muckefuck | You have to be carefully taught

You have to be carefully taught

My parents, in spite of their own shortcomings, did a decent job of raising us without any overt racial prejudice, to the point where I couldn't even wrap my mind around some of its cruder manifestations. I'm thinking in particular of the difficulty I had when I was younger comprehending the use of "black" as a slur. To me, race was an essentialist descriptive category, like "blond" or "broad-shouldered". Insinuating that someone was "black" when they looked "white" made as little sense to me as trying to make someone feel bad by calling them "short" when they were taller than you.

One incident which brought this into relief was a brief exchange I once had with a classmate back in junior high. I had given her the classic "Make me!" response to some exhortation or other and she came back with the equally classic "I don't make trash, I burn it!" Seeing as I was at a loss for a retort, she prompted me, "That's when you say, 'So that's why you're so black!'" At the time, I didn't read this as a racially-based insult. It seemed more-or-less equivalent to "You're so full of shit your eyes are brown!" which could be used against anyone, regardless of the actual colour of their eyes.

But in retrospect, it must've been. The girl in question was the most unreservedly racist of any in our school (small, parochial--in both senses--and 100% uniform in its racial compensation until the arrival of two Hispanic students my last year there). The one time I remember discussing "Black people" in class, her contribution to the discussion was "They look like monkeys!" (The teacher's reaction to this remark was to chuckle at it, prompting her to insist even more forcefully.)

A couple years later, in high school, a good friend told me about the "Three Big Lies" which--according to him--were "'Black is beautiful', 'The check is in the mail', and 'I won't come in you mouth'." Despite--or perhaps due to--not having really any context for the first slogan, I couldn't figure out what it was doing there. After all, I knew my friend wasn't a racist (since racists are bad people and my friend was good person, or else why would he have been my friend?) so there must be some other allusion there that I simply didn't get. No, not really.

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I imagine she's not as black as you're painting her. And we all look like monkeys, that's why they're charming.

I grew up in a place where the only non-white face I ever saw was my Indian friend (who, on reflection, had probably been born locally and was no more Indian than my children are limeys): the topic simply never came up. In some sense I think that might have been better for my own formation than if I'd grown up in a place where there was discussion of race and racism coupled with a visible, vulnerable minority to focus it on.

I did have some social awkwardness at college, which was the first time I spent much time with anyone who wasn't from my own social background - I was aware that I had no idea how to behave, but not confident enough to behave exactly as I always do. I think I'm mostly over that now.

The teacher's reaction to this remark was to chuckle at it

Sad.

I'm from a family that used NOT to be racist and has developed racism in the last years. Mind you, we're inmigrants too, but since they needed no passport change, they don't consider themselves inmigrants. Yet they absolutely hate all kinds of foreign people we have
-Latinamericans because they're liars and lazy people
-Chinese because they're liars and bring more people illegally and of course, they belong all to the mafias.
-Indian/Pakistani (all confused here): They bribe the police so they can open their shops on weekends while honest "Spaniards" can't
-Moroccans: Hoping to reconquer AlAndalus by means of having 50 children per family and living on social benefits. Bringing their mommas to get plastic surgery which you can't get in the public system but they get it because they're foreign and you know that in Spain we give to the "foreign" more than they give us.

It's discouraging.

Racism is always present even if it doesn't manifest itself as overt prejudice. Even though the didactic messages I was getting when I was younger were quite the opposite, I knew intuitively that it was "bad" to be black--not that black people were bad, mind you, but that being black just wasn't as good as being white, no matter what kind of person you were. My confusion was entirely because I expected more connexion between slurs and actual physical characteristics than there was in this particular case.

I suspect the same with your family. They always knew it was "better" to be Spanish than to be some sort of dirty foreigner, it's just that there's no real need to point this out if there aren't any dirty foreigners around.

What I find amazing is that we lived racism in our own flesh until very recently, even in my own family. My mum's eldest brother emigrated to France, to work for tire manufacturer Michelin in Clermont-Ferrand. He married a French woman (who is herself 50% of Portuguese descent) and two of my aunt's friends stopped being their friend because she married some kind of "African subhuman". Even if my uncle has blue eyes and fair skin (you know my mum's family is mostly Celtiberian)

Of course, to their eyes, my uncle was a honest worker and emigrated to France with legal papers.

I've lived with problems because of immigration and I can't deny that I don't like the islamic religion at all (like I don't like the Catholic religion).

Finally, in Spain, our "Blacks" have always been the gipsies

Not trying to condone any form of racism but to me it just goes to show that xenophobia in the broadest sense of the word is just a part of human nature. Everyone will always find a group of people they want to set themselves apart from and look down upon.
The degree to which they want to pound their views varies, and that's of course what everyone should watch out for but I don't think we'll ever get rid of it.

My favourite example here (Berlin) are young boho families in hip = multi-ethnic neighbourhoods in town that really go out of their way, using every trick in the book to get their children into schools with predominantly native German speaking children. Their arguments wouldn't be openly racist but subtle covert xenophobia is what it boils down to, imo.
(Not saying that I'm above it, btw.)

You're completely right in the bottom line and I think that it's something you should learn. I grew up in a household where I was told that I shouldn't look at the origin, sex or the person's skin tone, but how that person was but these cues are still there, hence my absolute shock when I hear my mother and her siblings to say that type of things about foreign people.

I'm not sure if what you're doing is wag a finger, because if you do I must have brought across my case very badly.
Observing that xenophobia is a part of human nature not at all the same as approving of it. What I'm saying it that it comes in many forms, not in just the most obvious ones, and that it's well worth being alert to.

I disagree. I think that xenophobia has to be taught. There has been some interesting studies in Northern Ireland that demonstrate that integration in schools (the earlier, the better) reduces tensions between groups when the students mature.

Chuck

I'm talking about xenophobia in a very broad sense of the word. What I mean and what I see is that every group tries to find another group that they can diss and look down upon and put the blame on etc. In my grandparent's times, it was some other family, or the next village. In my job nowadays it may be one department against the other - not much when things go well, but once something goes wrong, ...
That's what I mean, there's always "the other" and strong emotions against them. It's primitive, but it's always there in some form, and I think it's at the core of xenophobia.

What the study above tells me is that *integration* has to be taught - and that it should be taught!

The thing is, I think maybe we could have a really interesting conversation about this in the real world, over a glass of whatever, and both of us could give examples of what we mean. But I don't think I can do that over the internet. I wasn't trying to be confrontational, nor am I trying to convince anyone. I just observe and try to make sense of what I see. Other people might come to different conclusions.
And since I'm actually sure that both of us (and I reckon everyone on muckefuck's readers' list) belong to the same, essentially xenophile camp, I'll gladly agree to disagree on nuances.

Yes, sorry if sometimes my expression is not perfect! I guess all that was latent somehow and they just consciently educated us against that feeling. I'm not sure, really. In part, this happens because we didn't have inmigrants until the 90s

The Russians, Rumanians, Gypsies…

Chuck, tongue-in-cheek

Ah, you're right. Russians are plain thieves. All Romanians are in mafias that kidnap children to beg.

I mentioned gipsies, they're our blacks

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