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Photo Not Available PREJUDICE-REDUCING EXPERIENCE Chris BACKGROUND Sex: male Ethnicity: Caucasian Born in: Riverside, CA Parents born in: US   My father was a college teacher in the 1960's with very liberal/leftist leanings. I don't see myself as the typical white American; Republican, ethnocentric, probusiness, etc. I was brought up in an environment in which I was made conscious of the injustices and inequalities in American society. I had a prejudice against 'physically deformed' people as a child, that I feel I no longer have, at least not to the same extent.   I remember as a small child, probably four to five years old, an incident in which I saw a boy with a club foot at a picnic. I experienced a horrible sense of fear and dread about getting closer to him. I somehow felt that close contact or exposure to him would affect me somehow, as if I would get infected by him and develop the same physical condition. I don't remember if I talked to my parents about it or not. Several years later when I was in fifth grade, I remember a boy that I knew only vaguely who was playing in his garage with some chemicals and started a fire. He was wearing a yarn cap which caught on fire and melted on his face. The news of what happened to him was all over school, an it was several months before he came back to school. The same sense of fear and dread that I experienced before, returned when I saw him at school. He looked to me like a monster and I just wanted to get as far away as possible. I remember a certain sense of embarrassment and guilt that I felt because other kids had no qualms about interacting with him. I just couldn't do it. My teacher was an older Scandinavian woman who told me that the boy was the same boy as before, he had the same thoughts, emotions, and sense of humor as before the accident, I did eventually talk to him and came to terms with my feelings to a certain extent and maybe that paved the way for me to work with autistic boys after I graduated from college. The first day on the job one of the kids flipped over the dinner table, go up and ran off screaming and biting his hand. Although I didn't have the same sense of dread as before, I definitely was a bit freaked out. I ended up working at the home for about two years, and by the end I was so familiar and used to the eccentric behavior of the kids that I would often catch myself noticing the reactions of other people when we took the kids to a fast food restaurant or park. I had been around them for so long that I had become so use to their behavior and way of being, that I just assumed that everyone else would react to them as normal, average people. I think in that way I am much more comfortable with special or 'non-normal' people than I had been before. As a teacher now, I often teach physical or mentally challenged kids for at least some portions of the day or year, and basically see them as a student with special needs. Although it sounds cliched, I do think that once you know someone well you become much less concerned with their outward appearance, and actually evaluate their attractiveness (or lack of it) more or less on qualities such as wit, intelligence, kindness, energy and other attributes that are not based on physical characteristics.   BACK TO MENU | CHRIS'S PREJUDICE-ENFORCING EXPERIENCE Top of Page Home | Power of Teaching | Believing is Seeing | Truth or Consequences | That Was Fun