learning about racism in 1995

For some reason I've been thinking a lot lately about the first time I realized racism was alive and well. Obviously, as a white person in the USA, I've been benefiting from racism since t=0: as carefully as I was trained to telegraph that we were not poor white trash despite our class background making us vulnerable to such accusations, that "white" part was still pretty important. But the first time I really got it was pretty late.

I was in undergrad the first time, at a small women's college (I got sexism okay!), and I met someone I knew from online gaming when they happened to be traveling through my town. We hung out a little awkwardly and ate pizza and talked about our schools and the people we knew online. Then, as they were leaving, they asked me humbly, "Please don't tell anyone I'm Asian."

Now, I have always been bad with shocking social situations, and I just kind of did shock/buffer-overflow for a minute. And they said, people treat me differently when they know, I don't like it. I said okay.

Then... I treated them differently. And I would say it wasn't because of their race, but it was. It wasn't because I judged them for being Asian or thought that was bad or we didn't have things in common or anything like that. It was because they'd given me that experience of learning that something was really wrong, and I couldn't get my head around being able to talk normally with someone when I had not known that. White guilt crashed in on me for the first time, though it was mainly white confusion for kind of a long time after that.

So S, if you're out there somewhere: I'm sorry. I'm still working on it, and always will be.