Memories of Race - Reflection on Reading

For this journal entry I will answer the questions posed in an article included in assigned reading, Culturally Relevant Pedagogy: Ingredients for Critical Teacher Reflection

How frequently and what types of interactions did I have with individuals from racial backgrounds different from my own growing up?

Interactions with people from other racial backgrounds became more and more frequent as I got older. I lived with my father in Staten Island while I was growing up, where the majority of people were Italian-American. I was surrounded by a vast majority of white (primarily Italian-American and Jewish-American) people. On the weekends I stayed with my mother in a diverse neighborhood in Kensington, Brooklyn where people were of different races. I remember wondering if it would feel different if I touched the hand of the black policeman in the store. I remember another incident when I was very young. We were in Macy’s and I asked my mother, “If some black people are called niggas, what’s the word for white people?” I remember her getting so embarrassed and saying, “Don’t say that in public!” My mother also brought me to work, where African-American women were the majority.

Although my parents never spoke of race, the other children who lived on my block in Staten Island often did. They would mostly say derogatory things about black people and occasionally say things about Hispanic people or even Jewish people. Being the only Jewish person on my block, they would turn to me and say, “No offense” when speaking negatively about Jewish people. They would mostly talk about how cheap Jewish people are and how they were happy they were that the two other Jewish families were moving away. It wasn't as bad as the way they viewed black people, who, to them, seemed to be full of only negative traits. This type of pre-judgment confused me and I didn’t like it, but I didn’t think much of it. I only remember one time when I challenged my friend asking her how she knew what black people were like if she didn't know any.

In middle school, the student body started to include more black and Hispanic students. In 7th grade, I made my first African-American friend (Marquis) and Puerto Rican friend (Diana). Diana stopped hanging out with me and became friendlier with the black and hispanic kids. I didn’t know what was going on at the time and I don’t know how I may have appeared in regards to race relations. I had mostly white friends and a few acquaintances who were either hispanic or black, like this one black girl who would pass notes between me and another friend, but they stayed acquaintances at the most; no close friends like Diana.

By the time I got to high school, my school was even more diverse. I think it was about 50-60% white and 40-50% non-white. As I started to notice boys even more than before. There was one black boy, Junior, who really liked me, but black or white, I wasn’t into him. The boys I liked were always my friends, who were mostly white. One time another black boy asked if I had a date for the Valentine’s Day dance. He was so cute. I would have freaked out if he was white or black, but since he was black, I freaked out more. He didn’t push it. I remember being so happy thinking that someone so cute seemed interested in me and left it at that.

I had a high school friend who was Irish-American and dated a black guy. She wasn’t a very close friend and I actually never met him, but she often talked about how it was an issue and how her white guy friends gave her such a hard time. Later on, I one of my best high school friends, who was half Italian-American and half Puerto Rican, got a black boyfriend. He was a skateboarder, father was a doctor, and was a nice guy... seemed like a guy a parent would approve of. However, her father gave her such a hard time that he made jokes regularly and sent her to stay with a relative in Cape Cod for the summer so that she would stay away from him. I drove him up to see her. The separation didn’t make much sense to me. I just though her father was a little nuts, for this and for other things.

In high school my closest friends were mostly Italian and Jewish. I didn't really pay much attention to the diversity around me. One of my closest friends was Philipino and I didn't even think about the fact that he was eating very different food for dinner and didn't think much of his mother's Spanish-sounding accent. Looking back, I can see that my school was pretty segregated. I had black acquaintances, but no black friends. Some of the other white kids had black friends, but not many. When the Rodney King incidents happened, fights broke out regularly and one girl got her hair lit on fire in the lunchroom. On a positive note, I thought that the step club was really cool and wanted to join, but I didn’t have the guts to try. I wasn’t consciously aware of the severity of race issues. I just let it be. Nobody ever talked to me about it and I kept my thoughts on other things.

My first year of college was upstate at a predominantly white school. I remember feeling the absence of hip-hop which added to my unhappiness there. I remember realizing that even though I was into alternative music at the time, the presence of hip-hop was a big part of my life and my upbringing. Without hip-hop and with only a small group of black kids that stayed away from the others much more than in high school, something didn’t feel right. I told my friends back home, but that’s as far as it went.

I transferred colleges after the first year and went to Hunter College where I took a course called Multicultural Women’s Writing and fell in love with belle hooks. Belle hooks, along with Toni Morrison, Amy Tan, and Alice Walker, opened up my eyes to so much of what was going on around me. I couldn’t stop reading. I even remember sitting with a girl in another class who I knew from my high school and she was telling me how segregated our high school was and how the students were tracked based on race. I didn’t even really think about it until she said something, but it seemed true. There were mostly white kids in my honors classes.

I transferred to art school (SVA), but I spent a lot of time in Barnes and Noble reading about gender, race and class issues. While I was in SVA, I started to date much more. I also started dating guys of different races, ethnicities and classes. I dated a Japanese guy, a Puerto Rican guy, an African American guy… and then there was the guy from Barbados… he became my first love. I learned a lot from that relationship and the other guys I dated. For now, I leave it at that, but the story goes on.

Who were the primary persons that helped to shape my perspectives of individuals from different racial groups? How were their opinions formed?

The hatred and comments of people around me while I growing up made me question the ridiculousness of why you would hate a whole group of people without knowing them. I can only assume that their opinions were formed out of ignorance and inheritance.

My relationship with Kelvin (the guy from Barbados) shaped my perspective of race a lot. Dating him also made me see how racist the people around me could be. My father didn’t acknowledge our relationship and seemed racist. It was suppressed and repressed for many years, but now I know for sure that his views are mixed up. My mother is not necessarily against interracial dating, but is against interracial marriage. She was fine with him being my boyfriend until we started to get serious. Even saw one of my friends would make prejudged comments about Kelvin as if he was a stereotypical black guy from the ghetto that just stepped out of mass media. Meanwhile, her boyfriend sold cocaine and beat her up once. Things even came up for both, Kelvin and I.

Also, one of my best friends of 10 years is African-American (mixed with Irish and Native American, but primarily of African decent) and our many conversations about race have influenced me.

Other people who were, or are, not as close to me in my personal life have also shaped my perspective. When I worked as a waitress in an Italian restaurant on Staten Island I hung out with the Mexican guys in the kitchen and the Mexican bus boy. I saw how difficult it was to learn English from and ESL book and was amazed when the cook told me he was a direct decedent of the Aztecs. Teaching in NYC public schools also gave me insight into black and Hispanic cultures around me.

Have I ever harbored prejudiced thoughts towards people from different racial backgrounds?

It wasn't until almost my mid-twenties did I start to think more about Asian culture. In my early twenties I had a two Asian girl friends who were close to me and told me about the stereotypes they faced. They told me that men thought they would be submissive because they were Asian. I didn't really like the fact that it existed, but I didn't really understand it. After moving to Japan and living there as a teacher, my perspective on Asian society, and therefore Asian people, changed. I can tell about the many great experiences I've had because there are many.

Living in Japan gave me the experience of living as an immigrant, as someone who is illiterate and someone who is a racial and ethnic minority. All of this forced me to learn about myself in new ways. There were many good things about this, but there were also aspects of the culture I didn't like. I think this is natural, but I must have been hit with some culture shock because my sensitivity to gender issues was very high. We all have many roles in society and while I was living in Japan, my role as a woman, and the role of women around me, was different than I had anticipated. Regardless, I didn't expect gender issues to affect me since I knew I'd be a foreigner, but I was wrong.

I had been interested in gender issues before my move to Japan. After a few months in Japan I began to notice the discrepancy in gender relations and it really bothered me. There was a student at the company I worked for that was recently married. She had to give up her job as a pharmaceutical rep to become a housewife. She was bored, so she studied English. She was unhappy she had to move from Tokyo to Osaka because she was now married and that's the plan her husband was leading. She wanted to visit Canada to study English, but he didn't give her permission right away. Since she was close to my age I invited her out one night with my friends and, to my surprise, she ended up making out with some guy she met. We never talked about it. I had another student who told me how jobs became scarce for women as they got older because they were expected to quit their careers and get married. One of my managers confirmed this. I was also told that Japanese men were very sexist by Japanese women and told that Japanese men regularly cheat on their wives by foreigners. I then had a middle aged male student who was married with a family tell me he loved me and wanted to date me. Such gender issues even surfaced in my friendships with Japanese women. One of the woman I still talk to spent 5 years in a relationship with a man and she knew he was cheating. Every time she spoke to me about it I told her to leave. She hasn't mentioned him to me in the past few contacts we've had.

However, some of the most disturbing part of my insight into gender issues in Japan were through male English teachers. I noticed on a few different occasions that they were treated a little different by men and women. I also began to notice that men who visited Japan stayed longer than the women and more foreign men remain permanent citizens than foreign women. There were also the way that Japanese women were around these foreign men. What seemed to me to be a regular guy was really something special to these women. Foreign guys were almost always able to find Japanese girls with ease. Then the stories came... there was the American photographer who left his ex-wife waiting for 5 hours to get a good shot and didn't think much of it. His new wife served us when we went to his apartment to learn about photography. There was a Canadian guy who studied the occult and was particularly unattractive, but had a girlfriend who was gorgeous and it completely fed his ego. He thought foreign girls were jealous of Japanese girls, a common idea that was bounced around. Meanwhile, his girlfriend was in a marriage that was not filled with love and he thought it was great because she was given money by her husband. The worst, I think, was the English teacher from Maryland who enjoyed hanging around junior high school girls at the schools he worked in. There was an incident that happened before I got hired at that job that questioned the level of sexual relations he had with these girls, but he somehow got through it and remained employed.

The stories could go on. All of this made me a little crazy. One day, when I was commuting to work, I walked over to a man who must have been about 50 years old. He was staring at a girl who must have been in junior high school and staring at her short skirt in a way that made me uncomfortable. I asked him if he liked "it" and nodded at her short skirt. He smiled and said yes enthusiastically. I must have caught him off guard. My response was, "It's your little sister." My Japanese wasn't good enough to articulate anything better and he was just a guy on the train.

I began to understand the stereotypes my American friends told me about before moving to Japan was a thought. I began to feel I understood why Asian women were looked upon as submissive. I did not see any signs of women's rights as we know in America and only an acceptance of women in an inferior role. It took a long time to get over these views and I’m not sure if it’s just suppressed or if I have really worked through it. I can say that I have learned a lot through hindsight and that when I focus, I feel compassionate rather than uncomfortable dislike for the women who go through this. I needed to remind myself that I entered Japan from the vantage point of an English teacher and that I did not get a holistic view. I also reminded myself that I did enjoy my time with a few Japanese women friends. It's unfortunate that social pressures in Japan, and Asia as a whole, are so strong that when women are in a bad situation, they feel that is the only way. I think one way that Japanese women combat this is by not getting married. Marriage is on the decline in Japan. I also think that they view gender relations and sex differently than we do, in a way I don't fully understand.

A friend of mine always reminded me how gender issues in Japan are not much compared to the rest of the world. I agreed, but the gender issues in Japan were in my face and in my life. As I said before, I think it was a bit of culture shock and lack of understanding in cultural difference.

Aside from my experiences in Asia, there are times when I do not feel confident about the way I am perceived by low-income minority culture. I sometimes feel self-conscious that I am judged as priveledged, ignorant, and/or racist because of the color of my skin. Also, I think that the history of the Christian religion has been corrupt due to committed genocides and I don’t understand why people would continue to follow it. However, my 2 best friends are protestant and my husband is catholic.

If I do harbor prejudiced thoughts, what effects do such thoughts have on students who come from those backgrounds?

If you have students who come from a background in which you harbor prejudiced thoughts, you can easily act in subtle ways that are negative and harmful. In my experience, students can sense these things and are very aware. I once had two students from Mexico who had a teacher that did not like Mexicans. It was something that they could not get over and brought their experience into my classroom a year later. We had to have a few discussions in which I tried to separate their view of me from their experience with her and reassure them that I did not have those views.

I hope I can effectively communicate to my students that I am open to who they are and that I hope they can be open to who I am. I will do my best to provide a curriculum that celebrates any differences and similarities that exist.

Do I create negative profiles of individuals who come from different racial backgrounds?

At this point in my life, I am embarrassed to say, I need to be careful with the way I see Asian women from Asia. I realize that people are not stereotypes, but when people seem to portray negative characteristics that represent their negative stereotype, people of any race/culture, I sometimes feel discomfort.