Terica Post 3: Nessa and the crisco

“Stereotyping does not come from experience.” I thought it was funny when I read that. You always hear someone supporting a stereotype and usually saying it’s from my experience. In fact, I think most people just assume there is some fact behind. That somewhere down the line the person has experienced this. I think it is important for people to know this is not the case.

I learned this lesson long ago with a friend of mine. One day I was hanging out with two friends. My friend nessa I’ve known for 7 years and lizze I’ve known for 6 years. We use to hang out at nessa’s house fairly often. Usually when I get hungry I want to go out to eat. However, nessa and lizze are picky eaters. Lizze doesn’t care where we go as long as there is something she likes and nessa doesn’t like to eat outside of the house. On this particular day, nessa decided she was going to cook.

Now, I have to say I was shock by this. Nessa never cooked before and we weren’t sure if she could. It was decided, if it did not come out right we would go out for food. We followed nessa into the kitchen and watched her cook chicken. At first she was doing everything right but I noticed she was missing something. I said to her “you need to use flour for the chicken”. She said “we don’t use CRISCO. We’re Spanish, only black people use CRISCO”.

For everyone who doesn’t know Crisco is oil, not flour. You need oil to fry chicken, as she was doing so. When she said it, I looked down at the oil in the pot and the oil container in her hand. Then I just completely lost it. I just could not believe she said something so racist and didn’t even get it right.  It was downright stupidity. After yelling about how racist it was for a couple of seconds and seeing she still wasn’t getting the point I let her know that CRISCO is oil not flour. Lizze, who is also Spanish, yelled at her two about how she can say something so racist and didn’t even know what it meant. Nessa just sat there saying she didn’t know.

Lizze did tell me that Spanish people don’t use flour on their chicken. That I understood, it wasn’t the first time I saw people who didn’t use flour. However, it was upsetting that something which could have been simply stated turned into a race thing. Without any support behind the stereotype, a friend I’ve known for years felt free to utter something so racist. I learned ignorance is often based off of stupidity.