bunnyjadwiga

This was inspired by several other people's comments on the question of race and its discussion.

Full disclosure: I'm olive-skinned, dark haired, expose-me-to-light-I-turn-brown. All my formative years were spent in places where people who didn't look "Caucasian" were in the minority. Nowadays I still live in places where the biggest visual minority is Latina/Latino, with some blacks. I work in places that are working hard to on questions of diversity and advancing diversity.

I try to think about race, but being self-reflective, I know I can't have a good understanding of how it means from the inside to appear to be of the non-dominant racial appearance and/or to be of a background that is of the non-dominant race.

My grandparents and parents dragged us up to be race-blind. There are pictures of us playing with the black kids who lived across the street from my grandparents.
By the time I was in second grade, I understood how racial tensions impacted behavior, because there was a black kid in my class. He was picked on by everyone else, though I'd been dragged up to not pick on anyone, and was actually lower than him in the pecking order. It didn't take much thought to understand why he picked on me, or to let it go. (Sounds sanctimonious, right? I was seven. Sevens are often sanctimonious.) I did have a boyfriend whose half-sibs were bi-racial (there is NOTHING ON THIS EARTH cuter than a biracial toddler, ok?) but since they were also Jewish and their mother was an underbelly-of-frog-green-white person, I didn't learn all that much about dealing with race by knowing them.

But I know I don't understand. And I don't know how to talk about it. I'm afraid of being offensive, because I don't understand. I hear people say they feel excluded because of their color, and I'd like to try to approach people of color to be inclusive, but I'm terrible at making friends and being social to begin with-- it would seem pointed. What if that comes across as patronizing? And I'd like to talk about the subject of race, to open a discussion-- but suppose I say something hurtful.

I find that I'm naturally more likely to feel open with people of certain appearances, and many black women and men fall into that category. (People who fit the norm-- don't. I've been a fat white woman my whole life. I expect exclusionary behavior from skinny white people. I expect more kindness from people of color-- but is that trading on the fact I'm white and they feel they have to be nice to me?)

Add to that one thing I feel really strongly about. Everyone has a color. It's horrible that we normalize people as being white when we don't say they are black. It's also horrible that we can't talk about people's skin tones in describing them, because that might be prejudical. There are so many beautiful skin tones out there, some of them pinkish but most not. So I've consciously tried to describe people's complexions, specifically the complexions of peachy-pinkish people, when describing them... Is that fair? Is that prejudiced? is it logical? I don't know.