And then I realized they arent."
I come from a family of racists.
They spoke of other (than whites) races using ethnic slurs as common as commenting on the weather.
Markus Spiske
A black boy was in front of us in line.
Thats where I found some new friends with a big mixture of ethnicities.
One day I go to a friends house and he has some friends there and we play video games.
At one point I look up and realized Im the only white person in this room.
Before I always thought of POC as different, there I realized that I was the different one.
Ergo: If we all can be the different one we are all the same.
Grew up in a town with no black people.
Dad was very racist.
So naturally I grew up racist.
Joined the military and was forced to hang out with a melting pot of races.
I started a construction job.
Hispanics are some of the nicest, funniest people youll ever meet.
The language barrier even adds to the hilarity.
Landing this job has changed my view on ALL races and Im very happy it did.
You cant just HATE someone for their distance from the equator.
I grew up in an affluent area of Orange County CA.
My family had money, but not nearly enough as many of the kids at my school.
I was an only child, got picked on, had pretty low self-esteem.
My family were basically country club racists.
I wouldnt say I was a neo-Nazi.
I figured my life would improve if I went to a place like that.
Studying abroad in Germany though my Junior year is what really started to break the glass on my views.
I saw that modern Germany was categorically and vastly different than the one I crafted in my head.
I made friends from all over Europe and the world.
I had some people I cared about really roast me for some nationalist and militaristic views I had.
It made me really mad at the time but eventually, I took their criticism seriously.
I came back and finished doing some work in history classes and wrote a paper on Nazi propaganda.
It was then that I really examined Nazi viewpoints through recent experience sand saw how fucking dumb they were.
Second was I always knew it was wrong to hate people, but I still did.
I didnt have an online support structure to keep me in the mindframe.
My father was a racist just like his father before him.
My dad did his best to indoctrinate me and my brother with his racist ways of thinking.
I believed my dads philosophy was truth until I entered first grade.
That year I was sat next to the only black girl in my class.
Naturally, I hated her immediately.
Not only was she an n-word, but an uppity one at that.
She was sweet, kind, funny, and intelligent.
She helped me grasp the concept of arithmetic and was easily the best speller in our class.
That girl and I remained friends until she transferred schools after our third grade year.
I didnt keep in touch with her and have no idea where she is now.
If youre out there Adia, thank you for just being yourself.
You are the very reason why I went down a better path than the one I was shown.
I sincerely hope that you are well.
Not really racist, but we joked around a lot with racial slurs a lot when I was young.
I wouldnt say I was racist, but more uneducated.
All I had to go off of was how other ethnicities were portrayed in pop culture.
Well, that and my racist aunt and some other closed minded family members.
Plus it helped that my older brother talked to me about it before we moved.
He asked what I thought was wrong with it.
I said probably the engine or something like that broke (remember, i was 10).
I said no, that made no sense.
He said, And thats why racism makes no sense.
Oddly still remember that but I barely remember us moving.
I had a moment ages ago.
My first thought: Dammit, probably some old Asian lady.
I drove past and it was an early-20s white dude just like I was.
Even looked a lot like me, too.
That gave me a crystal clear holy shit that was racist as fuck moment.
So I was born in Alabama, still here, and come from a deeply white Christian family.
When I was younger I was told to stay away from blacks, Mexicans, Jews, and Muslims.
(Yep, literally, Mexican N-word is what my dad taught us to call them.)
Well anyways, my deep hate for non-whites/non-Christians was deeply rooted thanks to my parents.
Until in 2011, a tornado outbreak swept through the south.
Until about a week or two later when our school reopened.
We had a lot of new kids from various areas that were damaged.
Most of them black.
That ability to make someone smile, theres nothing better than that.
While me and her broke up later on, she had a massive impact on my life.
I still live in Alabama, and I still hear racist remarks from my parents and from strangers.
They will pass away, and sure they may have already left behind their mark of hatred.
But hate can be erased with love.
Having a ton of friends from different countries growing up.
Former Im not racist!
Reading a book calledThe Hidden Brainby Shankar Vedantam changed my mind.
Its about unconscious bias.
I know that marrying a black man doesnt give me a free pass or absolve me of racism.
In other words, I was that, Slavery is over.
Heres an MLK quote, but affirmative action is bullshit.
I have a black friend white person.
Were still experiencing the world in very different ways.
After I got out of the Army, I went to a state university for an engineering degree.
Two really important things happened there.
My experience as a white woman was that I got pulled over, and given a warning.
It was just so obvious how differently we were treated.
I wasnt a self-proclaimed racist, I actually was very certain I wasnt racist at all.
The narrator said Racially, what is the difference between these two people?
In my mind, I was like, Well one is black and one is white.
The narrator said, Both of these people have one black parent and one white parent.
And thats when it hit me.
We made up races to categorize people, but theyre all just made up boxes.
Theres nothing different between a black person and white person other than how much melanin is in your skin.
I realized I had always had these underlying assumptions that people of other races were different than me.
