Things I Don't Get: Racism
Mar. 1st, 2007 12:32 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
forsythI don't get racism. I really don't. Oh, I understand the whole scapegoat ohnoes different! part, but I don't get it. I know that sounds all sorts of self-gratifying, like I'm "Ha, I'm so good I don't even understand your concept of racism!" but that's not what I'm trying for. Honestly, I figure the reason I don't get it at all is just luck of where I was born. I grew up in Reston, a part of Northern Virginia, with all sorts of people. In my neighborhood until we moved when I was ten, our group of kids was me and my little brother, our next door neighbors who were some variety of Hispanic, a black chick and her little brother from across the street, the other white kid whose parents didn't celebrate Halloween, and my then-best friend, who'd been born in Hong Kong, his sister had been born in China, and his little brother had been born in the US.
It didn't matter, though. We were all into the same 80s kids junk, from Battle Beasts to the Fat Boys to "Jam shorts". And skateboarding. All we really noticed was each others houses smelled funny, because of the kinds of things that our families usually cooked. Sure, some of this might have changed once we hit middle and high school, and puberty, but we moved before then. Which is one of the things, in retrospect, I'm maddest at my parents for. We moved out to this development in the middle of rural Pennsylvania, about fifteen minutes or so from a town with a train station so my dad could get into Philadelphia to work. It was a nearly completely whitewashed subdivision. Not that it didn't have good parts, like the forests and streams and the hills for sledding and stuff, but it was so homogeneous. And then we moved back down to rural Virginia, where I've been pretty much stuck in different places for way too long. And I hadn't really noticed quite how much I'd missed the whole sense of mixed cultures and people from all over until I'd started going back to community college classes. Some of which took place out in Northern VA, not all that far from where I used to live. And then when I was on my trip to New York last summer, and people from literally everywhere, all walking down the streets or on the subways or things, and that was just such a contrast. I think that's part of why I felt so at home in New York. That and having half a dozen to a dozen other people all there for the con to just meet up with and do awesome things with all day.
Somewhere back there, I'd had a point, before I started getting into my life story. I think the point was that the biggest thing that probably works to get rid of things like racism is just dealing with all sorts of other people and living alongside them and then you realize that yes, they're people too. I don't expect that's always enough, especially if things get bad or if people are deliberately trying to stir things up, but it's definitely one of the keys. And it's why open racism usually lurks in isolated places where reality doesn't intrude on whatever caricatures of "the other" that get painted.
It didn't matter, though. We were all into the same 80s kids junk, from Battle Beasts to the Fat Boys to "Jam shorts". And skateboarding. All we really noticed was each others houses smelled funny, because of the kinds of things that our families usually cooked. Sure, some of this might have changed once we hit middle and high school, and puberty, but we moved before then. Which is one of the things, in retrospect, I'm maddest at my parents for. We moved out to this development in the middle of rural Pennsylvania, about fifteen minutes or so from a town with a train station so my dad could get into Philadelphia to work. It was a nearly completely whitewashed subdivision. Not that it didn't have good parts, like the forests and streams and the hills for sledding and stuff, but it was so homogeneous. And then we moved back down to rural Virginia, where I've been pretty much stuck in different places for way too long. And I hadn't really noticed quite how much I'd missed the whole sense of mixed cultures and people from all over until I'd started going back to community college classes. Some of which took place out in Northern VA, not all that far from where I used to live. And then when I was on my trip to New York last summer, and people from literally everywhere, all walking down the streets or on the subways or things, and that was just such a contrast. I think that's part of why I felt so at home in New York. That and having half a dozen to a dozen other people all there for the con to just meet up with and do awesome things with all day.
Somewhere back there, I'd had a point, before I started getting into my life story. I think the point was that the biggest thing that probably works to get rid of things like racism is just dealing with all sorts of other people and living alongside them and then you realize that yes, they're people too. I don't expect that's always enough, especially if things get bad or if people are deliberately trying to stir things up, but it's definitely one of the keys. And it's why open racism usually lurks in isolated places where reality doesn't intrude on whatever caricatures of "the other" that get painted.
