I am a white man who has been in a relationship with a black woman for 16 years. It has most certainly changed my perspective on race in a way that most white folks who have never experienced racism could never understand. I grew up in a very white, very segregated area. I had, have, many racist friends. Some have no idea they are racist, some don't care most have no idea the damage it causes to them, their children or their communities. I try to educate them through word and deed. Sometimes I think it helps, sometimes not. They grew up that way, they don't know better, or don't care. Anyway, this is important to me and should be important to us all. Thank you for your efforts.

@ BSweet -

"All animals are equal. But some animals are more equal than others." - George Orwell

We all should know that diversity makes for a rich tapestry, and we must understand that all the threads of the tapestry are equal in value no matter what their color.

-Maya Angelou

I'm glad to have found this forum because I've been thinking about race quite a bit lately and it is not easy to find a forum in which to explore race. The question for me really begins with "what is race?" Is it ancestry, presence or lack of melanin? A culture? A social construct? What makes someone black or white in America? I have an idea of what that means, what a black or white person looks like, but it it really that? Just what they look like?

I grew up in rural Minnesota where I never met anyone with significantly more melanin than myself. When I went to college I met people from all over the world, many of whom had much more melanin than I did. One of the first people I became friends with was Greg, his parents were diplomats, he had lived all over the world, gone to the best private schools, spoke better english, was more well groomed and much more well dressed, and had much more money than I did. He also had more melanin than me and as far as I can tell, that was the only thing that made him black and me white.

For a time my children were in private school and we became friends with one of the couples who also had children there. He was an executive at a large company and had just slightly more melanin than myself, not really noticeable. His children had blonde hair and blue eyes and were very melanin deficient like myself, yet they claimed their children were black, I believe they had one black great-grand parent. They did this so the children could benefit from affimative action, or so they said. An interesting twist from 50 years ago where a black ancestor may have been something to keep hidden out of shame.

May people who are melanin deficent will tell you that they like black people but don't like poor blacks, and they will sometimes use derogatory terms for poor, uneducated blacks. I imagine this is because they have gone to school, played on sports teams, worked with or served in the military with people who had more melanin than they do and found those people to be as pleasant and hard working as they are and someone they could befriend. Why do they make this distinction? Is it a cultural or a class distinction? Where do they get their ideas about poor, uneducated blacks? Is this a sign of gradual change in attitudes? What keeps poor blacks poor and uneducated when other groups seem able to get ahead easier. Is it really just a reaction to melanin, asians and hispanics typically have less than blacks? Is it cultural since asian and hispanic cultures are more closely aligned to european culture? Why does poor black culture try so hard to seperate itself from white culture? Why is the face of poverty black when there are more poor whites that poor blacks in this country? Is racism the only reason poor uneducated blacks stay locked in a cycle of poverty? Could there be other factors?

My best friend currently is a poor, uneducated man with more melanin than myself. He is extremely bright and can beat me in chess even when he takes his queen, a rook and a bishop off at the start of the game. My sense is that being raised by addicts and having fallen into addiction himself played a much larger role in his remaining poor and uneducated than racism. I might be wrong in that assesment, certainly racism has affected his life, but I feel that addiction was more harmful.

For awhile I ran a hip-hop club which was a hang out for gansta' types, some melanin deficient, some not. I can say with a good deal of certainty that middle class folks black or white would have been equally uncomfortable with all the patrons of the club without regard to their melanin but based on their social skills and the violent, tough guy persona they fostered. After being exposed to the music for awhile it occured to me that the values of main stream hip hop were those of suburban white America: money, displays of wealth and power, aquisitivness. Hip hop music has taken those values and distorted them into a crack crazed caricature, but still the same basic system. I imagine this may be why the music is so popular with white suburban kids and is the dominant popular music of the day. If music produced by people with plenty of melanin is the dominant popular music, what does that say about acceptance of those people and that culture? Blacks are okay as long as they are entertainers or sports figures but not in positions of power? I don't know. But it seems that if were have had two secretaries of state with enough melanin to pass as black and a president who also can pass as black, doesn't it indicate that the bias against melanin is lessening?

I find this question of what makes someone black or white extremely complex and difficult to understand and I am looking for any insight others might have into this question.

Excellent project, Carmen. Very enlightening and oddly addictive.

Sometimes I wonder what the world would be like if Africans had migrated to America by choice, rather than by bondage. Dwelling on that too long leads to a whole re-write of US history. No civil war, a huge drag on the industrial and agricultural advances during the 19th and 20th century...etc

In a strictly historical sense, slavery was one of the most important engines in the construction of the country as we know it now. Generations later we all are provided with the residual fruit of their forced labor.

An unfortunate scar left from the previous generations is our perceptions of each other based on a turbulent past. My dream is that a scar that took 400 years to create will not take 400 years to mend.

Hey Matt! Really wonderful to see you here! Thank you for that thoughtful comment and glad to know you find the site addictive. Yes! I hope you will hang around, speak up and make sure to check out Andrew Padula's posts - under the heading 'The Topsoil'. Old home week, right??

This is truly amazing - Anyone that says we don't speak enough about Race in America, in my estimation, is sadly mistaken. It is not a day that goes by that I don't hear about some topic and how it relates to its racial aspect. What more is there to say about race, really? White America is getting Fed up with what they view as excuses and a lack of coeherency within the black community. Most Whites feel, and rightfully so, that they have played no part in past discriminatory practices and/or policies and frankly they don't even understand why Blacks always seem to tout the mantra of 'victimization and the "Woe is We" complex, especially in the Face of black-on-black crime, the multi-million dollar black athletes that have been caught up in the justice system all too often, out-of wed lock births, high drop out rates, the drug culture (the list can get pretty long). A lot of the Black argument is starting to ring hollow and starting to fall on death ears when filtered through those other than Blacks. What are we going to discuss - WE'VE BEEN WRONGED. How many times and ways can that be said. What do we honestly expect to gain from groaning and moaning, having meetings and panels? Of course we have some gripes, but let us not pretend that the world revolves around us and fool ourselves into believing that we are the torch bearers for truth and honest debate. One would imagine that America has absolutely nothing to offer a Black person except heartbreak. Let us be honest and not fail to realize that there are millions of successful Black folk who do not feel victimized. It is mind-boggling to me that those politicians at the highest level of government are fanning the flames, touting discrimination and how difficult it is to get ahead (How incoherent and disingenous does that appear on its face) Anyway - The race argument is not dead and seemingly will never end, but I sincerely hope it does not continue being used as a crutch.

clarification:

It doesn't frustrate me that there are black people who want to reclaim black control of black dollars and the education of black children, it frustrates me that there are white people who couldn't care less about the well-being of blacks who try to paint these black people as racist.

Another thing that frustrates me is that there is a small - too small in my opinion - segment of the black community that says the solution to racism is for black people to accept that whites want nothing to do with them and to begin spending their money with black businesses and to place their children in all-black schools and teach the children black history and African culture.

While it makes sense for people who believe in integration to disagree with this idea, what pisses me off is that some of the same white people who deny the continued existence of racial discrimination and don't want to have serious racial dialogue have the nerve to call "racist" black people who basically say : "We accept that you want nothing to do with us, so we are going to go over here and do our own thing, so leave us alone while we teach our own children and do business with one another."

So there are people who at the same time want to avoid discussing racism but also want to prevent black people from self-education and economic self-determination.

My biggest frustration is that white people will not even entertain the idea that public and business policies contribute to racism. And it doesn't help, although I don't think that it would matter, that many black people who talk about "the man" or the "system" cannot give specific examples. These are specific examples of institutional racism that white people don't care about discussing:

The denial of low interest FHA mortgage loans to black veterans returning from WWII
The tearing down of black business districts when constructing the interstate highway system
The many acts of the real estate industry, including, "block-busting", and steering to certain neighborhoods
The refusal of state governments to alter the funding system of public schools so that something other than local property taxes pays for them
The fact that property in black neighborhoods is assessed a lower value in the first place
The decision of businesses to not locate in black areas, even when it is proven they can be profitable (Example: a grocery store used to be up the street from where I live. The owner relocated, not because the store was losing money, but because in his/her greed, he/she wanted to open a "superstore" in a white neighborhood that already has five or six such stores, including more than one from the same chain)
The emphasis on big-city governments in enticing businesses and white suburbanites to come back downtown, and spending money on downtown to the detriment of the neighborhoods

Most black people cannot adequately explain how all of these things negatively affect black people and create "ghettoes," and most white people don't want to hear these explanations when someone *does* make them.

Race is social, not biological, but that doesn't mean race isn't real. When people make stuff up, that stuff becomes just as real as if it had always existed. But white people don't want to hear about the fact that it goes beyond individual interactions, it didn't end with the abolition of slavery or Jim Crow, and it didn't end with civil rights. They won't even listen to white people like Peggy McIntosh, who has spent years talking about "white privilege" and the "invisible knapsack."

Until white people are willing to have a discussion on the macro-level causes of continuing racism, it is pointless to have a dialogue on race.