"J" is the husband of a family with whom my husband and I are friends. We attend the same church. I've had two of their three kids in class. They're all smart and funny. I was working with J. on the church website tonight, and I remembered a story he'd told me in the past. I realized his anecdote kind of fits in with the racial and cultural clashes we've been reading about.
J. used to travel for work. On this particular occasion, he was in the San Francisco area, traveling with another computer guy from Kansas. There was a particular Chinese restaurant they often visited. It wasn't Chinese American. It was Chinese. They couldn't read the menu so they pointed to what they saw on other plates to order. They couldn't read prices, so they spread out their money and let the server pick out the bills that were needed.
One evening when they were there, the co-worker turned to J. and said, "You and I are the only white guys in here." J. knew what he meant and laughed. Why was it funny? J. is African-American, not even light-skinned. The friend meant to say, "We're the only two who aren't Asian" or "We're the only two who are culturally American." But J. understood that the co-worker meant that J. was the only one who was culturally and linguistically similar to him. J. says the co-worker was not particularly enlightened about diversity and that that evening may also have been the first time the co-worker realized that someone Black could be more like him than unlike him.
I wish for a time when people would be so quick to see our similarities, rather than to dwell on our differences.
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