The Personal Side of Bias, Prejudice, and Oppression

The incident that jumps in my mind is one I saw take place about ten years ago and pizza restaurant. A group of teen-agers were sitting at a table talking meanly about others at their school. At the table diagonal from them was a young Asian girl in her late teens/early twenties. All of a sudden another teen-age girl walked into the pizza place and up to the table of other teens and said in a very loud angry voice, “If that Asian tramp looks at me again I am going to smack her in her pan flat face. What is with her face anyway? It’s like she does not have bones it is so flat”. All the other teens at the table started to laugh. The Asian girl and the other table hung her head low as if trying to hide. She was not even whom they were talking about but you would see the worry, shame, and sadness on her face and body language. She pushed her plate back and stood up and walked out.

In this instance the girl in no way felt equal or as good as the other group of mostly white teens. I cannot speak for her but if I were her I would have felt diminished, damages or wrong, and like my ethnicity was bad for simply not looking like others. When I witnessed this I was heart broken for the girl and so angry at the other teens.

After the girl left I did walk over to the table of teens and briefly explain that they need to be careful with what they say and that they hurt the feelings of the other girl that was sitting by them. There response was “so, we don't care about her. Mind your own business”. I wish I would have had the courage to teach them instead of point out what they had done. That I could have made a change in this minds and hearts so that the behavior would not have happened again. I think of this situation often and try to figure out what I could have done differently.