How did your family and peers react to your inter-racial relationship?

Never in my life have I felt uncomfortable thinking of an inter-racial relationship until I came to Syracuse University. Back home, in Puerto Rico, the elderly people in my extended family told me that I needed to be strong when I came to America because I was going to face racist people that will try to put me down. When I heard that I just thought they were crazy old people. I never truly believed that because I thought that society had come very far away from that era of black slaves. Unfortunately I wasn’t complexly right.

Puerto Rico is a very diverse country. There, people never ask each other where are they from. There, if you where born in Puerto Rico you are consider Puerto Rican, regardless of your heritage. Race doesn’t really make a difference when you decide whom you are going to date, although people do pay a little bit of attention to social class. A couple where one partner is white and the other one is black is seen as totally normal. People just don't care about that kind of things.

First semester I started dating a white guy. Everything was great at the beginning and all my friends were very supportive of the relationship. I won’t lie, at parties I felt that some people would give me weird stares, but I never paid attention to it, I didn’t even consider the idea that it was because I was dating a white guy. One day I found out that a couple of girls in his dorm were talking bad about me behind my back. Girls that I had never spoke to or even met. I thought that the only reason that they where saying mean things about me was because I was Puerto Rican. However, I didn’t give it a lot of thought because things with the guy were great and I didn’t wanted to over think this and create unnecessary drama. However I was worried that those comments would influence the way he saw me, and felt about me.

As time passed by are relationship faded away and we decided to stay friends. Weeks later one of my friends told me that she had dinner with one of the girls from his dorm and a bunch of other girls. They all had just met each other, and therefore the conversational topics where very vague and general. However, that girl thought that it was appropriate to say: “OMG, I have a friend that was hooking up with this latina girl and it was so disgusting”. I had never thought that I would be considered disgusting because of my ethnicity. At that moment I remembered what my extended family had told me. This girl judged me based on my race, she didn’t take the time to get to know me, she didn’t consider any of my positive qualities. She didn’t realize that if her friend thought I was worth dating, than maybe I was good girl, worthy of some respect. The worst thing is that she felt comfortable saying such a horrible thing in front of girls she just meet. As if it was something very common and average. As if they would all agree with her.

Racisms has definitely come a long way, but people can hurt others so much more with words than with actions. People now, do not only judge you on your skin color, but also on your religious background and sexual orientation. We live in a society were is acceptable to do such things, and even if we think they are wrong, most people don’t have the guts to stand up against these ignorant minds.