.  Now here's the kicker.  His grandmother told him she would disown him, heck even his parents said it, if he ever dated a "white girl".  Can you imagine?  

My grandparents were the same on my mother's side.  Black was never an option.  Not that was ever a problem.  I had a thing for blue eyes from a very young age.  Probably because my Granddaddy had the biggest blue eyes you have ever seen and he was my world when I was little.  I made him proud as a peacock.   A feeling like that, having someone who loves you so unconditionally like that, well that will ingrain certain attractions.  Yet, in their day and age, they were considered really progressive.  Grams only rented to "good black families" because she didn't want the "trash" ruining their properties.  She considered it very progressive to use the word "black" since that was what the black community wanted to be called back then when many of her generation were refusing to call them anything but "colored".  Of course, they, my grandparents were born at the turn of the last century and no matter what anyone says, yes, we've come a long way, baby.  

Perhaps not as far as we had hoped.  But who's fault is that?  I still have mostly "white" friends.  I have a lot of friends of every race though.  Perhaps that is the challenge though for those that have made no effort to ever be friends with anyone other than their immediate circles.  "All we are is all we know", and a lot of us, regardless of race or otherwise, simply refuse to expand our experiences.  Over 80% of all Americans live within 50 miles of the hospital they were born in.  Fifty miles at the turn of the last century was a day long plus ride on a good horse.  In a carriage it was an overnight trip.  Now a lot of us will drive 50 miles a day just to and from work.  A twenty to thirty minute drive to work is nothing.  Yet in ways, we still live in those sad shadows of almost a century gone by.  We live in the hovels that life laid out for us by the parents we happened to be given, and apparently if that was two white parents, it means we only have a 25% chance of expanding our views outside of that hovel.  

Not sure how I feel about it.  I don't know very many Asians that don't have other friends, that haven't mixed ourselves into American society, white, black, purple or orange.  But is it that "white" America still views the other races as some sort of lower class?  I mean I told my boys when they were growing up, "I don't care what girl you bring home, white, black, purple, green or orange, but you bring home any trash, I will throw it out."  Is a lot of "white" America still treating the certain races, even if it's only subconciously, like lower class citizens?  I don't know.  I've experienced racism.  I had a very fancy "white" woman looking me up and down once and at first in the politest tone she could muster (sarcasm) ask me if I was "Indian".  No.  Then a pause, "Are yeeeewwww Mexxxxican?"  No.  She looked me up and down.  The amount of disgust increasing with each up and down.  As she was about to open her mouth, I shot her a look.  She fumbled through her fancy Prada purse, tapping her fancy Prada shoe, after I flashed my military ID to the cashier.  This woman had more money at her disposal for her entire outfit than I made a year.  It was a rude awakening to me.  Some people are racist and don't even know it.  Even as they open their mouths, they don't realize it.  And I've had black woman tell me that I need to come back to my race after she had seen me at a party that aforementioned friend had and this woman happened to see me out with my "white" boyfriend a week later.  Later she even told my friend to "have a conversation" with me, who promptly explained that I wasn't actually "black".  I suppose being ambiguous looking has always been a positive overall, but it also has afforded me the unique opportunity to see that racism isn't exclusively "white".  

The only thing that I can say, no matter what our race opinion is, put us in the military and a comrade's life at risk, we see no color.  We might fall back into our racial pitfalls when we're home, but when those Twin Towers came down, no American, black, white, purple or orange, gave a crap what color were the dead.  We are American.  If we happen to be "white" American, then it might be a good idea to expand ourselves a little.  Not because white America is now the minority, but because it's a little weird that the rest of the races have friends of other races at rates of 65% or more and only 25% of white America does.  It's just such a stark contrast it screams something is still wrong in America.  If you happen to look around you and realize you are one of those 75% of white America, take that pilates class with the non-white instructor or say hello to that non-white co-worker.  I don't know.  Strike up a conversation with them.  You're probably going to find out that they are just like you, afterall they're hanging out doing the same things you do.  They're human, they're American most likely, and you just might expand not just who you know but who you are.  All we will ever be is only that which we allow ourselves to know.    

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