Sticks and Stones and Bullets Can Break My Bones

When we were kids, we were told to respond to name-calling with "sticks and stones can break my bones but names can never hurt me." I am not so sure if we can really say that names don't hurt. I was recently on YouTube catching all of Sanjaya Malakar's press coverage and mixed in with my search for media about Sanjaya Malakar were some home-made racist skits that I found so offensive. I am not sure what kind of person would produce a tape reflecting so much hate towards another human based solely on their ethnic heritage, and be proud to sign their name to it. Furthermore, who would post comments about such tapes being so funny and so great, and again, sign their name to it? I guess in the anonymous world of the Internet, you can write the most racist, hurtful thing possibly imaginable, and put it out there without having to take any responsibility for your words and actions. And it's not just in the world of the Internet, it's in our everyday human world as well.

I live in a community with some older white women who apparently have nothing going on in their lives so they complain about the Latinos and how they cook and smell up the whole building with their spices (I think it is actually the Indian cooking that causes the smell, but whatever). We live in a world with some very intolerant people. Certain people will criticize you if you do not live your life exactly the way that they live theirs. If you come from a culture where families are important and weekends consist of families coming together to sit and talk and eat and have fun, you will be criticized because you are Mexican or Puerto Rican. Are the old white ladies perhaps mad that their families do not want to visit them? One of the elderly white women who regularly complains to me about the Latinos also tells me that her kids will not come see her and she blames that on the African Americans and Latinos that live in the neighborhood. She says that her kids do not feel safe coming to visit her. I wonder if they just don't feel safe around her? I think if you have a mother that constantly criticizes everything you do, as an adult, you may not really want to be around her all that much.

The same holds true for all adult relationships. If anyone wants to try and make me feel bad about anything in my life, I have the ability to eliminate them from my life. It is a little harder to do that when you are younger, and that is why we have episodes like the Virginia Tech shootings. Cho Seung-Hui, the shooter of what is commonly referred to as the deadliest mass shooting since 1991, has a whole extensive history of "rich white kids" teasing and making fun of him and making him feel bad for not speaking English very well and his Korean heritage. And then we wonder how something like this could happen? The media paints this terrible picture of dead bodies being carried out of the school with cell-phones from their pockets ringing, most likely from parents hearing the news and calling to see if they are okay. When the identity of the shooter is released, the country all hops on a Korean-hating bandwagon. And since most white people don't care to tell the difference between Korean, Vietnamese or Chinese, it ends up being an East Asian hating bandwagon. Just like after 9-11 when our country went through a brown-people hating phase. Is there a cycle here that just keeps perpetuating more hate? Remember we're not immune to it - less than a year ago, an Indian kid shot up his school in Canada. What is going on?

It's hard to say what should be done. I have an African American friend who often says if a white person calls him the n-word, he would knock him out (he says it a little more colorfully than that, but you get the idea). This same man has a job working with kids and one of the kids he works with did just that when a white boy called him the n-word. The African American kid ended up getting suspended and the white kid got detention. Is that fair? We live in a world where we do not have to be accountable or responsible for our words and our language. What is the result of that? Virginia Tech.