conundrum

so here's the difficulty. i lived in Japan for 4 years, and in that time i made many friends. i sought out the people who didn't seek me out. it's exhausting to be hunted as the "trophy foreigner," the prop to be showed off to real friends. so if people i didn't know approached me, i was immediately suspicious that this was someone in the market for free english lessons and perhaps an introduction to an American boyfriend.
oh, how old prejudice comes to bite you in the ass.

because i find myself thinking, isn't it ridiculous to live in new york city and have not even one black friend? how can I know new york if i have no meaningful interaction with a group that makes up a third of this city's population?

but if i go out of my way looking for a friend based on the qualification of race, what does that make me?

crap. moving to japan cured me of exoticizing asians, because i am too used to them. spending a couple of years looking at almost nothing but asian faces, and i finally extinguished the little light that used to go off in my brain, that blinked "other" or "foreigner" at me and prevented me from seeing asian people for who they are instead of where they're from.

so perhaps immersion is, again, the answer? should i move to harlem? or is this the annoying liberal's dilemma, so obsessed with eradicating internal racism that the very desire becomes another form of putting distance between myself and everybody else?

one of my friends in japan, when i pointed out the various nationalities of the group that we were sitting with, (something along the lines of "isn't it cool that we have all the continents represented?") replied that he hadn't noticed.

"why are americans so fucked up about race and nationality?" he asked.

good question.