Wednesday, June 30, 2010
Racial Discrimination
I have witnessed racial discrimination several times in my life. My ex wife is and African American and we were discriminated aghainst on many occasions. It was many small things. Many times it was at restaurants were our waiter or waitress would be rude or mess up our orders. There were many times that our waiter would simple ignore us for long periods of time while keeping other tables around us served. Other times in grocery stores people would make rude comments or stare at us. My ex wife would get treated very badly by other African Americans. She told me many times when she would go to the store and African American woman would say very mean and hurtful things to her when they saw our sons with her. On one instance she told me that three African American women had followed her through the store harassing her nonstop. This was something that we lived with for the ten years we were together. Personally I didn’t notice it happing all the time but my ex wife would say things like did you see the way that those people were looking at us or did you hear what someone had mumbled under their breath. I didn’t always notice because I was not always paying attention to what others were doing around me. This would constantly frustrate her but the difference was that she had been living with this type of treatment all of her life and I had not. As I began to pay more attention to it I did see that it happened quite frequently.
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My uncle married a black woman and so my cousins are biracial. These cousins are probably some of my best friends and I too have seen instances of racial discrimination when spending time with them. One example that stands out is when my two cousins and I were shooting at the gym at IC. We had every right to be there because both our fathers worked at IC. We invited 3 other guys as guests to play 3 on 3. Every person with an ID card can bring a guest. As soon as the athletic director saw 5 black guys on the court he came down and kicked us out and refused to listen to our reasoning, just kicked us out, no questions asked. It infuriated me but they were all used to the discrimination.
ReplyDeleteThis type of discrimination is simply wrong. There is no reason for anyone to be treated different because of the color of his or her skin. I wrote about a similar experience that I witnessed. Here is what I don't understand. I don't understand, and don't think I will ever understand, why people choose to treat others differently simply because their skin is a different color. I don't think these people that say rude comments and such think about how they would feel if someone said these things about them or their family or someone that they care about. It is really a shame in my mind.
ReplyDeleteIt sucks that you get discriminated against so much that a perfecly normal situation becomes fearful. the fact that you always have to worry that you're not getting service or someone is talking about you becomes a reality when in fact, it could be perfectly innocent. A person in this situations then begins to blame everything on discrimination. For instance, the server could have just been bad or the people in the grocery store could have been talking about something entirely different. That would suck! I would have to prepare myself to ignore it all unless physically approached. Discrimination takes away from happiness and if you let it discrimination can keep a person from being successful. Many have been killed or suffered permanent injuries as a result of this thing called discrimination.
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