"He looks Jewish..."

The recent lectures we have been having about interracial and interfaith relationship has really made me think in dept about my views on these topics. Growing up in Poland, a country with little diversity and then living in a non-diverse neighborhood in the U.S has kept me from considering interracial relationships until college. My parents, my dad especially, are very old-fashion and conservative so I always got the impression that such relationships would not be accepted into the family. Also, my dad often made racist and discriminatory comments. My dad and I often got into arguments based on stereotypes and I often wondered how it could be that I could disagree completely with someone who has raised me. It was not until recently that I have started coming up with some possible theories.
The lecture we had recently on interracial relationship and its statistics, has given me some good ideas on how and why my ideas differ so much from my parents. The stats of intermarriage differ by Group, Gender, Educations, and Geography and in those groups I already see the differences between my parents and me. Educationally, my parents finished high school and had no further education. The high school included the same people they had been going to school with since pre-school and so the lack of diversity and expending cultural knowledge is obvious there. Similarly, geography has kept them isolated their whole lives also limiting the amount of cultural difference they experience. I remember my dad telling me about how he did not see an African American person until he arrived at the U.S airport when he was 27. This goes hand in hand with what we learned weeks ago in how ones neighborhood has the ability to create boundaries and exclude them from learning about differences that exist in the world when it comes to culture and race.
Often times when I would argue with my dad, I would be frustrated because his opinions were so socially constructed and, to me, evidently incorrect. Sometimes his comments include things such as “Oh he looks Jewish,” or “What do you expect, he’s black.” I was able to relate these concepts to the theories we learned against Physiognomy, something that is still commonly believed in Poland. The Symbolic Integrationist Theory matches perfectly with the socially constructed stereotypes that my parents have. In my opinion, the stereotypes are not just because they were exposed to little diversity, but rather the symbols and labels that were present in small non-diverse community they grew up in. They had no way of disproving those labels because they were never gotten the opportunity to prove some of those labels as incorrect. For example, if they would have had the opportunity to socialize with an African American, they would have been able to disprove the label that all African Americans are lazy. Thankfully, I was able to get an opportunity to be a part of more diverse culture. When I came to college I quickly made friends with a variety of people, many of which were culturally and racially diverse. I loved this opportunity because it was a very large learning experience.
One of the most educational experiences I had was when I started dating a boy that was Jewish. Of course never having had that I found myself questioning, is this ok? Even though I knew what my parents would say, I wanted to educate myself about the Jewish culture and see how people of that culture and religion felt about interfaith relationships. It took a while for my boyfriend and I to talk about this issue because, as we later discovered, both of us felt scared of being unaccepted. I am catholic so when it came to be Christmas time I slowly started talking about religious aspects of Christmas which to say the least made very awkward conversation. One night I asked him jokingly what he wanted for Christmas, and he corrected me and said “you mean Hanukah?” It was then that I found out a lot of his views on interfaith relationships which helped me form some opinions. He told me about how against his parents were about his older brother marrying a Christian girl, but how after it happened they learned to accept it and how now they celebrate Hanukah and Christmas. This matched perfectly with the discussion we had about the consequences of interracial marriage. It was apparent that his brother’s interfaith marriage brought positive consequences to his family, and not only made the distinction between the two religions less important in their everyday lives, but also caused a reduction in the discrimination and stereotypes they held before. Now I wonder if my parents would react the same way, or if the amount of time they spend developing and holding certain stereotypes affects whether they are able to be broken.