I had an interesting night yesterday. I went to "Wanton Soup for the Soul," (for extra credit in my East Aisian History course). I thought it was about issues confronting Aisia today, but basically the theme is "Some people discriminate against Asian people." Which is pretty boring, at least to me.

Plus, I'm surprised there's too much discrimination against Aisian people anyway. There isn't the age old struggle produced by slavery that black people have to deal with, they don't have to deal with the fact that there is a mass movement from their country to our country right now, like the latinos do, and they look practically the same as white people anyway. Their eyes look a little different, and they have dark hair. Oooh, how scary.

Anyway, they were saying how segregation happens naturally, and how they were surprised white people never come to APAC (our Aisian student organization) meetings. It was an open forum in which the audience took part, so this one guy next to me was trying to explain that white people don't exactly feel welcome to come to those sorts of things. The APAC people were trying to be like, "well, what more can we do? All clubs at ISU are welcome to anyone, and it's not as if we can put "white people welcome!" on our posters." (This sounds sort of attitude-y, but they really meant well, they were trying to see how they could raise awareness)

The poor guy was having trouble explaining, so I jumped in, though I wish now I hadn't. I was like, "Well, I've never really seen the APAC posters up (which I hadn't), but I've seen many black student organization posters up. And when I think about maybe going, I picture it, and there's all these black people, and I'm the only whitey, and it'll be like what's she doing here? One of these things is not like the other one. And, how much do I know about issues pertaining to the African American today? There's not much I could contribute. And, I've never been discriminated against, so it'd be like "you don't know what we go through!""

I felt this was a good point, the guy I was clarifying for was like yea, that's what I meant. But like everyone after that who wanted to refer to that point directed what they were saying to me. So I looked like some uptight white girl who was afraid to hang out with minorities. And people were like, "Minorities don't have a choice to be minorities, why shoudln't you go somewhere where you're a minority?" I'm thinking so....no one should have a choice? And there were several other points brought up, like that there are white people in the NAACP etc. etc., I was getting tired of this. I don't go to APAC because I'm slothful and introverted, not cause I'm racist. I don't go to any student organization. And I still stand by it. It would be weird to go to a meeting to discuss African American issues when you're not an African American.

Oh well. At least I didn't make the biggest faux pas of the night. One guy accidently referred to APAC as OPEC, and we all had a good laugh.