Reply to Insults from childhood that cast a long shadow

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]My parents are immigrants and thought it was a smart idea to move to an all white town where I was constantly taunted for not being the right race as a child. [/quote]

lol I was originally just going to respond to OP's comments in relating to their experience but on the opposite end.  But actually relate to a lot of the posts on here.

In particular with the poster from 1:16.  Generally I wouldn't have even look at it as just my parents wanting to live among white people.  But with rich white people, which makes it even worse when your family is not at the same income level as them AND we don't look or act like them.  But it was just in the last couple of years that I saw it kind of explained and kind of came to terms with it, even though I'm still not overly okay with it.  Especially given how my parents seem to lean it into more now.  But the way it was described was that when most of the immigrants come here, they don't come here to be amongst their own.  They come here for a chance for their kids to be American and live the American life.  And to take it a step even further back in parent's generation, things in their home country wasn't great during those times and I think during that process they got an idealized version of America.  This is especially when I hear them talk about their childhood experiences with missionaries and see a lot of other families really into Catholicism.  Then for accusations of immigrants wanting to be white.  Especially in those times, when immigrants come and want to live the American dream, they see what group is in power or has the higher status and they want to be associated with that group.  No one is going to say, "I'm going to leave my crummy situation, to go to another country, just to live among the oppressed and discriminated against too...."

Like I said, I still have issues with it and don't agree with it but can kind of understand my parent's perspective too now.  Chances are your parents probably came from a similar background as my parents.  It's as I tell people now, people usually don't just voluntarily pick up and go to another country if life is great for them where they are.

But going back to OP's experience, like I said I can relate but in the opposite way.  Where for a lot of my youth, I was called skin and bones.  And I did blame on this on neglect, which relates to being from a poorer immigrant family.  Which even worse, since we grew up in a rich area, people wouldn't believe me when I said we were poor growing up.  So didn't always have enough to eat.  And definitely never got to do physical after school activities, like after school sports, like how I saw all the other kids got to do and always asked to do but was always told no, even the school teachers told my parents that they should sign us up for after school activities.  So it was a big deal to me to make sure that my kids had the opportunity to do those activities that I didn't get to do, so they could develop their muscles, coordination and their self confidence.

As it turns out, some of it is probably genetics where my child is on the skinnier side and even worse gets emphasized how skinny they are by my parents.  Which I suspect they think it's okay to say because people used to say that about me.  The good thing is that I know what can be done about it and help them with it.  And while there are other reasons why I want them to bulk up,  I make sure to emphasize with my kid that their self esteem should not be tied to their body image and should never let anyone affect how they view about their body. [/quote]

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