God, when will racism be weak ?
Thierno Diallo,
Madison, WI.
It is really painful to be a minority in the US. It is a heavy ‘extra’ burden that you carry even to bed, hourly. Race is a determining factor everywhere.
White people: not them, but us.
Jessica Keast,
Portland, ME.
I’ve noticed that many white people have a tendency to use the pronoun ‘them’ instead of ‘us’ in relation to other white people when talking about race. By failing to include ourselves the group we push the blame off ourselves, but also neglect to recognize the implicit biases present in everyone. This only perpetuates the issues we have with race in todays society.
Vicki Felmlee,
Born in the U.S., NOT Mexican
Rachel Guerrero,
Menifee, CA.
I was born and raised in Southern California. My mother was born in Mexico and my father was born here. I have always considered myself Mexican and when I met my husband he said that I was not Mexican because I was not born in Mexico. He was born in Mexico City and came to the U.S. as a child. What makes him more Mexican than me. Both of my parents are Mexican just like his but somehow he is pure blood because of where he was born. I don’t agree.
CBU HIS311 – Go Lancers!
Problem: them or us. Solution: us
Sue Sanchez
Mexico
When we separate people into those who are like us and those we perceive as being different it can lead to fear, hatred or abuse. If we can include everyone in the “us” category maybe we would be less likely to fear, hate and abuse them. After all, our similarities are much more numerous than our differences.
“White” papers over background identity.
Catherine Kehl,
Cleveland Heights. OH.
When we divide ourselves into “us” and “other” we don’t only lose the other, we lose ourselves. I was twenty-seven before I realized that my mother sometimes spoke to me in Spanish not because she’d picked some up in college before travelling in South America in her twenties, but because her side of the family, some of whose forebears had been (wealthy) Spanish speaking settlers of California had maintained the language so as to be able to speak to their Mexican maids. I suppose that touches on some of the Cal-Mex cooking, anyway.
But does my late discovered hispanic background, such as it is, have more to do with who I am than having grown up close to my Japanese aunt, or having been a second language speaker of Chinese, and enmeshed in parts of the Chinese community for the last twenty-some years? I am an oversized white girl daughter of the Pacific Rim, I suppose, a fact that became more clear when I moved to Cleveland and couldn’t easily find half my kitchen staples in the supermarkets there.
You just assume that I’m American.
Sophie Kershaw,
Knoxville, TN.
I was born in England, lived in Denmark for a few years, and my family settled in the US. I speak American to Americans and British to my family. Most people assume I’m American, and people often make me uncomfortable by talking about “people from over there” and debating immigration reform without hesitation. Well, I’m from over there – wherever “there” is in their mind, and I wish that more people would embrace the diversity that makes this country so grand.
It makes me want to vomit
“GIRL”
Seattle, WA
Thinking about who I am and my racial past in the US.
You are the color of us
Jennifer Davis
St. Augustine, FL
I am a white mother of two bi-racial children. It is hard when society identifies them as black when they are an equal part white. But more than that, they are Milo as much as they are Jen, they are outspoken as much as they are unsure, they are me and they are him and they are us!
Affects us all of the time
Anonymous
Chadbourne Residential College
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.
