white guilt

I'd like to tell you three stories.

One- Yesterday I watched a movie called Something New, loaned to me by one of my fellow teachers. It's about an African American woman from very high society who dares to go against the expectations of her family and friends and date a white man. Her brother accuses her of "going over to the enemy" and her friends suspect the white guy of having ulterior motives.

One and a half- The teacher who gave me Something New is quite convinced that African (not African American, just African) students at UVU are shocked when they arrive here. Many of them come from well educated, upper class families, but at UVU, they are treated as any other student, not better or worse. They aren't accustomed to being the obvious minority and people not recognizing their higher social status.

Three- The more I'm around my ESL students, the more I think that as a whole, non-Americans are incredibly racist. Remember the drama with the Saudi and the Dominican last week? That isn't the first time something like this (though never quite that extreme) has happened in my classes. One of my Mexican students made shooting noises and motions at a Kuwaiti student. The Koreans don't want to work with the "Mexicans." One Peruvian refused to work with the Koreans. I routinely have students switch in or out of my classes because there aren't enough people from their home country in the class.

Three- within a few weeks of arriving in the United States, many of the refugees (in this example mostly Iraqi or Nepali) already identify the Hispanics as the bottom of the social ladder. Even though they come to the US with nothing, don't have a job yet, and may not even speak English, they put themselves higher on the social scale than their "Mexican" neighbors.

So maybe some white Americans are racist. But I think most of the racism these days comes in the form of "reverse" racism from the minorities in our country. Just listen to black talk radio in Memphis, for example. Or ask black people in the south why they voted for Obama (I've done it- a lot of them don't have a real reason other than his skin color).

What I'm getting at is racism is stupid. And I feel like I've been trained to be guilty about it my whole life. I can't help that I'm white. I usually wish I had darker skin and hair so that I could fit in better abroad. Being white makes you a target when traveling (because as we know, all white people are rich) and can be a serious disadvantage when applying for jobs or school (good thing I'm a girl). I don't deny that there may still be racial problems in the US. But it's a whole lot better here than anywhere else in the world, don't you think?