“Your child is milking her race”
Meryl Poku,
Needham, MA.
The most hurtful words said to me (white) about my biracial Jewish daughter.
White country, white privilege, yet minority
Emily Carter,
Needham, MA.
I am un-mistakenly white. I have blonde hair, blue eyes, grew up in a neighbourhood full of other white people, and had teachers who were all white. I have an name that is unmistakably white and very easy to pronounce, yet in a classroom filled with children with difficult sounding, Chinese and Asian names, it was my name not there’s which was always the stumbling block.
I went to school with and was solely friends with 1st or 2nd generation Asian Immigrants. They were elite academic schools, that were 99% people from Asian descent, who had parents who were extremely serious about school, and me. While I was also very serious about school, there were so many bridges that I couldn’t cross, my parents were considerably less strict than most of my friends, all of my friends went to the same academic centres after school, they ate different food, they went to different places, and no one identified with or understood my cultural heritage. I was effectively a minority in a country which was 90% white.
I was raised in Australia, a country that up until the 1970’s had an immigration policy known as the “White Australia Policy” and so, especially in older generations, there is very little racial diversity. and as such many people in my neighbourhood, and the Australia community at large, had deeply negative views of my schools, and my friends, thinking that we were “unnatural” and used methods that were “cheating” at school and on important country-wide tests. My parents often asked me and encouraged me to find friends who I had more in common with or shared my values. I couldn’t bring friends home without having theme endure an onslaught of difficult questions.
I found myself trapped between two worlds. While I knew I had significant advantages being and looking white, I often felt like I wanted to be of an Asian heritage like my friends, so I could fit in. Yet I knew that I had no claim, and no real sense of what Asian heritage actually was, and felt extremely guilty knowing only some of the disadvantages that my friends faced. When I moved to the United States to study, and found myself for the first time surrounded by white people, I found that I identified very little with my own heritage, and fit in even less. Even though it should be simple, I still don’t know what to define my race as.
I believe in the melting pot.
Dustin F. Hecker,
Needham, MA.
Identity politics will be the death of the grand American National experiment. In my humble opinion, we need to stop focusing on the 2% of our DNA that makes us look different than others and focus on the 98% of our DNA that makes us really quite similar. That does not mean we should ignore race or racial prejudice, when it exists. But we must learn to define ourselves as something other than the skin color, or gender, or ethnicity with which we were born. The content of one’s character, I thought, matters much more.
I am Afro-Caribbean, not African American.
Tracey Lincoln
Needham, MA
I am a proud Jamaican immigrant who was raised in that tiny island until I was eighteen years old. There, we have rampant classism, but racism – in a country that is over 90% black – is not something I had to deal with until I went to an elite small undergraduate college in the Berkshires. It was there that the racial heritage of this country, the history of low-expectations and the deeply-engrained stereotypes about what it meant to be a black woman in America were thrust on to me. In utter defiance of it all, whenever I was faced with prejudice I would utter my six little words, ” I am Afro-Caribbean, not African American”.
Almost fifteen years later, I am older and hopefully wiser now. I have been become a U.S. citizen and I see now that those six little words do something that I hate. They create an exception. In uttering those words over and over, I was almost inviting the people who harbored those feelings of hate to create a special category for me and for people of my culture they do not push them to use their interaction with me to change their mind and realize that their stereotypes aren’t true.
Now I’m uttering this, loud and proud – I am JAMERICAN. I was born in the tropics, but took advantage of the great opportunities afforded to me and was educated in of two of the finest institutions of learning in this country ultimately earning a PhD in Chemical Biology. I’ve lived here for my entire adulthood, and I have come to love this nation with all of its imperfections. There is so much that I have learned here that I couldn’t have in my native country and it has given me so much more than I have yet been able to repay.
So yes, I am of Caribbean ancestry and yes, I was raised without the scourge of racism but I am American, I am, in fact, an African American. I live here, I work here, I vote here. This country is mine, I can not hide behind my immigrant heritage.
“Everyone’s a little bit racist….” – Avenue Q
Lyn
Needham, MA
Edward R. Murrow said that we are all racist, i.s., we make judgments based on race (color, religion, gender). He said the solution is to be aware of it, thus to remake our judgment. One would hope that that would become the mental habit.
The lyrics of the song quoted above include:
“If we all would just admit
That we are racist, a little bit
Even though we know that that is wrong,
Maybe we could learn to get along.”
“Learn” appears to me to be the operative word.
