[The following post is changed significantly from what I originally intended to write. I wrote most of the original last night and lost it to a computer crash (serves me right for writing while alt-tabbing to and from World of Warcraft, I guess). The origins of my own opinions on race was the point I was making at the time of the crash, and that somehow became the central point to the post.]
With some of the racially charged commentary that’s been flying around in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, I’ve been doing some thinking about racism in general, and my own views on race in particular.
I grew up in an area with little diversity. In fact, I was aware of only one non-white student during the time that I went to Clay County’s public school system. The single non-white student that I knew was the adopted daughter of my dentist. She was a year or so behind me in school, and I really didn’t know her that well. Outside of a couple of conversations that we had after I asked a friend of hers out under duress, I don’t know that we ever talked. Other than that one exception, the school was, as far as I knew at the time*, racially homogeneous.
Here’s what I saw in my high school. I saw bullies. I saw geeks. I saw intelligent people. I saw idiots. I saw some of the nicest people you could hope to know. I saw jerks. In short, I saw humanity.
Fast forward to college. I was suddenly surrounded by people of different races and nationalities. Not as much as I likely would’ve been if I’d gone to school outside of West Virginia, but there was certainly more diversity than in Clay County High School when I graduated. Those minority students I encountered in my classes were, not surprisingly, just like everyone else — some of them I liked, some of them I didn’t.
Race had never been a part of my life when I was growing up. It was, therefore, a never a part of the “snap judgement” process that I developed for my initial impression with people. My experiences in college solidified in my mind that race was trivial. The way a person dressed, the way they carried themselves, their choice of words and the attitude conveyed in the tone of their voice — these things all provided much more reliable first impressions than the color of a person’s skin or the shape of their face.
My reaction to racism is strong, not only because I think it’s evil, but because it’s stupid. Compare Eject! Eject! Eject!‘s Bill Whittle to Michael Moore. Two men with the same race, but they’re as different as night and day. Or how about Martin Luther King, Jr. and O. J. Simpson?
Common wisdom tells us that the only way we can combat racism is to celebrate diversity, actively exposing people to not only as many different races as possible, but to different cultures and lifestyles, as well. There’s nothing inherently wrong with that, but what we really need to do is to make people understand that within any racial group, there’s a wide variety of people, most of whom are good and some of whom are not.
We should scale back the idea of forcing diversity down the throats of our students and instead focus on something I learned in mathematics and science classes: not every piece of available information is useful in making decisions. In forming an opinion on another human being, race is almost invariably non-useful.
* In hindsight, I know better. There was at least one other student who probably would’ve been considered non-white by an outside observer, but it never occurred to me that he was anything but a nice guy with an odd name.
That brings up another oddity of my perception of race — I don’t usually have any idea what constitutes another “race”. When some fans protested that Jessica Alba wasn’t right to play Sue Storm in Fantastic Four, there were a lot of protests that those fans were just being racist. My reaction to those protests was simple: “Wait, racist? Isn’t Jessica Alba white?” (Of course, the answer is, who cares? She’s undeniably an attractive woman, and I can’t really complain about her presence in a movie that did a lot of things wrong but was still fun. She just isn’t an actress who really has the maternal presence that Sue should have had.)