I remember the first time I became aware of race: I was coming home from my first semester at the University of Rochester in Rochester, NY, a dying town just outside the Rust Belt in Western New York. As I was walking through Los Angeles International Airport, I realized that I was, for the first time that I could remember, mentally identifying the race of the people milling around the terminals. To add insult to injury, there was a mariachi band playing Christmas music (it was a few days before Christmas, after all); something that had been so familiar to me during my childhood now seemed wholly alien and out of place.
I hated it.
Going to school at the U of R was actually an eye-opening experience, because it was the first time I had been really confronted with ignorance and racism. My freshman year roommate openly wondered if there were any fat asians, because "all of them are just so thin" (I looked at her, shook my head, and said "Sumo wrestlers?"); later on in the year, her then-boyfriend went on a disparaging rant about "migies", or migrant workers. I lost my cool in my freshmen writing course, a course on Terrorism and Intervention, because the other students were making essentialist claims about Muslim Palestinians over and against the rights and sovereignty of Israel. My sophomore year, one of my suitemates, while drunk, confided in me that he didn't know how Black students got into the university, because they simply weren't as smart as white students. Another suitemate, a young man from Colombia, told me how when he drove back to school from his homestate of Florida, he had to duck in the backseat through the Carolinas to avoid the law enforcement. Finally, I got in a huge screaming match with a guy I dated in that same year, in which he told me that my cosmopolitan mindset, acquired from living in a huge, multicultural city, was not the norm for "everyone else" and that I just had to "deal" with the fact that many of the people I was surrounded with were ignorant at best and racist at worst. I spent an hour in my advisor's office, crying, asking him for advice in dealing with these people, because I was completely out of my element.
Looking back, I know that I was unique in my friend group (at that time, anyway; I found new friends for my junior and senior year) in that I was the only one who was Caucasian and from a big city. Growing up in the San Fernando Valley of Los Angeles, I attended public school from kindergarten through 12th grade, and my high school was not only overcrowded and on the year-round system, it was also 90% Hispanic. My best friends were a rainbow of color, and none of us really cared, save for the fact that we knew that so-and-so's Korean mom made the best kimbap or that one girl's parents were making her go to Japanese school and learn kendo and another was doing traditional Indian dance and that my best girlfriend couldn't eat some cookies because it was Passover and yet another friend was unusually tall for a Mexican. Aside from things like this, none of us really gave any mind to the color of our skin, because it was mostly inconsequential for our friendships.
My parents found this sort of interaction remarkable. I remember both of them being shocked after a particular incident where I was having trouble with some co-workers at a day camp I worked at. I was 17, but I was running the camp's dance camp and had run it the previous two years. However, due to my age, I legally could not be the only counselor with the children, and so they had some older counselors to meet the guidelines. Of course, these older counselors bristled at the fact that a younger girl was running something they were nominally in charge of, and I was struggling with how to talk with these women in a professional and constructive manner. I went to my parents for advice, took it, and was able to resolve the situation. But what was remarkable to my parents, is that one of the women in question was Black. I didn't mention this to them because I didn't think it was important. My parents later told me that if they had known that one of the women was Black, they probably would have given me different advice, because they had been raised to be hyperaware of race.
On one hand, this sort of colorblindness can be seen as something of a success: in the years after the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s, the telos is for children to grow up not being overly aware of race or thinking that people are inferior or worse depending on the concentration of melatonin in their skin, or for what religion they practice. In this way, my childhood upbringing was a success. But all of this came crashing down around me and my friends when it got to be time to go to college. The while males I went to high school with were suddenly aware that they were at a disadvantage when it came to college admissions; it became a well-known joke that you couldn't get into UCLA if you were white unless you managed to cure cancer or something equally momentous while in high school. Several graduates of my high school publicly stated that they didn't think they would have gotten into Stanford, where they were currently attending, if it hadn't been for the fact that they were Hispanic. Suddenly, my white friends became sullen and resentful about college admissions, but felt terribly for it.
What I mean to do here is underline a problem that is having somewhat serious repercussions in today's society, something that is being caused by a two-fold problem in America's consciousness, at least on the part of white folk: we are raised to treat everyone equally, to believe in true equality. I believe in this; I believe that my children, and everyone else's children, should be able to do things and go places and not have their gender or their race or their religion be held against them, to prohibit them or bar them from doing what it is that they want to do. But these white children are suddenly faced with the reality that they are, in a way, being punished for the fallacies and mistakes made by their forebearers, and are often left wondering why they are not afforded the same opportunities of others on the basis of the color of their skin.
To be perfectly clear, I am not against affirmative action, nor am I apologizing for the way in which white people have made the world their own personal playground for thousands of year. I think that while the end goal of all this is to "level the playing field", but I think that the process of actually leveling it involves lots of work, often painful work, that needs to be done by whites for the benefit of everyone else. Namely, it necessitates sacrifice. But somewhere along the way, the work that was started, but not finished, by the Civil Rights Movement was obfuscated. "People are equal now," they say, "so why do some people get benefits and others do not?"
The answer to this issue, I believe, lies in education, and nowhere did this become more obvious to me than in my first semester of graduate school, an experience I will explore in part II of this post. For now, though, I would just like to raise the point that despite America insisting that everything is "all good" now, things are decidedly not all good, and with the budget cuts and tax cuts, things are only going to get worse as time goes on unless we do something to stanch the bleeding.
No comments:
Post a Comment