No Prejudice!

Hello High Heelers

Gosh! It’s taken me a few weeks to stand up bravely and broach the topic of today – race prejudice. I feel a wave of nausea as I type this post, because outside of sexism, there is nothing more disgusting than racism – in my books.

So a few weekends ago my fiancée and I hit the town with a group of new friends of mine. It would help for me to first clarify that my fiancée is a man of colour. He is a gorgeous shade of black and has a big fuzzy beard. He’s incredibly cute – and I’m not just saying that because I adore him. He really is quite delicious (even Natalie thinks so!). Right. So. We had a wonderful time! My man was teaching our boeremeisies (which translates as Afrikaans farm girls!) how to shake it like an African dude and they were teaching him all their weird and wonderful manoeuvres. It was quite scary. But what a blast!

After a whole lot of dancing and laughing, a certain person in the crowd found it acceptable to approach my fiancée (I’ll leave out all the fabulous, delicious adjectives from here on for space sake!) and use slanderous hate speech towards him based on the fact that he’s a black man hanging out with white women. I stood next to him horrified and speechless. In this day and age, it shocks me (perhaps I am really naïve!) that people in my generation can still think that way.

You know everyone has the right to have an opinion – that’s the beauty of free speech. But absolutely no one has the right to be accusing, prejudice and judgemental towards other people. As cliché and silly as it sounds: if it’s not nice – don’t say it. And I don’t mean you have to be literally ‘nice’ all the time. When I do something stupid at work and Natalie corrects me (in a ‘non-nice’ way) she is actually being nice in the long run as she’s guiding and teaching me. But when you’re being awful for the sake of your prejudice opinions, there is no space for your words.

May I encourage you to all be the people who are bigger than race, gender, religion, education, culture and status? At the end of the day these categories are our labels – they are not who we are. If that awful man had taken a step back and seen how wonderful my fiancée is, how massive his heart is, how passionate he is, how he loves to uplift women and how he loves his family, he would have never been able to have labelled him so quickly and disgustingly.

Step back and be bigger people High Heelers. Stand tall and know that there is more to those around you. Get to know people for who they are. Find out what they’re passionate about and appreciate them for their differences.

Be the person who has coffee with someone different to you this week. Be the person who sees beyond the exterior. Be the person who makes the difference.

Have a wonderful week!

Cheers,
Jo