Wednesday, August 31, 2016

Wednesday Factoid: Interacting

Today's Wednesday Factoid is: How often do you interact with people of another race or ethnicity?

I guess just about every day? Of my three closest friends, one is a black man, and I talk to him just about every day (though most of our interaction is through text/social media and on the phone). Text-based messages are most of my interaction with everyone, though, so I count that as "interaction." My inner circle of family and friends beyond those three includes several people who are black, several people who are Latino, and a bunch of people who are Asian. I'm not one of those "LOL I don't see color" people, but while thinking about it, I was kinda irritated at the question for making me pick it apart in this context. Not really sure why. I also work in a small office and four of us are white and one is black, so I suppose that also "counts." 

I remember once the same black friend I'm referencing up there was in one of those oh-so-pleasant Facebook arguments with someone about diverse fiction, and the other person was claiming diversity in media is usually forced because in real life black people just don't hang out with white people really. He posted a picture of his friend group (containing different genders, different races, different body types, different sexual orientations, and different ability statuses), and got told his real life is an unrealistic diversity postcard.


A different question, though, is how often I am in a space where I am not the majority race/ethnicity, and that's very uncommon. I can only remember being in that situation when I visited Japan, when I visited and stayed with a friend's family, when I went to a black church to participate in a performance, and usually when I ride the bus in my city. I imagine my friends who aren't white who might blog about this question would answer similarly to me about how often they interact with people of another race or ethnicity, but that they would have the experience of being around LOTS of people different from them much more often than I do.

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