The Race Card Project
By Michele Norris
Sandy
Outside USA
As an U.S. diplomat serving overseas, my job is to represent American society, with all of its varied nuances and complexities. However, I often find myself facing these very words in both my personal and professional spheres. Unfortunately, due to the nature of diplomacy, there’s often not much more I can do other than put on a smile and answer them with “yes, I am American”.
Sarah Cedar,
Castle Rock, WA
I grew up overseas where I was a white girl amid a sea of brown faces. I was the odd one out at school and I was bullied by the girls. This experience has had life long effects because I can still remember how scared I was. How totally alone I felt. Now I’m an adult living in a mostly white world. It’s been 30 years since I moved back to the states. It pains me when I see someone get bullied for the color of their skin. I know exactly how it feels….
Barney Rush,
Chevy Chase, MD.
Ours is an adopted family: my wife and I have two daughters, both of whom are Caucasian, as we are. We adopted them through agencies, the older when we lived in New York; the younger when we lived in Florida. After living six years in Europe, we returned to the United States in 2002, when our daughters were 14 and 8 years old. We had always told them that they were adopted, and so grew up never considering this fact to be a secret, or something that made them materially different from their friends, and certainly not something of which they might be ashamed. So it wasn’t surprising that our younger daughter, now in 5th grade at our local elementary school, would mention to her new friends that she was adopted. What surprised her was that her friends were surprised, and disbelieving. Hence her request to me when she brought a friend home after school. Why the disbelief? It wasn’t because her friends were unaware, or uncomfortable with adoption. To the contrary: there were plenty of adopted children in the school. What was different, I think, is that most of these adopted children were Asian or from Central America. So the idea that a child could be adopted who was Caucasian – THAT didn’t compute. And perhaps there was a deeper thought: “You look just like me; how could your “real” Mom have given you up?” I wonder about that; but I don’t know.
Rob Walbridge
Ivory Coast
I am a white American who has lived overseas (in Africa) for 40 years. Married to an African woman for 35 years. This assumption of cultural exceptionalism has caused conflict not only between white and black America, but increasingly between America and the rest of the world, most of which is ethnically different from white America, most notably now in the 21st century with the muslim world. No tolerance; no willingness or ability to listen to and understand others.
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