Interracial Family Organization

The War on Stereotyping is Far From Over

// February 15th, 2010 // 4 Comments » // Social Injustice

I was interviewing a wonderful nurse for a home health position at my job. She came to fill out an application and did not know she would get to speak to anyone. She was wearing a beautiful bright pink outfit with black jeweled shoes, a black long sleeve shirt under the pink top and a black, delicately jeweled head scarf covering her hair. She was obviously Muslim. She apologized up and down for the way she was dressed. She stated she was on her way to worship. I couldn’t imagine her picking a more beautiful outfit to speak to a potential employer in.

I was so completely impressed by the woman. Her professionalism, her sense of humor, her diverse nursing skills and experience. I had goose bumps just thinking about how well she was going to fit in being the main nurse at a certain case I had in mind. She even lived close to the patient’s home. One of the best interviews I have ever conducted. I was doing a happy dance inside!

She was completely appropriate and impressive through out the interview, but I caught her carefully mentioning her religion. She was NOT trying to push something on me, she was trying to make the subject clear in case I or someone else might have a problem with it. She mentioned that she was very open to other religions and spirituality and had no problem working with patients who may not be the same faith. It made me sad to think she felt she had to defend herself up front. Just as sad, because of her traditional dress, I too had to be careful about who’s house I sent her into. I wouldn’t want anyone to have a melt down when she entered their home.

She had an infectious enthusiasm and was thrilled to do some research and review on some of the high tech equipment that this patient was coming home on. Laughing she said, “You must have the right weapons if you are going to war.” Immediately she stopped and followed that with “I am sorry. I know being Muslim, I should never even utter the word war.” I put my hand on her arm and said, “Please, don’t apologize. You should not have to censor every word you say to avoid prejudice.”

I was angry at the ignorance this amazing woman had to wade through everyday. Americans, who are people who come from all over this world, can be so pathetic and self absorbed. We all carry with us and are shaped by our experiences and the people we meet. If you avoid/reject groups of people, you are limiting your growth as a human.

“Stereotypes are devices for saving a biased person
the trouble of learning.”

-Unknown author

Twitter Wars

// February 11th, 2010 // 22 Comments » // Social Injustice

For those who don’t know, I am most definitely addicted to Twitter. I’ve got over 3300 followers and I tweet several times daily. If you’re not familiar with this particular social network, let me explain a couple of things. Most tweets are public, but people do have the option of making their stream of tweets private. Twitter allows sitewide searches of public tweets.

I have a program called TweetDeck which allows me to have several columns open with various data pulled from Twitter. One of them lists search results for four terms: interracial, diversity, multicultural, and biracial. I use this column to find individuals to connect with as we grow our Interracial Family Organization name in social media. Tonight, I saw a tweet pop up that said: “Call me a hater but interracial relationships piss me the **** off.” So, on my personal Twitter account, I decided to respond. Since she asked the general public to call her a hater, I felt obliged to do so.

As a sidenote so that you understand what you are reading, each image is a tweet. The tweets that include “@karennduh” are directed at the person who made the comment about interracial couples. Tweets that include “@katjrobertson” are directed at me. Tweets that do NOT include “@” with a name after it indicate a general statement which is not directed toward anyone in particular.

This is how the conversation went:

I’m sure everyone is thinking what I asked myself after I stopped responding: “Why?” lol I really don’t know why I even let things like that annoy me or why I even engaged in that conversation, but sometimes I honestly can’t help it. I get sick and tired of hearing statements like that. Interracial couples piss you off? Just by EXISTING?? That is ludicrous. This is sad on multiple levels… the first being that this is a young lady (and I use the term “lady” VERY loosely) that I would estimate to be somewhere between 18 and 20 years old. I don’t KNOW that for sure, but I’m guessing by the way she acts, and the fact that other people on her Twitter list are in that age range. This is the generation coming up behind us… and it is pathetic.

I won’t get into how disgusted I am that this otherwise pretty young woman has such a nasty personality and how blatantly her mannerisms reflect a horrible lack of self respect, but just the realization that there are so many people who feel the same way… that interracial families consist of individuals who are weak, aren’t doing anything productive with themselves… that our children are useless, etc. What disappoints me even more is that I noticed at the beginning she was actually tweeting with a biracial teenager who laughed it off and said something to the effect of, “Oh well then you must really hate me then,” to which this girl replied:

Seriously, people… I know you can’t talk ignorance out of a person but that doesn’t stop me from wishing there were some way to get through to people so that they understood how stupid this is. What difference does it make who ANYONE is with?

“Ain’t yo daddy kkk?”

I just don’t even know how to respond to that except to be highly frustrated knowing that after all of these years… after all the movements for civil rights for everyone… after all the strides so many people have made to ensure integration, get us closer to equality, and remove laws restricting interracial marriages, we still haven’t moved all that much in the minds of people like this – the same tired mentalities that ran rampant in prior generations are raising the generations that are coming up now and while it may seem better on the surface, the prejudice is still alive and well.