i think people should be careful not to confuse prejudice with culture or
race
> i think people should be careful not to confuse culture with race.
>
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> on the phone a colleague talks about what isn't available in america
> due to ways of doing and studying the world, how they don't know
> about much what goes on outside americah. americans, she says, not
> that i want to be racist here, are pretty narrow-minded.
> not racist, culturalist, i asserted. a-sert-ed.
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> on the census form here, about race,
> you had several options to tick.
> white
> black
> asian
> and some subgroups in between.
>
> under the white box, they had two choices:
> british or irish.
> ehhheeeheeheheeee.
> sorry, dunno if irish and british are different races yet, but well,
> better bow out on that one.
> then, to write in the space for 'white: other', what?
> hand poised to scribe 'australian' when it froze, nup, still
> divisions of race there, and the original australians aren't
> considered, well, assimilated enough yet, no sirreee!.
> so i wrote 'mixed european' for the both of us.
> 'mongrel', the term i prefer, might have seemed a little unseemly.
>
> you know, the skool i went to most of my friends were jewish. i
> always felt on the outer, the one without the creds. one of them was
> a bit middle class enough to say to me i'd probably marry a jewish
> boy. no chance. they don't want no shiksa nitwits who are flakey like
> moi. i knew that. but i hoped anyway. the guy i had a crush on went
> hippy and took off to israel to work on a kibbutz. also, their
> parents were still a bit concerned about the race thing, the line
> passing down via the female and all, as soon as the parents found
> out, i'd be politely ignored.
> so my mother says, tell them you are jewish, like, my father's mother
> was jewish, doesn't that count? no mum, sorry lah. anyway, a lot of
> those parents were like e's i think - they had got out in the nick of
> time and not all of their families either, so they may still have
> felt a little on the alien side. my friends though, all born in oz,
> seemed oblivious except to stretch their eyes when telling tales of
> how orthodox aunties wouldn't show their arms and had to boil even
> their saucepans before passover.
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