things you learned about racism (and other discrimination) as a child

I don't think I had much of a conception of "race" in the heavily loaded American sense of the word (not that it's not loaded elsewhere, but I mean specific to the context of America's history) until adolescence. I can't remember any one action that triggered anything. I remember, esp. after my mom and stepdad got married and moved into the house that I grew up in (until around 6th grade when we moved into a nicer house in the city) (now that I think of it I think my parents bought the house from a black family but the memory's hazy - I think all the kids of both families played baseball in the huge backyard while the respective parents talked real estate inside) in a suburb of Louisville, playing and socializing with a pretty diverse group of kids, considering we were all living in, again, a suburb of Louisville. There was the two white girls and younger brother next door, with a strong mom like my mom, and a dad who was a tv producer for a local tv station; there was the elderly neighbors on the other side who had a nephew that visited every once in a while from Hodgenville (sort of rural, at least compared with Louisville); there were the two black kids roughly my brother's and my age, whom we were best friends with and played legos and skateboarded and listened to Devo and attempted to breakdance with (they were also our heroes because they had cable); there was a Vietnamese family that kept to themselves but seemed friendly enough; there were the older redneck/hesher teenage bullies that told us "the Police are fags" even though they still let us little kids hang around while they smoked, listened to classic rock and worked on their cars. It was a weird, but pretty cool environment. Unlike the private school where my mom sent us, it had its own diversity. Perhaps the school's lack of it stood out to me in that way.

I don't think it was the first time I ever heard the word, but I remember hearing a white kid in my Boy Scout troop call Martin Luther King a "nigger" while we were at summer camp (I think I must've only been 11 or so). I socked him in the eye.

I didn't learn much about racism from this, I just learned that my mother was not to be listened to on the subject of race. It took me several more years -- until I was about 28, to be exact -- to learn that she was not to be listened to on any subject whatsoever.

When I was a very small child (four? dunno) I'm told that I was frightened by a black man on the bus we were riding, much to the awkward embarrassment of my mother.

I would not say any of these things to anyone anymore, not even friends. But in our insular high school circle, it made a certain amount of sense. It was a jokey, self-acknowledging way of dealing with what was certainly an unusual amount of racial diversity, and an antidote to the very real racism we encountered in the rest of the world and at home. It feel freeing.

But in remembering this, I think there was a certain amount of tension in it, too. Not towards each other, not at all -- just an underlying painfulness to these jokes which, after a while, we made pretty compulsively. And in retrospect, I made a lot less racial wisecracks than the other guys, because I didn't feel as entitled, and rightfully not. And it wasn't a fun game, it was a desperate attempt to level a playing field that we were all beginning to realize would never be level.

My best friend told me that some kid had called our friend Inderpal a "paki", and I said, "no she isn't". So my best friend said really teasingly "don't you know what that means?" I said "yeah, it's a person from Pakistan" and my best friend collapsed laughing at me and said "no, it's someone who's BLACK".

Another time, my best friend said that a girl who was the naughty girl in our class had called Inderpal "wheat" because she was brown. I went around thinking this was a big taboo racist term for YEARS, never daring to say it to anyone. I would really love to know where she got that from.

Later, I did the "Ishi" studies and saw pictures of the White Deer Dance, etc., and I realized that California indians were every bit as cool as the plains indians, if a little less flamboyant. But the condition of some of the rancherias is still really rough, to this day.

it is? why not join in!

I don't understand. Almost anyone on this thread that was a child in the US, UK or Australia living in a land of white majority. "Racism" is an atmosphere or system, whether intentional or not; prejudice or bigotry are personally held beliefs. Anyone is capable of those feelings, whether you're a minority or not.

there are nonwhites on ilx (as i'm sure you're well aware). there just aren't that many of 'em.

When I was being registered at preschool, one of my future classmates told her mother that I was obviously very dirty because of the color of my skin. I have also been called "nigger" by toddlers in shopping carts more times than I can remember. I have seen my parents denied service in department stores and at restaurants. I have been consistently sat in the back of certain restaurants regardless of how I have been dressed or who I have gone with and at other restaurants I have consistently gotten bad service when all of the white people I was with have gotten good to excellent service (ie, everyone's drink order is taken except mine; everyone's food comes out except mine; everyone's order is correct except mine). My oldest brother was not allowed to play in the Parent's Day football game despite being the best running back on the team AND despite my grandparents coming into town to see him play. My middle brother was hassled by our local police at age 17 because they could not tell him apart from another kid in our town who was 14 (and looked 12). The teacher of every history class I was in from seventh grade onwards asked me to educate the class on "the black perspective" of historical events despite the fact that I had lived in that town since age 2 and therefore in my day-to-day life had as much contact with Black America as they did.

There is no sensible way for me to answer this question because, as an obvious member of a minority group, I have been keenly aware of racism my entire life.

xposts galore:

there are nonwhites on ilx (as i'm sure you're well aware).

I am kind of staggered that you are saying this to ME.

We have a student body of 1000 and usually have 2 white students per year. that's it.

and besides I shared my experience, small though it may be. . .

that reminds me of margaret cho's anecdote about doing an interview at some bubbleheaded morning show, and when the host said "can you tell the audience, in your native language, that we'll be switching over to an ABC affiliate?" margaret glared at the camera and replied "they're switching to an ABC affiliate."

it's not meant to be. "things you learned about racism as a child" is a very open-ended statement. you can certainly "learn about racism" no matter what race you are. not just learning that it exists or being a victim of it, but becoming aware of the different ways it manifests itself in your world.

It's just a guess.

Put another way - I'm quite sure there were kids in my school who were taught by their parents that blacks and asians were inferior, or were "taking over" or some shit like that .. The fact that the school was monochrome meant that those attitudes didn't get expressed in school very often.

sorry, I think this is just a major fallacy. cf my previous two posts.

Later I remember how at boarding school in Scotland some researchers came and asked us to pick the best-looking boy in our boarding house. The winner was Eric from Sierra Leone. I don't think I have ever heard anyone call anyone else "nigger" in a non-ironic way. But our family used to talk about "the Paki shop" in pretty much the same way that David Bowie would sing about "pictures of Jap girls in synthesis". Later I heard that Paki and Jap were insulting phrases, but this message came mostly from guilty white people who didn't have any Paki or Jap friends. When I married Shazna I found that she called her brother "Shaki the Paki" affectionately.

I deplore the part of PC which throws the baby out with the bathwater -- which assumes that any reference to otherness and situatedness is problematical and must be banished. This often leads to the invisibility of the culture of the people being considered... leads to them being blandly lumped in as "just like anyone else" or dropping out of the picture altogether. Embarrassment and political correctness has led to many people, already only semi-visible, becoming completely invisible. PC has internalised racism by assuming that it's easier to be a "bad other" than a "good other".

Otherness is not in itself a problem, and words which designate it are not automatically insulting. We are not all the same, and language which encodes that fact should not be seen as stigmatic.

that better?

I understand what you mean. My grandparents' generation also used to refer to stores by the ethnicity of the owner, e.g. "Go down to the Jew and get a pound of chopped meat," "Get some oranges from the Korean." It wasn't meant to be defamatory, that's just the way they talked.

i don't see where i said that racism bred in segregation somehow excluded other types, jbr. i can't make all points at once!

xpost

Otherness is not in itself a problem, and words which designate it are not automatically insulting. We are not all the same, and language which encodes that fact should not be seen as stigmatic.

I actually agree with this.

I don't really wanna call ya out but Tracer could you write about your experiences instead of nitpicking at everyone else's? I am interested to read about where you grew up!

xpost - Limey is such a weird insult, like it's bad to not have scurvy?

dj's experiences sound pretty close to mine. I can definately relate to both stories - I remember that grade-school anxiety and the awkward joking about race that's meant in goodwill but it just sort of makes things weirder (esp. when I had a crush on a black girl)(ok, crushes). my hs was like 80% black (like all the schools I went to), and the only white kids were bosnian refugees who didn't know much english (I wish I got to know the ESL students better). I was pretty shy and felt isolated/alien a lot of the time, but I know in retrospect that it was more like I TOLD myself that I was isolated as a way of not having to know people. In 8 or 9th grade I went on a four day field-trip for Georgia history class, and I was one of two white kids who went. I'd had a lot of black friends up to that point, but it was certainly helpful in that I still had a lot of anxieties about race, a lot of dwelling on the "otherness" of uhh other people, and just getting to KNOW them is the only way to break that down. NB. I didn't really make any new friends, since I also identified as gay throughout HS and was treated pretty poorly by almost all dudes as a result. I still could've done more to socialize though and not repel people, and there's a lot of stuff about class that ties into this as well, but that gets into indie guilt territory (OH NO). I blame my parents!!!

I went to school the next day, armed with my new word. I wasn't a racist seven-year old, but I was always looking for new mean things to say to people. We didn't have any black students at my school, so I singled out the Hispanic guy, Domingo Gonzalez. We were out on the playground, he was teasing me on something, and I reeled back and bellowed out YOU NIGGER!

He was stunned for a second. Then he started to pound on me, saying YOU'RE THE NIGGER. YOU'RE THE NIGGER. The teacher finally broke us up, told us to PLEASE STOP CALLING EACH OTHER THAT WORD, and made us sit on a rock far away from everyone else until the end of recess.

It was later in the week that I got mad at my little sister about something and called my sister a nigger. My mother overheard it, and asked where I had heard that word. I told her that Patti had told me everything and it was okay. She said that IT IS CERTAINLY NOT OKAY. I was to never use that word because only people who hate other people use that word. I hadn't known too much about racism, but I did know that my family didn't hate.

Patti never babysat us again. Instead, I got Kim who used to stand in front of the mirror only in her panties while she combed her hair. But that's another thread altogether.

i didn't know how to pronounce arab correctly until like freshman year of high school.

Same here. I blame Ray Stevens, of course.

Link plz

actually, i blame bugs bunny (remember that one BB cartoon w/ yosemite sam as an arab? "who's gettin' footy-prints on my desert"?!?)

Look, this is veering us off-topic here....

he moved in 7th grade, and i never kept up with him though :-(

hahaha sounds like a win-win!

-when I was at Disneyland maybe 8 years old, we(me, mom, dad) were walking out at the end of the day(everyone who's been there knows the big crowd exodus) and two white teenagers wind through past us very quickly and I hear the big one say "see what I said about niggers? They always walk in twos". That's it, that's all I heard then they disappeared. They didn't talk in our direction but I'm pretty sure he was talking about me and my dad and didn't see my mom cos she's much lighter. I was initially shocked just from hearing "nigger" but tone of it felt even more dangerous for being so calculated and seemingly part of some larger "teaching session" or "mission" they were on, it burned in my mind. I just remember feeling diminished, reduced in the way that I hadn't before(with ignorant questions from a classmate or whatever). I must have been exposed to racism before to process it like this but that was the first "trauma" to speak of.
- I've been in fights but on the whole I'm very easygoing and the only time I've attacked someone with redhot rage is when a white kid called me nigger. I punched him in the forehead(hurt my hand) and as he was on the ground covering his eye I kicked him in the face and would have ripped him apart given enough time. I'm not proud of this(and he apologized and we went on to be on good terms) I just describe it this way to say that THAT'S NOT ME, suggesting the theory of black rage might have some credence. I was probably 14.
- HS: My best friend's older brother had a confederate flag on the ceiling of his room. When I first saw it my friend freaked out and told me it was just because his brother thought it looked cool, his brother came to me and said the same thing, I took it at face value I guess, I never saw racism coming from his family so I wasn't too weirded out at the time. I rocked a dukes of hazzard hot wheel car with the flag on the top for chrissakes, I guess there was just a brief lull in the significance of the usual signifiers for my generation(also had a metal-ish white friend in middle school who dressed in fatigues everyday and slobbered over every issue of Soldier of Fortune; if I couldn't rely on him to be racist what hope did I have making sense of this stuff?)

The rest of my stories are pretty depressing and not worth talking about. I lived in a bumfuck town that was (literally) 99.4% caucasians and full of very ignorant kids. I remember calling this one incredibly racist 5th grader for listening to a Shaq CD.

wtf?

Another kindergarten story: this gross girl pooped on the floor and i didnt notice until too late and it was on my shoe. The teacher thought i had done it, and i CLEARLY hadnt, but she wrote a note home and i think my mom didn't believe me.

So the Bad Word when I grew up was "abo". Thing is though, there wasnt just racism against anyone dark skinned, there was also nasty discrimination against anyone non anglo, a holdover from the immigration influx of the 50s I guess. So lots of namecalling went on about "wogs", mostly. Wogs being Italians, Greeks and other mediterranian europeans.

I dont even know how to formulate a reply to this in the way everyone else here has, the american experience it totally alien to me.

I do know my dad's one of what you'd call a casual racist, in that he just flings words around and doesnt think he's being insulting. Last time he came down here to visit he made comments about "all the hymies" in the area and a joking comment about "dim and sim" (two asians nearby). I was disgusted, angrily told him so, and he just looked at me in bewilderment. Baby boomer white aussies grew up with the White Australia policy and the idea of not wanting "wogs" in the country and seem to think little of that. Its pretty depressing.

"what did I tell you about hippies... THEY ALWAYS WALK IN TWOS"

I will then arch a sinister eyebrow.

For much of my life I was surrounded by people who were pretty much exactly like me. I looked around and it was a sea of sameness. The men looked similar (but different), the women looked similar (but different), the children looked similar (but, again, different) -- we all looked as though we fit with each other, you know? Nice happy homogenous neighborhood.

Thing is, though, this was all very deceiving. When you're a minority living in a city where you are the "majority" and in a neighborhood where pretty much everyone in it is like you, you forget that you're really a "minority" and when you hear yourself being referred to as such, your natural instinct is to fight back and protest, "But I'm NOT a minority! I'm boring! White bread! I'm not 'exotic'!"

Thank goodness I was able to break free from this environment, temporarily at first but eventually on a permanent basis. (The "permanent" option happened when my parents and I moved to the part of town I currently live in.) By being able to distance myself from that insular environment, I was able to really get what it is that set me apart from others. I could actually see how I was different from what the actual national "norm" was and is. And that enabled me to see for myself that yes, I am a "minority", even though I still don't think of myself in those terms on a daily basis.

I know that my parents told me about the prejudicial segregation and inequality they suffered through when they were children and teenagers. A lot of people either don't know this or don't remember, but Latinos in places where institutionalized segregation occurred between blacks and whites also experienced the same segregation themselves. It wasn't just a "black" thing -- it was truly a "colored" thing, and if your skin wasn't a pale pinkish hue, you were considered "colored". My parents too suffered the indignity of separate entrances/exits, separate water fountains, inaccessible parks, etc. The only reason why they didn't have similar experiences at school is because they both went to Catholic schools exclusively, and Catholic schools have pretty much always been egalitarian institutions, especially if they're located in an area with a high concentration of minority students.

Still, though, I'm ashamed to admit that my parents did hold a lot of shamefully ignorant views of African-Americans, and horridly racist terms such as "jungle bunnies" and "n1gg3r toes" (the latter being my dad's favorite term for Brazil nuts) entered my lexicon from a very early age. I think they mellowed significantly, though, when I was about fifteen and was constantly arguing with them about this sort of thing. (I swear to you this was the period in my life when I was the most pro-Republican!! *laughs* I guess I was "Republican" in my mind because I had not yet heard of the Libertarians at this point in my life....) I felt like African-Americans were undeserving of this disrespect and needed to be treated with the same humanity as would be shown toward any other person out there.

Anyway, I still consider myself horribly sheltered in my interactions with others. I went to Catholic school all throughout my grade and high school careers, so I wasn't too familiar with dealing with people of different faiths (though a LOT of Hindus and non-Catholic Christians went to the schools I went to). I've still never had a close connection IRL with a Muslim. One of the earliest Catholic priests I had the opportunity to experience during worship was a (black) man from Ethiopia, so that taught me that Africans were kindly, wise, and wonderful. Post-high school, I've had plenty of chances to interact with Jews, Buddhists, and atheists, which has broadened my horizons, as has being able to do business with people from a wide variety of foreign lands. But still, I've got a long way to go before I can consider myself properly immsersed in the rainbow of cultures this nation holds within its borders.

I guess some people might find all this ironic, being that I look as though I'm a member of this Great International Society (foreigners mistake me for being from Mexico, after all) and I was mostly brought up in a working-class environment where no one's parents attended school beyond the high school level. I mean, this is where traditionally the sons and daughters of the teeming masses of immigrants would be situated, right? Thing is, though, in this part of the U.S., there's a distinct lack of diversity when it comes to the whole "immigrants" thing that's only now starting to be rectified.

Oh yeah, and one more thing -- I used to feel slightly odd for loving what it is that I love, partly because I feel like I was out of place for loving what I love and, well, coming from the ethnic background I come from. I mean, I was supposed to love R&B and rap, right? Maybe not, but that's what I sorta felt, peer pressure-wise, and the fact that I was in love with '80s British dandy music was, well, ODD. I mean, I don't believe this anymore certainly, but back when I was a teen (especially!), I felt this way a lot.

And that the only reason kids are racist is that they see adults do it and that makes it okay.

This time, I was the racist. I was probably in 3rd or 4th grade, and I went to a school in Akron for an Indian Guides event. (Does that group still exist) My friends and I had a run-in with some other kids - i think we both wanted to be on the trampoline at the same time or something. I don't remember how it started, but I said the one of the kids, "You're a Negro." - pretty matter of factly. I didn't mean to put him down for his race or have anything against him for being black - I just wanted to hurt his feelings somehow. I remember that he relplied with, "Well, you're a Deegro." ...and I was thinking that he's probably posting on a messageboard somewhere his earliest memory of racism...

To be completely fair, stereotypes don't come from the blue. No one reaches into a hat and says "Asians are... good at... math." Speaking as a Jew, I can say that most everyone in my family-- and the older they are, they more so it affects them -- are extremely cheap (to put it harshly). It doesn't apply to every member of the religion; it's not embedded in the DNA but it has a history. When you don't have money you learn to live cheap; and when as a culture you've had to live as the poorest of the poor for thousands of years you develop customs you teach your children how to be frugal. The reason I live in this country at all is because my great grandparents in Russia fled in fear that their house would be burned to the ground because of their religion. They came here with nothing and learned how to make do.

And I'd like to say to Dan, I can relate to having to teach the class. Every Jewish holiday I had to go in front of the class and explain what it meant -- and I've never been to a synagogue in my life so this was particularly challenging for me.

Jews control the media. Jews control the banks. Both of those statements are so very far from being true.

I read a book that seems to be out of print called something like "things they say behind your back", which traces the source of a lot of those stereotypes .. I should read it again I guess.

There is no sensible way for me to answer this question because, as an obvious member of a minority group, I have been keenly aware of racism my entire life.

Unlike Dee, I didn't have the experience of living in a neighborhood mostly populated by people who look like me, so I have never had the experience/illusion of being in the majority. The beginning of this thread leaned very heavily on a shared sense of innocence lost that I found extremely off-putting and exclusionary because I don't feel like I was ever afforded the chance/opportunity to have that sense of innocence.

http://www.eyecandyforthebrokenhearted.com/racistcandy.jpg