Everyone's a Little Bit Racist

Recently in an elementary nonfiction class, my students and I were working through some questions on a nonfiction article we read about addiction (something not often talked about here). And we were talking about weird addictions, one of which is known as tanorexia (the lay term for obsessive tanning). So as I ran the gamut as to why people tan in the U.S., I had to explain that they did this willingly. When a student asked me why Americans like to be golden brown, I responded by saying, "Why do Koreans like white skin?". You see, in Korea, tanning is what people (especially women) try to avoid. Carrying around umbrellas or wearing what look like welding mask visors are the norm. So the class eventually took up my very question I didn't expect to be answered and the following turn of events transpired. One of the cutest girls in class piped up and said her mother said dark skin is dirty. I saw a few other little black heads nod. She then said she was walking once with her mother, and her mom said some black man was "freaking out." Now, don't try to figure out what this means, because I'm pretty sure it carries no meaning. It was at this point where I didn't have much left in my rhetorical armory. I could have pressed her for a meaning, but I felt the point was moot. I didn't think it was the time for a lecture on race, nor did I think I was prepared, so I just went on with the class after an exasperated and drawn out "oookaaay...."

In any case, this was an eye-opening example of something we in America call prejudice. And it should be no shock to this expat that these poor stereotypes exists with no holds barred in other countries. But it still is a bit jarring. In any case, after I began typing this post I found this opinion piece from the English daily the Korea Times. The Mexican-American author talks about race and his own racial experience in the very homogeneous Republic of South Korea, in the context of the mixed-race presidency soon to come in the U.S.

Now, I doubt that the color of one president's skin has enough power to stop older Koreans from rubbing the skin of black expats only to then inspect their own fingertips to see if any color rubbed off in the process (ask your black friends if this has ever happened to them). I also doubt that Obama's victory will simply correct the most jaw-dropping assumptions about U.S. race relations that one hears in the "Hermit Kingdom," such as when a former student of mine asked if all black Americans were rich because all he had seen represented in the media were African-Americans draped in gold and diamonds.

Based on these anecdotes, the song "Everyone's a Little Bit Racist (language warning)" from the musical Avenue Q holds a great deal of weight (though I would classify my impressionable students' assumptions about race simply as recently learned prejudices). Hopefully these students will in time change their views. In any case, I'm willing to chalk these instances up to a lack of exposure to people of other races. After all, it's taken America quite a long time to bend the barriers of race relations to the extent that they've been flexed.