Week 6-The Personal Side of Bias, Prejudice, and Oppression

When I was getting my BA I was part of a program called Camp Adventure and we were highly trained camp counselors that worked on military bases around the world.  My first summer I was in Landstuhl, Germany working at a teen center.  At once point during the summer a young boy got into a fight with another.  He was hit in the face with a ping pong ball and wanted to get after the boy who accidentally hit him.  I immediately asked him to turn around and go for a walk and then he hit me.  Our protocol was to call a meeting with his parents.  I thought that it would be a meeting to discuss strategies to deescalate discuses where we would go from here.  Well, it turned out that his mother walked into the meeting and called me a " rich, white, racist.” Equity was diminished as soon as she walked in the door, she had assumed that I played apart in the reason her son hit me, even though he was mad at the other boy and not me. I had no words that could come out and it was the first time I had felt that my skin color was defining who I am and why something had happened. I felt that there was a bias towards me before she even knew me.  

This particular young boy was not the easiest boy in the center and at times it was challenging to deal with the behavior he was exhibiting.  Even though this was the most in your face incident I had ever experienced, it turned out to be a wonderful experience.  I changed the way I worked with this teen.  I saw the way his mother acted with me and I had a feeling she might act this way with her son.  I started to act in a more caring way towards him and we worked out what had happened and ended the summer on a great note.