The post about Race and racism December 13, 2006
Posted by spacemom in : Nance , 3 commentsI visit a few blogs that make me feel, well, downright guilty about myself. I will admit this right here, right now.
I am racist. I am prejudiced.
No, I am not proud of these facts. But they are the facts. I grew up east of Buffalo New York. Cows were our friends. The County Jail was in my town because we were in BFN. That rural. When I was in High School, we had ONE person of color, Marcus. He was African-American and annoying as hell. Couldn’t stand him for who he was, not for his color. I thought I was a "good person" on the race thing.
But when I went to Long Island for college, I discovered all sorts of different people. Latinas, Jewish, Indian, Pakistani, Black, White, etc… It was pretty scary for me to be exposed to all of these different cultures. What was worse was when I realized that some of my friends were blatant racists. I first heard about Jews and horns out of their heads from my roommate. My friend across the hall was sick of those Damn Dominicans (she was Puerto Rican). It was a shock. I became friends with people of many different religions, nationalities, races. But when push came to shove, I remember being accused of racism. When a group of women on my floor left dirty dishes in the bathroom and I complained, I was told it was because I was against the blacks. huh? I didn’t get it.
As I got older, I moved to another part of the campus. I became much more tolerant and more accepting of people for who they are. I thought that racism was not a problem. Even when I started dating Dr. Jay and my mom went around telling everyone that I had found a nice boy, and he’s Jewish, she would whisper, I confronted her about it and told her that it didn’t matter to me, because it didn’t.
But when I look at my actions I see that I do carry prejudices. I see that I go out of my way to smile at minorities. If I run past a group of men, I do stiffen more if it is a group of men that are dressed in what I consider "scary clothes", those baggy pants, hats backwards… silly and stupid.
I have run into African-American families that are middle class and my brain says "wow, isn’t that great!" Which is so damn ignorant and stupid. But it is still there.
I run into a person of Asian descent and wonder if they have an accent, until they actually speak.
I am trying my hardest to make it clear to my kids that people need to be judged by who they ARE, not what they look like. But my core programming is to notice the differences between others and myself. And I don’t know how to change this, even after years of working on it.
So yes, when I read AmFam I sometimes cringe, because I know, deep down, I am still racist.
To avoid this… December 13, 2006
Posted by spacemom in : Dr. Jay , 1 comment so farYesterday, I tried to go back to sleep. That failed, so I got up to make some cookies. I made the dough and it is still chilling in the fridge. Gotta roll it tonight.
Anyway, I had to hunt for some of the ingredients, so I cleaned the top most shelf of the pantry. I found a bag of assorted goodies.
In this bag, I found several bags of potato chips from Panera, a Terra Chips blue chips from Jet Blue and several packages of Oreos. In addition, I found two muffins. This scared me. I took a closer look at these muffins. They looked in perfect shape. I searched the packages for the expiration date… There was none.
Then it hit me. Oh My G-D! We got these in March of 2004 when we went to Buffalo to watch my nephew play in a tournament. These muffins were 3 years old and still looked good!
ICK ICK ICK!
This has lead me to create a new rule in my house: Do NOT, under any circumstance, eat food in a package that does NOT have an expiration date. G-d knows what makes that stuff stay untouched by mold. But if the wee beasties are afraid to eat it, so am I!
(Dr. Jay has now been banned from collecting random packages of food simply "because he can". Damn grad school mentality. He started this habit in grad school and I can’t convince him that he doesn’t need free food.")
ICK ICK ICK ICK ICK!
