Posted by
This Guy on Wednesday, August 30, 2006 5:54:40 PM
You'll know we've arrived at a healthy place in "race relations" in our nation when a
reality show can create teams based solely on ethnicity, and no one cares.
Those will be the days when someone will be able to look at me and say "You are a white dude" without intending it to be an insult, and I'll be able to hear it without getting defensive. Very young children are often excellent examples of this ideal, if their parents haven't corrupted them. Hang around a diversified crowd of kids long enough, and you're likely to hear something like this:
White kid: "How come your eyes are like that?"
Chinese kid: "I'm Chinese."
White kid: "Oh, cool. Want to play?"
In the above case, we might say that the White Kid "doesn't know any better" than to ask such a question. In this day and age, though, it would probably be more accurate to say the Chinese child "doesn't know" that he should be offended by the question in the first place. Children often have a remarkable grasp of the obvious. But somewhere along the way, we develop the idea that we need to be "more sensitive", which more often means we become less sensitive, but more adept at disguising our ignorance.
Personally, I look forward to seeing what I can learn from the Great Social Experiment on the Cook Islands this September.