To be brutally honest, I am bias against black males ages ranging from 19-25. My best friend from age 16-25 was a black male with more talent in his pinky than i had in my whole body. He was going to a prestigious high school on a scholarship due to his brightness. He sang like an angel and he was involved in every kind of sport known to man. How we became friends was and still is a mystery due to the fact that i was raised in white small town America. It was a beautiful, strictly platonic friendship. We appreciated cultural differences and learned a lot from each other. We told each other everything. If he came to visit me, he stuck out and I was honestly scared he'd get harassed by our small town police force. If I visited him, I was scared there weren't any police that would come around, and we could laugh about these differences. Anyways, when we got older and started college together, he got weird and distant and different and secretive. My trust in him and our friendship started to break. He started doing drugs, failing out of school and then he got his girlfriend pregnant and dropped out of school. A huge disappointment to his mom who worked so hard for him to have a great education. He would push me away but beg for my help. It was a tumultuous time. After our ties started to sever, he called me one day out of the blue and told me he needed to talk to me. So I went to his house eager to help and hear what he had to say. He literally lost his damn mind in front of me. I saw all color escape his eyes as he ranted and raved incoherently. I had never been so scared in my life. I was looking at a stranger. The friend I knew was long gone. It is an extremely bizarre situation to 'know' someone so well and intimately turn into an unknown psycho right before your eyes. I was young and had no idea how to handle it. I tried to leave knowing there was no way I could rationalize with him. He snapped. He broke everything in his path. He got extremely violent with me. He broke his pregnant girlfriend's face. It was sad and horrifying and took me a long time to recover-not to mention the PTSD.
I don't think this scenario is good cause for fear and predjudice. I just know where mine stems from. This would effect my teaching if i was interested in teaching high school, but I have no interest in teaching this age group. Perhaps it still will cause problems in my future career. I don't like the nervous, anxious, horrified feeling that comes over me when I see someone who looks like him (and no, I do not think all black males in this age group look like him). It's unnerving. I never had feelings like this towards a gender or an ethnicity or and age group. It makes me feel racist. I'm sure I sound racist. I still would like to think that I'm not but there's some ill feelings from the past that come up from time to time. This blog wasn't an easy one, guys. Let's not all get real judgey on each other, okay?
No need to be ashamed! You're open about it and your bias was not formed in a conventional, institutional way. It was formed by a particular traumatic event. If you are grappling with it, then you're on the right track to fixing it. It is absolutely PTSD- seeing a once close friend behave so violently can do things to one's brain at a very primal level. So, in my opinion, it is technically unfair to be biased against a group of people based on one particular event. BUT, in your case, the psychological trauma induced by that event led you to think that way not rationally, but at a very deep "fight-or-flight" level. Therefore, it isn't the fault of your rational, thinking mind. The fact that you are reflective and open about it means that you are not, in fact, racist. Thanks for sharing.
ReplyDeleteI think this was a REALLY valuable assignment. It was difficult and uncomfortable to talk about the truth about biases and put it out there for the world to see… By forcing us to think about our own and speak openly and honestly about them, we can be ever conscious about it when dealing with the vast diversity we will no doubt deal with in teaching. I loved the honesty of your story and the feelings you were obviously feeling when writing about it. I can only imagine how scared you must have been. Thank you for sharing your experience!
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