I think anybody that feels they are pre-judged feels this way. Life is hard enough on our own actions so the last thing anyone needs is people judging us on what people that look and or live like use do.
The irony is that the harder you work as an individual, the more you cringe when the news shows Blacks, Hispanics, Chinese, Jews, Red Necks, Gays, etc, etc acting badly. You don’t have to be an actual “Minority” to feel this way. Everyone is capable of being in the minority depending on where they chose to live.
Anybody who has felt in the minority can understand what it is like to see an opportunity side step you for reasons unknown to logic or reason.
Being Hispanic, I also cringe when the news shows young Latino boys thinking with their balls and not their brains. I used to live in an up-scale Yuppy part of San Antonio, Texas. The area of town had gone so far as to become it’s own city within a city to control it’s police force and Mayor.(Not to mention protect thier tax money) Their Police only pulled traffic duty and let the San Antonio Police force handle the real crime. If you drove a Hummer, you could drive 90 miles an hour down the road and never get a ticket, but if you have a faded paint job or a P.O.S., it only took one or two miles above the speed limit to get a ticket.
When I started ridding my 100 dollar Huffy mountain bike for excersise around the neighborhood, I was watched as a perp scouting the nieghborhood for something to steal. When I got into ridding a lot more, I moved up to a Trek mountain Bike. Now the question was which garage did the perp lift that nice bike from? I hated living in that area of San Antonio, everytime I started to feel that I was over reacting, some a police cruiser would slow down and pace me riding my bike to see if I would try and get away or some bitch at a store would be overly helpful to me and follow me around the store until I left. (On a side note, where the hell do retail sluts get off acting like their shit doesn’t stink? If they were all that, they wouldn’t need the shitty retail job in the first place.) Thankfully, my solution was simple. Once my lease was up, I move to another part of town and blended in. I now live a quarter of a mile from a police sub station and have never been made to feel uncomfortable around the parade of San Antonio Police officers driving all around me.
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Don’t get me wrong, most of the people in that small city within a city where nice people who didn’t care one way or the other of my heritage. It’s not like I lived in Naziville, Texas, but it only takes a few to build that feeling inside you.
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I may not be the smartest person in the world but I trying my best to better my life so it does hurt when Hispanics screw up on local, state, and national television. For every news broadcast, or news article, I have to work a little harder to get where I want to go in life. Everyone has at least a slight tendency to pre-judge what they don’t understand. The Middle East comes to mind. People don’t understand that it doesn’t take a large population or mob to make you feel helpless as a minority, only that one asshole in front of your goals and dreams.
My father worked at a refinery in Corpus Christi, Texas. His workers, who were all Black or Hispanic, used to kid him that if he gets promoted on more time, he would have to change his last name. He was the only manager that had an office outside the main building. His office was in the warehouse with his workers. My father is a very rational man, so he saw it as bonus since they never really bothered him and he didn’t like them anyway. He saw it as something better to ignore and draw a pension rather than make a statement about. He’s a smart man.
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The minority will always have to oversell themselves to the majority. Saftey in numbers damands that. There is nothing wrong in cringing or feeling unease when one of your own does something wrong, it just means that we all need work alittle harder to disprove the image. Just remember that the people before us had it alot worse than we do. Only fifty years ago, certain parts of San Antonio, Texas had shopowners posting signs that said “No Dogs or Mexicans allowed.” Today, our Mayor’s last name is Garza. Times change, even if it doesn’ t move at a pace we like.
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<b>JaunitaTech</b>
If you think about it, the closest thing ever to a “Master Race” is the African American population. Slavery was a business and it’s “Businessman” only brought the strongest and the healthiest Africans to the Americas. From the ones brought to the Amercas, only the healthiest and the strongest of that group survived the trip. Once here, the best of a race began to breed. The food that was feed to African slaves combined with the denial of education were the only two things that held them African American from taking over this country from the beginning. The Jim Crowe mentality has done it’s best to hold the Black race down since the end of slavery but I really feel the next century will go to the African Americans. Micheal Jordan, Coby Bryant, the Williams Sisters, Tiger Woods, Shaq, Ken Griffey Jr., Samy Sosa, Ali, etc, etc, are not flutes or freaks of nature. Narrow minded people three hundered years ago created these superstars strong in mind and body without ever knowing it. With every victory or title African Americans consume, the doors open wider for their race and soon the only place left to kick this countries ass in will be the classroom and there isn’t anything that will stop that.
Cheer up JaunitaTech, The future belongs to you.
