Growing up biracial — the importance of wordsPosted in Articles, Media Archive, United States on 2015-01-28 23:47Z by Steven |
Growing up biracial — the importance of words
The Lincoln Journal Star
Lincoln, Nebraska
2015-01-25
Cindy Lange-Kubick, Life columnist
She is in the breakroom at Walgreens Thursday morning, getting ready for a seven-hour shift.
KaDeja Sangoyele is trying not to cry.
She gets emotional, she says. It’s that word — half-breed.
“My life was horrible at times because of words like that,” she says.
KaDeja is talking about a blog, The Objective Conservative, and a post calling Barack Obama the “half-breed” president.
She’s talking about Patrick McPherson, the blog’s founder and co-editor who says he didn’t know about that post or about others, dating to 2011, that use those same words and other slurs and demeaning stereotypes about race.
McPherson is a newly elected member of the Nebraska Board of Education. He’s the former chairman of the Douglas County Republican Party.
Some people are calling for him to resign. Those people include the governor and senators and members of Congress and a multitude of ministers and educators and the NAACP and city council members and many others — both Republicans and Democrats.
And KaDeja, too.
“To be a part of today’s society — you can’t think that’s OK,” she said. “There’s no way.”
Especially for an authority figure, she says. Someone who is supposed to do what’s best for kids.
“It makes me angry.”
KaDeja is 19. She grew up in Lincoln. She’s a sophomore in college; she wants to study psychiatric nursing. She’s taking four classes this semester and working full time. She loves to run and read and listen to live music and watch Netflix; she likes leggings and Lilly Pulitzer and triple Americanos and hanging out with her friends.
She knows what half-breed means. She knows other words like it — meant to denigrate a person because of his or her skin color. The one they called her most was “mutt.”…
Read the entire article here.