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this morning's "conflict" and knee-jerk entry got me thinking all day about broader questions of race and prejudice and "correctness" etc.

my friend thankfully wasn't calling me a racist, or necessarily saying that my comments were racist. they were racial and that was enough to bother her. as comfortable as i felt stepping into swampy waters by making those comments, she felt just as comfortable with me to say that she was uncomfortable because of them. ok. i can see that. sort of.

i think racial stereotyping goes a lot of ways, and people seem to think that us lily-white folk inherently have racism in us, that is our nature, and we just can't escape it. well, to ME, calling a white person a racist is another form of that stereotyping, "reverse racism" as i've referred to it before. just like anything else, it is an assumption about me, my character, and my thoughts, based on the colour of my skin and my ethnic heritage.

hey, i'm as white as they get. i've thought long and hard about any deviations from the white line in my ancestry, and it's just not there. there were no native indian maidens, no slave maids, no east indian postmen, no chinese secretaries at the office...no chance for my ancestors to mess with our genetic lineage. my only claim to a racial minority is that i have dark skin pigmentations - my freckles. and hey, that's a minority amongst "my peoples". in england, it's a "shame" to be born a redhead with freckles - taunts of "ginger! ginger! ginger!" growing up, the constant worrying by grandparents that their grandchildren might get those recessive genes...heaven forbid.

even within my white lines, there wasn't much room to cry foul. my polish side was not jewish, they were the in-charge roman catholics. my english side were teutonic protestants. where oh where can i find my cross to bear?

well, my polish heritage has made me question the reasoning or humour in polish jokes. i think the poles are seen as dumb because they rode horses against a battalion of tanks in a particular battle. now, to some that may be dumb, but i think it's pretty brave and crazy. the poles were also "dumb" when they first were flattened by hitler's armies and used as his mass graveyard, bearing the ashes of europe. unlike pristine, beautiful czechoslovakia, who "made a deal" with the germans in order NOT to be destroyed. that's why you hear tourists speak of the beauty of prague, and not so much the beauty of warsaw (though it is beautiful). kinda hard to maintain your historic buildings and relics as a totalian leader's orders are to level everything to the ground with bombs and ground troops. only to rebuild for the waiting arms and armies of one josef stalin.

back to the race and prejudice issue - thank you for the guestbook comments, guys - and boogie, i know you know the flip side. as i told my friend today in an email, i have lived all over the world, with many different cultures, not separating myself from them but engaging with them, making them part of my own. how useful is it for me to speak indonesian? oh, but i do. and i have that flip side - i have been to auschwitz, i have been called a "dyke" in the not-so-nice context, and i've been called a "bule" (derogatory slang for "white"). i recognize differences between ethnicities and cultures and by not throwing those into some giant melting pot, i am not being discrimanatory. i am not afraid of food, as were two guests at a [chinese-canadian] friend's recent birthday party at a restaurant in chinatown.

i'm not claiming to be the fucking leader of the U.N., but c'mon. i will admit to some grudges against certain cultural behaviours (are you going to tell me that genital mutilation is ok? for men OR women?) but i recognize the ethnocentric perspective from which i cannot, and wouldn't really want to, escape. and i've always tried to educate people who say ignorant things, simply because that's what it is - ignorance. i've always maintained that there is no better or worse, only different.

racists just have a different way of thinking to me.