Reply to Does it make you uncomfortable when someone describes a persons race when telling a story?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Yes.  The people who start a story with "this black guy comes up to me and says...."  Those people are racist.  They may not specifically hate black people, but they are racist.[/quote]

No, they're telling you a story, and including some description.  If they say a child, they may clarify that the child was 5 instead of 15 (since that will give you a different mental image).

You're referring to white privilege and the default assumption that everyone is white unless you specify otherwise.  That's cultural, not racist.  (In other parts of the world, they have other defaults, unsurprisingly.)[/quote]

NP here.  Except that whiteness rarely gets described in these situations (when the teller is white).  It's someone who is black, or  Asian, etc.  Why is whiteness the default?  This is something that has always bugged me.  I remember reading the local paper in high school and wondering why it was pointed out if someone was black but not if they were white.  [b]If you find it important to describe someone's race when telling story, make it everyone's race.  [/b]

Signed,

A white person[/quote]

I think you will find most people won't use the race of every  person in the story, even when it is their own race, to be descriptive, with both positive and negative being applied equally for every race mentioned in the story.  So if you are interjecting race into the story for only one race when the story could be told without racial descriptions I  assume you are trying to make race relevant.  If the rude waitress was white and you are a different race, are you hinting the rudeness was racially motivated or you think most people that are rude are white?  Otherwise  there would be no reason to point this out as I don't need to physically be able to identify waitress for any reason.  Obviously this example could be used with other races and sexual orientation.

My only exception is if the person was born between the turn of the century and WWI, I know the would has changed a lot since then and I give some leeway.[/quote]

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