Resipiscence

Had a fun time at DeathClock figuring out when I'm supposed to die.

Normally: Sunday, January 6, 2064
Pessimistically: Sunday, November 15, 2048
Sadistically: Saturday, January 6, 2024
Optimistically: Sunday, March 3, 2075

As I commented on the forum I found this on, "I always thought it would be a Monday that finally killed me."

Anyway, something in someone's blog caught my eye. She was talking about a comment in a review that said something about interracial dating being difficult because of different cultural backgrounds.

When I was at my grandparents' house towards the middle of last summer, we were eating dinner at Applebees' one night. A few tables away, a white woman was sitting next to a black man. My grandmother made some comment about it, I forget her exact wording, but it wasn't very nice. She then leaned over to me and said, jokingly, as if she was sure I would agree, "Whoever you date, Liadan, at least just bring home someone that's the same color as you are."

And yes, I understand that she was raised in a very different era, especially considering that this state is about as Deep South as you can get. But this comment just kinda hit me between the eyes. No one expects their beloved grandmother to come out with a comment that's, if not racist, at least borderline so. After a second, I replied something like "Well, I will be going to a very diverse college, since AIUA has a lot of international students, and chances are greater than normal that I'll bring home someone whose skin is darker than mine." (Thinking to myself: Why the heck wouldn't I?)

She looked slightly horrified for a moment before going back to her enchiladas.

This is my dad's mom. My mom's mom, a dyed-in-the-cotton Southern Lady™, is scandalized by the sight of a black man and a white man in the same car. Or, as she put it in a shocked whisper, "a white man and a n*gger in the same car!"

I don't think it would be the cultural backgrounds between the two people that would be causing the friction. If they're dating at all, they've probably overcome that particular "barrier" already. But if they're coming from a background similar to mine, it would be their families stressing the relationship by sheer weight of disapproval. I'm not entirely sure my parents would be totally okay with my dating someone of a different race. Not that they'd say anything right out, but I can see them bringing up the "social disapproval" argument themselves.

That's the thing about the South. At least where I live, anyway. Racial tensions are alive and kicking. The city government's politics basically consists of both white and black officials tossing skin colors around, voting along race lines, campaigning along race lines, and so forth. There's even a word for it-- it's called "playing the race card." Entire campaigns have been described using this phrase. In middle school, social cliques split almost completely along racial lines. I can remember one white girl who wore hip-hop-type clothes and cornrows, and hung out with mostly black girls, and people wondering whether she "thought she was black." In the same vein, I can count the number of non-white friends I had on the fingers of one hand. (Actually, I didn't have too many friends in general, but that's another topic.)

I hear it's different in high school, where the cliques start dissolving a bit. I wouldn't know, going to an almost solidly white-upper-middle-class private school where entire grades can split into cliques of maybe six or seven people.

Which, actually, is why AIUA holds such great attraction to me. Diversity! Culture! Different people! New things to learn! New points of view! (And there's the whole quality-art-education thing, yes, that too.)

Labels: family, love/sex, politics