General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: White DUers: Tell Your Stories [View all]Hekate
(90,623 posts)...I've wondered how it will play out. Well, it is not where I grew up -- the history is all different, the composition of the population is different, it is geographically interconnected with the continent... It will be different.
My previous experience as a minority was as a kid and young adult trying to negotiate first school and later on full time work. There was an advantage in being in a ginormous high school, which guaranteed a level of diversity my friend in a deeply rural community did not have. There, one of her teachers would address her by her last name, kind of spitting it out when he called on her. She has friends-for-life from those days, tho, and fit in otherwise, as she was active in sports and had an olive complexion that tanned readily. She was not shy, was very outgoing and self confident.
I had friends but never completely fit in; I think I tried to blend into some kind of background. I sucked at sports, being hugely myopic. My heritage is Irish, and my people fry like bacon in the sun. There was always someone asking, "Haole girl, your father in the military?" (because clearly I had just arrived and would be going away soon). No, no he was not. He came in as a Lockheed Aircraft employee, and we were blue collar and fairly poor.
When the pineapple cannery recruiters came to my high school looking for summer workers, I signed up. Hard work. One day when I was working my shift a tiny elderly Japanese-American lady walked by and cackled, "You still here, haole girl?"
In college I worked in a major shopping center and my store drew a lot of young tourists. There was always someone who would ask enviously how I had scored this summer job (since I obviously had just gotten off an airplane myself). It was not a summer job -- it was my ramen and rent year round while I attended university.
Fast forward to my years as a young wife and mother: "Your husband in the military?" (because -- entirely without a tan -- clearly I came from somewhere else and would be going back there soon)
Well, you asked.
I ended up back in California after all, having married a Californian. My husband followed me out to the Islands with his new college degree, and ended up working as a bartender in a major hotel for over a decade. It was and is an extremely one-sided economy -- tourism.
I came back for a visit some years later with my second (and final) husband. We got together with one of my old friends I've known since elementary school, Chinese-American. (Yes, this is an important detail.) My husband was a systems analyst at the top of his game -- he was charmed by what he saw in Hawai'i and was sure he could do there what he could so readily do in California in those days: walk into a new job just like that. My old pal just laughed. He drew a verbal picture of what it took to get into various professions, and how many relationships and family connections you had to have, and which ethnicity, and so on and so forth. Being Jewish was no problem -- being haole and not from the Islands was definitely a problem.
Well, you asked.
Growing up, my mother was the arbiter of my reality. She grew up Roman Catholic in Colorado when the KKK was active and I think people forget how much they hated the Catholics. She had a store of memories and thoughts about the evils of racism, anti-Semitism, and the other bigotries. She had a lot to say about that. She thought multi-ethnic, much-intermarried Hawai'i of the 1950s-1960s was really some kind of paradise. She had dear friends in our diverse neighborhood. I was the oldest girl and became the babysitter in our diverse neighborhood. She did not have to ride the schoolbus and be called a fucking haole every day, though.
However, my mother's reality prevailed in those years. Based on her own experiences, she believed high school and junior high were a social minefield in any case, and all would be wonderful in college. That was one thing. The other thing was that she was a genuinely thoughtful, deep person, and taught me to think and to have empathy.
The people who were racist, the people who were full of resentment and could not see past the features of my face and the color of my skin -- they were not everything there was by a long shot. Returning for my 50th high school reunion with my husband, being with all those people who were young when I was young, and catching up a little on their individual sagas, was like returning to -- to home and family and a place I love on a deep deep level. (Whoa, just made myself cry)
It broke my heart to leave when I was 32, knowing there was no going back. It's the place that shaped me and my worldview, always. It's why I know racial/cultural identity is malleable -- and that if young Barack Obama had chosen to stay, he would have married a "local girl" and history would have been very different. It was a choice, in ways Mainlanders cannot grasp. It's why when I read about "code-switching" many years later I knew instantly what that was, and reflected yet again that if I had only done what my chameleon brother did and learned fluent pidgin for use out of our mother's hearing, I would have had a badge of belonging that would have belied my appearance as nothing else could have done. (And now I made myself laugh, remembering our mother's lifelong battle for Correct English At All Times.)
Well, you asked.
This is very very long, I realize. It remains to be seen whether I delete it tomorrow, or add it to my Journal.