Practicing Awareness of Aggressions

There are so many ethnics in my country, but we are not immigrants; we are one coming from the same country. Thus, racial diversity is not a serious issue here. Although fights happen among tribes or ethnics, but we commonly live harmoniously from day to day. The unique one is the Chinese people whose ancestor migrated to Indonesia hundred of years ago, and they have become Indonesian Chinese now. They do not speak Chinese nor do they seriously or obviously follow their heritage. What sometimes happens is that these Indonesian Chinese people tend to socialize close from each other. That is why we have housing complex, offices or schools dominated by the Indonesian Chinese, and it is just common and accepted. Since they consider themselves Indonesian, they do not feel insulted when people say about Chinese. Ethnics often become jokes here such as Bataknese people talk funny things about Chinese or Chinese people talk about Sundanese, etc. So it is kind of hard to observe microaggressions. There is no such hard feeling about racism because we are all Indonesians, and although we do have people from other nationalities like the Americans, Indian, Australian, etc, but they live and socialize exclusively among themselves. One rumour but cannot be proven is that some Indonesian Chinese people reject applicants from other ethnics in their business, but I cannot put this as a microaggression because the truth cannot be professionally observed.

However, I have examples more on acts of "-isms"especially the ones related to religion-ism. It just happened in my school this week that an applicant for Indonesian language teacher came for an interview. She is wearing a veil, and it is certainly not permitted in a Catholic school. We have Budhist  and Moslem teachers, but not the one wearing a veil. So, in order to reject her, we created reasons. I would certainly feel humiliated, unwanted or unfair if I were the teacher and knew the reason was just because of my veil. It is indeed unfair to judge people based on their religion or the attribute they wear. I know what the school has done is so bias. Margles and Margles (2010) describe about institutional oppression. I think this is an example of oppression in the form of religion-ism”.

From this week reading and the observation I see and experience, I conclude that reactions towards discrimination, stereotype, prejudice are much influenced by the community’s cultural characteristic at the place where they happen. From the readings and colleagues’ discussion, I find what is considered to be an act of microaggressions or “-isms” in America, it is just fine in Indonesia. This means, any professional in early childhood has to first understand the rules of culture applied in the place. The theories about microaggressions or “-isms” in diversity should be treated as a guideline to professionally decide when or where to and not to say or judge about someone, especially a child.

Margles, S., & Margles, R. M. (2010). Inverting racism's distortions. Our Schools/Our

Selves, 19(3), 137--149. Retrieved from the Walden Library using the Education Research Complete database: http://ezp.waldenulibrary.org/