As with most little local festivals, there was a beauty pageant connected to it, where beautiful girls compete to became Miss Small-Town-Festival. (Did you know Marilyn Monroe was the first official Artichoke Queen in Castroville, CA? It's the self-proclaimed artichoke capital of the world.) This year, a very lovely 17-year-old girl was chosen to represent our small town at the festival.
A huge uproar then ensued.
See, I live near a town referred to as Little Norway. The town is extremely touristy, and looks like a little Scandinavian town transplated to the US. All of our streets have Norwegian-sounding names that I can barely pronounce. Most of the businesses proudly display their Norwegian heritage; in fact, there is a Norwegian heritage store in the middle of the street.
This year's Miss Small-Town-Festival was a girl of black and Hispanic ancestry.
Most of the town rallied around Miss Small-Town-Festival and gave her a huge amount of support. She showed amazing maturity for someone so young in that she didn't even bother to respond to the hate mail that accumulated. Surprisingly enough, none of the hate mail was local. It all came from out of town, mostly from white supremacist groups.
In fact, during the festival this weekend, three male members of the Nazi party showed up in full regalia, passing out business cards to little children and encouraging them to keep their European heritage "pure."
A letter to the editor that appeared in the local paper summed up my feelings exactly. The writer mentioned that usually all it took to be considered "black" in the days of Jim Crow was a drop of black blood somewhere far back in the person's ancestry. By that token, the author went on, shouldn't all people of Norwegian ancestry be considered Norwegian as well? How do we know that this year's Miss Small-Town-Festival isn't Norwegian somewhere along the line, simply because her skin is darker than most Scandinavians? The writer, apparently a black person herself, describes her uncle, who had a medical condition occurring only in people of Scandinavian descent, and when he took one of those DNA tests that trace one's ancestry, sure enough, he was Norwegian, along with Norman and English. Wouldn't he then qualify to be the grand master at our local small town festival, even though he is outwardly a black man?
And who's to say that former Miss Small-Town-Festivals have all been Norwegian? I doubt they have been. But no fuss was raised simply because they have all been white, as my area is very homogeneous, ethnically-speaking.
I myself have been the target of some discrimination. While not nearly as major as what most people of darker skin have experienced, it still made my childhood somewhat uncomfortable. My maiden name is glaringly Jewish, and as a result, I was taunted when we lived in Illinois as the "Jew girl." I was doubly confused by this because we weren't Jewish, although my father's family all are. My father and stepmother raised us as Presbyterians, but it didn't matter to my tormentors. I was still Jewish, and therefore suspect. I could not understand as a child why people would make fun of me for something I couldn't help -- my ancestry. And what does it matter whether I was Jewish or not? Why did that make me a bad person?
Racism is something I just don't get. My father has said, more times than I can count, there are no individual "races"; there is only one: the human race. Within the race, there are differences, but we are all basically the same animal.