Family Origins

I interviewed my mother, and she told me that our ancestors originally came from Jackson, Mississippi. I was also told that they never relocated. Our family surname did not change during this time period. My preferred ethnic identification is African-American. I learned about my ethnicity from my parents and my grandmother on my mother’s side of the family. I learned about my ethnicity from my grandmother based on her experiences growing up in Jackson, Mississippi where she experienced treatments of racism because she was African-American. I learned about my ethnicity from my parents based on the foods that we ate and the music they listened to as I grew up. The most interesting part of the conversation with my mother was her explaining to me that my ancestral grandfather was an Irish-American and my ancestral grandmother was African-American. This was interesting because they had to experience discrimination being an interracial couple in a southern state during that time period.
About a year and a half ago, my friend Damien needed to get some ice cream out of his car so it would not melt. He asked me to go into seven-eleven to get him some cigarettes in order to save time. After he handed me the money, I was stopped by a police officer who asked me why Damien handed me money. The police officer explained that there had been a lot of robberies going on around the area. Even though I told him that I knew Damien from high school, I had to wait until Damien confirmed it. Then he asked for my ID and said “Are you broke?” I told him no and in the meantime, his partner went to ask Damien if he knew who I was. After that, the officer told me to have a good night. I felt as though this was discrimination because he saw my ID and knew that I was not old enough to buy alcohol for a minor, and his partner asked for Damien’s ID so he knew that Damien was old enough to buy cigarettes. As long as I was not committing a robbery, there was no need for the officer to ask about my financial status while waiting for his partner to confirm what I had already told him.

Assumptions

During senior year of high school, I took a course called sports and entertainment marketing. The class was discussing homosexuality in sports. Denny Neagle, a former major league baseball pitcher, was one of the athletes discussed. A classmate asked if Neagle was homosexual because our teacher mentioned rumors about him. The teacher answered no. I contributed to the conversation by saying that I thought Neagle was homosexual as well. This is when the cultural-individual dialectic problem started.
My teacher asked why I believed that Neagle was homosexual. My response was he kissed Larry Walker, who was his teammate at the time on the lips in the dugout during a baseball game on television. The teacher then asked “Why does that mean he is homosexual?” I responded by telling him that he kissed a man who he was not related to on the lips. Then two of my classmates made facial expressions which made me feel ignorant. The teacher then went on to say “That’s not a good reason!” In the culture and environment that I grew up in, males barely hugged other males even if they were relatives, unless they had not seen them for years. Then I saw two men kiss on the lips, and wrongfully jumped to conclusions.
As I sat in the class watching the documentary on homosexuality in sports, I thought to myself “I know I am right!” After class was over, I thought “How could I be so off base and not consider how ignorant that was?” I never looked at Neagle’s biography to find out his sexual orientation, I just assumed. Maybe that was just his way of communicating affection towards a friend and a teammate. I had become the culprit of what I hate being the victim of; stereotyping someone from a different culture or race because he communicated differently.