Woah... you are lucky, your family is a rich one.
Spoil brats do not know how hard we have to work just to be able to live properly.
Your family took all the money from us.
Can I have your money, you should buy us something. That what a rich boy like you have to do to us.
Those were some of common talks I often heard and addressed to me during my childhood. I had a slanted eyes and due to my eyes, people saw me as a Chinese descendant, even though I was not. But people would not care about it, you had a slanted eyes here, you were Chinese... chang ching chong
In the past, here in Indonesia, Chinese were seen as a part of society that did not belong in the whole community. They were second class citiizen, they did not have right to apply for a state official position, they could not enter national universities without specific written permit.
They were the mischievous people who were crazy about money and doing all the thing for the sake of getting rich... including the bad things such as bribing, colluding and scamming people.
Those was the stereotype of Chinese people in Indonesia decades ago. Yes it was more about racism but it was the exact stereotype that was hold for decades. Decades ago racism was something that commonly found everywhere. So this story might be hard to be accepted by most Gen Z, even some millennials did not believe those things were real.
The truth was most Chinese came from a merchant family, they were traders so they gathered wealth. They were hardly accepted due to different in visual and tradition, so to protect their family, they tend to gather and live in same region. Whenever someone got trouble, other Chinese helped them because none would.
And that condition was spun off as exclusivity
Ok back to myself here... My childhood was a bit like them. People around me tended to see me as a Chinese kid, or specifically as a rich kid. so everytime I played outside, bigger boys came and ask for money to buy some snacks and drink. there were times out of nothing, people just came to punch and kick me saying that this was not a place for rich kid to show off.
The truth that time was... my family was not even rich. We had to do everything double, so when they bought my a bike, then some people came and robbed that bike for me, nothing we could do. If we went to police, police would ask for money more than twice or thrice of the bike price.
So during those time, my father used to say this to me...
This is the reason why you must study harder, work harder so you can be richer than those bastards.
decades later... nowadays... I have fulfilled that mission
RACISM IS SIMILAR TO STEREOTYPE
Racism and Stereotype are different, but actually those two are not completely different. They are related to each other. Both are working based on prejudice. Racism born from stereotypes.
Because Racism is born from stereotypes, we can say it is a specific stereotyping, which the core or the goal is to set a social hierarchies. So Racism is like justifying inequality or superiority based on stereotyping based on race.
So in other words we can say things like this... Stereotyping is something that unintentionally occurs, unlike racism that is intentionally hold as belief. Stereotyping doesn't have specific orientation, so it can be neutral, or contain negative or even being positive.
You can not fight stereotyping, sometime it can save your time or even indirectly lead you to a more prompt action. However you should aware about the negative content or traits, don't let stereotyping leads you to hatred, jealousy, or belittling others. you might end up as a racist... lol
Thank you for coming and reading my post. I live in Jakarta, Ex-Capital City of Indonesia. I used to live by making money online, that's why I like being here, on HIVE, and in #PIMP - (Paper In My Pocket) community.
