My grandmother thought that my cousin's wife was black for a while. Her family is Filipino.

I had a little blonde 4th grader claim that being black and being hispanic were "basically the same thing."

I've been trying to be a lot more aware of this and listen for it, yeah, race is generally only mentioned as a descriptor when it's not white. White is default.

This, with a side of Jesse's hesitance to describe people by race for identification-by-description purposes.

Although, lately, I seem to be encountering in an ongoing but peripheral way a larger number than before of people who are not white, but whose ethnicity I feel completely unequipped to make any sort of guess at, so I would not be able to use any racial descriptor more precise than "she's a brown girl," which, no.

Just watched the second part of Ken Burns' "The Dust Bowl." Damn, I wonder what the teapartiers would make about the government work to save the people in there. Apparently there were people who advocated just writing off the whole region, move the residents out and let it go to ruin.

Plus there was the way the "Okies" were treated in California, with segregation and the usual discrimination. There were checkpoints at the California border to look for "vagrants."

Man, that was a tough time.

Connie, if you haven't, you should read The Worst Hard Time which is an amazing book about the Dust Bowl.

I thought you meant Jamaica to be a middle... I misunderstood.

There are countries with majority black populations with less direct and indirect exposure to the US--that's what I meant. But if the criterion is "most people are black", yeah we fit that. Nine out of ten, or something like.

I can't remember the guy, and he was possibly just trying to get into my pants, but he did tell me "You have black people on your money. You don't know what that's like." It's not only black people--we have our share of Caucasian money (now I need to go look at denominations...), but at least for him the quantity >0 did not have to be 100% to be emotionally charged. It's a different mindset to have a beauty ideal that is so vanishingly small within the national borders, but since half of that is my only mindset, I have no idea how significant that is.

whose ethnicity I feel completely unequipped to make any sort of guess at, so I would not be able to use any racial descriptor more precise than "she's a brown girl," which, no

I have been in scenarios where saying "Okay, but when you're standing here, where you're standing is white." will not get me beat up, but I was pretty much walking a fine line there. Because race is so much more subjective and less rigourously definable than, say, sex, I'm totally fascinated with what any of it feels like, but of course I will never know, and can't compare it to me, because I can't tell part of my psyche from the rest of it either.

I would say I'd never considered having non-white people on money must be because I'm white, but I don't think I've considered it all being men either. (Susan B Anthony and Sacajawea aside)

I don't think I've even thought about who was on our money. Except to say, why do we even have money anymore? Let's all use cards and hoard gold dubloons. Wait. Who is on the dubloon?

I watched it. We lived in Guymon, which is mentioned frequently in the "The Dust Bowl," for a year. It still has wicked blizzards, frequent tornadoes and a fair amount of dust. There's a little museum nearby that's largely devoted to the Dust Bowl era. It's the most depressing museum I've ever been in that wasn't related to Hitler.

Now I'm earwormed with every Woody Guthrie song I know, particularly "Do Re Mi."

Only because of what I have open in another window, I know whant to see "Glee does Woodie Guthrie!!!"

I do want to cream DUST BOWL at the "climate change skeptics"

It's the most depressing museum I've ever been in that wasn't related to Hitler.

This makes me a terrible person and I shouldn't have laughed, but I totally did.

We live in an area that is predominantly white (~65%) and asian, mostly Korean (~28%). The white is mostly Armenian (and if you ask me, geographically, they are Asian too). I often have the odd realization that, based on first name alone, I often misthink a kid's ethnicity, at least in N's and G's classes. Kyle? Who knew he'd be Korean? Fernando, though, most certainly is latino and one of the handful in the school. (Our Grace is certainly Asian, but, to others, surprisingly non-Korean).

It also occurred to me how we rarely address race in our family. Today, we were out for lunch and were watching a tennis match between someone from the Czech Republic and someone from Spain. Noah asked what the shirt said and I told him it said Czech Republic and did he know that his great-great-great grandfather came from there? Suffice it to say, kid was nonplussed.

Maybe we don't deal with race in our family much because we are so busy addressing gender? I dunno.

My kids describe skin and hair color in all sorts of detail, for all races pretty much, but I think they are still slowly processing the concept of racial identification. If my daughter describes someone as a "black guy" he's probably WEARING black, in the same way the red guy is wearing red and the blue guy is wearing blue.