She's the same age as me, about, and I had a friend who was half-Japanese who we thought of as white because his daddy was. I knew Chinese and Japanese people weren't exactly white, but nobody was "prejudiced" against them as far as I could tell as a child--for instance, they could date and marry white people and nobody got upset about it. We had a few Indian families as well, but the impression I had about them was not that we looked down on them but that they looked down on us and wouldn't mix with us!

I have no idea what it was like actually to be those people in that society, I'm sure they were less privileged than the "white" families. But they weren't "black".

I did encounter anti-Semitism pretty early on. We had plenty of that, but I remember hearing a woman from Texas complain, when I was at the University of Kentucky, that people were prejudiced against her because she was Mexican, and being astounded that anyone would be prejudiced against her because she looked totally white to me and why would anyone care that her family was from Mexico. I was in my mid 20s and working on a master's degree and I was flabbergasted. (Mind you, she looked like me, and when I came out to California, where I've lived for the last 12 years, people totally thought I was Mexican--I frequently have people walk up to me and refuse to believe I can't understand them when they speak Spanish to me.)