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It's hard to pin-point what I was taught about race and ethnicity, and what I absorbed from the larger culture around me. I went from living in Dallas and Chicago when I was age three through five, and being surrounded by people of color and different ethnic communities (in Chicago, at my Montessori school, there were East Indian teachers who taught us to speak French), to moving to Iowa at six and being surrounded by white people with no discernable ethnic background other than European. My friend Angie, pictured above with me and my cat Inky, was a notable exception. Her story was the first encounter I had with the idea that people who are not white sometimes live in a very different world. She went to school with me at a private school. I was told by my grandma, who was friends with her (white) grandma, that her (black) father had killed her (white) mother and was now in prison. Because she was half-black half-white, my mother referred to her as "mulatto", a term which originated in slavery (which I didn't know until much later). Angie and her brother were taken in by their white grandparents. My (white) mother actually told me at one time she thought about seeing if she could adopt Angie. I don't know if she felt sorry for her, or what. She took Angie and I to an amusement park one weekend, and then changed her mind, because of how people looked at her. I guess my mother believed people who saw her with Angie would think she had been with a black man, and that would be a bad thing. My mother died when I was sixteen, so I've never been able to ask her about it. In that way, I feel a connection to Angie, although I can't possibly know what it was like for her growing up. She always seemed happy and we had fun together. One day, she left town. Her grandparents sent her to boarding school, and I haven't heard from her since.
My mother sent me to a Catholic high school, even though we weren't Catholic (she was an athiest, in fact). I've always thought this was a little weird, but in part it was motived by race. When my mother was in high school, she told me, she dated black guys. I'm not sure, but this was probably in order to make my grandma mad more than her actually having an affinity for them as people. The black women beat her up because of this. I suppose it was a bit of turf war over what they considered "their men". There probably weren't many black men to go around in the Iowa high school she went to. So this past led to my mother's idea that I would be beat up at public school (by black people, which was unspoken), and so therefore I got sent to (almost all-white) Catholic school.
My earliest memories of race are the dolls I played with. Some of my white friend's parents were weird about their white kids playing with non-white dolls. My mom, who had an extensive Barbie doll collection of her own, bought me all different colors of dolls (and from a collector's standpoint, non-white Barbies are worth more, because they are more rare). I had a brown-skinned Cabbage Patch doll named Maria Teresa, although I don't think I thought about her 'ethnicity' at the time.
The Barbies I had came in white, black, hispanic, and asian. Interestingly, Ken only came in white and black. Of course, as the Wikipedia article on Barbie points out, "these Barbies are exact replicas of the original Barbie, with no individualism other than skin, hair, and eye color". They usually shared the same head-mold as white Barbie, and so were devoid of any 'ethnic' facial features. However, at least Barbie gave me an opportunity to make-believe play with a multi-racial society. I gave some of my black Barbies the inner-city black accents I heard on TV when they 'spoke'. My hispanic Barbies 'spoke' (pretend) Spanish. Each of my Barbies had a unique history and personality, some being 'immigrants' from other countries. It was my childhood experiment with a 1990s American version of Utopia, flavored by the Multiculturalism I was being taught in school.
I also had Barbie coloring books, for which I aquired a set of 'multicultural' crayons with 8 different skin tones, so I could depict all different colors of Barbie on the page. I remember thinking very hard whenever I colored Barbie, about what color her skin would be, and what color her hair and eyes and makeup would be.
When I was 13, I begged my mom to let me go to Japanese Camp in Minnesota. There are many different language camps. For some reason I can't quite remember I wanted to learn Japanese. I think because I knew it was a difficult language. Probably also it felt exotic and exciting. Even when I got to college, I studied Chinese for 2 years, thinking I would use it when I went to China to adopt a Chinese baby. Then I read more about the adoption industry and realized my fear of planes would keep me from ever going to China anyway, but I still find myself drawn to East Asian cultures.
What these vingnettes all seem to have in common is illustrating the aspect of being white that lets us pick and choose from people of color and other ethnic backgrounds for their "exotic" flavors when it suits us to. Because we have the priviledge of being in a society that values our culture above all others, it doesn't matter if our culture is being devalued in one place. We can simply go somewhere else. It's not hard to find somewhere where we will be the 'center'. Although all of these stories had a profound impact on my life and on who I am today, I don't think I really understood anything about the power dynamics and privildge dynamics of race. People of color were representatives of an idea of diversity to me, not really people. Despite what we've been taught, I think as white people we can learn to go beyond that conditioning, and have meaningful relationships with non-white people in the world.