[quote]krazykoukides wrote:
I think a lot of people just lack perspective on the subject. Like me, for example, I grew up in mostly white suburbia and just a few years ago I believed racism and hate crimes to be a thing of the past.
Then I got engaged to and subsequently married an Egyptian muslim. My perspective quickly changed as I witnessed relatives gawking at my wife’s father simply because he is rather dark in skin color. Some family members won’t even speak to me because I married a muslim. And others, while trying to appear genuine, talk to my wife like she is an alien from another planet.
The list goes on and on but before that I was clueless. I didn’t think the hate still existed like that. I thought we as a whole were free of it. I was really wrong.
I pray to god that when my wife goes to work every day some fucktard doesn’t do what happened to the poor woman in the news story, to my wife. People don’t understand that fear until they live with it.[/quote]
One of my cousins, born and raised French, had a hard time with her husband’s family. Like you, he grew up in white suburbia and thought racism was just a thing from the past. When they began dating, whenever my cousin was being discriminated against, he’d ignore it. According to him, she was seeing things. And he even used to take great offence at the fact that she was pointing out racism. She was French after all, why would she be treated like shit?
When it was time to introduce her to his family, they rejected my cousin and threw her out of their house like an animal. They knew beforehand that she was black, my brother- in- law had told them, but still, they invited her over, just to humiliate her. It didn’t matter that my cousin was French and not an immigrant. It didn’t matter that she had a great career, own a house and car, and was polite and courteous. She was black. And that was the issue. His mother even said she didn’t want the family blood to be spoilt, she didn’t want dark skinned grand -children and that she would disown him if he dared to marry my cousin.
What happened hit him hard. From that day, he began to notice people’s blatant or subtle racist attitude toward his fiancee. My cousin and her husband have now two wonderful 3 years old boys who don’t know their grandparents because they’re still refusing to see them.
It is a sad and sickening that nowadays, people are still being treated differently and even killed because of their race and cultural background. The fact that some people refuse to acknowledge or try to downplay racism makes it even sadder.
I hope you and your wife never go through what the Alawadi family has gone through, Krazy. No one deserves that shit.