My review of Men's groups on the internets.

[tblue37]

53. Whenever I am around someone who slips into such racism because he/she assumes it's

OK around other white people, I get real quiet and serious, and then I say, "I guess you don't realize that I am biracial. That's why I have brown eyes and don't sunburn easily despite being a redhead."

Actually, I am not biracial. I am a freckled redhead of varied European ancestry, but the people I say that to don't know my background. (My brown eyes and resistance to sunburn come from my Sicilian-American father.)

Besides, I have a niece and nephew and many precious friends who are POC, and I am determined to stand in solidarity with them. ("I am Spartacus!&quot

I also love to shake up a racist's comfy world view by making him/her question his/her ability to distinguish between "us" and "them" with any degree of certainty.

One amusing consequence of telling friends this story is that some of them have decided to do the same thing when someone makes racist comments in their presence.

In fact, I borrowed the seed of my idea from a former student. He was as pale and blond as Julian Assange, but when he was 6 months old his mother married a black man who, as far as Aaron was concerned, WAS his father. His stepfather loved him and raised him as his own, never treating him any less lovingly than he treated the 3 kids he had with the Aaron's mother. Whenever someone made a racist remark in Aaron's presence, he would smile sweetly and say, "Did I ever show you a picture of my family?" Then he would pull a family photo from his wallet, showing himself, his blonde, blue-eyed mother, his black father, and his three black siblings.

Sure, he lost some "friends" that way, but as he told me, those were the kind of people he didn't want to know anyway.

I find that most people I deal are less openly racist these days, even around other whites--though that is probably because I teach college and live in a notably liberal college town. But I used that little trick several times from the 1970s to the mid-1990s.