Which racial group do you have least experience with?

[Locut0s]

This may sounds like a strange topic but it's one I've thought about on more than a few occasions. I live in and grew up in Vancouver Canada. We are often listed as one of the more racially diverse cities in North America, one of the facts I love about this city, besides it's sheer beauty. But our racial diversity is in some ways somewhat limited as you can see from the following demographic breakdown:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Vancouver

Aside from various European groups the most visible minority here is Chinese @ about 20% (I myself am 1/2 Chinese). Then we have other east Asian immigrants, East Indians and Iranians. The city is very much coloured by this cultural mix and you will find vibrant communities of each all over the place. One group you don't see represented though are African Americans. Self identifying blacks make up just about 0.14% of the population. Growing up I had friends of every ethnicity I can remember except African American. It probably sounds strange to you that I'm singling this out but it's really something that stands out to me when you take into account how much of our media and entertainment comes from south of the border where blacks of course make up about 12% or more of the population. Sounds odd but I wish there were more African Americans living here in Canada, and Vancouver. Hispanics are another racial group that you don't see all that well represented here.

Note: I'm not trying to hyper racialize people here. We are all just people of course. But let's face the facts, ethnicity IS something real and something we face in our day to day lives and something that shouldn't be ignored but celebrated. If you think ethnicity plays NO role between best friends from different racial backgrounds you are kidding yourself. Indeed it can come to define a friendship and be an important bond that ties people together.

[vaberella]

1. I live in NYC. I watched SVH to Korean Dramas and Telenovelas.

I went to school Black and Hispanics and I'm Black. However my closest friends were Asian (East and West) and White. Ultimately... I have relationships across the racial divide. That includes those that marry into my family and my own lineage. I am not unfamiliar to them. I would say Native American, but the thing is...during my time in High School I wanted to study Native American law at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks. And I spent my time going to pow wows and NA meetings. So I'm not removed from them. In France, I taught mainly Middle Eastern and African kids. Culturally and ethnically I am not cloistered.

[Locut0s]

3. Nice. The world needs to get more diverse. BTW...

What is SVH?

[vaberella]

18. Sweet Valley High. I was a huge fan...meh still am. n/t

[boppers]

2. What a weird question.

I grew up in Tucson, Arizona. I guess I have the least experience with Inuit.

[Locut0s]

4. Yeah I'm hopping it doesn't sounds racist or creepy? nt

[CabCurious]

27. Try to think of this in terms of "ethnicity," not race - because...

Race is very unscientific, whereas ethnicity is intentionally cultural.

You see somebody with dark brown skin and certain facial features. What are they?

There are extremely dark people in India.
There are extremely dark people in Brazil.
There are extremely dark people in the Dominican Republic.

You get my point. Terms like "african" and "white" are practically meaningless when was scratch the surface, whereas it becomes very meaningful if you're talking about people who are jewish, or irish, or haitian, or korean.

[Quantess]

5. In the US, it was muslims

Oh wait, muslim is not a race. Hmmm... well are you really asking about race, or are you asking about culture? I suspect you are actually referring to cultural ethnicities.

Anyway, now that I live in Sweden I am suddenly interacting with a lot of muslims.

[Locut0s]

6. Yeah didn't think about that. Either one. nt

[Raine]

7. I'm a native Angeleno, Los Angeles is very diverse

so it would be hard to say. Off hand I can't think of any I haven't had some contact with whether it be social or business.

[longship]

8. Easy question.

Grey aliens from the Pleiades.

[freshwest]

9. You may have. They disguise themselves, you know...

[slackmaster]

10. I don't recall ever meeting an Australian Aborigine

[Cali_Democrat]

11. I grew up in a very diverse area

I've had contact with pretty much every group.

[laundry_queen]

12. Hm. never really thought about it.

I grew up in a pretty 'white' community, but lived a few minutes from a more diverse city. Every ethnicity is represented in my extended family, except Hispanic. Only recently has there been any Hispanics where I live, so I guess the least amount of 'experience' for me would be Hispanic. The most for me would be East Indian (large population near me, and I've had tons of East Indian friends of every religion and my uncle was East Indian) and First Nations (lived in a few places where they were the majority population and also had an uncle that took me to his reserve for week-long visits several times).

I know what you are saying about not as many AA in Canada as in the US. My SIL is AA and is also from near here, and she said she was the only AA in her school growing up. Although she's not really 'AA' since her dad is Jamaican and her mom is German, but she's quite dark and people don't care if her mom is blond/blue eyed...like President Obama she's identified instantly by others as AA.

[davidpdx]

13. Until I moved out of the small town I lived in, most all of them

It wasn't really that small around 18,000. There were very few African-Americans living there which should tell you something about the place.

When I went to college I met all kinds of people including a very nice guy from Iran. In graduate school there were lots of students from Turkey.

I would say the ones I haven't had the most experience with are Hispanic and Middle-Eastern countries (despite going to school with people from there I never really got to know them well).

Asian culture is the one I am most familiar with having lived in Korea for 8 years and a brief time in China (10 months). I've also traveled around many different countries in Asia.

Unless you have traveled outside the US (I'm going with the assumption that most people are American, through I know there are some non-Americans who are part of the board) it is hard to see things outside your own ethnocentric point of view. Even as someone who has lived abroad it is difficult to deal with ethnocentrism because it kind of just creeps up behind you like a bad penny.

[HiPointDem]

14. I think it's hard to see things outside your own ethnocentric POV until *you* are the outsider

& spend some time living as the outsider.

Travel per se doesn't necessarily change that, as so many travel experiences (like cruise ships, fancy american-style hotels, etc. with english-speaking staff) are designed to keep you *inside* your own culture and treat the "travel" as an extended photo-op -- you look at the exotic people, architecture, art, whatever and take pictures. Maybe you eat some food, so long as it's prepared in someplace that looks clean and western.

[davidpdx]

17. I haven't gone on a cruise ship and don't care for tours much

The cruise ships are not very safe in my opinion. Tours tend to weigh you down with things you don't want to see and take away from the things you do want to see so I find them annoying. The only times I took tours were usually one day tours to a specific place. For instance in Phuket I took a day tour to Phi Phi Island. There weren't any westerners on the tour, but I met some Koreans and Japanese though. I always prefer to wonder around on my own and set my own schedule. In Boracay, they had boat tours to different islands and there were a few westerners, but not many.

[Le Taz Hot]

15. None that I can think of.

The thing about the poor and working class? We're all bunched in amongst one another so I'd say in 57 years I've been around pretty much everybody.

[pinboy3niner]

16. Where I live it's pretty diverse

But the racists here still refer to some parts of town as 'Little Africa.'

After meeting a back VN vet at an event 11 years qgo, the next day I brought him a copy of a political cartoon I'd saved since the '70s. It depicted a wounded white troop being carried to safety by a black troop, and on the ground was a letter that had fallen from the white troop's pocket: "And can you believe it, son? They're trying to integrate your old school!"

My friend died this year, but he told me many times how much he liked that cartoon...

R.I.P., Larry. We'll always love you, Brother.

[Comrade_McKenzie]

19. I live in a town that's 98% white... so basically all of them. nt

[jillan]

20. Republicans. Hey - they are a racial group - old white men!

[arely staircase]

21. klingons nt

[riderinthestorm]

22. Native Americans for me and my area

I spent many decades in Wheaton IL, which is a huge missionary resettlement area so the People's Resource Center (food bank, job training, daycare etc.) where I volunteered saw a LOT of multicultural diversity from every corner of the globe (Hmong, Sudan, Kosovo, Greece, etc).

But Native Americans? Not so much. Even as I'm fascinated by their culture and history, I've had virtually zero experience with them aside from a couple Chicago Native American pow-wows.

[former-republican]

23. To me it's Asians

They are polite when you meet them but very clannish beyond that.

It's hard to get to know them. I don't mean American born Asians either.

[Cleita]

24. I used to live in LA and I always felt that I didn't need to travel to see the world

because the world came to us. You would hear a wide variety of languages on any busy street or mall you walked down. However, a couple of days ago I had a nice chat in a checkout line at K-Mart with a gentleman who told me he was from Surinam. I realized that he is the first person that I had ever met from that nation and that I had very little knowledge of that nation.

[IrishEyes]

25. I live in NYC

So I live and work with people of all races and nationalities. It is one of the reasons that I like living in NYC. However, I used to live in the whitest state in the USA. There were very few Asian, Black or Hispanic people in my state. I guess I would have to say Native American. I used to work with a girl from Eritrea. She taught me how to say a few words and phrases in Eritrean.

[RKP5637]

29. I always liked all of the races and nationalities in NYC. I grew up not horribly far from NYC and

used to work there a lot for various companies, but never lived in NYC. It's a great city. Most of my time was spent in Manhattan. I also spent a fair amount of time there as a kid. It was the "go to" city for me. I miss NYC.

[JoeyT]

30. You might have talked to some before without realizing it.

The wide variation in skin tone makes it hard to tell sometimes. I'm generally mistaken for a white guy with a good tan, and given how racist many people here (Here being this state, not DU) are, I don't volunteer the information unless it's necessary or it amuses me.

[RKP5637]

28. I met and worked with various nationalities going to school and working with several

large international hi-tech companies where I traveled a lot. I loved traveling and working with many types of people. It was always fun. It seems the US is really preoccupied with race and religion, at least IMO, way too much. I often think back on this ... my guess is it's probably easier in a work situation to get along with all types of people since you often have common goals.

[hifiguy]

31. Arabs and Muslims, I guess

Never known a person of Arab background or a Muslim.

Then probably Hispanics/Latinos.

One of my better friends in college was of Chinese heritage and my three best friends in grad school were a guy so WASPy he was almost a self parody, an African American guy who was actually from Beverly Hills and a Jewish guy from Lawn Guyland. With working class Midwestern me, it made for a pretty diverse, entertaining and interesting group. Sort of a mini Algonquin round table - you didn't let down your wits when we got going after a couple of drinks.

[JoeyT]

32. Depends on what we're calling experience and what we're defining as a racial group.

I'd have to say Jewish people. I have Jewish friends on the internet, but I can't say that I know any IRL. At least I know none of my IRL friends are, and I'm hesitant to ask casual acquaintances if they are: Having been subjected to the "What the hell ARE you?" line of questioning before, I don't want to hammer someone else with it.

Hispanic people would be the 2nd least familiar to me. I know a total of one Hispanic person well. Probably because racism is so common in this area anyone that isn't white is a bit leery when approached by anyone that appears white no matter how well meaning they might be.