Journal 4: Stereotyping

When I was growing up I moved a lot, and I came into contact with many different kinds of people. As a result, I’ve figured out that people don’t always live up to the stereotypes that society forces on them. I, too, am one of those people. However, some people are as open minded as I am, and sometimes I ended up being the victim of some serious stereotyping throughout my life. I moved to Auburn, Alabama. It was a quiet little college town that my family had moved to because of my dad’s job. This was when my parents first decided to put my brother and I in private school. After looking at several different schools, my parents came to the conclusion that Lee-Scott Academy was the school we were going to attend. Lee-Scott was a predominantly “white school”, and my brother and I were two of about 5 black children at the school. So it is obvious that we would be subject for some type of stereotype or the other.

Obviously, I’m black, and for most of my life, I have had very long hair, which was my own natural hair. This is not a typical trait for most black people. Most people think that all black have “nappy” hair, and that all black women wear “weave”. However, this was not the case. It was quite the opposite. My dad is half Spanish and my mom is half Indian (not American Indian) which is the reason for my hair being the way it was. One day in class, one of the boys that sat behind me asked how it felt to wear fake hair (weave) all the time. I told him that I don’t wear fake hair, never have, and never will. Then he said, “Of course you do. All black people do.” This made me so mad. How could someone be so ignorant? I kind of wanted to punch him in the face at that point. For the rest of the day he kept bugging me about my hair, telling me that it wasn’t necessary to lie, and that no one would judge me because my hair wasn’t my own. Oh the irony. The next day at lunch, the same kid decided to prove that I was lying by trying to pull out “weave” from my head. He had pulled and pulled so much that he actually pulled some from the back of my head, which made me start to bleed. After he realized what he had done, he just walked away and sat back down like nothing had happened. Luckily, the Headmaster walked into the cafeteria at the time, and he got suspended for two weeks. And to think all of that drama could have been avoided if he wasn’t such an ignorant jerk.