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racism and intolerance
May. 1st, 2007 02:01 pmI've been discussing and reading about prejucices, racism and intolerance in several people's journals, and thought I'd add some of my two cents to the mix.
This is not about statistics or great ideas, just stuff I experience and see from time to time.
I have to say I grew up in an all-white (and rather sheltered, as I had only few contacts outside of my family and the Christian Kindergarten I went to) environment. There were immigrants into the German Democratic Republic, but I don't think I saw any non-German until after reunification. In what my parents taught me, race never mattere, but then the point never really came up.
The first people of a different colour that I saw where Vietnamese selling cheap clothes from a roadside stall. About the same time, Vietnamese children started going to my school. I don't know whether they had to deal with racist comments from other kids. I don't think anybody in my year bothered them. I met two Vietnamese girls in an after-school activity group a few years later and we got on quite well, though the constant smile of one of them sometimes made me feel like she was laughing about me. Even though I knew she was just being polite, as she didn't consider showing emotions openly polite, it was difficult for me because I wasn't used to it.
Of course, I read about racism in its more violent forms in the newspapers. I was shocked and stunned when a young black man died after he had jumped through a glass door into a house to escape from a bunch of nazi teens chasing him. He was badly cut and bled to death. I think the police said it took more than an hour until he even lost consciousness, and all the time he lay there bleeding and crying for help, and all it would have taken was if anybody living in that house had at least bothered to call an ambulance, even if they didn't dare or didn't want to help him directly.
I learnt about Slavery and how many people profited from it, I learnt about how Cortez raided the people of Central America, about the Civil Rights Movement, about Martin Luther King, about the so-called reservations for Native Americans and how many died before they could even get there, how the US government took Indian children from their families to raise them as whites. I learnt about Apartheid and about the Nazis and about the camps into which Americans of Japanese origin were put during Second World War.
All of it just made me wish that people would stop having idiotic notions about what the colour of your skin or the shape of your nose meant about your personality. But it was all far away. It wasn't me, or people I knew, who were affected by it or did it.
Then I learnt that one of my great-uncles died in a Nazi work camp because he had a Jewish girlfriend.
Then a friend of mine said as if it was the most normal thing in the world "I don't like Jews".
I couldn't believe it. That a thing like that happened in the Third Reich was bad enough, but that a girl my age could say something like that and consider it perfectly alright completely baffled me. I asked her for a reason, and she said she'd had made bad experiences.
And I said okay and mentally changed her statement into "I did not like the Jews I've met so far," and thought I could live with that. I couldn't really. We were never close friends after that. But I still don't know why I let it lie, why I didn't talk with her about it.
That, I believe, was the first time I saw racism first-hand.
Now, as a white European, it isn't likely for me to actually experience racism. However, I do get my share of prejudices, and that is mostly because of the country I was born in.
( Ossi-Wessi stuff )
This is not about statistics or great ideas, just stuff I experience and see from time to time.
I have to say I grew up in an all-white (and rather sheltered, as I had only few contacts outside of my family and the Christian Kindergarten I went to) environment. There were immigrants into the German Democratic Republic, but I don't think I saw any non-German until after reunification. In what my parents taught me, race never mattere, but then the point never really came up.
The first people of a different colour that I saw where Vietnamese selling cheap clothes from a roadside stall. About the same time, Vietnamese children started going to my school. I don't know whether they had to deal with racist comments from other kids. I don't think anybody in my year bothered them. I met two Vietnamese girls in an after-school activity group a few years later and we got on quite well, though the constant smile of one of them sometimes made me feel like she was laughing about me. Even though I knew she was just being polite, as she didn't consider showing emotions openly polite, it was difficult for me because I wasn't used to it.
Of course, I read about racism in its more violent forms in the newspapers. I was shocked and stunned when a young black man died after he had jumped through a glass door into a house to escape from a bunch of nazi teens chasing him. He was badly cut and bled to death. I think the police said it took more than an hour until he even lost consciousness, and all the time he lay there bleeding and crying for help, and all it would have taken was if anybody living in that house had at least bothered to call an ambulance, even if they didn't dare or didn't want to help him directly.
I learnt about Slavery and how many people profited from it, I learnt about how Cortez raided the people of Central America, about the Civil Rights Movement, about Martin Luther King, about the so-called reservations for Native Americans and how many died before they could even get there, how the US government took Indian children from their families to raise them as whites. I learnt about Apartheid and about the Nazis and about the camps into which Americans of Japanese origin were put during Second World War.
All of it just made me wish that people would stop having idiotic notions about what the colour of your skin or the shape of your nose meant about your personality. But it was all far away. It wasn't me, or people I knew, who were affected by it or did it.
Then I learnt that one of my great-uncles died in a Nazi work camp because he had a Jewish girlfriend.
Then a friend of mine said as if it was the most normal thing in the world "I don't like Jews".
I couldn't believe it. That a thing like that happened in the Third Reich was bad enough, but that a girl my age could say something like that and consider it perfectly alright completely baffled me. I asked her for a reason, and she said she'd had made bad experiences.
And I said okay and mentally changed her statement into "I did not like the Jews I've met so far," and thought I could live with that. I couldn't really. We were never close friends after that. But I still don't know why I let it lie, why I didn't talk with her about it.
That, I believe, was the first time I saw racism first-hand.
Now, as a white European, it isn't likely for me to actually experience racism. However, I do get my share of prejudices, and that is mostly because of the country I was born in.
( Ossi-Wessi stuff )
