I had a really weird conversation with a friend from back in CT the other day.
I have a hunch that every person of color who grew up in the suburbs has at least one white acquaintance (possibly several) who is so clueless about race that literally everything that comes out of their mouth turns into a possible teaching moment, where during every conversation, you have to think to yourself, “How am I supposed to steer this?” This person is that particular acquaintance for me.
I am generally a non-confrontational person who hates to fight, but I get especially squeamish whenever white people bring up race. It’s a truly, truly exhausting experience, not only because I get flashbacks of being shut down from defining my own self and my own boundaries and it takes so much energy to just stay sane during these exchanges, but also because I also have a sort of irrational (not really) fear that I’m risking being the token friend of color whenever I talk to a white person in CT. In general, I think this is what happens when you grow up in the suburbs and then go to college and take Asian American studies classes. I just don’t have the energy to talk to or teach white people about racism. If I did, I’d be a professor.
ANYWAY, we were catching up about our kids and I asked about her kid’s new experiences at preschool. The preschool is in a different city from where they live which, thankfully, means more diversity, but this friend mentioned her kid was kind of having a difficult time processing that there were children who looked different from him. She expressed some concern that he was starting to think all people who look a certain way will act a certain way, that he’s already begun to make this association. He is four years old.
I know I’m supposed to applaud this person for showing concern and for attempting to teach her child that “not all people who look like X are mean, just that one person.” BUT.
First off, I still know loads of people in CT who epitomize clueless-white-folk-syndrome but unless you live in a place that straight up has a population of, like, five, it is my genuine feeling that at 2012, your exposure to people of color can’t be that limited unless you deliberately make it so. Like, you really have to try hard at sheltering your kid if, by the time your child is four, he or she is surprised that people look different from him or her. And by the time you get to a certain age, you don’t get any more passes for simply being ignorant anymore. You’re just racist. You are complicit in your own ignorance, and it’s not anyone else’s job to educate you but your own.
It has actually just occurred to me why people this annoy and exhaust me so much more than run-of-the-mill outright racists. It is not just that they’re complicit in their own ignorance, but because they’re looking to me to feel good about trying. They want me to validate and co-sign that they can say racist shit and have racist feelings and still not be considered racist, and therefore not have to do any more. Because in many cases, calling a white person racist is like the worst possible thing you can say to them — it shuts down conversation, it puts you in an “Angry People We Can’t Talk To” camp, and it means they actually have to actively experience race like the rest of us. Rarely do people like this acknowledge or even realize that “racist” is not a permanent state they need to be in for the rest of their lives, and that they can easily fix this situation by reading a fucking book or checking their thinking once in a while or exercising the goddamn filter between their mouth and their brain. Yes, I have been accused of saying racist shit and misappropriating culture myself, but it has been a continual learning process and I’ve mostly taken these moments in my life, learned from them, and moved on (though not without the occasional cringe-oh-my-god-I-was-so-stupid-back-then).
It is also my feeling (supported pretty much only by my personal experience) that at preschool age, kids don’t naturally distinguish people by race. Hugga has been in preschool for a year and a half, is about the same age, and as much as I talk about race and racism and privilege at home, she still doesn’t really understand what race is. Granted, this may have been the experience in our family because we are non-white, have many (possibly mostly) non-white friends, and live in an ethnically diverse and super liberal city where we interact with mostly non-white people (and white people who also interact with mostly non-white people), but certainly when Hugga first started preschool, she more naturally distinguished people by girl or boy, mean or nice, big or small, or by who’s her friend and who isn’t. This is still her natural inclination, and whenever I don’t know who she’s talking about, she gives other indicators like, “Quinn who lives in my neighborhood” or “Mia who has a brother in the Jungle Room” or “Not my cousin Kayla, but Ocean Room Kayla.” She doesn’t even talk about hair color.
She has only the vaguest understanding about being Korean and Filipino, and she really only understands it from a language standpoint — that her grandmothers speak different languages. She repeats that she is Korean or Filipino when we’re actually talking about it, but I still don’t think she understands what “being Korean” or “being Filipino” or “being mixed” means. The only indication I have ever gotten that she even notices race or skin color happened a few months ago when we were having lunch at a restaurant with my mom — our waitress was strikingly beautiful, was probably more bubbly than anyone Hugga had ever met, and she also had really dark skin, and Hugga was so intent on telling her how pretty and nice she was that she yelled across the restaurant, “I LIKE YOUR SKIN.” I would’ve died of embarassment if the waitress wasn’t so charmed by Hugga’s verbal diarrhea.
(Side note: I really didn’t know how to handle that moment — the waitress was clearly not offended, the restaurant was Hooters where I guess women are voluntarily objectified but gotdamn those wings are delicious, and at four, Hugga doesn’t even know the meaning of exoticizing, but if she said the same thing at middle school age, I’d have to have the “Why this comment is problematic” talk with her. Yeah, I’m gonna be that mom.)
I should make something clear — I don’t advocate for “colorblindness.” I think it’s important to teach kids that people are different races, and that racism and privilege are real. This is the only hope we have of actually combating racism — talking about it rather than pretending it no longer exists — and I try to talk about this with Hugga as much as I can in terms she can understand which, at four years old, aren’t many. I tried giving her the MLK Jr. lesson on her day off from school but I could tell she had just a basic grasp. Even when she uses the word “discrimination,” she really only associates that with when I try to tell her that the Oriental Trading catalog was made for teachers and not kids, even though it has all sorts of toys and candy in it.
But admittedly, we don’t regularly have reasons to talk about the otherness of the people we know. I used to have a weird inclination to ask Huz the ethnicity of every person he’d bring up in conversation, but after being asked “Does it matter?” every single time, I don’t even allow myself to go there anymore, cause it doesn’t matter and the answer always surprised me anyhow (unless he’s talking about a client with an entitlement complex, in which case I don’t need to ask — jokes, people!). The only “Very Special Conversation” Hugga really gets is that she has some uncles who like men and some aunts who like women, and that boys can wear makeup if they want to, and that some boys are born with girl parts and some girls are born with boy parts, and that there’s no such thing as boy favorite colors or girl favorite colors — and this only comes up in conversation because her friends are just wrapping their minds around gender right now and she’s kind of obsessed with this idea of “getting married” (which only means being really good friends with a person and maybe kissing).
Thus, I cannot wrap my mind around a four year old having the cognizance to make racist assumptions about people on their own, UNLESS this is something that is regularly practiced and talked about at home. Not that the practice is something I’d put past this acquaintance, but I guess I’m just exhausted to know people like her and to have these kinds of conversations with her 75% of the time we talk. It just reminds me of being in high school and it brings out the passive in me. I’m a nice person and I don’t like having to be a bitchy asshole about stuff.
I love the people I kept in touch with since high school, but the entire experience of growing up in the suburbs of CT was basically day in and day out of white people telling me how I was different, what my people were like, how my family was weird, etc. If my friends had any questions about my family or my culture or generally about being Asian, these questions weren’t asked out of curiosity. Instead these questions were asked like accusations. “Is it true that they eat dogs in the Philippines?” or “What do you guys eat that smells so bad?” or “What the fuck was your dad saying just now? Was he speaking English?” It was eighteen years of other people defining who I was, and as I got older, the truly racist dipshits would feel okay just saying racist shit in my presence because I wasn’t black or Puerto Rican. I’d only have the balls to just walk away from those types of people.
I can’t lie — obviously if you catch me in the right mood, I can still be mad bitter about it.
