One of the aspects of travel nursing that I have continued to say that I enjoy so much is meeting people from different backgrounds and cultures. The past couple of nights at work a couple of us tore down the walls of prejudice and really talked about some of the racism that still exists.
I have always said that movies such as The Help reinforce that I would have had a very tough time living during segregation. I grew up in a predominantly white area and really only had a couple of African American kids in my school. So it is safe to say that I never really had any AA friends growing up.
Then when I went to college, my sophomore year I had a roommate that was AA. That was a culture shock in a lot of ways, but I learned so much from LaNervia. First off, it took me a couple of weeks to even pronounce her name correctly. Secondly, I learned that AA's have extremely thin skin, so LaNervia said; as the reason that the thermostat was set at 80 degrees. Needless to say, I spent much of that year with my window open dropping the temperature out of sauna range. Just little old Northern Kentucky University opened this girl's eyes in 1995. Geez, that sounds forever ago.
The last couple of days I was working with a gentleman from the African country Malawi,and a young lady that grew up in the inner city streets of Baltimore, a young lady that grew up in Massachusetts and this gal whom grew up in a pretty rural area. The discussions that ensued were interesting.
A is a very dark black man with a huge heart of gold, that exudes nothing but generosity and goodwill. I just adore him. He calls me his work wife and we are always cutting up together and having a good time.
J is the young lady that grew up in inner city Baltimore. She is quite a bit younger than A and I, but definitely has street smarts that speak volumes of experience. She listens to my Baltimore tales and just shakes her head. She feels that Baltimore gets a bit more of a bad rap than it deserves at times. I don't how much creedence she holds as Baltimore consistently makes the top 10 list year after year.
For those of you that don't know much about where I grew up, it was a small town in Indiana that only had a blinking red light for the longest time. We had a mini mart, that somehow is still standing in the same building as it was when I was younger, a tiny post office, a couple of churches and a community of individuals that pretty much knew everyone. It was a very safe community that had lots of kids riding their bikes on country roads and playing football, baseball, and basketball outside until the sun went down. The good ole days, remember? When it was safe to stray from your parents for hours on end and kids actually did play outside. It was a farming area with horses, cows, guineas and peacocks wandering out in the road. I just have such fond memories of my time in Greenville. As I spent time with my mom, I also got to experience other small towns such as Georgetown and Corydon that also had that small community feel to them.
I set all this preface just to expose how we all came from very different backgrounds and we have come together here in Baltimore. I was really brought up not to see color. I can clearly see that A is much darker than I, but I am more interested in the culture that he brings to the table.
A told a story of when he was in nursing school and he had a white female that was adamant that he not care for her. Several other nurses accused this young lady of being very prejudiced and wrong in her actions. Albert said that he figured she had her reasons and chose to move on and not dwell on it. Later on the young lady asked to speak to A alone and he gladly went in to speak with her. She went on to explain that she really wasn't prejudice; but that she had been raped my a black man. A said that the 0.5% that was angry with her, yet he knew there had to be a better reason in this day and age, melted. He said he wanted so badly to rectify the wrongs that this gentleman had done and try to rebuild this girls image of an upstanding black man in her eyes; yet he knew he couldn't. She didn't want anyone to know that she had been raped and had come to terms with the fact that unless she was willing to go down that painful path each time, she unfortunately had to bear the cross of coming across as prejudice anytime a black male came in to be her nurse or aid. Wow! That made me think!
I have noticed that it really isn't whom the ethnic group is around me, but being anywhere that I am majorly the minority isn't really scary; it's just a feeling that is palpable. Not a feeling that I ever noticed in the midwest. Does that make sense? It is actually a very humbling experience. I have felt this feeling once when I was in a Target in SC in a predominantly AA neighborhood. I experienced it in California when I was in a grocery store and everyone but me was Asian or Middle Eastern. I noticed it again when I was bike riding a couple of weeks ago through a very Hacidic Jewish community and I rode through just as synagogue was letting out. I was like a needle in a haystack.
It was interesting to me though to hear what a scary situation would be for me versus A and J; just having different skin colors. A situation that would alarm me is if I found myself driving through or walking through a predominantly AA neighborhood, project area alone. I just feel like this Irish girl would stick out and just be asking for trouble. That is a situation that would put me on alert. J said that 9.9/10 times I would be just fine because I would probably be viewed as an undercover cop. I had never thought of it that way. Or, unless I was disturbing them for drugs or making a scene, why would I be bothered? I realize that bad things can happen anywhere. It is just best to be cautious and wary of your surroundings.
Their walk in my shoes would be a situation in which they were in an upper middle class white area and be the only black individual there. They state that they often feel that they are targeted that they are going to steal something or encounter an individual that still holds very prejudice views. It blows my mind that this would even still happen. But, I believe them that it does.
It was just so interesting to me the dichotomy of what we both feared in the same situations. I feared bodily harm or just being messed with, where A and J feared character assassination. Both are equally devastating and both exist everyday sadly. It is just sad that the preface for such actions can start skin deep.
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