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ID Man Arrested After Slapping Toddler On Plane

23
Interesting Times2/18/2013 1:02:39 pm PST

re: #21 CuriousLurker

Being one of two brown-skinned people in a predominantly WASP family, I remember thinking it sort of strange (once I was old enough to notice) how in conversations other white people were never identified as such, but non-whites (or white foreigners) had their ethnicity appended to their identity. It was very subtle and not done in a disparaging way, but still…it made it clear that the person was somehow different, “other”.

In the serendipitous coincidence category, I saw a very similar point made on the NaNoWriMo forums in a thread about racism:

We are categories of pornography. People fetishize us and treat our race as a monolith. People look at our popular culture and assume that’s exactly what our ethnic culture is like…Anything that we do wrong, as an individual, is somehow a reflection of our entire race. Our opinions are somehow a reflection of the opinions of our entire race. Whenever we succeed, we are a “credit to our race” or we are “successful for a (insert race) person.”

We sometimes wish we were white. Sometimes, we don’t even realise that we’re not white until it smacks us in the face.

It’s a pretty powerful post, well worth reading in full.