Geenschaap

Stigmatising

In a news article here: http://nos.nl/artikel/2077645-leerlingen-kaatsheuvel-begeleid-bij-fietsen-langs-azc.html it shows how easy it is to stigmatise a group of people. In this town there will be an asylum seekers centre which is on a road towards a primary school. Parents have addressed their fears about this to the city council, the parents thought that it would be unsafe for their children to cycle past this asylum seekers centre. Therefore the city council decided to have some volunteers or hired security guards to accompany the children when cycling to that school. The city council declared that they made no effort to convince the parents that it would be safe for their children to cycle past the asylum seekers centre because some parents will not be convinced. So now the parents will be justified with their fears and worse. This asylum seekers centre can become known as the place where "dangerous"people live because look, children can't safely cycle past it without guards! How stigmatising this is. And i know from experience how easy it is to stigmatise.

My father was a young man during world war 2 and has been in danger of being sent to Germany as a forced labourer, as it was proclaimed by the nazi regime that every adult man had to go there to work in the factories. My father refused to go and was therefore always in danger of being arrested. He must have been in fear for that and one day he thought that his fear would be proved to be a real one. My father was standing in the village where he lived talking to some friends of similar age, when suddenly a German officer and two soldiers came towards them. At gunpoint they were then taken to a cheese factory nearby to load a horse cart full of cheeses which would be taken to Germany. My father and his friends were expecting to be taken to Germany too, but to their relief they were sent home again.
This and some other events apparently made my father hate the nazis. Many years later in the seventies of the last century, i was walking with my father in this same village. As it was summer there were several tourists as this village is in the lakes area of Friesland, popular with boating tourists. This area was and is very popular with German tourists. But back then several male German tourists who visited this area were wearing a sort of captain's cap. So while my father and i were walking we passed a man with such a cap, and my father said to me "He was an ss officer, i can see it on his ugly face". As this man didn't say anything the only clue my father had for recognising this man as German was this cap. But my father knew nothing of this man, whether this man came from Germany or Belgium or anywhere else in the world. And if this man was German, he could have been too young to be an officer, let alone in the army during the war. But if he was old enough, he might have been active in the resistance against the nazis. But whoever he was, what my father did was stigmatising and i didn't have any idea of this. Actually i thought that my father was a great guy, hating the nazis. And so i copied my father and started doing the same. Every middle aged person wearing such a captain's cap used to be a nazi in the war. It took me a long time to realise how wrong my father was, stigmatising people just by how they looked. And how wrong I was by doing the same! Had i never realised that i was easily stigmatising people based on ignorance, i would have read that news article mentioned above and probably thought that these people were absolutely right in their fears and that the city council was absolutely right in their decision of having "guards" accompanying these children to school past that "dangerous" asylum seekers centre.

I'm not saying that i'm such a good person for recognising this stigmatising, i'm still a product of my youth and upbringing by my parents. It doesn't take much to stigmatise people. I can still go wrong when for example i read a news article about people demonstrating against the building of a new asylum seekers centre and think NAZIS! And that is stigmatising based on ignorance. I don't like stigmatising, but before pointing fingers at others i also have to look at myself and what i'm doing. Change the world and start with yourself!