For the past couple of weeks, my brother and I have not been
speaking to each other. I am sad about
our argument, although right now, I can not fix what he thinks is wrong. And, I may never be able to fix it. I miss him.
However, what I don’t miss are the condescending remarks made about me
or others based on stereotypes. I am my
brother’s half sister. I grew up in Detroit , while my half siblings grew up in San Diego , California Detroit . So, he only sees one portion of the city, and
to him that is Detroit . He has always made comments, like, “I don’t
want to upset you, because you may cut me.
You are from Detroit , don’t you carry a
switchblade?” or “Why would you feel uncomfortable growing up in a bad
neighborhood, you grew up in Detroit ?” Also, as a Black woman, I am always trying to
take advantage or lie about something.
Because, that is what Black women do.
All of these jokes or statements come from stereotypes instead of from
our 15 year relationship.
I was watching Oprah yesterday and the author of “Eat, Pray,
Love”, Elizabeth Gilbert was being interviewed.
The author talked about taking the path of answering your calling and
how when you decided to do that, you must realize that this is not an easy
path. She said that the path was going
to be difficult and there were going to be lessons that needed to be learned throughout
the journey. One of the things that I
have to accept is that no matter how long my brother or any person who relies
on stereotypes knows me, they will always rely on the stereotype first. They are never going to do the work of accepting
me or anyone else as an individual. They
are always going to rely on their race or gender first.
The only reason that I discuss this is because it conflicts
wit my upbringing. Yes, I was exposed to
stereotypes, but using them in any way was seriously frowned upon in our
home. A nice way to say it was that
using stereotypes was a lazy person’s way of categorizing people and their
behavior. However, my mother was not nice;
she said that using stereotypes was what common, low class and ignorant people did. And, that most of the time, they didn't
understand how what they were doing was wrong.
She would say, “You are a Leonard.
When you step out of this door, you represent our family. You come from a good family and we don’t do
that.”
What she didn’t tell me was that instead of stereotypes
being something common people used, it was something that people used commonly. And I never thought that it would be one of
the things that caused a division between my mother’s side and my father’s side
of the family.
No comments:
Post a Comment