My first RN job has lead me to a more rural part of the country. As a person of color, I have never experienced racism to this degree.
Some instances are subtle at work, but some are pretty blatant.
My first experience occurred when my preceptor mentioned repeatedly that I have a "black card" so I must be golden at my new position. (I never questioned her on what she meant.) My preceptor also mentioned things like "since you are black things will get stolen from you." Phrases like 'slave driver' have also repeatedly been mentioned in passing with my preceptor. Since I was on orientation, I let a lot of comments go and ignored them, due to fear of being let go or retaliation.
Now, the worst thing is that I have noted on several occasions, confederate flags waving from behind pick up trucks.
I'm not sure if I can stick it out for over a year in this place. What would you do?
OH...PUT IT BACK IN THE DECK SWEET CHEEKS!! I'd probably not feel safe around there either. I mean look at all the racial uproar black people have stirred up over the recent years. Come on, you want respect then act respectful damn it! Geesh
OH...PUT IT BACK IN THE DECK SWEET CHEEKS!! I'd probably not feel safe around there either. I mean look at all the racial uproar black people have stirred up over the recent years. Come on, you want respect then act respectful damn it! Geesh
Sez one who clearly has never been stopped for DWB. That deck is stacked, toots.
I am not an expert, please do your own research if you want to know more.
I have done my research and it is almost the complete opposite of what yours has shown. I can't find the statistics on what you've posted. I'd love to see the source.
This is not true. Racism is prejudice plus power. The dominant group cannot be oppressed because they have the power.
Racism exists on a systemic level. There have been amazing strides in the last 60 years. AMAZING!! There is still a long way to go. It's like watching a football game where the underdog scored 4 touchdowns in the third quarter but some people forgot that the half time score was 100-0.
racismnoun. [rey-siz-uh m] a belief or doctrine that inherent differences among the various human racial groups determine cultural or individual achievement, usually involving the idea that one's own race is superior and has the right to dominate others or that a particular racial group is inferior to the others.
The definition of racism does NOT require the racist†to have any POWER. By what you own words then, African Americans can not be racist. This notion is absolutely FALSE!
Racism is simply making assumptions about someone and treating them in a particular manner based on their perceived race.
Racism exists with both negative and positive connotations. For example, the assumptions that someone Asian is better in math or someone that is of African decent is better in sports is a racist perception. Now there are cultural traits that are NOT racist such as the Japanese culture puts an emphasis on education and excelling in both schooling and a career.
Kenya and Ethiopia have produced the most winning long distance runners in the world. This is NOT due to race, but to culture. The long distances between settlements, the infrastructure, and the agriculture produces lean individuals who routinely run long distances. These traits have been further refined and evolved through natural selection over the millennium.
What the OP has done is stereotype all white people in that town based on the actions of a few. I cannot believe that the whole town is racist. As a white person, I find it offensive when I am considered to have racist tendencies simply because I am white and because of the actions of other white people.
The racism described by the OP (white on black racismâ€), the oppression of African Americans (leading up to the Civil Rights movement), and even the confederate flag, has its roots in the Atlantic slave trade that lead to the civil war. The problem with this concept of racism is that it is believed that only white people are capable and responsible for such actions.
The white man did not introduce slavery to Africa . . . . And by the fifteenth century, men with dark skin had become quite comfortable with the concept of man as property . . . . Long before the arrival of Europeans on West Africa's coast, the two continents shared a common acceptance of slavery as an unavoidable and necessary—perhaps even desirable—fact of existence. The commerce between the two continents, as tragic as it would become, developed upon familiar territory. Slavery was not a twisted European manipulation, although Europe capitalized on a mutual understanding and greedily expanded the slave trade into what would become a horrific enterprise . . . . It was a thunder that had no sound. Tribe stalked tribe, and eventually more than 20 million Africans would be kidnapped in their own homeland(Source: Johnson, et al., Africans in America, 2, 5, 7; Seymour Drescher and Stanley L. Engerman, eds., A Historical Guide to World Slavery (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 370-375.)
So was this black on black racism†OR something different?
how Africans could have sold other Africans into slavery. The answer is that [African] slaveholders didn't think of themselves or their slaves as 'Africans.' Instead they thought of themselves as Edo or Songhai or members of another group. They thought of their slaves as foreigners or inferiors. In the same way, the Spanish, the French, and the English could massacre each other in bloody wars because they thought of themselves as Spanish, French, or English, rather than Europeans.(Source: Mary Beth Klee, John Cribb & John Holdren, eds., The Human Odyssey, The Modern World, 1400-1914, vol. 2 (McLean, Virginia: K-12 Inc., 2005), 269-270. )
Incomplete depictions of the Atlantic slave trade are, in fact, quite common. A 2003 study of 49 state U.S. history standards revealed that not one of these guides to classroom content even mentioned the key role of Africans in supplying the Atlantic slave trade. (Source: Sheldon M. Stern, Effective State Standards for U.S. History: A 2003 Report Card (Washington, D.C.: Thomas B. Fordham Foundation, 2003). This report is available for downloading at www.edexcellence.net )
In Africa itself, however, the slave trade is remembered quite differently. Nigerians, for example, explicitly teach about their own role in the trade:
Where did the supply of slaves come from? First, the Portuguese themselves kidnapped some Africans. But the bulk of the supply came from the Nigerians. These Nigerian middlemen moved to the interior where they captured other Nigerians who belonged to other communities. The middlemen also purchased many of the slaves from the people in the interior . . . . Many Nigerian middlemen began to depend totally on the slave trade and neglected every other business and occupation. The result was that when the trade was abolished [by England in 1807] these Nigerians began to protest. As years went by and the trade collapsed such Nigerians lost their sources of income and became impoverished.(Source: Michael Omolewa, CertificateHistory of Nigeria [Lagos, Nigeria: Longman Group, 1991], 96–103, cited in Dana Lindaman and Kyle Ward, History Lessons: How Textbooks around the World Portray U.S. History (New York: New Press, 2004), 79-83. )
Ghanaian diplomat Kofi Awoonor has written: I believe there is a great psychic shadow over Africa, and it has much to do with our guilt and denial of our role in the slave trade. We too are blameworthy in what was essentially one of the most heinous crimes in human history.†(Source: Johnson, et al., Africans in America, 2–3; Howard W. French, On Slavery, Africans Say the Guilt Is Theirs, Too,†New York Times, 27 December 1994, A4. )
In 2000, at an observance attended by delegates from several European countries and the United States, officials from Benin publicized President Mathieu Kerekou's apology for his country's role in selling fellow Africans by the millions to white slave traders.†We cry for forgiveness and reconciliation,†said Luc Gnacadja, Benin's minister of environment and housing. Cyrille Oguin, Benin's ambassador to the United States, acknowledged, We share in the responsibility for this terrible human tragedy.†(Source: Benin Apologizes for Role in Slave Trade,†Boston Globe, 19 April 2000; Richmond Times-Dispatch, 29 June 2003. )
Again, I am NOT excusing slavery or racism! I am not pointing fingers or assigning blame either.
I am however showing how certain facts are left out of the conversation and racism is ascribed to white individuals by the nature of them being white.
Another fact that is often overlooked is that there was another group that was more discriminated against held lower social status than African Americans (and slaves prior to the civil war). That was the Irish.
Like many immigrant groups in the United States, the Irish were characterized as racial Others when they first arrived in the first half of the 19th century. The Irish had suffered profound injustice in the U.K. at the hands of the British, widely seen as white negroes.†(Source: Book (fionnbarra1994ulster) Dochartaigh, F. Ó. & McAliskey, B. D. Ulster's White Negroes AK Press, 1994 ) The potato famine that created starvation conditions that cost the lives of millions of Irish and forced the migration of millions of surviving ones, was less a natural disaster and more a complex set of social conditions created by British landowners.
Once in the U.S., the Irish were to negative stereotyping that was very similar to that of enslaved Africans and African Americans. The comic Irishman – happy, lazy, stupid, with a gift for music and dance – was a stock character in American theater. Drunkenness and criminality were major themes of Irish stereotypes, and the term paddy wagon†(Source: Online Etymology Dictionary ) has its etymological roots in the racist term paddy,†a shortening of the name Patrick,†which was used to refer to the Irish. However, this is also a gendered image and refers to Irish men, specifically.
Simian, or ape-like caricature of the Irish immigrant was also a common one among the mainstream news publications of the day (much like the recent New York Post cartoon). For example, in 1867 American cartoonist Thomas Nast drew The Day We Celebrate†a cartoon depicting the Irish on St. Patrick's Day as violent, drunken apes. (Source: >> The Day We Celebrate Our Nineteenth-Century American Museum ) In 1899, Harper's Weekly featrued a drawing of three men's heads in profile: Irish, Anglo-Teutonic and Negro, (Source: The Sun At Midnight, St. Patrick's Day: A History of Racism, A... ) in order to illustrate the similarity between the Irish and the Negro (and, the supposed superiority of the Anglo-Teutonic).
​So after all this political corrected-ness, let's get on to solutions.
I am as much an artist as a scientist. My appearance does not fit that of a stereotypical professional male (except maybe in California); long hair, pierced ears, a preference for linen and seersucker suits… In order to be true to who I am, I became one of the top 100 people for what I do in the US. When I am called in to an organization, it is to contain, control, and mitigate something REALLY bad that happened. That being said, results, NOT appearances matter. I also charge accordingly.
To the OP, I say be the best that you can be at your chosen profession. That will shine through any appearances of you. Do not let you as a person end at your job either; there is much to be done in communities. I have to imagine that this town as described must suffer to some degree economic depression. What better way to change perceptions than volunteering at a free clinic? Treating people with dignity, respect, and compassion when they are at their most vulnerable has a way of changing perceptions.
I work as a nurse in a federal hospital...I get this all the time...yet I work psych. I get called sweet cheeks, cracker!, and a few other things but I think its funny. I have the great option of reminding people that the police will be up momentarily if it gets to that point, but more times or not I just say: "your a bold man sir...not many people announce their sexuality in public. I commend you"...then again I'm a big hairy 300lb male nurse. I will say I get away with a lot though. Like a patient told me he wasn't talking any more to me because I was white...I said "sir, I'm eskimo how and as long as your neck works you can answer yes or no".
I have done my research and it is almost the complete opposite of what yours has shown. I can't find the statistics on what you've posted. I'd love to see the source.
I erred in saying women aren't protected. They're not a specific class, but are deemed as having minority status. I don't really understand that, but that's what I read.
I'd be interested to read what your research has shown up until now. I do appreciate your sharing.
OH...PUT IT BACK IN THE DECK SWEET CHEEKS!! I'd probably not feel safe around there either. I mean look at all the racial uproar black people have stirred up over the recent years. Come on, you want respect then act respectful damn it! Geesh
morte, LPN, LVN
7,015 Posts
i am thinking you don't want to know...