Autobiographical post (1)

Geoffrey Simmonds

My personal ethnic heritage is that of Irish Protestants, Welsh yeomen, Scottish Highlanders, and German from the border of France. Ethically though I believe I am an American first. I know it sounds weird but I started watching Star Trek an early age and it gives me a different attitude towards what race actually is. I have always thought of myself is just human. I never considered anyone who was different not to be the same race; I considered them just to be different. One of the issues I have with race classifying and boxes, is that when it comes down to it we are all individuals. You can try and classify someone down to the point where their individuality actually becomes the most prominent thing you see. I think my parents had a big influence on the way I see things, but it is also hard look back and realize whether there were specific things that were done or said that influenced this. Or if it was just a general attitude that they had that I learned purely by being there. I feel that being in the military really opened up my thoughts more toward racism, especially after 9/11 and post-9/11 military. In the situations I was in, when deployed overseas, I could care less about the ethnic background of the person who was supposed to back me up in a situation, as long as they backed me up in it. Of course, I now realize this is not how everybody sees things and the fact that I have never actively done anything against racism or ethnic profiling or however you want to see it, because of this close-mindedness to the fact that there is a problem makes me just as guilty as those who actively push racism. Actually looking back now I realize that what I was doing ship boarding in the Gulf, the other boring team members never wanted the one guy to be their partner. And because this was so close to 9/11, I now can see looking at it, it was because the guy was Muslim. And that was what the moaning and groaning is about, because nobody knew if they trusted him or not. I never had an issue with him because I knew going into a room that was unknown, that he would be right behind me. And to me that matter more than what he believed a religiously.