so, im from a small town and i also work in a small town. im a CNA (nurses assistant) and whenever a black person is sent by an agency to come work at our facility, the word spreads like wildfire. who they are, if they've ever been here before, what they have done wrong in the past, and Especially what they have done that makes he or she "exceptional" to their small town, all white farming community's expectations. No matter what, the person's description is always prefaced with their race if they are anything but white; for some reason, this really makes a difference in how the person is anticipated to perform. so i was curious if there were any experiences to back this general theory up, and tried to pry into the reasonings that people had for the ways they described any fellow employees that were not white. now, i did this discretely as possible in order to avoid stepping on any toes too hard just because I have to work with these people every break and summer, and for the most part responses were just as racist as their original descriptions; "you know how Those people usually are" "them kind", small-town responses like that. so then i started wondering, how is everyone going to get exposure to multicultural america and gain an understanding of how and why to be supportive of diversity if they do not even have the opportunity to? do these types of people even matter? i'd like to think so...
but maybe the change needs to start with people in higher education... people that can actually make a change in the institutionalized racism... people that can become leaders for others... so is it a waste of time and breath to try to convince people to change their views when they simply do not have the education or experience to support any sort of connection in order to disconnect their naturalized and integrated racism?
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment