Uhh.....Frustrated with Myself!!!!

Ahh..............Why do I always just sit there without defending myself (most of the time) when some unintelligent person insults me (directly or indirectly) for being American! I just sit there like an idiot and say nothing, usually speechless because it always blows my mind when I hear someone's racist remark, against me or anyone! How can someone act like that? I believe that we all have prejudice built into our weak little minds, we can't understand anything without first processing it and categorizing it, putting it into its little square box where it belongs. But we are very capable of controlling what we say and have further abilities to discover where such a prejudice thought came from in order to minimize such happenings in the future.

Anyways.......to the story... Two of us were waking to school and we both stopped to say hi two a few class mates. Two of them began to talk, I wasn't even in the conversation and the all of the sudden (I wasn't really paying attention to the conversation) this guy calls me a gabacha! The same #%(*#*& guy who once TOLD me I'm not a Chicana. He doesn't even know what the term means, to him a Chicano o Chicana is a homie in a low-rider. So anyways, gabacha is a derogatory term for american, as if there weren't enough. And what did I do? I just sat there and said nothing while the two other people I was with defended me! Haha.....

This has happened to me tons of times now, gringa, gabacha, not Chicana, pendejos americans, assholes, that all americans are Cancun springbreakers, that the women are easy, all we do is party, you name it or that there isn't unemployment benefits in the United States or that all Americans think Obama is a communist, that Obama is the same as Bush, I could keep going on and on.....And most every time (with few exceptions) I just sit there stunned and can't say anything. Why? I don't really know, I always seemed to be amazed by what they have just said.

I know I had it coming, but I can never seem to stand up for myself! What does it even me to be "American", "Mexican", anything? Nothing! Its a false identity. Yeah, our government screws a lot of people over, including us, yeah American culture is forced on people all over the world by McDonalds, Paris Hilton and our stupid movies. Yes, Geroge Bush was horribe, yes, we consume more than any other country in the world, yes almost all the horrible transnational companies are american (Monsanto, Coca-Cola, Cargill etc etc), yes yes yes.....But we all have to work together against this horrible colonialism and not separate ourselves with racism, that is exactly what benefits such horrible atrocities, the separation of people. We are fighting the same fight for peace and justice, for the right to live our own lives. And when I say this to people at school or in other places, what do they say? They say, "Yeah, but you're different, your not like most gringos", totally discrediting me and everything I work for. What does it mean to not be like most gringos?

Maybe I sound like a little whiny baby right now, I have just had to put up with a lot of this and I'm not very at dealing with it. I see this prejudice as a huge roadblock to a # of problems in our world, we always categorize the "other", we attach past histories, people, situations to things in the now, things that are completely different and unique....we give everything its baggage and it looks like the baggage attached to me is one of an oppresive neocolonial country that will do anything to have more for itself. Ehh...