assumptions of race

[Amy Z]

Ebony wrote:

> When I first read SS, with Dean, Lee, and Parvati, I was shocked... 
and had 
> to actively remember that there is a nonwhite population in England. 
I'd 
> known this of course (we had a biracial exchange student from 
Liverpool 
> attend our high school during my junior year), but being quite 
honest, 
> multiculturalism is *not* the first thing that comes to mind when we 
think 
> of England over here.

I have a theory about this (the "I" and "we" that follow are a white, 
middle-class, hyper-educated, PBS-viewing U.S. woman's perspective):

-England connotes high class.  Even accents we recognize as 
lower-class are so terrifically cool that we like them way better than 
anything the U.S. produces.  But most English accents we hear are high 
class:  movie actors, Masterpiece Theater characters, news 
broadcasters, Monty Python.  In decades past, an upperclass U.S. 
accent was close to a British one--again, something you heard in the 
movies a lot (think Margaret Dumont--or was she actually British and 
I've forgotten?).  If an American wants to imitate someone being 
snobbish, he fakes a British accent.

-Put that together with "black" connoting "lower class," as it does to 
middle-class U.S. whites, and you get a jarring effect when you 
imagine black people with British accents.  Black voices are deemed 
inferior to ours (I blush, and when I blush I really turn red, to say 
it, but it's true); English voices are deemed superior. 

-In most British TV we see, the cast is pretty homogenously white.  
Mystery, Masterpiece Theatre, Monty Python, All Creatures Great and 
Small, all those sitcoms (Are You Being Served, Good Neighbors, To the 
Manor Born, Yes, Minister, Vicar of Dibley, Fawlty Towers, etc. etc.). 
 I'm several years out of the loop, so maybe British TV (or the bits 
of it that come west) has gotten more diverse, but when I was a kid 
watching all that stuff on TV, it was pretty close to lily white.

All of this adds up to an experience of going to London and feeling as 
if everyone who opened his or her mouth, whatever race or ethnicity 
he/she was, could have been straight out of a Monty Python sketch.  
(This was a source of great amusement to my family--the most ordinary 
statement seems comical.  But it also meant a crash course in British 
diversity.)

I've had the same experience going to Israel, where it seemed so 
amazing to me that the Jews weren't all white, as we almost all are in 
the U.S., the only exceptions I knew as a child being a couple of 
African-American and Pakistani kids adopted by a white Jewish woman.  
I knew already, intellectually, that this was because most American 
Jews are European, and that Israel is different, but it was still 
startling--and gratifying in a way that would take another long post 
to explain--to see Jews of all colors and ethnicities.

>  When we did Census 2000 lessons, 
> and it was mentioned that black Americans are no longer the 
> "majority-minority", one of my kids whispered to me, "Do you think 
they want 
> us to all disappear?"
> 
> I said, "Let's hope not..." and moved on.  For I honestly didn't 
know what 
> to say.

This is very sad.  Your students are lucky to have you, Ebony.  I 
don't think there's any way to answer that question, because the 
honest answer is "Some of them do."  I don't know at what age one can 
possibly absorb that ugly truth.

> Another thing I've noticed is that with white writers and 
characters, the 
> description seems to focus a lot on the hair and eyes (especially in 
> romances and women's fiction), whereas a modern black writer 
describing 
> black characters will concentrate on the skin color... whether the 
> character's skin is ivory, cafe au lait, toast, cinnamon, honey, 
golden, 
> sepia, mahogany, milk or bittersweet chocolate, or deepest charcoal. 
 This 
> is because one of the purposes of description is to differentiate 
characters 
> one from another... and since most blacks have brown to black hair 
and dark 
> eyes, the hair/eyes convention doesn't do much for us.

I suspect this is one of the reasons whites have trouble 
distinguishing among Asians, e.g.--when one depends so heavily on hair 
color and texture and eye color to describe people, one loses one's 
eye for other details.  This can come across as very racist ("they all 
look alike"), and sometimes it is; but I've seen this tendency in 
myself even in distinguishing between white people who have the same 
hair and eye color.  I recall one time when I was teaching, I had no 
problem memorizing almost all of my students' names within the first 
week, but I kept mixing up two girls who both had long red hair, 
freckles, and light eyes.  After a couple of weeks, when I knew them 
better, it seemed laughable that I'd mixed them up--they didn't look 
at all alike.  But I only "saw" the hair, eyes, and in the most 
general way, skin color, and those were the same.

You've opened my eyes with your explanation that African-Americans 
tend to describe each other by shades of brown (and how 
lovely--cinnamon, coffee . . .).  I have read this in fiction and been 
made very uncomfortable by it--somehow it's part of my 
white-person-trying-not-to-be-racist mostly-unconscious training to 
not describe people by skin color.  It does make total sense to do so.

Amy Z