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For the past eleven years, I've lived in a city where whites are the minority. I was the only white girl at my job when I showed up, and you can sure as hell bet that I encountered some racism there. My best friends in junior high were all Hispanic and none of their families could understand why they would hang out with a gringa like me. And it's not like Baltimore is a white-bread town, either...
Meanwhile, my little sister is at a high school where only 10% of students are white, and her friends who are black and Hispanic constantly get harrassed for hanging out with her-- that doesn't even bring into question the comments she's had thrown her way.
So maybe I haven't run into a huge amount of racism in my life, no, but it's not like I've lived in a little bubble where everyone was white and no one ever said anything mean to me based on the color of my skin.
This is what gets to me. I know that a lot of white kids who go to private Catholic schools like the one I'm at now-- especially ones on the East Coast-- haven't encountered a lot of diversity or been on the receiving end of a racist comment in their lifetimes. Shit, I know a kid from Vermont who had never seen someone who wasn't white till he got to college. It happens all the time.
But it's still pretty racist to assume that white kids have never been the victims of prejudice.
And race isn't the only way that people differ from each other, which is why it drives me nuts to go to a discussion about diversity and find that many people are completely unwilling to venture away from black-white issues.
-- sigh --
Pseu
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