I know that I've never really had to think about race unless I wanted to. I've never been in a situation where I have been the racial minority or in a situation that was overtly about race. Or at least that I perceived was about race.
I know I was old enough to remember when I discovered that black people did not all look alike. I really honestly was so isolated and inexperienced that this was a discovery for me.
Not long after that, on a trip to Chicago when I was seven, I saw a black girl who was about the same age as me. She flipped me off and I was horrified. Now that I look back on the situation I realize that her reaction to me was probably because I was staring at her.
The estranged father of my childhood friend is Native American. Her stepfather used to tell a joke: Why did God make seagulls? To beat the Indians to the dump. (Perhaps, I perceived this situation to be about race at the time. I hope I did. I imagine I did because I've remembered it so clearly.)
Two of my friends were part Chinese, but I don't think this ever really registered for me because, for me, black was different and someone who spoke another language was different but dark hair and slightly different features weren't enough.
I grew up looking for arrowheads with my grandma in the mountains, though it never really crossed my mind that the reason the arrowheads were there and the Indians were not had anything to do with race.
I covered my face in baby powder, painted my lips red and dressed in a robe and a cone shaped hat because we were celebrating the history of my town and my friend and I had been told that there were once Chinese gardens and, thus, Chinese residents. (What adult let us do this??? This just keeps getting more and more embarrassing.)
I was awakened to my learned prejudices when I began reading minority literatures. I suddenly became more aware of and changed how I perceived the world. The stories of minority literatures changed my story. What my sphere lacked was provided, at least in part, by literature.
Minority literatures opened up worlds of human experience to me that I could never have had any access to. Each story brought me to a different world, wholly unlike my own. More importantly, despite the differences between the worlds I read about and my own I could always relate to something. The "other" was no longer so different from me.
I have no doubt that minority literatures are important to me, to other white students, to students of other ethnicities and nationalities, to everyone, for the simple reason that we find where our lives meet with all others through the stories that are told.
And here's where we run into our little problem.
Though I've enjoyed and been moved by minority literatures do I, firmly part of the majority, have a right to claim a place in them? Can I help move that "other" into being a part of an overarching human existence? Do I have any business studying or teaching minority literatures or does my race and position exclude me from understanding? Can I help or am I, by default, the problem?
I hope not.
I don't want to be powerless. I don't want my best effort to be inadequate but what I can do is limited and ill-defined. I can only strive to do my best. And right now my best means thinking about this subject quite a bit more.
