Observation # 4

This past weekend I went home to attend a wedding. The groom in the wedding grew up in my hometown and moved to North Carolina a few years ago. While in North Carolina he met a Latino women that is now his wife. They decided to have the wedding back in Canaan because most of his family still lives there, and she didn't have a very large family. The wedding party consisted of her Latino family and two African Americans. I guess to understand where I'm coming from you have to understand what Canaan is like. We have no diversity in my town, and it consists of typical up north stick people so to have people of different ethnicities partying in one of our local bars was a little stressful at times. The reception was at the Northland a local restaurant/bar that usually fills up with locals on a Saturday night, especially when there is a big game on. The DJ that night decided to play mostly Hip Hop because of the wedding party reception. As the night progressed more and more locals were coming into the bar and looking at us dancing and listening to the "unusual" music that was going on. For the most part it didn't bother the people that this was going on because they knew the local family. There was the few older people the go there every Saturday night to two step that quickly left when they heard the music that was playing. What really caught my attention was this group of guys that walked that I haven't seen before. You could tell that they were out hunting that day and came in to have some beer and watch the game. I went to the bar at one point to get a drink and I overheard one of the guys ask the bartender who the "fucking porch monkeys" were, and they should go back to the zoo. I decided to ignore the comment for a few reasons. The first one was I knew it wouldn't make a difference if I tried to explain what was going on since most people up north have there ways set and aren't going to change them. The second one was I used to think the same way as he did. I'll admit when I went home for the wedding I threw around a few racial jokes because up there it really doesn't matter. I knew that they were good people and I had a blast with them that night. I usually shake things off like racial slurs, but since this class started I've started to notice it more in areas that I didn't usually. This fits into our racial profiling part of class because they profiled them as "jigaboos" and didnt take the time to see who they really were.