ダニエルの冒険

Just a short interesting story that I forgot to mention yesterday.

I’ve found that when I’m with Irish people, like John or Patrick or my boss, I get less conscious of making my speech clear and slur words, use (more) colloquialisms, and my Irish accent seems to get a little bit stronger (not that it’s even been too strong to begin with anyway). On the bus, I was talking to Patrick and we had been bouncing our accents off each other all day. On the 38-Geary from Japantown to Market St and a lady sitting across from us said “are you guys Irish?”. Turns out she was from Hawaii but her father was working in Dublin. We spoke a small bit about Irish cuisine (or lack thereof) and she tried throwing in one or two Irish colloquialisms (I’ve used that word twice in one paragraph!) with a fairly cute amount of fail. First time someone’s noticed I’m Irish! I’ve been asked for directions twice, by people assuming I’m a local! Then again, white people aren’t in a majority here and people seem to feel more comfortable approaching people of the same colour for favours like that. Is it “the black guy’s gonna hurt me” or “I’ve been responsible for so many years of slavery and oppression I’d better not ask for any more”, I don’t know, but it’s certainly out there.

I’m much more aware of being white, in such a cosmopolitan area. The guy who sold me my glasses, Frank, is so white. He’s in his early fifties I guess. Slightly horn-rimmed thick black plastic glasses, and a brilliantly white shirt tucked into his pants, with a red designer tie. And while I was talking to him, a black guy came in dressed in really loose basketball clothes, du-rag on his head, and asked to see his girlfriend who was supposed to be in for an appointment. Frank couldn’t understand what he was saying and had to get him to spell his girlfriend’s name before he could find her on the register.

When you get around middle-class, race doesn’t appear to make any difference, but with the lower-class (between the homeless and the people working white-collar or maybe blue-collar jobs), they seem to stick to themselves a lot more. You see groups of asians, latinos, blacks, whites, but not mixing so much.

Well, that’s enough of my commentary on racial issues in San Francisco. I’ve only been here two weeks so I’m not exactly an authority on the issue and have probably misinterpreted some of what I’ve seen, but these are just the impressions I’m having.

Cherry Blossom Festival photos coming too. Got them from Dave today. I was just told today, but he’s not going to be working at Havok anymore. Been going to lunch with him and chatting with him every day for the last few weeks and we had fun yesterday, so it sucks to see him go.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 22nd, 2008 at 2:41 am and is filed under San Francisco. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.