IBARW 3: When Minority Becomes Majority

[keilexandra]

This is the last day of IBARW, and I found myself with two possible topics. I debated between them for a while before realizing that IBARW should not be a week of awareness and nearly a year of ignorance. So--I've met my goal of a post a day, and here's a bonus post!

The University of California higher education system is an intriguing look at both race-neutral admissions (something that I won't go into here, since I posted about affirmative action earlier in the week) and at the flip-flopping of racial roles. California state law forbids the use of race as a factor in university admissions. According to the College Board, UC Berkeley is 45% self-identified Asian/Pacific Islander, 3% black, and 12% Hispanic (30% white, 7% unreported); UCLA is 41% Asian/Pacific Islander, 4% black, and 14% Hispanic (30% white, 4% unreported). Even assuming that the unreported demographic is white, the typical Caucasian American student will find him/herself a minority at many UCs. This has led to much disgruntlement and nicknames bordering on racially derogatory.

Personally, I think it would benefit any white student to spend a semester at a UC or a historically black college--to experience firsthand what it's like to be a minority. It's different, and often difficult, but neither is it the end of the world to be a minority or majority in school when your position in society is the opposite. I can attest to this myself, albeit on a smaller scale. I attended a performing arts middle school with very few Asian students and a math/science high school with a strong "critical mass" of high-achieving Asians; the environments are very different, both including the good and the bad.

Comments

[keilexandra]

I don't think it's possible to fully understand another racial/ethnic group simply by living as a minority, but it -is- different from the norm, and I think that is important to experience.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I wonder if it would have felt more different to me if my primary internal identity was "white" rather than "Scando." One of the oddest things about living in California for me was that most of the white people I encountered seemed to have white for an ethnicity, not just for a race -- so most of the white people I encountered had vastly different cultural assumptions than mine, and seemed to assume that they wouldn't have.

The difference between race and ethnicity is being really interesting around here right now: for a lot of African-Americans, I think "black" is both their race and their ethnicity. But in the Twin Cities in the last 10 years or so, we've had a large influx of Somalis, so now there's not just "black" there's "American black" and "Somali black." Which is how it is for most Asian-Americans I know -- they think of themselves as Asian but also as Korean-American or Chinese-American or whatever specific Asian ethnicity they have. And it's the case for some white people but not all. Very complicated.

[loligo.livejournal.com]

This is sort of a tangent, but I discovered last week that my six year-old has made some unusual assumptions about race & ethnicity in society. She goes to school with a number of kids from Africa, probably several in each grade (no concentration from a particular African nation -- their parents are professors and grad students from all over the continent). Her school is also over 50% African-American, and when we were talking about people who speak different languages, it came out that she assumed that *all* the Af-Am kids spoke "African" at home, just like the Mexican students speak Spanish and the Indian students speak Indian one of the Indian languages (edited: yes, I know there are many, and that they include English -- I was sort of writing that from my daughter's perspective). I know they went through the basics of African-American history in her class last year during Black History month, but the time scale obviously hadn't sunk in.

I had to explain that by most measures, the black kids in her class are *way* more American than our family is; my mom and grandparents only came here in the 1950's and I grew up with a lot of involvement their culture of origin. We're the foreigners here.

It's pretty clear that even though we live in a diverse community, my daughter has unfortunately picked up the message that "white" means American, and everyone else are exceptions. I'm going to have to look for more opportunities to challenge that.