All You People Look Alike to Me
I am a white Australian. On my father's side we have some German heritage I think, but on my mother's side we trace back to one of the First Fleet convicts (for US readers, that's roughly the equivalent of the Mayflower pilgrims).
I grew up in a small, quiet suburb, surrounded by other white faces. As far as diversity went, we had the deaf-mute hairdresser and the postman's gay son, but racially it was an all-white area. This was in the late 70's, early 80's back when Greek and Italian immigrants were being referred to as “New Australians”. The first dark-skinned person I ever knew was a boy named Joshua, in primary school. We weren't exactly friends, but we occasionally sat at the same bench at lunch and knew each other enough to say hello and have a chat with.
I only found out he was Aboriginal when, one time, he said something along the lines of “You know what we Aborigines do when we...” I can't remember the exact quote, but the point is that was the first time he had referred to his ethnicity. Other than that, nobody ever mentioned it or asked him about it. It was as if nobody noticed his skin was a different color, or if they did, they simply ignored it. I never questioned it at the time (at that age, I just accepted a lot of things about the world as simply “that's how things are”) and of course it's good that he didn't get teased or picked on because of it, but looking back now I realize that it was my first encounter with a phenomenon that I have come to call the “Global Grey Theory”.
Basically, I believe that people are so determined to not make a racist comment (or afraid that they inadvertently might), that they simply don't discuss a person's race at all. They selectively forget, or ignore, any cultural difference between themselves and the other person, as if they subconsciously view everyone on Earth as the same uniform colour (thus the term “Global Grey”). Admittedly, the concept isn't entirely a bad thing.
Racism is unacceptable under any circumstances and wanting to not be racist is certainly an admirable endeavor, but I have grown to feel that using this particular method to achieve it is flawed, as it also prevents us from learning about other cultures as well.
Grey is the New Black
I can vividly remember the first time I learned that the “N” word (and no, I don't want to type it anymore than I would ever want to say it) was an offensive insult to Africans and other dark skinned people. I was watching a comedy movie, one of those fast-paced slightly dirty gag style things, and there was a sketch about a daredevil/thrill seeker who was about to perform some kind of dangerous stunt.
He was dressed up like some kind of motorbike stunt man, but when he began his “stunt”, he walked over to a group of black men, stood right in the middle of them and shouted that word, then ran for his life with them chasing him. I asked my mother what he had said, because I didn't get the joke, and she explained what the word meant. I've never said that word again ever since. I say “again” because there is a chance I may have used it unknowingly. You know that old nursery rhyme “Eeny meeny miny moe, catch a tiger by the toe”? Well, I have this vague, uncertain half-memory that, way back when I was very little, I used to say that rhyme but I didn't use the word “tiger”.
Of course this was years before I knew its true meaning, and I'm still not 100% certain I really did it or whether I'm mixing up the memory somehow. Even if I did, I'm sure that I said it, not as a word in its own right but more as just a sound to fit the rhythm of the song. You may know that back in ye olde tymes an apple was actually referred to as “a napple”, well I think what I might have been actually saying when I said that rhyme was “an igger”. And yes, even typing that gave me a sour feeling. Call me over-sensitive but I really, really, really just do not like that word.
Anyway, after my mother explained about that word, I learned that there are certain words that should not be said to certain people. And since I had only discovered this one by accident, I figured that there must be plenty of others out there that I didn't know about and to be on the safe side, I should probably just not talk to people with dark skin or different shaped eyes in case I accidentally said one of these offensive words. I had succumbed to the Global Grey Theory.
