Crime, Stereotypes and the complex world

My mom just called me to tell me that my brother and sister-in-law were mugged last night at gun-point while their children watched.

I was at work with TakeAction MN today talking with our reNEW MN Campaign about the DFL State Convention today and we also talked to the candidates about appointments and priorities to communities of color. For this reason I was not at the gathering my family had at the park. Supposedly my bother showed up and he did not look right. At the end he told my family about what happened.

This is what occurred: they were getting to their home and when they were taking the kids out of the car, two men approached them pointing at them with guns and asking for their wallets. Both my sister-in-law and brother gave them their purse and wallet respectively. My sister-in-law fainted and one of the kids got really scared. The police then showed up after my brother called to report the crime. The police took the testimonies of my family and then advice they go cancels their credit cards. By the time they got to do that, supposedly the cards had been already used. And at least one cell phone was taken, which was well used before it got canceled.

I bet this was such a scary moment for all of them -- nothing like this has ever happened to a member of my family and we had never known someone to have gone through this. At least one of the kids is very traumatized and has not been eating well.

Here I want to recognize that there is a lot of stereotypes many Latin@ immigrants (the community I am a part of) hold about different ethnic communities. Sometimes even academics, especially Chican@ ones, dismiss this fact and only focus in stereotypes whites hold (which is important, but very impartial). I grew up hearing that blacks are bad and lazy, whites are good, especially when they try to speak in Spanish, and other Latin@s are so so. Asians are short and have many kids and Native Americans live off the government because they get so much money for being Native, so they don't have to work. Ever.

Now, what is very interesting to me is to see the language being used to describe what happened. Apparently the two males who mugged my sibling and family were black. The first time I heard it, it made me really uncomfortable. I think it was because these two black males meet the stereotype many in my community hold. Granted, we don't interact much with other communities, so every interaction we have with a member of an "other" community is going to live a mark. Definitely this one will leave a huge mark in my family's experience and how they think of blacks now.

Now that I am in college, I live in a very different world than my family. I interact with people from many walks of life and that shapes the way I think about race/ethnicity. I think I was also uncomfortable when I first heard it was two black males who mugged my sibling and family because for sometime I have been trying to speak about race/ethnicity not being the cause to why people act a certain way and what happened last night seems to be working against that. There was anything I could say to explain that the two males did commit this crime, but it wasn't just because they were black. It now appears that the belief is that all blacks are criminals for being black and yesterday's occurrence only enforced that, unfortunately.

I am not trying to excuse these thugs to any degree, but race/ethnicity is only secondary to what happened. And it is tough to convey this message, I feel.

This world of crime and race/ethnicity is complex. And occurrences that "prove" stereotypes we hold only reinforce what many think to be true even if it is not.

I am glad my family is fine and I sure hope this episode does not tarnish their love for humanity, all humanity.