Moises Velasquez-Manoff:
“The questions seemed innocent on the surface, but she sensed that the students were really asking what box to put her in. And that categorization would determine how they treated her. “It opened my eyes to the fact that not everyone sees race the same way,” she told me” (1)
Me:
I feel as though this is partially true, as it was different back in 1998 to a degree, yet she shouldn’t wrongfully assume this.
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Moises Velasquez-Manoff:
“The Dartmouth student body, on the other hand, seemed self-segregated. The nonwhite students primarily stuck with their own race — blacks sat with blacks in the cafeteria, Asians with Asians, Native Americans with Native Americans”(1).
Me:
I feel like this is partially true and still seen at colleges today. While segregation is wrong, is it human nature?
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Moises Velasquez-Manoff:
“Mixed-race people, who make up nearly a quarter of Hawaii’s population of 1.4 million, serve as a kind of jamming mechanism for people’s race radar, Dr. Pauker thinks. Because if you can’t tell what people are by looking at them — if their very existence blurs the imagined boundaries between supposedly separate groups — then race becomes a less useful way to think about people”(3).
Me:
Will we see this in the continental United States in the future as more and more people are mixed racially?
(“Diverse groups are better at problem-solving; in mock trials, diverse juries give fairer verdicts; diverse companies are more profitable; researchers argue that diverse countries have stronger economies. And the United States is not only becoming more diverse, it’s also growing more mixed. Mixed-race people are among the fastest-growing segments of the population — between 2.6 percent and 6.9 percent of the population, depending on the study. By 2060, the segment is projected to double”(3).)
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Moises Velasquez-Manoff:
“Some years ago, she began following 143 white college students from the mainland who’d come to Hawaii to study. Over time, she discovered, many of them lost the essentialist ideas that characterized their thinking about race when they’d just arrived”(4).
Me:
Will exposing narrow-minded people from the continental United States to an environment similar to that of the campus in Hawaii? How long does this take/is this possible? (probably depends on the person and their background or home life)
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Moises Velasquez-Manoff:
“During World War II, the fact that people of Japanese descent, then the largest ethnic group on the islands, were loyal Americans was held up as evidence that the United States was not, as Japanese propaganda claimed, engaged in a racial war with Japan. During the Cold War, as communism spread in Asia, Americans pointed to Hawaii as evidence that Asians and other nonwhites could be well integrated into American society. And during the civil rights era, Hawaii was held up as a place where nonwhite people were happy with their lot. Why couldn’t African-Americans be more like them?”(6)
Me:
This shows just how America changed over time, if only we can move to expunge racism or racial assumptions altogether. While it was wrong to criminalize all Japanese people in the U.S. during WW2, we have certainly moved in the right direction.
