My eldest son, Tavish, has a friend that he plays with quite a bit who lives just a few houses away. I realized earlier today that while I knew his friend I had never seen, as far as I knew, any of the rest of his family. Wondering if maybe I had and just hadn't realized it I asked Tavish about Adam's family and what they looked like. So beginning with Adam's older sister Tavish began to describe them "she's tall and pretty, with blond hair and peach skin like Adam's".
Now this isn't the first time that I've gotten a description of someone from Tavish, but today it just struck me. In all the descriptions of people that have ever come out of him he always describes color as a specific instead of a generality. To him people are brown, peach, or have skin like this person or that person that he already knows. He doesn't have the language to label people as 'black' or 'white'.
So how do we, as adults, learn from our children's ignorance and excise these labels from our vocabulary? Seriously - the labels are just generalities that provide little real information about the person aside from possibly some hint about skin tone or hair texture and in today's world that can vary so wildly as to be useless.
If my son came to me with a vocabulary that included "Black" or "Asian" there are so many degrees within that generality that I couldn't form a realistic picture in my mind of what the person might look like. I.E. is the person black like Seal (hershey's extra dark) or black like Halle Barry (hershey's milk chocolate). Additionally there's a stereotype of culture associated with defining someone as black. Assumptions might be made about political opinions or social leanings prior to even meeting a person.
I've met people from around the world some falling very easily into the sterotypical roles that we see race tied to. I think more often though I meet people that do not fall into those categories so easily. Our friend Anthony from years ago we assumed was "afro-american" - he was Mexican and his family all fit neatly into the "hispanic" stereotype but his mother and fathers features combined in him to create more rounded features similar to some African-american stereotypes. My friend Saeid - assumed Russian/Ukranian - he's Iranian. Then there's a host of friends and acquaintences from all over the asiatic Korean, Vietnamese, Philipino, Chinese, Japanese, Somoan etc. And don't ever call a Spaniard "Mexican" they just as defensive as Cubans, and many other "non-mexican" hispanics.
With all of the intermingling of gene pools and migration of peoples from one land to another so easily these days 'race' really ends up being a useless method for defining people. I say we ditch it in favor of crayola color definitions. Let's ditch all that baggage that goes along with race and racism for that matter.
Does it matter if I'm 1/16th native american if it doesn't obviously show in my outward appearance? Does it matter that outwardly people see me as "Mexican" despite the fact that my ancestors, with the exception of 1, were all Irish immigrants? Do I have to define myself as "caucasian" for any reason except to lump myself in with a group of people that I may have little visibly in common with?
What does it all gain us to categorize ourselves and each other so?
Posted by nhavar at February 20, 2004 10:02 PM