I am busy putting the final touches on my kitchen remodel today, so I am going to ask you all to help me with a little project.
You know how I never ask you for anything? Well, today I am cashing in. I am asking you to do me a favor.
I would love it if you would take 3 minutes and write down a story of a time when you really screwed up and you got called on it. Maybe it was a time when you did something racist. Maybe it is a time when you said something you were later really embarrassed about. Maybe it is a time when you went down in flames defending something you did, only to realize later you were so, so wrong.
You can write it in the comments or you can email me privately (and let me know if/how I can share your story on this blog) at amfamblog at gmail dot com.
I am going to write my own story too. I have screwed up many a time. Please reassure me I am not alone.
*Oh my gosh you guys, my kitchen is going to look so effing awesome! Pics by friday, I hope.
i can’t believe i’m writing this out here for everyone to see, but…..i wish everyday that i could go back and unquit the awesome internship I had at a non profit firm where i got to advocate for persons with disabilities everyday. i got pregnant my third year of law school (he is a wonderful, amazing oops and i wouldn’t trade him for the world!) but at the time i morning sickness was ALL DAY sickness and i was incredibly hormonal. a full load of classes, plus the internship (i’d been asked to stay on into my third year of law school, past the initial summer term i’d been hired for) and all the physical stuff i was going through was a lot. sometime during winter break, things got bad enough i called my supervisor without much planning and quit. the phone call went kind of badly….i initially felt better but then realized the magnitude of my error and have been living with my unprofessionalism ever since. blech. it was so stupid and out of character for me, i swear, that it kills me when i think of it. will that do? i can’t wait to hear about and see the kitchen!
This is my story. it is on IPad so excuse the mistakes.
When I was pregnant with ds (hapa), I was watching a true crime show with my mom. The show said, “A body was found. I could not be identified. It was either Asian or had Down’s Syndrome.”
So then I fretted and worried to my mom: “What if my kid looks like he has Down’s Syndrome?”. my mom’s response:”Chillax”
Then I was telling this story to my friend who was also hapa, and instantly I regretted it.
(The dead body in the TV show was eventually identified as an Asian woman.)
I think my biggest adoption regret is sharing WAY more of my daughter’s story than I should have, not only with family and friends, but ON OUR BLOG! I was uninformed – I didn’t read anything – and it was a HUGE mistake. I WISH someone would have commented and told me I was making a mistake. That was clear back in 2005; there weren’t many bloggers then, and not many I didn’t know visited our blog.
As soon as I knew better I took the posts down and hoped that no one would remember. Unfortunately the damage was done. I can only help by sharing my mistake with others…and keeping my big mouth shut about my daughter’s story. I even shut our blog down recently because at 7 my daughter no longer wanted me sharing photos and cute stories. I understand and I will apologize to her when she is old enough to understand my stupidity.
I’ve also said SO many idiotic things – racist things – which I had no clue were racist. I grew up in the midwest and attended Catholic School for 13 years; there was 1 person of color in my high school. I just didn’t get it. I am still learning and ALWAYS appreciate it when someone calls attention to something I say that is inappropriate.
One final story about how much my opinions have turned in the last 6 1/2 years…When a young person in our extended family became pregnant at 16 I suggested to my sister that she should give the child up for adoption so that the baby would have a better life and the girl could go to college, and have a successful life. (Yes THOSE words came out of MY mouth). My sister argued that giving up the baby for adoption would be traumatic for both the girl and her baby, that it wasn’t natural, that she wouldn’t be able to get over it, etc. My sister had a close friend who was a first mom and at the beginning of reunion with her daughter. Thankfully the family member kept her son, she is going to college, he has a good life, and they have a lot of family support. THAT’s what everyone should have. I’m the FIRST one now to preach it!
It’s amazing how an opinion can change once you’ve seen, heard, and considered BOTH sides of a situation. I’m so so thankful for the entire blogging community who has helped me see all points of view, directed me to tons of resources, and been open to answering my questions. It’s because of that that I am a MUCH better adoptive mother than I would have been had I only my previous experiences to draw from.
Ok.
There was the time that I assumed that the black man walking down the hall of my University building was a janitor and informed him the women’s bathroom needed toilet paper. Next day at faculty meeting I was introduced to Archbishop Desmond Tutu, visiting our school for the year, office down the hall from mine. Same man, of course. I was horrified. I’m still horrified. By all of it.
Omg, you totally win!!
You win.
I was about 14. We had just moved from rural Ohio to a Philly suburb in NJ. We (my mom and I) were working hard to be cool and cosmopolitan rather than appearing to the sheltered hayseeds we were. She had told me her new boss was gay – not a big deal, just something she mentioned. I had lunch with her at work one day and her boss joined us. I whispered (and I’m sure it was a stage whisper) “Is he the one who is gay?”. Everyone was horrified. I want to crawl under a table just typing that. Gah.
You totally win!
Yup, you win. But if it’s any comfort, you inspired me to post my own fail lol
Midwestern girl who belonged to a sorority in college that had themed parties. One was a reggae party and the t-shirt had a horribly stereotyped depiction of a Rastafarian. It was worse than you’re imaging. I wore it once. Fortunately I was called on it and trashed it immediately. I still feel sick thinking about it and know that shirts from the party were worn for years on our mostly white campus.
This shows how old I am…
Crowd gathered around the door of the head of my division’s office where there was a TV. I wander up and ask what’s up. Someone says problem with the space shuttle. I say maybe it blew up ha ha. Room goes silent and they all turn and look at me and then I see the detritus from the Challenger falling to earth. MY idiocy and crassness haunt me to this day. I had no excuse, yes I was young but still…
Ok, I have a couple of stories of racist things I have done:
1. Worn cheongsams for Halloween parties (complete with chopsticks as hair accessories) during college. I might have even done that twice. I am pretty embarrassed now. More so for the chopsticks, as I still think that the dresses themselves are beautiful…but still. As a costume, I shake my head.
2. When we first started to look into adopting from China – I did consider (for about a day or two) naming our daughter Mae. Yup. And thankfully, quickly came to my senses on the issues of appropriation. But I did think about it. Fairly seriously. Or as seriously as one can when first starting the “name choice”.
3. Probably my biggest wake up call (and most shameful), though, was when I asked my very good friend for a reference for our homestudy and she told me “no”. My friend, who is African American, told me that she didn’t approve of our decision to adopt transracially and she wouldn’t write any letter supporting that idea. It was a total shocking moment for me – how dare this person who had always told me what a good mother I was to C tell me that she wouldn’t write that letter of recommendation! And how dare she lecture me about racism! I wasn’t racist! I should be able to adopt any child I wanted to, darn it! Honestly, things were tense between us for about a year. And by tense, I mean we started having honest conversations about race, about racism in the US and about my sense of privilege that really challenge my viewpoint of myself and of our friendship.
Almost 7 years later, I can happily say that we are closer than we were before that conversation and she is godmother to our daughter from China. The biggest thing I learned from that experience was how much my friend had not revealed to me until that moment of truth on how she looked at the world, what her experiences had been in the world, and how separate she saw us (even though we were very good friends!). I also was forced to confront a lot of my own privilege and I realize now how lucky I was to have someone who cared enough about me and our friendship to be willing to be honest and to stick with me while I processed my own racism/privilege on display.
While I know that I am personalizing this, I now do shake my head anytime I read about a person declaring how their black friend, or Asian friend, or Latino friend feels about race (usually thinking it isn’t a big deal – whatever the context) because I see my younger self in that and feel pretty strongly that the person of color being used as “proof” in that context probably doesn’t even have a clue that the conversation is going on and has also probably never said what the white person is claiming. That a lot of those claims are most probably what the white person believes would be the answer…because their friend has never told them the truth about the differences between them in experience and perception. And that most of the white people having that conversation think that they aren’t racist, and therefore they cannot do racist things. Ugg.
I’m not adding a story, but I have a question related to this comment. Elsewhere I’ve seen people remark how wearing the traditional dress of a country as a costume is racist, and Sasha mentioned embarrassment at having worn a cheongsam as a costume. Please enlighten me because I don’t understand how this is racist. To me, it seems the same as wearing lederhosen or some other folk outfit and doesn’t seem offensive. I’d like to know why this is offensive/racist. Thanks!
I agree… I’m Chinese and I’m not embarrassed when other people where traditional Chinese dresses or outfits for costumes. Unless they start clapping their hands together and bowing, or trying to do other “traditional Chinese things.”
However, I think that some people might find it offensive because the person is wearing the dress as a costume, something along the lines of trying to be Batman or Wonder Woman. Or Frankenstein. Does that make sense? Probably not. It made sense in my head. That someone (Person A) might think the person (Person B) wearing the traditional dress as a “costume” would think that the dress of Person A’s culture is funny or meant to be made fun of.
I think Melinda’s 2nd paragraph nailed it.
The only thing I’d add is that, history and power differences and race being what they are, wearing lederhosen just *isn’t* the same as wearing a cheongsam (in the U.S., at least).
1) When I was about 10, I told my mother I thought it would be fun to have lived before the civil war and to have had a slave. I was thinking of a perpetual playmate who always had to do what I wanted, as opposed to my rather uncooperative siblings who had (gasp) their own ideas. She pretty quickly set me straight about the realities of slavery and how, even if I was sure *I’d* be a kind, gentle slave owner, it was still wrong. 2) I was scheduled to fly to Italy on 9/12/01 for a trip I’d been dreaming about and planning for about a year. The infamous day before, I was in a meeting when one of my colleagues announced he’d just heard that a plane had crashed into the
World Trade Center. My knee jerk reaction was “damn it, it couldn’t have waited a couple of days???” Now, I honestly had no idea at the time exactly what had happened; I think we all were envisioning a navigational mishap with a small private plane, but it’s still a remarkably selfish and callous thought. I get a little sick to my stomach when I think about what that comment reveals about my instincts.
I lost a friendship because I told a friend I saw her ex-boyfriend who had recently returned from a 3-month trip to Greece and that he never even mentioned her once….sighhh…I was really stoopid once….and should learn to use my grey cells a little more.
I vote Elaine who mistook Desmond Tutu for the university janitor.
I completely f**ed up my best friendship from high school when she told me that she considered that her sexual relationship with her h.s. boyfriend had been rape. (He was constantly pestering her for sex, she said no for a long time and then finally, reluctantly consented.) I showed no sympathy and told her that if she said yes, it wasn’t rape — she might regret it, but it wasn’t rape. I had no sense of the nuances, no sense of the power relationship or the way it should be “yes means yes,” not just “no means no.” I was totally on my high horse and I bitterly regret it. We are FB “friends” but it could never be the same, I don’t think.
You’re not alone in this. I thought the same thing about my best friend when she got drunk and had sex with a total jacknut from our school and tried to call it rape later. Thankfully, we recovered and she’s still my best friend. I just think when you’re that young, you just don’t comprehend things that way unless you actually live it.
Once in college two guys I knew were talking about a project they were working on in an engineering lab. They said, “Jose came and ruined it after we were done with it!” I said, “Who’s Jose? The janitor?” They rightly responded with, “No, you racist! He’s the Assistant Professor!” It jolted me that I had had such a racist assumption and I remember it often. And it kills me when I see someone approach a person in a store to ask them if they work there, based not on a uniform or a nametag, but on the color of their skin. Because it reminds me I once did the same thing based on a name.
When I was in high school, I was being interviewed by the student newspaper. During the interview I said something that rated a 10 on the cheese scale. It was corny and cliche. Realizing this, I said to the interview, “Wow, that sounded really gay.” The interviewer immediately gave me a verbal smackdown, telling me I shouldn’t say that. And I haven’t since.
[...] Stories. Ok, so if you weren’t reading along, please read the comments on the last post. I think we can all agree, poor Elaine takes the cake with her story. Oh man. I want to hide [...]
I routinely used the word gay to mean lame or stupid until my sophomore year of college when I was called out on, realized what an asshat I was being and never used it that way again. Gah!
A Filipino friend and his then pre-teen daughter too me to Grand-Mart (asian supermarket) one time because he was shopping for ingredients to make barbecued short ribs. I kept oogling at all the esoteric to me ingredients (chicken feet, squid, etc) and poking his daughter to show her anything I thought was weird…until I clued in to her total nonchalance that I was acting like a total fool, and what seemed weird and gross to me was totally part of her regular shopping experience.
I’ve let numerous naive and ignorant remarks fall out of my mouth over the years. I like to think I’m vastly improved… until I find a new blind spot. That’s me, always finding new and improved ways to embarrass myself. Two distant episodes that come to mind:
In college I lived in an international dorm that was about 50-50 international/American. I had lots of friends from different countries, and considered myself enlightened. But once when somebody from the dorm was doing a kind of interview survey with a Lebanese student, I made a stupid remark. I was going to tease him, so I said “Him? Why don’t you do a survey with someone from someplace civilized?” Several of my friends present immediately smacked me down, of course. I blithely did not believe them (I thought I was just making a joke.) It took me a few days/months/years before I understood how bigoted I’d been.
Oh, and then there was the after-performance Q&A talk at a modern dance. I exclaimed how interesting it was as an artistic choice that they had men dancing with men at certain points in the choreography. Everybody hurriedly ignored me. I’m amazed that the man I was seeing at the time didn’t give me an earful later. At least he didn’t laugh at me. I think I’ve forgiven myself by now.