<have you="" ever="" actually="" had="" diversity="" training?=""> Yes, I had. And I never had a issue with it.
There is a difference between “diversity training” and “check your privilege” training.
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Lucky you. For me, racial divide is within the family. We have … everyone. And we used to consider ourselves as one family.
“tolerance and open-mindedness of the American people” means that every human being has to fit into a box. Suddenly, I have “check-your-privilege” father and “oppressed and historically mistreated” mother. It gets even worth with cousins - all spectrum, from descendent of slaves to descendent of slave-owners. And our kids have to take sides: are you Hispanic or White or Native or Black or Indian (Asian)?
Do we have an option “Human Race”? Do we really have to divide, divide, divide? Obviously, you can’t say “Human lives matter” anymore without offending someone.
Black students at Dartmouth (Privileged to be at Ivy) disrupted library studies of White and Asian students by chanting “Black Lives Matter”. I am sure that was a lesson in acceptance and tolerance.
<and i="" went="" to="" an="" ivy="" league="" school,="" plenty="" of="" white="" kids="" complained="" too.="">
Complained about what? I studied at Stanford 20 years ago; I never discussed racial issues with friends of all colors. We were friends.
While I am not scared for the country (yet), I know exactly what @californiaaa means. As a now middle-aged immigrant I always perceived the US as the most generous and flexible country on earth. Yes, there was a lot of political correctness when I went to college in the 90s (Women’s Studies, Gender Studies, Latino Studies) but it was always very friendly; at times competitive between the fields but still non-combative.
I had a very activist streak as a teenager in my home country and participated in a few sit-ins, so I understand where all the interest groups are coming from and that it can help a lot to make one’s voice heard. Thus, I also know that there are professional activists and organizers who are ready for violence and prone to jump on any movement’s cause. Back then, I got quickly disenchanted when people did not really share my ideals but protested for protest’s sake.
When I read about the current demonstrations, I often perceive a huge dichotomy: On one hand, there is the need for safe spaces and thus exclusion from the general community, or - as mentioned here - the call for diversity trainings. On the other hand, everything is taken as a microaggression. My Latina niece just posted this morning, how much she hates it to be asked where she is from and how she is Latina.
Yet, those questions are always meant friendly and not hostile. And how are people expected to respect diversity if they have no idea what rubs the young person the wrong way? For me, the real problem is the contradiction of wanting to belong/being an equal part of the larger society and the self-exclusion in safe spaces.
And the student issues are just one cause, probably the most valid, while Conservative and Democrat contenders treat each other horribly in the debates. Each candidate on his or her own is far from peaceful. Comments about the Syrian refugees are more hateful than helpful. And this translates into the general population which is a lot more polarized about so many issues than 20, 15 or ten years ago … Even in my tiny-town, backwoods, rural daily newspaper people are fighting - not discussing or debating, mind you - over solar energy, feral cats, invasive plants, restaurant menus.
I do feel that the global situation is affecting the national and thus my local environment.
Oh I absolutely disagree with this. These questions are NOT always friendly and the underlying message for most people of color when asked that is “Hm… you aren’t white so you’re not from here.” I mean really, how often are white people asked where they’re from unless they have a thick accent?
Do I think that many times it is innocent? Sure. Always? Absolutely not.
(ETA: Fixed critical typo in 2nd sentence.)
@romanigypsyeyes: My niece is white, not sure about her accent in English though. You might be right. However, I always get asked where I am from and always ask people, too. Out of interest and curiousity … Say, someone is black and from Detroit or someone is black and from Haiti, I would either speak English or French and ask about the Eastern Market or a typical food on the island. And if I talk to a native Spanish speaker, I cannot always detect if they are from Ecuador or Colombia or Peru.
All the people I know ask in a positive way, there might be others or it might be generational.
Omg I haven’t this entire thread but for someone from California to say that all was peachy keen with race relations in the 1990’s is unfathomable to me. Ever hear of Rodney King? Of the riots in 1992? Of the Christopher Commission Report that found systemic abuses by the LAPD against minority communities? The OJ trial and verdict? The systemic corruption that was uncovered in various law enforcement organizations? that’s just off the top my head. The 1990s were a very sad low point for race relations in California.
Maybe it’s worth sitting down and having a conversation about this with your family members? I know that politics can really divide people, but coming together and agreeing to let everyone get their feelings out in the open might combat that. Your family sounds really awesome in that you can love each other and be united despite your differences; differences of opinion should just be one more way in which you are diverse. As much as these movements have been trying to demonize those who are privileged, their true purpose is to raise people up, not to tear them down. Unite, not divide.
I really don’t know what to say about how to approach the larger world, because this is the first time in my lifetime that something like this has happened. But if you want to know how to navigate this with your family, I would teach them to approach everything critically instead of blindly following dogma, and that people deserve to be treated with patience and respect no matter what their beliefs are.
@OnMyWay2013 - Very wise words! I think that the general “angst” of the OP is that current events touch very close to home, as in family make-up and identity. And you are right, it doesn’t have to be race; most often it’s either politics or religion or money.
Maybe I live in a bubble, but I’m actually reasonably hopeful about the future. We live in a very diverse neighborhood in a very diverse town. I see many interracial couples. I think once we are all brown this will become much less of an issue. And I think that time is less far off than we imagine. In the meantime there we are talking through things. There are misunderstandings and privileged people who still don’t get it, but I’ve seen huge changes in my lifetime.
Just one change for example - back at my first job someone on the phone with questions about a plan assumed I was the secretary. They were appropriately embarassed when I said I could probably help them since I’d drawn those plans. (I’m an architect.) No one any more assumes that a woman can’t be an architect.
This talk about the US going into a civil war, how divided we are, is looking at what is going on today as if it is unique. 25 years ago, NYC had been through a period of racial unrest, both under Koch and Guiliani there were racial flashpoints, and there was a lot of unrest because of that. One of the reasons 20 years ago that it seemed like things were peaceable was because the economy was good, but also 20 years ago we didn’t have the 24 hour news cycle,the internet was still in its infancy, we didn’t have the whole blogosphere and so forth, so it may have appeared calmer, but it wasn’t.
This country goes through cycles, and when it comes to radicalism, that goes through cycles, too. 50 years ago cities in the US were burning, LA, Detroit, Newark, Harlem, all had major riots that led to burning and looting, and back then, people thought cities were going to die, a lot of people felt like that. College campuses were inflamed, groups like the SDS were bombing computer centers and the like, in 1970 national guardsmen shot and killed students at Kent State. Back then college campuses were pushing for racial equality, they pushed for black faculty, and did things like occupy buildings and the like, claiming institutional racism on college campuses.
As far as the divide in the country, that has been going on for a long time. The South became a republican bastion when the GOP actively targeted the south, knowing of the bitterness because of the federal civil rights laws that broke up Jim Crowe (and many argued, the OP is doing with the diversity training and so forth, that passing those laws was wrong,that it would break up the country, etc). Part of the problem is that in this country we have never had a real discussion about race and what it means, what happens is during some periods of time people choose to pretend like it isn’t an issue, and often blacks and other racial minorities may feel like there is enough progress that they can concentrate on living their lives…and then things happen that blow it up.
The whole tea party phenomenon, the whole ‘real america’ to quote Sarah Palin ie the farm belt/rural/white America versus the coasts and the ‘money interests’ has been there all along, back before the 1960’s that was part of the Democratic party, the pseudo farm populism railing against the banks, the rural people claiming that they get nothing from the government and everything goes somewhere else, this is nothing new. The country has always had divisions, and many of them don’t really change much, they just change name and form. In the 19th century, for example, we had the nativist/know nothing movement that was anti immigration, declaiming what immigration from Ireland and later Italy was ‘ruining’ America, not to mention the Asian exclusion acts of the 1880’s. There was the Southern slave economy versus the north, that turned into Jim Crowe versus those wanting to get rid of it, there has been the city versus rural battles, especially once people en masse started leaving the rural areas to live in populated areas, we went from a majority of people being farmers or living in rural areas to where the population is concentrated in relatively small percentages of the land.
I also think you have to look at the current efforts like the crap at Princeton in its context, a lot of that quite frankly is the herd mentality, as much of it was in the 1960’s. There were dedicated radicals, who were in groups like SDS and the weather underground, who were saying burn baby burn, who wanted nothing to do with ‘the man’ or with corporate society, and then there were the followers, who thought this was being cool, to rebel and so forth And what happened? Within 10 years, many of them were living the lives of their family they claimed to despise, had gone into pursuit of the American dream (remember Jerry Rubin, yippie to yuppie, ended up on Wall Street?). I think the BLM movement is very real, and hopefully it opens up real conversations, but things like the actions at Princeton to me are quite honestly a bunch of kids being kids, idealistic, and quite honestly look silly as heck (at least to me), but that is the nature of things. Some of this might be that especially at schools like Princeton, these are students who most of their lives have been pushed and prodded into high achievement, of taking a workload in school that would kill a donkey, of doing all the activities to get them into these schools, and in some ways, this is them IMO rebelling against their families and the expectations of going to a school like Princeton, it is a way to finally rebel after being pushed and prodded by their families into going into the ‘right path’.
@OnMyWay2013: Not a thing to say other than ‘yes’.
@OnMyWay2013 - Thank you very much. You are right, probably I overreact.