International Blog Against Racism Week!
Usually I hide or lurk when an opportunity to discuss racial issues crops up on a virtual forum! But I would think less of myself if I passed up this chance to jump in the deep end. As part of participating in IBAR, I'll have to procure or make an anti-racism icon. 
oyceter has posted several for anyone to use.
On to the meat of the post. It will be about racism, really!
Why Don't Americans Ever Consider Living Abroad?
If You Want to Live Somewhere Really Different, You Move to Salt Lake!
Clearly, America is Just Too Damn Big!
Let's get a few details out of the way: I am white (worse, I'm blond). Anyone seeking a visual picture of privilege need look no farther than my fair locks. I also grew up in Southeastern Idaho, where white people are more the majority than many places in the US. This allowed myself and everyone I knew to Never Talk about racism, because it clearly Wasn't a Problem where we lived.
Of course, that was not true. In Idaho, the largest racial minority is the Hispanic community, and I saw quiet and very pervasive discrimination against it. (I doubt it was quiet for everyone; that's only what I saw.) But no-one ever talked about it in my circle of friends in school. And none of the white kids I grew up with figured out how to identify or talk about racism with any sensitivity at all.
Fast forward a few years, and I'm in high school, having spent my freshman year in Northeastern England (Northumberland) attending grammar school, discovering Terry Pratchett, etc. Now, I can't speak to the number of racial minorities in my school over there, because I was pretty distracted by the experience of being a cultural minority for the first time. If I kept my mouth shut I could pass for British, but once I said something it was all over. And much blind frustration and bemusement was had by all. In England I learned what some American cultural blind spots are, and I also defined for myself what meaning the word "patriotism" had for me. It had struck me as an extraneous and uncomfortable word before.
When I went back home to Idaho, nobody wanted to hear about the things I had learned. So I kept my own counsel, and when choosing colleges I instituted a 2000-mi minimum distance from Idaho: if said school wasn't in California or back East, it wasn't on the table.
Fast forward a few more years, and I was again excitingly in another country, this time Japan, with the benefit of a lot more preparation than I had before England. In Japan I am both a cultural and a visually obvious racial minority. People can see me from miles away. I scare small children and old ladies. (Okay, not in Tokyo, but in Kanazawa I sure could feel the staring eyes.) Other foreigners home in on me with beelike desperation, merely to have a real conversation. This is odd, odd, odd, and I'm sure I don't handle it very gracefully, especially when they want my phone number too.
All Americans should, at some point in their lives, have the experience of living in another country. I don't mean tourism; I mean living. For white people like me, it's pretty much only from there that we can begin to understand that privilege means not having to think about how different you are once or twice or a hundred times a day. In England, I did. In Japan, boy did I.
This is an aside, but it's that experience which creates (and in their opinion, justifies) the bitter, bitter, and angry tone of expatriate community discussion in Japan.
And even so, because I am white and because I am American, my experience as a minority in these other countries does not begin to approximate, for example, the Hispanic minority experience in the US, or the Pakistani minority experience in Japan. It doesn't even come close. No matter how lonely I felt, my race and my culture were still acknowledged, in various ways, as ones which had power.
In England, as soon as I opened my mouth I became a love/hate lightning rod for complex British feeling about the US. ("Have you met Brad Pitt? When I grow up I'm going to live in Hollywood! I heard you can buy a machine gun in the grocery store in America, is that true? How many people do you know who have died in gang violence?")
In Japan, although as a foreigner I wasn't safe to cross the street by myself, as an English speaker and as an American (who looked American), I was automatically given respect.
And that's the first part of the rant which people weren't interested in hearing when I went back to high school in Idaho. Part II of talking about these ideas would involve contrasting the American conception of racism and Political Correctness with the Japanese understanding. Tentatively titled: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love teh PC, or, Here At Last, Something America May Have Gotten Right.
oyceter has posted several for anyone to use.
On to the meat of the post. It will be about racism, really!
Why Don't Americans Ever Consider Living Abroad?
If You Want to Live Somewhere Really Different, You Move to Salt Lake!
Clearly, America is Just Too Damn Big!
Let's get a few details out of the way: I am white (worse, I'm blond). Anyone seeking a visual picture of privilege need look no farther than my fair locks. I also grew up in Southeastern Idaho, where white people are more the majority than many places in the US. This allowed myself and everyone I knew to Never Talk about racism, because it clearly Wasn't a Problem where we lived.
Of course, that was not true. In Idaho, the largest racial minority is the Hispanic community, and I saw quiet and very pervasive discrimination against it. (I doubt it was quiet for everyone; that's only what I saw.) But no-one ever talked about it in my circle of friends in school. And none of the white kids I grew up with figured out how to identify or talk about racism with any sensitivity at all.
Fast forward a few years, and I'm in high school, having spent my freshman year in Northeastern England (Northumberland) attending grammar school, discovering Terry Pratchett, etc. Now, I can't speak to the number of racial minorities in my school over there, because I was pretty distracted by the experience of being a cultural minority for the first time. If I kept my mouth shut I could pass for British, but once I said something it was all over. And much blind frustration and bemusement was had by all. In England I learned what some American cultural blind spots are, and I also defined for myself what meaning the word "patriotism" had for me. It had struck me as an extraneous and uncomfortable word before.
When I went back home to Idaho, nobody wanted to hear about the things I had learned. So I kept my own counsel, and when choosing colleges I instituted a 2000-mi minimum distance from Idaho: if said school wasn't in California or back East, it wasn't on the table.
Fast forward a few more years, and I was again excitingly in another country, this time Japan, with the benefit of a lot more preparation than I had before England. In Japan I am both a cultural and a visually obvious racial minority. People can see me from miles away. I scare small children and old ladies. (Okay, not in Tokyo, but in Kanazawa I sure could feel the staring eyes.) Other foreigners home in on me with beelike desperation, merely to have a real conversation. This is odd, odd, odd, and I'm sure I don't handle it very gracefully, especially when they want my phone number too.
All Americans should, at some point in their lives, have the experience of living in another country. I don't mean tourism; I mean living. For white people like me, it's pretty much only from there that we can begin to understand that privilege means not having to think about how different you are once or twice or a hundred times a day. In England, I did. In Japan, boy did I.
This is an aside, but it's that experience which creates (and in their opinion, justifies) the bitter, bitter, and angry tone of expatriate community discussion in Japan.
And even so, because I am white and because I am American, my experience as a minority in these other countries does not begin to approximate, for example, the Hispanic minority experience in the US, or the Pakistani minority experience in Japan. It doesn't even come close. No matter how lonely I felt, my race and my culture were still acknowledged, in various ways, as ones which had power.
In England, as soon as I opened my mouth I became a love/hate lightning rod for complex British feeling about the US. ("Have you met Brad Pitt? When I grow up I'm going to live in Hollywood! I heard you can buy a machine gun in the grocery store in America, is that true? How many people do you know who have died in gang violence?")
In Japan, although as a foreigner I wasn't safe to cross the street by myself, as an English speaker and as an American (who looked American), I was automatically given respect.
And that's the first part of the rant which people weren't interested in hearing when I went back to high school in Idaho. Part II of talking about these ideas would involve contrasting the American conception of racism and Political Correctness with the Japanese understanding. Tentatively titled: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love teh PC, or, Here At Last, Something America May Have Gotten Right.