Sorry leche. I just tend to take a different view.

I do believe that we are all responsible for how how we represent ourselves, but we are also all products of our culture. It's like telling someone from the south that they need to stop speaking with a southern accent or people will think their stupid/slow (that is a sterotype a lot of northerners have).I just don't think that stuff is something you turn off and on, unless your parents and community teach you how to that.

Along with working with refugees, I did some work with welfare-to work candidates. One of the candidates had such an attitude the first day I wanted to slap her. Nonetheless, we sat down and wrote out her resume, and I pumped her up, and I think, helped her see some of the qualities she never thought she had. She hugged me and cried when we were done. She masked her insecurity by being really agressive. We worked on how she presented herself to people, so she would do better in interviews. It was a loooong, tender process, she had/has a lot of hurdles to get over. She is one of many people I met, white black hispanic in the neighborhood who had a parent on drugs, in prison, abusive, etc. It's pretty hard to think about how to talk right so you can get an upwardly mobile job, when you are straddled with a community where drugs are the norm your dad smacks you around every night, as much as you might want to. We all need a little more guidance than that.

Most of the kids that I dealt with at this particular place knew literally NO ONE in their community that had gone to college, and had jobs. I guess I figure that most of us are not such extraordinarly human beings that we can completely divorce ourselves from our environments and re-create ourselves. At least not overnight...

I figure, I know what my prejudices are, and often their sources, but it is still up to ME to continue working on them. That has a lot to do with me trying to be the person that I want to be. I want to be compassionate and open. My attempts to be that kind of person have provided me with some pretty extraordinary experiences in my short life. I also think that is a life long and continual effort. I often dissapoint myself, but have been able to grow enormously from getting to know diverse folks in my life. I have really come to love people that I never thought I would talk to or be able to identify with.

One main point for me is that when prejudice exists, anything negative that happens serve to reinforce that in a lot of people. It is always "well this hispanic guy came up to me and.... what about the other 20 thousand hispanics that didn't?" I lived with a family in Spain my first semester that were continually telling me I needed to lose weight and that I shouldn't eat dinner (I was 5'4" and 115 pounds, not skinny but not exactly fat either - I later realized that this was because they wanted to keep as much of the $$ the institute gave them to house me- they also had all kinds of food locked up in the living room for the family where I got the cold spaghetti for dinner). Their son was extremely hostile and perpetually attacked me for being american, which was particularly frustrating, because I couldn't speak Spanish well enough to defend myself. Nonetheless, I never said, nor believed Spaniards are cheap/jerks/unapproachable and that they are anti-American. It probably would have been harder for me not to think that way if I already held that stereotype beforehand.

At school I had a friend gang raped by a bunch of white fraternity guys. On other occasions, frat guys stripped a woman naked down when she passed out and wrote on her body and left her outside in mid Iowa winter in front of the House. I don't say, nor do I believe that white guys are bad and that frat guys are bad. I don't feel a shiver of fear when I see a white frat-looking guy, because the stereotype hasn't been pumped into my head - despite the fact that there are plenty of statistics that should give me at least a little pause (these are not even close to the only examples of that stuff that went on at MY campus - let alone others.

That is the difference with groups that are discriminated against. Exceptions are used to "prove" a rule that dehumanizes people. Essentially, you let it prove to you that it is okay to continue thinking the way you do.

Besides, it is not (to me) about having your stereotypes proved wrong, because a lot of times we actually have elements of those characteristics in us - as well as a lot other stuff that doesn't fit into the stereotype people may have of us. I am a blond, blue eyed American, and it always seems to shock people that I speak spanish. I don't look like I would. I do have some serious stereotypical upper middle class American woman traits in me though. Can't help it. It is an indelible part of who I am, as well as much much more. Who knows what sort of things people think about me before I even open my mouth. It doesn't mean I am worthless or more worhy than others.

Anyway, that is my humble opinion, leche.

[This message has been edited by Nicole (edited 10-18-2000).]

[This message has been edited by Nicole (edited 10-18-2000).]