Oh, this should be flameful. Outside of work, you all are the only non-minorities I interact with on a regular basis, and I don't even think posting every few months on a message board should count at all.
But it's not flameful. It's simply honest.
Knowing this may be true for a lot of posters gives me a better perspective of the general makeup of this board.
My highschool had only white people and maybe a few Native Americans. Of course in college, I met and became friends with many different people. With my job I interact and develop relationships with minorities daily.
To give your question a serious answer, no don't have a lot of friends who are minorities. I have a Korean friend I used to work with, and.. I guess that is about it right now.
True fact - I only knew 2 Jewish families EVER before I went to law school.
There was a large Asian pop. at my law school (or so it seemed to me(, so obviously I interacted with a lot of Asians there.
Token minority checking in. But I look very white. I also live in a very diverse neighborhood. I have Filipino neighbors across the street, Jamaican next door, Haitian two doors down, Italian next to them.
Seriously, I used to live in a bubble until I started working in the IT world a year ago. We have a satellite office in Seattle. Before that, my black best friend who was my college roommate and here were my only contact with minorities. I'm not even lying. My world seriously started to change 5 years ago when I started posting on Internet forums. I was a 23 year old naive little girl.
Sent from The Room of Requirement
I grew up in a very Caucasian and Hispanic city. When I moved to the Seattle area 3.5 years ago (at 23) I was blown away by the diversity. At the public school I'm employed by there is a very diverse staff as well as diverse students. I love it.
On the interwebz/this forum & others I honestly have no idea what nationality anyone is unless people mention it or post a picture of themselves. To be honest, it doesn't matter to me.
Our neighborhood right now is really diverse. Our neighbors are black on the one side, from Bangladesh on the other. Across the street is a white elderly couple, 2 Chinese families, and a Thai family. Unfortunately, the schools in this area are pretty dismal so we plan to run away and to the white suburban enclave fairly soon.
Also, H's brother is adopted, Korean, and his great-grandma was born on the trail of tears.
My current city is 86.5% White (based on information from the 2010 Census, if Wiki is correct,) though I used to live in South [St Louis] City, and that area is fairly diverse.
I'm so confused at the Koreans not being Asian statement.
To sum it up; a Korean told me that it was rude/offended him that I called him Asian. So I took it as Koreans didn't like being called Asian and since I didn't want to offend him or anyone, I started separating it. I was wrong. It must have just been his issue and out of embarrassment, I never bothered to ask any other Asian person if this was correct or not.
The racial makeup of my city in 2010 was 93,597 (75.3%) White, 1,739 (1.4%) African American, 761 (0.6%) Native American, 11,555 (9.3%) Asian (2.7% Indian, 2.2% Filipino, 1.2% Chinese, 1.0% Vietnamese, 0.7% Korean, 0.5% Japanese, 0.2% Thai, 0.1% Pakistani), 178 (0.1%) Pacific Islander, 10,685 (8.6%) from other races, and 5,722 (4.6%) from two or more races. Hispanic or Latino of any race were 28,938 persons (23.3%); 16.7% is Mexican, 1.2% Salvadoran, 0.9% Guatemalan, 0.6% Puerto Rican, 0.6% Peruvian, 0.3% Cuban, 0.3% Argentinean, 0.2% Honduran, 0.2% Nicaraguan, and 0.2% Ecuadorian.
I'm confused how you would know you've only met one Jewish person. It's like the old SNL skit "Jew or not a Jew". You can't always tell someone's religion by looking at them.
I don't like talking about race because I feel like I'm going to slip up and say the wrong thing somehow. I feel like anything I might say opens me up to being judged by someone. I also feel like you are looking to judge people here.
I am not looking to judge here. I really want to know why people think and say the things they think and say here.
See, the truth is I didn't grow up in an extremely diverse area, but college and law school were diverse, as is my current city. I learned a lot when I moved from large city to large city.
But I also have the advantage of being a minority myself. LOL.
There is no shame in admitting that you live in a predominantly white area. The places we live and the places we grow up mold our world view. There's no escaping this. Having some knowledge about people's backgrounds can be extraordinarily informative in understanding how people think about race and race relations.
If anything, being mired in a sea of whiteness kind of gives you a semi-pass for not knowing stuff about non-white people.
Because, really, if you're surrounded by white people and you have zero interaction with non-white people, how are you going to know anything about non-white people?
I grew up in a town of 5k, in WI. There were like 10 people in my school who were not caucasian. I live slightly larger town now, but it is not much more diverse (87.5% White, 1.7% African American, 0.7% Native American, 5.9% Asian, 2.2% from other races, and 2.0% from two or more races. Hispanic or Latino of any race were 5.0% of the population).
I grew up in, what was at the time, the whitest county in America. It has become slightly more diverse since, but still very vanilla, so to speak.
I live in a different state now and to be honest, I interact with minorities the most at school and the gym. Most of my friends are like me; white, moms to young children, middle class. I don't do this on purpose. I am happy that my children are growing up in a place that has MUCH more diversity than I did.