Thanksgiving, Black kids in the Cafeteria, Censoring Myself and others...

One thing that I noticed in the Thanksgiving comic strip was the fact that the little white boy's shirt kept changing in each box but the little Indian girl's attire stayed the same the whole time. I like how they showed how naiive he was and how he believed everything that have been washed into his brain but at the end, being the superior white male he disregards everything he just heard and just tried to build himself up by remarking that his father could beat her father up in a fight.
I went to a predominantly black school so the black kids all sitting at the same table was inevitable but most of the Asian kids sat together and the Hispanics too. Since there weren't many Asians or Hispanics they sat with the Black kids too. Why is it that Black kids are the main focus as if other race and ethnicity groups including whites don't have identity problems? In my High School there was two Cambodian sisters, each in a grade above me. In our culture when someone we really care about pass away we shave our head in mourning regardless of if you were a man or a woman. Their brother passed away and they came to school with shaved heads and everyone made jokes like "oh look they just pulled a Britney Spears stunt." People then proceeded to ask me if my mother died, which I didn't think was a joking matter, would I shave my head!
I wasn't mad though, they come from different backgrounds where cutting off all their hair seemed absurd, instead of running to my Asian companions and keeping my fellow classmates ignorant I explained to them that its your choice and you didnt have to you didn't want. The point I'm trying to get at is when the teacher used the term "you people" to the little girl, YES she had a right to be mad but when she told her white friend and didn't recieve the response that she wanted she should not have shyed away from the situation. She should have taken the chance to educate her white friend because different people grow up with different experiences and they will never understand you the way that you want them to unless you explain it to them. Its like if I would have just kept to my Asian friends because they grew up like me and understood me, then I would have admitted defeat, in letting them believe what they had only assume I would have kept MYSELF in a little box.
I do know how the little black girl felt though, we had a science teacher; he was a fill-in and I admit that I was in a pretty bad class. The boys were always so rowdy and he would tell us to sit down but people would just walk around and he would always say things like "you people don't listen" or "it's just like you people to be actin like that". I knew he was never talking to me because I was an exception to the class, it's so weird being the little quiet Asian girl who always listened; thats so stereotypical, but anyways in grouping us together as a whole I always felt a little sting when he said things like that. My whole grade got together, signed a petition, and got him fired. I say in situations like these you either take take action or you take action_you either educate or you do something about it but you don't let an ignorant mind stay closed, you have an obligation to open up people's mind so that they don't go out and treat others the way that they treat you.

Race, Ethnicity and Stereotypes too...

Today I am not a person who judge someone based on their skin color. I like to say that I am color blind when it comes to things like that but from age 1-9, before I moved to Philadelphia I lived in Long Beach, California and I was surrounded by a majority of Cambodian people like me. There were a few African Americans and a few more Hispanics. So as you can imagine I didn’t come from a very diverse environment so when I first moved to Philadelphia I had some trouble making friends because there wasn’t much people like me and I really strayed from them. I went through a few years without having any friends until I learned to accept that color wasn’t really important. When I first went to boarding school there were a few people like me but the majority was African Americans but that didn’t make a difference for me. Most of them tried to stick to their own kind but I was friends with everyone, sometimes jokingly they would ask me if I was color blind and I would just simply say “yes.” As the years passed by the other Asians in my grade either got kicked out or they just left school and through my junior and senior year I was the only Asian person in my grade but I was cool with everyone_ white, black, Hispanic, or other. They called me the token Asian but I fit right in.

For me I can say that I don’t judge people by their skin color or the way they carry themselves. I like to look at personality but I know that I get judged by people every single day by the way I dress and the way I talk or don’t talk. I know that because I dress in baggy jeans and clothes that people think I’m a very sloppy person that don’t care about anything and because I don’t like to talk about a lot of thing s that I am a boring person but everyone who has ever given me a chance know that I am one of the most organized and neat person the world has and that I don’t let a lot of things bother me but when I am passionate about something I fight for my stand and when I’m just hanging out I don’t leave without getting a laugh from everyone.

Another thing is people think that just because I am Asian I have to be super smart in math and science but in fact I am only average and at times I struggle just like everyone else so stereotypes are never true for all.